Well, it looks as though 2009 will be the year I finally start to do this "social networking" thing for real.  I've been running this website for a few years now - originally set up to host my genealogy work for my family, it became something a bit more interesting when I embarked upon the Joomla! journey.  My first Joomla! site was the revision of my plain html North Bucks Road Club website using Joomla!1.0. I then reworked  this website using a release candidate of Joomla! 1.5.x, and subsequently set up a website for a conference in Oxford that I helped organise (this site has been removed as it's no longer needed).

This site has been upgraded to Joomla! 1.5.9. The initial upgrade from the release candidate to the final release version in summer 2008 was a disaster, and I had to rebuild it from a saved sql file. At that point, I switched to MyBlog to handle the front page.  I've also started using an extension that permits finer granularity in user groups, so that selected users can collaborate on documents, such as wikis.

The UK Government's plans to assemble a joined up database state appear to be drawing closer.  In the rather innocuous sounding Coroners and Justice Bill Part 8 - Data Protection Act 1998 (c. 29) lies an interesting clause, 152, in which the government empowers itself to authorise largely unlimited data sharing.

The bill's summary is as follows (my emphasis - at least it flags up the change that interests me):

There's been a profusion of articles in the popular press as he big Darwin anniversary swings into top gear.  Many of these make over-stated cases that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has been "shaken up", or "over-thrown" (see for example this blog post).

There's another at the Daily Telegraph today: Charles Darwin's tree of life is 'wrong and misleading', claim scientists. Setting aside the obvious point that Darwin couldn't have got all the details right given the scientific knowledge of the time, the article seems to restate the popular myth of the big icon of evolution - the diagram of evolutionary relationship as an oak tree:

Now that President Obama's in the White House, he's rolling out changes - closing Guantanamo Bay, permitting Federal funding for agencies that publicise abortion, and now enabling Federal funding for stem cell research.

Perhaps related to the thaw in stem cell research, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a proposal aimed at investigating the use of embryonic stem cell therapy in spinal injury (BBC News).  The proposal, from Geron Corp., has been approved.

So, it seems the old farts at the Met don't want kids to have much fun these days.  Apparently, every live music event needs to be "risk assessed", which involves completing a form 696, while afterwards you need to complete a form 696A. It's claimed that

Sunny Hundal writes in the Guardian's "Comment is free" about his experiences.  Before he and other fun-lovers could get into the venue, a variety information were gathered, with no indication of why the data were collected, nor how long it would be held for.

The Wordpress blog I described the other day has been fully launched - Wonderful Life - and is hosted here rather than at Wordpress.com.  I wanted to be able to do some css tweaking, and that proved a bit easier I installed it in my own domain.  I'm rather pleased with the clean and uncluttered layout of the template I chose.

I've entitled the blog Wonderful Life because it's the sense of wonder and excitement I gain from observing and explaining the world around me that motivates me as a biologist.  It's a forum for me to sound off on atheism and related matters.  Of course, it remains to be seen whether I keep it (the blog, I mean, not my biology!) rolling after the initial excitement.  And of course this blog will still be needing attention, as does the Team Grumpy blog (though that's more of a joint effort). 

Another broadsheet blogger rails against the atheist bus adverts, this time it's one Gerald Warner, blogging at the Daily Telegraph.

I have been conducting research using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster since I started my PhD in 1982.  In that time I have imported countless consignments of fly strains through the post and by courier (such as Federal Express).  On only  one occasion can I recall having difficulty getting them through customs - a box of female-sterile mutants from France got stuck, and was in a frightful state when they arrived (this was during my PhD).

The general practise is for the sender to affix one of those green customs tags, asserting that the contents are a gift, of no commercial value (typically $1 may be quoted), that they are live insects, but not an agruicultural pest or a vector of disease.  So for over 26 years as a practising Drosophila geneticist, I've had but one case where this has presented a problem.

It's all got rather Kafka-esque as I try to resolve the ongoing Drosophila importation crisis!  It transpires that the people who have decided that importation of Drosophila should be covered by legislation aimed quite properly at preventing the import of diseased farm animals are a subsidiary of Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) called Animal Health.

Now clearly these people have a vitally important job, particularly in light of recent outbreaks of bluetongue, foot and mouth and the potential threat of avian influenza (to which we can add the problems currently afflicting honey bees).  But nowhere on their website do I see indication of why they feel they need to hold up my harmless flies, which are not an agricultural pest, transmit no disease, are not harmful, and in any case would be unable to survive outdoors anyway.  To add to that list of characteristics, these are weak strains carrying recessive lethal mutations.  This is how they describe themselves and their responsibilities:

Over the weekend I've been playing around with Wordpress, having set up a blog over at wordpress.com, where you can set up a blog spectacularly quickly (as you can over with Google's blogger.com).  As a fairly experienced Joomla! user, I found the hosted blog slightly restrictive (for example I would have to pay a daily rate of $0.04 just to be able to edit the theme's css file).

I ended up doing a test installaion on my notebook, firstly using a dedicated database, then trying out incorporating its database within my main Joomla! database.  It turns out to be pretty straightforward to migrate content (though I imagine one would exceed the import limit quite quickly on an active blog).