Christian Voice vs the Atheist Bus

Christian Voice are an evangelical christian lobby group which is a bit cross about the atheist bus advert campaign.  From their website, Christian Voice...

...is a ministry for those Christians who are fed up with the way things are, who have had enough of secularist politicians imposing wickedness on the rest of us and who are not satisfied with trying to get ‘Christian influence in a secular world' because they know ‘The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein' (Psalm 24:1). If you want instead to lift high the Crown Rights of the King of kings, you have found the right place!

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BBC gifting private data to a USA-based company

For some months now the campaigners at nodpi who are working to prevent widespread adoption of deep packet inspection such as that implemented by Phorm have been seeking clrification of why the BBC use cookies to send of records of your IP address, your Post Code*, and what parts of their website (e.g. iPlayer videos) you've been viewing off to a third party company in the USA. This third party is Omniture, formerly known as Visual Sciences. The BBC say this is in order to monitor usage of their website. Response is here; the whole thread can be viewed here. Interestingly, such transfer of personal data seems to be legal under EU legislation, as indicated in this quotation from the FOI response Dephormation finally received:

To the extent that the bbc.co.uk homepage is capturing IP addresses and post code data for anonymous statistical reporting purposes, the BBC confirms that the BBC treats both IP addresses and post code data as “personal data” within the meaning of the Data Protection Act 1998, despite the currently uncertain legal position around IP addresses in particular. Given its position, the BBC does not permit the transfer of IP addresses and user post code data to countries outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) unless those countries have “adequate data protection standards” and/or there are strong contractual data protection provisions in place with the data processor. It is correct that Omniture is a USA company and therefore operates outside the EEA. However, Omniture do satisfy the European Union's Directive on Data Protection’s requirements by demonstrating “adequate data protection standards” by registering with the US Department of Commerce’s safe harbour framework.

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Police to have powers to hack your PC?

The Times reports that the Home Office has adopted a plan to allow British police to hack into people's personal computers without a warrant.

If true, this is a pretty shocking extension to investigative powers.  Apparently it was made possible by an amendment to the Compter Misuse Act 1990 - the proposals included breaking into a suspect's house to install keyloggers and sending emails bearing malware that allows remote access to a PC.

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Atheist bus ad update

The Daily Telegraph today has a report on the British Humanist Association's atheist bus advert (which I posted about back in October: Humanist message on London buses).  It's a peculiar article from the religious affairs correspondent that seems to emphasise the existence of the buses bearing the advert, rather than what I take to be the significant aspect of the story - that enough cash has been raised to fund 800 buses across the country (not just London).  Amusingly, one of the links on the sidebar is to this story from August entitled Atheists fail to cough up for London bus ad, while another, from October is entitled Atheist buses ready to roll across country after making £31,000 in a day.

I guess I must have missed the initial unsuccessful phase of the fund-raising campaign, and merely contributed to its resurrection in October!

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Latest Music

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Books that I'm currently reading

I'm usually reading several books at any one time: sometimes these include books I've already read, sometimes they are the kind of book you don't read from cover to cover (such as technical books).

You can visit my library here (books from my collection added daily)

Virgin Galactic Spaceport - it's not Lossiemouth

Richard Branson's Virgin empire has announced that it has leased a site for its first Virgin Galactic spaceport.  Not surprisingly, they haven't gone for RAF Lossiemouth as proposed by the Scottish National Party.

It's been quite some road for Richard Branson, from the early days of publishing a school newspaper, to founding Virgin Records, at that time an independent label, with this release (left).  He was a tougher cookie than Malcom McLaren when dealing with the Sex Pistols.  He founded a major chain of record stores (as a student in Edinburgh, the small Virgin Record in the New Town was the place to get indie releases), which recently got rebranded and has gone bust.  I can remember wondering what the hell he was up to getting involved in an airline, but obviously what do I know!

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23 Skidoo - Kundalini

Back in 1982, 23 Skidoo released Seven Songs, a mini-LP on the Fetish label (there was something of a fad in those days for budget-priced mini-LPs).  I hadn't played this in some years, when I noticed that it had been reissued with some bonus tracks that I hadn't got.  Aha! I thought, let's try out this Amazon.co.uk mp3 download shop.  Off I went, credit card in hand, to make my first online digital download purchase (well, except for Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV). 

What a refreshing listen.  Particular standout tracks are Kundalini (see video below), and The Gospel Comes to New Guinea, but the whole thing is great.

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Recently played music

I'm just playing with this last.fm thing.  Having just activated audioscrobbler on my Squeezebox, here's a little Recently Played widget from last.fm.


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Album carousel

Here's a neat widget that should show the ten most played albums in my last.fm profile.

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2009 New Year's Day '10'

The omens weren't good for this event. In early December I came down with a long-lasting cold that kept me from training for much of the month.  This, coupled with festive season food consumption, resulted in my carrying several kilos over my racing weight.  So it was with some trepidation that I set off for the club room to ride the New Year's day '10'.  The event was held on the F5d/10 Stoke Hammond bypass course.

As usual, I rode down to the club room, where we were meeting and signing on.  Fortunately, the weather was warmer than of late, and was just slightly over freezing. Less fortunately, it was kind of a damp, penetrating cold, that had us all shivering on the line. To add insult to injury, there was a gentle amount of tiny, almost imperceptible, snowflakes. Just before I was due to start, I decided against removing my outer thermal layers. This was all to the good, I think. I had a quick spin up and down the opening leg of the course, which was enough to confirm that was the correct clothing choice.  In all, we had a good turnout for this event - 13 riders.

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Twenty randomly selected books in my library


Twenty randomly selected books from my library

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In the Journals - Spiders, silk and evolution

Yet another palaeontology blog post!  This story roared round the internet just before Christmas (for example the BBC News story), but I found it interesting as a non-specialist in arachnid evolution or palaeontology, partly because of the methods used for extracting fossil arthropod material from the substrate, and partly because it tells a tale of re-examination and reanalysis of specimens with a quite different interpretation. Oh, and there's a tale of the evolution of silk use by spiders!

Production and use of silk is the defining characteristic of spiders - modern advanced spiders use silk for a quite astonishing array of purposes (from taking flight to encasing eggs; from capturing prey to constructing shelters), and a single individual may produce silk of several types with distinct properties.  Spider silk is produced from specialised structures called spigots, which are in turn located on modified appendages called spinnerets (see picture on the right, from the arachnology website, where there's a description of silk production). 

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Books in my Library

Twenty randomly selected books from my library...

 

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Goodbye leap year for Zune owners!

The much reported synchronised locking-up of first generation 30Gb Zune MP3 players appears to have an explanation from Microsoft: it's a poxy Leap Year bug!

I suppose this is only to be expected from a company that enshrined the "1900 is a leap year" flaw in its flagship Office component Excel.

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BT wins an award!

Thisismoney.co.uk announce that Money Mail have awarded their 2008 Wooden Spoon award to British Telecom.  This is from an online customer survey.  One notable quote from the article is:

There were two areas you felt most aggrieved about. The first was dealing with overseas call centres. You complained that you are forced to spend a substantial amount of time pressing buttons in the automated system before you can reach a human being.

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In the Journals - 15 Evolutionary Gems

In this year of not only the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, but the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, we can expect the major celebratory events to be countered by the usual mediaevally-minded creationist suspects.  The journal Nature has published a useful document with the aim of highlighting an publicising why (the vast majoroty of) scientists regard evolution by natural selection as a fact -  "15 Evolutionary Gems"- the contents are as follows:

Gems from the fossil record
   1 Land-living ancestors of whales
   2 From water to land
   3 The origin of feathers
   4 The evolutionary history of teeth
   5 The origin of the vertebrate skeleton
Gems from habitats
   6 Natural selection in speciation
   7 Natural selection in lizards
   8 A case of co-evolution
   9 Differential dispersal in wild birds
  10 Selective survival in wild guppies
  11 Evolutionary history matters
Gems from molecular processes
  12 Darwin's Galapagos finches
  13 Microevolution meets macroevolution
  14 Toxin resistance in snakes and clams
  15 Variation versus stability 

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Darwin 200 - Big Idea Big Exhibition

The Natural History Museum has a packed programme of events to celebrate the big Darwin anniversary in 2009.   I'm not sure why they've chosen the image on the left as par tof the logo - it seems to suggest Darwin is swearing us to secrecy!  (I wonder if it's a photoshopped image...).  In any event, this is a big deal in public understanding of science, and my university, The Open University, is a significant contributor:

The Open University is working with the BBC to co-produce four TV series that consider the impact and legacy of Darwin's theories and ideas in an attempt to engage the public to take their interest in Darwin further. The four series are: Tree of Life (BBC ONE) where Sir David Attenborough argues the case for the importance of the science of evolution; Life (BBC ONE) which will capture the most extraordinary and awe-inspiring animal survival behaviours ever shown on TV; Andrew Marr on Darwin's Legacy (working title, BBC TWO) which will explore the impact of Darwin's theory in science, society, political movement and religion; and A Year in Darwin's Garden (working title, BBC TWO) in which entomologist and farmer, Jimmy Doherty, recreates many of Darwin's ground-breaking experiments with plants.

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FAQ - New User Registration

Change applied 1st January 2009.

Owing to a number of apparently spurious user accounts, I've changed the way new user accounts are set up.  Before you can set up an account, you need to request a passcode from Robert (see "Email me" from the Main Menu for contact details).

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In the Journals - Reproductive isolation in Drosophila hybrids

Of the many questions in evolutionary biology, the genetic basis of reproductive isolation between species and subspecies is a pretty hot topic. Drosophila pseudoobscura is a new world Drosophila species that has been used in evolutionary biology studies for many years.  This paper looks at the genetic basis of the hybrid sterility and segregation distortion seen in crosses between two subspecies, D. pseudoobscura pseudoobscura (referred to as "USA") and D. pseudoobscura bogotana (referred to as "Bogota"). It's a nice illustration of the impact of the 12 Drosophila genome sequences now available - D. pseudoobscura was the second Drosophila species to have its genome sequenced.

There is only partial reproductive isolation between these subspecies - male progeny from Bogota females crossed with USA males are virtually sterile (though when aged, they apparently yield offspring, though with a distorted sex ratio indicative of segregation distortion).  The female siblings are fertile, as are the offspring of a cross performed between UAS females crossed with Bogota males.  The two subspecies therefore obey Haldane's Rule.

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