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).

The Chairperson of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council has announced an alternative therapy 'crackdown', according to the BBC news. How interesting:

It will not judge clinics on whether therapies are effective, but rather on whether they operate a professional and safe business.

The Windows Internet Explorer (Pre-Release Beta 2 Version 8) Privacy Statement makes for interesting reading.  Some excerpts follow (emphasis mine)

Suggested Sites

I reported the other day (BBC gifting private data to a USA-based company) that the BBC were using a cookie-based method to send off your browsing history at their website to a company based in the USA, Omniture.  It now turns out that several other companies are doing similar data transfer, though not using cookies.  Annoyingly, the list includes The Guardian.

In that thread, there are instructions on how to block transfer of this data: for Windows, and Linux.  Another contribution to that thread offers this crontab based approach for Linux, while there are observations for Vista users.  I think an approach for Macs will be forthcoming.

Via the excellent Pharyngula blog, I came across this ridiculous article by Bryan Appleyard in The Times:  For God's sake, have Charles Darwin's theories made any difference to our lives? - published on 11th January (so I got to it a little late - I'm more of a Guardian reader!).

Yes, Bryan, they have made a difference, and not the spurious negative ones you build up to in your article.  To be charitable, one must suppose the point of Appleyard's article is to point out that many (usually from the under-educated religious wing) do not accept evolution by natural selection (and I come back to the difference between comment and reportage later).

Picked this one up via Ben Goldacre's Bad Science miniblog, in turn linking to the Daily Mirror's site, where an article by some investigative journalists questions the efficacy of Ecoflow magnets.

It's a pretty straightforward debunking of the claims that these magnets when strapped onto fuel pipes improve fuel efficiency, cutting costs by 5-20%.  Similar devices, marketed as Bioflow are claimed to be benficial for arthritis sufferers.  Amusingly the company leaves any such claims to its network of distributors following a ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority:

Now, another protest against the atheist bus, this time from a christian bus driver, who is taking exception to the phrase "There's probably no god...".

The bus company apparently will endeavour to ensure that Mr Heather won't have to drive one of these buses.  So, I suppose end of story.  Except of course, I spend much of my atheist existence being popped at by bizarre religious ramblings, not least via my morning radio listening, which is invariably polluted by "Thought for the Day".  If you are really keen to listen, you can do so here.

According to The Register (IWF confirms Wayback Machine porn blacklisting), explanation of the loss of access to the internet archive to customers of some UK ISPs is due to an IWF blacklist, containing URLs contained within that archive.

The Register asked the IWF what URLs were blacklisted, who at the ISPs were responsible for implementing the blacklist, and why ISPs were blocking the whole archive, but the IWF refuse to comment on the URLs on the blacklist (it's their policy), and refused to (or were unable to) answer the other questions.

I picked up on this new blog at ScienceBlogs - "Blogging the Origin" via Science's Origins blog.  In this blog, science writer and evolutionist John Whitfield, who bravely admits to never having read The Origin of Species before, is conducting a book club cum blog as he reads the text, chapter by chapter in this anniversary year.  As I write, he's covered the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2, with the next instalment due on Friday.  He plans to finish in time to celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday.

I haven't read The Origins since I was a teenager (which is an upsettingly long time ago), and this has inspired me to read it again.  But which version?   The old Pelican paperback edition I read all those years ago is a later edition of the tome, while the edition reprinted in the compilation From So Simple a Beginning", edited by E. O. Wilson, is I think the first edition (but lacks a certain portability - the volume also has Voyage of the Beagle, Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions, all in a hardback binding).  Perhaps I should limit myself to the 1858 pair of papers by Darwin and Wallace?

Here is a visitor map - it should show where visitors are located!

Well, Andrew Brown (in who's blog at the Guardian I first read Clifford Longley's dopey ASA complaint) has written a little bit more about the affair, and judges that "Clifford Longley has been silly".  At least it would seem that the text that Longley appears to have sent to newspaper columnists up and down the country was sent by him.

His defence is that the quotes are genuine even if he did not collect them and he that he never claimed to have collected them himself. It didn't seem to him the important thing about them. Some of them he had in his own library, or could remember reading; others were new to him, but all seemed germane to his general point, that there are distinguished scientists who take the strong anthropic principle seriously as evidence for design in the universe. This was the point he wanted to make to the ASA, which offers a web form for complaints on its web site into which he cut and pasted what he had found. 

The Register reports that the UK ISP Demon has removed access to a larcge chunk of internet history.  The error pages that users are presented with apparently imply this is in response to the site being listed on the IWF blacklist.  Amusingly, El Reg reports:

One Demon customer tells us he was unable to visit archived versions of websites run by the BBC, Parliament, the United Nations, the Internet Watch Foundation, Demon Internet, and Thus. In other words, this customer points out, Thus is blocking its own web history. "It is nuts," he says.

This does seem to be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  I presume there are dubious sites archived at the wayback machine, but to block the lot seems a bit extreme.  Presumably the internet block derives from the way Demon have sought to implement the IWF blacklist.

Apparently the 1911 England and Wales census is now online, and I feel a renewed enthusiasm for a spot of internet genalogy (registered users in the apprpriate group have access to my genealogy web pages on this site)!  When the 1901 census data went online a few years ago, demand for access hugely exceeded the capacity of the servers.  It would be nice if the system this time round could cope, and in fact this seems to be the case!  Woohoo!

Link to the 1911 census website;  BBC News report on the 1911 census;

Many tropical diseases are transmitted by insect vectors - malaria (which is caused by Plasmodium parasites) and yellow fever (caused by a virus) being examples of diseases transmitted by Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes respectively.  Dengue fever is another viral disease that is transmitted by Aedes aegypti.  One crucial feature of the disease transmission cycle is that once the disease organism is collected by the mosquito in a blood meal, it takes some time to develop within the insect before it becomes infectious.  In the case of both malaria and dengue fever, this period of time is about two weeks.  This paper evaluates the use of the endosymbiotic bactera Wolbachia to shorten mosquito lifespan in the hope that this will reduce disease transmission.

In a sense, this is an attractive strategy, and one that makes use of one of the properties of some Wolbachia strains to shorten host lifespan. I have previously blogged about some aspects of Wolbachia biology in the immune system of insects.  Wolbachia infection is maternally transmitted, and spreads through insect populations because of a reproductive drive known as cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) - infected females mated to uninfected males yield infected offspring, while uninfected females mated to infected males yield no offspring.  This reproductive drive is presumably sufficient to drive even strains of Wolbachia which have negative effects on viability (such as reduced lifespan) through the population.

Ars Technica reports that SCO, the bankrupt (both morally and financially) company with a tangled history of amalgamations and renaming, and which has been fighting a losing battle against Linux (via courtroom debacles with Novell, IBM, Autozone and Red Hat) has filed a fourth reorganisation plan.  The whole sorry saga of how SCO's deluded CEO Darl McBride dragged the company into a legal morass can be read at the famous and excellent Groklaw blog.  With SCO's claims mere dust in the wind, Groklaw appears to be entering a phase of consolidation, as it sorts through the astonishing quantity of court filings and other documentation and comment the site has generated over the last four years or so since SCO launched is big action against IBM.  During that period, the story has been spectacularly convoluted, ultimately revealing that not only does SCO not own Unix copyrights, but that they actually owed Novell a significant wad of cash (still unpaid as SCO use it to bankroll continued legal action).

As far as I know, and despite his role in the company's looming demise, McBride seems to remain at the helm and is presumably one of the four top executives in line for continued remuneration.

The journal Science has launched a new blog to celebrate the Darwin 200 anniversary, entitled Origins. There's an rss feed.

In the current issue of the journal are articles by Peter Bowler on Darwin's Originality and by Carl Zimmer entitled On the Origin of Life on Earth. [subscription may be required].