The BBC Is Wrong

They said: Australia is suffering a "man drought"

My response: Then why am I still single?

Oldest Joke.

The BBC has reported on the World's Oldest Joke.

Apparently the joke is as follows:

"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap,"

It's not that funny. I guess the Sumarians were the Germans of their day humour wise. Or maybe I'm being too German here because I don't seem to get it.

I guess a Marsh Arab might get it, or maybe the funny is lost in translation. Or time. Probably time.

Read the article. It talks about the early days of British humour, with a joke from the Anglo-Saxon period, and I especially like the Roman joke.

RAN + Bigger Breasts For Sailors = ?

I found this on BBC News.

Apparently the Royal Australian Navy or most likely the Defence Department paid for the breast enlargement of two female sailors setting the taxpayer back $20 000.

I don't really know what to think here.

What exactly would potentially sexier sailors help the RAN in it's fight against, umm... , last time I checked it was illegal immigration?

Unless the plan is for them to help the male sailors on their long lonely voyages away from women except those...

Ok enough of the silliness the article says that it was for psychological reasons. So I guess that it might make it a bit better then because people with psychological problems of some sort are not really the best people for the defence forces, but I still feel a little annoyed that my tax dollars went towards this.

The Defence Department is already pretty bloated, overly bureaucratic and inefficient, for all we know this money could have gone towards something better.

Why isn't this an election issue?


On a side note for us Firefox users Foxytunes has released a new toolbar that allows you to add what you are listening to to your blog posts. If you are a person, like me, who has moved from say Myspace, where you can add what you are listening to blog posts and do kinda miss it, then this is the place for you.

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Now playing: Ishii Yasushi - Soul Police Chapter's Reverse Side Circumstance
via FoxyTunes

September 11

Well today is September 11, the 6^th anniversary of the attacks on the towers.

I hope that this day does not affect the families of those affected. Especially those who happen to be at the site of the towers.

The so-called "Truthers" will be there spewing their filth.

And that is all it is filth no matter what they say.

For example I go onto the Myspace political forum and it is full of 9/11 related crap, like it was faked, while I write this I look and see 9 threads with the numbers 9 and 1 and 1 in that order.

It is just sick. I personally am getting sick of it.

However some of those threads titled '9/11' were made by debunkers poking fun at the idiots.

I did find one important little gem.

A proper scientist has decided to tackle the 'demolition' idea. Dr Keith Seffen is a Cambridge University scientist and has published this paper in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. We all know it is complete shit but it is rather important because, unlike the conspiracy theorists, proper scientists put there ideas up to the all important peer review.

The conspiracy theorists seem to think that they don't have to stand up to the same scrutiny as real scientists and no conspiracy theorist has tried to publish a paper that would even disprove the Bazant-Zhou paper (see the link above entitled "peer review"), they can try on the internet, and a few sites seem to try but they are not doing it on the field of science.

They are pretend pretend scientists who should be ashamed of themselves for trying to pass off this shit as real science. That link can take you to many papers that disprove the conspiracy theorists however you will never see a conspiracy theorist publish their work in a scientific journal or try to disprove those peer-reviewed hypotheses in a scientific journal.

They may make up some stupid argument as a reason why they shouldn't but all it shows is that they have no argument that can stand up to science.

I will leave you with a 9/11 related psychology thing. Look at the following two pictures that I nicked from here:

















(I don't know if the pictures are working though. Stupid Australian internet).

Iraq

It started with an article on various Iraq blogs on Blogspot. But while writing this I have 8 tabs open (I use Firefox) of articles that I will be using.

I think I will work with data first before I head into the real life stuff.

This is the earlier of the two polls.

The main trends that you will clearly see is that people are thinking in 2007 about life overall has mainly been a decrease in all areas apart from 'somewhat worse' which has increased by about 10% from 2005 (this is the poll on the left). However there seems to be a slight increase in the 'about the same' section from 2005 (the poll on the left). However the poll on the right seems to show a few different trends. The 'somewhat worse' answer did increase, but the 'somewhat better section' shows a decrease. What the two polls do show is that there seems to be a pretty close split between people thinking that life is slightly better or slightly worse. That would probably depend on the location of these people.

A large number of the people believe that Iraq is controlled by the US. And surprisingly there seems to be an increasing number of people who think that attacks on the coalition forces is acceptable (51%).

Most people have experienced more violence from coalition forces (~45%) in their area compared to car bombs (~32%) or factional infighting (~25%). As well as this only about 26% of people feel safe in their neighbourhoods.

More people seem to believe that a democracy is the best answer for the state at the moment, but a strong leader is the second option.

This is some data taken after the 'surge'

Although the statistics look somewhat promising, looking carefully you see that only the US forces received any reduction, the civilians had an increase from the previous week and Iraqi police and military deaths and woundings has increased dramatically.

Power supplies seem to be rather non-existent while the price of fuel has jumped horribly while people wait in queues to get fuel to power generators.

This article has statistics regarding post-war Iraq. What they seem to show is that electricity is less then the pre-war level but it is nowhere near reaching demand. Also it seems that regardless of where they are in the country about 25% has daily problems with receiving fresh water.

Now the problem that this data is showing is that the reconstruction efforts isn't working well enough. The low level of security shows that the people might be turning to militias for the protection that they are not getting from the coalition forces.

On the 13^th the US forces launched a new offensive.

Called Operation Phantom Strike it was supposed to make the country safer by removing Al Qaeda forces in the country. This is at the same time that people are claiming that the national unity government has become useless and politicians are pressuring Maliki to hold an emergency meeting.

And while the US is trying to defeat Al Qaeda they have most likely struck back.

A truck bomb was used to attack some Yazidi villages.

The Yazidi are, simply, a group of Kurds who follow a religion that is an amalgamation of many religions. The Extremists consider them heretics and want them dead. The Yazidi say that they are not in any way heretical.

Recently there has been some trouble with the Sunnis and the Yazidi, with an attack by people believed to be Sunnis against the Yazidi in April where 23 people were killed after they were taken off a bus and executed.

What the news is reporting is that the minority groups, Christians, Yazidi and other small groups, are being targeted by the fanatics of the bigger groups, not like a big fish would eat a smaller fish so don't think that. What is happening is that the terrorists are trying to cause more discord by attacking smaller groups, they think they they are an easy, or easier, target, and, as noted by Iraqi bloggers, ruining the peaceful co-existence of these people before the country went to hell.

An article written on Thursday is discussing whether the attack was based on the surge that the US started. What this means is that the US is pushing the terrorists around, as they leave an area the terrorists just come back and get back to where they left off. At this point the number of dead was said to have been around 250 - 400 people.

Yesterday (Friday) the toll was at 344 dead, around 400 wounded and 600 people were made homeless.

Now this is really sad to hear. These people have gone through hell. And what I find more annoying is that the news here gave it less space then information on:

• A new surge in Afghanistan, and information about a German convoy being attacked (about half a page)
• News on Madeline McCann (about a quarter of a page)
• That woman who won the British Lotto (a half a page)
• Something about Elvis (same page as the 'article' about these bombings and most of it)
• Something about that golfer Greg Norman and his wife's divorce (same size as Elvis)

What annoys me even more is that it had less time to it then Mark Ricciuto's retirement which took up:

1. Front Page
2. Pages 4 and 5, part of the 'proper news'
3. Pages 106 - 107, sport section
4. Page 43, front page of the AFL supplement "main game"
5. Page 44 - 45 of the supplement "main game"

The "main game" supplement is part of the paper proper though.

And all we get from such a horrible event is a very vague description that the BBC has been writing articles on.

I guess there may be something in this mornings paper when I get it but I suspect that it will still be far less then the retirement which will probably take up half the entire paper. My God Australians are shallow people...

I honestly feel sorry for these people, to have had stability in their lives finally thrown upside down in a world that was on it's side to begin with. I am so pissed off at the newspaper though. People are suffering horribly but they don't seem to care. We don't seem to care, to us it is just "Another bunch of Iraqis died today". If it were Australians we would be going "Oh shit diggers were killed today" but because it is a bunch of Iraqi people it doesn't count as news.

These people have gone through hell and most of the world who should be caring will never know. The people who should really see what their governments actions has achieved will be able to shrug it off.

These people, with ties to the land they are in, who have a rather unique culture and religion my end up fleeing like many of their fellow citizens, and their culture will be damaged, their persecution used to fuel the fires of hatred, for those people to try and use them as an example of why people should believe what they, the fanatic, believes and all others are wrong.

I found the article that started this off.

It is a bit old, but the views are perfectly valid. These people know far better then I do about the problems facing the Iraqi people because, at least in the examples in the article, they have fled, in the process of leaving, or are still in Iraq, each one brings something new to the table, viewpoints, conditions, little known facts and write with a wide range of emotions.

If you want to know more about the Iraqi people, by all means read the newspapers, look at the online editions because they are not as bound as the printed media, look at other countries news sites, but most of all, read the blogs. You can go through life on a soundbite, but when you fail to take the opportunity to read what people are saying in the areas that are affected, or are now watching on the sidelines as their country that they had, and probably still do, love, fall to pieces around them, you really can empathise.

The problem is that our society is a self-centred one of bad news that really isn't so bad when you think about it, and pointless drivel. What we have created is a society that is losing one of the most important things that makes us human.

The ability to empathise with others.

The Ancient Ones Return

Reading through the BBC I found two articles that interested me.

The first was the discovery of an ancient forest in Hungary.

The trees, identified as a species of Swamp Cypress have been buried for about 8 million years, and protected by a layer of sand which kept the 16 specimens safe while the rest of the forest was buried.

Now there is something of a frantic rush to save these trees, because they are now unprotected and at the mercy of the elements, but I personally feel confident that they will be safe. However the productivity of the mine will collapse because they have found that they can't move the trees failed.

Really they are just tree trunks, about 6m high and 2-3m wide.

However the insight that they can bring. They can give a good idea as to the climate of the region for around 300 years, 8 million years ago.

And the next item that I have found takes us to a lab.

Scientists have managed to 'restart' some ancient microbes

Well, maybe 'restart' is not the right word, perhaps 'reawaken', but anyway the story.

This happened about a week ago though but it is still interesting.

What they have managed to do is revive various strains of bacteria that lived from around 100 000 years to 8 million years (I wonder if they knew the trees? Probably not because they are in Antarctica...) ago.

The results are interesting.

They have found that the oldest microbes reproduced slowly compared to the younger ones (doubling about every 30-70 days instead of about a week). They suspect that they have been damaged by radiation because they have also had trouble finding out what the oldest stuff was.

They found that the DNA will degrade exponentially after 1.1 million years, so the chances of finding a microbe with a full undamaged genome is highly unlikely, but the possibility is still out there.

This is probably some decent evidence pointing away from life having arrived on Earth from something else, but we never know.

The younger microbes are very interesting though.

DNA testing found that there were examples of common bacteria among them. They found forms of protobacteria, this phylum is home to commonly known pathogens like E. Coli, or Salmonella. The firmicutes found are part of the same phylum as Staphylococcus, or, if you work in the hospitality industry, Listeria. A final example in the news article was the actinobacteria, which have modern relatives like the Micrococci, including the bacteria well loved by deodorant companies Micrococcus luteus which helps to cause the bad odour when you sweat, or another bacteria loved by other companies Propionibacterium acnes which causes, well you can guess the well known condition that usually affects people in their teens or people the day they have a hot date...

Anyway.

What makes these young microbes interesting is that DNA testing also found few matches, which indicates that the DNA has genes currently unknown to Science. So they may not have been isolated yet or we have not found a modern example of the genes that we don't know anything about.

What would these unknown genes do? Are they just simple ones that regulate processes or the creation of certain proteins? Or are they genes that could have a more sinister purpose? Or are they genes that could provide cures for diseases?

Now interestingly a few days before this came out NASA launched their probe to Mars (The Bad Astronomer has a pretty good picture of it on his blog) which is going to look at the ice caps of Mars, and take some samples to be analysed on Earth.

Wouldn't it be interesting if they found some cells there with DNA similar to the ones found here?

I doubt it, but they would probably find better examples of the genome of whatever appears on Mars. Perhaps any examples of life might have developed a different way of storing information?

Update: I spoke to the Bio lecturer today who had experience with things like this and he said that in regards to the trees they can probably cover them in something that would protect them.