Gone fishing....

Ok, not really, I've just moved elsewhere, after a two-year hiatus, this time running my own Wordpress blog:

Mental Indigestion
(http://www.mentalindigestion.net)

Read more!

The smell of bullshit....

In the light of recent (and all too often) experience, I want to make one thing clear: my bullshit detector is second to none.

Tea and wine tasters have nothing over me. I can smell a million shades of bullshit, and see it a mile away.

This is partly why I get so annoyed when recent "graduates", foolishly thinking themselves lord and masters of the intelligencia, try to pull one over on me. There's nothing quite worse that being on the receiving end of bollocks, and enduring the smug satisfaction upon the communicator's face as they revel in their wildly inaccurate belief that they're telling you something new/made-up. They are, in effect, saying you're stupid. Do they think I was born yesterday? Do they not realise just how well-battled a skeptic I am? How logical my cogitative faculties? That I know what a dangling modifier is, or correlative conjunction for that matter. If you push me, I can even tell you the difference between a gerund and a present participle?

Of course, polite gentleman that I am, I rarely proffer the retort they so richly deserve. I recall Richard Dawkins mentioning in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, in the chapter entitled Hoodwink'd with Faerie Fancy, how children of a certain age can't believe that anyone knows anything other, or more, than what they know. This happens either before, or after (I forget), they become completely gullible and believe anything anyone tells them. Most of us grow out of that. Some don't.

Anyway, let them have their cake. Mine's home made, organic and there's nary a humectant in sight!

Read more!

Happy New Year, you bunch of animals...

Yes, yes. Happy New Year and all that. Tally ho!

So, let's start this year's blogging with another rant shall we?

There's been a real brouhaha over this human-hybrid embryo business. One minute it's unethical to harvest the Human eggs needed for implantation of Human genetic material and when an alternative, and more efficacious, "animalian" source is used, well the Frankenpress go to work on their "First Born" like mutant hybrid horror stories.

"He [Blair] said there were "difficult" issues surrounding creating the embryos, which are more than 99% human but have a small animal component. "

...but I would like to make just one comment on terminology. Now I may be wrong, in an ecumenical sense, but it was always my understanding that Humans are in fact animals. I wasn't aware that we had reclassified Humans to give us our own taxonomic Domain or Kingdom? Nor Class, Order or Family for that matter. Thus the issue being described in terms of Human-animal hybrid is somewhat bizarre and I would like it to stop. Stop it. Right now. Ssh.

So, fact check: they're talking Human genetic material inserted into a non-Human egg cell. They're not talking invasion of the Monkey-Boy hybrids here. They're talking cells, to study cells and purely in a scientific context.

As for the public consultation, I'd love to know just whom they consulted, no doubt readers of The Sun, Star, Mirror or Daily Mail for that matter; or people who get their scientific information from celebrities on Big Brother. Such is the level of scientific illiteracy in the UK at the moment, I'm not sure I'd trust anyone to give a fully informed opinion on any matter of bioethics. Hell, given the successful franchise in public fear that the Government has fostered so carefully, I'm not sure I'd consider anyone's idea of ethics full stop. Too much hype for sense and sensibility.

Read more!

Not far from the truth...

An amusing little nugget from yesterday's Onion.

Read more!

Jim Bond....

I have something to say...

Daniel Craig is James Bond, and a splendidly entertaining one at that!

You have been told ;-)

Read more!

Event horizon....

It is, frankly, all a little scary.

Event Horizon. That is currently where I stand in my life. I have been very preoccupied with the impending end of my research contract. Hence the absenteeism. Come the end of February, I will no longer be working in my lab. I'd like to say it was all a conscious choice, but it is largely due to the rejection of our submitted research grant, which itself came down to some rather cranky politics and personal conflicts of interest that have left me rather bitter towards certain members of my research community.

So here I am, waiting to see what happens in my life. I'm busy trying to network and apply for the few research positions that I can find, i.e. those that don't require me to start my life all over again in some new part of the country. I'm staying North. For now.

Some days I find myself about as despondent as one can be, but other days I am joyful at the opportunity to do something a little different. I was, if I admit it, getting a little stale. I want new things to focus on and get stuck into. I'm too close to what I work on right now. I don't want to leave science (the thought leaves me cold), I don't even want to leave bacterial molecular genetics (my bag). I'd like to get into science communication and science policy. I like the bigger picture, I'm a little tired of the minutiae. As long as whatever I do actually means something, is useful, and ultimately keeps me in the fun of finding things out, I don't mind leaving the bench. That being said, some research money may be forthcoming in June, following the next round of grants. So if I'm not gainfully employed by then, I may crawl back into one lab or another ;-)

....and if I can't find anything better to do, I'll be the one streaking across Centre Court at Wimbledon next year ;-)

Read more!

Torchwood

Having sated myself with an excellently prepared, though not universally appreciated, Spanakopita (Spinach Pie), the will to move or do anything that would diminish the comfortable and reassuring feel of successful digestion was thoroughly abated.

SO I found myself switching on th’elly (Northern parlance for the cathode-ray tube of horrors), I figured I’d see whether the BBC is continuing to wipe it’s corporate arse on the hard earned pennies I’d used to purchase my license fee. Being the sci-fi fan that I am, I thought I’d give the ubiquitously advertised Torchwood 15 minutes of my time; 15 minutes I’ll never get back.

I should have known that anything that is “spun off” from the complete and utter garbage that was latest Doctor Who, could only be, well, complete and utter garbage. Like Doctor Who, the series looks like it’s been filmed with a bargain-basement “camcorder” using props from a playschool broom cupboard and the four worst actors since those in my primary school’s version of Dick Whittington; oh, and it’s situated in Cardiff.

If it weren’t for the mindless interjection of the odd random swearword, spurting blood, same-sex snogging and a sex craved alien that feeds off “orgasmic” energy, you couldn’t have convinced me that this was a series for adults. If this typifies the level of sophistication in current British sci-fi, as I can only imagine they must have commissioned a focus group to rate previews, then it is a sorry day. I guess this is what happens when scientific-illiteracy reaches epic proportions.

Of course, it seems the series is targeted at adults, and I’m afraid that the only people who could possibly enjoy such tripe are likely to have a dribbling problem, either from their frontal lobotomy or their thorazine drip.

Read more!