The Hidden Truth Behind the Light Bulb

Yesterday someone- I don't know who, the usual suspects I presume- was asking us all to turn off our lights for an hour. My first thought when I chanced to hear about it was that 8:30 PM is entirely the wrong time of day for that sort of thing, since at this time of year there is almost nowhere in the world you can see without artificial light at that time. It also struck me as unlikely that the power stations can respond to small fluctuations on that time-scale, so no energy will actually be saved. On the other hand, for those who like to worry about this sort of thing it is an act of symbolic importance to sit in the dark for an hour, and for the rest of us it serves as a reminder that if we light the rooms we are not in we are just increasing our bill, and so lining the pockets of those ruthless capitalists we hear so much about. More on this in a moment.

Others have urged us to celebrate, at the same time, the fact that we as a species have learned how to light up the darkness, talk across the world, and control our environment so that we can live long, healthy, comfortable and contented lives (anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem). To me this seems well worth celebrating, and only the fact that I had no desire to add a few pence to the sum I pay every month to the greedy capitalists (see above, below, and much of this blog for more information) stopped me turning on everything in the house from the sheer joy of living in such a world.

But then I began to investigate, idly at first, and I discovered something astounding- a conspiracy on a vast scale, hidden in plain sight, like the purloined letter. We are being forced to consume light by a capitalist plot which benefits shadowy figures who might be used as metonyms of pure evil.

Cui bono, I thought. Who can be interested in persuading us that a world full of artificial light is such an unquestionably wonderful thing, converting our passion for luminescence into a form of religion?

To cut a long story short, I embarked on an exhaustive and dangerous investigation, involving going under deep cover in the rare earth mines of Eastern Europe, and meetings in tastelessly decorated offices in various European capitals with men with gold teeth and suspicious bulges in their trousers (and believe me they were not pleased to see me). And I discovered this truth:

The capo di capi of the international scandium maffia is this man, Tim Worstall. Sinister and secretive (do you know what scandium is? Exactly, he doesn't want us to know) he is known to live in the south of Portugal, but the precise location is 'unknown'. He clearly has powerful friends. He controls a number of propaganda organs, including the Adam Smith Institute, the Register, the American and, it is even suggested, parts of the Guardian.

This is a man who claims to be a liberal, a free-marketeer, and even, just today, a socialist. He will clearly say anything he thinks may be expedient. He defends a professed belief in capitalism, markets, freedom and personal choice on the ludicrous grounds that they work, increasing prosperity and human happiness. He only, by this, shows his greed, his love of money and power, and his skill in manipulating ordinary people. He doesn't link to my blog, and he doesn't answer my comments, and I say, enough is enough.

Light is the opium of the people, electricity is the root of all evil, there exists a hideous plot to control the world through dependence on electricity, and it all comes back to Tim Worstall. Every time we buy a light bulb, every time we flick a switch, we put money in his pocket. It is time to stand up and say no, I WILL NOT BE LIT.

Note: Nanny says it's time I had my cocoa, and pehaps, a lie-down. But I'll be back.

New Hominid Species?

Well, no. Like those questions that form the titles of articles in so much of our supposedly serious press, the answer is no. The paper doesn't talk of species, but form and lineage, and for a very good reason- there isn't enough difference in the mtDNA genome to be sure that it is more than a highly divergent eastern population of Neanderthal.

The story (behind a paywall) is discussed here, here, here, here, and here by people who mostly know what they're talking out.

The region of the Altai mountains where it was found was also home, at a similar time-depth (around 40,000 years) to modern humans and Neanderthals, and it came as a great surprise to Svante Pääbo and the team, because they had assumed it was just one more Neanderthal bone. 'It', by the way, is a single distal palanx, that is the tip, of a little finger, and it seems to be impossible to do any meaningful morphological analysis in order to learn about the phenotype of the creature it came from. But enough unadulterated DNA has been recovered to do the sequencing, and in the near future they hope to sequence the entire nuclear genome, too, which will provide a lot more information.

What does it mean? Did an unknown hominin leave Africa at an unknown time and evolve into something that we have only just discovered? Did it evolve from a known species of Homo, in a previously unrecorded exodus? How similar was it to Neanderthals and humans? Insofar as these questions can be answered at the moment, the answers will be found in the links.

So many gaps exist in our knowledge of hominid evolution (in fact it consists almost entirely of gaps, with random islets of information strewn over a vast ocean of total, and possibly permanent, ignorance. Finds usually come about by chance, and in many regions, including much of Africa, the geology is such that the likelihood of recovering anything from them is almost zero) that any new discovery is likely to require a big restructuring of our entire understanding of the matter. This bone has not quite put us in that position, but the nuclear DNA sequence may well do.

Palaeoanthropolgy is a science and, as such, it collects data, formulates hypotheses and detemines ways by which these might be tested, new data obtained and so the hypotheses rejected or refined. The usual caveats apply, concerning the limits of human nature, the weakness, pride, complacency and stupidity to which it is prone, but there is behind it all a well tested system for approaching the truth. The problem with the field, as I suggested above, is that the data become available rarely and randomly, and it is impossible to design experiments or to test hypotheses unless new data happen to emerge by chance which are more or less what was needed. It makes the search for truth a deeply frustrating one, and it means that every new site, or even a new bone, that appears, may show the previous, tentative but painstakingly constructed chronology to be false.

It is highly unlikely that we will ever know the full story of human evolution, but we have just learned something else, which might, one day, help us to understand a bit of the story, rather than being a few random syllables from a seemingly unconnected chapter.

It is a search I find endlessly fascinating, not only in itself as a constantly changing field of science, full of important surprises, but also because I, at least, am interested in it in part in order to get a clearer, fuller idea of what it means to human. To know something more of where we came from, and how, and what we might have been, is to have a better understanding of yourself. I think it matters, or perhaps I just find it interesting.

EDL and UAF

This story, covered briefly in the Independent and the Times, but not really followed up by anyone, in the press or on the blogs, is important because the most dangerous opponents of freedom- that is, those who have a chance of actually succeeding in reducing the freedom of others- are those who do it in the name of fashionable causes. So the following scene is instructive, and needs to be properly analysed (Unity of place and time are observed, unity of action may be assumed for the sake of argument):

The setting: Central Bolton on an overcast Sunday afternoon (not a promising start, I know)

The dramatis personae: The English Defence League (a bunch of thugs cobbled together from odds and ends not bright enough or clean enough to get into the BNP. They don't like militant Islam).

Unite Against Fascism (A bunch of thugs cobbled together from student politics and fringe bits of the extreme left. They like a punch up, don't like anyone who won't parrot their own pieties, don't know what fascism is, or freedom, and respond to provocation with the maturity of a 6 year old who's forgotten to take his Ritalin).

If you need to resort to abuse and threats you may just have lost the argument. If you start by setting out your intention to use violence and threats as your only answer then you are undoubtedly a bigger problem than the one you claim to be addressing. and you certainly don't deserve to be taken seriously.

The BNP, who were the original target of the UAF, are not fascists, and they are not right-wing. They raison d'etre is that they don't like immigrants, blacks, etc (insert term of choice) but as far as they have a coherent set of policies in other areas, which isn't far at all, they are left-wing, statist, and seek the working class vote. I wish they didn't exist, but they do, and we have to live with it.

The EDL, on the other hand, don't even pretend to have any coherent policies about anything, adn can hardly be grouped at all, politically. They claim to be against the supine acceptance of militant Islam, which may or not be an excuse to attack immigrants, but in itself it is at least defensible. They also, despite being mostly a chance for a bunch of thugs to have a little fun, have some intelligent leaders, who have learnt a lot from the BNP. The propaganda value of being the one who are violently attacked while peacefully protesting is high, even though the press tries to pretend it hasn't happened, and so the EDL isues rules for its own demonstrations, provides stewards from its own ranks, bans its supporters from carrying alcohol, and knows it can rely on the UAF to turn up and throw things, break things, and assault people, because that's what they do.

I'm not black and I'm not from Bolton, so I can look at this more in the abstract. The EDL may or may not be a spontaneous response to a genuine problem, but it is certainly not the answer to that problem. Nevertheless, it exists, and it's members are entitled to their views and to express them publicly. To deny that freedom is to make it conditional on orthodoxy or fashion, and it is amply demonstrated in human history that no one can be trusted to determine what people may be permitted to think.

If the EDL are a problem, and they probably are, the UAF, a violent, illiberal gang led by Trots, is certainly not the answer to it.

Don't believe me, go and read what they have to say. Listen to them speak. Let them tell you, through their words and actions, what they are. Unlike them, you see, I do believe in freedom, and not just for people who are like me.

I thought there was a point to this post when I started, but now I'm not so sure. In any case, read what everyone has to say about this. The Independent, you will notice, talks about the police battling right-wingers, but the police spokesman makes it clear that it was the UAF causing all the trouble. The EDL have, as I say, learned a lot very quickly. And don't trust anyone who wants to tell you what you are allowed to hear, and what you are allowed to say. They are not on your side.

Rivers and Bridges Again

You can get a bit obsessed with water down here, as regular readers may have noticed. Usually we don't have enough of it. Just now we have a bit too much, but it may have to last us years, so we won't complain too much. There are several places along the river not far from the city which are attractive enough to be worth walking out to, and now that it really is a river rather than a ditch I'm trying to have a look at them all before the whole place dries up again.


Yesterday I went out to an old bridge on a very minor road from Carrión to Malagón (yes, quite), within view of another mediaeval castle once home to the knights of Calatrava, before they went off to somewhere sufficiently distant from the swamp to avoid being wiped out by typhus or cholera every few years. The new bridge is a flimsy looking thing, strung together with leftover bits of metal and tarmac, but it gets you over to the other side, which the old bridge no longer does. The old one is made of stone, and rather than go directly from bank to bank in the fashion of more traditional bridges, it winds across. This is explained by the remnants of old mills still lying on the riverbed. There used to be a lot of them along the river, but social change (electricity) and the everfalling level of the water put an end to them decades ago.

The last time I went there, back in October was with Mrs Hickory, and an old man on a bike who claimed to be eighty told us of how he remembered the water reaching near the top of the banks when he used to go past as a child, and how it was all much greener then. He was probably telling the truth. Yesterday it was not very green, as many of the trees in the bed are dead, but there were almonds in flower, and a smell of fresh, running water about the place.

Before and after photos, for comparison.

In Which I Shudder at Change

I've always disliked the Duckworth-Lewis handicap system for one-day cricket, partly because of its quite unnecessary complexity, and partly for the related reason that, being rather opaque, it is not obviously fair. This may not make it unfair, but when it produces an impossibly high target after a few lost overs for a side that was going along quite nicely, or every ball, run or especially wicket causes the DL figure to lurch and bounce about like a drunk in a dark alley, or there is a rush to shorten the innings and calculate a target at the first sign of a drop of rain, even though there is plenty of time left to finish the game, it is hard to avoid the impression that it was bought up after a gleaming pitching session at HQ by men in shiny suits and sunglasses with cybernetic blackboards and laser pointers, and promises of free merchandising products if they got the nod, rather than for what it might actually add to the beauty of the game. It was too clever, and too pretty, to refuse, but what problem was is it intended to solve? Something much, much simpler had always been used. Everyone knew where they were all the time, you could easily change your tactics if there was a chance of rain, and it was both transparent and intuitively fair.

Mind you, being, in all the important things in life, as entrenched a conservative as ever wore tights and walked backwards at the State Opening of Parliament, I never liked this new-fangled limited overs stuff in the first place (even though it's older than I am). So I may well be missing something.

In any case this post is not about cricket, but ski-jumping. Mrs Hickory and I are both fans. They do it mostly at Sunday lunchtime, and there are few better ways of digesting your roast than watching people throwing themselves over cliffs in the frozen wastes of northern Scandinavia (watching the Addis Ababa marathon is up there with it, perhaps). Suddenly, someone has come up with a way of compensating for differences in the starting gate (which had never existed before, everyone jumped from the same gate) and for variations in the wind, which have always been thought of as part of the sport, the rub of the green.

There are two major problems with this that I can see (three if you include the aforesaid conservatism). The first is the same as with DL, that is, although there is a reassuringly complex procedure for coming up with a reassuringly precise figure to add to or subtract from the points total, there is no obvious way of checking that it is fair. The figure is not intuitively meaningful, and so it looks like an arbitrary correcting factor. The second problem is that it diminishes the spectacle enormously. Until now you knew what each jumper had to do to go ahead of the current leader, you could see what he had done, and you could see whether there were any clear technical defects which would cause the judges to mark it down. Suddenly the jump itself is not that important; you have to wait for the machine to spit out the number before you know what's happened. And this is every time, every jump, not just a bad solution to what is in cricket at least a real problem, the rain, but a solution to nothing at all which has made the whole thing much less fun to watch. For that reason I suspect it will not survive. I hope not, anyway.

This may not be important in the great scheme of things, but it got me wondering about how these decisions are arrived at, and I suspect dark plottings, money spinning, and stupidity.

Miguel Delibes, Man

Miguel Delibes died on Friday. He has been the grand old man of Spanish letters for as long as I've lived here, which is over twenty years. His first novels, recognised as good, were written in the 1940's and he continued to publish until a few years before his death.

He had competition as the great Spanish writer, particularly from Camilo José Cela, but Cela, though undoubtedly a writer of genius, was also an irrascible old s***e, whereas Delibes wrote, then went off for a pint, or to the football, or to pot a few rabbits in the woods.

His place in the hearts and minds of Spain as a whole, and particularly Valladolid, which is in a genuine and unaffected state of mourning, was won largely by being an agreeable, intelligent man who liked people, was aware of those around him, placed enormous value on his family and friends, and told very good stories very well. He wrote because he enjoyed it and was good at it, not to publicise his sense of his own importance or to express simplistic political opinion. He rarely gave interviews, and he never got involved in the great self-appreciation movement that for many seems to be the main purpose of literature and the arts in general. His great loves were hunting and Real Valladolid football club. I should imagine the former gave him more unmixed pleasure than the latter.

A great man, has left us. And part of his greatness was that he himself would never have imagined that he was more than a normal chap.

Broadly on the same subject, Óscar Pujol is a Sanskrit scholar who spent 13 years preparing a Sanskrit-Catalán dictionary, said to be the first in a Peninsular language. This may well be true, I certainly know no other, not even in Spanish. I use Monier-Williams in theory, though in practice, Theodore Benfey's dictionary is easier to handle. (There's an on-line Monier-Williams, by the way, which is fiddly and often unhelpful, but can be a lot quicker. This one's useful, too.)

Pujol is now at the Casa Asia, and collaborates with the University of Valladolid, and I mention him here because he seems to have a deep love and knowledge of Sanskrit literature and the culture that created it, and to some extent still does. Also, a man who can spend 13 years of his life writing a dictionary to help speakers of one small minority language (nearly all of whom are bilingual in Spanish, so it reduces his possible readership very dramatically and quite unnecessarity) understand another language which, despite its beauty, and its historical, cultural and literary richness, is of interest to very few people indeed outside of India, has my respect and regard. (The only Sanskrit department I know of in Spain is at Salamanca.)

And so I raise my glass this evening to these two men. Without pretending to compare anything about them, I merely recognise that they have both made the world, as I understand it, a better place by being in it.

I Feel it in my Bones

The damp, that is.




I spoke a while back of our attitude to rain over here. Good stuff, is how we think of it, wish there were more of it. You'll need an umbrella, about time, is our reaction. Filling the reservoirs, wetting the soil. These things matter here, and we are always glad to see the rain.

However...

It started raining in late November, and hasn't really stopped. The reservoirs are overflowing, the rivers are bursting their banks, whole estates built on dried up riverbeds are being all but swept away, the soil is so damp you can sink into it up to your knees and we are all, fickle types that we are, thoroughly sick of the sight of rain. We don't need any more, not for a year or so.

It is rather pretty, though. Compare these before and after photos of the river below the old town (basically an abandoned fortress compound from the 12thC, recently re-excavated. The more modern city is several miles from the river, for reasons not unconnected to some serious smiting at the hands of the conquering Arabs in 1195).

The whole effect is remarkable to see, if you are used to the browns and yellows that we have here nearly all the year, including winter, outside of the field that are irrigated one way or another, and we don't do much irrigation here, you need water for that. The yellows and browns are light and bright, and have character and beauty, but it is good to see green from time to time. The lakes this year in Ruidera will be spectacular. I look forward to seeing them soon.

The bridge is called Roman, because of the style it is perceived to have, rather than its origins. It's 19thC and not of any special interest. The second photo is taken from it, looking towards what is the foreground in the first photo.

It is very rare indeed to have so much rain, and so much cold. It snowed again on Monday. I don't know whether this is global warming, incipient Armageddon or just time to move to the Bahamas. Or perhaps it's no more than an excuse to post some photographs.