Musings Upon a Wonderful Creation

I recently took a stroll to a country pub, with a small group of friends plus a dog. The dog was wearing a muzzle. When I enquired as to why, I was told that it had recently picked up the habit of eating dog shit.

That's a pretty unpleasant thought and you can see why any dog owner would want to break that particular bad habit. The thought of the dog licking you, or mooching around the kitchen after indulging in its scatological passion is enough to put anyone off their breakfast. Joy of joys I have to dog-sit this particular mutt in a few weeks time.

Unpleasant as the talk of faeces is, there is a profound sense in which humans, as part of the wider animal kingdom, are the daily creators of this wonderful thing called dung. Rich in bacteria, each "doing" shoots off down the sewage system, to join a nether world of unseen (and unsmelt) effluent. If you want to know the correct relationship between an all powerful Creator God, and a new universe, look no further than Man, trousers rolled around his ankles, sitting upon his throne.

It's not right for a man (or woman) to pay too much attention to their own business - once it has been released into the wild it becomes a taboo. Concentrate instead on a good digestion and a regular habit, then you will have done enough to set this new microverse of DNA and roughage spinning down the pan, and out into its own nascent world.

Much as I used to enjoy Channel 4's series "You Are What You Eat", if only to witness helpless souls being harangued by Gillian McKeith, I'd never be as daft as to try and follow her advice. It's not just that "@gillianmckeith is a poo-bothering quack" as twitterer eleanora_ succinctly puts it, it is also a fact that McKeith is offending the very laws of creation. When all is said and done, each and every one of us leaves behind a glorious trail of steaming turds. This is not to denigrate the wonderful work of professional sewage engineers. Anyone who helps expediate the evacuation of waste from my house to any anywhere else must be applauded. On the other hand, anyone who thinks you should defacate in a sandwich box then poke it around with a spatula needs their bumps felt.

In a funny way of thinking, this brought me around to the Pope. Andrew Brown at the Guardian wants us to design an anti-Pope t-shirt. I had a go, and then I realised I had quite mixed feelings about him. On the one hand, I think the superstition and pagentry of the Catholic Church is ridiculous. But on the other hand, the world would be quite a bit more drab without him. This is a romantic notion, that somehow I need other people's refined eccentricities to liven up my day. Perhaps I should be putting a lot more work into my own passions, and pay a lot less attention to the passions of others? Something to ponder, at least, the next time I am sitting on the lavvy.

Lost Worlds

Interesting to note that Michael Bywater's Lost Worlds blog has itself become a lost world. At least it didn't just 404.

Bloody celebs!

There I was, sitting peacefully in Watford High Street, sipping an 89p cup of tea from MacDonalds. Who pops up, but Peter "Bloody" Serafinowicz, all lost 'cos he can't find Watford Palace Theatre. Naturally I sent him on his way quick sharp.

Bloody celebs!

Adventures in Time Travel

As observed by humans, time consists of three distinct phases: past, present and future. Moments in time, which were once thought to be universal in the Newtonian scheme, are now understood to be relative since the discoveries of Einstein. Two paradoxes about time travel appear to make it an impossibility. The first is that if time travel were possible, why haven't we seen time travellers from a later technological age travel back to our time? The second is that if you could travel back in time, wouldn't you be able to modify the events of the past, and so change the present day?

Both paradoxes can be debunked, but first I want to tackle the present "now", to show that its component is not just "time", but "space and time". An event which I personally witnessed will be used to illustrate this, but you can easily check the data for yourself. In 1999 I travelled to Kamen Bryag in Bulgaria to see the solar eclipse as detailed by this map. A solar eclipse as viewed from the Earth is the moment when the Moon obscures the Sun, and darkness is observed during daytime. The darkness typically lasts a couple of minutes, but this will vary according to how close you can get to the centre of the eclipse, and to where and when the eclipse occurs on the Earth's surface. Kamen Bryag was on the centre line of the 1999 eclipse, and is on the Black Sea coast, so it can be located as the mostly easterly point of landfall for the eclipse on the map.

From the map you see that I would have witnessed the height of the eclipse at about 11:12:20 am on 11/08/99. Since the Sun, the Moon an myself were perfectly aligned, you might expect that the time was aligned too, but this is not the case. We know that light takes about 8 minutes and 12 seconds to reach us from the sun. This means that an observer on the sun would not witness the eclipse at Kamen Bryag until 11.20.32 am (ie the time on Earth, plus the time it takes for light to travel back to the Sun). Similarly a witness on the Moon would not see the event until 1.3 seconds after an observer on Earth.

So three objects are aligned, but witnesses at each different place note different times for the alignment to occur. If I shout "now" at the moment of the height of the eclipse, we note that there is one shout of now at each observation point, and they occur at different times. Now is both a measure of space and time.

Travelling forward in time is trivial to demonstrate. I get in my car, and and I drive to Leeds. It takes about 2 hours. I have travelled through time and space to reach Leeds. How do I travel back in time?

This article was written in 2010. Suppose I want to witness Earth in the 1970's. Simple, I travel to a place in the galaxy which is 40 light years from Earth and I build a massive telescope to witness Earth from 4 decades ago. The truth of the matter is that in that part of the galaxy which is 40 light years from Earth, it still is 1970. The "now" which is 1970 Earth is a matter of both space and time.

Another example of travelling backward in time goes like this. Take a fantastically fast space ship and send it to a place which is 1 light year from Earth. Suppose that observed from Earth it took 4 years to get there. To the occupants of the space ship, it will have taken just 3 years to reach their destination (ie 4 years observed from Earth is 3 years travel, plus 1 year for the signal to travel, saying they have arrived). The ship then returns to Earth. From Earth the return voyage takes 4 years again, a total journey time of 8 years. To the occupants of the space ship, the return journey takes 3 years, a return voyage of 6 years. In other words, the occupants of the ship will have travelled 8 years into the future on Earth, for a journey time of 6 years. The occupants of the ship will have travelled forward in time 2 years. But all motion is relative, why not regard the Earth as having travelled, and the space ship as having stayed put? In which case the Earth will have travelled back in time by 2 years.

So what of the two time travel paradoxes? The first is mundane. Time travel is actually so commonplace we are are rarely able to spot it. We don't need to invent time travel, because we have been doing it all our lives. Move through space and you will reach a different time.

The second paradox is demolished when you understand that to observe a different time, you must be so far away that you cannot change the past. To observe the 1970's I needed to be 40 light years away. To try to influence the 1970's it would take another 40 years for my signal to arrive.

Should ITV hire bigot Paul Staines?

from: Martin Wiesner
to: xxx@itn.co.uk
date: 30 April 2010 16:14
subject: Fwd: Do you know who you have got into bed with?


Dear ITN, I am informed by ITV you are people to contact here. Please read my original e-mail below, Martin

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Martin Wiesner pogsurf at googlemail dot com
Date: 30 April 2010 15:54
Subject: Do you know who you have got into bed with?
To: viewerservices@itv.com
Cc: info@rethink.org


Dear ITV,

The charity Rethink is right to be proud of its compact between the three main party leaders not to make slurs about other politicians mental health. As Dinesh Bhugra, President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “This election may be a battle – but it should be a battle of ideas, not slurs. Candidates must be able to be open about mental health without it being used against them. Discrimination against people with mental health problems should have no place in society, and certainly not in politics."

http://www.rethink.org/how_we_can_help/news_and_media/press_releases/decision_to_ban_ment.html

Work to end the stigmatization and discrimination of people with mental health problems is important, and so I would expect to see the party leaders example being followed by others, including public bodies such as ITV. How disappointing it is to learn that ITV is in fact hiring one of the most unreconstructed mental health bigots to cover the election for them?

I am referring to Paul Staines, who blogs under the name of Guido Fawkes. Here is Staines boasting how he will be under contract to ITV on election night:

http://order-order.com/2010/04/30/wheres-the-election-night-party/

And here is an example of one of his juvenile tirades about the Prime Minister:

"Gordon was angry because he is a malevolent weirdo, unable to relate people like a normal human being, unable to interpret the emotional signals and body language that we all do instinctively.  He is a
bonkers, not like an eccentric old aunt, but like a dangerously paranoid political psychopath."

http://order-order.com/2010/04/29/bonkers-brown-leading-labours-lemmings-over-the-electoral-edge/

I hope you can see the irony of the party leaders signing a compact hoping to bring to an end to mental health slurs, and you hiring the political blogsphere's worst proponent of it.

I look forward to receiving a reply indicating that you will not in fact be hiring this psycho-bigot. Should I not get satisfaction, I will of course look at ways of drawing this to other peoples attention via various new media.

Yours faithfully,

Martin Wiesner

Please don't laugh

Please don't laugh at the funny man in the white dress. It makes him very unhappy if he is told that he is a figure of fun.

Laughing at him is "seriously offensive" according to the Daily Mail. Making jokes about him is "ill-judged, naive and disrespectful" as reported in the Guardian. In fact the BBC reports it is actually "despicable", which is co-incidentally Daffy Duck's ultimate retort. Are you starting to get a feel for how serious this is?

Fun with place names

Spotted on tonight's episode of Have I Got News For You was this reference to Funbag Drive, Watford:



It's been mentioned in the Telegraph and the Express recently, so it must be true. Oh, and it appears in that oracle of truth and veracity, Wikipedia, too. Watford football fan and Twitterer Kerron Cross misheard it spoken of as "Funbag Crescent", and he asks "Where??".

Where indeed. Funbag Drive, Watford is on the telly, it's in our papers, in fact it's everywhere - except on a map. Google maps says (rather dolefully): we are not able to locate the address.

There are two other rude named places in the Telegraph/Wikipedia list which don't exist. Can you spot them? Or do you prefer facts which are copied from flaky sources and not checked before they are broadcast or published?