Beating stupid surveillance laws : let's all be villains !

OK, I'm totally learning how to write a web crawler.... maybe. Get everyone secretly looking at absurdly depraved and dangerous content and surveillance becomes meaningless. Wouldn't be that hard to do for a simple test. What would be more complex would be something that could fool a "big data" analysis. It would have to (depending on what precisely the ISPs have to store) :
- Mimic user's browsing habits, e.g. spending a realistic amount of time on different sites, coming back to some repeatedly and visiting others for mere seconds before never coming back again
- Be randomised, possibly by starting with a very large list of sites and then visiting all the links on every page in a pseudo-random order, plus using search engines to look for random combinations of naughty words; thus over time each individual user would have a unique web history
- The file itself would have to have a random name so that it couldn't be easily identified by anyone snooping on the computer
- It would have to download and store material from the web in a different directory on the user's computer so that anyone snooping the machine would think the user was genuinely interested in specific content
- User variation in what themes of criminal activities get searched for; e.g. home bomb-making equipment versus outlandish pornography

And then there's the very real concern that this would help genuine criminals hide from surveillance.

Anyway, there's the idea now thrown out in the public domain. Or, if we're lucky, the Parliamentary debate will see reason and (somehow) scale back the worst parts of this Act.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38134560

Animals can be jerks as well as adorable

Animals are a lot like people. It's wonderful that they exist, but they are not nice.

The conventional view is that gorillas, like bonobos, rarely turn violent... Now a surprising series of observations of mountain gorillas in Africa's Virunga Mountains, published in the journal Scientific Reports, has overturned this view of gorillas.

In the first observed attack, a solitary male named Inshuti approached a group of 26 individuals, but was chased off by three males. When the males caught up with Inshuti, they pinned him to the ground and started to attack. The rest of the group soon followed and the mob started to bite, kick and pull out his hair. "The alpha male repeatedly sank his teeth into his body and shook his head back and forth, similar to a canid shaking prey," the authors report... The attack stopped about four minutes later and Inshuti, though injured, escaped.

In 2010 a separate and even larger group of 42 gorillas attacked an unknown lone male. Again he was hit, kicked and dragged. But this time the attack lasted much longer: it went on for 18 minutes until the victim managed to flee... In all three cases the entire group participated in the attacks, including females and juveniles.

Gorillas tend to live in groups with one male and multiple females. But these groups are different. There are now several with three or more males. "In groups like that, the costs of engaging in this kind of behaviour are pretty low, because the victim is so badly outnumbered," says Rosenbaum.

"It's possible that the things [Fossey] saw then were actually less representative of 'normal'," says Rosenbaum. "But that's pure speculation, and it's unclear exactly how long we would need to watch them to come up with a meaningful picture of what 'normal' looks like."

The change to their group structures – with more males present – has made today's gorilla group structures more similar to humans and chimpanzees. In chimps, violent aggression is often attributed to an "imbalance of power". Something similar appears to be going on with these gorillas. However, in chimpanzees and humans, it is usually only males that do the attacking, not the entire group. Another difference is that these gorilla attacks did not appear premeditated, whereas humans and chimps are known to actively seek out victims.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161128-groups-of-gorillas-have-turned-violent

Rhys' Law of Press Releases

If someone else doesn't have this already, which they almost certainly do, I'm totally claiming this as Rhys' Law :

The value of a press release and the probability that the reported discovery is correct is anti-correlated with the grandiosity of the claims.

It's probably not a linear relation. Maybe more like a galactic hydrogen density profile : flat near the middle out to some quite large distance (importance of the claim), but then it drops precipitously beyond the stellar disc (as claims move from "probably" and "show" to "mystery solved" and "proof").

The message is being heard but ignored

At least someone is pointing out all this to those in charge, even if those in charge are not very sensible.

Originally shared by Chris Blackmore (The Walrus)

I keep writing to my MP to remind him that MPs are supposed to represent us by thinking for themselves about what is best for the country, rather than just counting how many of their constituents are grunting about #Brexit.

Here's a little something I noticed just now, in an article on another site, describing a constituent's meeting with Theresa May.

She replied that she was a representative and not a “delegate” and was not obliged to be the voice of her constituents.

So we are part way there, May actually understands that MPs are not forced to vote in accordance with the mob. Now we need her to understand that the measure she is trying so desperately hard to force through is a disaster looming large, and that she can "respect the result" all she likes, but doesn't have to do what the 37% wanted.

https://www.facebook.com/Reasons2Remain/posts/342481772777865:0

Recounts ahoy

Now it gets interesting.

A lawyer for Hillary Clinton's campaign says it will participate in a recount of US election votes in Wisconsin. The recount was initiated by Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, who is also seeking recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, citing "statistical anomalies". Results would need to be overturned in all three states to alter the outcome of the election.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38118852

The paper written by a Giant Asshole

Hoover, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, had tried unsuccessfully to get a paper published in two leading journals. So he added a co-author from a prestigious-sounding institute, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Palermo, Sicily, and resubmitted the work. Sure enough, the paper was accepted and published. He did this several times with the same result. But the name Hoover chose—Stronzo Bestiale—was a sly tell: In Italian, it means “giant asshole.” And yet Bestiale remains in the scientific literature, just like Hoss Cartwright. So does Galadriel Mirkwood, an Afghan hound that belonged to biologist Polly Matzinger of the National Institutes of Health. She was fed up with the use of passive voice in scientific papers, and decided to add her pup’s name to a paper in protest.

In astronomy the use of the passive voice is severely frowned upon... errr, I mean, we hates it, precious ! We hates it !

It’s tempting to laugh off some of these antics, which seem driven by ego and self-interest. But they also underscore a painful truth: Unless the evaluation of scientists—and the all-important doling out of funding—can be wrenched away from bean-counting metrics, history is likely to repeat itself. Tomorrow’s metrics gamers may come up with some other ruse, and spoofers like Morgenstern will invent the next Hoss Cartwright in response. Taking time to read and evaluate a selection of a job applicant’s papers takes far more time than plugging a bunch of numbers in to a matrix. But it’s precisely that output, not metrics, that science is supposed to be about. The agencies that fund grants and committees that hire and promote academic researchers need to get back to doing the hard job of assessing the value and quality of candidates’ scientific work rather than leaning on the crutch of overly simplified publication metrics.

It's the over-reliance on simplified metrics that's the problem here. A publication record is a useful thing, but relying on sheer numbers is a terrible idea. Hence my previous suggestion of a more nuanced journal/publication ranking system, where one could see how many papers of particular types and review quality a researcher has. Even then, to rely entirely on numbers would be a fatal mistake, because you can't quantify research quality. It's fundamentally impossible. All you can do is to try and make the current system better.
https://plus.google.com/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/LfJxdkdhcz2

Via Adam Synergy.

Originally shared by Kenny Chaffin

Ethics in Science. Faking science.

"Why Fake Data When You Can Fake a Scientist?"

"Hoss Cartwright, a former editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Innovations and Research, had a good excuse for missing the 5th World Congress on Virology last year: He doesn’t exist. Burkhard Morgenstern, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Gottingen, dreamt him up, and built a nice little scientific career for him. He wrote Cartwright a Curriculum Vitae, describing his doctorate in Studies of Dunnowhat, his rigorous postdoctoral work at Some Shitty Place in the Middle of Nowhere, and his experience as Senior Cattle Manager at the Ponderosa Institute for Bovine Research. Cartwright never published a single research paper, but he was appointed to the editorial boards of five journals. Apparently, no one involved in the application processes remembered the television show Bonanza, or the giant but amiable cowboy named “Hoss” who was played by actor Dan Blocker. Despite Cartwright’s questionable credentials, he was invited to speak at several meetings such as the 5th World Congress on Virology—typically a mark of recognition as an expert...."

http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/why-fake-data-when-you-can-fake-a-scientist
http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/why-fake-data-when-you-can-fake-a-scientist

Clinton ahead by 2m votes

But obviously she fought a terrible campaign and nobody likes her. Riiiight.

Hillary Clinton's lead over Donald Drumpf in the popular count of the US presidential election has increased to two million votes. Republican President-elect Mr Drumpf won the election by winning a majority of the electoral college votes, and he will be inaugurated in January. But with votes still being counted, two weeks on, the Cook Political Report has his tally at 62.2m and hers at 64.2m. It is the fifth time the winner of the popular vote has lost the election.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38087150

A white rainbow

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-38063662

Molten salt nuclear reactors could help eliminate existing waste

While we're on the subject of energy production - which if done properly may have far more drastic effects than the latest crop of idiot politicians - it's still worth giving nuclear a look-in. However, it looks increasingly unlikely to me that large-scale nuclear power will be needed. Maybe on small scales as backups for those rare occasions when wind and sun both fail across large areas, or for regions where these aren't practical for whatever reason. Still, we've already got existing nuclear waste, so it makes a lot of sense to develop a reactor that can consume it and reduce the problem. We could probably have had this decades ago if we'd invested properly instead of treating the n-word like the other n-word.

At least in theory*, this type of reactor can’t suffer the kind of catastrophic failure that happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima, making unnecessary the expensive and redundant safety systems that have driven up the cost of conventional reactors. What’s more, the new plants should produce little waste and might even eat up existing nuclear waste. They could run on uranium, which powers 99 percent of the nuclear power plants in the world, or they could eventually run on thorium, which is cleaner and more abundant. The ultimate goal of the Shanghai Institute: to build a molten-salt reactor that could replace the 1970s-era technology in today’s nuclear power plants and help wean China off the coal that fouls the air of Shanghai and Beijing, ushering in an era of cheap, abundant, zero-carbon energy.

* As I understand it, this statement may be over-cautious. The reactor is safe by design, not by clever engineering : if it overheats, it can't melt down.

That reactor at Oak Ridge ran on uranium; Weinberg’s eventual goal was to build one that would run exclusively on thorium, which, unlike uranium, cannot easily be made into a bomb. But the molten-salt experiment was abandoned in the early 1970s. One big reason was that Weinberg managed to alienate his superiors by warning of the dangers of conventional nuclear power at a time when dozens of such reactors were already under construction or in the planning stages.

Because conventional reactors require huge, costly containment vessels that can blow up in extreme conditions, and because they use extensive external cooling systems to make sure the solid-fuel core doesn’t overheat and cause a runaway reaction leading to a meltdown, they are hugely expensive.

Solid-fuel reactors cooled with molten salt can run at higher temperatures than conventional reactors, making them more efficient, and they operate at atmospheric pressures—meaning they do not require expensive vessels of the sort that ruptured at Chernobyl. Molten-salt reactors that use liquid fuel have an even more attractive advantage: when the temperature in the core reaches a certain threshold, the liquid expands, which slows the nuclear reactions and lets the core cool. To take advantage of this property, the reactor is built like a bathtub, with a drain plug in the bottom; if the temperature in the core gets too high, the plug melts and the fuel drains into a shielded tank, typically underground, where it is stored safely as it cools.

These reactors should be able to tap more of the energy available in radioactive material than conventional ones do. That means they should dramatically reduce the amount of nuclear waste that must be handled and stored.

Because they don’t require huge containment structures and need less fuel to produce the same amount of electricity, these reactors are more compact than today’s nuclear plants. They could be mass-produced, in factories, and combined in arrays to form larger power plants. All of that should make them cheaper to build.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602051/fail-safe-nuclear-power/

Storing energy in magic beans

From the article on solar power, but this probably deserves its own post. Article is from September, but I missed it when it first came out.

When a type of salt is added, vermiculite, which is normally used to pot cactus and similar plants, takes on an extraordinary property. Blow warm air over it — breathing will do — and it dries out. But if you then expose it to cold, damp air, it absorbs the water and releases heat. Dubbed “magic beans” by researchers at Swansea University, the material can be used to store heat energy for months in this way.

A fridge-freezer-sized box of it could be used to provide effective heating for a domestic house for potentially months during the winter.

Professor David Worsley, an engineer at the university, said: “In the summer, we’ve got this massive amount of hot air collected by solar thermal collectors. We wanted to make a material you could put heat into and save it for the winter. You drive hot air over it, it drives all the water off and in the winter all you do is introduce cold damp air. It absorbs the water and releases energy... It will keep the heat until you put some damp air on it — so you can time-shift solar energy from the summer into the winter. We are really excited by this.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/heating-vermiculite-potting-plants-heat-storage-summer-sun-winter-swansea-a7234406.html

Solar power even works in Britain

OK, now I start to believe that solar really could be the answer. Solar power outperforming coal in Britain ??? Granted, this was in May, which is one of the nicest months - so let's not get carried away here. But it's still Britain, and its reputation for miserable weather is well-earned. Do read the linked article on energy storage too.

James Court, head of policy at the Renewable Energy Association, said: “Solar overtaking coal this summer would have been largely unthinkable five years ago. This new data shows its popularity amongst homeowners and businesses and its falling costs. Now that we have a significant global and domestic industry, solar is one of the cheapest forms of power."

“Government policy stability is critical, however. Solar PV deployment in August 2016 was one third of what it was in August 2015 due to the sudden and severe changes to policy in the past year.”

“The role for solar is significantly expanding as we develop complementary energy storage technologies, but we need government support to continue to achieve its potential."

Juliet Davenport, chief executive of renewable energy supplier Good Energy, said: "Renewable energy has been an unbelievable success story in the UK and around the globe... As clean technology advances, Britain is bidding farewell to coal. The transition to a 100 per cent renewable future is within Britain's grasp.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/solar-panels-electricity-coal-power-stations-uk-sun-a7344326.html

Australia enters the space race

This seems like a very complicated idea to me, but it's definitely interesting.

"You’ve already got to be going at hypersonic speed before a scramjet works but, once you get there, it’s by far the most efficient type of engine.”

To reach these hypersonic speeds, Smart plans to combine an uncrewed scramjet with conventional rockets. He believes his Spartan launch system could radically reduce the costs of blasting satellites into orbit. “All conventional satellite launch systems use different stages,” says Smart. “There’ll be a first stage rocket that normally gets up to Mach 5 or 6, you’ll have a second scramjet stage that goes two thirds of the way to space and you’ll have a final upper stage that takes the satellite into orbit.”

On the launchpad, Spartan will look and launch like a conventional rocket. Once it reaches hypersonic speeds, however, the first stage will drop away and the scramjet will unfurl its wings to blast the spacecraft into the upper atmosphere. When it runs out of air, the scramjet will separate and a small conventional rocket will carry the satellite into space. The only part of the launch system that will not survive the flight is the final third stage, which will burn up in the atmosphere after releasing its payload into orbit.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161117-australias-hypersonic-spaceplane-for-a-new-space-race

Referenda, as with all things, need safeguards

Perhaps the biggest failures of the referendum advisory opinion poll campaign were the following omissions :

But those two sections of Briefing Paper 07212 seem not to have been read, or if they were read, they seem not to have been understood; and if they were read and understood, why are they being ignored? Section 5 expressly and explicitly says that the referendum is advisory, consultative, and not binding on the government or parliament. Section 6 says that if there were any question of a referendum being binding or mandating, a simple plurality of votes would be insufficient – that is, a majority is not enough: it has to be a super-majority. Why is all this being so blatantly ignored? Why? Which MP or government minister will give an answer and a reason?

I guess no-one wants to market it as "vote in this opinion poll and we may or may not listen to you". Fair enough, really. But why oh why did they instead implicitly say, "vote in this opinion poll and we'll definitely go with the result, regardless of how small or transient the majority is" ? Instead of one silly extreme, they chose the counter-extreme which was equally silly.

We should not have had a referendum on this in the first place, because you shouldn't give people a choice to vote for shooting themselves in the economic kneecaps. It was only there for Cameron to secure his historical legacy anyway (well, look how that worked out). But if we did insist on one, we could have done a much better job.

Section 5 would make the whole thing pointless and no-one would have voted for it. Hence it wasn't widely reported. Section 6, however, is much more interesting. Having chosen to circumvent section 5 and make the referendum legally binding - which should have been subject to full Parliamentary approval as with all laws - the government should then have voted on the level of the majority needed to secure a change in the status quo. Consider the hypothetical extreme scenario that it was won by a single individual vote. Would this not be obviously an incredibly stupid decision to let the next few decades be decided by an infinitesimally tiny majority ?

Of course it would. A majority of 4% of the voters is much more significant, but as the levels of "Bregret" clearly indicate, it can in no way be seen as decisive. That's 4% of the voters, mind you - not a majority of the electorate at all. It's not sensible to presume that those who didn't vote had no preference one way or the other because that preference is always going to be dictated by one's own biases. Nor is it sensible to make a decision with major economic and political implications unless there was a very clear majority. Hence the referendum should have been considered advisory unless there was a much, much more decisive result - say 60% of the whole electorate (not those who actually voted). Even then, added safeguards would be needed because it's not inconceivable that voters might have decided differently six months later. We could, for instance, have been given the option to vote again based on the status of the exit negotiations a year down the line (article 50 isn't itself legally binding, as the author of A50 attests to).

That's ignoring the fact that reducing our relation to the EU to a simple in-out choice makes absolutely no sense, because decades of economic and political ties just aren't that simple, and the fact that the campaign lies were more blatant and extensive even than in the usual standards of political campaigns. If you insist on people voting for big decisions, it's imperative that they be given the correct information. Without this, a vote makes no sense.

Why, you might ask, do I not insist on similar safeguards for regular votes ? Because voting for a political representative is not the same as voting for a decision. If I choose my MP, I choose someone to negotiate and compromise on my behalf. I do this partially because I like their stated policies and partially because I think they will best represent my interests - that is, doing what will improve my conditions. I don't expect to get everything I want, but I do expect them to mostly act in my favour most of the time. That can sometimes mean doing things I didn't actually want them to do but nonetheless actually help me in the end. Most day-to-day votes are of much lesser importance and subject to negotiation anyway, and are generally easier to repeal - not so when we're talking about breaking relationships with a massive economic bloc that have been forged over decades.

But no, it's all "the will of the people", and democracy must be treated as an absurd absolute. Yay.

What will happen if parliament votes not to trigger Article 50? Answer: the pound will rise and stocks with them; businesses will breathe a huge sigh of relief; tens of millions of UK citizens here and abroad, and EU nationals in the UK, will join their sighs of relief with that gale; companies that had decided not to invest in the UK, and students who had decided to go elsewhere, will reconsider in the UK’s favour. And the world – currently thinking that the British have taken complete leave of their senses – will begin to recover its respect for us.

http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/articles/ac_grayling_on_why_now_is_the_time_for_mps_to_derail_a_disastrous_brexit_deal_1_4779842

Word of the day : puggles

D'awwwww.

Sydney's Taronga Zoo is celebrating its first baby echidnas, or puggles as they are better known, in almost 30 years. The three babies hatched from their eggs in August but keepers wanted to see them grow before going public. "Echidnas are notoriously difficult to breed in human care, but keepers are pleased with the progress of the tiny trio," the zoo said.

The puggles have opened their eyes and are developing the spines characteristic of their species. They have yet to be named by the keepers but are not expected to leave their burrows until early next year. Until then they will be mostly sleeping.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-38027485

A skateboarding balloon robot that walks on water

OK, it's restored my faith in humanity a little bit to know that we've invented a skateboarding balloon that walks on water.

The helium-filled body is just barely counteracted by the spindly legs and feet. The feet hide the actuating cables that bend the legs along a single degree of freedom, with very limited force. But it’s enough to put one foot in front of the other, or hop in place and a few other little tricks.

Changing its locomotion style (four legs instead of two, for instance, or giving a bit more power) could allow it to go faster, jump higher, even walk on water — and versions with these capabilities are all being pursued by the lab. Although in all cases there’s the risk of it blowing away.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/16/oh-the-humanoid-dont-worry-this-blimp-bodied-robot-cant-crash/?ncid=rss

Deaths by selfie to improve the gene pool

Yes, it is indeed going to be one of those days.

The first report (by a reputable news source) of a selfie-taker dying while snapping a picture was in March 2014. Since then, Hemank and his team of researchers found there had been 127 recorded incidents of selfie deaths across the world. 76 of these took place in India, nine in Pakistan, eight in the US and six in Russia.

The most likely cause of death was falling from a great height, with people going to extreme lengths to take a selfie on cliffs or the top of buildings to impress followers on social media. In India, there are more selfie deaths related to trains, which Hemank and his team said are due to "the belief that posing on or next to train tracks with their best friend is regarded as romantic and a sign of never-ending friendship." In the US and Russia, a high proportion of deaths occur due to weapons, which the researchers believe is most likely due to gun laws in the two countries.

Hemank and his team hope to develop an app which will warn thrill-seeking selfie takers when their quest for the ultimate photo is putting their life in danger. They hope the app will be able to identify when someone is taking a photo at a high point, by train tracks or in other dangerous situations and alert them to the possible risk to their life.

Of course, you could argue getting an alert while in a perilous situation might make things even more dangerous.

Ummm... yeah ? At this point please just imagine me storming off in a huff, muttering things like, "Darwin Awards" darkly under my breath.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38012990/the-rise-in-selfie-deaths-and-how-to-stop-them

"Trump is not a racist", say bunch of utter twats

A casual glance at my G+ stream this morning reveals that Trump is not a racist because :
a) Some people of ethnic minorities voted for him (oh yes, I suppose that makes him a feminist too)
b) Racism is a crime and you can't call him a racist until he's been arrested for it.

You people disgust me. Clearly this is going to be one of those days.

Post-truth : word of the year

How depressing.

Oxford Dictionaries says post-truth is thought to have been first used in 1992. However, it says the frequency of its usage increased by 2,000% in 2016 compared with last year, coinciding with the EU referendum and the campaign for the White House in the US. Mr Grathwohl said: "Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time," he said.

"We first saw the frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and again in July when Donald Drumpf secured the Republican presidential nomination. Given that usage of the term hasn't shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn't be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37995600

The strange case of the vanishing shipwrecks

Well that's peculiar.

Three Dutch World War Two ships considered war graves have vanished from the bottom of the Java Sea, the Dutch defence ministry says. All three were were sunk by the Japanese during the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942, and their wrecks were discovered by divers in 2002. But a new expedition to mark next year's 75th anniversary of the battle has found the wrecks are missing.

Experts say salvaging the wrecks would have been a huge operation. The defence ministry is to investigate the mysterious disappearance. In a statement, it said that two of the ships had completely gone, with sonar images only showing imprints, while large parts of a third ship, a destroyer, were missing. "The desecration of a war grave is a serious offence," the ministry said, hinting at human involvement in the disappearance.

The seas around Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia are a graveyard for hundreds of ships and submarines sunk during the war. Illegal salvaging of the wrecks for steel, aluminium and brass has become commonplace. But the three missing wrecks were located 100km (60 miles) off the coast of Indonesia, at a depth of 70m. Salvage operators say it would not be easy to lift them.

"It is almost impossible to salvage this," Paul Koole of the salvage film Mammoet told the Algemeen Dagblad. "It is far too deep." Experts say the operation would have needed large cranes for long periods of time and would be unlikely to have gone unnoticed.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37997640

Dialogue

Originally shared by Craig Froehle

"Co-opt" -- a new #drawninpowerpoint original comic

http://www.drawninpowerpoint.com/2016/11/co-opt.html

Training machines to expect the unexpected

Interesting project.

The case study of the Nobel-prize-winning discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell is instructive. A talented and persistent PhD student studying interstellar scintillation (and thus expanding the observational phase space), and who knew her instrument intimately, recognised that ‘bits of scruff’ on the chart recorder could not be terrestrial interference, but represented a new type of astronomical object (Bell Burnell 2009). As a result, she discovered pulsars.

...A present-day Jocelyn Bell is unlikely to understand the instrument well enough to distinguish astrophysical phenomena from instrumental effects, and would not be able to sift through the petabytes by hand, searching for something unusual. On the other hand, failure to identify unexpected effects may mean missing out on the most important science to emerge from ASKAP. It is therefore necessary to plan explicitly to build techniques to make unexpected discoveries, rather than hoping to stumble across them.

We have therefore started a project called “WTF”, which explicitly aims to mine EMU data to discover unexpected science that is not part of our primary science goals, using a variety of machine-learning techniques and algorithms. Although targeted specifically at EMU, we expect this approach to have broad applicability to astronomical survey data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02829

Brain implants for monkeys to make the world a better place

“The whole team was screaming in the room as we watched,” says Courtine, who has seen many failed experiments to restore walking ability. The rhythm of the leg movement was imperfect, but the monkeys’ feet were not dragging and the movement was coordinated enough to support the primates’ weight.

Researchers have previously used brain-reading technology to enable paralysed people to move a robotic arm, give themselves a drink or to move their own hand and play a video game. The brain signals involved in activating muscles in a paralysed leg are less complex than those that guide the hand and all its digits, says Courtine. But researchers studying arm and hand movement have the advantage that even incremental improvements are useful.

One can imagine all kinds of, err, interesting and unexpected side-effects if this device could be hacked.

Via Kazimierz Kurz.
http://www.nature.com/news/brain-implants-allow-paralysed-monkeys-to-walk-1.20967

Madness, madness, everywhere...

Madness, madness, everywhere...

Jeremy Paxman says he is "baffled" by students voting to boycott University Challenge over claims that a complaint about "misogynistic and sexist comments" was not taken seriously enough.

Mr Paxman has suggested that it might be about comments he made about a knitted mascot of himself. "I have racked my brains to discover what on earth the Reading students' union is on about," said Mr Paxman.

I think they're referring to a recording of University Challenge which took place in February 2015, though I am baffled at why it has become an issue a year-and-a-half later. "There was a technical fault which meant we had to interrupt the recording, leaving all of us sitting at our desks in the studio while the problem was sorted out in the control gallery.

"In the conversation to fill the void - in a brightly lit studio, in front of all eight contestants, a full studio crew and an audience of several hundred spectators - I asked the Reading team about the mascot sitting on their desk.

"One of them said it was a hand-knitted Jeremy Paxman doll. Across the several yards separating the chairman's desk from the teams, I asked the whole team whether they took it to bed with them. Though no complaint was made at the time, this, apparently, is what has upset them."

If correct, this is politically cuckoo. If. An absurd over-reaction to a meaningless and utterly harmless joke. You can't go around jumping down people's throats every time they say the tiniest little thing you don't like, because they'll damn well do the same to you.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2016/05/politically-correct-or-politically.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-37926729

Morons in a graph

Note the y-axis doesn't start from zero and that this is irrelevant.

Found on the internet.

231,556,622 eligible voters

46.9% didn't vote
25.6% voted for Clinton
25.5% voted for Trump
1.7% voted for Johnson

A dark day for America

Originally shared by William Black (not my own content)

On this dark morning it's hard to find a bright note. The best of us, those who see further, and look deeper at the underlying causes, we have not carried the day, always outnumbered by brutalist voices, our work is to the longer term struggle, to build a better tomorrow.

Over the past year I have spoken out, here and there, admittedly, often ineffectually, reason is seldom heard. Just about a year ago I encountered an individual promoting a book that was aimed to essentially murder the notion that humanity could build a better society, unless, of course it was a society that adopted his favored ideology, and what ended the dialogue was his sentiment that: It is necessary to preserve all the hatred and outrage, to strengthen our cause, and punish the perpetrators.

Which is precisely the underlying sentiment that ushered a monster into the White House.

The brutalist voices are everywhere, on the Right and on the Left, and all of them have played a role in summoning the demon.

Everyone wants to cast the enemy as a homogeneous group of identifiable perpetrators, despite the evidence no such thing exists. Societies are nothing other than aggregate of individuals, not all good, not all bad, merely human.

Only the brutalists believe in a single, simple,  solution.

In the realm of political activism, at both extremes of political ideology, and across the entire spectrum of American politics, the loudest voices are the most guilty of this, and with their words, and their deeds, they have been summoning the demon.

There are no simple solutions, there is only the process of working the problem. Sometimes we fail. And learning from our failures we move forward. In that sense today is no different from any other day.

Here's to hope, for a better day, and a brighter future.     
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/mars/videos/novo-mundo/

A little poem from my mum

My mum just wrote me a little poem.

You're heading for The White House, it's as bad as it can be,
With your sexism, racism and misogyny
You'll be the leader of the free world for the next four years they say
November 8th 2016 has proved to be a real momentous day
For the NRA, fascism and the KKK
It's been a fairly long time that you've been my source of rancour
I feel quite justified today at last to say that you're a w....r.

European flags for some...

Best idea I've seen yet. Meanwhile, Brexiteers continue falling yet further off the cliff of sanity.

"The European Parliament is to consider a plan that would allow British citizens to opt-in and keep their European Union citizenship – and its associated benefits – once the UK leaves the EU. [...] Associate citizens would be allowed to keep free movement across the EU as full citizens currently enjoy and would be allowed to vote in European Parliament elections, meaning they were still represented in Brussels."

Jayne Adye, director of the Get Britain Out campaign: “This is an outrage. The EU is now attempting to divide the great British public at the exact moment we need unity."

"It is totally unacceptable for certain citizens in the UK to subject themselves to laws which are created by politicians who are not accountable the British people as a whole."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-citizenship-freedom-of-movement-passport-how-to-keep-parliament-live-move-abroad-a7405196.html

Scotland tries to stop Brexit

The first minister said: "The Scottish government is clear that triggering Article 50 will directly affect devolved interests and rights in Scotland. And triggering Article 50 will inevitably deprive Scottish people and Scottish businesses of rights and freedoms which they currently enjoy. It simply cannot be right that those rights can be removed by the UK government on the say-so of a prime minister without parliamentary debate, scrutiny or consent."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-37909299

There's only one choice

I will now refrain from any further commentaries on the election I can't vote, in stick my fingers in my ears, hope America decides to embrace sanity, and ignore the whole thing until 9th November.

Via Sakari Maaranen.

Originally shared by Eli Fennell

My Final Plea To Voters

Tomorrow is Election Day 2016 in the United States, and while many millions of people have already voted, more people haven't voted yet. I doubt anything I can say at this point will change anyone's mind, but let me try to convince you if I can. I believe every American voter of good conscience should cast their ballot for Hillary Clinton, that she is the best and frankly only good choice for our future. Let me, therefore, make a brief 'closing' argument for everyone who isn't committed to her (or hasn't already voted early for her).

To Trump Supporters

If you're planning to vote for Donald Trump, please reconsider. I won't waste time arguing over issues, because that would be to legitimize what is, sadly, not the top consideration here. I've often said that issues matter more than candidates, but there are exceptions to every rule and Donald Trump is one of them.

There has always, virtually without exception, been minimum standards of qualification and experience, temperament, and basic decency for American leaders. Hillary Clinton easily clears these bars, indeed if anything one common complaint from certain types of voters it that she is too 'establishment', and for whatever faults this nebulous and poorly defined 'establishment' may have, maintaining basic standards is not one of them.

Donald Trump does not meet this minimum standard, and therefore issues are irrelevant, or very much less relevant at least. You may or may not agree with Hillary on issues; you may or may not like her personally; but she doesn't call Mexican immigrants 'rapists', women 'pigs' and 'slobs', attack Gold Star families for their religious beliefs, threaten to ban whole religions, discuss her genitalia during debates, lash out on Twitter in the wee hours, insinuate dark theories about 'certain people' committing 'vote fraud', encourage armed vigilantes to commit voter intimidation... honestly, this list could go on forever.

He is also the most notorious liar in the history of modern Presidential politics, with nearly every word that comes out of his mouth being a bold faced, proven lie. This is not my opinion, this is a fact, as proven by multiple nonpartisan Fact Checkers. And his life of work is likewise a testament to astounding, habitual dishonesty so extreme it is clear he is pathologically incapable of even distinguishing truth from falsehood or of keeping promises. So whatever positions or promises you think he'll honor, think twice, thrice, a fourth and fifth time, because any honest assessment will tell you that he cannot be trusted.

Vote for Hillary, and we can spend the next 4-years debating and fighting over the positions she holds that you may disagree with, as we Americans have always done. Split your ticket and vote GOP on the down-ballot if you feel she needs to be 'checked' against her platform and policies. That is how America works. Donald Trump is not how America works, or not how it should.


To Johnson Supporters

If you're supporting Johnson because you're a Conservative who can't vote for Trump, vote for Hillary instead. Johnson can't and won't win, and you know it, but beyond that basic fact, what this means is by not voting against Trump, you're saying it's OK for the GOP to nominate a candidate who doesn't meet the minimal level of acceptability that if met would have convinced most of you to vote against Hillary if not for the GOP candidate.

If you can't convince yourself that Hillary is so much worse than Trump that you should vote for him anyways, after decades of her being GOP Enemy #1, then that says all you should need to know about how horrible Trump is, and how not stopping him now would only send the GOP farther down the rabbit hole of crazed bigotry and lack of experience and substance Trump represents. A Clinton victory is the best chance the GOP has to find an excuse for introspection and learn from its mistake and how to avoid it.

If, on the other hand, you're a Liberal and you're supporting Johnson, then as Obama says, "C'mon, man." Please, actually go and read, in full, the Libertarian platform, because it isn't all pot, gay marriage, and nonaggressive foreign policy, it's also anti virtually everything else you claim to care about. It's about opposition to science; a blank check and zero regulations for big corporations; dismantling of the Department of Education; overturning Roe v. Wade; and much more. If you know all this, and are still voting for him, then be honest with yourself and admit you're not a Liberal, because you can't call yourself liberal just because the Libertarians agree with you on two or three things.

To Stein Supporters

Jill Stein is no Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders believes in science, he doesn't play footsie with anti vaxxers or people who think WiFi melts your brain. Bernie Sanders wants a world of peace, but doesn't think ISIS can be defeated by a "Peace Offensive" (which is literally Stein's 'prescription' for ISIS, as though the sight of a few tie dyes and sunflowers will get them to put down their suicide vests, stop severing heads, and embrace us). Bernie made the wise choice not to run as a third party 'spoiler' because he knows only one of the two major candidates will win and that the two aren't equivalent, unlike Stein who claims that they are.

And, oh yeah, Bernie has flat-out told you that the success of his Revolution depends on Hillary winning and Trump losing.


To Undecideds

If you're still undecided, it at least means Trump hasn't won you over. Neither has Clinton. So if you have to choose between two people, neither of whom convinced you, go with the 'known quantity' candidate. This is a no brainer, just as surely if you were otherwise equally split between two possible candidates for a job but one clearly had more experience and qualifications, and a more proven track record, than the other.


Before closing this out, let me add that, if you 'hate' Hillary Clinton, consider that the same people who convinced you to hate her also told you that every supposed 'scandal' was the smoking gun that would DESTROY her, only to have it turn out to be wild goose chases that wasted taxpayer money. How many times can they lie to you about her actions and her record before you realize that falsely shouting 'Fire!' fifty times doesn't make it any less false than shouting it once or twice or a handful of times.

This is not a normal election. This is a choice between a candidate who is clearly qualified, in terms of experience and temperament, to lead this country, and one who isn't. If no other argument sways you, let that be the one.

One of our nukes is no longer missing ?

A spokesperson for DND told the BBC the department had conferred with its American counterparts, and that the object the diver found could very well be the bomb. The American military do not believe the bomb is active or a threat to anyone, he said, but Canada is sending military ships to the site to make sure.

But while the military and the diver believe they may have found the lost nuke of Bomber 075, Septer says the diver's location is totally wrong, given what we know about the plane crash. "It could be anything," Septer said. "Whatever he found, it's not the nuke."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875697

Review : Sacred History

Going out of my comfort zone and reviewing a very strange book indeed.

I think it's entirely rational to speculate as to the nature of the mind. Certainly, it could be that the mind is nothing more than the actions of particles within the brain by some ferociously complicated process. But why is is considered so ridiculous to propose that our sense of self is actually just some shard of a much greater "cosmic mind", a "spark of the divine" with reality an "objective illusion" as Black calls it ?

Answer : it isn't. But it is unequivocally *un*scientific. Yes, everything could be an illusion or a simulation, but it isn't possible to test this scientifically. One could use this hypothesis to explain any otherwise tricky phenomena, thus getting us nowhere. In terms of analysing the world around us though, it's useless.

And the "we're all living in a simulation" idea, which seems to be an increasingly reoccurring theme on the internet these days, is just a modern manifestation of old mystical notions. It's simply been redrafted in a way that militant materialists are marginally more comfortable with. Even the very term consciousness has mystical overtones. But computers ? Mere machines. We know about computers, we understand computers, with think we can build artificial intelligence => someone else has probably built an AI => we're all living in a simulation. It's exactly the same idea as that of a cosmic mind, just with a crude and ineffective attempt to strip it of the supernatural elements. It lets the materialists off the hook of having to concede that minds are all-important while simultaneously but stealthily acknowledging that minds are all-important. It's just replacing one god with another.

This isn't anti-science at all, unless you think that Elon Musk is anti-science - at least, so long as you don't go resorting to using simulation/cosmic mind as your explanation for everything. But it is most definitely un-science.


While Black claims that sometimes visions of mystical beings and whatnot happen in a spiritual realm which is normally inaccessible, which I could accept as merely unscientific, he also claims that sometimes these events happen entirely in the physical world.

And lo and behold... just like every single other book on the paranormal I've ever read (and there have been many over the years), his descriptions of these are unconvincing and his citations are frankly appalling. If you want to say, "I'm being irrational but here's what I believe - I don't think these things can be analysed rationally" (which he does on many occasions), then fine. But if you want to say, "here's the rational, measurable evidence for what I believe", then you've got to do better than a bunch of anecdotes.

Yet I find it as preposterous to consider the Universe and conclude that it definitely has no absolute, intrinsic meaning - as scientisim assumes - as I do to conclude that it's all about a big beardy dude in the sky who is inordinately concerned with whether I eat bacon or what I do with my genitals. The assumption that there's no great cosmic mind is just that - an assumption. A leap of non-faith. Ordinary science doesn't concern itself with this in the least, it simply looks at the world and tries to explain the observations according to rational processes. Whether there's some higher power at work causing those processes and imbuing them with meaning is irrelevant. Only scientism explicitly believes against the existence of such a divinity - ordinary science doesn't give a crap about it. Science is apatheistic, scientism is antitheist.

For me neither materialism nor idealism provide satisfactory solutions. But while I'm happy to consider these radically unscientific ideas at a very abstract level, when it comes to specific details I find Black's concepts to be utterly lousy. He simply states, bluntly, that angels are doing this that and the other without the slightest bit of justification.

So, unsurprisingly, a book that looks at some of the deepest questions fails to provide any satisfactory answers. It managed to provoke some very interesting lines of thought... but the effort to find a harmony between idealism and materialism ultimately completely failed, leaving me in the unusual position of declaring that I rather liked this crappy book. I can't give it more than 3/10, but it was worth reading.

Letter to America

Please don't end the world, America. It's "competent politician" (yes, with all the usual corruption and self-serving agendas that implies) versus a latter-day Nero, only more orange and with nuclear weapons.


Originally shared by Edward Morbius (everything that follows is not mine !)

A brief note to my American friends

1. Please don't fuck this up.

You've got the choice at the top of your ballot for a highly competent and exceptionally tested leader, and a nightmare from a dystopian fantasy late-night B-movie. Clinton is very clearly the only possibly sane choice, and if your vote is in a state in which the outcome is even possibly in doubt, do whatever it takes to vote for her. No abstaining, no third parties.

Leaning Clinton now are New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Virgina. Keep them blue.

Leaning Trump now are Nevada, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, and Arizona. Possibly in play: Texas. Turn them blue.


2. Down-ballot matters. A whole fucking lot.

Much of the current state of American politics has come about through an exceptionally skillful manipulation of both Congressional and statehouse politics. Things have reached a point where I find zero justification for a Republican vote on any race, no matter how small. The GOP is a cancer. It must be stopped.


3. I'm preaching to the choir.

Mostly. I'm aware of that. I've spent the past few days wondering what I could possibly say to turn the mind of someone who doesn't agree with me, or perhaps is even sitting on the fence. I've come up with little.

Part of that is directly related to a massive problem, not only of this election, but of American political and media discourse of the past two, or three, or five, decades: we're living in a post-fact age.

This ends badly.

The best I've got are:

a) Ask yourself, what would it take to change my mind. And reflect on whether or not, in the light of changing your mind the evidence supports that.

b) Step back, look at yourself and the general situation, and ask yourself if you could really live with voting for either Trump, and all the foulness and stench he is, and the party and movement which have created him.

c) Yes, shit's fucked up, yo. But I have a hell of a time seeing how fucking it up yet further gets us anywhere better. We've seen this movie and it ends poorly. Italy and Germany in the 1930s. Ireland in the 1970s. Much of the Middle East and North Africa in the past decade.


4. Shit's Fucked Up, Yo.

I stand with the Black Lives Matter movement, against the systematic and endemic racism, oppression, violence, and denial of opportunity that's the legacy of 300+ years of an extremely ugly history. The US has made several attemtps to change this -- in 1784 as the Constitution was being hammered out, in 1861 as the nation was literally torn in two, in the post-Civil War reconstruction era, in the 1950s and 1960s with the civil rights movement. That effort is nowhere near finished.

I also stand with the white working class high-school educated man who's finding that the dream he'd been sold was smoke and mirrors, a mythology, a big white lie (in more ways than one). And who is seething in rage watching both what he'd dreamed for and what he'd actually managed to accomplish slip from his grasp. That pain is very real.

The leap, though, is to realise that those are both the same fight and battle, and that their enemy is the same: a game of systemic oppression and deprivation which works against all but a few, and turns the losers against one another. This is why though I am for the rights of blacks and browns and yellows and gays and muslims and hindus and jews and athiests, I am not about them. That is: the goal is to raise up all, especially the least among us as the great socialist philosopher Adam Smith wrote, but not divide ourselves in the process.

Let's work together.

The real problems run deep. Some are complicated. Some are distressingly simple, but not easy. Wishful thinking won't solve these problems or make them disappear. All of us have some very unpleasent truths we're going to have to face.


5. This is bigger than the United States of America.

The United States is the biggest, most powerful, most dangerous, and most promising empire the world has ever seen. Its influence extends vastly beyond its own borders. Its neighbours, Mexico and Canada, will be profoundly affected by what happens this week, as will distant parts of the world: the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, India, Iran, Pakistan, China, Africa. Whether or not we have a future at all, thanks to the endogenous human threats of global climate change, pandemics, financial collapse, nuclear war, overpopulation, hunger, and more. Clinton is well aware of these threats, and I suspect hopes to resolve them to maximum benefit. Trump denies them publicly, though if he does actually believe in them, seeks a resolution that benefits principally himself.


6. Media are a huge part of the problem.

Several authors have declared losers of this election. Email. America's respect in the world. Bigger than any of these is the fourth estate, the essential nervous system of a democracy: its media. As with other countries (notably the UK, or what's left of it, and Australia), a mix of deliberate deception and manipulation, a systemic rot, a shattering economic foundation, the cancer of advertising and a crass commercial "marketplace of ideas" philosophy, and yes, the outrage-and-eyeballs dynamic fed by Google, Facebook, and online media, the capacity for the US to be sufficiently, accurately, and meaningfully informed has been lost. Much of the current political state devolves directly from this.


8. The election isn't the end of the fight but the beginning.

No, my preferred candidate isn't in the running. The ideals of that candidate still are, and can and will continue to be championed. Hillary Clinton's most compelling qualification is that she is a consumate political creature with decades of experience in many of the most challenging fights. As such, the real pressure is on you, as Americans, to hold her feet to the fire, and to apply those talents to the change that will help turn this ship around, raise up the oppressed and the abandoned, and just maybe thread through the multiple perils between the present and a hopeful future.

I've been asking for several years, "What are the Big Problems?" You might want to consider that question, and what the points of influence on those problems are for effecting a positive outcome.


So get off your damned ass, vote, and do everything you can to help those who think likewise to do so as well.

Measuring animal intelligence is tricky

“It’s not really appropriate to pit one species against another, as each has evolved different skills or ways of thinking that provide them with an advantage in one test, but a disadvantage in another. There isn’t an IQ test for animals to rank their intelligence.”

For example, lab tests have shown that rooks and crows are better than eight-year-old children at reaching a treat by making a wire hook, but of course there are many things eight-year-old humans can do that rooks and crows can’t.

For a long time birds had only one known tool-maker: the New Caledonian crow. But just this year, scientists discovered that the ‘alalā, or Hawaiian crow, is also capable of making and using tools. The ‘alalā is actually extinct in the wild, but 109 individuals survive in captivity today.

Worryingly, only a handful of bird species (out of 10,000-plus) have actually been systematically tested on their intelligence. Even whole bird families have never been tested, including most of the world’s raptors.

All this means we need to rethink how we treat birds, according to Emery.

“The domestic chicken is the most populous bird in the world, which we consume in massive numbers. But, if I told you that day old chicks can count or they can tell if two objects are the same or different, a so-called abstract concept, would you think twice about eating chicken?”

I would have assumed they could tell if two objects are different or not anyway - that's not intelligence. Being aware that more is different to less isn't intelligence either. But still... hurry up with that lab-grown chicken, eh ?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2016/nov/05/birds-intelligence-tools-crows-parrots-conservation-ethics-chickens

Giant snowballs on a Russian beach

A strange and beautiful sight greeted locals in the Gulf of Ob, in northwest Siberia, after thousands of natural snowballs formed on the beach. An 11-mile (18km) stretch of coast was covered in the icy spheres. The sculptural shapes range from the size of a tennis ball to almost 1m (3ft) across. They result from a rare environmental process where small pieces of ice form, are rolled by wind and water, and end up as giant snowballs.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37883003

Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce...

Found on the internet.

Learning from Albania

Over the course of the regime, Albania became a complete isolationist state with virtually no ties to the outside world. In 1967, Hoxha tightened his grip on the country even further by banning all religion, declaring Albania the world’s first atheist state. During this time, churches and mosques were seized by the military and either destroyed or turned into cinemas or dance halls. Clergy members were stripped of their titles, shamed and in some cases incarcerated.

Some speculate that this violent ousting of organized religion resulted in Albanians adopting a secular mindset, and that the country is void of any religious tension because faith is not an important element of life for many today. Buba begs to differ, though, dismissing this as cynical.

“I hear all this talk of people wanting to build walls and ban believers of certain faiths from entering countries,” Buba said. “This is only going to breed hate and misunderstanding. The reason harmony exists in Albania is because we engage with one another. We debate, we discuss and we educate ourselves about those around us.”

There are numerous Muslim and Christian religious events in which practitioners of both are in attendance. The Day of the Blessed Water, for instance, is a Christian holiday celebrated by participants diving into a river in search of a cross, but it is open to all and has had many Muslim winners over the years. Likewise, Buba explained that it is not uncommon for Christians to participate in feasting during the Muslim holiday of Eid, which breaks the fast of Ramadan. By engaging with one another so frequently and in such meaningful ways, Albanian Muslims and Christians have created a strong community founded upon understanding and respect.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20161024-the-worlds-most-tolerant-country

Article 50 can be revoked, says its author

The Scottish cross-bench peer who wrote Article 50 - the procedure by which the UK would leave the EU - believed it was "not irrevocable". In a BBC interview, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard said the UK could choose to stay in the EU even after exit negotiations had begun. He has also renewed calls for either parliament or the public to be given a chance to stop Brexit.

He explained: "It is not irrevocable. "You can change your mind while the process is going on. During that period, if a country were to decide actually we don't want to leave after all, everybody would be very cross about it being a waste of time. They might try to extract a political price but legally they couldn't insist that you leave."

Lord Kerr said he had never imagined the UK would make use of Article 50. He explained: "I thought the circumstances in which it would be used, if ever, would be when there was a coup in a member state and the EU suspended that country's membership. I thought that at that point the dictator in question might be so cross that he'd say 'right, I'm off' and it would be good to have a procedure under which he could leave."

A Department for Exiting the European Union spokesman said: "The UK voted to leave the European Union. The people have spoken and it is now the duty of the government to make sure that happens."

- What utter tosh. Slightly more people voted to Leave than Remain in one advisory opinion poll on one day, many have now changed their minds, so we must now commit ourselves to doing irreparable harm to the economy ? We must concede to the racists and xenophobes ? I think not.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-37852628

Armoured spiders - yes, these are a thing

If scaled up, these beasts would have armour thicker than a World War Two Panzer Tiger tank.

Of course, the spiders do not need to deflect shells or bullets. Instead, they face a smaller but no less formidable foe. The tropical and subtropical forests of South East Asia, where most living tetrablemmids are found, are prowled by aggressive predatory wasps that specifically hunt spiders. Spider-hunting wasps will tackle prey several times their own size. Some species are capable of taking on tarantulas.

This is where tetrablemmids' armour may come into its own, according to Kropf. "These wasps always sting spiders in the soft [region] between the plates covering the top and bottom of the front section of the body," he says. However, with their hardened plates fused together, the tetrablemmids do not have such a weak spot. The wasps probably find them very hard to attack.

If the tetrablemmids' armour is so beneficial, why has it only evolved in one small group of spiders?

The muscle structure inside the armoured spiders appears completely different... rather than slowing the spiders down, the extra armour may actually help them to save energy and move more efficiently. In other words, it is still a mystery exactly why so few spiders have extra armour.

Essentially, the abdomen, with its thick plates on the top and bottom along with the strips of hard cuticle along the sides, acts like a bellows that the spiders can squeeze and expand at will to pump fluid around their bodies. "It is a fundamental change of the whole body construction," explains Kropf.

So it seems, to accommodate their armour and the protection it provides, tetrablemmids have had to radically redesign their own body plan and even their development.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161102-there-are-spiders-that-encase-their-bodies-in-thick-armour

Parliament is sovereign

Parliament is sovereign, and that's what we voted for.

Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU, the High Court has ruled. This means the government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty - beginning formal exit negotiations with the EU - on its own. Theresa May says the referendum - and existing ministerial powers - mean MPs do not need to vote, but campaigners called this unconstitutional. The government is appealing, with a further hearing expected next month.

It is a fundamental principle of the UK constitution that Kings' or Queens' powers cannot be used by the government via the Royal Prerogative to change or do away with rights under British law unless Parliament gives it authority to do so. The court looked at examples ranging from the 1600s to the 1970s Laker Airways legal battle.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37857785