“Can a cat get a rabbit pregnant?”
“Nah”
“Why not?”
“I dunno”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Something to do with enzymes.”

Our education system is crap. For proof, see above.

Listen, government, you really don’t get it. Schools need more money, yes, but throwing money at education without actually using your brains is the wrong solution.

The RSC made one simple demand, and it’s something that the government completely failed to grasp.

We need a higher standard of science taught in schools.

Throwing money at the problem won’t solve the fact that the curriculum is pants, many of the teachers are underqualified to teach the subject, the course doesn’t encourage any level of understanding above just ‘learning for the exam’, and after all that, the exams are trivial.

Yes, Gordon, you’re going to have to bite the bullet on this one – for once, we’ll have to accept that the number of students passing exams will go down. Because, you see, the number of students passing exams is not an indicator of how good the teaching has become – it’s a very clear indication that the exams are inadequate.

Okay, so I haven’t written for two months. Apologies for that. I’m afraid other things have been hihger priority recently.

However, I’m just writing a brief note to urge everyone to sign up on the Sense About Science petition There’s loads of information there about the main case, of which those in Britain will no doubt already be aware, concerning journalist Simon Singh.

This petition is vitally important to get British libel laws changed. Currently, our libel laws are the worst in the developed world, stifling freedom of scientific debate and allowing mega rich corporates to walk all over legitimate dissent. Simon Singh is being sued because he had the tenacity to comment that Chiropractic therapy is incapable of curing childhood asthma. Unfortunately, he used the term “bogus”, which the clueless judge took to mean “deliberately fraudulent” and not its actual meaning, understood by English speakers worldwide, as merely “false”.

So, I’d like to go on record as saying that the use of chiropractic to treat childhood asthma is totally unproven by science, completely and utterly impossible by any known laws of science, and, frankly, daft. But I’m not suggesting that all chiropractors are aware of this obvious fact – I’m sure many of them are stupid and/or deluded instead, as those are the only logical alternatives.

Anyway, sign the petition. Please. It’s very very important.

Oh, and it doesn’t only affect British people – thanks to the Internet, anyone in teh world can be sued in an English court for writing something against English libel laws that then gets published in England.

Yes, that’s retarded. I know. We all know.  Let’s fix it.

The bit that angers me isn’t the whole ‘heaven’ thing. I can sort-of understand why people would want to believe in an afterlife that is better than this one – especially with the growing stress and trauma of modern life. But read down a little further into that page, and you come across the following:

39% of people today believe in ghosts, compared to 10% of people in the 1950s.

So, let’s underline this to point out how terrifying it is:

In the last fifty years, science has given us computers, the Internet, affordable air travel, the entire space race, modern medicine, genetics and nuclear physics. It has given us the Large Hadron Collider, the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, stealth fighters, mobile technology… And in that time, despite an increase of zero evidence (adding to the zero evidence that existed before) four times as many people now believe in ghosts than when Crick and Watcon discovered the structure of DNA.

It is at times like this that I’m glad only my words fail me, as opposed to my brain. Which is apparently what has been happening to the rest of the country over the last few decades.

Seriously, how can this be reversed? Why is it that people are turning their back on rationality and common sense and instead embracing stupidity, gullibility and credulousness?

Answers on a postcard please…

He’s selling his course, folks – and it’s only $9.95. An amazing bargain!

Maybe he should be using his own methods, because his predictions don’t seem too hot so far. For example, “Obama will win the presidential election by a narrow margin.”  That’s odd, I remember it being a landslide. Also, too bad about the Ukrainian military action and the Russian power outage – I guess the detective isn’t too hot on his Cyrillic.  Still, there’s a chance for the major earthquake in Mexico he predicts. Let’s just hope he doesn’t strike lucky on that one.

I’ve just had a wonderful idea. I can advertise a special series of meditation techniques that are guaranteed to improve your natural psychic ability by a factor of 100. And the best bit is that I can do it without lying. I wonder how many people would complain? Hmm… strictly speaking, I should definitely be able to get away with it.  Why try to educate the gullible when I could just con them for every penny they have?

Oh yeah, that’s right – it’s because I have morals.

I should be happy, but I’m not. And the reason why I’m not happy is because the vote was 7-7. That is to say, 50% of the people in charge of making a decision for the education of an entire state’s children, don’t understand reality.

To be grateful for such a result would be like saying I was glad if my country narrowly voted down a proposed law to allow psychic mediums control of our nation’s monetary policy.

We shouldn’t be glad when insanity is narrowly defeated – we should be appalled that insanity ever got to such a strength that it needed to be defeated.

If you write a C++ app using MSVC++ Express Edition, and compile it for distribution to other machines, you might get the following error when you try to run it on a machine other than the one it was compiled on:

This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix the problem.

Essentially, the code was compiled in such a way that it expects to be able to find the runtime libraries it needs somewhere on any computer on which it runs. Which is probably not what you want – as most computers won’t have the correct libraries available, by default. Hence the error.

I found the solution eventually, which was actually really easy. Simply go to Project-> Properties -> Configuration Properties -> C/C++ -> Code Generation and change from a DLL based Runtime Library to a non-DLL one. I used “Multi-Threaded”. Then recompile, and you’re done. The executable is a bit larger – presumably because it bundles everything in the one file, but at least it works.

I’d appreciate testers, suggestions for new puzzles, or just general abuse. No, really.

Ben Goldacre on YouTube

The part of that particular video that slightly annoys me is the very end. After Ben has finished giving a short and, in my opinion, extremely mild and toned-down version of his overview of the MMR controversy, the presenter says: “I stress it was the personal view there of Dr Ben Goldacre, who has some pretty strong feelings about the media’s take on medical stories.”

Here’s what annoys me about that: Firstly, those views weren’t strong – not even close. Those of us who believe that we should lock up people like Jeni Barnett who use the power of the media to broadcast irresponsible and dangerous misinformation on medical issues, would certainly have a lot more to say, were we given the opportunity.

Secondly, what I found bizarre was that the presenter had to state that those were Dr Goldacre’s personal views and, presumably, by implication, not those of the TV station on which he was broadcasting. But, of course, they should be the views of every sane person in the country, so for a broadcaster to think that they needed to excuse themselves from responsibility seems strangely disturbing to me. 

Anyway, it’s worth a watch, and if you have time I strongly urge you to buy Ben’s book, Bad Science.