Giraffes on skis? Possibly

More here.

Happy Al-Khidr Day!

Yes, we all know that St George was a Palestinian by birth who never came near England. England is not, of course, the only or indeed the first nation to have him as a patron saint. He put himself about a bit. According to Wikipedia:

Many Patronages of Saint George exist around the world, including: Georgia, England, Egypt, Bulgaria, Aragon, Catalonia, Romania, Ethiopia,Greece, India, Iraq, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, Serbia, Ukraine and Russia, as well as the cities of Genoa, Amersfoort, Beirut, Botoşani, Drobeta Turnu-Severin, Timişoara, Fakiha, Bteghrine, Cáceres, Ferrara, Freiburg im Breisgau, Kragujevac, Kumanovo, Lebanon, Ljubljana, Pérouges, Pomorie, Preston, Qormi, Rio de Janeiro, Lod, Lviv, Barcelona, Moscow and Victoria, as well as of the Scout Movement and a wide range of professions, organizations and disease sufferers.

So, George is pretty much the patron saint of globalisation. And Preston. But did you know that he is also venerated by Muslims? He is identified with 'The Green One', a shadowy, mystical figure possessed of great wisdom and knowledge.

I wonder if a Palestinian going by the name of Al-Khidr is quite what the flag-waggling brigade have in mind for England's saint.

Al-Khidr (aka George) is one of the two blokes praying. The other is Elijah, apparently

Don't tell anyone, it's a secret

There's this huge mosque in Brighton...

The English Defence League. A small barrel crammed with dimwitted fish, just begging to be shot.

If you don't know Brighton, that's the Royal Pavilion, built (rather slowly) from 1787 to 1823. It is not a big mosque. But apparently being in the English Defence League doesn't require any detailed knowledge of England. 

Running Down a Dream

It was nice to see 36,000 runners and half a million spectators in London this morning to demonstrate that there is such a thing as society.

I've been trying to find an estimate of how many people turned out in London on Wednesday for Maggie's funeral. No dice. The Metropolitan Police website expresses thanks to those who informed them about protests beforehand (which is about as conventionally British as you can get) but seems to offer no estimate of crowd numbers. The Mail refers to 'tens of thousands' lining the route of the cortege, but offers nothing more. The Sun said 5,000 thronged the area around St Paul's  The BBC carefully referred to 'thousands'.

Now of course the funeral was on a working day in a busy city. But if there are, say, seven million people in the Greater London area, you'd think one million should in theory have been able to make it, if only for part of what was a long send-off. That's not counting all those ardent Thatcherites from other parts of the UK and indeed the wider world.

If the London Marathon can get half a million, why couldn't Thatcher get about a tenth of that number? Has the whole thing has been a colossal misjudgement by Cameron and the Tory elite? Has Ed Miliband been laughing up his sleeve and mulling over Napoleon's great maxim, 'Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake'? Will millions of sensible voters remember ten million quid blown on a political stunt when they go to the polls next time, and maybe the time after that?

Oh, I do hope so.

BAH!

To some people, evolution is to blame for everything. Which of course it is, considered in rather general terms. If we'd evolved from moles instead of monkeys, playgrounds wouldn't have climbing frames but would be tunnel-rich environments.

See what I did there? I indulged in the sort of wanton, evidence-free speculation that often counts as 'evolutionary science' in the media. Hence BAH!, a proposed festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses: 'The major criticism for evolutionary theorists is hyperadaptationism, "over-the-top" evolutionary ideas that try to explain too many of an organism's features as adaptations'. So, from a scientific point of view, this sort of thing can lead to a laff-riot.

"Please note," the guidelines state, "Being funny is not a good defense. We want to see you actually defend your terrible, terrible theory!" 

The winner of BAH! Fest, chosen by a panel of bona fide scientists, will earn a 3D-printed version of the trophy first imagined in the SMBC comic — a "depressed-looking Darwin,"(...)

Sad to note, though, that one of my favourite ideas in my younger days, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, is cited as a classic instance of a duff brainwave.

First proposed in the 1940s, the theory imagines that human ancestors went through a sea-based stage, which would explain things like the species' relative hairlessness and greater ability to digest fish compared with other primates.  

Despite seeming coherence, though, that theory has very little (if any) support from serious evolutionary theorists. "Clearly, it's crazy," Weinersmith said. BAH! Fest just takes that craziness to the extreme. And, serious satirical intent aside, the event has captured the enthusiasm of scientists and science fans alike.

Is it 'clearly' crazy? Well, the AAH is certainly seductive to non-scientists, and that is often one of the warning signs. And it's not just ordinary members of the public who've been won over. Check out Desmond Morris and David Attenborough, both being very pro-AAH, here.

You can still find references to it all over the place. I searched for it on the BBC site and got a few hits. This one is a passing, properly sceptical reference. This one from BBC Wales is understandably respectful of the feisty Elaine Morgan, who promoted the idea as part of a broadly feminist agenda, and has just been honoured for her writing. And she's a damn good writer, which in part explains the idea's tenacity.

Anyway, the BAH! event is clearly a fun idea that has survival potential. Sadly, though, it didn't take place last week because it was to be held at MIT in Boston. I think it's reasonable to conclude that some very bad ideas were responsible for the whole city being on lockdown.

In the City

Over here you can find a transcript of a talk by a chap called Jeffrey Sachs. He is controversial, but he is also very much an insider on Wall Street. He knows whereof he speaks, and is not some leftist hippie wanting to bring down capitalism (if those exist any more). I find it hard to believe that the things he says about Big Greed in the US don't apply to our own dear City of London. Anyway, the interview he gives is boring and complicated, as always with financial matters. But the gist of it is interesting and depressing.

These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to people, counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, you know, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.
(....) It really doesn’t have anything to do with right wing or left wing, by the way. The corruption is, as far as I can see, everywhere. But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now, and it’s very, very unhealthy.
I have waited for four years, five years now, to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language, and I’ve not seen it once. And that is shocking to me. And if they won’t, I’ve waited for a judge, for our president, for somebody, and it hasn’t happened. And by the way it’s not going to happen anytime soon it seems.

Replace a few terms and you've got a pretty accurate description of the UK's witless, gutless coalition's non-response to the banking crisis.

From this it's logical to conclude that, if there is any genuine economic growth in the next few years, it will simply be taking us along the road towards the Next Big Rip-Off, not towards lasting prosperity.