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13 Mar 2010
The MOD has been served with a Freedom of Information Act request relating to what it knows about "worringly big sea monsters":
Dear Ministry of Defence,

Are there any abnormally large, or dangerous sea monsters hundreds of metres under the sea that haven't been revealed to the public?

Being a marine biologist, it would be in the best interest of the public as our lives could be at risk.
And the MOD hasn't responded as promptly as it should have done... what are they hiding?		 Sea Monster
12 Mar 2010
71 year old woodworker Del shows off his pointless but wonderful beautiful new wooden machine:
He has made several other wooden machines, but calls this latest one his crowning achievement.
And rightly so.
09 Mar 2010
I had to wait for a haircut today so was pretty much forced to browse a copy of the Daily Mail in the barber's, and the big story in the Health section was the mind-bogglingly silly "Infra-red magnetic pants and homeopathy keep me healthy".

A few days ago, perhaps deciding that not even they could run scaremongering vaccines-give-children-autism stories anymore, they ran with... "Vaccines made my spaniel autistic".

The world must be a very scary and confusing place to Daily Mail readers.
17 Feb 2010
A herbalist pleads guilty over the poisoning of a customer with pills which contained a poison banned over ten years ago. Oddly, the judge decided to let her off for the actual poisoning because she had no idea what was in the pills she was dispensing:
But an Old Bailey judge ruled that, as the sale of traditional Chinese medicines was totally unregulated, there was no evidence that she knew of the potential harm. A charge of "administering a noxious substance so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm" was therefore thrown out.
"Everybody accepts that you didn't know you were breaking the law," he told Ms Wu.
That seems a strange ruling. Selling bottles of poisonous "medicine" is okay as long as you don't bother to find out what it is?
The Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, which represents more than 450 practitioners, said the case highlighted "the urgent need for the statutory regulation of herbal medicine in the UK".
Well... sort of. What is not needed is some new and different way of regulating herbal medicines and herbalists. What is needed is for people who want to diagnose diseases and prescribe drugs, or people who want to dispense those drugs, to train as doctors or pharmacists; professions which already have statutory regulation. And what is also needed is to treat herbal medicines for what they are; they are drugs, so should be subject to the same standards of testing for efficacy and safety as anything a modern pharmaceutical company might produce. Drugs are drugs, whether they're traditional, Chinese, herbal, or modern or western. They have effects and benefits, and they have side effects and dangers, so regulate them all as medicine. The current set-up is absurd. I saw St John's Wort, an antidepressant drug with complex side-effects and interactions with other medications, being sold as a "food supplement" in a health food shop the other weekend. That's like stocking bottles of Prozac on the shelf and labelling it as a "condiment".
09 Feb 2010
In a feat of unintentional jingoistic comedy, the Daily Mail runs an article headlined "White Cliffs of Dover to be sold to the French to help reduce Government's debt" full of lamentation that this symbol of Englishness is falling into foreign hands, illustrated with a photograph of "A Spitfire over the White Cliffs of Dover". It's enough to makes you come over all tearful. Except that the spitfire isn't over Dover, it's over Beachy Head - dozens of miles away. And the spitfire is in Polish markings, so would have been flown during the war by that creature the Mail loves to hate... an aylum seeker.
A Polish spitfire, over Beachy Head
You can almost imagine Daily Mail readers during the war grumbing about the influx of skilled central European workers... "Those bleedin' Poles, coming over here looking for asylum, fighting on our side and flying our fighter planes... makes you sick".

And of course neither the cliffs nor the town are up for sale; parts of the port might be but that's far from certain and the port have said they've not agreed anything with any frenchmen. But apart from that the report is solid.

(Via Tabloid Watch.)
08 Feb 2010
Gallery of American space suits past and future:
spacesuitspacesuitspacesuit
03 Feb 2010
Ah good, Prince Charles has announced that nobody needs to take anything he ever says seriously ever again. Speaking at an architecture conference he said he's proud to be an enemyof the Enlightenment:
I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud. I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it.
The Enlightenment: the idea that the universe can be methodically studied, its laws and processes understood, and that the world isn't made of magic. This has been a hugely productive approach which has advanced health and knowledge and happiness enormously. Notice how you're not having to scrape a living out the mud as a subsistence farmer before dying of smallpox? You can thank the Enlightenment for that, with all its sciencey goodness. But Prince Charles thinks it's somehow outdated. And this man gets to meet with members of the government. Hint to members of the government; just smile and nod politely until the old duffer goes away.
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