why wasn't I taught at school that the British invented the concentration camp?

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Johann has a harrowing article up detailing the British occupation of Kenya and their appalling treatment of its indigenous people. Its funny how I remember several years of my schooling being spent learning about the World Wars but little of it being devoted to the British Empire.

Johann rules.

petition the queen not to give Margaret Thatcher a state funeral

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Mark Thomas. He rules.

Do it!

Sir David Attenborough: "Our planet is overcrowded".

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Dave rules.

do you want a vagina full of AIDS?

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Because apparently, if you use a condom as a precaution against STDs, that's what you'll get:



This video is funny but only because the guy is such a distressingly ignorant fucktard.

This next video is the funny junglist mash-up version. Oh yes!

UK democracy is dead

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From the synopsis of The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby:

"[T]he author argues that anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by “Washington” but is the inevitable result of “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making."

This applies equally well to the UK. If the electorate cannot make sound public decisions then democratic elections become dysfunctional. Elected governments become plutocracies, which then entrench themselves and install policies that suppress any attempt to enact reform and reinforce the antidemocratic cycle; typically through demagoguery and assaults upon the professional classes, who are the only people with the intellect to perceive the threat and challenge it.

Sound familiar? It ought to.

cultural differences

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"Speaking in the parents' defense, Tom Molomby, SC, said that, as the parents came from India, where homeopathy is in common use, they should be declared not guilty due to cultural differences."

Yes, sure. Because killing your nine month old daughter by neglect is an intrinsic part of Indian day-to-day culture. And we should respect that.

libel tourism in the UK and Obama's dodgy Syrian friend

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Cool article from Wikileaks that points out- surprise, surprise- that UK libel law is shit and a threat to freedom of speech, good investigative journalism and democracy, generally.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAH A HAHAHAHA A AHAH ah aahaH AHA HAhahahaha AH ha ha ah ha . . . . .

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Holy crap, this made me laugh like a donkey. Sadly I can't embed it.

punkscience: helping to understand swine flu

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I read this article on swine flu and was surprised to come across the demographic parameter R0. This is something that I have regularly encountered in my work on demographics and I revel in the opportunity to explain a little straightforward maths to the pubelic: R0 is the net reproductive rate of an individual or a population.

From my thesis' scrap file:

R0 can be calculated from the equation:

R0 = V(α) . b . E(α)

Where: V(α) = Survival rate to the age of first reproduction.
b = is the product of the lifetime average rate of offspring production.
E = is the average adult life span of an individual at the age of first reproduction.

For semelparous organisms this equation can be further simplified to:

R0 = V(α) . S(α)

after Charnov (1997)

Where: V(α) = the reproductive value of an individual at the age of reproduction (b multiplied by E)

It is possible to determine several factors which influence either V(α) or S(α) and these factors have often been quantified as surrogates for fitness (eg. McDowell et al. 1999; Kashian 2004). Bearing in mind that fitness is a product of both genes and the environment in which they operate any assessment of fitness will be specific to the environment in which it is assessed (Stearns 1992).

The only problem, of course, is that a flu virus is not semelparous. In which case all of the above isn't relevant. So that's a lot clearer then. Yes.

war crimes

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Punkscience hasn't commented on the civil war in Sri Lanka so far. Its about time he did. Fuckers.

Good Science: Why fertilisers reduce biodiversity

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'Nuff said.

NMR results

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WARNING: This post contains ecotoxicology: Non-biologists may be incredibly bored!

This is the result of Principle Component Analysis on the non-polar spectra from my methanol-chloroform extracts. The different symbols represent three different populations of animals. As you can see they are completely separated by PCs 2, 3 & 4. This is quite a weak differentiation as these three PCs account for 15.29, 9.74 and 7.95% of the variability in the data, respectively. However, differentiated they are, demonstrating that significant differences in fundamental metabolism exist between the three populations. Now I've just got to work out what those differences are. Which is a lot harder.