C'était un rendez-vous

5:30am. The streets of Paris. 1976. An unidentified Formula 1 driver. A Claude Lelouch film.

Homer at Cerne Abbas

The priapic Cerne Abbas giant in Dorset, has been joined by a diaperic Homer Simpson! The giant is one of those chalk figures, not exactly inscribed into the hillside, but, given that the figure is formed by exposing the underlying chalk, it is perhaps 'exscribed'. There seem to be quite a few of these. I remember seeing the (Uffington) White Horse on the Berkshire Downs as a kid; I can recall walking round another one near Cirencester on a school-trip; there's one just outside Devizes in Wiltshire; and the Cerne Abbas one is somewhere to the North of Dorchester. Apparently, it's a tradition for young couples to visit the giant to ensure conception. Although, it's a bit of a trek, so, to save time, you could try drinking a couple of pints and not using a condom instead.

The vampire fly

It seems that the Blandford 'vampire' Fly may be enjoying a renaissance. 73-year old retired journalist, Peter Dunn, of Bridport in Dorset, spent four days on an intravenous drip of powerful antibiotics after he was bitten by just such an airborne varmint. The larvae of this unusually sanguine fly breed in the weed beds of the slow-flowing River Stour, close to the town of Blandford. After emerging, the female fly seeks a refreshing haemoglobin repast, before mating. The female fly also enjoys nights out at the cinema, and nights in with a DVD and a bottle of wine. In 1988, more than 1,400 people were treated in hospital after being bitten by the sisterhood.

Blandford, in fact, is a rather unusual place all round. It's quintessential rural Dorset, but it's also heavily influenced by the presence of nearby Blandford Camp, home to the Royal Corps of Signals. So it's rather like a vector sum of Hardy's Wessex and Aldershot.

Balderdash and multiverses

Every gland in Victoria Coren's body is devoted towards the secretion of sexuality. Even the thyroid. An Oxford graduate, and daughter of Alan Coren, she once tried, with Charlie Skelton, to make the greatest hard-core porn film ever. This, in turn, inspired them to write the making-of book, Once more with feeling. More recently, Victoria presents Balderdash and Piffle, a BBC2 programme tracing the provenance of well-known words and phrases. Throughout these programmes, Vicky emanates simmering sensuality like a nuclear reactor emitting Cerenkov radiation, about to go critical. Even in the simple act of walking, she gyrates each hip erotically around the other.

Now, I wonder if Vicky would like to trace the origin of the term 'multiverse'. I first came across the term in a Terry Pratchett novel in the early 1990s, where it was used less than seriously. These days, however, it's used very seriously by cosmologists to refer to a hypothetical multiplicity of universes. An article in Nature this week attributes the coining of the term to science-fiction author Michael Moorcock, but Wikipedia attributes its origin to William James, and suggests that Michael Moorcock merely popularised it.

Can Vicky discover the truth?

The Sun and global warming

A new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, confirms that neither variations in solar output, nor variations in the flux of cosmic rays, are capable of explaining the rise in global temperatures since 1980. The flip-side to this coin, however, is that the pattern of greenhouse gas emissions is equally incapable of explaining the temperature profile of the twentieth century up to 1970. Global temperatures increased up until 1940, despite a negligible increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and temperatures then decreased until about 1970. The pattern of solar activity explains the global temperature pattern very nicely up until 1970.

The obvious conclusion to an independent analyst is that both solar activity and anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases contribute to global temperature patterns. And yet the people on both sides of this debate seem congenitally incapable of acknowledging that both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic factors have contributed to the rise in global temperature over the twentieth century.

There's only one Richard Dawkins

I've started reading God is not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, and I have to say it's not as good as Dawkins's book, The God Delusion. First of all, there's a distinct and unavoidable feeling of deja vu . The Dawk was here first, and that's just the end of it. Take the following passage:

"Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience."

He's right, of course: most religion in most of the world, at most times in history, is just like this. The trouble is that Dawkins established something like the same proposition only six months or so ago. The other problem is that Hitchens uses a higher rhetoric-to-reason ratio than Dawkins. Like most journalists, Hitchens tries to convince by manipulating the emotions with anecdote and story; in contrast, Dawkins tries to convince by the use of reason. Notwithstanding these reservations, Hitchens does identify a few home truths about religion:

"The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place, but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one. This is only to be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made. And it does not have the confidence in its own various preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths."

Live Earth and Hot Fuzz

It is, of course, Live Earth today, where a bunch of millionaires promote themselves, and tell us how we can save the world by being less wasteful. Not having a taste for humbug, I occupied myself otherwise during the day. In particular, I watched Hot Fuzz on DVD, the British comedy film starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and directed by Edgar Wright. It was quite good, although, much like Shaun of the Dead, the previous film from this triumvirate, it isn't as funny as many of the critics suggested. It seems that pretty much any British film that's half-decent, receives excessive praise from British film critics. I wonder if this serves the interests of cinema-goers or the interests of the film critics...

It was noticeable that Edgar Wright still employs the same whizz-bang-snap editing technique that he used repeatedly in Spaced. And afficionados might also have spotted Julia Deakin, who plays the landlady, Marsha, in Spaced.

Noctilucent clouds

Noctilucent clouds are spooky, silvery-blue clouds which shine at night. Like cirrus cloud, they're composed of ice crystals, but they form at such a high altitude that, during the Summer months at least, they can be seen even after the sun has set.
NASA's AIM satellite has just taken some images of noctilucent cloud distribution in the Northern hemisphere. It's claimed that the clouds are becoming brighter and more widespread, and one explanation for this is that the upper atmosphere may be cooling due to the energy being absorbed by increasingly abundant greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere.

Fractured Life

I've heard it said that true Radiohead fans hate Muse, perceiving them to be nothing more than Radiohead imitators. This is nonsense. Certainly, Muse picked up where Radiohead left off when Thom Yorke disappeared up his own posterior, but Muse have very much their own sound. Nevertheless, a decade on from OK Computer, comparison to Radiohead remains a touchstone of musical quality. And now the first album from Bournemouth band Air Traffic, Fractured Life, received the following glowing review in The Sunday Times:

This young quartet from Bournemouth are so much more musically savvy than nearly all the new crop of guitar bands that it will probably take the mad-for-it rock crowd a while to catch up with them. When they do, they will find this debut to be a richly coloured sequence of songs, comparable in scope and intensity to mid-1990s Radiohead. Beginning with a couple of hormonally overloaded rockers, Just Abuse Me and Charlotte, it shifts gears over the next nine tracks as vocalist/keyboard-player Chris Wall refracts his dark side through the hauntingly beautiful Empty Space, eventually regaining his equilibrium on Your Fractured Life. Performed with precision, conviction and, best of all, a poppy conciseness, this album is that often mentioned, rarely sighted thing: an emotional rollercoaster ride. Get on it.

But I'm not going to buy the album purely on the basis of one good tune that I've heard, and a review which compares them to Radiohead.

Am I?

Ron Dennis

The perspicacious Martin Brundle conducts an interesting interview with Ron Dennis, Chairman of the McLaren Group, in The Sunday Times. THE subject of conversation, of course, is Lewis Hamilton, and what Brundle describes as team-mate Alonso's emotional reaction to Hamilton's success. I particularly enjoyed the following paragraph:

So, Alonso is completely happy then, Ron? "Anyone is going to be happier if they’re leading the world championship than if they’re not. But that is being a competitive human being. He’s as happy as someone can be in his situation. But not as happy as he would be if he was leading." So, happy within the constraints of being someone who is not particularly happy, then.

The Physics of christianity again

Bryan Appleyard has secretly reviewed Frank Tipler's recent book, The Physics of christianity, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The book review section of the Inquirer is edited by Frank Wilson, a contributor to Bryan's blog, and a fellow religious sympathiser. Nevertheless, I expected the review to be a little more scathing. Why not the Physics of islam, or the Physics of hinduism, or the Physics of Greek mythology? Tipler is quite potty, and although Bryan isn't in a position to adjudicate on the physics, I think he notices the extremity of Tipler's claims that "We have a theory of everything, all the problems were resolved 30 years ago...To deny the multiverse is to deny quantum theory; a complete theory of quantum gravity was stumbled upon long ago by Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg."

Tipler claims that his salary is "some 40 percent lower than the average for a full professor at Tulane as a consequence of my belief." I seem to recall, however, that he has a second home in Florida, so things can't be too bad for someone who has now written two populist books at the interface of science and religion, both of which employ what might be termed a large degree of 'artistic license' with the physics.