Well, Andrew Brown (in who's blog at the Guardian I first read Clifford Longley's dopey ASA complaint) has written a little bit more about the affair, and judges that "Clifford Longley has been silly".  At least it would seem that the text that Longley appears to have sent to newspaper columnists up and down the country was sent by him.

His defence is that the quotes are genuine even if he did not collect them and he that he never claimed to have collected them himself. It didn't seem to him the important thing about them. Some of them he had in his own library, or could remember reading; others were new to him, but all seemed germane to his general point, that there are distinguished scientists who take the strong anthropic principle seriously as evidence for design in the universe. This was the point he wanted to make to the ASA, which offers a web form for complaints on its web site into which he cut and pasted what he had found. 

It's a few days now since Clifford Longley's supposed complaint to the ASA was released on the internet via the wonders of blogging (for example search Google for the string "According to growing numbers of scientists, the laws and constants of nature are so").

I did just that search, along with a few others to see whether Clifford Longley had indeed made that complaint to the ASA with the plagiarised text.  (See my post Rebutting Clifford Longley), and I'm unable to see any  evidence that (a) the complaint has been made and (b) that it is anything to do with Clifford Longley.

The journal Science has launched a new blog to celebrate the Darwin 200 anniversary, entitled Origins. There's an rss feed.

In the current issue of the journal are articles by Peter Bowler on Darwin's Originality and by Carl Zimmer entitled On the Origin of Life on Earth. [subscription may be required].

Ars Technica reports that SCO, the bankrupt (both morally and financially) company with a tangled history of amalgamations and renaming, and which has been fighting a losing battle against Linux (via courtroom debacles with Novell, IBM, Autozone and Red Hat) has filed a fourth reorganisation plan.  The whole sorry saga of how SCO's deluded CEO Darl McBride dragged the company into a legal morass can be read at the famous and excellent Groklaw blog.  With SCO's claims mere dust in the wind, Groklaw appears to be entering a phase of consolidation, as it sorts through the astonishing quantity of court filings and other documentation and comment the site has generated over the last four years or so since SCO launched is big action against IBM.  During that period, the story has been spectacularly convoluted, ultimately revealing that not only does SCO not own Unix copyrights, but that they actually owed Novell a significant wad of cash (still unpaid as SCO use it to bankroll continued legal action).

As far as I know, and despite his role in the company's looming demise, McBride seems to remain at the helm and is presumably one of the four top executives in line for continued remuneration.

Apparently the 1911 England and Wales census is now online, and I feel a renewed enthusiasm for a spot of internet genalogy (registered users in the apprpriate group have access to my genealogy web pages on this site)!  When the 1901 census data went online a few years ago, demand for access hugely exceeded the capacity of the servers.  It would be nice if the system this time round could cope, and in fact this seems to be the case!  Woohoo!

Link to the 1911 census website;  BBC News report on the 1911 census;

Many tropical diseases are transmitted by insect vectors - malaria (which is caused by Plasmodium parasites) and yellow fever (caused by a virus) being examples of diseases transmitted by Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes respectively.  Dengue fever is another viral disease that is transmitted by Aedes aegypti.  One crucial feature of the disease transmission cycle is that once the disease organism is collected by the mosquito in a blood meal, it takes some time to develop within the insect before it becomes infectious.  In the case of both malaria and dengue fever, this period of time is about two weeks.  This paper evaluates the use of the endosymbiotic bactera Wolbachia to shorten mosquito lifespan in the hope that this will reduce disease transmission.

In a sense, this is an attractive strategy, and one that makes use of one of the properties of some Wolbachia strains to shorten host lifespan. I have previously blogged about some aspects of Wolbachia biology in the immune system of insects.  Wolbachia infection is maternally transmitted, and spreads through insect populations because of a reproductive drive known as cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) - infected females mated to uninfected males yield infected offspring, while uninfected females mated to infected males yield no offspring.  This reproductive drive is presumably sufficient to drive even strains of Wolbachia which have negative effects on viability (such as reduced lifespan) through the population.

I was interested to know more about Stephen Green, the man who has filed a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority against the Atheist Bus ad campaign.  The blog site mediawatchwatch has an interview with Stephen Green, dating from June 2005.  In it, he demonstrates an astonishing lack of understanding of biology and evolution by natural selection.  For example, on one of the classic examples of sexual selection, the peacock's tail:

Why does the peacock have such a magnificent tail? ‘So he can attract a mate', the evolutionist replies. So how does the hedge-sparrow do it? 

The ASA complaint about the Atheist Bus ad campaign, as reported in the Guardian website supposedly emanates from one Clifford Longley.  In fact, the complaint is largely plagiarised from a religious website, and makes the same strategic cock-ups as many a creationist tract does: old quotations, out of context quotations, quotations incorrectly attributed, quotations that may never have been made.  Add to the mix an argument from authority, presumably right up the street for someone who can accept the most improbable drivel from an priest figure, and you have a classic set of misapprehension masquerading as an academic exercise.  Perhaps the whole thing is a hoax?

I read in the blogosphere that over 50 complaints have been made to the ASA - if they are all as pathetic as this one and that of Stephen Green, I say bring them on!

I fancied a change from the old website template, which has been going for more than a year.  The new template is a modified Siteground template.

I had a few issues making the header image work with Internet Explorer 6 and earlier (the notorious png problem), but seem to have cracked that.  As usual, the the site has been tested with a variety of browsers on Linux (Firefox 3.0.5, Epiphany 2.24.1, Konqueror 4.1.3, Opera 9.63).  In Win XP I've looked at it on IE 6 and 7, and it seems to work (now the png fix for IE versions =<6 has been implemented.  I haven't tried Chrome, or any browser on Mac OSX.

Introduction

Here's another attempted broadside from religious wackos. A comment article on the Guardian website from Andrew Brown presents a statement that "distinguished religious affairs commentator" Clifford Longley (who? Presumably this Clifford Longley, who's website hasn't been updated in a while) has made, in addition to the crackpot Christian Voice, complained to the ASA about the atheist bus advert.

In an astonishingly inane piece, Longley maintains

it would be honest and true to say the opposite - "There probably is a God."

Christian Voice are an evangelical christian lobby group which is a bit cross about the atheist bus advert campaign.  From their website, Christian Voice...

...is a ministry for those Christians who are fed up with the way things are, who have had enough of secularist politicians imposing wickedness on the rest of us and who are not satisfied with trying to get ‘Christian influence in a secular world' because they know ‘The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein' (Psalm 24:1). If you want instead to lift high the Crown Rights of the King of kings, you have found the right place!

For some months now the campaigners at nodpi who are working to prevent widespread adoption of deep packet inspection such as that implemented by Phorm have been seeking clrification of why the BBC use cookies to send of records of your IP address, your Post Code*, and what parts of their website (e.g. iPlayer videos) you've been viewing off to a third party company in the USA. This third party is Omniture, formerly known as Visual Sciences. The BBC say this is in order to monitor usage of their website. Response is here; the whole thread can be viewed here. Interestingly, such transfer of personal data seems to be legal under EU legislation, as indicated in this quotation from the FOI response Dephormation finally received:

To the extent that the bbc.co.uk homepage is capturing IP addresses and post code data for anonymous statistical reporting purposes, the BBC confirms that the BBC treats both IP addresses and post code data as “personal data” within the meaning of the Data Protection Act 1998, despite the currently uncertain legal position around IP addresses in particular. Given its position, the BBC does not permit the transfer of IP addresses and user post code data to countries outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) unless those countries have “adequate data protection standards” and/or there are strong contractual data protection provisions in place with the data processor. It is correct that Omniture is a USA company and therefore operates outside the EEA. However, Omniture do satisfy the European Union's Directive on Data Protection’s requirements by demonstrating “adequate data protection standards” by registering with the US Department of Commerce’s safe harbour framework.

The Daily Telegraph today has a report on the British Humanist Association's atheist bus advert (which I posted about back in October: Humanist message on London buses).  It's a peculiar article from the religious affairs correspondent that seems to emphasise the existence of the buses bearing the advert, rather than what I take to be the significant aspect of the story - that enough cash has been raised to fund 800 buses across the country (not just London).  Amusingly, one of the links on the sidebar is to this story from August entitled Atheists fail to cough up for London bus ad, while another, from October is entitled Atheist buses ready to roll across country after making £31,000 in a day.

I guess I must have missed the initial unsuccessful phase of the fund-raising campaign, and merely contributed to its resurrection in October!

The Times reports that the Home Office has adopted a plan to allow British police to hack into people's personal computers without a warrant.

If true, this is a pretty shocking extension to investigative powers.  Apparently it was made possible by an amendment to the Compter Misuse Act 1990 - the proposals included breaking into a suspect's house to install keyloggers and sending emails bearing malware that allows remote access to a PC.

Here's a neat widget that should show the ten most played albums in my last.fm profile.

I'm just playing with this last.fm thing.  Having just activated audioscrobbler on my Squeezebox, here's a little Recently Played widget from last.fm.

Back in 1982, 23 Skidoo released Seven Songs, a mini-LP on the Fetish label (there was something of a fad in those days for budget-priced mini-LPs).  I hadn't played this in some years, when I noticed that it had been reissued with some bonus tracks that I hadn't got.  Aha! I thought, let's try out this Amazon.co.uk mp3 download shop.  Off I went, credit card in hand, to make my first online digital download purchase (well, except for Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV). 

What a refreshing listen.  Particular standout tracks are Kundalini (see video below), and The Gospel Comes to New Guinea, but the whole thing is great.

Richard Branson's Virgin empire has announced that it has leased a site for its first Virgin Galactic spaceport.  Not surprisingly, they haven't gone for RAF Lossiemouth as proposed by the Scottish National Party.

It's been quite some road for Richard Branson, from the early days of publishing a school newspaper, to founding Virgin Records, at that time an independent label, with this release (left).  He was a tougher cookie than Malcom McLaren when dealing with the Sex Pistols.  He founded a major chain of record stores (as a student in Edinburgh, the small Virgin Record in the New Town was the place to get indie releases), which recently got rebranded and has gone bust.  I can remember wondering what the hell he was up to getting involved in an airline, but obviously what do I know!