I understand that recently you were made to feel uncomfortable by hearing people speaking in a foreign language on a train. Yesterday, I heard three non-English languages being spoken in the course of a short tram journey.
Here’s the thing, though: my life was not adversely affected one iota by it. I think that may be because I’m not a fucking xenophobe.
So, Alan Turing gets a Royal Pardon. What is he being pardoned for? Being gay? Being persecuted by the state for being gay?
There should be no pardon: being gay should never have been a crime. What is needed is the recognition that the crime should never have existed and that everybody who was convicted under it should be considered to have no such ‘stain’ on their character. A pardon implies forgiveness, but if there was no wrong, there is no forgiveness.
That still leaves the persecution by the state, of course. Nothing we do can amend that, but we can continue to to work towards implementing real equality for everyone, so that the need for this retrospective action does not occur again.
(This post is based on one I wrote for my main photography blog.)
Humans — Homo sapiens — are closely related to chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans: the other great apes. This is simple fact. We share a last common ancestor (LCA) with chimpanzees; this ancestor lived about 6–8 million years ago (Mya). The LCA of (Humans/Chimps) and gorillas lived about 10 Mya, and the LCA of (Humans/Chimps/Gorillas) and Orang-utans lived about 10–16 Mya. Continue reading “I don’t care what your magic book says, we are related.”
I see from today’s Grauniad that ‘[a] former Tory minister has defended Prince Charles‘s right to have secret meetings with members of the government’. Apparently Tim Loughton says that the unelected parasiteprince had ‘always come across as “well briefed and knowledgeable” in their meetings’.
I was thirteen at the time.
I had school the next day, but my parents understood that the most momentous event in history was about to unfold, so I was allowed to stay up until stupid o’clock (I think it was about 3 or 4 in the morning) to watch the small, grainy, ghostly image of a man doing something utterly unprecedented: setting foot on the moon.
The next day, there were a lot of bleary eyes at school. Not much work was done: all we could talk about was how we had actually seen a man walk on the moon!
Like many children at the time, I was obsessed with the Apollo mission. I lapped up everything that James Burke and Patrick Moore could me tell about it. I bought models of the LEM and played with them on my mocked-up lunar surface carefully constructed from papier-mâché, jam pot lids and plaster of Paris. My pride and joy was a four-foot-high Saturn V model – I took more care building that than I had with anything else. It sat in our living room – no way was that going to be hidden from view – my parents lovingly indulging my obsession.
Over the next few years, I followed all the missions faithfully. I shared the frustration when Alan Bean fritzed the camera on Apollo 12, so we never saw live images. I spent days worrying over the fate of the Apollo 13 astronauts and I still remember the feeling of relief when the command module splashed down and they were safe again.
And then it all stopped. I didn’t appreciate at the time that we would never go back, that mankind had become, maybe, a bit blasé about the whole thing, that people were questioning the expense and need to go to the moon. No, my head was still filled with the idea of moon bases and that, just maybe, I could go there myself. I still want to go there. I can’t be Neil Armstrong – I can’t be the first – but I could still be one of those who has stood on another world.
My talents lay in a different direction, but my love of astronomy – my love of science – is as strong as ever, due in no small part to the efforts of a bunch of human beings (I don’t think issues of nationality ever entered my head) who reached for the greatest prize and grabbed it firmly in both hands. And to one man – a man that I have been insanely jealous of for most of my life.
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In 2005, I went to the Kennedy Space Center with my family. We paused in the control room reconstruction to watch the video presentation and then walked through to the next room… and there it was: a Saturn V rocket. I looked up at the five enormous exhaust nozzles of the first stage and my childhood came flooding back. I walked the length of that magnificent vehicle, my family totally ignored as I was swept up in the moment. My eyes teared up as I gazed on this symbol of mankind’s greatest, most audacious adventure and all I could think was “I watched that”. I didn’t expect that short visit to be so emotional, but there it was – whatever else has happened in the world, good or bad, at that moment, only one thing was important: we, Homo sapiens, had walked on the moon. We had walked. On the moon. And my thirteen-year-old self had watched it as it happened.
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| My son, just a little younger than I was in 1969, beside the Saturn V |
And now that ghostly figure from my living room television has gone, but the memories are as vivid as ever – more vivid, I think, than almost any other event in my life. Neil Armstrong – NASA – you inspired a young boy in a far-off land to dream of a spectacular future for humanity; a future from the science fiction novels that I eagerly devoured; a future of hope, ambition, striving; an end to pettiness and stupid quarrels. We still have that future in our reach: do we still have the will to grab it, though?
Since that day in 1969, whenever I look at the moon I think of the footprints that are still there. From now on I’ll also give it a little wink in memory of the first man on the moon.
I’m getting increasingly fed up with the rich and privileged bleating on about how they’re going to have to go somewhere else if we fail to continue pandering to their inflated concepts of their own self-worth.
We have banks and major industries claiming that the top executives have to be paid huge salaries and bonuses because we apparently need the best and the only way to stop these paragons of fiscal rectitude from buggering off to pastures new is to force enormous quantities of cash down their unwilling throats. These people are the best we have to offer? Global recession, countries going bust, austerity measures creating real and substantial poverty — this is what we get from the best financial minds in the world?
There are about 70 million people in the UK. I’m sure that, somewhere in that lot, we could find someone who could do just as good a job, and would be willing and happy to do it for a more sensible remuneration.
Recently, we had the unedifying spectacle of the bigwigs in the CofE prattling on about how the church would have to be disestablished if we didn’t permit them to keep their places in the House of Lords and to carry on with their religiously-based misogyny and homophobia. Disestablish the church? Bring it on — step one on the road to a republic.
Now, I see from the Guardian, Jersey has threatened to secede from the UK if we upset its privileged position as a tax haven for the filthy rich.
So, here’s my plan: call their bluff. Let them go. When they get in a strop and threaten to take their ball away, just wave “bye, bye, and don’t let the door hit you on the arse on the way out”.
Any replacements we get can’t be worse that what we’ve already got, surely?
To commemorate the day that physicists announced a new particle consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson (posted 4th July 2012).
These days I call myself a photographer; for about 30 years prior to that I tried to persuade computers to do what I wanted them to do. Before that, though, I was (briefly) a scientist (that’s to say, I obtained a BSc in Biochemistry and did a couple of years post-graduate work).
I love science. As Richard Feynman said “[t]he first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool”*.
I love the way science provides a mechanism for avoiding fooling ourselves.
I love the way that some scientists will devote their entire careers to gaining a better understanding of, for example, worms.
I love the way that their work, and that of all the other scientists, has helped us to build up a working model of the whole frikkin’ universe!
I love the fact that each new discovery opens up several new fields of study.
I love the serendipity—you never know where an investigation will ultimately lead.
I love the way it sometimes throws up completely counter-intuitive theories—who needs mind-altering drugs, when you can have quantum mechanics?
I love the sheer awesome majesty that it uncovers—the Hubble Ultra Deep Field is one of the most moving and affecting images that I know of.
I love the way that it can be so stunningly simple—evolution by natural selection is such an easy concept to understand, and yet the process is capable of the most astonishing feats of apparent design.
But what I love most about science is simply this: it works.
I thought I’d start up a new blog so that I can keep the main one (http://blog.greydogphotography.co.uk) solely for photography-related posts.
I’ll be using this one for posting about other things that interest me – mostly science articles, but maybe a few rants and general moaning.
Anyway, if you’re reading it, I hope there’ll be something in there for you to enjoy.
an old grey dog 