Evolution appears to accelerate over time, and new scientific evidence suggests this is due to bacteria exchanging genes – but not within their own species, but horizontally, between groups. Thus, the total rate at which genetic information is exchanged can be faster than that provided by sexual reproduction and random mutations alone. Horizontal information exchange…
Read More What links these links?Whilst we’re on the subject of dubious Anglo-American diplomacy, it looks like nothing at all has been done about the F-35 intellectual property question. The HOC Defence committee says, essentially, that the supposed agreement on this is worthless and urgent steps should be taken to prepare a plan B. There is still no word on…
Read More Here we go againIf the Americans were going to attack Iran, you’d think they would do it when they had a ship or two available. Various people have been getting their knickers in a twist because the Dwight D. Eisenhower and her task group sailed for the Indian Ocean on the 3rd of October. (The Nation, this means…
Read More There will be no attack on Iran this yearNow it’s all over, what was all the shooting about? To answer that question, we’d first need to know something of each side’s aims. Hezbollah’s were reasonably clear, at least as far as the decision to take the two soldiers prisoner went: put pressure on the Israelis to release their remaining Lebanese prisoners, and not…
Read More A war for neuroticsRemember the Kenyan mystery-man and press censorship crisis back in April? (See here, and here.) You may recall that the mysterious Armenians who threatened to set crocodiles on the cops were “Artur Margaryan” and “Artur Sargysan,” probably DRC/Dubai minerals scamsters, who were somehow associated with a giant seizure of cocaine. Well, we now have some…
Read More Air Van and “Sargysan”One of the many events I should have blogged but didn’t over the last week or so, due to a combination of elections and unusually short deadlines, was the death of John Kenneth Galbraith. In memoriam, I’m rereading his book on the 1929 Wall Street crash, The Great Crash. It will probably surprise no-one that…
Read More Galbraith and the Core/Gap..some real policemen as fake unidentified gunmen. Goons in masks, brandishing AKs, invaded the printing plant of the Kenya Standard last night and set fire to several thousand copies of the paper, before carrying off several employees. The paper believes they were policemen for the simple reason that they took the detainees/abductees to the central…
Read More After the fake policemen..Well, aren’t David Mills’s explanations for that £350,000 getting creative? First up, he said the letter in which he fessed up to it was “purely hypothetical”. Fine. So there was no money. Now, he says that the £350,000 came from his mate, the Neapolitan shipowner. (Shipping in Naples. Not likely to be any trace of…
Read More Been through the Mills?John B. has an interesting post up about British and English identity. His premise is that, in effect, England doesn’t exist. Or at least, there are parts of the geographical entity of that name that do represent the stereotype “England”, but they should not obscure the parts of England that don’t. Now, I’ve been known…
Read More Identity, and a good ideaThinking about unmanned flying things, an interesting point comes to mind: the answer to the question “will UAVs make pilots obsolete” is one of economics, not technology. Think about it – proponents of the things argue that you can save on training human pilots, send them into greater danger, and make them do manoeuvres beyond…
Read More Apropos drones