I’m not going to go into the scientific evidence for man-made global warming here. I’ve read arguments from both sides, and for me the crucial factor is that the vast majority of scientists, while they might disagree about the amount of man-made global warming, all seem to think that it is something critical which needs to be addressed.

But even if you don’t believe it’s man made — or only believe a tiny proportion of it is man made — then what you’re doing amounts to a bet. I’ll stake paying a few quid less tax against the potential loss of large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable for humans.

Personally, in this sort of circumstance I don’t care what the odds are, I don’t like the stake we’ve just put up.

So I’d like to say something to all the governments of the world for failing to reach any sort of meaningful deal over carbon dioxide emissions — they’ve failed to cut them enough, and they’ve failed to make any sort of binding agreement.

Fuck you. Fuck you very much indeed.

On the plus point though, I live on a hill 128m above sea level. Or, as we’re risking it being called in the future, ‘an island’.

And this is a shame, because one of the things he does do well — extremely well — is to write a compellingly and captivatingly on evolution. I know this from having read his other books (The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype et al), and this is what made me pick up his latest — The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

Before I start on the book, I’m going to expand on why it’s a shame. It’s a shame because his attitude towards religion will cause some religious people to see him as the enemy and not want to read it. Indeed, when I was reading this book on the bus, I had someone actually say to me “I used to really like him before he went off on one about religion; he’s a bit of a nutjob in that respect, isn’t he?”.

And it’s that perception which will probably make some religious people unwilling to pick up this book. And that really is a shame; if you have any doubts over the truth of evolution, you ought to pick up this book. What Dawkins does well in this book is to put the question of religion to one side (he makes it clear he’s an atheist, but readily admits that’s an argument for elsewhere) and sets out here to make a case for one thing, and one thing only — evolution.

And he does it extremely well…

There is a note in the first chapter where he speaks of Emmanuel College in Gateshead. This place is very close to me (some of my relatives went there), but what Dawkins — along with a group of bishops — wrote a letter about was to complain about the way evolution was taught there as a “theory”.

Yes, it is a theory. But Dawkins goes some way to identify the differences between accepted scientific theory, and the idea strung together by the man in the street which he brands as his “theory” about the Kennedy assassination. Sadly, he missed the chance to use my favourite argument: if you don’t accept scientific theory, why not treat all forms of “gravitational theory*” with the same disrespect. And, to show I’m scrupulously fair about this, if you can float about, unencumbered by gravity, I might even concede the point.

*for the physics nerds, yes, I know it’s part of general relativity.

Moving on from my rant about Dawkins probably having already alienated the people who should be reading this book, I’m going to move onto the evidence itself. He provides evidence not only for evolution (though that is the central aim), but also delves into plate tectonics, radioactive dating and radioactive decay, to provide the evidence that the world is not 10,000 years old. No, we’re talking billions.

He lists ways evolution could have been proved wrong (but wasn’t); predictions made which were found to be true, demolishes arguments about ‘missing links’ and so on. Every chapter provides a different angle of attack, different sets of evidence all laid out neatly, all supporting evolution.

As an hardline agnostic myself, I find something quite beautiful in the concept that a creator could define a mechanism as simple and as capable of producing such seemingly miraculous change as natural selection: I don’t see that there needed to be a creator, but if there was, natural selection for me would add to the beauty of creation rather than detract from it — and you can add stuff like plate tectonics to that list too.

Unfortunately, he can’t quite resist attacking people: instead of suggesting that people who have drawn a different conclusion are mistaken, or haven’t considered all the relevant evidence — maybe haven’t been taught the relevant information, he takes a much harsher stance:

…those who think that the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversityThe Greatest Show On Earth, p85

…yes, they are obviously wrong, but only a sub-set of the people who believe that will have had Dawkins’ level of education, training and understanding in science; only a sub-set will deliberately have turned their back on the evidence; others may simply not be aware of it, and Dawkins does them an injustice here.

Of course, if any of those people were reading, and have managed to avoid throwing the book down in disgust at being insulted, he then goes on to provide the evidence that the earth is simply not that new.

But, to give him credit (at least in comparison to some of his works), this sort of thing is kept to a minimum, and the tale of evolution is told, explained, and expanded on, including one of my own personal favourites — that of the Octopus eye and convergent evolution (want to know why the octopus eye has evolved without the major design flaw ours have? read the book…)

One of his passages on species is perhaps the most instructive for those who do not have a biological background. Non-scientists have raised questions before (apparently) about “I’ll believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human”. Obviously this is a load of rubbish but Dawkins explains with crystal clarity why evolution would specifically not expect this to occur:

…the common ancestor would have looked a lot more like a monkey than a man, and we would indeed have called it a monkey if we had met it, some 25 million years ago. But even though humans evolved from an ancestor that we could sensibly call a monkey, no animal gives birth to an instant new species, or at least not one as different from itself as a man is from a monkey, or even from a chimpanzee. That isn’t what evolution is about. Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual…The Greatest Show On Earth, p155

It’s only later when scientists start poring over fossils that they make the decision “this specimen looks more like group B, so we’ll classify it as group B” simply because each specimen must sit somewhere. While he’s on, he also takes the time to take potshots at some other common misconceptions about evolution (that it is a ‘ladder’ with animals gradually and inexorably becoming more complex over time and so on).

If you have any concerns over whether or not evolution is fact, please do take the time to read this book, even if for no other reason than to prove you are not closed-minded. Even if you already do accept evolution as fact, it’s still a marvellous story, full of colourful examples and there are bound to be some stories in there relating to the ingenuity of nature — and the fact that while evolution and natural selection are (in my opinion at least) proved, there’s also some arguments showing where, if there had been a designer, you’d have expected him to do a lot better, as much of it appears to be a bodge job at best.

Dawkins has managed to rein in his hectoring fairly successfully, and in so doing, has produced a wonderful work, which ought to sit on everyone’s shelf.

English holidaymakers are turning to drink on their breaks with the average adult consuming eight alcoholic drinks a day, a survey suggests.BBC News: English Turn To Booze On Holiday

This struck me as noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly, the sheer amount. Eight drinks per day would amount to 112 pints over the course of a fortnight’s holiday, which is surely a little excessive. I mean, I’ve been known to take a real ale or two in my time, but that is way out of my league. Unless maybe they mean people average four pints per day, which would be eight units. That sounds a bit more plausible…

Secondly, by my reckoning I only had about fifteen alcoholic drinks in total when I was on holiday (although I did have more than half of these in one evening), so I am “owed” another 97. I’m not sure whether or not I’m allowed to spread them out over the rest of the year, or whether I am somehow obliged to have fifteen drinks a day the next time I am on holiday in order to even it out…

But the figures just seemed too high to be right. And I couldn’t find the actual survey results anywhere (although plenty of media sources appeared to have regurgitated the press release), so I thought I’d contact Know Your Limits (the NHS site behind it) myself to see if I could find out more.

Disappointingly, I wasn’t able to get my hands on the data itself, which reduces my confidence in the data — if the results aren’t available to double-check, we’re asked to simply assume that no mistakes have been made anywhere in the calculations. They might be right, but as far as I am concerned, anyone wanting to throw statistics or survey results at me needs to provide access to the data (or at least a tabulated format of it) if they want me to trust it. They don’t have to hand the results to me, but they ought to be available if I want to go looking for them.

If they provide no way for me to check it, I am not going to put too much stock in the results.

Anyway, when I contacted Know Your Limits, they did say that while they were unable to extract the results for me (if I understood right, it was part of a larger survey) but they were able to provide me with the original copy of the press release, which had a bit more information on it.

This clarified some of my original questions. Firstly, it was indeed 8 alcoholic drinks per day, not units…

With the typical summer break lasting ten days, that’s 80 alcoholic drinks over one holiday; 80 pints of beer is equivalent to 227 unitsSummer Drinking National FINAL

…bloody hell, that is rather a lot. They also managed to break down the drinks consumed to some extent:

beer lovers consumed an average of five pints a day. Wine drinkers lapped up four standard glasses of wine each day, while spirit drinkers admitted to having five mixer drinks, such as vodka and coke, each day. Drinkers also admitted to downing four other alcoholic drinks, such as strong cocktails or shots each daySummer Drinking National FINAL

But it was a couple of other bits that really surprised me. Firstly, a bit saying that about a quarter of holidaymakers admitted to drinking more than three times more than usual. Now let’s play about with the stats here. The sample size was 3,500 or so, of which 1,611 ‘qualified’ (adults who had taken a summer holiday this year).

If 1,611 averaged eight drinks per day, that’s 12,888 alcoholic drinks between them. If the highest drinking 27% (those drinking 3x their normal amount) managed 16 alcoholic drinks per day, that’s 6960 drinks between those 434 people. Leaving everyone else still averaging over 5 alcoholic drinks per day, 35 pints — or 70 units — per week.

Surely this can’t be right, otherwise we’d be having thousands and thousands of people returning from holiday each year with a barely-functioning liver. Although this would go some way to explaining why people keep talking about alcohol-related disease costing the NHS vast quantities of cash. I’m still finding a lot of the stats quite difficult to believe, though:

one in five people (19%) surveyed in the ICM poll pledged to take two days off drinking a week;Summer Drinking National FINAL

Am I to understand from this that 81% of the adults surveyed are going to be having an alcoholic drink at least six days a week? Again, surely this can’t be right — I will generally get myself out once or twice a week, so there are usually at least five days in a given week when I don’t have a drink. I accept that I’m probably slightly unusual in the sense that I practically never drink in the house, but still, I find it difficult to believe that most adults are drinking virtually every day…

Which is why I’d feel a lot more confident in the stats if I could actually see the raw data and/or the ‘weighting’ which they say has been applied to it (although I have been told that the weighting was based on a more accurate population survey so shouldn’t have thrown this out), but even so, without being able to see the actual raw data, I cannot bring myself to entirely trust the statistics derived from it, although I can accept that it was at least a reasonably large sample size.

So while I’m disappointed with Know Your Units — a health site really ought to show the information they are using to back up their claims with, particularly when they are as astonishing as this — I’m pleased with the person I was dealing with at Know Your Units for providing the help she did (she went out of her way to answer questions about the stats and the data, although she didn’t have access to the data itself), and I’m also pleased to discover that they’ve got a tetris-style game based on the number of units in drinks. Whether or not it actually helps anyone learn the amount of units in a drink remains to be seen, but it’s a larf…

And then of course, there’s one final thing: the recommendation of how much people should actually drink. They seem to have backed away somewhat from the ‘x number of units per week’ approach, instead now going with:

The NHS recommends women should not regularly drink more than 2-3 units a day (around one large glass of wine) and men should not regularly drink more than 3-4 units a day (two pints of beer) . [...] ‘Regularly’ means drinking every day or most days of the week.Summer Drinking National FINAL

So my understanding is what what they are saying is that if (as a man) you drink more than two pints most days, this is bad for you. Which led me to wonder about the ‘binge drinking’ measures, as while it’s unusual for me to drink more than twice in a week, I might well have more than a couple of pints each time…

There is no consistently agreed measure of ‘binge drinking’. More than eight units for men and more than six units for women on any one day is used as a measure of binge drinking in the population, but individuals vary and the vital thing is to avoid drinking to intoxicationKnow Your Limits FAQ

So this tells us two things: firstly that virtually that the majority of British holidaymakers are going to spend their entire holiday binge-drinking (again, I find this implausible: what about the non-drinkers, people with small children who drink less?) as an average of eight drinks will be well past eight units, but also that there’s no specific measure of binge drinking — basically, it’s saying you can go out and have a nice time, but don’t get too pissed. In other words, if you go out and drink reasonably sensibly a couple of times a week, that’s pretty much okay.

Well, I’ll drink to that…!

As I said at the time:

This looked at mapping actual traffic data, and air quality/pollution data and modelling what happens to these flows under different conditions. This enables those planning transport to investigate what would happen if certain changes were made (what would happen if you added a bus lane here, what impact on pollution would it have if we changed the order of these traffic lights and so on).

The Transport Observatory was a fascinating use of data, and I’m planning to get in touch with Margaret to find out a bit more about this work…

Building Blocks Of The Digital Economy

And I did get in touch with Margaret, and she did send me some more information. Unfortunately, what with one thing and another it has taken me quite some time to get around at looking at this, but I’ll have a shot now.

Basically, there are four universities involved in the programme — including Imperial College as well as obviously Newcastle University — and between them they have installed 100 sensors monitoring levels of five different pollutants.

The scientists will also model pollution clouds in 3D, by attaching sensors to traffic lights and street lamps. They aim to understand how it forms, lingers and dissipates in high-emission zones. The team hopes this will lead to insights about whether, for example, poor signalling causes traffic congestion that contributes to reduced air quality in the area.The Engineer: Pollution Project

Once the models have been shown to be correct, this will allow modelled run-throughs of pollution maps with some of the variables changed — for example, would adjusted traffic signalling or priorities make a difference?

Different sensors were developed by the different universities — for example the Newcastle sensors are not as big as those designed by Imperial College, but have a significantly longer battery life: once put in place they can remain in situ for 6 months before needing to be recharged. Live data is being relayed from 30 sensors in Newcastle, 15 in London, 50 in Leicester and 2 in Palermo. Sensors were also previously deployed in Gateshead during early testing and development.

I think this is a wonderful idea: if we can map and model pollution, it gives us the ability to understand more about it and look at methods to minimize pollution and/or ameliorate the hazardous effects. Obviously there are some drawbacks: a lot of the official documentation seems to have been written in that strange language academese:

Modelling is used by the traffic manager to design an appropriate control strategy to alleviate pollution hotspots. Often several options are considered (such as queue cascading or re-location to less sensitive areas of the built environment or open spaces to facilitate dispersion) and the most suitable for the specific problem is implemented. Crucial to the accuracy of the air quality prediction is the validation of
the traffic micro-simulation model.Pervasive sensor applications: Model Validation and Assessment

…and you can’t help feeling that the project is called Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments simply so they can use the acronym MESSAGE, but from what I’ve seen of the data, and the modelling — the capture and processing of real time pollution information and the pretty graphics showing it — it is going to be an amazing tool.

Sadly, for the moment this data is not generally available, but I sincerely hope that the MESSAGE project will look at — once they’re satisfied that their models are fine — making the data available online in a very graphable, mashable format. And from a personal point of view, the sooner the better — if we can get access to real time pollution information and graphs, that’s brilliant. If the modelling part of the system can’t be included at the same time, never mind — but let’s get this data out there and get it shared.

Timetric show how useful data comparisons can be — for example, if you want to know the CO2 pollution per capita, take a look at this:

I knew the United States was producing a lot of CO2, but China seems to be mentioned as a big polluter, but if you compare the per-person tonnes of CO2 produced, there really is no contest: per person per year, the United States emits around 19.8 tons of CO2; the UK 9.2, China 4.2 and Belize 3.0. Admittedly, there are more people in China but why should they feel the need to cut their CO2 output when each Chinese person is producing less than a quarter of the CO2 of each US citizen?

And Timetric shows the power, the shareability, the embedability of what can be done with data. Please let’s ensure that other data that is collected — including the MESSAGE data — is shared and made available in this way.

To set the scene: the article talks about drugs used as a legal ‘high’ — stuff like Salvia, amyl nitrate and isobutyl nitrate, which do not fall under the Misuse of Drugs Act — and talks about how they can be dangerous and how the authorities would like to see them banned. However, it’s the quote from the MHRA (not to be confused with MRSA, by the way) which rather puzzled me:

The MHRA says because they have a physiological and potentially harmful effect on the body, they can be considered a medicine.BBC Magazine: High, Above the law

Let’s just recap: because they are harmful, they can be considered a medicine. This rather suggests that something which is not harmful cannot be considered to be a medicine; and therefore that all medicines must be harmful.

I’m not entirely convinced that this was the message they had been hoping to get across…

Whereas had they just said “because it has a physiological effect on the body, it can be classed as a medicine” that would have made a little more sense. After all, we don’t want medicines which are invariably harmful, do we?

We’d surely prefer medicines which are invariably beneficial. That would be marvellous. Indeed, I’d be prepared to drink to someone who could come up with that: a medicinal compound which would be efficacious in every case, so…

We’ll drink a drink a drink to Lily the pink the pink the pink, the savior of the human race, for she invented medicinal compound most efficacious in every case.The Scaffold: Lily The Pink

(Aside: when you’ve got a sixteen stone drunk, aggressive looking bloke belting out this song at you, and blocking off your only exit from the pub, it tends to stick in your memory somewhat. Ah, but that’s The Station for you…)

The Adverts released a song called Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, which was decried as being somewhat in bad taste (probably a fair point), which asked what it would be like to be the recipient of Gary Gilmore’s eyes.

Now I do have a reason for bringing up a song released 22 years ago. I came across an interesting article on the BBC which suggests that:

Most people have a strong aversion to the idea of receiving a donor organ from a killer [...] they would be far happier receiving a transplant from someone with a good moral backgroundBBC News

They go on to suggest that one in three people who have received an organ transplant believe that they have taken on some aspects of the donor’s personality. Obviously in the case of a killer, the crux of the matter would be — and this is where the song picks up the idea perfectly — would you look at people in precisely the same way?

The eye receives the messages,
And sends them to the brain.
No guarantee the stimuli must be perceived the same…
When looking through Gary Gilmore’s eyes.The Adverts: Gary Gilmore’s Eyes

Now that’s an interesting topic. I suppose I too would have a preference that any donor organs I was ever to receive hadn’t come from a nasty person, but not to the extent that I’d turn them down if I needed a transplant. But do I believe in organ transplants changing your personality?

Well, yes but no, to be honest. After all, if one in three people think their personality has changed, this would mean that two in three people don’t. Secondly, you’d have to explain some mechanism whereby the donor’s personality wasn’t associated with either their brain (or, if you are so inclined, their soul) and has somehow been partially transplanted at the same time.

But I’m prepared to concede that some changes may be possible. I personally don’t know enough about the science to rule it out (others may have this knowledge) but I would presume that a donor organ would have some physiological differences, which might relate themselves to different chemical balances, which may impact upon the personality in some ways. There are a lot of mights in there. I don’t think it’s likely, but without further knowledge (whether from someone who already knows, or original research), I wouldn’t like to say I’m sure.

Equally though, there are other logical reasons why your personality might change. You’ll just have had a life-threatening experience, and major bloody surgery for a start. You also might well feel gratitude that is difficult to express — because if the person you are feeling grateful to hadn’t died, you’d have no reason to be grateful. So that’s a bit odd. I think these things are likely to have some impact upon your personality.

There are now more than 70 documented cases [...] where transplant patients have taken on some of the personality traits of the organ donors. Professor Gary Schwartz and his co-workers at the University of Arizona have documented numerous seemingly inexplicable experiences similar to Sonny’s. And every single one is a direct challenge to the medical status quo.Mail Online

And then you’ve got confirmation bias. I don’t know how many transplants there are per year, but I’d guess we’ve clocked up our millionth global transplant by now. If someone has clocked up 70 cases where the personality has changed and is more like the donor, that’s hardly a surprise. If 1/10th of transplant cases have a personality change, then the change is either going to make them more or less like the personality of the donor — call that 50/50? So we’d expect 1 in 20 (hey, call it 1 in 50 if you like) to have a personality more like the donor.

With about a million transplants, that would be 50,000 at 1 in 20, or 20,000 cases at 1 in 50 where we would expect this to occur pretty much by chance. Now it might be that people aren’t really looking for this, so if they looked closely, they’d find more, but 70 cases where we’d expect to see at least 20,000 isn’t exactly convincing. Every time you find another case that seems to fit, you add it to your “ahah!” list; the cases which don’t fit don’t attract your attention. That’s confirmation bias.

As I say, I don’t know it’s nonsense, but I’d need a lot more convincing. And examples like this hardly convince anyone:

She believes that she must have picked up her new characteristics from the donor, a 59-year-old man who died from an aneurysm. Now, not only has her personality changed, the single mother also claims that her tastes in literature have taken a dramatic turn. Whereas she only used to read low-brow novels, Dostoevsky has become her author of choice since the transplant.Daily Telegraph

Note that there’s no indication whatsoever that the donor liked Dostoevsky: the assumption is seemingly that because she didn’t previously read Dostoevsky, and now she does, that it must be related to her transplant, and that the donor must themselves have liked Dostoevsky. That’s one heck of an assumption. On that basis, I must have had a transplant about five years ago that I wasn’t aware of from someone who liked detective stories, because I didn’t used to read crime fiction and now I do.

I’m not saying it’s nonsense, I’m just saying that I am not yet aware of any credible evidence. So — assuming I needed them, and the organs were in good condition — I’d be quite prepared to be looking through Gary Gilmore’s eyes, hearing through Dennis Nilsen’s ears, breathing through Jeffrey Dahmer’s lungs or even filtering water through Jack the Ripper’s kidneys. But it does (and has, repeatedly) made for a good story or plot hook.

[hmm: tempted to change post title to 'filtering water through Jack the Ripper's kidneys' now...]

Of course, if you know different, do tell…

After all, these are now generally termed complementary medicines; they used to be referred to as alternative medicine. Why the change? Simply because if you give people the placebo as well as the tested medicine, they are much more likely to get better. If you give people just the ‘alternative’ (the homeopathy, or whatever), there’s no guarantee people will actually get better, and they might possibly get worse, with serious consequences.

It’s just not safe or sensible to treat these as an alternative to conventional medicine. The problem is that they might work for some people; the problem is in determining whether that is regression to the mean (i.e. most of the time, people aren’t ill; take an ill person and leave them for an amount of time, and if it’s not a serious illness, they will generally get better, irrespective of whether or not they have been given medicine), whether it’s to do with the placebo effect, or whether there has actually been some benefit. Anecdotally, people tend to assume that it’s the therapy which is the cause of the person getting better. Scientific studies are yet to bear this out.

So while I don’t have a problem with someone wanting to use a homeopathic remedy where, in order to get one molecule of active ingredient, the user would need to drink the equivalent of more than all the water in the world, I do have a problem with someone believing that this should be used instead of traditional (read: proven) medicine.

You can do all the bile chanting you want, but don’t ever think it should be used instead of proper medicine.

Otherwise you’ll get sad cases like this one:

A couple whose baby daughter died after they treated her with homeopathic remedies instead of conventional medicine have been found guilty of manslaughter. Gloria Thomas died aged nine months after spending more than half her life with eczema.

The skin condition wore down her natural defences and left her completely vulnerable when she developed an eye infection that killed her within days of developing.

Sydney Morning Herald

Obviously Gloria Thomas is one of the victims here: the poor little child died unnecessarily; she spent most of her short life in discomfort because of the eczema. But her parents, who presumably believed they “acting for the best” are also victims. They were led to believe that homeopathy was better, that there was somehow something wrong with conventional medicine. And because of that, they are responsible for their daughter’s death.

Of course they are far from blameless — they specifically ignored advice given to them by doctors — but I find it difficult to believe that they were doing this out of spite; but they allowed their unsupported beliefs to be responsible for the suffering and death of their daughter.

But the fault doesn’t just lie with them. The fault also lies with the people who spend time suggesting that these ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ medicines actually have any benefit beyond the placebo effect [begin edit for clarity] where this has not been backed up by any properly rigorous scientific study, particularly if they are advertised in such a way as to imply they are better or safer than conventional therapies [/end edit]

And the problem is that people (in particular people in the media) are allowed to put forward suggestions that conventional medicine may be dangerous (depending on what it is, it may be, but not being treated adequately is likely to be more dangerous), or perpetuating myths such as the MMR vaccine being associated with autism. They are allowed to put forward these suggestions, and then when as a result of this, children get measles and die, they do not face any consequences.

Irrespective of the fact that they might think they are giving people good advice, they aren’t. And if they dole out poor advice or misinformation — whether it’s because they don’t know better (because they haven’t checked it out properly) or because they are seeking to deliberately mislead — they need to be held accountable.

Should parents be forced to give their kids the MMR jab? I’d say no. I don’t think it’s right to force parents to give their children particular vaccinations. While I have some sympathy for the “if you’ve not been vaccinated, you don’t get to attend state schools” idea, I’m still wary about this — surely those people who have been vaccinated won’t be at risk, so they are only risking killing their own children anyway?

I can understand why parents would have been wary about MMR, after the scare. What I can’t understand is those parents who think “ooh, autism is bad, therefore me no give vaccine” without considering what the vaccine is actually for. If you’re worried, and you’re a responsible parent, you ought to at the very least look into it. And if you do that, the evidence will push you overwhelmingly towards giving the MMR jab.

And if you’re not capable of doing that, I can sympathise with (without fully supporting) the view that maybe you’re not a responsible enough parent to be in charge of your child’s vaccinations. If you’d rather ignore all the evidence based medicine, then you might as well focus on the bile chanting…

The commonly understood legend is that Dr. John Snow understood that the outbreak was clustered around a water pump near 40 Broad Street in London. Those using that water pump were much more likely to get cholera; those using a different pump still had a chance of catching it (as it wasn’t exactly uncommon), but much less. Dr. Snow explained this to various civic leaders, who removed the handle of the water pump and ended the outbreak.

And this is true, sort of. Only it misses out a lot of the detail, like the fact the civic leaders didn’t really believe in his water-borne contagion idea, but closed the pump because of the risk analysis — if they were wrong, shutting off the pump would save lives; if they were right, it would mean people would have to walk a few streets further for their water. It also misses out the point that it was a lot of follow up work after the outbreak which ultimately (but not for some years) established cholera as water-borne; and perhaps most strangely it suggests that the Broad Street pump was actually cholera-free at the time it was closed down, but that a second outbreak was prevented…

And all of this is what Steven Johnson’s book The Ghost Map explains. Firstly it tells the story of the urban conditions in London at the time (generally squalid and overcrowded), and of course how there was no form of sewer system. Instead, people just had cesspools and for hundreds of years, people had been paid to empty them:

The collecting of human excrement was a venerable occupation; in medieval times they were called “rakers” and “gong-fermors” [...] While the rakers and their descendants made a good wage, the work conditions could be deadly: in 1326, an ill-fated laborer by the name of Richard the Raker fell into a cesspool and literally drowned in human shit.The Ghost Map, p8-9

The history of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak is also explained: a particularly virulent form of cholera which could take the afflicted from no symptoms to dead within twelve hours, killing 127 residents of the area within three days.

The cholera outbreak is also traced back to its index case: a five month old baby girl. This was discovered later by the Reverend Henry Whitehead who initially had sent out to debunk Dr. Snow’s theory, but ended up becoming convinced of it himself, and ending up being responsible for collection of some of the evidence that would finally convince the vestry report on the water-borne nature of the epidemic (although the official report at the time believed no such thing). You have to bear in mind at this time, there wasn’t a germ/microbial theory of infection, which makes the ability to track this down even more astonishing.

Basically, some of the dirty cholera-infected nappies of this baby girl were dumped in a cesspool at the front of Broad Street.

The walls of the cesspool were lined with bricks that were so decayed that they could “be lifted from their beds with least force”. Two feet and eight inches from the outer edge of the brickwork lay the Broad Street well. At the time of the excavation, the water line in the well was eight feet below the cesspool. Between the cesspool and the well, York reported finding “swampy soil” saturated with human filthThe Ghost Map, p179

…although by the time the pump handle was removed, people were drinking the water without succumbing to infection, as since the baby’s death, no more cholera-infected material was being added and the bacterium might have been dying off in the well.

The “Ghost Map” of the title was a map produced by Dr. Snow to compare where the deaths occurred. It’s basically a simple map of the street layout, with all of the deaths marked against the properties with a black bar, with the water pumps also marked on. It shows a fairly obvious clustering around the Broad Street pump — but it was the exceptions (those nearby not infected, those further away who were) who provided some of the clinching detail.

The massive engineering project that was London’s sewer system is also described, as well as how, once complete (as opposed to “not quite complete when people thought it was” in 1866) it provided protection to Londoners who never suffered another serious outbreak once cholera contamination was kept out of the drinking water supply…

For me, though, the thing that sticks in the mind is that cesspool that leaked into the water supply; and the human tragedy of one family — the Lewis family of 40 Broad Street — who were ultimately responsible for the outbreak:

It is not known if Sarah Lewis ever learned that the final days she spent tending to her daughter had triggered the most devastating outbreak in the history of London. If so, the weight of the news must have been unbearable, because the outbreak she had unwittingly set in motion eventually killed her husband as well. Thomas Lewis had fallen ill that Friday, within hours of the pump handle’s removal. He fought the disease for much longer than most, surviving for eleven days.The Ghost Map, p187

…and this is where it was fortunate that the handle was removed from the well. Because some of Thomas Lewis’ cholera-infected waste was dumped in that same cesspool (of course, Sarah Lewis was certainly not to know this at the time — not having been interviewed until the outbreak was over), providing a fresh new supply of cholera into the well, and could potentially have triggered a second wave of cases, had the pump handle not been removed.

It’s a powerful work; it’s not always pleasant reading, but it is captivating. Steven Johnson has done an excellent job of bringing the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak to life, explaining why the urban conditions led to cholera outbreaks — and how they led to the cholera bacterium evolving to become more virulent, and bringing the main players — Dr. Snow and the Reverend Whitehead very much into focus.

Anyone with an interest in science, in history, in ‘detective mysteries’, in urbanisation, in living conditions, or in any combination of the above will find something for them in here. This is not a dry, dusty history, but one that springs vividly off the page, hopefully not bringing Vibrio cholerae with it. Well worth a read.

I can cope with them in the house; I can cope with them scuttling across the floor. I do however not like the idea of them getting on me, and have a tendency to react violently to any spider which would try such a thing.

What I didn’t know is that they grow in clumps. Well, that’s certainly what it looks like. Apologies for the poor quality of the photograph: next time I get a camera, I’m going to get one which specifically does close-up stuff. The entertainingly named Wizzywam has a better photo of much the same thing.

I’d seen something just outside the conservatory window — some sort of yellowy-brown thing which at first glance appeared to be stuck to the window. When I looked more closely, I saw it was something stuck to a spider’s web outside the window. When I looked even more closely, I saw that it was around one hundred baby spiders clustered together into a ball.

And I thought “I’ll have to get a photo of that for the blog”. After all Shannon shows us her hatched wildlife babies, so why shouldn’t I?

Had they just hatched right at that moment? It’s possible, because when I started watching for a while, they spread out a bit, then returned to their clumping behaviour but did not seem to clump together quite as tightly as before. On the other hand, baby Araneus diadematus (European Garden Spider) spiders do tend to clump together anyway so it’s also possible that they were just disturbed…

Young spiders emerge from the egg sac in may but usually stay together until they are mature enough to leave.Nick’s Spiders

Zerozilla said something similar at the Board Game Geek Forums…

Apparently (I just learned) they’ll stay together in a ball like this for the first day or so after hatching, or until disturbed.BoardGameGeek Forum

…although the Encylopedia Brittanica suggests they may cluster for several days. This next image is not great either, but it’s certainly better. This shows the spiders somewhat scattered: the wind was blowing somewhat, which might have been part of the reason, or it could just have been that they were getting sick of me repeating “say cheese” a lot as I took loads of photographs of them in an attempt to get at least one of them vaguely in focus.

I obviously didn’t disturb them too much, as within about an hour or so after taking photos of them — and even with my three year old son on the other side of the window, pointing at them and tapping the window — they had reclustered.

Just to give you some idea of the size or scale of the thing, the final photo, with my three-year old’s hand in the background, shows how tiny these spiderlings (although I do like the term ‘spiderbabies’) are. Basically, the entire spider ball — with around 100 spiders in it — would have been smaller than his thumbnail.

It actually looks as though they are all dangling from his thumb, but he was on the other side of the conservatory window: these spiders are actually on a strand of web gently swinging in the breeze. I’m pleased to have had the chance to see one of these spiderballs: not only had I never actually seen one before, but it wasn’t even something that I realised spiders actually did.

I thought it was you…

The Hancock Museum is near Haymarket Metro station in Newcastle. It’s been a Newcastle institution for years. I visited regularly as a child (mostly, I think, because every time I went, my parents would buy me a small plastic dinosaur to add to my collection), and I remember all sorts of things that they had, with stuffed animals, fossilised trees, absolutely ginormous crabs and a selection of other stuff.

Over the years, the building got a bit, well, scruffy-looking, as did many of the displays. Some of the displays tried to be hip, modern and up-to-date — stuff on pollution, for instance, — but generally ended up telling you little you didn’t already know and feeling like you personally were being held responsible for the whole thing.

It closed on the 23rd April 2006, for a great deal of refurbishment, after merging with Newcastle University’s Hatton Gallery to form the Great North Museum. This caused me some concern — not the refurbishment, which was clearly necessary, but the name change.

The Great North Museum tells you it’s a museum, and it’s in the North, but beyond that it sounds rather smug and self-congratulatory. It also doesn’t have any character or soul to the name. The Hancock Museum was named after the local brothers John and Albany Hancock who collected some of the contents. The name had a definite local link, and it told you something of the history of the museum. This character has been wiped out in the name of corporate rebranding. And it’s entirely wrong.

The Museum was then closed for three years, re-opening on 23rd May 2009. And because myself and the GLW had been quite fond of it, we wanted to go back and see what we believed would be the new, improved museum.

There was new, certainly, but I’m not entirely convinced on improved. Well, that’s probably being unfair. It’s better than it was, but I’m not convinced that the level of improvements seen should really have required three bloody years to complete.

Firstly, there are some things missing which used to be there.

They used to have a bee hive inside one of the windows, so you could see the bees going about their business as you wandered up or down that particular staircase. This was great for watching with the kiddies, and I think it’s a great shame that this is no longer there. A kids ‘play area’ may well be ideal for parents to sit down and have a few minutes rest, but if I wanted them to go to the park, I’d take them to the park. I want them to go to the Museum where they can learn things, get inspired by nature and so on.

There used to be a ‘night time’ display with stuffed animals: badger, fox, and various other small animals which was very much in the dark and you had to look at it carefully, allow your eyes to adjust and then gradually try and spot all the animals. There’s no sign of this, either.

They also used to have a pirhana in a tank, which was well worth looking at because you could see it had teeth. You could easily imagine that biting a big hole out of you if given the chance: you could certainly imagine a river full of them stripping a large animal down to the bone quite quickly. Only there’s no sign of that either. Presumably with the museum having been closed for three years, there haven’t been enough small children dangling their arms in the water to keep it fed…

But they’ve still got the big Japanese Crab. No, really, it’s a big Japanese crab, and well worth a look. This is one of the things they’ve done right: previously it was stuck up high on the wall and easy to miss unless you were specifically looking for it; now it’s much more visible.

But this is also part of the problem. Large parts of the old Hancock museum still had a Victorian museum/collection feel, with lots of boxes and cases of stuffed and mounted animals of various sizes on the walls. One the one hand, it’s not what museums tend to be about today; on the other it added a certain character to the museum. I can understand that they wanted to reduce the amount of this, but I can’t help but feel they’ve reduced it too much.

…but back to the “Living Planet” exhibition which contains a mixture of these stuffed animals and a series of models. The Great White shark is a model; I presume the lion is stuffed. This for two reasons; firstly it’s in a case, and secondly the mane is rather mangy-looking, and has definitely seen better days. Possibly could have done with being removed from the display…

And then you’ve got the dinosaur; they’ve got a model of a T-rex skeleton. Look, by all means have a picture of a dinosaur — indeed they have a video — but if you don’t have your own fossil bones, then why bother with a model skeleton? The kids would rather a model of a living T. Rex, and fake bones don’t mean much to anyone… if you don’t have T. Rex fossils, display the fossils of something else…

Although I will make an exception for the replica Rosetta stone in the Egyptian Gallery, as this is a unique object, which also illustrates how we learned about the demotic script and hieroglyphics. The Egyptian Gallery is one of the things the Hancock Museum still does well (look, I’m not going to call it the Great North Museum, okay? It’s a shit name!).

Of course, what boils my piss* is the fact that I wasn’t one of the people they surveyed in the opening day or so:

One hundred percent of visitors to the Great North Museum: Hancock agree that it deserves to be called ‘Great’ according to an exit poll conducted at the museum following its launch last week. Putting ‘Great’ into Museums

…good job they didn’t survey me then, isn’t it? I would have rather scuppered their headline…

*It doesn’t really boil my piss, but it’s such a good phrase (meaning “very much annoys me”) that I wanted to use it somewhere.

Where was I? Oh yes: the Roman display is very good too, particularly the focus on Hadrian’s wall, and the model showing not only the wall but people and different points at various lengths along it. The Explore area is well done too, as is the Ice Age to Iron Age display.

Another down side was that it seemed quite a few of the displays weren’t actually on display at all. There was a Wolf Fish aquarium and something else where the animals were not actually present because they were in quarantine. On one hand, this is fair enough: animals need to be quarantined appropriately. On the other, couldn’t they have timed this a bit better — surely they knew when the museum was due to be open?

Similarly, at least one of the ‘interactive’ displays — something where you are supposed to be able to compare footprints — wasn’t working, as it seemed to be missing paper or something. If you work for a museum, read this next bit, as it is important. There is absolutely no point having an interactive display if it doesn’t work. You’d be better off with some form of static display if you can’t actually make your interactive display work, as a broken interactive display looks crap. Really, seriously, if you can’t have it working, don’t even bother with it. Okay?

We didn’t visit the planetarium, which is chargeable and requires an extra ticket. This wasn’t because we didn’t have time, but we were rushing off to try and grab some lunch before rushing further off to see someone at a wedding, before rushing home to watch the FA Cup final. However, the planetarium would definitely be on our list for a subsequent visit.

On the whole, they’ve done a good job with the refurbishment to be honest. I just think that they’ve tried to be too modern, and they’ve stripped some of the character, some of the soul, out of the museum. I also don’t think the changes that I’ve seen really justify the museum having been closed for three years.

For those of you who saw my initial reaction on Twitter, my views won’t be too much of a surprise:

Not impressed with the #GreatNorthMuseum It’s like the #Hancock museum always was, only seemingly tidier and – crucially- with less stuff.@ThePickards

…but it’s also important to point out that I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t gone with small children, as then I would have actually been able to properly look at various exhibits and read the information associated with the displays instead of generally trying to have to herd the children, prevent them climbing on things, try and get them to follow us around the museum and so on. But then again, as they get older (particularly when they will actually read things themselves, instead of just wanting to climb about), I think it will be somewhere we would enjoy more.

So while I’d certainly not call it a Great North Museum, I might settle for calling it a Quite Good North Museum, or a “slightly improved in some respects but at a loss of some of the character Hancock Museum”, or even ideally just “the Hancock Museum”.