Astronomy: my first non-disappointing comet

Went to the astronomy lecture and viewing at the
Institute of Astronomy last night with my son, and queued up with many others to see Comet Holmes, which has undergone some kind of terrible bad hair day and is half a million times more fuzzy than it was last week -- and now an easy naked eye object.

Fan of astrononmy though I am, I have to admit that most objects in telescopes are a bit of disappointment -- Mars, the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn are about the only really good ones. But this here comet Holmes was definitely the most non-disappointing comet I've seen. Here's some pictures.

Lived faithfully a hidden life

Just finished listening to an abridged version of George Eliot's Middlemarch. The abridgement didn't bring out all it could've -- especially the book's modern-sounding theme, that noble ideals sometimes lead to disappointing lives -- the noble outcomes being subverted by naivety, pride, mistakes, or unforgiving convention.

The abridgement kept Eliot's original ending in full, which was a kind of resurrection for this subverted idealism, and a lovely quote:

that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Science and religion: Polkinghorne at the Royal Society

I've listened to this three times. It's really good.


Here's roughly where it goes, from the introductory blurb to the lecture.

'Science and religion are both concerned with the search for truth, attainable through well-motivated beliefs. The aspects of reality they investigate are different - in the case of science, the impersonal, physical world; in the case of religion, the transpersonal reality of God. Neither can tell the other what to think in its own domain, but their insights have to bear some consonant relation to each other.

'Science tells theology about the structure and history of the universe and, in particular, emphasises its evolutionary nature.

'Religious insight can set the laws of nature in a more profound context of understanding, so that their deep order, rational beauty and anthropic fine-tuning become intelligible features and need not to be treated as brute facts.

'As a consequence, there is a vigorous and enlightening intellectual exchange between the two."

Spaceflight: The beagle is grounded

Went to a lecture by Prof Colin Pillinger last night. All the times I've seen and heard him, I never realized that he was disabled, hobbling around on two sticks. What a fighter.

• He did Beagle not because it was easy but -- in the Kennedy-like cliche -- because it was hard
• The UK is the fifth richest nation on the planet, but spends on space like we were the 17th richest
• Two-thirds of probes to Mars have failed. The Public Accounts Committee told Pillinger that they didn't want British taxpayers' money involved unless a project was 99% likely to succeed (so why did they let us go to war against Iraq?)
• Beagle II aimed high, briefly caught the imagination of a nation, fired up a new generation of scientists, and increased the £5bn contribution that space already makes to the UK's GDP. Not bad for a failure that cost us less than a quid each.
  
• The folks at the European Space Agency said they'd help pick up where Beagle left off. The date of this proposed mission has shifted from 2007, to 2009, to 2011, to 2013 and now to 2015. ESA, by the way, criticized Pillinger's management skills.
  

On the other hand: one elderly, crippled, eccentric scientist, against all the odds, nearly pulled it off -- nearly put a probe on Mars, nearly dug into its soil, nearly got to a point where it could have made the greatest scientific discovery of them all.

Beagle cost £55m. When I got home, I read that Cambridge County Council has just put a bid in for over £400m of government money, in order to improve Cambridge's congested traffic.

I am beginning to think I may not walk on the moon, after all.

Rolling Back Malaria (not)

The British Medical Association (back in 2004):

"We have the three tools we need to curb malaria deaths—bed nets, effective combination treatment based on artemisinin, and insecticides. What we urgently need to do is make these tools much more widely available to affected communities, which are almost always too poor to pay for them themselves."

"But even with Roll Back Malaria's best efforts [This is a World Health Organization campaign, started ten years ago], only about one in seven children in Africa sleep under a net, and only 2% of children use a net impregnated with insecticide."

State giving to Roll Back Malaria is running at about 10% of the $1bn or so needed per year that would have halved malaria deaths between 1998 and 2010 (and now won't).

Here's how we can buy and distribute some bed nets, at the bargain price of 10 for £27.

Social Justice: The importance of early years

Just read that

'A child’s education developmental score at 22 months can accurately predict educational outcomes at the age of 26.' (Source: the Social Justice Policy Group report Breakthrough Britain set up by David Cameron, overview, p 8.)

So if you assess a 2 year old, you can predict whether in 24 years time they'll have no qualifications at all or just be tidying up the final draft of their PhD.

Here's some data from the same source about marriage, cohabitation and the welfare of very young children:

• Nearly one in two cohabiting parents split up before their child’s fifth birthday,compared to one in twelve married parents
• Three-quarters of family breakdown affecting young children now involves unmarried parents
• If you have experienced family breakdown, you are 75% more likely to fail at school,70% more likely to be a drug addict and 50% more likely to have alcohol problems.

A thanksgiving prayer for the ability to urinate

Not found in common books of liturgy, I reproduce it here with thanks to the peerless Neal Stephenson who puts the prayer into the mouth of Samuel Pepys. (Lithotomy is of course the removal of a gall stone.)

'Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that you shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun's radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobbly stones hidden in our coat pockets remind us that we are all earth, and we are all sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr Waterhouse?'

'Only, Amen!'

(Neal Stephenson, The Confusion, p500)

I am reading Stephenson's vast Baroque Cycle, made up of the books Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, historic novels based around the people and the times of the Scientific Revolution -- and I've been reading them for several months -- with something approaching sheer delight.

Humour: anagrams, continued

Here's a couple more:

The London Olympic games = Logical to spend money? H'm.


The Department for Education and Skills = Daft kids learn, on hated Intel computers

Humour: the fine game of nil

I am enjoying some of these wonderful anagrams from this site:

The countryside = No City Dust Here

Astronomers = Moon starers

Evangelist = Evil's Agent

The cockroach = Cook, catch her!

The Morse Code = Here Come Dots

Slot Machines = Cash Lost in 'em

Conversation = Voices Rant On

Software = Swear Oft

Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one

The Meaning of Life = The fine game of nil

To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. =

In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

and some of the names:

William Shakespeare: I am a weakish speller

Tony Blair, MP = I'm Tory plan B

Virginia Bottomley = I'm an evil Tory bigot

Florence Nightingale = Nigel, Fetch an Iron Leg

Society: how to really, really, really govern badly

Cost of the national probation service: £860m per year

Cost of the headquarters of the National Offender Management Service (into which the entire probation service was folded in 2004): £899m per year.

The probation service had its origin in work done by Christians and churches.

Government took it over in 1907 and it has steadily grown and changed since, providing more and more ways of dealing with offenders other than by jailing them. Between 1910 and 1930, thanks to Probation, the number of people in prison in the UK halved.

In 2001, our government gave the probation service a huge once-in-twenty-years' shakeup.

In 2004, they did it again --merging prison and probation together into the NOMS.

And in 2007, plans are afoot for yet a further epoch-changing restructuring, to allow for private tendering of probation work.

After these three major efforts, they should have got rid of most of the good people by now.

Society: An invisible hand

Four visits in the last month:

1. A tour round Jimmy's Nightshelter in central Cambridge
2. Taking some furniture to be recycled at the Emmaus community north of Cambridge
3. Buying some fairly traded food at the Daily Bread Cooperative in the North of Cambridge
4. Popping in to see the manager of our own St Martin's Centre for the elderly.

Each place exuded peace and a kind of a quiet well-ordered-ness. Each place runs through the hands of many volunteers and a number of full-time staff who are not paid well. Each fights almost daily battles with bureaucracy and politics that threaten to capsize the whole ship. Yet each provides a vital service to a large part of a city.

Each is an expression of Christian faith that is unsung, long-term, wholly appropriate for the 21st century.

Then I read this quote:

'Alongside the political, economic, social and technological revolutions ... which have commanded enormous media attention and coverage ... there has been this far less trumpeted, but equally important revolution in the status and standing of worldwide Christianity. Few have taken on board what is happening.' (Kenneth Hylsom-Smith To the ends of the earth ISBN 978-1-84227-475-0.

A little glimpse of a new world

'... It's a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life.

'It's where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup, and the elderly for someone to chat to. It's where you'll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose and a new power to carry it out.

'It's where people bring their own small faith and discover that when they get together with others to worship the true God, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. No church is like this all of the time. But a remarkable number of churches are partly like that for quite a lot of the time.' Tom Wright Simply Christian (ISBN 978-281-05481-7), p. 105.

Giftedness: the sweet spot

My friend's eyes lit up when he saw the chairs, so we asked him about them. These were chairs that had somehow tumbled down through the generations of my wife's family and ended up with us. He picked one up.

'Aw, this would have been made somewhere between 1860 and 1880. Mahogany? No: rosewood. Lovely. Balloon-back rosewood dining chair. Put a little bit of detergent in water and they'll come up lovely. Very easy to take apart, reglue, beautiful job, last you another 100 years.'

He picked up another.

'But this one, ugh, look, someone's put some screws in here.' (The screws too were probably antique). 'See, here too. Goes right through the tenon joint and splits it. Bodged job, no wonder it's unsteady. Probably was steady for about half an hour after they screwed it.'

'Can you fix it?'

'Oh yeah. But it's a lot more difficult.'

The original job for which we'd called him in (fitting some doors) was forgotten as he lifted and turned and scrutinized the antique chairs with something like love in his eyes.

What a wonderful world.

Famous for 15 seconds

Millions of British eyeballs and ears are glancing at the street next to mine as I write this. The person who mailed letter bombs over the past few weeks, lived, if the allegations are true, about thirty paces from my house.

Outside an hour ago, I saw three different reporters lining up in front of TV cameras, ready for the six o'clock news. and I watched a radio reporter filing her copy, which I am just hearing on the BBC. 'Neighbours are shocked', apparently.

You can tell who the journalists are, oddly enough, because they look young and normal and are unusually eager to catch your eye and engage in conversation. So next-door-but-one was interviewed by the TV, as was the teenage girl next door on the other side. I bumped into the Sun and a local stringer, while I was out taking photos. My wife Cordelia met a couple of others, and it is slightly wierd being able to go to the BBC website or the Daily Telegraph website (to name the only two I tried) and see photos of my estate. Coming back from a car trip, we had to pass a p0lice check-point to go to our house.

Science and Religion: the sane enter the debate

Cambridge is a rare city in that (as well as cinema multiplexes and the odd theatre) you can attend free lectures many days a week.

The Faraday Institute, based at St Edmond's College and, I suspect, newly flush with funds from the (very rich) Templeton Foundation, is an organization set up to provide some coherent and sane thinking about Science and Religion. Thank goodness. As an ordinary punter you get fed up of the they-just-don't-get-it 'Intelligent Design' and Creationist lot in the States and equally fed up, though more entertained, by the as-zealous-as-a-convert Richard Dawkins in Oxford. I think they should all be locked in a room together forever and the resultant warm air used to heat a nursing home or something.

Enter the Faraday Institute, made up of people whose science and thinking would be respected whatever their views: Cambridge-based discoverer of the pulsar, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, for example, Theoretical Physicist turned Anglican priest John Polkinghorne; superstar theologian Alister McGrath, and a bunch of alpha-males who can strut their Chairs and Fellowships and CBEs with the best of them. Oh, it's great.

Better still (and the reason for this blog) is all their courses and lectures are now available as podcasts. Like living in Cambridge only without the house-prices. Here's the link:

www.faraday-institute.org

Society: the causes of poverty

According to the Tories' Iain Duncan Smith (who seems to have found a happy, if unlikely, berth as a campaigner for social justice after his short tenure as Leader of the Opposition), here are the causes of poverty in the UK:

• Family breakdown
• Lack of educational achievement
• Addiction
• Dependency
• Debt

The mis-match with government policies (of all stripes) is interesting. We have:

• 'Education, education, education' as allegedly the first three priorities of government
• Family breakdown completely ignored
• Drug addiction declared war upon
• Alcohol addiction essentially ignored
• Dependency (in the sense of the poverty trap) attempted to be tackled by successive budgets and
• Debt essentially ignored.

Here is where the gospel is so enormously better than the best the government can do. In our little (low-cost, voluntary, local) C of E church we have members who have successfully been weaned off each of these killer afflictions. I can even think of one or two or who joined us with zero education, no family we knew of, alcohol problems, and mental illness, who are now standing on their own two feet, cherished members of the congregation, whose lives have blossomed before our eyes.

Atmospheric methane: The danger of boring blogs

OK, I look again and realize that the last entry, about atmospheric methane, could be construed as boring. But, hey, it was one of those news stories that gets completely buried because it is the complete opposite of the received wisdom.

And anyway, you didn't have to read it.

And actually, it's quite interesting.

Sustainability: good news about methane

An unexpected piece of good news seems to have been little covered: the fact that the quantity of methane in the atmosphere has stopped rising, as the BBC reported the other day.

It sounds arcane but methane, which apparently arises from sources as rich and varied as

• melting Siberian permafrost
• gas production and
• both ends of the humble cow

is a potent greenhouse gas. Anyone who reads about sustainability will have come across stories about (for example) giant methane burps from the deep ocean ending life as we know it. Here's one. Methane is, we are told 21 times worse than an equivalent amount of CO2 and is responsible for 20% of all global warming, if you can rely on the climate models, which you can't.

Anyhow the good news is that, after rising to 150% of its pre-industrial levels, the global atmostpheric methane level hasn't budged for the past seven years, and may even start falling. This may even be a result of various conservation attempts over the years, including farmers bottling the stuff as it comes out of cows (let's not picture this in our minds) and then selling it or using to power their milking parlours.

Not, in other words, like this cartoon:

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Society: HMP Grendon

Just come back from an open day at HMP Grendon, a unique prison in the system that is set up as a 'therapeutic community'. You have to be in prison for quite serious offences, and you have to ask to be referred to this prison. Each morning, the inmates in each wing meet for an hour and a half of group (I guess cognitive) therapy.

In this way they unbottle, for perhaps the first time, their story and their feelings, and face up to their crimes.

Themes
At this Open Day, perhaps a dozen inmates spoke to an audience of psychologists, lawyers, prison visitors, other prison officers, students, random other visitors, and me, telling how they had been changed through HMP Grendon. They were all sex offenders, rapists, murderers and people who had committed violent burglaries. Some themes that came up over and over again:

• Sexual abuse in childhood, usually from family members
• No love expressed in the family home -- quite moving to see these big, ugly, tattooed men describing how their mothers didn't want to help them or the fathers brutalized them; how they never knew a hug.
• Very low self-esteem, hidden for decades under bravado and machismo
  
• Drug taking and violence to ease the pain
• Having been desensitised to violence -- being violent to express their anger, but not being aware of the hurt they were causing others.

Other prisons versus HMP Grendon
Some interesting comments regarding other prisons rather than this one:

• Free availability of drugs. One inmate described how he smoked 'the weed' and thus dozed through his first long sentence in the Young Offenders Institute. Another said told how he felt at home in one London prison, since there were both drugs and fights a-plenty,
  
• Other prisons teach you not to trust. Instead you learn to lie to probation, go on courses so as to get parole, watch your back. At Grendon they seemed to go for (and often found) honesty and group accountability.
  
• Remorse that you were caught, not that you did what you did.

Reality check
Prisoners' views on different prison regimes were also interesting:

• You can even blag your way through HMP Grendon -- though many don't. Many do indeed face the painful process of self-disclosure.
  
• Liberal regimes only increase prisoners' exploitation of them. You need both justice applied firmly and opportunity to change.
  
• You can't excuse adult crimes because of childhood abuse -- there are 'innocent children', but not 'innocent adults'. You have to face up to both -- the terrible things done to you or that happened to you; the terrible things you yourself did.
• Many guys had had many opportunities to change presented to them, before they decided to take one of them up.
  

The overall impression, though, was of a bunch of guys (at least, the guys on show) who were facing up to their crimes, their pasts, their present situation, and taking responsibility. Spending time with one or two of the prisoners, I saw something I'd never seen in a jail before -- peace and even joy.

A challenge to me also before the day was finished: on the way out, do I shake hands with a man who admitted on stage to grooming and controlling children, planning and then carrying out violent sexual attacks on them? Do I wish him God's blessing?

Here's a view from the inside on the prison

Society: 'Stuart, a life backwards'

Alexander Master's unforgettable book (Harper 2006) about a man who spent half his short life in prison and much else of it homeless is given extra fascination because it's a Cambridge story, involving situations and ministries I know quite well. Stuart Shorter apparently is one of the 'chaotic homeless'. Among the few staples in his life are drugs and alcohol.

Healing didn't reach him
Stuart does come across people or environments that were genuinely caring and healing -- this in the midst of much of the inadequate un-joined-up work that is called 'care' in our society.

• HMP Grendon, a prison for the mentally ill that is uniquely therapeutic: he manages to get himself sent there (there's a waiting list), but then ships out, unable to face or bear the regime, even though they seemed perhaps to be getting to the roots of his chaotic behaviour
• A girlfriend, who seemed to offer genuine love: his response simply was to take everything she offered, then disappear and get high on drink or drugs for a few weeks
• The Emmaus community outside Cambridge, which offers a simple, working community, which he turns his back on.

The joy of solvents
The book describes the joy of solvents: amazing hallucinations from almost anything containing solvents: glue, Tipp-Ex, nail varnish, car paint and on and on. The typical gluehead is an adolescent,lower-class male with low interest and motivation, whose father left or died when the child was young, who is excluded or rejected by his peers, and short of stature' (p172) -- all of which is true of Stuart.

How it happened
The book seems to blame two things for Stuart's destruction:

• Child abuse at the hands of his brother and his babysitter; then by some of those in the care system, including some of the most popular and respected social workers
  
• Choosing violence and madness as a way to get respect when he was bullied and mocked for his physical handicaps as a small boy.

Neither Stuart nor Alexander Masters has much time for God. Stuart, at least, however, has no problem believing in the Devil. Near the end of the book, Stuart says this:

"You know, Alexander, I don't know meself how I got to be like this ... sometimes I think I'm the child of the Devil. Honestly, I do believe that. I've invited the Devil in, and now I can't get him out. I've tried burning him out and cutting him out and he don't take no notice. Why should he? He doesn't want to be homeless. He's got me. Little, skinny, violent me." (p 284).