Gruts

Sunday Times: Hunts kill 91 foxes on first day of ban
On the first day of the hunting ban 250 hunts rode out into the wintry sun and killed no fewer than 91 foxes. It looked very much like business as usual, apart from some huntsmen dragging effigies of Tony Blair for their hounds to pursue.

I've been doing some maths:

• I don't know the size of a typical hunt, but as a conservative (in both senses of the word) estimate, let's say it's 30 horse-faced toffs and associated hangers-on, plus a pack of, say, 30 dogs. (I'll ignore the horses, hunt saboteurs, police, and Sunday Times journalists to keep it simple.)
• That's 7,500 people and 7,500 dogs working a whole day to kill 91 foxes.
• That's 0.0121 foxes per person/dog per day.
• That's 82½ person/dog days to kill a single fox.

Doesn't that strike you as spectacularly inefficient?

It makes a lie of their argument that fox hunting is was all about pest control.

Either that, or the hunting ban has been highly successful in reducing the number of foxes killed for fun.

Guardian: Official: Britons are most cultured Europeans
The Italians have Michelangelo, the French Molière and the Germans Beethoven. But, according to an Italian survey, the British—the beer-swilling, tabloid-reading, supposedly sports-crazy British—are more cultured than any of them.

Presumably, that's cultured as in Petri dish.

This sort of snobbery really winds me up: beer-swilling, tabloid-reading and watching sport are cultural. You can't compare amounts of culture; everyone in the world is surrounded by the stuff 24 hours a day.

Unless they live in Dumfries.

Not only did animals use a mysterious sixth sense to escape the recent dreadful tsunami, but it would appear that supposedly primitive people (who, as we all know, are much more in tune with their environment than we are) also saw it coming—although saw isn't exactly the word:

BBC Radio 4, Thinking Allowed (16-Feb-05): What is the role of the senses in society? Why do many people in west-African societies hold hands when they talk? Did a group of islanders in the Bay of Bengal really 'smell' the Tsumani coming? And thus survive?

No, they didn't.

Of course, the sociologist and Thinking Allowed presenter, Prof. Laurie "I misquote people on air to make them sound stupid" Taylor, being a total expert on the scientific hypothesis front, immediately challenged the utterly preposterous assertion made by this week's guest, David Howes, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, that the members of an ancient tribe in the Andaman Islands smelt the tsunami coming. Here is what Prof. Taylor said:

…

Yes, that's right, he didn't even bat an eyelid. Nice one, Laurie!

Why do people always have to look for mysterious explanations? The BBC has already published a far more sensible account of how the ancient tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands happily managed to survive the tsunami:

BBC (20-Jan-05): Tsunami folklore 'saved islanders'

Traditional knowledge handed down from generation to generation helped to save ancient tribes on India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands from the worst of the tsunami, anthropologists say…

The aboriginal tribes—some of the oldest and most isolated in the world—have oral traditions apparently developed from previous earthquakes that may have allowed them to escape to higher ground before the massive tsunami struck the island chain off Indonesia.

The Onge tribe, for example, have lived on Little Andaman for between 30,000 and 50,000 years and, though they are on the verge of extinction, almost all of the 100 or so people left seem to have survived the 26 December quake and the devastating waves which followed.

Their folklore talks of "huge shaking of ground followed by high wall of water", according to Manish Chandi, an environmental protection worker who has studied the tribes and spoke to some Onges after the disaster.

No voodoo. No mysterious sixth sense. Just good old-fashioned folklore.

• My sixth sense worth
• Sixth sense, my arse
• Shafted by a Sociologist

I found myself using the phrase selling like hot cakes earlier this week. It suddenly occurred to me that this is a very strange expression. I have never eaten a hot cake, and I have never seen one for sale. Perhaps that's because they sell out so quickly.

Hot cakes? Pretty odd.

Jen thinks it might refer to fairy cakes (what the Americans call cup cakes), which are particularly tasty when eaten warm, fresh out of the oven. That's as maybe, but, if so, shouldn't the expression be selling like warm fairy cakes?

But even if Jen's interpretation is right, do warm fairy cakes sell particularly well these days? If they do, I've certainly never noticed. In this day and age, wouldn't it be more appropriate to say selling like iPods, or something like that?

…All of which got Fitz and me talking in the pub last night about the Fosbury Flop. Good old Dick Fosbury is one of those totally cool individuals who have had a manoeuvre named after them. His particular manoeuvre revolutionised the world of high jump. It added several inches to most people's high jumping ability. No high jumper in their right mind would be without it. Indeed, when it comes to high jumping technique, it's the only game in town—it has been a massive success.

So why's it called the Fosbury Flop?

When I comment on news stories, I have been known to look for the occasional quirky slant. But sometimes the stories are quite odd enough on their own:

Reuters: German 'Homosexual' Penguins Spark Gay Protest
A plan by a German zoo to test the sexual appetites of a group of suspected homosexual penguins has sparked outrage among gay and lesbian groups, who fear zookeepers might force them to turn straight.

…and not forgetting this one:

Guardian: Monkeys go ape for a little allure
Scientists reported last week that male rhesus monkeys will 'pay' to check out pictures of female monkey bottoms or images of socially dominant members of their species.

CNN.com: Arthur Miller dead at 89

I'm gutted: Chattanooga Choo-Choo is one of my all-time favourite tunes.

As the keeper of a Charles Darwin website, I receive occasional emails from fundamentalist Christian loonies, who inform me that evolution is "only a theory", but who don't seem to realise that the first chapter of the Book of Genesis is only a creation myth.

When it comes to explaining reality, give me a theory over a creation myth any day.

Curiously, these loonies never attempt to explain what makes them think the Genesis creation myth is so much better than any of the hundreds of others they could have chosen. I don't bother arguing with them any more, and simply refer them to my standard response.

Employing divine intervention to explain how the universe came about clearly explains nothing, in that it begs the obvious follow-up question, "So where did God come from, then?" Adhering to Occam's Razor (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, in case you were wondering), we make fewer assumptions if we claim that the universe was created out of (and by) nothing, than claiming that God was created out of (and by) nothing and then took it into His divine head to create the universe.

The latest scientific thinking is far simpler:

New Scientist: How 3D space survived the great destruction

Why do we live in a space with only three dimensions? Because, at some time in the past, all the universes with four or more dimensions collided and destroyed each other, while our 3D space survived by slipping between collisions. Or at least, that is what a new theory claims.

Easy-peasy, you see?

It sounds like a tall tale. Can't we accept that our universe has three space dimensions and that's that? Not if you believe in string theory—physicists' best bet for a fundamental description of all particles and forces—which needs nine spatial dimensions.

Nine dimensions. Got that?

In one interpretation of string theory, called braneworld, those extra dimensions are large, perhaps even infinite, and our universe is just a 3D membrane drifting in a higher-dimensional space. However, that does not explain why our "brane" has three rather than, say, four or seven dimensions.

Now a team led by Ruth Durrer of the University of Geneva in Switzerland has an explanation. The idea is that the cosmos once included branes with up to eight dimensions, floating about at random in nine-dimensional space. In their model, this 9D space has the form of a torus, or doughnut, with each dimension circling back on itself (www.arxiv.org/hep-th/0501163).

Mmmm! Nine-dimensional doughnuts!

BBC: Prince Charles to marry Camilla

Shouldn't all us loyal royalists be getting a day off work? Better still, why not make it a week? Hurrah!