Various updates

Here's where we're at:


The front garden has a new fence.  It's five foot high with the trellis topper and provides nice screening.  I'll be planting a row of dwarf trees behind it in the Autumn, in-between the fence and the ramp.

My peas are ready.  

George has squashed my maincrop potatoes in his paranoid bids to bark madly at the big Maple.  I'm not convinced I can save the spuds.  He's already trampled my Thyme to death.  

The Jasmine has now grown to the top of the arbour, and will soon be trained across the front.  

The lawn survived the heatwave mostly intact.  I'll give it a reseed in March ready for next Summer.  

And almost all the books I ordered have come.  I'm still waiting on Wheater's Functional Histology.  The Gray's Anatomy and the Stryer's Biochemistry I already had from donkeys' back.  The rest, including the Histology book, came to £28 on ebay.  Kerching!

Preparing for college

  So I think tomorrow I'll be ordering a lot of textbooks. For £9 all-in I'm getting Principles of Genetics, Functional Histology, and Principles of Anatomy and Physiology. I'd best clear off a shelf in my room for all this (or build another shelf if I can't clear one), and fetch my Gray's Anatomy and Striker's Biochemistry down from the loft, though I prefer Lehninger's Biochemistry and will be getting a copy at my earliest convenience.  

  Getting Bioscience Laboratory Techniques next week, along with as many box files and as much lined paper as I can scrape together.  A friend has offered to lend me her copy of Essential Cell Biology.  

  The advance legwork I need to put in ahead of my practicals is well in hand.  So much so that Julia now has an entire folder of emails titled "Jo's crabs".  Yep, I'm looking at mitten crabs.  I'm also intending to look at bees and holly.  Two subjects of great environmental significance and one subject of personal curiosity.  If I get the green light for the holly study then I may find myself doing carpentry in the lab: the study will need a rig that I don't think we have, but that I can build for next to nowt.  

In 69 days' time I will be a biologist-in-training!

My Botanical Adventure

Went to Kew Gardens for the first time today.  I really should've gone sooner.  The guide thingy suggests you leave yourself two to three hours to get around the place - aye, sure, if you're an anorexic on a souped-up granny scooter being piloted by the Stig!  I was there for five hours and I reckon I'm lucky if I got to experience half of it.  I'm going to include the bulk of the photos on a separate page because I took 103, but I'll post a choice few here.  I went in the Winter, so I presume you've got to see it again in the Spring, Summer and Autumn to really get a sense of the lifecycles of the specimens there.

 Me amidst an amazing collection of palms and ferns

The Coffin Tree can grow to be among the tallest trees in the world!

This fish was watching me.  

This Cycad is older than Kew Gardens.  Cycads as a bunch are older than the dinosaurs!

And for reference, here's a cycad being munched on by a Triceratops

This is a Banksia, named for a local boy...

There's a gallery of botanical art there, it has its own building, The Marianne North Gallery.  It features a load of paintings by Marianne North plus the Shirley Sherwood Collection, a collection of paintings by various artists.  There's a whole section on fungus for any myco geeks.  Sadly, no photos allowed.

I stopped for a burger halfway through.  It was a hell of a burger!  Venison.  You heard me; a venison burger!  Venison, in a burger.  I'll stop now.  

There were piranhas

The turtles were nothing like the ones you see on the telly though.  They weren't even armed!  Bit naff really.  

Now the Kew Pagoda is a bit of a local landmark.  You can see it from over the Thames in Brentford, from half of Richmond and Sheen, and of course from the top of a 65 bus.  So I decided to see where in the Gardens I could grab the best long shot of the Pagoda.  

Here's it up close

The Treetop Walkway is the highest publicly-climbable structure in the Gardens.  The Pagoda is taller but you aren't allowed up it.  Here's the walkway:

I expected the views from there to be amazing, and they are!  You need to get that high and see Brentford, see Sheen, to remind yourself that you're still in London.  

But the view of the Pagoda was obscured by tree branches.  

Still, at least in the Winter you can see it at all.  In the Summer that'll be a wall of green.  The view from the top of the Temperate Greenhouse (the biggest greenhouse) is significantly clearer, albeit with a big tree blocking part of it

Best view however was straight down the Cedar Vista from the corner of that wee lake in the North of the Gardens:

These parakeets live all over Richmond Borough.  A shitload escaped from some private collection back in like Victorian times or something and the rest is history.  Their ubiquity in Strawberry Hill has seen them nicknamed "green pigeons".  

I saw a Japanese Minka house.  These were made of wood and ridiculously versatile and durable.  

I saved the Evolution exhibition for last.  It was cool, though some prat had vandalised part of it.  It was full of fossils, ancient living species and models of ancient extinct species.  These Liverwort have been around for 400 million years - twice as long as the mighty Cycads!

A fossil

Aaand I'll put the rest on a side page, because there's bloody loads of them!  Suffice it to say that a great day was had and I'll be back there in the Spring.  

How far do ethics go?

It's an interesting question.  Normally in Science we think of ethics in terms of the direct effects of an experiment on subjects participants.  True up to a point.

Let us consider the Bell Curve, a psychological treatise that didn't directly involve much in the way of live experimentation, but which was used as a scientific justification for widespread racism.  Schools in black areas are underfunded compared with schools in white areas, and this underfunding leads to underperformance.  The Bell Curve allowed politicians and racist pundits to argue that "these kids aren't underperforming because the school is underfunded, they're underperforming because black people are not as intelligent as white people".  On that basis, correcting the underfunding was never a priority.  Thousands and thousands of young people received a sub-standard education because of the abundance of melanin in their neighbourhood, and this was allowed to continue because some bloke they'd neither met nor heard of had gotten it into his head that they were just naturally stupid.

I would beg to differ as - indirectly - this man has saved my life on more than one occasion.  At any rate, the racial aspects of the Bell Curve were later proven to be dodgy as fuck, and using that to form policy is seen as scientifically unethical.  If doing your thang as a researcher causes others to be harmed - even if they aren't involved - and you could have foreseen or avoided such then you are unethical.  Simple enough.

People say that politics should not interfere in Science.  True up to a point.  Misusing Science (or Psychology) to round up political undesirables is reprehensible behaviour on the part of all involved.  With that said, unfettered Science has given the world its fair share of horrors.  Freedom without some degree of regulation is like a loaded gun in the hands of a toddler.  There must be, not control as such, but limits.  There must be checks in place to ensure that innocents have nothing to fear from Science.  There must be acts that are deemed to be beyond the pale.

Ethics, in my view, begins with the germ of a thought in the researcher's mind before the study has even been fully conceived and ends only when those ripples upon the surface of history which were caused by the study have ceased.  Typically this point will be reached long after a prominent researcher has died.  Indeed, his great-grandkids might have great-grandkids by the time we can say that his work is no longer skewing the world.  If you loose a thing upon the world - be it a theory or an ideology - then you are responsible for what it does.

In my view of ethics, J. Robert Oppenheimer killed a quarter of a million civilians, because he built his doomsday device knowing full well that it was a tool for levelling and irradiating cities.  If we divide the casualties (c.250,000) by the number of weapons needed to cause that many casualties (2), then at a ratio of 125,000:1 we can say that the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the single most efficient slaughter of civilians in human history.  He's a hero to some, sadly, because the bomb is said to have ended WWII and saved the lives of thousands of soldiers who would've been flung back into combat had the war continued.  Standing between the war and the civilians is what soldiers are meant to be for.  A few thousand troops saved at the cost of a quarter of a million civilians is not an ethical trade.  Of course to some people it makes a difference that the unelected emperor of those civilians was in bed with the Nazis.  To others, it makes a difference that those civilians weren't white.

So then I encountered this article via a link on Facebook.  The university in question is undermining Palestinian homes in occupied territory at the risk of causing a collapse.  They say that groups calling for a boycott are attempting to bring politics into the business of what should and shouldn't be researched.  I disagree.  Ethical oversight prohibits abuse primarily because it is abuse.  Our notions of what constitutes abuse evolve with the political understanding of the times, but if we today perceive it as abuse then it is abuse, plain and simple.  Endangering the lives of families is not made acceptable just because they're Palestinians living somewhere Israel wants.  If anything, by forcing this upon those under occupation it is the university itself which has brought politics into research, as there's no way in hell they'd be allowed to do that kind of maverick shit in Tel Aviv!

It then falls to ethics bodies to intervene and halt the study.

If however the ethics body cannot or will not apply its own rules; be it because the abuser is untouchable (as in this case, Israel has Uncle Sam behind it to grant impunity), or because the ethics body has been bought, then we reach an unfortunate circumstance wherein the nearest semblance of ethical enforcement is obstruction by the protest of citizens.  A boycott or blockade has no weight on paper, it is unaccountable; but on the other hand I struggle to think of a more democratic way for a society and its citizens to articulate the point at which they draw the line between acceptable conduct and unacceptable conduct.

Now for the ethical distinction between winging a stone at the guy who took the decision to dig under homes in the first place and winging a stone at some poor bastard who is just doing his job...

So why Biology?

Be warned: there's no gardening in this one.

  Before I start, I just want to give a shout out to London's navvies.  Tonight the rain is amazingly heavy and the wind is frankly extraordinary.  I saw it at Clapham blow the rain thirty-odd feet off plumb in the space of a ten foot drop.  It was in the eyes, knackering my visibility.  It was in the boots, numbing my feet.  It was under the boots, denying me a comfortably sturdy footing.  Ridiculous conditions.  Then as the train went through St. Margarets I saw the Men In Orange preparing to walk the tracks.  Such a brave and dangerous thing to do, but if they don't do it then one night my train might not deliver me home to Strawberry Hill in one piece.  I take my hat off.

No great shocker that I'm presently nursing a hot chocolate with a decent glug of Bailey's in it.

  So I've decided that I'm no longer going to try and get a head start on my fees.  £27k is either ten years' saving or a bank job.  If I want that slip of the paper which says I can probably try grownup science then I'm just going to have to swallow the debt.  Fucking Tories!  I want to do Natural Sciences, and having been unable to choose between Biology and Geology I'm looking at the possibility of taking a major/minor split with Biology being the major.

  I've just finished college this year, a fact that my circle seem to be quite proud of.  I get asked what I'm going to do next and it's always "so are you going to do Medicine?"  Up until a year ago I would've said yes, but something has changed.

  When I was sixteen I enlisted.  I applied at first to join the REME, to become a mechanic or a spark.  Joining up is quite an involved process, and there's all manner of screening to go through.  When I completed my psychological profile I was taken to one side by a recruiter who said that being an electrician would suit me, but that being a medic might suit me more, and with a BARB score of 80 (the intelligence test, the average score is around 50) I might enjoy the mental challenges of medicine.  So I ended up joining the RAMC and training as a medic.  One conversation really can put your life on a different path.

  I was earmarked for the 16th before my legs got busted and I was honourably discharged.  I landed on my feet in civvy street and found work as a nurse in acute stroke care.  I spent a good few years in stroke and loved every minute of it.  When I was 20 a patient had what was from my perspective the worst possible outcome.  Not just a death - I'd had my first at 17 and a good number since - but a death in which a choice I'd made had affected things.  Let me be clear: the patient was not going to be walking out the front door whichever way you slice it.  Still, when you're young and you find yourself in that scenario, how things are explained and handled in the first few hours can make or break you.  It broke me.  It messed me up, tore my mind apart so badly that I spent a week under observation, and I'm not the same person since.

  That is not the problem.  Far from it.  It hurt, and it should hurt.  It should hurt so that you don't make the same mistake twice.  It should hurt so that you don't assume, you don't gamble, you question everything (most of all yourself) and you kick your own arse into doing the very best you can do; because you never want to feel that again.  Then a year ago I found that I had accepted it, that after more than half a decade I'd made peace with myself.  This was unnerving, because I don't want to ever become hardened to such things.  I've already lost a part of myself, and I don't want to know how much more of myself I'd have to lose in order to wear so thick a shell as that.

So no Medicine.

  Medicine was always a second choice.  I'd never really aimed to have a career in healthcare.  I was a geeky kid who liked circuits and snails, minerals and fossils.  I was always interested in the natural world and how it worked.  Medicine appeals to the right person for the right reason, but is also just a popular way for a scientist to get a paying job.  What I really want to do is give the Universe a poke to see what it does, and I always have.

  I started college two years ago at 25.  A late bloomer, but what the hell.  That could've been shit, but it wasn't.  When you're a hyperactive genderqueer autist with a fucked up knee and a half-palsied hand you find you can have quite a spread with teachers and with authority figures in general.  Maybe you'll be pitied, or ignored, or seen as a curiosity, an interesting case study or test subject, or someone to tick a load of boxes for their diversity cred.  I lucked out in that my lecturers did none of that shit.  The experience gave me a renewed confidence, not only in my aptitude for science but also in my ability to carve out a place for myself as a scientist.

  Going out and studying the natural world no longer feels like an impractical pipe dream.  It's real and attainable and if I could spend the rest of my life doing that then I would be a very happy person indeed.

Now, if I am going to give the Universe a poke then I'm gonna need a bloody long stick...

On Science, Journalism and Stupidity

So over thirty years, a hundred scientific studies, each one done on a thousand pineapples, have each said that pineapples are green.  A hundred thousand green pineapples over three decades lead us to the reasonable conclusion that pineapples are green.  Fair enough?

One guy comes along and publishes a poorly-designed article about the study of a dozen pineapples, done over a weekend in his flat, which claims pineapples are actually red.  It is possible that this lone maverick is a voice of truth in the wilderness, but chances are that it's a fuck-up.  Chances are that this lone maverick is a nob who just wants five minutes of fame, or some money, or to cause a controversy, or is simply too incompetent to realise s/he is incompetent (and let's all be thankful that s/he does not work in demolitions!)  The Theory of Green Pineapples, established over a hundred thousand pineapples, should ideally need a controlled lab study, leading to a peer-reviewed article, to overturn as bunk.  This standard is not grievously high if you have truth on your side.  This standard is not met, not even close, but the headlines start cranking out.  I'll post the real headline (within the context of this hypothetical example) in bold, and then how the headline should read in italics:

SCIENCE PROVES PINEAPPLES ARE RED
NOB CLAIMS PINEAPPLES ARE RED

SCIENTISTS DISAGREE OVER GREEN PINEAPPLES
SCIENTISTS DISAGREE WITH NOB OVER GREEN PINEAPPLES

PINEAPPLES: THE HIDDEN RED MENACE!
NOW THAT WE'VE SCARED YOU, GIVE US MONEY!

Let's take it further: the basis of the red pineapple story, the case study, was based neither on the scientific study of pineapples, nor even on the emergence of a red pineapple.  The study says, in a bunch of longer words than this, "Dave down the pub says pineapples are red, thus pineapples are red".  For a researcher, this is as close as you can get to lying without actually lying, and even then you can scarcely fit a Rizla between the two.  For a journalist who uses this study as a basis for scaring mothers with tales of evil red pineapples harming children, this is actually lying, and it is perhaps the most reprehensible lie that a journalist can tell.

Ladies, gents, and various points between, I give you the MMR Autism scare, based upon the red pineapples of Andrew Wakefield and his "mate Dave" (or twelve frightened and litigious mothers with no basis in science between them).  Whether the cause is genetic or to do with diseases or toxins your mother was exposed to pre-natally, autism is congenital.  It first shows symptoms at a year old, but you might just as well give your kid a jab at 12 months then blame it because the same kid was born with no ears.

I'm writing this grumble because I stumbled upon somebody today holding up MMR as a reason why science can't get it's story straight.  It pissed me off.  What pissed me off further was that, when I challenged this study, I was told "mothers know their kids.  Think how many babies were sent home from hospital, the mother being told the baby has flu and that she's being hysterical, only for the baby to die of meningitis when it could've been saved if the doctor had listened to the mother.  You can't just dismiss it when a mother knows something's wrong with her child."  Fair enough, there are enough doctors out there with a cavalier attitude to mothers, but this is not the same.  If a mother is in A&E with a sick baby, running a quick blood test to check for anything nasty is not likely to kill anyone; and to brush her off with paternalistic swagger without taking this basic step is taking a risk just for the sake of getting the mother out of your face, which is wrong.  BUT, that is not the same as using the word of twelve frightened mothers as the sole base of evidence for an academic study on the link between MMR and autism.  Even after I said this, I was told "But you're dismissing mothers, just like those doctors in A&E."  WHAT?!  Demanding that a study which will undoubtedly be used to establish causality contain at least some scientific basis for establishing causality is not "cavalierly dismissing the concerns of mothers", it is demanding a standard of evidence which can help prove or disprove the basis of those fears.

I'm on the autistic spectrum, somewhere.  As it's a spectrum, I'm hoping that I'm in the purple bit because I like purple.  I have many of the traits of Asperger's syndrome with a few of the traits of classic autism.  To clarify: I'm of the Inattentive And Ridiculously Inappropriate Bastard Who Flaps When They're Amused form of autism, rather than the Sitting In A Corner Banging Themself In The Head variety.  I say this not because it's particularly relevant to my argument, but for two reasons: 1) to defuse any complaint that I'm "picking on the disabled", 2) because on those occasions where I need to declare - such as when signing on or going through occupational health at a job - I absolutely hate it when the eejit taking the details asks "oh dear, were you vaccinated?"

The world of autism is getting bloody stupid.  We have, on the one side, doctors and mothers of kids with Banging Themself In The Head autism crying "we want a cure"; and on the other side we have young adults with my flavour of autism saying "we don't want a cure, it'd be nice for that lot, but don't force it on us, look to the social model instead".  This is all well and good, but when doctors then talk of detecting and aborting foetuses it gets really touchy.  Some want it, others don't.  Me, I like being alive!  I have a decent quality of life, I'm no strain on my family.  I see the world differently to you, I study and learn differently to you, and this makes me a more difficult student to teach within a system that is set up to teach neurotypical students, but that's about it.  All this makes me want to sit in my room with some music and some cake and just ignore the world.

But I guess we'll see where science takes us.  I'm off on holiday until Monday, so here's hoping Mike gets watered on the right days...

Results Day

Went back to college as a mature student and now I've learned that I've passed all my A-Levels.  There'll be no digging today.  I'm in my comfiest clothes, sat with a pepperoni pizza from Angelo's up on the Heath Road, listening to old rock and contemplating university.  Natural sciences is a certainty, but beyond that it's all just so much "what if..."  Do I take Biology?  Anatomy and Physiology?  Geology?  Palaeontology?  I have time yet to weigh this decision.

In the meantime, I leave you with Queen:

And tomorrow, I DIG!