Lavengro in Spain

AIDS and the Church

It is an article of faith among British atheists and other rationalists (and anti-Catholics in general) that the Roman Catholic Church is single-handedly responsible for the AIDS epidemic in Africa. I have no particular reason to defend the Church (of which I am not and never have been a member), but when things just don't stand up it is worth mentioning them. Yes, the ban on the use of condoms is stupid, though it is not literally dogmatic: it is not a matter of dogma and could be changed quite easily. Especially, there seems to be no reason why they shouldn't accept the use of condoms for medical purposes as the lesser evil, and still the Church's policy unquestionably leads to deaths of people who would otherwise live. But, to what extent is it in fact the cause of AIDS in Africa?

According to a recent UN report (pp 39-41) there are 22.5 million adults and children living with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa; 1.7 million became newly infected during 2007; and 1.6 million died of AIDS. These figures are shocking and I repeat that the Catholic Church has a share of responsibility; after all it has a certain presence in the region.

But hang on. That Church, with the same policy, has a far, far greater and more influential presence in Latin America, where the figures are 1.6m, 100,000, and 58,000 respectively. I am not a statistician or epidemiologist but it looks to me as if there might be other factors that lead to the spread of AIDS in Africa. Or can some British rationalist put me right on this?

Oh, one reason (and there are others) just might be that the President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki is a nutcase who refuses to accept that AIDS is caused by HIV. But it's so much easier to bash a white European Catholic than a black South African Socialist, isn't it?

Quantum physics

Some people find quantum physics a bit puzzling, but I have studied it and I have found that really it is quite simple. What this theory says in its first law is:

• You can never really be sure where anything is.

Does that sound familiar? Then there is the second law, which says:

• If you try to look for something, you can be absolutely certain that it won’t be where it was when you last saw it.

What more sublime expression of the human condition could there ever be?

But there is more. The third law of quantum physics is formulated to ensure that common sense prevails, however clunkingly and surrealistically. It is this:

• If you lock a cat in a steel box for an hour and then open the box, you can’t know whether the cat will a) be dead, or b) jump out and bite you.

Who says science is difficult?

Sludge

This remarkably sensible letter appears in today’s Independent: 

Sir: I can only take so much sanctimonious misanthropic claptrap and today I think I may have reached my limit. If one more person tells me to turn off the lights or eat more organic asparagus I will throttle them. 

The result of all this self-congratulatory secular penance will be to delay climate change by about half an hour. The only way we will face the challenges posed by climate change is through our own ingenuity and that means constantly moving forward, not yearning for some mythical golden age where we lived at one with nature. We didn't, we got horrible diseases or suffered from malnutrition and died young. 

The tragedy is that this is still happening in many areas of the world, and that we have the means, but not the will, to stop it right now. Still, at least it will cut down on their carbon footprints. We used to dream of space travel, of solving hunger and disease, now we feel guilty if we take the kids to school in the car. It's pathetic. 

Jonathan Gill, Leeds

As it happens I am in the middle of a long (13,000-word) translation about the treatment of sludge from wastewater treatment plants in Catalonia. This is not so simple a matter as you might think (the sludge treatment I mean, though the translation’s a bit tricky too). The sludge can’t just be put on the land as fertiliser because it needs pre-treatment to remove toxic chemical substances; there are various competing ways in which this can be done but the commercial interests involved do not necessarily coincide with the country’s best environmental interests. Moreover, there’s too much of the stuff to start with for it all to be used in agriculture, but its very abundance leads farmers to use it inappropriately. I can’t help feeling that the public officials and the scientists who spend their days thinking deeply and seriously about sludge are doing more for the long-term benefit of the planet than all of those smug environmentalist puritans who enjoy going round telling everyone else what to do.

***

Since writing the above I have seen a post on The Select Society with an interesting link that shows that it really is a rather complicated matter deciding how to deal with sludge in the best interest of the environment.

Headbangers and flash

A publicity-hungry Yorkshire MP called Barry Sheerman has got himself in the papers (here) for telling the world that firework night is a ‘cataclysmic disaster’ for the environment. Not an ordinary, common-or-garden disaster you understand but a cataclysmic one. And the word cataclysm is the Greek for deluge and originally referred to the biblical Flood, so that has to be serious.

It so happens that last Sunday I was flying from Liverpool to Barcelona on a flight that took off a few minutes before six o’clock. Looking down from the plane I could see the fireworks in people’s gardens, but what really struck me was just how feeble the occasional flashes of the fireworks were in comparison with the street lights that mark the pattern of British suburbia when seen from above at night, and which are there all night every night of the year and are apparently not shielded so that they cast all their light downwards. It is obvious that in this context the effect of the fireworks on one night is a mere, err, flash in the pan of no great relevance at all to overall energy consumption. And while I make no claim whatsoever to understand the chemistry of it, I did notice this letter in the Guardian (here):

David Sutcliffe [Who he? PH] would like to ban us from letting off fireworks. But not all simple pleasures are bad. In addition to carbon dioxide, fireworks release large quantities of sulphur dioxide, which has the opposite effect in the atmosphere. Let's celebrate while we're still allowed to.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Aylsham, Norfolk

Love and mental illness

Perhaps it is no surprise that this comes from Italy:

Alteration of the platelet serotonin
transporter in romantic love
by
Marazziti D, Akiskal HS, Rossi A, Cassano GB
Dipartmento di Psichiatria,
Neurobiologia, Farmacologia e Biotecnologie,
University of Pisa, Italy.
     Psychol Med 1999 May; 29(3):741-5

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The evolutionary consequences of love are so important that there must be some long-established biological process regulating it. Recent findings suggest that the serotonin (5-HT) transporter might be linked to both neuroticism and sexual behaviour as well as to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The similarities between an overvalued idea, such as that typical of subjects in the early phase of a love relationship, and obsession, prompted us to explore the possibility that the two conditions might share alterations at the level of the 5-HT transporter. METHODS: Twenty subjects who had recently (within the previous 6 months) fallen in love, 20 unmedicated OCD patients and 20 normal controls, were included in the study. The 5-HT transporter was evaluated with the specific binding of 3H-paroxetine (3H-Par) to platelet membranes. RESULTS: The results showed that the density of 3H-Par binding sites was significantly lower in subjects who had recently fallen in love and in OCD patients than in controls. DISCUSSION: The main finding of the present study is that subjects who were in the early romantic phase of a love relationship were not different from OCD patients in terms of the density of the platelet 5-HT transporter, which proved to be significantly lower than in the normal controls. This would suggest common neurochemical changes involving the 5-HT system, linked to psychological dimensions shared by the two conditions, perhaps at an ideational level.

But then, as Sigmund Freud said: You are always insane when you are in love.

Science and language in Spain

To have an article published in the scientific journal Nature is a great achievement for any scientist, and for it to be the lead article is the stuff of dreams, but this is what has been achieved by a team of Spanish biologists, the first such article by Spanish scientists since 1985 (click here to read the article or here to read about it). Their genetic work with Drosophila flies has led them to find a link between genes that cause and suppress cancer, which will be of very great assistance in controlling and maybe preventing or curing it. But this is hardly a success story for Spanish science because it has turned out that two doctoral students on the research team were working without grants or any other financial assistance because none was available. A lot has been said recently about the parlous state of scientific research and R&D in general in Spain but not a lot has been done about it. It is to be hoped that this case will propel the Government finally to allocate more funds to research and to introduce the necessary reforms to the Spanish university system.

Unconnected with the scientific aspect but often overlooked in English-speaking countries is the fact that these researchers will probably have written their paper in Spanish, or perhaps in Valencian* as they were working in Alicante, and it has been translated into English; even if they wrote it in English, it will have been corrected by a translator. Like other journals Nature expects the articles that it receives to be ready for publication; it does not provide language services and however good your article may be from the scientific point of view, if it is badly written it simply will not be published. The time, cost and effort involved in learning English and in using professional translation services are additional hurdles faced by non-English-speakers who wish to operate internationally.

*Valencian is a separate language from Catalan; it just so happens that the official codified grammar of Valencian is word for word the same as that of Catalan. Such is the barmy nature of language definition, which is almost always political and does not conform to linguistic criteria. Last year the EU accepted two separate translations of one of the Treaties, one in Catalan and one in Valencian. The texts were identical.

Mumbo Jumbo

I have seen some nonsense in my time but this (from the BBC) is close to the limit, especially with the misuse of the word 'literally' in an allegedly scientific report. For the record, I find most of Agatha Christie's books eminently putdownable and only a very few worth reading to the end.

*****

Scientists study Christie success

 

Novelist Agatha Christie used words that invoked a chemical response in readers and made her books "literally [sic] unputdownable", scientists have said.

A neurolinguistic study of more than 80 of her novels concluded that her phrases triggered a pleasure response.

"Christie's language patterns stimulate higher than usual activity in the brain," Dr Roland Kapferer said.

...

The team found that common phrases used by Christie acted as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins, the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction.

These phrases included "can you keep an eye on this", "more or less", "a day or two" and "something like that".

"The release of these neurological opiates makes Christie's writing literally unputdownable," Dr Kapferer said.

*****

It was also found that she used a 'very limited vocabulary'. Now perhaps that has something to do with her extraordinary, and to me inexplicable, popularity.

Language, science and logic

As a linguist I am nominally an artist, but I often find that I have a lot in common with scientists; it comes down to an appreciation of accuracy in expression. I say that unlike many people I am aware that words have meanings, and scientists complain about scientific ignorance and say that factual accuracy is essential, but we are really saying the same thing; for example, when people go on about ‘chemicals’ in food we both point out from our different standpoints that all food consists 100% of chemicals, many of which are health-giving and tasty.

I saw a splendid example of this misunderstanding of science and misuse of language last weekend in Cambridge. On the market was a stall selling jars of fruit, with this notice on a blackboard:

NO PRESERVATIVES

(Preserved in genuine French cognac)

Pastafarianism

Kansas has tried once again to return to the Dark Ages but there is hope from Dover Pennsylvania, whose residents have  annoyed Pat Robertson by voting against the teaching of intelligent design in its schools.

Meanwhile, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster continues to preach Pastafarianism. Its founder has written to the Kansas School Board asking for equality for his theory of creation.

"I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. I think we can all agree that it is important for students to hear multiple viewpoints so they can choose for themselves the theory that makes the most sense to them. I am concerned, however, that students will only hear one theory of Intelligent Design.

"Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him."

If you click on this thumbnail, you will see what it is about. But I do think that Michelangelo's aesthetic sense was preferable.

      

MMR and Mumbo Jumbo

Tony Hatfield has been following the saga of the MMR vaccine on his blog and  today he has posted a reference to an article that should help to kill off this dangerous scare. What is interesting though is that this affair has been treated with British insularity; no attempt has been made to wonder whether the risk of autism associated with the vaccine is replicated in other countries. It isn’t. The triple vaccine is used quite uncontroversially here. Some time ago I mentioned it to a doctor (a gynaecologist) here and he knew nothing of the supposed link; later, when I mentioned it again, he said that he had heard something about it and that the paediatricians in his hospital were looking into it. Nothing more ever came of it – but in Britain, with worryingly low vaccination rates in some places, the risk of a measles epidemic cannot be ruled out.