From the BBC news site:
Scientists have created an ideal colleague – a robot that performs hundreds of repetitive experiments.
The robot, called Adam, is the first machine to have independently “discovered new scientific knowledge”.
It has already identified the role of several genes in yeast cells, and is able to plan further experiments to test its own hypotheses.
I’ve been saying for years that this was going to happen. Now will you believe me?
This, dear readers, is the top of a very steep and very slippery slope. Firstly, the food police are one step removed from the thought police: if they can control what you eat, they can control what you think. And secondly, once one class of food is subject to a tax, you know it’s going to creep. It will start out on one “unhealthy” food (chocolate); then, just a budget or two down the line, it will spread to a few other unhealthy foods; then less-unhealthy foods — potatoes for example (because you can make chips out of potatoes), and so on. Eventually, the original stated purpose of the tax (to punish people for buying “unhealthy” foods) will be forgotten, replaced by the real, practical purpose (to raise revenue for the government); and you won’t be able to buy so much as an organic rocket salad with oil-free, egg-free, vinegar-free, salt-free, taste-free dressing without having to pay tax on it.
This is also exactly the sort of measure that, once implemented, no government will ever reverse; strident exhortations from the same press who once brayed their opposition to it will ensure that the tax stays in place, because if it’s repealed then people will get fat and anyone who opposes it wants us all to die from obesity.
Officials from councils sampled nearly 500 Doner kebabs and found that they may contain up to 4.2MJ of energy and “shocking” levels of salt and saturated fat. Link to BBC story
No s#!t, Sherlock.
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The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that South Yorkshire Police acted illegally in retaining the DNA of two people who were arrested but not charged.
Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights , which is written into UK law as the Human Rights Act 1998, clearly states:
Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
- Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
- There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Seventeen senior judges decided unanimously that the retention of this information “could not be regarded as ‘necessary in a democratic society’”.
Smith is not taking this lying down, though. She said “The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgement.” Whisky Tango Foxtrot? Does this mean any defendant, duly pronounced guilty, may now remain at liberty and continue committing further instances of the offence with which they were charged while they “carefully consider the judgement” ?
In an earlier post, I called Andrew McClintock — who believed he should not have to obey the Law of the Land because his imaginary friend says so — a homophobic dickhead.
It has been pointed out to me that this choice of wording might tend to diminish McClintock’s standing in the eyes of someone who considers being a dickhead to be somehow less acceptable than being homophobic. (I personally would have expected that believing such things would cause most people’s heads to undergo what mobile phone manufacturers’ lawyers refer to euphemistically as spontaneous rapid disassembly.)
I also realise that there is a world of difference between being a dickhead and merely acting like a dickhead. After all, actors in soap operas who portray characters who perform distasteful acts regularly receive hate mail and death threats from members of the public who conflate television drama with reality, and the imaginary character Deirdre Rachid received more letters of support from a concerned public than any real-life political prisoner. I should not stoop to the level of these people.
Anyway, to return to the subject at hand. Andrew McClintock is not a homophobic dickhead. He is merely a homophobe who sometimes behaves like a dickhead. OK now?
BBC reporter Chris Jeavans is embarking on an ambitious project: to see if she can spend a month without buying any disposable plastic items, including packaging — that’s right, she isn’t even going to buy anything with a plastic over-wrap. Re-usable plastic (e.g. food containers) is O.K. though.
Most of the negative response has been from smart-arses trying to point out that computer keyboards &c. are made of plastic — yes, but you don’t throw a keyboard away after typing one document, do you? (I bet I am going to hear from somebody who does exactly that now.)
I say good luck to her. She’s linked on my Blogroll. You can read the initial story here and the blog here.
I haven’t broken any law.
I know who I am, and I don’t have to prove that to anyone!
– Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Ezard in The Last Enemy
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The National Ambulance Followers’ Federation are out in force again:
How a gambling addict lost £2.1m
The guy obviously begged and pleaded with them to allow him to re-open his account, or gave them some bull$#!t details to create a new one.
Most people know the difference between a bit of fun and a problem. If this idiot wins his case, expect things to get worse for the rest of us.
See this story on the BBC website:
Gay adoption tribunal appeal due
The upshot of it is that a man is complaining because he has to do what the Law of the Land requires, as opposed to what his queer-bashing imaginary friend requires. Well, boo bloody hoo.
I really, really hope this bigoted prick gets shot down in flames. If someone’s religion said that they had to sacrifice thirteen virgins every full moon, we wouldn’t have to umm and aah about allowing them to do that out of some misguided “respect for their religion”. Why on Earth do these christians think that just because their big book of fairy tales tells them that something is wrong with it, they have the right to interfere with a perfectly natural practice?
Anyone with half a brain could see this was going to happen:
Adults ‘too afraid’ of youth work [BBC]
Adults are often too scared to work with young people for fear of being branded a paedophile, according to a new report. No s#!t, Sherlock! Who wants to risk the wrath of a baying mob of News of the World readers, complete with torches and pitchforks, just for telling some snivelling little brat to behave?