Then I read this brilliant piece of writing about journalism. It says so much about so many of these topics and more without saying more than is necessary. Each sentence of it could be the topic of entire essays. It’s a political amuse-bouche to get the brain thinking.

I give you “The war you don’t see”.

In comparison to last year the event was much bigger but with more delegates (c.1000 vs c.400) came some problems. The venue was not as good. The auditorium was just a large room which meant all the seating was on the same level rather than tiered as it was in 2009. That meant a lot of people straining to see over or around those in front. The seats themselves were also very narrow, making the discomfort of the long sessions overbearing. As the room was not an auditorium per se the light and sound rigging wasn’t up to scratch either.

The food distribution was also chaotic. Firstly it involved 1000 people traipsing up and down three flights of stairs and secondly it wasn’t remotely as good as last year. Far too much about presentation than content! And I hear that vegetarians were really badly catered for.

And that was all the space we had in the hotel. i.e. there was no particular space for stands and stalls. They were just wedged into the foyer spaces between those two halls.

Drinks in the hotel were also a complete rip-off. £4.70 for a pint at the bar and £4.80 (!) for a CAN of beer at the Saturday evening gig.

And then there was the ‘Green Room’. Unlike last year the speakers for the most part retired out of the way between sessions limiting the opportunities for the delegates to mingle with them and to get autographs.

But most of all there were the sessions themselves. I tried to enjoy the talks for what they were but nearly all of them fell into three categories. Preaching (DJ!), Irrelevant (Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie) or Content-less. Richard Dawkins really there was NOTHING in your talk! Why didn’t you talk to us about your work in evolutionary biology or of what you achieved during your time in the position of the Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science? The best talk of the weekend was from Sue Blackmore who actually told us about her work and her story of Believer to Skeptic. Where were the informative and entertaining talks that we had last year from Phil Plait, Brian Cox and Ben Goldacre?

And when I say there was preaching there really was, mostly from DJ Groethe. You are talking to Free Thinkers. We do not want to be preached at! Please do tell us about upcoming events and campaigns but you can do that in 5 minutes and then move on to telling us more INFORMATION. Heck, as the new President of the JREF if you ran out of information in 5 minutes then let us ask you about our thoughts and concerns.

What I really enjoyed was the social time spent with friends from last year and making new acquaintances. What I really enjoyed was bumping into David Deutsch again and getting to thank him for his pointers last year. What I really enjoyed was spending an hour in the bar with Tim Minchin.

On the Tim Minchin subject it was unfair to brand the evening gig as ‘Tim Minchin and friends’ and then for him to only perform 3 songs. Clearly he wasn’t to blame for this as he was evidently exhausted. But it could have been branded as an Amateur Transplants gig with special guests including Tim.

So for next year let’s have a better venue with a proper auditorium. Let’s have decent food. Let’s have it organised so it doesn’t take the entire comfort break to get to the coffee, drain your cup and get back to the hall. Let’s have more informative talks and less preaching. Let’s have more time for questions. Let’s NOT have any more speakers who don’t belong at a Skeptics conference.

To cut a long story short, it seems to me that what Quantum Mechanics does is what any computer programmer would do when faced with an enormous amount of information that he could not possibly compute in a sensible timeframe.

Why track every particle in the universe if it only matters where it is when you need to know about it?

Could the interference patterns caused by single particles be the result of approximations in the computational algorithms of the universe?

Put it this way… if the universe was in some way ‘pure’. If it existed arbitrarily, independent of anything else, then why would time and space be quantized? Are Xeno’s paradoxes for real? If time and space were not indivisible then I would claim that Xeno’s paradoxes would NOT be paradoxical IF the universe were ‘pure’ and ‘free’ because a smooth calculation over ANY interval would be possible. The paradoxes ONLY become paradoxical if you have to make the calculations! If nothing needs to do any calculations then yes you CAN integrate from 0 to 1 in a finite time. It is ONLY if something has to work something out that an un-quantized space or time will never complete an integral.

So, in the way that I see it, the Universe really works like an enormous computer. There are a huge number of locations, but they are discrete. One planck volume each. And a huge number of times, but discrete. One planck time each. At each time each volume contains information. Nothing more.

And my idea is testable! I learned this in my degree when simulating the n-body problem.

Take two bodies that are falling towards each other under gravity. As they get closer together they get faster and faster. Any computer program that simulates this over discrete time periods will eventually reach a point where the bodies are really close together and the forces on them are enormous, so the accelerations are enormous and so their new velocities are enormous. After one more time period they have passed each other and are racing away at stupendous speeds. You just violated conservation of energy. So you step back one step and you move forwards by a smaller period of time. Now the forces, accelerations and velocities get even higher. And no matter how small you make your unit of time you always face a point where things break down. Even at the planck scale of time and distance conservation of energy will be violated.

So we have a position where either planck scales are real or they are simply descriptive in terms of quantum uncertainty. You can test by conservation of energy which is the case. It may be beyond our detection abilities at the moment but the test is there. If we could prove that energy is not conserved then we would know that time and space are genuinely discrete and therefore we COULD describe the universe as a set of information which is really just like a computer model. Or we would show that energy is conserved and that therefore the planck scales are simply descriptive of our ability to describe the universe using observation. Indeed a place between unit 0 and unit 1 on the planck scale would exist. In which case quantum theory would appear to break down. In fact Xeno would come back to haunt us. After all if you need to make an infinite number of calculations to move an infinitesimal step forward in time and space you could never get anywhere. After all even the tiniest change in the universe requires the propagation of that change to everywhere else in the universe, allbeit at the speed of light of less. In a smooth scaled universe any change, no matter how small, requires an infinite number of propagations of the changes – as per Xeno.

In a way, if I follow this argument to its logical conculsion I have to ask myself again : Why does a single photon interfere with itself in Young’s Double Slit experiment? If I follow this path then the answer is that it does so because the universe doesn’t know where the photon is and therefore it does pass through both slits and that it is not because of interference with another universe where everything is identical except that the photon went a different way. After all where the bloody hell ARE all these other universes? That’s the hardest question for the multiverse proponents to answer! Myself included!

One answer would be to conclude that the universe itself is a quantum computer but then it would have to exist inside some container which leads to infinite regression.

I’m not happy with any of the answers. How CAN a photon go through both slits? Yet how CAN there be an infinite number of universes (or rather a very very large number representing each possible quantum state)?

I suspect the answer is far more subtle than any of us can realise. I do not want to shed the idea that our universe is mechanistic although including a lack of knowledge that we call the WaveForm, but neither do I wish for a plethora of universes constantly being created.

So it would be so easy just to say the universe is a computer program. But then it’s got to be running somewhere on something and we have to wonder about the rules of the universe in which that computer exists. If that universe was singular and purely mechanistic with not even the concept of a wave-form then where would they come up with that idea from? Indeed without the mechanisms of quantum mechanics what would existence even be like? Everything we know relies on quantum mechanics. Take it away and you are left with a reality that we could not even begin to describe. Could anyone come up with a way to describe a self contained computer that conforms to everything we know? After all… there is such a thing as a wave function that describes the entire universe and if it can be conceptualised (although not solved) inside that universe would it require a larger universe to contain it?

Quantum Mechanics is the most confusing thing human endeavour has EVER come up with.

I believe it was Feynman who said “If you think you understand Quantum Mechanics then you don’t understand Quantum Mechanics.”

Over the past year or two I’ve been doing a lot of research into vaccines and the anti-vax movement. One thing I did not know was how long the immunity you gain from vaccination can last. With a new baby in the family who is just approaching his first vaccinations and the recent re-emergence of Pertussis (particularly in California) I have become concerned whether my immunity is up to scratch and whether I or anyone else my son might come into contact with might even be a carrier of diseases that he could catch.

I had to visit my doctor yesterday so I asked him “Why we don’t have continual boosters throughout our life for Pertussis or Tetanus for example?”

He said that the perceived wisdom here in the UK is that after your childhood course of 5 vaccinations for each condition you are as good as protected for life. Now my doctor is pretty good and quite the skeptic himself. We recently had a good chat about Andrew Wakefield being struck off. So he didn’t state this as fact. He stated it as the NHS’s position.

Since then I’ve been looking for research articles on the duration of vaccination immunity and so far this is the kind of evidence that I’ve found:

Pertussis vaccination immunity wanes in 4-12 years
Natural immunity can last up to 30 years
There are also articles which discuss the need to re-vaccinate the elderly against diseases including Pertussis.

So it seems on the surface at least that the NHS is wrong. If the last vaccination is given in the mid teens then by the age of 30, possibly even by the age of 20, people will have lost their immunity to at least some of the diseases they were vaccinated against. Those diseases may no longer pose a significant threat to their lives but they do still pose a risk to the lives of the young and old they come into contact with.

Now I am thoroughly confused about why we let this risk exist and I draw no firm conclusions at this point as to the level of the risk or the accuracy of the links above in relation to the specific NHS vaccination schedule. More research needs to be done but my opinion is clearly moving towards there being a real risk as a result of this vaccination policy.

Man at front of queue gestures at bracelets on sale at the counter. The packaging says “Embedded Holographic Technology” and “May improve your strength and swing” etc.

Man at front of queue: Do those really work then?

Boy behind counter: Yeah, I wear one all the time.

Me: Yeah, wearing a hologram on your wrist will really make you better at golf.

Boy behind counter: Well I play off 4.

Man at front of queue: [With slight sarcasm] There must be something in it then.

Me: Yeah, Confirmation Bias.

Anyway I looked these things up and the company behind them is EFX. They have websites for many different countries. I stumbled across the US, UK and Hungarian sites in my top few google hits.

I decided to make a new Trading Standards complaint about it. And here’s my complaint sent to Consumer Direct:

Please would you forward this complaint to Kent Trading Standards, as the body responsible for applying the law in this company’s region.

The company detailed in this complaint is selling a range of products for which there exists no evidence to give backing to the claims they make for their ‘Embedded Holographic Technology”. The products are sold by many websites and shops around the country and are no more than snake-oil.

Allowing such blatant rubbish to be pedaled at the expense of those without a basic understanding of medicine and physics is shameful.

The claim on their website follows – ALL this from a mylar ‘holographic’ device???

A side note – their main US website claims that Mylar is a ‘metallic substance’ when in fact it is a polyester (plastic)… they can’t even get THAT right!

—

Q. What is the major benefit of EFX?

A. EFX helps restore natural in harmony to the body.

The effect is believed to stabilize and harmonize the body’s bioelectric current. When the body is in harmony, the muscles relax, cells un-clump, and blood circulation increases, allowing for greater stability, easier movement and pain relief.

EFX energetic power works instantly. The immediate effects experienced are; increase strength, balance, flexibility and range of motion. EFX products have also been reported to help relieve joint and muscle pain, improve blood circulation, reduce swelling, keep muscles conditioned and flexible, alleviate stress, boost endurance, and prevent motion sickness.

I am still waiting to hear back from the Trading Standards Office in Manchester about the ‘minus-ion’ bracelets I complained about previously. They aren’t obliged to contact me unfortunately but the chap I spoke to there did say he would try and call me when he had something to report.

The Pope will never stop being head of state as he will remain in office until death and he hasn’t committed any war-crimes (other than joining the Hitler Youth) so it would seem nigh on impossible that blame would ever be laid upon him in a court of law.

Until now! Dawkins and Hitchens are investigating whether or not they could have the Pope arrested during his state visit to the UK. I think it’s still highly unlikely to happen but it’s more critical news in the media which can only encourage him to get his house in order.

The first story I read that made me think to write about them was some time ago on the BBC. I seem to be in a fair minority but I don’t have a problem with the kinds of images that it produces. It’s not the sort of image I would choose to have made of me but then I’m not intending to post it on my facebook profile. And do you seriously think that the person viewing the images – hundreds or thousands of them in a shift – is going to actually care that you have a little penis or a slightly chubby arse, digitally rendered in slightly vague greyscale? They don’t have a photo of you to go along with it. It’s not like some pervy bloke is going to be sat there looking for fit girls so he can see what they look like under their clothes.

I’m sure some people must have brought up “oh but the poor children!” and probably even “oh but what about the pedos!”. Most likely these are the same people who let their kids go butt-naked on the beach. Most likely they’re the same people who think that a Pedophile is the same thing as a Pediatrician. Did you notice that one of the finalists in Masterchef (UK) this year was a ‘Children’s Doctor’? In the first round his caption actually said “Pediatrician” but we dumbed it down so as not to confuse the witless.

It is worth noting that the scanners used in the US are able to store and offload the images which we were assured they could not do. I am not aware of any reason to believe the UK or Dutch scanners can do the same.

I haven’t actually taken a flight since these scanners were introduced in the UK. They should remove the need for people to remove coats, belts etc, although shoes will probably have to come off still as the picture angle is horizontal and can’t really scan the shoes’s soles properly. But when I went through a US airport last they STILL made us take all that stuff off. That is just bloody stupid. It’s utterly unnecessary and it would really help people accept them more readily if it alleviated a lot of the hassle (and bottleneck) in getting through those controls.

Has anyone been through the new scanners yet in the UK? Has it improved transit speeds through there?

Anyway, despite the fact that I’m not really bothered by the images these scanners make what does annoy me enormously is the two-facedness and hypocrisy of the government. In 2008 the EU Parliament refused to support the EU Commission’s desire to implement the scanners across Europe because:

In MEPs’ opinion, the measure is “equivalent to a virtual strip search” and “has a serious impact on the right to privacy…and personal dignity”. British Conservative Philip Bradbourn MEP said that such scans “were a grave violation of the right of privacy and a degrading measure”.

Then late last year they suddenly started getting trialed in Manchester. In 18 months all the ‘grave violations’ of people’s rights were no longer a concern. Now we were being told that it’ll help us get through the security checks faster and therefore it’s fine to have a trial. The public were outraged and it would seem that any government who actually cared about PR would just let the trial end and drop them.

But…

On Boxing Day 2009 a man attempted to blow up a plane traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit. And suddenly the scanners were a ‘proportionate reaction’ to the threat. The scanners were suddenly implemented everywhere.

Perhaps I missed something here? Perhaps you did to? This man boarded a plane in Amsterdam – which started using these body scanners in 2007. Yet they didn’t see fit to scan passengers transferring from a flight from a country as ‘interesting’ as Nigeria to a flight to the US. In fact I’ve flown through Schiphol airport numerous times since 2007 and I’ve never been scanned once. I haven’t even seen the machines.

You might also notice that the article states that the millimetre wavelength radiation used bounces off the skin and nothing is absorbed. Referring to the article about the Manchester Trial again the head of the airport’s “Customer Experience” team says:

“Passengers can go through this machine 5,000 times a year each without worrying. The amount of radiation transmitted is tiny.”

So is it tiny or is it nothing? It might be trivial compared to a day in the sun or a minor x-ray but there is a difference between something and nothing. I certainly would not want my pregnant wife to go through the scanner – just because that’s how you treat pregnant women! It may well be irrational but it’s also an evolutionary imperative to protect them!

Refer back to the Manchester Trial again. It specifically states that people will be able to decline the scan and be patted down instead. But of course this only applied to the trial. Anyone who refuses now is turned away and not allowed to pass through the security checks.

You might also notice this:

The scanners, made by RapiScan Systems, have already been tried at Heathrow Airport from 2004 to 2008.

Well I went through Heathrow at least a dozen times in that period and I wasn’t scanned once. So it seems to me that the trials were shams. The Manchester one appears to have been genuinely implemented but the others I have serious doubts about. It really looks like we were being conditioned to accept something that the government(s) knew we would rail against.

Did you also know that the EU Parliament bought six of these machines at enormous tax-payer expense to protect the parliamentary buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg? Well the MEP’s decided they didn’t want to be scanned. And they still don’t want to be scanned. So they’ve been trying to sell them and trying again. No luck though!

So is the threat any greater than it was before the Boxing Day bombing attempt? Was there some new intelligence that made these scanners a proportionate reaction? After all, these scanners were rushed in as a response to the attempt but they have no legitimate place if the danger is not higher. Nor do they have any legitimacy if the use of them is a sufficient invasion of privacy that does not offset their benefit. As I said at the top I wouldn’t care if they just said “hey these will get you through security quicker and we promise never to allow the pictures to be stored or offloaded” and they were right on both counts.

I don’t recall the terror alert status getting any higher. It was definitely higher nearer 9/11 and it must have been really high around the time of the Iraq invasion and the start of the Afghanistan operations. How is it that one more failed attempt at bombing a plane means the threat is now higher? One would actually think it’s lower. One more would-be bomber is out of circulation and every other would-be bomber has been reminded yet again how difficult it is to pull it off.

So are we actually any safer with these things installed? The head of InterPol doesn’t think so and on German TV they have demonstrated how the machines can’t even detect the kinds of materials that a bomber might use these days.

All we have is a greater perception of a threat because we see measures like these implemented. All we have achieved is to increase the fear that people live under. This is not a fair game to play. If every time something gets past security we decrease people’s liberties and/or privacies to counteract it then we will be in a permanently escalating state of deprivation. There will always be someone who gets past security and we have to accept that. In fact I think the vast majority of people do accept it. But the government use the perception that it is an acceptable game to play to put us further and further under the thumb. Maybe, as some of my friends believe, it is a deliberate choice made to deprive us of our liberty whilst getting us to agree to and accept it. Maybe, as I more moderately believe, politicians honestly think that these apparently positive actions serve to protect us and to get them votes. Either way I think the game is up and people won’t stand for much more of it. The level of risk that people are prepared to live with if it preserves their liberty is much higher than it is now and it applies to many many more areas of our lives than just airport scanners. CCTV’s, the Police, ID Cards, RFID Tags in everything, teacher’s rights to censure pupils, even the right of a parent to smack a child. The last years of government legislation has really revolved around finding a liberty that COULD be abused and then taking that liberty away from everyone just in case someone abuses it, even when there is a law that already prohibits them from abusing it.

The only problem is, do we have enough liberty left to reclaim what we’ve lost?

Benjamin Franklin said it first and he said it best:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

1. That Organic Farming is better for the environment.
2. That Organic Food tastes better.

From my own previous discoveries I have several pre-formed opinions:

A. Organic Farming’s output is sufficiently lower than non-Organic farming that we could not feed everyone if we all adopted it.
B. Organic Farming in general MAY not be the same thing as sustainable farming and non-organic farming practices MAY be sustainable.
C. Organic produce is no better in taste or nutrition.

Being a person of sound scientific method I am open to changing my opinions based on evidence. So I will try to address both the media assumptions and my own views. But first we need to know exactly what Organic Farming is. Does it mean no chemical fertilizer or pesticide? No fertilizer or pesticide at all? There must be differences from farmer to farmer but in terms of the legal ‘Organic’ phrasing in UK shops, what does it mean? Must they be non-GM products? What does GM even mean? Where’s the boundary between Modified and Genetically Modified?

Firstly the term Organic in relation to farming or produce is a generic one. To sell your food as Organic you must be certified by an agency. The most well known of these bodies, in the UK, is The Soil Association.

It was quite a wild goosechase to get to that previous statement that seems so trivial. From Wikipedia I found DEFRA from where I (eventually!) found the right BusinessLink URL for Organic certification, which here in the UK, is defined by the European Union and regulated by DEFRA. You have to be certified by a Certification Body of which, in the UK, there are 9 approved bodies. The link to find this list took me back from businesslink to DEFRA again. But then each of these bodies has its own certification requirements – they may be very similar but they are not the same – and from this page you can only get an email address for some of these bodies – apparently they don’t all even have a website!

So what can I find out about their certification? After a bit of searching I found their information pack and downloaded the one appropriate to agricultural farming. Only problem is that there’s nothing in there about what you have to do, just contractual stuff and an application form. Eventually I downloaded a standards document which is the closest I can find to a set of instructions.

So what’s involved? For the most part it’s what you would expect. Genetically Modified Organisms and nanotechnology are absolute no-no’s. Crop rotation is required. Packaging has to be ‘Green’. But there is a lot of content about everything beyond the actual food itself. From managing hedgerows to protecting forests, from keeping uncultivated land for wildlife to maintaining and restoring old buildings. Of course there is a great deal of detail on managing the soil, from not doing any deep ploughing to only using natural and organic fertilisers.

There are exceptions to pretty much every rule but they generally say “Where not possible to use organic xxx you MAY…”. However the sheer number of exceptions listed for supplemental nutrients is shockingly large. It speaks about “Where Justified” and “Heavy Metal Analyses” and “With Approval” but there are TEN such revisions taking up several times more space in the document than the actual Rules. See section 4.8. This same pattern is repeated in section 4.11 regarding the use of pesticides.

It would take a biochemist to state whether the options available to Organic farmer for Fertiliser and Pesticide “where justified” are relatively harmless compared to what is regularly used on non-organic farms. And it would take a team of researchers and a Freedom of Information act to work out how much non-organic fertiliser and pesticide is being used in our supposedly organic food. The conclusion one must draw though from the sheer number of exceptions in these rules compared to the rest of the document is that the Soil Association is having to give in to farmers’ needs to keep productivity up.

Interestingly you cannot burn crop stubble which, as anyone can tell you, is a zero carbon activity, but which I thought was the best way to return lots of nutrients to the soil. When I reflect on that I suppose it is the best way to get some nutrients back into the soil quickly so you can replant the field for the very next season, but if you are using crop rotation letting the field lie fallow and then mowing/ploughing is probably better. At least you allow everything to break down that way rather than risk losing some of the nutrient content to oxidation.

Overall the intentions of these Organic Certifying Bodies is undoubtedly good and I really applaud the requirements concerning wildlife habitats, boundaries, buildings and all the ancillary stuff that isn’t the food itself. But, given my above points about the exceptions to the rules, I have serious doubts as to whether the average Organic food is any more ‘organic’ than food produced on a modern non-organic farm which simply uses sensible policies. Just recently the BBC ran a program on farming in Australia where by creating custom nutrient mixes based on each field’s requirements the farmers have seen an increase in productivity and a decrease in both volume and cost of fertilisers. In the same program the same farming consultant showed how he had created another additive which allowed the water that the irrigation system delivered to penetrate deeper into the soil resulting in stronger plants and less water used.

If the soil on your farm is just deficient in Manganese don’t you think it’s better to take your waste (which may well be ‘organic’) and process it in a factory to produce a Manganese product for you and other products for someone else, rather than just dumping a generic product with everything in it on your land? And do you think that plants grow differently depending on whether that Manganese is organic or synthetic? Do you think any other part of the eco-system that it may get into reacts differently based on its origin? If Manganese is harmful, say in the nearby river, then is it better to dump a small amount in the river from using a small amount of organic fertiliser or is it better to dump a tiny amount in the river from using the precise amount (large or small) of a modern, targeted, soil-penetrating, synthetic?

What I’m trying to get at here is that Science is a tool to be used. Without doubt in the past huge amounts of broad spectrum fertilisers have been dumped on fields simply because ‘they do the job’. However modern farming techniques use targeted fertilisation and pesticidal techniques. This is cheaper and results in the minimal amount of run-off from the fields to the rivers for the maximum crop yield. If I can create a targeted fertiliser that results in no run-off from your field but it happens to be synthetic and not organic would it not be the right thing to do to use that instead of the organic solution? Does it therefore not follow that a certifiably organic product may not have been produced in the most environmentally friendly way? And isn’t the real driver behind organic produce that of being Green?

Moving on, consider for a moment what a genetically modified organism is. The particular phrasing means that a scientist in a laboratory has specifically altered the gene sequence of an organism in order to change something about it. It may be that the change makes it glow in the dark, or have larger leaves, or be resistant to a parasite. It might even make the fruit of the plant produce a chemical which can be manipulated through the ingestion of another chemical to produce an immune reaction. This last point is salient. We know how to modify rice such that by prescribing a simple pill people will gain the same benefits as an anti-malarial injection – it’s been done with mice already – and it could save millions of lives. The conventional injection techniques do not reach the vast majority of people who need them because of the need to refrigerate them. I’ve been searching for the link to this article but sadly cannot find it – it seems to have been lost in the furore of on using modified mosquitos instead!

So are GMO’s evil? No. Could they be mis-used? Yes. Can you trust the companies that are going to produce these things? In general of course you can. They may backstab each other and stories about them forcing farmers to burn crops that have been contaminated with their patented GMO may be true, but ultimately they want to make money. And how do you make money? By selling a successful product to more and more consumers. If you damage or even kill your consumers you generally lose money, go bankrupt or go to prison. In addition I DO trust the scientists who do the actual ground work, the tests to see if there are any unintended side-effects; and I trust the government bodies who approve products for use.

But take away the word ‘Genetically’ and you’re still left with something ‘Modified’ and we’ve been modifying food since humans first stopped wandering nomadically and became a sedentary society at least as far back as 11,000 years ago, when, as the megafauna of North America declined, the Clovis people turned to cultivation of plants for an increasing amount of their diet. Naturally they re-cultivated the strongest and highest yielding plants and those with the most useful products. Within only a few hundred years they had created, by selective cultivation, plant breeds that could not survive without human intervention.

In the rather more recent past, from the 1950’s onwards, large-scale and intensive cross-breeding produced most of the strains of cereal crops that are grown around the world today. Even those grown on organic farms are Modified by the actions of the past. These breeds would not exist without human intervention in their genome, albeit through macroscopic manipulation. There is an Episode of Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit” which discusses this in some detail that I would highly recommend viewing. This “Green Revolution” was driven by Normal Borlaug who is often referred to as having saved 1 billion lives with his work.

I should also mention a program I watched on the BBC a few weeks ago on farming and specifically one farmer who had some wonderful (and organic) farming methods that had increased his yields, completely removed his need for fertiliser and reduced his waste products.

His cattle were confined to a relatively small tranche of a field at any time. There was plenty of room for them have no fear but he had parcelled his fields off into 30 or more smaller fields. They were kept in a given tranche for just a few days at a time and then moved to the next. The first result of this was that the cattle had changed their grazing style. Rather than pick and choose the best grass from a larger field they simply ate what was in front of them. It wasn’t that they had to eat the area bare to get enough to eat but rather as the farmer described it, the cattle knew they wouldn’t be able to eat that grass in the near future so they just grabbed whatever was nearest. This keeps the entire field area in a growth cycle rather than just the best bits of it. I assume that it beneficial for the field as nature’s abhorrence for a vacuum will surely increase the nutrient levels in those less luscious areas of the field if the plants require the nutrients to regrow. Additionally I assume that the cattle are better off for having a more varied diet.

The next step in the process is to move the cattle on to the next tranche and to introduce hens to the tranche the cattle have just left. The hens do several things. First they stamp and strut through the cow-pats, mixing it with the grass to form a high quality fertiliser. Secondly they feed on the parasites in the cow-pats. As a direct result of the latter the cattle have become entirely disease free and the farmer claimed that he had reduced his vet bills for the herd to zero.

The farmer had reduced his bills, improved the quality of his fields, increased the meat yield from the herd AND gained another source of income from the hen’s eggs whilst utilising the exact same space as he had previously. This is sustainable farming working brilliantly.

A second system the farmer had set up was to have a barn with rabbits in mesh cages, suspended above the floor. On the floor were more hens. The rabbits and hens both require a food input for this and additionally sawdust is scattered across the floor. The rabbits provide the farmer with meat and pelts and the hens mix the rabbit droppings with the sawdust to make fertiliser that can be sold, as well as laying eggs. The farmer makes a significant profit and has no waste products.

These are the kinds of techniques that we need to be encouraging. An organic certificate does not ensure that these kinds of approaches with minimal inputs (particularly fertilisers and pesticides which are the pollutants we really need to cut down on) and maximal outputs are being used. But neither does not having said certificate mean that methods like this are not being used.

My first search was for ‘Organic farming pros and cons’ and my first link was to this hugely long domain name. As I started reading it I thought it seemed quite rational. The page is even titled ‘Advantages AND disadvantages of…’. However by a third of the way down the page I realised something was awry. Perhaps you’ll notice that there are no links to any research or that there are lots of links to books for you to buy.

The graph of cancer rates fails to correct for anything except life expectancy so it remains a graph showing the impact of everything else on cancer rates. Everything else and Exposure to toxic chemicals are not the same.

And lastly the Disadvantages section claims all perceived disadvantages to be advantages or at least desirable.

My second search result led me to Buzzle.com. Sadly this website falls down on its homepage with the bold statement that:

Organic Farming is a technique used in farming without the use of any chemicals or synthetics.

As we already know that is incorrect. Synthetics are allowed.

Aim of organic farming is to produce crops which have the highest nutritional values with least impact on nature.

We have yet to address this issue. We will shortly!

Crop rotation, green manure, use of natural fertilizers and biological pest control form the crux of organic farming. It is a proactive ecology management strategy. This strategy enhances the fertility of the soil, prevents soil erosion and at the same time protects the humans and animal kingdom from the side-effects of chemicals and synthetics.

Crop rotation does enhance soil fertility by giving it time to recover between periods of intensive use. However many non-organic farmers do this anyway as purely sustainable, green and economic sense. Soil erosion is caused by deep ploughing – another thing that most farmers do not do anymore.

Organically grown food tastes better too.

We haven’t addressed this yet but no evidence is offered by the site.

The overall cost of cultivating the crops reduces as the farmers use green manure or worm farming to replenish the lost nutrients of the soil.

Kind of… All farmers will re-use their own ‘organic’ waste products if it is the appropriate source of nutrients for their fields. However if the soil is deficient in something specific the most effective, sustainable and cheapest solution is a narrow-spectrum fertiliser which may or may not be organic.

The life of organically grown plants is longer than the plants cultivated by traditional methods.

A plant only grows the way it is genetically programmed to grow. It matters not what nature of external forces acted on it. The lifespan of a given species will always be the same with the same inputs – whatever their source.

Organically grown crop is more drought tolerant.

Totally incorrect. GMO crops are vastly more drought tolerant than unmodified versions of crops. The gene that makes them so came from an existing crop of course. Nature provided it and we copied it.

And the site continues to be inaccurate when it comes to the disadvantages of Organic farming, although I give it a little credit for mentioning that there are some:

The first disadvantage of organic farming is low productivity. With the highly developed chemicals and machinery, the farmer is able to multiply his harvest manifold times. The organic farmers use the cultivation method as opposed to drilling method used by the traditional farmers. The cultivated soil is prone to wind and water erosion. The traditional farmers opine that direct drilling does not cause any disharmony in the soil structure.

Organic farming uses machinery too you know!? Traditional farming also eschews deep ploughing because of the problems it causes with the soil.

The next argument, which goes against organic farming, is that the organically produced food is expensive. The cost is very often 50-100 percent more than the traditional food.

This doesn’t have to be the case. If you take the examples above of the farmer with cattle/hens or rabbits/hens he was able to produce more for less. By being sustainable your costs will always be lower and by manipulating synergies you can increase your yields. But sustainability does not go hand in hand with the presence or lack of an organic certificate. Being sustainable is an entirely independant call. Yes there will (always?) be some farmers willing to dump vast amounts of fertiliser on their land to gain a short term productivity that cannot be rivaled and to make a small margin of profit on a lot of product. But hopefully we can make them see sense.

The other valid argument is that organic food is not always available. There is a reason behind that. The organic farmers grow crops in accordance to the season. Neither do they artificially grow any crop nor do they extend the life of the plant or use chemicals, synthetics or pesticides. Therefore, oranges will be found only in winters and mangoes only in summer. Looking at it from the health benefits point of view, there is no doubt that you will benefit if you eat a particular food item, when it is actually in season.

There’s no reason you can’t create organic food out of season. I don’t recall anything from the Soil Association’s guidelines that preclude the use of UV Lights. I admit it’s fairly unlikely that an organic farmer would use them but either way there’s nothing unsustainable about the poly-tunnels in The Netherlands that produce an enormous proportion of the UK’s vegetables on a tiny amount of land. As a sealed system the ‘run-off’ could be collected and processed to prevent any pollution which would in fact be more sustainable and Green than anything else.

The last statement about benefits of eating foods in season just leaves me bemused. Can anyone think of any reason why anyone would even put this forward as a rational hypothesis?

Anyway, enough of quoting from random websites. I have to assume that, somewhere out there, there exist equally biased sources on information on the other side of the fence. I haven’t found one yet but they must exist. If someone hasn’t come up with it already I announce the law that ‘If it can be perceived of then it exists on the internet’, which is probably analogous to infinite monkeys and typewriters.

I still need to tackle the issue of whether organic produce tastes better.

My first search took me to TheNibble.com, a gourmet food website. In a non-scientific test 11 products were tested and:

Organic was the clear winner in one and tied in five others.

What she fails to mention is that the conventional food won in two of the remaining 5 categories (!!!) with the last three being described as ‘NONE’. I think this tied-but-not-tied result was where both products were just horrible.

So that’s twice as many wins for conventional food as for organic (which I can happily state about this non-scientific test).

You could also check out another episode of Bullshit which I would trust as reasonably good testing. No double-blinding but I don’t think Penn has anything to gain by fudging his results. 71% preferred non-organic products. And 90% (9/10) people were tricked into thinking that one half of a regular banana was in fact half of an organic banana. Actually this video excerpt from the same episode puts across most of what I’m writing about in the kind of manner I would normally like to put it across!

What remains to be answered? Whether or not Organic Farming could be used to feed the entire world…

I could tell you the answer is No. I could point you to the mathematics and you might respond that it’s too abstract. You might argue about crops we could use in areas we don’t currently cultivate. We could go back and forth for ever. So let’s instead ask the one man who probably ought to know, who since the 1930’s has been working on increasing crop yields around the world and feeding the starving, Norman Borlaug, in his 2000 interview with Reason Magazine:

This shouldn’t even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it’s up to them to make that foolish decision. But there’s absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can’t tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it’s better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It’s a free society. But don’t tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That’s when this misinformation becomes destructive.

Since this has been such a long article, let me summarise:

1. Is Organic Farming is better for the environment?

No. Modern scientific techniques that are not necessarily compatible with the Organic Certification result in less pollution.

2. Does Organic Food taste better?
C. Organic produce is no better in taste or nutrition?

While I haven’t found any broad double-blind scientific tests, what evidence does exist is that people assume organic tastes better because they are told that it does. Ultimately a food product consists of exactly what it is genetically programmed to consist of and it doesn’t matter one iota where the elements come from to make it and therefore the nutritional content is the same.

A. Organic Farming’s output is sufficiently lower than non-Organic farming that we could not feed everyone if we all adopted it?

True. I have mentioned some methods which can increase yields for some food products but they would equally apply to non-organic farming and in the arena of crop yields which are the most important source of the world’s nutrition I bow to Mr Borlaug.

B. Organic Farming in general MAY not be the same thing as sustainable farming and non-organic farming practices MAY be sustainable?

True. While the aims of the organic movement to provide sustainability are noble this is not their core aim. Green and Organic are NOT the same as Sustainable. Both Organic and Traditional Farming can be sustainable but organic farmers are not able to use many of the best scientific techniques and products to improve their yields and reduce their pollution.

Imagine that… A mentally unstable person managed to get close enough to afront an 82 year old man in the richest most well guarded city in the world!? Begs so many questions!

Like doesn’t it seem convenient that the person who assaulted Silvio Berlusconi last week also happen to be mentally unstable?

Actually I should not cast dispersion on what may or may not be their mental state without any evidence but it would seem awfully convenient to label people who attack heads of state as mentally ill because then they can be locked up with a minimal trial for EVER.

It also begs the question as to why all popes are so old. Could it possibly be that the Vatican is so embroiled in politics that it doesn’t want any ruler to rule for too long? Could it be that it takes 82 years to become the representative of God on earth? One would imagine that a God would be powerful enough to impart the needed knowledge to you at birth. And that he would make it so frigging obvious that a life as a cleric and a vote by others who aren’t God’s chosen representative on earth wouldn’t be needed.

And let’s not forget that the Pope was a member of the Hitler Youth. What is it that those bracelets Christians are so fond of say? “What would Jesus do?”?

Yes I’m sure Jesus would join the Hitler Youth.

Really.

Sure.

Of course I’m against all religion on principle but I found it quite upsetting that a government can ban one religion’s activities (publishing bibles with the word Allah in them) because it might upset another religious group. And that’s just the first story.

The Swiss story I find mildly amusing because of how the Swiss are perceived word-wide as this credible, safe, stoic place/people when in fact they are ultra-conservatives. It’s kind of hard to know from any experience or knowledge that I’ve ever been exposed to whether they are just really hard-nosed old-fashioned conservatives or whether that’s a veneer under which lies pretty extreme fascism. I’m not accusing them of the latter I just don’t see how one can discern which they might be from the press they get.

And for the Italian story, together with the mentions of the US and Germany and the implications for the entire EU now that the Human Rights Bill is enshrined into their law through the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, well…

The Italians should put up or shut up. Quite simple. Displaying a Crucifix has NOTHING to do with ‘tradition’ that is not tied to religion. They chose to sign up to Lisbon.

The German law that you can only display religious paraphernalia in a classroom if a parent does NOT object is likewise bullshit. The law is that you shall not discriminate, not that you may discriminate until someone objects.

You can be sure that when I have school-attending children I shall be absolutely certain to ensure their rights under the Human Rights Charter of the Lisbon Treaty are adhered to, including campaigning for the removal of the legal requirement for state-funded schools to provide a ‘broadly Christian’ assembly each day.

I am so glad that the UK does not have a Constitution that people can throw in the faces of the law makers. Of course that brings its own issues up in that it makes it easer to change what may be natural human rights but I think this could be an interesting topic for another post so I’ll stop there.

I wish all of you a really great holiday. Call it what you will… Christmas, Yuletide, Noel, Getting Drunk Time, Saturnia, Winter Solstice or any of many other names.