If climate change or swine flu doesn’t get us, the machines definitely will. I came across BigDog via this talk on TED, where Juan Enriquez talks wonders aloud about a version of the Turing test. On the basis of this video, we’re not far from the point where we can’t immediately tell the difference between a machine and an animal.

If genuinely want to have your mind blown, check out the kick at ~35 seconds in. I was pretty much ready for it to turn around and charge at the guy.

It turns out that the monkeys “partially destroyed the machine, used it as a lavatory, and mostly typed the letter ‘s’”.

The study: A single computer was placed in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo to monitor the literary output of six primates.

Who and when: Students at University of Plymouth, 2003, paid for from a £2,000 Arts Council grant

The aim: To test the “infinite monkey theory”, which states that if a monkey hits keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time, it will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

What was learnt: The theory is flawed. After one month – admittedly not an “infinite” amount of time – the monkeys had partially destroyed the machine, used it as a lavatory, and mostly typed the letter “s”.

via BBC NEWS | Magazine | Is there any point to ‘frivolous’ academic research?.

Not So Humble Pie: Biology Cookies: Petri Dish.

L. paradoxum is an absolute little shit of a creature, and it goes about its business in a way that would make even the brashest chestbursters from Aliens blush. Snails accidentally eat L. paradoxum eggs, which hatch and grow into huge worms while still inside the snail.

Fair enough, you might say. Even we get tapeworms.

But the broodsac doesn’t stop there. It burrows its way through the snail and up into its tentacles, where it starts pulsating its green-banded head (see video – it’s amazing). Passing birds look down, think they’ve spotted a tasty caterpillar, and the snail is toast. Once eaten by the bird along with the snail, the parasite then deposits its eggs in the bird’s droppings, and the whole sorry affair starts all over again.

If that wasn’t devious enough, the parasite also buggers up the snail’s light perception – snails normally hide out in the dark, safely out of the way of predators. L. paradoxum makes sure they can’t do that. Double trouble.

Sleep well.

Postboxes are on strike too

Yeah, so, the postal strike is a bit of a pain in the bum.

Intuitively, the reason for it happening might seem obvious. Sending bits of dead trees to each other is a bit antiquated next to the wonders of email and social networking, which is quicker, cheaper, and even better for the environment. Inevitably, dead-tree-couriers get less business, fewer profits, and are therefore forced to cut costs and modernise – leading to howls of complaint from the layabout workers who’ve got used to their cushy jobs…

But before you walk that path of derision, have a read of this blogpost, written by a postman. Not only does he a shed a bit of light on working practices – for instance, the weight limit for a bag is meant to be 16kg, presumably for health and safety reasons, but postmen routinely carry more than that because they would never get through their work otherwise – it also debunks some of the popular perceptions which surround Royal Mail.

A bit of preamble, inviting your increasing ire at the ‘lazy posties’;

According to Royal Mail figures published in May, mail volume declined by 5.5 per cent over the preceding 12 months, and is predicted to fall by a further 10 per cent this year ‘due to the recession and the continuing growth of electronic communications such as email’. Every postman knows these figures are false. If the figures are down, how come I can’t get my round done in under four hours any more?

One thing you probably don’t know, for instance, is that the Royal Mail is already part-privatised. It goes under the euphemism of ‘deregulation’ [...] It means that any private mail company – or, indeed, any of the state-owned, subsidised European mail companies – is able to bid for Royal Mail contracts.

But the best bit is here. Postmen say their workload is up. Royal Mail say their figures are down. It’s difficult to see how they can both be right. Something must be wrong…

“Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes [...] In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains [...] That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150.”

“Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. Our office was one of them. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters, actually carry 267 items of mail.”

Interesting, I hope you’ll agree.

I have to admit, this does play into my standard left-leaning corporations-are-evil worldview slightly too easily. But if the numbers are correct, it’s difficult not to agree with the Communication Workers Union when they say that Royal Mail “are not engaged in modernisation … [they're] managing the decline of Royal Mail”.

Without being too patronising, I doubt that postmen are stupid. I think they understand the need for modernisation in a changing world, but it seems to me they’re being treated like idiots by Royal Mail. I’d strike if I were them.

Next time you go for an operation, make sure you ask for the one where they don’t stitch a massive suicide bomb onto your liver or turn your willy into a remote-controlled surface-to-air missile.

UK Govt Health Minister refuses to comment

The “Evil and Orwellian” NHS has come in for a bit of a battering in the last few days from rightwing nutjobs in the USA who are opposed to Obama’s health reforms. They’ve been citing our healthcare system’s shortcomings, as well as inventing failures. That includes – bizarrely and hilariously – one (now corrected) editorial which claimed that ALS-sufferer Professor Stephen Hawking would have been left to die if he lived in the UK. In case there is any confusion, Prof. Hawking is both British, and alive. Presumably this is despite the best efforts of the NHS, rather than because of them.

In response, Brits on twitter (shush) have been tweeting about why they love the NHS – so much that it’s now the top trending topic on the site. More people are talking about it than any other single topic anywhere in the world.

See the updates here: http://twitter.com/search?q=%23welovetheNHS

Who would have thought there’d be so much patriotic fervour about our National Socialist Death Panels. Gives you that nice warm feeling inside.

Science can be innaccessible. It can be seen as a series of facts and theories about the world, results of experiments, and an attempt to distil the beauty of nature down into a series of numbers.

But in Life Ascending, Nick Lane reminds us that it doesn’t need to be that way. Life Ascending is a really quite brilliant book about evolution, which has two major things going for it. Firstly, evolution is in itself a story. Secondly, the author knows that science is only accidentally about numbers and facts and figures – it’s really the way that humans try to understand the world.

Lane makes his book a zippy sightseeing tour through ten of the greatest inventions in evolution, and as much a narrative of how the ideas themselves evolved (that includes the story of some of the people behind them) as anything else. It has to be said that there’s a good smattering of biochemistry in there, but if you have vague memories of ATP from GCSE science, it’s worth persisting with it – the payback’s good.

His first chapter, on how life first coalesced out of the primordial muck nearly 4 billion years ago, gives you a bit of existential vertigo. The step-by-step delve into how minerals and chemicals (when you add a bit of heat) might have become the very earliest living cells, almost by chance but almost inevitably, puts the arguments over the rest of evolution into perspective.

If he can persuade you that the very first jump – that big leap from chemistry to biology – was no epic shift at all, but a series of completely believable small steps somewhere in the limbo between life and death, then the other big questions in evolution don’t seem quite so intimidating.

But, of course, Lane gives you a brief intro to them. His chapter on photosynthesis explains how the planet’s then-dominant lifeform did its inadvertant best to kill off the rest of them with a poisonous gas – oxygen. He talks you through how animals first chanced upon the equipment they needed to move and see – already present in their own array of proteins, because their algae-like ancestors used them to photosynthesise and put their cells together.

There’s an intriguing chapter about the latest thinking on how the first complex cells – like the ones that we, plants and fungi have, containing a nucleus and various organelles – might actually have been a mashup of cells from the two other great lineages of life which predate us, the bacteria and the archaea. We don’t seem to have conclusively evolved from one or the other, and there’s evidence to show that we’re a weird hybrid of the two.

Lane takes in DNA, sex, and warm blood along the way, even having a go at explaining consciousness before ending – appropriately enough – with the evolution of death, and how we might work around it.

But all the way through – and emphasised in the epilogue – the author makes clear that the science he has covered is humanity’s best guess so far. Borrowing from Jacob Bronowski’s haunting treatise from Auschwitz, he reminds us that science is a very human form of knowledge; “We are always at the brink of the known… Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible”.

And thanks to one of humanity’s great inventions, the internet, here’s that short Bronowski clip. In a dirty pond he stands, literally, in the ashes of his ancestors, before pulling up a handful of mud. Science doesn’t destroy beauty and humanity – it’s misplaced certainty which does that.

You can infer stuff about personality, yeah

According to the BBC article ‘Glass hold’ reveals personality, “The way you hold your glass can reveal much more than you might realise”, including how you interact with fellow members of the drinking classes. I know, I know – sounds like bollocks, right?

That’s what I thought! But then I kept reading, and found out that not only was the article the product of a study by “consultant psychologist Dr Glenn Wilson”, but that he examined the ‘body language’ of 500 drinkers and found that they fell into eight very scientific-sounding categories, such as “The Gossip”, “The Ice-Queen”, “The Brow-Beater” and “The Jack-the-Lad”.

With findings so plausible, I can only assume that this study is available for me to download and take a look at, if only to marvel at its brilliance. Especially given that the news report is peppered with quotes from Dr Wilson such as, “When you’re in a crowded bar, often all you have to go on is body language”.

But oddly, I can’t find a version of the story anywhere on the web which includes references to the study as being published in a psychological journal. Except… oh. It does say that Wilson “carried out the work for the Walkabout bar chain” right at the very top of the BBC page, and ‘Walkabout bars’ is also watermarked in the prominent graphic that goes with the story.

Wilson’s staff page at KCL just says “Sorry, this staff profile either does not exist or access to it has been restricted”.

Dr Wilson. Imagine him 'studying' you in a bar.

His intriguingly complimentary Wikipedia page claims he “is a psychologist best known for his work on attitude and personality measurement, sexual attraction, deviation and dysfunction, partner compatibility”, etc.

It also has what seems to be a fairly comprehensive list of his work, including “developing the compatibility quotient (CQ) as a predictor of relationship success”, resulting in “his characterization as ‘the father of modern compatibility testing’”, as well as papers including “Vital statistics, perceived sexual attractiveness and response to risque humor”, “Measurement of sex fantasy”, and “Finger length as an index of assertiveness in women”.

Not having read any of these papers, I’m clearly not in a position to comment on Wilson’s qualifications as a psychologist – but I am left surprised that someone of such obvious academic success wouldn’t publish such a groundbreaking study in a reputable journal.

I’d be pretty concered if what has instead happened is that Wilson had sent his ‘findings’ only to the people who paid him to do the ‘study’ – Walkabout Bars – so that the results couldn’t be peer-reviewed by other psychologists (or anyone, for that matter). And for Walkabout to then press release it, for outlets such as the BBC and The Telegraph to uncritically publish it as ‘news’, thereby giving Walkabout untold ££££s worth of free advertising.

But hey, I’m just speculating. Catch me in the bar – the way I hold my glass probably gives me away as a cynic.

Daniel Kish

Daniel Kish was born blind, but he can slalom on a bike, play tag, and climb trees – a range of things I would like an idiot trying to do even as a sighted person, basically.

He sees the world through echo-location, having taught himself how to use his own personal sonar from an early age. The full article is here at New Scientist.

He can use ‘passive’ sonar, which relies on listening to the echoes of sounds like footsteps, and ‘active’ sonar, where he produces a sound (such as clicking his tongue) deliberately to generate more precise echoes. He calls the latter ‘flash sonar’, “because for [him], each click is similar to the brief glimpse of the surrounds sighted people get when a camera flash goes off in the dark”.

What I find most interesting is that he’s not the only one to have taught it to himself. Apparently lots of blind kids do it. He thinks that “the readiness with which people learn sonar suggests to me it may be an inbuilt skill”. Kish hypothesis that

“Humans probably used to rely on echolocation far more in the days before artificial lighting, when we had to find our way round in the dark.”

In pitch black, Kish can tell the front of a car from the back, an SUV from a pick-up truck, a bush from a fence, and even identify a credit card. Which is pretty damn cool.

When I first found out about platypus electrolocation, whereby the monotremes use their bill to electrically sense prey in the water, it made me wonder whether it’s possible to even imagine what it’s like to have an extra sense. So for instance, if you had no sense of smell, would you be able to imagine what scents are like?

After reading about Kish, that seems like an even more interesting question. There are people, almost indistinguishable from me in the grand scheme of things, who perceive the world in a way I can’t imagine – and yet go about their lives just as I do.

Note: this map may become out of date as everyone dies and there is nobody left to update it, so bear that in mind if you want to use it to plan holidays.

It reassures me that you can always find an adventure.

Link:
infinite thØught: socialism and/or barbican.

"These people are all writing essays on the liberatory potential of concrete."

Link: Simply Understand: Translation.

Maybe if we just forget that we lost...

Impending catastrophic doom (such as huge earthquakes, nuclear holocausts, Will Young gigs, Manchester United losing, etc) could be avoided by forgetting that you found out about them in the first place. That’s according to physicist Saibal Mitra, as reported by Marcus Chown in the New Scientist this week.

Mitra’s theory relies on the Multi-World Interpretation of quantum mechanics – parallel universes, basically. If you’ve not come across it before, the idea is that each time there is a chance of an event (or many events) occurring or not occurring, each option actually does take place in a parallel universe.

A mundane example of this is when you flip a coin and get tails, there is a parallel universe where everything is exactly the same as this one, except you got heads instead. More interestingly, it also implies that there is a universe in which I am a wanton sex god. (what do you mean, that’s this one? Oh, you…)

Mitra imagines that at some point in the future, there might be a very clever computer that backs up its memory each night. Chown explains,

“Imagine that on learning of an impending disaster – perhaps a catastrophic asteroid strike on its planet – the machine resets its memory. Now, an observer sat next to the machine can verify that the “same machine” will still face disaster after the reset. But from the perspective of the machine’s reset memory, the state of the universe in the many-worlds scenario becomes “undetermined”. After all, for all the machine knows, the reset probably occurred for a mundane reason, such as a crash of its operating system.”

Here’s where it gets weird.

Once the computer’s forced itself to forget about what’s going to happen, the universe becomes ‘undetermined’ again. Think of Schrodinger’s cat, which is both dead and alive until you open the box. The computer may well then wake up in a universe where the cataclysm isn’t going to happen at all.

This, to borrow from Tim Minchin, blows my hippy noodle. It just doesn’t fit with my understanding of the world.

That’s even though, as a curious person with a science background, I have a very basic understanding of quantum theory. And it’s despite the fact that I can read the New Scientist article, understand it (though I only made it about a sentence and a half into the actual paper), and appreciate the logic of the argument.

Mitra ‘explains’ further;

“If we watch a recording of a soccer [sic] match played a long time ago, the outcome is undetermined, not just if we are watching the match for the first time and never read about the outcome, but perhaps also if we’ve seen the match before and forgot”

What, seriously? Surely even if I forgot the result, someone somewhere will have watched the (let’s say) home win – does that mean if I watch it again, it can still turn out to be an away win? What happens to the memories of all those people who watched it the first time? I’m lost.

But still.

Let’s say that Mitra is right, and his sums do, in fact, all work out. Which isn’t unlikely – he does seem to be an expert in this, and I’m not. How do I then square my disbelief with potential scientific fact?

I don't know where this came from. Is it yours?

In short – is this how Creationists feel? What if you know it’s true that God created all the animals as they are, and that Richard Dawkins, fossils, and facts were put there by Him to test us, and that all this ‘scientific’ ‘evidence’ is just heresy?

Can that ‘knowledge’ be compared to my ‘knowledge’ that cause leads to effect? And my knowledge that if I lose my pen, it’s likely to be wherever I left it, rather than in an ‘undetermined’ place until I come across it again? And me thinking all this talk of parallel universes is, almost by definition, unprovable nonsense?

I suggest my disbelief in Mitra’s theory isn’t based on stupidity, or a total lack of understanding. But Creationists may say that their disbelief in evolution is not at odds with being rational, and that it doesn’t matter that they don’t have a degree in biology – they don’t need one, to know that their great-great-[...]-great-great-grandma wasn’t a monkey.

I might say the difference is that my beliefs are based on rational scientific objectivity. If it’s something you can’t set up an experiment to disprove (e.g. God put the dino-bones there, or there’s a big pink giraffe in the middle of the sun), then it can’t be treated as a legitimate claim, and belongs in the world of complete speculation or spirituality, not serious discourse.

But then my belief in a non-quantum-fucked world falls into the same category. In order to prove Mitra’s conjecture in practice – by actually avoiding the apocalypse, for instance – I’d need to forget I was doing it in the first place, right? Which takes me back to square one, and I’ve proved nothing at all to myself.

My brain hurts.

Someone has to RickRoll the committee. Please.

Yes, sorry. This isn’t about Select Committees embracing Twitter at all.

But one committee – the House of Lords’ Information Committee – has announced that, for its “People and Parliament” inquiry, it will be accepting submissions from the public via the medium of YouTube.

I am bit a sceptical. I mentioned Twitter to point out that just because there’s an interesting and useful way of communicating available, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an interesting and useful way of communicating across the board. Twitter has its uses, but I doubt parliamentary evidence is one of them. I’d suggest the same is true of YouTube.

Traditionally, all evidence to Select Committees (groups of about a dozen MPs or peers drawn together to scrutinise a particular area of public life/policy – all the Commons once are here) has to be either submitted in writing, or if you’re very special and get hand-picked, by coming and speaking to the Committee personally.

I actually feel that this is quite a good system. The parliamentarians who sit on committees, and the people who staff them, are quite busy people. And not only can you pack way more information into 30 minutes of reading time than you can in 30 minutes of YouTube-watching, the written word is far more flexible than video – you can pause, fast-forward, rewind, and tag, all without so much as thinking about it.

So I don’t really feel that the submission of YouTube evidence will catch on – and if it does, it’ll actually reduce the efficiency of Select Committees and how much ground they can cover.

Still – my scepticism has limits. The actual enquiry that this is being trialled with is called “People and Parliament”, which will be looking at how… er… people can better engage with, well… parliament. Sounds like a pretty good forum to try out new ideas, and if it does mean that an entirely new constituency gets to have its say, then I’ll be the first to applaud. In fact, have a go yourself if you’ve got an opinion.

And if anyone does have ideas on how to integrate Twitter into Select Committee evidence sessions, I’m all ears…

Lord Renton explains what the inquiry is about:

I really don't care that much

But if you’re a normal person, you’ll hopefully start by agreeing that the whole thing seems like a bit of a storm in a teacup. I’ve struggled to identify anything in the story that can’t be boiled down to “politicians think about discrediting other politicians”. It deserves to be reported, but the days upon days of media coverage it continues to get cannot be a reflection of how interesting it is.

“Are there really no important court cases happening in Britain? Controversial planning applications being pushed through? Interesting scientific research being published?”

The reason we’re being barraged with an endless stream of invective about McBride and Brown, background analysis of Draper, Dale and Fawkes, and rumination about ‘new media’ is because for ‘old media’, there’s nothing else really happening.

Newspapers need to be printed, rolling news channels need to be filled – and if journalists can’t find anything to fill them with, they’ll fill them with vacuous crap. So what if, normally, a stupid amount of the news we consume is triggered directly from the goings on in Westminster? The past couple of weeks have been Easter recess, and Parliament’s been empty. MPs have been on holiday, or in their constituency. Even the Prime Minister has been holed up in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

Recess means there are no Bills being discussed in Parliament, which means no public debate of new laws. It means Prime Minister’s Questions doesn’t happen, so there’s none of that gladiatorial theatre which makes such good TV. It’s a bad time to announce policy announcements, because Government’s not really around to take advantage of any good press, and if there’s a risk of bad press, it’ll be everywhere, because… there’s nothing else being reported. Obviously, this isn’t a new thought. The Silly Season is well-described.

“Would it be unfair to say that a slow news day isn’t caused by a lack of news – it’s caused by a lack of journalism?”

Still. The news tends to be the background music to our lives. The tunes change, but the volume and tempo tend to stay the same, so it’s easy to not notice when the you’ve started listening to the Backstreet Boys by accident. But let’s have a think at what we’ve had recently. Apart from the continuing fallout over the G20 protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson, I can think of hardly any attention-grabbing stories.

To illustrate my point, I took a screenshot of the front page of BBC News from the evening of the 18th of April. The stories include coverage of Richard Phillips, the captain who was captured by Somali pirates, returning home. Interesting, but was it really the UK’s second biggest story? (it also got a two-page spread in the Times on Saturday)

BBC News frontpage, 18th April 2009 (evening)

Then you have “Cuba to dominate Americas summit”. Speculation over an event that doesn’t directly affect the UK, and hadn’t even happened by that point. Apparently that’s this third most important story of the day.

We also had huge coverage of the Hillsborough disaster’s 20th anniversary. It dominated news for a day. Clearly the avoidable deaths of 96 people is a tragic event which we mustn’t forget – but given that it happened two decades ago, surely it’s worrying if it’s filling the headlines, rather than having in-depth features instead? And I don’t recall seeing any comment about the rather obvious parallels of police stupidity back then at Hillsborough, and just now at protests.

Bad week for Pirates?

I also now know far more than I want to about a possible candidate for World’s Tallest Man and the job specification for a new Chief Scientific Adviser at MI5. For a day, electric cars seemed to be the sum total of the nation’s environmental policy. Coverage of The Pirate Bay court case was massively over-egged too – again, was it really the most important thing happening in the UK? – but I’m not complaining so much on that front. More publicity for the Bay means more file-sharing peers for me.

The thing is, I know there’s other stuff out there. Can some news outlet tell me what Tony Blair is upto as Middle-East peace envoy, please? Or why we’ve heard nothing from Darfur for months? Or what the fallout over last summer’s war between Russia and Georgia was? Or why it feels like once 9/11 happened, we’re doomed never to hear anything from Chechnya ever again? Or we’re being told that the biggest democratic elections on the planet are about to take place in India, but initially with virtually no context of the political situation in that country being given? (thinking of the BBC News Channel in particular, on that last one)

What's Blair even upto?

Do we really think that politicians are the only ones that have dodgy expenses? Isn’t there room in the continuing credit-crunch narrative to have a look at the hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds lost in corporate corruption? Are there really no important court cases happening in Britain? Controversial planning applications being pushed through? Interesting scientific research being published?

Having got halfway through Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, I recognize that the failings might be largely systemic, rather than human. Which both is, and isn’t, an excuse. But I’ll still be depressed if the return of Parliament tomorrow is the only thing required for a business-as-usual to resume in the news media. Would it be unfair to say that a slow news day isn’t caused by a lack of news – it’s caused by a lack of journalism?

And one last question – if we are going to spend all this time and attention looking at Smeargate, why has nobody yet been able to answer the only truly compelling questions in the whole affair: how and why did the McBride emails get leaked in the first place?

I can understand how people can get tired of this town, but not how they could be bored by it. The single best thing about London is the way it’s big enough for there always to be something intriguing going on. And of those, the best things are those taking place just under the city’s skin. And even better, they’re often completely (or very nearly) free.

Here are a dozen of them.

Slow Club bandstand busking

1. Go to a lecture at the RSA – you get to see and hear people who’re often genuinely setting the political, social and cultural agenda right now. Speakers have included Kofi Annan, Robert Peston, Will Hutton, George Osborne (and probably a whole lot of other middle-aged white men too) talking about everything from digital radio, neurology, international development, education, and cartoons.

2. Check out a Bandstand Busk – There are over 50 bandstands in parks scattered around London, pretty empty most of the time. It clearly seemed a shame not to fill them with loveable indie kids wearing tight jeans and funky hair. Unlike real busking, you don’t actually have to contribute any money, and it takes place on the first Sunday of every month, rather than whenever happens to be most inconvenient to you. The adorable Slow Club were there last time.

a chair at the last sandpit. teunous, i know.

3. On a similar note – for those of you who like your music experience to be in the same, reassuring place, and protected from the elements, try the frequent in-store gigs at Rough Trade East, down Brick Lane. If you don’t like music they’ve even got a little (internet) cafe and comfy sofas, as well as literally tens of slightly-too-cool folk wandering around in retro clothes pretending to like odd music, for your people-watching-amusement.

4. Go play in the Sandpit – Run by Hide and Seek, it’s a monthly pervasive gaming festival that hops from venue to venue. The idea is you use the city itself as a space to play, whether it’s chasing shadows down the backstreets of Soho or having an impromptu Mexican-wrestling thumb war just off the Mall.

5. Achieve Critical Mass – This one’s for the wheeled folk only, I’m afraid. Critical Mass is a worldwide phenomenon; a way for cyclists, rollerbladers, skaters and scooter… er… scooterers to claim back the roads without getting turned into roadkill. The London chapter meets at 7pm on the last Friday of every month on the South Bank, below Waterloo Bridge.

critical mass at buck house

6. Be part of a BBC Audience – admittedly, there are some BBC shows that aren’t recorded in London, but do you really want to go see “Sally on Saturday” in the flesh? It’s really just all about getting tickets for the Radio 4 Friday night comedy shows, the Now Show and the News Quiz. You’ll never listen to them in the same way again.

7. Try a bit of laughter in odd places – Ok, this one’s not strictly free, but it’s definitely kooky enough to make it onto the list. It all started when someone did a stand-up gig in a laundrette (why not, eh?) The locations are often secret until shortly before the gig itself, just for that added air of mystery…

labcoat dj at science museum lates

8. Go on a tour of Parliament – everyone knows it’s there, but it’s less widely known that you can get a guided tour of the place, totally free. Yes, you get to hang around the House of Commons chamber itself and stand at the dispatch box like a prat. No, you don’t get to use the Queen’s toilet. Just email your MP.

9. Go to Science Museum Lates - although it’s billed as “adults only”, the hydraulics demonstrations are kept to a minimum. But there is booze, silent discos, comic demonstrations of primary school science which you’ve forgotten, and the chance to see your friends turn into 5 year olds in the launchpad. Last Wednesday of every month.

10. Find the River Fleet – yeah, so, this one is quite ropey now that I think of it. But there is a romantic in me which loves the idea of a long-lost river which now only flows underground, and you can just about hear going by if you go to the grating in front of a pub in Farringdon…

Dana Centre

11. Be Skeptical in a Pub – third Monday of every month, downstairs in the Penderel’s Oak in Holborn, this is way more interesting than a bunch of old men nursing pints and slagging everything off (which may be what it sounds like). Turn up for talks and Q+As on creationism, homeopathy, churnalism, alien abductions – and beer.

12. Get your science on at the Dana Centre – this is basically for those of you who find the idea of the RSA way too arty farty. Interactive science events on a huge range of stuff – face transplants, music, robots, parallel worlds, social networks, etc etc. Dealing with the on-site overpriced bar and restaurant is optional.

If you know of anything similar that I’d enjoy, leave a comment or email me.

Today’s story that Allied High Command insisted that there should be no black people in De Gaulle’s army which liberated Paris from the Nazis in 1944 rightly attracted a lot of attention – hopefully because it challenges some of our preconceptions.

Ja, mein Fuhrer!

Most British people have grown up with a view of the Second World War being a titanic battle between Good and Evil. Kind of like Star Wars. Both Evil Empires even had Stormtroopers, how about that?

But seriously. We have a cultural knowledge that Britain during the War exemplified everything that was Good. Bravery in the face of adversity, camaraderie, the breaking down of class-barriers, female emancipation, democracy, and the bit in the film where Steve McQueen jumps the barrier on his motorbike. Plus, the political legacy of the War included the Welfare State and the NHS. Winnar.

“Nazis kept black people out of Paris during the occupation. Here’s a plea; let’s not be surprised that it was the British and Americans who kept them out during the liberation.”

For the other side, you have illegal invasions, gas chambers, social uniformity, dictatorship, secret police, and the Holocaust. It’s so bad that we daren’t even use the word ‘Germans’ – it’s always the Nazis, when we talk about the war, as if we might infect today’s enviro-liberal Germany with fascism just by the language we use.

It’s an understandable fear. By referring to the Nazis, we draw a big line in the sand between us and them. They might as well be aliens – nothing they did could say anything about us as people. They weren’t like us at all – that’s why they could murder over 10 million Jews, disabled people, Soviets, gay people, gypsies, and Poles (which, of course, they did because those groups weren’t like them).

So it’s good that the Allies won, spreading freedom, liberty, democracy, and… er… communism. Dropping over half a million bombs on Dresden in the space of three days, and slightly fewer but considerably bigger bombs on Japan, were means which were justified by the end.

Wallis Simpson with a fascist. And Hitler.

I’m not about to deny the Allies had the moral high ground – I mean, really, it can’t have been difficult when you’re fighting the Nazis. It’s just that I think we could do with a little more questioning of precisely high that ground was. It was the English, after all, who invented concentration camps. And what would have happened if Edward VIII hadn’t fallen in love with that American floozey, hadn’t had to abdicate, and it’d become obvious that we had a German fascist for a King?

The Holocaust is supposed to be special because of the utter inhumanity of treating people like insects, to be wiped out. But how is that any more inhumane than 12 million African people being treated like dumb animals, shipped across the Atlantic as part of the slave trade, just in the pursuit of profit? We kind of got away with that one.

In free, liberal, victorious Allied America, the descendants of those black slaves were still officially second-class citizens – sub-humans – for decades after the War ended. Unofficially, just between you and me, some still are. Nearly two thirds of unqualified black men in today’s Obamafied USA end up incarcerated.

In completely geopolitical sense, you could see where Hitler was coming from. Britain and France had raped and pillaged their way to worldwide Empires, so there wasn’t any overriding reason why the Third Reich shouldn’t be entitled to do the same. The downside for Hitler is that when Britain and France hit back, it was with the full force of the overseas colonies behind them.

It wasn’t really just Dad’s Army, Churchill, Bomber Harris and the Desert Rats who triumphed. A generation of men of any and every colour laid down their lives in a war not of their making so that we could have what has turned into a rather silly football rivalry where the Germans still win on penalties. And for De Gaulle’s country, it wasn’t just a batallion of surly French waiters that finally irritated the Nazis into leaving without paying the bill. Having been conscripted to make up two thirds of the Free French Forces, 17,000 black colonial troops ended up dying for that country in the war. And then their compatriots weren’t allowed into the victory parade, because they weren’t white.

Smile if you're white!

We’re not surprised that the Nazis kept black people out of Paris during the occupation. Here’s a plea; let’s not be surprised that it was the British and Americans who kept them out during the liberation. In fact, let’s have it mean that we look at the Allies with a bit more of a critical eye.

Thinking the Holocaust could never happen again is dangerous. It means that we’ll be unprepared when it does. Because here’s the scary bit – the Nazis were people, just like us. Imagining we have an aura of moral superiority for evermore just because we beat them doesn’t help. It means we’ll filter out everything which contradicts the idea of the West as a well-meaning purveyor of liberty, egality, and fraternity.