Cristiano and Wayne. They are the leading candidates for the presidents of the universe.

I posted before I watched the whole show - I should have waited. It just got better and better.

Well done both Johns but, in particular, well done John Stewart for making your point about the nature of patriotism. I’ve waited 4 years for that.

Outstanding show.

Well done John McCain! Outstanding performance! He should have John Stewart as his running mate though.

According to various news reports,

Sweltering heat made the London Marathon an even bigger test of endurance today as a record number of runners took part.

Runners reported “nightmare” conditions as ambulance staff said they dealt with a higher than usual number of patients.

The BBC reports that the unseasonably hot weather in England caused one death and thousands of heat-related maladies during the London Marathon.

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, who was running his eighth marathon, said the conditions were “extraordinary”.

He said: “It was like running in a desert today. I stopped to help one guy. It was quite bad. They were dropping like flies.”

There were a record number of casualties as

Temperatures hit just below 21C at midday, almost equalling the 1996 record, and rose slightly higher later in the day.

Are those people crazy? 21C ! That’s very nearly 70F !!

My wife tells me that she won’t ever let me play football in hot weather again but, fortunately, it never gets that hot in Morgan Hill.

A common argument, among those who wish to debunk evolution, is the argument from irreducibly complexity. The idea is that, if there is a complex organ - like an eye - and that there is no value in having a slightly less complex version of the same organ, then it cannot have evolved and must have been designed. The eye is the most often quoted organ, partly because Darwin himself, in The Origin of the Species, said

…to suppose that the eye… could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree…

But most critics, when they quote that line, forget to read the rest of the chapter where he describes in detail how the eye could have evolved. If anyone is still wondering what use an extremely primitive eye might have, consider this recent experiment from the science journal Nature via the excellent Neurophilosophy blog.

In today’s issue of Nature, former collaborators of Boyden report on a similar method, based on another photosensitive protein, called NpHR. The authors cloned the NpHR gene from N. pharaonis. The gene product is a protein called NpHR, which works in the same way as ChR2 - it is also a light-activated chloride channel. Photoactivation opens the channel, allowing an influx of chloride ions into the cell. Like ChR2, it can be used to knock out single action potentials in cultured cells. But the authors of the new study also describe experiments in which they expressed the protein in living nematode worms (Caenhorhabditis elegans), and used it to control the worms’ behaviour.

This film clip shows the use of the system to control swimming behaviour in a nematode worm. When a pulse of light is directed at the worm, it activates the NhPR protein; this hyperpolarizes the motor neurons and inhibits their activity. The swimming movements cease about 600 milliseconds of illumination. Switching off the light pulse inactivates the protein, so that the motor neurons resume sending action potentials to the muscles. Illumination with yellow light is indicated by a yellow dot

Georgina is telling me that I can’t have tea to ease my post-op suffering because hot tea will cause my bleeding to bleed.

But this website (the online arm of The Lancet and endorsed by the AMA and the BMA) suggests that:

“A nice cup of tea and a sit down proven to cure all human ills”

So which is it? If only I knew a haematologist…

…I will just have to do the experiment for myself.

I used Microsoft Movie Maker for my second video. I fully expected it to suck. What I hadn’t anticipated was how badly it would suck.

It’s hard to imagine a video editor program that would suck more than Microsoft Movie Maker and, unless there is a free(ish) video editor that is much better (and doesn’t require me to buy a mac), the wait for my third video will be rather long.

So don’t expect to see Dylan’s guitar recital on YouTube any time soon.

In 1997 I posted my first video to the web.

Here’s the second:

Jazz’s Piano Recital

The best news to come from Manchester all week.

Cristiano Ronaldo signed a new five-year deal that should keep him at Old Trafford until 2012.

The second most striking thing about Einstein’s religious beliefs is that he really, really did not want to be pinned down.

 ”There are people who say there is no God,” he told a friend. “But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.”

The words that he uses to describe his beliefs are almost exactly the same words that I would choose for my own (he probably copied me)

 ”Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

and yet he was adamant that he is not an atheist.

“The fanatical atheists,” he wrote in a letter, “are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who–in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’– cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

He must have known Bertrand Russell. And he must have known that Russell heard the music of the spheres. The only rational explanation is that he had his own private definition of atheist.

 ”What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos,”

The most striking thing is that everyone wants to claim that Einstein’s beliefs are just like their own.