While cycling through London this afternoon, I happened upon a small group of Syrians demonstrating by the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The Syrians were only a few dozen in number, but their unamplified presence was considerably greater than that of any of the other competing attractions in the square, including nearby break dancers with a huge boombox.

But what struck me most about the freedom-seeking Syrians was their sense of rhythm and cadence. A cantor led the chant, and funky stuff it was too. As for the political views expressed, there was certainly no love expressed for Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. When it comes to the west, one little boy’s placard read “David Cameron – condemnation is not enough”.

Long live Syria, proud and free!

You have been warned…

This petition may cause some embarrassment. Let it be so.

A trickle becomes a flood becomes galactic ubiquity. That is the message from astronomers who from an analysis of data from optical telescopes infer that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception. The implication is that the Milky Way is likely home to billions of Earth-like planets. And the ramification of that is something I shall leave up your fertile imaginations.

The discovery*, flight of rational fantasy, call it what you will, was to those of us who follow research into exoplanets always coming, but that has in no way lessened the impact of the announcement. It is staggering in its immensity, and the cultural narrative underlying the scientific report has within hours taken on a life of its own. Humanity alone in the universe? Though we have yet to find direct evidence of extraterrestrial life, it seems inevitable that it exists. In abundance.

So where does this leave us as a thinking, enquiring, telescope peering species? Exalted, I would say, rather than relegated to the status of mere specks in the cosmos. This soulless, mechanistic universe, once dissected mathematically by Isaac Newton and later bemoaned literarily by William Blake, has once again become a poetic marvel. It is a truly awesome universe that can give birth to intelligent life and consciousness, as is the thought of lifeforms such as we semi-evolved bipeds reaching out to find and possibly communicate with others across the galaxy.

* Cassan et al., “One or more bound planets per Milky Way star from microlensing observations”, Nature 481, 167 (2012)

There is a hoary old joke that nuclear fusion power is a decade away, and will always remain so. It would be a fool who bets his life savings on when the first viable fusion reactors come on-stream, but a recent advance in plasma physics and fusion research indicates that it may be sooner rather than later. We should certainly hope so, for fusion power is our best hope of providing on a sustainable and environmentally friendly basis the electrical energy required for a crowded planet in which everyone can realise their dream of a life of opulence and blameless bourgeois domesticity.

The latest sign that power from nuclear fusion could soon be on the cards is provided by work carried out at the Joint European Torus, the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment, sited on an old Royal Navy airfield in Culham, Oxfordshire. In a paper published today in the journal Nature Communications, a team of Swiss and UK physicists led by Lausanne-based Jonathan Graves shows how it is possible to control certain plasma instabilities in tokamak reactors, and thereby overcome some of the more serious problems that have long dogged fusion power.

Plasmas are extremely hot, ionised gases, and in fusion reactors they are confined within doughnut-shaped vessels by powerful and power-hungry magnetic fields. The problem is that confining such highly energetic fluids so that they do not come into contact with reactor vessel walls is an huge technical challenge. Plasmas are inherently unstable beasts, whether they be of the engineered type, created, confined and manipulated in the laboratory, or naturally at large in Earth’s space environment and wider cosmos.

With fusion plasmas, a variety of physical forces and instabilities oppose efforts at confinement within reactor systems. Magnetic instabilities can sharply reduce reactor efficiency, to the degree that the input power required to sustain the reaction is greater than the output from the reactor.

What Graves and his colleagues have done is exploit a recently discovered theoretical effect in magnetohydrodynamics – the physics of electrically conducting fluids – and with a technique known as phase space engineering show how to avoid the kind of disruptive tearing instabilities common to fusion plasmas. This breakthrough could lead to major performance advances in the next generation of research reactors, such as the international ITER project currently under construction at Cadarache in the south of France.

Further reading

Graves et al., “Control of magnetohydrodynamic stability by phase space engineering of energetic ions in tokamak plasmas”, Nature Communications (2012)

Just say no! is the latest advice from MPs, at least for two days a week. I mean abstaining from alcohol consumption, not churnalism related to official health guidelines.

For the past few days I’ve been mulling over a report from the UK’s parliamentary Science and Technology Committee which raises concerns over the government’s advice on sensible drinking. Entirely legitimate concerns held by MPs from across the political spectrum who, to their credit, favour evidence-based policymaking over cheap political sensationalism. However, there is a discontinuity between the committee’s work and how this is reported in the news media.

Today the embargo was lifted on the report titled “Alcohol guidelines”, and it is interesting to see how my colleagues in the media have approached the story. Some appear to have got no further than the first quote in the committee’s press release, in which chairman Andrew Miller refers to the public’s relative lack of conceptual understanding of alcohol units, and recommends that people should take at least two drink-free days a week. That is sensible advice which could easily be extended to other habitually consumed substances.

Such common sense advice is all very well, but the media have largely failed to pick up on the two central theses of the report: (1) that there is no expert consensus on the health benefits and risks associated with alcohol, which makes a mockery of the very idea of universal guidelines; and (2) there is a conflict of interest between sensible drinking messages issued by government and the business model of the drinks industry.

The full report is less than 50 pages, and is worth reading in full.

White Night by Richard Lainhart is a work that I first heard many moons ago, and it was then immediately burned into my synapses. Lainhart’s recent passing is sad news, and, as it happens, I read of it while fiddling with Csound on my computer. A Moog or Buchla modular synthesiser such as used by Lainhart, complete with a maze of patch cables and bank-busting price tag, would be nice, though maybe not so practical in this constricted living space.

RIP Richard Lainhart (1953–2011)

Hat tip: Richard Sanderson

Bob Holness was a legend in his own lifetime. He should have been bleedin’ prime minister.

No chance now. A terrible loss to humanity.

RIP Robert Wentworth John Holness (1928–2012)

With a number of nation states declaring that internet access is a fundamental human right, and a UN special rapporteur commenting that cyberspace had “become an indispensable tool for realising a range of human rights”, there has so far been little questioning of the basis for such claims.

The genial old whitebeard dubbed the “father of the internet” has in a New York Times op-ed said that such lofty claims miss the point, and distort the meaning of human rights. In his brief and well-argued article, Vint Cerf, who is employed by Google as a special consultant with a responsibility for internet evangelisation, acknowledges the power of the internet in facilitating communication between individuals and citizen interest groups in their struggle for freedom and democracy.

Should internet access be a civil or human right?

Information technology is an enabler of information exchange, and so cannot be regarded as a fundamental human right in itself, which is something intrinsic to us as human beings…

“There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.”

It may seem a subtle distinction, but it is an important one, as acknowledged by the UN in a report which, while widely hailed as declaring internet access a human right, argued that the technology was valuable as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself. This leads us to ask whether internet access should be considered a civil right: something conferred by law, and not a fundamentally moral issue.

Cerf goes on to say that such philosophical questions should not distract us from practical problems, including the role of technology and technology service providers in supporting human and civil rights. He is referring here to a range of corporate entities from engineering associations responsible for creating and maintaining standards, to commercial search services which may cooperate with undemocratic regimes to the detriment of citizens exercising their rights to free association and dissent, and seeking to protect their privacy and data security.

She’s a piece of work, is Diane Abbott, the Labour MP who spends more time on TV chatshow sofas than the parliamentary front bench that she is paid to occupy on behalf of her downtrodden constituents and a shadow cabinet notable for its general uselessness. Abbott is known across the land for possessing a gob the size of a minor planet, and the latest shitstorm Twitter storm in which she is involved should surprise no-one with even a cursory knowledge of British politics.

I should stress than my own low opinion of Ms Abbott is influenced to a degree by stories related in private conversation by her former parliamentary colleague Brian Sedgemore, who for many years represented a neighbouring London constituency. Needless to say, Uncle Brian is unimpressed with Ms Abbot’s personal and political qualities, and has said as much in public.

Abbott’s crapness aside, I cannot for the life of me see what all the fuss is about concerning her recent online comments on the all too evident racism-lite of petit and thoroughly petty bourgeois white British society.

After 18 years, (two of) the murderers of Eltham teenager Stephen Lawrence have been convicted, and a degree of emotional closure granted to the Lawrence family. The area in which Stephen was knifed to death by white youths who bragged openly about skinning black people and setting them alight was my stomping ground during the late 1970s.

The conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris is welcome news, but there are unanswered questions concerning possible police corruption, with evidence provided by witnesses and then suppressed by the police, and allegations that Clifford Norris – the hash smuggling father of David – bribed a detective sergeant who senior officers believed to be bent.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission at first claimed there was no substance to the allegations made against the police by BBC journalists, yet in 2009 the IPCC’s own investigation led to the arrests of a current and former police officer, both of whom were subsequently released without charge.

How is it that serious allegations of corruption and misconduct against a police force that the state insists is no longer “institutionally racist” can continue to be dismissed by assertion and not properly investigated?

RIP Stephen Lawrence (1974–1993)