Are you sick and tired yet of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, and the massive public outrage stoked by bored BBC journalists looking to give their managers a good kicking? Me too. Or maybe you are a bemused foreign observer struggling to comprehend the scandal currently gripping the nations of Britain.

However, on the plus side, the affair has given our more linguistically-creative hacks a perfect excuse to return the verb “hunker” to popular usage. I can just imagine Mr Woss a hunkering on his haunches in his multi-million pound house, while tradesmen are filmed by the world’s premier TV news bulletins calling to deliver supplies of fine foods and wines. Even if the now-suspended miscreants are sacked following the BBC’s rigourous investigation, they will no doubt be snapped up by one of the commercial channels, and continue to make a fortune.

So let’s have more hunkering, I say. And combine this with the public flogging of Messrs Ross and Brand, who I, along with millions of my fellow citizens, detest with a vengeance. So much so that we watch and listen to the wapscallions’ output every week. After all, we have to keep up with all the filth in our popular culture in order to combat it. It’s only British.

Now what shall I complain about tomorrow?

In physics there are a number of so-called ‘conservation laws’. For example, the conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy in a closed system remains constant. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form such as friction into heat or sound.

Another useful way of looking at this is through the concept of continuity. In the case of mass-continuity, the principle states that the density at any point increases where material flows into a region, and decreases where it flows out.

Mass is just one of several quantities conserved. Here is a generalised form of the continuity equation in all its glory:

To me this mathematical relation is a thing of beauty. The first term on the left denotes the time change of some quantity ψ, the second term the change in density of ψ, and s the generation or removal rate of ψ. The important point to note here is that, whatever ψ is in real rather than mathematical space, it goes somewhere and does not simply disappear into thin air.

So what of money?

If information is a measurable thing governed by physical laws, then so too is money. After all, when it comes to high finance, money is realised as bits of information flowing through cyberspace, which connect with the physical world through the actions of individuals.

Today we are told by the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street – who may end up as a decrepit bag lady roaming the streets of London – that the world’s financial firms have lost some €2.3 trillion as a result of the credit crisis. If that is so, where has all this wealth gone?

Anthony Cox points to a recent post by science blogger APGaylard concerning a complaint to the BBC about an alleged case of “churnalism” on the corporation’s news website. This Cox defines as “rewriting press releases rather than news reporting”.

I’m afraid there is no clear boundary between churnalism and serious news reporting, and I cannot comment in detail on BBC environment reporter Matt McGrath’s piece “Britain’s happiest places mapped”. Sometimes, rewriting a press release after attempting to extract a bit more information is the right thing to do. It all depends on the story and its perceived importance.

Journalists have a responsibility to cast a critical eye over press releases that cross their desks and land in email inboxes. But quick decisions have to be made regarding the newsworthiness of stories, and how much work a journalist can or should devote to them. Compromises (and the odd mistake) are inevitably made.

The real difficulty comes with organisations and their PRs who for whatever reason will not provide any more information than is contained in a press release. This is a common practice, and not just with government agencies and powerful private corporations. In the case of science reporting, it can often be a challenge for journalists to gather detailed information and have their questions answered following conference presentations, while following established protocols. Deadlines are often tight, and news has a limited shelf-life. PRs know this, and often exploit it.

So how does your average, hard-pressed newshound respond to this kind of spin? Spike the story? Possibly, though they might then incur the wrath of a stressed-out editor desperate for copy. Any copy. How about retaliating against the PRs responsible by reporting the story with a deliberately negative tone, or even ridicule? This is tempting, but unprofessional.

Churnalism is a bad thing, and I will not defend fellow journalists who indulge in it. In the case of alleged churnalism highlighted here, APGaylard was quite right to question McGrath about his report of what is clearly Bad Science. But the blogger then went over the top in demanding that the piece be pulled. What I would have done is suggest to the reporter that he find an expert to counter with some criticism of the research being reported. That would have taken no more than a couple of quick phone calls, and served as a warning to the PRs who spun the story.

You have to hand it to the Democrats. Not only has Barack Obama out-orated his Republican rival, but his party’s campaign excels in terms of shear inventiveness. They have even harnessed science to the cause.

In this week’s Lancet there is a letter from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based John Alam concerning the Republican candidate’s past and likely future state of health. Specifically, the physician and registered Democrat discusses John McCain’s battle with skin cancer eight years ago.

Alam uses an “evidence-based analysis of the available information to calculate the mortality risk to McCain due to melanoma”, and concludes that the probability of the septuagenarian senator snuffing it – and hockey mom Sarah Palin thus becoming leader of the free world should the Republicans win the election – is 12 percent per year for the foreseeable future.

Scary stuff. But note that relatively little attention has been devoted by political commentators to the fact that Obama is a habitual tobacco smoker.

The UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has this week published a press release about some fascinating new research into the physics of condensed matter. By looking at the scattering of X-ray laser light from a compressed sample of lithium metal, STFC and Oxford University scientists have found that ultra-dense matter exists in a state intermediate between solid and gas over lengths greater than a third of a nanometre. Condensed matter is often described as a charged liquid, but over sub-nanometre distances it behaves more like a gas.

As for the practical significance of the work, the very first paragraph of the press release refers to “cleaner energy”, which turns out to be nuclear fusion. I can fully understand why the STFC chose to present the work in this way, given the political pressure on research institutes to promote the commercial or planet-saving implications of their work. But pure science of this quality could do without such spin.

How do the STFC’s scientists describe their efforts? According to Gianluca Gregori:

“[The study] shows practical applications for controlled thermonuclear fusion, and it also represents significant understanding relating to astrophysical environments found in the core of planets and the crusts of old stars. This research therefore makes it not only possible to formulate more accurate models of planetary dynamics, but also to extend our comprehension of controlled thermonuclear fusion where such states of matter, that is liquid and gas, must be crossed to initiate fusion reactions. This work expands our knowledge of complex systems of particles where the laws that regulate their motion are both classical and quantum mechanical.”

These are accurate and carefully-chosen words, but even with serious sub-editing their impact is minimal, lost as the meaning is in a nest of sub-clauses. This story is a very nice illustration of the challenges involved in preparing science news for public consumption, and the two cultures that exist within the science and technology community. On the one hand we have communications specialists with an eye to linguistic style and impact, and, on the other, researchers constrained by a rigid linguistic mindset. The struggle is to find a synthesis in this dielectic.

A message from Francis’ PA…

For the past few years Francis has blogged about life, the universe and everything, but he is growing weary of the medium and may soon call it quits. If that happens, this website will be reorganised and all dated posts deleted save for a portfolio of selected journalistic articles and other pieces relevant to Francis’ work as a science writer.

Would General Colin Powell make a good President of the United States? In my view he would make an outstanding president. But would he be elected? Possibly not. This has nothing to do with popular feeling about America’s most famous black soldier. Powell shines as a diplomat and military commander, but from what I can see he is not an effective or inspiring politician.

To hear Powell endorse Barack Obama comes as no surprise to me, and the timing is just right. I was struck by the detail of what Powell said. What disappoints me is that no other senior political figure, Obama included, has seen fit to challenge the anti-Muslim bigotry stoked, says Powell, by senior Republicans during the election campaign.

In his endorsement of Obama, General Powell made reference to US Army Corporal Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan from Manahawkin, New Jersey, who in August of last year was killed in Iraq. In this post I’ve not included the ubiquitous picture of Khan’s mother Elsheba leaning on her son’s gravestone. That posed, emotionally-saturated photograph is part of a essay by Platon in The New Yorker magazine. I much prefer the simple image above of the grave, found on a page devoted to Khan on the Arlington National Cemetary website.

My colleague the video journalist Jason Parkinson has posted on his website a four and a half minute film taken during the recent anti-banker demonstration in London. It’s just a shame it took the so-called Socialist Workers Party to organise this show of popular disgust with the actions of those at the pinnacle our plutocratic (and some would say kleptocratic) society.

© 2008 Jason Parkinson. All rights reserved.

Click on the video still to be taken to Jason’s website. You may not be particularly impressed with video of a noisy left-wing street manifestation, but it was a significant if fairly small-scale event, and one little reported by Britain’s mainstream media.

As for the title above, which derives from a mildly funny chant heard during Jason’s film, I would say that this captures the zeitgeist among the lower orders of our dysfunctional society. One could of course interpret it as typical Trotskyite sloganeering: “I say bankers, and you, comrades, will respond with ‘wankers’. By order of the Central Committee.” After all, the SWP is a standing joke among the thinking left. But in this case, credit where credit’s due.

An even more amusing take on the banking crisis, and in particular the government’s response to it, comes from Olly. All power to his Onions!

For the past five years or so I’ve been using Apple computers almost exclusively. Apple’s products are overpriced and overhyped, but the hardware is often well-designed and the operating system is rather good. Having an integrated hardware/software solution can save much time and help preserve sanity in the face of a technology that in terms of human usability remains rather primitive, despite what charismatic Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and his fellow salesmen say.

Apple ticks a number of boxes on my list, but forgive me if I decline to sing the praises of Apple Inc. and proclaim Steve Jobs as my Lord and Saviour. Over the years the company has been hugely innovative, and will likely continue to be so. But Apple is a culturally closed entity that demands total loyalty from its customers, locking them down to what the company regards as good for them. Personal choice simply doesn’t come into it, following a product purchase, and neither does market research as we would normally think of it. As for Apple Store sales assistants, some of them remind me of evangelical Christian church “greeters”.

In recent days I’ve been browsing a couple of the rumours websites beloved of Apple product obsessives, as for some time there had been word that Apple was about to release new computers with much improved specifications and lower prices. A crunchy new Apple for credit-lean times, perhaps? Actually, no, going by the press conference held yesterday in the wonderfully-named “Infinite Loop” in Cupertino, California.

I’ve recently been having problems with an Apple bollock-burner that has a number of quite serious engineering design flaws. From aesthetic perspective it is a beautiful machine, but it helps if you don’t have to switch the thing on. Its replacement is unlikely to be an Apple.

The new laptops announced yesterday have – all things considered – lower specifications than the machines they are replacing, and Apple has raised prices at a time when the company’s stock is tanking, and we shopper units are wondering about the safety of our bank deposits. Even the fanboys are weeping after yesterday’s disappointing product announcement.

There appears to be a move by Apple to shed its loyal but demanding “creative professional” customer base, and appeal instead to middle class lifestyle consumers with shedloads of cash. This may be a viable business model, but I have no intention of commenting on the nature of the consumer electronics market as it bores me rigid.

For me now it’s either back to roll-your-own Linux and other free and open-source software on uncool but quality hardware of my choice, or I disregard Apple’s End User License Agreement and install OS X on a non-Apple computer.

See here for Steve Jobs spinning his reality distortion field at yesterday’s product announcement. The man is a marketing genius, but I am largely immune to his charms.

The American tourist who spent $30m on a trip to the International Space Station (ISS) won’t be pleased that the Russian crapper installed on the orbiting tin can has failed once again.

“The problem appears to be a [gas] separator issue.”

said NASA spokesman John Ira Petty. And this no doubt with a smug look on his face, despite the fact that the Americans have reportedly paid $19m for a second Russian-made toilet from the firm that made the pongy commode currently causing problems on the ISS.

I wonder what Slavoj Žižek would have to say about this.