A new feature summarizing policy ideas suggested on this site.

From: DIARY: Education, March 1, 2009.

The State education system in Britain just gets worse and worse. Hyperactive jobsworths are forever coming up with new wheezes that dazzle in the headlines for an hour but have no merit in practice.

The entire structure is probably beyond repair after 12 years of scorched earth policies for everything that promotes a well-stocked mind and an understanding of the principles that stand behind ideas and formulations.

The Conservatives have yet to jettison some of Labour’s most pernicious obsessions, like the refusal to allow selection in academic subjects. I have high hopes they will do so in office.

But what should the basic education system provide?

It should give students the ability to position themselves in time and space, with historical narrative as the time axis, and geography as the space axis. Both subjects have been severely downgraded in primary and secondary schooling.

The curriculum should also be shorn of soft “social” subjects better learnt at home or through experience. All attempts at social engineering should be strictly outlawed.

Psychobabble has become a wordy substitute for a true understanding of human nature, which is not a machine. Allied to that, PC (political so-called correctness) has assumed fascist proportions in attempts to control the thoughts of the population. Schools lead the way as mind-cleansing centres of anything with which the government disagrees.

Why do they do that? Because “they” — and we know who they are — want us all to be just like them.

Sorry, we don’t.

A lost generation of schoolchildren from the Labour years will probably never be redeemed and will haunt the future as they carry the mouldy seed of mediocrity forward.

The Conservatives can make a start on creating a new wave of educated young people with a better grasp of the fundamentals and of more use to the 21st-century world.

From: Conservatives dream of Silicon Alley, February 27, 2009.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to adopt the can-do attitudes of West Coast Silicon Valley and Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train home-grown developers and software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East. More engineers in general are also urgently needed.

From: Why is Gordon Brown protecting the rest of the world?, January 31, 2009.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

The Conservative Shadow Education spokesman, Michael Gove, will have his work cut out to make instant improvements to a depressingly hopeless State education system. It will take three Parliaments to get the structure right, never mind the quality teachers it needs.

Opposition from the blockheaded educational establishment will be fierce. An alternative approach might be to set up a separate system alongside the State one, allowing parents to migrate across voluntarily. It would be difficult for teachers’ unions to strike against the freely made choices of parents and pupils.

Abolishing the politically contaminated teachers’ training colleges would also be a godsend to good heads and concerned parents.

This has been a year of portents. We’ve had so many “end of the world is nighs” that we’re probably into “the end of the end of the world is nigh” by now.

It clearly isn’t the end of the world though, just the end of our picture of it as a booming sybaritic paradise.

A new Great Depression was well trailed this year and last, despite scornful voices to the contrary. Those of us who knew it was coming are now fearful it may be even worse than we thought. Portents do sometimes come true.

The prophesies surrounding the Large Hadron Collider were probably the most entertaining, especially when it spluttered to a halt before it ever got going. It’s still in the repair shop, naturally, and the universe has not been sucked into a Black Hole caused by a few lengths of pipe and wiring in Switzerland. How arrogant to imagine it would.

However, a scientist now believes that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is revolving around a Black Hole 4000 times larger than the sun. He can’t prove it of course, it’s just a possibility thrown up by his mathematical modelling.

Frankly I’d rather believe an astrologer. At least the planets are visible to the naked eye and the results of the predictions are clear for all to see. So it interests me, as a student of the ancient and arcane, that today an almighty Grand Cross is forming in the sky around us.

Jonathan Cainer describes it thus on his astrological website:

“The rare ‘grand cross’ culminates today with the full Moon in Gemini. As you watch it rise in the sky, look towards the setting Sun. You’ll see Venus and Jupiter, beaming in the twilight. Also near the Sun is Mars — too low to view but in a position of great significance. Half way between the rising Moon and setting Sun is Uranus, invisible without a telescope. Opposite Uranus, halving the sector of sky beneath our feet, is the planet Saturn. You can’t see it but you can easily see the impact of this ‘grand cross’. Just look at how strangely people are behaving!”

I like that last bit. To my eye, people are always behaving strangely, especially politicians and scientists. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for bringing to our attention this majestic astral configuration.

It’s the grand culmination of … something. The apogee of … infinite possibility, perhaps. If you are about to rush to the supermarket to stock up with cases of baked beans and bottled water, stop! It’s way too late. The tentacles of strangeness are already encircling you. You never know, you may enjoy the experience.

So if my Saturday Ramble column on this site tomorrow appears a little…er…strange, how could you tell the difference?

John Evans

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What’s the best definition of a scientist? Someone who joins up two dots on a graph and, if they point up, shouts “fire”, if they go down, shrieks, “ice-age”.

It seems we are now on the cusp of a rapid about-face from the former to the latter.

According to an article in the respected, learned journal Nature, global warming is off the agenda, at least for a few hundred-thousand years. The real menace is a vicious ice-age that will cover the eastern side of the British Isles with 6000ft of ice and snow. Even those of us in the warmer west can expect 3000ft of the white stuff.

If you’ve already thrown out your thermal underwear in anticipation of Mediterranean temperatures all year round, well … you should read Syntagma more often. We have been ridiculing the man-made global warmers for a couple of years at least.

Mind you, I doubt the global freeze-up picture too. Mankind has recently demonstrated a very destructive tendency to imagine that if something happens twice in a row it will go on forever, despite a million years’ experience to the contrary.

It comes from an over-reliance on a narrow concept of the intellect. Paranoia is a disease of rationality extended beyond its natural reach. Many people who should know better convince themselves that bad events must be set to continue and, naturally, get much worse. They react by building massive defences and shelters against “the coming storm”.

In reality, things usually switch over to the opposite well before crisis conditions set in — see my piece, Up-To-A-Pointism.

That is, unless a large enough group convince themselves of the worst and, by their actions, prevent the normal turnaround setting in. Almost all economic crises are made worse by economists and politicians. Now, it seems, actions to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere against supposed global warming could precipitate a sudden global cooling of unstoppable proportions.

When eventually the worst doesn’t happen, the “activists” will just find something else to scare the pants off themselves and the rest of us. It’s their nature. Fear is also a bankable commodity these days, especially for the bright sparks seeking government research grants.

Western administrations in the U.S., Europe and Britain, have been frantically creating siege conditions against jihadist terrorism since 9/11, even kicking away the basic freedoms that distinguish our societies from the supposed insurgents’ dismal autocracies. They lose the “war” before firing a shot.

In the UK, politicians mimicking beached sardines, are plotting a kind of Stasi-state right out of Eric Honecker’s East Germany. Individuals you wouldn’t normally trust with assembling a flat-pack whelk stall are building vast databases of the personal data of every individual in the country, backed up by draconian laws. And this is being done “for our own protection”.

Did anyone give them permission to do this? Alas, if it’s not global warming or an ice age coming to get us, it’s a new form of “white slavery”. And the slave masters are materializing from our own political class.

So here’s a word to the scientists. Stop building flummeries in the air from tiny samples of data. Desist from imagining that the 3lb lump of fat and gristle in your skulls knows all there is about everything.

In the meantime we could always redefine mental illness:

Thy name is SCIENCE.

John Evans

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It probably hasn’t escaped many people’s attention that on Wednesday an important event is taking place in the rarified world of Big Science.

At Geneva, CERN is to fire up its new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive particle accelerator which is the child of the aborted American version in Texas.

This multi-billion dollar project may give an assorted band of scientists insight into what happened one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang, or so they claim.

That, of course, begs a number of questions. Was there a Big Bang at all, or do we have a Steady State universe, as the British astronomer Fred Hoyle asserted, in which matter is continually created?

Again, if space and time are illusions of the mind, as many scientists and philosophers believe, isn’t it likely that matter also is a figment of the mind’s buoyant imagination?

Strange that quantum physicists have no idea what gives matter mass. To fill the void in their knowledge they have plucked a new particle from thin air, so to speak. It’s called the Higgs Boson after its proposer, Peter Higgs.

Some commentators have jumped on this exquisite piece of fiction and named the new arrival, the God Particle. The Collider’s main mission is to discover traces of this elusive little bit of stuff.

And that’s where we’re at. Billions of European taxpayers’ money has been spent on trying to find Winnie the Pooh.

Naturally, they will come up with something. But will it be yet another fiction, arising from yet another mathematical model, and simply explaining the inexplicable by filling in the gaps with a bit of cartoon wizardry? We just don’t know, but can guess with a fair degree of confidence in the outcome. However, CGI is no substitute for the truth.

The end of the world is nigh
Most of the press and other media are concentrating on a more exciting aspect of this story.

That the forces unleashed inside the great particle accelerator will create a small Black Hole which will suck the Earth into it, and progressively, the rest of the universe bit by bit. As disaster scenarios go that must take the gold medal by a mile.

Others believe there’s a chance the reaction could change the fabric of space and time itself. It could speed it up, slow it down or even cause it to stand still. Result? We could all start saying or doing the same thing, over and over. Groundhog Day on acid.

Naturally, the Prophesies of Nostradamus are never far away from some people’s thoughts, especially the one that mentions Geneva.

So what is the most likely result when the big beast is finally switched on early Wednesday morning GMT?

Zilch.

How do I know that? Well, consider: the Earth is one vast particle accelerator, dwarfing even the great chunk of engineering buried beneath the French landscape. Countless cosmic rays are hitting the planet’s atmosphere every moment, colliding with all kinds of matter. So far, no Black Holes have been spotted lurking in the Van Allen Belt.

Indeed, the more honest of the scientists involved gave the game away when he admitted that the H.G.Wellsian machine may be much too small. “We may have to go back and ask for more money to build a bigger one,” he let slip. One wonders how safe his pension is.

The problem with all this peering into the soup of life is that it’s alive, just like us. The great Albert Einstein asserted that human observers affect the processes we observe. In other words we are co-creators of the universe. What we expect to see, we often get. The boffins want a Higgs particle that gives mass to matter. They will surely conjure up something like it.

But what, I’m inclined to ask, gives the property of mass-accumulation to the Higgs confection? Yet another particle? Where does it end?

The argument goes on and on, an infinite regression in human minds that can’t see the simple truth: that the universe is made of infinitely-adaptable mind-stuff, not hard lumps of rock floating about in a void with consciousness as “a disease of matter”.

One good thing may come out of this — with any luck. The new religion of Scientism may go into retreat when the last vestiges of the seven veils it holds up to the world are finally divested from the naked body of the universe and we find a mind looking back at us.

But I doubt the LHC is big enough even to make a start on that.

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Have you noticed how the word “quantum” is everywhere now? It’s hard to find an intelligent publication these days which isn’t going quantum in a big way — if that isn’t a contradiction of terminology.

Copywriters could have a lot of fun with slogans like : “Go large, go quantum.” However, it’s not easy to see how quantums have a part to play in the real world, apart from the trendiness of the word itself.

Quantum mechanics is the newest fad in science, with its magical mystery tour of the universe that must owe a lot to Dr Who.

Upcoming computers will be quantum machines that run 1000 times faster than the trendiest current Mac or Vista PC. We’re persuaded that teleportation will at last be possible with them.

Okay, you go first. I may try it when you return with all your organs intact.

Nanotechnology, which uses quantum techniques, is invading every part of us from our clothing to our bodies. Why doesn’t anybody tell us that?

No learned discussion of the latest science is complete without a deep dive into the sub-atomic world of quantum fantasy.

And, to ram home my point, the latest James Bond flick — far distant from the world of Ian Fleming — is called Quantum Of Solace, a title clearly chosen more for its resonances than its meaning. It would be a better description of the atmosphere in 10 Downing Street right now. Although Gordon Brown requires more than a mere quantum of solace.

It’s as if the big, solid cosmos of the universe is now less interesting than the smallest of the small where the laws of physics are very different and weirdly unfamiliar.

I’m tempted to change the name of this site to Quantum of Syntagma, just to get into the flow, of course. I’ve decided against it because the word is just too small to do us justice.

The European Union could certainly find a use for it though.

I spent some of the longish Easter break thinking about Dark Matter — as you do.

The reason is, I have a theory about all this. But before you duck for cover, let me explain.

Physicists claim that the universe punches above its weight. It behaves as if it were much heavier than it appears to be. To make allowances for this the boffins describe the chunk they can’t see as “Dark Matter”.

Of course, this begs the question of how they weighed the universe in the first place. Does a weighing machine exist hidden away in the basement of the Physics department at some university? It would have to be bigger than the universe itself, of course, and it couldn’t weigh itself. Presumably the scales would have to be designated Dark Matter.

Anyway, they obviously think they’re on to something here.

Not quite. I remember an ancient text by the Buddha in which he says that only one-quarter of the universe is made known to us, the rest is hidden. Hmm, sound like Dark Matter to me. Sorry lads.

Now — are you still with me? — if we remove the word “Dark” from the equation we’re left with “Matter”. Did the Buddha think of the remaining three-parts as matter? What if it were software of some kind?

Say you were trying to show someone on a blog how to code a particular action — putting up a picture, for example. Every time you post the code the software converts it, usually into a blank space with a symbol or two dangling from it. That’s because you wouldn’t have fully completed the code. If you had, your student at the other end would get a picture instead of an explanation.

Hold that image in your head as we move on.

Quantum physicists say that if you have twin particles — presumably electrons — and you change one of them, the other changes too … wait for it … even if it’s on the other side of the universe!

How do they know that? They’re magicians, of course. Seriously. Their latest theory is called “M Theory”, the “m” standing for Magic and Mystery. I’m not making this up.

Anyway, you see where I’m going with all this.

Let’s assume Dark Matter is software or its mystical equivalent. Every time you wish for something, the “software” tries to convert it into reality. Remember the time you wanted something very badly : “Please land me a big job and a mansion in the country. I promise I’ll be good from now on.”? Fat chance.

Actually, it’s said you often get a rough approximation of what you ask for. That’s because, like the code, you won’t have framed it specifically enough, and you may even have changed your mind halfway through the process. Presumably that explains why camels often appear instead of horses.

Einstein mentioned the fact in his Relativity Theory that human observers affect the processes they’re observing. In other words they often see what they want to see. Take the human genome. These genes can only be seen by an electron microscope, which only shows what it’s been programmed to show. So, if we are set on finding “genes” we’ll find genes — and they will look like some fantasy picture by a splendid artist — a double helix, let’s say.

Physicists always look for complexity, that’s the way they’re made. So we have one dizzying set of particles after another, like the quark, which used to be soft cheese and is now a fundamental building block of the universe. The moon could be made of green cheese after all, if we want it enough.

Once — like Einstein and the Quantum chappies — you start breaking down matter, the whole of science reveals itself to be a sham. I’m not talking about technology which probably works on the “cosmic ordering” principle. Man dreams about flying like a bird, and decades later the Tiger Moth appears, later still the Jumbo jet. Not quite what we had in mind, but close. Teleology lives!

Back full circle and someone now claims to have found Dark Matter, neatly tidied away in some unused corner of the cosmos. It had to be. The mathematical model required it.

Or could it be the universe gave us what we wanted? The only question is, what on earth will we do with it?

Be careful what you wish for — you may get it.