Shock horror: Homophobic obscurantist has top job

I discovered an interesting fact about Italy's National Research Council (CNR) today, thanks to a letter in Repubblica. The CNR is a state-financed public organization that, according to its website, exists "to carry out, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth and of its applications for the scientific, technological, economic and social development of the Country." (I love that capital 'C'.) This is a laudable aim but it's a little hard to square with an event entitled Evoluzionismo: il tramonto di una ipotesi (Evolutionism: the twilight of an hypothesis), organized (although not apparently financed, for which much thanks) by the CNR, and intended to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. This is rather like celebrating the anniversary of Mother Teresa's birth by holding a lap dancing competition but there you go, there's nowt so queer as folk, especially scientific folk. Especially scientific folk in Italy's top scientific body.

The conference was organized by the deputy president of the CNR, a certain Roberto de Mattei. You'd expect someone in such a prestigious position to have a pretty impressive scientific curriculum, and you'd be right. Let's have a look. De Mattei is professor of that rigorous discipline, the history of Christianity and the church, in a place called Università Europea di Roma. No, I hadn't heard of it either, but that's hardly surprising. It's run by the Legion of Christ (currently under investigation by the Vatican) and only started handing out degrees three years ago, after being granted permission to do so by the then-Berlusconi government. The Legion of Christ is justly famous for its level-headed approach to molesting children scientific endeavour, as is another richly spiritual organization, the Lepanto Foundation, of which the same De Mattei is the president. Judging from its site, which claims that the stated mission of the foundation is to "defend the principles and institutions of Western Christian civilisation", the Lepanto Foundation is a sort of vanity press for the works of its main man. These include: "Turkey in Europe: benefit or catastrophe?" (I'll leave it to you to work out the answer to that one) and "Holy War, Just War". Just the sort of thing that qualifies a man to become second in command of a national research council and to make him supremely competent to talk about evolution. Sorry, evolutionism.

And if you're still not quite convinced of the man's credentials, here's the clincher. After the 2000 Gay Pride in Rome, which culminated in Piazza San Giovanni, de Mattei and some chums went along to the square to perform, in laboratory conditions naturally, a rite of expiation. So that's all right then.

(One last thing. The acts of the conference, edited by de Mattei, have since been published 'with a modest financial contribution' from the Publications and Scientific Information Office of the CNR.)

Music

Thanks to Lally's Alley, who had it from Gene Wright Harris, for pointing me to this.

The dark side

I'm not sure how much of this, from today's NYT, I understand, but it certainly feels exciting. Here's an extract:

A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

Maybe.

From A to B, via C, is just so gay

According to some new research, although I feel I've read it all before, gay men and straight women can't navigate, while lesbian and straight men can. This is due to the relative proportions of the left and right hemispheres of their brains. I don't have time to get mine scanned, however tempting the prospect is, so I can't check, but I do know that I have an almost unerring sense of direction, which would make me a lesbian or a straight man, and no inclination at all to have sex with women, which wouldn't. My partner, on the other hand, bless his cotton socks, would get lost in a glass of water, as we say in Italy, which tends to confirm the research.

Is there something wrong with me? Will I wake up one morning and not know my left from my right, and need a map to find the local supermarket, and walk out of shops and turn back in the direction I came from and end up standing on a vaguely familiar corner wondering where the hell I am? Or will I just buy the latest Mara Carfagna calender and drool over those ministerial curves? Maybe some minor brain surgery can be performed, to slightly deflate my right hemisphere. Or maybe, just maybe, the research isn't quite as watertight as it would like to be. I wonder if Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will have anything to say about this... I wonder which way is up...

Facts

Let's start the year with a fanfare for rationalism. World-class scientists were asked what, if anything, had changed their minds by John Brockman, a New York literary agent and the man behind the site, Edge. All of them confessed, for want of a better word, that new information, new evidence, had led to new formulations. Well, of course. This is how science works. Now let's ask a similarly eminent group of religious leaders the same question and listen to them ramble on about revealed truths.

As Brockman says: "When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science."

Toilet paper poll

I suppose I could plead, as disappointed statisticians so often do, that the sample is too small to be significant (and if you didn't vote, shame on you!). But that would be lily-livered of me, so I'll just have to be brave and accept that the results do not entirely bear out my initial hypothesis, developed with Jane and tested at numerous social gatherings, that men fold their paper and women crumple it. Let's take a closer look at the results.

Men who fold: 12 (48%)
Women who fold: 5 (20%)
Men who crumple: 3 (12%)
Women who crumple: 5 (20%)
None of the above: 0 (0%)

Until the rush of female voters (5) of the last few days, the first datum to be gleaned was either that more men than women visit the site or that men are more prepared than women to vote on such a delicate issue. The final difference, though, is trivially small (60% against 40%), so let's move on and see how they voted.

Well, an overwhelming majority of men do tend to fold, so no surprise there. It would be fascinating to track down the nationality/age/sexuality/political allegiances of the three male crumplers (you know who you are), but not really necessary. Twelve out of fifteen is conclusive enough for me. Obviously, it would be interesting now to know how many sheets they each fold at any one time, but there are limits to what a poll of this nature can achieve.

The most startling result for me is that women divide right down the middle, with five folders and five crumplers. This goes against all my previously conducted field research, to such an extent that I wonder if the poll has been, in some way, tampered with. In fact, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that my poll, ground-breaking in its small way, has been deliberately skewed. Well, the truth will out. This tiny seed has been sown. Now let it grow.

Gay bomb gets Nobel, sort of

This year's Ig Nobel Prize for Peace has been given to the Air Force Wright Laboratory of Dayton, Ohio, theorisers of a chemical weapon that would make soldiers sexually irresistible to one another (as if they weren't already).

For details of the other awards, click here.

For my initial, over-excited, reaction to this extraordinary device, click here.

It must have been quite a week...

Now, let's see. Monday, light, Tuesday, space. No, wait a minute. Monday, light, Tuesday, the land and the sky and the oceans. Oh hell. (No, that was later.) And all the things that creep on the surface, etc. Wednesday? Thursday?

I wonder which day he made the gigantoraptor on.

PS The image is blurred because it's a very old photograph.