Introduction and first rant

Well, since everyone else seems to have a blog these days, it seems churlish not to have one myself. As the name of the blog suggests, it is likely to be on whatever takes my fancy at the time, but there are some things that will keep coming up. There will be quite a lot on identity cards and other forms of surveillance. I am doing a PhD entitled "Biometrics and Social Exclusion", and it seems likely that widespread use of biometrics will cause a lot of people a lot of trouble. I really do not like the proliferation of surveillance technologies - it is clear that the government does not trust the population, and, since the population has not really changed, except maybe to become more informed through the use of the internet, it is clear that government has changed. That is a bad thing.

There will also be quite a lot on "global warming", as I just cannot see how people can buy into the rubbish being put out by people that should (do?) know better. Maybe, just maybe, there is climate change happening, but so what? It is a natural process. It has happened many times before, it will happen many times again. I honestly think that our ancestors, as signs of "global warming" took away the ice sheet 11000 years ago were having the same sort of panics because something was happening that they had no control over, and which meant that their world-view was changing. They may even have sacrificed precious things to try and appease the gods. This is no different to today: superstitious people are clamouring for us to sacrifice one of the most precious things we have - technology - to appease the gods/gaia/whatever, because they want to feel in control of things. They have even created an evil spirit - carbon dioxide - as a measure of what we have done wrong. Well, CO2 isn't evil - without we wouldn't be here. In the history of the earth, we are actually living in a CO2 depleted atmosphere, and life has done very well, thanks very much. It is time for humanity to stop being so parochial, and recognise that what humans are doing to the planet is, at worst, trivial, at best, negligible. Celebrate the incredible ingenuity that is mankind's greatest survival strategy,but stop being so arrogant as to believe that we have any real effect on the planetary system.

Thanks for reading this first post. Comments are welcome.