Family ties?

I have long known that I have German relations, but more recently I have begun to wonder if they lie a little closer than "by marriage". One thing that has sparked this thought is the Genographic Surbey and Family Tree DNA project to which I submitted a DNA sample. It has turned up the fact that genetically I am a European, I have the typically Western European Haplotype (R1b1) and the dominant end Y Marker M343. This means I belong to the human group that migrated along the edge of the Ice Sheet covering Northern Russia and Europe and then down the west of Europe and the British Isles. Not surprisingly I have found a number of genetic matches (Or rather FT DNA have!) scattered across North Europe and the low countries. Some in Normandy, a lot in the UK and in Ireland. The genetic group is a major part of the Keltoi people - the Celts.

So I have been looking at my father's family line again. His mother's family name was Nielsen and it was always said that the family was Danish, but now I begin to wonder. In the time that he was born, Schleswig-Holstein was, at least partly, ruled by Denmark and he seems to have arrived in South Africa around the time of the big "German Settler" migration which was largely the Hanoverian Legion's soldiers who were given land grants in what is now called the Ciskei. He certainly settled and raised his family in an area that was strongly associated with that settlement. Sadly I do not have sufficient information at present to do a proper trace on him and his roots and the response from South Africa to any enquiry for Births/Deaths information meets with a total lack of response.

I shall have to track down my surviving cousins there and see if any of them can throw any more light on this.

Baltic Interlude

Mausi and the Monk are having a short break in Lubeck, the ancient Hanseatic League city in Schleswig-Holstein, North Germany. We are using the opportunity to discuss our future and to enjoy exploring the city where Mausi was born. It will be a busy three days.

Pictures will follow in due course.

Heading out

Posting will be a bit sparse over the next few days as I am heading for the airport and thence to Hamburg and Lubeck for a short break.

Pictures and reports when I am back. THis will be the last opportunity for a break and an important discussion with Mausi before I head to Tehran once more for three months work there. There is a lot to settle and discuss before I go.

Death of a Fire Fighter

The death of Watch Manager Paul Fletcher of the Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service on Monday night is a tragedy for a service used to a very low casualty toll. I had the privilege of training Paul some years ago and know he will be missed by his crew and certainly by the service.

Unfortunately the rising toll in Fire Fighter lives since the "modernisers" ripped the heart out of the service, threw out the Discipline Regulations and introduced "Itsy Pitsy Diddly Squat" as a training system at the behest of the Union, the Civil Service (who hate professionalism in anything they can't understand) and the Chief Fire Officers Association and their Puppet Masters the Local Government Association so that they could parachute into command positions people without the experience or the knowledge necessary, is now coming home to roost in terms of increasing Fire Fighter fatalities. Equally unfortunately they will never be called to account for this mess because their Lords and Masters in Westminster and Whitehall are busily covering it up.

It is a disgrace that people like Paul are paying the price. Pray please for his family and friends - and for the repose of his soul. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

Hurricane's seldom happen ....

The tail end of Hurricane Bruce is busily passing the west of the UK today bringing wind and yet more rain to our shores. I wonder how long it will be before the media start whipping up a panic based on "Global Warming/Climate Change will see the UK suffer hurricanes on a regular basis"? I'm expecting to hear at least some such claim within the next few days.

An interesting item on Watts wrong with that recently raised an interesting point. It points out that a crucial dataset being used by a prominent leader in the whole "Climate Change is All Down to Human Activity" debate - and one of the Obama Administrations "favoured" advisers, is excluding a large section of the record which shows a deep trough and record high in temperatures. They have chosen to start their dataset in the years immediately following that which shows only a steady rise in temperature. Reading these pages I am reminded of an after dinner speaker I once enjoyed listening too who said of transport safety statistics as "You draw a line above the Titanic and then only count everything that happens after that."

It seems to be a trick our Climate Change lobby have mastered pretty well. Only count the stuff that makes human (particularly western human) activity look bad. I wonder what the real agenda is?

Keeping up with science

Writing SciFi is quite a challenge these days, it often seems that scientific advances and technology is advancing so fast it is almost impossible to come up with something "futuristic". When I started writing my Harry Heron series, the idea of ships that were run by "intelligent" computers seemed like a suitably "future" scenario. The book was no sooner in print than I discovered that there were already plans for a computer that ran on a sort of neural net rather than on banks of processors, hard drives and so on as we have now. I had already envisaged my future computers running on fibre-optic type wiring, so in the next I took that step further and made the ships self aware and able to "converse" with the heroes. Book 3 takes that to its ultimate expression with the ships experiencing a range of "emotions" and emotional problems. Where to from there?

Reading several scientific journals and blogs I find myself sometimes wondering whether this is a sustainable growth or whether it will eventually lead to something like the human race dividing as H G Wells "Time Machine" envisaged with one group of tree-hugger types being cultivated by the sinister sub-surface dwelling cannibals. The world seems to be dividing into a scientifically adept and aware group and those among them who use science (or a "media ready" version) to manipulate politics and the people they rule, and those whose scientific understanding is best described as "limited" and rely on what they are told in the media to even begin to grasp some concepts. Hence the whipped up storms over things like GM foods, irradiated fruit and the "Sky is falling" Global Warming debate. The divide is gettig wider all the time and is made far worse by the refusal of some members of the science community to consider anything which challenges their own favoured theories or to consider data which comes from another discipline which may suggest a different path to the one followed by a particular line of theory.

Part of the problem is the misuse in the media of the word "theory" which, in scientific terms, has a particular meaning. It is further complicated by the use of statistical analysis in "proving" theoretical work. Statistics can be used and misused in a number of ways and almost all the data used in the Climate Change modelling or reporting is "smoothed" in some way. Put simplistically, "smoothing" involves "averaging" the data so you end up with a "mean value" which is easier to work with, but this excludes sometimes significant variations in the measurements. That is not, in itself so significant, but it can, if extrapolation is then applied, produce some very dubious results. Statisticians look for "significant trends" in their numbers and most would be very quick to tell you that it still provides only a snapshot of what has happened, not necessarily what will. And therein, for the wider public lies the problem, most of us do not have the technical expertise to understand the processes or the significance of a very complex process of analysis - and most media reporters don't either, so they go for the sensational interpretation and the politicians encourage this.

What concerns me more than anything else as I try to stay abreast of science is the knowledge that the vast majority of the human population of this planet don't even have a basic understanding of the science or the technology we in the "developed" world take for granted, but seldom fully understand ourselves. This gap is getting wider as well and I'm not at all sure it can be bridged. Which leads me into my final point, one of the things I have had to consider in writing about the future. What will the future world population look like?

I'm still not sure, though I think it will be much more racially mixed than at present, I think the divide between the educated and the under developed will get wider - but above all the ppulation will have to be reduced and that is neither popular nor easily achievable in any forum. Study of the socio-economic relationship between wealth and population quickly exposes that poverty and population are linked, so is education and wealth. Poorly educated populations with a low per capita wealth index are much more likely to be found in overpopulated areas than in wealthier ones. How one addresses this, particularly in fiction is tricky and in reality I suggest impossible despite all the good intentions in the UN and various governments. That makes one aspect of writing SciFi easy. Human nature doesn't change - the human propensity for corruption, self-interest and their opposites provide plenty of fodder for storylines and will do for as long as there are human beings telling stories.

Book reviews

Just as I was starting to think I wouldn't see another review of The enemy is within I have been pleasantly surprised by the appearance of this on Blogger News. I'm flattered by the reviewers take on my time travelling trio and their development in their new roles. It took quite a while to get that book into the right shape.

It is encouraging to learn that someone found it a rivetting read. Now I hope it will move me a step or two closer to finding a publisher for the third book.