The Law of Unintended Consequences.

 I'm always minded to disagree when someone says "The Government must do something" regarding whatever pet interest they are championing.

The problem is that the rules that come out of that "Doing Something" may not do the thing you want them to do and have further unforeseen consequences down the line, or elsewhere in legislation.

I'm reminded of this by the Formula One debacle last weekend, where Carlo Saintz hit an unsecured manhole cover and destroyed his car. It required serious repairs to fix the car ready for the following day.

But Formula One has had rule changes over the last decade to try and enforce some semblance of fairness and to allow lesser-monied teams to compete with the teams with larger pockets. Laser-focussed on creating a fair playing field, they ignored the affects the rule changes would have on every single scenario, including the repair of a car forced upon a team by outside forces.

So teams are limited to the number of things they can change on a car to limit the amount of upgrades or to stop them adding important parts that only last a race. Changing major parts incurs a penalty.

Teams are also cost-capped.to try and even the playing field, so none of the big teams could have a budget ten times the amount of the smaller teams and gain an advantage in increased R&D.

Sadly, no-one foresaw a car being damaged by a poorly prepared track.

So Carlos's car was destroyed by the track. Unfortunately major parts required replacing. Instant penalty. Go back ten places on the grid.

Despite the stewards looking at loopholes to try and avoid Carlos being penalised through no fault of his own, there were none. The rules were watertight. Ten steps back you go. Very unfair on the driver as everyone recognised. But... unintended consequences.

Not only that, the costs of the repair now rest with The team Ferrari. That's an unplanned cost that now affects their cost cap. So late in the season there is very little chance to absorb that cost into the overall budget. So it's possible they may be over the allowed budget at the end of this season. That is, unless someone accept liability for the unsecure manhole cover and compensates Ferrari for the cost of the repairs, so the work than becomes budget-neutral. Would the track owner pay the hundreds of thousands out of their insurance? Would insurance cover it? Would Ferrari chase the operative that welded the manhole shut, if they were self-employed? Would their professional liability cover pay out? 

The point I'm making is that unless you are some omnipotent being that can foresee absolutely every consequence of your actions and any legislation you propose, then be very wary of imposing it. Because one day there may be a very unintended consequence of your legislation, something severely affecting a person or group of people you never intended to affect.

Will Remainers Be Moaning a Decade After Brexit?

It seems the Anti-Brexit rhetoric will never end and now we have a fervently Pro-Remain, Pro-Globalism cabinet in charge of the country.

Will we ever get the Brexit we asked for?

Also will the Remainers ever stop moaning about the damage caused to the UK by Brexit?

It's very easy for Remainers to blame an aged grey-haired, male, Racist, Zenophobic caste of the country for voting to leave the EU, but they steadfastly fail to blame the people to blame for Brexit: themselves.

They failed to convince a majority of the country that the EU was worth voting for.

The EU itself failed to show it was worth voting for.

If the EU was maybe more upbeat about allaying Brexiteer's concerns, rather than just hoping for the best, then Brexit may never have happened.

Instead the EU continued to work in it's own arrogant way and didn't do the work to convince a significant majority of the country that it was worth fighting for. As with much of modern politics, there was too much stick and not enough carrot.

The EU was all about directives preventing the operation of the UK government and to an extent the remnants of the EU we still cling to are still doing the same.

The ECHR controls legislation in the UK and is still overruling, via the UK supreme court (another remainer invention) the UK government's wishes.

Let's make this clear: we did not get the Brexit we were promised. From the start it was scuppered by those that thought we had voted incorrectly, that we couldn't see the benefits. 

The mismash of legislation that came out of the Brexit negotiations benefitted no-one. EU authorities still seek to impose their will and punish the UK for daring to remove itself from the EU. Other countries have done it and are spectacularly successful, but the UK failed to use any leverage and instead gave up bargaining chips too easily.

EU customs authorities still take ay too long to process packages to and from the UK. They arbitrarily impose excessive charges even though paperwork is filled in correctly. Or they just reject packages for no reason.

Sorry, but that is no way to do business. If you can't be professional and instead revert to personal attacks, or act unprofessionally or unpredictably, then I have a problem with you.

These are exactly the petty, power-hungry practices we left the EU for. The practices that extort you unless you are inside the club.

Nothing has convinced me to go back despite the issues raised by the current state of Brexit.

The Rise of The Closed Scientific Mind.

If anything illustrates the piss-poor state of modern science, it's the attempts to debunk the findings or suppositions of Avi Loeb, who is searching for interstellar objects.

He keeps an open mind, saying that the current mania around UAP (The UFOs of old) needs to be backed up by scientific investigation. He wants to set up a world-wide network surveying the skies to look out for unexplained aerial phenomena with decent, modern and clear sensors, so the sightings can be properly investigated, rather than the always out-of-focus, blurry, overly grainy and unclear optics of the rarely-released videos we get online.

Professor Loeb's last investigation was to look for parts of a meteorite that airbursted over the ocean. It was confirmed by Norad to be faster than any normal meteorite. Faster than the escape velocity of the Sun, which defines it as an object not in orbit around the Sun, but an interstellar object from another solar system. 

Not only was it one of the fastest objects to interact with the Earth, it was also one of the longest lasting, indicating it was made not of the normal rock, or iron, instead it was made of some denser material, able to handle the stresses of entry into our atmosphere at higher than normal meteoritic speeds for longer.

He went to the ocean and dragged a magnetic sled behind a ship. That bore fruit: tiny (in the millimetre range) spherical objects attracted to the magnets of the sled in the area of the meteor's track. Indicating they could be molten parts of the meteorite falling to the Ocean as the object melts in the severe heat.

So far so good. Hopefully the spherules will prove to be extra-solar in origin. Time will tell.

But I'm interested in the number of other scientists that instead of openly supporting this scientific exploration, actively attempt to debunk Professor Loeb's investigations and suppositions.

The spherules recovered from the track of the meteorite have so far proved to have unusual compositions. For a meteorite that is. Instead of the normal Iron and Nickel of the majority of objects that fall to Earth, the spherules recovered contain some unusual metals like Beryllium, Uranium and Lanthanum. 

Just those results would or should pique the interests of any scientist. But instead the science community seems intent on attributing more mundane origins for the spherules.

Professor Loeb is doing further isotopic analysis on the pinhead sized objects he recovered in order to once and for all confirm if they were formed in our solar system or beyond. If it's from another solar system, that opens more opportunity to go back and recover bigger chunks of the object. 

The presence of Uranium opens up the possibility of a nuclear power source. Or it could just be a chunk of rock from a planet outside our solar system. But either way it still pushes science forward with more information than it had before Professor Loeb went trawling.

But it really intrigues me why the scientific community won't stay quiet and let him just get on with confirming his suppositions or coming out and saying the material recovered isn't interstellar. 

Why is there always this clamouring to disprove research that is against the current narrative? That's against the scientific method, surely? Isn't an open mind the best to have, to openly investigate and move science along?

Why instead do we have this closed shop in everything scientific, especially climate and medicine? Is it the financial interests behind the various wings of science vying for funds? Is it professional jealousy? 

Somebody please explain!