• STUFF I'VE LEARNED •

• Dangerous and homicidal people can make excellent and extremely loyal friends (says my experience).

• Out of sight, out of mind; out of country, out of interest. People don't get too worried by things that aren't in their country and that they're not causing directly. If someone knows they have the power to prevent a death, but fails to do so, this generally isn't thought as bad as actually killing that person. I think it's as bad. Africa is in the throes of a greater calamity than the Black Death. It's called AIDS. Africa also has other problems of some note. We know it's happening, and we have the power to help. But we stand by and do next to nothing. So people die. To me, that's the same as murder. People mostly kill through passivity and complacency. Guns are rarer weapons.

Recently, drugs companies and the American government attempted to commit 'passive genocide' in South Africa. They wanted to prevent cheaper rival versions of AIDS medicines from coming on the market. If they had succeeded, many thousands of people would have died. Not murdered with guns, but slowly, undramatically, for money.

The cause of the drugs companies was championed by, among other people, then-vice-president Al Gore. US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky threatened South Africa with trade sanctions.

Here are some of the companies involved:

- Glaxo Wellcome (GlaxoSmithKline, as it's now called, says that it's "committed to improving the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer.")
- Email me any others you know - this really makes me angry, and I think these people should have the spotlight put on them.

The US Government and the pharmaceutical companies have agreed to suspend their actions in exchange for promises that the cheaper medicines would not infringe drug company patents. As if drug company patents should take precedence over human lives.

The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer makes a drug called Flucanozole, which is used to treat a fatal brain infection which arises from AIDS. Until activist pressure forced the company to change tack, Flucanozole cost up to $18.00 a pill in Sub-Saharan Africa. A similar pill imported from Thailand costs 29 cents*. Pfizer made Flucanozole free to certain patients in South Africa, but has not done the same for patients in other African countries.

There's more info on this kind of thing here, here and here.

• People react to once-off dramas - they are less likely to deal with a steady trickle of woe. Think famine relief versus development work. Dramatic floods versus chronic slavery. It's a feature of the human mind - if something important happens day after day, you stop paying as much attention to it after a while. Often, the human mind wants news, not olds - even if the olds are more important. In your personal life, you have to live with your problems, and get rid of them if you can. But often, you are not personally affected by international affairs, corruption, abuse, and slavery. Even if you don't deal with these problems, you can ignore them without personal repercussions. When something new comes along, it's even easier to forget them.

• Those Americans who say that theirs is the greatest nation in the world - please give over. Power and influence do not equal greatness. America spends too much money on weapons (both personal and military), and does not especially use them to create 'the world of the free'. There are remarkable double standards operating - within America, political freedom operates to a large extent; but American foreign policy has been genocidally self-serving on numerous occasions (i.e. Cambodia, El Salvador, Chile, Iraq, etc.). I don't mind Americans, by the way (not that they need my approval) - I just dislike the arrogant, bullying, self-righteous attitudes of rednecks and their political brethren.

Some simple observations on biology and ecology give an interesting slant on the 'free will debate' by clearly refuting the existence of free will. The assertion that free will exists can be used to, among other things, justify the punitive aspects of our justice system and accuse the poor of being the architects of their own misfortune.

One's environment interacts with one's brain to produce a particular personality and type of consciousness; people neither determine what brain nor what environment they inherit; therefore the self cannot be not independent from the interaction of mind and environment - no matter how complex the interaction is. A more general recognition of this fact might - despite the intuition that you respect people more if you think they have free will - reduce the 'culture of blame', the self-blame, and the lack of self-worth which exist in most societies.

The field would then be clear to concentrate on remedying the situation rather than wasting time on kneejerk reactions to past events.

• NEUTRON STARS •

A neutron star is a body which deserves a whole site to itself; however, I'll just give a brief description here. Imagine, if you can, a matchbox weighing 500 million tonnes; now make it circular, and enlarge it to about 10km across (and make it commensurately heavier - about as massive as the Sun). Now push it so that it starts spinning 625 times a second. You are watching the fastest pulsar known. Your body is being torn to pieces by its magnetic field and gravity.

A pulsar is formed when a star collapses; electrons and protons are fused in a supernova explosion (or in some cases by other processes), leaving only a superdense, rapidly-spinning clump of neutrons. As with a magnet, a pulsar's magnetic field is not distributed evenly on the star's surface. For this reason, an observer will see regular, spaced pulses of X-rays, gamma rays, light and radio waves - a sort of berserk lighthouse. When a pulsar was first discovered - by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 - the regularity of its pulses made scientists wonder whether it was an extraterrestrial signal. Sadly, no.

Here's an illustration of the power of neutron stars. If you watch an untuned television channel, you may notice something apparently unremarkable occur at intervals of 5 minutes: a burst of 'snow' will cover about a third of the screen. It's coming from the pulsar in the Crab Nebula, about six thousand light years away. In other words, if you were fast enough to circle the world seven times in a second, you still could not reach the pulsar until the year 8,000. And our humble tellies can detect it.