I blame the scapegoats Read Online Free PDF Page A

clone a sheep, because the life choices facing
sheep are pretty limited. Most lambs come out of their careers interview at
school and say to their anxious parents, 'Brilliant news! He thinks he might be
able to get me into the wool business!' And mum and dad jump up and down with
delight that all the hopes they had for their clever offspring will be
realized: she's going to stand around in a wet field for a few years and then
be served up as Mutton Pasanda with pilau rice.
    But
how is any person supposed to live a normal life with the knowledge that they
are a duplicate of someone, possibly a 'parent'? How are they supposed to
become an individual in their own right? It must be hard enough joining the
family business without having 'Johnson and Clone' on the side of the van.
World leaders should act now to prevent human cloning. I cannot understand why
they are dragging their feet. Do they imagine they could use this power and
clone themselves so that they can govern for ever and ever? George Bush is
doing little to prevent it, as did his father George Bush. Oh no, I've just had
a terrifying realization . . .
     

The
scientists are making it all up
     
    18
August 2001
     
     
    As
news stories go, this item has taken slightly longer to reach the front pages
than most, but the scientific journal Nature has
just published an exclusive that four million years ago the Earth was involved
in an enormous interplanetary collision. The story was immediately picked up by
all the papers, who each put their own particular spin on it. The Daily
Mail: 'Earth in cosmic collision; Blair failed to
heed warnings.' The Sun: 'Planets
collide to create Earth, Moon and Helen from Big Brother.' The Maidenhead
Advertiser: 'Interplanetary crash created solar
system. No one from Maidenhead involved.'
    The revelation that a proto-planet the size
of Mars crashed into the Earth, tilting the Earth's polar axis and accelerating
our orbit, has caused great excitement in the scientific world and given
insurance companies another excuse to put up their premiums. It turns out that
before the collision, Earth had a day that was only five hours long. So you'd
stay up for two days and two nights and then sleep straight through for a
couple of days - it was like being on holiday in Ibiza. The collision sent
billions of tonnes of molten rock into the atmosphere, which typically the
weather forecasters of the time failed to spot: 'A lady rang in to say that
molten gravel and flaming rocks will be raining down for the next million years
- don't worry, they won't be; though do look out for a little light drizzle
over East Anglia over the weekend,' said Ian McCaskill's predecessor, as lumps
of molten lava landed all around him. Some of the debris from the collision
flew up into space and eventually coalesced to form the satellite we know as
the moon, later joined by other satellites sent into orbit by a powerful force
known as Rupert Murdoch.
    It was previously believed that the moon was
created by a white-haired man called God on a Tuesday, but as cosmology has
become more advanced, this theory has failed to withstand rigorous scientific
scrutiny. The collision theory is not an entirely new one, but now there are
detailed computations which have apparently proved it. On page 709 of this
week's Nature, the
scientists explain how they made their calculations: 'We use a beta spine
kernel,' they say. Oh yeah, right, a beta spine kernel. Pull the other one.
There are then two full pages of mathematical calculations and equations
involving lots of Greek letters and squiggly symbols which they knew the sub-editor
would take one look at and say, 'Er, yup, that all looks fine!'
    Clearly what has happened is that the
scientists are making this all up. They have spent the last two years sending
each other silly e-mails and playing Minesweeper, and when their deadline
suddenly came along they were forced to throw together a scientific theory and
some calculations so they didn't