I've been a-wandering the dark web. First ever work related post.

One of the things I have never done on here is talk about work, it’s pretty much just Florence, and how kick ass it is to be on the side of Science!  However I have recently been involved with a project that has genuinely taught me a few things, and I do like to share.  I’m a network engineer by trade, but this is not going to be an article about IP sub-netting, there are plenty of people writing articles that no one reads on that subject; I’m talking about our online identities.  This project has taught me about ID theft, fraud, and how criminal hackers make their money.

The project I have been involved with is www.hasmyidentitybeenstolen.com, a database of stolen identities that are currently been sold online.  We have, without giving too much away, developed a method of finding, and capturing this information from criminal websites on the dark web.

When people see dark web, they sometimes become rather worried, or suspicious, thinking it is some sinister corner of the online world, overflowing with hackers and terrorists, and that everything which emerges from it, our site included, must be a threat.  In truth, dark web simply means not on Google, and constitutes about 70 – 90% of all webpages, most of which are benign, or plain old junk, but some pose a risk to ordinary web users.

There is a massive industry selling personal details, on secret websites.  Cheap bulk lists of email addresses get passed on to individuals who add more information before selling them on.  Some of this data is the result of very sophisticated hacks, much of it just leaks out of our day to day lives.  That it is of value to someone never occurred to me before. 

The bones of your identity are your name, a date of birth is great, your address, and your email.  From this point you can start to build more information, and gain more access to a person’s online activity.  These basic blocks of personal details are available for pennies.  We have hundreds of millions of them in our database, go and look, you might be there, and it’s free to use during this launch period.

Florence will never use her mother’s maiden name for an online signup; I will teach her not to.  Here is a scenario, and it involves no technical hacks at all.  She is a young adult, and someone gets her details.  The electoral role, which is free to access, will give you her date of birth and who else lives at the same address, which would be me.  My date of birth is three decades before her, but same family name, so I’m a parent.  Search for me, and you’ll find other addresses I’ve lived at.  Eventually you find a woman, similar age to me, but with two different surnames.  Oh look.  Mother’s maiden name; that was easy.

The more information you have, the easier it is to craft a phishing attack, or a social engineering attack and gain more information.  If I have your date or birth and mother’s maiden name how many security questions can I correctly answer?  The email password is what you need.  Once you have that the gates really open.  In a person’s emails you can see who they bank with, what credit cards they have, where they shop online.

Have you ever had an email telling you to click here to reset your password, maybe from Amazon, or eBay?  You didn't ask to reset your password, so you know it’s fake and ignore it.  Maybe you were not the intended recipient?

We have records where the criminal is claiming to have Amazon passwords; there was an increase in eBay accounts for sale before news of a wide spread hack came out in May.

The more information your profile has, the more valuable it becomes.  There are millions of profiles that include credit card, bank card, or bank account numbers.

Think how many times you have filled in your address on a random form, or a website, without really knowing where it’s going?  How many websites use your email as the username, and do you use the same password on more than one?  If someone gained control of your Facebook account, even temporarily, how much could they learn about you?

It’s worth thinking about, but please don’t panic.

Reducing the risk is just a matter of been sensible; behave online like you would in the physical world.  Use a different password on each website, a practice I have been doing since I started online, and yes, it is annoying sometimes, but never that annoying.  Change passwords periodically, which does make the previous policy more annoying, but there are tools to help you manage and store all of these passwords.

And be vigilant; don’t click on links people send you, don’t agree downloads you didn’t deliberately start.  A lot of basic attacks are incredibly badly crafted, and written, and clearly don’t make sense given even a few moments consideration.  Laugh at the grammar, then bin them.

And, since it doesn’t cost anything, have a look at our site.  It only needs an email address to search against, it will tell you if that address is part of a profile for sale, and how many fields the profile contains.

Hopefully some of you will find the ideas behind the project as interesting as I did.

The new Longitude Prize

Given the whole science, fuck yeah, theme of my blog, I can’t let the 2014 edition of the longitude prize pass by without voting, and explaining why I chose as I did.

To mark the 300^th anniversary of the original longitude prize, the lottery backed charity Nesta is putting a ten million pound fund for the scientific problem that wins a public vote run by the BBC.

If you have not read the account of John Harrison, and how his clock won the original prize of twenty thousand pounds, which in 1714 was literally a king’s ransom, then get yourself over to Amazon and get a copy.

From the dawn of the ocean going vessel, every sailor that lost sight of land was lost and could only guess their position by dead reckoning.  Latitude was easy.  Just measure the angle the sun climbs to in the sky, or where certain stars are, and combined with knowing what day it is, you can immediately work out how far north or south of the equator you are.  East and West were at the start of the eighteenth century unknowable in open water.  When the sun reached its highest point in the sky, it was midday, and if you knew the correct time at another point on the earth, you could tell how far you were from it, as the sun moves at a fixed speed across the sky.  A Yorkshire clock maker built a clock that could keep very good time on a pitching and rolling ship, which is why the whole world measures east and west from London, and a small island nation became the worlds undisputed naval power, and why to this day London houses the master clock for all the others.

The hope is that this recreation of the prize can recreate the drive to solve a problem that affects everybody, and in keeping with the spirit of the original, these are all problems we know about, and even know in principle how to solve, but not in practice.

For me there is only one outstanding choice amongst the six options presented.  All of them have their merits but ultimately five of them are nice to have, rather than imperative.

Paralysis

In the UK, which is only 1 percent of the human race, someone is paralysed every eight hours.  The dream of returning movement to those afflicted with debilitating diseases, or victims of serious accidents, has been with us for as long as we have understood the role of nerves in the body.  My own father was reduced from a six foot four bull of a man, to a shell trapped in a wheelchair he slowly lost the ability to control, by motor neuron disease.

But this is not the one I’m voting for, as despite the massive benefits to those it would help, this is a nice to have.

The technology for this is desperately cool, and normally that is enough for me.  Exoskeletons that can move a paralysed body following the instructions of the wearer, possibly even interpreting their brain waves directly to movement for the full, almost subconscious movement we all enjoy.  These systems will spill over in to all manner of applications.  Superhuman strength for rescue workers, augmentation for those who work in physically demanding jobs, soldiers that can carry heavy weapons in situations where armoured vehicles would escalate tensions.  The first people to Mars, after months of microgravity will be pinned in their capsule by muscle wastage. The first boots on the surface will belong to their exoskeletons.

Cells in the body communicate via electrical, and chemical path ways.  By manipulating the bio-electrical path ways, with genetic engineering, or drugs, or focused electric fields, it has been possible to restart regeneration in species that normally lose it later in life.  Older tadpoles have been made to regrow lost tails, something only young tadpoles naturally do.  Frogs, which cannot regenerate, have grown new legs.  Making the techniques work in mammals is a big challenge, but ultimately our cells use the same basic systems, we just need to learn how to control it.  There is no intrinsic reason that cells taken from one part of your body cannot be caused to become a type of stem cell, and then instructed to grow nerve tissue in a particular shape to reconnect a severed spinal cord.

Still not voting for it.

Low Carbon Flight

This is clearly a nice to have.  The single largest producer of carbon dioxide is agriculture, if change of land use is included.  Aviation is responsible for 3% of all CO2 emissions globally, live stock is 9%.  But I’m no sceptic, and 3% of thirty seven billion tons is well over one billion tons, and is well worth going after; if all human activities could cut a couple of billion here and a couple of billion there, the projections would look very different.

Again, there are some great technologies coming along in this area, since zero carbon flight can only be achieved by burning hydrogen, and so producing a water exhaust, or through electric engines.  The fact is that hydrocarbons are almost perfect as a fuel, easy to handle, with huge energy density.  Hydrogen does have more energy, but currently only as a cryogenic fuel, which is very hard to handle.  It might be possible to use metal hydride storage, and then burn it, which solves the storage and handling problem, but the fuel is going to be very heavy, on the other hand, If electrical systems can pull an order of magnitude more work out of the same mass, then they will rival fossil fuels for efficiency.  These aircraft are going to require some very advanced technology; ultra-light graphene composite fuselages, induced plasma drag reduction, super conducting electric motors, nanotechnology batteries and ultra-capacitors.  All cool stuff.  And I love planes anyway, but I’m not voting for it.

Dementia

With an ageing population, this is going to become a major factor in society, but this is also a nice to have.  It only really applies to the developed world, as most of the earth population live in countries with a growing youth population, as stability and growing wealth reduces infant mortality.

At present dealing with dementia is a design problem, as we really don’t know anything like enough about its underlying causes to enable a technological solution; robotic assistants seem to be the best option at present, but of course does nothing to the symptoms or the progress of the disease

Good design can be literally life changing to dementia sufferers.  The blue vinyl flooring universal in hospitals is confusing and people with dementia think the floor is wet, and they will slip. Lighting that creates pools of light and shade is disorientating, and a building you have to learn your way round is useless.  One NHS Hospital recently opened a garden where all the paths are circular, because you can’t get lost on a circle.  It’s good that such simple things can improve lives so much.

I’ve been reading design guidelines produced by the NHS, and while they are excellent in the context of what we know about changes in cognition from dementia, it does seem that a world designed around dementia patients will be pretty dull for the rest of us.

Food and Water

I’m going to lump these two together, because frankly they are very similar, both of them are on the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, along with sleep, air, sex, and wi-fi.  For every country with a food shortage there is one with a surplus.  It’s a wet world, with millions of tons of water for every person on the planet, but most of it is salty and undrinkable.  These are both very, very big issues with lots at stake, and national interests and national resources.  Ultimately I’m not voting for these two either as a ten million pound project in the UK will not make any difference.  Neither require a technological breakthrough; they need a political breakthrough.  If one country dams the river and reduces another to drought, then technology is not the answer, unless you’re going to blow the dams up, and that will just create more problems.

A technological solution to food shortages is either GM, or better still, synthetic biology, but there are so many idiots in Europe right now that this is not what the money would be spent on, so a vote for food would just be a waste.

Antibiotics

Finally, we arrive at the meat.  Of all the issues listed here only one is a civilisation stopper.  If humankind exits the period where routine infection cannot be dismissed with scarce an effort, then most of these other issue become null and void.  No one will need treating for their paralysis, because they won’t survive the surgery after their car accident.  Dementia will still happen, but only to the very few people who live to old age.  Man’s carbon emissions will drop as our populations, and economies shrink, and food and water shortages will retreat for the same reason.

This may seem a tad alarmist, and even excessive, but given the prospect of modern medicine ending, and the reversal of ever increasing life expectancy, for the first time in history, then I think we can be justifiably alarmed.  At the start of the 20^th century, illness from infections was second only to influenza as the biggest cause of death, by the end of the century, infections were nowhere on the list.

Think how many times you have taken antibiotics in your life, or how many times your children or parent have?  Now imagine if next time they are not available.  Every time you gain an infection there are no treatments, and it is just a case of you been strong enough to survive it, or you die.

And it's not just how infections are treated in medicine that will change.  Routine surgery will become extremely risky, and may even end.  Million of people have small operations on non life threatening conditions in order to have a better quality of life.  In the wealthy west it could possibly continue, with positive pressure operating rooms, sterilised air, and robotic surgeons, but the cost will be immense.

Given the billions spent by pharmaceuticals on research each year, it would seem that this ten million pounds would be fated to disappear in the same manner I mentioned with food and water.  But here there is a specific difference.  The golden age of antibiotic research was 1930 to 1970, during which almost all of the one hundred and fifty or so drugs, in twenty classes, were introduced.  No new classes were discovered between 1970 and 2000, and only a dozen drugs in four classes have been produced since then.  Big drug companies prefer to introduce molecules based on other molecules they already own.

By the time current drugs stop working, and there is a massive market for new one, it will be too late to start researching them.  In fact the best strategy is to find new classes of antibiotic and then not bring them to market so they are ready in reserve for when we need them.

There is a second part to this solution, and that is to prevent the misuse of antibiotics.  The reason that resistance has become so prevalent so quickly is because millions of courses of antibiotics are started but never finished, leaving the strongest bacteria alive.  Millions more courses are prescribed for illnesses that are not bacterial in cause.  This has allowed our world to become awash in antibiotics, and so bacteria are continuously exposed to the active elements, and evolution does the rest.  The incredibly short generations of bacteria allows them to outpace our technology, especially if we don’t concentrate on it.

Delivery systems that allow a whole course to be administered in a single dose will help cut the unfinished course problem and tests that can confirm a bacterial or viral pathology in seconds will avoid prescription errors.

For someone who is a big science champion, and finds himself genuinely impressed with his species ingenuity in figuring out new things, it is a sign of how serious I think this is, that I want the world to work hard simply to retain a technology.  Our society depends on our public health, and the biggest threat to public health is antibiotic resistance.

The vote closes on the 25^th of June, please do it.  Vote antibiotics here.  You can place three votes and all of mine went to antibiotics.

National Physical Laboratory Open Day

Tuesday was, if you didn’t know, and shame on you if you didn’t, World Metrology Day.  And so I found myself parking outside the globally respected, centre of excellence in measurement and materials science, that is the National Physical Laboratory.

I really didn’t know what to expect, I knew of the labs of course, but I’ve been to research centres before, and apart from slightly chaotic rooms of unidentifiable equipment, and informational posters highlighting obscure corners of physics, they aren’t very informative, or day I say it, interesting.

I did wonder if it would be more of the same, lots of lab benches, lots of glass vessels, and lots of places you weren’t allowed in.

Not a bit of it.  This is one of the best science related days out I have ever had, and the five hours I was on site were nowhere near enough.  To give you some background, I have taken time off work in the past to look at powered down science infrastructure.  I’ve been to JET at Culham, which is another jewel in the British science crown, and the Diamond Light synchrotron at the Rutherford Appleton labs.  Both of these are mightily impressive, not just as experiments, but as imposing bit of infrastructure.  They left me inspired and excited by the possibilities they offer.  The NPL was more accessible, more human, more informative, and more incredible than anywhere I have been.

I spun rare earth magnets in their own induced magnetic field over a super conductor, made my own graphine and examined in under a microscope. The anechoic chamber made my ears feel funny as all external sound vanished, and I’m still wearing my cardboard diffraction glasses, which split the light from the bulbs in my house, so I can compare their spectrums.

In the fuel cell lab, by using a hand generator, I split water in to hydrogen and oxygen, which was stored inside the body of a model car.  The gas recombined inside a fuel cell on the car and an electric motor spun the wheels.  About twenty five percent of the energy from the hand crank ends up on the road.  More dramatically they had a lipstick sized cylinder that stored hydrogen gas as a metal hydride.  No pressurised canisters, and no risk of gas leaks.  It contains as much energy as the best battery technology, and can be recharged indefinitely.  One day we’ll all have them.

In the electron microscope lab, the researchers were using the focused ion beam scanning electron microscope to write children’s names in to a strand of hair, then printing out pictures of it.  The hair was very big and the names, very small.

Next door they were showing off their latest mass spectrometers, one of which fired a beam of argon 2000, which must surely be a band name, and the other worked in normal air without a vacuum chamber.  One of the researchers was putting visitor’s money under the probe tip.  One of my bank notes had cocaine on it, allowing me to maintain my rock image.

By putting my hand on top of an electro thermal generator, itself on top of a heat sink, I was able to move the needle on an ammeter, as my body heat setup a temperature gradient and produced a current.  In a brilliant piece of science theatre, two children were hammering, with soft glockenspiel hammers, faster and faster on two thick strips of piezoelectric material, trying to get the voltmeter to read the target number.  Cheers went up as they reached the desired figure, before they were pushed aside by the next two contestants, eager to reach, then beat the previous figure.

I saw the caesium fountain, a cloud of super cold caesium atoms, who’s oscillation between excited and ground state, provide the tick for the most accurate clock in the world, and the source of Coordinated Universal Time, the world’s prime time standard.  In the room above it, the equipment that converts the signal from seven atomic clocks into the time signal that is sends around the world.  One of the transmission methods is NTP (network time protocol) used by your PC to set its clock.  If you change the configuration of your PC to use ntp1.npl.co.uk, then your own computer will be synchronised with the world’s best clock.

A couple of doors down was the optical atomic clock, a single atom of strontium, in a vacuum, at a thousandth of a kelvin, interacting with a laser, and will in time replace caesium as the standard for how our species measures the second.

The kilogram was there of course.  That is the kilogram.  The object that defines the weight of every other object in the United Kingdom, a 3.9cm platinum-iridium cylinder stored under glass, behind more glass, and cleaned very occasionally with a hydrogen plasma beam.

I saw electronics that operate on a single electron; cooled almost to absolute zero, within powerful magnetic fields.  Had my retina scanned by a door lock, and watched an electro responsive fluid change the focal length of a mobile phone camera.

I spent several minutes in the presence of holograms so perfect that it took that long to realise the objects on display were not there at all.

I located plastic figures hidden in a jelly with a medical ultrasound.  Stared into the black depth of a five meter wide, former distillery mash tun that was now the underwater acoustic test tank.  Had the workings of a laser that pulses for less than a thousand billions of a second explained, and wore a holographic head up display that hands down beat anything Google glass can manage.

If you are interested in science, or if your children are interested in science, or if you are interested in science and wish your children were, then I cannot recommend this open day highly enough.  All of the staff were tremendous, happy to give explanations, and answer any questions.  The enthusiasm was clear to see, even though many of the researchers were helping out in parts of the lab they don’t normally work; their desire to promote the work of the NPL, and the wonderful world of science, was tangible.

They have held this open day for the past few years on the 20th of May, and it is free to attend.  Follow them on Twitter @NPL, and you'll hear about next years in time to register.

As the day ended we I exited past the shop where I could by the full set of sever SI unit mugs.  I didn’t buy them.  I already have all of them.

Scottish Independence; counter productive to the point of nihilism

I’ve been musing about the approaching vote on Scottish independence, and while I live almost as far as you can from Scotland, and I haven’t even been there properly, I am very, very keen that the result should be a resounding no!  By the time of the vote, I will have spent a week in a rented castle in Dumfries, and taken the Landy round as much of it as I possibly can.  I have catching up to do.

Not because I think I’ll never get the chance if I don’t go now, or any apocalyptic nonsense; apocalypses are always nonsense.  I am very glad the No vote is ahead and I think it will stay there, I want to say my bit because this is a once in a generation, possibly once in a century, bad idea.

I want the UK to remain together, and before I get to the emotional argument, a few practical technicalities.

Firstly, Scotland can’t have the pound.  Now Salmond may say he’ll have it anyway, but it’s not his decision, because it’s not his currency.  The decision is made solely in London, and while some say that’s the whole point of this, that all the decisions are made in London and it’s not fair, London isn’t deciding to take the pound away, Alex Salmond is deciding to take it away, and Scotland would be mad to go along with it.

A currency union, despite the recent suggestion that RBS would have to move to England, reducing the banking bailout dilemma, is still out of the question.  Currency unions work best where there is very deep economic and political integration across the union, which an act of independence is the dead opposite of.  The four countries that use the pound, or the fifty two states that use the dollar, work because the integration is so deep everyone forgets that they are unions or federations.  The recent troubles with the Euro show that, politically, there can only be one possible direction.  In order to stay in the Euro, Greece had to cede control of its economy utterly, as to an extent did Italy.  So if the Scottish economy got in to trouble, by for example, massively over estimating the oil revenue, which they already are, and getting tax and spend wildly out of balance, which it already is, then the fix would be to have the economy run by England, with the elected Scottish officials cut out entirely.  I can’t see them accepting that one, so the UK would be left with the pound been pulled down by a small economy it could do nothing about.  The only other solution would be to bail the Scottish government out, no questions asked.  Why anyone thinks we would risk our currencies global reputation for the convenience of a group of nationalist we don’t like anyway, is a mystery.  And if Scotland did somehow keep its banking sector, we most definitely don’t want to be faced with the potential bill that comes with a currency union.

Another factor in currency unions is their permanence, but this union looks to be anything but.  The pound would seem to be in perpetual danger should Alex Salmond have a tantrum.  I have noticed that throughout this whole debate, whenever someone shoots another hole in the nationalist argument, it seems the international expert is wrong, and the first minister is right.

So, can’t have the pound, or, and I’m coming to it, the Euro.  I don’t know what Scotland will have, but my next holiday there will be cheap, because I’ll be able to get eight of them for my pound.

Scotland can only have the Euro if it joins the EU, and Scotland can’t join the EU.  The claim it can just walk in, and quickly, is only been made by the nationalist; no one else has said this is realistic.  And there is a good reason for that.  To join the EU, the Scottish government would have to adopt thirty five chapters of EU rules, which although made easier by UK law already having been written around them, except for having a commitment to join the Euro as we opted out.  New applications, unlike the existing UK agreement, are not allowed to negotiate out of the Euro.  It would require a huge amount of new legislation, at a time when the new parliament is trying to patch the holes left by the removal of all the UK wide laws.  It won’t be quick.

It has been suggested that Scotland would automatically be a member of the EU, but only by the Scottish government, no other country, or the administrators in Brussels have said this, so it can be considered untrue.  There is an old principle in international law known as successor state, which is the country that inherits the treaties and agreements of a predecessor country on the event of a territorial split.  In this event it seem that the UK would be the successor state to, the UK.  Seems sensible; no one even needs to change the paperwork.  If its application makes it through, then Scotland will have to have its membership ratified by all twenty eight existing members.  That will not happen.  Spain will veto it.  I know Spain has not said it will veto it, because this is diplomacy, and you never say what you will do till you do it, but they have said that if the UK constitution allows Scotland to become independent (shot across Catalonia’s bows there), and if the vote is fair, and recognised (another shot), then their application must be considered.  Must be considered…  Which is basically a big no.  The Basque terrorist movement ETA killed nine hundred people over forty years.  A ceasefire has held for the last few years, and the Spanish government is not going to risk that starting up again by given a separatist movement elsewhere in Europe political credibility.  Italy and Belgium also have separatist movements that their governments will not want to encourage.

The SNP are a perfectly respectable political party that has never done anything but talk of independence, it has published pamphlets and given speeches about wanting to have a deep and friendly relationship with the rest of the UK.  Others in Europe choose a much bloodier path to gain independence, and so the SNP will not be allowed to succeed in full.  It is an unfortunate reality, but that is how international politics works.

International events have recently drawn attention to the fact that Scottish independence would destabilise western military power at a crucial time, with Russia appearing to be going on a bender.  Once again, the first minister, renowned expert on everything, said it was nonsense.  But again, it is he that is wrong.  The UK is the west’s second military power, and we are number five in the world.  Even though our forces are small, our training is excellent and much of the equipment is state of the art; a squadron of Typhoons is worth several squadrons of lesser aircraft.

The UK operates bases all over the country to maintain our maritime and airspace security.  Currently we spend £57 billion on defence.  Does Scotland, with its £2.5 billion projected defence budget, really expect to be able to carry on patrolling its massive cost line and huge volume of airspace?  The Scottish government has said it will inherit bases and equipment, but the MoD have said no equipment will be handed over, so there will be no navy and no planes, and building the force from scratch will be expensive and slow.  This will be a very messy divorce, with men and equipment and years of investment and experience all up in the air as it has to be moved, reorganised and rebuilt.  It is inconceivable that wider operations will not be affected, with a knock on impact to our allies.  As the first sea lord has said, Scotland is choosing to deny itself access to one of the world’s most effective navies, the oldest blue water navy in the world.  A navy that carries Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

The SNP have repeatedly stated that Scotland will not have any nuclear weapons as they are immoral, and are not necessary for the security threats we face, thus completely failing to understand that we face no major threats because of nuclear weapons.  Faslane is of course in Scotland, and is the only place in the UK that can support and service nuclear powered and nuclear armed submarines.  The SNP have said the base would be retained to service the conventionally armed Scottish navy of nonexistence ships.  That would mean the total relocation of all the specialist nuclear capability to one of the Royal Navy’s two other main sites, or the development of a new one.  The bill for that is enormous, there are no exact figures but twenty to thirty billion pounds is not unrealistic.  That bill would have to be paid by the new nation of Scotland, as it is their decision to close the base to the submarine fleet.  That sum is ten percent of Scotland’s economy, so moving Faslane would be bigger than the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project, combined, then doubled.  I’m sure the world’s leading expert on economics and historical scientific programs, the first minister, would disagree.

They might be hoping the matter become null and void if we do not renew Trident, but we will, as renewing it is the easiest decision any government will ever make.

Then there is NATO, which Scotland should be in because it is a strategic area of the north Atlantic.  Article 10 of the NATO charter requires all member states to support the first strike nuclear policy, which is a bit tricky if your have just written a constitution for your new country, outlawing nuclear weapons.  The SNP, to pander to the left, who enjoy more support in Scotland than in England, have pledged that little gem, but it is idealistic clap trap.  Scotland wants to be in NATO, and NATO wants Scotland to join.  There is no advantage to leaving them out, and unlike the EU, there is the strong possibility of a fast track entry, but not with that constitutional rule in place.  They have been publicly told they cannot have it both ways.  I wonder what the first minister would say?

The international situation is clearly very complicated, and I haven’t even gone near what happens with other organisations, such as the United Nations, but presumably Scotland will not be on the security council, or the G7, being the world’s 39^th economy.  The UK will retain its seat, becoming the 7^th largest economy.

But even the national situation is so complicated it makes the whole idea seem too much trouble for no good reason.  Within the UK there are a significant number of laws that apply separately in England and Scotland.  This will of course be very handy for an independent parliament to build on in an independent Scotland.  However one law that applies across the whole UK is employment law.  There is no Scottish version, and so they would have to draft their own version before full independence arrives.  Except that means that everyone currently employed in Scotland will have to be reemployed under new law, which may mean changes to pay and conditions.  I’m sure that the big employers in Scotland will be lobbying for changes that benefit them, and the unions will be lobbying for better pay.  The trouble is that the big employers in Scotland are either UK companies, or international companies, and if the employment law in Scotland is identical to the rest of the UK, then why not just move to the bigger employment pool, in the bigger economy?  There is also the matter of Scots who are employed in the UK.  Presumably they will have to choose if they want to be Scottish, and get a new passport, or English, and keep their UK passport?  Since Scotland cannot apply to join the EU until the day it actually becomes independent, on that day any Scots working in the rest of the UK, will not be UK or EU citizens, and so cannot be employed without a visa.  There are there eight hundred thousand people affected by this.  It’s going to cause an almighty mess.

For the sake of the huge amount of trade and employment across the border, let’s hope the EU membership, that Scotland can’t get, is ratified quickly, which it won’t be.  England does a lot of trade with Scotland, and Scotland does an even larger proportion of its trade with England, which will make the intrusive border controls really unfortunate.  Why would there be border controls, why, because if Scotland is part of the EU, then it is part of the Schengen Area, which allows free movement within the EU.  The UK has an opt-out from the agreement, but new members aren’t allowed to opt out, and so it would be possible to travel from anywhere in the EU to Scotland without any checks been carried out on individuals, so the UK would do them at the England Scotland border.  Now, I’m not suggesting that it’s going to get all petty and Gibraltar, with miles of queues, but it will be disruptive to anyone living in the borders who currently crosses the none existent divide to go to work, or the shops, or the pub.

Then there is the negotiation on where to draw the line on the seafloor to divide the oil fields.  It would seem that having set a deadline of 24^th of March 2016 for Independence, that these negotiations, and indeed all the negotiation, are fatally flawed.  The UK can just give unfavourable terms and wait for the deadline to loom, when Scotland will have to sign.  Union was created by acts of both parliaments, and both parliaments will have to vote to separate them.  That vote cannot happen until negotiations are complete.  If they miss the deadline, goodness knows what happens; perhaps Scotland becomes a failed state?  The amount of messiness in this whole business is just going up and up.

All this technicality is getting very heavy and very negative.  It is true that the No campaign as the Better Together camp is called by the Yes crowd, talks negatively rather than positively, but then its campaign is about stopping something.  It is not able to talk dreamily about an imagined Scottish folk myth of a future, as it has chosen harsh reality as its strategy.

So let’s leave this downbeat political talk and focus on the positive; the emotive reasons why Scotland should remain in the UK.  It comes down to common history, the three centuries that we have all shared a single nation and what we have achieved in that time, and what we have yet to achieve.

This country has given the world a huge amount over the centuries, we have real reputation for innovation and creativity in this country.  There is practically no area of modern life that Britain did not play a major role in creating.  We have affected all social and political aspects of the modern world by giving it, parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, its most spoken language, and the industrial revolution.  We standardised time, created accurate clocks, had the first postal system and the first central bank.  The eighteenth and ninetieth centuries saw Britain grow in to the world’s leading industrial nation, laying the foundations for the science and engineering still central to our success.  Before the industrial revolution, came the agricultural revolution and Andrew Meikle, Scottish engineer and inventor of the threshing machine.  We invented crop rotation, seriously, that was us, and made selective breeding a science.  The better farm system freed up labour for industry.  We invented the factory system, and with it the transportation that goes with a manufacturing economy; the canals, the great earth works, the bridges and docks.  The first railway, the first iron bridge, the first iron ship.  James Watt, the man who made the steam engine into a real practical machine was Scottish.  Thomas Telford, a man who’s engineering genius may only have been exceeded by Brunel’s, built miles of canals, including the Caledonian, and the magnificent Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, which I have been over, hundreds of miles of road, dozens of bridges including the Menai to Anglesey, also been over, and docks in London.  He was a fellow of the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London, and the first president of the Institute of Civil Engineers.  If you need to be told he was a Scot, then your knowledge of our industrial heritage isn’t as good as it should be.  It is hard to imagine the industrial revolution without Scottish engineers, but could it have happened without them, probably, England has had a lot of fantastic engineers.  Could these talented Scots have achieved this without England?  No.  England had the population and the money, only combined could it have worked out as it did.

British science has, and still does, lead in many fields.  As anyone who has read my other posts will know, this is my real area of interest.  The names connected with British breakthroughs is like a who’s who of science history.  Isaac Newton gave us the laws of motion, and gravity, and calculus, which would have been enough for most countries, but not us.  Lord Kelvin formalised thermodynamics, the untouchable corner stone of physics, Michael Faraday made electricity a practical technology, and the undisputed giant of Scottish science, James Clark Maxwell, gave us electromagnetism in his field theory.  Practically every modern technology that transmits energy, be it by radio or light, relies on his equations, and he laid the ground work for relativity as he mandated the speed of light to be a constant.  Earnest Rutherford gave us nuclear physics, Charles Darwin the sublime theory of evolution, and Alexander Fleming, antibiotics.  Lord Cavendish weighed the Earth, Francis Crick co discovered the structure of DNA, Andrew Huxley explained how nerves, and thus your whole nervous system, works. Paul Dirac predicted antimatter, Dennis Gabor invented the hologram, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars.  Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell at University of Edinburgh, cloned Dolly the sheep.  Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at Manchester University, produced graphine, Peter Higgs explained the origin of mass, and Tim Berners-Lee created this very media you’re using now.

I could go on for pages, the list is practically endless; germ theory, sanitation, the hovercraft, fibre optics, the first commercial nuclear power station, the turbine, transformer, the microchip, communication satellites, and radar.  It’s hard to think of three British inventions that have changed the world more than the computer, television, and the jet engine, although two candidates must be plate glass, and most importantly, the lawn mower.

If there is one machine the British love as much as trains, it is the car, and we have built some of the most desirable and impressive cars in the world, as well as some of the worst, but only in the Midlands in the 70s.  The Mini was the first modern car, with a transverse engine and front wheel drive, which practically every car now uses.  To this day all Formula 1 cars follow the pattern established by Lotus, monocoque construction, with the engine and gearbox serving as structure, and an obsession with lightness.  Britain has held the world land speed record since 1983, we beat our own record in 1997 by breaking the sound barrier, and in 2016 the Bloodhound car aims to break our record again, along with the 1000mph barrier.  There are very few countries that could build a car like that from indigenous engineering, a dozen at most; we are good at fast.

Our inventiveness in war has long been a source of gripping stories, quirky mavericks, brazen boldness, and victories.  In the twentieth century alone, Britain pioneered the technology and tactics of the battleship, tank, fighter plane, and aircraft carrier.  The history of Britain is tightly intertwined with its military history, an area of exploit where the relatively small population of Scotland has always had a massive impact.

Britain, possibly the only country to win a war in Afghanistan, at least in 1880, achieved its final victory at the battle of Kandahar, where the Afghan forces besieging the remains of General Burrows’ army, after his defeat at Maiwand and the last stand of the 66^th, was defeated and the city relived, a victory that could not have happened without the actions of the 72^nd and 92^nd Highland regiments displaying their expertise in the bayonet charge.  Something the Scots have used to put the fear of god in to American rebels, Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, German storm troopers, and assorted spear wavers for three centuries.  It worked in Basra in 2004 when the Scots guards, surrounded, outnumbered and low on ammunition, and considered cowards by the Mahdi army for their use of body armour and drones, came pounding across open ground, screaming.  The coward motif was dispelled that day.

The cap badge of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards is a French Imperial eagle, to commemorate the eagle of the 45^th Regiment of the Line captured by the Scots Greys at Waterloo.  The Sutherland Highlanders stopped the Russian cavalry at the Battle of Balaclava, saved the port and gave us the phrase, the thin red line.

And it’s not just the army in which the Scottish hallmarks of ferocity and courage excelled, whether the Nelson era career of Sir James Alexander Gordo, who rose from midshipman to Admiral of the Fleet, the highest rank in the Navy, or the Admirals Cochrane, most notably Thomas Cochrane, who if not for scandal in his midlife, may have beaten Nelson to the title of greatest naval officer we’ve ever known; he is certainly the inspiration behind the characters Horatio Hornblower, and Jack Aubrey.  I would advise anyone to read his biography; its bloody good stuff with not a swash unbuckled.  And he had a perchance for independence, forming, and leading the navies of Brazil, Chile, and Peru in their fight against the Spanish.

It was a Scotsman, Douglas Haig who was commander of British forces in World War 1, and another, Lieutenant General Sir David Henderson, was the first commander of the Royal Flying Corp, and instrumental in the creation of the RAF.  On the outbreak of World War 2, Archibald David Stirling, laird of Keir, was training to climb Everest, so he joined the Scots Guards, and after fighting with Z force in Libya, formed the SAS in 1941.  He was eventually captured, and after four escapes, sent to Colditz.  We are free because of men like this, we are free because of a rich vein of stubbornness that refuses to acknowledge it is beaten, a stubbornness that runs through our entire nation.

The culture of Britain is a unique product of the melting pot of our four nations.  British films, much more successful than they used to be, are still identifiable as not American.  The number of genres of music we have originated; the legendary bands that have conquered the world, our writers and artists, our sportsmen and our statesmen, are international figures.

The country that gave the world football, rugby, billiard, cricket, tennis, and golf, is famed for its sense of fair play.  Hardly surprising that The European Convention on Human Rights, a document that removes the power of a state to do whatever it wants to its citizens, and guarantees freedoms, should be a British idea.  It was drafted in 1950 by a Scot; Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who was Home Secretary.

The reason for these lists and facts, is clearly to demonstrate that the sum really is greater than the parts.  Britain as a union of four nations has achieved a truly vast amount and it is very hard to believe that we could have done this while divided.  It is true that England has always had the biggest population and economy, and has therefore carried the majority of the political momentum, but let’s not forget that that the greatest institutes of our nation have been run by notable Scots throughout the period covered by the acts of union.  President of the Royal Institute, governor of the Bank of England, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Prime minister, and leader of all the recent political parties, have all been posts held by Scots.  This is not an England only partnership, this is a true partnership with full, total, and mutual integration.

So far I have found no good argument for ending the union, no improvement to the nations of England and Scotland that would be impossible within a union.  I don’t think there is one.  I have even heard that a vote for independence will be a way for Scotland to avoid having to keep the Tory government that England will probably elect in 2015.  That is the single most ridiculous short term idea I have possibly ever heard.  To undo, arguably the most successful political union in the world, after three centuries, in order to avoid a few short years of government, the colour of which is not to your liking, is insane.  Yes, David Cameron is unelectable in Scotland, and Alex Salmond is unelectable in England, but that is no reason to instigate the disintegration of the United Kingdom.  Throughout the campaigning, Alex Salmond has tried to turn this in to a competition of personalities with Cameron, and Cameron, to his credit, has avoided it.  Political leaders come and go; the decision the Scots are being asked to make is long term in the vast sense of the word.

The SNP are in effect a single issue party, and a vote of Yes, is in effect a vote of confidence in the SNP.  As none of the Westminster parties will be able to stand for election in an independent Scotland, there will be a very real vacuum, and the SNP clearly expect to fill it, and fill it permanently.  A vote for Yes gets Scotland independence from the UK, and gets them an SNP government for twenty to thirty years, as there will be no effective opposition.  Everybody with experience, and the organisations with established capacity will now be political agencies of a foreign country, and will no longer be there.

This comes down to Alex Salmond wanting a promotion; the trapping of a head of state, which he can’t have under the current system.  He is clearly a gifted politician, and a very clever and ambitious man.  History is filled with ambitious men and the countries that they wrecked.

I don’t want to see it wrecked.