GMO you didn't!

Articles like this one from Stuff.co.nz irritate me. Not just because they blatantly get basic scientific principles wrong, TV and movies do that all the time. What annoys me is that in the case of genetic modification, all they do is perpetuate ridiculous myths about mad scientists toiling away in their underground lairs creating frog-potatoes that will devour us all. A basic understanding of genetics and the role of DNA would be quite refreshing in a lot of science reporting.

In the article mentioned above, there is one line that urks me, that is "...fundamental flaws in the monitoring of horizontal gene transfer from genetically modified animals disposed of in offal pits." This sentence conjures up images of DNA oozing through the soils and some cow licking it up and growing an extra udder or something. Horizontal gene transfer only occurs in bacteria and some fungi and yeasts. I'm guessing the genetically modified organism (GMO) in question here is actually some sort of bacteria in the cow's gut, not the cow itself. Genes can not spontaneously transfer themselves from one animal to another and instantly incorporate themselves into the DNA of every cell in their body. Viruses can achieve something close to this, but they're not the products of science. If animals could transfer genes by ingesting the tissues of another animal the vegetarians might actually have a valid argument. I'm not sure if the reporter's parents have had this conversation yet, but in order for animals to exchange genetic material, they need to have sex. For that to happen with GMO, first GE animals need to be produced, then they need to escape, then they need to fornicate with similar species, then the offspring need to do the same in order for the gene in question to be perpetuated through a population. To prevent that, it would be wise not to carry out this research in the animals natural habitat. However, cows tend to be reasonably well contained, so a GMO outbreak would require a lot of faulty number 8 wire.

Science reporters should really attend a primary school science class or two, or at the very least do a quick search on Wikipedia before submitting their article.

Non-News is S#@t News

I get my news during the day from Stuff.co.nz. Often they're more tolerable than NZ Herald, often they're bang on par. I just saw a news story titled World Cup advert 'unlikely to offend'. Granted, it made me look. On closer inspection I realised that this was another non-story, paraphrased from a press release.

The story talks about a complaint about the ANZ ad where a couple fire a giant party popper from the top of Ruapehu. It goes on to say that the complaint was rejected.

I visited the Advertising Standards Authority website and found that it wasn't rejected, it had 'no grounds to proceed'. That's the equivalent of someone bursting into the ASA screaming 'this ad offends me' and the ASA waving their hand and saying 'get this man out of my office'. It was barely even considered. THAT'S NOT NEWS!

There were 15 other decisions released yesterday, 10 of which had 'no grounds to proceed'. Why did they choose this one? Probably because it had all those great elements that get the punters clicking: "World Cup", "Pakeha", "Iwi", "Party Popper". They probably wanted us to get all full of national pride and say 'have they no sense of humour?!'. Well I did one better, I wasted part of a Friday afternoon blogging about it and directing traffic to the article.

By the way, if you really want to get all riled up about the lack of humour some individuals possess then visit the ASA website and read some of the full decisions. There's not having a sense of humour and then there's this.

Sincerely,

J. Milledge

Exactly like stealing cars

Big brother, draconian laws, corporate pandering, guilty until proven innocent and all that. Or maybe not so much. With the passing of the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill it would seem that, like so many recording companies and movie studios, our government is refusing to move with the times and instead have decided to stand and fight the inevitable digital revolution. The new law might not be as big a deal as it appears on face value, but it still goes nowhere to addressing the issue of trying to stuff a digital world into a physical pigeon hole.

There was an uproar back in 2009 when an amendment bill (section 92A) was passed that allowed ISPs to cut off a person’s internet access if they suspected them of downloading illegal content, putting the onus of proof on the accused. One of the courageous acts of defiance prompted by this law change was people all over Facebook changing their profile photos to black squares (come on the internet, you can do better than that). This law sought to punish the downloading of illegal content without addressing the problems that caused it, such as hyper-inflated movie prices. To put it in physical world (‘meatspace’) terms, it’s like being arrested for stealing a television and then having to provide a receipt. Of course, it was never intended to be used on every individual who had a sudden desire to watch Joe vs. the Volcano but didn’t want to fork out $3 for a weekly rental (commonly known as a ‘Tom Hankering’). Laws like this are most likely designed to scare people into not doing things by promising more than they can realistically achieve, rather than punishing every possible individual until society has been cleansed.

The new amendment has seen section 92A scrapped and a swathe of changes made to make it slightly harder for people’s internet access to be cut off. A rights holder (Paramount, Sony BGM etc.) informs an IPAP (ISP redefined as an ‘internet protocol address provider’) that they have identified an IP address linked to a specific illegal download. The IPAP then issues the holder of the IP address a warning notice. These warning notices expire after a maximum of 9 months. After three non-expired warning notices an enforcement notice is issued by the IPAP. The IP address holder can then challenge it, in which case the rights owner is notified and can choose to reject the challenge. If rejected it then goes to the Copyright Tribunal and if the IP address holder is found “guilty” they can be issued with a maximum fine of $15,000 and can have their internet account suspended if the Tribunal decides that’s not a completely dickish thing to do.

So, in order to be fined you have to download enough content for the rights holder to take notice. A feat in itself given this country’s extremely low data allowances. You then must do that twice more within 9 months, not including the illegal downloading against the same rights holder within 28 days of the detection notice they issued because they aren’t allowed to issue two notices within that period. You can always challenge them and delay the process, bringing that 9 month expiry ever closer. Once you’ve been issued the enforcement notice and end up in court you’re in trouble. This is where the IPAP will demonstrate that your morally reprehensible acts of piracy have ruined the lives of countless children and are solely responsible for the degradation of modern society, at which point the judge will fine you the amount you saved by not going to the movies and force you to take up one of the other IPAPs offers for free connections and wireless modems. To avoid the horrific fate of having to deal with customer service every 9 months, here are some tips:

* Diversify - download from a number of rights holders so you’re never downloading enough from a single entity to arouse their suspicion.

* Change tack - if you get issued a warning notice, target the rights holder responsible like the rabid pirate they think you are for 28 days straight. Download their entire catalogue of music and movies and then avoid them for 9 months.

* Sleep around - If you really want to continue downloading so much material that every rights holder in the world is issuing you notices left and right, have more than one internet account. They can only target IPs; your details are never released to the rights holder. In fact, when you get sent that second warning notice, change ISP. After the next two warning notices, change ISP. You can pick your favourite two and flit between them every 9 months.

So, other than the fact that this sort of law does nothing to force the studios to rethink their distribution plan or lower prices of existing online content to reduce the need to turn to file sharing, it probably won’t harm the ‘casual pirate’. There may be concerns about rights holders submitting notices for every IP address they find on BitTorrent, but there is a fee associated with each submission payable to the IPAP by the rights holder. It wouldn’t make financial sense for them to target every IP address because they could quickly lose any profits they would hope to gain from legitimate sales.

Much like the amendment to section 59 didn’t see parents hauled off in droves for giving a light smack to a child, and was never intended to, this bill will not see you punished for your illegitimate collection of Bieber tracks. These high-profile bills are most effective in the way they raise awareness and make people second guess themselves before committing what they now perceive to be a crime. Unlike the amendment to section 59 however, which was a huge leap forward in the way society operates, this bill merely clings to the notion that a digital copy of a song or movie is exactly the same as a CD or a DVD. I’ve argued for years that ‘piracy’ doesn’t hurt the artists, it hurts the executives. Musicians make the majority of their money from concerts, so they benefit from more people hearing their music by any means. Those responsible for making movies, (actors, directors, best boy grips) still get paid enough money to make Powerball look like a meat raffle (maybe not the best boy grips, who would most likely still be happy with a meat pack). That might not be the case for independent movies I suppose, but the more obscure the movie, the more likely those that watch it paid for the privilege to do so.

iTunes is great for music, but it’s still only marginally cheaper than a physical CD, yet there are no specific production costs per unit sold (except for data storage, which is cheap but not free). Radiohead should have shown that people will pay for music even if they don’t have to. They made $3.6 million without a record company or even a pricing structure. At an average of $3 per album download ($7.5 for those who actually paid) they earned more than twice as much per album as most artists make through traditional CD sales. It might be different for new artists that don’t already have a fan base, but how many more albums would you buy if they were only $3? iTunes would also be great for renting movies if they weren’t only a dollar less than the video store and took less than 18 hours to download. I can download a movie from BitTorrent in about half an hour. If that cost me $3 each time I wouldn’t download any less. A great example of low price equals high profit is the App Store. At $1.29 per app I don’t know many people that hesitate to download something new on a regular basis. The developers get 70% of that. Angry Birds reached 50 million downloads in December 2010. At 90c per download, that’s $45 million they’ve made in a couple of years. That’s $61,643 a day, which is more than I earn in a week. There are plenty more success stories out there too. Maybe not quite to that extent, however if someone takes 6 months to write an app that reaches 100,000 downloads they make $90,000 and all it cost them was time. Many millions have been made out of people sitting on their couch with nothing good to watch on TV and $1.29 burning a hole in their bank balance.

The biggest thing holding back the music and movie industries from fully embracing this sort of pricing structure is that record companies and movie studios are scared of losing profits and becoming obsolete, so they fight to keep it exactly the way it is, potentially taking money away from the artists they claim to be protecting. They do this by working with lawmakers to produce such things as the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill. As long as these sorts of laws are perpetuated, digital media will be forced into a style of marketplace and pricing structure that was designed for physical items requiring production, distribution and marketing. All of that takes place digitally now. Rethink the industry to reflect the product; don’t change laws to force the product into the existing thinking. You wouldn’t hear of a law that prevented the development of alternative fuels to protect the profits of oil companies, or legislation that banned the sale of gardening tools to stop people growing their own food. Freely downloading digital media is not the same as stealing a physical item; I hope that in the near future the lawmakers will come to realise that. In the mean time, don’t worry too much about the new law changes. The copy of Twilight your daughter is currently downloading is just as unlikely to get you prosecuted as clipping her round the ear for watching it; and only one of those things is morally reprehensible.

Hypocritical Oaf

It's an often asked question: Is God responsible for tragedies, or if not could He have prevented them?

I'm not going to go into the existence of God here, however I will get into how much influence He has on the movements of the Earth. I find it silly that people would claim God has any control over natural disasters, in the same way I find it silly that fundamentalist Christians deny the theory of evolution.

If I was God, hypothetical of course, I wouldn't bother creating a universe that I had to monitor every single moment and control every single aspect. If I'm busy creating universes I'm probably a bit smarter than that. I'd do it more like someone might program a computer game. I'd come up with the concept, draw up some designs, then work on creating a number of algorithms that will allow the universe to go about it's thing. Of course I'd want to be able to alter things from time to time, no one wants to play a computer that has no user input. Hence, I would create physics to allow things to interact without causing too many errors, I'd install evolution to allow things to adapt to their environment and finally some jerks to make it interesting. Then I'd sit back and watch, occasionally collapsing governments or creating new mountain ranges if I was bored.

Now, what irritates me about the question is that people can't seem to decide whether or not He is directly responsible when disaster strikes. The answer to the question is largely based on the outcome of the disaster, particularly in relation to the loss of human life. Here's an example from Roman Catholic Bishop of Christchurch Barry Jones:

5th September 2010: 'Roman Catholic Bishop of Christchurch Barry Jones said in the wake of the earthquake many people were finding comfort in the church. "We just have to give thanks to God that there's no-one dead."'

24th February 2011: 'Bishop Jones reminded everyone that bad things happening was not God punishing people, despite the "tragedy that has unfolded in our city over the past 24 hours". "Such thinking is a mistake ... it's not about vengeance," he said.'

We should thank God that people were not killed in September, but can't blame Him when they were in February? You can't have it both ways Mr. Jones. Passive God or vengeful God. At least if it's one of those we know what we're dealing with. Unpredictable, erratic God? How is that any different to having no God at all? Oh, right...

Too many spirits, not enough Christmas

Wanting to get into the Christmas spirit we rented ‘A Christmas Carol’. An animated adaptation of the classic book. Having seen Scrooge flying through the air, sliding down bannisters and lots of pretty colours and whimsical music in the trailer we settled in for some holiday cheese. Oh, dear God, were we not expecting what the next hour and a half would bring. This movie is dark; REALLY dark. Broken-jawed ghosts shackled in chains doomed to walk the Earth for all eternity dark. Struggling families with dying, crippled children dark. Being chased by the shadow of Death and his screaming shadow horses dark. The scenes that didn’t result in horrified recoiling were so lathered in Charles Dickens' olde English that it took all my attention just to decipher what the characters were talking about. Sure, there are a few scenes with pretty colours and whimsical music, but these mostly come at the end, after you’ve already been subjected to an hour of panicked screams, horrifying visuals and insights into the miserable lives of the Victorian-era working class.

I’m not having a go at the story. It’s a story of self-reflection, second chances and all that. The movie probably captured the mood and message of the book perfectly. I didn’t feel it was a particularly good movie in many ways (motion capture animation kind of weirds me out, I blame the uncanny valley, and I found the whole 'ghost of Christmas present' scene to be visually confusing). What struck me most about this is that this movie was marketed at children. It was marketed as a delightful holiday romp. If they hadn’t intended it for children, maybe the trailer should have included the scene where the shadow of Death (ghost of Christmas future) dangles Scrooge over his own grave while he pleads for his life.

There’s a certain ignorance from the studios that causes the mis-marketting of these movies. Anything that doesn’t feature live actors seems to be automatically assumed to be for children. It’s like giving a piña colada to a child because it looks like fruit juice. This phenomenon still dogs The Simpsons for some people. Those people are all the more moronic for it, but I have heard comments like ‘I don’t feel like watching cartoons’. 'Cartoons' they say! Heaven forbid they should ever buy their niece or nephew a birthday present from a Japanese video store ('oh look, this one has a girl in a school uniform holding some sort of microphone, it must be similar to High School Musical'). It also affected Fantastic Mr. Fox, one of my favourite movies and one of the funniest movies of the past few years. The jovial DVD cover image of the characters riding a sidecar was reminiscent of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and in no way did the movie justice. It’s like studios pay people to make movies, watch a 30 second highlights reel and devise a marketing strategy. But there’s more than just ignorance at play. There’s a certain level of irresponsibility that goes along with it. Insisting a movie is for children when it’s not simply because you can’t figure out a way of marketing animated films to adults is almost a form of child abuse. Saying A Christmas Carol is for children because it’s animated is the same as saying Event Horizon is for children because it has a spaceship in it. I wonder how many parents have sat their kids down to watch A Christmas Carol while they were doing something in another room, probably wrapping presents I suppose, only to come back and find them rocking gently in a corner muttering something about Tiny Tim.

I don't think it’s a new phenomenon either. Have you actually seen Dumbo? He gets wasted and starts hallucinating in a scene that would make Pink Floyd shift uncomfortably in their seats. Granted, the rest of the movie is pretty child-friendly, but that scene is a tenth of the whole movie. A lot of the animated films of the 40s and 50s were similar. I can’t say whether they were marketed towards kids at the time, or whether kids at the time routinely got hammered and hallucinated, but they're definitely marketed as nothing but kids movies now.

So, this is a plea to studios and the general public alike. The use of animation in movies and television does not automatically pigeon-hole them as perfect for children. Sometimes it’s not a case of being aimed at kids but still entertaining for adults (a la Shrek, Nemo, How to Train a Dragon etc…). Sometimes they are simply meant for adults, and should require a pre-viewing before subjecting little Bobby to a lifetime of therapy. A movie should be judged on its own merit, not assigned an audience based on how the poster is going to look, especially now that animation has become so versatile. Once the public acknowledges that, the studios might be willing to accept it too and we’ll see more movies like Fantastic Mr Fox doing well at the box office because they’re being marketed at the right audience. That means more movies like Fantastic Mr Fox being made, and that is definitely not a bad thing. We also might be able to start watching movies like A Christmas Carol with the proper expectations and not sit through an hour of dark, dark soul-searching, all the while waiting for the cutesy squirrel character to come bounding onto the screen and lighten the mood.

500m Straw Clutch

Australia did tremendously well at the recently closed Commonwealth Games in Delhi. They blitzed the field with gold after gold, showing that it's not the size of a country's population that matters, but how you use it. Congratulations to them and their athletes. They're a relatively small country that have consistently punched well above their weight. It's hard to fault their performance. Hard, but not impossible. What sort of Kiwi would I be if I didn't waste my time trying to find a way to bring the Aussie's down a peg?

For this I have burrowed through the data to uncover that vital piece of information that I can skew in such a way that if you squint it almost makes Australia look less-than brilliant, and hopefully move NZ up a couple of spots in the process.

In the interest of conciseness, and because making tables in HTML is incredibly tedious, I'm only going to list the top 5 countries (and NZ and Australia if they aren't up there).

Firstly, the standard medals table, ranked by gold medals (and then total if there's a tie):

Ranking	Country	Gold Medals
1	Australia	74
2	India	38
3	England	37
4	Canada	26
5	Malaysia	12
11	New Zealand	6

The only thing you can say about that is that Australia didn't get as many golds as in previous years; it's their lowest gold medal haul since Auckland in 1990. That's about as small a consolation as they come. That's gold though. There's a common line of thought that says that a bigger population means that you should win more gold medals. Another way of looking at it is that a bigger population gives you a higher chance of winning each gold medal because you have more people to choose from. So Australia had a 5 times higher chance of winning each gold than NZ. Wouldn't that be reflected in the total medal count then?

Ranking	Country	Total Medals
1	Australia	177
2	England	142
3	India	101
4	Canada	75
5	New Zealand	36

Well, I guess we moved up a few spots. Unfortunately, Australia didn't budge. It looks like I have to manipulate the data a little bit more to get what I want. Luckily I'm a scientist, so that's pretty much my job.

For my next trick I'll look at number of gold medals per capita. Surely a big old country like Australia will falter when faced with the likes of small-and-mighty NZ. I'll use millions of people per gold medal so the numbers don't get out of hand. The smaller the better in this case.

Ranking	Country	Population per Gold Medal
1	Nauru	0.01
2	Cayman Islands	0.06
3	Samoa	0.06
4	Australia	0.30
5	Bahamas	0.35
9	New Zealand	0.73

Curses! I suppose that knocked them off the top spot. I think I can do better than that though, and maybe even get New Zealand a little higher. Modern sports is all about money, right? Then GDP (in millions of USD$) per gold medal should weasel out the over-spenders.

Ranking	Country	GDP per Gold Medal
1	Nauru	$60
2	Samoa	$163
3	Cayman Islands	$1549
4	Kenya	$2516
5	Cyprus	$6227
9	Australia	$12497
16	New Zealand	$20860

Ha! Take that Australia! What's the matter? Earn too much money do we? So that's the first task, taking Australia out of the top 5. Sadly, NZ has also been pushed down, all the way to number 16. For us to overtake Australia I'm going to need to get things nice and convoluted on the home straight. Here goes. GDP in USD$ per head of population per gold medal. This can't possibly fail...

Ranking	Country	GDP per Capita per Gold Medal
1	India	$28.7
2	Kenya	$65.2
3	Nigeria	$97.1
4	Uganda	$232.8
5	South Africa	$476.7
7	Australia	$555.7
19	New Zealand	$4747.6

Damn it! Lousy Aussie overachievers. Australia actually did slightly better and NZ did slightly worse. That was a waste of time (unlike the rest of these tables...). Good on India though, sort of. They must have blown a lot of lunch money on training their athletes for these games.

I suppose whatever way you look at it Australia did pretty well. Not even the fact that they have the second highest GDP per capita of all the nations competing at the Commonwealth Games (Isle of Man has the highest) can account for the number of gold medals they are capable of pulling in, they just got too many. I would have loved to look at medals per athlete competing per country, but Wikipedia let me down there. Not even Google could find me the information I needed.

I've tried all sorts of combinations and I just can't get NZ ahead of Australia. I guess the only hope for all my Oz-bound friends, when faced with the inevitable gloating Aussie, is to point out that they earn 40 times as much per person than India and could only manage twice as many golds. If they start pointing things out, like the fact that we earn 30 times as much as India and only managed 1/6th as many gold medals, then just keep spouting figures in terms of foreign currencies, arbitrary multiplications and decimal points until they get bored and start hitting you. Anything is better than that bloody gloating.

Anand then...

I used to think television-induced outrage was reserved for the bitter elderly and the perpetually unemployed. I’ve realised in the past couple of days that it is now the right of every New Zealander to race into a state of hysteria without stopping to think that there might be something more important to worry about.

I am of course talking about Paul Henry’s latest controversy. The crux of the issue appears to be that him asking if Govener-General Sir Anand Satyanand was ‘really a NZer’ and then going on to ask the Prime Minister if he was going to appoint someone who ‘looked and sounded more like a NZer’ was deemed extremely racist. Judging from the sheer amount of outrage, media coverage and water-cooler conversation around the subject, I have to assume that it was more racist than Hone Harawira, a member of parliament, stating that he wouldn’t want his daughters bringing home a pakeha, or Winston Peters’ ‘Yellow Peril’ campaign from a few years ago, or Michael Laws opening his mouth. I don’t think that’s true, not even close.

Paul Henry may be racist. It’s highly likely that he is. Not in an overly malicious way, but from a number of his comments it’s reasonably clear that he holds different opinions for members of different races. However, the questions he asked were not racist, especially not as racist as everyone seems to think.

Firstly, ‘is he really a NZer?’. At it’s base, this is a sign of ignorance, if anything, rather than racism. I myself am a first generation NZer. My mother is Dutch and my father is British. People have said to me ‘oh, I thought you were German’. I wasn’t offended. I was a little taken aback, but that was it. If I did consider myself Dutch then I imagine being called German might be a little offensive, however I consider myself an NZer so I dismissed it as an odd observation. The truth is that in such a multi-cultural country, it is unclear who is an NZer and who is not. It doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t make it any more obvious. When Anand Satyanand was first appointed as Governer-General many people asked ‘is he an NZer?’. In fact, soon after his appointment Sir Satyanand himself said in an interview, ‘I imagine during [my term as Governer-General] there will be some who will say “there is one of us being one of them” while for others it will be a case of saying “there is one of them being one of us”. So even he acknowledged that his Indo-Fijian descent might cause a bit of confusion. The fact is that when you see a person of Indian descent (be it Indian or Indo-Fijian) with an Indian name, your first assumption isn’t that they are from NZ. With nearly a third of the World's population fitting that description and not being NZers, to make that assumption would be statistically ignorant (I’ll confess my own ignorance here, in that I’m not aware of the difference between Indo-Fijian names and those from countries in the sub-continent). It is also not a pre-requisite that the Governer-General be an NZer. So, assuming complete ignorance, that question in itself is not unreasonable, nor is it racist.

That leads me to the next question in question, ‘are you going to choose someone who looks and sounds like an NZer?’. Now I admit, that is a stupid and irrelevant question. It’s not racist, at least nowhere near the level of racism that it’s been elevated to, but it is stupid. It doesn’t matter if the Governer-General instantly portrays an image of being an NZer or not, that's never been a consideration in their selection, so why ask? Most likely it was blurted out to get a cheap laugh, which evidently was a bit of poor judgement. As for the alleged racism buried in the question, I don’t believe that Paul Henry was referring to Sir Satyanand himself. Rather, he was likely referring to the fact that Sir Satyanand looks Indian and has an Indian-sounding name. Given that the Governer-General’s parents are Indo-Fijian, I doubt that stating he looks Indian or has an Indian sounding name would cause him any offense, no more than calling me Dutch or British would cause me offense. The reference Paul Henry made was to the man on paper, not the man himself, and it most certainly was not a reference to every NZer of Indian or Indo-Fijian descent. Extrapolating a stupid question about a man’s name deisgned to get a cheap laugh into full-blown xenophobia is more than a bit extreme.

I like Paul Henry. I think he’s often very funny and is the only celebrity that regular calls out the media on its lazy practices. I don’t agree with everything he says, particularly his extreme right views of some things such as Government spending, and he can definitely go too far at times. On the whole though, I think television is a better place with him on it. I’m glad to see that Rick Ellis, CEO of TVNZ, has said in an interview that he has no intention of sacking him.

People in this country have become extremely sensitive, and often I feel that that sensitivity is extremely misguided. It’s like there are people in this country who just meet up for a protest, pick up a newspaper and decide what to write on their signs. And too often that newspaper is the New Zealand Herald, which makes matters that much worse.

I’m not condoning racism here, I’m saying that I don’t believe what Paul Henry said should be considered racist. I hope everyone moves on before October the 18th, so Paul Henry can come back to Breakfast and start gearing up for the next bout of over-blown controversy that will inevitably come. I expect nothing less.

Update (08/10/2010): Really India? You're angry at NZ because one TV personality laughed at the name 'Dikshit'? Newsflash India, sometimes your names appear funny to us because they contain certain portions that we consider to be rude words. That's funny. Was there a national incident when Billy Birmingham released any of the 'Twelfth Man' CDs, most of which contain jokes about the names of cricket players from the sub-continent? The name 'Dikshit' is actually quite funny because it contains two very closely related rude words. That's not racist. It's only funny when mispronounced anyway, so Paul Henry wasn't even laughing at her real name (although when pronounced properly it's possibly funnier; Sheila Diksit - sounds like an Aussie porn-star). It was childish, but not racist. When I was in London, I giggled to myself every time the voice came over the speaker and said that the train terminated in Cockfosters. And that only has one such word in the name. It isn't a racial slur if you laugh at someone's name. It's not a reflection of the person and it certainly isn't a reflection of their entire race. It's just a reflection of that inner child in all of us that still smiles when we see the word 'poo'. It might be insensitive if you laugh in their face, but the act of laughing alone simply denotes ignorance and immaturity, not racism. Maybe the bit about the name being appropriate because she was Indian was a little racist... If he'd just pronounced it correctly and gone with Aussie porn-star there wouldn't have been an issue.