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In Oxford, UK, there has been something of a controversy in the local council when various families in council accommodation have requested that they needed gas cookers rather than electric cookers. The reason? Because their religion required them to cook over open fire.

This is sensitive because the council doesn't want to appear hostile to any particular religious faith but nor does it want to be held ransom to irrational demands. What might seem a perfectly reasonable request for those strictly observing edicts laid down in pre-medieval times, the very fact of its observance can appear utterly irrational. After all, why the insistence?

The council understandably doesn't want to be seen to be denying legitimate claims but it's tricky because if they give in to this demand, what other demands will follow? The problem is not the specific demand, which is easily met (though racists will take advantage of it) but the acceptance of irrational demands as being reasonable.

One local councillor has predicted demands from light-sabre-toting Jedi warriors for safe cupboards for their storage. But of course, there are more serious implications. What about a religious community who requires access to specific fresh food? Should the council be obliged to provide access?

The only reasonable way out of this political fix is to accept that people are free to observe whatever religious beliefs they want to but it is their choice because they are free to observe the traditions or not. Where a religion is imposing its will on them, that's a human rights issue rather than a demand on the council. If an individual wants to have a chapel/temple in their house, they can of course convert a room and deck it out as they want to, but there is no obligation on anyone else to provide it.

Of course the stronger position for the council to take is to explain clearly that religion is irrational, leads to discriminatory practices, and although a personal choice, should provide no obligation on any aspect of the state. Separation of church and state would clearly indicate where this irrationalism stops. Of course, that would have implications for how much influence the Christian churches have in the institutions of the state. Even the House of Lords starts with a Christian prayer.

By automatically giving respect to religious belief, we start on a chain of silly compromises with irrational behaviour. It's as if it's not possible to reject a religion-based demand on the grounds of irrationality because that might appear insulting to the person holding the belief. And if that position is accepted, it applies equally to the Jedi warriors and the followers of the Grand Leprechaun.

If the council gives in on the question of cookers (ludicrous though the issue seems) there will inevitably be cries of foul from the non- or other-religious who just want to switch from electricity and the only basis for discriminating will be by spreading more irrational nonsense. And the racists will have a field day claiming cultural discrimination.

Are we going to get Zoroastrians demanding fire platforms, and perhaps the Rastafarians demanding UV lighting? Hopefully the good folks of Oxford will have a good laugh at all this and just reject it - somehow I doubt it though.

I've recently bought a laptop with the intention of trying out a Microsoft-free zone. It came with the unwanted Basic version of Vista pre-installed with a lot of advertising gunk that took up 20GB of the disk. I cleaned it off, reformatted the disk, then installed Ubuntu 7.04, a remarkable version of Linux that runs from a CD so you can explore it first before installing it on your machine.

This is my first exploration of Linux despite having been developing software for a very long time and although the installation goes well, you are quickly brought home to the fact that Linux is an OS largely for developers, despite the hype. As an open source product, the support you get is from the open source community and consequently there is an unlimited amount of really helpful people giving uncoordinated and sometimes contradictory advice. This is particularly apparent when you discover something isn't working and appeal to the web for information.

It must be said that an incredible amount works straight away - the OS is after all completely free. But some things almost inevitably don't work. In my case it was the wireless connection to a router. Cable connection, fine. Wireless, nada.

Now for those who don't know about drivers... they are bits of software that allow the operating system to talk to the hardware you have in your machine, such as the keyboard, mouse, network cards, and so on. The hardware manufacturers provide drivers for the popular operating systems, and there's the problem. Until Linux is popular enough for manufacturers to make the drivers available (as they do by default for Windows), the job is left to enthusiasts who do it for nothing. Each time a device comes out, there is a hole until some group of developers provides a driver for Linux.

In my case, the wireless card built into my laptop isn't quite compatible so there are various steps required and that's where you take the plunge. In a very short time, you are typing arcane commands into a terminal window, opening configuration files and modifying various settings on the advice on members of the excellent Ubuntu forum, downloading new versions of drivers, unpacking tar files, compiling drivers, installing prerequisites, and generally getting very frustrated. If you enjoy the challenge, it can be fun.

For the novice with a bee in their bonnet about a piece of hardware that's not working, the task can quickly become very daunting and it's not because any of the steps are particularly difficult. It's simply that you cannot get a clear starting picture quickly enough to address your problems. The advice you get is often very detailed - but may not work, and you then don't know the consequences of what you've just done, making further diagnosis a bit more difficult.

So you have a steep learning curve. If you like that, it's fun because you find out a lot about how your system works. If you don't want to be bothered with it, you can easily just use what's there. No wireless? OK, use a cable.

What is most remarkable about the Linux community, from my very brief acquaintance with it, is that it is overwhelmingly well-meaning and helpful. I haven't come across any back-biting or snide comments, and even complete beginners are treated with the greatest respect and consideration. You actually feel welcome. It's not just the source that's open - the whole community seems to be.

I still haven't got my wireless working properly, but I'm enjoying finding out and communicating about the problem. And the prospect of a powerful OS that really is free is quite liberating. More on this in future blogs.

Last week the UK government came up with a formula for the acceptable mix of human and animal DNA in hybrid embryos developed for scientific research. The mix is 99.9% human and 0.1% animal DNA.

The way it works is that an animal ovum would have its genetic material removed and replaced with human DNA so that it is possible to develop stem cell lines which contain the same genetic information as the human DNA implanted. That offers the prospect of researching on unlimited amounts of stem cells compatible with sufferers of neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, and Alzheimers. The cells used for research would be indistinguishable from those of the donor DNA. But, there's a catch...

Despite the UK government backing down on banning human-animal hybrids for stem cell research, their draft legislation does not positively assert its legality. It explicitly bans the creation of embryos based on a human egg cell fertilised by animal sperm, and vice versa.

Even the claim that stem-cell research is made possible is debatable. Sir Richard Gardner, chair of the Royal Society's stem cell working group, thinks that the proposed legislation would put a shelf-life on the techniques and that as soon as newer and better techniques were developed, the legislation would quickly become restrictive.

But what exactly is the objection? Clearly the creation of hybrid animals with a mixture of human and animal features would make us feel uncomfortable and many would argue the line that it goes against nature. But we do such things with plant species all the time. We have an ethical sensitivity to larger moving animals which we don't typically extend to smaller animals or plants. No-one would think twice about eradicating smallpox, or creating a cross between disparate plants which can be encouraged to produce something useful.

We have a belief that the biological ecosystem is static and needs preserving. Certainly it needs protection from the rabid exploitation of commercial industry and it has always been true that the intricate interactions and equilibria are too little understood for us to safely control them. But we operate double standards when we partition off some species in this way, and especially when we consider humans.

Partly, we consider humans to be privileged and at the top of the tree, clearly able to impose our will on the rest of nature (to a point). That means we have a different ethics for humans compared to our treatment of animals and plants. It's our exploitation of nature that has produced the technical and scientific progress that we see around us. So we're not likely to stop farming any time soon.

But the other side of the coin is that in order to understand our own biology better and to cure illnesses, we illustrate just how close our biology is to our animal relatives. And if we give ourselves rights based on our biology, we feel hypocritical not to do the same for other animals.

In fact, rights for animals only make sense if we afford them the status of honorary people. If we consider people as animals and treat them as such, we have taken away what rights they have. Rights are claimed and exercised in human society. The ethical arguments about stem cell research are side-stepping the very real exploitative nature of the human relationship with the natural world. And just as the idea of using an animal to grow replacement human tissue seems grotesque to some people today, a hundred years ago the idea of using animal insulin, or even the possibility of a skin graft would have seemed awful.

The routine use of bacteria in generating pharmaceutical products is little different ethically from using hybrid tissues to produce stem cell lines. Both are exploiting the understanding of nature to benefit humans.