Do librarians have a sense of humour?

Of course they do, LOL!

Message from God

te he...

Drawing a veil over (real) freedom

I'm fascinated by the current veil debate; it seems to me we have two entrenched positions neither of which is actually focused on the real issue,  two opposing sides arguing about a straw man that is irrelevant to the actual ethical question raised by this issue.

On the left we have a lot of hand-wringing about the role of Government, i.e. Governments should not be legislating what people can or can't wear and on the right we have indignation that an Islamic tradition (alien to them) must be swallowed lock stock and barrel meaning veils should be able to be worn in courts and schools etc..

Both positions miss the point and that is should the rights of the Woman be protected by the Government? Its all very well valuing freedom from being bossed around by the authorities but where is the concern about being bossed around by Husbands and Brothers or religious authorities?

Consider the following points,

• People bleat on about religious freedom, but the veil is nothing to do with Islam or religion, there are no religious texts or edicts that mandate wearing one?
• People bleat on about racism, but Islam isn't a race?
• People bleat on about tolerance, but should we be tolerant of backward (in relation to our own cultural evolution) systems that are intransigent and demand special privileges with threats of violence?
• People bleat on about freedom of expression, but we throw people in jail for being naked in public, isn't this a double standard?
• The silence from feminists on this issue is deafening.

It's about time we take a rational approach to this issue, if it is safe to wear something and the wearer wants to wear it then fine, if there's a rational and therefore practical reason why something shouldn't be worn, i.e. a disguise in a courtroom or a necklace in a factory then ban it! If any adult person is being bullied (by anyone) into wearing something against their will then they should be supported to the hilt by the law in a proportional and fair manner, stuff "culture" or "tradition".

Some old news

A couple of stories tweaked my interest this morning, firstly we have a triumph of engineering and science over stupidity and secondly the exact opposite.

First up is the salvage of the Costa Concordia, a huge cruise ship that ran aground and tipped over next to the small island of Giglio in 2012. The ship capsized due to what appears to be an act of negligence by it's Captain for which he is standing trial. Not withstanding the loss of life which is bad enough, the wreck is cluttering up what is a beautiful coastline. It could have probably been left to break up naturally but it would have taken decades to do so and caused untold environmental and economic damage in the process. The process of righting and then floating it so that it can be towed away to a scrapyard is a monumental engineering project, the forces and masses involved mind boggling, however it looks like the salvage team have been successful in the first phase which is to bring the ship back up to the vertical and to place it on a submerged platform, the time-lapse video of the process is amazing.

Next we have the anti-evidence brigade, a coven of senior politicians that include John Redwood, Peter Lilley, Andrew Tyrie and Graham Stringer who seem to hell bent on ignoring or misrepresenting the mountain of scientific evidence on man-made climate change. The debate last Tuesday, proposed by MP David Davies, seemed to be awash with fables, conspiracy theories and zombie myths; at the very least Mr Davies owes the house some corrections for the woeful errors and flagrant misrepresentations he made during the debate. The motivation for such apparent feeble powers of comprehension among such expensively educated men is predictable, the politicians mentioned all have links to the oil industry and seemed to be attempting to use this debate to cement some kind of kinship in denial, as Upton Sinclair once said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!". For me, the scene was reminiscent of a kind of Scopes monkey trial, a flavour of fundamentalism that is unhelpful and much like religious objections to progress based on rational investigation a millstone around the necks of future generations.

One gigantic step

What were you doing in 1977?

In the Spring of that year I remember buying the Fleetwood Mac album "Rumours" and playing it obsessively for weeks. Later in the Autumn I remember hearing the Sex Pistols and The Clash for the first time causing me to reject my precious Fleetwood Mac album (figuratively of course, it cost me £2.99 after all!) to buy a baggy mohair jumper, a pair of 10 hole DM's and to make my hair spiky. I remember being thoroughly bored by the whole silver jubilee thing (nothing changes) and upset that Marc Bolan died in a car crash, I guess you could say that I was a fairly typical stroppy teenager. What passed me by in my youthful self obsessed haze (I must have missed the relevant edition of "Tomorrow's World") was the launch of a spacecraft called "Voyager 1", despatched in September of that year it's mission was to study the outer planets. On 25th August 2012 (confirmed yesterday) that little tin bucket full of transistors and solder (plus an LP record) officially left our Solar System, the first man-made object to achieve that feat.

How far is it to the edge of our solar system?  About 12 billion miles or in other words, a bloody long way! Voyager is travelling at 100,000 miles per hour or to express that on a more understandable scale its about London to Bristol in 3 seconds! Even so, it has taken 36 years to reach proper "interstellar space" and what's more mind boggling is that even at this huge speed it will take a further 40,000 years to reach the next nearest star to our Sun! (unfortunately long after it's Plutonium power source has run out)

In some ways its a shame that Voyager was launched when it was, i.e. at the dawn of the digital age, if it had current digital/computer technology on board imagine the hi-resolution pictures it could be sending back. It's a sobering thought for us folks of a certain age that even if we launched another voyager now I probably wouldn't be around to see it reach the same point. On the positive (and less self obsessed) side though, what a fantastic achievement!

10bil LOL ;)

I read this evening that Twitter intends to float on the stock exchange, they reckon that the price will be $10 billion, that's an 18X multiple on revenue which I suppose isn't too outrageous bearing in mind the eyeballs it attracts today and the sheer scale of the global mind-share it has. I won't be investing though as I think their business model is unrealistic, the amount they charge for access to their data and the channel model they've opted for seem too much like hard work for potential business consumers like me. I reckon unless they crack the commercial market and diversify quickly others will eat into their share of the personal micro-blogging scene driving their value down, for this reason I'm out! (like they care :)

Welcome to the 1920s

I see today that the Church in Wales has voted to allow Women Bishops; many would say about time too, some (incredibly) would say that such a move represents a mortal blow to the unity of their organisation, as an outsider and someone interested in promoting secularism, reason and tolerance as a way of achieving cohesion between all the different elements of society I hope that this is too little, too late.

Makes perfect sense...

Saw this cartoon today, it made me smile, which is always a positive on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon...

Weekend beers

I've been trying some different craft beers lately; there seems to be a resurgence of interest in beer of late in the UK with an explosion of choices ranging from traditional regional bitters through to American style hop busting IPAs as well as more exotic "flavoured" beers which are paired with everything from fruit to coffee!

Here are four interesting examples from a small Scottish brewery called Brew Dog, they focus on individual hop varieties (names on the labels) but in all other respects are made to the exact same recipe. The idea is that the drinker gets to directly experience the flavours of the different hop species and is able to compare and contrast them, all in all an interesting taste experiment. The hops are from all over the world, Goldings from the UK (Kent), Waimea from down under (New Zealand), El Dorado (USA) and Dana (Slovenia) and the in the finished beers the differences between them were marked. My favourite was the Waimea, lemony, clean, fresh and seemingly lighter than all the others even though the alcohol level was exactly the same in each. My least favourite was the Goldings which tasted more fruity but in a soapy/perfumed kind of way, like an old fashioned 70s home brew, they were all nice enough and very drinkable but at 6.7% ABV only in small quantities!

What's the point?

As usual JesusAndMo nails the hollowness of the religious position..

Paradise

I was speaking to a friend the other day about "ideal" holidays, she said she was a beach fan and that her idea of a perfect holiday would be the Maldives, in fact if given the choice (and unlimited funds) she would go there every year. Not being a beach person (fair skinned and short attention span) I was interested in why the Maldives were so great, her response was an unequivocal "it's paradise".

Whenever I hear that word my spider senses start to twitch, in the case of the Maldives I couldn't help but recall a BBC program about the Indian Ocean that visited the Maldives, sure, the brochure views of azure sea and palm fringed white sand were present and correct but there was also an apocalyptic scene of the "rubbish island" which is a stinking, fly infested pile of dead coral covered in all of the garbage that the tourist industry generates, it was quite eye opening, barge after barge simply piling up all manner of detritus and pollutants seemingly without any other disposal solution. I also happened on this story today about an unfortunate 15 year old Maldivian girl who having been raped by her step father was sentenced to 100 lashes for "fornication", as you can probably guess the Maldives have an "Islamic" government. Only after an international pressure campaign that called for holiday boycotts and got two million signatures was the sentence overturned.

I guess "paradise" is a relative term; in the immortal words of Don Henley and Glen Frey "you call some-place paradise, kiss it goodbye"..

Silly ink

Saw this and it made me chuckle, the dangers of cherry picking..

Offensive?

Here's a shocking and sober story for this 21st century of ours. In the home of the brave and the land of the free, no not Yorkshire but the good o'l US of A an atheist by the name of David Silverman applied for a custom number plate, nothing wrong with that I hear you say however it just so happens that Silverman is the President of American Atheists and so naturally he asked for his number plate to read "ATHE1ST". His request was denied by the traffic authorities in the state of New Jersey, the reason given was that this would be offensive!!

In the immortal words of Jim Royle, "land of the free my arse!"

Slip sliding update

Looks like we won't be raining fire down on anyone this weekend... more PIMMS anyone?

Slip sliding away

With the western world seemingly sliding toward greater involvement in the conflict in Syria its probably a good time for our politicians and leaders to think seriously about the pros and cons of military action. On the one hand we have an atrocious situation where thousands of people are being killed on a monthly basis and on the other a political, ethical and legal quagmire that could seriously bite us if done wrong. If it were me I'd try to build a model and iterate through different scenarios in order to reason about the possible outcomes, it would be a very complex model of course. I wonder how our government will do it, I read today that parliament has been recalled to debate it so it seems likely that something will happen. It's an interesting thought experiment to try to write down the list of factors, even more so to try to think about scoring them, anyway, here's my list (0=bad, 10=good).

Factor	Score	Comment
Saving lives	6	Short and long term angles to this but should help
Ethical	7	What would we do if our own people were being gased
Self interest	3	Not a huge amount of trade with Syria but they do have some oil
Cost (money)	4	Not as expensive as Iraq, could do without it in a recession
Cost (human)	4	As long as it's an air campaign, not huge (like Libya?)
Complexity	2	Horribly complex, Russians, Turks, Americans - political rats nest
Impact(failure)	3	Bad but not too bad
Impact(success)	7	Can't see a massively positive outcome, perhaps a construction windfall?
Inconvenience	8	Most ordinary people won't notice any effect
Impact(long-term)	7	Probably won't affect the terror situation, might upset the Russians
Political	6	Probably good for the tories
Hypocrisy	4	Why are drone strikes less ethical than gas bombs?
Evidence	4	Need something incontrovertible

If you then take the average of these factor scores you end up with 5, i.e. possibly only just worth doing but not conclusive either way, which pretty much sums up my feelings about it.

The wrong kind of woo II

I know Muslims aren't that fond of cartoons but someone in the Saudi Arabian government should take a look at this characteristically accurate cartoon from xkcd.com, for me it just about sums up religious (aka magical) thinking and its unsubstantiated claims to have authority to interfere in government and legal matters.

The wrong kind of woo

Apparently the religious authorities in Saudi Arabia are stepping up their efforts to stamp down on the wrong kind of magic. The infamous Saudi "religious police" are expanding anti-witchcraft units around the country, units that convicted some 215 sorcerers in 2012, punishing them in a variety of ways for example fines, public flogging and in some extreme cases even beheading.

A belief in magic is of course widespread throughout the world; I would argue that to be a proper Christian, Hindu or Jew you must believe in the supernatural aka "magic", a suspension of the natural order and an interference in human affairs by invisible and purposeful forces. I'm often surprised how "western" Christians I know look down on primitive practices like this; from my point of view they don't look all that different to talking snakes and whispered prayers. In fact the only discernible difference I can see is that aggressive religions in places like Europe have been forced back into their respective boxes by 400 years of relentless secular and scientific progress and success which on the whole religions tended to impede.

There are of course other cultural factors at play here, the eternal fascination that superstitious authorities seem to have with sex; I've always wondered why forbidden religious practices almost always seem to centre around Women and invariably require practitioners to be naked? Then there is the delicious possibility of settling tribal scores using unfalsifiable bollocks, wouldn't we all love to dispose of an annoying neighbour or a nagging wife with a swift and effortless accusation of "magic", how convenient, how human.

23 varieties

I'm a big fan of wine particularly red wine, collecting and sampling (in moderation of course) is a major hobby of mine so I was pleased to notice this heart warming story about it this morning. Apparently red wine has even more complex compounds in it than previously thought and a recent investigation by scientists in Australia has uncovered 23 new ones previously undiscovered that may yield health benefits for all kinds of ageing related diseases. Everyone who's had an "ageing" week at work can fully understand the health benefits of a glass or two of red wine on a Friday night so I reckon that's case closed, we should all appreciate good wine more.

Coincidently my parents came over for Sunday lunch last weekend and I opened something nice to have with our roast lamb, the picture above is the wine we had (Sarget de Gruaud-Larose), it's from Bordeaux and my favourite district of Bordeaux which is called St. Julien. Normally you should leave good claret like this for at least 10 years before you drink it but in this case I took a chance and the bottle was from the 2005 vintage, a good year for Bordeaux. The wine had a good nose of cedar and red berries, plenty of soft fruit, full bodied but well balanced with a typical St. Julien finish, memorable. I'd say it was drinking well now but also that it has plenty of legs left in it, at least another 5 years in the dark wouldn't hurt.

Not a cheap wine (about £20) but think of the health benefits!

The God quotient

There is a paper doing the rounds at the moment which is a meta-analysis of various intelligence related studies that concludes atheists are smarter than religious people (on average). I'm reasonably schooled in maths and statistics but I can't understand how different kinds of intelligence measures can be combined to calculate a single correlation, it would seem like a case of apples and pears to me, anyway I'm also not sure a complex thing like intelligence can be boiled down to uni-dimensional measures like this? Mathematically it's probably OK but it doesn't mean much in the real world. I know plenty of religious people who are smarter than me in many different ways and I know atheists who are as thick as pig excreta, luck, environment and personality must also play a significant role in ones deistic outlook I reckon (but only have anecdotal evidence for that)

I'm sure that social scientists can use statistics to prove that social scientists are cleverer than you but I'm also sure that those who still use chickens entrails to determine things will continue to disprove them with gut feel..

Socially networked world

How true is this...

Slow news day

I was watching the BBC news channel this morning whilst munching on my breakfast and thinking to myself that the actual "news" content of the bit stream was close to zero; a series of pieces whining about the NHS interspersed with pointlessly elaborate weather reports. I actually watched two almost identical weather reports separated by only 6 minutes! Now either that's a reflection of some new and incredibly precise meteorological science or a desperately slow news day!

I reckon the BBC should challenge their audiences a bit more, instead of pointless Summer "news" they should re-run dramatic old news stories like the sinking of the titanic, the 2005 ashes victory or the relief of Mafeking, see if anyone notices.

Frontier mentality

I noticed a rather odd story on the BBC site yesterday it highlights the abnormal rate of church construction in Romania at the moment and contrasts this expensive hobby with the generally dire and cash strapped state of the economy there. I visited Romania in 1986 a few years before the collapse of the Ceausescu regime, it felt to me like a very grey and sinister country. I remember being struck by how there was a feeling about the place of being at the edge of Europe, a frontier between a familiar culture and the heathen darkness of Asia. This feeling was undoubtedly implanted by stories of Vlad the Impaler and his quest to defend the extremities of Christendom against the Ottoman hordes which are laid on thickly throughout the tour of Bran Castle (of Dracula fame) near Brasov which is near where I was staying.

Perhaps this desire to re-establish Christian traditions so vigorously is a reaction to the threatening spectre of an expanding Islamic influence from the East again or is maybe a knee jerk reaction from years of being oppressed under an atheistic communist dictatorship, whichever is the case it seems to me like Romanians could probably better spend their money building a few roads and hospitals before they fill elaborate buildings with credulity and candle smoke. Of course private Romanian citizens should be able to spend their cash however they like though I do hope none of the charity that secular countries like the UK donate to them ends up as concrete narthex foundations otherwise Daily Mail readers will start referring to Eastern Europe as "bongo bongo" land...

Pro-humanitarian

I saw this story today in the Independent it left me thinking what the hell is wrong with some people, especially some supposedly educated Americans in the Southern states?

The article is about the last abortion clinic in Mississippi an Alamo of rationality and humanity in Jackson where Women run a gauntlet of arrogant and aggressive morons shouting threats of hell fire and waving little black books who do everything they can to harass and abuse Women going about their lawful business. I guess if you feed people enough supernatural delusion with a side of political certainty from an early age you will eventually manufacture monstrous personalities like these; people who are bloated with entitlement and propped up by an illusion of absolute knowledge, such shameless and random inhumanity is incomprehensible to me.

We have isolated incidents of conflict on this subject the UK of course, sadly we still have some fundamentalist theocratic Christians here too but relative to Mississippi reproductive healthcare would appear freely available and a private matter between the doctor and her patient under the (secular) law of the land, the way it should be.

Geek partners

My wife would empathise with these, she would probably add a few additional ones too, for example "bringing evidence into an argument" and "insisting on feature comparisons when buying expensive things" and "working out what it would cost NOT to do something"....

Verse du jour..

"Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; his number is 2,347% APR repayable over 1 year"

Complex? not really, I Guess CofE CEO Justin Welby won't be getting his positive media buzz KPI bonus this quarter..

Awkward Bible moments

Love this idea, create an "alternative" Children's Bible (or any holy scripture) as a counter to the religious indoctrination and blatant cherry picking that occurs in our junior schools up and down the county (even the secular ones!). No need to exaggerate or lie, there are plenty of contradictions, obscenities, absurdities and awkward moments in the real things to work with, it just needs someone to point them out. In my experience children are quite capable of using reason to see these stories for what they are (i.e. tools for indoctrination) when presented with _all_ the facts. Perhaps then the 40% or so of non-religious people in the country could also lobby the Government to insist that it is presented in R.E. classes just like the Christian (et al) alternatives are (for balance), seems fair to me.

Apparently the book will be hitting the shelves in time for Christmas, a worthy stocking filler if ever there was one, until then, here is another example (click the image to see a bigger copy),

Smile please..

Forget about the royal baby news here's an achievement much more impressive and unusual than the birth of another Human Being, something incidentally which happens about 350,000 times daily on our planet. The photograph above is of exactly that, i.e. our planet, and was taken from the vantage point of an orbit of the planet Saturn, imagine what historical explorers like Magellan, Cabot and Cook would have thought of this achievement.

The picture was snapped by the Cassini probe at a distance of a billion miles and shows the Earth as a pinpoint of light in the centre right of the picture. Should the new royal baby ever get to be king he would be wise to view his importance through the sobering lens of this photograph; he would be ruler over 0.05% of a few pixels.

Self analysis

I saw this article today and it made me think about what kind of atheist I am; as the title suggests and I already suspected atheists are pretty much like everyone else i.e. a complex assemblage of genetic, cultural and environmental stuff that is difficult to pin down and impossible to define in less than a million words (minus a belief in the supernatural of course). According to the article there are six different types of atheist, although when I look at the list I can empathise with different aspects in each of the categories. I suspect it's exactly the same for believers which for me makes it less rather than more likely that they are right about the nature of the Universe, i.e. Complex beings like Humans are all different and that's the only real truth of the matter.

Anyway, here is my summary of the six different kinds of atheist, see what you think...

1. Intellectual Atheist - intellectually stimulated by information about atheism and the "debate" - likes arguing and is usually well versed in books and articles about religion and atheism.

2. Activist - Not content with just disbelieving in Gods, they want to tell others why religion should be rejected and why society would be better off without it etc. Tend to be vocal about political issues like gay rights, feminism, environment etc.

3. Seeker-Agnostic - Unsure about the existence of God but keeps an open mind, recognises the limits of human knowledge, embrace uncertainty and hold no firm ideological positions.

4. Anti-theist - Regularly speaks out against religion, sees religion as ignorance or delusion. They believe that obvious fallacies in religion and belief should be pointed out openly and addressed in some way.

5. Non-theist - Apathetic or disinterested, simply do not concern themselves with religion or the questions surrounding it. Religion plays no role in their lives, a simple absence of anything religious from their mental space.

6. Ritual atheist - Don't believe in Gods but still finds some religious teachings useful, may participate in specific rituals, ceremonies, meditation etc. Attracted to symbolism inherent within religious traditions but without needing the associated supernatural parts.

For me, I'd say something like:

Giving a tuppence..

People here in the UK are preoccupied with two all consuming topics at the moment, firstly there's the weather which has been warm and sunny (shock horror!) and secondly one of our royal family is due to have a baby at any moment. I can't really get too excited about either of these natural phenomenon, sure, nice weather is, well, nice. As for royal babies, OK, having a baby is usually a wonderful (and terrifying in equal measure) experience for any parent but I'm not a great fan of singling out specific Homo Sapiens within the population for special treatment on the sole basis that one of their ancestors hundreds of years ago happened to be a more successful bandit and war-monger than anyone else.

In other news, I took a long overdue holiday last week and packed the family off to Devon for a week to visit some friends and to escape the rat race for a while. It was just what the doctor ordered, we hardly watched any TV, read very little e-mail and generally kicked back and did nothing but swim, play tennis, BBQ and socialise with friends. In an era of cheap foreign travel it's sometimes easy to forget how beautiful England can be, I know its a cliché but when the sun is shining and the roads are relatively quiet it really takes some beating. Anyway, I switched the TV on this morning to catch up with the news only to find that the BBC seemed to alternate between pictures of pink fatties eating ice cream and shots of sweaty reporters desperately trying to think of something to say against the backdrop of a London maternity clinic entrance door; is there really nothing else going on?

I guess if you're lucky enough to have skin that tans easily and like to read Hello magazine while eating Haagen Dazs then now is your moment but personally I really couldn't give a tuppence for any of it.

Settled

I saw this on the wonderful xkcd site today, it made me chuckle, which is what I like to do on Fridays before gloriously sunny weekends...

Coincidental miracles..

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
-- David Hume

So I read that the Catholic tribe are going to declare that their ex-leader John Paul II has become a supernatural being; their claim is that even though he's long dead some part of his conciousness still exists and is able to communicate with living people and exert invisible forces at the cellular level within the bodies of certain cherry picked individuals (also Catholic) to cure them of illnesses that are seemingly incurable; all this from a distance of thousands of miles from the crypt in Rome where his corpse lies serenely decomposing.

Statistically of course being cured (or appearing to be cured) of certain diseases like Parkinsons is very rare but statistically improbable events within large populations of things (7 billion human beings in this case) happen all the time; the medical establishment even measure and document them. The good philosopher David Hume advised us to ponder this over 200 years ago, he suggested that we consider what is more likely, that a particular individual has an occurrence of a remission from a condition (that many have had before and since) or that a dead body can exert curative forces supernaturally across vast distances?

The balance of probability on this seems pretty clear to me and clearly those Catholics need to get a grip on reality; next they'll be claiming that a Brit can win Wimbledon!

The art of listening..

Most Religions frown upon this particular art form, as usual, Jesus and Mo nails it.

Pointless

I read today that channel 4 will be providing extensive coverage of Ramadan this year. For those that don't know Ramadan is the Muslim period of prayer and fasting that lasts roughly one month every year, a period of 30 or so days when Muslims are not supposed to eat, drink, smoke or have sex between dawn and sunset. I'm sure TV coverage of hungry, thirsty and horny people praying will be riveting for some, but as an atheist I would struggle to think of any kind of coverage of anything more pointless (well, maybe big brother or that awful thing in the jungle)

Channel 4 is claiming that these programmes will "provoke" us non-Muslims and bring to our attention the period of personal sacrifice and worship about to take place, what? In what kind of warped universe is the act of skipping lunch and afternoon nooky for a few weeks any kind of "sacrifice"? For me, (real) sacrifice, is doing something like Captain Oates did on the Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic he wandered out of a warm tent to a certain frosty death so that his comrades wouldn't be slowed down by his ill heath or perhaps the 300 Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae who faced overwhelming odds and yet stood their ground for their tribe; some might even see the deaths of the thousands of lads that went over the top at the Somme as some kind of sacrifice, let's not mince words though sometimes sacrifice can be stupid and pointless.

Surely true personal sacrifice has to contain some aspect of altruism or it's just plain old self interest, (imagined or otherwise) isn't it? Why would anyone be interested in or impressed by watching a bunch of people skipping lunch because they think this helps to feather their own imagined eternal nest like some kind of deistic version of the apprentice? I think what's more likely is that most non-religious and/or rational-secular people here will see this all as slightly comedic; something to be ridiculed and parodied (more like the egotistic, self-centred candidates on the TV show), certainly not thought provoking in the way the producers seem to hope.

Of course in a liberal democracy like ours people should be allowed to believe whatever they wish (including the people that think this kind of sacrifice is pointless) free speech is a privilege that unfortunately isn't afforded to most people in most Islamic countries. So, if some Muslims want to give up lunch, sex and silk cut then good for them, if others don't then good for them too! But, be careful what you wish for, some ideas and beliefs are probably better kept within the confines of our personal lives and not exposed to the barbed critique of outside and unsympathetic perspectives unless that criticism is sought; we all know how sensitive some people can be about these things.

Going, going, gone

So I read this morning that the Western Black Rhino is now officially extinct; how depressing.

4 billion years in the making, an uninterrupted lineage going back to the earliest cyanobacteria all those trillions of mutations, adaptations an unimaginable length of time and a mountain of struggle all terminated prematurely because some monkeys in sandals believe that the lump of keratin on its head cures demonic possession.

Don't pin it on me!

Here's an interesting piece on acupuncture, it's a summary of some 3000 scientific studies into the efficacy of this ancient pain control technique, as is fairly common with ritualistic procedures like this the conclusion is that from a medical point of view acupuncture is bunkum. No doubt the anti-evidence brigade will appeal to the mysteries of the ancients thinking this makes their lives a little more interesting and the practitioners (i.e. those that make a living from such shamanism) will be lobbing around accusations of closed mindedness, it all follows a fairly fixed pattern, that's the problem with fans of irrationality and superstition, they're really hard to pin down.

Supermen, so many to choose from...

According to this article on the CNN web site Warner Brothers are actively marketing the new Superman movie to church pastors in the USA; their logic seems to be that "Superman is like Jesus". To the more sceptical among us this looks like blatant commercial exploitation of a particular local market segment, but I wonder?

Clearly elements of the superman story are superficially like the Jesus story, both "men" are obviously "supernatural" beings with super-powers and in part at least, both are supposed to wander around the place doing good and promoting a certain set of values. In Superman's case those values are derived from the fight for a simplistic "mom and pop" form of social justice in 1950s USA and in Jesus's case the values seem to be those of a prophetic, rebellious and establishment-fighting first century Jewish preacher, to most of the religious right in America those two sets of values may merge and become indistinguishable. So far so good, but philosophically this is an odd alliance, some would argue that the majority of media moguls in Hollywood are of a political leaning more to the left than the right and would probably also conclude that there are more liberals than literals living along the palm lined boulevards of Beverly Hills. When I think about possible motives for this then money is clearly top of the list but could there be more to it?

Perhaps what's happening here is part of some kind of Trojan horse deal by which the secular liberals of tinsel town are attempting to counter the grass roots political momentum of the religious right? A supplanting of a central concept in the main monotheistic religions with an atheistic and secular idea, the idea that scripture is entirely man-made, i.e. a work of fiction.

Any parishioners listening to a preacher espousing the analogies of the two stories cannot possibly miss the most obvious conclusion and perhaps the subtext of this alliance in the first place, i.e. both Jesus and Superman are inventions of humans. Both superhero's were invented in the minds of men living in insecure times by cultures seeking comfort in the idea of an all powerful patriarchal figure that could protect them and fight a perceived evil force in their world. As evidenced by the beauty queen video I linked to earlier today  remarkably, there are still billions of people out there in the 21st century who believe in a literal interpretation of ancient philosophy books like the Koran and the Bible; losing this perspective is clearly a step towards a more tolerant and reason based approach to life, if more people get there via Superman then all hail Kal-El!

How do you know if you're deluded

In my experience delusions are invariably parochial and self-serving; assessing the measure of self interest attached to an idea or dogma is a fairly reliable way of separating delusion from reality.

Not wanting to stereotype or anything but...

Clearly this sequence of clips has been edited and the interviewees are probably attempting to be politically correct in the extreme but wow, just wow, if this is in anyway reflective of what beauty queens think let alone Americans more broadly then I find it incredible that they are able to function in a modern society at all! You'd struggle to trump this kind of ignorance in even the most primitive theocratic third world backwater.

Take a look, you'll get the idea pretty quickly.



All the classic Christian creationist bullshit is here in spades and not a sliver of anything that would suggest even the most basic understanding of the value of reason, evidence and science or even the difference between a belief and knowledge. You can't help but feel sorry for them, with such a limited world-view their perspectives must be pitifully constrained and self absorbed, quite amazing.

Run that by me again...

Why oh why

Saw this, was mildly amused..

I see what you did there..

Excellent cartoon from the reason stick

Victimless crimes

In a retrograde and unintelligible step (along with supplying missiles to the Syrian regime) the Russians seem to be intent on reintroducing blasphemy laws onto their statute book in order that secular protesters and anti-religious groups may be severely punished for "upsetting" religious people. Clearly the all powerful Gods of these same religious folk are insufficiently powerful and the people insufficiently sure of their own convictions to stand up to a bit of peaceful criticism (there are already adequate laws to deal with violent criticism), clearly these powers require assistance from the instruments of the Russian state, the "Jesus squad" perhaps?

New beer

I tried a new (to me) beer at the weekend, it's called "Wild Raven" from brewer Thornbridge who are based in Bakewell, Derbyshire. Thornbridge call their beer "craft beer", i.e. small production and innovative with a focus on flavour and very nice it is too. To the eye it looks like a stout, i.e. dark coloured, almost black but to the nose and tongue it's like a fruity American IPA, tons of fruit and hop flavours, nice weight, smooth and reassuringly bitter. This combination of attributes seems counter-intuitive, if you close your eyes you'd expect the beer to be a light amber colour but the overall effect is good. My only criticism would be the alcohol level which is quite strong at 6.6% it's not an issue from a flavour point of view, no alcohol burn at all but I like my ales to be around the 4% level if I have a choice. Other Thornbridge beers I've tried and like include Jaipur, Wild Swan, Kipling and Chiron, you can get the first three of these in Waitrose; recommended!

Why trust them?

At last the Church of England has decided that gay couples should after all be allowed to marry, this is good news for everyone it affects of course but surely this is a further nail in the coffin of the church? Allow me to elaborate.

We are told by these people (i.e. the Bishops that sit in our Parliament) that the source of our morality is or should be (their) God and is therefore objective, so what are we to think when this morality changes? It strikes me there are only 4 possible options.

1. There is a God and he cares about what people do with their genitals but sometimes changes his mind. This should be a terrifying proposition, here is an all powerful deity who sends you to paradise or purgatory depending on rules that he can change at any time? What about all those poor gay people throughout history who have already spent hundreds or thousands of years in hell, what compensation do they get?

2. There is a God who cares what you do with your genitals but the priesthood has misinterpreted him. Such a revelation should surely shake your trust in organised religion to the core? it means that the church can get God's will totally wrong. What if he really made genitals for a reason and we're all supposed to use them in joyful ways and the communication between heaven and earth is just totally garbled? We could be committing all kinds of omissions and errors and be completely oblivious to them.

3. There is a God who really doesn't care what you do with your genitals. So this would mean that all the angst and psychological pain suffered over the years by millions has been a huge unnecessary distraction and exists solely in the minds of the self appointed religions morality monitors, again, why trust them ever again?

4. There is no God, no afterlife, no eternal punishment or reward. The priests and shaman have been making it all up all along and using an invisible super-being to scare people into serving their own earthly whims. Religious people have been "had", so, rise up and throw off your chains!

I wonder which is more likely?

Augmented smut..?

I'm not quite sure why this would be surprising to anyone but the first "adult" applications are starting to be talked about for Google Glass. For those that don't know Google Glass is an augmented reality system which projects useful information (or stimulating information in this case) directly onto a special set of glasses that the consumer wears. I can think of all kinds of new and interesting applications for this technology, for example showing someone's Facebook page as you're talking to them allowing you to find topics of conversation that are mutually interesting. Something like that would be at the more civilised end of the spectrum but there are undoubtedly more fertile imaginations out there thinking up all kinds of sexually oriented flavours of that idea, "picture this person naked" etc. Whatever technology we come up with from the printing press, photography through to the internet humans are interested in sex and therefore sex sells; after all when you think about it we're all just monkeys in shoes really..

Useful models

These amazing pictures were taken at the University of California using an atomic force microscope, this device effectively probes the surface of a material with a very fine "needle" and measures the forces of attraction/repulsion to derive an image of what it finds, much like the tip of a gramophone needle riding in the groove of a record. The tip of this needle is actually a single molecule so the resolution is pretty fine, these pictures are showing a single molecule undergoing a reaction, i.e.  detailing the intermediate forms and bonds of the atoms as the reaction progresses. It's astonishing that the images show molecules looking remarkably similar to the stick models we used to use in Chemistry lessons, some bright spark in the past clearly latched onto the right idea for modelling these things.

Jesus fixed my hard drive..

Here's an amusing little story for a cloudy Wednesday morning, the Australian chap in the picture above is Jesus, yes the real Jesus of Nazareth! Former IT specialist Alan John Miller, or "AJ" as he prefers to be known, runs a Christian cult known as the Divine Truth from his home near the small town of Kingaroy in the state of Queensland, Australia and claims to be Jesus reincarnated. I watched his video and he seems to be sincere enough, lots of talk of love and human solidarity (especially "love", if you know what I mean), references to Bible characters and insider anecdotes about things like who was at the crucifixion and performing miracles; I guess no one can prove him wrong. He also claims to have visited the "spirit world" and talked to Plato and Socrates, personally I would have gone for Darwin and Alexander the great but "AJ" is clearly a dedicated Brazilian football fan.

For me, what's more amusing than this all too familiar cultist in-group, out-group mind trick is the huffing and puffing going on in blogs and news articles from Christians demanding "proof" that this person is in fact Jesus reincarnated, don't they understand, it's not about proof, it's about faith... After all, the only difference between a cult and a religion is that in a religion the person who knows its all a scam is dead.

Tipping points

Practically every interview I've seen of survivors of the recent tornado in Oklahoma have mentioned their "God" at some point in the dialogue, it doesn't bother me in the slightest of course however I must confess after a while it does sound a little contrived to my ears, perhaps it's the accent. BUT, never mind all that, here's something refreshing and something you don't see everyday, a regular person in mid-western America happy to let the world know that they are an atheist ON TV!. The woman in this interview was asked a completely dumb insensitive question by this facile TV presenter, he asked if she had "thanked the lord" (presumably for being spared), she replied, " no, because I'm an atheist" - good on'ya lady! Significant for two reasons, firstly it shows that belief in Yahweh or any other Deity has sweet FA to do with whether your house collapses on your head and secondly LOOK AMERICA a perfectly decent and nice person with a cute baby (not being eaten) who survives F5 tornadoes and doesn't need Jayzus to be her personal savior.

Although when you think about it the more interesting question for the followers of Jayzus in Oklahoma is why did he send the tornado to kill an innocent bunch of school children in the first place?... or maybe they're all just all praying to the wrong God?

Right direction

Released today here are the results of the 2011 census in the section about religion, Christians down 12%, Muslims up 2% and atheists up 10%, it would be easy to extrapolate the trend and calculate the year when Muslims will outnumber Christians as the largest religious group in England and Wales although I'm sure it won't be that simple, certainly not if the Daily Mail get wind of it.

Optical Illusion

Oh we humans are so easily deceived..

Human misery

In the many strata of human scum in our world there must be a particularly viscous layer reserved for clairvoyants who profit from the grief of others, particularly of the TV celebrity kind.

In the US today we learn of the discovery of three incredibly unfortunate and brave women who endured 10 years of captivity in what sounds like the hands of inhuman criminals for what purpose we can only imagine in our worst nightmares. This is bad enough but what shouldn't be forgotten is the message (supposedly from the "other side") given to the Mother of one of these women just before she died by a fraudulent old hag called Sylvia Brown, a so called TV clairvoyant who told her that her daughter was dead. Where ever Sylvia Brown is today (in jail with any luck) I hope she is feeling the deep shame she deserves.

PS. This isn't a picture of Sylvia Brown but I wanted a suitable image of a clairvoyant so I laid out several pictures of well known woo woo practitioners, closed my eyes and concentrated hard on a mental image of a fresh steaming turd; once the image was clear I let my hand be guided by my spirit helper (Pinocchio) to a particular photo and the star spangled image of Sally Morgan rose up from the pile.

Cryptozoology

I learnt a new word today, Cryptozoology, apparently it means the study of "hidden" animals, like the Loch-Ness monster, Abominable Snowmen or Bigfoot etc. I'm a firm believer in such creatures, it would be so cool if they existed that I don't want to handle the intellectual and emotional disappointment if it were shown they don't, so clearly they do! Fortunately you don't just need to take my word for it, we see the evidence of crypto-creatures all around us, you just need to have an open mind. Take the picture accidentally snapped by the Google street view camera for example (above), it clearly shows an entirely unknown (to science) species of cat! Those pedantic scientists don't know everything you know, after all, what's the point of human existence if you can't make stuff up and convince other people to believe it too, the endorphin rush that I get by feeling part of an in-group is so.. social, I'm not a whole person without it.

There are plenty of us around who feel this way, take the Christians who teach the ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) curriculum to children. As they point out, evolution can't be true since the Loch Ness monster exists and as for those whining secularists who nit-pick about "evidence" they're just not seeing the big picture, after all, it's only a few thousand kids we're talking about so what does it matter if they don't get a decent education, we need uncritical thinkers to host chat shows and write newspaper columns. The British Government even support such open-mindedness by providing positive OFSTED reports and limited funding to at least 5 ACE schools in Britain, Carmel Christian School, Bristol along with Excellence Christian School, Tower Hamlets, Redemption Academy, Stevenage, Kings Kids Christian School, New Cross, and The Lambs Christian School, Birmingham so it must be right?

Obvious solutions

Here is a horrific story, a five year old boy in Kentucky, USA was given (as a gift) a real gun; he then promptly shot his 2 year old sister dead.

Clearly the solution to this problem, as recommended by the pro-gun lobby in the USA, is to buy guns for ALL your children at the same time.