Toil and trouble..

As is tradition at this time of year, the BBC have summoned up the spirit of Halloween and featured a clutch of ghostly, ghoulish news articles for those fond of a ritual or two to consume (along with their left over Haribo's!) One particular piece caught my eye, it's about heritage agency "Historic England" asking people to record ritual markings on old (16/17th century) doorways and fireplaces that were put there in order to ward off witches and demons. As the article says, these marks, usually circle designs or particular letters, were supposed to confuse and entrap evil spirits. Clearly our ancestors were an incredibly gullible bunch, either that or the witches and demons of the day were pretty pathetic, you'd never catch a proper 21st century mythical creature being so easily defeated. Of course we don't believe this nonsense anymore in this country and the last witchcraft act was repealed in 1951 (alarmingly recently!) although it was tuned down over the years from it's barbaric heyday in the 16th century. 

What's often forgotten with all this jolly, pointy hatted tomfoolery re-enacted at Halloween is that real Women (usually vulnerable and poor), innocent women, were tortured and often murdered as a result of this religiously inspired insanity, no one knows for sure but it's estimated that at least 500 people were killed in this country alone and in Europe the picture was even worse. Incredibly there are still countries in the world today that execute people for witchcraft or turn a blind eye to vigilante mobs who do the same. These are people so monumentally stupid that they watch the wizard of oz and think it's a documentary! Countries like Saudi-Arabia, Uganda and India seem quite willing to put up with such epic failures of reason and justice; for us it's history, for some it remains reality.

Ghoulish ..

The Islamification of our culture continues... ;)

Scaring the children..

Totally terrified mine...

(is this the way to) Amarillo

More beer brewing pictures, today we have a fine specimen dry-hopping in the cooling Autumn air. This little number is a brown ale called "Jackie Brown" (for film buffs everywhere) and is a classic English brown ale with added American hops, in the photo you can see around 9 grams of Amarillo hops sitting in the fermenting vessel where they will soak for a couple of days before bottling. These hops were fresh from America (sent via chilled air freight from the West Coast) and from the 2016 harvest and were the most sticky, pungent hops I think I've ever used, wonderful aromas of citrus, apricot and peach fruits, I have big hopes for this brew!

Smirk II

Couldn't resist this one, the latest update on the Schiaparelli lander is here...

Friday smirk

So, here's a couple of topical jokes that you can use down the pub tonight, or while killing time when out this weekend scaring young children in your new evil-clown outfit...

1. My wife asked me to start treating her more like the Women she's seen in classic black and white movies... so I left her tied to the train tracks..

2. I'm confused, is Pete Burns, Dead or Alive?

3. Congratulations to West Ham, the only football club named after the two things ISIS hates.

Disclaimer; these aren't my own inventions, just the ones I've heard this week (and smirked at)

Dry times at the Sind Club

I see in the news today that they're proposing an alcohol ban in Pakistan; the Sindh province banned it on Thursday and many are now calling for a total ban across the whole country. The move is surprising since the Sindh province includes that country's largest city, Karachi (pop. 24,000,000) , which is still around 10% non-Muslim who I'm sure are thrilled at this development. If you ever wondered what many Muslims behave like when in an overwhelming majority then look no further than Pakistan, a secular, open and tolerant society it ain't. Yet another reason to avoid this place like the proverbial plague.. I wonder if they've broken the news to Blowers yet?

Pantheism?

Weird story in the news today about a weird cult, the Catholic church. Apparently this organisation has "banned" the scattering of dead people's ashes, they also disallow keeping ashes in ornamental containers and the splitting of ashes between members of a family (they only lifted a Catholic ban on cremation as recently as 1963!). Strict new Vatican guidelines dismiss the practice as "Pantheism", which as we all know is the worship or tolerance of many gods, and as any student of religious studies knows is nothing like Roman Catholic beliefs, with their myriad saints, archangels, spirits and trinitarian god-head.

I'm tempted to criticize this organisation (as I often do) by scoffing at their rather silly medieval belief in zombies rising from their (actual) graves come judgement day, but I reckon the real reason underpinning this dogma is much simpler (and "earthly"). If you read beyond the headline you discover that the guidelines dictate that unless you put the ashes in a church or graveyard then you'll not be a "proper" Christian, and presumably won't go to Heaven, in other words, sprinkle poor old auntie Mildred's ashes on our property (small fee may be applicable) or burn baby, burn! How quaint, I wonder where they stand on cricket stumps?

Starry starry night

Went out the other night for a bite to eat and to have a business meeting with a colleague, so since we were on expenses I went upscale a bit and booked a local one Michelin starred pub called the Royal Oak. Owned by Michael Parkinson (off the telly) and his son, this pub turned gastro-venue owes much of it's hefty price tags to this simple fact. Whilst the food was OK, IMO it wasn't really worth the "London money" being charged (£26 ish for a main course) and their policy of forcing customers to pay extra for vegetables you'd normally expect to see on the plate (like red cabbage with duck) seemed to rub even extra salt into the somewhat over-salty crab ravioli. 

My biggest beef though wasn't the £35 steak (potatoes £4.50 extra) so much as the wine list. Along with many other Michelin starred places these days, they feel it's perfectly fine to apply mark-up's of around 4-6 times onto bottles of decidedly average wine (even more for the "trophy wines"). I must admit I was a little surprised to find that this eatery doesn't publish their wine list on-line (most do these days) and now I think I understand why. If I'd have seen it in advance I think I'd have chosen a different place to go. I really object to paying £45 for a sub-£10 bottle of wine served in clunky pub-stemware. I'm quite happy to pay a reasonable margin for any service I receive (the service was good), I do understand how businesses work! But, this wine price-fixing among upmarket restaurants these days is just exploiting people's ignorance and/or blatant profiteering, star or no star, I shan't be visiting again in a hurry.

God gene

New J&M up today; Interesting idea. Much as I usually try to steer clear of articles in mainstream media that start with the phrase "scientists say", the cartoon refers to a recent study done at the University of Helsinki (ranked around 100th in the world) involving religious people and autistic people. The idea is that autistic people have a specific condition that makes them tend to view the world as entirely "physical", i.e. they struggle to comprehend the feelings or mental states of other people. Whereas religious believers often have the opposite problem, i.e. often conflating mental and physical entities, for example, believing that inanimate objects like rocks, rivers and mountains have spirits (as per many animistic belief systems) or that hurricanes are sent to punish gay people etc. The objective of the study was to see if there were any real correlation between these groups and their alignment to either physical or mental beliefs, apparently there is. 

I do wonder if there is such a thing as a "god belief gene", it would explain a lot; it would certainly help explain why (regardless of culture or environment) there always seems to be a reasonably consistent % of the population that simply doesn't believe whatever the pervasive cult or religion says.

Fake shake?

Funny tweet from a seemingly serious "Islamic Scholar"; when my wife saw this on the Twitter feed she said "what kind of car is that, and where can I get one!?" - I've always wondered why they don't allow Women to drive in places like Saudi Arabia.. I'm not an Islamic scholar of course but being an inquisitive sort I wonder why this problem doesn't also afflict Women passengers?

Reminds of the one about two nuns riding bicycles in the back streets of London. One says "I've never come this way before.", the other replies "me neither. It must be the cobblestones!"

Never a truer word..

Excellent cartoon from J&M; this kind of thing would simply be amusing if we didn't have real countries and Governments in this world like those in Saudi, Iran and Pakistan (among others) who seem to think that this kind of religiously inspired intellectual intolerance is perfectly OK because their God is clearly the "right" one and everyone else's view on this matter is wrong (as you do). There are many examples of people caught up in overtly biased legal processes in these theocratic hell-holes, take the case of "Asia Bibi" for example, a Christian Woman sitting on death-row in Pakistan, her crime? simply being a Christian. The crime of "believing the wrong thing" is alive and well in these places, usually with particular torments reserved for those who simply don't believe any of it, in fact in places like Saudi, Atheists are considered by some in their Government to be "terrorists", a level of state-promoted psychosis that's quite extraordinary to see in the 21st century.

100 People

This popped up on one of my feeds today; thought it was mildly interesting, some of these statistics (if true) surprised me, particularly how many people have a phone these days.

Everything that's wrong

I kind of agree with this, except I'm not sure it's our culture that's "wrong" so much as the effect of new (unresolved) challenges emerging in some of the elements that feed and shape it, especially education. It's worth noting that contrary to the assertions of many people with agenda's to impose, we live in an age of record prosperity, health and mobility. And despite there still being wars, skirmishes and the odd psychopathic ideology, we are also (on average) less likely to die a violent death than at any time in Human history. The odd blip like Trump should be expected; the trick will be teaching future generations mastery of critical and skeptical thinking, i.e. equipping them with the most reliable tools we know of in order to expose the hucksters and con-men before they screw things up for everyone.

It's good to talk

Interesting story in the computer press today about a software advance at Microsoft. A team from the Artificial Intelligence and Research department announced that the latest iteration of their speech recognition software had achieved an error rate of 5.9%, i.e. in a segment of normal human speech (i.e. conversation) it interpreted 94% of the words correctly, this is pretty similar (if not superior) to the rates you would expect a professional transcriber to achieve. This achievement, along with some other advances in NLP (natural language processing) and machine learning, opens the door to potentially having a proper spoken dialogue with computers rather than having to "type" stuff all the time. Removing the barrier of the keyboard and operating systems of modern computers opens them up to communities and uses that have proved difficult to satisfy, for example handicapped and elderly people. The race is now properly "on" to achieve fully integrated, voice controlled systems that do real and useful things in the real world. 

I recently got my hands on the new Amazon Echo device which admittedly has a limited set of topics currently, but has speech recognition and natural language processing capabilities that are excellent for the price point IMO; and it gets better as it learns the nuances of accents and FAQ's etc. You can simply ask it things like "how do you spell xxx" or "what's x divided by y" and you instantly get the right answer (a boon for my kids doing English and Maths homework!) I'm also finding it useful to capture shopping list and "to-do" items whilst juggling pots and pans around the kitchen (as the thought strikes!); I also rate highly it's music playing abilities, combined with a service like Spotify pretty much any track from any era and any artist is available just by asking for it. My next experiment is to link it up to some home automation devices, see if I can control some of the more frequently used devices and lights around the house. It's a brave new world, if I were 18 years old again and wondering what field to get into at this point in history, I think AI would be it.

Divide and... collapse..

So it looks like the answer was "fire" then... the fact that these UKIP clowns were instrumental in spectacularly deceiving the public to achieve the most stupid and divisive political decision in modern history simply rubs salt into the wound.

Col Mustard in the library with the lead pipe

Nice cartoon from XKCD - makes you think; I wonder how many of the attributes, both physical, phenotypical and behavioural we've missed or gotten wrong through only having an (incomplete) fossil record to go on. I wonder if those gaps could be plugged by DNA, i.e. if spider DNA codes for proteins that make silk then we can guess that spiders make webs without ever seeing one, same for venom.

Best, best

For ages now I've struggled to make a really convincing English "best bitter", despite being probably the easiest (on paper) beer to make with the simplest ingredients, getting it right on the day was proving elusive. This evening I cracked open a new batch of a Fullers London Pride clone which I must say has turned out fabulously. I've made this beer before and it turned out pretty good (I thought it was wonderful at the time) but compared to this one it had its flaws. This time around the colour is spot on, clarity excellent and the taste really authentic (tried side-by-side with a bottle of the original), good balance between malts and hops with a nice bitter finish (made with Challenger, Northdown and Target hops) and around 4% ABV it's a really nice, session-able brew! Once my friends discover this one I don't think it'll hang around.

Obama for president

Is it just me or does anyone else think Michelle Obama should take the place of Hilary Clinton and become the next US president? Eloquent, rational, passionate, intelligent, principled, untouched by scandal what more could you want? 

Hyper-sensitivity

As if on cue J&M posts a cartoon about hyper-sensitivity on the subject of mocking religion.