😀 This is too good to pass up. There is loads of pornspam disguised as Comments on Microsoft’s Livewriter page that announces the “New Release! Windows Live Writer 1.0 (Beta) Update with Windows Live Gallery”
Come on Microsoft. Everybody else has to deal with it. You may be too proud to use Akismet but there are other ways to stop getting rubbish comments on your blog page. You are supposed to have programmers working there. 😀
Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman – an Egyptian student with the nom de blog “Kareem” – has been jailed for four years for insulting Islam and the Egyptian president, as reported by the BBC How depressing is that?
Here’s a brief summary of the BBC report. Abdel Soliman is a secularist, who was expelled from his University law studies for criticising religion. The University was responsible for reporting him to the police.
Mr Nabil had declared himself a secularist who does not fast during Ramadan and he criticised al-Azhar, the most prestigious institution of religious learning in the Sunni Muslim world.
He accused it of spreading radical ideas and suppressing freedom of thought.
Well, that’s certainly proved his point then.
The BBC claims that Egyptian bloggers have gained an influence that greatly outweighs their numbers and have been instrumental in exposing some true horrors carried out by the Egyptian state. This is rather humbling to the rest of us bloggers, who usually just about manage to expose what we think about the latest top-selling indie record.
I said previously that I was going to come back to the debate about the Call to Prayer a Mosque in Michigan is trying to get played over loudspeakers. It has taken a few days but I am not going to let it lie…
Now, I am not an apologist for Islam or anything and I certainly do think the religion is the source of more dangerous crackpots than Christianity (albeit less entertaining ones). All imaginary friends are just as insane, and those who “devoutly” follow the teachings of their interstellar teapot deserve maximum ridicule. It is, therefore, with a heavy heart that in this instance I feel I may side with the Islamic nutcases. (Hopefully not..)
In a nutshell, a Bangladeshi Mosque has applied for permission to play the call to prayer over loudspeakers five times a day. Now, I would object to this. Why on Earth should I have to listen to some one else’s devotional wailings. This is not me being “anti-Islam.” I am not demanding they listen to Richard Dawkins five times a day… The people who run the Mosque are the ones wanting their beliefs to be forced upon others. It should also be noted that there are other Mosques in the area who haven’t asked for the call to be broadcast.
So far, I am very against the plans of this Mosque. Urban areas already have enough of a noise problem and adding to it (although I like the call to prayer) is a “BAD THINGâ„¢.”
Now, reading through the article on CBSNews makes me change my opinions a little. We get some comments from the Mosque:
“It takes only one minute — what is it, five times a day? Five minutes only — that’s all we are asking for,” Masud Khan told CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan.
If only it were that simple. Just because the inconvenience is minimal does not make it “right.” If it is such a small thing, why do they want it? Can’t they telephone the faithful and tell them the prayer is on? Broadcast it over the Internet? Anything. Five one minute interruptions add up to more “annoyance” than a five minute interruption.
Next there came a bit I cant help but agree with:
Muslims figured it was no different than Christians ringing church bells which incidentally ring just across the street from the mosque five times a day, reports Cowan.
Actually, I agree. Cant have one rule for one and one rule for another can we?
If the Christians get away with noise pollution (and I suspect the bell ringing will last longer than a minute a time), why cant the Muslims? Why cant every one else? Do Rastafarians get to play loud music five times a day?
The good old Christian Tolerance kicks in eventually:
Joanne Golen, a lifelong Hamtramck resident, said she finds the content of the call to prayer offensive. “It says Allah is the one and only God. I am Christian. My God is Jesus Christ. That is my only objection — that I have to listen to a God other than the one I believe in praised five times a day,” said Golen, 68.
Really? It is nice of Ms Golen to solve that theological argument – however I am not convinced that saying “My God is Jesus Christ” is really a legitimate phrase. While it could be argued that the holy trinity means Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit are one and the same, this is different. Still, the devout don’t need to know their religion in depth – they have FAITH.
Caroline Zarski, 81, said allowing the call would put Islam above other religions.
Really? Why? Are church bells banned? Aha, I hear you say:
Opponents take issue with that comparison, saying that church bells today are used to mark the time of day and have no religious significance. If the bells are the issue, then turn them off, they say.
Ok. Turn them off then. If they are stopped there are no grounds for the Muslims to get the call to prayer. If the bells continue, I can’t see what logical grounds can deny the Call to Prayer.
It seems the weirdness of Einstein@Home’s averages calculations remains. I still have no idea what the basis for the calculation is…
The only positive part about it, is that it seems my overdue credit has finally been accepted – however, I suspect tomorrow it will plummet like a stone once more.
Shouldn’t averages be a bit more stable than this – especially when the total is very stable…
A few of the atheist and pro-religion blogs have referenced Terry Eagleton’s views on Dawkins. I can’t miss the opportunity to bore you to death with more on this.
Eagleton is not a bad writer. He uses quite an impressive turn of phrase when he’s insulting Dawkins. He is a cultural studies lecturer of a certain kind – was brought up as a Catholic, was a Marxist in the 1970s. He was in one of those rather sweet Trotskyite groups that appeal to idealistic students, The defining characteristics of these are usually that they direct their intellectual attention to ripping apart the views of other such groups, in “how many angels can fit on the head of a pin” debates. I.e. they appeal to people with a religious nature but no belief in God.
Sadly , Cultural Studies in the hands of a lot of university dons becomes stuff that you would rather pull your teeth out wiithout anaesthetic than read. The subject meanders away from the facsinating and illuminating work of people like Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco (I’m talking about the last two when they are writing for a popular audience 🙂 of course.) It becomes “an angels on the head of a pin” debate subject, with arcane rules and procedures that are neither art (because lots of the works are ugly) nor science (because they make endless unproven assertions). Unlike Hall or Barthes, they don’t care much whether their work has any relevance to human society. It often becomes a way of showing off to their fellow Cultural Studies intellectuals. The world outside the University is as alien to them as the world of the average worker is to Posh and Becks.
I suspect, maybe unfairly, that Eagleton may be one of those lecturers with little concept of “too dull”, witness his reverential mention of Derrida. OK, fair point, the piece was in the London Review of Books, hardly a mass market publication. Still this gives a flavour of it:
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?
Well, nor have I. But I’m still going to mouth off about it.
Dawkins often seems to be a very traditional Enlightenment rationalist, with an optimistic belief that logic and reason have some sway over human actions. Dawkins is writing on the assumption that it is enough to draw attention to errors in their thinking and people will give them up. I wish that were true. Yes, the “God” concept that he attacks most often is the concept of a child, not of a theologian. Dawkins’ arguments are addressed to the general public. Who have usually been fed a lot of “God” nonsense that bears no relation to Eurigenia. And I would be very surprised if one in a million people had heard of the “epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus” etc.
I can’t begin to see what possible relevance these arguments could have to the point of whether God is a delusion. (The people banning evolution teaching in schools can probably barely read, for a start. I suspect Rahner’s words are as unknown to them as they are to me.) The abstract arguments of theologically sophisticated thinkers are not what get taught to kids in Sunday schools and Maddrassas. Imagine an infinitely complex and elegant argument about how Father Christmas could get round everyone’s house in the same night (by bending the space-time continuum, creating his own warp space, or merely amending our consciousness so we thought it was one night but it really takes years.) The debates would throw lots of light on our thoughts about the nature of space and time. But guess what? Father Christmas doesn’t really bring your presents. (Sorry to be the one to break that news.)
I am not a big Dawkins fan, I’m still miffed about the sociobiology…. I think he is utterly naive in terms of sociology and doesn’t understand how the power of religion is indeed rooted in power. He often writes as if ideas have an existence of their own outside of the material world. tA best, can influence the world, but don’t really grow out of social relations. I think this is called “Idealism”, as a Philosophical concept, or it should be. He is not a social scientist. Unlike Eagleton, I don’t this disqualifies him from having views about society though. It just shows that he isn’t the infallible authority on atheism, (thank Void.) There is a lot more to be understood about the role of belief in social relations, and to do it effectively does need a grounding in social science rather than biology.
However, Dawkins isn’t talking about sociology. Nor is he discussing theology, Eagleton. He is talking about whether there is a personal God who made the universe and performs miracles. He is absolutely right about the illogicality of Faith. Dawkins expresses views that you would imagine would be all-but universal in the 21st century and is attacked from all sides.
Hence, he makes us realise we live in a time when human intellectual progress is in reverse and he’s prepared to challenge this state of affairs. In the popular media. Repeatedly. Lucidly. And his influence has encouraged lots of people to actively assert their rationality in a world which is abandoning the whole awkard rationality thing at a rate of knots.
What’s Eagleton doing? He’s turning to the Church he was brought up in, like many lapsed Catholics in their later years. He’s looking only at a Church that appeals to socially-unengaged and pampered intellectuals. He doesn’t seem aware that the world is becoming a battleground and religion is being used to stir up the fighters on every side. For at least a thousand years, religion has been the excuse for committing atrocities, obscuring the battles over land and property that were really taking place. It does matter that people speak the truth about it and question what they are told.
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly
Of course, all ordinary believers don’t seek to brainwash their chilldren. (Although the faith schools and vicars and pastors and priests and Imams all have a good stab at it.) In fact, many people feel compelled to make their children observe religious tradtions that they don’t really believe themselves. That’s why children are brought into territory of the Church or Mosque or synagogue before they can speak, let alone reason. And the old Jesuit saying of “Give me a child before the age of seven and he’s mine for life” (or words to that effect) seem to be proved by Eagleton’s own leanings.
In any case, I think by definition, faith in the unknowable is blind faith.
As alluded to in the past, for some reason Wednesday has become the day with “very little blog postsâ„¢”. It is strange and I have no rational explaination for the trend.
Today (being a Thursday) however, there is an excuse… Most of the spare time has been taken up with a combination of illness, work on customer websites and helping out on a new blog site (you can have a look if you want). As you can see, the site is new, there isn’t much content there (yet) but it has potential.
Anyway – hopefully normal service will be resumed soon.
This may seem deeply unpatriotic but I am have to protest at some arrant nonsense.
In today’s Guardian Charles McNulty claims that the best actors are British. Are you mad?
This unlikely claim is based on Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Peter O’Toole and Kate Winslet being in line for Oscars today. OK, these are all great actors but only one of them is likely to be under 50. So, it’s really more like saying Britain used to have the best actors.
An RSC-style delivery really impresses the helll out of Americans. The masters and mistresses of the style, from the bloke who played Jean-Luc Picard to the bloke who plays Gandalf are briliant.
However, most good acting has to work on the tv and dvd. The “acting” needs to be unobtrusive and understated and convince us we’re looking at real-life characters rather than Shakespearen declaration. And Americans just win hands down on this.
I’m sure that we don’t get the lamest US soaps here, so it’s not really fair to compare the relatively big-budget US productions that make it to the UK with the dross that home-grown television has become. But, I’m still going to. I am ashamed to say that the mass of Americans, from childhood on to old age, can act most British actors off the stage and into the “don’t call us” bin.
Their bit-part actors are immeasurably superior to ours. If they didn’t have a niche for an evil Brit in every known style of film or tv programme, we would produce about five actors a year and they would all be crap.
Sometimes you might be caught watching such rubbish on television that, to save face, you find yourself claiming that “the off-switch is broken.” The off-switch on my last tv did actually break (as a prelude to its turning into a psychedelic random colour diplay and dying altogether) but I would have to admit it was a good while before I noticed.
We’re often told we waste loads of the planet’s resources and contribute greatly to carbon emissions by not switching off our tvs and videos at night. Granted that figures for the actual sums wasted seem to be based on some back-of-an-envelope calculations with little relationship to reality (see an old Times article by Matthew Parrish), I still get a niggling sensation of irresponsibity if I leave red lights on the tv and its accompanying attendants. (I still do it though).
It would be pretty difficult not to leave the tv on, if you have one that doesn’t even have an off-switch. According to Guy Clapperton in today’s Guardian lots of new televisions have an off-switch located in an odd place or none at all. Toshiba doesn’t put an off switch on its plasmas, apparently so it can upgrade them overnight. LG has decided to reintroduce an off switch, under pressure from environmentally-concerned customers.
I”m as gullible as the next person when it comes to wanting the latest high-tech objects of desire – as long as the next person is only moderately enticed by spending money they don’t have – but I can think of two solutionsthat would cut energy use even more than buying a beautiful new tv with a low-power standby improvement.
One, better than buying new gadgets, why not keep using the old ones till they break?
Two (and I couldn’t resist this, so, apologies in advance to everyone with taste) I finally get to add the punchline to the blog name, based on the old kid’s programme..
Switch off the television and do something less boring instead…
It looks like the Einstein@Home servers are down again. This seems to happen once or twice a month and can last for anything up to a few days.
Looking over the BOINC message log, it appears that the servers may have been kaput since around 0430Z today. Over the last few days there have been occasional problems when my client has tried to connect and download new work units, but this looks like a big one.
At the time of writing, the Server Status page is non-existant and the main project page isn’t coming up (It may have made sense for the Einstein@Home team to have put these on different servers…). The forums, which I thought were on different servers, also seem to be off line at this time.
Oh well. Might as well turn it off then.
Playing with Lightroom a bit more (and a sunny day) has resulted in a new Flash-based photo gallery (Stourhead Gallery – needs flash player). At the moment these are the basic pictures taken earlier today with no editing. It took about 5 minutes to copy the files off the SD-Card, into Lightroom, create the gallery and upload. The first and last stages were the slowest.
Now, I think I should point out that although I like Lightroom (a lot), I have no intention of buying this when the beta runs out. As a free tool it is fantastic. I am not sure I would be willing to pay for this functionality though.
If I was a professional photographer with no IT Skills it may be worth while, but given the ease with which you can create similar sites (flash or otherwise), it strikes me this is a shrinking market. Adobe may have been better giving this away and charging for support.
Once more Nullifidian has spotted a great example of theistic madness. On the “Dear Alice” post there is an excellent send up of the nonsense a “concerned” reader has sent to a newspaper. This was funny enough, I decided to have a quick look round the internet to see if I could find out the source of the letter and any more details on it.Isn’t the internet grrrrreat.
It seems the letter was sent to the Peninsular Clarion, a newspaper which covers the Kenai Peninsular (The Kenai Peninsula is a large peninsula jutting from the southern coast of Alaska in the United States, Wikipedia). I wont stoop to discussing the perils of inbreeding for remote communities, but suffice it to say the Clarion’s letters pages make entertaining reading. Fortunately, the vast (and I mean vast, the cranks are only a tiny minority of the letters) majority of letters seem to come from sane, reasonable people (whatever their religious beliefs). Not so fortunately (although it does provide me with hours of merriment) there are still a vociferous few who rant nonsense!
This was going to get ignored but, the BBC having beaten us to it by featuring two Downing Street mass spams in a couple of days, it will have to be said. The government response to e-petitions is to fire off a patronising spam telling you that your concern was noted but Tony is now going to explain patronisingly and irritatingly why you are wrong and the government will pay no attention.
The UK government is experimenting with online petitions. Two had massive numbers of people taking part, to express opposition to road-pricing and/or the national ID card. There were over a million against road pricing and around 800,00 against ID. (You can see where people’s priorities lie…)
Now, clearly the only people who sign one of these are those who care strongly enough an issue to sit at at a PC, find the site, find the right petition and send their name, get an email and reply to it. Which requires knowledge of the whole process, plus the will to go through it. You’d imagine that you could multiply these numbers by at least 50 to get a true idea of the strength of feeling.
It’s like cheap MORI poll for the government. It requires an address and postcode. The government can get plenty of very detailed information about which issues people find important and where they live, which could be very useful in an election campaign.
How sane is then, to reply to everyone with emails that set the teeth on edge? I was shown a copy of the ID mail and it basically said
“Thanks for the e-petition. However, the government is not interested. You obviously don’t understand the issues or you wouldn’t have ventured your opinion. ID will fight crime, let you go to America and will hardly cost you anything. in any case it’s inevitable”
Ok, I admit to some exaggeration in the precis here. But it was way too long and boring to read (Yeah, yeah, people who live in glass houses…)
In fact, yesterdays’ blairspam alerted the Opposition to the fact that the ID was to be used as the basis for a national registry of fingerpints. Funny, you didn’t really mention this before, HM Government.
Today’s news item is the road pricing one. This was worded slightly more cagily – over a million opponents, remember – but the impression I got from the BBC was that the government was saying a slight more appeasing version of exactly the same thing “Tough, it’s inevitable but it will be out of our hands and private companies will run it. Nothing we can do mate”
Here’s my response:
**********************
Hi Tony
I welcome your move into the technological world of email spam, Tony. It’s an exciting new contribution to the democratic process.
However, I’m sorry to have to explain to you that there may be some misunderstanding here about the nature of consultation. This is for your own good and it was inevitable that someone would have to do it.
Consultation is not really achieved by hearing contrary views then telling the electorate that they don’t understand the issues and that process x is inevitable and is for our own good really.
It is actually not inevitable that the government carries detailed ID information on those citizens who aren’t engaged in organised crime deeply enough to escape the system.
It’s not inevitable that intrusive technology takes over from competent policework or that the data that we provide the government is dictated by the requirements of the US immigration service or that we even have to stump up our own cash so Big Brother can keep an even closer track of us(probably private sector) These seem a lot like political decisions, Tony.
I will just take this opportunity to explain what a “political decision” is . I have to admit I’m surprised that this is necessary for someone who’s worked his way to the job of Prime Minister, but that’s one of the drawbacks of our tragically underfunded private education sector….
*******************
And what a lucky coincidence that the announcement about partial troop withdrawal from Iraq (for once, slightly better than normal war news) was leaked on ID Emailspam day and released on the Road-price Emailspam day.
If you were ever entranced by reading HP Lovecraft or Victorian horror stories as a kid you will know that the word “necropolis” has a fascinating but chilling power. ** This news item is for you.
A BBC reports archaeological discoveries in the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo. It is estimated that only about a third of the finds in the site have been discovered.
These are three to four thousand year sold and include a carved wooden sarcophagus (another fantastic word) and the tombs of a royal scribe and a butler.
There are sketchy pictures on the BBC site but the paintings and carving still look amazing.
It seems a little ironic. Ancient Egyptian culture was so focussed on preparing for the afterlife that bodies and artefacts can revealed as fresh to us, who live almost an eternity, in human terms, after them.* So the technology was pretty effective, it’s just the god stuff that didn’t quite pan out.
Although, ancient Egyptian gods are generally pretty engaging, with their jackal heads, and so on. And they kept plenty of artists and builders in work. It’s a pity at least some of them aren’t still around.
* In fact, from the creationist perspective they might have almost predated the creation of the universe, unless I’ve mixed up whatever 4,000 years is. (Maybe it was 4,000 BC. I am buggered if I am going to pay enough attention to the rantings to find out) That makes it an actual eternity. It makes you wonder why the Abrahamic world-religion God started out with a people who didn’t even recognise him, let alone pay constant obeisance to him. You think he’d have demanded a few first-born son sacrifices or handed out rules cut into stone or something, not just damned them as unchosen.
**And yes, I know all that Victorian exotica and horror stuff was a mixture of imperialism and childlike fascination with the Orient. Edward Said was completely right to criticise it. And the Victorian distortion applies to all history, the Victorian story-telling that turned snippets of historical information into myths, (Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Vikings, and all). The knowledge doesn’t stop it having power over the imagination, though.
To try and change the subject away from Religious crackpots for a little while, I thought I would upload some photos! Here are a selection from Stonehenge and Stourhead. As you can see these are quite old photos which have been scanned in.
Ok, in reality, they have been run through Adobe Lightroom which is actually a wonderful bit of software. I downloaded the beta version quite some time ago but never really made any use of it. Today I had a reminder it was going to expire on 28 Feb so I thought I would try it out.
It is not a photo / picture editing package along the lines of Photoshop but it is excellent for photo management and applying quick preset filters to pictures. This one is called “Antique Grayscale” and seems to be a mix of normal greyscale and sepia tones. I quite like the effect 🙂
Where Lightroom really excells is in creating Web Sites for photo galleries. It is amazing how easily this will take a collection of picures and turn them into a functional, usable (valid XHTML!) website. There is only limited control (in the beta version) over the exact style but the look and feel is good enough that most people wont mind. If you are a graphic artist or photographer, and want a quick and easy website, this package really is the best I have seen. Before my trial version runs out, I fully intend to upload some sample sites so you can see the output. At the moment I did two quick sites (one flash gallery and one html gallery) which are now online. Remember, you need ActiveX and flash player to view the flash site in IE.
As a rule of thumb, a site with 28 pictures takes about 30 seconds to select the pictures, a few mins to type in some basic details and then another 30 seconds to build the site. It really is that quick. The longest part is uploading the images!
This is pretty much software that anyone who can actually copy a image to their computer, can use to create photo galleries in seconds.
It seems that no matter how hard I try (or dont try as the case may actually be), I cant avoid the madness that permates the Internet and specifically the Blogosphere. Just to get a bit of perspective, there are millions of websites, millions of blogs written by sane, “normal” people. They just aren’t as much fun…
The serendipitous wonder which has been following my bored searches on Technorati brought me to a blog by one “joannafrancis.” This really was a descent into the world of madness.
The internet has always been a hotbed for “conspiracy” lunatics of all branding, and among the big three Abrahamic religions, Jews often get a rough end of the conspriacy deal (people even try to claim General Relativity is a Jewish conspriacy), so lots of this blog is no real surprise. What is shocking, especially for a blog from what appears to be a devout Catholic(religion of compassion?) is the sheer vitriol and hatred which oozes from pretty much every word on every post.
Just to be open, the reason I think she is a Catholic is she makes the following statement: (read original)
And yet, what Catholics should realize, whether Novus Ordo, SSPX, or sedevacantist, is that these Jews from the SPLC are attacking not only our religion, but all of our ancestors as well.
As an atheist, I find it quite entertaining how much she rants about even the slightest hint of Jewishness in people (for instance, apparently Courtney Love is a Jew, based on an oblique entry in NNDB)
The post which really made me chuckle (on the assumption she reall is alone with these ideas) was made on 10 Nov 06, titled “Israeli Snipers Killing U.S. Troops?” in which she postulates the idea that Mossad or another Israeli organsiation is responsible for killing Americans in Iraq to drag the war out. It is a great post. It has every single one of the crackpot conspiracy nut hall marks in. It could be used as a teaching tool to help spot nutters.
She has some “proof” that the Israelis are involved, for example:
At the very beginning of this video clip, you see a rifle with a video camera attached to it. This weapon is made by the Rafael company, an Israeli arms manufacturer, that also makes IEDs.
So at the very least we know she has no idea at all what an IED actually is. If they were manufactured, they would not be “improvised” would they? Manufactured IEDs are called bombs and mines etc. After some nonsense about rifle mounted cameras being another sign of the Jews, she somes out with:
Mossad is a master at false flag operations, e.g., Oklahoma City, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, the 9-11 attacks in New York, the assassination of the Prime Minister in Beirut, the stoking of Muslim riots in France last year, the bombing of the Hassan al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, etc.
Wow. Mossad took out the World Trade Center and the London Underground. Amazing. I bet they even killed Jean Charles Menendes and just blamed it on the Metropolitan Police. I mean, he was a catholic as well wasn’t he?
The post carries on along these lines – even going as far as to say the Mossad Liaison was in charge of US troops at the time of a bombing in Fallujah. The rest of the posts on her site follow this thread. One of the other themes seems to be blaming Jews for American abortions – it all being part of a Jewish plot to kill more and more Americans.
Madness does not do her justice.