The UK is getting worse as far as education goes. Following from a post I found on the Nullifidian Blog, I ended up at the BBC News page for Friday 2 Feb 07, with the title “Teacher sacked over religion row.”

In a nutshell, a supply teacher at a Slough secondary school was “sacked” (after “several days” rather than an eight week contract) for saying “most suicide bombers were Muslim.” For context the supply teacher was teaching Religious Education so the debate about religion is probably appropriate.

Now it appears (the only source is the BBC website) that the teacher (Mr Andrew McLuskey) was sacked after the pupils complained at his comments. To put this in perspective, the school is predominantly Muslim, so it could be agreed that his comments were “ill advised.” Mr McLuskey was obviously upset that he never had the chance to defend himself and the BBC reports the school comments as follows:

The school authorities denied they were being heavy-handed and said their first priority was pupils’ welfare. “I don’t think it’s important what I think,” said the school’s deputy head teacher Ray Hinds. “It’s what the pupils think that were in the classroom at the time. And they were very upset.”

This is mind boggling. A quick Google search has reported that at least 99.9% of suicide bombers are Islamic, or supporting an Islamic cause (you can rarely ask the bomber about his religion after the event). It seems to me, that what Mr McLuskey said is factually correct.

It is certainly not the same as saying “Most Muslims are Suicide Bombers” which would have, quite rightly, caused outage and is blatantly false. The comments made by the deputy head are telling and it is a worrying story they tell.

I am sure the School (who oddly are unfindable on the internet), feel they have done the right thing but in reality all it has done is play into the hands of the right wingers who will cry “political correctness” and probably lead invariably towards backlash.

In the sad world where teachers can be sacked for saying something which, while correct, upsets the pupils (and I suspect the deputy head), it is no surprise that creationism and other forms of religious fundamentalism is sneaking into our society.

Tags: Education, Crazy Schools, Religion, Islam, Suicide Bomber, Society, Rants, Mistakes

Loathe though I am to admit it, there is actually an article (op-ed piece really) in this months .net Magazine which I agree with. Yes, it is shocking.

This is temporary. There are rantworthy bits to the rest of the magazine. Normal service will be resumed soon

The normally loathsome “Gary Marshall’s Big Mouth” section is about a news item in which two UK schools have banned Wi-Fi devices after parent’s complained about the health risks the devices posed. Strangely for .net they are actually on the ball here and, as Gary Marshall points out it is a load of “bollocks.”

There is no evidence that Wi-Fi is dangerous and from a scientific point of view you can’t prove they are “safe.” Sadly, some of the less informed people out there will hit upon this and assume it means they are dangerous. You cant prove using pens is safe, but you can say there is no evidence it is dangerous. Shall we ban pens? The reductio ad absurdum on this one could go on for ever.

What the schools really should have done, is made the parents come back in for science lessons. Well done to .net for standing up for sense and science (for a change).

Tags: Science, .net Magazine, Web Design, Wi-Fi, WiFi, Wireless Networking, Technology, Health and Safety, Education, Crazy Schools

Just a quick one, there have been a couple of changes to how the styles on this blog are handled. Mainly this has involved the introduction of a few new clasess (download, code, note, taglist, alert, new, construction, taglist and information) which can be added to <p> tags to give a bit of inline style alteration.

The taglist class is already in use, but we are not going to go about add retrofitting it two hundreds of messages.

Let me know what you think, or if there are any other things you think we should add.

Doing a search on Technorati tags for Error Messages was quite enlightening. First off it linked me to a site called RegSpyWareCleaner.com (which I refuse to link to but you can see it’s profile on Technorati).

The main thing to notice is the spelling mistakes: For example, posts have titles like “Kill spywrae,” “Spywarei nfo” and “Daware se” (I assume that is something to do with Adware – which the site often calls Addware). Now I am not doing a spelling offensive here, but it is interesting that a supposedly professional site, trying to sell its product to English speakers doesn’t spell check its content.

The more important thing is when you realise what is basically a Google Ad site has six backlinks on Technorati. That is surprising. Who in their right mind would backlink? There really is little on the site you could call content, and at first I though the links were just other blogs laughing at the site (as this one nearly was). However a second search on Technorati shows who the culprits are.

Now there is nothing wrong with getting backlinks, until you see these are from dodgy looking spyware sites which make the same spelling mistakes. The most recent is a post titled “Spyg ames” (I am not going to link, they have enough backlinks already) which is from a site that has 67 blogs linking to it. A quick visit shows it has almost no content (and what it does, seems to be by accident). That is amazing. The site has six times as many inbound links as this blog, which produced over 120 quality posts last month! Checking on Technorati again, shows that these 150-odd links from 67 blogs (this time all the linking blogs have zero links of their own) are from yet more scrap sites which do very little other than show Google ads.

I get the sinking feeling that if I carried out the same checks on each of the other blogs which have backlinks, I would find pretty much the same story.

So much for the power of the social web and the value of backlinking.

Tags: Technorati, Web 2.0, Useless, Technology, Rants, Backlinks, Social Networking, Backlink Spam

What is it about “Web 2.0” sites that they feel the need to wrap error (or unavailable) messages in all manner of flowery nonsense? In the past, technorati has often returned a spurious message about the monster escaping and now it seems Flikr has followed suit.

For those who were wondering where the images on the right hand sidebar have gone – this is the answer:

Now, I am sure I am not alone in thinking that is a lot less than an I would normally think of as an answer. If you follow the link to the Flickr Blog page you get some more details, but surely that defeats the point of having the error message?

Not to long ago, every site which considered itself trendy had “doorway” pages, which were normally little more than a flash animation or a “cool” (i.e. crap) logo which they wanted visitors to look at before they got into the site. This lasted a very short time (although there are still sites which do this…) and very quickly people realised that it was madness. When people visit a site, they expect to see the site – not some artistic nonsense. That error message is basically useless. It tells you nothing about what is going on and forces you to continue to visit more pages just to find out what the problem is. What lunatic thinks this is “usability?”

Likewise, when people see an error message they expect to be told what the error is, not some attempt to be trendy and humanise the website. This is what the blog says:

Downtime tonight

UPDATE@11:50pm: Still going smoothly. Looks like we might finish up a few minutes early.

UPDATE@ 9:40pm: Flickr’s now down and busy bees are switching and racking and installing and setting up. All proceeding wel!

Tonight at 9pm (San Francisco time – view in your local time) Flickr will be down for maintenance for up to four hours. We apologize for the length of this downtime, but we’re making some big changes which will enable us to roll out new features faster. So … it’ll be worth it!

As usual, photos will still be served, but you won’t be able to access Flickr site or API. We’ll post here once we start and when we’re ready to come back up. Thank your for your patience!

Now how hard would it have been to put that on the previous page?

Tags: Flickr, Technorati, Error Messages, Web 2.0, Bad Ideas, Useless, Technology, Rants

Well, it is a new month so as you would expect the latest .net magazine appeared. It is still early days but so far there is little sign of improvement (traditionally the writers seem to get a lease of life at the start of the year, but by Oct – Dec are producing mostly garbage), which could bode ill for the rest of the year.

I will write more on it another day, but I am still intrigued that instead of printing more letters they have brought back the “penny forum” nonsense – if you want to read the forum, go to the forum – and they waste pages at the back with pure drivel.

One thing which made me laugh was a quote which read:

There aren’t many digital cameras or DVD players out there without the DivX logo slapped on them…

Wow. Can I suggest the journalist who wrote that needs to actually leave the building every now and then? Ideally (s)he should also visit some shops before making such a broad sweeping remark.

Last time I looked in Currys, Comet, Dixons and PC World – I found two out of a total of about 50 different types of DVD player which would play DivX. I have yet to see a digital camera which has DivX “Slapped on it,” so I can only assume the writer was completely making things up.

If they are going to lie about something like this, where do they draw the line? Can you ever be sure what they say is true?

More on .net will follow if the magazine seems worth it.

Tags: .net Magazine, DivX, Web Design, Technology

Today’s news papers (for example the Guardian) have been talking about the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which says that, for those really slow on the uptake, climate change is influenced by human behaviour. How this is news is beyond me, but there are some unreported aspects which I thought people should be aware of.

Today is 3 Feb 07. It is winter. February is traditionally the coldest, snowiest, month of the year in the UK. When I was younger, there would be so much snow schools would close. Dont even get me started on the rain.

However, this is today (Photos taken at Old Sarum, an English Heritage Site in Wiltshire):

Today it was clear, very sunny and really warm. No wind. Not a cloud in the (perfect blue) sky. Fantastic. On Flickr there are a few more pictures which are worth checking out:

(before anyone gets all hyper, the title was a joke – it is not trying to imply there are any “good things” about Global Warming. If you were offended – get over yourself.)

Old Sarum 26 Jul 06,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

It is one of those strange things about life, but there really is no accounting for taste. This picture has, for some reason, been consistently the most popular image on my Flickr collection – pretty much since the point it was uploaded.

At the moment it has been viewed over 600 times, which is nearly a hundred views each month, and I have no idea why.

Of course, I think it is a great photo. I took it. I photoshopped it.

Personally though, I think there are others which I would rather look at. One other oddity is that despite its mountains of views, no one has added this picture as a “favorite” – that honour tends to go to ones of Stonehenge or Romans in armour.

Tags: Photos, Lomo, Lomography, Photoshop, Photoshop Effects, Picture Editing, English Heritage, Old Sarum, Wiltshire

I admit that the Family supplement in Saturday’s Guardian is one of the supplements that would normally only get read on a five hour train journey, at a point when I’d even tried to read the (quite tedious-enough) Sport and Work supplements twice. But I read its front cover today and it managed to push half a dozen rant buttons.

Precis: A Jewish man married to a non-Jewish woman has a family crisis over circumcising his new-born son. He caves. The baby is circumcised.

It’s not even a crisis of conscience for him. It’s mainly an argument between his wife’s and mother’s consciences. His wife is determinedly against it but his mother and father bring the whole weight of their kin and community down on him.

The whole article made me almost speechless with rage. (Yes, I know you are possibly wishing that “almost” wasn’t there) Mutilating new-born babies on behalf of an imaginery divine being. Argh. Grrr. That enrages me enough.

But what really gets me angry is the way it shows that being reasonable and benevolent and NOT CRUEL can become such a weak position in the face of irrationality that the nutters may always win, because the rest of us are too moral to fight them with the level of ruthlessnessness they show.

The wife and her family put feeble rational arguments against it but, basically, they are too afraid of upsetting the baby’s father’s family and terrified of not respecting his Jewish identity and so on. So the baby’s needs are sacrificed through the weakness of their opposition.

The paternal grandmother makes her son swear that he will allow it, using the full force of Jewish mother emotional blackmail which I had assumed was a racist myth. For example,

“My mother began to weep openly on the Phone. “Oh my God, Neal, I can’t believe you’re doing this to me”

Well, he isn’t doing anything to her, is he? He is just suggesting for one minute that he mightn’t do something barbaric to his firstborn.

The wife expresses a passionate and reasoned defence of her newborn, but she’s an amateur, constrained to fighting fairly. In the end, facied with opening a “wound in his family life that might take years to heal,” she gives in.

Rationally – what if parents decided to drll 4 inch nails into their baby’s hands, without anaesthetic? I think we all know what even the slackest Social Services departments would have to do about that.

But, what if the parents felt that their God required them to mutilate their offspring? Their whole community has done this since time immemorial. They would reject to own this child as one of them if it isn’t mutilated. (The writer’s father told him they would not accept the baby as their grandson if he wasn’t circumcised.) In that case, what would the Social Services department do? Nothing , it appears, as it doesn’t even constitute recognised child abuse. It seen as Jewish and Muslim custom and somehow has come to be treated as a normal procedure by US citizerns of every faith.

I am first in the queue for arresting the perpetrators of the even more horrifying mutilations practised on some teenage Muslim girls – and ideally applyng a little “eye for an eye” justice on them. However, I can’t see why baby boys have to be without protection from sadistic body-hating lunatics either.

We don’t want to offend people so devastatingly damaged by their own cultural values and their ingrained feear and abhorrence of nature that they actively campaign to mutilate infants?

Who excuse it on the grounds of worshipping a God who actually deliberately added bits to baby boys with the express intention of having them painfully sliced off? It’s that evil Satan deity again, obviously.

If it’s so great, why not leave the babies to grow up and make a choice on reaching adulthood. That is the age at which we allow people to choose to get gender reassignment or breast augmentation – however stupid we may find these choices – because it’s their bodies and they can do what they want with them.

Noone remembers the first few days of life so we can kid ourselves that newborns don’t suffer. Anyone with children is aware that newborns suffer infinitely more intensely than anyone older. Hunger drives them to hysteria in afew moments, for instance. They don’t just feel a bit peckish.

I suspect this is like baptising newborns only taken to psychologically disturbed lengths – religious believers rightly suspect that few people would make these insane choices if they were left to their own devices when they have achieved an adult level of rationality. They somehow manage to coopt new “believers” at an age when the recruits’ skulls haven’t even closed over, so they can avoid having to make a convincing case for following their belief system.

And the rest of us, we should be ashamed of our weakness in the face of fanaticism. I don’t mean we should throw out our moral sense – that’s what stops us being like the fanatics, thank *** (insert name of non-denominational, non-montheistic, deity or wise person of your choice) . I mean that, where we have a choice, as this mother and father did, we should never agree to things that we know are deeply wrong, just to avoid offending people. We have to start somewhere.

A healthy dog wouldn’t let you start cutting into its pups without taking a good measure of flesh out of your hand. As humans, we just let our religious leaders do whatever they see fit to our offspring. If we can’t even protect our own newborns from mutilation, we definitely represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac, our culture having evolved to the point at which it overrides our own natural instincts to protect our young.

Technorati tags: atheism,religion,circumcision.child abuse.mutilation, society, Guardian, family, emotional blackmail

It turns out that WTFs are supposed to be definitions. I quote, after changing the spelling of explanations:

On January 31, 2007 Technorati released a new feature to help people to get explanations on things they see popping up in the blogosphere

This post explains that WTFs are supposed to share your knwledge and links. So far, so good, sounds like Wikipedia in blog format. The Technorati twist is that voting is used to push definitions up to the top. Technorati encourages you to add to the collection and get your “friends” to vote

If you think that you’ve got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.

Maybe it’s terrible cynicism but doesn’t get your “friends” to vote for it mean, in practice, “Send in votes from the dozens of fake blogs you’ve set up to spam your blog to a high enough position to become visible”

Technorati claims this is an experiment. A test may be unfair, given it’s only been going for two days. But, who says the blogworld is fair? So, here goes.

On that very page there is a list of Most Recent WTFs. I’m pasting the whole thing here.

• WTF? Branding a Generic Term (1 blurb)
• 2000 Bloggers (1 blurb)
• congoo (1 blurb)
• ESB (1 blurb)
• Howie Carr (1 blurb)
• avid Hosting (1 blurb)
• Drug Companies Own Texas (1 blurb)
• TV and Radio (1 blurb)
• genocide intervention network (1 blurb)
• genocide intervention (1 blurb)

Who needs TV and radio to be defined? And Drug Companies own texas? This is blatantly a link to someone’s blog and I suspect most of the others are. So the sample list has already dispensed with the definition fiction.

What about Hot Topics

• Boston Mooninites
• Windows Vista
• Myspace
• Marions Kochbuch
• Paris Hilton

Windows Vista, OK. Paris Hilton even. I can’t even hazard a guess what the Marions and Boston ones are and life’s too short to look at everything on Technorati, but I clicked on MySpace. This brings up a list of 4 definitions.

Number 1 – i.e. most popular – is not in any sense of the word a definition, or even remotely interesting, but it has attracted 9 “votes”.

Number 2 is a discussion about the My Space business model, with a list of links, although you would probably be none the wiser if you didn’t know what MySpace was. At least it’s reasonably interesting and throws in some opinion.

(Number 4 is just silly, not qualifying as a definition or comment and has no votes so far.)

Number 3 says “Myspace http://myspace.com/ is a popular social networking, blogging, and content hosting/sharing site.”

Now that actually looks to me like a definition. But it’s clearly not “popular” enough. It will disappear to the nether reaches of the list after a few more bloggers see that a “definition” on the WTFs is just a way to get people to see your profile name and link to your blogs……..

Hey, why am I wasting time on this when it could be a ranking WTF?

Technorati tags: technology, technorati, wtfs, technorati rank,

Sorry, this is yet another post on Technorati. To repeat WTF are WTFs?
If you look at a blogger’s profile on Technorati, you see a page with two tabs one of which says WTF

Technorati Tags: technology, technorati, WTF

We always appreciate feedback here at WhyDontYou blog. We get little enough of it recently, it seems, despite blogging to within an inch of our lives. So, it was gratifying to get a response to the blog post What is it about evolution and vaccination from http://www.geocreationism.com/.

I have to admit the argument went over my head but the gist seems to be that only Christian Jews are obliged to follow Leviticus. I can’t quite work out how that explains why vaccination and evolution are counter-religious but it sort of explains why Christian fundamentalists don’t feel they have to follow every word of the Old Testament – it’s only meant for Jews, apparently.

Do I have to say – if that is the case – why draw the line at Leviticus? Why insist that any of the Old Testament applies to Christians? And if the Jews were given these rules as God’s chosen people, as in the geocreationist comment, then how come Christians are expecting to get into Heaven come the Rapture? Hasn’t God already made His mind up who He wants to take – and they’re all Jews?

I tried to read the blog but my mind glazed over. (It seems to be a defence of evolution, but sees it as due to divine selection rather than natural selection, so it’s not totally anti-scientific.) But I am still doing the decent thing and giving them the credit of a link here for the effort of replying. That is meant as a lesson for all you other people who could be getting links here ……. 😉

Technorati tags: Intelligent design, Fundamentalism, religion,philosophy, atheism,

Interesting piece in the always wonderful Register today: The President of Romania apparently said that pirated software had started the computer industry in Romania, This was reported as having been said when the Romanian President shared a platform with Bill Gates, at the opening of a Microsoft Technology Centre in Bucharest.

I can’t resist this quote from the Register article:

72 per cent of software in Romania, one of the EC’s newest member states, is pirated according to the Business Software Alliance (BSA). That costs companies like Microsoft $111m in lost revenue each year.

Technorati tags: (why do we bother?) technology, Romania, Microsoft, warez,piracy.

Excellent video on YouTube, with a title like “Fundamentalism is a Mental Disease” you know it will be entertaining:

Tags: Evolution, Fundamentalism, Creationism, Mental Disease, Intelligent Design, Science,Philosophy

I can be as illogical and superstitious as the next person – though I like to justify it as thinking metaphorically…. – but I hope this isn’t the case if the next person happens to be a fundamentalist of any stripe. Looking through TW’s posts here (e.g Bad bad Medicine ) and some of the sites we’ve linked to, such as Pharyngula, I detect some bizarre themes that have been challenged by these blogs.

1. evolution (obviously)
2. vaccination
3. AIDS therapies

No matter how hard I try, I can’t really find any coherent connections between the major works of the God-of-Abraham religions and these topics. Not least because the theory of evolution and the medical science behind development of vaccines and anti-virals DID NOT EXIST at the time that the infallible books were dictated straight from the mind of God onto paper.

Evolution is the easiest topic for following the fundamentalist logic. The Bible says the world was created in 6 days, in a specific order. Obviously, if the Bible is always infallible and not metaphorical, this must be what fundamentalists believe. But it’s a Jewish book. I’ve not heard of any major Jewish movements against evolutionary theory. However, I believe that orthodox Jews do actually attempt to keep up with a fair number of the multiple prohibitions in Leviticus. So how is it that fundamentalist Christians can treat the Bible as literally true in every word and avoid doing all these observances? As pointed out repeatedly on the blogsite God is imaginary, many of these rules and the penalties for breaking them are genuinely repulsive to most people’s thinking. You can see why there would be problems putting them in practice today – not to mention pretty severe opposition. So the Christian fundamentalists have already dispensed with huge chunks of the Bible.

Did Jesus say “Follow everything in the Old Testament word for word, except for the million instructions for living in Leviticus”? I’m not too familiar with the New Testament but I’m pretty certain this instruction doesn’t appear anywhere. in fact, I doubt that Jesus is ever actually reported as having said “The Old Testament is true, word for word” but I am happy to be corrected on this.

Even if we were to accept that the world was created in a week and “the exact length of time for all the begats in the Bible to have a generation each” ago, then why does this stop evolutionary processes being true? Ah ha, because, man is supposed to be set apart from the animals. Good job we don’t need to breathe and communicate amd move and grow and eat and excrete and reproduce then, because, otherwise, we would be like animals.

Evolution is one thing. It requires some level of logical thought to grasp its principles. It could be replaced at anytime by some other theory of the natural world. However, it seems to have proved itself by the very fact that advances in biology – based on the theory – are already developed to the point that our knowledge is giving us enough control over nature to threaten our survival of the planet in new and exotic ways. (Just as our mastery of physics and chemistry and engineering prove themselves daily – nuclear weapons and poisons and transport machinery – they all work. :-))

But vaccinations? Treating AIDS with effective medicines on the basis that it’s caused by HIV infection? How can these possibly conflict with any Biblical teachings? I just don’t get this one. Medical science has made its fair share of mistakes, OK. All the same, being a science, medicine is obliged to test the effectiveness of its cures and develop new ones if the old ones aren’t working. Vaccinations are the best way to prevent suffering and death on plague scales. Does the fact that the Bible is full of plagues suggest that vaccinations are irreligious because they stop these Biblical events happening? Does God really want to see the people who live in countries that are too poor to provide effective vaccinations wiped out? Because that seems to be the Intelligent Design going on at the moment.

The AIDs-denying stuff is just demented. It has been associated with unneccesary deaths in South Africa, with spurious “natural” treatments being advanced in a country that has a desperate need for working and affordable anti-virals.

In both these cases, lack of access to vaccines and medicines don’t seem to be leading to better health.

Not being a theist myself, I probably don’t have a right to say this, but the fundamentalist position assumes the existence of a God who is is just pure evil. He sends illnesses on the basis of his moral judgements of people’s ways of life, and these illnesses somehow attack the most blameless. His aim is really poor if he’s trying to strike at wickedness and his arrow of destruction hits a year-old baby living in a shanty-town. Now, worshipping a Supreme Being like that, out of fear of what He might do if he’s not treated to a constant sycophantic chorus, seems to be both sacrilegious and craven.