Monthly Archives: March 2007

Dr Who

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The new series of Dr Who started on BBC1 today and, while I was only half watching it, I must say that so far it is not as good as those that went before. I am not sure if it is a combination of dodgy scripting or atrocious supporting actors, but there is certainly room for improvement.

First off, sadly, David Tennant is a very, very good Doctor. Christopher Eccleston is a very good actor and really got the new series off to a good start after the problems which ended the series in the late 80’s. (Colin Baker and Sylverster McCoy truly have a place in the LinuxGod’s hell for their part) Despite this, Eccleston never really was “Doctor Who.” He was a touch too agressive and militaristic (maybe I just remember 28 Days Later too much).

Tennant is as close to the real Doctor (Tom Baker of course) as any one since has ever been. Shame everything about him screams that he should be terrible, he just isn’t.

Unfortunately he is pretty much on his own though. For some reason Dr Who’s scriptwriters – who include some of the most imaginative people in Britain – have a hard time putting together a decent plot. I suspect it is not all their fault, the constraints of the new format are against them.

Compared to the old series, the new ones are rushed. They try to introduce a setting, build tension, create a conflict, get the audience attached to the protagonists, get all dramatic and conclude in about 45 minutes. That is never going to be good. If you look at the Tom Baker years, each “episode” ran about 3 hours long and the extra breathing room certainly pays off. The plots are massively more engaging and you can actually get into the characters and their interactions. Are children really so short of attention span now? I doubt it myself.

The scriptwriters obviously collude with the set designers to make life easy. Oddly it goes horribly wrong. Unlike the first seven doctors, Doctors 9 and 10 never seem to leave Earth. It is rare for them to go anywhere other than London. Nearly every episode starts and ends “today” which seems to miss most of the point of it being Sci-Fi. None of this fighting Daleks on Skaro or the like, now the Doctor largely fights comedy monsters in London. Sometimes it is Victorian London, and I think a total of three episodes out of the last two seasons have been elsewhere. On the massively rare off chance any one involved reads this GET OFF EARTH! Go to colony ships in deep space, go to weird trading worlds, or planets which are stuck in a combination of the middle ages with lasers. Get SCIFI! Please! Don’t turn this into Hollyoaks with a sonic screwdriver.

Obviously the set designers like this because it should be easy to mock up sets that look like London. However, they still get things weirdly wrong. Tonight’s episode had a hospital moved to the moon, and every time they tried to show shots of people looking at the stars, or the ones back home looking at the hole you could see massive visual artefacts round the join points. I know it is not high budget, but this is 2007. Even the BBC can afford a decent Linux box with decent software… surely… ?

Add to all this the nonsensical “baddies” and it seems the BBC is trying to cut costs for what should be the flagship programme for 1900hrs on a Saturday. In the episode tonight, there were two sets of baddies, a blood sucker (who kills Dr Stoker – see, humour is not dead) in the form of a little old lady and some intergalactic police. When the police turn up, they are basically cybermen in black with bigger helmets. They walk the same, they form up the same and initially they act the same. It was almost painful. Please Dr Who scriptwriters. Use decent monsters. Stop going for people with funny masks on. Remember this is 2007. Check your calendar if you don’t believe me!

In a similar vein, despite Tennant’s excellent acting skill, the rest of the cast are painfully bad. I thought “Rose Tyler’s” family in the last season were poor but this new crop reach a new nadir of poor acting. The new sidekick/leading lady “Martha Jones” (Freema Agyeman) is a poor actor. She seems to be constantly giggling and gives the program the air of watching a secondary school play (High School for the Americans). Even at the most traumatic, shocking, surprising or scary moments, she appears to be fighting to suppress a grin. It is painful. I can only assume she will get better.

That said, she outclasses the rest of the supporting cast by an order of magnitude. Watching them pretend to scream, pretend to faint, argue or whatever is painful. I know this is “Kids TV” but if the support can’t act, write scripts that need less of them. Stop trying to recreate Ben Hur in a hospital.

I know this is a bit of a rant and there seems to be quite a few whines, but overall, I quite enjoyed the program. I am sure kids today will like it, but sadly they miss out on the real joys that Dr Who could provide. The lack of a cliff hanger is a shame and it seems to pander to limited attention spans rather than make people want to come back and watch more – this is odd, as each episode shows a taster for the next one…

Maybe someone, who knows someone, who knows someone who works on the team for this will read this blog and pass on some comments. If it changes for the better, brilliant and it could be a fantastic series. If it doesn’t, never mind. It will still be OK (if repetitive). At least the science is broadly sound 🙂

[tags]Dr Who, Doctor Who, BBC, Freema Agyeman, David Tennent, Tom Baker, Television, TV, Daleks, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Rants, Christopher Eccleston, Martha Jones, Cybermen, Rose Tyler, Society[/tags]

DIY & Linux

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Painting my hallway – to match the rest of the EC gift house upgrade – I was thinking about a comment, by someone called Tel, on a post here. He basically said, in response to a plaintive whine that Linux should have simpler forms if it is ever to become really popular with non-techies “Hint. Pay someone to do it.”

I would rather mess about with Linux for weeks than paint my house. All the same, the cursory paintjob took a couple of hours at a total cost of £18.99 for a huge bucket of uninterestingly coloured paint and a set of rollers.

There are so many calluses on my hands, it would probably justify more spending on some sort of medicinal cream. I suppose the cost of hot water and soap to turn me back into a human being rather than a mobile device for carrying paint round should also be factored in. I refuse to cost in the old brush pole or the rags I was wearing, as these were already landfill waiting to happen. All the same, this barely adds up to much over £20.

How much would it have cost to get someone to paint my hall and stairs and landing? A good few hundred GBP more. It would certainly be a better job. Would I care? Clearly not or it would have been decorated before. It’s not as if I lounge around on the landing admiring the finish of the walls.

To spell it out, if I couldn’t do it myself for very little cash, it wouldn’t have been done.

I’m going to turn this into a parable, in a truly Christ-like fashion. (The more devout among you may already know the Parable of the Linux Installation,as a part of the Apocrypha.)

When the place where I work gets painted, they hire professionals. When they want networked IT systems or new software, they pay (comically) large sums of money – for things which even their best friends could hardly call “fit for purpose” – i.e they pay professionals.

When I want something to eat, I cook my own food. I know that I’d get a better meal if I hired a gourmet chef, but, yet again, I’m going with the DIY ethos…

LInux is more or less free. That is, it’s even LEGITIMATELY free – unlike so much else in the PC. geek’s world …. If you try to use it, you know you have to put some effort in in exchange for spending money. I’d be prepared to do this – in the event I ever get off my butt and re-install a Linux distro on one of the half -disassembled PCs which usually surround me.

I can’t see this is doing a techy out of a job. If I have to pay someone to install *nix – instead of relying on my well nigh 15 years’ experience of building and messing about with PCs, plus help and advice from friends, family and forum users – then what hope is there for someone who’s just bought their first PC?

It’s as if I couldn’t paint the hall without first learning how to make emulsion paint through attentive googling. Plus knitting my own paint roller, devising a mechanism for spinning it and whittling my own brush pole. Too much of a challenge? “Pay a decorator, you tight git.”

(Nice one TW in getting a PCLinuxOS distro working. It sounds ideal for you. Not having a wireless network, I’d not have the same problems – I hope – but I still think it might be worth me giving it a try. Soon. Really.

Pity it shows the new layout doesn’t work in *nix but, I suppose you can only solve one torturous IT problem at a time. It looks pretty good in my antique IE6.)

Linux – Partial Success

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Well it seems I have had at least a partial success with the installation of Linux onto this machine. Numerous attempts with openSUSE, Ubuntu and Solaris all failed dismally.

openSUSE 10.2 in both 32 and 64bit versions refused point blank to find the USB device (previously they found it) and certainly wouldn’t give me the facility to configure it. This is doubly strange as I have openSUSE 10.2 running on an older machine in the spare room which uses an identical USB WiFI dongle, and it worked straight out of the box. This really is a shame as over the years, I have come to like SUSE and thought it’s progress was excellent.

Ubuntu 6.10 (32/64bit) and Ubuntu 6.06 (32 bit) also completely failed to work. While it was similar to openSUSE, Ubuntu is a lot more frustrating with it’s problems. The way Ubuntu obsesses about hiding the inner workings and hand-holding pretty much drive me insane. As I see it, the main reason some one will go to Linux is because they want the power and capabilities offered by a great OS. Making all of this hidden and “unintuitive” strikes me as abject lunacy.

Solaris 10.2 (32 bit) bombed. I wasn’t really expecting much from this, my experiences with Solaris on desktops in the past has never been “fun.” This time was no different. It got as far as trying to set up the graphical interface and crashed. A reboot and it was the same all over again.

While the Solaris farce was no surprise, I was a bit disappointed by the first two. This time last year I was happily running multiple linux machines (SUSE and Ubuntu) and would regularly tell people about the benefits of using them (see blog archives for examples). I honestly thought that the way both were heading, there was actually a chance you could get Linux out to the broader audience (ask heather – I kept harassing her to try it, saying how easy it is now, etc.). Give my recent experiences, I think both have taken a step backwards.

No one expects a “niche” OS like Linux to have out of the box support for every hardware device on Earth, but I would expect them to make it easier for people to find the problems. Having lots of on-line resources is useless when your problem is the network connection! I wonder what the goals of the various distros are – in the case of Ubuntu, I can only assume world domination. If the distro makers want to really move away from the small home market share (in the main, people who work in technical jobs), they need to re-think their approach.

This brings me to my last attempt. PCLinuxOS. Worked straight out of the box. I even did it twice to check. Both time this ran perfectly. Given the frustrations, and the cabinet full of install DVD/CD-Roms I have, this was amazing. I am even writing this on Firefox, under PCLinuxOS.

While I am impressed with it’s ability to find and connect to the network first time (with lots more configuration options than either SUSE or Ubuntu), I am not fully convinced I “like” PCLinuxOS yet. Give me some time to play with it, and see what installing new software is like – the main reason I want Linux is to set up an Apache server with PHP5, Perl, Python and Ruby/Rails to assist with web development. If this is not up to the task….

Anyway, let me close with a big well done to PCLinuxOS. It has succeeded where the bigger names failed (Even Mepis dropped the ball).

Linux Gamble

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Well, it is the weekend. Previously, I said I was going to get some Cat5 (or Cat6) cable and hard wire myself into the router to see if I could get 64 bit openSUSE or Ubuntu working. I have discovered that 5m of Cat5 costs £24.99 from PCWorld and that is a lot more than I intend to pay on the off chance it allows me to get Linux up and running, on the grounds the Belkin works fine in Windows.

However, there is some remaining perseverance.  Tonight I have started the incantations, I have sacrificed a square pane of glass to the LinuxGod (a window… get it? Oh I give up) and unwrapped two penguin (bars) to inspect their entrails. Hopefully this will enable me to get a working Linux system over the course of the weekend.

I suspect, if I am honest and borderline serious, I am going to resort to installing 32bit openSUSE or Ubuntu, as they have worked with this device in the past. If this still fails, I will travel to Antarctica and kill every single black and white, flightless bird I come across. In a bizarre fit of over confidence, I also have a 40gb partition put aside for Solaris. I may be online again before 2008…

Self-styled “most-hated family” earning the title

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In among the news on disturbing world events, with frightening implications, (captured sailors in Iran, carnage in Iraq, and any number of other things….. ) the BBC has this little gem on its magazine page.

It refers to Louis Theroux’s programme on the Phelps, who he calls the “most extreme people” he’s ever met. Now, this is a man who’s interviewed Eugene Terrblanche, normally considered one of the most extreme people on the face of the planet.

Obviously Theroux just normally interviews people who are extreme only in terms of their uniqueness or silliness or publicity-hungriness, or any combination thereof, like the Hamiltons. He adopts a self-mocking uber-English diffidence but he’s really taking the piss out of most of them, letting them react to his apparent naivety. This can be so funny it chokes the breath out of you or dull and predictable depending on who he’s interviewing.

The Phelps must be in class of their own.

They call themselves the most hated family in the US and they picket funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.

In case you think this means they are just oddly insensitive anti-war activists, think again.

They picket these funerals to draw attention to what they see as God’s punishment on America for tolerating homosexuality.

You may have guessed it, they are the Westboro Baptist Church.

Louis Theroux claims to find them perplexing. He says they are pleasant, normal people outside of their picketing. He says they started out “moderate” – only picketing places where gay people meet, Gya Pride events and so on – and didn’t use words like “fags”.
(I’m not 100% convinced that this constitutes moderate or normal.)

Apparently, they just accumulated extremeness as they went about it.

Louis Theroux says that they are basically a model family (hmm, that not 100% convinced thig is rearing its head again) that really care about each other, just dominated by an evil Gramps. He seems to have ended up seeing the Church as some sort of genetically related cult.

It shows you what strange avenues the religious impulse can take you down. I think another part of the answer is that parts of the Christian Bible are pretty weird. There’s a lot of weird stuff in there and when you take that and you add this angry, domineering kind of a father figure, which is Gramps, and you add that he has sort of separated them off from other people, other families and driven them to achieve a lot, and he was kind of a charismatic guy, and still is up to a point.

I still can’t dissipate the image of being at a funeral that is being picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church. In the most frivolous terms, I think it’s partly because it brings to mind the phrase “You wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry”.

More seriously, it’s quite difficult to think of many legal activities that could be more vile than turning up at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq to harry the grief-stricken with bigoted anti-gay propaganda. You’d have to be a hell of a lot more than averagely nice and normal in the rest of your life to balance out that level of wickedness.

Religion has problems

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Now lots of “militant atheists” are happy to talk about how religion is the cause of all the worlds troubles, but personally I think it is going a bit too far. People do good and bad things independently of their religious beliefs, no matter how much the religious apologists try to claim religion is not the source of morality and “goodness.”

For me, where the problem with religion comes in, is the almost automatic assumption amongst the “faithful” that others with the same beliefs will be good people. This is reflected in the oft quoted statistics about how many people in the US would vote for an atheist. Here in SecularUK, while we may like to think it, things are not massively different. While the average person on the street may be pretty much agnostic there is a preference for the Faithful in positions of power. More importantly, there is the false assumption that a persons “belief” means they will be good and should be above suspicion. This has been shaken in recent years with the scandals of Catholic priests but you only have to watch Sunday morning television or listen to a radio 2 phone in to see it is far from gone.

This brings me to my current point. There is a woman called Eunice Spry, she is a 62 year old devout Jehovah’s Witness. She is a bit funny looking as you will see in a bit, but she looks normal enough (for a crazy pensioner). During her life she has acted as a foster parent for numerous children. She sounds like a pillar of the community and a good example why the Church is opposed to the government having any say in who can become foster parents.

However, as the article in the Evening Standard points out, Eunice Spry is an evil, sadistic torturer who systematically abused the children in her care for Thor knows how many years. A couple of paragraphs from the online edition show a new face of Ms Spry:

A foster mother was found guilty today of subjecting three young children to a “horrifying catalogue of cruel and sadistic treatment”.

Eunice Spry, 62, routinely beat, abused and starved the youngsters in her care over a 19 year period. The devout Jehovah’s Witness forced sticks down their throats and made them eat their own vomit and rat excrement.

As punishment for misbehaving, she would beat them on the soles of their feet and force them to drink washing up liquid and bleach.

Spry, a pillar of her local community in Gloucestershire, staunchly denied all the claims made against her and insisted the only physical punishment she ever used was “a smack on the bottom”.

It really is a shocking catalogue of abuse. It is made the more disturbing by the phrase “a pillar of her local community” – I am aware that newspapers say that all the time, but some background reading into the local papers suggests that prior to the abuse becoming news, she was actually considered sane and capable. I mean, she is a devout Jehovah’s Witness…

Victim A told how when she was a young girl her foster mother had fixed a sign to the back of one her dress to cause embarrassment in public. The message read: “This child is evil. Do not look at her or talk to her. She wets the bed and is an attention seeker.”

Obviously Spry is evil and probably insane. I suspect that goes without saying. She is not an evil, or insane, person because of her religion but because of the deference the devout get, her evil insanity was allowed to carry on for 19 years. Her religious fervour meant there was less questions about the home schooling, less questions about the lack of medical treatment, less questions about odd things which happen. People, even in the UK, have an unfortunate tendency to give the devout the benefit of the doubt.

Hat tip: Black Sun Journal where this excellent commen resides:

If a church community could have this kind of mayhem going on under their noses, what does this say about their usefulness to society? Religions make all sorts of noises about creating “standards” and norms to “protect the children.” Such a spectacular failure of a “pillar” of a church community should make us question these false mandates.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Themes and Upgrades

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Well, it seems my hopes that the last theme I tried out would be the “be all and end all” theme for the blog were dashed against the rocks of reality.

It seems that something on the theme “Cleaker 2.1” was quite badly broken when viewed in IE6. This is a big shame because I really did like that theme. However, more than 35% of the hits this site gets are from IE6 (with almost another 5% coming from IE versions older than 6), so this is not a problem we can ignore.

Screenshot Showing the Site ThemeThere is now a new theme (minor additional changes may have taken place) and the image you see here shows how it is expected to look. If you are seeing something radically different from this can you please let us know?

Although I am not as enamoured with this theme as I was the previous one, it appears to work even in old versions of IE so it may be kept for a while.

This leads me on to another, important (to me) issue. If you are using IE 6 or older – UPGRADE! Please, for the love of Tim Berners Lee get a more modern browser. I am loathe to say IE7, but it is better than IE6. For the 0.4% of you who insist on using IE 4 or older, you really are missing out a lot of what the internet has to offer. I mean, people talk about Web 2.0 and there are still around 5 people a day who come here using Web 0.1beta browsers…

Download FireFox, Opera, Mozilla, SeaMonkey or even (gasp) IE7. They are all free!

Well, at least I have got that of my chest.

(p.s. before any Apple / Linux / BSD etc people pipe up – Windows accounts for over 75% of the traffic to this site)

How to Defend Religion?

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(found from Nullfidian’s excellent blog)

I was reading the write up on the various Times Online sites of the “Intelligence Squared” event which tool place recently. Basically this was a debate on the motion “We’d be better off without religion.” On the side For the motion were Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling and Christopher Hitchens. On the side Against the motion were Julia Neuberger, Roger Scruton and Nigel Spivey.

Ruth Gledhill, the Times’ Religion reporter, has written an interesting summary of the proceedings titled “Articles of Faith.” Gledhill describes herself as someone who is sure God exists, yet there is not much in the way of a pro-theist bias in the reporting. All in all, it struck me as a reasonable post (not least because she says the “For” argument was better than the “Against” one 🙂 ).

Towards the end of the piece it gets a bit strange though. When talking about the dangers of creationism, she writes:

Well I’d be upset if my son became a creationist but there is no chance of that, not in the Church of England at least.

Which, while reasonable, is a risky proposition to take. Creationism / ID is a fundamental part of the monotheistic doctrines, so while [insert religion] may not overtly push it, it is there below the surface. I would love to see a Christian doctrine which does not assert the universe was created by God, and that man was not made in his image. Although I may be biased, I find it hard to see how some can reconcile this belief with anything else.

Next she comes to something I find very strange, yet it seems used all the time by “reasonable” people when they want to defend their faith:

[Dawkins] problem is that he takes religion too literally, and as many have pointed out, is too fundamentalist about his own atheistic creed.

Wow. All over the net, on TV, the radio and in papers people try to defend religion, and deflect criticism, by saying the critic is taking religion “too literally.” Personally I am at a loss for any other way to do it. Either God exists or he doesn’t. I assume Christians (and Jews/Muslims) believe God exists – is that taking religion too literally?

Religion is built around doctrine and “rules” which are claimed to be the word of God. If the faithful get to pick and choose which ones they follow, doesn’t that make a mockery of that which is already comical? If the best defence for “religion” is that it is something which gives people the chance to get together with each other and has some vague good ideas (don’t want to take the doctrine literally, do we?) then it strikes me it really is an idea which has passed its sell by date.

If religion is not meant to be taken seriously, what is it?

On a different note, as always, the comments in response to a post like this produce much more entertainment. Gledhill is too good, too reasonable, a writer to really froth properly – unlike those who comment … 🙂

Some examples include:

I agree with Richard Dawkins, we WOULD be better off without religion.
But Jesus… without Him, we are all – literally – lost! (David Smith)

Not sure if that was supposed to be a joke or what.

This kind of format suits both Dawkins and Grayling if they speak in the same way that they write. They like to write controversial bluster which they don’t need to provide references for or explain further. (Phil Craig)

I assume that was a joke. Both write books which are filled with references, unlike the religious apologists or more relevantly the holy books themselves. When the Bible claims that “In the beginning…” where is the reference to back this up? Interesting when Phil Craig is challenged about his comments, David Smith responds:

Mike George:
‘To suggest that [Dawkins] offers ‘controversial bluster’ with no explanation is to ignore the fact that the whole of his writing offer rational arguments and link to scientific study and theory.’

Richard Dawkins:
1.’It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane, or wicked… ‘

2. ‘I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywherein the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection (i.e. evolution).’

Still, at least Dawkins is consistent with Darwin himself.

Having made an exhaustive study of Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’, which set the evolution ball running, American engineer Henry Morris wrote: ‘One can search the whole book in vain for any real scientific evidences for evolution – evidences that have been empirically verified and have stood the test of time. No proof is given anywhere – no examples are cited of new species known to have been produced by natural selection, no transitional forms are shown, no evolutionary mechanisms are documented… One can only marvel that such a book could have had so profound an influence on the subsequent history of human life and thought.’

Which broadly shows a lack of understanding (two references out of context – sounds like Uncommon Descent to me..) about both Dawkins’ work and the actual mechanics of the theory of evolution (and how science works). For some reason, UD may be to blame, anti-evolutionists seem to think that the whole current theory was written by Darwin in Origin. Madness. I suppose this is what comes of being tied to a book which is not supposed to ever change…

There are more, but I could end up spending all month writing about them so I will stop now. Have a look, see what you think and if there are any more howlers please let me know.

A Borg perspective on Wikipedia’s religion page

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If there was ever a Queen of our hive mind*, it’s Wikipedia.

Feeling a bit robotic today, I thought I’d see what the religion quotes page threw up.

This is partly because looking at creationist blogs stops being funny very quickly and achieves the seemingly impossible feat of being both terrifying and boring at the same time.

This Wikiquote page has lots of quotes, split into alphabetical groups, on some principle that already passes all understanding. (D’oh, actually, no it doesn’t. The order is based on the first letters of each quote.)

Some of these are just great. Lots are (deliberately) funny

Much as I want to paste loads of the anti-religious quotes here, or even steal them for a byline for this blog, I’m just mentioning the link so you can pick your own.

Oh well, OK, then, since you twisted my arm, just one two.

Any religion that teaches there is only heaven or hell is gonna be a haven for manic-depressives.~ E.T.B.

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. ~ Spider Robinson

The actual Wiki religion page is just, how shall I put this…. dull.. Too dull to even stir up a rant about anything (unusually) but a least it’s not terrifying.

(I would say that it would be good if you had to write a school essay but, for some wierd reasons, students get penalised for using the greatest knowledge resource on the planet, although they are supposed to be doing a good job if they quote any old Harvard referenced tosh. )

* The blogosphere – I can’t come up with a less repellent word – is obviously the Collective, assimilating more and more odd folk every day. Resistance is blatantly futile.
Immature and specialised Wikis – like the Wikiquote, which was new to me – are being spawned all the time but the Queen remains pre-eminent.

Two Suns

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Midnight Sun 3 - Twin sunsNot much on-line time today, so I will keep it short. Today’s BBC website has an entertaining little article about how “many planets have two suns.”

Star Wars got it right!

The BBC opens with:

The dual suns that rise and set over Luke Skywalker’s homeworld in the film Star Wars may be more than just fantasy, according to data from Nasa.

In a classic scene from the 1977 movie, the hero gazes into the distance as two yellow suns set on the horizon.

Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope has found planetary systems are at least as abundant around dual stars as they are around single stars, like our own Sun. (Read Original)

Brilliant. Who would have thought George Lucas would have been so prescient…. Although the BBC (and I presume the article in the Astrophysical Journal) did go on to qualify this: (emphasis mine)

Dr Trilling said that if planets did exist in dusty discs around these binaries, they might be at distances where the conditions could be hospitable for life.

“The Luke Skywalker picture is science fiction. But I don’t see anything that’s astronomically incorrect about it,” said the University of Arizona researcher.

“With some of our systems, you could play with the geometry, put a planet there, get the temperatures right and make it look just like [Tatooine].”

Still, I am sure everyone who watched Star Wars (the proper one, not the rubbish new ones) as a child can still hope that one day…

[tags]Science, Astrophysics, Cosmology, Star Wars, Planets, Spitzer, Space, Telescope, NASA, BBC, George Lucas[/tags]

Site Theme

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As you may have noticed over the last few weeks, we have been trying out new themes for the blog (the joys of WordPress).

It looks like this is the one we are going to settle on, and it will remain in use for the next few days. Can you take a moment to let us know what you think please? Good and bad comments are welcome here.

Incognito in Afghanistan

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This is a frivolous post about what is a grimly serious topic.

According to the BBC the RAF is letting its servicemen grow beards in readiness for deployment to Afghanistan. The idea is supposed to be to fit in with Afghan cultural values that a beard represents maturity and manliness.

If it’s so that off-duty RAF men don’t stick out like the proverbial sore thumbs against the Taliban, I can tell them now it’s never going to work if the picture of the red-bristled corporal halfway down the page is anything to go by.

We have them here too – Dubious English ID blog

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The British Centre for Science Education: Revealed blog is crying out for a good metaphorical kicking.

It exists solely to attack the British Centre for Science Education (whatever that is) on the grounds that it’s basically an atheist plot.

The purpose of this blog is to examine the new group calling itself the “British Centre for Science Education”. We aim to shed light on the available facts concerning its membership, published statements and discussions. In doing so, we expect that you will come to the same conclusion as we have – that anybody taking it seriously needs to take another look.

The blogista’s personal statement says:

I am a graduate in both science (Masters) and theology (Bachelors), and a minister of Grace Church Belper, an evangelical Christian church in Derbyshire, United Kingdom

Well, I am surprised. An evangelical church? Who’d have expected this blog to have an evangelical agenda? That is almost as surprising as there being atheists in an organisation called the British Centre for Science Education. This world is truly full of new and surprising wonders every day. You would almost think there must be an all-knowing designer behind it all. 🙂

It’s hard to pick out any specific posts for your entertainment as the whole site oozes rage. This is mainly directed at the arch-atheists seen as in charge of the the BCSE, as the other members are assumed to be too naive to understand what they have signed up to.

I suspect that some of BCSE members are simply philosophically naive – they really do imagine that a hard materialist approach to science is “neutral” or “value free”.

(I really would be surprised if anyone with any epistemological understanding thought science – or any human endeavour – was “value free”. At the same time, it’s quite difficult to think of much in the realm of science where a “hard materialist approach” wouldn’t be the only option.)

I can only assume that the BCSE must be some organsiation that is seeking to support the teaching of evolution, otherwise how could it have stirred up this blog’s ire to the extent of devoting a whole blog to opposing it.

You wouldn’t think that standing up for rationalism in British science education would even be necessary, would you? It would be like having to set up an organisation to support the value of integrating exercise into PE lessons. Sadly, this blog suggests otherwise.

I’ll resist the temptation to quote any posts from the blog as I would be spoilt for choice. Look at it yourself if you have an obscure sense of humour and a very high boredom threshhold.

Virgin – ad vs reality

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Just when I was starting to feel positive about Virgin.

(My net connection service is sorted. I was even beginning to feel a mite guilty – maybe the fault really was my raggedy cat5 – further damaged by the building work.)

An advert in the bus paper – the Metro – this morning compared the great cheap Virgin cable service – 10 MB broadband plus cable channels plus phone rental for £30- with the inferior Sky service.

The advert showed Sky with an impressive 80 MB or something- can’t remember the detail, sorry, but Virgin claimed it was capped and is slower the further you are from the hub (isn’t that true of all DSL anyway?) and costlier, at £36 plus £11 BT line rental.

Now, I was already a mite baffled, because surely it’s 10 Megabits not MB, which I am pretty sure usually means MegaBytes. Maybe it’s just how they put these things in ads, but as far as I can see, it’s exaggerating the speed by a factor of 8.

But I get home and open a letter from Virgin. It announces a 1 May price increase to £37 (though doubling the bandwidth, I am pleased to see) and an increase in phone charges. (Well, an exciting new way of calculating the phone charges, that sounds like a reduction – if you take some extra inclusive phone charge package – but slips in that they are rounding up to the nearest minute.)

So the price they are advertising today as being £6 a month lower than Sky’s package is actually going to be £1 more in a month. (And still minus Sky One.) Hmmm.

Join the Animation

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(hat tip: Pharyngula)

A Scottish animator (Iain Gardner) is looking for people to send him JPGs of themselves, holding either a light bulb or an apple, to be spliced together into an animated video. Watch the YouTube clip for more details:

Seems like a reasonable thing, quite easy to take part and the results should be interesting. I think I will have a go this weekend. (Apple – obviously 🙂 ).

If you like the idea of this, please help spread the word.

[tags]YouTube, Creationism, Evolution, Video, Society, Technology[/tags]