Daily Archives: Tue, 8 May, 2007

Rational Response Squad Debate

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Quick one for people who haven’t checked out Pharyngula recently. PZ Myers has put up a link to some video footage of a debate between the “Rational Response Squad” and Ray Comfort / Kirk Cameron.

It is pretty entertaining footage, for very predictable reasons though. The theists are actually embarrassingly bad at putting their argument forward. After about five or six minutes it becomes painful watching them spout nonsense and revert to book thumping arguments.

If all theists were this inept, religion would have died out long ago. (This is especially true as the RRS are not really putting forward very strong arguments themselves… 🙂 They really did not need to read from scripts so much… )

[tags]Atheism, Belief, Christianity, culture, debate, Faith, Kirk Cameron, pharyngula, Philosophy, Rational Response Squad, Ray Comfort, Religion, Society, Stupidity, woo[/tags]

Miracle of Photoshop

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As mentioned previously, I have taken a few photos of Bodiam Castle (National Trust site in Sussex) and have been pushing them through Photoshop.

The wonders of Photoshop filters can never, ever, be overstated. Here you can see the results of a ten second experiment with a single picture. The first image is the basic image which was then passed through the mosaic filter, the texturizer and desaturated. All of these produce some interesting effects which radically change the impact of the original photograph.

Bodiam Castle - Initial Photograph Bodiam Castle - First Effect - Mosiac Bodiam Castle - Second Effect - Texturiser Bodiam Castle - Third Effect - Desaturate

All this strikes me as pretty impressive for what took up about 5 minutes of my life. In fact, it took longer to write this post about the effects (and upload the images) than it did to create them. I really do like photoshop 🙂

Educational Standards

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It seems that teaching in UK schools hit the news a bit over the bank holiday weekend (for overseas visitors, I was proven correct this weekend, when I said the May bank holiday is generally the wettest time of the year…).

Nullifidian discusses an article in the Times which reports that the Religious Education Council (REC) is trying to remove a parent’s right to remove their children from a religious education class. This is pretty shocking and as you might imagine the arguments put forward by the REC are riddled with nonsense. It seems they have a “Good Idea” and the best of intentions (and it would do them well to remember the road to hell here…) but, as with most things Religious types get involved with, the practicalities and implementation sucks. When I was at school, RE was 95% Christianity, 4% Judaism and 1% Islam. I don’t recall any other world religion being mentioned, but it was good in teaching me the nonsense and sheer “woo” being spouted by theists. Thank [insert deity of choice] for Science classes…

Also looking at Education, Alun Salt has an excellent discussion about the loss of “Ancient History” as a subject in the UK  (Heather has also mentioned this). It is sad that at the same time the Religious nutters are advocating more and more religion be taught, the basis of a “humanist” society are no longer going to be taught. Will we go to a future where people think the Battle of Thermoplye was a fictional tale? Will we have a society where people think Alexander was actually Irish? This may seem trival, but the lessons (and understanding of society) provided by the classics still underpin the values we live by today. Removing their teaching can only be a step back to the medieval period.

Healthy Eating

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This is not normally a topic I would stray into, but as Heather is hors de combat for a while, I thought I would give it a shot. It certainly strikes me as “bad science” but I may be wrong…

Given the way the UK has got on board this “healthy eating” campaign, it is not surprising that the supermarkets have pulled out all the plugs to use this woo to sell more products. On a fairly regular basis there are adverts on TV how this product or that product is “one of your five a day” with minimal reason behind the claims. It seems Sainsbury’s (supermarket chain) has joined in and in their infinite wisdom have decided that telling their customers how many grams of fat, carbohydrates/sugar, protein etc., are in their food is not effective. As part of the great dumbing down of the UK they now use a “traffic light” system. It is pretty embarrassing.

Sainsburys Cheese Ploughmans PackagingWhat intrigues me the most, is the apparently arbitrary nature of what gets a “green” compared to what gets an “amber” or “red” (I am assuming Green = Good and Red = Bad by the way, can food be “Bad?”). As a recent example, I bought a Sainsbury’s Cheese Ploughmans ready made sandwich which comes on malted bread with “seeds.” The packaging calls it “reduced fat, a healthier option.” In the picture, you can see what the traffic light system looks like, but please note, the fat and salt are supposed to be “amber” rather than red. Continue reading →

Side Admin

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A couple of asides for general information. First off, I have been working my way through emails lately and a few people have asked for a return to the “old” theme. While I suspect most of these people are Heather, I am sure not all are, and there are a few valid points made (apparently this theme breaks on IE6 or older, which makes up over a third of the visitors). As a result, while a bespoke theme is being worked upon, we will revert to the Fallseason theme of a few months ago. Personally, trying to settle on a “nice” theme which works for as many people seems a task which I will never, ever, manage.

Secondly, as mentioned the other day (“Not Many Posts“), there have been a few problems with Heather’s access. Virgin Media were supposed to send an engineer out today to fix it. As a sane person would have guessed, the engineer never turned up (an accident was to blame, no more details known) and now she needs to rearrange the visit. While accidents do happen, it is a shame that cost cutting measures by Virgin have meant that they had no slack in the system to work around this and it could be another week Heather goes without access. What great customer service…