Monthly Archives: June 2007

Over-reaction

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Media hysteria again, which will inevitably lead to more and more repression, giving Brown a free pass for not undoing any of the civil liberties damage of the past few years.

This country is under more or less blanket surveillance. We are supposed to be a democracy. We are supposed to adhere to values of freedom of expression and movement and so on.

WTF are all these cctv cameras, biometric data collection, interception of comms for if they don’t protect us yet? We all know that any professional criminal or terrorist just regards these things as nuisances that they have to pay to get round.

What about the rest of us? We may have mistakenly thought we could rely on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights and things like that. (If you asking what they were, you probably left school when the History syllabus was made more idiot-friendly. And no, don’t ask me. How much do I know about them.? More or less nothing.)

As the UK abandons centuries of constructing “liberal” political values, as soon as it’s faced with a few determined groups, what will remain that is even worth defending in our way of life?

I’m going through one of those phases where I want to go up to 80 odd year old men and women in the street and apologise.

“I know you were part of the opposition to fascism. I know you helped create the welfare state. I know you went through Blitzes and rationing and so on. But look, sorry, we just can’t be arsed keeping up with that stuff, when we have shopping and reality shows and celebs to worry about.”

The history of all conflict – not just the UK’s history – suggests that, in the end, there is no alternative but to sort out the basic causes. If this doesn’t happen soon, anything recognisably sane about our society will have been put in a straitjacket.

(To borrow Trevor Phillips’ memorable phrase and mess about with it a bit) Why are we sleepwalking into tyranny?

How to avoid Alzheimer’s?

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The British Alzheimer’s Society are apparently promoting healthu living advice as a way to avoid or delay the illness. Wow, amazing. One of the great fears of an increasingly geriatric population? And there’s a way to avoid it?

Launching a booklet, Be Headstrong, he said that five steps were necessary to reduce the risks – do not smoke, eat less saturated fat, exercise regularly, lead an active social life and have blood pressure and cholesterol checked regularly. “If we could delay the incidence of dementia by five years we could reduce its incidence by 50 per cent,” he said.

(“He” refers to the society’s director.)

The Society has produced research which suggests that overweight people are twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s, according to the Independent. The information is being linked to this research.

(Sorry, I’m too idle to look at the research. I will of course take the newspaper’s shorthand analysis of it – after it’s been filtered through the Alzheimer’s Association Press launch – as being the truth and leave it at that….. Oh, blimey, I thought that was what we were supposed to do.)

I can’t quite see a clear connection beteen the research and the booklet- it doesn’t even mention overweight in that summary. It even mentions things like “not smoking” when I seem to recall that one of the few benefits of smoking was supposed to be lowering the chance of getting Alzheimer’s, according to research reported in New Scientist a few months ago (Don’t even think about making me look that up.)

Doesn’t this sort of thing sail dangerously close to woo? I mean, this is advice given out on the basis that it will allow you to avoid Alzheimer’s, which seems a bit spurious. Well, quite spurious, if you must.

Let’s just think for a minute- all those “healthy” things. Don’t they sort of characterise people who have a bit of education and spare money and time? Don’t such people generally tend to be healthier generally? On every health measure?

Does observation of things that occur together prove causation?

(It’s raining and Columbo is on TV right now. This happened last week as well. Does showing Colombo cause rain. Does the rain make the Hallmarck channel show old Columbo episodes?)

Isn’t it logical cheating to say that these are the specific things that give the wealthier people their advantages? I would lay out actual money that people living in Hampstead or the Cotswolds have lower Alzheimer rates than say, Glasgow Govan. And that people with double-barrelled surnames have a later onset of Alzheimer’s than the rest of us.

Does that mean, that calling your son Piers Oldmoney-Jenkins or your daughter Cressida Cholmely-Waugh will ensure they don’t get Alzheiners? Well no, but the existing evidence suggests that it’s probably going to work at least as well as following the advice of the Alzheimer’s society.

Oh dear, I’ve forgotten what was I going to say next 🙂

Social scrutiny dept

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Great concept. with some really funny pages on the Department of Social Scrutiny with such gems as the ID Application Forms pages You can click on each form to get the full detail.

Just go there. Don’t make me quote whole pages from it, please.

Privacy statement zzzzz

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The very words “privacy statement” have a hypnotic effect. You see them, click “Yes, Ok I’ve read it” to get to the next bit…… There may be some inbuilt mental process that protects the brain from damage by shutting it off in the presence of the small print on things like loan agreements, the introductory bits of software and so on.

I happen to have read one by accident trying to find out if there was a (potentially illusory) Microsoft product named WI. Googling just took me to the Wisconsin Microsoft Developer’s network, which wouldn’t let me go any further without agreeing to the privacy statement.

Props to Microsoft here, because you can actually read the provisions – indeed you would have to if you decide to go through the gateway. Not having any reason to join the Wisconsin Developer Network – apart from sheer nosiness and apparently a temporary failure of my low boredom threshhold – I obviously didnt.

However, the contents come as a bit of a shock. Here’s an extract:

Collection of your Personal Information
WI Microsoft Technical Community collects personally identifiable information, such as your e-mail address, name, home or work address or telephone number. WI Microsoft Technical Community also collects anonymous demographic information, which is not unique to you, such as your ZIP code, age, gender, preferences, interests and favorites.
There is also information about your computer hardware and software that is automatically collected by WI Microsoft Technical Community. This information can include: your IP address, browser type, domain names, access times and referring Web site addresses. ……

So, to join that particular developer community you just hand over information so far beyond the expected IP and referrer as to be on another level.

You might think “so what”? I hope the BBC article about the private detective agency crackers gives you a little pause.

In which case it may be a good idea to read the privacy statements now and again. ZZZZZZ ZZZZZ

Terror Returns to London

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Once more, the actions of the insane, cruel, evil and disturbed make headline news in the UK. Even though I am almost as far from London as you can get in the UK, the news of the Car Bomb outside a London nightclub has been pretty big stuff. Quite understandable as well really, as this is the “purpose” of terrorist attacks – create terror.

Putting a bomb made up off “60 litres of petrol, gas cylinders and nails” outside a busy London nightclub on a Thursday night (often one of the busier nights in the city), strikes me as a pretty effective way to make people frightened. That the bomb did not detonate is certainly amazing (invoke god of choice if you wish, I will stick to the wonders of the bombers ineptitude), and it seems reasonable to assume the police comments about possible casualties are accurate.

It is certainly remarkable that this device was discovered (prior to it announcing itself in a big way) and it is a tribute to the bomb disposal teams who had to render it safe, while retaining forensic evidence. A big well done all round there. Continue reading →

Mental riff – special project

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Hat tip to Black Sun Journal for sparking this off with his comment on the last post, in which he suggested searching out El Morya

(Mea culpa, I would have to say that I was only vaguely aware of Black Sun’s back story though I’d sort of picked up bits of it from the personal bits of his posts. His parents were pretty well-known leaders of a Blavatsky influenced cult. Really.)

First shock is how often El Morya pops up on web pages. “1 – 10 of about 125,000 for el morya.” Not quite a household word but probably more than you’d get for a fair number of other topics. I was going to see how many hits some science and social science phrases got but,no, it’s not like anyone would thank me.) Continue reading →

ID proponents are theosophists

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In your face, creationists. Here’s some old school stuff about Intelligent Design from Blavatsky net – amazing that Mme Blavatsky can blog from beyond the grave. Pretty well proves the survival of the soul all by itself doesn’t it? 🙂

(It’s also mildly amazing that she somehow managed to get the French form of Mrs into her name. (Like Lord Lucan. Or President Bush. It’s only us lesser folks that have to use our first names.) But I digress.)

Helena Blavatsky, in 1888, was the first person to use the phrase “intelligent design” to convey her understanding of evolution.

Continue reading →

Yet another reason…

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This is a good BBC read that might convince a few people that the information technology involved in setting up national database systems isn’t going to be intruder-proof.

My precis:

Basically two policemen moonlighting as phone crackers etc for a private detective agency that provided tech interruption services to a toxic waste company to carry out surveillance on local planners and environmentalist opponents. (Plus the hiring guy’s wife when they were getting a divorce .)

The guy put on BT overalls and attched the devices to BT lines. Noone batted an eyelid obv until BT found its customers were getting ripped off for phone time.

You couldn’t make this stuff up…. etc 🙂

css is the work of the devil

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(Not only aiming at two targets with one blog – how economical is that? – but giving it a spurious biblical aura.)

This blog tends to the belief that ID is the personification of evil in (two-alphabetic-character form and in two repellent variants (Intelligent Design and National Identity Card) that we rant about with a pleasingly symmetrical regularity.

But the previous post here mentions, in passing, the differently demonic horrors emanating from its three-alphabetic-character rival for demonic rulership CSS.

We may be forced to form a new anti-css cult, dedicated to blaming all the ills of this world on ranndom initial pairs or triads.

Don’t think its only manifestation on the human plane is just the newly emergent life form CSS, able to resist any human efforts to make it place anything on a blog or webpage where you expect, in a remotely similar way at different resolutions on different browsers.

The cursed initials have meme-wormed their way into the wonderful world of copy protection.The Register said:

Buying a DVD and then copying it for use on your PSP, iPod or laptop could soon become impossible, if the DVD Copy Control Association gets its way…. The association wants to amend the licence underpinning the use of its DVD copy-protection technology, CSS (Content Scrambling System).

(see – the evil letters appear in another context :-))

The amendment would force, say, DVD playback software from displaying ripped content. It would also imply the use of software built into PCs and optical drives to prevent ripping software from saving an unscrambled copy of a disc’s contents for later playback on a device without a DVD drive, such as a PSP or an iPod.

The plan is that the DVD tech will only let you run something while it is physically present in the drive. This is already getting challenged by companies trying to make multiroom home cinemas. However as the Register points out, there is no way that crackers won’t have already got round it. )

Anyone spot in the market for a device manufacturer who takes this stuff into account? From the BBC today, when it refers to a (surprisingly modest) 61% of the population having admitted to crimes from a list of ten:

Presumably, that 61% would be higher still if the list had included a wider range of crimes, such as downloading music and copying software illegally.

Tagged by Atheist Perspective

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This blog was tagged by atheist perspective I’ve shamelessly lifted an explanation of what that means from the atheist perspective site, which is excellent by the way.

We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
– Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
– People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
– At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
– Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Well part A is completed with minimal effort. Clearly the next stage must have to be the 8 random facts. Argh, 8 things about us that we wouldn’t mind going on the net – but are actually interesting enough to post. Damn that rules out almost anything I could put here….

Hmmm…. hmmm…..

  1. Between us we have lived on or visited 5 continents. Antartica is one of the two we’ve never been to, although one of us has been close enough to swim in it’s waters. (Yes, it really is as cold as you would imagine).
  2. Between us we speak – to a standard ranging from fluent (English) to pathetically halting (well, the others) – 5 languages and can make sense of a couple more with babelfish’s help. Oh yes, 5 languages Plus Latin.
  3. One of us genuinely believes the Wire is the major artwork of the 21st century. This is a minority viewpoint in every sense, even on the blog.
  4. We train with weights, more or less every day. One of us even got a certificate that will pay out thousands if anyone he trains gets injured, The other one has long been planning to enlist him as her personal trainer and do something spectacularly stupid…
  5. One of us has become obsessed with taking photographs and keeps getting better and better digital cameras every few months. And the pictures are getting better all the time as well.
  6. One of us refuses to accept any limitations, no matter how glaringly obvious, and hence persists in thinking she can do 3d graphics, despite the evidence of the senses.
  7. Terry Pratchett remains the one author we agree 100% over and have obsessively read every book produced. (Not all good though- the “actual” sci-fi books are poo and the science companion is distressing)
  8. CSS design is soundly despised by every one who has anything to do with this blog. Even their pets hate CSS.

Choosing 8 blogs was no easy task either. There were obvious choices – like nullifidian – who have probably already been tagged within an inch of their lives so would just get pissed off. However, I sprinkled my fairy dust over the atheist blogroll and found some worthy, if less familiar, contenders.

[tags]Blog Meme, Atheism, Wire, WhyDontYou, Why Dont You, Society, Culture, Travel, Languages,Blog, Meme, Blogs[/tags]

If in doubt, appeal to ridicule

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Reading through the comment is free part of the Guardian is enlightening, entertaining and a bit saddening. It is enlightening because it shows how confused people become when they want to find a target to attack, it is entertaining because the commenters are, basically, crazy and saddening because once upon a time you would have thought people who read the Guardian were reasonably educated. Obviously in the internet age, this is no longer the case…

Anyway, a rant against the HSE by Simon Jenkins, titled “The zombie health inspectors should be replaced with a risk commission” drew my attention today. As I have mentioned in the past, I am often drawn into the murky world of health and safety much more than I would normally like, so this intrigued me.

The title of the article seems to draw on this part of Mr Jenkins long, repetitive, rant:
Continue reading →

Another reason to say NO to ID cards

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Now, of late, the Guardian Money’s obsession with demonising “buy to let” landlords has been more than a little annoying. However in Saturday’s paper, the Capital Letters section had a bit which was quite interesting. Capital Letters is a sort of consumer rights thing, where people write in following problems with various companies and Tony Levene sorts things out for them. Very interesting reading most of the time.

Basically, this week, some one wrote in saying that HM Customs and Excise (Now properly known as HM Revenue and Customs) was threatening to take them to court over non-payment of taxes. The person was complaining because they did not owe any tax and they were on the PAYE scheme where tax is deducted from wages at source. The unfortunate correspondent had tried to convince HMRC about this but was unsuccessful. Continue reading →

Social Networking Evolved

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With a hat tip to the Friendly Atheist: It seems that Richard Dawkins has stumbled upon the crux of Web 2.0 applications and now there is a dedicated social network for evolutionists to join. The blurb from the admin team reads:

We hope this new site feature will help you meet and connect with like-minded people from around the world or in your area.

Brilliant. Now, what are you waiting for? Get over to Richard Dawkins.net, log in and add Friendly Atheist and myself as your friends.

[tags]Richard Dawkins, Friendly Atheist, Social Networking, Society, Technology, Culture, Evolution, Dawkins, Atheist, Atheism[/tags]

Most viewed posts

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Just out of interest, I thought I would take a look at the most popular posts on the blog and see if it gave an insight into visitors here.

The top three most viewed articles on WhyDontYou (at the time of writing this post) are:

  1. How to Defend Religion? with 2411 direct views (it even has 14 comments and over 1000 home page views).
  2. One Person’s Take On Christianity has managed a total of 2332 direct views, although it only generated three comments and 14 home page views.
  3. Content Negotiation – Mirrored Post, which despite being a blast from the past still gets 10 – 15 hits a day and has amassed a total of 1979 direct hits but in languishing in the comments stakes.

Alternatively, using Feed views you get this picture:

  1. Rapture with 5197 feed views (a paltry 106 direct views of the URL though)
  2. Faith in its death throes? with 5150 feed views but only 114 direct views
  3. Computers aren’t doctors with 5119 feed views but only 126 visits to it’s URL.

This produces some interesting assumptions about people who come here. It seems (and this correlates for more than just the top three) that a post is either popular with people coming to visit the site (direct URL views) or popular with people reading it on the feeds, but never both. For example, One Person’s Take On Christianity has amassed exactly ZERO feed views.

The most popular category is Bad Shops with almost twice as many views this year as the second most popular which is Television (13598 views vs 7278), which, given the high quality philosophical content here, speaks volumes about what people are really interested in 😀 .

Now, my original aim was to see if I could get an insight into visitors here. I am not sure the stats are really successful.  The preponderance of Religious related posts in the “most popular” lists makes sense, but I have no idea why “Content Negotiation” has become a run away success. How to defend religion has a constant stream of visitors since Ruth Gledhill linked to it in her article for the Times Online but why the others are popular currently escapes me.

From a technological point, I have no idea why the decisions between reading post / viewing feed seems so heavily polarised. There are no posts I can find which have a similar number of both, it seems very much an either/or thing.

Lastly, I wonder if, by highlighting the most popular, will this make them even more popular? I often see blogs with sidebars proclaiming the “most viewed” posts – surely this will have the effect of making those even more viewed and, as such, increasing the distance between them and others to the point at which it can never be crossed.

Comments welcome 😀

[tags]Technology, Feedburner, Feeds, RSS, Content, Blog, Philosophy, Society, Content Negotiation, Religion, Ruth Gledhill, Times, Firestats, Statistics[/tags]

Penultimate Dr Who – Blimey

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Oddly there is not very much I can say about this weeks Dr Who. It was excellent, a proper “edge of the seat” type episode with surprisingly good acting. Even Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) has won me over and I’ve lost the urge to vomit every time he speaks.

As the story (and this series) concludes next week, I am largely lost for things to say. I have no idea what the little flying baddies are, and while they were the weakest part of the story they didn’t take away from the overall quality. Well done to the BBC and Russell T Davies. I just wish, I really wish, they could try to keep the doctor away from London, 2007. It is getting annoying now.

Overall, this series (especially the last few episodes) has been fantastic. The stories (largely) have been compelling enough to keep adults and children watching. There is enough tension to make them mildly scary without relying on the gore that “adult” horror relies on (can you ever look at scarecrows or statues in the same way?).

It really will be a shame when the series finishes next week. Shame on the BBC for such a short season. David Tennant may even be a match for Tom Baker…

[tags]Doctor Who, Dr Who, BBC, Timelords, Television, Master, Captain Jack Harkness, Captain Jack, David Tennant, Tom Baker[/tags]