Monthly Archives: February 2008

What would Jesus eat?

Posted on by

How did I miss this? It’s a 3 years out-of-date news item on the BBC website’s health section.

Americans look to Jesus for a diet
Five loaves, two fish and a goblet of red wine could be on the menu for Americans if a new diet takes off

(Sorry, Americans, but this is the sort of thing we’re told is normal for you. Just when we’re feeling bad about the xenophobic national stereotyping, some of you go and vote Huckabee back into the running.)

Don Colbert, a Florida doctor, published a diet book that is based on the food in the Bible.

He says: “If you truly want to follow Jesus in every area of your life you cannot ignore your eating habits.”

Well, if there are any over-enthusiastic fundamentalists reading this, it seems to mean that you should stick to kosher foods and just eat bread, fish and lentils.

In anorexically small portions, if you only get a five-thousandth share of five loaves and a couple of fishes. Now that is one harsh diet.

Still, at least you can replace all your water with wine. There’s always an upside.

Games ratings folly

Posted on by

Why not just blame the Internet for everything? Well everything wrong with people under 20, anyway. (Everyone over 20 is obviously already incapable of error.) Bullying, teenage suicide, gang warfare? All the fault of the Internet.

Hence, UK ministers plan to restrict children’s access to computer games. According to the Guardian, recommendations likely to be adopted by the Department of Children and Families include a compulsory new licensing system for games, with prosecution for stores who supply games to the wrong age group.

If teenagers were getting killed by well-aimed consoles, then computer games might indeed bear responsibility for youth violence. Otherwise, this is quite a difficult case to make.

The government’s advisors have allegedly reviewed “the literature” to come up with this plan. Maybe, I am just not up with the latest research but I refuse to believe that any evidence to support these policies either exists or could exist.

This project could be a boon for computer games salespeople, of course. The fastest way to cult status amongst teenagers is the tantalising whiff of the forbidden that an over 18 cert would bring. In fact, any of all the political parties’ crackpot suggestions about pin numbers and certification could be overcome for a whole neighbourhood by one reasonably tech-savvy kid. (On the bright side, it might give a few nerds a short-term rise in popularity. Every cloud etc..)

Ministers are also expected to advise parents to keep computers and games consoles away from children’s bedrooms as much as possible, and ask them to play games in living rooms or kitchens facing outward so carers can see what is being played.
Ministers are also expected to recommend blocking mechanisms to protect children from seeing unsuitable games, emails or internet sites. Discussions have already been held with internet service providers to see if an agreement on a standardised filter can be reached.

Translation – make sure your kids are fully adjusted to the ongoing surveillance society by monitoring their every communication.

In fact, why not set up blanket cctv coverage of their conversations with their friends? You don’t want them to reach adulthood unprepared for the realities of life in a modern western democracy.

Just ban whatever you decide they shouldn’t be aware of. You will save years of effort that might otherwise be wasted in discussion and debate and trusting their judgement and accepting their mistakes – all the stuff involved in becoming autonomous and confident adults.

Archbishop gives up using brain for Lent

Posted on by

In a over-enthusiastic observation of a usually ignored traditional Christian festival, Archbishop Rowan Williams has apparently chosen to give up using his higher brain functions for the next 40 days.

As evidence, he is splattered over the news on every terrestrial channel and on the BBC website, expressing a belief  that

some Sharia law in the UK seems “unavoidable”.

Allegedly, for “community cohesion” 😀

(Splitting a country into different groups with different sets of laws for specific purposes is cohesive? I run screaming to a dictionary. I am relieved to find out that “cohesive” has indeed not magically come to mean “utterly divisive,” since I last looked.)

How impressive that a career religious man can reach the age and novelty-of-eyebrow-development of Rowan Williams, without having gained the slightest idea that “marital disputes” involve relations between men and woman.    And whatever else one might think of Islam, female equality has not traditionally been considered its strong suit.

Shari’a law seems to involve stoning adulterers. Wouldn’t that come under the “marital disputes” category?

There are several countries in the world that claim to apply shari’a law. If anyone chooses to live under it, let them move to one of these countries. How difficult an argument is that to follow?  If I wanted to live under the Netherlands’ legal system, I would have to move to the Netherlands.   Surely the same self-evident principle applies to religiously motivated law.  Ironically, many foreign-born muslims in Europe migrated specifically to enjoy the personal freedoms of the west.  Are they also to be thrown on the mercy of the mullahs, in the name of community cohesion?

There are enough reports of bad things happening to non-muslims living in places – such as the North of Nigeria – where shari’a law has been newly applied. These would make anyone –  male or female &  muslim or infidel – feel a bit uneasy (well, all right then, terrified and aghast…) about living under those legal systems.

Criminal Intent

Posted on by

Five musicians were awarded damages after a Ryanair pilot  refused to carry them, acting on the suspicion of an onboard psychologist.

(This is clearly a man whose awareness of the limits of his own expertise had been misinformed by tv programmes with psychologists and profiler heroes, such as Cracker and Criminal Intent. The pilot may also have watched too many of these.)

The story would be quite comical if it didn’t involve serious embarrassment and major inconvenience to some blameless travellers.

…. And if the incident didn’t expose pure racism …..

The paranoid psychologist saw 5 black men sitting separately on the plane, although they had been together in the departure lounge. (Has he never been on a packed plane before? Maybe he knows the secret of getting 5 adjoining seats without booking 2 years in advance. It’s often tough enough to get two seats in the same part of the plane.)
He claimed that one of the men, who was blind, appeared to be reading a newspaper. (The blind man’s friends were actually reading to him, but in any case, blindness is not necessarily total. Does a blind person incur a duty of complete blindness on themselves, in case their limited sight turns out to confuse people. )

Apparently impressed by the psychology professor’s logic, the Ryanair pilot,

Captain Dunlop decided to remove the men, the only black people on the flight, after two families and a stewardess said that they would not fly with them on board.

So, even after the men had been removed from the flight and their credentails fully established, Captain Douglas refused to have them on board.

The decision left the group stranded in Sardinia and unable to see their families on New Year’s Eve. The first available flight back to Britain on New Year’s Day was to Liverpool. The men could not find a hotel when they arrived in the city and had to spend the night at a bus station, sleeping on their instruments. They only got back to London on January 2.

Even if you choose to ignore the obvious racism behind all this, the incident speaks volumes about where our anti-terrorist panic is leading us, as a society. We seem to be becoming more and more like the McCann “witness” – who saw a non-Anglo-saxon man in the resort, a few days before the McCann’s arrival, and assumed that he must be the person responsible for the disapperance of Madeleine. The British press seem more than happy to treat this prejudiced nonsense as a genuine witness statement.

This psychologist did the same. He saw some people who stood out – to him – ONLY by the fact of their not being white. He then chose to interpret their every action as a threat and to report them to an authority – the pilot – who immediately went along with the claims of a middle-class white passenger, despite their innate absurdity.

Imagine:

  • Professional terrorists whose plan somehow requires that there be 5 of them together on a flight but that they appear to be strangers to each other.
  • They also have to pretend to be a steel band, thereby making a mockery of the whole “unknown to each other” idea.
  • One of them has to pretend to be blind.

This already constitutes a plan so cunning as to be incomprehensible to mere mortals. What could possibly be achieved by having an ostensibly blind passenger, who was actually sighted? Would a terrorist act be more effective if any stray nosey fellow-passenger passers-by might assume those involved weren’t travelling as a group.But the oddest assumption is that the supposed terrorist architects of this intricate and complex plan do not even have the wit to stick to it for a couple of hours.

They are “terrorists” so inept that they can be out-thought by an academic with a plane ticket – someone who fills no formal intelligence or security role and has no access to any information whatsoever, except his own prejudices, in fact.

The judge gave them 4 times the standard amount of damages, but this sum still seems derisory, especially as RyanAir even gave a false story to the press.

Normally, damages for being denied boarding are limited to £250, but the judge said that the group’s “embarrassment at being the only black persons removed from the aircraft at gunpoint for no just reason, their inability to be with their families and friends on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, the overnight stay in the cold of Liverpool, [all] had to be taken into account”.
Ryanair had also lied about the incident to the press. Peter Sherrard, the airline’s head of communications, had told newspapers that “airport security were informed and decided to remove the group”, and that “no request was made to our pilot to allow this group to reboard”. This was “false and misleading”, the judge said.

Flickr – Change at the Top

Posted on by

Since my last post about my pictures on flickr things have changed.

The most interesting, most viewed and most favorited haven’t changed (sadly), although there was a small flurry of extra views on the images I posted in this thread – thank you to the people who bothered to look at the picture 🙂 . The biggest change is the sudden appearance of a new “Most Commented” picture.

Devon Church

Even though this picture hasn’t been on Flickr long, it has already outstripped all opposition with regards to the number of comments it has attracted. While I like this picture, and think it is nice, this is not totally down to the picture quality. In reality, this picture was subjected to a lot of “tactical” pool posting – aiming to get the timing right and selecting groups which are pretty good at generating comments. I am in no doubt that if was only visible in my photostream it would have about six comments…(*)

Is this a sign of the reality of web 2.0?

—

(*) It is worth noting however, that flickr is much, much better than this blog for comments and visits. Taking yesterday as an example, my photostream had 354 visits, this blog had 302. My photostream had 96 comments, this blog had 1… It sometimes intrigues me that only 1 in 300 visits results in a comment or trackback – is it something we say?

The “atheist gods” delusion

Posted on by

Today’s New Statesman goes to town on the topic of God.

Sholto Byrnes makes a barely comprehensible argument that is summed up in the subhead as:

For most Europeans, a belief in God may have given way to a belief in democracy, law and human rights. But the Almighty remains the source of our secular freedoms

Huh? Even without reading further, this fails to make even the most minimal amount of sense.

I think the first sentence is what a more philosophically erudite blogger might call a category error. I’ll try for some definitions to see what these already totally distinct ideas have in common. Hmm. Democracy is system of government. Law is a set of social rules. Human rights are socially agreed standards that we all hope get applied to us by our rulers. Maybe he’s referring to the fact that we invest these different ideas with an element of idealism?

We don’t think they made us, let alone the universe. We don’t pray to them. We don’t hand over big money to people who claim they can intercede with them. We don’t believe they gave their only son to be crucified for us. We don’t feel obliged to prostrate ourselves before them several times a day. They aren’t known for healing the sick or making the lame walk. We don’t have to assemble once or more a week in a temple to Human Rights and listen to dull readings. We certainly don’t believe that they will take us up in an almighty rapture.

in fact, they are such poor gods that even the smallest of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods would knock them out with a single raised eyebrow. There is no sense in which belief in these ideas equates to belief in a god.

I’ve laboured this screamingly obvious point because it encapsulates a whole flawed current line of argument – that the social and political ideas that still remain to us from the Enlightenment are just another form of religion. They bloody aren’t. So there :-p

How else to explain the new religions that we have created for ourselves? A religion of science, whose priests make proclamations imbued with a certainty that their empirical branch of learning cannot justify; a religion of rights which, however much we may instinctively agree with it, has no more coherent proof than that it is “self-evident”; and now, perhaps, a religion of ecology whose ministers thunder as self-righteously as any 17th-century Puritan preacher.

Rubbish, for so many reasons that it’ would be too boring to labour them any more here (although the blog reserves the right to do so, more entertainingly, I hope, in the near future. Sorry. I’m just annoyed at this right now.)

A lot of bird-seed

Posted on by

This must be the pigeon-racing world’s equivalent of the Olympics. There was a million dollars in pigeon-racing prize money on offer in South Africa yesterday. (It seems like the winner’s prize is actually fifth of that but, who’s counting?) The BBC tantalisingly introduced the story on Friday, but didn’t deliver on the winner yesterday.

Well thanks to the IPRR, today’s guest publication, I can tell you that

Filip Norman wins the prestigious One Million Dollar Race in South Africa, with the attached prize of no less than 200.000 dollars.
The pigeon in question is a grandchild of the World famous Zorro

You can’t say we don’t provide a public service.

McQualification snobbery

Posted on by

On the BBC website, those (like me) who mocked the new McQualifications get a right telling off by Mike Baker for being snobbish.

Hmm. Another chance to sound off about them. In numbered list format, even.

  • It’s fine for companies to choose to train their staff and give them proof of having achieved a certain standard of competence in the company’s work. It’s hardly the concern of public awarding bodies.
  • Despite a rhetoric of opening up the opportunities to gain qualifications to the less academic, these “qualifications” implicitly place the holder firmly in the “peon” class.
  • At the same time, they create a further “under-peon” class of people who haven’t got them. So, they put people who haven’t got them at an unnecessary disadvantage in terms of getting jobs or promotion.
  • Vocational qualifications being what they are, they will reward those people who can fill out the standard phrases in their standard portfolio in a standard way. This means that people who are actually good at being shift supervisors but rubbish at documenting their achievements will do worse than those who are good at collecting documents.
  • Any one of average intelligence can pick up the skills needed to work in most jobs, with a bit of experience. What difference does a piece of paper make except to limit access to those jobs?
  • There is a big UK push for all under-18s having to be in “education or training.” Hmm. Education that stretches the mind, maybe. Training in craft skills, maybe. Training in tasks that any able-bodied person can pick up in a couple of weeks, no.

Is objecting to McQuals for McJobs being “snobbish” toward the recipients? I think the disdain they rouse comes from a recognition that these are worthless bits of paper that just attempt to draw an obscuring veil over the massive deskilling of workers and the failure of the education system to develop people’s real potential.

Thoughtless Blaspheming

Posted on by

The leader of the Anglican Church, Rowan Williams supports the idea of dumping the Blasphemy laws and even talks sense about the environment. It’s been a bit embarrassing to be occasionally recommending the Archbishop’s words, on an atheist blog.

So, it should come as something of a relief to find him spouting absurdity in a lecture in which he discussed some alternatives.

“The legal provision should keep before our eyes the general risks of debasing public controversy by thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting,” he said. (from Ruth Gledhill in the Times)

OK, There is far too little thought in the world. So, criminalising thoughtlessness may be the way to go….

(I may be being intentionally cruel here.)

I’ll give the Archbishop the benefit of the doubt. I’ll translate “thoughtless” into “insensitive,” as I assume he meant, and I’ll even treat it as a serious argument for a moment.

He is calling for laws that would be far worse than the Blasphemy laws. Despite the activities of a few minority Christian pressure groups, these laws are only enforced, every few decades. They are generally regarded as ludicrous “legacy” laws, the legal system’s equivalent of the Atari.

Certainly, the established Anglican Church – which they are designed to protect – is none too keen to go to court over every taking of the lord’s name in vain. (Any of that and they’d swiftly find themselves disestablished.)

The replacement that Dr Williams is suggesting wouldn’t even have the Olde Worlde charm of the Blasphemy Laws. They would just be thought crime laws. Which could criminalise more or less anything.

Imagine someone chatting away to a stranger on a bus about their puppy’s latest funny actions. Seems harmless enough. That couldn’t be considered thoughtless by anybody?

Well, what if the other person’s dog has just died. Or they have a crippling dog phobia?

Their right not to be unintentionally hurt could hardly be the basis of law. So is the law to be confined to beliefs?

Well, what if the hypersensitive bus companion believes that keeping a pet dog is a cruel enslavement of another species?

What if the (increasingly conceptually eccentric) bus companion even believes that he/she is the incarnation of a dog-spirit and regards the dog-owner’s drone as an insult to their own ancestral heritage and most deeply held values?

Ha, chatty dog-lover. You would have no defence in any of these cases, as Dr Williams includes unintentional cruelty.

It is barely possible to think of any thought or action that wouldn’t offend somebody. The average person probably gives so much offence in the course of a day that it’s a wonder that so many noses remain unbroken.

And insensitivity can only be defined by the person who feels they have been offended. I work with some people who are so sensitive that a slightly preoccupied look can be interpreted as a sign that they are hated to the very core of their being. (And that’s before I give vent to the string of random computer-directed cuss-words that could easily get me diagnosed as having a terminal case of Tourette’s.)

There is more and more pressure to give undeserved respect to any and every crackpot set of beliefs. It’s presented as if the right to argue with people is somehow disrespectful, rather than the most genuinely respectful. way you can relate to others.

Do as you would be done by, and so on. If you like the idea that people are humouring your stupidity – because you are too fragile to face the truth or too dangerously fanatical to allow an alternative opinion – then legal protection of everyone’s delicate sensitivities is fine. If you prefer to see yourself as a thinking being, you just have to accept that other people will not always share your beliefs.

Listen, offended people. Feeling offended is just a feeling. It doesn’t give you automatic rights.

Learn to stand up for yourself and to fight back like a civilized human being. Learn to communicate, ffs. Learn to disagree. Learn to welcome challenges to your beliefs. Learn to express anger…..

Not quite a capital offence

Posted on by

The Independent says today that the Afghan senate withdrew its confirmation of the death sentence on a blogger, after a fair amount of heavy-duty international pressure. (Hat tip to Discernible Chaos for his/her/its report that gives lots of details about the case. The blogger was daring to claim that oppression of women wasn’t ordered by the Koran…...) The blogger’s not been released, of course.

Don’t get all misty-eyed about triumphs for freedom of speech yet.

Also in today’s UK press, the Guardian reports the arrest of a Chinese dissident who used a blog and video diaries to communicate.

Lighter Notes

Posted on by

There is, as Heather often reminds me, a risk that this blog can be a bit too serious and lack colour. To try and (pathetically) rectify this, I’ve decided to post about Flickr. Obviously the self interested part of me will rely on my own flickr images…

On Flickr, you have two ways of looking at image statistics. There are the basic ones where images are ordered based on “Interestingness” (whatever that means), number of favourites, number of comments and number of page views. Using these stats you can get an idea of which pictures are the most “popular” among other flickr users. On my stream the following hold pole position:

The most “interesting” picture is:
Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

The most “favorited” picture (which is also the most commented) is:
An Eye

While the most viewed picture is:
Sunrise over Farm - HDR

Pitched against this, for paying Flickr users, is a new stats tool which shows all manner of information. Using this tool I can see that only 2% of my Flickr traffic comes from this blog (around 3 clicks a day – makes you wonder if the photo stream is worth it 🙂 ), and I can see that I get almost three times as many hits from Google image search. As Flickr is a Yahoo company it makes sense that both are eclipsed by Yahoo search which accounts for around 16% of the site views. The numbers aren’t really any different but despite this being a supposed “pro” service, it actually tells you less than the basic options. There is no way, using Flickr Stats to sort your images by anything other than overall views. The only good thing it brings is the ability to see which were the most viewed pages yesterday – good for drilling down to see recent activity rather than the all time winners. Using this, it shows the two most viewed pages yesterday were:

Devon Church Rowallane Path

Ok, this is all very interesting and I am sure if you are wondering is there any point to this post – other than to get more hits for my most popular images…

Flickr is one of the darlings of the Web 2.0 craze. It is the shining example of how user generated content can become popular and make a service almost essential for some people. According to Flickr there is in the region of 2000 new images uploaded every minute. 33 pictures a second. Amazing.

That is, IMHO of course, also the downfall. Blogs are the same – there are millions on Technorati, with millions of new posts being made every day. Champions of Web 2.0 cry about how great it is that anyone can post and be read, anyone can upload an image and have people swoon over it (etc.), but the reality is for 99.9% of people your posts and pictures will be lost in the vast chasm of garbage that is being spewed out every second.

As an example, take Flickrs Photo stream. This is the most recent 20 photos uploaded to flickr. Out of the 20, at least 19 will be garbage. If you spend more than 1 whole second evaluating these pictures, by the time you refresh you will have missed the next 30+ photos. If you spend 5 seconds evaluating the 20 pictures and then decide they are rubbish, when you refresh to see new ones you will have missed over 150 pictures. If you reverse this and imagine you are a fledgling photographer who wants to see what public opinion of your pictures is. You take the most fantastic, well composed, well framed, properly exposed picture of the most interesting subject in the world and upload it. What do you think will happen?

Sadly, the odds are no one will look at your picture. Web 2.0 isn’t the democratisation of the internet. It doesn’t give the “common man” the chance to be seen and heard worldwide. It just creates a shocking amount of “user generated content” (slang for crap) and catapults a few individuals to cult-like status, even if their pictures are crap and their blog posts unreadable.

There is an upside in that any system can be “gamed.” If you want exposure on your Flickr photos find groups which are good for comments and add your pictures. Work out what time zone most of the groups users are in and post when they are most active. When you get loads of comments, add loads of people as your contacts – chances are they will reciprocate and your pictures will appear in their home page, this will in turn increase the chances of you getting comments and views. From this, you can take reasonably pedestrian pictures and make them very popular (for example, I have no idea why so many people were taken by the Eye, but it still gets a few hits a day).

If all else fails, and you want to drive some traffic to your photo stream you could always blog about it…

(footnote: at the moment, I haven’t quite worked out how to game blogs in the same manner – any ideas welcome! 🙂 )