Following the last post (about The God Delusion), I had a look on Technorati to see what others were saying.

This URL is interesting: http://adricv.vox.com/library/post/3-reasons-why-richard-dawkins-is-an-arrogant-prick-despite-having-some-good-ideas.html. Mainly because it is apparent that the author of the blogpost has not read the book.

It is a short blog entry – only having three real points:

• God ‘Delusion’? Is he a psychologist?
• God ‘Delusion’? Who gave him the authority to conclusively say there is no form of deity?
• God ‘Delusion’? I beleive in God in my way – not as a force concerned with terrenal matters, but as something unnamable and higher, a form which could explain the Big Bang – something which Dawkins can’t do

In the book, Dawkins addresses the title in the first few page and explains why the term “delusion” is used and sets the context for it’s use. This largely renders the first point above meaningless.

The second one, is equally irrelevant and meaningless. What authority can be granted to say there is or isn’t a form of deity? Who gave the author of the blog post the authority to challenge Dawkins’ imaginary authority?

The third point hammers home the playground level of the blog post. Dawkins is a Biologist, who expects him to explain the Big Bang. What “explanation” is actually provided by the cop-out “God did it” that does anything but end further learning?

All in all, and this goes for most English language blogs which rail against The God Delusion, most of the critique comes from people who have not read the book and have couched their “complaints” in the terms of a nine year old.

Well, December is always hectic at WhyDontYou, as you can imagine. This tends to mean that our blog posts concentrate into two periods – autumn (fall) and spring. This is not always a bad thing. Sorry for the recent lack in posts, it isn’t because we have run out of ideas – just time!

Oddly (given that Richard Dawkins can be a bit annoying), I have been reading “The God Delusion” and it certainly is something I would recommend to everyone else. The book is interesting, insightful, at times witty and always well written.

In the past I have been concerned that vocal atheists, especially scientists, are running the risk of creating Atheism as a religion. The God Delusion has actually managed to make me re-assess this idea, and see that within reason there is a “need” for vocal, outspoken, well educated, intelligent opponents of “Religion.”

Some of the more pertinent points of the book (and another interesting book – Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris – even has its own “mySpace” space), is how the devout followers of various religions respond to criticism. I frequently read on the Internet and USENET, times where followers of the supposededly peaceful religions threaten non-believers with all manner of physical harm in the name of their peaceful Deity. Strangely, the error in this thinking seems to escape them. In the US, abortionism seems to draw the same sort of response. Killing a collection of cells is “morally wrong” but killing fully grown humans is OK.

I am sure there is some logic there somewhere……

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As always, the combination of the season, work and education commitments mean there will be very, very few posts here for the next few weeks.

Sorry for the interruption to the service and seasons greetings to everyone.

I know this blog tends to “poke fun” at technorati a lot, but right now it deserves it.

After being told that Technorati was playing up (see http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/28/technorati-tech-support-needed/) I thought I would check it out myself and see what it produced.

Visiting the links about this blog page (obviously where my main interest lies 🙂 ), I thought I would check out what Technorati thought about other blogs which linked here and what it described the site’s profile as.

Trying the standard search which looks at blogs linking to a site (http://www.technorati.com/ search /http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog?cc=xrw7n395cr) was a total non-starter on IE. I tried this link (by clicking the link and by pasting it into the URL bar) several times, almost every time I got an odd windows error message saying “Operation Aborted” and IE returned to the about:blank page it likes so much. One time I got through, I ended up with a page which said “Sorry, no blogs link here.” Strange as at the top of the page it said “14 links from 6 blogs.”

Curiousity got to me and I checked the URL in Firefox. This was even stranger in some respects. I had a few page not founds then all of a sudden a hit! The page appeared but without the “Sorry, no blogs link here” malarky. Firefox claimed that while the site still had “14 links from 6 blogs” there were actually 19 links (Sorted by freshness) and then procedes to show 18.

Amazing.

I tried the “» View my profile” link but after ten attempts (five each IE 7 and FF2.0) which only got operation aborted or blank pages, I gave up. I don’t have that much patience even looking for pure hubris.

Well, if this is the face of Web 2.0, I cant wait for the bubble to burst.

Adding to some of the odd things about technorati, I am going to revisit some complaints that have been made previously. Are blogs dying under the weight of spamblogs?

Let’s take lomography as an example. This is an interesting topic and you would think there were more than a handful of people who were obsessive enough about this that the blogsphere would be well populated. As a counter weight “Lomography” returns over 30,000 hits on flickr, with lomo generating over a hundred thousand hits. People are obsessive about it 🙂

A search on technorati (http://www.technorati.com/ tag/ Lomography) turns up some interesting results. Sadly, you have to wade through some real dross until you hit an actual page about lomography. When I did the search just now, only four of the first ten were not single page advert blogs (eg Pinhole lomography.com) which appear to serve no other purpose than try to get you to buy something (or worse are just an inbound link farm).

Of the four which were legit one was the previous post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/19/digital-storage/), which although it is excellent ( 🙂 ) it isn’t really about lomography – it just has a link to Technorati search on the topic.

Well the web 2.0 may well be the social networking phenomenon to change the web, but so far it is a marketing scam of massive proportions.

Technorati tags: Lomography, Cameras, Digital Photography, Editing, Effects, Technology, Technorati

Flickr tags: lomography, lomo

Well, as my recent interest in digital photography has taken off lately I have found myself reading some of the “idiots” guides available on the net.

While, generally, these have been helpful – before reading them I had no idea what the different f-stop values meant and the like – there are some odd misconceptions being bandied around.

I really get the feeling that these books are written by people who are actually wetfilm enthusiasts but are trying to convert themselves at the same time.

The main thing which interests me are when they have a list of “pros and cons” comparing digital with wetfilm. l love these! You almost always see some reasonable examples mixed in with what is (in my opinion of course) the nonsense.

Things like being able to take a bazillion photographs (effectively unlimited storage, you can just copy them off whatever memory card you are using and use it again) are a massive pro on digital cameras. Compare the utility of going out for the day with a roll of 36 exposure film compared to a 1Gb SD-Ram card!

Also, with digital cameras you get the chance to review your photos there and then. So when you take that memorable photograph you don’t have to wait until you get home to realise you had your thumb half over the lens and the image is lost for ever – you can check and reshoot as often as you want.

The pro of digital cameras which really gets me is the storage. Often books and articles will be filled with the benefits of using digital media to store pictures. They will go on about how the picture will never fade, you can make unlimited copies and all will be identical and how the digital copy will remain intact, with no loss of quality for ever.

This is nonsense. While it may well be technically true, it hides an underlying falsehood. In work, on the wall, is a picture taken in 1898. This picture is 108 years old. It is black and white, and a bit faded around the edges but I can look at it. Anyone who walks past it can look at it. I could copy it if I wanted, although the bright light may further degrade it. This is the wonder of wetfilm pictures.

Now take a digital picture. Imagine for the sake of argument I had a digital picture that was a mere ten years old (one tenth of the age of the photo on the wall). It is in the JPEG format which is good because we can still read JPGs but it was archived onto a 5.25″ floppy disk. Well that’s that then. I have nothing which can extract data from a floppy disk like that any more. No one I know has anything which will do it. I could take it to a specialist retailer and have it done for me – but what specialist equipment is needed to look at the hundred year old photograph.

Now moving close to the modern day, I have a digital picture which is only three years old. It is JPEG, which is good but for archiving purposes it (and some others) were zipped onto five floppy disks. Again this is a big problem for me as my PC has no floppy drive. My laptop doesn’t either – and my mobile phone certainly doesn’t. Once more I have no method of accessing this image – which is only one twentieth of the age of the one at work, without purchasing more, specialised, equipment.

This problem continues on many levels. For example, JPEG photographs are a “lossy” format so some picture quality is lost no matter how hard you try. As a result of this, some camera manufacturers allow you to take RAW pictures, but this adds a new problem. You then need specialist software to view the pictures (and convert them to JPG etc), which kind of defeats the point. Also, not all camera manufacturers have compatible RAW formats so there is little reason to be confident that the RAW data you have today will be viewable next week.

In addition to this, online storage services aren’t much better. You may think uploading all your date to Flickr/Google/Whoever is great and solves all your backup issues but it doesn’t. What happens if you lose your account details? What happens if your host decides to charge (or charge more) for its services? What happens if they fold and get rid of all the data? However you look at it, its gone.

In all, while there is good reason to think digital has advantages – I am not convinced long term storage is really one of them.

(note: The pictures here are just nice ones I found on Flickr – I did not take them myself)

Stourhead Lake in Autumn Sunlight,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

Fantastic weather for this time of year.

Well, sooner than normal, some links which are well worth visiting:

• New Scientist Podcast
• Beyond Belief (new scientist subscription required)
• New Scientist Podcast (iTunes link)
• Wild Chronicles (iTunes link)
• Science @ NASA Feature Stories Podcast (iTunes link)

If you don’t have access to the full “Beyond Belief” article a lot of it is included in the podcast. I can not honestly say I am convinced that a conference looking at how science has “supplanted” God is a good thing.

Apart from anything else, this begins to create the impression “Science” is a replacement for Religious belief. Hopefully this is not the case but with more than a few of the people who contributed to this conference I am not sure. It is, as I see it, like saying bananas are a replacement for camera film. The two are totally different things.

Creating a conflict between the two is not a “GoodThingâ„¢” and simply provides more ammunition for the Religious Right to demonise science.

Oh well.

In a recent post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/16/more-fan-stuff-on-the-wire/) heather writes “I’m still not 100% sure how to get to the podcasts…” – well the solution is at hand.

Assuming you are looking for quality science and technology podcasts the place to look is:

Science & Medicine or Technology

If for some reason the iTunes store URL doesn’t work then try these steps from the iTunes store..

New Scientist “special report” (titled: Home-schooling special- Preach your children well – us – 11 November 2006 – New Scientist) looks at how Home Schooling in the US has become a new tool in the religious right’s campaign to remove non-biblically-accepted teaching.

The scary part is the bit about how the Patrick Henry College benefits it’s students because “Government-schooled children have spent their time constructing their own truths” – obviously PHC don’t have to learn what is and isn’t truth, they are obedient enough to be told and must accept it.

Scary that this is the worlds superpower…

Technorati tags: Home Schooling, Intelligent Design, Discovery Institute, Patrick Henry College

del.icio.us tags: Education, Religion, PHC, Patrick Henry College, Conservative, Christianity, Right Wing

Following on from the last post about .Net magazine, I thought I should add in a few comments. Not about the magazine, which despite the initial optimism caused by the first few issues of the new format is still fairly poor but about the website.

www.netmag.co.uk

This is actually fairly good now. The layout is drastically improved and the content is getting better all the time.

All I can say is, well done .Net.

In a previous post about Wikipedia, the following comment is made as justification for using Wiki. (Remember, as said before, I like wiki!)

Fair points. But I still feel that universities should not still be teaching people to refer to authorities. They should be teaching people to think critically and evaluate the materials they get.

While this is something I whole heartedly agree with, it is not as clear cut as you make it seem here.

Yes, students should be able to think critically and evaluate the information they get – this is part of the problem with Wikipedia. When you read an article what mechanisms are available for you to evaluate what is said, other than weeding out the obvious nonsense (such as some edits to Albert Einstein’s page saying he was a Nazi). Wikipedia articles rarely cite source materials, often sneak original research in under the radar and are very often so badly written it is not possible to backtrace even when sources are mentioned.

For undergraduate study, surely the idea is to read and research through the published materials to demonstrate the ability to research and to critically assess information which has already been assessed – giving a level playing field. By using Wiki for this, it strikes me that any old nutter can get their ideas taken on board because there is no mechanism for verifying the information (beyond anecdotal experience).

Using Wikipedia as a citation is similar (IMHO) to using something like Encarta as an example for a science lesson.

On a lighthearted note – The Wikipedia and the Death of Archaeology – is certainly entertaining to read. 🙂

Following the “Nothing Wrong With Wiki” post, I thought that (in addition to the comment), I should leave a more open response to some parts of it.

First off, I am a big fan of Wiki. It is excellent at providing background information, often in a very easy to understand manner. It is excellent in the breadth of articles it covers. It is, basically, very useful.

However it is certainly not authorative. As it has grown to stratospheric popularity, people are becoming to think of it as authorative. Google groups has bazillions of posts where people cite a Wiki article in support of their argument. This implies people think it is authorative. It is easy to say “well they shouldn’t” but they do.  When you look up something on Wikipedia, how often do you verify the claims? How do you verify the claims?

My take on the university comments were along those lines. The universities may well be fed up with people citing Wikipedia as a source when in reality it is little more than a shortcut through “real” research.

The previous article says:

Anything posted is immediately peer-reviewed and challenged by anyone who has a problem with it? This hardly applies to most academic journals, which are already subject to phenomena like sponsor bias and publication bloat. Noone publishes on wikipedia (so far) to keep up their publication average or because a large pharmaceutical company paid for their research.

While I would hesitate from directly accusing a specific poster of sending messages for the wrong reasons, with Wikipedia how can you ever know? How do you know if LargePharma is paying for people to write up articles? Already bands and PR firms pay people to post blogs and to forums, who is to say it isn’t happening on Wiki?

In addition to this, the flip side of no-formal-peer-review is that any crackpot can make or edit an article. Until some one who knows better can correct it, it is accepted as correct. I have read articles which are in a subject I know well and found mistakes. When I read a subject I don’t know well, how do I know that the mistakes aren’t there?

Well, time for some more. This time I have tried to add a bit of info about each link 🙂

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6115140.stm – Pupils Put off Science.
• http://tinyurl.com/y9hqk7 – Irony department: the leader of the US Evangelical Church, who argued with Richard Dawkins, resigns.
• http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/11/the_future_of_p.html – The Future of Paperless Hacking
• http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/05/183240 Wikipedia used to spread virus
• http://news.linux.com/news/06/11/03/2325229.shtml?tid=41&tid=96&tid=12 – Novell talks about the Microsoft deal
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/04/eff_fights_bogus_dmca_case/ – How to gag your enemies using the DMCA

All worth visiting.