Ground zero mosque

This will be a short post a) because I should be doing something else and b) because it's mainly a vehicle to post this link to newsbiscuit's take on the whole incident.

That being said I will say this about the debate: "why are we having it?" it's utterly stupid. Yes it may not be the most sensitive thing to build there but it's not actually a full mosque (more a community centre with a prayer room) but that being said they still have every right to build it there and that should be it.

It seems that people seem to forget that freedoms apply to everyone: I may not like organised religion but if you really want to do it I'm not going to stop you unless you start trying to impinge upon my freedoms...

ah well, hopefully the news biscuit article will help some people perform self rescue from the predicament of having a rectal-breach-head.... we can but hope

Thought/rant for the day: "Isn't that odd" or when your just not thinking

I have acquired a new pet peeve: the rhetorical question "isn't that odd?". My peeve is not with the question: things that are odd should be remarked upon and investigated. It is the latter part of this that causes me the annoyance: that thing's aren't investigated.

Things that people remark "isn't that odd" to will be of one of two catagories: either something of at least passing interest (eg sun dogs or ice formations) or that is out of place ("I'm sure I put my keys here"), the cause of my irritation is that situations of the former do not provoke investigation. Often they won't even illicit 5 seconds of thought as to the possible origin of the subtle strangeness that triggered the observation. Why is this?

Why are we so blasé and jaded that upon being presented with something we don't understand or is strange we are more likely to dismiss it that give it even a moments thought? While this point has any number of reasonable answers I think it highlights something that is deeply wrong about how we approach the world we live in: we apparently don't think.

In one of my favourite books (Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) there is a point where Ford Prefect hypothesises that humans talk to exercise their jaws, he then adjusts this to the theory that by talking we stop our brains working. This should not be something we find funny.

I am not advocating full scientific investigation just a little more thought when using the the expression, if only as a form of mental exercise. I find that I feel much better when I walk home from university than when I get the bus. The reason for this is that on the bus I will read whilst when I walk I will think (in fact this post was born on the walk home today). Letting my mind wander as I walk presents me with many little puzzles that I love to work out eg. why is that when I bus I people watch while on my walk I am not offered this luxury? Because on the bus I pass people but when I walk I don't. I could list many other realisations that I have experienced but most of them, like this one are utterly boring. Why then do I encourage it?

It may seem a daft point but firstly because its relaxing, the act of walking is relaxing but so is the act of finding small problems and solving them: teasing apart the situation based on what you know and what you've observed gives an amazing feeling of accomplishment (this is especially nice when the day has yielded few results). The second reason why I would encourage you all to pause after uttering or hearing uttered the phrase "isn't that odd?" that occasionally you will discover something profound.

NB. While writing this I had to work hard not to get distracted by sun dogs or ice formations, these are subjects that I have read about before and even then the lure of re-reading and investigating them was strong (yes there is also an ironic confirmation bias in my selection of topics that interest me as examples here).

Anyway I'm done with my thought for the day, to those of you who made it this far: well done! 

Religion: why is it privileged?

There is a recent news piece on the BHA about the Department for Communities and Local Government's (CLG) recent creation of "faith advisors" this really annoys me.

Why does this annoy me? because there is a persistent rumour that we should give a damn what various religious leaders think.  Having a religion does not give you special insight into anything. Being a priest to a religion does not give you extra useful knowledge. In fact what little insight it gives you will most likely be through a haze of out-dated rules and laws set down in a completely different time.

There are many community leaders, priests are just one example. If we're giving priests a special position within government (as advisers) why not scout masters? The argument that many people base a large portion of their life around their religion is normally trotted out at this point and I would like to take that trotting target and shoot it down now.

Apparently 66% of the population of the UK have no connection at all with a Church and I would be surprised if the number who genuinely shape their life by it is anywhere near that. People base their morals and tastes on those around them. This is part of what's called "social contract" essentially it is "I won't kill you because you might kill me first".

The religious already have a voice, it's called a vote. In a democratic society that is the only voice they or anyone else deserves. Other experts advise within a narrow realm that is defined specifically by their expertise. These "faith advisers" are going to advice on "economy, parenting, achieving social justice and tackling climate change" or the "big issues". Of all the groups in existence those that follow a religion are rarely the same that I would want to tell me how we can solve the complex problem of reducing green houses gasses against everyone's desire to produce them. They may have a "unique insight" but I don't consider praying for salvation a useful input.

If these people have genuine contributions to make from a standpoint of actual knowledge fair enough but some empty headed assumption that they connect with the people (that minority of 34% or less) and that this connection is somehow special beyond that of just grabbing someone from the street is bollocks.

This is not a post advocating the insertion of a humanist or atheist onto this panel it is advocating the removal of this panel, if you want the advice of community leaders ask them with reference to a specific situation. 13 advisers is too few to cover even a fraction of the many, many, many facets of life in the UK that they will need to in order to garner useful opinions on the topics they want. Will there be a Scientologist? how about a 18 year old street preacher from Brixton? or an anarchist Humanist? Faith may be a major point in a lot of people's life but given the department concerned I think they would be better served looking for representatives of specific socio-economic groups. not faiths.

NB the 66% figure is from this page here: http://www.vexen.co.uk/UK/religion.html

The burning stupid

This really hurts my brain. To suggest that being secular is what has caused the reduction in the number of births and overall family size is stupid. To quote a parliamentary report I found:

"The number of births in the UK has declined throughout the
century [1901 to 2001], interrupted only by the two post-war ‘baby booms’ and
a secondary peak in the 1960s. " [1]

Unfortunately I can't find any information about relative percentages of secularism to any form of religion other than in 2001 when only 15.5% [2] identified themselves as having "no religion (inc Jedis)". Now this strikes me as not really a reasonable way of accounting for the massive drop in birth rates over the last century:

"Between 1901 and 1905 the general fertility rate in the UK was
about 110 live births per 1000 women aged 15-44. By 1971 this
had fallen to 91 and in 1997 to 597." [1]

Call me scientific but might it just be that the number of people surviving birth has increased: 140 infant deaths per 1,000 births in 1900 to 5.4 per 1,000 in 1997. With more people surviving birth you don't need as many children, life expectancy has also increased (75 for boys, 80 for girls in 1999 compared to 45 and 49 respectively in 1901). A longer life expectancy reduces the pressure to have children at a young age, or at all.

Anyway, moving on from the stupid argument my main interest is this: over the last year what happened? maybe I'm being more focused in my reading but the number of public figures (Tony Blair for example) basically slagging off those who take a humanist or secular world view has seemingly massively increased.

As a standard test: re-read what Lord Sacks said but substitute the word 'muslim', 'black' or 'gay' where he says "neo-Darwinists". Not sure a bastion of great "interfaith relations" is he now?

Gripe the second: WHAT THE HELL is a neo-darwinist with respect to religion? They have nothing to do with eachother unless you happen to be some knuckle-dragging idiot. If anyone out there seriously thinks that secularists or humanists work from any sort of Darwinian principle they are utterly mistaken. We just don't believe in God. Evolution is an utterly seperate argument and the continued muddling of the two is stupid.

Repeat after me: "Evolution, The Big-Bang, Cosmology, Chemistry, Geology have NOTHING to do with the fact that I don't believe in any deity". They may both come from the fact that I think about things and draw what I think to be rational conclusions but one does not cause the other. 



[1] www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf
[2] http://www.vexen.co.uk/UK/religion.html

Sex, drugs and rock n' roll.

Well one out of three isn't bad. Here is a summary of some interesting reports on drug use. These interest me for a couple of reasons: I have tried various chemicals and enjoyed them; I have read (well skimmed) various government reports most of which go against the accepted wisdom that 'drugs are bad'; finally I have always wondered why people are so blind to the affects of alcohol/tobacco and so vocal on the affects of everything else.

While this is the age old argument there is VERY little reason why alcohol should be acceptable while cannabis or MDMA isn't. There are two reasons for my confusion; firstly while none of these drugs are safe (don't believe me look up liver failure from alcohol and permanent psychosis for cannabis) secondly I fail to see how most people don't realise this. I would expect it's from the propaganda that says drugs are bad you are hooked the instant one touches your lips (or vein or what ever) and that they will kill you in seconds.

It is this second point that depresses me the most; the double standards I can understand to a degree: people are comfortable with booze but the rest is strange and scary, fine. The second point though raises a much more dangerous truth: that we should lie utterly to children and ourselves. This isn't the science "this is mostly true but not everything" lying this is out right driving fear in to people's hearts to the point where those people who genuinely need help (ie addicts) cannot admit it most of the time because of the stigma and hence are denied what should be an avenue out for them. It also raises the worrying question of what else we let ourselves be feared into (ID cards anyone, net monitoring?)

This is a wonderful highlight of an endemic problem in our society: that expertise is no longer trusted, in any way. I'm not saying we shouldn't question what we are told be experts or anyone, but they are experts for a reason. The number of government policies that are created despite experts turning round and saying "what you planning is rubbish" is a sad indicator of something found at all levels of society.

I hope it ends soon...

Job hunting

Well it's summer again which can mean only one thing: time for another soul sucking summer job. In years previous I've been very lucky in being able to get jobs through friends this year with the economic situation being what it is it doesn't seem as likely, certainly no luck so far. The upshot of this is that today has been spent a) in the sun and b) sitting in my room trawling through pages of job agencies which mainly consist of various recruitment firms pertending to be employers looking for jobs rather than agencies looking for more people to put on their books, oh the joy!

Instead of doing further searching and CV massaging I'm here; procrastination how I love ye!

bah jobs suck!

/rant

I hope this is a hoax...

This is a wonderful money spinner and a horrible idea.

I'm all for highlighting the general daftness of most religous views but the thought of people paying money into a bank for the express reason of coming back from the dead and claiming the money is just painful.

I dearly hope that they get shut down or DDoS'd.

This (like most woo) just prays on those who are gullible.

"its natural" do you say this? punch yourself.

This is a wonderful blog post by one of my favourite bloggers, blag hag.

A simple discussion of what is actually natural when it comes to animal mating habits, and yes there isn't really anything that is natural or 'normal'. This is one of those arguments that really does annoy me on two fronts: first as the post shows there isn't any single mating habit that is natural. Second the naturalness of an action is a rubbish rationale to use with relation to humans, again as the post reports many animals eat their young, or their partners or carrion.

The naturalness of something is a stupid arguement and the sooner we move on from it the better. Either everything is natural (we are after all products of a natural environment) or we are better than that and it doesn't matter anyway. We certainly can't claim that some subset of our actions should be natural (sex etc) and another it doesn't matter (wearing skins of other animals).

WBRTBN films...

....or "White Background, Red Title and Blue Name" films.

In terms of poster design these films suck. They are universally the same sort of film: 'quirky' (ie mass produced) rom-coms, these are the films where a board of people have sat around and brain stormed what ever hasn't been done recently and make what ever falls out:

"rom-com"
"ohh lets have a ghost"
"done! where's the coke?".

I hate this kind of film (I've yet to see one I've enjoyed) and it really annoys me that they seem to be breeding - I guess in a recession they're cheap and easy to produce.

Either way utterly sick of seeing the adverts for them on the sides of buses - they could at least try to vary them and try to stand out/lighten my day a bit.....

This annoys me

This story really annoys me. It is worrying that a paper is willing to publish something that is quite so wrong.

Gah... stupid paranoid ....

More government optimism

Well looks like the government is shelving the database of all our communications idea (at last!) in preference of asking Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to log who connects to what and how - ie if you access Facebook from your iphone or similar. This seems to be an extension of the existing laws regarding telephone logs that allow the police and security services to see who called who when.

What strikes me about this is that it is a £2b scheme that will most likely be futile. Just as cheap pay-as-you-go mobiles have made telephone logging pretty obsolete because it becomes very difficult to log who calls who when the phone isn't registered it is very difficult to glean useful information from the internet when you can send stuff via a proxy and have the information of who your talking to disappear especially when systems like The Onion Router (TOR) exist that helpfully cover who your talking to and where without any real effort.

Basically this seems a lot of money on a system that will achieve next to nothing. If people want to organise via the net there are a hundred ways of doing it that make it near impossible to trace who spoke to who, asking the CSPs to log this information doesn't really help at all especially when you don't even have to route most of your stuff via your ISP - open DNS servers in other countries will allow alot of the useful (to the services) information to by-pass the UK utterly.

Who ever says windows "just works" can sod off..

I have recently got the orange box. I love it. Well that's a lie. I love the copies of the games I've played on other people's machines as mine it seems to have a grudge against.

I can play 'counter-strike' and anything up to and including 'Half life 2: episode one' but beyond that it stops working. As in no error messages (not even a crash) it just stops. It sets up the loading screen and sits there, filling up my primary screen with hazy boxes (I'm trying to play portal).

I'm not sure what it is (as if windows was ever helpful with methods to interrogate start up of programs or even useful error messages) and I can't close it because it fills my primary screen where pop-ups appear. I can open the task manager and see that nothing much is happening and its not responding but if I try to close process it just sits there.

For anyone with a similar problem here is an exact run down of whats happening.

I'm running a Windows XP system
AMD 3500+ processor
MSI AM2 motherboard
2Gb RAM
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS with a 24" (1920x1200) Dell as primary and a 17" (1200x1024) samsung as secondary
I have the latest driver (Nvidia 182.something)

I can run 'counter-strike'; 'counter strike-source'; 'half-life 2'; 'half-life 2:episode one'

but with 'half life 2:episode two'; or 'portal' it will run the valve video get to the hazy loading screen (ie the menu but out of focus with 'loading' in bottom right) and stop. I can move the mouse around, although when I move it over the loading screen I get an hour glass I can move it to the secondary screen (where I'm typing this) and work normally.

In fact it just seems as though it locks down that part of the screen and stops.

I have tried manually setting the width and height of the game with the:

'-width 1920 -height 1200'

launch options in case it was something to do with loss of the actual menu or weird graphics problems (none of the half-life games auto-detect my resolution). I have also tried:

'+mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1'

which should force the game to use the monitor's defaults. Neither have worked and I'm about to try the

-console

command to (hopefully) bring up just the menu options with out real graphics controls.

I will update with whether it works - or if I go mad....

UPDATE 01:52 26-04-09: well '-console' failed....

UPDATE 02:13 26-04-09: GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH *~$£*%"£$%"$£% WINDOWS turns out that portal had been going full screen. This meant that when steam bounced stuff off a server somewhere zone alarm froze the game and wouldn't allow further loading until I clicked something in a pop-up. This pop-up was cunningly underneath the full screen window. GAHHHHHH. Those that are interested the useful launch command was

-sw

I hate windows.... wine + ubuntu can't be much harder than this...

Facebook in the news...

As a 'netizen Facebook accounts for a reasonable amount of my time online, certainly while in procrastination mode, even when I'm not I probably check it daily. This makes stories like this all the more interesting for me.

I can understand the rationale that "those who are well enough to use Facebook with a migraine are well enough to work with a migraine" but it does raise an interesting point: what activities are reasonable if you are off sick?

For me I would be deeply angry if I was sacked for checking Facebook when ill - firstly my computer is logged on almost 24/7 so it would be hard to tell when I was actually using Facebook and not just logged in. Secondly I would consider checking the net (if not Facebook certainly gmail) as normal as checking my snail-mail; its just one of those things I do everyday (yes, I'm an addict but I like it).

It seems daft that an employer would expect you to spend the whole day immobile in bed if you are ill; even if that illness is a migraine you might listen to quiet music or read a book for a bit between sleeping. While superficially this seems the same as being caught out and about in town when ill I would argue that it is very different. Its akin to being caught out of bed when ill. I suppose this is just part of the penalty we pay for being more connected at all times; we get more information on each other and so everyone else gets a little more information on us.

Hopefully situations like this will be few and far between. I certainly hope that no employer (should I ever get one) thinks that it's okay for them to follow me online. I don't mind work colleges, even my boss following my Facebook or similar but when it becomes the company as a whole or is done for reason other than genuine friendship I get worried. The age of privacy is essentially dead - but that doesn't mean that we can't protect what privacy we do have (which is one of the reasons I don't like to make it too obvious who I am in the blog).

All that being said I can't help but wonder if this is something along the lines of the straw that broke the camels back. Unless the employer is truly draconian I suspect that the person concerned has probably had a few run-ins, especially if either they were spying on here or that the hear-say of a college spotting you online is enough to be sacked for.

science rage!

The media fails at reporting on science. This is a wonderful example of how much. Having read the actual article the bbc get the gist right but fails in the presentation.

My objection to this is that a lazy reading of the bbc article gives the impression that pollution is stopping global warming. It isn't. Not even a little. It is slowing the process a bit. It does raise the point that by cleaning our air the added removal of CO2 via this diffuse effect will be removed and that it highlights the incredibly complex nature of climate modeling for that I applaud it. It still utterly fails to point out that the paper doesn't mean driving a hummer is helping the environment.

That being said the bbc has better title than some...
"Climate change fight could raise CO2 levels" - thank you Glascow Herald

I raise this because this is exactly the sort of thing that denialists/the lazy/the unconcerned will point to and say 'see we're helping' without any comprehension of whats actually happening. That being said this is a perfect example of the constant problem in all science reporting - take a technical paper written to be read by experts. Pass to intelligent but non expert journalist. Speed read/research. Associate with something that public will understand. Condense to 10th original size and 1/100th scientific content.

Maybe I should have a go at this scientific wroting that everyone seems to think is such a good idea. Then again given my patience and spelling ability maybe not.

Revision Blues

Its truly amazing how much I get done when I should be revising. I mean in the past three days I've cleaned the bathroom (utterly its beautiful), cooked a huge dinner, completely dismantled a chest of drawers... and drank a lot.

Why can't I find a way to focus this procrastination into something when it would be useful? Maybe I should look for jobs I hate to avoid, either way revision with something is a must I have decided. You get stuff done! need to work through statistics still though which sucks as revising it is painful, at least it's easy to follow.

In other news it does amuse me how people seem to fail at basic concepts of data security, I can still submit emails to an emailing list that I should no longer be admin for and they get auto-accepted still, ah power what fun!


hmmmm wonder how many of my friends have actually found this yet or even bothered.... ah well can keep dumping random stuff here none the less.

gah must stop blathering.....

more police ranting..

Videos like this one really do worry me. Not because I'm much of a protester myself but if the police continue along this line they're are going to be stuffed. From what I've seen in any recession there is a general increase in protests and the police seemingly need a radical shift in tactics for protests or else they will cause some serious riots....

Hopefully G20 will raise enough issues to cause a change in policy and police attitude.

Would be even nicer if would could convince the government to change their policies....

This is about time...

Seems like post G20 joy as well as wonderful incidents at the protest held over Ian Tomlinson's death have triggered a response from the Met who are reviewing their tactics. I can understand that the police in both situations would have felt VERY pressured and under threat but also in many of the (admittedly biased and somewhat lacking context) videos that have being doing the rounds you do wonder what the hell they were thinking.

In any situation it should be obvious that there will be some people looking for a reason for a fight, even if there isn't and all they are doing is being loud, threatening idiots you still don't hit them.

The BBC report has a few disturbing quotes as well; a personal favourite is from Kit Malthouse who praises the Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, on his swift action in requesting a review. Call me a harse but swift would have been when Ian Tomlinson died - not two weeks after the event. Even accepting that for a few days it was unclear the exact details something had gone wrong and it should have prompted some form of review..... or maybe thats just me?

The best quote of the entire piece has to be from Sir Paul:
"The public has a right to be able to identify any uniformed officer whilst performing their duty."

This seems, just a little, at odds with section 76 counter-terrorism act 2008 which states that
"A person commits an offence who—
(a) elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been--
[sic]
(iii) a constable"
while this hasn't come to court (yet) it has been mooted in several places that it means you cannot photograph police constables....

Anyway the whole thing looks like it could go either way and given that this is likely the first of many more riotous protests we will probably see while the recession runs it course hopefully the whole thing will go down a slightly more sane route....

or the police could continue as they are.

Also of interest always makes me smile to see the bbc using youtube as a source.

ranty

Grrrr some what annoyed that people on facebook didn't find my links interesting.

ah well

*grrr's some more*

UPDATE 20-04-09: yes I'm a whiny bitch