27Dec04 — 0

Getting Worse

The Independent Radio News report on 96.9 Chiltern FM at four o’clock:

“11 Britons are among the dead.” [Recording of northern Irish bloke recounting his experience] “—journalist Blahdy Blah on the earthquake in south Asia. In [Thailand] alone, eight Britons died. Others are on their way home to emotional reunions.”

Don’t the media just love those emotional bloody reunions? Only in later reports today did the brown people start to feature on IRN. The superior BBC Radio 4 six o’clock news concentrated on the other 20 000+ swarthy dead for eight minutes before talking about the Brits.

Norm’s got more. I sent my donation here and can now look forward to a 2005 full of junk mail from the Red Cross. If we ‘Bloggers have a whip round we can perhaps get together enough to sponsor David Carr to write a rib-tickling article about how little he’s bothered.

27Dec04 — 1

Shrinking Tulips

December 2004, is turning out to be the sixth consecutive month of falling house prices in the UK. The hysteria has flipped. John Plender in the Financial Times has a word or two to say to those who believe that markets are rational. [Read the article before it becomes subscription only.]

26Dec04 — 12

Good, Bad, And Mixed

I used to have reservations about Ute Lemper as a singer, but on Radio 3 this afternoon, performing with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, she was stunning. I’m sad that I missed the Hebrew and Arabic songs she began her show with.

Apart from an abortive attempt to read Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone—I gave up, bored—the whole HP phenomenon has passed me by. On Christmas day, therefore, I resolved to watched the movie. I’ve not found it so difficult sitting to the end of a film since Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Some of the child actors were excellent (including Daniel Radcliffe who played Potter) and the sport of Quidditch was a fine invention, but, despite the lush production, a lot else was just not very good. As with so many British classics—including the book that inspired the name of this ‘Blog—Potter sneers at length at the lower-middle classes. Harry’s evil step-family live on a new-build estate on a street with “Privet” in its name (all posh English gardeners are supposed to look down their noses at said bush—it’s terribly non-U). Potter’s real, loving parents, on the other hand, lived in a nice period cottage in the country. Like all true aristos, Potter has greatness in his blood and he doesn’t do anything as vulgar as trying too hard when he is finally spirited off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry—which is clearly modelled on one of Britain’s great public (meaning private) schools. The magic bank where Harry Potter’s inheritance is kept is run by hook-nosed beasties; they are described by one of the characters as “clever as you like, but not the friendliest of creatures”.

The real problem with Harry Potter is what ultimately did for the Star Trek franchise. There is no sense of genuine danger or threat because, instead of using pre-existing elements of the story to resolve tension, Rowling just pulls an answer from nothingness, adopting Trek‘s subatomic-particle-of-the-week approach to all cliffhangers.

“Captain, the ship will be destroyed within seconds if we can’t stabilize the hull!”
“Perhaps we can re-route the phasers to produce a stream of deus-ex-machinons!”
“It’s working!”

How can you give a toss about a story in which at any minute you know Rowling is going to do everything but tell you “it was all a dream”? A few of you might remember the terrible Children’s Film Foundation productions they used to fob British schoolkids off with at cinema matinees in the 70s. In them, annoying child actors would battle sub-Dr Who special effects and the world’s wussiest criminals. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was like one of those with a NASA-sized budget. It’s lucky Potter was played by such a sympathetic performer, rather than some stagey squirt, because the sheer laziness of the plotting made me resent almost everyone involved, including the ever-reliable Robbie Coltrane and thinking man’s MILF Zoe Wanamaker.

Now the mixed. My brother-in-law bought my sister an iPod Mini for Christmas. The iPod itself is a pleasing object with a smart, if not immediately intuitive, interface. The supplied headphones are not just fashion accessories but deliver the music well. Apple’s proprietary compression system is excellent. (Perhaps I could detect just a hint of wispiness through my own expensive, over-ear Sennheisers.) Of course the whole package is overpriced. Worse, however, if you are a PC owner, I have to warn you that the bundled iTunes software is a roadcrash of twisted unusability. Installing and configuring the programs for our dear Clare and transferring just a couple of music CDs to her PC was a frustrating experience that I have no desire to repeat in a hurry. Now that is also how I feel about seeing Harry Potter films.

26Dec04 — 0

Thank You

I am having an excellent Christmas. Thank you to the Counsells and Beardsleys for their kindness and generosity and hospitality. And thanks to everyone everywhere who sent me cards and gifts and good wishes. Thanks especially to Maisie for being such a good girl and such good fun.

24Dec04 — 0

More Bimbo Fun

I watched The Incredibles with the Anonymous Economist earlier this week. It is superb. See it. The movie takes a strong philosophical line on the question of unusual excellence and the way contemporary institutions, especially educational ones, do their best to smother it: “When everyone is special, no one is.” This quote encapsulates the underlying ethos of the British comprehensive school system, though it doesn’t capture the hypocrisy of the middle-class “socialists” who play it to their advantage.

In England and Wales we live at what I hope is the peak of the Pop Idol / Big Brother / National Lottery / I’m A Celebrity… age. The popular media seem to broadcast the same message over and over: that fame, fortune and adulation are the right of any mediocrity who can cultivate Madonna-like self belief or is simply lucky enough to catch God’s eye—“God” being the media themselves. At the same time, they mock anyone doggedly pursuing greatness the old-fashioned way as “sad”.

There is an interesting article about Bill Cosby’s recent pronouncements on “black” “culture” in the US in Newsweek currently, which goes well with their Barack Obama front cover. Hard-working black American school kids complain that any effort in school results in their being branded “white”. Reading that piece I laughed as I thought of my own experience of moving from a working-class environment, where people knocked my teeth out because I was “black” and because I worked hard, to a middle-class environment (I use the English meaning of “middle-class”), where people questioned my “blackness” because my behaviour and appearance didn’t fit some “street” stereotype they had fixed in their narrow minds.

(Curiously, when I describe myself as “coloured” a standard response I get from some non-white Britons is “What’s wrong with calling yourself ‘black’?”. My answer is that it’s not accurate. Even the “diversity monitoring” forms have a box labelled “Mixed: Black African/White British” for me to tick now. If American blacks can reclaim the word “nigger” from white Americans, I can reclaim the word “coloured” from white Africans. I’ll never forget reading an interview in The Guardian in which a white “poet” described his children with his black wife as “people of colour”. If my dad called me and my sister that I’d have to disown him. He’s a working-class Lancastrian—no danger there.)

Tom Hamilton at Let’s Be Sensible has found something in The Sun newspaper that says too much about the sorry state of our “meritocracy”. The full article, I should warn you if you are reading this at work, comes with an image of a woman’s breasts covered in artificial snow. And not covered in artificial snow.

24Dec04 — 1

WikiWikiWoo!

I am a Wikipedian and link from PooterGeek to the wonderful Wikipedia frequently. This communal project has shown (yet again) the power of distributed collaborative work via the Net—just like the operating system running my PC and the Web server sending this page to you. Further, Wikipedia has proved conclusively that a philosopher can be both useful and participate in a World-changing revolution without his ideas being used to excuse mass murder. Here he is. (When you look at the interviewee’s photo I want you to remember that he is exactly the same age as me.)

[Thanks to Slashdot]

UPDATE: The cover design of the current dead-tree edition of MIT Technology Review is inspired—and might soon be illegal in England and Wales.

24Dec04 — 1

David Carr Is The Anti-Swift

Hello, loonies of Libertarianism. This is good irony. It is funny, sharp, and original. It has a serious underlying point to make. This is bad irony. It is flat, smug, and tired. Somehow it doesn’t score a hit against crap British celebs making crap records for charidee. David Carr, you win this week’s Prêt-à-Porter Award for Failed Satire In The Pursuit Of A Tranquilized Three-Legged Elephant Of A Target. [Thanks to Harry’s Place.]

23Dec04 — 1

By Special Request

As I predicted, the pull of Blade: Trinity was too strong and Leasey and I went along to see it last Saturday. It turned out to be both very entertaining and utter rubbish. The plot is thinner than a 15-year-old on a catwalk; Parker Posey couldn’t act her way out of a parking ticket; and the bad guy—though very bad indeed—was about as physically intimidating as a member of the Chippendales having a hissy fit in his fantasy gardener outfit. On the plus side Jessica Biel can take my shopping home any day; Ryan Reynolds looks so good and has so many excellent lines that even I was beginning to fancy him by the end of the film; and, fortunately, I love watching vampires explode. This is important: exploding vampires are what substitutes for dramatic tension in this movie. Apart from Biel’s lickable midriff, this film’s real redemption is that it is very funny indeed—and mostly on purpose.

On the way back, Leasey drove with her usual commendable care and respect for the law along one of Cambridge’s residential roads and was overtaken, first by boy racers in a straining, over-tuned hatchback and then by a Porsche Carrera in close pursuit. The latter had probably barely got out of second gear, but was travelling at over twice the speed limit. Just as we were tut-tutting their recklessness the tools were lit up in double flashes from a speed camera. So a fun evening was rounded off by (the appearance at least of) justice being done. Thank you Leasey. Thank you Cambridgeshire Police.

23Dec04 — 2

Dumber And Dumberer

Oh woe, a university chemistry department is closing. “What is to become of British biomedical research?” whine the great and the good of the scientific and medical establishment. Michael Rees, the head of the BMA’s medical academics committee, is a laugh a line as he cries:

“If this trend of closures continues, it will cut off access to the range of knowledge vital for groundbreaking medical research …

“Chemistry A-level is still a requirement for most medical schools. Without university chemistry departments, who will train the secondary school teachers of tomorrow?”

It’s striking that someone who benefits from the gravymobile that is the British academic medical pay system should find it so difficult to understand incentives, but I’ll do my best to help Prof Rees.

When I was an undergraduate, nearly twenty years ago, the largest single employment destination for fresh Oxford Chemistry graduates was accountancy training. This is because, despite the moans (even then) about a “shortage” of qualified chemists and other scientists, many who chose to work in those fields ended up doing a boring job with limited career prospects for little money. Unsurprisingly, many of the brightest chose to do a boring job with good career prospects for a great deal more money. That’s how job markets work outside the protection of closed shops.

To my chronic mystification, university teaching in Britain is funded based on the publication output of the research departments charged with doing that teaching. This is the most important of many reasons why so much teaching in British universities is rubbish. If David Beckham were paid according to his contribution to football coaching theory he probably wouldn’t be quite so devastating in dead-ball situations. Why are we so surprised when university lecturers complain that their doing anything more than occasionally mumbling into their shirts for an hour is “spoon-feeding the students” and “interferes with their real work”?

Medics are paid a great deal more than chemistry teachers and research chemists. If there were a real shortage of chemists or if salaries in Britain were based on the actual contributions of various workers to their companies’ bottom-lines (rather than on their connectedness to professional networks of mutual backscratching) then chemists would be paid more and there would be more people going into industry and research. They aren’t so they don’t.

If you want good chemistry teaching to continue then reward people for doing it well. If you teach it well the students will come. If you want more and better chemists then reward them for doing chemistry. If you want your offspring to go to university to do medicine then pay a private chemistry tutor to cram them on their way. If you want to moan about the situation then try not to be so naïve.

[There. That’s buggered my chances of going back to computational analysis of medical imaging looking for a new job.]

23Dec04 — 0

Blonde Celebrity In Least Convincing “I Am Not A Bimbo” Protest Ever

Read all abaht it!

I’m fuming,’ said the 21-year-old. ‘I sat there with a fleshcoloured bikini on and they have air-brushed the whole thing out.

‘That’s not my belly button. I’ve got a sticky out belly button and it’s pierced,’ she added.

‘They’re not my boobs either.’ Ellison, currently starring in the film version of Phantom Of The Opera, may sue over the picture. ‘I vowed never to take all my clothes off in pictures,’ she said.

Ellison claimed she thought nothing of it when photographers asked her to cross her arms and legs to give the illusion she was naked.

But she was ‘mortified’ when she saw the magazine, the Liverpudlian told a radio station in the city.

‘I don’t want my dad to see anything like that,’ she added.

It was to be her last glamour shoot, so she could be taken more seriously as an actress.

A spokeswoman for Maxim claimed Miss Ellison’s agent had seen the pictures before publication and raised no objections.

22Dec04 — 0

Tales From The Pride/Embarrassment Border

As if timed to illustrate my entry two days ago, the Jerusalem Post reports an update in a story Judith has been following from her home within the Zionist Entity.

She wrote to me at the end of November expressing her discomfort, even as a very close friend of Israel (and a Jewish one at that), at the tactics employed by an IDF officer at a checkpoint on the West Bank. A Palestinian presented himself with a violin case and was asked to play it for two minutes to prove he really was a musician. Judith pointed out that (rightly wary as she is of such comparisons) it called to mind Nazis forcing musical Jews to entertain them. My email reply was, I have to say, hawkishly dismissive. If I’d been in his seat I’d have done the same as the soldier, who was filmed by “Machsom Watch”, a group of women monitoring treatment of those crossing checkpoints. Four days later Judith emailed to say that a Palestinian in Israeli custody had admitted to smuggling explosives inside his guitar*.

But what happened next with the violinist? The sort of thing that makes you proud to be a friend of Israel. [Thanks again to Judith.]

*UPDATE: Claire points out by email that the “guitarist” didn’t just transport but detonated the explosives in question and what exactly passed between the fiddler and the border guard is the subject of some discussion.

21Dec04 — 8

Four-Wheel Driven

If the worst came to the worst, you would, of course, stamp on the head of that annoyingly talented and inquisitive Pakistani girl who helps her mother out in the local corner shop, but luckily you don’t have to resort to direct violence to keep the little oik out of those places at Oxbridge you have earmarked for Olivia and Ben—because your parents and your husband are pretty well-off.

Sadly, they aren’t sufficiently rich to support a completely private education for your angels; and, although everyone says your children are bright, they aren’t quite bright enough to get that full scholarship. We at Mitsibushi understand this. It is with your family’s relative affluence and your children’s special needs in mind that we have designed the Mitsubishi MotherFucker.

Three storeys high with a 47-litre fuel-injected diesel engine, the MoFo is the all-terrain vehicle that carries its own terrain on the school run. Simply drive the MoFo into the catchment area of a good city academy and put Olivia and Ben’s names down on the waiting list. Why bother renting a room in a property near the school when the MoFo is bigger than most of the properties anyway? And you can park it anywhere you like.

The MoFo’s driving position is so elevated that only office workers in high-rise blocks can see you. In the past, when your thoughtless driving caused serious injury, you probably felt obliged at least to make a fake-apology wave out of the driver’s side window in the vague direction of the spasming victim. The MoFo renders even that gesture completely superfluous.

The MoFo comes complete with its own oil refinery, saving you the challenge of aligning your vehicle so that it prevents others from using two pumps at the garage while you loiter in the forecourt shop, browsing Harper’s.

The MoFo’s as-standard handsfree kit allows you to release the steering wheel completely, so that you can hold your mobile to talk to your husband in Frankfurt and pluck your eyebrows simultaneously, while this state-of-the-art vehicle negotiates complex roundabouts on its own—by simply crushing them under its tracks.

And if it’s big enough to skip over that mound of municipal greenery, you can be sure speed bumps are as pimples beneath the monstertruck wheels of Mitsubishi’s latest. Drive as fast as you like through traffic calming—and even accelerate past speed cameras. The MoFo’s side-mounted chainsaws deploy instantly in response to GPS signals, slicing through the uprights of gatsos—and (for you celebrity yummy mummies) the legs of paparazzi—with aplomb.

The MoFo Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.

Not that you were going to.

21Dec04 — 5

Cutting Back On Intelligence Spending

xXx: he’s meant to be the USA’s hip-and-happening answer to Britain’s 007. Problem is, you can’t afford Vin Diesel for the sequel and you’ve blown most of the budget on Samuel L Jackson, Willem Defoe, and exploding helicopters. So who do you get to play the last hope of freedom and democracy? A short, fat, fella with a goatee, that’s who. At last, a movie action hero the bloke who serves you in the video shop can identify with.

20Dec04 — 1

Gap In The Market

Why can’t I get a button for my ‘Blog saying “I’m An Embarrassed Friend Of Israel“?

“Yeah, this is that ‘Izzie’ you’ve heard so much about. You must understand that most of the stories just aren’t true. I’m sorry she has to carry the semi-automatic and the bowie knife everywhere. And the thermonuclear handbag. And I apologise in advance for her manners. It’s just that, well, half the people she meets want to kill her, so naturally she’s a little bit more aggressive than your average woman—she has to be. You’ ve got to admit she looks great in fatigues, though.”

20Dec04 — 2

In The Ghetto

As you probably know if you are a regular, I live off the Mill Road, Cambridge’s ethnic strip. I do so not out of solidarity with the city’s immigrant population nor as some kind of fashion statement. I would much rather be in one of the areas where the rich white people live, but I couldn’t afford it and anyway preferred to be near the station here so I could easily get the train to lecture in London when I moved from the Smoke. (Once I got into town, the Tube journey to Imperial would take longer than the train journey to King’s Cross.)

So I live in the gentrifying ghetto with the other beige people and public sector workers. (A bit further out of town you get your actual blacks and salt-of-the-earth working classes—plus chavs with rusty saloon cars propped up on bricks outside their homes and mad old ladies who chase you down their front lawns when you try to deliver Labour Party leaflets.) Here, you can’t move for shops selling traditional wooden toys to the spawn of the wholemeal-trousered, Fallujah-is-burning whiners; pubs playing that dangerous, new-fangled reggae music; and bloody students. There are also three, yes three oriental supermarkets within ten minutes walk of my front door. (I have to say “oriental” because I am British and, if used the word “Asian” I would have to include “south Asian”, as in Indian subcontinent, and I’d be counting until Christmas, which isn’t very far away, I must admit.)

Anyway. I have become something of a connoisseur of oriental food round here. I have no idea if the places I frequent are being run by Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese or Martians; and the people running them (like many of the peoples of the world) have absolutely no idea what my racial background is. What amuses is me is when Brits in such venues say, “There are lots of Chinese people in here; the food must be good.” Imagine you are visiting a spot in, say, Brazil that holds the equivalent tourist appeal in that country of Cambridge within the UK. You wander into an “Irish” pub (because I guarantee there are plenty operating successfully there right now). It’s full of drunk twentysomething Anglos. Is your first thought “There are lots of English people in here; the beer must be good”?

19Dec04 — 1

American Arthouse

Hi, I’m on the set of Meet The Underwater Smoking Tanngoliabees with director, Hiram Czeapli. Hiram, there’s already a tremendous buzz about this star-studded, sprawling ensemble piece. Perhaps you could tell us why this of all your works has attracted so much pre-release media attention.

Well, although The Smoking Tanngoliabees has a lot in common with some of my other productions, with this creation I’m hoping to achieve something that, to date, I feel I have only been groping for.

Which is?

This motion picture will, I believe, be the first to dispense with content entirely. I intend to fill two-and-a-half hours of screen time with A-list cameos, improvised dialogue, and fashionable winks at the worst of 70s fashions—no plausible plotting or character development at all, though several of the leads will change their excruciatingly unflattering hairstyles in the final act. It will also be the first film of this sub-genre not to feature Bill Murray. Bill did stipulate, however, as a condition of his non-appearance, that I cast Harvey Keitel in the role originally intended for him.

So the “No Bill” rumours are true?

Yes, I can confirm that it is possible to produce pretentious free-form noodling within the United States, but without the master of the genre himself in the cast or directing.

Surely the occasional snigger at his endlessly amusing hangdog expression is crucial leavening to the failed, flat irony of a story about a dysfunctional family that happens to consist of the cream of Hollywood’s seven-figure box-office leads looking for cred?

Oh, don’t get me wrong here. We’ll still be showcasing the very worst of US indie rock in the soundtrack, intentionally shooting under bad light, making somebody like Julia Roberts look very silly indeed, and asking a white person to wear an Afro wig; but, yes, we have no Bill Murray.

So what will Bill be doing during filming?

He’ll be working on Ghostbusters III.

Wow, that’ll be quite a contrast with the movie you’re making, then?

Well, it’ll probably be funny. And entertaining. And say something (albeit fairly unimportant) about the human condition.

And Meet The Underwater Smoking Tanngoliabees won’t?

Not if I have my way, no.

18Dec04 — 1

More Haste; Less Speed

The last couple of days’ entries have been so full of typos that readers have actually been emailing in corrections. Thank you to Hak Mao and casualsavant for spotting some of them and my dad for having the restraint to let me correct most of them before getting out his red marking pen online.

18Dec04 — 0

And So Farewell, David

From “The Tragedy of David Blunkett” in today’s Economist:

“the British have lost their primness about sex, but they still hate a queue-jumper”

Whatever you think of his policies, you have to feel something for the poor man. If you were choosing how your career was to end would you prefer it being:

  • supported to death by Tony Blair?
  • bitch-slapped to death by John Prescott?
  • leaked to death by your former mistress?
  • admired to death by Stephen Pollard?

Makes our being humanely put down by the Medical Research Council seem like a treat.

17Dec04 — 3

Nah

All my numbers have dropped lately because I have been posting less frequently and I know my US reader numbers have been in particular decline, but, for those of you still left, the topic for discussion today is: Hillary Clinton—could she really be the next president of the United States of America?

17Dec04 — 7

Yes, But

Yes, it’s bad there, but what about North Korea?
Yes, he’s an evil dictator, but the Americans will be even worse.
Yes, they’ll overthrow him, but what about the humanitarian disaster that will inevitably follow?
Yes, democracy’s all very well in theory, but those people aren’t ready for it yet.
Yes, they chopped off his head, but what about Abu Ghraib?
Yes, the north might be peaceful, but what about Fallujah?
Yes, the south might be peaceful, but what about Fallujah?
Yes, millions of refugees have returned, but only because other countries don’t want them any more.
Yes, things might be better now, but at what price?
Yes, there are three hundred mass graves, but what about Fallujah?
Yes, Saddam had to be punished, but giving him the death penalty makes them worse than he is.
Yes, other countries in the Middle East should become democratic too, but what about Palestine?
Yes, it’s booming now, but if we’d given diplomacy more time the country would be better now without those hundreds of thousands of dead and the massive rebuilding operation.
Yes, my stepson’s going to university there, but he feels it’s a way of giving something back, making amends for all the damage we’ve done.
Yes, I drive an Iraqi car but that doesn’t mean I’m supporting the American puppet government there and its terrible treatment of its Palestinian population.
Yes, the holiday was great thanks, and the historical sites are just amazing, but think how much more amazing they would have been if we hadn’t bombed them into the Stone Age.
Yes, those bastards have outsourced Gavin’s job to Baghdad, but that’s globalization for you.

17Dec04 — 9

No

It takes a professional philosopher to choose, of all the arguments for the existence of some kind of god, the most exquisitely wrong:

“A philosophy professor who has been a leading proponent of atheism for more than 50 years has decided that God may exist after all.

“Antony Flew, 81, now believes scientific evidence supports the theory that some sort of intelligence created the universe. But he continues to reject traditional religious ideas of God and especially the idea of salvation after death.
…

“Speaking in a new video, Has Science Discovered God?, Flew argues that the investigation of DNA “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been involved.””

Just for the record—and I suspect this is one of those rare occasions when I can say I am speaking not only in a personal capacity, but on behalf of my colleagues and employers—the investigation of DNA has done no such thing. If science is a stately home, then in one room, in one wing there is a cupboard. In the drawer inside the bureau inside that cupboard is the little box devoted to my sub-specialism. If there was even a hint of intelligence behind the origin of life I would expect to find that box empty.

Even from reading his own public correction of exaggerated reports of his theism, Flew is clearly touting a slightly polished variant of the Argument from Design—the one I refer to as the “Argument from Lack of Imagination”. Perhaps he read a special genome edition of Nature and saw the light. This would be ironic, because anyone who has paid close attention to the general results of molecular biology and the sequencing of various species’ genomes should find that the spontaneous emergence of life and its acquisition of complexity to be that much easier to explain than they have ever been. (One of the most awe-inspiring aspects of Darwin’s insights is that he originally made them, not only in an unsympathetic intellectual environment, but in the absence of fundamental knowledge of biological mechanisms underlying the processes he described.)

A couple of other philosophers have dismissed Flew’s conclusion as being trivial—in the sense of being without philosophical consequence. Other professional philosophers could, I think, make a good case against this, but I know that this is not true in the broadest sense of “philosophy”. If I accepted Flew’s conclusion I would stop wondering about the first replicators, alternative forms of life based on different substrates, or the possibility of generating life de novo in the lab, and I would especially stop worrying about the reason why there are both so many different protein structures and so few forms for proteins to fold into. His is a counsel against a class of speculation and, as a natural philosopher, I dismiss it as intellectual cowardice.

There is one excellent practical argument and there is a number of illuminatingly seductive (and broken) philosophical arguments for God. The latter are useful for investigating certain logical fallacies and amusing stoned undergraduates. The former is that believing in God makes you happier. Certain kinds of ignorance can be bliss. I am a sad scientist and Flew has done a piece of bad philosophy. I hereby sentence him to statistics tutorials until the end of time.

16Dec04 — 0

Multiplication

The nerds at Slashdot have been discussing the book Mathematics and Sex by Australian mathematician Clio Cresswell. She was once voted one of the 25 most beautiful people in Australia. For a mathematician she’s pretty fine [large jpg], but for a cookery writer she’s no great shakes. Amongst other gems, the book applies insights gained from the Optimal Stopping Problem to the question of which of 100 potential mates you should choose. Answer: anyone after the 37th who’s better than the ones you’ve met before. My favourite contribution in the forum was a link to an explanation “Why I Will Never Have a Girlfriend“.

16Dec04 — 0

Random Jottings

I am pulling out of the Genome Campus when I notice the car in front of me has a registration which is just a couple of characters away from spelling out “deontic”. First I think, “A near miss like that’s a bit of a shame.” Then I think, “Yeah, but what is the size of the intersection between the set of people prepared to pay a premium for a registration number that almost spells a word and the set of people who know what deontology is?”. Then I think, “God, you’re a snob, Counsell.” Then I think, “Shit, shit! Brake, you idiot! That car in front’s been stationary for four seconds!”

All US movie telephone numbers contain the digits 555. My local mobile phone shop’s number contains the digits 555.

This week I read two fascinating biographies of eccentric outsiders. One, Peter Mitchell won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1974. The other, John P. Ennis, aka “Sollog” is one condom short of a pack of three.

16Dec04 — 0

Tally Ho!

Also from Slashdot I note that the planned advertisements for the superb open source Firefox Web browser have appeared. The ads depict the Firefox logo, a giant fox encircling the globe. This monster is the combined result of Tony Blair’s ban on hunting with dogs and his authorization of the release of GM organisms into the environment. For those people having difficulty reading this ‘Blog under Internet Explorer I keenly recommend both Firefox and his big brother Mozilla. While I’m on the subject of Web browsers, unfortunately (and at the risk of sounding like Microsoft tech support), I have been unable to reproduce this bug.

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