Creationists don’t have a problem with science, they have a problem with argument.
Professor Steve Jones of UCL, quoted in today’s Guardian.
Monthly Archives: February 2006
Dumbing down
Q. In which well-known publication did the following gibberish appear?
It might well be the secret to a successful marriage: one bathroom for him in black marble, with a power shower and a screen to watch sports, and another for her in limestone and pastel shades, with a bath for relaxation surrounded by candles.
Or maybe it’s a dressing room for him with extra hanging space for suits and big drawers that he can shove things into (plus the odd pointless gadget so beloved of blokes) and another for her with a full-length mirror, a table and shelves for shoes and handbags…
A. The Financial Times, which once upon a time was a serious newspaper. The quote is from an article by Simon Brooke in the issue for February 11/12, 2006.
Dead issues
AOL is holding A Discussion (capital letters) on a portentous topic — Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing? I only know about it because Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Svengali, was on Radio 4’s Start the Week this morning talking about it. Apparently, Alastair has decided that the Internet is here to stay. Phew! Meanwhile, now that AOL is in discussion mode, how about another, equally relevant topic? Is Electricity A Good Thing?
The “let’s discuss the Internet” meme is spreading btw. I’m speaking next Thursday in London at the RSA Economist debate on the motion “The Internet’s best days are over”. I’m down to support the motion. Yikes! I’m developing lawyer-like tendencies. Dr Johnson once observed that “lawyers are like dice, in that they can lie on any side”.
Will Apple Adopt Windows?
John Dvorak, desperate for something to write about. It’s tough being a columnist on a slow news week. I’m going to write about Bill Gates’s desire to switch to Linux any day now.
Vindicated at last!
Er, I always knew there was method in my somnolence, but now there’s scientific evidence to support it!
When it comes to making tough decisions – don’t sweat it, sleep on it – or so a team of scientists recommends.
A Dutch study suggests complex decisions like buying a car can be better made when the unconscious mind is left to churn through the options.
This is because people can only focus on a limited amount of information, the study in the journal Science suggests.
The conscious brain should be reserved for simple choices like picking between towels and shampoos, the team said.
Zzzzzzz….
Dead duck was “isolated case”
French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand trying to reassure consumers that poultry remained safe to eat. [link]
wikiCalc
Dan Bricklin, who wrote VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program and one of the great Killer Apps of all time, has released the Alpha version of a web app which does some of the things a spreadsheet does. Here’s how he describes it:
The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. It can be easily set up to publish to basic web server space accessed by FTP and there is no need to set up server-side programs like CGI. It can, though, run on a server and be used with nothing more than a browser on the client.
It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux under a GPL licence. Thank you, Dan.
More: More information here on the features Dan expects to be in the Beta version.
Brokeback hypocrisy
There’s something deeply comical about the tangle Hollywood has got into over Brokeback Mountain, the so-called “gay cowboy” movie. Basically, the problem is that the awkward fact of homosexual love at the heart of the story has to be somehow finessed so that it becomes Motherhood and Apple Pie. Daniel Mendelsohn has a lovely piece about it in the New York Review of Books. He notes:
The reluctance to be explicit about the film’s themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards—for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as “a story of monumental conflict”; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger’s character as “a cowboy caught up in a complicated love.” After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, “This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story.”
What’s going on, Mendelsohn maintains, is a concerted attempt to situate the story in a well-understood and respectable genre — the Romeo and Juliet story: lovers doomed to be destroyed by horrid families, tribal jealousies, race or whatever. The difficulty is that Brokeback Mountain is about two boys who happened to love one another but whose lives were destroyed not by traditional scapegoats but by the hostility of their society (US mainstream society, that is) to their sexuality.
It will be interesting to see how the Oscars ceremony handles this delicate problem.
Why are only some faiths sacrosanct?
I’ve always agreed with H.L. Mencken that “you should respect the other guy’s religion, but only to the extent that you respect his view that his wife is beautiful and his children smart”. (“I believe”, he wrote somewhere, “that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking”. Amen.)
So the plight of believers who get all worked up because someone has offended their religious sensibilities leaves me cold. I expect the police to prosecute, in due course, the fanatics who were waving placards about beheading their fellow-citizens (though I think the police were wise not to arrest them on the spot that day), and I will be very pissed off if they don’t. But Nick Cohen makes an interesting point in his column today — which deals with the way our mass media blithely offend Catholic and Jewish sensibilities but back off when it comes to our Muslim brethren. “You can’t be a little bit free”, he observes. “If you are not willing to offend Islamists who may kill you, what excuse do you have for offending Catholics, the families of murdered children and British troops who won’t?” Precisely. No wonder people conclude that violence — or the threat of it — is the only thing that really works. That’s not to say that fear of being murdered is not a rational sentiment. But it does rather expose the contemporary cant about the importance of a ‘free’ press — it’s free only when there’s little real danger.
I haven’t seen the offending Danish cartoons, btw (because they weren’t published in the British media, as far as I can tell), but the current issue of Private Eye prints a useful textual description of each. (Only in the print edition, alas.)
Update: Lots of helpful emails, pointing to locations on the Web where the cartoons, or accounts of them, are posted. There’s a good Wikipedia page on the whole business. Many thanks to Werner, Ben and others for the leads.
The Brown/Blair team in action
Armando Ianucci, one of the best things in the new-look Observer, has a lovely spoof interview with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Excerpt:
Iannucci: On the issue of terror, why did you feel the need to bring in an extra law banning the glorification of terror?
Blair: Well, you see, Armando, you don’t sit where I sit and see day in, day out the intelligence reports…
Brown: I see those as well…
Blair: Really? I didn’t realise you… anyway, we get the intelligence that says people are up to no good, but in ways that don’t flout existing laws. The police tell me they’re seeing people commit offences all the time, but that at the moment these are legal offences. The police need to be able to see if someone’s committing an offence, then bring in a law afterwards to tell them what that offence is. Like glorification.
Brown: I’d go further. Yes, we’re bringing in a law to make glorification illegal. But you can also break glorification down into its three constituent parts.
Iannucci and Blair: Can you?
Brown: Yes. Smiling, exaggerating and being sarcastic. There are people who smile when they hear about terrorism, or who exaggerate how successful a terrorist act has been, or are sarcastic whenever we come on the news. It only needs three of these people to come together in co-ordinated attack for them to collectively commit glorification.
Blair: Precisely. I think.
Brown: Or two people being sarcastic and one smiling. It works in different ways.
Blair: Really?