2006.04.31


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2006.04.30

Majikthise is pointing to news that the DoJ are planning to introduce a faith-based pre-release program. Perhaps they should call Charles Clarke and ask him how well faith-based criminal justice works. Yes, yes, cheap shot. Seriously, that Chuck Colson really is a nutter. 2006-04-30T21:18:33ZUntitled entry permalink

Oh yeah, they've now killed it. Bastards! 2006-04-30T21:12:45ZUntitled entry permalink

Lenny Flank has a good paper on ID and "presumption of naturalism" arguments: "There is no legitimate reason for the ID hypothesis to be privileged and have the special right to be exempted from testing, that other hypotheses do not." (Hypothesis? What hypothesis? I've seen only fluff!) 2006-04-30T21:05:53ZUntitled entry permalink

Nick Robinson rebuts the claims of (an unacknowledged) Stephen Pollard. Interesting side point: Robinson only has one link on his blog that goes to a non-BBC source. 2006-04-30T20:26:08ZUntitled entry permalink

One thing that would make IMDB heaps better: a way of searching films for music. For instance, if you want to know what films have used a certain song or tracks by a certain artist, if you could search for them on IMDB. 2006-04-30T13:50:37ZUntitled entry permalink

Reason's Hit and Run has some libertarian/capitalist reaction to Galbraith's death. John J. Pitney: "John Kenneth Galbraith is of the first type, a sterling model of how to err in style... Though he's seldom been right, he's always been a gentleman." 2006-04-30T20:57:07ZUntitled entry permalink

J. K. Galbraith died yesterday. 2006-04-30T11:33:03ZUntitled entry permalink

Mark Vuletic: "Ah, my apologies, dear Rabbi: I grow angry. But I do so not because I am an atheist. I do so because I am human." 2006-04-30T20:24:31ZUntitled entry permalink

Les Jenkins: "Unlike God, the existence of the New York Yankees, rap music, or animals isn¹t something you have to take on faith alone. And while Yankee fans, rap music aficionados, and animal lovers can certainly be annoying at times, not a single one of them has ever shown up on my doorstep early in the morning to see if I¹d mind spending a few hours of my day letting them try and convert me to their point of view. Certainly none of them has ever taken the time to write an essay in a mainstream news outlet to tell me how my lack of enthusiasm for the New York Yankees, rap music, or animals in general means I¹m a immoral degenerate leading a meaningless life." 2006-04-30T20:36:48ZUntitled entry permalink

Stick this in your anger pipe 2006-04-30T13:25:43ZTitled entry permalink

So, we're angry because we don't believe? Is that right, Rabbi Gellman?

I'm angry because negative stereotypes of non-believers are ten a penny in your country of residence.

I'm angry when I see things like that darned Kirk Cameron film the other day - because young people are being taught that science doesn't matter, only a very unthinking sort of faith. "You don't have to think about it, we've done it for you!"

I'm angry because certain religious people get in a self-righteous huff when you suggest that we should be able to have a real proper look at religion and try to understand it in depth - the dogma, the theology, the psychology, the philosophy - and pose difficult, interesting and challenging questions about the nature of faith, religion and belief. They mutter about it being 'reductionist' when we try to look at religion objectively.

I'm angry because, having being told that I'm a reductionist about the psychology of religious belief, I'm then told by religious believers like Rabbi Gellman that my atheism is solely the result of nasty childhood memories of angry preachers and dramatic losses. If it's reductionist for me to say that your religion is based on fear of an invisible sky-daddy, it's just as bad for you to say that my atheism is based on other similarly reductionist views.

I'm not stupid enough to say that it's simply based on fear of an invisible sky-daddy. It's that, a pinch of lubricating Sophistry from some babbling theologian and some mysterious experience that you haven't taken the time to look in to other explanations for.

Why else am I angry? Because I'm fed up of being told that religion is a necessity for morality, as spiritual warfare wages with us atheists as a rather benign anomaly in an increasingly sick game of religious politics.

Anger by atheists is due to politics and discrimination.

Perhaps I could show the good rabbi how this works.

"No, I don't know that Jews should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots." - George H. W. Bush

Woah! Woah! Woah! Anti-semite! Lunatic!

Oh, wait, sorry.

"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots." - George H. W. Bush

That's all better. Any other group but atheists and we'd have to get out of our chairs and do something. Let's see what we shouldn't get angry about:

"Can it be that we, too, are ready to embrace the foul concepts of atheism? Somebody is tampering with America's soul, I leave it to you who that somebody is." - former US Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia

"Under no circumstances would I ever vote for an atheist [for President] because they are terrible [and have] no moral code." - Television presenter, Star Jones.

"[We shouldn't] indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." - 2000 Democratic VP candidate, Joseph Lieberman

"[I find it] impossible [to imagine] that a nation which is grounded in Judaeo-Christian principles would somehow select someone [for President] who would repudiate those principles." - Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

After all that, should we just suppress our anger, lest an almost trollish rabbi write nasty things about us in Newsweek? Fuck no. We should be irate. We should be outside in Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue with shotguns until they shut down or privatise the faith schools and the faith-based programmes and listening to all the nutty abstinence-only folks and intelligent design creationists.

Gellman confuses people getting angry about stuff with having some predisposition towards anger. In the process, he is asking atheists to bend over and take whatever abuse comes their way. If they object, they are a spooky, evil, angry atheist!

We're angry about the fact that politicians can so easily brush us off, use the word 'atheist' as the scare word (in the States) and appease religious nutters in clear contravention of things like the First Amendment and any rational understanding of Article 10. As I said above, if you rewrote those sentences above or many other quotes by religious folk to say "Muslim" or "Jew" or "Christian" where they refer to "atheist", everyone would be far angrier than we are.

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2006.04.29

I stated earlier that Bryan Appleyard doesn't have a feed. He sent me a correction. Atom feed. Thanks Bryan. 2006-04-29T17:33:24ZUntitled entry permalink

Yawn. Nothing to see here. Just tired old nonsense. If you ban memory sticks, why not ban human memory. If you don't want people distributing files either (a) don't give them the file or (b) tell them not to distribute it and threaten them if they do. 2006-04-29T15:55:17ZUntitled entry permalink

Kevin Murphy has really a cute Sheltie! 2006-04-29T15:43:39ZUntitled entry permalink

Finally, the Mexican government are decriminalising small amounts of drug possession - not just marijuana but cocaine and heroin too! Of course, for us to really see the benefits of drug legalisation, you need to stop enforcing all the damn drug laws, but this is a good start. 2006-04-29T15:27:34ZUntitled entry permalink

Tom Coates pointed to the new BBC Infax catalogue. Very cool. Now to tie that to BitTorrent. Seriously, sites like UKNova could use the BBC Programme Number to check for duplicates. For instance, the first Jonathan Miller Atheism programme ('Shadows of Doubt') is NMGJ580L. 2006-04-29T14:41:49ZUntitled entry permalink

The Guardian has an article profiling healthy fast-food places across the country. There are a few places that sound god in central London on there, even though a few don't meet the fast food ethic. Yes, ethic. The thing which is great about fast food is that it's unpretentious and cheap. With McDonalds and the suchlike, you get exactly what you pay for. There is no elaborate nonsense or 'dialectic'. There's no "platters" or "drizzles" - there's fries or there aren't. Vegetarian food has this problem - all the organic crapola that goes with it. We need "unpretentious restaurant awards". 2006-04-29T09:51:12ZUntitled entry permalink

Jeffrey Shallit has a slightly more odd creationist quote-mangle. 2006-04-29T09:39:19ZUntitled entry permalink

Bryan Appleyard: "The reflex egalitarian, anti-elitist streak in the BBC means that they prefer bland, jolly, tabloidy types to anybody with any weight or authority." 2006-04-29T09:32:59ZUntitled entry permalink

Jacob Sullum: "I don't know how many innocent men there are at Guantanamo, and neither does the government. I wish it cared a little more." 2006-04-29T09:24:01ZUntitled entry permalink

I've just set up Virtue Desktops so that I can switch between operating systems - OS X, Windows and Second Life. Smile and a wink 2006-04-29T09:19:57ZUntitled entry permalink

Ian is doing clever stuff with XSL to produce posters for Geek Dinner. 2006-04-29T08:07:41ZUntitled entry permalink

I didn't know that Dave was a Kill Bill fan. 2006-04-29T07:56:23ZUntitled entry permalink

Andrew Sullivan: "Equally, we have to make sure that our criticism of Bush and his dreadful, criminal defense secretary does not mean a capitulation to the anti-Americanism, moral relativism and defeatism of the cut-and-run left. We must fight that tendency as relentlessly as we must fight Christianism and Islamism. But a new coalition is forming - against all these isms. For freedom. For the West." 2006-04-29T07:46:29ZUntitled entry permalink

Free hugs next Sunday. I'm usually a very cynical person, but this is a cool idea. 2006-04-29T07:39:48ZUntitled entry permalink

Nintendo now has a really dumb name for it's next console. Someone in Japan has been watching the Web 2.0 silly names contest in the Valley. 2006-04-29T07:31:59ZUntitled entry permalink

This needs OPML. 2006-04-29T07:30:55ZUntitled entry permalink

So, Google have released yet another Mac-unfriendly product. Wake me up when something changes... 2006-04-29T07:27:25ZUntitled entry permalink

2006.04.28

Want a reason not to visit Maine? Read this. 2006-04-28T11:45:10ZUntitled entry permalink

Yet another Web 2.0 site which doesn't support Safari. At least I didn't have to spend hours hunting down an invite to find out. 2006-04-28T11:27:26ZUntitled entry permalink

Stephen Pollard: "Throughout the day when the story broke, the BBC made almost no reference to the revelation that Mr Prescott had had a two year affair with his secretary." 2006-04-28T10:13:16ZUntitled entry permalink

WTF? This guy is so dosed-up on crack. "You motherfuckers need Jesus!" 2006-04-28T09:27:41ZUntitled entry permalink

I've just posted some pictures up on Flickr from my phone. 2006-04-28T08:25:32ZUntitled entry permalink

Lee: "Okay, so Exxon makes about 10 cents a gallon.  Not a huge profit margin, is it? Now, by way of comparison, the average per-gallon gasoline tax is 45.9 cents". Blame the State before you blame the corporations. 2006-04-28T07:49:46ZUntitled entry permalink

Oh, I like this: adverts targeted at IE users only to persuade them to use Firefox. 2006-04-28T07:44:00ZUntitled entry permalink

There's nowt wrong with sex toys, but these are just tacky. 2006-04-28T07:42:24ZUntitled entry permalink

2006.04.27

Tony Long doesn't get that blogging is a literary hybrid between numerous differnt genres - it is a cross between the email, the links page and the diary. Not to mention the many early newspapers which were as humourous, ranty and polemical as blogs are today. As for the "unsavory writing practices", I'd say that I see about as many 'SPAG' errors (to use the examination board's words for spelling, punctuation and grammar) in the blogs I read as in the transplanted print publications. 2006-04-27T15:07:10ZUntitled entry permalink

To be honest, every time I read the writings of a blog skeptic, I picture up the sort of person who would have objected to the printing press, but now that has been rationalised and commercialised, is just about fine with it. But the blogger is much the same. Their computer is the printing press, their internet access and power is their supply of paper and ink. What's so difficult to understand? Now, go and read W. Caleb McDaniel's "Blogging in the Early Republic". 2006-04-27T15:27:54ZUntitled entry permalink

My Mac didn't make a sound on startup when I had to restart it a few minutes ago. Perhaps it has learnt a lesson. 2006-04-27T14:53:44ZUntitled entry permalink

Sounds like the conference for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws was fun. 2006-04-27T09:24:35ZUntitled entry permalink

Amy Bryant: "From its inception, the abstinence-only education initiative has promoted a biased moralistic agenda instead of a public health agenda, withholding vital information and promoting misinformation... In December 2004, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) released a report that exposed many of the factual inaccuracies presented in abstinence-only curricula, such as the erroneous claims that condoms don't work 30 percent of the time and that HIV could be transmitted through tears and sweat... No research has proven that abstinence-only programs actually work. What the research does show is that Americans, by and large, are not abstinent people." 2006-04-27T09:20:31ZUntitled entry permalink

Yesterday was Tax Freedom Day. 2006-04-27T09:16:05ZUntitled entry permalink

Talking of ID, there's some craziness with Dembski and Ann Coulter. A worldview indeed. I guess, they've got nothing left to lose. 2006-04-27T09:04:52ZUntitled entry permalink

Science and Theology News has an article on how ID is being discussed where it should be - by philosophers in college, rather than by biologists in schools. I like this fluff-up though: "The course delves into the history of the intelligent design movement, beginning with Plato, the first Western philosopher to make an argument for the existence of God based upon the design of this world." Theological teleology and the IDM differ, y'know. The IDM is a sociologically defined group of academics and 'culture warriors', who happen to fit in to the historical trend of teleology. 2006-04-27T09:00:33ZUntitled entry permalink

Bennet Kelley at the Huffington Post: "The Christian nation movement is part of an escalating assault on the separation of church and state by the Republican right, so that the real question today is not whether we are a Christian nation but whether we are still a First Amendment nation." 2006-04-27T08:59:52ZUntitled entry permalink

Publishers Weekly are saying that anti-religion books are gonna be big. Dennett said that the worst reaction he has had comes from "misguided multi-culturalists - literary types who are afraid of science". 2006-04-27T08:57:09ZUntitled entry permalink

Laurie Taylor reviews Melvyn Bragg's "12 Books". 2006-04-27T08:55:59ZUntitled entry permalink

Darn it, I wanted to try this, but I won't be able to - it will take hours to download on my GPRS connection. 2006-04-27T08:47:17ZUntitled entry permalink

Tom Coates: "Shock revelation! A new set of technologies has started to displace older technologies and will continue to do so at a fairly slow rate over the next ten to thirty years!" Tom is right - the BBC are really acting completely surprised. What's actually happened is that the techies who work there (and you only have to go to a geek dinner or something like that to meet more than a handful of BBC techs, and an even bigger handful of ex-BBC techs) have been right for the last five years, and the executives have finally gotten around to realising the fact. Perhaps it was the fact that it's not news until the Media Guardian report it, even though people in the Corporation and people outside have been saying this both IRL and online, and presumably inside the Beeb, for years. 2006-04-27T08:44:17ZUntitled entry permalink

Richard Horton says that Britain has had a failure in philosophy. My reaction? Russell, Ayer, G. E. Moore, Locke, Hume, Mill, Hobbes, Richard Dawkins, Swinburne, Don Cupitt and many, many others. Of course, I may be biased. I'm on the train going up to London to spend a day working on my naff little essays (that said: nobody I'm currently writing about is British, they are mostly French and German, plus a certain existential Dane). 2006-04-27T08:30:53ZUntitled entry permalink

2006.04.26

Don't do it, Apple. We already pay for the computer, iPod and the songs. Advertising is an insult to your paying customers, unless you wish to offer an ad-suported iPod which would play an advert once an hour and halve the price of the hardware. What is the customer getting from this? Nothing. 2006-04-26T09:10:20ZUntitled entry permalink

NFL player beats up laptop-using nerd in a Denny's restaurant. Lovely. 2006-04-26T08:53:28ZUntitled entry permalink

Terry Heaton's wife died yesterday. Sorry to hear about that. 2006-04-26T08:49:33ZUntitled entry permalink

Lee: "I certainly hope that the anti-dildo campaign scores a lot of points with the banjo-plucking slack-jawed yokel crowd, because it sure as hell cost the GOP my vote." 2006-04-26T08:46:13ZUntitled entry permalink

Stephen Pollard: "Charles Clarke simply has to go." I agree, but for other reasons. I'd rather have 900 criminals roaming the streets rather than have to carry an ID card, since that would create 60 million criminals. 2006-04-26T08:44:36ZUntitled entry permalink

Smokedot is reporting that the FDA are reaffirming their "marijuana doesn't do anything" policy, which is completely contrary to the evidence. They only need an economy ticket to Amsterdam to see that it does. They don't even have to go that far. They could have a chat with Dr. Lester Grinspoon. 2006-04-26T07:28:15ZUntitled entry permalink

iBeebSpacr 2.0 2006-04-26T07:39:43ZTitled entry permalink

This all started yesterday, but I'm here to pour some cold water on the BBC's plans - the "radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com".

There have been some good reactions, and speculation about software.

But, like Om, I have to say, I'm cynical about this whole thing.

What the BBC don't seem to understand is that user-generated content is happening all around them, and that we don't need "BBC Blogs" or "BBC Flickr" or "BBC YouTube" for that to happen.

The BBC have been incredibly patronising with the Creative Archive - instead of releasing the stuff and letting people have fun with it, they've been having little "test runs" where they set up the parameters of the project, release about 3 or 4 minutes of footage and then invite mashups.

But mashups and remixes dont happen with such predictability. They happen when people have lots of content to play with, no boundaries to stick to, and the ability to follow their imagination.

Creativity is going to happen without project briefs and trial runs from the BBC. As I've discussed, the BBC are reluctant podcasters - they 'admit' to podcasting when they are talking about the inability of undergraduates to read and write properly, rather than shouting from the hilltops the phrase "We podcast... we're still relevant!" They then go on to describe it as a "non-literary culture". (An army of twenty-somethings walking around listening to Radio 4, PBS and Cory Doctorow short stories is a non-literary culture?)

This is all fluff. If the BBC wanted to do user-generated content, it's quite simple how they could do it. They should add a new widget to their news pages which pulls in results from Technorati or some other blog search engine. That way people could respond to BBC News articles.

The problem with that is that the sort of people who will respond on their own blogs are usually pretty intelligent and will point out problems. The sort of people who hang out in the Have Your Say box (or the Guardian's new Comment is Free sections) don't usually say anything unique, repeating tired and hackneyed "opinions" rather than synthesising interesting stuff out of the river of historical context.

We don't need another blogging site - we've got Blogger, Typepad, Moveable Type, Wordpress, and a million other services each offering their own version. What we need is simply for the BBC to quietly add this functionality.

The BBC iPlayer is a sad impersonator of what should be happening - which is free and clear MPEG4 downloads. Why would someone want to download something via the iPlayer and deal with all the Windows Media Player proprietary crap that goes with it when BitTorrent lets you get the same content in a true time and place shift (DivX, Xvid and MPEG4 play in a lot more places than DRM-ed Windows Media files).

Linux and Mac using licence payers are subsidising the added value for the Windows Media platform, just as people who don't use RealPlayer are subsidising the BBC's adding of value to that terrible platform.

Trusting this nation's enormous and varying public media output to Microsoft's Windows Media platform and it's atrocious DRM solution is akin to letting NAMBLA look after your kids.

Why the seven day limit? Do programmes stop being interesting after a week? Of course not. Uninteresting programmes stop being interesting after a week, but most don't start being interesting at all.

That's not what I care about. When I look back in ten years, it's not going to be the Eastenders reruns I care about, or those depressing interviews on Radio 4 with public intellectuals. It's going to be the few things they got right and don't release.

Jonathan Miller's "Atheism" programmes was one of those instances. It was only available for a long time on digital TV, until they finally rebroadcast it on terrestrial. Thankfully, someone made a torrented version of the show, and I have mine safely backed up to a DVD in an open format.

This doesn't free us from the tyranny of schedulers. I don't want to watch programmes when the BBC say I should. I like listening to 'In Our Time', but there's no way in hell I'm going to be near a radio from 9.00-9.30 on a Thursday morning. I'm either on the train or I'm asleep (or sometimes both). If I download the podcast, I can let them queue up and listen to them when I'm interested. And if I stop half way through, when I come back, it all goes from where I left off.

I then backup all the listened-to shows on to a DVD every week or so creating the "Creative Archive" where the BBC are incapable of doing so. Radio programmes and television become items which can be stored and referred to rather than disposables. We wouldn't have a system with books where you can download them for only seven days and then have to throw them away, so why with any other form of culture?

To whoever was responsible for this at the BBC: you've done this in a completely farcical manner. It's taken years for you to get your finger out and do anything, and every time it happens, it's thoroughly disappointing.

You don't need to make BBC Flickr because Flickr do it perfectly well. You don't need to make BBC MySpace because MySpace do that as perfectly as that can be done. We don't want a BBC blogging service, we want you to look outside your own hide-bound institution and see what the rest of the world has been doing for the last eight or nine years.

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2006.04.25

So, I've been coerced by the thought of Free! Stuff! in to linking to those chaps who are running a thing called BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com where they are giving away licences to SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys by, erm, using the power of hyperlinked doodiddles. Even as a confirmed OPML nut, I'm a SubEthaEdit fan. Bribery complete. Back to your normal, regular programming. I can neither confirm nor deny that I can be bribed by similar offers in the future. 2006-04-25T22:45:41ZUntitled entry permalink

Funny stuff. A few of the entries need updating though, most notably Adam Curry and Ray Ozzie, who have since moved on to bigger things than humble blogging (one involving smoking dope and distributing MP3s, the other trying to lure Microsoft away from Steve Ballmer's gorilla visions). This is snarky, but it's quite interesting - if you randomly picked ten words from that lot, you'd have some interesting source material to build the future from. Very Microserfs and all that. 2006-04-25T21:55:11ZUntitled entry permalink

A word I hate at the moment: vlog. It sounds horribly hard Russian and ugly. The "bl-" sound in blog has lots of great words like blabber and bloat and blotto. Meanwhile the "vl-" has such words as Vltava (a river in the Czech Republic) and vlast. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Give us "video podcast" instead. Far nicer. Nothing is better, though, than "plugging the a-hole" (analogue). Writing "plugging the anal. hole" is the copyfighters version of those photos they'd take of Conservative MPs outside their local office, cropping the picture so it says "Conservative Ass". 2006-04-25T18:55:22ZUntitled entry permalink

I've just added a new pimped out subscription box on the right hand side. It lists all of the aggregators I can think of. I'll add any new ones I can think of. 2006-04-25T18:06:37ZUntitled entry permalink

Andrew Sullivan has some lovely pictures of his native Sussex. I ought to take some next time I'm out on my walk. 2006-04-25T16:45:32ZUntitled entry permalink

If you've been enjoying the Adam Curry/Madge Weinstein drama, the next episode is the latest Eat This Hot Show with Wanda Weinstein, Madge Weinstein, Ragan Fox and Rachel Kann. Good stuff. Smile and a wink 2006-04-25T12:00:02ZUntitled entry permalink

Lee: "Basically the GOP has become an amalgam of everything I hate about conservative social values and everything I detest about the liberal view of the role of big government. The GOP is essentially a Christian socialist party." 2006-04-25T11:37:01ZUntitled entry permalink

Londonist on Tom Cruise: "We get it. You're not gay." 2006-04-25T10:37:48ZUntitled entry permalink

Tom Coates has got some pretty del.icio.us visualisations. 2006-04-25T10:35:25ZUntitled entry permalink

Matt Marshall has a review of Sphere, a new blog search engine. 2006-04-25T08:35:55ZUntitled entry permalink

I just got Yahoo! Mail Beta. It's nice, but I'm still gonna do the Gmail. 2006-04-25T07:50:15ZUntitled entry permalink

A day in the life of Mike Arrington 2006-04-25T14:51:00ZTitled entry permalink

The plane got back to SFO, and a tired Michael Arrington disembarked. Cheap airfare was a real enablr for Arrington's business. He could go and hang out with startups, and meet some really nice chicks in the Airset.

He got in to the car and flickred the radio on and tuned it to the last.fm station on the dial. It was ideal radiotime. Sometimes the music really can fluctu8 too much, but this wasn't the usual grat.uito.us crap you find on FM radio which pushes people to buy and iPod and turn it upto11.

As he was driving, he pulled over to the McDonalds drive-thru and decided to order a cheese burger. He pulled up and winded his window down.

"Simpy, Chuquet blurb rrove! Get me a wobblog you qype!"

The voice hesitated and then responded.

"I'm sorry, sir, we are out of that."

"I'll have McNuggets instead. And bring it here fastr than last time, or I'll beat your ookles in you dimewise sxip!"

Back on the road, he tucked in. "These are del.icio.us!" he thought to himself. Usually they're foul, but something must have kept his ikarma levels up. He'd stuck to the 9rules he'd learnt from Mozes.

At the end of the day, even if he spends all of his time climbing the blogladder and hanging out with people with lifetypes, at the end of the day he sits back and enjoys a crazyegg, a quick beer and a hackoff to pics of Lulu. He's only human after all. Smile and a wink

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Kirk Cameron is a dumb arse 2006-04-25T20:08:25ZTitled entry permalink

I'm being blunt and rather crude. Kirk Cameron is talking absolute rubbish on this video that's been circulating. Let's take a look.

First, we skip past the first seven odd minutes. They've got random people at a zoo to talk about evolution. Fantastic. It proves that the average Joe doesn't know much about science. Fortunately, science isn't done by people who've just walked in off the street, but by people with a drive to know and a drive to learn about why.

They all admit they aren't experts, so why judge evolutionary biology on the basis of three individuals who have gone out for a fun day at the zoo and are being harangued by creationists rather than, say, talking to professors of biology or students with something beyond their mandatory schooling in science (which is, if my experience is worth anything, pretty rubbish).

Cameron then goes on to say that there is a lack of transitional fossils, and that evolution cannot be proven without these fossils.

There aren't a lack of transitional fossils. It is quite difficult for something to get fossilised, and that's why we don't have many of them. But the idea that evolution cannot be shown to be true without a lot more fossil evidence is ridiculous. Richard Dawkins writes: "it is surprising how much we would still know about our evolutionary past without them" (The Ancestor's Tale, hb version, p. 16-17).

He goes on: "The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelmingly strong. At the same time, if we had only fossils and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand, we are blessed with both." (p. 17)

Cameron then goes on to point out that drawings - in, say, a science book - are not proof. I had this same argument with a Muslim creationist (who refused to call himself a creationist, despite the fact that he believed in a God revealed in the Koranic scriptures who, erm, created). He pointed out that drawings can be very inaccurate and are a guess. Of course, drawings can be quite inaccurate, as are scientific theories. They are subject to the evidence available, and if the evidence isn't available, then one has to provide a more general picture.

This happens with testimony. On television, you get reports of crimes, and the programme then produces a dramatic reproduction. They picture the rape victim wearing blue jeans not black, and with a slightly different hairstyle, and the lighting isn't quite the same. On that basis, let's throw out all stories of rape as inaccurate. That's what creationists are asking people to do.

Learning materials are just that - materials and aids. They are never 100% accurate, because there will not be a 100% accurate scientist. A certain degree of the things scientists say are wrong. The point about science is that it's possible to then work out when they are wrong by presenting more and different evidence.

He then has a rather natty shot depicting what "the scientists actually have" - himself and a tastefully dressed monkey. The video then superimposes the "missing links" in between. Let's forget the fact that there's loads of evidence that one can see over here (there's more than that, but it's a neat chart because it shows you how creationists throw things all over the map). The missing link isn't between modern human and modern monkey. It's between modern human, modern apes and an ape-like ancestor. This is a simple fact that creationists get wrong about evolutionary theory every time they try and play in our toybox.

They then get on to hominid and pre-hominid fossils. Lucy, aka the Australopithicus afarensis, they claim is nothing but a three-foot ape. Of course, that's not really true now is it.

Then there's Nebraska Man, which was an error. (Of course, they cite it as if it was still part of the evidence which demonstrates hominid descent, even though it's not). (See here) And Piltdown Man, and Neanderthal Man too. Yawn, this is what I got from the bonkers guy on the ladder with the Koran, only he didn't have tacky music.

They then quote Steve Gould's "extreme rarity" statement. It's a quote-mine. Don't worry about it, it's just creationists misrepresenting scientists. Nothing new, folks.

They then have a cringe-inducing sequence with Mr Cameron doing some horrible gesturing, which then cuts to one of our evolutionary cousins doing the same thing. They're smart, we get it.

He then compares a biplane with a 747, and asks "did they evolve?". Of course not! They had a common designer! (Actually, they didn't... the 747 was designed by Boeing and the Tiger Moth from their picture, was designed by de Havilland). They used "a similar blueprint". Funny you should mention that, because the analogy between a blueprint (or, better yet, a recipe) and that funny DNA stuff is rather a nice one.

If you are putting forward the functional repetition across species as proof of common design, by what method can we verify and falsify that? Is that an inference to the best explanation or the most ideologically pleasing? I'm gonna lay my bets...

Another "humour" section - if apes are our relatives, why can't we take them on the plane? I guess it was easier to call some airlines than it was to call some scientists.

They then decide to try and prove that monkeys aren't that intelligent by taking one to a diner. Congratulations on proving the obvious - that table manners aren't a useful adaptation for our hairy chums. You know, out in the jungle, they don't have "shirt and shoes" rules to contend with when they get the munchies, so using up them neurones on table manners isn't high on natural selection's agenda.

The other presenter goes on to say that they are another species and this explains it (gee whiz: they used the word "species" rather than "kind", which is a nice surprise from this kind of nonsense).

Back to Cameron. He pulls out a nice big bound copy of Darwin and quotes from a rather more Victorian passage about "The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexs is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up than woman can attain, whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands." (from their quote of The Descent of Man - I haven't checked the reference though).

Cameron then completely misunderstands the point of that passage, which is not that Darwin is arguing a moral superiority over women, but rather that men have certain advantages that favour them in the theory of sexual selection. These differences are picked up by Peter Bowler in his superb tome "Evolution: The History of an Idea" where he writes that "Darwin's theory of sexual selection seemed to reflect Victorian stereotypes about what was "natural" behaviour for males and females and thus formed another source of prejudice." (ed. 3, p. 313).

Modern sexual selection theories have, of course, evolved. Darwin's social and moral views (as well as religious and cultural views) are interesting pieces of history to read and understand, but any moral failings do not affect the truth of the theory of evolution, though do possibly throw some cold water on his epistemic values (or, to quote Bowler, it suggests that his theory "reflect[s] the tendency for male assumptions to become embedded in scientific thinking" - p. 314).

This carries over to Cameron's discussion of Darwin's possible racism. The point is that, whatever his flaws as a person, Darwin proposed a mechanism which later scientists have shown to be the most accurate of it's time, and he did so lucidly in his writings. Should modern evolutionary biologists be embarrased by Darwin's Victorian social beliefs? A little, but not so much as to turn you in to a creationist. Any person in Darwin's circumstance would have similar social beliefs, and that may have made him err in certain details of his work.

But the whole point about science is that it can correct those things - it is an epistemological system that has a self-corrector built right in to it, something creationism sadly lacks.

A couple of natty quotes (nothing earth shattering), then were back to the gormless people they picked up at some zoo or the other. They finally find someone with a Ph. D. in biology, who they show for a few seconds until they say something that proves their point. From what he was saying, he actually was talking a lot of sense. That isn't accepted in creationist videos though. His final point is a matter for philosophical and theological debate, and also clear demarcation of fields - evolution deals with the origin of complexity not the origin of life.

Cameron then goes in to "training the hordes" mode. Evolution, he says, isn't an issue for anybody he has witnessed to. He guides them to talk to the conscience (he points to the heart, I point to Nietzsche), and "circumnavigate the intellect" (oh my!). That's right - if you want evolution to go away, tell people not to think. You got that one right on, buddy.

You don't have to become an expert, the other guy tells us. And you don't have to remember long words. That reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by one Senator John Randolph from Virginia who said to some Baptists who wanted money to start a school for their flock: "But, my dear sir, if you educate them, they will no longer be Baptists" (source).

Are they being anti-intellectual, they ask? Of course not. They've got a book! And they're gonna pimp it to you. They can't be anti-intellectual if they've produced a book!

It then descends in to the usual evangelical pap. So what have we got? Holy rollers, some moderately amusing monkey shots and a load of unscientific nonsense combined with distortion, misrepresentation and out-and-out bullshit about evolutionary science.

I haven't written one of these in a long time, but now I have got back in to the groove, it's kinda fun.

Here's the video if you want to see that train wreck for yourself. Why can't these fools read some science books written after 1900, not base their opinions on Jack Chick and save me a lot of Googling finding all those nice skull pics so I can go back to lying, cheating and adulterating? Or at least, lying to the Amazon Wishlist, cheating at cards and adulterating raw chicken. These guys were less fun than the Muslim guy I was arguing with the other day, and it was raining then!

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2006.04.24

I just subscribed to Adam Green's OPML Camp Participant Reading List and just realised that I haven't seen my own feed in NewsRiver before. 2006-04-24T15:39:05ZUntitled entry permalink

There's pix and natterin's from yesterday's podcast get-together at Dissident Vox, podcastpaul, jamesfcarter, Jo and Adrian. It was good fun. Lots of people with business cards too. 2006-04-24T09:42:43ZUntitled entry permalink

EasyBib is an online bibliography manager. I found it via Lifehacker. There are comments there about Word 2007 having bibliography functionality. Welcome to the party, Microsoft. Only you are a decade or so late. 2006-04-24T08:59:45ZUntitled entry permalink

Londonist: "Disclaimer for creationists: Dinosaurs, of course, never existed. The so-called 'fossils' that are periodically excavated at sites all over the world were, in fact, planted thousands of years ago by a youthful Richard Attenborough as a kind of 'back story' for his role in Jurassic Park." Smile and a wink 2006-04-24T08:37:01ZUntitled entry permalink

Audiomartini host Rick Wood is ill. Get well soon, Rick. In the mean time, they have an RSS feed, but it's not advertised. It's here. 2006-04-24T06:35:40ZUntitled entry permalink

Erik Barzeski sold his software company Freshly Squeezed Software, maker of the RSS reader PulpFiction and numerous other bits of Macintosh software. The software is now unmaintained and going nowhere. Shame. Despite it running slightly slowly, I rather liked PulpFiction. Until the maintainer gets his arse in gear, don't buy a PulpFiction licence. Until then, Erik, why not join in with an open source aggregator and hack it to do what you want. 2006-04-24T06:32:02ZUntitled entry permalink

Ed Brayton: "Ah, this is what I love about the attempts by ID advocates to claim that ID is not religion - their followers always spill the beans. Here Voigt admits that the Dover case was a case "against religion"; I'm sure the DI would rather he say "against the robust research program of intelligent design theory", but you see, Voigt has been listening to the wrong DI face and he's not quite up to speed on the preferred terminology." 2006-04-24T06:31:27ZUntitled entry permalink

Europhobia summarise Tony Blair: "I'm right and everyone else is wrong". I'll summarise Tony Blair too: "ridiculous troll". 2006-04-24T06:27:15ZUntitled entry permalink

Thanks for the link, Dave. 2006-04-24T06:31:21ZUntitled entry permalink

Vegetable Curry 2006-04-24T15:47:31ZTitled entry permalink

On today's DSC, Adam asked for feedback on how people listen to the show. I listen in numerous different ways. I've been listening to podcasts mostly on my long walks over the last few weeks. I try to do a two or three hour walk every day unless I am travelling or the weather is really shitty.

A mixture of long and short shows is good for me. Variety helps the podosphere because it lets people try out different shows to fit different tasks, different journeys and so on. I like Cory Doctorow's craphound podcast because the chunks of story are just the right length for a Tube journey or to play just before dropping off to sleep.

One thing I would like is if the music and promos were all played together in something like this order: ideas and news and talky bit, audio feedback, then features (in Adam's case that would be Metrosexual Moment and the like), then promos, then music. I'm ruthless in ascending order. I am very selective about the music, and if I don't like it, I skip it. I also listen to music while doing different things than when I'm listening to voice.

What else? More Roger Smalls and less Comic Strip Blogger. Nothing personal, CSB, just not interested.

As for the music on DSC: more variety, and lots more soul. The stuff which Anji Bee plays is good, as is the stuff which Stephanie Renee plays on Soul Sanctuary Radio (though that's not podsafe).

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Gillmor on Links 2006-04-24T11:05:26ZTitled entry permalink

I'm really not sure what Steve Gillmor is saying in Friday's discussion with Doc Searls on Gillmor Daily about links. Anyone care to explain what he's waffling on about? Inefficient, "gamed" and "noisy".

A "linkocracy"? What on earth was Steve smoking before he phoned Doc?

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2006.04.23

William Dembski is a masochist! He likes to get beaten up by leather mistresses with whips. Or perhaps even guys! He sounds like he's got a Mother Teresa streak. Only difference is, he isn't pushing it for the poor and dying in Calcutta, he wants to push it on American school children who have to read the half-baked nonsense in "Of Pandas and People". If we're talking suffering, you've never apologised for "No Free Lunch" or "The Bridge Between Science and Theology". Don't worry, I'll forgive you. DaveScot's provided more amusement than all the radio comedy programmes on the Beeb in the last year combined. 2006-04-23T08:47:22ZUntitled entry permalink

Everyone's getting off at London Bridge (get your mind out of the gutter). We've got lots of Marathon fans today then. 2006-04-23T08:40:11ZUntitled entry permalink

The thing is, I've got three monitors on my desk, running off two computers, one dual-booting Windows and Linux, the other running OS X and Parallels Workstation (XP). I've got Synergy set up so I can use one mouse and keyboard to control up to three operating systems across up to three monitors (or four at a push, but it's something I try to avoid). I can't keep track of what OS I'm running. But, unlike Calacanis, I don't have to chat with Valleywag about a possible move to Google or about my cool monitors (I was dual-heading before it was cool). This may explain why Calacanis gets quite a few more readers than I do. Smile and a wink 2006-04-23T08:11:43ZUntitled entry permalink

There's madness over at The Secular Outpost. 2006-04-23T08:09:03ZUntitled entry permalink

Lee points to an absolute "WTF? Muslims really are fucked up" event. 2006-04-23T08:07:25ZUntitled entry permalink

If you are travelling to London for either Copyfighters or Adam's meetup, be sure to remember: the Marathon is on. Avoid Greenwich, the Docklands (including any part of the DLR) and Southwark (Borough market, London Bridge et al). From what I've read, the West End, Hyde Park and TCR (where the events we're interested in are going on). See here for full details. 2006-04-23T07:52:52ZUntitled entry permalink

Pito Salas is engaging in some dialogue about reading list problems. I tried BlogBridge - it's quite a neat aggregator, and I've got some ideas on how to improve NewsRiver having used it. 2006-04-23T07:49:04ZUntitled entry permalink

Make sure you read the comments here for more on Blair's neo-elitist view of civil liberty. I am, of course, taking a silly view. If 99% of people want to eat me for lunch, that doesn't give them the right to, because I am the property of only myself. The only force I believe in is the stuff that Newton and Einstein talk about, not the stuff that the Police, the Army and the Government deal in. 2006-04-23T08:41:25ZUntitled entry permalink

Blair, Liberty and Elitism 2006-04-23T08:25:37ZTitled entry permalink

Tony Blair presents a spooky liberty-utility calculus. He claims that anyone who defends libertarian values is "out of touch". He's lucky. Nobody is going to be telling him that his words are out of place. Something else happens for the rest of us, Mr. In Touch. The point about liberty is that if you want it, everybody else has to have it also. Mr Blair's statements are not going to be censored - he is the prime minister - and says nothing which could possibly be thought of as worth censoring. It's only when you come out with ideas that someone wants to censor you. Nobody wants to censor platitudes and chumpish remarks about 'community'.

No, it'll be the people with ideas - good and bad - who are going to be censored before the purveyors of populist gruel like Blair. Tony Blair is undertaking a classic piece of misdirection. First, he condemns the out-of-touch elite - "legal and political establishment". He then paints himself as the man to protect us from these out-of-touch elites.

Nobody could oppose this. Elites are bad, right? Of course. Then why are we having an Eton and Oxford trained barrister married to an equivalently-trained barrister who has been elected to the post of Prime Minister explaining why elites are bad. Will he then be burning his degree certificates and rescinding his membership of whichever of the Inns of Court he has a membership of, and step down as Prime Minister.

If elites are bad, then you can't exempt yourself Mr. Blair. You are undertaking in special pleading, and you aren't succeeding. You are playing a tacky game. And while the masses may not see through it, some people can and will understand it. You are the legal and political establishment, Mr Blair. You control the government, you have a fairly good stranglehold on the Legislature (who occasionally get pissy when they don't get the socialist equivalent of bread and circuses - the fox hunting ban, for instance) but barely blink when you propose the latest measure to throw away our long fought for civil liberties.

You also show no knowledge of history. When you get rid of a liberty or install some new programme, it very rarely gets reversed. The American government are finally getting round to rescinding the telephone tax, over a century after this 'temporary' measure was introduced to help fund the Spanish-American war. The American federal income tax was a similarly temporary measure.

Churchill rid us of the Soviet-style "Papers, please" society which accompanied the wartime ID cards, only for both the Labour party and the Tories to try to reintroduce it every few years. The War on Terror has provided us with many other examples of this creeping totalitarian state.

The legal and political elites may be out-of-touch with the common voter. Mr Blair is out-of-touch with reality - you know, the stuff which doesn't go away when you shut your eyes.

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Comment Madness 2006-04-23T20:37:58ZTitled entry permalink

A week or so back, Kosso wrote a script that makes it so that OPML Bloggers can add HaloScan comments to blogs. Very nice. The only problem I had with it is that it inserts the code indented at the bottom of the entry. Indenting works nicely on an entry like this, with a title. Indenting doesn't work nicely on a one-line entry, because adding a sub-level to a one-line entry turns it in to a title and paragraph.

Unexpected behaviour ahoy! So, what do we do? Well, I went fiddling and by a process of trial and error, I have produced some new code which lets you add Haloscan comments to one-line entries, either by putting a line break or simply a space.

The key is the wp.insert command, which makes hacking up addons for the OPML Editor a piece of cake.

wp.insert simply inserts whatever argument it gets in to the outline (or the wp-text file) in Frontier and the OPML Editor.

With this, I can now try and produce some neat new stuff including Technorati tag support as well as polls, podcast players and so on. If anyone has any ideas of things they've been missing from their other blogging software that they want (automated) in their OPML Editor blogs, just shout.

You can find my updated code for Haloscan in my Instant Outline under OPML Code. Kosso's code goes by the name "On Indented Tab". You have to install this manually in to the place which you prefer (for me, that's user.menus.customMenu - some may prefer user.tools.menus.rightClickMenu).

In terms of programming, this illustrates a simple principle: when you don't understand something, nothing goes anywhere. When you understand it, everything starts kicking again. Think of it as a clogged vein in the development.

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What about the simple? 2006-04-23T21:08:52ZTitled entry permalink

Here's a point I care about. We can keep adding new stuff to these blogs, but isn't the point of the OPML blogs their simplicity?

Yes, that is important! I love the fact that I can post really short links to my OPML blog. The point in that is that I can, not that I must. Meanwhile, on any other blogging software, I must even if I don't want to.

The OPML Editor is one of the few bits of software that enables Scripting News style outline blogging. I don't need a title for my entries. If I have an entry like "Mike Arrington reviews new Web 2.0 site", I don't need it twice. It's fine in the body, without a description. Minimalism.

They say about UNIX that it makes the simple things hard and the hard things possible. OPML Blogs make the simple things possible.

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2006.04.22

Adriana Cronin at Samizdata was on Sky News talking about blogging. 2006-04-22T21:56:17ZUntitled entry permalink

Paul Harris reveals the casual racism of America's middle class. 2006-04-22T21:52:13ZUntitled entry permalink

Folder Brander lets you easily label your folders with text and colours. Pretty! 2006-04-22T21:49:40ZUntitled entry permalink

Cool postage stamps! Britain have had some neat stamps recently - 'Winter animals' - lots of sabre-tooths and so on. The full set of American computer ones are here. 2006-04-22T21:48:13ZUntitled entry permalink

This story passed me by, but it's important. The EU want to regulate online video content in the same way they do broadcast TV. 2006-04-22T21:46:43ZUntitled entry permalink

Dave wants a SF BloggerCon this June. We need a London one this summer also. 2006-04-22T21:42:05ZUntitled entry permalink

Ed Brayton has a good takedown of the claim by the DI that they are a secular, non-partisan think tank. 2006-04-22T21:41:17ZUntitled entry permalink

Techdirt: "It's been proven time and time again that filters don't work -- so, again, why not use the time and resources spent on these filters and tracking kids' ways around them on teaching critical thinking and good judgment instead?" 2006-04-22T11:25:27ZUntitled entry permalink

Dave, try Parallels Workstation. It's a superb piece of software which needs only a few little fixes to make it a perfect drop-in replacement for my PC in all but a few instances. 2006-04-22T11:05:46ZUntitled entry permalink

The KISS-inspired "Lordi" are representing Finland at Eurovision this year playing heavy metal and wielding a chain-saw. That should liven things up a tad. 2006-04-22T05:26:04ZUntitled entry permalink

I'm running Parallels on OS X now. Very cool to have XP sitting there in the background. My main peeve though is the lack of pass-through virtualisation of graphics processing. Once that happens, my Mac is goin' to LAN parties, baby. 2006-04-22T05:07:59ZUntitled entry permalink

2006.04.21

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini is moving slightly towards sensible by saying that condoms are acceptable when one partner has HIV and using a condom will prevent the other from getting an HIV infection. Heretic! Seriously, though, Martini is a smart chap - check out the series of letters between him and Umberto Eco. 2006-04-21T21:52:55ZUntitled entry permalink

It's a good sign when someone you read supports things you find abhorrent. It proves that we're both human. Well, Lee is in the "immigrants are bad" camp. For shame. 2006-04-21T21:49:36ZUntitled entry permalink

Peter Wilby in the TES: "Parents think faith schools deliver better academic results and better discipline. Since no one ever claimed that religion makes you more clever, we must assume the faith schools' X-factor is the discipline and the improved results follow better behaviour. It is, after all, a truism that religion makes you a more moral person." 2006-04-21T21:47:49ZUntitled entry permalink

Pat Hayes has a good profile of the good Dr. Barbara Forrest. I particularly like the "Southern magnolia routine" bit about her making Bill Dembski shake her hand, especially after she's written a book tearing him down. Nice. 2006-04-21T21:42:31ZUntitled entry permalink

Cute kitties and a techno-design moral to boot. 2006-04-21T21:30:38ZUntitled entry permalink

Get some soul. Smile and a wink 2006-04-21T21:25:49ZUntitled entry permalink

I guess us young folk aren't so bad after all. 2006-04-21T19:33:40Z