I know that I come across as a misanthrope – gawd knows that as a species we do enough bad things to make that almost inescapable as my response to things. But then, every now and then, something happens to make me feel proud to be a hairless ape. This time it’s not in the area of morality or of helping relieve the burden of fellow-apes. It’s in the area of pure science – what’s out there, why is the universe the way it is – and so forth. Look at these pictures of the surface of Mars and think about the implications, That’s something to take a teensy bit of pride in. Next up, let’s find a cure for AIDS and stop global warming…
Year: 2006
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Meaning? I Don’t Need No Steenking Meaning…
I do despair about my species. It’s not bad enough that they feel impelled to invent a god to blame their existence on, but that even those who dismiss the idea of a god feel impelled to dream up the Goldilock’s Universe. Paul Davies says:“Somehow,” he writes, “the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make, not just life, not just mind, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show, but to unravel the plot.”What exactly is Davies saying? His starting point is the “highly significant” fact that the universe supports people who understand its laws. “I wanted to get away from the feeling in so many scientific quarters that life and human beings are a completely irrelevant embellishment, a side issue of no significance. I don’t think we’re the centre of the universe or the pinnacle of creation, but the fact that human beings have the ability to understand how the world is put together is something that cries out for explanation.”Er, no, Paul, it doesn’t cry out for anything of the sort. It just is. If the physical laws were slightly different, we wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t have a book that you’re trying to peddle. On the other hand, in that alternative universe perhaps there would be a nexus of fningian energy with a koob to lles. Either way, I don’t buy it. -
More Fish In A Barrel
Ophelia has her doubts about limbo. It doesn’t surprise me. I find the whole concept of thirty theologians deliberating over a pile of nonsense utterly contemptible – the more so because millions of people are fooled into taking it seriously instead of treating it as the rubbish it is. Why on earth do people continue to ignore the man behind the curtain? Life is too short and too unique to be in thrall to memes that devour rationality and shit out needless guilt. -
Good Art, Bad Art…
Alright, I know that I’ve had a humour bypass over the subject of fashion. Put it down to bad experiences with fashionistas in the 1970s. But I really do not understand what anorexic females wearing fabric have to do with the meaning of life in any real sense. And now we have fashion that feels. A note: you have to skip forward about nine minutes into the video before you see anything that has evolved beyond paint-drying. From Boing-Boing’s panting review:Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan premiered his Spring/Summer 2007 collection this week, and it’s full of Swarovski-crystal-embellished animatronic couture. The clothes wriggle, unfold, collapse, and transform by themselves. The final act in Chalayan’s show, at left: this piece began as a dress, morphed into a hat, then rained down as a cloud of Swarovski crystal dust. Hot.
Er, not. I am reminded of Boswell’s dog. And aurally quoting the soundtrack from Forbidden Planet was depressingly gauche. At least Boing-Boing didn’t plumb the depths of this review:This was fashion addressing the subject of fashion, a dissection of our contemporary habit of recycling "vintage," and an embrace of high technology, all at the same time. It wasn’t just the uncanny sight of the self-undressing clothes (tech-genius courtesy of the team who made the hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) that provided the chills. That would have left it at the level of childlike entertainment. What really gave the show a disturbing sense of wake-up-to-reality was the soundtrack. Here, the changing shapes were connected to the sounds of the twentieth century—fragments of music, trench warfare, the ranting of Hitler, aerial bombing, jet engines, the beating of helicopter rotors.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Catch yourself on, Mary, as a good friend says to me when I spout crap. It’s a fashion show, it’s not reality as the vast majority of the world knows it. You silly, silly, woman. -
More Money Than Sense
Obsession is a strange thing. I suppose the saving grace of this is that while someone thought that a model of a fictional form of transport was worth half a million dollars, it was an obsession that did not cause the ending of another human life. But it’s still a case of someone having more money than sense. -
A Day Out
Our neighbour is the secretary of a horse and carriage club. The club had a day out today – a roundtrip starting at her farm and with a route going through the local woods. I positioned myself at the entrance of the wood to take some photographs. At the end of the ride, Martin and I joined them for pancakes in the barn section of the farmhouse.
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Do We Laugh Or Cry?
As regular readers know, I follow the blog of Dr. John Crippen over at NHS Blog Doctor. Dr. Crippen has now found a kindred spirit in Dr. Francis Rant, whose eponymous blog – Dr. Rant – is a masterpiece of bile directed at the goons who appear to be in charge of the British National Health Service. Take this entry, for example; it’s a wonder that the good doctor doesn’t burst a blood vessel. Mind you, I think he/she is absolutely right to be pissed off at the fatuous 5-a-day initiative. Looking beyond the jolly web site reveals the true horror. Reams and reams of turgid management-speak apparently produced by dozens of brain-dead drones, who sit around murdering the English language all day. That’s where the 10 million pounds of British lottery players’ money is going. For example:The five pilot sites also carried out their own evaluations. These were mainly aimed at understanding the process for implementing the intervention. They also assessed any changes in the influences on fruit and vegetable consumption. The evaluation methods included countywide surveys, postal questionnaires, in-depth interviews with individuals and food mapping.Doncha just love it: "understand the process", "implement the intervention", "in-depth interviews", "food mapping". And then after this drivel, you suddenly realise that they can’t organise a piss-up in a brewery:Each site developed its own evaluation strategy and tools, so it is not possible to compare results of the five local evaluations.Erm, didn’t anyone think that it would have been a good idea to have been able to design the pilots so that data could have been compared? Of course, then, there would have been a single design team. This way, we got five teams (doubtless at five times the cost) all busily reinventing their own particular wheels. Dear god, words fail me. -
Tongland Dam
Nothing to See Here has a good entry on Tongland Dam and the hydro-electric power station that was built in the 1930s. I’ve seen the outside many times (it’s just outside Kirkcudbright where members of my family live). But I didn’t realise that you could get guided tours around the inside of the station as well. Something to do the next time I’m in that neck of the woods… -
Irony Is Lost On Alton Verm
I swear, you couldn’t make this up if you tried, because you would be thought of as pushing things to a ridiculous level. But no, Virginia, there are people in this world like Alton Verm, who clearly has had an irony bypass operation at some point in his existence. I particularly like the tidbit that he wants to ban the book even though he has not read it. -
It’s That Man Again
Keith Olbermann with another rousing piece of oratory – this time on the many lies of President Bush. -
Bent
A sad coincidence. Martin Sherman’s play Bent opened in London in a revival last night, the day after Tom Bell, who played Horst in the original production, died at the age of 73.I saw the original production of Bent at the Royal Court theatre in 1979, with Tom Bell and Ian McKellan in the main roles. It was an extraordinarily powerful production and their performances were electrifying – quite literally so for one of the protagonists. The play has also been made into a film, which has its moments. McKellan appears in it, but this time in the role of Uncle Freddie, rather than as Max. There’s also an interesting turn by Mick Jagger playing a drag queen. If you can’t get to see the play’s revival, then the film is worth tracking down. Just don’t expect a jolly evening – this isn’t Cabaret. It’s much darker – a descent into Hell. -
Hang On A Minute…
…I want more than this. It’s like something shouted to me as you whizz by en route to somewhere much more interesting. I need more – come back! -
The Importance Of Footnotes
A lovely piece of trivia about how a footnote in a science fiction novel has spawned a whole area of scientific research. Thanks, Fred! -
Klaatu Barada Nikto
This is very good on a number of levels. Humour, cultural reference, security holes and so forth.(hat tip to The Bad Astronomer) -
Murder In Amsterdam – Part II
Recently, I mentioned the new book by Ian Buruma. I bought a copy and have just finished it. Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance is every bit as good as I hoped for. Buruma interviewed a wide range of people in Dutch society for the book, from all sides and walks of life. The result is a cross-section of voices that illuminate the scene and show that there are many strands of attitude and belief.
Buruma doesn’t have any easy answers for how Dutch society can accommodate these many strands, although he does comment on some of the people he interviews. He also paints portraits in his words of some of the players that he could not interview: Pim Fortuyn and his murderer, Volkert van der Graaf; Theo van Gogh and his murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri. Buruma shows that the two murderers shared attitudes in common:
It is a characteristic of Calvinism to hold moral principles too rigidly, and this might be considered a vice as well as a virtue of the Dutch. It played a part in the makeup of Van der Graaf, as well as Mohammed Bouyeri, and even Theo van Gogh. The two killings, of Van Gogh and Fortuyn, were principled murders.And, says Buruma, committed by a pair of society’s losers. He mentions the psychiatric report on Bouyeri, prepared for his trial:
[Professor Ruud] Peter’s report, prepared for the court, makes for strange reading, because he attempts to find coherence in these violent ravings [in Bouyeri’s writings] where often there is none. “Ideological and religious development” is a rather grand description of Mohammed’s thinking. But the report is worth studying nontheless, not so much for what it says about Islam, but for what it says about the revolutionary fantasies of a confused and very resentful young man. These are not so different from the fantasies of other confused and resentful young men in the past. You can find them in the novels of Dostoyevsky or Joseph Conrad, desperadoes who imagine themselves as part of a small elite, blessed with moral purity, surrounded by a world of evil. They are obsessed with the idea of violent death as a divinely inspired cleansing agent of worldly corruption.In a weird sort of way, I am reminded of the ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the hero, Sam Lowry, retreats into madness as a way of escaping from the society in which he lives. The last words of the film are Mr. Helpmann, the Minister of Information, saying to Lowry’s friend and torturer: “I think we’ve lost him“.
In a perverse parallel, it seems to me that Bouyeri has retreated into his world of religious zealotry from which he will never escape. He sits in his prison cell surrounded by his holy books and continues to dream his revolutionary fantasies. I think we’ve lost him. But we cannot afford to lose more like him.
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Atheist Fundamentalism
David Byrne, over at his journal, has an interesting entry about a public discussion between Sam Harris and Oliver McTernan. While I’m all for cheering Sam Harris on, I share Byrne’s misgivings over Harris’ support for torture. That is never excusable. -
Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva Dance
This is bizarrely beautiful. OK, the video resolution is crap (shrink down your browser window to make it better), the kitsch factor is astronomical, but the result is strangely wonderful. Supposedly performed by 21 deaf dancers (boys and girls) from China (where else?). -
I Know What He Means
Diamond Geezer touches upon a necessary skill for survival in the office jungle. I recall it well. Although I’m old enough to remember that the skill predates emails. I recollect quite a few memos went through the officespeak translator before being issued. And I remember seeing a copy of an apparently friendly and jovial memo sent by one manager to another that was spoken of in hushed tones as being the perfect example of the style. On reading it, the words and sentiments of "dear crabface" were plain to perceive without any need to be so obvious as to actually write them.
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