Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2007

  • Our Maddy of the Sorrows

    I confess that almost anything that Madeleine Bunting writes usually has me rolling my eyes by the second paragraph. And that’s on a good day. Some of the pieces from Our Maddy of the Sorrows have been known to push me close to apoplexy. It’s really not good for either my sanity or my health. In June 2006, it was announced that she would be leaving the Guardian to take up the post of Director at the Think-Tank, Demos. Pausing only to wonder whether Demos would have to re-christen itself to be a Belief-Tank, I did permit myself a sigh of relief that I’d no longer be reading her rubbish in the Guardian.
     
    Alas, a mere six weeks after taking up the post, Demos announced her resignation, and she scuttled back to the Guardian. I wonder whether we’ll ever learn the true story behind that. The Demos press release is intriguing:
    Since it has emerged that her vision for Demos is incompatible with that of the trustees, she has decided to focus on her interests as a writer and a thinker at this point in her career. She will resume her regular column in the Guardian and her position as Associate Editor… 
    That’s the trouble with incompatible visions, always causing problems for someone or other.
     
    Anyway, she’s back, writing the kind of article that we have come to expect. I was going to comment on it, but I see that a far better class of fisking has been delivered by Opehlia Benson, over at ButterfliesAndWheels, and J. Carter Wood at Obscene Desserts. Go and read them and sorrow at our Maddy.
     
    Oh, and J. Carter Wood amplifies on something that struck me when reading AC Grayling’s retort to Bunting; that Grayling could be said to have delivered a hostage to fortune with the lax wording of his challenge. Fortunately, J. Carter Wood tightens up the challenge, and demonstrates that the essential point is that the religious have a distressing tendency to insist that their holy books must be right when science points out a discrepancy.

  • Hobbit Redux

    Along with a passion for parasites, Carl Zimmer also has a fondness for Homo floresiensis (hobbits). He summarises the current state of play in the scientific controversy that’s currently underway. Let’s hope that now the cave is open for business once more, we will see evidence emerging that will tip the scales one way or the other.

  • Bruckner on Hirsi Ali et al…

    Via the blog of the editor of the New Humanist, I’ve come across a defence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Pascal Bruckner against the "attacks" on her by Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma. I must admit I found Bruckner’s piece somewhat shrill.
     
    While I haven’t got the writings of Garton Ash to hand that Bruckner quotes, I do have a copy of "Murder in Amsterdam" by Buruma that Bruckner uses as evidence of the attack on Hirsi Ali. And I have to say that I don’t recognise the portrait of Buruma that Bruckner paints from it. I thought that Buruma portrayed Hirsi Ali very sympathetically, even when he mentions what he sees as her shortcomings. His writing about the events and the participants are rounded and humane. I don’t think the same could be said of Bruckner:
    It is her wilful, short-fused, enthusiastic, impervious side to which Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash object, in the spirit of the inquisitors who saw devil-possessed witches in every woman too flamboyant for their tastes. 
    Er, I’m sorry? As I said, Bruckner’s piece strikes me as being shrill and makes it difficult to be receptive to his argument. I felt as though I was being hectored by someone shouting in my ear and waving his arms about wildly…

  • Cold Turkey

    I’ve been fortunate enough never to have had to take anti-depressants in my life. The real kicker appears to be when people stop taking them, as Holly Finch has found out.

  • Maths Equation

    And now, courtesy of xkcd.com, the Romantic Drama Equation. Seems pretty logical to me.

  • A Date for your Diary?

    Somehow, Las Vegas feels like the perfect choice of location for this: an International Alchemy Conference. A place (built by profits transmuted from the hopeless dreams of people who fail to acknowledge that the house always wins) hosting a conference for the hopeless dreams of people who fail to acknowledge that alchemy is nonsense. I foresee more profits for the house.
     
    (hat tip to Les over at Stupid Evil Bastard)

  • Mission Impossible

    On the day before Microsoft has a collective orgasm over the introduction of Windows Vista, how could I resist this old promotional video for Windows 386…?

  • Lost In Translation

    At least, I hope it was. Surely the Japanese Health Minister didn’t really refer to women as "birth-giving machines"?

  • No-Body

    I know that self-awareness makes us to be a very strange species, but sometimes I come across something that I find extremely difficult to understand. Here’s an example: a healthy woman who sees herself as incomplete – because she has too many legs.
     
    Update: Vaughan, over at Mind Hacks, has some more information about this.

  • Black Sheep

    New Zealand, the country where men are men, but now the sheep are apparently no longer nervous… The trailer looks good, I hope the film stands up. Shear terror, perhaps?

  • The Fire on Apollo 1

    Phil, over at The Bad Astronomer, reminds us that 40 years ago yesterday, a fire on the Apollo 1 spacecraft took the lives of astronauts White, Chaffee and Grissom in just 17 seconds. Go and read it and remember them, and others like them.

  • Which SF Writer Are You?

    Another little quiz. My result:
     

    		I am:

    Olaf Stapledon

    Standing outside the science fiction "field", he wrote fictional explorations of the futures of whole species and galaxies.

    Which science fiction writer are you?

     

    Interesting that it’s Stapledon. I don’t actually have any of his books in my collection, although I’m sure that I have read some of his work when I was growing up. Perhaps that’s a gap that I should seek to fill.

  • OTT Bike

    For those who think that the bicycle is passé, may I point you towards the Hyperbike. Somehow, I can’t see myself wanting to cycle through town in this. I’ll take my chances on the old-fashioned bike, thank you very much.
     
    (hat tip to Improbable Research)

  • The Sound of Woo

    Following on from Donnie’s musical offering, Orac treats us to the wilder shores of woo…

  • Blasphemy!

    If you didn’t catch the discussion (I wouldn’t call it a debate) between Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry at last year’s Hay Festival, then here’s your chance to hear it or capture it for posterity. Posterity will be moderately proud of you.

  • Science Imitates Art

    Well, that’s if you can stretch the concept of Star Wars into "Art". Tara C. Smith asks: what bacterium was named after a George Lucas invention?

  • Smoke and Mirrors

    This week’s Improbable Research column in the Guardian has a piece on Barbara Tedlock, distinguished professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Apparently she’s just published a study on a "theory of practice for divination".
     
    I got two sentences into the piece before I went: "hang on a minute…".
     
    Sentence 1: How do diviners divine? A reasonable question, I think. What is the process that they follow? How do they interpret their data, whether it be twitching of a rod, the pattern of cracks or the state of a dog’s intestines? From aeromancy (divination by wind) to zygomancy (divination by weights), the trappings of diviners are many and various.
     
    Sentence 2: How do they achieve such dependable results? Er, excuse me? Did you say dependable? I puzzled over this for a moment, and then realised that what must be meant is that one can depend on the results being governed by the laws of probability, i.e. we know from scientific testing that the results are the same as for random chance. Phew, what a relief, I thought for a moment there that professor Tedlock was implying that divination actually worked. Silly me…
     
    Er, but what’s this: These practices are so prevalent we must assume they work, Tedlock says. Er no, that’s about as valid as the old joke: eat shit, nine billion flies can’t be wrong.
     
    And this: Given that scientists are now imagining gravity-bent light "and other strange concepts that defy common-sense reality", Tedlock says, "why should we not approach divination with the same conceptual openness?" Careful, professor Tedlock, too much of an open mind can make your brain fall out.

  • Submission 2

    Interesting interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali here. Some good points, but I couldn’t help but raise the ironical eyebrow at this:
    Ms Hirsi Ali made a relaxed impression during her visit to Barcelona. She seems more at ease having exchanged the snakepit that is Dutch party politics for the very proper American Enterprise Institute. 
    Methinks that either Hirsi Ali, or rather more likely, the interviewer, has not realised that she has exchanged one snakepit for another. Mark my words: out of the frying pan and into the fire.
     
    Still, I do, and sincerely, wish her good luck in the next phase of her life.

  • Is It, Or Isn’t It?

    …Real, that is. I’m talking about the video: God Hates Fags. I blogged about it here, in an entry called WTF? The video was taken down from YouTube, but now I’m told that it’s still (at least at the time of blogging) available on MySpace. So, if you go now to my WTF? entry, hopefully you’ll be able to see Donnie Davis in all his glory.
     
    And, is it real? My money, and my sanity, rides on the proposition that it’s a brilliant parody. Sacha Baron Cohen, you have competition in the room…

  • Touchscreen Take Two

    Some time ago, I blogged about a touchscreen interface that had been developed by Jeff Han. Now there’s an article about him and the interface, together with a very impressive video.
     
    A direct link to the video is here (sorry, I can’t directly embed it into this post, and you’ll have to watch an advertisement first).
     
    However, as I said in my original post, the mode shifts in the interaction are minimised, and the gestures are emphasised so as to be the whole story. It’s not. We are clearly watching a master manipulate his instrument. How intuitive that will be, without some meta interface rules that span multiple applications, remains, for me, an open question. It looks good though, but then, so does a concert pianist playing a Beethoven piano concerto. Doesn’t mean to say that anyone can do it.