Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
UK Students, aged 13-16, were asked to name a famous scientist in an online survey carried out by an examination board. Depressingly, only two out of nearly 1,000 students managed to name a living scientist, and even then it was the highly suspect David Bellamy.
Bizarrely, other students cited Madonna – please tell me that was a teenage joke?
The Guardian carries a full report on the survey.
Echidne of the Snakes writes about life. I empathise totally with how she feels, and her philosophy of how to live one’s life. Go and read it, and think about how you can make a difference.
Another post that deserves multiple categories: Science, Politics and Society. I’ve chosen the last, because the impact of the scenarios are likely to be so far-reaching.
Data point one: Interview in today’s Guardian with Lord Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell:
The basic facts of climate change: since the industrial period carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per million (classical for all previous warm periods) to 379ppm today, and are rising at 2ppm per year. In 10 years’ time they will be at 400ppm; at 500ppm, Greenland’s ice will melt entirely – it’s already receding by 10 metres a year – and the sea level will rise, drowning coastal cities and entirely changing the contours of the earth. Most scientists now agree that unless we stabilise the earth’s atmosphere by 2050, there will be no way to halt the disaster.
Lord Oxburgh: "We have roughly 45 years. And if we start NOW, not in 10 or 15 years’ time, we have a chance of hitting those targets. But we’ve got to start now. We have no time to lose."
Data point two: Peak Oil, Beyond Optimism and Pessimism – article by Jim Hill:
Statistically speaking, I am due to live another 40 years. During that time, I will witness the complete collapse of free-market capitalism. The project of globalisation will fail, and the consumer culture within which recent generations have been raised will end. A massive reduction in living standards, unlike any other readjustment in history, will be experienced by 99% of us living in the industrialised world. A hundred thousand things that we all take for granted today will have ceased to exist by the time I reach my allotted lifespan. This will happen.
(hat tip to Chicken Yoghurt for the pointer)
Data point three: The advisor to the Bush Administration who fiddled with the scientific report on climate change has landed a plum job with ExxonMobil. No surprise there, then.
Why do I get the feeling that, despite the "crisis, what crisis?" mentality of ExxonMobil, climate change and peak oil are the Scylla and Charybdis of the 21st Century?
Marshall Brain has an entertaining and wise tutorial/presentation on how to do it. While I was reading it, I thought his name sounded familiar, and then I realised I had read his book on programming the Motif user interface.
Hat tip to Pale Blue Dot for the pointer to the presentation.
And while I’m having a Victor Meldrew moment, Butterflies and Wheels comments on a recent Polly Toynbee article in the Guardian (Toynbee’s article is here). As Stephen Fry said at the Hay Festival, the words "Respect" and "Offence" are taking on creepy overtones. Respect should be earned, it ain’t automatic.
I’m certainly not going to automatically respect someone who acts on beliefs that are clearly barking, and if they take offense at that, then really, in an adult world, that’s their problem.
I feel another Victor Meldrew moment coming on… Apparently, genealogists want psychotherapy to be made available for people who stumble across unpleasant discoveries while researching their family history, according to a story in the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.
An example of this is provided by Diane Mattinson, 48, an office manager from Bicester, Oxfordshire, who discovered that her great-grandfather, James Phillips, had never married her great-grandmother, Elizabeth.
"It was a bombshell," said Mrs Mattinson.
Er, excuse me, a bombshell is what happens practically every day in Iraq, and the result is blood and death. Discovering that your great-grandparents weren’t married doesn’t even register on the Richter scale of bombshells. It might cause an ant to stumble, but that’s about it, Diane.
Physical and mental abuse may call for counselling, but genealogy? The world’s going mad, I tell you.
I was wondering today why I blog. I suppose partly it’s because I want to capture something in the stream of life. The modern day equivalent of keeping a diary. But there’s also a bit of vanity going on. I confess that I keep an eagle eye on the statistics of my blog – who’s been looking, or whether anyone has left a comment.
Frankly, and in the long run, who gives a toss? It’s really not important.
I got started on this thought by reading Tom Reynolds’ entry today, talking about his reaction to attending the recent Reboot conference. He writes:
‘A-Listers’ are A-listers for a reason.
Determination, focus, and the ability to prioritise people into those of value, and those not of value.
At first I thought people were being rude to me. Nothing explicit, just that while I was talking to them they seemed to be ‘elsewhere’, always casting their eyes around looking for other people to talk to.
But they aren’t being rude – they are being direct to the point of being abrupt. While I might happily chat away about random subjects with someone I’ve just met, for however long the conversation lasts – ‘A-Listers’ seem to evaluate whether you have anything important to say, anything that they can use to advance their own career or if you are a potential ‘customer’.
If not, then they consider the conversation of little value, and look for something of more value.
He points out that he is not being judgemental about this, merely acknowledging that some folks do this and he (and, I think, I) do not. It’s that "people who are of value and people who are not of value" thought that makes me feel hollow inside. It’s the "I was only following orders" thought – the cry of man’s inhumanity to man down the ages.
But then I thought of what it is that Tom does for a living, and I thought that I would far rather listen to him than 99% of the A-listers prattling on about the latest gee-whizzery that appeals to their jaded senses. Tom, you make me think about life, and how people behave towards people.
PZ Meyers over at the Pharyngula blog has a sample of the transcripts of the recent hearings at the Kansas State of Education. In case you’d forgotten, this is where a variety of "expert" witnesses attempted to make the case for Intelligent Design to be taught in the schools in Kansas.
The transcripts make sad, sad reading. However, while Meyers feels that the transcripts amply illlustrate the depths of stupidity of IDiots, I feel that one should never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups (I even have a T-shirt bearing that very slogan). This skirmish in Kansas will not be the last. The Demon-Haunted World grows ever stronger, and the candle of Science may yet gutter before the forces of superstition and ignorance that seem to be growing in the US at the moment.
Today it’s our 7th wedding anniversary (although we’ve been together for 21 years). Time flies, I can’t believe that it was seven years ago that we were standing together in the Trouwzaal (Wedding Hall) of the Stadhuis (Townhall) in Gouda, saying "Yes!"
Majikthise posts a disturbing entry on her blog about Zack. He is a 16 year old living in Tennessee who recently came out to his parents as gay. Their reaction has not been one of support, but to send him to a place called Refuge, a Christian programme centre that promises to turn gay children straight.
Zack’s own blog entries are pretty heart-rending, the one lifeline that he has had is his blog and the messages of support that he has been getting via the blogsphere. But against that is the physical fact of his parents and his current incarceration (I can think of no other term for it) in a brainwashing centre. The rules of Refuge make sad, sick reading.
I’ve said before that I feel fortunate to be living where and when I do. It is still disturbing to realise that the "where" is just as important as the "when". This may be the 21st Century, but some people in the USA are still living in the mindset of the 1690s – the days of the Salem witchtrials.
A combination of H. P. Lovecraft, Samuel Delany and David Bowie (Changes), this is amazing. Brings it all back to me, the nights on Hampstead Heath in the early 1970s…
OK, I know I shouldn’t expect rational thinking. So when the Pope says that "The spread of AIDS in Africa ahould be tackled by abstinence rather than condoms", I suppose I should not be surprised.
But then he goes on to say that "The traditional teaching of the church has proven to be the only failsafe way of preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS".
Er, no it hasn’t, you stupid, stupid man.
I’m reminded of the old joke:
Q: What do you call people who practice the rhythm method of contraception?
A: Parents.
I did not expect anything other from this pope. He will continue to bask in the luxury of the Vatican while tens of thousands of his followers will go to their early deaths through ignorance and superstition. It’s at times like these when I almost wish there was a god to strike down meretricious buggers such as Benedict.
It’s a pity that it’s been patented. I can think of a number of people who should be wearing this and forced to use it.
Sometimes I find it difficult to love my fellow human beings when they are like these particular examples. This is a US-centric list – doubtless we should be thinking about one for citizens of the world at large… Any suggestions?
This is a phone. According to the sales blurb: "Customers can also choose from optional costume covers in unique forms such as Bull, Tire, Cheese, Lawn and Sucker to change handset appearances with ease and a sense of fun".
Alright, I know I’m obviously out of touch with today’s modern world, but all I would like is a simple phone, OK?
What is it about people in marketing? Why is it I look at many of them and think: "The wheel’s spinning, but the hamster’s dead"? And then combine the world of Fashion with Marketing, and you’ve got a foolproof case of why they should be first up against the wall, come the revolution. Here’s a case in point: a news story on the birth of Hybrid Man.
All the usual suspects are there:
The managing director, Pierre Francois Le Louet, said: "We are watching the birth of a hybrid man. … Why not put on a pink-flowered shirt and try out a partner-swapping club?".
Beg pardon? What was that you said?
"He is looking for a more radical affirmation of who he is, and wants to test out all the barbarity of modern life" including in the sexual domain, said Le Louet, adding that Reebok with its "I am what I am" campaign had perfectly tapped into this current trend.
How times change; in my day, "I am what I am" was a torch song belted out by a drag queen – now it’s a slogan for overpriced footwear. Sorry, Monsieur Le Louet, I think I’ll pass on your invitation to become a hybrid man – I don’t think my comfy slippers quite fit the image your campaign is pushing.
Sepia Mutiny has two interesting data points around the beliefs and practices of Homeland Security in the US.
Data point one: two high school girls in New York whom the FBI and Homeland Security jailed on suspicion of being aspiring suicide bombers.
Data point two: a bug-eyed, swastika-festooned white murderer with an assault record who shows up at the U.S. border with a bloody chainsaw, slashing weapons and body armor is let in after being served coffee at the border post.
Hello?
The BBC news site is carrying a story at the moment about an online gamer who has been sentenced to life for killing a fellow gamer. The motive for the killing? The dead gamer "sold" a virtual sword belonging to the killer. So alongside the Virtual Economy now arrives Real-life Crime. This may be the first, but it won’t be the last.
Today I came across Gabriel Rosenberg’s blog that, in his own words, is "A mathematician’s thoughts on same-sex marriage, and little else of late". While obviously a lot of the discussion revolves around the culture and mores of Americans, I noticed that one of the entries referred to an article by Stanley Kurtz that was called "Lessons of the same-sex marriage debate in the Netherlands". Intrigued, I went and read the piece, which turned out to be arguing that same-sex marriage signifies the demotion or abolition of marriage as the socially preferred setting for parenthood.
The article leads off with a graph that strikes me as being a very questionable piece of statistical cooking. It is a graph from the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics showing "Out-of-Wedlock births" for the years 1970 – 2003. That in itself is fine – the questionable bit comes in having certain years marked with the milestones in the moves to introduce same-sex marriage in the Netherlands, and the suggestion that the conjunction between the introduction of same-sex marriage and the rise in out-of-wedlock births "is no coincidence". There are of course plenty of other factors that play out in Dutch society that might influence the figures, but those are ignored by Kurtz.
I thought that I would visit the Central Bureau of Statistics web site to see what they might have to say about the matter. I found a paper by Jan Latten on Trends in samenwonen en trouwen (Trends in cohabitation and marriage) published in Q4 2004. It’s in Dutch (unfortunate – if you don’t read the language) and it illustrates some of the complex interactions. Latten himself warns against simplistic interpretations using the traditional categories of marriages, divorces, etc., but I can’t resist pointing to the very first graph in the paper, showing the numbers of marriages registered during the years from 1960 to 2003. What that shows is that the rate of marriages rose during the swinging sixties to a peak in 1970, and then fell very rapidly thereafter to a low point in 1983, whereupon it picked up again and oscillated at around 85,000 per year up to today. These facts clearly didn’t suit Kurtz’s argument. Also, at first sight, graph 8 is startling, showing that in 2003, nearly 40% of the firstborn were born out-of-wedlock. However, as Latten points out, many parents now marry after their first child is born – and graph 8 also shows the effect of this.
What all this boils down to is that ideas of marriage are indeed changing, but that simplistic, Chicken Little-like cries of "The Sky is falling" are not the answer, particularly if the "blame" is placed at the door of same-sex marriage.
As an aside, reading some of the comments on Gabriel’s blog gives me a strong impression that their writers are particularly unpleasant people. Phrases such as "same-sex impersonation of marriage" and how homosexuality "crushes responsible procreation". I think I need to go and have a wash.
That was one of the essential ingredients in building an infinite improbability drive in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Alas, as Neil Gaiman discovers, it’s rarer than it should be in the real world.
