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03:49 pm
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Ethics - interesting stuff
I must finish reading Moral Minds at some point since it's idea of "natural ethics" derived from out genes is fascinating (if hard to digest at first reading).
For example - why is it I have no problem with the idea of pigs being killed so I can eat them and yet feel very uneasy at the idea of them being killed just so they can be stabbed with ballpoint pens to prove how stupid the TSA are?
Aside - why is it that one of my friends on here only reads this and not Twitter and yet his girlfriend only reads Twitter and not this? You know who you are!
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02:14 am
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Battlestar Galactica : The Plan
( Spoilers )
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12:52 pm
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Following on from the previous post
The Democrat candidate won after the official Republican candidate dropped out and endorsed them.
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10:46 pm
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Republican party continues to implode
Blogging rather than tweeting as several friends not using Twitter yet (and this will get automatically forwarded to my twitterfeed anyway).
Sarah Palin (and others) endorse a non-Republican candidate in election.
So, the Palinator has official endorsed a candidate in an election who is standing against someone from her own party. In most political parties this would be immediate grounds for expulsion. Problem is the GOP thinks that the headline-grabbing loonies in its ranks have more credibility with their current base than the people in charge.
Of course since the candidate was nominated by local GOP members it also shows that the right-wing aristocracy aren't necessarily representing the party members at all.
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05:46 pm
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Taking the p*ss out of Nokia
Only funny 'cause it's true : http://vimeo.com/7142739
We've got some way to go but our heart's in the right place (it is supposed to be our left shoe, isn't it...?) :-)
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12:20 am
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In which the author makes a Bold Statement
I'm not sure if trying to write this on the tube is a good idea. Still, better now than in 2012. If we're not vaporised around that time I should be able to tweet directly from here with all fumbled mistyping happily included (while I miss my station due to concentrating on writing). Still, Marshall Mcluhan aside...
I may be about to make a Bold Statement. This sort of thing is never advised but sometimes they are at least amusing.
Tonight I went to Methodist Central Hall for an Intelligence Squared debate. This event was on the motion "The house believes that the Catholic Church is a force for good". Speaking against the motion were Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens. For the motion was an African archbishop and Anne Widdecombe. The first three, Stephen Fry not surprisingly in particular, were excellent public speakers.
I'm giving nothing away to announce the results as they will be online soon enough and next week, we are told, the video of the event will be televised to 70 million people (mostly in Africa). It is the convention for IQ2 to canvas audience opinion before and after the debate and questions. In this instance before 634 were for the motion, 1,204 against and 432 undecided. After it was 237 for the motion, 2002 for the motion and 34 undecided.
Now ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alobear can tell you better than I about biased and self selecting groups. IQ2 events are organised by The Spectator and similar publications and so will naturally tend to draw a skeptical crowd. It was rather telling though that 20% of the way through the Q&A the chair asked for any questions not going to the Catholics and all hands went down. Only five people spoke for the Catholic side. One openly decried the state of the church and called for reform and 3 of the four others, all from Africa to judge by their accents, made statements about belief rather than asking questions. It was interesting to not that both Ms Widdicomb and the archbishop said at the end how much they enjoyed the event.
Anyway, what is this Bold Statement I was going to make? Well, I was thinking last night about the already monumental changes that have happened in my lifetime and wondering what else could happen if I'm lucky enough to live another 40 or 50 years or more.
Well, I'm going way out on a limb here but I starting to wonder if we're on the edge of a catastrophic collapsed of organised religion in most 1st world countries (US aside).
Perhaps I hang out too much in secular societies and have drank the Kool Aid but it seems to me that there are any number of signs.
Looking past events such as this evenings which tend to attract confirmed skeptics.
Much of the worlds most popular "new media", such as BoingBoing the world's most popular blog, are either completely run by atheists or give more space to secularists than religion.
Religion has all-but disappeared from radio and television. Not only shows about religion but characters even mentioning religion are now either the bad guys or seen to be out of date or somehow strange.
Church attendance numbers, Christian churches particularly, (again outside the US) are falling to record lows.
Perhaps most interestingly though is that I feel that now it is becoming taboo to discuss religion at all. The meme always was that it was bad to criticise religion but now that has bonded with not wanting to offend anyone and since it is so easy to become accidentally offensive when discussing religion, usually because the side defending it is doing it from faith rather than reason, it is simply easier to avoid it at all. I recently found out by accident, much to my surprise, that a friend of mine of many years is an atheist. The subject simply never came up.
I don't like Richard Dawkins much but many of the things in The God Delusion are true. I'm thinking in particular that as a society we are collectively holding our breath - waiting for someone to tell us it's okay not to believe. I don't think it will take much. A few high profile sports and pop stars saying the got to where they are today without God and the kids will be finally be able to say openly "I'm like them".
I do feel that a movement is growing. Yes, it is quite small now and mostly limited to the sort of folks who were there tonight but I do think we're reaching a tipping point and in perhaps the next 20 years it will become the norm to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic, in many countries of the world.
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05:21 pm
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Are you ready to rock? :-)
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03:14 pm
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Cthulhu fhtagn!
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02:09 am
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Interesting short video
Props to mongo42 for posting this:
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12:29 pm
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Lecture bingo
I'm off to a lecture tonight on The World in 2050.
I'm going to have a go at listing what I would talk about and see how many of them come up...- "AI" still doesn't work (but we're getting closer via simulating large parts of the human cortex)
- Home fabricating of products
- Mass reduction in copyright and drug laws
- Wars fought over resource issues (especially access to water) but fought using terrorist tactics - almost complete end of "state warfare"
- Both India and China are more influential on the world stage then America or the European Union
- Therapeutic cloning (limb and organ replacement)
- Neural integration with prosthetics and other devices (such as "phones").
- Most computing power processed remotely
- Humanoid robots almost indistinguishable from people but only able to perform extremely simple tasks
- Climate changes noticeable by everyone
- Beginning of the end of the nation state as people identify more strongly with their online communities than their neighbours (see "Diamond Age")
That's just a 5 minute go - let's see what turns up... :-)
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07:18 pm
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Interesting social comment (from /. of all places)
In a thread about kids texting instead of talking but not actually about that...
Firstly:
"In the 1950s, recent history was what has happened in the last hundred years. Nowadays, thanks to what could be terms a cultural compression -- recent history is what has happened in the last decade. The older generation(s) like to point to this and say we've gotten dumber... The truth is we've just changed our scope. What happened in the 1950s doesn't have much (if any) relevance to our day to day lives now... What happened even ten years ago now has only limited importance. Don't judge people based on their memory or caring for esoteric issues that might have affected life in the "distant" past (for people my age, that's anything more than about 30 years ago) -- they know just as many fungible facts as their older counterparts, it's just about a smaller period of time."
Followed by (my highlighting):
"'Compressing your timeframe' means that there is a lot more of history that you are doomed to repeat. It's happening right now. We have a war on drugs, 23% of national income going to the top 1% of earners, we've got tons of folks clamoring for a New Deal and public works, we've seen massive corporatization (media & Internet), we're even having our version of the Red Scare, the list goes on. So yes time is compressed. We're repeating much of 1920-1950 and with new technology we're doing it in a fraction of the time for 100x more people. But you sound like you probably have no idea what I'm talking about? There's a George Orwell quote that would go nicely here."
Interesting.
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11:26 pm
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Other things I don't understand
Starting with this : 1 in 3 teenage girls tell of sexual abuse by their boyfriends
I've commented on this kind of thing on LJ before. What makes it very hard for me to believe is that these numbers can be accurate (for a sensible definition of "abuse") and it isn't common knowledge. I was a teenager (some time ago) and I had a lot of female friends. Were 1 in 3 of them being abused? Seems extremely unlikely to me.
Then this :
A very difficult case but I don't see how people can have thought that it would go any other way. To my understanding it simply isn't a crime to talk someone into doing harm to themselves (I'm happy to be corrected).
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10:05 pm
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Wireless electricity
Been watching the TED video of Witricity. Extremely impressive technology but I worry that it will never take off because, unless you can tune the coils, it not possible to stop people leaching off their neighbours power...
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05:01 pm
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Difficulties in being a "free speech" beliver
One of my LJ friends mongo42 serendipitously just wrote a post on something I've had tagged to mention for a while.
The BBFC has denied a certificate to a Japanese film that is so horrific they don't believe that is should be seen by anyone. Now, while the film does sound truly nauseating the question is - at what point do liberal folks like myself and Matt consider that it should be stopped?
As well as the "public hazard" speech Matt refers to there is also a well understood sub-set of speech that is banned. That which is said to be "obscene". This is often defined by local community standards (guess what NYC and Ohio are quite different) and center around speech which is "harmful". Originally to "weak" people (women and children) but increasingly to everyone.
Obviously even someone like me is in favor of keeping this film away from highly impressionable people but who can define who they are these days? Most kids probably have a stronger stomach for this kind of thing than I do.
Well, I guess if this was easy people wouldn't still be fighting about it...
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11:37 pm
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Young Rewired State
#youngrewiredstate Had a great weekend at Young Rewired State.
A write-up here.
A Flickr stream here.
A twitterfall here.
Press Association copy here.
BBC article here.
Update on Yahoo Developer Network from Christian here. Including a cool (if rather small) picture of me.
Guardian article.
Meta page.
Video of the day.
My biggest finds of the weekend were YQL and the chaps that run the London Hackspaces.
Pic of my team - who won this "Wish I'd thought for that" award for our site "Will Work for Peanuts".
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10:59 pm
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Clutter
As people may know I, and Annie to a lesser extent, like to regularly get rid of "stuff" that we've accumulated over time. For example I've got a bunch of stuff up on Freecycle at the moment that's been sitting under the bed unused for years.
Regardless, this is still one of the most obsessive things I've ever seen.
That said I would find it difficult to even list the categories of the objects that I own - never mind any kind of actual list of items:- Flat
- Car
- Furniture
- Electrical "white goods"
- Other electrical goods
- Orniments
- Pictures
- Books
- DVDs
- CDs
- Games
- Clothes
- Kitchen utensils
- Tools
- Soft toys
- Linens
- Bathroom items
- Plants
- Fish
- ...
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04:40 pm
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Terry Pratchett on the right to die
See : http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/07/terry-pratchett-on-t.html
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11:52 pm
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Arcadia
We went out tonight to see Arcadia. Probably one of the top five plays I've ever seen with something that will appeal to fans of comedy, tragedy, literature, history and maths. Tom Stoppard is a genius.
However, be warned, it's also very very sad. It's over two hours since curtain down and I'm still upset.
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09:49 pm
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You just couldn't make this up
The government has decided to create a "major youth leadership program". What's it called i hear you ask...?
The Youth of Today.
(Apologies to non-British readers who won't get this joke).
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09:26 pm
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Fertility Clinic Bows To Pressure, Nixes Eye and Hair-Color Screening
Interested in people's opinion about this. Since they are selected the embryos in question rather than altering them it doesn't get into the whole genetic engineering debate. It's hard to be pro-IVF / pro-abortion (where the choice is not to select an embryo at all) and then say that this kind of selection is bad.
Thoughts?
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