I just got soaked coming home from work. Everything: coat, trousers, shoes, shirt, tie. The lot.
The wind wa so high, it wasn’t so much turning the brolly inside out as it was forcing the sping back down and buckling the clip to close it.
It’s an official category four: Fuck me, where’s Noah? storm.
I’ve just seen an advert break on Sky One where EVERY single advert for Sky’s own shows was a celebrity show. There’s celebrity driving, celebrity circus shows! It just never ends!!!
It’s all the same damn show repeated over and over again.
It was like listening to the latest Oasis song that’s being touted on the radio shows as a fantastic new song.
And it sounds exectly like every bloody other song they’ve ever made!
Inspiration for this entry came from the mid-term elections coming up in the US. It seems that Democrats and Republicans (who currently hold the majority in the House of Representatives) are vying to oppose each other on all issues. Democrats are presenting themselves as pre-evolution (opposing the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools), and pre-environment (imposing taxes on carbon, etc).
One person once told me that the problem between embattled camps of scientific and religious people is that each can’t understand the other’s viewpoint. This is more ture than most people realise.
Religion’s pinciple problem with science is that science is ‘constantly changing it’s mind’. Science, being willing to accept change to it’s founding principles or revoking or fine tuning theorems. This implies that science cannot or will not discover any universal truth. Religion is the search for truth, and truth is truth. It never changes.
But science is not in search of truth, but fact. To paraphrase Indiana Jones:
Science, on the other hand, has trouble understanding why religion is so unwilling to change, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Take the birth of Christ. Historically, we know there were several errors in calculating his date of birth, so he was actually born some time between 4BC and 8 BC. Most religions failed to correct their information.
Take something else, like evolution. Genesis was the the Christian church’s way of explaining how the world and all the animals came into being. But then came geology that proved the age of the Earth was ancient, much older than was widely believed. And then came Darwim who gave us a way to understand how species come into being.
And still the church stuck to genesis.
This is the problem. Science has never claimed to be searching for truth. It is interested in facts. And how we measure, interpret or predict these facts changes over time, so the theories have to change to adapt to this. Newton’s laws of motion are the best example of this. They are correct, so they’re still used. But they are not as accurate as Einstein’s relativity, which gives better predictions of planet positions over time. The problem with Einstein’s calculations are that they’re too complex for everyday use. Newton’s ones are much easier.
Neither gives you a ‘truth.’ They are both theories, that give you formulae to calculate the same problem. You choose which one depending on the accuracy you need.
In fact, the domains of science and religion do not overlap as most people believe. Science is intested in fact, religion in truth. The problem may be that people believe science says truth doesn’t exist. It doesn’t. It just says that science cannot lead you to truth.
If religion wants truth, why does it still believe in things we know to be false. And if science wants truth, why is it always correcting itself?
The problem appears to be the word ‘truth’ itself. Each side is interpreting the word with a different meaning.
No brainer, right? You’d think.
A vaccine has been developed that targets the virus that causes cervical cancer. This is a sexually transmitted disease (called HPV), and the cancer it can cause kills 274,000 women worldwide a year (about 1,120 in the UK). It is designed to be given to women aged between 9 – 26.
You’d think people would be queueing up to get the jab. But some parents are actually suggesting that this vaccine could promote underage sex.
Seriously.
The same thing happened in the US where this is already available, and in India, where the argument went “But doctor, my daughter isn’t having sex just now. Why does she need the vaccine?”
I really worry about this species sometimes.
My method of dealing with these sorts of arguments is to reduce them to their constituent points.
We have a hard enough time getting our kids to ask us for contraceptives before having sex. No woman is ever going to think “Oh I think I’ll have sex with Dan tonight, but I’m not protected against the HPV, so I’d better wait.”
Or to put it another way, if our kids can’t come to use and ask for contraceptive before becoming sexually active, why wouldn’t you immunise them against a sexually transmitted disease?!?
What is up with these parents? Are they off their axis?
This isn’t going to be a popular post, but going by the feedback so far, no-one’s been reading anyway…
This train of thought all started with that news item about the teacher’s assistant who was suspended and then dismissed for wearing a full shroud while at work. It’s not clear whether the children made complaints about being able to hear her or not, there are claims and counter claims. The woman at the centre, Aishah Azmi said that when asked to remove the veil durring English lessons, she would comply but would not remove it in front of male colleagues.
This lead to her suspension and eventually to her dismissal.
However, she did admit that she did not wear the veil when she was interviewed by a male governor, even though she had done in previous interviews.
Now she says that the children can understand hre just fine, and maybe that’s true, but I just have this quote from the film Hitch in my head:
Now comes the controversial part of it. I think the problem lies in religion itself. It’s been said that the majority of Muslims have no sense of humour about their religion.
Try that joke, but replace the clergymen with muslim clerics and see how many laughs you get. Or watch a standup, because very few of them will try jokes about muslims.
Why is this important? Because laughter is one of the best communication methods we have. It says ‘Don’t mind me, I’m harmless.’ It helps build bridges and relax paople who are apprehensive about each other. And if someone can’t have a laugh about their religion, it makes everyone else deeply nervous, even though they would have difficulty rationalising it.
Religion itself seems to be the problem. It’s all a bunch of rules and regulations, that can get so complicated that it’s no wonder that people have difficulty seperating it from faith. It used to be simple. Take the ten commandments. Today they seem out-dated, but a thousand years ago, people living in small rural communities, these rules made for a good society; don’t kill, don’t steal, help out strangers.
And then came people willing to re-interpret these rules for a more modern society. Don’t kill, unless it’s your enemy. Don’t steal, unless you need it more. Help out strangers, as long as they’re the same race/religion as you.
In 3001, Arthur C Clarke described that deep religious feelings were a form of mental illness. In his vision of the distant future, everyone was either deist or theist. One group believe there’s at least one god. The others believe there’s at most one god.
It’s a nice way to look at the universe. Me? Well, that’s a topic for another blog…
Another celebrity game show. Wow.
Again, like the club reps one, I kept asking “Who the hell are these people?” I recognised a few of them, but one of them’s only claim to fame was as a child actor on Grange Hill, and several of them only came to the public’s attention through other reality TV shows. One’s a contestant from The Apprentice, one’s from Big Brother.
Urgh!
It’s TV for TV’s sake. What’s the point of that?
I just found out a few interesting facts about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
I knew a lot about this film, things like the model of the Reliant is upside down because that’s how the drawing arrived at the art department, and trivia like the re-used models and sets. Space Station Regula 1 was the space office from The Motion Picture [TMP], several beauty shots of the Enterprise (leaving dry-dock for example) were re-used, and some sets from the Klingon battlecruiser were used for Enterprise’s torpedo room and Regula 1’s transporter room console. Have another look at that transporter room sequence. Doesn’t that console just scream Klingon to you now? 
Other things like the original title was Vengence of Khan, but was changed because George Lucas…let’s say he requested (that’ll keep the legal department happy, won’t it? Huh? Yes? Good…)….requested that the title be changed because of his upcoming film Revenge of the Jedi. By the time Wrath’s name had been decided, George had changed his name to Return of the Jedi. (Historians tell me this happens all the time and there’s nothing I can do about it.)
But what I didn’t know was that while TMP was made on a budget of around $43 million, Wrath of Khan was made for $10 million.
Read that again. I’ll wait.
$10 million. It was distributed through Paramount’s film division, but shot and made by their television department. The re-use of shots, sets and models helped keep the costs down enormourly, and Paramount was trying hard to re-coup its losses from TMP which had run way over budget in several departments, notably special effects.
For a more complete list of the trivia, check the IMDB trivia section.
The one message you don’t want to see when you boot up your PC is:
“Windows has recovered from a serious error.”
Particularly when you don’t have a clue what it’s referring to. Ouch.
I hate that ad too! Fantastic bit of comedy for everyone who’s ever seen that Frosties advert and really hated it.
The latest reality TV show, where contestants fight to win a job as a PA, similar to The Apprentice, with Alan Sugar.
I think I’m going to be sick…
