I halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plane lee marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea

Eye ran this poem threw it
Your sure reel glad two no
It’s vary polished in it’s weigh
My chequer tolled me sew

A chequer is a bless sing
It freeze yew lodes of thyme
It helps me awl stiles two reed
And aides mi when aye rime

To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should be proud
And wee mussed dew the best wee can
Sew flaws are knot aloud

And now bee cause my spelling
is checked with such grate flare
Their are know faults with in my cite
Of nun eye am a wear

Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed to be a joule
The chequer poured o’er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule

That’s why aye brake in two averse
My righting wants too pleas
Sow now ewe sea wye aye dew prays
Such soft wear for pea seas

Via.

Hmmm, re-reading my earlier post over the faith group exemptions, it seems a little angry. I was wound up at the time and the emotive tone seemed appropriate, but I think it would be improved if I’d tempered it a little. Something less of a rant. Ah well, this is what blogs are for, I guess.

Just to point you towards One Day in History, which is asking for a maximum of 650 words describing what you did today, October 17th. It’ll be stored at the British Library for future historians. I suspect future historians will have more information than they know what to do with¹ but I guess it would only need a few well-placed EMPs…

1. Hello, future historians! Do you have jetpacks? Is Charlie Kaufman President yet? Did Firefly ever come back? [↩]

Over at the appropriately named Damn Interesting I found out about Gravity Trains:

About four hundred years ago– sometime in the latter half of the 17th century– Isaac Newton received a letter from the brilliant British scientist and inventor Robert Hooke. In this letter, Hooke outlined the mathematics governing how objects might fall if dropped through hypothetical tunnels drilled through the Earth at varying angles. Though it seems that Hooke was mostly interested in the physics of the thought experiment, an improbable yet intriguing idea fell out of the data: a dizzyingly fast transportation system.

Hooke’s calculations showed that if the technology could be developed to bore such holes through the Earth, a vehicle with sufficiently reduced friction could use such a tunnel to travel to another point anywhere on the on Earth within three quarters of an hour, regardless of distance. Even more amazingly, the vehicle would require negligible fuel. The concept is known as the Gravity Train, and though it seems inconceivably difficult to construct, it has received some serious scientific attention and research in the intervening centuries.

They’re literally straight line tunnels from one point on the Earth to another. Jump in and gravity does the rest. Were it possible to design a system with no friction, you’d arrive at the exit as your speed reached zero - at which point, presumably, something would have to stop you falling back in. No matter how large the vehicle or how great the distance, the travel time would be about 42 minutes (approximate because the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere). The article has much more detail, as well as the extreme technological hurdles that would have to be overcome to build one. I’m surprised this concept hasn’t turned up in any sci-fi I’ve read, although maybe it has without me registering it as a plausible device.

Which is siller - writing it in the first place or putting it onto a poster?

Lobbyists in a meeting with the minister for Women and Equality:

Ruth Kelly: Our vision is of an equal, inclusive society where every citizen is treated with respect and where there is opportunity for all. We want to measurably improve the lives of all of those who are discriminated against. Our task is to promote equality for all regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion or belief, age or personal disability. This is why we are implementing legislation to prevent discrimination on the grounds of sexuality. A bank can’t sack somebody for being gay, but can refuse a mortgage application on this basis. It’s wrong, insulting to reasonable thinking people everywhere, and a genuine violation of individual rights. Does anybody have any questions?
The BNP: Hello. We hate gay people. Can we be excluded from this legislation, please?
Ruth Kelly: Get the hell off my planet.
The Church: Hello. We hate homosexuality, but can forgive homosexuals themselves, obviously. Can we be excluded from the legislation, please?
Ruth Kelly: Sure thing.
The BNP: Hey. What?
Ruth Kelly: It’s their religion, retards.
The BNP: Huh. Oh, did we mention we have a magic thimble that tells us to hate homosexuality? Obviously we can separate homosexuality from homosexuals, just like it’s practically possible to hate the colour of people’s skin, not the people themselves. Are we good? Can we be excluded?
Ruth Kelly: …

Obviously, that’s not very funny. Because the whole thing isn’t bloody funny.

Years ago I saw Tony Blair in a commons debate over Section 28 - the Local Government Act that said local authorities would not “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. The Conservatives wanted to keep it due to their mostly being compassionless dinosaurs with no sense of decency concerned about ‘family values’, then Tony Blair stood up and said Section 28 was a piece of bigotry, and it would be removed. I didn’t know all that much about politics, nor had I thought much about my own stance on this kind of discrimination, but his response was so clearly right, so purely and unambiguously the correct thing to do, that it was obviously the way of the future.

Yet today Tony Blair and Ruth Kelly are apparently trying to exempt faith-based organisations from anti-bigotry legislation. You know: the most powerful, vocal and ubiquitous anti-gay groups in the country. It’s just so completely absurd, and contrary to Labour principles, that I almost find myself assuming there must be some decent argument from the other side that I’ve missed. What are the arguments for their side? It helps to get a little clarification on the legislation itself:

The proposed measures would ban discrimination over the provision of goods and services, meaning, for example, that hotels which banned gay couples from sharing a room could be prosecuted. In turn, gay bars would also have to be open to straight clients. More broadly, the rules potentially affect everything from fertility clinics’ right to refuse lesbian couples IVF treatment to whether the tourism industry can promote heterosexuals-only honeymoon resorts, drawing several Whitehall departments into the row.

Some have argued that there’s no point, that why would gay people want to stay in an obviously hostile hotel? Why should a gay bar be forced to be open to straight clients? I think this is full of crap - tolerance has to protect itself, and see Jo’s post for more - but the Church’s arguments don’t even have such verisimilitude:

Faith schools have, however, led the protest, arguing that the rules could affect teaching about sex or require them to let gay groups hold meetings on their premises after hours. Catholic adoption agencies fear being forced to allow gay couples to adopt children. The Catholic church, which regards homosexuality as a sin, has suggested adoption agencies would close down rather than obey.

They’d have to let gay groups hold meetings on their premises after hours? Diddums! How terrible! Goodness, just think of the consequences of such a horrific requirement! And you’d have to change how you teach about sex? How on earth are you teaching it at the moment? By avoiding homosexuality altogether? If adoption agencies would rather close down than obey, that sounds like good riddance to me.

These are the same faith schools, bear in mind, that say things like:

The Church’s approach to education as a whole, while admitting of diversity of practice in the light of particular local circumstances, is one founded on a notion of inclusiveness rather than separation from the community. The composition of its school population, especially in primary schools where parents generally want their children educated close to home, will reflect the composition of the neighbourhood and must therefore be inclusive of all ethnicity, belief and social class. The Church will seek to develop its provision as part of a wider partnership with communities. Its schools will seek to engage actively with all parents and to be distinctively welcoming to them.

Well, isn’t that just bollocks. This, also from the 2001 Archbishops’ Council Report, is more appropriate:

If the Church schools are at the centre of the Church’s mission, their work must derive from the mission of the whole Church. In a sentence, the Church’s mission is to open up people to what God desires for them: Church schools are places where a particular vision of humanity is offered.

Bit different from providing a tolerant, inclusive education when you put it like that. Isn’t it obvious that schools of a religious character have a built-in predisposition to their own moral failings? Isn’t it obvious that many are going to raise children indoctrinated with the bigotry that pervades the major religions?

The Church’s arguments are an evasion. They don’t address the substance of the legislation nor the assumption behind it, namely that it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of sexuality. Of course they don’t bring this up. There are no valid counter-arguments; the only argument they have is that a magic thimble in the sky gives them orders. Nobody who uses that kind of argument has any business being involved in the creation of law, and it’s always possible to separate the argument from the faith behind it, if it’s valid. Labour is rejecting its principles by considering exemptions, and we’re simply better than this. Aren’t we?

This evening, while out and about in town, I said to my friend Nod “do you want to come back to mine?”. Unfortunately when I turned to face him I found he’d wandered off and I was instead talking to Random Woman. I thought this was quite funny, and apologised. I’m not sure she was so amused, but said “don’t worry, I do it all the time - it’s very embarrassing”. I wonder whether she meant accidentally using bad pick-up lines on strangers. It didn’t work.

[phone rings]

Hello?
Hello, Mr West?
Yes. Hi.
Hello, I’m calling from British Gas. I believe you have an existing contract with us to service your boiler, is that right?
Yes, it is.
I’m phoning to let you know about an offer we have on at the moment which is a very good deal.
Oh?
At the moment you’re paying £25 a month for your support contract, I believe?
Yes, that’s right.
Our new offer would add electricity and drainage cover to your contract for an extra 25p per month
Um, I don’t think I really…wait, 25 pence, not pounds?
Yes, it’s a very good offer.
[beat] How long would this last?
Twelve months, after which it will go up to an extra £9.75 per month. I can add it right away, and send you the paperwork with a seven-day cooling off period so you can check all the details. Would you like to go ahead?
Um. It really covers all the wiring in the flat?
Yes.
…Ok, then.

I don’t think I’ve ever said yes to a phone call like this before. The trick here is that they’re hoping I won’t revert back to the cheaper contract once a year has passed, right? I’m not missing anything, am I?

If you happen to use Firefox, Gmail, Google Reader and greasemonkey, this post is for you…

The recently relaunched Google Reader is very swish. Nearly good enough to wean me away from FeedLounge, in fact. The interface is very similar to Gmail, and Lifehacker pointed me towards this greasemonkey script, from a member of the Google Reader team, which directly integrates the post list into Gmail:

When items are selected the usual Google Reader options are available (although ‘email’ doesn’t currently work for me):

Reading between the lines of the post, it seems that official integration is a possibility but a long way from production, and this is their pre-Labs way of testing things out with a tech-savvy crowd. It does work very well, imho. It’s fast and doesn’t slow down Gmail overall, and feels surprisingly handy. Currently the list view can’t be filtered - the tag interface would undoubtedly clutter things up terribly - so it’s only appropriate for people with a relatively small number of feed items.

If you’re comfortable messing around with the greasemonkey script it’s apparently possible to get the ‘expanded view’ by searching for and removing “&view=list”.

I’m a fan of Star Trek, and I want to wear the communicator badge on my uniform when I go to work for BA. Should I be allowed to do so?

BA, it turns out, don’t like employees bringing their hobbies into work. However, they ask me to cover up the badge instead of removing it entirely. What logical argument is there against this? That I’m wearing the communicator badge to actively promote Star Trek? If so, it’s hardly reasonable to do that on somebody else’s time. But maybe it’s impolite of them to ask this of me. What harm is the badge doing, after all? Well, it could provoke discussion, which is a waste of company time, something particularly valuable when I work at a check-in desk! It could also cause problems with crazy Babylon 5 fans who think my wearing of the communicator badge is insulting. Yes, they’re mental, but it wastes time and money and who needs the hassle? In response I point out that BA is allowing Firefly fans to wear Truly Excellent Hats, on the basis that these can’t be covered up. Everybody mumbles incoherently when this point is raised. Nevertheless, I do actually work for BA: they can request anything they like of me, providing it doesn’t cause harm to myself or others. If I don’t like that they want me to cover my communicator badge, I can leave. While the policy they applied to me makes sense, their overall stance is illogical, so I resign.

I train as a teacher, and my love for Star Trek grows. I am not longer satisfied with the communicator badge - I want the full Klingon mask. Fully qualified, I interview for a job as a teaching assistant, but do not wear the mask. I then turn up for work in full Klingon garb, and help teach the children. The school has concerns and ask me to remove the mask as it distracts the children and some say they have difficulty understanding me. I refuse - they can see my eyes and body language and I think they can understand me well enough - but compromise and say I will only remove the mask in the presence of other Star Trek fans. They come back that this is unreasonable, they won’t be held hostage by my arbitrary whims and point out that only politeness is letting me keep my job. Star Trek is just my hobby, after all, and I don’t get to impose it onto others to their detriment. It can be psychologically demonstrated that emotions and meaning are communicated with many different parts of the face, not just the eyes. Masks are also a sign of wanting to be separate, and encourage suspicion and hostility. The school also, quite frankly, object to the whole idea of wanting to be a Klingon, as the defining characteristics are hardly virtuous and aren’t a good example to children. It’s not compatible with the job of teaching. I talk to the media, who go bugnutty.

Normally I’m all for relaxed dress codes. I tend to think that people can wear what they like, including religious / hobby paraphernalia, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of what they’re paid to do, and that many such rules as employed by big business are out-of-date and vaguely paranoid. But when there are good reasons for them, as there seem to be in both of these circumstances, isn’t the answer obvious?

Demanding the right to not just wear but display a cross while at works smacks of evangelism, and if any Star Trek fan did the same with a communicator badge he/she would be laughed out of court. Demanding the right to wear a veil while teaching children suggests you don’t have your priorities straight.

We can apply the same rules to religion as we would to hobbies. When working for somebody else there’s a reasonable level of politeness, up to the point at which you put your own ideas ahead of the job you’re being paid to do. It’s only because crosses and veils fall under the banner of religion that this even makes the papers. As so often, religion gets elevated above the level of private hobby, and it’s bad for everybody.

I thought The Devil Wears Prada looked fun, but the trailer suggested it might be an ugly duckling film. You know the type: stunningly beautiful actress is given frizzy hair and glasses and mocked by her peers, then halfway through the film gets a makeover plus contact lenses and emerges a jaw-dropping slow-motion wonder. Anne Hathaway certainly meets the criteria (and in fact did exactly this as a 14-year-old in The Princess Diaries, which I remember thinking had some very odd morals in this regard), but happily The Devil Wears Prada has more to it. There is a transformation, but it links into an overall theme and isn’t pushed as entirely virtuous. I thought the whole film was very well made, and really enjoyed it. I have a feeling that there were many cameos from famous fashion people that completely passed me by, mind.

I couldn’t resist nipping into town at Thursday lunchtime. I wanted to see the daytime view from the top of this:

The previous evening the ride had been full, but this time it was just me. As a result my weight unbalanced the freely rotating chair, so that while riders were loaded onto the far end I was eight storeys up, facing downwards. This is substantially more unnerving than the balanced, upright position! I was held in by a heavy shoulder harness, which supported my weight entirely, and would have preferred at least a belt as backup. I spent about a minute up there, thoughts alternating between “if the harness gives way I don’t think I’d be able to hold onto it” and “I wonder if I can get to my cameraphone.” I decided against the latter on the basis that any unintended movements might result in splatty death.

A few people on the ground spotted me and pointed, so I waved. One woman was terribly embarrassed by this I figured it was a funny thing to do, so waved to anybody obviously watching. A guy gave me a very strange look and kept staring, and I was glad he’d have walked away by the time I was back on the ground. Of course the ride promptly stopped, so we were just two people in a rather weird situation. Ho hum.

Better than your average lunchtime, though

This is all very familiar:

I was walking down a long hall at the gym today, and a flusteringly attractive woman was walking toward me.

I never know what to do in these situations. Obviously, given my druthers, I would just stand there in slackjawed amazement and openly gawp, but apparently this is considered “uncouth” in some quarters.

I normally go with the ’staring at the ground’ option, sometimes with added blush. Sometimes I’ll be concentrating so hard on looking normal that I forget to blink, and my eyes start to water. I don’t think I should be allowed out in public, really. See the full post for his eventual solution, which turned out to be less than satisfactory.

While driving through heavy mist just now I realised I was looking forward to reaching the clearer main roads. Presumably this is because the mist-ploughs would have been out, or something.

Incidentally, going to Tesco at 0100 is lots easier than in the day.

I am highly entertained by the Stratford Herald’s review of last week’s Richard Dawkins talk. Whether you agreed or disagreed with the various points raised during the evening, and taking into account that it’s just a local paper, it’s still astonishingly bad. There are many, many problems, but I’ll concentrate on one paragraph from the centre, which starts off badly and ends up completely nutty:

Religion imposes social control on society and without it, as the vicar of Holy Trinity rightly said, anarchy would rule in a state of chaos.

I think believer and non-believer can agree that this is ridiculous. Whether you take the humanist, evidence-based position that humanity is essentially good, or even the H.L Mencken “[p]eople say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police” side, this makes no sense. Some go further and suggest there’s evidence of the inverse: Sam Harris has pointed out the positive correlation between levels of religious belief and crime levels throughout the world, but that of course doesn’t imply causation.

However, to demonise one particular “brand” or denomination and pitch it against another is surely leading to the new world order[...]

Woah. ‘new world order’? That phrase rarely appears outside of conspiracy websites. Odd. I don’t know what this sentence is all about, to be honest - it doesn’t relate to anything that came previously. Maybe it’s the old ‘atheism is a faith position too’ argument, but it’s far from clear.

[...]which is precisely the reason for Britain and America’s fanatical anti-Islamic attitude.

Ah, that. Yeah, it’s terrible that Muslims don’t get to live freely and practice their religion without hindrance in the UK or the US. Also that both countries have intervened on behalf of Muslim countries, or tried to liberate them from dictatorships. I appreciate most people disagree with the Iraq war, but are there any sensible people who actually think it was because of an anti-Muslim agenda?

It would appear that Prof. Dawkins is a one-world government devotee[...]

Bit of a leap.

[...] and he seems to promote his ‘non-belief’ with all the zealousness of the religious afficionados he corrals together as the deluded.

I’ll come back to this point.

This one trick pony of a man, I would suggest, is a signed-up member of the illuminati.

*splutter* What? I’m going to assume the author - the deputy editor of the newspaper, no less - isn’t actually suggesting the Illuminati really exist, even though his use of ‘new world order’ is bizarrely compatible with that view. I’ll charitably assume what he really means is that Prof. Dawkins is of the opinion that scientists should rule the world. I think that in debating circles this is known as the Argument from Dan Brown.

The review ends by saying that the whole religion debate is clearly about making money. It’s just godawful, to coin an appropriate word, and I don’t understand how it got through editorial controls.

I’ve been trying to read reviews of The God Delusion, both positive and negative, and haven’t seen much coherent argument against. The best I’ve come across was somebody who said he knows God exists through personal revelation, not scripture. I can counter that I think it far more probable that whatever experience he had was the result of something in his brain - psychologists can induce states of religious euphoria in laboratory situations - but this will always end in stalemate.

Incidentally, the vicar of Holy Trinity who argued with Prof. Dawkins during the evening does himself no favours by being quoted here:

“Dawkins is the acceptable face of what he espouses, but an atheistic world would be very ugly at the edges - remember Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. At the end of the day the man is an Oxford don trying to sell a book. I wonder who or what he turns to in his hours of need? He’s probably too ashamed to say he prays.”

Ah, the age-old debating technique of making things up. It’s a shame he said this, as on the evening he did a good job of being friendly and polite. This just sounds petty.

Russia and Cambodia are flawed arguments, too. It’s not like the horrors were committed because of an atheist outlook. If you’re going to say that a lack of religion caused it, you have to deal with the genocides and wars in the name of religion (plus the many in which religion fostered hatred and prevented any hope of dialogue between the sides). I personally tend to agree with Steven Weinberg: “with or without [religion], you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

The point that comes up time and time again in descriptions of Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett etc. is that they are ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘dogmatic’ in the same way as religious extremists, therefore no better. That completely misses the point. They’re not fundamentalist in the same way, because there’s always room for doubt. Criticisms of the dogmatic nature of religious fundamentalists are because they do not acknowledge any possiblity of error, not that they hold their opinions strongly. There’s nothing wrong with having and expressing strong opinions, providing you’re open to evidence and will debate reasonably. If you’re going to argue that they are not open to argument - this review called Dawkins “brainwashed by his own beliefs” - then present your alternate evidence. But no reviews do this, or they come out with the same old tired comments about Stalin, or atheism as a faith position, which have invariably been ripped to shreds in the very tomes they’re reviewing. The Dawkins-as-fundamentalist-therefore-we-must-look-for-middle-ground argument gets way more time than it deserves.

One of the more wonderful aspects of living in Stratford, and something I’ve been looking forward to for months, is the annual Mop Fair. According to Wikipedia, it’s so named because of its roots as a celebration for workers who would attend carrying items symbolising their trade, and generic servants would carry a mop head. Whatever the reason, the streets are closed to traffic and taken over by fairground rides, food stalls and games tents. I first encountered it when working here in 2001, when I hit as many rides as possible during my lunch hour
I knew the fair was coming soon, but didn’t know it was this week. The first sign was the Reverse Bungee towering over the town centre shops. I was most excited - I go a bit giddy in fairgrounds Something about the lights, noise and colour just appeals to me. My friend Ben happened to be back from Oxford, and along with Nod we headed into the fray in the early evening.

Incidentally, Oasis’ Champagne Supernova started playing while I was editing the photos, and my brain has for some reason deemed it official Mop Fair song. Don’t know why; is just how it is.

The rides were surprisingly exciting. Our favourite was ‘Storm’, which rose maybe eight storeys above the ground, then whipped round at great speed, spinning the seats themselves in the process:

We were stationary at the peak for a minute while riders were loaded into the other end, and it was an excellent view. Tests your faith in engineering, but good nevertheless Nod stayed on the ground for the first time, and took photos that make me laugh:

We wandered around and grabbed something to eat, before I finally managed to talk somebody into going on the Reverse Bungee with me.

The cage is held at ground level while the elastic cords tighten on the towers to either side. After a countdown (then another few seconds) the ground cable releases and you’re shot upwards until gravity asserts itself, you reach the tip of the arc and begin falling. And repeat.

It was great.

We headed back to the flat and ditched all extraneous items so we could all go on the rides at the same time, then returned to town. We all went on ‘Storm’, then another that I’ve forgotten the name of. A central hub had six arms, each of which had four seats in a 2×2 arrangement. The seats then spin and rotate independently as the whole thing turns and tilts. Ben and I sat opposite Nod, who was on a different arm from us. Ours was neatly weighted by the two of us, but Nod was the only person on his particular arm and unbalanced it, so whenever there was a moment of calm his chair would promptly rotate 180 degrees so he was upside down, which was perhaps the funniest thing Ben and I had ever seen. We spent the whole time in hysterics, made worse by Nod’s bemused expressions.

Despite the crowds the queues were always very short/non-existent. I know it’s stereotypical of me, but I do find it funny when I see skinhead, khaki-wearing, earringed teenagers looking at a ride and saying ‘no f-ing way!’ The mop lasts until tomorrow, then returns in a week’s time in the smaller ‘runaway mop’, where children who traditionally ran away with the fair return to their families. I think I’m going to run away with the fair.

An excellent evening The others seemed to enjoy themselves too. The whole flickr set is here. It’s still going on today, and I’m considering going for a ride on Storm at lunchtime. I can actually hear the screams from my desk…