Has anybody seen the new Microsoft adverts? Do you think they hired IBM’s ad agency? They might as well swap logos.

PC World have a (clearance) laptop with the following specs:

Only 256mb of ram? For a Core Duo? That’s crippling some seriously powerful hardware. It wasn’t a mistake, either. At least it’s not running Vista - apparently 1gb is the minimum for reasonable performance.

My uncle had his laptop stolen a couple of months ago, and the insurance just paid out with PC World vouchers. I can see their logic, but it seems unreasonable: the original laptop was chosen for his needs from a wide range of different suppliers, then further customised. We visited PC World this afternoon and found their range small and of poor value compared to the original purchase. I understand the insurers want to avoid him spending the money on other items (although the PCW vouchers could theoretically be used for ten thousand mousemats) but couldn’t they request he get a replacement and supply the receipt?

A man on the radio just now was disgusted after being fined and getting three points for reading a text on the motorway. He was only checking to see who it was from - he wasn’t talking or anything! Maybe people should get points for demonstrating they have no sense.

And then there’s the guy who uses his mobile at 100mph on the motorway because he’s been driving for 42 years without an accident, but it’s ok because he’s in a big, fast Volvo (his words). I just don’t know how you justify that to yourself. What is it with the bravado that goes with driving dangerously? The number of people who give me smug little smiles while explaining how fast they’ve driven, or that they use their phone…

If somebody steps out in front of me and dies, I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing it hadn’t happened. If I’m going too fast, or on the phone, I’ll spend the rest of my life knowing they might still be alive if I’d been obeying the law. It’s a complete no-brainer - I’m in control of a massive machine travelling at high velocity only metres away from fragile beings: the onus is entirely on me to do everything I can to be safe, and my judgement is nothing compared to qualified road safety experts.

I’ve been called a ‘goody-goody’ when people discover I only drive speed limits after asking questions that assume I go as fast I possibly can. I’m fed up of this. I like the exhilaration of speed as much as the next guy, but there is no justification for putting yourself above other people on public roads because “it’s quiet”, or “the houses are set back”, or my favourite “I have to keep up with traffic”. It sometimes seems like most men¹ are incapable of making this distinction, but maybe that’s unfair. Thus far I’ve quietly fumed when people look down their noses at me, but one day I’m going to react badly.

Man, some issues get me annoyed rather quickly. I should stop listening to the Jeremy Vine show I shall have some lunch and calm down.

1. let’s face it, it’s normally men [↩]

So apparently the Guardian printed something nutty today. I don’t think anyone’s had the strength to fisk the whole thing - every few paragraphs there’s something jaw-droppingly stupid - but Shuggy, Ophelia and The Labour Humanist have good responses, mainly concentrating on the idea of ‘fundamentalist’ atheists being as bad as ‘fundamentalist’ religious crazies who like blowing things up.

I’m rather tired and shall try to read the article properly tomorrow, but right now I fail to see how this made it past the editor’s desk:

Neuberger is to take on Hitchens, Dawkins and Grayling when she speaks at a debate against the motion We’d Be Better Off Without Religion next month. The debate has been moved to a bigger venue. “What I find really distasteful is not just the tone of their rhetoric, but their lack of doubt,” she says. “No scientific method says that there is no doubt. If you don’t accept there’s doubt in all things, you’re being intellectually dishonest. ”

This is a thought taken up by Azzim Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought. “I refer to secular fundamentalism. The problem is that these people believe that they have the absolute truth. That means you have no room to talk to others so you end up having a physical fight. They want to close the door and ignore religion, but this will provoke a violent religiosity. If someone seeks to deny my existence, I will fight to assert it.”

Tamimi’s words also resonate with what the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, said last November: “The aggressive secularists pervert and abuse any notion of diversity for the sake of promoting a narrow agenda.” They also parallel the chilling remarks of Richard Chartres, Bishop of London: “If you exile religious communities to the margins, then they will start to speak the words of fire among consenting adults, and the threat to public order and the public arena, I think, will grow and grow.”

Quote complete crap all you like, but some kind of reasonable response would be nice. There’s no counter-argument pointing out that the whole point of everything Grayling, Dawkins or Hitchens say is that there is doubt. Or even mentioning the tiny bit of irony in the above quotes.

The author starts from an H.L. Mencken quote:

We must accept the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

And comes back to this throughout the article:

The gay adoption issue also outraged many non-believers, among them philosopher AC Grayling, author of Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God. “These groups are trying to be exempt from the effort to be a fair society, and we are faced with the threat of a possible return to the dark ages. We are trying to keep a pluralistic society, and elements in the Christian church and other religions are trying to destroy it.”

Why this departure from tolerant, if nicely ironic, Menckenism?

Yes, why? How strange that anybody would want to fight against bigotry using strong language. How strange that in a world where people who spout such vile opinions are taken seriously by newspaper columnists we should fight back with everything we have. How strange that we would be considered rude for doing so.

I was doing ok for a while, but this bit of commentary tipped me over the edge:

One example of this growing conscientiousness is a recent paper for the new public theology think-tank Theos, in which Nick Spencer concluded that in the 21st century, liberal humanism would face a challenge from an “old man” - God. “The feeble and slightly embarrassing old man who had been pacing about the house quietly mumbling to himself suddenly wanted to participate in family conversation and, what’s more, to be taken seriously.” Indeed, in Britain’s ethically repellent consumerist society, even some atheists might consider it would be good to hear from the old man again, if only to provide a moral framework beyond shopping.

Oh, grow up. I’m going to bed.

This Saturday Abi and I were invited to a fancy dress party with a theme of ‘S’, and after deciding that Scissor Sisters would be fun but too tricky we went as Slytherin. Obviously the Slytherin vibe didn’t come naturally to either of us, but we tried nevertheless. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the ‘official’ Harry Potter wand I won years ago in a write-the-plot-of-the-5th-novel competition (I also won some Every Flavour Beans, one of which was - alas - sardine) but capes and crepe paper badges did the trick. As ever with fancy dress parties we were a little concerned we’d be the only people to have put any effort in, but happily we quickly bumped into a scientist, Shaft and Miss Scarlett, amongst others.

I haven’t been to many fancy dress parties, but I can’t think of an occasion I haven’t worn a cape. This is perfectly reasonable. I’m hardly going to turn up such opportunities while I wait for Gandalf-style cloaks to come back into fashion. Along with sombreros. Ignore the naysayers, we all know that would be great.

Some decent commentary for anybody who, like me, is far from convinced by the road pricing = slippery slope to killing babies hysteria…Firstly, there’s a great fisking of the recent email campaign encouraging people to sign the petition:

The government’s proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having to purchase a tracking device for your car [they’ve made this up] and paying a monthly bill to use it. The tracking device will cost about £200 [they’ve made this up too] and in a recent study by the BBC, the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver. A non working mother who used the car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month. [Since the scheme doesn’t exist, none of these people have actually paid anything to anyone. What the BBC did was make assumptions off their own bat of what charges might be, without making any allowance for the savings on petrol tax.]

On the Telegraph’s front page ‘black boxes will cost £600′ article:

…[T]he Telegraph has:
* Assumed that the most expensive variant of the scheme (intelligent black box in every vehicle) is adopted
* Assumed that the maximum estimated cost is the correct one
* Assumed that mass-production for every vehicle in Britain produces no economies of scale

There’s plenty more. The BBC ran a survey:

The e-mail comes after 74% of the 1,006 people questioned for a BBC-commissioned survey said they were opposed to charging motorists by the mile.

But 55% of those spoken to said they would change their minds and support such a scheme if the money raised was used to improve public transport.

If you ask me this suggests that the majority aren’t, in fact, opposed to the idea.

More than 25% said nothing would make the policy acceptable to them.

Nothing. Nothing at all would make the policy acceptable to them. The eradication of all taxes and free bouncy castles for everyone? Not enough. Ok, that’s a bit silly. But still. A Downing Street petition (they didn’t tell us it was there!) in favour of road pricing can be found here (via B4L, which also includes links to pro-road-pricing arguments).

I live in a block of flats owned by an old-people’s housing association, and the ground floor is reserved for the disabled / elderly. One I’ve chatted to a little, one is housebound and I only see rarely, and one is always coming and going but gives me are-you-crazy looks whenever I nod a hello here or on the street, so I haven’t spoken to her at all. Earlier this week I bumped into the latter while taking the rubbish out, and held the door open as she moved some objects around. She suddenly started talking, telling me how she helps out the partially-sighted lady who lives along the corridor, and in the process indicated what I thought was her flat.

I don’t think she lives here at all. This would explain the strange looks. It’s only taken me 18 months to realise. Ahem.

After a few lovely dates, my ‘mysteriously mysterious companion’ and I have become a couple. I am a very happy and lucky person. Abi is all kinds of wonderful, and, amazingly, as big a fan of The West Wing as I am
*bounces*

Last night Tamsin Greig won a Laurence Olivier award for her performance in Much Ado About Nothing. I saw this last year and thought she was excellent - certainly the best Beatrice I’ve seen. I’m currently watching her in the second series of Green Wing, which is frequently causing late night fits of giggles and convincing me that Mark Heap is a comedy genius.

I was twenty minutes into the gorgeously dark and wonderful Mirrormask when it froze. My DVD player couldn’t get any further, but the computer coped and after much rearrangement of furniture so I could sit comfortably I was able to watch until fifteen minutes from the end before everything stopped. Damn, I’d been looking forward to that. It’s a rented title, though, so I can easily get a replacement. [Insert rant about people who don’t take care of DVDs properly]. Never mind, I’ll go finish my book instead.

According to my stats, somebody reached this site after searching for ‘catholicism causes atheism’. You’d think. From the Wikipedia article on transubstantiation:

A hat’s shape is not the hat itself, nor is its colour the hat, nor is its size, nor its softness to the touch, nor anything else about it perceptible to the senses. The hat itself (the “substance”) has the shape, the colour, the size, the softness and the other appearances, but is distinct from them. While the appearances, which are referred to by the philosophical term accidents, are perceptible to the senses, the substance is not.

When at his Last Supper Jesus said: “This is my body”, what he held in his hands had all the appearances of bread: these “accidents” remained unchanged. However, the Roman Catholic Church believes that, in accordance with what Jesus said, the underlying reality was changed: the “substance” of the bread was converted to that of his body. In other words, it actually was his body, while all the appearances open to the senses or to scientific investigation were still those of bread, exactly as before. The Church holds that the same change of the substance of the bread and of the wine occurs at the consecration of the Eucharist.

Not bonkers; deeply held religious belief.

Last night I was on the front row of a very small cinema to see Babel. Four loosely connected stories told of a husband trying to get help for his injured wife in Morocco, a deaf-mute Japanese girl looking for companionship, two isolated children given a gun by their father, and a nanny who takes her charges across the US/Mexico border for her son’s wedding. As you may guess from the title, all had the same theme of communication, with a minor in cultural differences. Mild spoilers ahead…

I thought the tales were well intercut, despite being temporally out of sync., and the film stayed interesting throughout. I often disagree with people over acting ability, but I found the characters convincing and the star performances of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett nicely understated¹.

I don’t know that there was any sociological or political point being made, it was more about contrasting the same experience in different worlds. The four tales were of communities within communities - a tour group, a deaf group, mountain-dwellers and two American children in Mexico - and each was a mixture of clash of cultures and the difficulty of engaging with anything outside your experience. Everybody had the same problem regarding communicating with the people around them, and dealt with it differently. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The children adapted quickly to the differences of Mexican culture, while the deaf girl struggled for attention, sometimes too hard, and Brad Pitt had to deal with a scared and reactionary tourist group on top of the far more important fate of his wife.

Admittedly I see this everywhere, but I thought there were echoes of humanism: if there was a point it was that people are all the same, and we can only progress by interacting with and compassionately considering those around us. For once I’m quite interested in reading the reviews, as I’d like to see what impression others had of the various resolutions.

I left the cinema thinking it was a little like Crash: not bad, but nothing I’d really want to see again. But the parallels between the stories have played on my mind, and new angles and perspective keep occurring to me. Definitely one I’d recommend.

1. having said that, it’s hard to think of a time those two haven’t been very good indeed, imho [↩]

It looks like Flickr has some major problem involving seemingly random images (occasionally) appearing in place of regular photos. I imagine the site will go down shortly - 240 comments in 40mins on this forum post - but if anybody meanwhile sees hardcore porn in my Flickr photos, it’s nothing to do with me. I assume they’ll have to rebuild the image caches, and I hope they do it quickly - there are some seriously angry people on the forums atm.

Update: It doesn’t seem likely they’ve been hacked - I’m guessing it’ll be massive corruption of the image database. I know Flickr don’t object to ‘adult’ images providing they’re kept private, but I’m amazed there’s so much of it stored on there.

Update 2: Heather and the Flickr staff are apparently on it, at 0600 in SF.

Update 3: People are mental. Sure it’s not ideal, but is it really the end of the world if a child accidentally sees a pornographic image? Do children actually get upset by that kind of thing? I think I’d just have been confused.

Update 4: All fixed.

I had a great Valentine’s Day. I spent a lovely evening with a delightful companion, and I miss her today. Must. Concentrate. On. Work. Elsewhere, Google had a clever logo, xkcd was sarcastic (but has been beautifully touching before, so I don’t think he means it) and T-Rex wasn’t around, but a couple of years ago was rightfully getting told off by Utahraptor.

While on the Valentine’s theme, I really like this:

I sometimes see these things and later find out it’s a terrible photographic cliché, but I don’t think that matters.