They smashed the passenger window to steal the suction cup that holds my satnav, so are likely dining out on the 50p they reaped from that little gem. The glove compartment was open and I assume they were looking for the satnav itself, which was in the house with me. I’d always assumed “don’t leave the holder visible” was rampant paranoia, but maybe not.

I was parked outside Abi’s house in Nottingham, and was about to head home when I spotted glass bloody everywhere. According to helpful neighbours it must have happened between 1000 and 1300. Unfortunately I’d just posted her keys back through the letterbox, so sat on her doorstep with my low-on-battery mobile phone and a notebook. I wasn’t sure of the procedure in such situations so phoned home for advice. Dad said to contact the police first, so I got the nearest station details from 118118 and phoned in an incident report. I didn’t think anything had been stolen, but later phoned back to report the suction cup thingy in case the insurance required it, at which point they upgraded me from ‘criminal damage’ to ‘theft’. Feel a bit guilty about that; not all that bothered about my gps holder.

I drove back to my parents’ in Solihull, feeling very very glad it was a warm summer day, and spent a couple of hours pulling glass out of crannies and waiting for the insurance company to phone back. Which never happened. Well, they were cheap.

I taped a large cardboard square over the gap and was happy with the results until my sister pointed out that driving home might be a little dangerous. The wing mirror, I asked? No, she said, not being able to see anything to your left. Fair point. I can’t be bothered faffing around and getting cold, so I’ll stay here tonight and chase up Swiftcover tomorrow.

Being male and 24, there’s not a chance the repair costs will exceed my excess. Anybody have any tips for cheap window replacement?

Happily, I’m not all that bothered. It’s a fuss, but these things happen to cars and I’ve never been terribly attached to them. I’d be annoyed if I’d left something in the car, but thankfully I didn’t. The only time I was bothered was directly after discovering it, when I worried they might still be around and about to mug me for the satnav swinging from my wrist. There were enough people about that this didn’t last long, though.

One weird thing: they must have seen the “Doctor Who - Voyage of the Damned” audiobook in the glove compartment, yet inexplicably it wasn’t taken. Odd.

The Enemies of Reason. Tonight. Channel 4. 8pm. Because you know you want to see astrologers trying to argue with Richard Dawkins.

My entry in Norm’s short short story contest is now online.

Is ok - I haven’t been taken out by hitbunnies. A cat did sneak into my parents’ house and try to eat my pet cockatiel, however. I rushed into the conservatory and it was sitting on the patio, giving me a look that said “Nerve. I has it”. Cats are clearly in league with bunnies. Doesn’t surprise me.

I have been listening to Russell Brand while drinking full-sugar coke. Communication of any form is possibly unwise.

Mr Brand is quite funny. I didn’t know. I’d never really seen or heard him until he compered at Live Earth, where he kept making me laugh. I think it’s his florid way with words. Abi and I giggled involuntarily after he described Spinal Tap as ‘meddling with guitars’, while the audience around us sat in stony silence. Strange. I put his Radio 2 show on this evening whilst continuing on The Computer Upgrades That Wouldn’t Die¹, and was immediately endeared to it when RB called his producer a ’solipsistic git’ for only bringing one tea-bag. He also interviewed a representative of Finland’s Moominworld theme park, calling her ‘mooninland lady’ for the entire conversation. Made me smile, anyway.

Never really saw many Moomins. Are they like bleached Smurfs? Not that I saw Smurfs either. Ok, this is now less blogging and more just putting off washing up.

1. sorry to Scrabulous partners - this has caused me to neglect you over the last couple of days [↩]

I was driving home at 0245, and something ran out in front of me. I barely saw it, let alone had time to brake. I knew it was small and not a person, but that was about it. I don’t think I’ve jumped so high at the wheel in my life. The mirror showed something lying in the road and I looped around, having horrible visions of killing a 10 year old’s pet cat. By the time I got back, about twenty seconds later, there was no sign of anything in the road. And then I spotted it.

At the side of the road was a bunny, sitting upright and giving me a look that said, unambiguously, ‘I will get you’. I’m worried I nearly killed a mafia-rabbit. If I don’t post tomorrow, put a warrant out for General Woundwort.

I thought my inbox was a bit quiet, and since midnight I’ve had 20 emails from (roughly) the last two days arrive in dribs and drabs. Apologies if I haven’t replied to you - hopefully I’ll have everything by morning.

First time I’ve had anything like this with Gmail, although I guess it could be my domain hosts.

• You will draw blood at some point. Usually when trying to remove stubborn cd-bay covers. Have plasters available. Try not to drip on the motherboard.
• Never do anything in a hurry. It won’t work.
• Do not leave USB card-readers plugged in. Windows will decide your 250gb hard drive should be designated H:, because it has no sense. You will only notice this after ninety minutes of configuration.
• Those drive-rails you have lying around won’t fit. Don’t even bother.
• Autopatcher is your friend.
• It is a little-known consequence of the second law of thermodynamics that is it impossible to get a floppy-drive cable’s orientation correct first time.
• Don’t screw the side of the case back on until you’re about to leave the building.
• Electrical components are more robust than you might think. Touching the sides of graphics card / ram probably won’t cause any problems. Keep yourself earthed, though.
• Do not install RealPlayer. Do not.
• People installing modern heatsinks do not appreciate how lucky they are. Tell them.
• The pause between ‘checking for connectivity’ and ‘your copy of Windows has been activated’ never stops being worrying, no matter how sure you are of legality.
• Install the dotnet framework now and get it over with.

I don’t know why this t-shirt is so funny. I can’t decide if it’s meant to be smutty but transcends it, or is actually completely innocent. Either way, I can’t stop giggling.

I like Helena Bonham Carter. I think she’s a good actress. Unfortunately, since Harry Potter 5 she is Bellatrix Lestrange, and that’s the end of it. I can’t see her without thinking ‘crazy wild-haired witch’. So it makes perfect sense that she’s married to Tim Burton.

Ms Carter (?) is apparently pregnant with their second child. Said she of the first:

“It’s like an explosion of heart, love, everything - and it’s extraordinary.

“It’s changed everything. Everybody told me it would, and, of course, I didn’t really listen, and there’s no real way of describing it.”

While her husband:

Burton, who was in the delivery room, recalled: “It was like my own private Alien movie.

“I’ll tell you, it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. It was amazing.”

Heh. That’d be me. I recently felt my sister’s baby kick. It was both completely explicable and bloody weird.

Incidentally, I’m campaigning for Guybrush if it’s a boy. A girl? Bellatrix. Who’s with me?

Apparently the French version of Deathly Hallows won’t be available until late October. It’s a shame the publishers couldn’t arrange simultaneous releases, but I’m prepared to accept that’s a massive undertaking. Nevertheless, it must suck to know half the world has already read a novel you’re eagerly awaiting. As a result, some fans have quickly released their own translations. Bloomsbury aren’t happy.

I appreciate that J.K. Rowling / Bloomsbury have the intellectual property rights to Harry Potter. I appreciate that, flawed as the copyright system may be, the underlying concept of creators’ rights is just. But when a kid loves a novel enough to translate it into another language, for no commercial gain, prosecuting him seems a bit much. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a realistic legal setup whereby the translations could be pulled but the kid not be guilty of anything. But it feels wrong.

Incidentally, anyone who’s finished the book might find this amusing. Don’t click if you haven’t.

I’d planned the post in my head. I was going to talk about Richard Dawkins’ new Channel 4 show: The Enemies of Reason. The Telegraph describes it with:

The 66-year-old scientist has investigated a range of gurus and therapists, including faith healers, psychic mediums, angel therapists, “aura photographers”, astrologers, Tarot card readers and water diviners, and concluded that Britain is gripped by “an epidemic of superstitious thinking”.

I was going to predict responses to the show. I reckoned there’d be a couple of types. Comment Is Free might have a few “science is a faith and doesn’t have all the answers and there’s actually something to all this stuff”, and the Guardian itself would have “yes of course it’s all nonsense, but don’t you see that it makes people happy and it’s a bit mean to attack it. Also Richard Dawkins is a fundamentalist and the show would be better presented by someone else”. But I wasn’t quick enough: Melanie Phillips got in there first¹.

I know she’s usually a bit, um, extreme, but this is just nuttery of the highest order. And it starts off so well:

In a TV programme to be shown later this month, Dawkins looks at a range of ludicrous therapies and gurus, including faith healers, psychic mediums, ‘angel therapists’, ‘aura photographers’, astrologers and others. Not surprisingly, he is horrified by such widespread irrationality, not to mention an exploitative industry that fleeces people while encouraging them to run away from reality.

He is right to be alarmed. What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has become mainstream. The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory for Alternative and Complementary Medicine promotes ‘dowsers’, ‘flower therapists’ and ‘crystal healers’.

She agrees! Wow. I was expecting the first type of response.

Disturbing indeed. But where Dawkins goes wrong[...]

Right, here we go.

But where Dawkins goes wrong is to assume this is all as irrational as believing in God. The truth is that it is the collapse of religious faith that has prompted the rise of such irrationality.

What? Seems like a non-sequitur, but whatever. The collapse of religious faith is to blame for the rise in irrationality? This seems immediately unlikely as much of the irrationality has been around for a long, long time. The murder of Abraham Lincoln prompted massive conspiracy theories. Astrology has been around for centuries. Alternative medicine could only really be seen for what it is once evidence-based medical science came into being, but would seem to be far more in response to that than anything religious. In Britain religious faith is down, but it’s had a massive resurgence in the US, which is also a major stronghold for all types of the irrationality being discussed. So I’m not sure the timeline really works. But let’s see how she backs this up…

We are living in a scientific, largely postreligious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense. It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped that ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.’ So it has proved. But how did it happen?

Proof by repeating yourself, apparently. All right then, how did it happen?

The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe — which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.

So, let’s get this straight. The whole world has stopped believing in god, apparently. Everybody sees religion and reason as opposites, so they’ve taken up irrational things in its stead, despite having rejected religion for rational reasons. I’m not really following this. But, anyway, it’s not even true because religion and reason aren’t opposites. We know this because it says so in a magic book, and we should believe anything written in magic books.

Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance.

I wonder if she’s been reading Alister McGrath - he’s always going on about ’significance’. Still not sure what her point is. Magic book says things happened. Dawkins says they probably didn’t. Melanie Phillips says they didn’t and are of course metaphors. So? Presumably she doesn’t deny all the miracles - virgin births, a child of a god, resurrection etc. etc.? If she denies it all, she has little in common with most Christians I’ve read. She’s using the initially-persuasive idea that the Bible can be interpreted in such a way as to make logical sense. Which still doesn’t mean it’s true, but would be a start. Sam Harris and others would argue that the Bible is such a mess of contradictions that there’s no way to interpret it without simply ignoring the parts you don’t like. But I digress.

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is ‘true for me’.

Knew we’d get to relativism eventually. Note that Dawkins isn’t mentioned here. Not one of the ‘New Atheists’/'Fundamentalist Atheists’/whatever has any truck with relativism. Nor do the vast majority of scientists, as far as I’m aware. I never understand how people so willing to read Christian theology can be so ignorant of secular philosophy, which pretty much rejects relativism outright. I also strongly doubt that any sizeable percentage of the population think there’s no such thing as objective truth (outside of postmodernism students, anyway), but then I can’t really back that up.

That is because our society won’t put up with anything which gets in the way of ‘what I want’. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.

This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.

What? Scientists now don’t believe in objective truth, so science doesn’t work any more? What? I’m not a sociologist, but I’m pretty sure all her statements about society are complete nonsense.

When science first developed in the West, it thought of itself merely as a tool to explore the natural world. It did not pour scorn upon religion; indeed, scientists were overwhelmingly religious believers (as many still are).

Oh, for crying out loud. Yes, Newton was religious. With the information he had, it made sense. Before the theory of evolution came along it was pretty damned hard to see any other explanation. But now, with the evidence we have, religious belief is undoubtedly irrational. If Newton were around today, it’s reasonable to think he wouldn’t be religious.

In modern times, however, science has given rise to ’scientism’, the belief that science can answer all the questions of human existence. This is not so. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe. Yet it now presumes to do so and as a result it has descended into irrationality.

No it doesn’t. That’s just not true. There are plenty of questions on which science hands over to philosophy. There are incredibly speculative ideas as to how the universe started, sure, but nobody with scientific credibility claims to have actually explained it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a question outside of science, though. We just don’t know. Presumably she doesn’t mean ‘how the universe started’, she means ‘why there’s something rather than nothing’, but the same applies.

The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution — which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection — also accounts for the origin of life itself.

No he doesn’t. This is also completely false. In fact he specifically says that evolution doesn’t account for that. Biochemistry is investigating that particular problem. It depends what she means by ‘the origin of life’, of course. Does she mean consciousness? Cells? Things that evolve?

There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question ‘Who created God?’, it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question ‘What created the bang?’ Indeed, if the origin of life were truly spontaneous, this would constitute what religious people would call a miracle. Accordingly, this claim in itself resembles not so much science as the superstition that Dawkins derides.

I’m not sure she isn’t confusing the origin of the universe with the origin of life, but whatever. It might be that the origin of life is extremely unlikely - indeed, it seems that it took millions and millions of years for (presumably) one chance event to occur - but that’s not ’spontaneous’ any more than the weather is ’spontaneous’.

Moreover, since science essentially takes us wherever the evidence leads, the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research — which have revealed the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life — have thrown into doubt the theory that life emerged spontaneously in a random universe.

Uh oh. She’s not going to…she wouldn’t, would she?

These findings have given rise to a school of scientists promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, which suggests that some force embodying purpose and foresight lay behind the origin of the universe.

She did. I don’t believe it.

While this theory is, of course, open to vigorous counter-argument, people such as Prof Dawkins and others have gone to great lengths to stop it being advanced at all, on the grounds that it denies scientific evidence such as the fossil record and is therefore worthless.

A bit, but not really. The problem with intelligent design is that it’s not science. It makes no predictions. It has no causal mechanisms. It hinges completely on the idea that if evolution is wrong, god must have done it. It occupies the infinite space of crap-I-made-up-ness. I could say that the process of evolution is actually controlled by an intelligent and incredibly tiny bumblebee named Gordon. It’s possible, but a) if evolutionary theory is wrong, it doesn’t mean Gordon is real, and b) until I can provide any kind of experiment that would provide a different outcome for evolution vs. Gordon’s Design, how can we know? There are an infinite number of things that could be true, and we believe what the evidence suggests and nothing more. The reason scientists and rational thinkers have tried to stop intelligent design progressing is that it has no substance.

Yet distinguished scientists have been hounded and their careers jeopardised for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it. Some 570 million years ago, in a period known as the Cambrian Explosion, most forms of complex animal life emerged seemingly without any evolutionary trail. These scientists argue that only ‘rational agents’ could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems.

Oh, man. There are any number of books which explain the Cambrian explosion. It’s actually really, really cool. I’m surprised she didn’t bring up punctuated equilibrium, but then she has just claimed all scientists are incapable of performing science. I like how she mentions the Cambrian problem, then tries to get out of it:

Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled — on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.

There is no such claim, so their argument is bogus. You don’t need to be a scientist to understand this point.

As a result of such arrogance, the West — the crucible of reason — is turning the clock back to a pre-modern age of obscurantism, dogma and secular witch-hunts. Far from upholding reason, science itself has become unreasonable.

And thus, the whole of science is now ‘unreasonable’ because of, even from her viewpoint, a spat limited to evolutionary theory.

So when Prof Dawkins fulminates against ‘new age’ irrationality, it is the image of pots and kettles that comes irresistibly to mind.

Aha! I knew it!

So: the world went all rational and rejected religion. Religion, though, is secretly rational, and people are therefore rejecting rationality. So they now believe in all sorts of crap. This breaks science, because all scientists no longer believe in objective truth and think they can explain everything without using any kind of logic. This results in heroic evolution-deniers being silenced by conspiracies. Yes, looking at this evidence it does seem like religious belief lends itself to rational thinking. Also, Richard Dawkins is wrong about everything, and the program would better be presented by someone else.

I know it was fish in a barrel. I know I probably shouldn’t pay attention to such nonsense. But it was an incredibly annoying fish.

1. I wrote all the below before showing the article to my girlfriend, who said ‘yeah, it’s Melanie Phillips’. Which is a fair point. But as it’s written I might as well publish [↩]

Not to detract from the point of his post, but Norm is currently the only person on the Internets to have used the word ‘wallonkies’. And I think we can agree it is an excellent word. I was going to call it a googlewhack, but that requires a two-word phrase.

His post only went up at 14:28. Google is fast. So I guess he won’t be the only result for long.

Kudos, hat-tips and smiley-faces to B4L, who says everything I was thinking about Facebook/BNP shenanigans, only in actual well-arranged words.

And while we’re talking Facebook, everybody should join the Bring Back Joosters group. Because they should. A world without Joosters is worse than one with and furthermore everyone knows it. My mouth is literally watering at the thought of Joosters. I was in the fan club, you know, although their website has now been squished, like a proverbial Jooster.

And while we’re talking about sweets, I would like to say that I am terribly conflicted over stories of cricketers and jelly-beans. On the one hand, just another example of cricketing muppetry. On the other, terribly endearing.

Abi and I headed to the Peak District this morning with a guide book and walking boots. We hadn’t anticipated the skyrocketing temperature, and the 4 miles felt more like 8, but it was fun times. I was amused by the car park’s ‘ice cream van’, which appeared to be a guy who owned a white van, some stickers, a tub of Tesco’s Finest, flakes and a scoop.

We walked past a house with a belltower. A belltower! This is my new ambition. Or at least it’s added to the Ambitious List of Things to Own. Which now looks like this:

• A cuckoo clock. A proper one made of wood. Mechanical rather than electronic.
• A ship in a bottle. A big one. Must be a real ship, not a yacht or the QE2 or something. With painted sides, mermaid prow and (if at all possible) little men engaged in piratical endeavours. Alternatively, Kandor.
• A working paper clock. This was on my list for a long time, and I now have one! It just doesn’t work yet.
• A bezoar, because a) they’re cool and b) they gross people out. Preferably a Gaimanesque version from a girl with Rapunzel syndrome.
• A Franklin-style armonica. I would obviously learn how to play it.
• A dog.
• A wunderkammer to contain said objects, except the dog because that’d be cruel and it might eat the bezoar. This can now be inside:
• A house with a belltower. Imagine! I could ring the bell to bring the cats in, or whenever there was a particularly great episode of Lost, or if the local mosque was being too loud. I could set up the alternative quartlerly bell-ringing chimes, with snappy melodies from popular showtunes, or Suzanne Vega records. 

Man, I want a belltower.

P.S. You have no idea how close Mork and Mindy: The Board Game came to being on this list. I may yet edit the post.

I don’t think my application for insanely cool dream job succeeded, which makes me sad even though it was a long shot, so I’ll apply to Jessops tomorrow. I could be setting myself up for a fall, but my hopes are high this time: I’m local, have worked in retail before - almost a year on a PC World customer services desk - ,¹ have a photography A-level and am about to start the degree. Hopefully less of a gamble than the editing job, anyway.

1. this comma is giving me issues [↩]