From a pamphlet delivered by Jehovah’s Witnesses:

The standard underlying circular logic, but isn’t it usually a bit more subtle? I don’t know how someone types the last three sentences without noticing a problem.

University finished early a couple of weeks ago, so I headed over to the Tate Modern for the Man Ray/Duchamp/Picabia exhibition. I’d forgotten about Shibboleth, the infamous crack in the floor, and it resonated with me far more than anything by the modernist masters. It’s surprisingly impressive, although the grandeur of the surrounding turbine hall probably helps, and I wandered around for quite a while, just taking in the atmosphere and people-watching. There’ve been accidents, so signs and attendants conspicuously warned against falling in. I took a few pictures, mainly because it was a good chance to test out Photoshop’s panorama features:

I didn’t do a particularly good job with this one - too much vertical movement - but while merging it this evening I spotted something:

The ghost of a soul lost down the crack? Or a bizarre artefact of Photoshop’s auto-blending? You decide.

The Daily Show skewering the response to Barack Obama’s recent ‘gaffe’:

Andrew’s uninformed opinion: Hillary Clinton is probably no different from most politicians in trying to take advantage of odd campaign moments like this. But Barack Obama gives every impression of just trying to talk sense without fighting dirty, and she comes off worse every time.

I saw Kottke’s link to an NYT a New Yorker article about a man trapped in an elevator, and it sounded pretty interesting. So I clicked through and started reading. The article began the story, then took a break to talk about the history of elevators. I only noticed the scroll bar after a few paragraphs; there was a long way to go - surely the entire page couldn’t be about elevators? A little part of my brain wondered how much I’d have to wade through to find out what happened to this unfortunate man.

Turns out, elevators = really interesting. Seriously.

Fortune carries a “probable stop” table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops. Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster. It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator.

The amount of personal space preferred in different cultures, the myth of the close-door button¹ and mimes all crop up. Worth a read.

If you make it 2/3 of the way without getting up for a drink, I’ll be impressed.

1. I mention this for one person in particular [↩]

I quite fancied watching Pushing Daisies, but didn’t get around to recording it¹. Just as well:

The second episode of Anna Friel’s hit US drama Pushing Daisies will not be screened by ITV, it has emerged.

The UK broadcaster bought the rights to the entire nine-part series, but only has space in its schedule to show eight programmes before Euro 2008 begins.

It’s ok, they say dropping episode 2 won’t spoil the storyline. Sounds likely.

The broadcaster blamed the mix-up on the US writers’ strike, which meant only nine episodes of Pushing Daisies were made.

Um. What.

However, ITV said the programme would “be shown at some point because the series will be repeated”.

Ah, that’s all right then.

1. edit: god, how old do I sound? If only there were some internet-based way of watching the show. [↩]

When I’m working at home I usually have Radio 2 on in the background. I like the music - contrary to its old-fashioned image, they seem to play a good range of modern stuff, but without the genres that aren’t particularly to my taste - and the presenters. It’s certainly light years ahead of any local station. But I’m increasingly irritated by the public interaction, particularly in the mornings.

Terry Wogan’s show is heavily based on listener comments, but what’s meant to be pithy and/or insightful is increasingly just ignorant. I don’t know whether it’s always been like this, or if they’re filtering differently, but it seems far more cynical and authoritative than before, and certainly isn’t intended to be funny. Global warming features prominently, and is genuinely spoken about as just another lie; this is backed up by definitive statements based on the movements of birds in gardens, the everpresent fallacy that scientists are always changing their mind, or - my particular favourite - opinions apparently based entirely on the meaning of the words ‘global’ and ‘warming’. Health advice and the general awfulness of any public service / American take up the rest of the conversation. It’s no longer wry, it’s just a sad and unnecessary affirmation of the worst old-person stereotypes.

I get bored of the barstool cynicism, but a moment this morning particularly bothered me. The hourly news had relayed the awful story of Mark Speight, reporting how he’d been found dead at a London railway station. Having listened to this news of a guy whose life was so dreadful he felt the only way out was to kill himself, somebody wrote in to point out that Britain doesn’t have railway stations, it has train stations¹².

I guess that’s a way of avoiding dealing with the real world, and I’m not particularly surprised somebody felt strongly enough to write in with such a thing. But why read it out? What does that add to anything?

Still not defecting to Radio 4, though. I can at least feel happy singing along to the inter-snark songs on Radio 2 - I don’t think I could cope with the depression of Radio 4 at that time of the morning.

1. incidentally - WTF? I’ve never heard this before [↩]
2. edit: ok, so I realised what this was all about as I was falling asleep last night. Got sidetracked by the nationalistic bit, but I guess it’s pedantry over ‘train’ and ‘railway’. Still stupid [↩]

Has Gordon Brown gone off the deep end, or what?

Britain is to hold an Armed Forces Day to allow the public to show their support and respect for the military, Gordon Brown has suggested.

In a letter seen by the Sunday Telegraph, the prime minister signals that plans are being drawn up for “a special day of celebration”.

Yes, because what we all need is to worship the military a bit more. It’s difficult to discuss this without giving the wrong impression, but what the hell, I’m having a crappy day so let’s try anyway.

This isn’t about showing ’support and respect for the military’, it’s about encouraging mindless patriotism.

For all that people in the military are brave, their job is not to think about what they’re doing. Their job is to follow orders. And that’s fine - the world is such that this is necessary. But this is only applicable within military institutions. The absurd hand gestures, individuality-quashing routines, vilification of ‘cowardice’ and the unquestioning deference to authority are not virtuous - in any non-military arena they’d be revolting. It’s a crappy way to behave, and a crappy way to think. But if you want people to follow orders unquestioningly, that’s what you have to do. It’s a necessary evil, I’m bloody glad there are people willing to do it, and I don’t judge anyone who chooses to, but don’t make me pretend the military outlook is a great thing.

Again, before people start yelling: I am not criticising any individuals. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing this, as long as it’s a free choice to enlist. But I do have a problem with the idea that being brave enough to put yourself in harm’s way means I have to pretend all the above isn’t true, or couch any negative statements into abstraction by surrounding them in tropes emphasising how great it all is. Don’t tell me I have to treat ‘the military’ like gods among men, who’ve earned the right to do whatever they want. They’re not. I won’t. I will be exactly as polite to someone in the military as I am to anyone else. This is not ‘unpatriotic’, nor do I intend any insult - it’s about trying to get the correct perspective.

‘Respect’ does not extend to the entire person. I can ‘respect’ someone’s abilities while thinking they’re cretinous in other ways. Newton was a genius, but a total dick. Being brave enough to put yourself into battle is without doubt brave and impressive, but not the be-all and end-all. Social workers, abuse counsellors and parole officers all do a job I couldn’t perform in a million years, and put their mental health on the line every day. This isn’t to suggest that there’s a hierarchy, or that putting yourself in harm’s way is somehow less important than people suggest, just that it’s one of many things worthy of ‘respect’.

But my particular viewpoint obviously isn’t the cultural reality. In practice it’s black and white - not thinking the military is the epitome of greatness apparently means you want them all to die. Every politician competes over whose chest can swell the most while smacking down on anybody who dares say the slightest negative thing. Remembrance Sunday is a bizarre dichotomy: remember those who have died, and say it should never have happened, but remember that dying for one’s country is the most noble, admirable thing one can do, and would that we were all so brave. But there’s no duty to be willing to die for ‘your’ country. If people want to, sure, but the heavily promoted idea of patriotic sacrifice is made up so that people will.

And that’s why ‘armed forces day’ is so insidious. We’re meant to worship ‘the military’, and we’re meant to see that the people society demands we unflinchingly respect do whatever their country tells them, and think this is in some way virtuous. But it’s not - following orders is their job, ours is to make damn sure the orders being given are correct. Being impressed that people are brave enough to go into battle does not mean the reasons they’re told to do so make any sense, and ‘armed forces days’ are an exercise in blurring this boundary.

I’m not a pacifist, nor anti-government. This post is isn’t anti-Iraq or anti-soldier, nor am I suggesting the government is actively setting out to be manipulative. On the contrary, I suspect they genuinely think it’s a good idea - maybe they think it’ll encourage a sense of ‘Britishness’, or whatever. But this feels too much like taking understandable emotions and using them to quell critical thinking. We can admire people in the military, in specific ways, without having to worship them.

I’m a bit worried people might be terribly insulted by this, but I’ve hopefully been clear that I don’t intend to criticise anyone in the military, just that the emotion surrounding it shouldn’t prohibit discussion…If anyone’s offended, please do tell me why.

I don’t recognise the reference on xkcd’s top half, but the second part is lovely.

It’s fairly well-established that the average person will pay more attention to things they agree with. It’s therefore no surprise that I listened to Philosophy Bites’ discussion on the ‘definition of art’ three times over. The 12-minute podcast asks how the word ‘art’ has been defined throughout history, and doesn’t come to any kind of resolution. In fact, it effectively gives up, calling on philosophers to get more involved in the discussion.

Every suggested definition was, to my mind, comprehensively refuted. Is ‘art’ something we find beautiful? No: much of ‘modernism’ - Duchamp’s urinal, say - couldn’t be called ‘beautiful’. Is it whatever the ‘art world’ calls ‘art’? Maybe, but how do you define the ‘art world’? Even if you come up with such a definition, there must always be a reason for something to be considered ‘art’, so you hit the same old problem. Even if there’s no specific reason that can be applied to all of ‘art’, something has to be arbitrary, be it the ‘art object’ or the reason it’s an ‘art object’. Stalemate.

Isn’t it possible that ‘art’ is a meaningless term? Like trying to define the offspring of a monkey and a spanner - you can play word games forever, but it’s actually an invalid concept. I guess I don’t see what it is that people are trying to explain; where does the concept come from? Is it something they think exists because of Clive Bell’s ‘aesthetic sense’? I suppose I lean towards having a thousand definitions of things that actually exist: ‘things that give people pleasure’, ‘things an individual finds beautiful’, ‘things that fit certain criteria within certain frameworks’ etc.. Trying to amalgamate these into a coherent whole makes no sense to me.

But I can’t see why Philosophy Bites wouldn’t have raised this as a possibility, if it was worth considering. Am I missing something basic and obvious?

This won’t mean anything if you haven’t seen Sarah Silverman’s video, but I was laughing for a long, long time:

Flickr launched their new video functionality last night, and it’s nicely implemented. They’re calling videos ‘long photos’, which is a decent way of approaching it. There’s a 90-second limit, only Pro members can upload, and they integrate into photostreams just like any other picture. It’s fairly snappy (although the FAQ says some older computers may struggle, in which case ‘just go to Best Buy dude’) and nothing plays automatically if you don’t want it to. Their charming FAQ explains the ins and outs.

Digital SLRs can’t record videos, so the only footage I have comes from my old Canon G3 - lost/stolen/beamed-up in a field in 2004. I had a dig through and found a surprising number of clips, but they’re almost all of my ex-girlfriend and I’ve no desire to re-visit them. Maybe in a decade or so. I did find this, though, taken on Prague’s Charles Bridge in 2003:

The upload process is a breeze compared to the morass of YouTube, and the - admittedly short - clip processed in only a few seconds. I tagged / geotagged it just like any regular photo, and it slotted into my photostream without issue. Neat, especially as their servers must be getting hammered about now.

I don’t envy the job of policing video uploads, but I’m impressed with the implementation. It’s obviously early days, but video fits into Flickr better than I expected. Their blog has a few decent examples. I can’t see me using this feature much, at least until I get a cameraphone with better video quality, but I’ll be interested to see where people take it.

As predicted, Knut the Polar Bear is sinking further into depravity:

Germany’s celebrity polar bear Knut has triggered a new controversy by fishing out 10 live carp from his moat and killing them in front of visitors.

Knut has a moat.

Critics say Berlin Zoo should not have put live fish inside Knut’s enclosure. But German media report that the carp were put there to eat up algae.

Who knew polar bears like fish?

The Frankfurter Allgemeine news website reports that Knut “senselessly murdered the carp”, fishing them out, playing with them and then leaving the remains.

Last week I dropped a potato and Megan ate it. She clearly has no respect for other people’s property, and it’s a slippery slope. I once saw a dog chasing a squirrel.

An Evening With James Randi and Friends is “an evening of discussion about science, pseudoscience, scepticism and the paranormal” on 19th April in London. Guests are:

• James ‘The Amazing’ Randi
• Ben Goldacre
• Richard Wiseman
• Simon Singh
• Susan Blackmore
• Chris French

Just a few of my intellectual idols, then. Tickets £11 / £5.50 concessions. I’ll be there. Via bagrec.

I’ve recently had a few spells of thinking everything’s crap. The news is generally godawful (tho no more than normal, really), work’s threatening to get on top of me, and I’m operating a Just In Time policy on keeping my life in order. Thankfully I come out of it quite quickly - I have a pretty cushy existence, after all - but things like this speed up the process.

Improv Everywhere turned a local kid’s baseball game into an all-star extravaganza, complete with manic fans, programmes and a few large-scale surprises. Lovely stuff; made me teary-eyed at times. Check out the comment troll who thinks it sucks because being nice to people becomes ’saccharine’. Probably one of those cretins who screams ’sentimental’ the moment anything nice happens in a film, because they’d hate anyone to think they were affected by anything. Ugh.

See, there was no need to pay attention to that guy. Must get a grip.

An interesting article on deliberately saying the wrong words. I’ve heard some people do it in print as well. Freaks.