I’m a bit worried about 2009. Firstly, because even before the world fell into recession I was barely making ends meet. If everything dries up in the next six months I’m in trouble, and I really need to find new sources of income. So that’s one problem.

But I’m also getting increasingly antsy. I need to do something. I just graze on other people’s content, and nothing I do helps the world in any way. I’m 25, which - despite the never-ending bleating I hear at parties¹ - is obviously far from old. But it’s a good, commitment-free age to be doing things, and atm I’m wasting it.

I have a nurse friend who’s volunteering on a ship in Peru this summer - they sail down the Amazon, providing medical treatment to remote communities. This is Properly Worthy. Me, I do nothing. I don’t contribute anything to the skeptical community other than occasional sarcastic fiskings², I don’t volunteer locally, and my BHA membership is just that. I suck.

This has been building up for a while, but sitting in art theory lectures, discussing how Oyster Cards have “produced a whole new gesture”, brought them properly to the surface. I’ve got to start contributing or I’ll go nuts.

So, resolution for 2009: Fucking Do Something.

1. if they were joking I wouldn’t mind, but people srsly lamenting their lost youth at 25 drives me mental [↩]
2. what happened to this word? [↩]

2008. Pleh. In my head it went: uni, The Summer of Teenage Angst, uni. But looking over my archives it seems a bit more did go on. Particularly memorable bits:

• Watching Katie Melua on a lovely summer’s evening in Devon.
• Playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
• Splitting up with Abi.
• Losing my regular dance partner, but meeting another (who’s rather better than me).
• Six weeks of ceroc dancing, despite my inability to talk like a normal person.
• Running a dance evening, which scared the hell out of me.
• Mingling with people way out of my league at a Neil Gaiman signing.
• Trying to revamp myself, a bit (as a result of a naive romantic EPIC FAIL).
• Selling my first photo.
• Completing my Year 25 Project (then crashing out of Year 26).
• Seeing James Randi live in London.
• Seeing a whole brigade of humanist awesomeacity at the Bloomsbury.
• Watching Doctor Who, Studio 60, Strictly, 30 Rock and Battlestar Galactica, as well as WALL-E, Hancock, The Dark Knight, and Juno.
• Staying up all night to watch the US election.
• Reading Atul Gawande’s two fantastic books on medicine, which I never got around to reviewing.
• …and I still think Where the Hell is Matt is the best viral video of the year.

Most of which is quite good, really. 2008 got a solid ‘meh’ before I started typing this, but I’ve now upgraded it to ‘ok’. Lots of room for improvement, though.

Bring on 2009. It’s a much better number than 2008. 2008 is numerologically pants.

Help me out here. I can’t afford an iPhone, but - unsurprisingly - I really really want one. So I’m rationalising my way around the expense. Here’s what I have so far:

1. My iPod is 3.5yrs old and keeps freezing. I’ll need a new one soonish, and they’re very expensive. An iPhone would solve this issue.
2. iPhones are only available on O2. O2 offer £7.34/month broadband to their customers. That’s £10 less than my current home broadband. Now, as my current mobile phone contract is £20/month, and an iPhone is £30/month, that means it’s paid for already. Sorted.
3. Quidco will pay me £45 if I get my contract through them.
4. An iPhone would be lighter than my current phone + iPod combo, and would give me more jacket space.
5. The lighter, thinner iPhone would improve the line of my coat, thereby making me more attractive to women.

I think we can all agree #5 is the best rationalisation ever. You can’t say I’m not trying.

I was groggy on Christmas morning. I wasn’t in bed till late, then I must have been yanked out of R.E.M. sleep, or something, as everything pre-breakfast is a bit of a blur. I unwrapped a couple of presents, then began my ascent of the Glasgow Coma Scale before reaching full consciousness sometime after 1000.

I mention this because one of the presents was put underneath a calendar, and I completely forgot about it. Hence my delayed excitement at remembering, this evening, that I HAS IT.

The I Can Has Cheezburger book - it is mine!

Srsly, it is a thing of beauty. I shall carry it with me everywhere to cheer up the glum and the snippy.

In the last few days I’ve heard a few rants over whether wearing a hat will keep your head warm. Honest. I hardly believe it either.

You see, the BBC posted a list of winter myths, and one of them was apparently ’you don’t need to wear a hat to keep warm’. This has been lauded as a clear example of how scientists are a) stupid and b) change their minds every five minutes.

Well, guess what? Ranty people are wrong. The list of myths came from the British Medical Journal, and here’s how they describe it:

As temperatures drop, hats and caps flourish. Even the US Army Field manual for survival recommends covering your head in cold weather because “40 to 45 percent of body heat” is lost through the head.¹⁹ If this were true, humans would be just as cold if they went without trousers as if they went without a hat.But patently this is just not the case.

This myth probably originated with an old military study in which scientists put subjects in arctic survival suits (but no hats) and measured their heat loss in extremely cold temperatures.²⁰ Because it was the only part of the subjects’ bodies that was exposed to the cold, they lost the most heat through theirheads. Experts say, however, that had this experiment been performed with subjects wearing only swimsuits, they would not have lost more than 10% of their body heat through their heads.²⁰ A more recent study confirms that there is nothing special about the head and heat loss.²¹ Any uncovered part of the body loses heat and will reduce the core body temperature proportionally. So,if it is cold outside, you should protect your body. But whether you want to keep your head covered or not is up to you.

They’re busting the myth that 40-45% of body heat is lost through the head. That’s it. That’s all. To be concise:

• Your head loses heat at the same rate as the rest of you.
• If your head is the only thing exposed, you’ll lose most heat from it.

Nothing about whether you should or shouldn’t wear a hat. Is this clear from the above? Well, yes. Not if you decide you know what it says before you read it, though.

My four missing Etsy parcels didn’t show up. I was annoyed, and worried they might have been stolen from the communal post-table. Once, though, Postie left a too-big-for-letterbox package with Colin The Butcher, and didn’t leave a note. So I nonchalantly ambled into said shop, trying not to look too hopeful. Colin looked up, said ‘ah’, disappeared into the back, and returned with a stack of five padded envelopes. He apologised for not delivering them, because, you know, butchers don’t have much else to do on Christmas Eve. I explained his new status as The Man. He saved Christmas. I bought some ham.

Hope everyone’s had a merry merry Christmas so far. I have a lovely Annie Liebovitz book to read, amongst various other entertainments, and am a happy bunny.

Also, here is a useful family tree explaining cousins, x-th cousins, cousins once removed etc.. It was necessary this afternoon.

In case you were wondering…

Click through for more details. Kudos and kisses to anyone who can identify the black/white spotlight-thingy in the top left - I’m baffled.

Last year I didn’t finish present wrapping / delivering until 9pm on Christmas Eve, and I was grumpy about it. I used to quite enjoy the thrill of doing everything last minute, but then it just became annoying. It meant I had three hours to properly relax, which wasn’t enough (Christmas Day itself is lovely, but couldn’t be described as relaxing ).

I’ve done a bit better this year. Most presents have already been delivered, but I’m waiting on four parcels which were posted last Thursday (from different places). Three others, posted the same day, arrived on Monday. I know the Christmas post is slow, but I’m a bit worried now. If they don’t arrive I can make do, but it’ll be a disappointment. Still, not much I can do other than wait and hope…

I’ll move in with my parents for a few days, as it’s no fun waking up on Christmas day on your own. Also they have lots of chocolate. Hopefully I’ll be ready a bit earlier, too.

Six weeks ago I was given a broad photo project. The possible themes were ’still life’, ‘a journey’ or ‘a document’, which meant I could shoehorn in anything I wanted; I just needed to come up with something interesting.

I had an idea. It only required dry ice, a prism, fifty light bulbs, and access to a physics lab. So one Saturday morning I was figuring all this out, and at the same time (in an uncharacteristic fit of forward planning) looking for decent non-religious Christmas cards. I idly tweeted about the dearth of good cards from the BHA/NSS, and Andrew of Apathy Sketchpad replied with a comment about making your own. Well, that did it. I couldn’t let the opportunity pass, so I changed my entire project in an afternoon¹.

So I wanted to produce images for non-religious Christmas cards. Not in an avowedly there-is-no-god way - no need to be a jerk about it - but (somehow) pro-science and secular wonder. My lofty dream result was images that evoked a sense of awe. Not at the aesthetics or my photographic skill or anything², but at the facets of nature they represented. They’d have a festive air, but be about reality and the joys of discovery. I also wanted them to work as images on their own, but with a ’something else is going on here’ for anyone interested. If that makes sense.

That’s what I wrote in my project proposal, anyway. I figured this might be pretty difficult in practice, but really I just wanted to produce some cool science-y Christmas cards that I could actually send out. The only catch was the project needed to be on film, so I couldn’t use Photoshop - everything had to be done in-camera.

Anyway, I had good fun with this project, and did eventually produce some actual cards (until WH Smiths ran out of photo-card printing packs, anyway). If anyone’s interested, here are the final results (the captions were printed on the back of the cards):

The Candle Aquatic
(no Photoshop involved)
http://tinyurl.com/6owruo

Fibonacci Cones
Pine cones grow to the Fibonacci golden spiral:
http://tinyurl.com/6qk3kc

Oh say can you C
(yes, if you know one Smartie = 15mm)
http://tinyurl.com/5pqyff

Bauble Fractals
http://tinyurl.com/69n2hu

More info after the break, for anyone interested.

Continue reading ‘Uni project: science-y Christmas cards’

1. my workbook is…messy [↩]
2. as if [↩]

Here’s a charming festive message from that glorious leader of mankind, the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

What. A. Dickhead.

He wraps up his bigotry in transparent nonsense about gender theory, and blurring the lines between male and female leading to the end of the human race, whatever that means. As if. What he really means, of course, is ‘ewww I don’t like it don’t make me think about it gross’.

This is the problem with getting your morality from the millennia-old demented ramblings. You can’t be trusted. You get ‘don’t kill people’ and ‘be nice to your neighbour’, which is lovely, but at exactly the same level of importance are ‘don’t wear hats on a Thursday’, ‘budgies are unclean’ and ‘eeewww ickky gay stuff it should be banned’. And (in some religions) most people ignore all the latter, because it’s transparently insane, but the leaders can’t, so you get this kind of bigotry splashed all over the media when it should be in the gutter where it belongs.

It’s 2009 in a week. That’s THE FUTURE. In the future, nobody pays attention to pathetic homophobic dickheads.

w00t! I do enjoy the Strictly final. I always end up emotionally investing in one of the couples, and have to hide behind a cushion during their routines. And don’t even mention the final - endless - ‘moment of truth’. My favourite has always won, but it’s a bit more open tonight. My bias going into the show is Lisa, but she’s probably the underdog against Rachel…I’ll try to judge by the dancing alone, though. That said, Lisa’s showdance is apparently to I Would Do Anything For Love, and you know me and power ballads…

Halfway point: ZOMG. My girl pulled it out of the bag - 80/80! But I’m worried. The public’s votes last week obviously put Tom at the top and Lisa at the bottom…if they do the same this week she’s out. Which would be awful, as she got a perfect score. Everyone vote Lisa!

End of show: Hmph. The public votes were a reversal of the judges’, so Lisa went out first. Then came the two big showdances. Tom’s was undeniably better than Rachel’s, but I’m not a fan of the smarmy Fred Astaire swingy arms / silly expressions / style - it’s forced and annoying. That’s just me, though, and it certainly seems to be the minority opinion. To be fair, that’s been Tom’s schtick the whole way through, and if that floats your boat I’m sure it was lovely. So the result was a bit flat for me, but then I’ve had five years of the ‘correct’ result, so it had to happen sometime

This evening I headed to the Bloomsbury Theatre for Robin Ince’s Eight Lessons and Carols for Godless People. He arranged it in response to incessantly mental claims of an atheist ‘war on Christmas’, and his impressive lineup of comedians and musicians provided three hours of secular entertainment. It was excellent. Really, really great, and surprisingly life-affirming.

I have to spend all tomorrow writing and reading logical-fallacy-filled art theories in the uni library, so I’ll write up my thoughts on tonight while they’re still fresh. Sorry if it’s not terribly coherent.

The evening was bookended by Carl Sagan, and (half) the audience laughed at an uncertainty principle joke. It was obviously not your usual event, and, for me, it was like going home. I just felt comfortable. This was mainly due to the makeup of the audience, who were probably all secular freethinkers. This was fantastic, as lots could go unsaid. There were, as you’d expect, plenty of cracks about religion, but the type of audience meant there was no need for ‘of course, we don’t actually think all Christians are morons, and that was a bit of hyperbole for comic effect, and we understand the social and psychological pressures that lead people to have a deep attachment to their religious faith, although we don’t think that’s an excuse etc. etc.’. Instead you could just say ‘anyone who thinks God tinkers with financial matters but ignores the Rwandan genocide is clearly fucking crazy’. Because everyone understood.

At the risk of sounding like an awful snob, the whole thing was sophisticated. Not in an aren’t-we-clever way, just that nobody pandered or was condescending. It was just…mature. And rational. And elitist, in that the people on stage often knew a lot, and weren’t afraid to show it. Great stuff.

Robin Ince compered the evening, and made me laugh a lot. His contempt for Stephen Green (the despicable homophobic head of Christian Voice) was palpable, although sadly the man himself didn’t turn up.

Richard Dawkins read his gerin oil essay, which works surprisingly well out-loud, as well as an extract from Unweaving the Rainbow. I assumed he’d get the loudest round of applause of the night, but that wasn’t actually the case…

Ricky Gervais was as good as you’d hope, and is apparently touring with his long-promised ‘Science’ show next year. I’ll have to get tickets for that.

Stewart Lee was very impressive, as you’d expect from the writer of Jerry Springer: The Opera. I mentioned recently that he tries to make his comedy situational, rather than language-based, and that was certainly the style of this evening. His comedy partner Richard Herring was a highlight of the second half of the show, and his image of heaven as full of your parental ejaculate’s 600 million losing sperm, to whom you have to justify your life, is surprisingly evocative.

Chris Addison is apparently in a BBC sitcom called Lab Rats, which I’ll certainly be checking out. His manic performance was great in that he explained lots about the development of language, which you wouldn’t think is an inherently funny topic, but he proved otherwise. His line about a remote tribe that communicates with clicks and whistles always being surrounded by unexpected horses reduced me to a giggling wreck. I think I remember him from HIGNFY, now I think about it.

I’ll have to investigate Natalie Haynes, too, as her re-telling of a radio debate with a grumpy my-baby-trumps-all mother was a thing of beauty.

Ben Goldacre is a force to be reckoned with. He speaks as well as he writes, which if you’ve read his articles¹ you’ll know is very well indeed. His was the only not-so-cheerful talk, but his savaging of the woo community’s response to AIDS denialism was a thing to behold. It wasn’t a direct call to action, but it was lucid, logical, and angry. I suspect everyone in the room found themselves wanting to get involved in that particular battle. I certainly felt guilty that I haven’t tried to do more, and tried (vainly, so far) to think of ways my photographic or computing skills could help. I’m sure he wouldn’t be keen if I said he was a hero, but he’s increasingly a superstar of the skeptical community, as he a) knows his stuff b) does something about it. All while working as a doctor.

But the unexpected highlight of the evening was a final nine-minute beat poem (forgive me if the terminology is wrong) by someone whose name I can’t remember, and doesn’t seem to be written down anywhere. He was barefoot and awesome in his reading of a poem about battling a dinner party woo-meister. The rhymes were unforced, the story witty, the theme uplifting and the musical timing to his backing track impeccable. I must find more of this guy’s work, as I liked everything about it. If only I knew his name. I think he got the loudest applause of the night, and deservedly so.

I don’t have a list of the performers, so I’m undoubtedly forgetting and omitting some excellent people. I’ll probably remember them all while trying to get to sleep. Everybody was entertaining, although I admit one or two of the musical acts passed me by, and at least once I felt like I was missing something big - Peter Buckley Hill? But that’s just personal taste, and is only a minor quibble.

Robin Ince says he hopes to produce similar shows year-round. I think he called it a ‘rationality ramadan’. If they’re as optimistic, entertaining and balls-out-standing-up-for-what-we-believe-in as this one, sign me up. What a wonderful thing.

1. or book, which I recommend unreservedly and shamefully haven’t written up on here yet [↩]

I’m off to 8 Lessons and Carols for Godless People tonight. I’ve been looking forward to it for months.

Organised by [Ricky Gervais'] touring sidekick Robin Ince, the line-up includes both men, along with Chris Addison, Phill Jupitus, Stewart Lee, Dara O’Briain and Mark Thomas. The bill is bolstered by leading lights from the world of science - including arch atheist Richard Dawkins - and music from, among others, Jarvis Cocker.

“I want these evenings to be like fractured versions of the Royal Institution Christmas lectures,” says Ince, “fun, entertaining and informative.”

His motivation is as benign as it is pro-rationalist. “I wanted to do events around Christmas for people who don’t have any belief, to show that they’re not bitter, Scrooge-like characters. Everyone is going to be approaching the evening from a passionate scientific perspective rather than from a bashing-the-Bible slant.”

 The Telegraph, being the Telegraph, felt it necessary to include a bit of muppetry:

There will even be carol-singing, he promises. “Who doesn’t like singing a carol? I mean, if you sing Robbie Williams’s Angels you don’t have to believe in angels, do you? Most singers sing lots of songs that have no truth in them whatsoever.” It’s that kind of casually derogatory remark that may do much to stir the antipathy of those with religious beliefs.

My heart bleeds. Seriously, outside of Stephen Green and the various Archbishops, are any Christians that sensitive?

But by holding this rationalist jamboree so close to Christmas, are they not guilty of provocation?

Hmmm, good point. It is a bit militant of us, holding a stage show and all. I wouldn’t want to provoke the Church of England’s uncontrollable urge to feel victimised.

(wait, can you use ‘bonanza’ like that? I’m confused. Oh, never mind.)

a) astonishingly
b) absurdly
c) its majesty has crashed my database of superlatives

Answers on a postcard.

Is it far too big for my flat? Most definitely. But it makes up for it with true awesomeitudemacity. Note the slight back-right leaning. This is a deliberate homage to the pagan tradition of, erm, not making stuff stand up straight.

There’s something missing, though…something…it’s like there’s too much space underneath…can’t put my finger on it…

Yesterday’s One Show discussed Wallace and Gromit, and a message in the end credits promised a festive W&G video for anyone who texted in. It cost 10p.

I quite like W&G, so I duly sent a message. Now, The One Show finishes at 1930, and at 1931 - according to my phone - I got a text saying my request had been received. At 2144 the video itself came through. I watched it. It was short, but funny.

24 hours later and I’ve just received another text from the BBC. They’re very sorry for the delay I experienced in receiving my video. They’ve let me know two separate ways to submit feedback.

FFS, BBC! You don’t have to apologise for every little thing. You’re trying to send a 125k video-MMS to thousands of people simultaneously - I’m impressed you managed it in two hours, frankly, and anybody with half a brain can appreciate that it might be technically challenging. And those with less - The Daily Mail and the Conservative Party - are always going to hate you. It’s what they do. Look at the evidence: you’re already the best television network in history; you already produce content that’s the envy of the entire world; you’ve already spent the last three months caving to their every desire. None of it’s helped. What are you expecting to happen?

Look, here’s why I care. I’m very interested in the skeptical community, who are in turn pretty interested in the BBC. I recently explained to a friend that while the skeptical community goes nuts when the BBC reports uncritically on woo¹, nobody cares much when it’s other channels. C4, maybe, but ITV or Sky? As if. Nobody expects high standards from them. But when the BBC get something wrong we anticipate it being fixed. How is this different from the above? Because when we complain, we think you will understand the complaint. We think that because you’re only beholden to high standards, rather than shareholders or advertisers, you’ll actually think things through and assess complaints for their merit. This is entirely different from rolling over because somebody’s not happy. That’s what everyone else does, because they suck. That’s not the BBC way.

If, say, Panorama produce a ridiculous, scare-mongering piece on the dangers of wifi, we’ll complain about it. We then expect you to independently research the dangers of wifi, in order to find out who’s correct. We like this, because it works both ways: when you produce a sane, rational piece on the dangers of wifi and the woo community go mental, you’ll assess their complaints logically too. And they’ll be wrong, and we’ll be right. And you’ll figure this out for yourself, because you’re the BBC and that’s what you do. And of course it can’t work all the time, but at least you try.

That’s just one of the reasons the BBC is so important. So please stand up for yourself, and stop bloody apologising. It’s embarrassing.

1. incidentally, I prefer ‘woo’ to ‘pseudoscience’, because last month I overheard someone explain applied kinesiology with ‘there’s no evidence for it, so it’s only a pseudo science’. Which actually caused me to pull a muscle in my brain [↩]