I am properly weird this week. Two extremes:

Yesterday I went into H&M and failed to find the Menswear department. Everything else had a sign, but Menswear? Nope. It was probably upstairs, but there was a big Womenswear sign pointing in that direction, and the assistants seemed to be watching, and I felt conspicuous and silly, so left. 

Then this evening I went to my sixth and final week of Ceroc dancing. It works on a six-week loop, so I knew that by the end of today I’d have learnt all the beginners’ steps. I’ve been determined to complete the six weeks, but by today my enthusiasm was waning. I can’t continue the classes beyond this week, plus it’s not like I know anyone else who can dance ceroc anyway. Learning had been fun, but it couldn’t go anywhere. I still wanted to complete my goal, but I figured I’d leave after the initial lessons. I hadn’t been practicing enough to hold my own during the freestyle practice sessions, and was fed up of sitting at the edge feeling like a tit.

Except I stayed the entire evening - which I’ve never done before - and danced with half the women in the room. Including really good people - I even asked Teacher Lady. I have no idea how this happened. Well, it was at least partly to do with a very nice lady called Karen telling me off and dragging me onto the dancefloor. But I hung about after that, inexplicably full of confidence, and had a great time. This is as far from H&M Andrew as you can get.

I’m worried about social awkwardness this weekend, and now I have no idea what to expect. I feel like S4 West Wing staffers, wondering which President Bartlet is going to turn up at the debate. 

Ho hum. Like I said: properly weird.

I can’t get through it without laughing:

If they think this is the way to go, we will end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness

It’s ‘unmentionable awfulness’ that gets me.

I didn’t think the new X-Files film made sense. And not in an X-Filey everything-has-double-meanings way - it just didn’t hang together at any level. Here are some things that happened (spoilers ahead):

An FBI agent has been kidnapped, and a psychic dude claims he can locate her. Mulder, obviously, believes him, and demands they take a trip to the crime scene. They pull up to the house, but Psychic Dude knows they’re not in the right place. She wasn’t kidnapped here! And he trots over the road. To a house they’ve just driven past. A house covered in ‘crime scene’ tape. It turns out Mulder took him to the wrong place as a test, and look what happened! Everyone’s well impressed at this amazing display of psychic powers. This wasn’t an audience-knows-best thing either - I think they just arranged the scene badly.

They realise the kidnapper is choosing his victims based on blood type. Scully is on this like a shot - they’re clearly stealing organs to order. The FBI team should for some reason start by investigating local organ couriers. So they do, and they happen across Bad Guy immediately. And he has some tenuous link to Psychic Dude. Ra! Except, the plot turns out to have nothing to do with stealing organs. So Bad Guy was an organ courier by chance.

The worst FBI team in history raid Bad Guy’s office. Bad Guy wanders in, sees them, quickly hides, and leaves via the front door. But Mulder spots him, so Bad Guy runs off, in the process dropping Victim 1’s head, which he was carrying for no particular reason. Irrelevant shenanigans occur. Mulder then takes a trip to Psychic Dude, and asks him if Victim 1 is still alive. Psychic Dude says yes. Mulder = despondent, Scully = vindicated. Keep this in mind.

Mulder and Scully crack the case independently, and both do it using magical powers. After going on about animal tranquilisers for half the film, Mulder has the genius idea of asking the local animal supplies store whether they’ve sold any lately. But while he’s in there, he sees a truck pull up. Oh noes! A truck! Clearly, only he and the killer use said shop, so Mulder hides and follows him.

Meanwhile, Scully has announced to her hospital that she intends to treat a young boy with stem cell therapy. Being the amazing doctor that she is, the first thing she does is return to her office and google ’stem cell therapy’. She finds lots, and prints it all off. Later, she comes back to her desk and her eyes are drawn to something she’s printed but apparently not read. It details a Crazy Russian Doctor who’s been transplanting the heads of dogs. ZOMG. Everything falls into place - clearly this Crazy Russian Doctor is now trying his Crazy Experiments on humans! This has nothing to do with stem cell therapy.

So Scully phones (by now in grave danger) Mulder and says, inexplicably, “she’s still alive!”. Referring to Victim 1, whose head was found in a bag. We then cut to an operating theatre, where we see a man’s head on a woman’s body. When Mulder and Scully later burst in on Crazy Russian Doctor, they find a head, sitting on a desk, still alive. Just a head.

I could go on for quite a while. The weirdest thing is, it was barely an X-File. Psychic Dude did very little, and the rest was just crazy medical bullshit. The first film wasn’t particularly coherent, but at least there was a dirty great alien spaceship.

Oh yeah, there’s one more scene that should be mentioned: at the beginning we see Mulder and Scully waiting outside an FBI office. The camera pans left to reveal a portrait of George W. Bush. And the main X-Files doo-dee-doo-doo riff plays. Not as part of the background, or anything subtle like that, just loudly. The camera then pans back, and everything carries on as normal. I like a bit of Bush-bashing as much as the next guy, but this was just crap.

But my main gripe is what they did to Scully. She’s gone from uber-cool Agent of Rationality to whiny religious housewife. She and Mulder had 25 identical conversations, all of which involved her telling Mulder to give up. At one point she complains they they have a home now, and she doesn’t want this kind of darkness in their home. She also ends up completely obsessed with Psychic Dude saying “don’t give up” to her. What could he mean? How can he have such insight into her life? How amazing! Scully now has the analytical reasoning skills of a badger, and has clearly never read a horoscope.

Scully is also suddenly very Catholic (was she always religious? I don’t remember) and spends lots of time having strops over Psychic Dude’s claims that God is speaking through him. How does he know it isn’t the Devil, she asks. And she eventually attributes the whole plot to God’s will. Sigh.

She does at least save Mulder, for possibly the first time ever.

The X-Files always had a great premise and great actors. But the series pretended it was unravelling some great plot, when actually they were making it up as they went along. And despite having six years to write a film script, they apparently couldn’t think of any storylines. Shame.

Paul McCartney is performing a free concert in Quebec this weekend. Some people aren’t happy about it:

…artists and politicians questioned his involvement in the 400th anniversary celebrations of French-speaking Quebec City.

They say his presence is inappropriate because of Britain’s conquest of New France - including Quebec - in 1760.

So, let’s get this straight. Paul McCartney shouldn’t be there because 250 years ago some Bad People were born on same patch of land as him. Despite Paul McCartney not being able to help where he was born, not sharing the opinions of Bad People and everybody alive at the time being very, very dead because it all happened 250 years ago, this is still important. Because the patch of land where you popped out has magical powers that transcend time.

Just so we’re clear. Anniversary celebrations are the perfect time to behave like chinese room zombies and demonstrate why nationalism is one of the most intellectually insulting concepts ever conceived. Good.

This solves the Fermi paradox, doesn’t it? There are no spacefaring races because there comes a point in history where all action becomes impossible without being a hypocrite or insensitive to history.

Last week a student took a cracker from his local church, and the Internet exploded.

Some Catholics think the cracker is actually - literally - the body of Jesus, and say it’s a hate crime to hold it hostage. A hate crime! The US Catholic League has gone bananas, hurling fire and brimstone (and bizarrely coming out as anti-evolutionists, despite their church’s ‘official’ position) and suggesting the student should be expelled. Of course, if he’d taken the cracker and chewed it up, that would have been just fine. Their little world is really quite gross.

The insanity ensued after science/atheist blogger P.Z. Myers posted about it, in typically entertaining style. He asked for crackers to hold hostage on his blog, and he’s had to close various posts after literally thousands of comments threatened to take down his server. The Catholic League is in shock that anybody would want to hurt the baby Jesus, and so is telling people to email the head of P.Z’s university with their complaints. P.Z. has tenure, but I think he and everyone are somewhat shocked at the escalation of muppetry in just a few days.

One the one side you’ve got many many people taking advantage of an excellent opportunity to take the piss out of the Eucharist. I don’t blame them at all. The Eucharist is so conspicuously stupid that it’s almost a duty to bring it up whenever the opportunity arises.

It is a bit weird that the Eucharist is still around, if you ask me. Religions have been quite good at abstracting out all the fantastical stuff so it’s vulnerable to logical fallacy. Miracles conveniently happened thousands of years ago, because humans for whatever reason think old stuff = wise. God acts in mysterious ways = the ultimate argument winner. Jesus died for our sins makes no sense, but it’s mysterious, and humans for whatever reason equate mystery with virtue. All pretty obvious. But the Eucharist doesn’t bother. It just says ‘this here cracker literally becomes the body of Jesus Christ’, and that’s it. No equivocation. They’ve got as far as using fancy words to make it sound Big And Clever: a cracker = ‘The Host’, magic spells and voodoo = ‘The Eucharist’, doing something the Catholic Church doesn’t like = ‘Desecration’. But that’s it. No spin, just magic spells and cannibalism. Really, at some point it’s got to be phased out.

I guess I find it hard to believe that most Catholics, in their heart of hearts, really think it’s literally true. I mean, most religious nonsense I can empathise with. There are plenty of reasons people believe wrong things. But the Eucharist? Come on. The cognitive dissonance must be epic. The whole concept makes no sense - why do you want to eat Jesus? what part of his body does it become? Is he alive or dead? WHY DO YOU WANT TO EAT JESUS? - and I suspect most people just take it as highly symbolic.

Which is why the other side of the argument is probably just your standard mental minority. But they’re very very loud, totally paranoid, lack any kind of sense of humour, and have been sending death threats. At which point it stops being funny. Although, having said that, the average YouTube videographer gets death threats - “this video sucks, die in a fire” - so while it’s serious, I suspect that’s just the way things are on the Internets. You get the impression they’re quite new at this lark, and watching them try to take on creationist-hardened skeptics is almost painful.

Still. The Eucharist itself = pretty funny. I only know one Catholic - I must ask what she thinks…

This post was longer than intended. I really just wanted to point towards Ophelia, who made me laugh.

Here is the deal. Here is how it works. If you live in London, everybody does you a favour. We pretend like London isn’t where most interesting things happen, so you don’t have to feel embarrassed talking to people who live in Milton Keynes. This is how it is. We’re nice like that.

Here’s another thing. You live in London, where you’re surrounded by many interesting people. This makes you inherently liberal. We don’t nuke small-town we-hate-change-and-anyone-not-like-us Tories who infect the greener areas because we know that decent city-dwelling folk can appreciate the world’s eclectic nature without getting scared. Your votes cancel out the dumb ones. This is all part of the goodness that goes with living in the capital city.

People of London. If you were any part of this, the deal is off. I’d revoking your privileges. Get out. Seriously, this is not a drill. Once we find Charlie Brooker, and I don’t think it’ll be that hard, he’ll be round to pack your stuff.

Plans are afoot to change the priorities of royal succession. Currently, if King William¹ has a daughter, then a son, then falls off a horse, the son will become King because men = better. Some people think this needs to be changed, which seems reasonable. Having said that:

These are people who can arbitrarily pardon criminals, dismiss governments, command the army, and run out Established Christian church whose ministers get a free say in the running of the country on the basis that they were born into the right family, and you’re concerned that that might be sexist?!

Fair point.

1. or whatever he decides to call himself - I suggest ‘Kong’ [↩]

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.

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. [↩]

I am now going to do something very very silly. I have to produce a set of abstract images, on slide film, for a uni project. While researching I came across camera tossing - a technique in which you throw your camera into the air while it’s taking a picture. This can produce utterly lovely results:

And it can also total your camera beyond repair. Various techniques and approaches for avoiding this outcome are detailed here, but it’s always a risk. I’m generally an ok catch - a benefit of learning to juggle - but I hadn’t twigged that I’d have to catch the camera in the dark. I had a brief, terrifying attempt with my digital SLR, and came out with this:

Which convinced me it’s worth trying out on slides. I originally intended to use a Very Old film SLR which could be destroyed without causing upset, but on inspection today it needs old+weird+expensive batteries, so I’m instead going to go with my Old But Still Pretty Good film SLR. I could cope with its devolving into a million pieces, but I’d really rather not.

I’m using old-school Velvia film, which has frankly insane colour saturation (never, ever photograph people with it). Should be fun, although I have visions of my SLR hitting the floor on shot 36 and sending the film spilling out…I’ll report back in a bit, if I’m not sobbing in a corner.

Update: Ok, that’s one roll exposed. Nothing broken, thank goodness. I put a load of pillows on the (wooden) floor, and the camera hit them a few times. I also caught it by the lens once or twice. My camera now hates me. I’ll take the film into Jessops tomorrow, then it’s a quaint 48hr wait for the results.

Please tell me this is an early April Fool:

Skinner is one of a growing, albeit secretive, network of astrologers who work for seemingly conservative British institutions such as high street banks, City investment funds and retailers. Desperate to avoid financial meltdown and to spot fashions and consumer trends before they start, these institutions have turned to the planets to divine the future.

Great. As if there weren’t enough problems already.

“Most academics distrust astrology and regard it as mumbo-jumbo,” she says. “The thing is, it works. Nobody’s sure how it works, but it does. Most of my clients are business people who are very canny. If it didn’t work for them, why would they use it?”

Maybe because the idea of the ultra-rational businessperson is a pervasive myth? Somebody who works in ‘business’ (whatever this means) is just as vulnerable to logical fallacies as the rest of us. Try watching Question Time - the ‘business’ panelists are regularly the most cringeworthy, and often have rings run around them by debate-trained politicians. Being good at making money doesn’t mean you know how to think.

Hitler, a keen user of astrology, notably failed to take into account Mercury’s influence. He launched the Battle of Britain and planned Operation Sealion - the invasion of Britain - just as Mercury turned retrograde. Both mistakes dealt serious blows to his plans for world domination.

Christ. No other factors involved there. Post-hoc rationalisation, anyone?

While many decry astrology as bunkum, Dr Percy Seymour, an astrophysicist recently retired from Plymouth University, has his own theory of how this inexact science might work. He believes that low-frequency magnetic fields emanating from the sun interact with those of the earth, which in turn affect the functioning of the human brain.

“The magnetic field of the sun can be affected by the movement and position of the planets,” he says. “Having said all that, I don’t believe that the cosmos controls us, but it can influence us.”

It’s a neat theory, but does it stand up to scrutiny?

Well, no. Theory is redundant without an effect to explain, and there’s no evidence of planetary movements affecting anything. The ‘cosmos’ only influences us in as much as, when times get bad, people will turn to anything. I’m sure The Skeptics’ Guide once mentioned a correlation between economic downturns and the popularity of woo, although I can’t find anything to back this up atm. Incidentally, Dr. Percy Seymour has apparently been saying this stuff for a while, and his theories are taken apart here.

Jim Porter (not his real name), chief technical analyst for one of the largest banks in Britain, believes it does. He uses heliocentric astrology to predict the direction of the international financial markets.

Millions of pounds’ worth of commodities, shares and currencies are traded on his command. His decisions may affect the values of your pension and your home, and perhaps decide how long you hold on to your job.

We’re all screwed.

I’m pretty skeptical of the stock market. I’ve yet to be convinced its movements aren’t random (or, at least, chaotic) and inherently unpredictable. Richard Wiseman detailed in Quirkology how the investments of a stock analyst, an astrologer and a five-year-old girl performed over different periods of time - from a week to a year¹. The girl won. Random processes are an easy mark for anything that claims to predict the future - the nature of random data means there’ll always be some pattern you can take credit for.

Via Bad Science.

1. or longer, I’ve lent my copy out so can’t check atm [↩]

I’ve made some silly mistakes when ordering stuff over the Internet, but this afternoon I messed up in a frankly ridiculous manner.

I was ordering some gear from eBuyer, and paying through Google Checkout. I’ve done this plenty of times before, but was particularly excited as I’m finally, finally replacing my never-worked-since-I-got-them motherboard and CPU. My final kit selection had been worked on for days, and I’d checked the cart many times to ensure I’d added the correct items. I knew that if the order went through smoothly they’d be posted for next-day-delivery, which, being an impatient sort of chap, I wanted. So I completed the process and eBuyer confirmed they were waiting for Google to authorise payment. Google emailed me five minutes later to say my credit card had been declined and the order had been suspended.

Damn. I assumed the transaction was hitting not-usual-spending-pattern security flags, so the thing to do was phone my bank - Smile. I needed to fix the problem then tell GC to re-check my card, so I brought up GC’s transaction page. I grabbed the phone and tried to look up smile’s customer service number, but their help pages were down for maintenance, although I could still log into my account. I switched back to GC while searching the back of my credit card for hints, and in the process somehow dropped the phone.

It hit the keyboard, specifically the Enter key, thereby selecting whatever was focussed on-screen, which happened to be the ‘Cancel Order’ button.

Quite impressive, really. GC and eBuyer both emailed within seconds to confirm the cancellation and tell me not to worry - there was no way I’d be charged or the order would be retained. And that was that. Obviously it’s no big deal, but the elegance and speed of the operation were dazzling.

I ordered again, using a different credit card, and GC + eBuyer paused just long enough to make me think I’d confused the hell out of the system, but eventually accepted the order. It’s now with City Link and should be arrive tomorrow, although I’m a little concerned the fates may be against me.

I’m spending lots of time following the US elections, at least partly because UK politics is so embarrassingly stupid at the moment. To wit, David Davis on the MP bugging row:

“Why was this allowed to happen without ministerial knowledge?” he said. “When it was discovered in December, they didn’t tell Jack Straw or Jacqui Smith.

“These intercepts have broken a prime ministerial promise. They involve the intercept of the justice whip - someone who works with Mr Straw.

“This is a very serious issue. It’s a breach of a prime ministerial undertaking to Parliament, so it makes the prime minister a liar, basically.”

The undertaking was 40 years ago. I’ve no idea on the rights and wrongs of bugging MPs, but a breach of a 40-year-old prime ministerial pledge without Gordon Brown’s knowledge does not make him ‘a liar’. That is stupid. Is it possible there’s been a slow gas leak under Westminster Village for the past few weeks?

I’m doing a puzzle where you have to find the word linking three others, for example ‘house’, ’sky’ and ‘weight’ are linked by ‘light’. Sometimes I can get a word linking two of the three, but I don’t know whether the remaining concatenation is nonsensical and I’m therefore wrong, or it’s just something I haven’t heard of. I started thinking about ‘on’, ‘tail’, and ‘wool’:

On, tail and wool…Ooh, cotton. Cotton wool, cotton tail! That must be it. On cotton? Why’s there always one I don’t understand? I wonder whether it’s just a badly made quiz. This seems to happen quite a lot. I…oh.

I suppose that’s a little irony, right there.

We went to an intermediate jive class on Monday. It wasn’t our usual venue, but I admit to being fairly confident about my ability to keep up, as the jive has generally come fairly naturally over the past few years.

Ha.

They used a different timing. Where we go quick-and-quick quick-and-quick quick quick, they go slow slow quick quick. It was like a different bloody dance. Lynsey adapted without a problem. I was pitiful.

The thing about getting to an intermediate dancing level is that you begin to do things automatically: muscle memory takes over and you can even forget what comes next then find yourself doing it anyway. This leaves you free to concentrate on arm movements etc.. Which is what we did. Except I couldn’t concentrate on steps and arms simultaneously. I got a bit pissed off before realising this was pathetic. Sorry, Lynsey!

I’ve been practicing around the kitchen. Don’t want to make a fool of myself again next week. The bright side is I won six lessons for me and a partner in a competition last year, so it’s not costing us anything.

Meanwhile, here is what jive looks like done properly:

See look, they go quick-and-quick quick-and-quick quick quick.