Author: geoff

Fearmongering and word games

The media has been all a-twitter about a new report entitled Extensive usage of ‘Web 2.0’ sites opens new business data leakage risks. My first thought was “WTF does this have to do with Web 2.0?” (And of course my second thought was “Oh no, here with go with that stupid Web 2.0 meme again…”) Fortunately Alec has fisked this comprehensively, by playing the word substitution game. As The Who might have put it, “Meet the new vulnerability/Same as the the old vulnerability.” Or perhaps not. Anyway….

The opiate of the masses….

Matthew Parris shares my indignation:

A nun has apparently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through writing the name of John Paul II on a piece of paper.
[…]
Where are you, intelligent Christians? Where is your voice, your righteous anger? Where is your honest contempt for this nonsense? Take that claimed recent miracle, for instance. I know lots of nice, clever Catholics — friends, thoughtful men and women, people of depth and subtlety, people of some delicacy, people who would surely cringe at the excesses of Lourdes. Do they believe that John Paul II may have cured this nun from beyond the grave? […] I have a theory about their reticence. I think they know this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter. And they may be right. But what a melancholy conclusion: that the thinking parts of a religion should be almost extraneous to what moves it; far from the core; just a little fastidious shudder; a wink exchanged between the occupants of the reserved pews.

Of course it is these “occupants of the reserved pews”, these representatives of “the thinking parts of a religion”, who excoriate Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for the “crude” conception of God which they attack. “Dawkins is merely betraying his ignorance of the sophisticated aspects of theology,” they sneer. “If he is going to criticize religion, he should engage the best arguments, and not these crude populist forms.” But their silence in the face of arrant superstition exposes their hypocrisy. Either they disbelieve this nonsense, in which case they should join the secular world in calling it by its proper name, or they actually believe it, in which case their criticisms of Dawkins are inexcusable. Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

At Ignite

Excellent scene. The paper aeroplane contest was fiendishly difficult… More anon.
[Later, back home.]
The format was excellent – two series of “Ask Later” talks, each 5 minutes long with the slides set to auto-advance whether or not the speaker was ready! The topics ranged from teaching CS in prisons to IT ops with the US Marines in Al-Anbar Province, by way of such things as running your life on Outlook(!), social network tagging, bee-keeping, choosing business names, naturopathic “health hacks”, surviving Lyme disease, getting skeptical about security, hanging with the Touareg, and optimising the fuel efficiency of aero engines! The full list is here. I guess that there were about 200-250 people there: a nice crowd, all ages and quite heterogeneous.
Two things struck me. First, a lot of my friends at Amazon would enjoy this. Next time, let’s mob it. And second, if I were told that I had to do one of these talks, what subject would I choose? That’s an intriguing question….
Here’s a phone-cam picture of the paper airplane contest in full swing. The woman holding the target got hit quite a few times….
UPDATE: The crowd was larger than I thought: 351, according to the Ignite blog.. Excellent!

Snooker to go

One of the British institutions that I miss by living in the States is snooker. Nobody over here knows anything about it; at least Americans have usually heard of cricket. So… no Pot Black on TV, no epic breaks played out while the opponent sits helplessly in the corner, and no snooker videogames. What’s an expat to do? So on my last trip to England, I visited a videogame store to examine the possibilities. They had a pre-owned copy of Sega’s World Snooker Challenge 2005 for the Sony PSP, which looked promising – the reviews at Amazon.co.uk are excellent. The only problem was that the back of the box had a “DVD Region 2” icon. Would it play in my US PSP? I decided to take the chance that it would, and bought the game. It turned out that it does work, and I’m rapidly finding that I have a personal time management problem with it….
😉
As I subsequently discovered, the PSP only enforces regional lockout for UMD movies, not for games. Printing a region code on the box was purely a scare tactic. I didn’t even bother to look at snooker games for the PlayStation, because I assumed that it would enforce lockout – but maybe that, too, is just an empty threat. Anyway, I’m hoping to replace my PS2 as soon as Outtastock.com shows that Nintendo Wiis are available!