Mars Hill is a nice low-key blog run by Paul Burgin over in Baldock (Herts, England). Most of the postings are about British politics, but he also runs an interesting series called “Twenty Questions to a Fellow Blogger”. For the most part, these aren’t the “A list” blogs: they represent the diversity of ordinary people who have found that blogging gives them a way of expressing themselves. People like Andrew Sullivan and David Carr may argue about the relationship if blogging to journalism, but there are plenty of bloggers who have no pretensions to being members of the Fourth Estate. They just want to write.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Paul has just posted my “Twenty Questions” interview here. There’s nothing startling or revelatory here: no “25 things you don’t know about me” or other blogmeme stuff. I think that’s why I really enjoyed doing it. Thanks, Paul.
Author: geoff
All change
The only constant is change, isn’t it? Two days before I was due to zoom off around the world comes a change of plans. I’m postponing my visit to Beijing, and realigning my stay in Hyderabad so that I can participate in some additional meetings. Instead of Star Alliance round the world, it’s probably going to be BA out and back via LHR. (I looked at going LH through FRA, but for some reason, BA is about 25% cheaper than LH right now.) I’ll update with the details when I have them.
UPDATE: Here we are:
BA048 Dep: SEA 07:40PM Mar 16 Arr: LHR 12:00PM Mar 17
BA277 Dep: LHR 01:40PM Mar 17 Arr: HYD 04:40AM Mar 18
BA276 Dep: HYD 07:30AM Mar 25 Arr: LHR 12:55PM Mar 25
BA049 Dep: LHR 02:20PM Mar 25 Arr: SEA 05:01PM Mar 25
I’ll be in 744s between SEA and LHR and 777s between LHR and HYD, with window seats on every leg. I get to kill a couple of hours in T5 each way.
The brains of religious believers
Sciencedaily reports on a study of how the brains of believers and non-believers behave under stress:
“We found that religious people or even people who simply believe in the existence of God show significantly less brain activity in relation to their own errors. They’re much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error.“
These correlations remained strong even after controlling for personality and cognitive ability, says Inzlicht, who also found that religious participants made fewer errors on the Stroop task than their non-believing counterparts. […]
“Obviously, anxiety can be negative because if you have too much, you’re paralyzed with fear,” he says. “However, it also serves a very useful function in that it alerts us when we’re making mistakes. If you don’t experience anxiety when you make an error, what impetus do you have to change or improve your behaviour so you don’t make the same mistakes again and again?“
[Via Sully; my emphasis.]
First Kindle 2, now Kindle on my iPhone
I’ve been enjoying my new Kindle 2. Several people have asked for my opinion of it, and have wondered when I was going to post a review. Instead of rushing to press, I’ve been taking the time to appreciate the difference between the original and the new model; I wanted to finish a complete book before committing myself. I’m in the middle of Jenet Conant’s wonderful The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington; I started reading it on my original Kindle, a couple of days before the new one arrived. Exactly as advertised, when I opened up my Kindle 2 and selected “The Irregulars”, it opened up just where I’d left off. Very nice!
So for the last few days I’ve been enjoying my new Kindle as well as a delightful book. And then, a few minutes ago, I was scanning my blog feeds and came across a piece by Marc Hedlund on the new Kindle app for the iPhone. I knew that it was in the works, but I had no idea when it was being released. (Our internal “need to know” is pretty good at Amazon.) So I fired up iTunes, found the app, downloaded it, sync’d my iPhone, ran the app, signed in, and picked “The Irregulars” from the Archived items list. A few seconds later I was reading the book, exactly where I’d left off earlier today.
Page turning is achieved with the kind of sideways sweeping gesture that is completely familiar and natural on the iPhone. It’s fairly easy to do this one-handed, using either hand. The default font was a bit too large for my taste, making each “page” uncomfortably short, but switching to the smallest font resulted in a beautifully crisp display. Just out of curiosity, I logged in to the “Manage your Kindle” page on the Amazon website, and it showed Geoff Arnold’s iPhone as a managed device.
So now I have another kind of Kindle to review….
UPDATE: Glenn Fleishman has some interesting comments over at TidBITS.
Souls, neuroscience, and daisies
Andrew Sullivan links (without comment – chicken!) to a letter in Science in which neuroscientist Martha Farah and theologian Nancey Murphy “worry about fundamentalists attacking neuroscience”. For some reason, Andrew illustrates the piece with some pretty flowers, which he usually does when he has no answer to the points just made except an appeal to the emotions.
The problem for mysterians like Andrew, who claim that they embrace doubt while at the same time being utterly enslaved by their faith, is that neuroscience isn’t just a threat to “fundamentalists”: it undercuts every religious view which assumes the existence of a soul that is distinct from (and can exist independently of) the physical body. We’re talking about all of Christianity, Islam, the dualist variants of Judaism, and any belief system which includes reincarnation. And we’re not just talking about naive, folk-theories about souls (being reunited with loved ones after death, or having out-of-body experiences); even the most subtle and sophisticated theological positions are pretty much threadbare. And that includes Andrew’s. Pretty pictures of daisies won’t make up for that.
Comprehensively refuting the antivaccinationists
For anyone interested in the controversy over MMR vaccines and autism, David Gorski’s comprehensive fisking is a must-read. The exposé of that sleazy fraud Andrew Wakefield is particularly detailed.
After presenting the unambiguous findings of the various “special masters”, Gorski points out what’s really going on here:
Special Master Hastings recognized one of the main drivers of the scare over the MMR and vaccines in general as a “cause†of autism: Money. Indeed, a veritable cottage industry of “biomedical†quackery, dubious therapies, and pseudoscience depends upon keeping the idea that vaccines cause autism alive. “Luminaries†of this cottage industry include the aforementioned Andrew Wakefield, who has now infested the United States (the State of Texas, specifically) with his brand of quackery at Thoughtful House, now that the U.K. is investigating him. Also included are Mark and David Geier, who have been touting the use of a powerful anti-sex steroid medication to treat autistic children, and, until recently, Dr. Rashid Buttar, who is now facing sanctions by the North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners and has been banned from treating children. Add to that ambulance-chasing lawyers like Clifford Shoemaker, who have been raking in money hand over fist, thanks to the fact that the VICP actually pays the petitioners’ attorney fees regardless of whether the petition results in compensation, and it is easy to see why this industry won’t easily let parents be disabused of the fears over vaccines that it has stoked.
To those parents who are dealing with the devastating effect of autism on their families: please don’t be taken in by the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen who are trying to recruit you to their causes. They’re simply trying to use you for their own purposes. They are wrong.
Ken Binning, RIP
I just learned from my mother that an old friend of ours, Ken Binning, died last weekend. Ken was an extroverted, larger than life man, with a booming laugh, a firm handshake, and a slight stutter which enhanced rather than interrupting his jovial repartee. I first met him when I was a child: Ken was a colleague of my mother’s at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and we visited him, his wife Pam, and their children several times.
In 1968, when I was trying to decide how to spend a “gap year” between school and university, Ken suggested that I join him at the UKAEA. By that time he was running a small research group at Harwell, the Programmes Analysis Unit (PAU). Their mission was to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the various science and technology programmes funded by the British government, in areas such as computer technology, energy, aerospace, materials science, nuclear medicine, and atomic power. I spent a year with the PAU as a mathematical assistant, as I discussed recently. By the time I was next working at Harwell, in 1971, the Conservatives were in power, and I think the PAU had been dissolved.
After the UKAEA, and the controversies over nuclear power, Ken moved to an even more contentious project: Director-General of Concorde. As he described in a BBC documentary in 2003 [22:20 into the program], “I had a very uncomfortable morning in Delhi, in front of the Secretary for Transportation, attempting to explain why it was perfectly sensible to overfly six million Indians supersonically, and wake them up in the middle of the night, but we didn’t do the same thing to Europeans.” [Full transcript here.]
Ken was also involved in the hearings on Capitol Hill in 1976 about whether Concorde should be granted landing rights in the USA. [27:05 into the program]; he remembered it well because it was his birthday (January 5th). The preparations were intensive, including a mock cross-examination of the Minister, Gerald Kaufman, and the outcome was eventually successful; in May 1976 Concorde finally went into Transatlantic service.
Ken and Pam retired to south-east London, and I visited them there several times, usually with my mother. I’ll miss him.
The Art Instinct
I’ve just posted a review of Denis Dutton’s wonderful new book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution”:
If you’re reading this, you probably enjoy books. You take pleasure from good writing, compelling insights, and the kind of well-turned argument that gives you that “aha!” moment of recognition, identification, and delight.
Imagine then the pleasure of reading a book which not only has these characteristics, but provides a convincing explanation of why you feel that way. And not just of why you enjoy that kind of experience, but why (for example) you would feel disappointed if you learned that the author had plagiarized the material. (Why should you? It’s the same text, isn’t it? There’s something else going on here.)
This is a wonderful book. It’s not just about art, in the same way that Pinker’s work (cited in the blurb) isn’t just about language. It’s about being human, and how the last few hundreds of thousands of years of evolution made us that way. It’s about the complex interplay between natural selection and sexual selection in this process, an interplay which Darwin captured so well in The Descent of Man. It’s about philosophy, too: about ontology and category.
The book draws on art as a rich source of facts and paradoxes about human nature. Does intent matter? Why do artists sign their work while plumbers don’t? What is the relationship between artistic value and monetary price? And (notoriously) can a urinal on a plinth be thought of as art – and why do people get so worked up about it?
I hesitated to choose this book, because I feared that it was going to be just another book on art theory. (And why would that make me reluctant? Hmmm….) I’m really glad that I overcame my hesitation. In fact I’d rank this as the best non-fiction book that I’ve read over the last year – and it’s been a good year. (Best fiction is, obviously Fulghum’s Third Wish, a book that I want to re-read in the light of some of the insights I’ve gained from Dutton.)
Highly recommended.
Happy birthday Colin
Today is my boss‘s birthday….
"I want everything he does to fail"
Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly waxes incredulous at Rush Limbaugh’s latest piece of… well, treason is about the only word for it:
The right-wing host went on a similar tirade yesterday when talking about the economic recovery package: “I want everything he’s doing to fail… I want the stimulus package to fail…. I do not want this to succeed.”
Limbaugh is, without ambiguity, rooting for failure. In the midst of an economic crisis, Limbaugh quite openly admitted that if Obama’s economic policies are successful, it would undermine the talk-show host’s worldview. As such, Limbaugh wants desperately to see more Americans suffer, more workers unemployed, more businesses close up shop. […] Limbaugh would much prefer a suffering nation than a reevaluation of conservative ideas.
Keep in mind, of course, that such talk under Bush’s presidency would force someone from the airwaves. If a prominent progressive figure said, just as the president was sending troops into war in early 2003, “I want everything he’s doing to fail. I want the war in Iraq to fail. I do not want the president’s national security agenda to succeed,” he or she would lose all advertising revenue and be fired. In the midst of a crisis, Americans rooting against America, based on nothing but ideological rigidity, are pariahs.
Or, at least, they used to be.