Fear of a Blank Planet: one week to go

The buzz around Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet is amazing. The critics are certainly impressed: my old school friend Paul Smith sent me an early draft of his review in which he talks about the challenging nature of the music:

It’s official: I love this album – but it’s taken three weeks of my life to let it weave its special charm. Whether it is the best thing the band has recorded is still very much open for debate, but it is a very special release from a very special British band.

Then on Monday I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, browsing the latest Sound&Vision magazine, and they were waxing lyrical about the album. And after praising the 5.1 version (which I have on order) they go on to tease…

You can get that mix right now in DTS 5.1 on a limited Special Edition CD+DVD of Planet that also includes a 40-page booklet. But fans of high-resolution sound will want to know that a DVD-Audio edition (with extras) is due in September. S&V acquired an early copy, and the sound is superb…. Porcupine Tree’s music has simply outgrown two-channel stereo.

Sigh. Where’s my credit card?
PT will be touring the US to promote the album starting next month. In fact the first show is on May 8, right here in Seattle at the Showbox. It’s going to be a busy few days: I fly down to San Francisco on Friday May 4th, so that I can go to Steve and Wendy’s wedding on the 5th. On the 7th I’m going to visit my colleagues at A9 in Palo Alto, then I’ll fly home and get psyched up for Porcupine Tree on the 8th. Mmmmm….

Inference

If you were to read the following sentence in a news item, could you correctly recreate the rest of the story?

The Salt Manufacturers Association said the evidence did not prove that salt reduction would have any significant health benefits for the majority of people.

If you deduce from this that there is new, overwhelming evidence that limiting salt intake has dramatic health benefits for the whole population, you’d be right. It’s a great time-saver: just flip to the bottom of the story, check out the industry association reaction, prefix it with NOT, and you don’t need to read the rest of the story.

It's hard for satire to stay ahead of reality these days

Several years ago I came across an incredibly funny satirical novel called Jennifer Government by Max Barry. American corporations rule the world; everyone takes his or her employer’s name as their last name; even government is not immune. Appropriately manic; lots of fun; presumed one hit wonder; forgot all about him.
And then a couple of weeks ago I was browsing through an airport bookstore (“Get used to disappointment”) and found Barry’s new book: Company. This is the perfect novel for everyone who has read a management guru’s book and wondered, “What would it be like to actually try that out here, where I work?” Now imagine an entire organization that, unbeknownst to its employees, exists only as a laboratory for experimenting with such management fads! Let the fun commence….
Not quite as strong as the earlier novel, but still a most enjoyable (and twisted) romp.

The DNA of Religious Faith

David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, has just published a comprehensive survey of the debate between critics of religion and its apologists. On the one hand, we have “[t]he four horsemen of the current antireligious apocalypse… Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Carl Sagan”. On the other, Barash spotlights those who would seek to reconcile the irreconcilable. Francis Collins, the geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project, comes in for some probing questions:

What, then, is his basis for accepting some Bible stories and not others? If Collins is simply clinging to those tenets that cannot be disproved, while disavowing those that can, then isn’t he indulging in another incarnation of the “god of the gaps” that he very reasonably claims to oppose? What about, say, those loaves and fishes, or the Book of Revelation? And does the director of the Human Genome Project maintain that Jesus of Nazareth was literally born of a virgin and inseminated by the Holy Ghost? If so, then was he haploid or diploid? Is it necessarily churlish to ask what it is, precisely, that a believer (layperson or scientist) believes? In the devil, angels, eternal hellfire, damnation, archangels, incubi and succubi, walking on water, raising Lazarus?

Well worth reading in full.

Is this what people mean by "sophisticated religious viewpoints"?

We are frequently told* that Dawkins, Harris et al are at fault for critiquing a crude and simplistic view of religion. Most Christians, we are assured, have far more sophisticated beliefs which “fundamentalist atheists” don’t understand. But then what are we to make of Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, who appears to believe in a literal Noachian flood:

A few fixed points might provide some light.  We know that enormous climate changes have occurred in world history, e.g. the Ice Ages and Noah’s flood, where human causation could only be negligible.

I suppose that he could simply have been carried away by his passion over the subject of his editorial – global warming. After all, he had earlier said:

In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

Maybe he gets it from his boss…..
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* Certainly I am frequently told, in comments on this blog!

The scientific illiteracy of pundits

As a footnote to my recent piece on taking responsibility for scientific literacy, check out this piece in which Jeremy Smith fisks Brooks in the NYT:

In his Feb. 17 New York Times column, “Human Nature Redux,” David Brooks argues that belief in human goodness is nearly extinct–and that science is responsible.

As Smith demonstrates, Brooks gets most of the science (and much of the history) dead wrong. Embarrassingly, painfully wrong. And this is stuff about which some of the best science writers have produced extremely accessible material. Pompous op-ed writers for the WaPo and NYT should stop blaming scientists and consider their own responsibilities….

Splogs on the rise

I’m seeing an increasing number of splog trackbacks. If you blog, you will, of course, know all about blogspam: comments that are injected into your blog by “spam bots” and which contain links to spam targets – usually porn, pharm, gambling, etc. There are many ways to counter this stuff, including comment moderation and spam detection systems like Akismet. (I use Akismet and Bad Behavior on this site.)
But splogs are fairly new. The most common manifestation is a fairly generic-looking WordPress or MovableType blog with a set of sidebar links to spam targets. It’s the blog “articles” that are interesting. A spam bot scans various Popular Blogs, finds a recent article, scrapes some of the text, wraps it in some boilerplate text, and constructs an article on the splog. It then generates a trackback ping to the original blog. The idea is that the owner of the Popular Blog will publish the trackback in the comments section, and that later on the spiders from the search engines will find these trackbacks, note that they come from Popular Blogs, and bump the pagerank for the splog to which they point.
And they work! On a couple of occasions recently, I’ve Googled for a subject about which I’d blogged, and I’ve found hits on splogs, quoting my words and referring back to my blog! It’s a bit weird actually… I find myself wondering if splog links are affecting my pagerank!
Simple moderation doesn’t always catch this, because the trackback looks genuine, and we all want our blog entries to be popular and attract links – don’t we? (Of course the paranoid among us, like Alec, are safe: they simply ignore trackbacks.) Fortunately Akismet seems to be on the case; it’s caught several splog trackbacks here recently. In the meantime, I’ve got into the habit of inspecting all trackbacks to my site. You should, too.