Another one bites the dust

Earlier this month I wrote about the resignation of the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, Stephen Bates, and his poignant essay Demob happy. And now I read in Reuters that William Lobdell of the LA Times has also quit. Read his farewell essay, “Religion beat became a test of faith“, in which he explains how his experiences destroyed his faith and left him feeling “used up and numb”.

The iTunes/iPhone/Starbucks business model seems to work

Here’s a nice example of a successful bit of business synergy. (Pardon the “stream of consciousness” style; this is exactly how it went.) I was sitting in Starbucks this morning, sipping my quad espresso macchiato, and listening to a podcast ((It was one of the excellent “Semi-Coherent Computing” pieces from The Register. Highly recommended – the conversation with Dave Patterson was incredibly good.)) with on my iPhone. During a moment of quiet, I heard the music that was playing in the store: “Needle and the Damage Done” by Neil Young. I pause the podcast, listen to the song. Hmm… which version is it – the original studio recording, that “Live at Massey Hall” disc I picked up a few months ago, or something else? I select iTunes on my iPhone, up comes the Starbucks icon, I touch it, and I can see from the “What’s Playing” box that it’s the Massey Hall recording that I already own.
OK, while I’m logged in to iTunes, what’s in the “Featured” category today? Oh yes, the new Led Zeppelin collection, “Mothership”. I browse the tracks, and see that I have all of them (from the “Led Zeppelin Remasters” box set) except for one: “When The Levee Breaks”. I’ve always liked that track, and post-Katrina it acquired a special significance, but for some reason I never got it on CD. Never mind: I touch the title, confirm “Buy”, re-enter my Apple password ((I had changed it recently.)), and download it. A few seconds and 99¢ later, I’m listening to Robert Plant’s plaintive harmonica over that menacing beat and Jimmy Page’s shimmering guitar. And half an hour later when I get home, I drop the iPhone into the cradle and the track is sync’d back into my regular iTunes library.
Apple has successfully redefined the process of buying music. Now we’re going to try to do the same for books. Should be fun.

Meanwhile, back in England the paranoid obsessive-compulsives seem to be running the asylum

I know, I’m being unfair to real sufferers from paranoia and OCD. But how else to describe these pusillanimous nincompoops? Honestly: I don’t recognize the country I was born in. I know this story is from the Daily Mail ((And they get it wrong by describing this as a “PC” issue, which it isn’t.)), but even so…

A leading children’s author was told to drop a fire-breathing dragon shown in a new book – because the publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations.
It is just one of the politically correct (sic) cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories.
As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

At least these idiots are only screwing around with books. Here in the U.S.A., the paranoid idiots are playing games with people’s lives.
UPDATE: This ridiculous dumbing-down of material for children is in full swing on this side of the Atlantic, too. Today’s NYT reports that DVDs of the original Sesame Street are not suitable for children:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
[…]
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Aldous Huxley nailed this ghastly kind of insipid ((As he put it, “All of the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”)) mind-control in Brave New World:

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions… Suggestions from the State.”

Desmond Tutu sticks it to the Anglican leadership

From the BBC:

Archbishop Tutu referred to the debate about whether Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, could serve as the bishop of New Hampshire.
He said the Anglican Church had seemed “extraordinarily homophobic” in its handling of the issue, and that he had felt “saddened” and “ashamed” of his church at the time.
Asked if he still felt ashamed, he said: “If we are going to not welcome or invite people because of sexual orientation, yes.
“If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.”

Seems kind of obvious to this atheist, but then what do I know about such matters? Shouldn’t textually obsessive Christians be stoning the adulterers and divorcees rather than the gays?

Pride of place in my collection…

Regular readers will know that I have a longstanding interest in transportation, particularly buses and airliners, and that I built up sizeable collections of models of each kind. Most of these are now packed away (( I’d actually like to figure out how to sell them, but eBay feels so laborious.)) but occasionally I pick up a new item. And so this week I added a new airliner model to my collection, and I have to say that it’s the best small-scale replica I’ve ever seen.
Gemini 200 British Airways Airbus A320
(Click to enlarge.)
It’s a 1/200 scale model of a British Airways A320 by Gemini Jets. It’s one of their new “Gemini 200” range, and the level of detail that they’ve achieved is amazing. All of the antennas and warning lights are there; the engines have detailed metal fan blades; the undercarriage uses rubber tyres and the nosegear steers. And somehow ((Yes, I know, cheap Chinese labour.)) they’ve kept the price under $60. The closest I’ve seen to this in quality is the Herpa Premium line, where a 1/200 Boeing 737-300 costs around $300.
So I suspect I may be adding a couple more Gemini 200 aircraft to my collection. There’s a Monarch A321, and an American 737-800…..

The dishonesty of homeopaths

Must-read article in Bad Science on “The end of homeopathy?” Among other things the author addresses the way in which homeopaths distort the evidence. (The emphasis is mine.)

Why else might there be plenty of positive trials around, spuriously? Because of something called “publication bias“. In all fields of science, positive results are more likely to get published, because they are more newsworthy, there’s more mileage in publishing them for your career, and they’re more fun to write up. This is a problem for all of science. Medicine has addressed this problem, making people register their trial before they start, on a “clinical trials database“, so that you cannot hide disappointing data and pretend it never happened.
How big is the problem of publication bias in alternative medicine? Well now, in 1995, only 1% of all articles published in alternative medicine journals gave a negative result. The most recent figure is 5% negative. This is very, very low.
There is only one conclusion you can draw from this observation. Essentially, when a trial gives a negative result, alternative therapists, homeopaths or the homeopathic companies simply do not publish it….
Now, you could just pick out the positive trials, as homeopaths do, and quote only those. This is called “cherry picking” the literature – it is not a new trick, and it is dishonest, because it misrepresents the totality of the literature. There is a special mathematical tool called a “meta-analysis“, where you take all the results from all the studies on one subject, and put the figures into one giant spreadsheet, to get the most representative overall answer. When you do this, time and time again, and you exclude the unfair tests, and you account for publication bias, you find, in all homeopathy trials overall, that homeopathy does no better than placebos.

If all that homeopaths did was to push harmless placebos in situations where a placebo was the best choice, that might not matter. But having fraudulently established their credentials as healers, they abuse this power in horribly dangerous ways:

It’s routine marketing practice for homeopaths to denigrate mainstream medicine. There’s a simple commercial reason for this: survey data show that a disappointing experience with mainstream medicine is almost the only factor that regularly correlates with choosing alternative therapies. That’s an explanation, but not an excuse. And this is not just talking medicine down. One study found that more than half of all the homeopaths approached advised patients against the MMR vaccine for their children, acting irresponsibly on what will quite probably come to be known as the media’s MMR hoax.
How did the alternative therapy world deal with this concerning finding, that so many among them were quietly undermining the vaccination schedule? Prince Charles’s office tried to have the lead researcher sacked.
A BBC Newsnight investigation found that almost all the homeopaths approached recommended ineffective homeopathic pills to protect against malaria, and advised against medical malaria prophylactics, while not even giving basic advice on bite prevention. Very holistic. Very “complementary”. Any action against the homeopaths concerned? None.
And in the extreme, when they’re not undermining public-health campaigns and leaving their patients exposed to fatal diseases, homeopaths who are not medically qualified can miss fatal diagnoses, or actively disregard them, telling their patients grandly to stop their inhalers, and throw away their heart pills. The Society of Homeopaths is holding a symposium on the treatment of Aids, featuring the work of Peter Chappell, a man who claims to have found a homeopathic solution to the epidemic. We reinforce all of this by collectively humouring homeopaths’ healer fantasies.

At the Cinerama

I’m at the Cinerama in Seattle, waiting for the 9:50am showing of “Beowulf”. It’s the first time I’ve been here, and the first time in years that I’ve been in a “full-sized” movie theatre. I’d forgotten what it was like. Fake stars in the ceiling, a huge stage curtain which has just parted to reveal what must have seemed a huge screen… before the era of iMax.
The trailers have just started. There are just 12 people in this cavernous space. Time to watch…
UPDATE: I enjoyed the film; I’d probably rate it seven out of ten. You have to see it on a big screen – iMax or Cinerama – or you’ll lose most of the grand sweep of the action. On the other hand, I don’t mind seeing it in 2-D rather than 3-D; it was quite vivid and immersive enough for me. It’s rated PG-13, but that feels a bit of a stretch. The “swiving”, ribaldry and nudity are just fine, but the violence is very graphic, intense, relentless, and hyper-realistic.
Yes, Angelina Jolie is gorgeously, unabashedly naked. OK, so they smoothed off her nipples, and gold-plated her from the neck down, but so what. And the 30 foot flagellum works beautifully.
I read a few reviews of the movie yesterday, and none of them picked up on what seemed to me an obvious angle. This is a film designed to look like a videogame. The visual realism of the latest PS3 and XBox360 games is approaching that of film, but it still has a way to go… so now film is starting to bridge the gap from the other direction.

reCAPTCHA

Here’s a really cool idea: reCAPTCHA. It’s a system which “takes scanned images from actual books, with which optical character recognition software are struggling, and uses them as the source material for CAPTCHA’s.” So when you’re proving that you’re not a robot to yet another web site (something which happens 60 million times a day, apparently), you could be helping to digitize old books.

Oh, the joy of it!

Stephen Fry captures the essence of the iPhone:

In the end the iPhone is like some glorious early-60s sports car. Not as practical, reliable, economical, sensible or roomy as a family saloon but oh, the joy. The jouissance as Roland Barthes liked to say. What it does, it does supremely well, that what it does not do seems laughably irrelevant.
The iPhone is a digital experience in the literal sense of the word. The user’s digits roam, stroke, tweak, tweeze, pinch, probe, slide, swipe and tap across the glass screen forging a relationship with the device that is like no other.
“But I don’t want to ‘forge a relationship’, I just want to get the job done,” you say? Well then, you know what? Don’t buy one. And stop reading this. You’re only doing so in the first place to lend fuel to your snorts and puffs of rage. Allow us our pleasures.

(If you haven’t bookmarked his blog, do it now. You will not be disappointed.)