"You Picked Me"

I’ve got this song stuck in my head: “You Picked Me” by A Fine Frenzy (a.k.a. Alison Sudol).

I heard it playing in Starbucks yesterday, and used the new iTunes/Starbucks service to buy the album and download it to my iPhone. The service works just fine, although the download is a little slower than on my PowerBook. (The iPhone does a track at a time, rather than keeping three connections going in parallel.)

Mekons: Superb!

Just got back from seeing the Mekons at the Town Hall Seattle. Fabulous show, but in completely the wrong setting. There were about 150 people, in the centre of a much larger auditorium, with no beer. The members of the band sipped their bottles of Red Stripe and taunted us! And it was billed as a quiet acoustic set, but they still rocked out! We should have been packed into a smoky club with benches, sawdust on the floor, and pints of bitter, singing along with them…
Oh well, never mind. It was still one of the most enjoyable shows I’ve been to. Even though I’ve never heard them live or owned any of their recordings, it all felt oddly, comfortably familiar – from the angry numbers about Maggie Thatcher (“TINA”) and the Miners’ Strike, to their alt-country material, to their newest songs. To hell with categories. Quirky personalities, great musicianship, memorable songs. We all had a wonderful time.

Dawkins on Dennett

Here’s ‘a lovely tribute to Dan Dennett by Richard Dawkins:

Since the deaths of Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, I have been rather short of intellectual heroes to consult on difficult questions. Thank goodness we still have Dan Dennett.

Yes indeed. All heroes should be teachers. Looking back on it, Dan’s Philosophy of Mind course that I took in 2005 was one of the most important passages of my life. In the words of Walt Whitman, such experiences raise us up and then “level that lift, to pass and continue beyond.”

Going to see the Mekons

I’m planning to celebrate my birthday, The Mekonand the 50th anniversary of the Windscale nuclear accident ((Speaking of which, Palgrave has just issued a new edition of my mother’s book Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident.)), by going to see the Mekons at Town Hall Seattle tomorrow. I vaguely remember them as a highly-political punk band, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of their “post-modern country” work. However, as a loyal reader of Dan Dare in my childhood, how could I pass up an opportunity to see a band that was named after his arch-enemy? ((Bizarrely, the write-up at the Town Hall website states that “they took their name from a classic British science fiction comic hero”. Hero?! That leader of a bunch of green jackbooted Venusian thugs? Hardly…))

Frustrating

Poor old Hamilton. Why didn’t he pit immediately when Raikkonen passed him? (Were his crew not ready?) Did he forget that the pit lane would be more slippery than the track? (And did the team remind him?) Oh, well: on to the last race of the season, in Brazil, with three drivers having a shot at the Championship for the first time since Nigel Mansell’s tyre exploded in Australia.
And don’t get me started on Chinese weather forecasters…!

PZ: No, Sam, atheists do not belong in the closet

Pharyngula responds to Sam Harris presentation to the Atheist Alliance:

Like you, I look forward to a post-theist future when the term “atheist” is a quaint relic that lacks any contemporary context, as silly as saying that one is an a-Zeusist or an aleprechaunist. That time is not now, and you are ignoring reality to pretend that it is. We do have a context that makes atheism relevant and appropriate: we are immersed in a deeply irrational religious culture. Those labels you denigrate — “atheists,” “humanists,” “secular humanists,” “naturalists,” “skeptics,” “anti-theists,” “rationalists,” “freethinkers,” and “brights” — are useful rallying cries for the tiny, scattered bubbles of rationality drifting in the sea of superstition and ignorance. It’s how we find each other and grow. It’s how we build whole communities working for a common cause, rather than acting as isolated individuals.

+1 (geek for “I strongly agree”)

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

After watching the practice session for the Chinese Grand Prix on SpeedTV, and hearing about:

  1. the ridiculous suggestions about penalizing Lewis Hamilton for last Sunday’s race, when the fault clearly lay with Webber for repeatedly getting alongside Hamilton [fortunately resolved with a bit of common sense], and
  2. Max Mosely’s unprofessional and borderline-libellous comments concerning Jackie Stewart

I can only conclude that the FIA is, itself, acting to “bring the sport into disrepute”. But since it is the sport’s governing body, who is going to hold them accountable? This is ridiculous…

Andrew comes all over Deepak Chopra

You can always tell when Andrew Sullivan is going to talk about religion, because he sticks a nice picture of clouds, or water, or rainbows, or some photogenic bit of nature at the top. I’m guessing that he was exposed to “All Things Bright And Beautiful” one too many times as a child.
Anyway, today’s piece was pretty much par for the course. A nice picture of rippling water, and then a correspondent talking about an autistic child:

The example of Jessica shows us how our own view of the world might be equally skewed. There may be many essential features of the world to which we are blind, just as she is blind to other people’s thoughts and feelings. So our theology also reflects our possibly skewed view of the world.

And Sully plunges in:

It has to, of course, because we have no other way of knowing God. But that is surely the point: anyway to understand God that is not God will misprise the divine in some way. Which is why the Incarnation remains our best hope; and why he spoke in parables. The most we can understand is stories and analogies. The rest is more distant from us than an autistic mind is from a normal one.

WTF? What the hell does that bold text actually mean? First there’s the obscure “misprise”, which even Google can’t define. (It means “mistake”, of course.) But even then… Is “anyway” meant to be “any way”? No, it still doesn’t mean anything. Won’t parse. The last time I saw that kind of woo was when I mistakenly read some Deepak Chopra over at HuffPo.
Coincidentally, the Barefoot Bum ((I thought you’d renounced blogging?)) just posted my favourite quotation from Frederick Crews’ book Follies of the Wise. It’s a wonderfully refreshing antidote to woo of all kinds:

“The human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology, characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is simply empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties. Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith or privileged ‘clinical insight’ or the say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be countenanced until they can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which all other contenders are subjected.”

And if Andrew feels that this doesn’t apply to theology, then he’s really saying that his theology doesn’t involve the real world. It’s unreal. In which case it’s time for Dawkins’ suggestion.