Nasty moment

Watching Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren bury itself in the tyre wall during qualifying, after a mechanical failure in the pits caused his right front tyre to fail.
Hopefully he’ll be OK to race in the European GP tomorrow. Of course he’d be starting from 10th on the grid, so realistically he would be unlikely to finish on the podium. Unless it rains, of course.
In the meantime, enjoy this:

Short and sweet

Friendly Atheist poses a set of common questions for atheists, with the injunction to keep the answers short and sweet. ((Hat tip to the Barefoot Bum, who also provides a nice, but not so short, answer to the morality question.))
Why do you not believe in God? Define “god” and I’ll tell you. Every deity I’ve heard of is either logically incoherent, incompatible with the evidence, or unworthy of serious consideration.
Where do your morals come from? Evolution and socialization.
What is the meaning of life? A strange human obsession, to which the universe is totally indifferent.
Is atheism a religion? No. People only call it so in order to set up a false equivocation.
If you don’t pray, what do you do during troubling times? I can’t do better than what the Barefoot Bum said to this: Try to fix the trouble. (Add a Homer Simpsonesque “Doh!”.)
Should atheists be trying to convince others to stop believing in God? In general: yes. In particular: only if it’s likely to be worth the effort.
Weren’t some of the worst atrocities in the 20th century committed by atheists? And some were committed by men with beards. So what? None of them seem to have been motivated by their atheism…
How could billions of people be wrong when it comes to belief in God? Knowledge – justified belief – is not a popularity contest. Millions of people are wrong about evolution, and geology, too.
Why does the universe exist? If you mean “why” causally, we don’t (yet) know. If you mean it purposefully, that’s just that strange human obsession again.
How did life originate? We don’t know for sure yet, but it seems dumb to bet against the observed self-organizing powers of simple chemistry, coupled with lots of time, energy, lots of parallel experiments, and good old natural selection.
Is all religion harmful? Probably not – any more than all bacteria are harmful. But most of it is. As Dan Dennett has pointed out, we need to understand religion as a psychosocial phenomenon much better.
Is there anything redeeming about religion? Ultimately, no, I don’t think so.
Shouldn’t all religious beliefs be respected? Of course not. Respect should be earned.
Would the world be better off without any religion? Yes. The world is better for the fact that we replaced belief in demonic possession with the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Magical thinking is for entertainment, not for understanding.
What’s so bad about religious moderates? Ask an Episcopalian why s/he doesn’t rip the bits out of the Bible that endorse slavery, genocide, the subjugation of women, and stoning to death for trivial acts. Does s/he think that those ideas deserve respect?
What if you’re wrong about God (and He does exist)? Which god? If it’s Huitzilopochtli, we’re all screwed, aren’t we?
Are atheists smarter than theists? No – they’re just more realistic. (UPDATE: But there are good reasons why IQ tests might show a difference.)
How do you deal with the historical Jesus if you don’t believe in his divinity? Skeptically, of course. And since most of the New Testament is demonstrably false, there’s not a lot to go on.
What happens when we die? Recycling. First, organic chemistry; in the long term, stardust

Day trip to Mount Rainier

I’ve just got home from my day trip to Mount Rainier. Steller's Jay at Mt. RainierThe weather cooperated, and it was a really great experience. I’m in the process of uploading 149 photographs (191.4MB) to my gallery. I used the Kodak P850 (5.1Mpx, 12x zoom) instead of my usual Casio EX-S600, and I was delighted with the results. However there were a couple of scenes that I couldn’t do justice to with a static photograph, so I’ve uploaded three QuickTime clips as well:

Depending on your browser and QuickTime settings, you may have to wait for a few moments for these video clips to be downloaded.

Theodicy is not just a debating point

Pharyngula reports that a Seattle girl is dying of cancer, and her entire community is praying for a miracle. No, they are not hoping for a medical breakthrough: they are pinning their hopes on direct divine intervention. A surgeon finds this outrageous:

I must also say this: there’s something perverse to the point of revulsion in the idea of a god that will heal the girl if enough people pray for her. […] To believe that, you must believe he deliberately made her ill, is putting her through enormous pain and suffering, with the express plan to make it all better only if enough people tell him how great he is; and to keep it up unto her death if they don’t. […] If people survive an illness because of prayer, does that mean that god has rejected those that didn’t pray? If you pray for cure and don’t get it, and if you believe that praying can lead to cure, then mustn’t you accept that God heard your prayers and said no? […] But if you say either outcome is God’s will, then what’s the value of the prayer in the first place? In this case, it seems, it’s only to make the girl feel guilty and unworthy.

Once

Around lunchtime, I developed a yen for a movie. It’s a warm, slightly humid day; A/C would be nice; what shall I see? Maybe a bit of mindless fun with “Transformers”? I checked the reviews at RottenTomatoes: not promising. OK, if “Transformers” was at 56%, what was the top-rated film currently in the cinemas? I scanned the full listing, and although the animated film Ratatouille had an outstanding score of 96%, the outright winner was Once, with 97%. OnceI watched the trailer – and I was hooked. I finished lunch, hopped a bus up to Capitol Hill, and went to the Harvard Exit.
It was a superb film.
One reason that I think I liked it so much was that it was set in Dublin, and I was there so recently that it was particularly vivid. Just as Tokyo is “the third character” in “Lost in Translation”, so Dublin – especially the area around Temple Bar, Grafton Street, and St. Stephen’s Green – is a character in this film. And as in “Lost in Translation”, the film revolves around the way in which an unexpected and ephemeral relationship can offer the possibility of change. The romantic in me wonders if the relationship is going to be the outcome, rather than simply a catalyst. The film-lover relaxes and appreciates the economy of the art that brings these things to life, and makes us care so much.
Oh yes – I bought the soundtrack CD on the way out of the cinema. Because even though some of the dialogue (with heavy Irish and Czech accents) is hard to follow, the music is the true language of this film. And there are no surrogates here: the actors wrote and sang their own compositions.

A non-random 10: music to play loud

Instead of my regular occasional “Random 10” list, here’s one of my favourite iTunes playlists. I call it “Blow Your Speakers Out”, and it’s a collection of tracks by various artists over the last 40 years that sound best when played unusually loud.

  • “Jesus Built My Hotrod (Redline/Whiteline Version)” by Ministry (from the Jesus Built My Hotrod single) If you only buy one thing, etc. Simply wonderful.
  • “Cowgirl (Album version)” by Underworld (from Dirty Epic/Cowgirl) “Everything, everything” – Underworld at their best. The break at 5:56 into the track cranks up the nervous energy beautifully for the head-snapping moment at 6:25…
  • “Dime-a-Dance Romance” by the Steve Miller Band (from Sailor) The intensity builds over the last three tracks on this album: “You’re So Fine/Overdrive/Dime-a-Dance Romance”. I wish I’d heard them in concert: the only live track in my collection that comes close to capturing the heavier side of Steve Miller is “My Dark Hour” on disc 1 of the King Biscuit Flower Hour collection.
  • “I Keep Singing That Same Old Song” by Heavy Jelly (from Psychedelic Years: Back In The British Isles) If there’s one track here that NOBODY will remember, this is it. Of course Heavy Jelly was really Skip Bifferty. As one reviewer put it: “Very L-O-N-G cut. First an unsure and plaintive vocal and a repetitive acoustic piano. Some aimless guitar. Then it gradually builds up (everybody having a rave up as the good ole Yardbirds would say!) to a bit of a mess: Tons of guitars, Creamish riff fragments, relentless staccato drums. Too much of everything. At the end it sounds as if it’s all going to explode.”
  • “Shallow” by Porcupine Tree (from Deadwing)
  • “Last Train To Trancentral (LP Mix)” by the KLF (from The White Room) This is about as far from the KLF of Chill Out as it’s possible to get.
  • “America (Second Amendment)” by the Nice (from Here Come The Nice) “America is pregnant with promises and anticipation, but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable.”
  • “Leg” by Arzachel (from Arzachel) Arzachel were actually Uriel, a short-lived project by Steve Hillage and Dave Stewart. Their eponymous LP is reckoned to be one of the best psychedelic albums of all time.
  • “Sister Ray” by the Velvet Underground (from The Best of the Velvet Underground)
  • “Kandy Korn” by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band (from Strictly Personal) Yes, I know the Captain hated this album. And yes, there are several live recordings that are more ferocious – but none of them capture the sonic layering that defines this track.

Sharing my favourites from Google Reader

I mentioned recently that I’ve started using Google Reader to cope with the dozens of blogs and other feeds that I read each day. As Art pointed out, Reader has a feature whereby you can tag individual items as “Shared”, and they will then show up on a publicly-accessible page. I’m taking this one step further, and adding a sidebar item to my blog that shows the last 10 few items that I’ve shared. Enjoy!