Obama vs Romney

Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour party during the 80s and 90s once made a speech about the the Tori leader Margaret Thatcher. This is widely regarded as his best speech and the following is possibly his most memorable quote ever. As it happens, Mrs Thatcher did win the election and his predictions started to come true.

"If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old."

In my personal opinion  Obama would be perfectly able to use that line with regards to Romney and the US election tonight.

Equality of opportunity in the wider world.

This is my reply to another blog post by Crommunist entitled "Finding the faults" and located here: http://freethoughtblogs.com/crommunist/2012/09/10/finding-the-faults

" ...  I find this supposed ‘unity’ of the atheist cause to be nothing more than ridiculous wishful thinking. ... ".

Those us against Atheism Plus are, in fact, saying the opposite. Atheism has always been non-unified. The only thing any of us can guarantee to have in common is that we don't see enough evidence for gods or the supernatural.

Many atheists are completely for the aims of Atheism Plus (as am I), as long as you are fighting for equality of opportunity, but it is precisely because Atheism Plus are trying to create a unified group that we are against it.

I happily stand with christians/muslims etc... who are against racism/misogyny etc... In fact, I'd rather spend my time fighting these things in public with anyone who stands with me on these things rather than be a member of a group that claims inclusivity, but you can only be an atheist to join, even if you agree with all of our aims.

The issue of equality of opportunity for everyone is so important that having a specifically atheist group that is pro social justice is divisive (not to the atheist community, we are only a group in the loosest population dynamics sense) but to the wider community fighting for social justice.

Reply to Crommunist Manifesto on Atheism Plus

This was my reply to Crommunist Manifesto's blog post on Freethought Blogs.

His original post: http://freethoughtblogs.com/crommunist/2012/08/22/atheism-plus-sounds-awesome



When it comes to feminism, I am perfectly happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with any christian (or muslim, or hindhu…) if they share my views that men and women should be treated equally.

When it comes to racism, I am perfectly happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with any christian (or muslim, or hindhu…) if they share my views that all races should be treated equally.

When it comes to sexuality, I am perfectly happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with any christian (or muslim, or hindhu…) if they share my views that people of all sexual orientation should be treated equally.

When it comes to church/state separation, I am perfectly happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with any christian (or muslim, or hindhu…) if they share my views that people of any religion or none should given any preference by the state.

See a pattern?

There are also atheists who don’t share my views on these things and I am perfectly happy to discuss with them our differences of opinion.

I am perfectly happy if humanism is not entirely atheistic. There is nothing about atheism that necessarily leads to any particular political viewpoint. There is also nothing about humanism that means it has to be entirely atheistic.

But that’s fine. I fight each issue on it’s own merits. Creating specific clubs that exactly match my viewpoint is not something I want to be part of. In fact, the opposite is true. I want to be challenged on my views.

I thought, perhaps naively, that when I started to meet other atheists and skeptics that having my views challenged would be the norm. In fact I was rather excited by it.

I hope that is still the case.



I thought I should post my reply as a blog post as it kind of sums up my views on Atheism Plus.

A tribute

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars", "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", "I have a dream".

"One small step for man ... One giant leap for mankind".

To be a military test pilot is probably the most challenging, thrilling and frightening job in the world. You must have the experience of a forty year old combined with the physical strength and mental dexterity of youth. You need to be brave enough to take calculated and sometimes uncalculated risks. You must have the ability to come up with novel solutions to problems in split seconds in life threatening situations and have the fortitude to say, "go for it".

Only the best test pilots, at their peak fitness are ever considered when deciding who should become an astronaut. To be chosen to be the commander of a lunar lander you must also have the utmost respect from, and for, the team of which you are in charge.

To be the first of them and to be chosen to be the human being that will place their foot on a surface not of this world, you must be someone who has the respect of an entire nation.

To do all that, and to land with one minute of fuel to spare, then come up with one of the most memorable lines in human history takes an exceptional human being. Only a few of which come along in a generation.

That man was Neil Armstrong.

1930 - 2012

Diversity breeds Adaptability

10,000 years ago small tribes of people crossed the land that is now covered by water and that we have called the English Channel. Ever since then, we have absorbed so many cultures.

The Flemish, The Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, the French, the Dutch, the Jewish, the Caribbeans, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Polish and so many more.

A mongrel nation makes for a healthier nation. A more diverse nation. A nation that not only copes with the world, but adapts to it and makes the best of what is thrown at it.

If we can take anything from the last two weeks, perhaps it has shown us we had, just maybe, forgotten that.

Pastor Charles Worley - working the figures

So, this man, if such a moniker can be used for someone with such inhuman standards on how to treat others, has said all the lesbians and gays and should be rounded up and put into separate "pens" and left there until they die. (He did say he would feed them, although that's un-biblical, as he is showing mercy).

In case you missed it:

I thought I would do some stats on the things he said, so here goes:

Here is my basic assumptions.

• He said 50-100km so I'll assume 100 to be generous
• He made a vague circular motion when he said it so I'll assume a circle
• He suggested a separate "pen" for gays and lesbians, so I've calculated for just one population (but the calculation is the same for both populations).
• I have assumed 1% of the female U.S. population are lesbians, although it is almost certainly much larger (which just makes the figures even more inhuman).
• I have taken the poulation of the U.S. from google to be around 312M 

It turns out that the "lesbian density" (good grief!) would be 2000 lesbians (or gays) per square kilometre! That's half a square metre per lesbian.

Given that the absolute minimum recommended for free range chickens is 2 square metres per chicken, that gives you an idea of just how inhuman this man's ideas are.

I know doing these calculations seems ridiculous, but you can bet that any leader of a nation that has concentration camps does precisely these same calcuations with the added inhumanity of a cost/benefit analysis.

Quite apart from the fact that most gays and lesbians come from heterosexual parents and there would always be new gay and lesbians born anyway.

Taking offence

My wife recently put a post on facebook that included a quote from a Tim Minchin song that refers to pope Ratzinger using some swear words. Some people took offence so she took the post down.

I have posted the following on her wall, in the hope that it makes people think a little more before trying to crush free speech.

Hazel recently put a post up about the pope that included a few swear words from a song by Tim Minchin. Some people got a bit upset so she, very generously, deleted it. In a country that has free speech at it's heart, she didn't have to do this.

I had a response to these people that I didn't have time to send before the post's removal. I still think it is worth saying, so here it is:

If you read the lyrics of the Tim Minchin song in question, you will find that it is a rant, by Tim Minchin, against Ratzinger himself, for not turning priests accused of paedophillia over to the authorities, as any other responsible institution would have done. Instead, he swept it under the carpet and moved priests to different parishes.

If anyone is not offended by that, but, at the same time, offended by a few swear words, then they need to think seriously about their priorities.

Tim Minchin himself has said he would march shoulder to shoulder with people for their right to hold sacred anything they want, but don't ever tell anyone else what they must hold sacred.

I hope that next time they think before they take offence so easily.

To measure love.

How do you measure love? I mean, really, how do you weigh it? Surely not in kilograms, or lb, or miles per hour, or kiloNewtons or mass x the speed of light squared.

Yet love is real. It is physical. True love, at least, exists as a real physical thing. Our minds can become obsessed with it, our bodies can yearn for it as much as it might yearn for chocolate, coffee, alcohol or even cocaine. Love is not some ethereal, metaphysical concept. It is absolutely real. Our love for another human being can move us to do amazing, and sometimes dreadful things. I am not judging which things are amazing and which are dreadful, but the things people do for, and in the name of love, are real.

So, given it's reality, how do we measure it? What instruments could we possibly use? What data would we look at? What are the error bars? What's the p-value?

Well, of course, we wouldn't use some instrument, some vial, some computer. But yet, it is real. So, again, how do we measure it? In what possible way can we say we love someone?

If you love someone who sees life the same way you do, then that's easy. It's a "no-brainer", everything is "hunky-dory" it's "a-ok". But how can you really say that you love that person? That is difficult to measure. Loving someone with the same values, the same principles, who looks at life in the same way, is easy. To love, within your own boundaries, is but a small step.

To love someone with different values; with a different outlook on life; who holds sacred things, which previously, perhaps, you did not; Who does not hold sacred the things that maybe you do. That is not easy. That is difficult. That involves change. Not just changes on the surface like, I don't know, changing your hairstyle, or the clothes you wear, or the type of food you like.

I mean real change. Change that actually matters. Change in your principles; Change in how you view the world; change in what you hold precious; change in how you go about this thing we call life.

They, of course, change too. But when they do, when they change their outlook on life in response to you, and when you both discover new things, new principles. That is real love. That is dedication. That is what "laying down your life for someone" really means.

And that?! That is how you measure love. Change. The measure of love is change. How much you change to become someone new; To become someone different. I won't say better, that is subjective. A fuller, richer person perhaps. A more interesting person, certainly! but a different person than the person you once were. You can still look back and see life through the eyes of that person you were, but now you have this new perspective. Now, you see the world from two different viewpoints.

And what does viewing the world from two different positions give you? Perspective. You see the world in 3D. And the further apart the two positions were to start with, the better the sense of depth. The better the perspective.

That is how you measure love!

In response to The conundrum of atheism.

No-one kills people in the name of Santa Claus, or tells everyone else they can’t spend their life with the person they love, just because they are of the same gender.

How patronising to think we really think God exists but are pretending. To what end? Imagine if I used that argument on you and said you don’t really believe, but just pretend you do.

As for morals. They didnt “magically evolve”, they evolved. You, however, believe they magically appeared from God.

So called militant atheists are harmless. Militant theists are not. See this cartoon.http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/06/05/beware-the-militant-atheists/ to make it clear what I mean.

Got that off my chest.

Losing my humanity?

"And it came to pass at midnight, that Jehovah smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the first-born of cattle."

Exodus 12:21

For some reason, I have found myself talking to a few theists recently, or more specifically, Christians. The above quote from exodus is one reason (of many) that I left the church. So, it was interesting to ask them what they thought of the above passage.

Apart from the usual, "you are taking it out of context" answer, to which I say, "there is no context whatsoever that makes God's actions in Egypt morally justifiable", one answer in common was along the lines of, "God needed to show his power so that he would be respected"!

Anyone that uses that kind of violence to gain respect is not interested in respect, they are interested in fear. It is the justification a spouse uses when they use violence against their partner. God, of course, cannot bypass his own moral laws and commit genocide, unless he is a hypocrite, in which case why worship him?

Anyone who defends someone else's violence by saying they need to be respected and so need to show their wrath, has lost their instinctive ability to tell the difference between fear and respect. Is this the reasoning they would have used If one of the Egyptian parents had asked, "why did God kill my child?"

This reasoning, that is used to defend God's actions, is a sign of how far down the rabbit hole Christians have to be. They have lost that very human quality, empathy. Instead they look to the bible and their pastors for answers. They no longer trust their own thoughts and feelings, particularly if those thoughts and feelings are not seen, by their peers, to fit with the group-think that is their own church's interpretation of the bible.

If that kind of twisted logic is what is required to be a Christian, then I have made the right choice. I am right. I am free of that way of thinking and that I no longer have to twist my thoughts and feelings to obey any one particular church's interpretation of the angry whims of a jealous, spiteful, violent and abusive God.

Point to ponder. Why would an all-powerful God require a red mark above the door to distinguish households of his chosen people and those of the Egyptians? Other than to require absolute obedience (a very appealing characteristic, I'm sure) or to allow humans, who probably carried out the genocide, to tell which house was which.

iPad ... Not for me ... Just yet!

It appears, unusually, that Apple may have got their market research wrong which has led them to release the iPad before it is really ready.

Don't get me wrong. I think the iPad is probably the most beautiful piece of electronic equipment ever created in looks, the way it is seamless in it's functionality and in it's " holdability".

However, Steve Jobs has said that they were creating a new category of computer somewhere between a smart phone and a laptop and that netbooks just didn't do that properly.

Where do Apple think the Market is for this is? I have a smartphone (iPhone in fact) and a laptop already as do a lot of people. In fact most of us will still be tied into a mobile contract to pay for the iPhone. Apart from the big beautiful screen there is nothing that I can do on the iPad that I can't do between my iPhone and my laptop. Worse the iPad can't take over the joint functionality of both together.

And there's the rub. I don't think people wan't another category of computer. Certainly in my case I was hoping for something that would completely replace my iPhone and my laptop and perhaps, with the addition of a docking station, the desktop too.

The problem is that the iPad doesn't do that yet. Not even close.

To be more specific here are the things that would be needed before I think it could replace the smartphone and the laptop.

3G (coming in later models).
Multi-tasking.
Flash player.
Proper access to the file system.
Front mounted camera.
More memory.
More solid-state disk space.

Certainly, Apple will sell a lot of them to apple fans and to people that don't have an iPhone yet. Especially considering the low price. But it won't replace the laptop. Not yet.

That said. The iPad is definitely going to change the way that we all look at computers and the way we interact with them.

If Apple can deliver all of the above in the next year. The competition will be worried!

The Three Chimneys

Well, we went for it. We went to the three chimneys in Skye while on honeymoon. Here is what we had:

The 7(9) Courses of Skye

ENTREE: Bites: Mini Goats Cheese Bites

COMP: Soup: Watercress Soup with Creme Fraiche and Herring Roe

1: Prawns: Langoustines with Tattie Scones and Mesclun

2: Crab: Colbost Crab risotto with Shellfish Essence and truckle wafer

3: Smoked Fish: Selection of Broadford Smoked Fish with Croft Quail Eggs

4: Scallops: Sconser King Scallop with Hazelnut Crust, Pickled Winkles, Split pea and ham hough purry and Claret Jus

5: Oysters: Three Loch Harport Oysters with cucumber and mint jelly, home-made Creme Fraiche and smoked herring roe.

6: Lamb: Roast Glenshinnisdal lamb loin with Kidney, Heart, Sweetbread and Hairst Bree(Haggis)

COMP: Pre-Desert: Saffron Genovise with Pink Grapefruit Syrup

7: Souflee: Three Chimney Hot Marmalade Pudding Souffle with Drambuie Syrup and Mealie Ice Cream

(8): Cheese: Selection of Cheeses and oatcakes

All Accompanied by Rosemary Bread, Sourmilk bread and Seeded Bread

Finished with coffee, mini bakewells, chocolate coconut and tablet.

Neither of us quite felt up to the cheese course!

If we had gone for the soup and included the coffee as a course that adds up to 12 courses.

Price: Ahem!!!

Hey, It's a five star restaurant, one of the top 10 in the world. pick a number and probably double it! Well, we were on honeymoon!

It was definitely worth it.

"Fakery" at the Olympics

There have been countless stories about "fakery" during the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. From the piano not being real and the singer being substituted, to some of the fireworks being CGI and the ethnic kids not being truly ethnic.

The opening of the Olympics games is a show, just like any other show. It's on a much grander scale perhaps, but it is a show none the less.

Shows are live. Things that are live have a knack of going wrong. Much of the production time of a show is put in to reducing the risk of things going wrong. That is why most shows have a prompter; It's why there are understudies; It's why we have rehearsals.

Shows are also fake. Nothing is real. Nothing! Anyone with a vague knowledge of putting on shows knows this. The acting is fake: The actress playing Juliet doesn't really kill herself (even method actors draw the line somewhere). The scenery is fake: That's not a real bus in Summer Holiday. Even the flying car in Chitty isn't really a car. It's a life-size model on wires. (Sorry to anyone who thought it was real).

And that mottled lighting effect in the woods in Babes in the wood? The stage crew open the roof and allow the sunlight to filter through the 5 large trees they have planted specially amongst the tabs. They really do. Honest! ;-)

As humans we have the amazing ability to suspend our disbelief even when given very little information, particularly with other humans. This ability is used all the time by directors/set builders/lighting crews/make up artists ...

Of course the piano was fake. It had to sit on a piece of flexible flooring because the flooring was lit from underneath to make the scroll work without any shadows from the people moving on top of it.

Of course some of the fireworks were CGI. They had to make sure they looked right when they were live in front of a massive audience. Also, the fireworks were set up but they felt it was unsafe to film them (see the paragraph at the bottom).

As long as the games are real I don't mind fakes at the opening ceremony.

Stephen Fry

I've been following Stephen Fry's new blog. He writes with humour and warmth about anything and everything but is a self confessed geek. He also has a new column in The Guardian.

He owned the second ever Mac in Europe (Douglas Adams owned the first) but uses Windows and Linux too. At last, someone of his standing saying it's not "either/or".

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Doctor Grimwig

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