Phoebus Gins

Travelling Theatre RPG campaign mind-map

2011-02-11T03:19:00.003Z

So this is a bunch of ideas I had for how to create a fantasy RPG campaign based around the idea of a travelling theatre. The PCs would be members of the company, initially fairly low ranking. The premise makes it simple to move the PCs, while maintaining a continuity of NPCs, background plot and motivation. Also, there are lots of fairly obvious plot starters involved in being part of a travelling theatre.

Climate v weather

2010-01-21T20:29:00.002Z

Gerald Warner is obviously a man with an agenda. He is given to sweeping statements, idiotic claims and badly thought out thought experiments. He's the sort of person you don't want to meet at a party, because you'll spend the next 90 minutes listening to some sketchy argument that the ice-cubes in his gin and tonic mean we don't have to worry about climate change.

Thought experiments are not a way to do science, but as I'm writing polemic here, I can meet Gerald on his own ground. I'd like to suggest my own thought experiment to those who claim that bad prediction of local weather undermines the credibility of climate science.

Gerald's claim is:

'The line being taken among climate alchemists now is: “We admit we cannot predict whether a season will be hot or cold; we are lousy at forecasting the weather over a week, a month, a quarter or a year. But when it comes to forecasting conditions in 2030, we are infallible.”'

My response:

Imagine you come into a room on a sunny day and shut the window. How confident would you be of predicting the rise or fall in temperature in any one 1cm² section after 5, 10, 15 ... seconds? Presumably not very. But how confident would you be of the room being generally warmer in 30 minutes?

The idea that the broader a trend is the harder it is to predict is simply asinine. Would you rather bet on the average result of 10 dice or 1000? Would you rather bet on Celtic finishing in the top two of the Scottish Premiership, or on them beating Falkirk? My thought experiment doesn't show a thing about climate-change, but it should demonstrate how stupid Gerald Warner must be. A trend becomes more predictable precisely when it occurs over a longer period of time, not vice versa.

Doubting or disputing the science is all very well, it is what science does and scientists do. Trying to muddy the waters with pissweak drivelling about cold winters is just crap.

Denialism and World AIDS Day

2009-12-01T16:27:00.005Z

HIV/AIDS denialism seems to be back with a vengeance. The lies that the potion pedlars fed to a scared African continent that was understandably distrustful of the Western establishment are now hitting us in the face like filthy sewer backwash.

Let us be clear, AIDS is caused by HIV solely. The exacerbating factors of poverty, malnutrition and other diseases do not cause the syndrome. Read up on the facts, and when you find someone wavering about denialism, calmly and politely try to help them understand that they are being misled. Public opinion on matters such as this are fundamental to shaping government policy.

http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/myths

Let's sing of rats

2009-10-06T13:17:00.007+01:00

'I have always been a solitary man, never well liked. It is not that the company of others does not have its appeal, but becoming involved with your fellow man has its risks, and I have never been lucky in such things. School was the usual succession of bullies and failed friendships, university little better. Social activities simply did not pay off for me. Perhaps I might briefly experience a sense of friendship and bonhomie through a night's drinking, but this pleasure was always outweighed by the backlash of shame I felt in the cold grip of the next day's hangover. I imagine that my alternative might have been to turn to religion. Churches are ready made hives of social activity, creatures clinging to gods and each other for comfort. Sadly I have never been a man of a superstitious or supernatural bent, and I am sufficiently honest to imagine that the small drops of communion wine would charge a heavier price in shame than ever did the briefly warming excesses of my youth.

But everyone needs a place in the world. There is no such thing as a genuine misfit, everybody has to fit somewhere. The question is simply how they reach that position. Do they adjust themselves to their discomfort, or adjust the world to them? I imagine that most people would like to say that they took the latter option, but the sheer weight of this world's numbers makes it seem a little unlikely. There is not much room for self-expression. Perhaps it is only the so-called misfits who are even fighting to make the world suit them.

My customers call me Mr Hamley. It's not the name my parents passed down to me, but as I cared very little for it or for them, I feel no regret about the necessity of shedding it. I selected "Hamley" quite calculatedly. It is a solid, dependable name, as I am solid and dependable in my demeanour and duties. However it is not dour, it suggests playfulness. I do not know who the Hamley responsible for the toy emporium was, but I know that I owe him a debt.

One needs to win confidence in my line of work. Rat-catcher is a necessary profession, never more so than in this increasingly urban world, but it lacks glamour. Indeed, there clings to the job a sense of something unsavoury. Perhaps it is the guilt of all those who wish to slaughter the billions of rats, merely for having the temerity to try to live, and the fortune to be good at it. Maybe it is a mere guilt by association, rat-catchers go in the company of the hated rats. Never mind that we are the necessary solution to the problem.

Whatever the cause, if a man wants to be a successful rat-catcher, he must do all that he can to combat the prejudice against his profession. This is the primary reason I adopted my new name. Likewise I keep myself and my clothes spotlessly clean, my van waxed and brightly painted. I smile gently and politely at the customers, and always remember to conceal my revulsion at their eagerness for the slaughter.

During my early career this hypocrisy rankled with me badly. I never joined in with glee, like the fat handed murderers who make up the bulk of my profession, saloon-bar swaggerers compensating for their disgusting job with jokes and rounds of scotches and handfuls of tails. But I nodded and smiled while vermin complained of rats, and took the money to dispose of the problem for them. I am not ashamed to admit that I did kill many rats in those first years. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and I needed capital if ever I were not to be a misfit. But it has been easier for me to swallow my anger these days, now that I am doubly a hypocrite. The two seem to balance each other out nicely.

I still catch rats, you see, but I do not kill them. Not a one now for the past dozen years. Not that I tell the vermin this. They think that the larger van I have taken to driving is filled with the specialist killing equipment that has made me the best man in my field, but it's not. It's just shelves. A little place for the rats to cling while I take them to safety. Some of them, the most beautiful specimens, I invite to come and live with me. They are my muse, my motivation, and they sing to me each night. They teach me new songs to sing to their brothers, and so my practise grows, and the 'rat problem' gets less and less. All the others are on their uppers now, they scratch around for a living, dealing with mice and insects, and the rounds of scotch at the bar are just a memory drowned in cheap beer. I, on the other hand, have been awarded the key to no less than four different London boroughs. I am a hero among the vermin. "That nice, dependable little man Hamley, a bit odd perhaps, a bit of a misfit, but what can you expect?"

Of course, once all the rats have gone away, they will want me to go away too. I have never been well-liked, and once the problem is removed, I shall just be an embarrassing reminder. If I had committed the crimes that I have laid claim to, I should have no alternative but to go, to accept that my place in the world was defined by others, just another failed misfit. It is fortunate, then, that the rats have not gone very far, and that I have been taking care of them. I believe that they will return the favour.'

-----------------------------------

The cats had been mewing at the door all night, but there had been no thought of letting them in. Now finally, some hours before the dawn, they were silent.

Daily Mail Front Page

2009-03-10T19:20:00.003Z

Obviously more stuff over at mailwatch, but I'd just like to register my disgust with today's Daily Mail front page. The use of the term "IRA" to identify the killers was misleading, and presumably intentionally so. The Provisional IRA have long been identified as the IRA, and to suggest that they are responsible for these murders is simply shit-stirring. And yes, that is murderS, in the plural. The Daily Mail seem to have entirely forgotten about one of the soldiers. How absent minded of them. I can't think why they would have done that. Ummm, what was his name again? Ohhh yes...

Cengiz Azimkar.

I look forward to the speedy arrest and trial of the murderers of Cengiz Azimkar, Mark Quinsey and Stephen Carroll. I also look forward to the day when each and every Mail hack comes to fully understand the evil that they have done and feels the true bitterness of remorse.

Gindrinker on youtube

2009-02-12T13:06:00.002Z

In which we find Gindrinker in three different moods.

Acoustic loudness:

Acoustic quietness:

Electric loudness:

It's good catch all these nuances. Have fun kids.

Jeni Barnett and Bad Science

2009-02-06T20:50:00.004Z

So it looks like the Jeni Barnett thing on Bad Science has gone over pretty big. I made my complaint to OFCOM about Barnett's January LBC 97.3 programme on MMR this morning. I felt that LBC "reserving their rights" (their rights to sue him, that is) on requesting Goldacre to take down his clip of their programme was really the last straw.

Possibly LBC are looking to stir this up in an attempt to boost their listenership. Personally, I don't have a problem with this. Their greed may result in some good in this case. Firstly because the available evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the safety and value of MMR; secondly because Barnett's views are so obviously unsuppported and her means of expression so unpleasant; and thirdly because blasting someone decieved by the MMR hoaxes would work well as a story for all the old MMR hoaxers in the mainstream media. Goldacre taking on LBC sounds like good copy to me.

Hey ho. If the result is a greater uptake of MMR, and maybe a slightly better understanding of evidence based medicine, then Jeni Barnett's broadcasting career is a sacrifice we should all be prepared to make.

The importance of the nonexistence of magic part one: "Man like dog".

2009-01-31T23:11:00.000Z

The intellectual foundation of the Enlightenment was as small and simple as its repercussions have been vast and complex. The world (and everything it is composed of) is susceptible to rational investigation. Perhaps this does not seem particularly radical to you. That we are able to examine things in the world, experiment upon them, reflect on the way that they behave and draw conclusions from this may seem to be essential to the human condition. How else did we ever get from seeing fire to making fire to building steam engines? How did we get from cracking someone over the head with a rock to the wergild to the criminal justice system? Surely human being are innately rational creatures, applying their understanding to experience and drawing conclusions?

On one level this is view of humanity is undeniable. All of us make rational decisions influenced by evidence every single day. I look out the window and pick up an umbrella, I look at my change and put back the crisps. These are self-evidently rational decisions, and we are the only species on the planet with the capability of making them. But this is the point where our view of man runs into difficulties. Innately rational animals though we are, we cannot escape our animal natures. We do this unique thing with our brains, but it was not all our brains are constructed to do.

Autonomic functions are vital of course, but we are also equipped to do a whole other range of things non-rationally. We judge distance, differentiate colour, brace ourselves for landing, experience pleasure and pain and respond to them too, we catch balls and dodge blows, we recognise faces and language. Of course, there is a rational element to most of these too. Maybe I only catch the ball because I want to get the batsman out, for example. And of course the question of the instinct for language, although empirically well-supported, raises fundamental and profoundly difficult questions about the "wiring" of our brains. The line between the rational and the non-rational suddenly looks very blurred, perhaps logically undefinable, in the same way as the exact number of hairs I would need to pluck from my head to consider myself bald is, or perhaps even non-existent as a line, with elements of rationality and irrationality included in all human behaviour.

Along these lines, I tend to believe that the reason animal behaviour so often seems like our own rational behaviour is less that animals share traits of our rationality, and more that we share elements of their non-rationality. The dog begging for food resembles me begging for money, not because the dog's behaviour has some element of rationality in it, but because my behaviour has so many non-rational elements.

All this is a way of explaining why we should not be surprised either at the existence and extent of Enlightenment project, or at the extent to which it is unfulfilled. To indulge in a little paradox: "Dog like man" is not true, even though "man like dog" is. Our approach to the world, and the rationality that is inherent in it, is grounded in the functioning of brains that necessarily make use of non-rational techniques and components, even to the extent that eliminating these components eliminates the possibility of rationality.

Woo is the enemy of science and philosophy alike.

2009-01-30T22:30:00.000Z

Thankfully the anti "arts graduate" fever over at www.badscience.net seems to have died off for a while. Ben Goldacre is still defending reason over woo, and the community of comment contributors is providing valuable arguments and links about his articles. But then the occasional real piece of work turns up who simply beggars belief. Andy Green, a member of the publicity company GREEN, or "Green Communications", or whatever he wants to call it.

Reading his initial post on badscience, I just took him for yet another troll. However, at the end of stating his piece, he explained that he was "the PR guy who is behind the Blue Monday campaign". He had spouted a lot of nonsense about "heuristics", "paradigm", "meme", "current reality" and the like, as if the way he used such terms meant anything. And this is what gets on my wick. Massively.

People like Andy Green, with whatever boring degree from whatever boring university and with whatever boring ideas in his head, misrepresent people who are attempting to deal with interesting and difficult concepts. The idea of a mediated reality, of debate about what we understand as "true", "justifiable", "useful" is not woo. To draw the most obvious example in this context, the Popperian model of scientific progress describes a way of dealing with data in order to evaluate their worth in particular contexts. This is a paradigm, a way of interpreting ideas and data according to a set of assumptions.

Whether paradigms change in the way that some theorists claim is up for debate. That paradigms are free-floating, free-for-all, free of explanatory conditions and free of logic, as Andy Green wishes to claim, is not up for debate. It's just bullshit. Everything that Andy Green is spouting out of his second class mouth is woo. Philosophy is not. The very reason that real philosophers don't tend to make much news is that they are generally either not able or not prepared to couch their ideas in simple or ambiguous terms. One thing is as true in the case of a philosophical concept or paper as in a scientific one: the simplification of a complex idea is, to a greater or lesser extent, a misrepresentation of it.

Andy Green is an example of the risks of academic conservatism of expression, of the failure of the media to represent ideas accurately, and of a lack of effective critical thinking skills in many people. Because there is insufficient understanding of either science or philosophy, Green feels free to misapply and misrepresent philosophy, and to use his paid psychology graduate Cliff Arnall to misrepresent the scientific method and to misapply mathematical symbols.

I'm not saying I've got a solution. I'm saying that we need to recognise that what we are dealing with is a general failure of critical thinking, and that inadequate mathematical skills to understand and interpret quantitative data are only a part (although I suspect a/the major part) of the current tidal wave of woo. And that Andy Green would describe Satan coming in his mouth as a valuable paradigm shift if someone paid him to spit the jizz through the right shaped stencil.

UPDATE: I just tried to order a copy of Green Communications' "Little Book of Values". All I can get is this message:

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.

Is this satire? Well? Is it? IS IT?

2008-08-17T02:22:00.001+01:00

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Stupid person in stupidity incident

2008-08-06T14:15:00.000+01:00

I've recently been enjoying listening to Lily Allen. I was a bit dismissive at first, but I am now patronising Lily with my much derided "Proper Pop" award, which I'm sure will be a weight off her mind. That said, I'm actually posting to pour mockery and scorn on someone less talented than myself, which I always find more gratifying than applauding the abilities of those who happen to have some.

Or one ability, which is one more than Joey Smith appears to possess (although there are rumours). Mr Smith is a loveable comedy racist who records on the Great White Records imprint, pet label of the FASCIST FUCKING SCUM party, aka the BNP. He has been offended, it seems, by this:

Which is good, I'm glad the stupid little twunt is offended. I'm also, somehow, glad that he has seen fit to record a response to Lily Allen's song. I'm afraid that, in order to enjoy the schadenfreude one can only derive from the humiliation of one's enemies, you're going to have listen to it. I fucking did, you cunts.

Epic fail. Also, have you not noticed that you are Mickey from the League of Gentlemen? "No political power?" As a fictional character, you're not even eligible to fucking vote, you frond.

But the point is the apparent strangeness of the BNP's response to a quote in the NME. The Lily Allen snippet is obviously not directed at the BNP. The clip was originally released, as far as I can tell, under the name GWB, which then became "Guess Who Batman". Its title and content suggest that it's about George Walker Bush. It has very little to do with the BNP, whatever its "original" might have been like. Allen's NME quote seems to be a fairly obvious tactic to stop her label from worrying too much about the song and holding up her already much delayed (but sure to be kick-ass, kids!) album. "It's not directed at anyone" means, "I've got a distribution deal with Walmart".

So how do the BNP respond to this one-line arse-covering statement? Well, they get their boys at Great White Records to put together something that they think will appeal to "the kids". It's shit, it sounds like something put together put together by a bunch of 18 year olds statemented for MLD after two years teaching by Jim Davidson and Phil Collins. They have this goon, Joey Smith, who they think looks like a pop-star, but who actually looks like a slow, and somewhat bitter, reject from the local gay scene. They also release a YouTube video interview with him about his new album, referring to Lily Allen in it. So why? Were they crying salt tears because a woman who looks like she was made as a puppet for a margarine ad says she doesn't like them?

The BNP were looking for spin. They were looking to feed off whatever press Lily Allen was getting, in order to promote two ideas. The first is that there is a raging online debate about the nature of Britain today. In reality, the most significant contribution that BNP supporters can be bothered to make is spunking out a few watery lines of hate over the comments page of whatever mainstream news-source they're reading at the time. The second is the myth of the liberal media, liberal arts, nasty dirty liberal conspiracy. It's the old "All those people who seem to be cleverer/funnier/better informed than me only seem like that because of a bias that no-one wants to talk about". The BNP want to present themselves as being the perpetual underdogs, the only ones who will speak out for the people against the conspiracy masterminded by the 'Liberal Elite', who back Lily Allen to the hilt in every whim she has.

Joey Smith is an idea that the BNP are trying out. They're chancers, and they're looking for ways to push into people's consciousness, no matter how stupid those ideas seem to most of us. I'm sure that, if another similar publicity stunt fails, Joey Smith will soon find himself just one more discarded dicksock on the BNP's bedroom floor. The poor fucking cunt really IS Mickey from the League of Gentlemen, I wasn't joking about that bit.

What is the Smell of a Vampire Slayer?

2008-07-24T13:52:00.000+01:00

I have two exhibits for your perusal. One is a light hearted comedic romp, the other is one of the most sinister and disturbing pieces of popular television ever produced. Yet, somehow, I see a lineage. Are they related? The public should be informed.

The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer - "Masterchef"

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"