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.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Gindrinker on youtube
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.
Acoustic loudness:
Acoustic quietness:
Electric loudness:
It's good catch all these nuances. Have fun kids.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Jeni Barnett and Bad Science
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.
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.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
The importance of the nonexistence of magic part one: "Man like dog".
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.
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.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Woo is the enemy of science and philosophy alike.
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:
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.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Is this satire? Well? Is it? IS IT?
Latest news on guardian.co.uk
Last updated one minute ago
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Health chief attacks drug giants over huge profits
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Sport
Beijing Olympics - day nine live!
Last updated one minute ago
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News
Health chief attacks drug giants over huge profits
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Sport
Beijing Olympics - day nine live!
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Stupid person in stupidity incident
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.
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.
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