Lost Worlds

If That's How "We" Are Then Include Me Out

In this week's London Review of Books, the culture critic John Lanchester writes about, and around, global warming. He declares:

Electric light and power, and television, and computers, and fridges, not to menton cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust; we don't know how they work but we're happy to benefit from them.

Who is "we"? I am neither a professional scientist nor an engineer but I understand perfectly well how these things work. All of them. I suppose Mr Lanchester means, by "we", people of a liberal humanities background who overwhelmingly occupy the media and most of politics; people who not infrequently pronounce upon a science or technology of which they know little and understand less, while proudly waving their ignorance as a badge of their refined sensibilities and social standing. In a world which is run more and more through technology, the sort of chap who says "Oh, I barely know how to turn the damn thing on, let alone how it works" seems less like the elevated being he imagines himself to be, and more like an idiot, in both the modern and the ancient Athenian senses of the word.

I suspect Mr Lanchester knows perfectly well how his stuff works and is just pretending he doesn't, in order not to seem common or blokeish.

But that approach leads him to make remarks like: "there is one school of thought, and a few nutters".

Tell that to Copernicus or any other scientists ("nutters") involved in serious paradigm shift. The truth about science is that, first, there's only a model, which it's everyone's duty to throw rocks at to see if it falls over, and, second, science being emphatically not a democracy, it's perfectly possible for one person to be right and everyone else wrong.

To us caring, egalitarian relativists, that may seem tough. But it's a tough world, and may do for us yet.

Technorati Tags: culture, global warming, infantilization, journalism, media

That's What They Think We Are Like

On a sachet of Nescafé Latte Skinny Less Than Half The Fat:

• Empty a sachet into a mug
• Fill the mug with 200ml of hot but not boiling water, stirring all the time. Add sugar or sweetener if required.

Is that how stupid they think we are?

No. They think we're stupider. Because the instructions continue:

• Enjoy your deliciously frothy latte!

Ah. Thank god they told me. I had been wondering what to do with the damnable stuff.

Technorati Tags: infantilization, advertising

Eat Shit; 110,000,000,000 Flies Can't Be Wrong

The oldest trick in the Dud Logic Toolbook is confusing correlation and causality. The climate is changing: check. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are rising: check. Mankind dumps a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: check. Ice core studies show high carbon dioxide levels in previous periods of rapid climate change: check. Therefore mankind's carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for climate change: hold on a moment.

There is nothing in that dodgy multi-part non-syllogism to justify drawing that conclusion. So to concentrate our resources on reducing our CO2 emissions may be barking up the wrong tree or, just possibly, barking up no tree at all. A good idea to do something rather than to do nothing? Yes. Better still to consider the worst-case scenario (as they say)? Yes again.

What we should be doing, therefore, is planning for damage limitation, because if climate change is nothing, or little, to do with us, and everything, or mostly, to do with nature, then all hell is going to break loose and we had better be prepared. Save the Earth? No. The Earth will be fine. It has shrugged off bigger species than us in the past. Wehat we mean is: Save Our Own Skins. And reducing CO2 may, of course, help; but let's not persuade ourselves that it's a cure or even a cause.

Writing in The Times today, Mary Ann Sieghart addresses herself to this question but floats elegantly around the point. She accuses the complacent of "denial", but announces in a rather de haut en bas tone:

You see, there comes a point at which you have to admit that 95 per cent of the world's scientists can't be wrong.

This betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is that it's almost shocking to find it the pages of a great national newspaper.

It's not just that science is emphatically not a democratic process. More crucially, it's that most of what Thomas Kuhn called "paradigm shift" has occurred, at least initially, against the received opinion of far more than 95 per cent of scientists. And, most crucially, that's how paradigm shift science has to occur, because the prevailing paradigm ("malaria is caused by bad air") is, by definition, what the great majority of scientists believe.

The Ibsenesque notion of the solitary scientist battling against mass prejudice is Romantic and unrepresentative of most scientific progress. But neither evolution by natural selection, nor the "deep time" against which it took place; neither Newtonian nor Einsteinian mechanics; neither heliocentricity nor electromagnetism nor the wave/particle duality of light: none of these represented the prevailing paradigm — or, to put it another way, all were cases where 95 per cent of scientists were most emphatically wrong.

This is, of course, because reality is often ambiguous. Copernican heliocentricity was opposed by natural philosophers who said "Well, it certainly looks as though the sun goes around the Earth," to which the best reply was "So what would it look like if the opposite were true?"

But the difference between scientists and politicians is that politics is the art of the possible, whereas science is the understanding of the actual. Which is why scientists, once persuaded, are happy to say "We were wrong".

Richard Dawkins tells of the "elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford" who firmly and persistently maintained that the Golgi Apparatus -- a part of cellular micro-anatomy -- was an artefact. "One Monday, the [visiting lecturer] was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said -- with passion -- 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.'" [1]

Can we imagine any politician, anywhere, ever, saying such a thing?

---
1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London, Bantam 2006, 283-4)

Technorati Tags: global warming, media, science, society

"Gonna Miss You Loads" My Ass

Oh lord. Oh god. Shall I... no. Further comment would be otiose and we all kno otiose comment's like gunna make Kong like totally crap on the rug, right?

Technorati Tags: culture, infantilization, web

And You Thought It Was More Dangerous in The Dark...?

Scarborough (oh God help us) has cancelled its switching-on of the Christmas lights because people were coming to watch. Which gave rise to concerns on -- all together now -- "health and safety grounds".

And how (according to the inevitable spokesman) was the decision not taken?

"Lightly," of course.

Technorati Tags: health & safety, tragedy

Oh THOSE Training Purposes...

From the Daily Telegraph email disclaimers:

Emails sent and received may be read by people other than the intended recipient and may be monitored to ensure efficient operation of our email systems.

Ah, "efficient operation". I see. So... if I send someone an email and it doesn't arrive -- i.e., the email system isn't operating efficiently -- nobody will know. Very good.

Incoming and outgoing telephone calls to our offices may be monitored or recorded for training and quality control purposes and for confirming orders and information.

Training whom? To do what? Controlling quality of what, come to that? My accent? Grammar? Excuse me? I mean to say, is this how stupid you think we are?

Technorati Tags: computing, journalism

This Is Your Captain SpeaKABOOM

Thinking of flying RyanAir? A recent report from the AAIU into an incident in which a collision (with the ground, at Knock) was "narrowly avoided" has shown up so much corner-cutting, toothless regulation, bad cockpit management and just about everything else you mightn't want to happen on an aircraft you were flying on, that you might want to think of flying on another airline or maybe just not going at all.

Some of the comments on PPRUNE, the Professional Pilots' Rumour Network, that are really disturbing. Anyone who's ever flown RyanAir knows that its management are cost-cutting pricks who have nothing but contempt for their passengers, headed by the prick-in-chief, Michael O'Leary - who allegedly has threatened to move his entire operation to Eastern Europe if the toothless old whore of a clapped-out "regulatory" body, the IAA, don't co-operate.

There's too much stuff in the PPRUNE forum to quote here. But when you see the pilots sitting at the sharp end of your next RyanAir flight, you might like to know how their day began:

Well yes, believe or not we do have pre flight briefings but just try to do them in 45 min. for a 4 sector day including:
* gathering all the info. (aircraft reg, pax numbers, stand, etc.)
* printing your own plogs
* printing your own met & notams
* ordering your fuel
* brief cabin crew
* collect jepp. fotocopies of all the destinations, alternates and of course checking that each single plate is up to date.
* Fill our container with water for the day (I am embarrassed to even tell that one)
* long walk to the aircraft
* and nowadays we do fuel supervision as well.
Throw on top of that printers that don't work, zero wind plogs, missing jepp. plates and a total chaotic crew control with only one person to control 45 flights during the first morning wave and you will see the recipe for a disaster happening very quick.
Of course you always have the option to show up well before and break the IAA approved 10 hour minimum rest that we get.

Reassuring, yes? Nice to know the regulators of the Nanny State are looking after us so well. For, of course, our comfort and safety...

Technorati Tags: air crash investigation, aviation, RyanAir, travel

They Just Don't Learn, Do They?

Another perpetual-motion scam (with the usual it's-not-quite-perpetual-motion scam provisos in its corporatist huffing) has demanded that all websites remove all references to it.

Oh men of Nikkogen, don't you realise that that sort of blowhard nonsense is only going to make more of us plaster references to Nikkogen, together with possibly (though probably not quite) unrelated phrases such as "pull the other one" and "bollocks, if you ask me", all over blogs which wouldn't have mentioned Nikkogen (although we might well have mentioned other annoyances, entirely unrelated to Nikkogen, such as people who think we're idiots, and grandstanding assholes who think that by sending out stroppy letters they'll get us to do exactly what they want.

Doesn't work any more, Guys At Nikkogen. The estimable Tim Worstall explains why. But if you want to read the stuff for yourself -- the horror! the horror! -- have a look at what seems a little slippery, in the way that snake oil is slippery: a slipperiness which is explained at the excellent Ministry of Truth.

The War On... What Was It Again?

Miles Davis would be in prison in the USA today; as a felon, he would be stripped of his right to vote; when released, he would be unable to get a student loan. His driving licence would be revoked and he could not travel to work.

So would Samuel Johnson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Gladstone, John Keats,Jimi Hendrix, William Wilberforce, Dorothy Wordsworth, W C Fields, Elvis, Sarah Bernhardt, Sigmund Freud, Florence Nightingale, Johnny Cash, Edith Piaf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ray Charles, Wilkie Collins, Janis Joplin, Bella Lugosi, Sir Walter Scott, Marvin Gaye, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Eden, Branwell Bronte, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Lenny Bruce, Jean Cocteau and Tim Buckley.

Quite right too. They were all drug users. And the state must punish drug users. Ideally, the state must mostly punish black drug users, and the USA is doing well at that. As are we. But white drug users will do at a pinch.

Or you could look at it this way: if you are a black woman in America and you have a son, there is a one in three chance that your son will end up in prison.

Aren't we doing well, with this war on drugs?

Now go and have a look at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and ask yourself: What have we learned?

(Nothing. Absolutely nothing.)

Dies Irae, Adonai Elohenu al-Hamdalillah

The Sunday Times reports that

Thousands of dying patients are being denied the last rites because hospital chaplains are not being given access to their personal records to establish their religion.

Why? The Data Protection Act -- foreseen by Aeschylus in the Oresteia; in which the watchman says "For them as knows, I'll speak. For the rest: my mind's a blank."

Another. Damned. Disclaimer.

The Burger King "I'm a man" commercial? Where Men in muscle vests and hard hats show how Manly they are by eating 20,505,321 calories of meat? Have you noticed how, halfway through, a subtitle flashes up which says:

"FILMED ON A CLOSED ROAD

?

What it should say is:

Most MEN in muscle vests and hard hats are actually GAY ICONS and
LOOK AFTER THEMSELVES and
eat LETTUCE

Vista™®™™®™®™™™® - It's™ sublime®

The image of Windows™®©™ Vista©™®:

What are they looking for, this cosy adventurous couple perched in a Rousseauiste landscape of uncompromisingly pure sublimity? A computer that works, perhaps? But this has nothing to do with computing, and everything to do with not-computing.

And whatever it is they are looking for, they haven't yet found it.

But let's remember that Rouseau found it necessary for the™ sublime to make him afraid.

Technorati Tags: computing

Sorry, But You Are So Stupid You Need It To Rhyme

I bought some miso. It is perfectly decent miso. You squeeze it out of the little plastic packet (which is itself satisfying) and add hot water and lo!, miso, and LO!, bits of seaweed.

But they can't just sell miso. No; they need a little rhyme. Here you go:

Sushi made Japan-easy™.

Is the terrible thing

(a) That they think a little rhyme will make us think "Gosh, I'll buy that stuff, which I wouldn't have otherwise"? Or
(b) That the little rhyme itself is so inane? Or
(c) Grown-up people with families and hopes and lives actually sat round thinking it up? Or
(d) They were prepared to take the money? Or
(e) Some asshole actually trademarked the little rhyme, filling in all those forms and putting a suit on and being important? Or
(f) The trade mark people didn't say "Oh for heaven's sake grow up and fuck off."?

Or is the terrible thing, as usual, that that's what they think we are like?

The Post-literate Society

Mark Bernstein blogged this pictogram:

One of the very few which doesn't fall foul of the Utterly Bloody Pointless Pictogram rule, which goes as follows:

(1) Not everyone can read.
(2) Therefore we should give them notices -- NOTICES! We need LOTS OF NOTICES! -- in pictographic form.
(3) But the pictographs are often incomprehensible, so
(4) Underneath the pictogram, we write an explanation. Which means that
(5) A significant number of people can neither understand the pictogram nor the explanation. Which in turn means
(6) They are just ignorant (from the Latin ignoro, 'I do not know') while we are fools (from the English fools, "fools".)

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut--

As many as 16 million Americans have been affected by intermittent explosive disorder (IED) in which the sufferer displays unwarranted violent outbursts.

Bad Corporate Mistakes

Who on earth advises corporations that it's a good idea to try and stifle criticism with heavy-handed lawsuits? And how come an advertising agency – which you'd think would understand about public opinion – like Warren Kremer Paino Advertising can be perfectly sanguine about the consequences of behaving like this?

Gosh, all they had to do was laugh, acknowledge their simple error, and it would all have gone away having given a few people a smile.

Instead, they may have made sure that, for the rest of time, they are branded on Google as bullying clowns.

Perhaps "intense and congenial" WKP President Tom McCartin should bail out fast, drop this anti-free-speech lawsuit, sack his advisers, and spend the money saved on rebranding his company. Truth and lies go halfway round the world at about equal speed now.

Technorati Tags: business, culture, media