Truth in Advertising

Posted on November 4, 2004 by acb

Reaching for a squeegee flask of Original Source Tea Tree and Mint shower gel, I see it promises me “the most motivating shower experience you have ever had.” Where were these guys at school? The most motivating shower experience I have ever had was after afternoons on the rugger field, at prep school. There was a white tiled room with twelve showerheads round three walls. The first six varied from tepid to scalding. The last six were invariably freezing cold. A master watched to ensure that we ran through all of them. These motivated me so much I stuck to baths for the next thirty years.

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

Wishful thinking

Posted on November 3, 2004 by acb

When I went to bed this morning, at about three, I was so sure we had won; and so, I think, were the people on the BBC. It seemed just, fitting, divinely ordained, almost. When I woke up at seven I felt I’d just trod on a rake.
When we recoil in horror from the people who voted Bush because — so far as we can see — they are blinded to overwhelming reality by fear and desire, we shouldn’t suppose that we’re immune.

It seems absolutely clear that a large majority of the smart, well-educated and well-informed voted for Kerry and quite probably we thought we must win. The voters who suppose that Bush will prevail in his struggle with reality should be more prone to self-deception than we are. If we can’t even cure ourselves, why did we think they could somehow be cured?

Posted in War | 6 Comments

Grapes so sour

Posted on November 3, 2004 by acb

that they almost taste like wine: for Harriet, I offer this argument for not voting, from Alasdair MacIntyre. Curiously, the Revealer, where I found it, describes him as a leading conservative Christian. What, exactly, is he conserving when he turns the system on its side like this?

When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. …
Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.

What is needed to secure family life is a sufficient minimum income for every family and that can perhaps best be secured by some version of the negative income tax, proposed long ago by Milton Friedman, a tax that could be used to secure a large and just redistribution of income and so of property.

Posted in God | 4 Comments

Great swell of the escrotal stock market

Posted on November 1, 2004 by acb

In a comment on Pharyngula, Mrs Tilton points to a vividly illustrated story in Portuguese. You don’t want to see the pictures. Trust me.

INstead I present the story they illustrated, suitably mangled through lycos’ translation service. The pronouns grow rather confused, but this is just an example of form following dysfunction.

Clinical case: Patient of 23 years, masculine sex, looks the service of urgency with extreme difficulty to urinar and bleed for uretra, with history of that she has 3 days suffers an attack for a fish from the Amazon region known by the CANDIR

Posted in Travel notes | Comments Off on Great swell of the escrotal stock market

It can’t hurt more

Posted on November 1, 2004 by acb

I see that John Kerry has drifted out again to 5/4 on Victor Chandler; although I haven’t bet on anything since the 2001 Grand National, I bunged on

Posted in War | 4 Comments

Ad placement

Posted on October 31, 2004 by acb

What does Google know about the London Review of Books that we should?

unfortunate google ad.jpg

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment

One elegant trick

Posted on October 28, 2004 by acb

When using OOo: the language of a passsage is an attribute of the character formating. This seems silly until you have multilingual dictionaries installed. Then the words marked as Swedish are checked against a Swedish dictionary and Swedish alternatives are offered by the spellchecker. It looks like magic.

With that said, I’m surprised that Mälaren isn’t recognised. It’s like have “Thames” rejected by an Enlgish dictionary.

Posted in OOo | Comments Off on One elegant trick

Hominid variety (2)

Posted on October 28, 2004 by acb

The greatest Telegraph obituary of this millennium:

Nerina returned to her mother, by now living in a house near Horsham with her sixth husband, Noel Sparrow. Just before her mother’s death in 1958, Nerina decided to take up ballroom dancing and joined a dance club. Before long she had met and fallen in love with Phyllis Haylor, a well-known figure in the ballroom dancing world. After selling the house at Horsham, Nerina and her stepfather moved to live nearer Phyllis in London, where Nerina found work as a secretary at a hostel for unmarried mothers and later as a voluntary social worker with the Samaritans.

It is the extraordinary life of Nerina Shute, a woman born into a rich and decadent family two generations on from real power. ” born on July 17 1908 in north Wales, where her parents had briefly repaired after her father lost all his money on the stock exchange; but she spent her early childhood in a house on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, her father having inherited money from a relative”

Her mother was to rack up six husbands of her own, and uncounted of other people’s:

in 1920 Renie Shute abandoned her husband and baby son and took Nerina to Hollywood, having received an offer for one of her novels.

There she bought a gold mine in which she and her husband were to lose what remained of their inheritance, created a scandal by embarking on an affair with a married man, then attempted suicide after her lover was killed in a motor accident.

Rapidly recovering from this tragedy, Renie then married a Hollywood actor, despite still being legally married (under English law) to Nerina’s father, thus becoming, consciously or unconsciously, a bigamist. It was at this point that the 18-year-old Nerina decided to return to London …”

The young Nerina made a career in journalism, but was, herself, only married three times. Her final husband, a distinguished BBC war correspondent, made off after she confessed an affair with the maid. Original to the last, she then took up with her ballroom dancer, which is where we started.

This sort of behaviour is why we need brain cases of 1000cc.

Posted in Blather | Comments Off on Hominid variety (2)

brain the size of a grapefruit

Posted on October 27, 2004 by acb

I just want to say that the hominid remains discovered in Indonesia, of a wholly unknown species, extinct no more than 12,000 years ago, tool-making and, if it were to get to the island, at least descended from a boat-building primates, is one of the most wonderful scientific stories of my lifetime. The creature was only a metre tall, and a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s — 380cc.

Oh, and one more thing. Nature, where the real story appears, wants $30.00 for a peek at a single article. Even a creature with a brain the size of a grapefruit could be smarter and more moral than that.

Posted in Science without worms | 4 Comments

Moderation in all things

Posted on October 25, 2004 by acb

The Evolutionary Psychology list used to be one of the most interesting places on the Internet. It was thoughtful, disciplined, multi-disciplined, and wide-ranging. There was seldom time to read all of it, but it was necessary to skim if you wanted to keep up with the world. The real glory was the fact that most of the postings were not from members. They came from the moderator, Ian Pitchford, pointing out interesting areas of new research.

In retrospect, now that we know what blogs are, it worked more like a blog than a mailing list. In fact most successful blogs have a ratio of comments to posts much higher than 40/60, if they allow comments at all.

But the founder got his PhD and moved to the States. At first this showed in a loss of focus: articles about the horrors of American life and foreign policy started to appear. Then it showed in a loss of interest or simply a loss of time. In any case, it seemed to me that less and less was posted on cutting-edge science. A co-moderator appeared, a man called Robert Karl Stonjek. The journalistic function of the list, where Pitchford read vast quantities of crap so we wouldn’t have to, fell behind. More and more it became a place for people to talk to each other.

Amid the waffle, something nastier began to appear. Some of the “scientific racists” like JP Rushton had always been members of the list. But their remarks had been moderated, and their view opposed. Now they began to flourish: the last straw for me was a long discussion in which Rushton claimed that Black African mean IQs are somewhere around 70; that this represents a genetically established and ineradicable difference, and that anyone who claims that the test results can be explained by poverty or racism is unscientific. Comment on the list seems to be running about 75-25 in favour of this crap. One man1 has posted a detailed and comprehensive refutation. Almost everyone else is either silent or claiming to be persecuted by the politically correct.

Marek Kohn, who left the list six months ago, when there was the last outbreak of this kind of argument, sent me the perfect epitaph. “I suspect we may be seeing a game theory lesson: any sociobiological internet group will be invaded by scientific racism, which is an ESS.”

1 I can’t link to it because the list is closed; but his name is Jason Malloy.

Posted in Science without worms | 2 Comments