Some short silly links

Posted on April 21, 2006 by acb
  • The man whose idea of fun is picking through slug shit to find what they’ve been eating. With his son.
  • The Peter McKay column in the Mail claims — I can’t find this anywhere online — that the in-house beauticians at a Miami hotel where Gianni Versace was shot “will dye the pubic hair of female guests ‘the exact blue shade of a Tiffany box’. A member of the hotel staff says: ‘We thought this might remind their wealthy husbands of where to shop fr their jewellery’.” This has the ring of untruth to me, and should perhaps be reported to Snopes, But it’s funny.
  • A man named Michael Hampson has written an excellent short book on how the Church of England is fucked. I was asked to blurb it, which is unusual. I did so happily. The thing that really struck me was that it was written in English: the clear and unforced language of a skilled and intelligent person trying to communicate. This may not seem remarkable. But it makes you realise what a very high priority is placed in most language about the Church, on not saying anything about some pretty obvious and important things. It’s called Last Rites, due out in October from Granta.
  • Fantastic comment thread on Pharyngula about the best ways to kill small animals in laboratories.
  • If ever there is a Campaign for Real Patriarchy, it has a new president for life, though he will have to receive the other officers in jail. This story reads like something out of PZ’s book of horrors: The defendant pleaded guilty to nine of the charges under a plea bargain. His lawyer, Harold Seet, told the Guardian that his client acted as he did “because he was troubled by financial matters and his daughters’ interest in the opposite sex”. Mr Seet added: “He said he would prefer to do the act with his daughters so they would not do it with any third parties.”
  • I have double booked myself and must pay a full single air far from Munich to London if I want to attend the Darwinian Religion conference on Friday next week. I blame the software. It’s the first bad thing that Ecco has done to me in ages — it won’t show multi-day appointments in a list view, so I could see, when I checked, that I had no meetings that do; I couldn’t see that I was not having these appointments in Germany.
Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

small spam tweak

Posted on April 21, 2006 by acb

It occurs to me that there is one very simple adjustment could be made to any spam filter: if a message contains “u” and “ur” as separate words, it’s not from anyone I know or want to know. How to tell Spamassassin this?

Posted in nördig | 8 Comments

Final note on SQlite and MT

Posted on April 19, 2006 by acb

They are two wholly loathsome bits of software. I’m sure it’s possible to run a Movable Type blog on sqlite if you start from scratch, but once you have a couple of thousand entries, it’s impossible to copy everything over. Entries and comments can be exported and imported without to many problems; but all the templates, all the settings, and all the author details are also held in the database, and they are much harder to export and import. That’s MT’s fault.

UPDATED below the fold is the particular contortion I had to go through to get it working with Pair. But in practice the simplest way is to install on your own machine MT, mySQL, and the conversion script.. Since the conversion can take some time (the blogs here make a 7.4 MB file) and will certainly go wrong,1 it’s silly to do them on someone else’s machine where the process may be at any moment interrupted.

SQLite files (*.db3) can be pushed around with FTP programs. For transferring MySQL, the easiest way is to back up on one machine and restore to the other.

1 In particular, you will need to unlink linked template files before trying to convert the database; I also had repeated problems with log entries and had to purge them all.

Continue reading →

Posted in nördig | Comments Off on Final note on SQlite and MT

A subbing error

Posted on April 19, 2006 by acb

I posted a version of the Cannibal Blogger piece down the page a little, before sending it off to the Guardian. It got held up there by the spam filters — this seems to happen to my copy quite often — so I had to send another version with all the naughty words replaced by square-bracketed euphemisms. They all seemed clear enough to me, and all but one was obviously clear to the sub who did, however, let through the phrase “a copy of the [Mark Steyn] monologues”.

Oh shit. Still, a correction to that will look even more ridiculous than the one that Dan Dennett had printed.

Posted in Journalism | 4 Comments

Passive smoking

Posted on April 19, 2006 by acb

It’s quite common to see people in wheelchairs smoking at the entrance to hospitals, Usually they are in wheelchairs because they have had feet or toes amputated as a result of diabetes; if there is one thing guaranteed to worsen their poor circulation, it is cigarettes. Yet still they smoke. But the prize for acute suicide by cigarette in hospital goes to Philip Hoe, 60, who lit up on a fire escape at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, where he was being treated for a skin condition. The treatment, in his case, had been to swathe him in a mixture of paraffin and kerosene wax. He had been told this was inflammable, but he lit up anyway. He died a few hours later in the specialist burns unit of a Sheffield hospital.

But even this, however criminally stupid, couldn’t really be said to have harmed anyone else. A real cynic might point out that if you have to die, you might as well do so in a way that gives pleasure to millions of people all around the world. If he’d burned the whole hospital down, that would have been damage from passive smoking. It might have been one of the first recorded instances of harm done by other people’s cigarettes.

I don’t smoke myself any longer, and I don’t miss it more than seven days a week, but the argument that you should give up because it harms other people has always seemed to me completely bogus medically. It’s certainly much less damaging to be around smokers than to be around drunks. Dominic Lawson claims to have published a study proving this, when he was editor of the Sunday Telegraph.

On the other hand, even if he and I are right – especially if we’re right – the assault on "passive smoking" does demonstrate that anti-smoking seems a moral cause: we feel, instinctively, that morals must be binding on everyone. If smoking were treated as merely unhealthy, we would not mind other people doing it any more than we mind tem drinking. But but because it is treated as immoral, the anti-smoker is not satisfied not to be smoking themselves. They want a world where no one smokes and enjoys it. This makes perfect sense if moral sentiments are in fact an adaptation to group living, as Herbert Gintis argues. The great problem with altruism, in a Darwinian world, is to stop others taking advantage of you by not behaving as you do. The smoker, if they are violating a moral rule, is threatening everyone who doesn’t; and all the fuss about "passive smoking" is merely dramatising this intuition.

Posted in Science without worms | 13 Comments

a note on nuclear power

Posted on April 18, 2006 by acb

There is an aerated letter in the Independent today from a Lib Dem spokesman in the Guardian complaining that the Finnish government is buying French nuclear reactors. This only makes sense, the writer says, because of huge state subsidies on both sides. But isn’t this one of the things that states are supposed to do? The argument in favour of nuclear power is that the foreseeable alternatives are worse. A world with too much nuclear waste is better than one where electricity is in short supply. Now, we won’t know whether these really are our choices for another 25 years or so. But it is hardly inconceivable that oil — and energy generally — will be come very much more expensive and that in 25 years time nuclear power will be clearly the least worst option. But of course, the power stations take a long time to build, and to integrate. So there is a kind of market failure here. Keeping your nuclear industry going with subsidies until it is profitable seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing for a government to do; if it does become profitable, it will be very profitable indeed. And wouldn’t you rather buy French engineering than American?

Posted in Blather | 4 Comments

The Cannibal Blogger

Posted on April 17, 2006 by acb

I just filed this to the gdn, and I am afraid that they will think the end, which is the whole point, is too strong. So I post it here anyway, below the fold, for tidyness, and also so my mother won’t read it.

Continue reading →

Posted in Net stories | 12 Comments

Oops

Posted on April 16, 2006 by acb

If anyone reading this thinks they are having lunch with me on Tuesday 18th, could they make themselves known? I seem to have a blank appointment in my diary then — at least an appointment with a comma. It may all be a software glitch, of course.

Posted in Blather | 3 Comments

Vienna notes

Posted on April 16, 2006 by acb

Easter on Mariahilferstrasse

I didn’t have a very cultural time, since I had a nasty ear infection that made walking exhausting and music pointless. But I managed one good photograph, and saw enough of the city to remind myself how very much I love it. There is something about the light which is wonderful; there is the astonishing wealth of art. I know I should appreciate the music, but I never had any interest in classical music when I was there as a young man, and nowadays I am allergic to the Mozart industry.

What struck me on this visit was how very little Americanised the place is. This may sound absurd, but inside the Gürtel there is very little sign of the kind of car-borne and spreadsheet-driven commerce that spreads over most of Europe. Almost everyone smokes. Public transport works, of course; the shops are almost all small. There are greengrocers’; little bookshops that aren’t in the least bit twee; somewhere I passed a tailor who does alterations. I suspect that bits of Greenwich Village must have been like this once. Everywhere there are bars and unpretentious cafes. To enter them is to realise just how loathsome and homogenised British pub culture has become. We had only one disgusting meal in four days, and that was the result of ducking into the first open pizzeria in a rainstorm on Good Friday evening. One question does arise, though: has any reader tried Bueschel? It appears to be a Styrian dish made of pig’s lung. My courage failed me.

Two bad shocks at the Albertina. The first was the discovery that the collection has been removed to make for an exhibition about Mozart; the second, that the cafe, though it still sells delicious food, charges €6.40 for a small bottle of mineral water. This makes a snack for four people without wine rather expensive.

If you are going to spend a lot of money on a meal, the place to do so is the Witwe Bolte, in Spittelberg. Not only is the food magnificent, but the notes in the list of wines by the glass are accurate. It’s not fantastically expensive, either.

The cafe in the Hotel Sacher which sells original sachertorte ought to be a horrible overpriced tourist trap — and it is certainly nothing like a proper cafe, either ancient or modern. But the torte itself is utterly sublime, and I speak as someone who doesn’t like chocolate or cake.

I wish my German were good enough to read Nietzsche. I flicked through one of those lovely yellow paperbacks of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in a bookshop, but decided that it was just too pretentious to buy it. This was probably a mistake. But you have to admire a city, indeed a culture, where works of philosophy are published in durable, pocket-sized paperbacks for €7.00 or so.

Posted in Travel notes | 3 Comments

Polish Catholic Radio denounces German Pope

Posted on April 13, 2006 by acb

I’m in Vienna right now, and stumbling down for a tourist breakfast I found a glorious story1 in Der Standard, bylined from Warsaw.

A Polish Catholic radio Station, Radio Marja, whose programme could be summarised as “back to the2 Thirties” has displeased the Vatican with the strain of anti-semitism in its broadcasts. At the risk of another torrent of green ink, I will point out that there is a long history of popular anti-semitism in Poland, as well as of its opposite, and that the last pogrom on Polish soil took place in 1946 when the rest of Europe had rather outgrown the practice. There is a sort of patriotic Pole who talks as if every single communist was actually a Jew, and not a Pole at all.

These are clearly the people running Radio Marja. There has been trouble there before, and at the end of March someone called Stanislaw Michailkiewicz broadcast a commentary attacking the Jewish societies which have for the last few years been reclaiming synagogues, graveyards, hospitals, and schools which had belonged to the community.

There was a storm of criticism. The Vatican wrote to the Polish Bishops’ Council demanding that they take steps against the radio station. Within Poland, the critics included the country’s official Council on Media Ethics, a voluntary body which seems to correspond to the British press council. Radio Marja retaliated by setting up a committee of its own supporters, “The Independent Ethical Council for the Media”, whose chairman, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Warsaw University, explained to the listeners of “the Catholic voice in your house” what lay behind the whole thing.

“The Third Reich took the moral backbone out of the Germans, and [Pope Benedict’s] hasn’t grown back yet”.

This is a remarkable thing for any Catholic radio station to say about a Pope, but Professor Wolniewicz is a remarkable philosopher, went on in a later broadcast: “”The terrible suspicion grows in me,” said Wolniewicz to Radio Marja’s audience of millions, “that the people who have organised the latest attacks against you are trying to exploit the fact that the Pope is a German, and that it must seem extraordinarily difficult for him openly to defend anyone who has been accused of antisemitism by the media, and possibly even by some of his closest advisers.”

In other words, the Pope is not just a German, tainted by Nazism: he is a crypto-Nazi who is being manipulated by the Jews.

After I had stopped laughing at this story, and after I had stopped marvelling at the inexhaustible creativity of the religious imagination, which can breed such monsters as a German Pope being manipulated by the Jews against honest Polish patriots, I felt (how can one, here, in Vienna, avoid it?) a chill of real horror at persistence and versatility of anti-semitism throughout history.

The Polish bishops, who help to fund Radio Marja have so far kept silent about the matter. They have to make a decision soon, though: Pope Benedict is due to make another foreign visit at the end of May, and this time he will be coming to Poland.

1 Some details of this translation may not be accurate. I don’t have a dictionary handy; my German has not had much practice for many years now; and when I saw on the German for “of the ethical council” I read it at first as a reference to the little-known pre-Socratic philosopher, Ethikrates.

2 I don’t know enough Polish politics to be sure whether these are the nineteen, seventeen, or the fifteen thirties

Posted in God | 5 Comments