Ann Widdecombe, who can always be relied upon to jump into the wrong side of any issue put before her, offered this dismal attempt at an explanation:

Look, you read your newspapers every day. Scientific advice changes almost as often as the wind.

You can hear this on iPlayer now; I heard about it from @krypto. And she’s right, of course, because the sum total of everything we know about the universe changes when we learn new things. Your choices are to go with what we know now, understanding that it could change in the future, or to make shit up and run with that. If you want to make shit up then fine (it’s called religion), but don’t foist your made up shit on me, and don’t employ a scientific advisor to make it look credible or else exactly this is bound to happen.

The Daily Mail’s A N Wilson also defended Johnson, who presumably wishes he wouldn’t, saying

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.

This was accompanied by an inset photo of Hitler until The Jan Moir Police made them take it down.

While obviously Wilson’s biggest crime against reason in that quote is kidnapping the word ‘only’ and dumping it, lost and confused, in front of an idea well outside its comfort zone, he’s also quaintly ignorant. Hitler was a big fan of science in principle, but corrupted it with quackery and racist ideology, and all but banned theoretical work as ‘Jewish science’ (except secretly where it might help his war effort). Anyone caught doing science that didn’t fit the racist message was fired. One mathematician even attempted to prove quantum mechanics and Nazism were the same thing. All of this is covered in John Grant’s Corrupted Science which I presume the Daily Mail’s A N Wilson hasn’t read, because it is a book.

Melanie Phillips, also of the Mail, implied pretty strongly that Nutt’s claims were simply wrong, which would at least be a legitimate defence of his sacking, were it true.

The reason they are casting the Home Secretary as the villain of this episode is that the chattering classes have bought into the idea that soft drugs are indeed less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco. They therefore think Nutt is the voice of scientific reason.

But he is not.

She does, at least, appear to have read his speech, as she criticises it piece by context-free piece, which is perhaps as strong an endorsement as a scientific claim can get. Melanie Phillips’ views on science are almost uniformly opposed to reality. Take, for example her butchering of the Cochrane report on MMR or her support for ‘intelligent design’. Incidentally, Nutt’s speech cites the MMR fiasco as an example of harm done by ignoring evidence. Phillips doesn’t mention this. (For a better cricism of Nutt’s ideas, see the Transform blog post about the original paper.)

On what I will generously refer to as ‘the left’, Alan Johnson himself defended his actions by saying

Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with … He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. This principle is well understood and long established.

Widdecombe also made this case. And it’s true, although irrelevant. This was a lecture about scientific work, not a campaign. In any case, I think it’s equally well understood and established that you can’t ignore science and expect your science adviser to sit there and let you get on with it. Even if Nutt had crossed the line into campaigning, I think he would have been justified in doing so. As it is, Nutt did little more than present an alternative idea for consideration and present arguments in its favour (i.e., science). Gordon Brown believes Nutt should be fired for this, “because we cannot send mixed messages”, an argument pre-emptively demolished by Nutt himself on page 12 of the PDF transcript.

Martin at LayScience.net points out [with my annotation in square brackets] that

nobody hearing Professor Nutt speaking about the government is going to confuse him with a Labour minister [and it was made clear Nutt was speaking only as a scientist], so the problem that Gordon Brown is referring to is the problem of a senior scientist publishing and publicising research that contradicts the government line. In Gordon Brown’s world of control freakery, such dissent is not to be tolerated.

which sounds familiar but I shan’t comment on why because I’m not sure what happens if both sides of an argument are compared to Hitler.

Don’t listen to these people, and don’t listen to me. Read Nutt’s speech for yourself. If you’re a scientist, you’ll find its structure and tone familiar and start to wonder what all the fuss was about. If not, just read it and then ask yourself if you’d consider it ‘campaigning against government policy’ or ‘a man telling a class what he does at work’.

On the right hand side, it’s long since had little faces, with names, and the phrase ‘you have one mutual friend’. Which is fine when it’s that guy from uni who I never got round to adding but less useful when it’s a passing acquaintance of someone I randomly met at a pub after Facebook friending briefly became the new swapping numbers. And that’s passably useful, I guess, although there do seem to be only about six people going round and round in that slot like they’re terrifyingly stalking me and they have no idea.

Underneath that is the new feature. This is a someone on my friends list I’ve presumably not contacted in a while (or, I haven’t messaged on Facebook because I genuinely know them). It has their name and face, then says ‘catch up with him’ and ‘write on his wall’. The only use I can possibly think for this is that it will keep reminding me of which of my lesser-seen friends’ names connects to which human face. That’s a useful service, like flashcards for babies learning to speak, and naturally it’s only trying to help (and by ‘help’ obviously I mean, ‘ensure I do as much of my communication as possible via Facebook and not only read their ads but force my friends to read their ads’). I just feel like any day now Facebook is going to pop up a picture of an ex with a link saying ‘what happened to that nice girl you were seeing?’.

Well, thanks, Facebook. You’re helping a lot.

I mean, I don’t like it in principle because I think if people are going to believe something then it should be true. (And for the record, anyone who falls for Mormonism or Scientology is a fully levelled-up imbecile, with a million inexperience points and the Shield of Ignorance card.) I also object to the relativist attitude the current culture promotes. Lastly, I object to anyone identifying themselves as ‘Catholic’ because that’s an endorsement of Pope Batshit-Mental XVI, and more generally a large number of believers gives any religion’s lunatic fringe a dangerous illusion of credibility. And these are all fine objections in principle, but in practice, in reality, for the purposes of day-to-day thinking, I just find it weird.

I think I’ve essentially been an atheist ever since it occurred to me to think about religion. For years since then I’ve surrounded myself with young, middle-class, liberal science students and their ilk, so now when I meet someone I assume they’re an atheist in the same way I assume they like cake: so completely have I accepted that there aren’t any gods that it simply wouldn’t occur to me that anyone might disagree. I mean, I know religious people exist outside of churches and other countries and the Internet, but only in the same way that I know a lot of people are conservatives and I know the weekend isn’t an infinite time-bank in which I can catch up with any ridiculous amount of work I care to ignore during the week: I can remember that these things are true but they’re kind of not programmed into my internal model of the world. You know, like general relativity.

But then… there are a couple of my friends who are theists, and every so often I see a Facebook update or something* that casually mentions God or Jesus or Allah vel cetera as if it’s a real person and it just weirds me out. For one thing, I don’t know what to do when I’m invited to thank God for some meaningless turn of fortune. Anything honest seems impolite. How is that fair? They’re the one with the delusion — if anyone’s going to be in an impossible situation, surely it should be them?

In the end I just ignore them. I know if I correct them they won’t listen anyway. Although that said, I do the same thing in pub quizzes and I’ve lost out on a prize that way, so maybe I need to be more assertive. In the meantime, though, my sheepishness to correct the deluded stands me in good stead for handling the religious. Sometimes I post passive-aggressively atheist messages just to balance it out.

The feeling that it’s weird persists, though. Here, I think (in that implicit, subconscious way we do most of our low-level thinking) is a list of updates, from people I care about, to let me know what’s going on in their lives… and here’s one that also involves a fictional character that my friend genuinely believes to be real. I literally don’t know how to process that information. It’s like presenting DOS with the command “c:\make me a cup of tea”. My face just goes blank while my brain throws it the neural equivalent of an unhandled exception error and emails a crash report to Charles Darwin.

I don’t really have a point to make here about anyone other than myself. (I thought I’d wait until the end to mention that. So you’d read it.) I think I just needed to write this somewhere before it drove me crazy. I vaguely hope that any religious folk who happen across this post might understand a bit better what it’s like to be an atheist, although I suspect they might only learn what it’s like to be a socially inept geek-atheist who is procrastinating rather than write his thesis.

Steve: [in a thick, perhaps German, accent] Hello. I’m Steve, and I’m calling from Save My Bill. Okay?

Me: Okaaay…

[pause]

Steve: Is that okay?

Me: Yes.

[pause]

Steve: What’s okay?

And then I hung up.

The mathematical framework that makes CT possible was all outlined in 1917 by Johann Radon. Then in the 50s, the mathematical framework was outlined again, differently, by Allan McLeod Cormack, who invented the CT scanner without having read Radon’s work. Then, in 1973, the CT scanner was invented by Godfrey Hounsfield, who hadn’t read Radon or Cormack’s work. For this, Cormack and Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize.

I’ll be honest, this somewhat undermines the importance of the literature review in my mind.

Only… I wonder what amazing stuff we’d have invented by now if we’d started inventing information technologies instead of pissing about with steam engines all that time. There should have been Discworld-style semaphore towers up and down the country in Tudor times at least. Why should a message take days to get across the country just because that’s how long paper takes? We could have had a CT scanner in the 30s, for a start. By now I’m totally convinced we’d have flying cars and moonbases.

And even given that, scientific knowledge is still trapped in PDF versions of paper journals, behind a myriad different paywalls and arbitrary institutional subscription lists. That’s a terrible system. It should be on a big database, searchable by any parameter you like. If I’ve got a question to which mankind has found an answer, I should be able to run a quick-and-dirty search and get a good idea what that answer is in about fifteen minutes.

If you want jetpacks, don’t invent the jetpack, reform scientific information handling. Because that way it’ll come with teleports and moving hologram projectors and sexy androids and other implausible future stuff.

My question is this: is the following quote from St Thérèse the sort of thing you would want to publicise if it was your religion?

Be not afraid to tell Jesus that you love Him; even though it be without feeling, this is the way to oblige Him to help you, and carry you like a little child too feeble to walk.

Read it again, this time mentally substituting ‘your boyfriend’ for ‘Jesus’. I think that’s a little bit like something Jo Brand might say.

From the b3ta newsletter, it’s OK Cupid’s analysis of what words and phrases are more successful than others at eliciting a response to a first-contact message. Essentially, it’s a formula for the perfect on-line chat-up line, and it basically reads ’spell right, don’t be a creep, and mention specific interests’. It’s just a blog post, so it’s still not really Proper, Peer-Reviewed Science, but there are enough mentions of N and f and statistical significance — all used quite correctly — as well as a note about anonymisation, that my instinct says they probably did it right. And the results are a nice mix of the obvious (read the other person’s profile), the counter-intuitive (confidence is bad) and the interesting (mentioning a religion is good but mentioning atheism is better).

In any case, it does what the original ‘perfect formulae’ story tried to do (or at least what its creator claims he tried to do and I see no reason to disbelieve him), which is to combine clever PR with an actual attempt to show how science can be relevant. And it worked, because here it is in the Telegraph, alongside a photo of attractive young people kissing each other, for purely illustrative reasons, naturally. Wouldn’t it be nice if companies realised they could get the PR without the sneers of intellectuals if they just did these things right?

Also I’m inclined to like it because it seems to say that self-effacing male atheist physicists are sexy. And I think we can all agree that that’s basically indisputable.

But, I thought, I routinely record TV shows then skip the ads when they’re on. Isn’t that the same? But no, I don’t think it is. My watching a show that was on while I was out doesn’t cost the broadcaster anything, and I’m doing it passively — I’m recording the shows out of necessity and then not feeling the need to voluntarily spend twenty minutes watching adverts. That’s not the same as going out of one’s way to avoid or ‘block’ them. When I watch TV at the time it’s broadcast I generally sit through the ads.

So, I thought, is this basically the same as copying CDs? I’m sure we can all agree that that’s both immoral and illegal and that anyone who thinks otherwise is simply better at rationalising their crimes than the rest of us, but still most people do it and clearly it’s not that big a deal or, necessarily, bad for the industry. But then I thought, no, people who copy CDs routinely also buy more CDs than the average person, whereas someone who uses AdBlock to filter out the mammoth reams of advertising on newspaper websites also uses it to strip out the relatively tiny ads on Google or Facebook, and these websites only survive because most people have either less technical know-how or more ethics than that.

The internet is built on advertising. It’s the best revenue stream it currently has, and while it’s not ideal, people are doing all sorts of really clever things to make it more relevant, less intrusive and more useful both to advertisers and consumers. Except, that is, for the users who choose to exclude themselves from this economy and simply scrounge off the wealth of tools and culture it has produced, while sucking resources out of it like some awful electronic leech, or a burglar. Not only that, but by filtering out easily-identified adverts, they encourage website operators to use more obtrusive, less clearly marked adverts the software doesn’t pick up. AdBlock is very bad for the internet.

If you use Adblock to filter out adverts from websites whose content and bandwidth you consume, I’d like to know what your justification is. Because my current theory is that you haven’t given it a second’s thought. Also I’d like you to turn it off for a week and see if online advertising really bothers you that much. If it does, I suggest you either change your web habits to visit better designed sites or just mellow the fuck out. If not, consider leaving it off and welcome back to the fold of contributing members of internet society.

This week, a South African call-center business, frustrated by persistently slow Internet speeds, decided to use a carrier pigeon named Winston to transfer 4 gigabytes of data between two of its offices, just 50 miles apart.

At the same time, a computer geek pushed a button on his computer to send data the old-fashioned way, through the Internet.

Winston the pigeon won. It wasn’t even close.

It’s a cute stunt to highlight an apparently a bit rubbish internet connection. It’s just epically unimpressive because, as an actual experiment, it doesn’t make the slightest jot of sense. The two aren’t remotely comparable. If the pen drive had been smaller, broadband would have won. Had the distance been longer, broadband would have won.

Internet speeds are measured in data/time, with distance being less important. Pigeons travel distance/time, largely irrespective of how much data you tape onto them. If I was to copy 500GB from my laptop, through the Internet, to my desktop across the other side of the room, I’m confident it’d take hours even on a good day, but I could easily hurl my 500GB external hard disk the same distance and it’d get there in seconds.

I don’t mind this sort of thing being done, but it’s been over-reported to a ludicrous degree, and ABC’s line “just 50 miles apart” suggests to me that they think the short distance somehow makes this more impressive. Of course it doesn’t. Everyone who’s ever worked in an office must know that: you don’t email large files to your friend across the room. That’s what pen-drives are for.

And let’s not start on their throwaway and derisory use of the term ‘computer geek’.

I can’t tell you how he did it, but I can tell you how I’d do it. If you don’t want to know, don’t read. Bear in mind I’ve never tried this, so I’ve not had that chance to work out the fine details.

The whole thing was shot with no audience and two cameras, which is one more camera and one fewer audience than I’d use if it was real, and one of the cameras (which I’ll call ‘camera 2′) was needlessly far away. (The camera that follows Derren into the studio I shall obviously call ‘camera 1′.)

So. Derren walks in, followed by camera 1. He gives his spiel, pointing out camera 2, strides over to the podium and TV, waves to camera 2, which gets some nice wide-shots of the setup. Then everyone breaks for tea.

Next, top-secret camera 3 is mounted on a tracking device, similar to the ones that power those ever-so-precise spotlights that spin around so impressively on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. It films the podium of balls for 10 minutes while nothing happens. (You could reuse camera 2, but for clarity I’m invoking a third.)

At precisely the same moment, shortly before broadcast, the video of the balls camera 3 took starts rolling in the editing room, and the same sequence of moves is started on the live camera so that the two feeds perfectly match up. This means the editor can cut between the pre-recorded balls and the live feed seamlessly.

When broadcast starts, camera 1 and Derren are in the next room. He then walks in, and camera 1 follows him. You cut in a shot taken with camera 2 earlier in the day (with live sound), which falsely establishes that (a) there is a second camera at the back of the room, and (b) there are no other cameras, and no clever moving camera mounts. You can’t tell camera 2 isn’t live because it’s too brief and far away to show lip-sync in detail. Now you have to get from the live camera 1 feed to the live camera 3 feed without an obvious cut. So camera 1 is held next to the mounting device, and Derren waves to the back of the room, where camera 2 used to be. This is an excuse to cut to another pre-recorded wide-shot. Partway through the wave (nice touch) you cut ‘back’ to the live camera 3 feed. From here on, the camera rotates and zooms slightly, but never moves, and the whole thing can go out live until the draw starts.

At this point, while all eyes are fixed on Derren or the podium, Andy Nyman robs a bank. Remember that this was billed as a feat of misdirection.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, Derren moves round to the other side of the TV, so nothing is anywhere near the podium with the balls. This allows the editor to cut in the left hand side of the image from the pre-recorded footage, masking somebody quietly taking out the dummy balls and putting in the correct ones, as they’re drawn. The edge of this mask is smooth, because a crisp join is obvious even when it’s perfectly done. When the balls are in place, you quickly fade out the pre-recorded mask. (With luck, camera motion will mask this.) Once you’re back totally live, Derren triumphantly walks over to the podium, and the program on camera 3 switches to a predefined ‘zoom in on the balls’ sequence.

I’m pretty convinced this is how he did it too, because the whole broadcast plays out how I’d expect it to. But I obviously wanted to get this out there before tomorrow’s show.

On other hands, I’ve heard a theory that camera 3 was fixed and the motion is a computer effect, which is equally plausible. It’d be more robust to things going wrong but probably less convincing if they don’t. I’m told if you look carefully you can see the screen-left ball jump slightly, but I don’t think the YouTube version above shows that clearly. I’ve also heard a lot of people whine about freezes and balls with ambiguous numbers (including, at one stage, a ball 59) and so forth. I’ve even seen one person complain that the camera motion froze momentarily who believed it was a computer effect.

It’s fascinating to me that the same fallacious ‘flaws’ people imagine in the moon landing videos are also applied to this kind of thing, which genuinely is fake and is therefore by definition already plausibly fake without inventing extra reasons. You want proof it’s fake? It’s a video of a man predicting a lottery draw. If that’s not enough for you then there’s something wrong.

I think I’ve fixed most of the teething troubles, but the database upgrade does seem to have done a rather nasty number on any unicode I may have used, or for some reason any copy-pasting. I think this is really caused by a bug in old Wordpress versions but nevertheless I’m annoyed. If you do spot any posts with higher-than-usual concentrations of €, æ and  symbols strewn through them, do leave a comment and I’ll try to fix as much as is plausible. That said, the archives have been through enough CMSes by now that I reckon they’re probably mostly exposed markup code and errant unicode by now.

Oh, well.

photo credit: Daquella manera

No, I like my art to be out in the wild. I love Slinkachu’s tiny figures left in city centres. I love the paving slab outside Leeds Gallery with the phrase ‘YOU ARE A ROCK’ carved into it for no clear reason. I thoroughly enjoyed the melting writing someone did on one of Manchester University’s shoe bins with insulation tape. And I love the huge, elaborate murals randomly spray-painted on walls. The one on New Wakefield Street was amazing until it was heartlessly painted over earlier this year. That’s proper art — you can’t sell a mural, so what else could it be?

And I utterly object to anyone who says something isn’t art just because it’s spray-painted on a wall. I think that’s the most awful, pretentious snobbishness.

“The two words ‘graffiti’ and ‘art’ should never be put together,” said the art critic Brian Sewell. He added the council were “bonkers”. “The public doesn’t know good from bad.”

Now. Normally, of course, I’m the first person to berate the general public for their godawful taste in just about everything. Chart-topping bands are mostly dross, the top-rated TV shows are generally dreadful, and then there’s Peter Kay. But these are majority-popular things. They come out on top because they’re widely accessible and heavily promoted. Very few people, I think, genuinely consider The X-Factor or The Sound Of Laughter to be art. They just enjoy them and consume them on that basis.

“For this city to be guided by the opinion of people who don’t know anything about art is lunacy. It doesn’t matter if they like it. It will result in a proliferation of entirely random decoration, for want of a better word.”

Oh, I do hope so.

My point is that ‘art’ is an impossible concept to pin down, and in attempting to solve that problem I think Sewell has decided that, as an expert on art, he gets to decide what’s art and what isn’t. From there it follows logically that he’s an expert in it. It’s circular reasoning, and it’s true only if you agree to his definition of, by which I mean ‘taste in’, art. Essentially, Brian Sewell is an expert in the kind of thing that Brian Sewell is interested in, just like everyone else, only he has the audacity to base his definition of the word ‘art’ around it.

…for Sewell, the [Banksy] exhibition’s popularity was another sign that “the art world has gone absolutely crazy”.

“Any fool who can put paint on canvas or turn a cardboard box into a sculpture is lauded. Banksy should have been put down at birth. It’s no good as art, drawing or painting. His work has no virtue. It’s merely the sheer scale of his impudence that has given him so much publicity.”

That, Brian, is part of the art.

Art only exists as a construct of the people who create and consume it. If all humans vanished overnight then art, like money, would cease to exist as such. The deserted world would just be littered with pointless canvases and engraved metal discs which would confuse the hell out of any visiting lifeforms. What wouldn’t happen is the aliens saying (in alien) ‘well, the haphazard spray-paint pattern on the wall of this building we can’t fathom out at all, but this colourful piece of fabric in a wooden rectangle inside… well, that I feel compelled to exchange a lot of these engraved metal discs for’.

But in Sewell’s world, it sounds like only his kind of people are allowed to be the creators or consumers of art. If anyone else does it, well, that’s just not art. And I really hate to put words like that into his mouth, because I suspect they’re unfair, but ultimately I can’t understand how deriding an entire movement like street art can ever be anything more than bigotry.

And I fully realise that I’ve been guilty of similar ways of thinking in the past, and as much as I like to think I’ve matured since then, very possibly I still am. And if so, I really hope you’ll all call me on it.