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March 17 2019March 17 2019

BAH!

Yesterday I went to Imperial College to see two talk / roadshow things. The first was the Ig Nobel roadshow which lasted about two hours and had talks from the chap who runs the Ig Nobel awards and also from four scientists who had won the prize. The Ig Nobels are awarded for science that:

makes you laugh, then makes you think

It was a lovely couple of hours hearing about the endeavours of scientists from around the world trying to make the world a better place.

I laughed and smirked and reveled in the atmosphere of nerdery and geekiness. You can watch it below:

After an intermission of a couple of hours there was the London round of BAHFest. The Bad Ad-hoc Hypothesis Festival. I went last year and enjoyed it immensely. I really liked it again this time around. The ideas were delightful and thoroughly entertaining. Watch it now:

Hopefully my calendar will allow me to go next year. Such a delightful event.

March 17 2019

Captain Marvel

This afternoon, St Patrick’s Day, I went to the cinema to see the latest Marvel super hero offering – Captain Marvel. I noted the state of the tide and it was low, but there was also a new area of the mud bank that had been dredged and two barges were anchored in there properly afloat. I rated this film on IMDB and there’s a communication dealing with how the system works here.

I rated Captain Marvel (2019) 8/10 #IMDb https://t.co/9B6mmsxW8p

— Ian Parish (@iparish) March 17, 2019

I note that the poster for this film outside the cinema had an F-15 Strike Eagel based at RAF Lakenheath on it and this excited me, I thought I might get to see some decent military flying by the USAF but there wasn’t really any. Also, all the flying action took place in sandy places, even when returning from space because it would be impossible to associate any other kind of land type with aliens.

I really enjoyed this film. The first thirty seemed a little slow and I did think about having a nap but I didn’t want my head to lay on either person at my side so I forced myself to stay awake. I’m glad I did because I really enjoyed this film. Well worth watching.

The best thing about this movie was the positive and strong female role models within. Most of the soundtrack was by female artists and the whole thing effused oestrogen. This is how films should be. Strong positive female role models. Women should be doing these roles and they will kick your butt. Such a force for good in society.

Obviously there’s still all those issues about winning by hitting someone until they don’t get up. I’m not keen on those messages. I think we see enough of that from the G5 in the world. Oh, there was Jude Fucking Law, yeaugh.

February 19 2019

He Said What?

Over the weekend I went to a chapel communion service and I did this voluntarily. I was away at the Armed Forces Chaplaincy Centre and while there one of the members of staff was going to deliver the chapel service. I went to the chapel service to support her and be a part of her experience. There is also the very slight possibility that one of these services might persuade me a little to partake in religion. It’s not happened yet and perhaps I secretly want this. I am, very slightly, jealous of those who have such faith, such comforting thoughts about the world.

As it turned out my friend couldn’t deliver the service because there are rules about who can touch certain parts of church paraphernalia and I guess you have to be a certain rank within the church before you are allowed to commit certain acts. I find it all rather confusing and very amusing. I think that every church has these man-made rules to govern who can do what within their made up system of belief. Everyone seems to take this very seriously.

I was once at Amport House and someone mentioned that although gay priests are allowed your vicar licence has to be approved by the local bishop and if that bishop is homophobic then you lose your licence to priest if you come out to the church. That seems utterly ridiculous that your ability to church is dependent on what your human boss thinks. But then again, the idea that a committee of humans can overturn the common ideals of a religion within a committee and change a religion’s view on a particular issue amuses me greatly.

The sermon on Sunday was interesting. The padre [I honestly don’t understand the terms for vicar/priest etc] spoke about Valentine’s Day and the love that we receive from partners on that day. He then linked this into the love that Jesus gave to us and also the love that God gives us. There was general chatter about two holy men who gave their lives for strangers. One of them was at Auschwitz and he sacrificed his life for another man. The other man went on to live to an old age and had many children. The other priest was a man who got entangled in another soldiers parachute on D-Day. The priest cut himself free to fall to his death and the other soldier went on to do his job. These stories were interesting and not ones I had heard before. While they showed a love for the stranger I do think they missed the point that they occurred within a time when there was great evil on the Earth and millions were dying in concentration camps and in battle. But religious people gloss over the problem of evil.

Within the sermon the padre talked about a passage from John. He mentioned words that Jesus said:

[side point: Jesus didn’t say these things. This was written about thirty years after Jesus died. Go back and think about any conversation, important or not, from thirty years ago and try to be convinced about how accurate you are. It amuses me just how much study is made from the EXACT words in the bible when it’s all translations and copying errors]

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Hey, it’s only my way or no way. You must do as I say or you won’t get to heaven. Do as I say you muthafuckers because I will damn you if you don’t follow my exact words.

“But, Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?”

Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.”

This part was read out and the message was meant to be that if you love Jesus you will get to heaven. My problem is the bit IN THEIR OWN BOOK which clearly shows signs of an abusive relationship. This part wasn’t talked about in the sermon and it’s interesting the bits of their own book they are willing to gloss over. You see that little bit in there which is along the lines of:

Follow my rules or else. Follow my rules and I will love you. Don’t follow my rules and you are damned to everlasting hell.

Do as I say or you will be burnt and suffer in indescribable pain forever. This section of the reading was glossed over in the sermon but it screamed in my head and really bothered me. If christians take this book so seriously and believe it is the word of god then why don’t they see these parts. The parts that require complete submission or else. They don’t see them because they are either glossed over or they think it is a good thing. That passage has really bothered me for a few days now.

Follow my rules or get fucked.

It’s not like following the laws of the road or those at work. This is referring to eternal damnation and the only path to heaven is through following the rules of Jesus. Well, screw that. This book has been used to justify hatred and murder for the last two thousand years and probably will be used for another millennia. I do hope that one day we grow out of following a book written by men about two thousand years ago which is demonstrably wrong about so much.

You don’t need Jesus to understand that being nice to people is the best way to go. You don’t need Jesus to believe that treating people as you would wish to be treated is a good maxim for life. These things are self evident and don’t require a god or his naughty boy. It’s easy to use the principle of BE NICE to inform all your choices and decisions. If only more people realised you don’t need god [or the threat of hell] to be good.

February 6 2019February 8 2019

RAST Heats

I have spent some time recently at an Army Training Camp with a team of CCF cadets whilst they trained to compete in the Royal Air Squadron Trophy. They worked very hard and won the South East heats and so now move on to the national finals in a month’s time.

I can’t show you any photographs of that because they all contain the cadets. What I can show you are two pictures of Crowborough in the lovely sunny snow.

Another:

I’m very proud of the work the cadets put into the competition.

Also, while at the defence training area I found an old safe. I thought it looked particularly picturesque and so here it is:

January 29 2019

Unsightly

Scanning down the BBC News headlines page I came across a few headlines that bothered me and I think they show a disconnect between what the public think and what is correct. This has always been the case but social media and the ease of connectivity now means that people who are wrong can gather together and think that being in a community of like-minded people means that their views are correct.

Apparently 5% of the population do not think the holocaust happened. Whether this is the same as denial I am not sure. Perhaps they just haven’t appraised the evidence. Apparently 45% of people polled didn’t know how many people were killed in the holocaust but I think that is more forgivable. To know something happened is one thing but to know numbers about it is another. As long as they all know it was a bad thing then we should be ok. There were 17 million victims in total.

What this news article seems to be pointing out is that we clearly are not learning from the mistakes of the past. We are also pretty poor at appraising evidence. Too many people don’t understand how to read articles critically and to appraise their sources of information. Too many people can easily be swayed by group-think and the idea that many people saying the same thing over and over must be right.

What’s more these people also probably don’t care that they are wrong. They are going to believe what they want because they can. They also probably think that there isn’t objective truth. They probably struggle to cope with the idea that they can be easily manipulated and are possibly being used by other forces or that they are just stupid. The reason we have experts in certain fields of human endeavour is so that not everyone needs to be an expert about everything. People should be accepting of allowing us to defer our human knowledge to people who have spent their lives pursuing the best-as-we-know-it truth in these matters. We also need to understand that it’s not just a single expert we should trust but the consensus view of the world of experts.

This is what science does. Science changes its views with evidence and sometimes it changes quickly and sometimes its a more gradual change but over time the direction of scientific knowledge is to getting things correct. In terms of history we should listen to the consensus view of academics while we learn more and more. In terms of economics we shouldn’t really listen to anyone because it’s not a science, more a dark art. In terms of Brexit we should listen to the lawyers, the economists and the scientists. We should not be listening to the MPs because they aren’t experts in those fields. They are people elected by us to represent us whom, we would think, have the best interests of the country and its citizens as a whole. But we should also recognise that they are human and so fundamentally flawed individually.

We also need to understand that sometimes we just won’t know and answer to a particular problem or that the question isn’t a valid question. Think about something from history, something like what Masham said to Queen Anne. We can’t know what was said but we can use the best evidence we have to try and build a picture. Think about the start of the universe, we have a pretty good idea of what happened and asking “what” is a very legitimate question. The problem with that one is asking “why”. Although why something happens is a legitimate question the answer is unknowable and this makes the question reasonably void. It is these gaps in answers to questions that humans don’t seem to like and in those are inserted many stupid theories along with the concept of god.

Education is how we get out of this. We need to educate the country in particular matters so that people understand why and how. This is not an easy process. To allow a decent explanation to the country on matters of importance with a series on TV or radio or the internet somewhere. Mind you, you can’t make the horse drink. Some people will choose to be willfully ignorant and others are just ignorant. Personally I think this is correlated to good effect with empathy, but that is something I haven’t investigated.

This is how it is done. We educate people. We let them understand the experiences. We talk to them. We hope they are willing to listen and learn. I do think, however, that there is an awful lot of the Dunning-Kruger effect going on with people who choose not to learn.

Two more headlines next to each other on the very same BBC News front pages as the others in this communication. I did not read each article and that may be the start of the problem but I want to point out the following:

Astrology is bollocks and, unfortunately, people fall for its charm and simplicity. Perhaps if we could educate people more about appraising evidence and understanding a little more physics we could kill off this bollocks and other religious bollocks too.

Finally, putting a question mark at the end of a headline does not good journalism make. It is really lazy. It implies that the answer is yes but also shows that the journalist doesn’t really have any proper evidence to answer the question because otherwise the question mark wouldn’t need to be there. If you have evidence then it is fact and you can write something like that as an indictment of underfunding of our roads. But if you are just using “anecdotal evidence”, or to give it its proper name; “anecdotes”, then you are just a lazy piece of shit and you shouldn’t be a journalist.

Always remember when your aunt starts telling you that she took activated carbon tablets and that cleared up her cancer that the plural of anecdotes is not evidence. People are flawed and terrible at understanding evidence. That is why science and experts exist.

January 27 2019

Things Change

I watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark yesterday. It’s still a great film if you ignore the glaring inconsistencies and “Indy” problem. I think it’s one of those things you should just enjoy rather than tear it apart. Having said that I have an issue with it, something that had never struck me before but bothers me now.

Indiana Jones is a university lecturer who has young women swooning over him in lectures. This is made clear by the number of women in the lecture theatre when he is lecturing, this is 1936 and women weren’t commonly at university then, and the young lady with “Love You” written on her eyelids.

Later in the movie Indiana travels to Nepal to meet with his ex-girlfriend Marion. After an initial greeting she hits him [wrong thing to do]. This is the exchange just after that:

MARION: You son-of-a-bitch! You know what you did to me, to my life? This is your handiwork.

INDY: I never meant to hurt you.

MARION: I was a child!

INDY: You knew what you were doing.

MARION: I was in love.

INDY: I guess that depends on your definition.

MARION: It was wrong. You knew it.

Quite clearly in this situation we have a college lecturer taking advantage of his position of influence over a younger female student. She has every right to be angry at him. He’s even quite dismissive of her feelings in this situation.

You can see that in the early 1980s when this was released this was an accepted form of abuse. We now recognise the problems with this behaviour and treat it accordingly. Let’s be clear, I am not asking for the film to be withdrawn, I’m not saying you shouldn’t watch it but I am saying that times have changed and we need to understand how society is generally self improving over time [or at least the last seventy years].

Given the way things are going in this country and the USA I am worried that society will regress in acceptance and understanding of moral codes over the next twenty years. I mean I’m optimistic about it, but I do worry.

January 12 2019January 12 2019

Midnight

I’ve been thinking about time. Well, let’s face it I think about lots of things all the time but time is problematic. I was mostly thinking about this at the turn of the year, when 2018 magically turned into 2019 or the start of the nth journey around the sun when starting from an arbitrary point. I mean starting the new year on the day after the shortest day for the northern hemisphere would be more sensible but I guess we could have a war with the southern hemisphere about that.

Midnight is the first moment of the next day. When the clock hits 00:00 that is the start of the next day. The previous day ends at a moment which is the limit of all time before 00:00. Twelve AM is the beginning of that day. Such is the definition.

Now, here’s the problem and it involves language and colloquialisms as is often the case with problems about definitions. Within mathematics there are plenty of words which have specific definitions in the subject and different meanings in casual language, I mean that was designed that way originally to exclude the masses from education.

So, if I said to you I will meet you “at midnight on Thursday” then it is likely that we would be talking about meeting at the boundary between Thursday and Friday. But, if I said I’d meet you at 12am on Thursday that would probably mean we were still meeting at the boundary between Thursday and Friday but in reality that time is the boundary between Wednesday and Thursday.

Thinking about this now I think it would be only me having problems with a meeting time of “midnight on Thursday” and in a group discussion I would be the one asking for clarification whereas everyone else would be perfectly happy with the understanding of the meeting time. Oh how I hate language sometimes.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
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16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
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