Wis[s]e Words

Not a great day

Published on April 29, 20102 Comments

Today my parents and I went the funeral of one of my uncles, who died relatively unexpectedly last Friday. As could be expected considering his background, the funeral service was on the churchy side, not my cup of tea but it suited him. Much less personal than is probably the norm today but the vicar did well in linking his life with the readings chosen for the service. It all left me a bit maudlin and wondering what my own funeral would be like. Everybody has that don’t they, these worries about whether anybody would actually turn up and what will be said about you?

What made this day so bad wasn’t the funeral but the trip to it. It should have taken two hours or so with the train, from Amsterdam to the wild woolly East of the country, with a couple of changeovers, but it took almost four. We left more than an hour and a half earlier than we needed to yet still couldn’t make the start of the service. A power failure twenty minutes out from Amsterdam meant our train had to turn back, we had to travel over Utrecht to Amersfoort instead of going there directly and because the changeover in Utrecht had only a margin of one minute (and our train was five minutes late anyway) which meant another half hour delay on top of the more than an hour already suffered. Bye bye margin of error…

Hoisted by their own petard

Published on April 28, 20101 Comment

Journalista links to a BBC report about the acquital of the AEL for publishing Holocaust cartoons:

A Dutch court has acquitted an Arab cultural group of hate crime for publishing a cartoon on its website questioning the Holocaust.

The Dutch arm of the Arab European League said it had wanted to highlight what it said was double standards.

It published the cartoon last year after a decision by Dutch prosecutors not to put MP Geert Wilders on trial for distributing cartoons of Muhammad.

What these dry facts miss is the pure irony of the verdict. The AEL (Arabic European League) had, as the report says, published cartoons to make clear the double standard in Dutch law and society regarding the way in which Jewish and Muslim sentiments are treated. The idea being that nobody cares if the prophet Muhammed is insulted or whether or not this insults and hurts Dutch Muslims, while even mild criticism of Israel is seen as anti-semitism and cartoons about the Holocaust are entirely taboo. Under Dutch law insulting a specific group of people can be a criminal offence and although its enforcement is sporadic, people have been convicted under it, the most famous example being that of evangelical preachers being convicted of exciting hatred against homosexual people.

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The AEL fully expected to be convicted and hence score a propaganda victory; what they didn’t expect is to hear their own arguments for publishing the offending cartoons being given as the reason why they weren’t offensive/insulting under the law. The AEL from the first insisted that the publication was meant to “expose double standards” and not insult anybody and the judge took them at their word…

The visitors are our friends

Published on April 27, 2010

Stephen Hawking is skeptical:

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

That quote in the title is there not by accident; Hawking’s fears bear a remarkable resemblance to a certain mid-eighties television series of friendly aliens that turned out to be carnivorous lizards wanting to steal our water (and women). Hawking’s fears are just as realistic as V ever was. Anything Earth has can be had just as well elsewhere in the universe, you don’t need to raid us for raw materials. Now add to that the problems of traveling to us, in an universe which so far seems sadly devoid of easily usable FTL travel and the likelihood that we’ll have to deal with a Columbus type situation is vanishingly small.

Which doesn’t mean any sort of genuine, unambiguous alien contact won’t create a proper out of context problem for us. To have not just life, but intelligent life confirmed to exist elsewhere in the universe means as great a setback to our unique place in history as Copernicus’ insistence that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. It will change everything, though probably not as melodramatically as most science fiction has it…

Metal Monday: losing my religion

Published on April 26, 20103 Comments

It’s weird how bandnames cluster around certain letters of the alphabet. De and E were lousy with bands I like and so will M & S be, but bands with a name starting with “F”? Though the BNR Metal Pages list eightytwo I could only think of one that I actually knew and liked. You know this one and you know this song, as it was inescapable back in the early nineties:

Faith No More – Epic

I always thought poor old Faith No More were a victim of the rise of grunge. Like quite a few bands from around that time they were busy mixing up metal with rap with hardcore punk and along came the sullen Nirvana boys with what was basically just more mopey guitar based rock and that was the end of that.

Looking at my picture, you know you can trust me

Published on April 25, 2010

Bearded men are just more trustworthy, unless we’re in our underwear:

A recent study in the Journal of Marketing Communications found that men with beards were deemed more credible than those who were clean-shaven. The study showed participants pictures of men endorsing certain products. In some photos, the men were clean-shaven. In others, the same men had beards. Participants thought the men with beards had greater expertise and were significantly more trustworthy when they were endorsing products like cell phones and toothpaste.

But, oddly, men with beards were slightly less effective than smooth-cheeked fellows in underwear advertisements. Apparently we don’t want Zach Galifianakis selling us boxers.

I started growing my beard at eighteen because I was tired of shaving each morning. Now you know you can trust anything I say…