Apathy Sketchpad

You never know how much you really need something until it’s taken away, when you would give anything to have it back. This is the idea behind striking; if enough employees of the same industry just stop working for long enough society is disrupted enough that their demands are met. It doesn’t always work, but it can be very effective.

Today is Day One of the two day strike by the AUT, and tomorrow is the one-day strike by the NUS. The AUT is the union the lecturers belong to, and is campaigning for equal pay. The NUS is the student union and is a little miffed about fees. Unfortunately, neither strike will have any effect on anybody at all. I will use myself as an example here, simply because it will require minimal research on my part. As a member of the NUS, I am pressurised to skip university tomorrow. There are several small problems with this plan:

1. All students (in theory) have Wednesday afternoons off anyway.
2. I have the whole day off thanks to cunning module selection.
3. Most students routinely skip lectures anyway.
4. If the AUT is on strike there won’t be any lectures to skip.
5. Students have no power.

Students do not provide a useful service to society until they graduate and get real jobs, at which point nobody will notice that they all took a day off a few years ago. Therefore, striking will not effect anyone. In our department, the students who strike will still have to do the work, they’ll just do it later. That won’t inconvenience anybody except the students.

Similar problems affect the AUT’s proposed strike:

1. There are (in theory) no lectures on Wednesday afternoons anyway.
2. Most students routinely skip lectures anyway.
3. If the NUS is on strike there won’t be any students to lecture in any case.
4. You will only inconvenience students, and students have no power.

In my specific case I have only three lectures on a Tuesday. Two of them are given by the highest paid lecturer in the department, so the chances they would be cancelled in favour of an equal pay campaign were never very high. The last one is Physics in Review, which is a waste of time anyway and only generally has three students turn up. And they were glad it was cancelled.

For the last two days I have been trying to get my money out of the small-minded, petty ATM machine in the side of the Yorkshire Bank on Woodsley Road. This is easier said than done. I inserted my card and tried to work out how much I wanted. It started beeping at me and the screen said “Transaction timed out”. Right. But what do you want me to do about it? I can see it’s timed out, but none of the buttons appear to do anything. I pressed cancel, reinserted my card, and asked for £50. Nothing doing. Apparently I could only withdraw £45. That seemed odd, so I checked my balance. Current balance: £286.45. You may withdraw £45. I have a £100 overdraft and a £300 daily withdrawal limit, information which Dr. Idris Ahmed would love to get his hands on. I knew I could withdraw £300, but the machine insisted I could only have £45, so I asked for that. It told me it was unable to process this amount, but gave me no suggestion as to why this might be. I assumed it was a £10 multiple limit, and it allowed me to withdraw £40.

I gave this to Adam to pay for train tickets from the previous weekend, and tried again to get some spending money this afternoon. I asked for £30; it said I could only have five. I asked for five; it said I couldn’t have that amount. So now I have an account full of money, and £6.03 in my wallet which may have to last me the rest of my life.

In case you haven’t heard of the Atheist Test, it is essentially an attempt to logically disprove atheism. This is obviously a very doomed idea, since all religions are based on faith, whereas atheism is largely founded in cold, unemotional logic. If you really want to, you can take the test yourself at quo.cc/atheist.htm, but I’m going to explain most of it here anyway.

It starts by telling a story about how the Coca-Cola can evolved out of rocks and aluminium, which is clearly silly (because as everybody knows they were originally made of steel and only evolved aluminium to avoid being hunted to extinction by the Magnet Fish). Then it suggests that “to say that the banana happened by accident is even more unintelligent than to say that no one designed the Coca Cola can”, based on the observation that bananas taste nice and are easily unwrapped. They seem to be missing a few key point here, which are that apes spread banana seeds by eating bananas, bananas which are pleasing to apes will therefore survive better, and apes are a lot like people. They then apply much the same argument to the human eye.

Having demonstrated that he has zero knowledge of evolution, the author (Ray Comfort) demonstrated a similar grasp of statistics:

Could I convince you that I dropped 50 oranges onto the ground and they by chance fell into ten rows of five oranges? The logical conclusion is that someone with an intelligent mind put them there. The odds that ten oranges would fall by accident into a straight line are mind-boggling, let alone ten rows of five.

Yes, that is exactly what happens inside molecules, but with two small changes. First, there are millions of atoms and therefore some of them are bound to be neatly arranged. Secondly, and more importantly, the atoms are nudged into a regular arrangement by electrostatic forces.

Clearly unsatisfied with his demonstrations of foolishness thus far, he decides that the reader may still suspect he has some idea of logic. Never one to resist a challenge, he quickly debunks this theory as well. He claims (essentially) that to prove God does not exist, you would need to know everything about everything, or else God might simply be hiding somewhere you haven’t looked yet. I take issue with this for two reasons. The first is the Problem Of Evil, which states that if god is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, then no evil can exist in the world, and since it does, logically God does not. There are a lot of arguments against this, mostly involving free will, but I’m not going to get into a philosophical debate here. The second reason is that religion is based on faith, and therefore if he calls someone who believes there is no God but can’t prove it an agnostic, then logically he must call himself an agnostic, since he has faith but can’t prove anything either. But don’t worry, he can allay your fears:

Almost every question you have about suffering humanity etc., can be adequately answered.

Exactly what the answers are appears to be left as an exercise for the reader, but it’s good to know there are answers, isn’t it?

His next argument is that God only appears to those who have no sin, and that you have sin. Yes, you personally have sin. In fact, you are very probably a murderer, since he classifies hatred as murder, in accordance with some obscure throwaway comment in the book of John somewhere. In fact, by his logic, God broke most of the commandments Himself. He doesn’t actually mention that the whole thing is rigged from day one in any case because everybody is born carting around something called “original sin”, but if he had it would lend weight to his argument (as well as the argument for “God is a jerk”). He signs off with a brief summary and a bible quote:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

Yes, that’ll be it. Forgive my cynicism (lest I die in Hell), but what right did God have to do that? Jesus didn’t want to do it; God made Him. If God was such a nice guy He should have come down here Himself.

I know the Internet is the natural home of those who have been cast out of regular society, as well as those who voluntarily choose to ignore it. Despite this, the Internet still has the capacity to surprise me with exactly how sad it can get. Look at the advert that appeared on my forum today:

Live in a 3D World
Full 3D, textures, sound. If you imagine it you can make it.

Well, I was intrigued, as one might reasonably expect. I was under the impression that I already lived in a 3D world, at least to a good approximation. So, with nary a thought for my own personal safety, I steeled myself and clicked it. The advert linked me to a page called Second Life, which seems to be some kind of online society. This is what the ‘about’ page has to say for itself:

Second Life is an expansive online society, lived in and built by its participants. Join a 3D world full of people, activity, and fun, where you and fellow residents can build a shared reality. You choose your own goals – travel and explore, claim and build on virtual land, make friends and socialize, or vie for status and wealth. Whatever you choose to do, your Second Life starts now.

I contest that anyone with a Second Life is not unlike a blind psychic — in that the latter has a sixth sense but no fifth.

Second Life, it appears, is a little more realistic than most of these games, often referred to as MMORPGs, or “stupid wastes of time”. Their picture galleries show shots of an in-game wedding, an online pet store selling virtual pets, a team photograph for some imaginary tournament (probably in a fictional sport), a small war, a funfair ride you can only ever watch, and — I swear — a billboard a player has erected to advertise his gallery. Here is my favourite Second Life picture:

“A private hot tub get together”
See if you can spot which player clicked a wrong button whilst signing up and can’t change it now.

To get a feel for the type of people who enjoy a Second Life, I had a look at some of the “featured residents”. Here is the first one I found:

Tracy Kato
In SL, I have a beautiful home on the water, backed by a lovely pine forest. In the evening I sit on my patio, watch the sunset and listen to crickets, as gentle winds blow through the trees.

She (if indeed she is a she) spends her evenings sitting on an imaginary porch, watching a computer generated sunset, and listening to prerecorded crickets. Okay, perhaps she’s not representative, though. Let’s see who’s next.

Bel Muse
The hot tub came out of those spontaneous collaborations that take place so easily in SL. As I was building the tub, a friend started scripting the bubble jets. And it came together great.

And you’ve seen the hot tub. Bel’s friend ought to go have a look at his bubble jet script. Clearly it doesn’t work. But the bigger point here is: blonde hair looks stupid on black people.

And people pay for this site. It sort of made sense when I thought perhaps it was free, but the very idea of paying a monthly fee to relinquish your social life and live in a computer seems just a touch on the wrong side of the famous genius-insanity border.