Apathy Sketchpad

Yesterday, The Times reported that the Labour party had taken donations which had come to them via. a proxy to conceal the donor’s true identity. Aside from containing this fantastic sentence:

Donations made via third parties are illegal unless the person behind the donation is also declared or there is a “reasonable excuse”.

…it also explained this email I received in March but had always assumed was a scam:

DEAR BELOVED URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL

I am DAVID ABRAHAMS, an impotant businessman here in LAGOS, NIGERIA and I have sum of $600,00 USD  (SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND US DOLLAR) which I want to donate to THE LABOUR PARTY. I would like a trust worthy partner to act as a donor. The money will be transfered into your account and then into THE LABOUR PARTY. The fund will be split as follows: 15% for your expenses, 10% for contingency/emergency and 75% for THE LABOUR PARTY.

Yours in Christ,

David Abrahams

LAGOS NIGERIA

No, really. I wouldn’t lie to you.

Also I read that Santa has lost the disks on which he stored the lists of 25 million naughty and nice children. So, er, let’s hope that doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Apparently, a BBC show that nobody watches (hence the interviews ending up in the news in advance of the broadcast) will include an interview in which Tony Blair admitted that religious faith was “profound about [him]“, but that he’d tried to underplay it because otherwise “people do think you’re a nutter”. Well, yes. Turns out, in a shocking revelation, that people like to think you have actual reasons for doing things beyond an irrational belief that an invisible wizard who lives in the sky would like you to do them. When those things are limited to where you spend your Sunday mornings, nobody much cares, but when they’re decisions like whether or not to start a war, people tend to think motives are important.

Essentially, what we have here is a man who knew his beliefs would be unpopular, so he acted normal until he got out of power and now he’s converting to Catholicism, which is by any reasonable definition joining a cult. He knew that people would object to having someone running the country from a religious standpoint so he pretended not to have one. The “we don’t do God” quote has been swimming around the Internet a lot again this week. Essentially he lied about something that he knew people would consider important in order to get himself elected to a position of great power. Surely we have a system to punish people who do that?

Why is it so hard for politicians to think clearly about religion? Blair knew that people wanted secular politics or else he wouldn’t have covered up his faith in the way that he did, and yet he still insisted on advocating faith schools, without doing anything about the mandatory Christian worship in all other schools, the Establishment of the church, or the fact that the Prime Minister was a closet nutter. All the while, public opinion, and that of his own education secretary, was firmly against him. He knew that people disliked the influence of religion on politics, and yet as far as I can see he did everything in his power to increase it.

Make no wonder he thought people might call him a nutter — he is a fucking nutter. (If you doubt that, check out the scary grin.)

Could this be the least newsworthy story ever?

Spice Girls in ‘fake’ email claim

The Spice Girls announced their reunion earlier this year

The Spice Girls have denied cancelling a concert in Argentina, after a story appeared on several websites claiming they had.

A spokesman said an email sent to fans claiming they had scrapped the Buenos Aires concert due to high demand for their other dates was “fake”.

The Spice Girls are due to play in the South American city as part of their reunion world tour.

The Spice Girls have not canceled a show. How is that news? Now, if Amy Winehouse didn’t cancel a gig, that would be news, but this is not.

I can’t help shake the feeling this would make a great T-shirt. (Or at least my hi-res version would.)

I am once again forced to return to the topic of “collective worship”, which I first covered when I awarded Religious Crackpot Of The Month to five government cronies. For those who aren’t up to speed on this, despite any amount of human rights legislation people may have passed, despite protests, and despite all common sense, it is a legal requirement for British schools to hold an act of collective worship every day — Christian for preference.

Rather reasonably, hundreds of people recently signed a petition asking for this ridiculous rule to be scrapped.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to remove the statutory obligation in schools to provide a ‘broadly Christian’ daily assembly.

Religious observance in schools is divisive, especially when the obligation is exclusively to the Christian faith. The link between state education and religious observance should be removed completely allowing atheists and those of other faiths to participate in school life on an equal basis. Allowing an individual to “opt out” is not sufficient as this categorises and potentially stigmatises children. Furthermore in rural areas often ONLY faith schools are available locally. This discriminates against non-religious children and teachers (who often can’t be employed without religious hypocrisy) and those of other faiths.

I honestly can’t imagine there’s a single word of that that any reasonable person could object to. Therefore I can only assume that the government does not contain any reasonable people, as this was their response:

The Government believes that Collective Worship stimulates thinking–

I promise this is real. Look, here’s a link. It even has a .gov.uk TLD — you can’t just buy those. I swear they really said that. How scary is that? The country’s being run by total fucking morons!

The Government believes that Collective Worship stimulates thinking and encourages pupils to learn about Christianity as well other religions and belief systems, nurturing respect and tolerance. It also offers schools a unique opportunity to develop their particular ethos and set of shared values.

All maintained schools are required to carry out a daily act of Collective Worship of a broadly Christian nature for all pupils. This reflects the religious tradition of this country. For schools where this is not appropriate the head teacher can apply to the local authority to have it lifted so that the Collective Worship in that school does not have to be of a Christian nature.

Every parent has the right to withdraw their child from Collective Worship and we believe this is important. In addition, from 1 September 2007, a new clause in the 2006 Education and Inspections Act came into force which gives students over the age of 16 the right to opt out of collective worship, without parental consent.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families will be updating their guidance for schools on Collective Worship to ensure that schools are aware of these issues.

In rural areas, Church of England schools have traditionally seen their role as catering for all the children in an area and admission arrangements for church primary schools in rural areas make no distinction amongst pupils.

There’s really nothing I can say to that, is there? It’s bullshit, from start to finish. There’s not a single word of it that any reasonable person would endorse. I mean, the third paragraph is vaguely laudable, but I don’t see how excluding children from assemblies based on their faith can ever be the correct solution.

I don’t mean to be obscene, but sometimes there’s really no other way to express an emotion, is there? Especially when you have nobody to blaspheme against.

I had what may be the worst lecture ever last week. I mean, it was easier to sit through than many I had as an undergraduate, but at least they did, if you could bring yourself to listen and having listened remember any of it, contain some information. This one… well, it did have information in it, and some bits were relevant. Other bits were even true.

I say some bits were relevant. Of course, it was all relevant. Granted the lecture was to dental PhD students and the lecture covered relativity, SI units (wrongly), string theory, gravity, religion and how mercury thermometers work (without mentioning that you shouldn’t use them), but all those things connect to dentistry, which is of course the Master Science from which all other sciences flow:

(I love that lecturers put slides on the intranet now. It makes it far easier to mock them.) In fact, he said, all sciences connect to dentistry, “except perhaps oceanography”. So now you know. As such, here’s a slide which clearly impacts directly upon dentistry:

I’m not convinced it makes any sense to unify one thing (such as alpha-decay) with itself, but there you go. I also like that he’s put “planets” and “apples”. Because really, Newton did “unify” the theories behind the motion of planets and that of apples, but the way it’s presented here — and there was not a spoken word of context for this — makes it look like there was a Theory Of Apples.

The lecture was actually delayed because the lecturer had forgotten it was on and turned up forty minutes late.

He stated that there are five SI units (there are seven) and that the second* is defined by astronomy (it isn’t).

In this slide, he explained that while science was good at finding secondary causes, religion was the path to true understanding:

I can’t say I was pleased with this slide (not least because he’s used a famous quote from a vocal atheist to make his point).

I didn’t like this slide either, but that’s just for composition reasons:

I don’t mean to just sit here and reproduce all his slides. I want to stop somewhere about where I think “fair use” ends. So here’s just a couple more of the most laughable:

I know it looks like I’ve resized the second one badly, but I promise you that’s what the original looked like.

Honestly, this lecture sounded like he’d been told to give a lecture but not what it ought to be about, so he tried to cram the entirety of mankind’s scientific achievement into forty-five minutes in no particular order. He failed. He bounced between sciences (but not oceanography) like a crazy lecture pinball, offering a few facts (and/or lies) about each but no real understanding of any.

I mean honestly, how am I (or anyone else) supposed to learn anything from this drivvel? This took two hours out of my day that I could have spent writing reports which would have saved me time I could have used to write programmes which would have saved me time I could have used to fix all the comupters in the building which would have saved me enough time to actually do some research. But no, it’s a requirement for my PhD that I sit through this nonsense.

Here’s a research question for you:

Why?

A few days ago, an old manual for Guantanamo Bay was released. I say “released”. Leaked, really. It should have been released, of course, but then it should have said that the Red Cross were allowed to talk to all the ‘detainees’ (which is a polite word for “prisoners”) so you can see why it wasn’t. None of the news reports I saw actually included a link to the document itself, which to me seems like it would be a pretty important thing to include (hence I did post a link, and if you can’t find it then a Google search for “gitmo-sop.pdf” will find a list of mirrors).

It is, like all government documents, crushingly dull, but this one is livened up by the occasional patches of things-the-US-government-had-specifically-denied, and human rights violations. Of course, the US government have said that the document is out of date (it’s from 2003) and that now everyone gets access to the Red Cross, but then they said that in 2002 as well so they probably aren’t to be trusted.

But the thing that really baffled me was the full page illustration, with instructions, on how to correctly perform a Muslim burial. So your human rights are seen as unimportant when you’re alive but your religious convictions (which one way or another are probably why you’re in there to begin with) are respected even when you’re dead.

Who decided on those priorities?

Last week when coming home from work I walked through the park, and I could see a man standing there with his arm out like he was making a videocall. It was pitch black. I thought that strange but I ignored it. Moments later there was a bright white flash all around him, so clearly he had a camera-phone with a flash. Okay. I got a bit nearer and noticed he was photographing the floor. Again strange but I’d done that too about a month earlier (although in daylight) to create a nice autumnal background image for my phone. When I got nearer, I saw he was photographing a branch. Fair enough, that’s even quite photogenic. But it was all the little white card arrows on the ground pointing at it that surprised me. They’d never been there before; they’ve never been there since. I can only assume they were his (or else he was on a thoroughly bizarre scavenger hunt).

From now on, when I see this kind of thing, I am going to ask the question that is in my head, because I don’t like the feeling that there’s a good explanation that I don’t have. It’s like if you’ve set the video to record Jonathan Creek and it didn’t finish on time.

I just got one of those copperplate email jobs. I’ve included it here but there’s really no reason you should read it (as such, it’s after the fold). Read the rest of this entry »

At work, we have a big metal board which everyone routinely ignored until yesterday when for some reason we all had to start using it. It’s a list of names and a little slider so everyone knows if you’re in or out. It’s a fire rule, apparently. But there’s been a big push to keep it up-to-date now. The upshot of all this, anyway, is that we now have a bit of paper next to the exit saying “please remember to put yourself out”, and should anyone ask what it’s for we can tell them it’s a fire regulation.