Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve just installed the magic new Google Talk badge, on the right-hand sidebar. This allows you, the humble reader, to talk live with me at any time that I happen to be sat near my PC with Google Talk turned on, which is some evenings and weekend daytimes. Please don’t assume that when it says “Available” I am, and please don’t be offended if I don’t answer. I’m probably just doing something else and have left the computer turned on, where it will be failing to find signs of extraterrestrial life almost as completely as people running SETI@home. Or I hate you.

Since this update was not very funny, here is a nicely ironic quote from an article I read the other day:

Remember that although English is NOT your NATIVE Language, your writings should conform to the conventions of standard written English (sentence form, grammar, spelling, etc.). Your ideas will have little impact, no matter how well the research, if they are not communicated well. Remember always that scientific terminology very often has precise meaning. Be certain you choose your words correctly and wisely.

Quite. Lastly, an observation.

Every so often Adobe Acrobat Reader updates itself, and every time it makes a little shortcut on the desktop. I have to delete it. Usually it makes a couple more around the place, too. What are they for? Who clicks them? When has anyone, ever, run Acrobat Reader from a shortcut? You double click files, that’s how you get it. You browse to PDFs online and it appears in Firefox. You don’t run it, then click File, Open. It just doesn’t happen. Does it?

Do they just want a tiny, free advert on your screen? Well, they can’t have one.

The whole ‘bad-science blogs’ thing has given rise to an amusing retaliation movement of ‘bad science-blogs’ run by homeopaths. There’s a little network of them and they all link to each other and post approvingly about each other’s updates. I was put onto them by Blogging The Organon, wherein Gimpy posts sections of Hahnemann’s Organon (upon which homeopathy is largely based) one at a time and then people discuss them for a bit, then it descends into farce and the next chunk of Organon goes up. But of course, they’re clearly not as good, because they haven’t got a central aggregator website.

They all have names like “good science”, “suppressed science” and “remedy reality”, and they all update every few days about homeopathy. This is somewhat pointless, because homeopathy hasn’t changed since it was invented in the nineteenth century, except for the addition of a few extra remedies and the decision to start making their magic water using preposterous machines instead of dilution and succussion (which is fair enough since neither works anyway so you might as well do it the quick way). One of my favourites is Homeopathy4Health. I think it’s always a good sign when a website carries a disclaimer like this:

Disclaimer: I am not the owner of any website named homeopathy4health.

I think you have to question the mental state of someone who would say that at homeopathy4health.wordpress.com, under the name homeopathy4health. Many of the posts do at least allow public comments, although I’m given to understand there’s some censorship there. But some posts have no comments on them. An example is “Medicine: blind and in the dark?”, which is essentially a long attack on evidence based medicine for blinding studies. The anonymous author’s thesis seems to be that looking at more than one subject is bad because it means using “statistics which are incomprehesible to the lay person and which are subject to statistical interpretation bias” instead of just looking at one patient and trusting yourself not to indulge in any confirmation bias. That, and

The foundations of the scientific approach are suspicion and doubt: both are deeply negative mental processes.  I am told that a good scientist should doubt his results as his first reaction; I would say that this is an unhealthy reaction in most normal situations: someone who doubts his reactions has poor intuition. Someone who is doubtful isolates themselves from experience. Suspicion causes peers to doubt each others results and slows progress.

…

Sceptics believe that the scientific method is the answer to medical problems, I am unconvinced.

That sounds like Biblical thinking to me. The whole idea of “negative mental processes” leading to negative outcomes sounds like something Master Splinter would say. But just as I was thinking he was crazy, I saw a link in his blogroll that put that into perspective. The “Freedom of Science” blog is proper crazy. Honestly, I’m not totally convinced it’s not an elaborate joke, although the archive goes back over a year and that’s dedication if it is. It’s inextricably linked with “Alphysics”, which I think is a joke, but is a rather stupid one written by a crank in the style of Facts For Life in an attempt to discredit physics by equating it — I think; it’s not clear — with alchemy.

It’s very telling: there’s always the chance that the author of Homeopathy4health genuinely has had the astonishing good fortune claimed, and that the range of symptoms described on the “about” page genuinely did vanish just after taking homeopathic remedies. I could see something like that being very convincing, and once you’re there it follows logically that anyone who dismisses it is being overly suspicious of it. But no amount of coincidental remissions could justify listening to the cranks at Freedom of Science (which really should be called Freedom From Science). It is a website devoted to “removing Newtonism from the education process”. It says, with no apparent trace of shame,

Physics is Newtonian religion. Physicists are priests who believe in Newton’s laws as their immutable faith. Physicists are the enforcers of Newton’s occult laws in the name of God.

Now I am a physicist and I’d be the first to tell you Newton’s laws are wrong. They’re wrong because they break down when you look at very small objects. They’re wrong because they’re an approximation to the truth; an expectation value. They’re wrong because they don’t account for relativity. But they’re not wrong because

Occult does not exist therefore Cavendish did not measure the Newtonian force. 

“Occult” is the author’s favourite word to describe force:

Occult does not exist outside physics. Occult may be the official faith of physics and every physicist must believe in it as part of their professional faith but occult does not exist in nature.

This is especially vexing, since he says on the same page:

If we look at the Newtonian force closer we see that force is not really occult.

He is of the opinion that what he calls “physics” is actually a religion devoted to pushing Newton’s politics and never questioning his Laws:

In order to understand what force is a scientist must question it. A scientist, unlike physicists, is not bound by Newton’s authority. For a scientist there is nothing sacred about Newton’s arbitrary definitions. To understand force a scientist must take it apart and then put it back together. Since this is forbidden and illegal in physics a scientific investigator must look at the Newtonian force from outside of physics.

It’s brilliant. The lengths some people will go to be wrong has never failed to astound me. I suppose it starts with one unshakable belief in something — homeopathy, Jesus, racism, whatever — or a fundamental and equally unshakable disbelief in something — relativity, vaccination, science, maths, the holocaust, whatever — and from there you quickly hit a contradiction. Clearly either your pet theory is wrong, or else something very sinister and slightly stupid is going on, and clearly the pet theory can’t be wrong, so you end up justifying it in increasingly moronic ways…

[Force] is a placeholder because it cancels. We cannot cancel radius R and Period T from R3 = T2. But if we write it as Newton did as

Force = R/T^2 = 1/R^2 = Force

we can cancel the superfluous terms of force. We can also write

Newton’s soul = R/T^2 = 1/R^2 = Newton’s soul.

Or

Newton’s wig powder = R/T^2 = 1/R^2 = Newton’s wig powder.

So planets may be powered equivalently by Newton’s force, Newton’s soul or Newton’s wig powder. The last two are as good as force.

Well done for proving we can give a quantity a different name, although the idea that if something cancels it must therefore be antique powdered starch is a rather strange one. Freedom of Science thinks that Newton’s Laws are just made up, and that the actual fundamental law at work here is Kepler’s Third Law, which he calls “Kepler’s Rule”. This is, you may remember, much the same idea that Mark McCutcheon utterly failed to defend when I emailed him.

The site is also hooked into a “wiki” (which is not a wiki at all — it uses Wikimedia but it’s not a wiki because, like with Homeopathy4health’s more preposterous claims, I can’t edit or comment on it) with similarly strange ideas:

We know that Newton started from Kepler’s rule and wrote it as

where R is the radius and T is the period of the orbit. Newton then multiplied both sides by a label he invented, mass, then labeled each side by another label he invented, force, and labeled each side Newton’s laws

This guy thinks that mass is made up. Indeed, he thinks this of all quantities which cancel out even if there are other equations from which they do not cancel. Mass cancels in discussion of gravitation because the gravitational force is proportional to mass and therefore acceleration, and therefore speed and position, aren’t affected by it. Force is a slightly redundant concept when discussing gravity, although it’d be hard to discuss electrostatics without it. Presumably, therefore, he would be happy to play my game: he drops a 4g mass on my head from a height of one metre. Then, I drop a 2-tonne mass on his head from the same height. Then, assuming he survives, I give him £50. See how strong his faith in a massless universe is.

Essentially, he’s angry with Newton because he’s replaced k² with GM (when I learned this at school I never for a second imagined I’d hear even one person take umbrage with it, and here’s at least the second) and arbitrarily defined another quantity as “force”. He seems to consider this a pointless (and indeed politically motivated, although what the politic in question might be is unclear) obfuscation of Kepler’s elegant theory, which indeed it is, as long as you never want to discuss anything but planetary motion. The moment you want to discuss apples, Kepler’s Laws, brilliant as they are, just don’t apply. One of Newton’s greatest achievments was thinking in terms of general theories, rather than having one theory for planets and a separate Theory of Apples. Furthermore, introducing the concept of “force” (which we could always simply call “rate of change of momentum” which is a physically manifest quantity — although so is force if you want to talk quantum) means that we can then add three other forces and describe the whole of the universe, or at least what Richard Dawkins calls “Middle World”, in a few short equations. That has to be better than knowing how fast planets go, doesn’t it?

Well, you would think. But apparently there is what I shall generously term “some debate” about it.

I just read this comment on the Times’ website, under an article about how “most Britons belong to no religion”:

A committment to anything other than the state would be a big problem wouldn’t it? How fortuitous that so many people are willing to capitulate. Very shortsighted I would say. We need to be MORE religious just to let the politicians know that they’re not going to get an easy ride with their drive towards stamping our foreheads with a number.

judy, Liverpool, England

Personally, I congratulate her — it must be hard to type with a plank in your eye.

Apparently, Bill Gates, best known for announcing that nobody would ever need more than 640kB of RAM and then releasing an operating system that needs a gigabyte to run well, has said the days of the keyboard are numbered:

People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.”It’s one of the big bets we’re making,”

No.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.

No. We’ll be typing.

For one thing, I work in a shared office. The last thing I need while I’m trying to write a document is to listen to another document that someone else is writing. I certainly don’t want them to hear my initial “zero’th draft” versions. The same applies to internet searches. I don’t want to be constantly announcing what I’m doing to anyone else who might be in the room at the time. Nor do I want to hear what they’re searching for. It’s totally impractical for the business user and I can’t imagine home users wanting it either. Aside from anything else, I rarely type a page of text in the order in which it will appear, and I wouldn’t have thought that it would be at all intuitive to speak in that way.

Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps everyone else would love to talk to their PC instead of typing. But I doubt it.

A while back Mitt “Well At Least I’m Not An Atheist” Romney, the crackpot torturer who thinks the First Amendment is more of a guideline than an actual rule, woke up and smelt the coffee (this is statistically likely as he would have been in America and therefore no less than 50 yards from a Starbucks). He realised that he had no chance of becoming President and withdrew from the race to give his support to someone else, this being the only possible way he could influence the result. In which direction his support would influence the result is a matter of debate.

I heard today, in an article about Obama suggesting Clinton follow suit (which presumably means his campaign considers Clinton is either doomed or suggestible), that Mike “But If We Change The Constitution, Then We Can Make All Kinds Of Crazy Laws” Huckabee refuses to withdraw. Which is fair enough and all, but “it is mathematically impossible for him to catch up to John McCain’s lead”. This makes sense. We already knew he don’t think too good. So that can only be good news. McCain is more than slightly screwy, but has to be the best of the Republicans on offer.

So it’s looking like Obama versus McCain. That’s probably the best result we could have hoped for (although in one respect it would have been better had Romney won the Republican nomination, because he’d have been a lot easier for the Democrats to beat in the election).

And now we have to wait for about a year for the election, because of America’s habit of making primaries more and more ridiculously early every time. Within our lifetimes, they’ll be held before the previous election.

I didn’t see Baby Bible Bashers when it aired, because it was Valentine’s Day so of course I was out, er, at the pub with several friends. After three unrelated people recommended it I watched it on Google Video, and it was more-or-less what I was expecting. A load of pushy parents exploiting their children for varying levels of financial gain.

It’s a good video for anyone who thinks religion is a good thing to watch. (Parse that how you like.) These kids are home-schooled (I may never understand why that’s legal) and so they’ve basically been given nothing but religion down their throats from birth. Here’s a typical quote:

When he was three, he came in the kitchen and asked me, would he go to hell if he died and I said, “have you sinned against God?” And he didn’t say nothin’, so I said, “have y’always obeyed your mother?” And he said no. I said, “well, you’ve sinned against God.”

–Kendall Boutwell (11′25″ in)

Nice answer. I mean, say what you like about atheism, but it’s never terrified someone that much. What happened to shielding your kids from the terrifying reality of the universe until they were old enough to take it? That’s what I would do. I’d evade questions about what kind of awful things might befall the poor kids until they can understand the situation properly. Inventing extra dangers is just needlessly cruel, surely?

One kid’s grandmother says she’s never seen him preach and there not be at least one miracle. But then, she also thinks

Most babies say “dad”, first word. Terry’s first word was “hallelujah”.

–Sharon Munroe (9′20″ in)

No. No, it wasn’t. Nobody learns to say four syllable words before one syllable words. That’s almost necessarily false. That would be like solving quadratic equations before you’ve learned to count to ten.

My favourite quote is this, from one of the young preachers:

I know God is talking to me because I can hear it. Sometimes it sounds like me, but I say no: it’s God.

–Terry Durham (23′10″ in)

And the problem is that I can’t fault these people’s motives. I just can’t. They genuinely believe that preaching is the highest possible calling and that their children should be doing it — despite Samuel’s particular beliefs causing him to burst into tears when people have the sheer affront to be reasonable at him (43′45″ in) and causing a highly bizarre argument between a policeman, who is arguing that the Boutwells are on private property and are compelled by the law to leave, and the the boy’s father, who is arguing that the policeman should repent whatever unspecified sins he may or may not have committed as if this will alter the law (25′10″ in).

How is that poor kid supposed to lead anything like a normal life after that upbringing? He needs a proper secular schooling and he needs it now. And he needs proper secular therapy too, because if he goes crying to his parents, they’ll say something like “you see, they’re hostile. That’s what they did to Jesus. That’s why they plucked out his beard and whipped him with a cat o’ nine tails. They hated him,” and that won’t help even a bit.

This is child abuse, there’s no question about that. People like this shouldn’t be allowed to have children. These kids should be put into care.

What?

A while back I reproduced a page from Quackometer.net which the website’s owner had been forced to take down after the Society of Homeopaths threatened them with some unspecified legal action, claiming the pages were defamatory (which they were, assuming you define “defamatory” to include things with are both nasty and true).

A while after that, I mentioned a second incident, where a crazy man called Joseph Chikelue Obi pulled a similar stunt, presumably because he’d seen it work for the Society of Homeopaths but hadn’t noticed that the page had been reproduced on about 50 other websites (or as Joseph Chikelue Obi calls them, “5,000 defamatory bloggers” — or as Gimpy calls them, “let slip the blogs of war”).

Well, the thoroughly lovely people at Positive Internet have offered to host the site for him, which is good because Netcetera have stopped.

Thanks for your comments. We do not wish to be in a position where we could be taken to court, and incur the loss of time and expense that would involve.

…Therefore we have decided to breach our contract and refuse to provide the service for which we were paid. This seemed like a good idea at the time.

Consequently Netcetera have decided to suspend the Quackometer website, with reference to our Acceptable Usage Policy, the first part of which is quoted below. The full policy can be found on our website www.netcetera.im/SiteInfo/AUP/

“Acceptable Usage Policy

This policy is subject to change, without alternate notice, so please check regularly for updates. This policy is in addition, and considered part of Netcetera’s Terms and Conditions.
Netcetera will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision.
1) Web Hosting
1.1) Netcetera reserves the right to suspend or cancel a customer’s access to any or all services provided by Netcetera, where Netcetera decides that the account has been inappropriately used. Netcetera reserves the right to refuse service and /or access to its servers to anyone.”

It occurs to me that that isn’t an acceptable use policy, that is an insurance policy. It’s a pathetic attempt to free themselves of any contractual obligations whatsoever. I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure this would not fly in a courtroom. I’m sure at least that statements like “this policy is subject to change, without alternate notice, so please check regularly for updates” have been overturned by judges before now:

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the US has held that companies cannot unilaterally vary the terms of a contract such as this one by merely updating their website, and that actual notice is required to users.

That’s from a discussion of Facebook’s user agreement. And Facebook don’t charge you so this is far worse.

We will prevent public access to the site as of noon today 18th February 2008.

It’s worth mentioning that this email was sent at about 11:40 AM on the 18th of February 2008, as if that’s good enough.

You will be able to access the content to be able to transfer it to another host if you so wish.

We will hold the content available to you for 30 days, and then we will remove it from our servers.

Regards

So, in short, Netcetera think it’s okay to screw their paying customers because somebody who is not a customer asks them to. It would be the work of but a few moments to Google Joseph Chikelue Obi and discover he’s a fraudster. In fact, Googling him would be pointless as the complaint must have included a link to the pages being complained about, which are littered with references to newspapers chronicling his fraud. I’m at a loss to see how they hope to make money this way, although I presume it involves getting people to pay them for a service and not providing it, thus generating a near-100% profit margin. There really isn’t any chance that this quack could put up a decent court case. No chance at all. Apparently, Netcetera don’t want the good PR that would come with standing up for their customers at almost no personal risk.

I can only surmise that Netcetera are a pack of spineless morons. I really can’t think of any other explanation for their actions.

On a largely unrelated note, here is a laughably ridiculous report by Joseph Chikelue Obi about all this.

This is a trailer for a documentary film about Guantanamo Bay. I include it because there’s a clip in it I want to point out. Anybody who saw The Late Edition on BBC4 the other day will have seen the same clip. It’s Donald Rumsfeld defending Guantanamo Bay. It’s pretty well right at the start of the video, and the really interesting bit comes right after the word “convention”.

I say “interesting”. Really “shocking” or “indefensible” or “moronic” would have been a better choice. In any case, there’s really not a lot else that can be added to that. And I can’t imagine any context in which that clip could be placed to make it seem okay, with the possible exception of immediately after an interviewer asking “how might a belligerent thug defend conditions in Guantanamo Bay?”. The conditions in Guantanamo are “consistent with the Geneva convention for the most part“. What an utter cunt.

Way back in July 2005, I commented on a story where a 15-year-old sued the police for forcing him to stay out of the town centre because other people of a similar age had committed crimes. He won the case, quite rightly. So why have I just heard about this equally brazen and rather scarier evil?

This thing is, apparently, called the Mosquito (which is a very apt name considering how people who use it are treating people), and it’s a little box you bolt to your shop and, its thoroughly awful developers claim, “is the solution to the eternal problem of unwanted gatherings of youths and teenagers in shopping malls, around shops and anywhere else they are causing problems”. It works — and I still can’t believe someone actually fucking did this — by emitting the same high pitched whine as a television only much louder. Anyone over the age of about 25 can’t hear it because it’s ultrasonic to them. Young people have better high-frequency hearing and they say the noise is “distressing” and “unbearable”. Basically this is the same thing you’d use if you have a problem with urban foxes. This is treating young people — in fact, no, let’s not be vague about this. I’m 24, so this is treating me like vermin. Like some problematic animal to be repelled by whatever means necessary. They’ll be leaving little bottles of poisoned white lightning around next to kill us all off. And they’re doing it for no better reason than because other people of a similar age look a bit menacing. And the parallel with the previous case is clear: if it was any other minority group being targeted, nobody would stand for it for a second. This is the kind of scary, discriminatory use of science that was all the rage in the nineteenth century but really people should know better than by now.

Needless to say, Liberty (who in my experience always know what’s what) want to get rid of the things. They think that it

…is not a proportionate response to loiterers and could adversely affect young people. We believe that the Mosquito does not encourage young people to act responsibly instead simply presuming that they will not.

…

It could be argued that the Mosquito device constitutes a disproportionate interference with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – the right to respect for private life, which includes the right to respect for bodily integrity [and] this interference with Article 8 rights is discriminatory because it only affects young people, and Article 14 prohibits discrimination.

…

We believe that the Mosquito could be successfully challenged in the courts, which should put an end to its use. Unfortunately we are still looking for the right young person’s case to represent in such a challenge. Please get in contact with us if you or anyone you know know has been affected by a Mosquito device.

The Children’s Commissioner takes a similar view, and the BBC say “work towards a ban on the use of Mosquito devices in Scotland has been under way since last year”. The manufacturers have also scooped the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for 2006. There is a campaign to ban it, called “Buzz Off”. (That may not be quite the correct link but the campaign does not seem to have a website.) And yet according to the BBC,

There are no plans in England to ban the use of devices which emit a high-pitched sound to disperse groups of teenagers, the government has said. But it stressed the Mosquito devices, which can cause discomfort to youngsters’ ears, should be “a last resort” against anti-social behaviour.

But? But!? That sentence is no place for the word “but”! A better phrase would be “worse still”. They may think I’ll be placated by the fact that they consider it useful only as a last resort (we already know the government has some pretty bizarre ideas about what will placate me when they’ve angered me), but in fact I’m further angered by the fact they’ve publicly endorsed it!

Mosquito alarms’ are not banned and the government has no plans to do so.

Obviously no-one would want to have to use a device like this, and it should very much be seen as a last resort.

We will continue to tackle the underlying problems through better neighbourhood policing, giving young people alternative things to do in their spare time and, where necessary, using the powers we have put in place to prevent anti-social behaviour.

Oh, so now until the underlying problems are tackled we’re allowed to use extreme measure with no regard for human ri— Ah, that explains everything. Well I don’t think any reasonable person would agree that that’s the right attitude to take.

Personally, I think the best solution would be to find the shops that are using this device, turn up in large groups, and then when they turn on the device, take out large, battery-powered stereos and play irritating chart music loud enough that the sound of the Mosquito goes away. The advantage of this plan is that with the right choice of song it would be only people over 25 who got significantly annoyed. I’m wondering about Mika, although I worry that older Queen fans might enjoy that.

It works, by the way: I’m 24 and I certainly won’t be going near any shops that use them. Of course, I’ve never caused any trouble in my life and in face tend to spend money in shops, which I believe is what the shops want, but then, I would assume if that’s what they wanted they’d be more careful about who they repel with ultrasonic weaponry.