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2 days ago
Today is World AIDS Day. One of those occasions that you wish you didn't have to have, but which is important to remember and do something about. At a personal level, it's a chance for me to recall some lost friends: Kerry, Lance, Eric, Humphrey, Peter, John, Kingsley, Graham, and Neil. I'm sorry that you're not around with the rest of us today.
3 days ago
Just been watching the Intelligence Squared Debate on the proposition that “ Atheism is the New Fundamentalism ”. Speaking for the motion were Richard Harries and Charles Moore. Speaking against the motion were AC Grayling and Richard Dawkins. It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the proposers of the motion were trounced. Harries was ineffectual and Moore was bordering very close to ad hominem attacks on Dawkins. The problem that the proposers had is that, as evidenced from their opponents’ performances tonight, Dawkins and Grayling clearly aren’t “Atheist Fundamentalists”, no matter how much Harries, and Moore in particular, would like them to be. Dawkins and Grayling were very good and effortlessly staked out their position against the motion. It seems to me that an Atheist Fundamentalist is something of a mythical beast, invented by the religious, and has no more likelihood of existence than a pink unicorn. It’s a simplistic label for the ...
6 days ago
As we're now in the run-up to Copenhagen, there's a couple of things that I think are worthwhile drawing your attention to. The first is the Copenhagen Diagnosis report produced for the conference by 26 climate scientists. The report has been written, not for an audience of scientists, but for the policy-makers and the general public. This makes it accessible to a far larger group of people, and this is a good thing. The second item of interest is that David Archer, a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, has put up a series of videos of his class for non-science majors on the topic of global warming. Definitely worth checking out.
10 days ago
Reading about the floods resulting from the heavy rainfall in Cumbria last week made me think about the potential for disaster here in the Netherlands. By coincidence, I see that the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics published an item on the 19th November that states that 6 million people live in flood-prone areas of the Netherlands, and those areas are also where one-third of the GDP is generated. It's small comfort to note, looking at the map on that page, that we have at least relocated ourselves from the heart of a flood-prone area to one which is not.
10 days ago
I amuse myself in my idle monents by browsing some of the web forums set up to help people get to grips with their computers. I do this partly out of a drive to actually try and help people with their computers, but also I fear out of an increasing realisation and desperation of the fact that we are all trapped in an inner circle of hell. Here's an example: an innocent request from someone in Ireland who wants to know how to find a digital Photo-Frame that will connect with the online FrameIt service. The answer: it's in Japanese. Are we any the wiser? Er, no, probably not.
