apennyformythoughts

damn. I thought I could leave politics alone for a while, but then I had a look at moorishgirl's site, and saw this article about the FBI investigation into the WTC attack which describes their strategy. In short, if you are an arab in America, even if a US citizen, you are now guilty of any crime you may get accused of, until proven innocent of terrorism. Wasn't this war supposed to defending the great freedoms of American society?

Well seeing as some people seem determined to turn this into a clash of civilisations, let me quote from the late great Jesus: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone" (John 8:7).

This sounds like a really cool discovery, but I have to say I am highly skeptical. Scientists at Bell Labs claim to have created a two molecule transistor. The thing is, the manufactured transistor consists of a great many molecules, of which they reckon only two are "electrically active".

There are many examples from my field of researchers hitting on designs that they have great difficulty analysing, and when they try to remove parts that seem not to do anything the system either fails or at least performs less well. Here is one example of seemingly inactive parts of a circuit affecting its performance from the work of Adrian Thompson, my supervisor. Findings like this make me very skeptical of people who claim to be able to analyse a set of complex organic chemicals and say which molecules are important when they can't isolate those molecules.

....and still on the same track: John Pilger on voluntary censorship, bias by omission and lack of variety in a legally free press. Here is the first paragraph, quoted because it really struck me:

Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. "In our country," said one of them, "to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What's the secret?"

I also don't think that this applies much less in Britain than in America.

related to the manufacture of consent issue: Eight Key Concepts for Media Education. Important stuff to remember if you ask me.

a nice piece on the manufacture of consent. This is a hugely important, and I think under-scrutinised (at least outside academia), issue - while countries such as Britain (naturally the one I feel I know most about) and America (the one the article is referring to) don't have thought police forcing people to say or think certain things, a great deal is achieved towards this end by careful manipulation of the media.

I guess the message is don't just read the mainstream media if you want to actually understand what's going on in the world....

Britain responsible for increasing the peace. There has been tension between Rwanda and Uganda for a long time, naturally unreported in most of the press over here because they don't have any oil, are not majority white populated, and are not nearby, which has been threatening to turn into a full scale war for some time. Britain has sponsored a meeting between the presidents of Rwanda and Uganda, which (together with the threat of withdrawing development aid) seems to have averted a crisis for the time being.

Nice to read some positive news about my country sometimes.

cool. IBM are using pixie dust in hard drives.

Now even General Musharraf, who has been supporting the US military action in Afghanistan so far, wants the bombing to stop, because "It is being perceived in the whole world...as if this were a war against the poor, miserable and innocent people of Afghanistan".

wahey! Prince Charles got a slap today!

The true meaning of my name

I want one!

This actually annoyed me quite a lot: Philosophical Health Check. Not because it pointed out tensions/contradictions in my beliefs - I know they are present - but because all of the things it pointed out as tensions were wrong. I won't bore you by listing everything, but here are two examples of its silliness:

It claimed that these two statements: "Severe brain-damage can rob a person of all consciousness and selfhood" and "On bodily death, a person continues to exist in a non-physical form" are contradictory. What I actually believe is consistent with both of these, if a slightly unusual interpretation: a person continues to exist for a long time after their death by the impact that they have had on others' lives, which does not necessitate some mystical concept of the soul.

Far more irritatingly, it reckoned these two were contradictory: "The government should not permit the sale of treatments which have not been tested for efficacy and safety" and "Alternative and complementary medicine is as valuable as mainstream medicine ". This is based on the totally loaded assumption that alternative & complementary medicine is necessarily untested. There is an obvious synthesis here, which is what I actually believe: alternative and complementary medicine are intrinsically as valuable as 'mainstream' (in itself a totally loaded term - things that count as 'alternative' medicine here are entirely mainstream in China) medicine, but the same standards of rigourous testing have to apply to both before they can legitimately be prescribed.

I guess I'm being petty getting so wound up by this, but seeing as it is on what rather arrogantly claims to be "the world's premier philosophy site", I don't think a bit of philosophical and linguistic rigour is too much to ask for.

Time has indeed moved on. After the WTC attack, meta-resources like blogdex showed an enormous skew towards highly serious matters such as news and politics. I had a look today, out of curiosity, and I'm glad to report that the return to silliness is in full effect. One of the most linked-to sites is spank the monkey

am I growing up or getting old?

A few years ago I was so eager to see my favourite bands that though I never quite followed them around the country, I did see each of Catherine Wheel & Orbital multiple times on their respective tours, even going to gigs in cities far from home, if I knew anyone there. This year Orbital have toured twice, and I missed the first one because I was ill when the tickets went on sale and just didn't notice, and am about to miss the second because I have more important things to do. I still love the band, so what's going on here? Should I be smugly pleased about how much more mature I am, or quietly embarassed about how I'm already growing old?

mmm.... bonfire night in Lewes.... Totally crazy spectacle in its scale (biggest celebration on this night in the country, and bigger than almost all similar things I've seen abroad) and in the virulence of the sectarianism that still underlies it. Absolutely not to missed if you happen to be vaguely in the area (think south-eastern England) at the right time.

Naturally I took loads of pictures, but I still have a few left to do from China, so this will have to wait. I have produced a couple of small images to show you now:

Romania's resourceful tourism plan (courtesy of alt text)

What perfect timing. Just as I was typing the previous post my BBC News ticker brought up an article in which Tony Blair shamelessly tries to blame terrorism for economic weakness. No Mr. Blair, you can't blame events in September for a recession that everyone said was already coming before then. You also can't fix these problems by bombing Afghanistan. Try implementing sensible policies on the 'home front', such as supporting education & training in an increasingly knowledge-based and fast changing economy.

The govt have recently withdrawn one of the few initiatives that had drawn much praise from me - the Individual Learning Account.

It is not without reason - the scheme was being widely abused, but it strikes me as just typical of this government to over-react by withdrawing the whole scheme with no notice, with a lot of users not even knowing about it, and a lot of training providers likely to go bankrupt as their main income stream is instantly removed. Luckily for me my the more ILA-dependent of my employers was in the process of repositioning as a training provider to businesses anyway, but I can see this causing many problems nationally, just at a time when the economy is suffering and there should be action to increase job security (not make companies go bust) and increase workforce employability (education, education, education!).

just thought I'd share something I heard on the radio today: the US baseball competition being called the 'World Series' is not actually the example of American arrogance that it is often held up to be - it's just that the original tournament was sponsored by a newspaper called 'the World'.

Today's black is white is from Donald Rumsfeld: "Mr Rumsfeld said he thought there had probably never been a bombing campaign so focused and precise" - so only hitting TWO Red Cross buildings is a good result then?

back from Worcester now, no thanks to Thames Trains (I still don't know why, but they decided that the train I was on couldn't be arsed to go to Reading as planned, so it would terminate in Oxford, as a result of which my journey involved 5 trains rather than 2), and it certainly has been a worthwhile trip.

I will be going back to the Students' Union here at Sussex and trying to get an actual postgraduate budget, because travel expenses for this weekend came out of my pocket, but for the AGM next year that won't work because there's a £200-odd fee, travel up to Scotland (the meetings rotate around the country - the Scots had to come down to Bognor earlier this year, so it's only fair that we southerners should have to go to St. Andrew's at some point) and 5 days' accommodation. I think it would be a real shame not to have Sussex represented there, but I won't be able to go if I can't get it funded....

We spent some time today talking about a review of NUS structure, which is welcome because they're pretty useless at the moment, but about which I am also pretty skeptical. Of more interest was a long discussion about how to judge the quality of a research environment (COGS [my department] scores pretty highly on the things we agreed were important), and about intellectual property contracts imposed by universities on their research students. The main thing to come out of that was that I must find out what Sussex's actually is, because I don't know, and at other universities it ranges from the blatantly unfair & illegal ('you sign away the rights to anything you invent/discover or else you can't be here') to the fair and pragmatic (St. Andrew's policy still involves signing away rights to patentable ideas, but the university is contractually bound to develop the idea commercially and share the profits with the student). Have to find out what ours is before I can really comment....

brief, but surprisingly positive, review of Windows XP. If the article is to be believed, it looks like computers have taken a step closer to being easy devices to use without technical knowledge, which has to be a good thing. It probably won't be a thing I want to use, because the flipside is that it does a lot automatically without direct user control, but if it makes computing more accessible to non-techies it has to be a good thing.

Salman Rushdie talking sense

interesting article on how Arab Anti-Semitism is largely a Western import, and a 20^th century phenomenon. As I had the chance to discover yet again when meeting a large group of people on the trip to China, it is normal for Brits (Jew & non-Jew alike) to be surprised or even shocked at the existence of a Jewish community in Turkey. This is based on the prejudice of Europeans that Muslims are necessarily anti-Semitic. The article rightly points out that it was Christian Europe that was eagerly killing and expelling its Jews through the Middle Ages, while the Muslim world accepted them. It also explains how this rather cosy state of affairs descended into the poor relations between Jews & Arabs these days, just as the Jews were becoming accommodated in Europe....