John 'Calgacus' Kidd

CALLING ALL MEN !! SAY NO TO HORSES

2007-02-14T10:33:00.001+02:00

Before you marry - find OUT if your wife is 'horsey'

and no circumstances ever let your Daughter near a Pony
or you will end up having to ....
Buy a brute for £5,000
buy its tack, saddle, reins, noseband, stirrups, English egg-butt Pelham's, martingales = £1,000
buy riding hat, crop, jodhpurs, boots, and goes knows how much paraphelia of lead ropes, curry combs, sweat bands = £300
You ll have to buy the horse a new Zealand rug - make that rugs - one for winter, one for summer, one for sweating all cost £100+ plus the £20 a month cost to stitch them for every tear on a barbed wire fence = £500
Then the annual costs - paying for its VET insurance £35 per month and pay for wormer and injections at £100 more = £450
inusre your self and third party agianst the horse sitting on a car = £350
rent it grazing at up to £250 a month = £3,000
buy it Hay at £5 a bale a day per horse for up to 6 months = £1,200
buy it feed (Oats, chaff) at £25 a month = £300
you may even pay out for a stable or field shelter another = £8,000
then you'll need a car - + tow bar - capable of pulling a horse box - another £4,000
you need to pay a surly Farrier £75 every six weeks to shoe the damn thing = £650
after all that you'll have to turn out a show jumping Trials and Gymkhanas , wait around for an hour for the horse to walk into the damn trailer, then drive at £25 MPH for 2 hours to get to the god forsaken show ground, pay entrance fee = £50
wait for hours for the 10 minutes your horse is in the ring then you repeat the whole procedure in reverse!

so thats £26,000 and you could have bought a new car for that!

NO MAN NO !!

info :The Mozart Effect

2006-02-25T11:56:00.000+02:00

Mozart effect ...

The Mozart effect is a term coined by Alfred A. Tomatis for the alleged increase in brain development that occurs in children under age 3 when they listen to the music of Wolfgang Gottlieb (now trans. 'Amadeus') Mozart.
The idea for the Mozart effect originated in 1993 at the University of California, Irvine, with physicist Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher, a former concert cellist and an expert on cognitive development. They studied the effects on a few dozen college students of listening to the first 10 minutes of the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448). They found a temporary enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by the Stanford-Binet IQ test. No one else has been able to duplicate their results. One researcher commented that the "very best thing that could be said of their [Shaw's and Rauscher's] experiment—were it completely uncontested—would be that listening to bad Mozart enhances short–term IQ" (Linton). Rauscher has moved on to study the effects of Mozart on rats. Both Shaw and Rauscher have speculated that exposure to Mozart enhances spatial-reasoning and memory in humans.
(aber Zwar bezweifeln Wissenschafter mittlerweile, dass klassische Musik die Intelligenz fördert, der Mozart- Effekt also nicht existiert, dennoch ist seine Popularität immer noch enorm. Das meint Chip Heath, Professor für Verhalten in Organisationen, der die Evolution dieser wissenschaftlichen Legende Stück für Stück verfolgt hat. )

"We have this common internal neural language that we're born with and so if you can exploit that with the right stimuli then you're going to help the brain develop to do the things like reason." -- Dr. Gordon Shaw
"We exposed these animals [rats] in utero and then sixty days after birth to different types of auditory stimulation and then we ran them in a spatial maze. And sure enough, the animals that were exposed to the Mozart completed the maze faster and with fewer errors. And now what we're doing is we're removing their brains so we can slice them and see neuro-anatomically precisely what has changed as a function of this exposure. So it may be that this intense exposure to the music is a type of enrichment that has similar effects on the spatial areas of the hippocampus of the brain." --Dr. Frances Rauscher
"Stories stressing that children's experiences during their early years of life will ultimately determine their scholastic ability, their future career paths, and their ability to form loving relationships have little basis in neuroscience." --John Bruer
The Mozart effect is a term coined by Alfred A. Tomatis for the alleged increase in brain development that occurs in children under age 3 when they listen to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The idea for the Mozart effect originated in 1993 at the University of California, Irvine, with physicist Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher, a former concert cellist and an expert on cognitive development. They studied the effects on a few dozen college students of listening to the first 10 minutes of the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448). They found a temporary enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by the Stanford-Binet IQ test. No one else has been able to duplicate their results. One researcher commented that the "very best thing that could be said of their [Shaw's and Rauscher's] experiment—were it completely uncontested—would be that listening to bad Mozart enhances short–term IQ" (Linton). Rauscher has moved on to study the effects of Mozart on rats. Both Shaw and Rauscher have speculated that exposure to Mozart enhances spatial-reasoning and memory in humans.
In 1997, Rauscher and Shaw announced that they had scientific proof that piano and singing instruction are superior to computer instruction in enhancing children's abstract reasoning skills.
The experiment included three groups of preschoolers: one group received private piano/keyboard lessons and singing lessons; a second group received private computer lessons; and a third group received no training. Those children who received piano/keyboard training performed 34% higher on tests measuring spatial- temporal ability than the others. These findings indicate that music uniquely enhances higher brain functions required for mathematics, chess, science and engineering (Neurological Research, February 1997).
Shaw and Rauscher have stimulated an industry. They have also created their own institute: The Music Intelligence Neural Development Institute (M.I.N.D.). There is so much research going on to prove the wondrous effects of music that a web site has been created just to keep track of all the new developments: MüSICA., which has a section just on the Mozart effect.
Shaw and Rauscher claim that their work has been misrepresented. What they have shown is "that there are patterns of neurons that fire in sequences, and that there appear to be pre-existing sites in the brain that respond to specific frequencies."* This is not quite the same as showing that listening to Mozart increases intelligence in children. Nevertheless, Shaw is not going to wait for the hard evidence to pour in before he cashes in on the desire of parents to enhance their children's intelligence. He has book & CD coming out called Keeping Mozart in Mind. You can buy it from his institute after September 1999. He and his colleagues are convinced that since spatio-temporal reasoning is essential for many higher order cognitive tasks, stimulating the area of the brain associated with spatio-temporal reasoning and doing spatio-temporal exercises will increase a person's intelligence for math, engineering, chess, and science. They even have a software program for sale, which uses no language and aims at exercising spatio-temporal skills with the help of an animated penguin.
Shaw and Rauscher may have spawned an industry, but the mass media and others have created a kind of alternative science which supports the industry. Exaggerated and false claims about music have become so commonplace that it is probably a waste of time to try to correct them. For example, Jamal Munshi, an associate professor of Business Administration at Sonoma State University, collects tidbits of misinformation and gullibility. He used to post them on the Internet as "Weird but True," including the claim that Shaw and Rauscher showed that listening to Mozart's sonata for two pianos in D major "increased SAT scores of students by 51 points." Actually, Shaw and Rauscher gave 36 UC Irvine students a paper folding and cutting test and found the Mozart group showed a temporary 8-9 point increase over their scores when they took the test after either a period of silence or listening to a relaxation tape. (Munshi also claims that science cannot explain how a fly flies. Scientists have been working hard on this crucial problem, so we should give them their due. Some even claim to know how insects fly.)
Don Campbell, however, has become the Carlos Castaneda and P.T. Barnum of the Mozart effect, exaggerating and distorting the work of Shaw, Rauscher and others for his own benefit. He has trademarked the expression The Mozart effect and peddles himself and his products at http://www.mozarteffect.com/. Campbell claims that he made a blood clot in his brain disappear by humming, praying, and envisioning a vibrating hand on the right side of his skull. Uncritical supporters of alternative medicine don't question this claim, though it is one of those safe claims that can't be proved or disproved. He might as well claim that angels took the clot away. (One wonders why, if music is so good for you, he got a blood clot in the first place. Accidentally listening to rap music?)
The claims that Campbell makes for music are of an almost rococo flamboyance. And like the rococo, just about as substantive. [Cambell claims music can cure just about anything that ails you.] His evidence is usually anecdotal, and even this he misinterprets. Some things he gets completely wrong.
And the whole structure of his argument collapses under simple common sense. If Mozart’s music were able to improve health, why was Mozart himself so frequently sick? If listening to Mozart’s music increases intelligence and encourages spirituality, why aren’t the world’s smartest and most spiritual people Mozart specialists? (Linton)*
The lack of evidence for the Mozart effect has not deterred Cambell from becoming a favorite on the lecture circuit with the naive and uncritical.
When McCall's wants advice on how to lose the blues with music, when PBS wants to interview an expert on how the voice can energize you, when IBM wants a consultant to use music to increase efficiency and harmony in the workplace, when the National Association of Cancer Survivors wants a speaker on the healing powers of music, they turn to Campbell (Campbell's website, http://www.mozarteffect.com/).
The governors of Tennessee and Georgia have started programs which give a Mozart CD to every newborn. Hundreds of hospitals were given free CDs of classical music in May of 1999 by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Foundation. These are well-intentioned gestures, but are they based on solid research that classical music increases a child's intelligence or an adult's healing process?
Not according to Kenneth Steele, a psychology professor at Appalachian State University, and John Bruer, head of the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis. Contrary to all the hype, they claim that there is no real intelligence enhancing or health benefit to listening to Mozart. Steele and his colleagues Karen Bass and Melissa Crook claim that they followed the protocols set forth by Shaw and Rauscher but could not "find any kind of effect at all," even though their study tested 125 students. They concluded that "there is little evidence to support intervention programs based on the existence of the Mozart effect." Their research appears in the July 1999 issue of Psychological Science.
In his book The Myth of the First Three Years, Bruer attacks not only the Mozart effect but several other related myths based on the misinterpretation of recent brain research.
The Mozart effect is an example of how science and the media mix in our world. A suggestion in a few paragraphs in a scientific journal becomes a universal truth in a matter of months, eventually believed even by the scientists who initially recognized how their work had been distorted and exaggerated by the media. Others, smelling the money, jump on the bandwagon and play to the crowd, adding their own myths, questionable claims, and distortions to the mix. In this case, many uncritical supporters line up to defend the faith because at stake here is the future of our children. We then have books, tapes, CDs, institutes, government programs, etc. Soon the myth is believed by millions as a scientific fact. In this case, the process met with little critical resistance because we already know that music can affect feelings and moods, so why shouldn't it affect intelligence and health? It's just commonsense, right? Yes, and all the more reason to be skeptical.

philosophy: Spirited Away - Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi

2006-02-25T11:47:00.000+02:00

You've got to wonder why people continue to write reviews of Miyazaki movies, since they almost all end up sounding the same in the end. "Wow," "magical," "he's done it again" "sure to be the biggest movie of the summer," on and on it goes, and then after recycling the same words of praise and amazement in a slightly new order for a few paragraphs you come the inevitable five-star rating. So why am I adding to the pile? In the words of Raphael See in his Laputa review, "Because that way, I get to watch the best animated stories in the world..."
The story begins with our main character, the young and scrawny Chihiro, becoming trapped on one side of a river after walking through a dark tunnel. She finds herself in a town normally invisible to humans, one in which various gods, from local deities to goblins and monsters, are quite visible. After she is trapped in this town with her parents, who are turned into pigs for eating the food of the gods without permission, Chihiro begins to disappear. She survives by getting a job from the witch Yu-baaba at a public bath for gods, which is the main attraction of this strange town. In order to receive her job, however, she is forced to give Yu-baaba her name, who then replaces "Chihiro" with the moniker "Sen."
Thus the first theme of Spirited Away is revealed: that of the importance of words. Some ancient cultures believed that all things and people have "real" names, and when you know that real name, you have power over that thing. Words were used carefully. Miyazaki has stated that he believes that words have great import and meaning, and is distressed at the lack of thought that goes into them in our modern times. He believes that there is still great gravity of purpose carried in words even today, though plethora and overuse of meaningless words nowadays often makes that hard to believe. That theme is revived in Spirited Away as Chihiro must remember her name in order to return to her world. She becomes increasingly distressed during the movie as she begins to have trouble remembering her true name.
Another major theme is that of the existence of good and evil in the world. In Spirited Away we are taken into another world, one that comes beautifully to life in the hands of Ghibli's animators. It is distinctly Japanese, and flows from that rich and unique folklore history. At its core, however, it is also a reflection of our world, and brings this movie into the realm of allegory. Chihiro's adventures in the public bathhouse is characterised by meetings with many types of gods, both good and evil. Through her wit and with the help of her friends, she survives. In the end, when the lights go on and the credits roll across the screen, the story is done not because evil was vanquished or the other world disappeared, but simply because Chihiro found the will to survive. This is a recurring theme in many of Miyazaki's works, most notably in his manga "Nausicaä," as is his belief that to destroy evil completely would be to destroy the world. He believes that evil is part of this world, and integral to its existence; to deny evil is absurdity, to vanquish it, impossibility.
So what of the character development, the computer animation, the basic plot and suspense? All excellent, of course. The character development is charming and moving, and the computer effects are even more effectively integrated than in Mononoke Hime. The surface plot and suspense situations are also well done in the classic Ghibli style. But it is the underlying themes discussed above that, in my mind, elevate this movie above a Disney fable or children's cartoon. While not as deep or epic as Nausicaä, nor as action-packed as Laputa, this movie is nonetheless firmly entrenched in my mind as one of Ghibli's best. Miyazaki has done it again, folks. Is anyone surprised?

Hayao Miyazaki own view (from interview ~ )

This film is an adventure story, although the characters neither swing weapons around, nor use supernatural powers in battle. It is an adventure story, but its theme is not a confrontation between good and evil. It will be a story of a girl who was thrown into a world where both good and evil exist. She gets trained, learns about friendship and devotion, and survives by using her wisdom. She finds her way out, dodges, and comes back to her old daily life for the time being. However, it is not because evil was destroyed -- just as the world does not disappear, (evil does not disappear). It is because she gained the power to live. Today, the world has become ambigous; but even though it is ambiguous, the world is encroaching and trying to consume (everything). It is the main theme of this film to describe such a world clearly in the form of a fantasy.Being enclosed, protected, and kept away (from dangers), children cannot help but enlarge their fragile egos in their daily lives where they feel their lives as something dim. Chihiro's skinny limbs and sullen face, which indicate she would not be amused so easily, are a symbol of that. Still, when reality becomes clear and she finds herself in a crisis, her adaptability and endurance will well up within her. She would find an existence in which she can bravely decide and act within herself.Certainly, many people might simply panic and sink down to the ground. But such people would vanish or quickly be eaten in the situation Chihiro faced. Chihiro is a heroine, because of her power not to let herself be eaten up. She is a heroine, (but) not because she is beautiful or because she has a matchless heart. This is the merit of this film, and this is why it is a film for 10 year old girls.A word has power. In the world into which Chihiro has wandered, to say a word out of one's mouth has a grave importance. At Yuya, which is ruled by Yu-baaba, if Chihiro says one word like "No" or "I wanna go home," the witch would quickly throw Chihiro out. She would have no choice but to keep aimlessly wandering until she vanishes, or is changed into a chicken to keep laying eggs until she is eaten. In turn, if Chihiro says "I will work here," even the witch cannot ignore her. Today, words are considered very lightly, as something like bubbles. It is just a reflection of reality being empty. It is still true that a word has power. It's just that the world is filled with empty and powerless words.The act of depriving (a person) of one's name is not just changing how one (person) calls the other. It is a way to rule the other (person) completely. Sen becomes horrified when she realizes that she is losing the memory of her name, Chihiro. And every time she visits her parents at the pigsty, she becomes (more) accustomed to her parents as pigs. In the world of Yu-baaba, you should always live in the danger of being eaten up.In this difficult world, Chihiro becomes lively. The sullen, listless character would have a surprisingly attractive expression in the end of the film. The essence of the world has not changed a bit. This film will persuade one of the fact that a word is one's will, oneself, and one's power.It is also the reason why we make a fantasy that takes place in Japan. Even though it is a fairytale, I do not want make it a Western one in which we can find many ways out. This film will probably be looked at as one of those run-of-the-mill other-world stories. But I'd like you to consider is as a direct descendant of "Suzume no Oyado (Sparrows' House)" and "Nezumi no Goten (The Palace of Mice)" in the Japanese folktales. Although they did not use such a phrase as "parallel world," our ancestors have blundered at Sparrows' House or enjoyed a party at The Palace of Mice.The reason why I made the world of Yu-baaba pseudo-Western is because it is a world filled with Japanese traditional designs, as well as to make it ambiguous whether it is a dream or reality. We just don't know how rich and unique our folk world - from stories, folklore, events, designs, gods to magic - is. Certainly, Kachikachi Yama and Momotaro have lost their power of persuasion. But it is poor imagination to put all the traditional things into a snug folk-like world. Children are losing their roots, being surrounded by high technology and cheap industrial goods. We have to tell them how rich a tradition we have.By combining traditional designs with a modern story, and putting them in as pieces of colorful mosaic, (I think) the world in the film will have a fresh persuasion. At the same time, (we must) recognize again that we are inhabitants of this island country. In an era of no borders, people who do not have a place to stand will be treated unseriously. A place is the past and history. A person with no history, a people who have forgotten their past, will vanish like snow, or be turned into chickens to keep laying eggs until they are eaten.I would like to make it a film in which 10 year old girls can find their true wishes. Hayao Miyazaki

moan: What's with the Guardian Crossword!

2005-10-10T12:41:00.000+02:00

Whats with the Guardian crossword compilers - why have they started allowing complete nonsense to start
being part of the cryptic crossword?

I am collating many examples of the kind of clue that gives a solution that is neither clever or logica - and will be filling in this blog with these in the next few days.l

And to state succintly the Laws of Cryptic Crosswords ;

1.Every clue must offer two routes to the solution word, including at least one straight definition.
2.There are no extraneous words in the clues.
3.“The clue writer may not mean what he says, but he must always say what he means.”

Lets start with Araucaria..

Executed agitator keeping revolutionary Western idol (6,3) = SACRED COW
How workers in two shifts smile crookedly at one on river quiz (3,5,2,2,1,11) = WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE

It becomes us all and, ungrammatically, on the contrary(4) = DUST
No further charge on the Blaydon Races? (4) NETT
Actor in boot? (4) TREE
Relating to a branch that causes alarm (5) RAMAL
Universities now (4) CATS
Reportedly on good terms with urban horticulturalists (6) WELWYN
Important suit state sector’s half ruined (4,4) TEST CASE
Drippy bath, yah (anag) - joyful anniversary (5,8)
Clue: Mole takes snack next to river. Solution: Pier
Coffee order sent back for alternative? (5) MOCHA
load of rubbish by ‘omo sapiens? He plays a part (6,7) DUSTIN HOFFMAN
Way to be brought up in life, failing inward reference (6) ITSELF
Boss to get a grip? (4) STUD

build the blog and they will come ... The Grauniad now has Hugh Stephenson columninisng on 'how to solve (Guardian) crosswords - Mondays Feb 20th article was right up my blog ~
critiscism of unfair cryptic clues (not sticking to Ximenes) ;
Friend in much trouble (4)) ~ CHUM - 'trouble' doesnt infer to clue 'much'
stick duck in boat (5) is unfair as CANE ('duck' isnt put in word 'boat')
and one by Paul - three clues included city (11) ~sol = SUNDERLAND 's under land' giving three solutions "franceS' 'Malised' 'Peruse' - as Stephenson - squeals of pain over that one!

so if you have any examples of ridiculous cryptic crossword clues appearing nowadays in The Guardian then please do add them

.. May be we can start a campaign to pressure the Guardian into doing something about the crap compilers that have started using!

politics: 1980s Pop Stars bringing out new records and terrorism

2005-10-07T12:01:00.000+02:00

Could it be that many moribund pop acts of the 1980s have only recently brought out new records for the first time in over a decade (not including the Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger solo album, - Madness, Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, Kate Bush,Enya, Simple Minds, Bananrama etc etc - Could this be in order to cash in on the mushrooming market in download i-tunes for the middle-aged online savvy population?

Another theory closely related to the Abba and Mamma Mia smash success and re-vival could be linked to same effect in the USA in the 1980s - a country humiliated by Iran hostage takers (although Jimmy Carter did do the right thing and stop propping up the Shah dynasty) and we could still be suffering the ripple effects of this with Iraq and Afghanistan being convenient stepping stones to invasion. In a world of uncertainity the USA (see later blog - USA Quo Vadis) looked to a historical certainty of childrens saturday morning movies (Indinana Jones) and the
iconically titled BACK TO THE FUTURE , thus the US voted for a cowboy hero but John Wayne had died of Cancer so the hat was passed on to Reagan.
Now in the same conditions of an implacable enemy in the form of religous fundamentalists we see the rush to the comfort of safety in NOSTALGIA, thus we have Abba and 1980s Pop wave revival in Europe and stand aghast as the US is swept by fascist sentiment linked to religous fundamentalism (mainly being the poor i.e. black). watch out soon for new blog on christian fundamentalist fascism and disaster movies!

politics: scots wha hae evolution led..

2005-10-06T13:01:00.000+02:00

Why evolution has no 'other side' It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the heart.
The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."

to analyse controversies is of enormous value to education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? Why would we join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"?
The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.
Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sexual selection; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for lively argument.
Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class.
So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the essay topics we listed above? Here's why.
If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish.

The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be too complex to have evolved by natural selection.

What is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil that would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process.

But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths results in a fossil anyway.
The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.
Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such a fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.
As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.
If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.
Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.

politics: United States Quo Vadis?

2005-09-11T10:39:00.000+02:00

http://www.itaweb.it/startrek/papers/coldwar.html - saw this and loved it!

- Okay, here's the deal. You guys remember when we all knew who the bad guys were? No matter what the movie was, the bad guy always wore a black hat, or was a Russian, or spoke in any foreign accent other than American. The Bond series thrived during the heat of the Cold War 'cause everyone was scared to death that, in the ink of an eye, we'd all be eating borscht and standing in lines for toilet paper. Fear came in the form of the Iron Curtain. But, whoopsie, thanks to great Gorbachev ,the Berlin Wall fell down one night, and with it, Hollywood lost its bad guys. Gorbachev said—apparently with wisdom—after the breakup of the Soviet Union, that the United States would now need a new enemy. To me this means that nationalism is nothing more than ego extrapolated to identify with the image of a country, that is, the U.S. Every nationalist thinks that their country represents the ideal. Nationalism functions as a religion, either an extention of one's personal religion or as a substitute for a religion. It's a polarized religion, i.e., a religion with god (the country) on one side and evil personified as the devil (the enemy country) on the other side. Note that should the devil ever be destroyed, then god ceases to exist. Therefore, fundamentalists always need to point out evil somewhere—even if it is within themselves—lest their self-image be destroyed, and they are always on a crusade to convert or destroy the evil. In nationalism there must be an enemy country lest the nation's image be lost, and there is always a crusade to convert or destroy the enemy. In both cases, though, the conquered enemy must immediately be replaced with a new enemy. There was a disturbing and unfocused anger in the U.S. after 9/11. People wanted an enemy to attack, and "terrorist" wasn't a concrete enough target. They wanted a country as a target, and George Bush, rising to the occassion saw his oppurtunity to attack Iraq as a gift to the angry Americans. Bush, right from his election, wanted to attack Iraq, and now he could use 9/11 as an excuse and give the angry Americans a place to focus their anger. It's called displaced anger. Your boss yells at you, and you go home and yelll at your wife who yells at the kids who kick the dog. Bush, being a fundamentalist, believed in what he was doing. He needed an enemy as badly as Gorbachev said the U.S. needed an enemy after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It was Bush's fervor both as a fundamentalist and a nationalist that drove him to attack Iraq, and had the conquest of Iraq been the "piece of cake" that he thought it would be, we probably would have attacked other countries. In other words, success exists only in a constant supply of enemies, not in the conquest of an enemy, just as a polarized god must have an enemy to exist.Suddenly, everyone was in a tizzy because, well, you can't make political thrillers and spy movies with no political differences to oppose. The world's spy community can't just gang up on Cuba. So, what do we get? South American drug lords were all the rage for a while, but that got boring, mainly 'cause there's just so many of them, and they don't pose much of a threat to steal an ICBM warhead and hold the world ransom for billions of dollars. There was still Communism in China, but, hey, they are about to join the capitalist club for who knows why?. Why try to start WWIII on top of everything else? Fortunately, there was a solution. Middle Eastern terrorists were all over the news every night, with bombs and biological weapons and civil wars. And, before you knew it, Hollywood had their next generation of "bad guys." If you needed a villain in your movie, chances are that villain would be from the Middle East. Or, better yet, he/she had "strong Middle Eastern ties." That way, you could cast virtually anyone, and still keep the new bogeymen in the picture. Now, though, there's an even greater bogeyman, thanks to Chris Carter and the "X-Filers." Instead of massive fear of anything foreign, there's a funky new twist working our fears. Everyone is now paranoid of the government here in the good ol' U.S. of A. Cover-ups, conspiracies, lone gunmen, you name it. Ordinary people versus The Government is good business. Big Brother is watching, and computers allow them anything and everything they need to destroy you. "BOO!" Here's a question for you now - which one is worse, the foreign threat, or the domestic threat? The new movie The Siege poses that very question. And, while it doesn't give all the answers, it does make for a pretty good action flick. A little more benign than one would expect with such a topic, but with a cast of Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, and Bruce Willis, it's more than watchable. New York City is Ground Zero for a terrorist war. It seems the U.S. went and abducted an Arab sheik thought to be the leader of a terrorist regime. His loyal followers didn't take to kindly to this five-finger discount and, so, they begin blowing the Big Apple to shreds to voice their disapproval. Suddenly, the government begins herding any and all Arab-Americans into internment camps, much the same way we treated Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Among the many investigators of these bombings are FBI agent Anthony Hubbard (Washington) and CIA agent Elise Kraft (Bening), whom Hubbard finds rooting through the rubble of one of the explosions. There's a major jurisdictional clash between the two, and it's only made worse when General William Devereaux (Willis) shows up. Full of gung and flowing with ho, he dances right up Broadway and declares that, 'til further notice, The Apple is under martial law. Let the War of the Egos commence. It should not be some "Eureka!" discovery that director Ed Zwick knows how to make a movie. If you saw Glory or Courage Under Fire, you know he can construct memorable scenes and paint wonderful pictures. Here, though, he does stray a bit out of his element. It's no knock against him; indeed, it's a credit to his ideal that he doesn't go all Bruckheimer with this story from the first minute on, and let nitro and bloodbags tell the story for him. Zwick has a pretty intelligent script to work with, one that plays with the main point -- could we indeed be our own worst enemy? -- very carefully. And this script, written by Lawrence Wright, has some trickery and double-crosses that would make "X-Filers" proud, particularly when the government becomes The Government, the embodiment of pride, wrath and superiority. It also helps that Zwick gets two tight performances from Denzel and Miss Annette. Hubbard is obviously the "good guy" here, from start to finish, and it's thrilling to see Denzel in a thriller again. He was so good in Crimson Tide, playing much the same character, and he's the type of actor that seems to thrive in a tense scene. He can rivet you with his eyes and voice, and, as he showed in Glory, be even more impressive in silence. That being said, though, the worker here is Bening. She's the balancing point here, and does herself proud. Her character, Elise Kraft, is one of those Hitchcock women, cool and complete on the outside, fire and fury within. Being CIA, she has more than one identity, complete with disguises and gadgets, but she also has her own "ties to the Middle East." It's this point that keeps you guessing about her, and it keeps the suspense flowing as you try to figure her out. Notice I did not comment on Brother Bruce. Simple answer? He's wasted here, like logic in a WWF pay-per-view. I don't know if Zwick chose Bruce for the part of this super-soldier general, or if Bruce was forced on him, but he just couldn't pull off the demeanor of a gung-ho warhawk. Bruce has always made his money playing "the Rebel" and in The Siege, he never loses that smart-aleck smirk, like he's got a secret and he's not telling, and that wipes out every word he speaks. The character seems like it was aimed for someone that can smolder, someone that can get almost god-like with power. I kept thinking of people like Donald Sutherland and Sean Connery, two men that can clinch their teeth and speak in a normal voice, and still sound like they're screaming. Willis seems so out of place here; he becomes a distraction more than anything. He would have been at home as the rebellious FBI agent, but as a By-the-Book Uniform, he's lost. I do have a note to Ed Zwick, though. Ed, partner, you let the Bruckheimer get the best of you at the end. You had a good thing going, and then you reversed gears and aimed for "bang" over "plot." You should've had more cojones about your work, friend, 'cause the end is a big cop-out. You were going along so well, but you sold out to the smell of napalm in the morning. Amateur mistake from a pro, Ed. You could do worse than seeing The Siege. Think of it as Mission: Impossible for 90 minutes, and Die Hard for the last 20. Some great plotting and a few tricks from the sleeve, followed by some standard bang and bleed. It's not an even shuffle, but, for the most part, it pays off. It saves the world without getting the Red Dawn kids in the picture, and it lets you get the juices flowing for the next "threat to all of mankind." Where's Goldfinger when we need him, huh?

philosophy: David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

2005-09-10T11:13:00.001+02:00

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. Why is it more than probable, that all men must die; that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water; unless it be, that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and there is required a violation of these laws, or in other words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation....
The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish....' When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.
In the foregoing reasoning we have supposed, that the testimony, upon which a miracle is founded, may possibly amount to an entire proof, and that the falsehood of that testimony would be a real prodigy: But it is easy to shew, that we have been a great deal too liberal in our concession, and that there never was a miraculous event established on so full an evidence.