Think logically, think skeptically

A regular commenter on this blog, The Skeptic, has now set up shop and created a blog on WordPress, ‘Bad Thinking‘.  It’s shaping up to be an exercise in using formal logic as part of the skeptical toolkit to examine the extraordinary claims of paranormalists, UFOlogists and any other ‘ists’ who fail to apply critical thinking to their own remarkable assertions.

It promises to be interesting, challenging, funny and if past performance is anything to go by, sometimes upsetting to the self proclaimed ‘experts’ of the weird.

Benefit cuts explained

Watch the skies!

Source: Hubblesite.org

Looking for something to do next week?  Then look to the skies!  Starting this Saturday is BBC2′s Stargazing Live 2012, a week-long series of live TV shows to get people interested in, and share their love of, astronomy.  In parallel, events are being held the length of the country, and here in the North East we are not alone.  One of our own local astronomy groups, the Sunderland Astronomical Society (SAS) is holding three events next week at the Washington Wetland Centre in Washington, Tyne & Wear.

The great thing about this celebration of stargazing is that it’s not just for astronomy geeks, the wonder of the universe is for everyone to behold – it’s for people of all ages and levels of knowledge.

At this time of year Jupiter is looking bright and beautiful in our sky and will rightly be the ‘star’ attraction at the Sunderland Astronomical Society events, but the gas giant won’t be the only cosmological celebrity.  As well as using the Society’s telescopes to see our planetary neighbours, visitors can explore and discover distant nebulae and galaxies, and learn how by looking into our skies we are also looking deep into our universe’s past.

The events are free and the times are:

1. Thu 20 Jan 19:00–21:00
2. Fri 20 Jan 19:00–21:00
3. Sat 21 Jan 19:00–21:00

Wrap up well for the cold.

Contact details are here.  Places are available, but it’s recommended to book quickly, as events across the region are filling up quickly – Gibside is already fully booked!

Windy in South Shields

Bellway sign at Cleadon Vale at the Nook South Shields falls prey to the winds.

Goverment housing policy – still in the 1980s

It seems that we are doomed to repeat our mistakes.  Well at least the Con-Dem government is.  A question has been doing the rounds recently in an attempt to explore the current Con-Dem approach to the economy by comparing it to a fabled Tory golden age: what would Thatcher do?

The answer would be simple: strip the state’s assets and put them into the hands of the markets.

Yesterday’s announcement that the government was planning to ‘get Britain building’ should set off alarm bells for anyone who has taken the slightest notice of the housing market over the last thirty years.  In a desperate attempt to boost the economy the government wants to introduce a mortgage indemnity scheme, where the government would underwrite mortgages – for lenders – of up to 95 per cent loan to value.  This means the taxpayer will carry the risk of high LTV mortgages going south.

And South is where much of this money will go.  As house prices are already high in the southern regions, returns there are much more attractive for developers.  This means yet again, government adding further heat to an already overheated south, boosting building in already overcrowded areas or on attractive greenfield sites, and help further push southern region house values into the stratosphere.

At a time when government can hardly issue a press release without mentioning national debt, it intends to implement a scheme which will increase personal debt and government risk of debt, as lenders will take full advantage of this guarantee.  It’s not hard to imagine that underwriting decisions by lenders will be made in this light, making risky lending decisions more common.

So who benefits?  Builders build, lenders lend and people will get to buy pretty new houses.  Sounds great doesn’t it?  But what this plan really represents is a privatisation of the profit whilst nationalising the risk.

It seems this government is only too happy to help the dead hand of the market along, despite the claims of Tories and Lib Dems.

Sadly, Labour support this policy.

Instead of creating another housing price bubble built on debt – underwritten by the tax payer – there should be a move to fund the building of affordable social housing.  The Tories started to kill off social housing with the right to buy scheme (another example of tax payer funded housing market interference).  Labour failed to stop the decay, instead allowing councils to offload their social housing portfolios into arms length management organisations and privatisation on the cheap.

We have a government and ‘opposition’ policy which will encourage subprime lending masquerading as first class mortgages (where have we seen that before?) that will ultimately fail to provide what is desperately needed: quality low cost housing developed to meet the needs of a 21st Century society.

A national social housing building and renovation project could be used to usher in a new generation of low and zero carbon housing, provide much needed building jobs with new skills using sustainable technologies, which could help kick start a fledgling green building industry.

There is a housing crisis, but it offers an opportunity to regenerate Britain’s housing into something that would benefit society a lot more than the short term interests of property speculators.  Instead of getting all misty eyed over 1980s Thatcherite home ownership dogma we need a diverse – and sustainable – modern housing infrastructure to face Britain’s future housing needs.

Alpha – the new missionary position

If you’ve travelled by bus or Metro on Tyneside you can’t miss the posters advertising the Alpha Course, normally posing generic questions like ‘Is there more to life than this?’, or delivering bland feel-good phrases like ‘Life is worth exploring’.  In the run up to Christmas, they’ll be everywhere.  Despite the Alpha Course being a Christian missionary project, their posters rarely mention God, Christianity or Jesus.  I’ve always wondered by their advertising was so coy.

Over at the Atheism UK website, correspondent John Hunt has produced an excellent concise review of the current state of knowledge about the New Testament and the Jesus stories, and suggests that Alpha’s reluctance to mention the bible is down to the fact that the New Testament doesn’t really stand up to serious scrutiny.

Christian apologists debating the basis of their religion often point to the ‘historicity’ of Jesus and the brutality-lite New Testament account of his life.  But outside the scriptual accounts, it’s likely that Jesus is at most a construct of bolted together pre-existing myths, possible real or exaggerated accounts and even bare faced made up stories to fit in with – and expand – the legend of Jesus.

From the tales of King Arthur to Robin Hood, myth has played an important part in building cultural identity, but is ultimately an unreliable foundation for an evolving ethical framework.  As myths are retold it’s through the bias of the story teller, the perception filter of the listener and reflected in the mirror of zeitgeist.  They are also refined to either meet the tastes of a contemporary audience, or to provide a better story.  Sometimes, myths are remoulded to satisfy the demands of propaganda for political ends.

If the foundations of a belief structure are so shaky, how can anyone build an effective ethical ideology based upon a myth?

The Skeptic answers

If you read the Shields Gazette, you might have spotted that last Thursday columnist Mike Hallowell used his column to call out a commenter on this blog. the Skeptic.  The article isn’t on the Gazette’s website so I can’t link to it.  Sadly, Hallowell failed to mention that it was this blog, despite lifting a good bit of text from it.  It seems 600 words or so doesn’t provide enough space for courtesy.  The Skeptic has responded to Hallowell’s last comment on the Dangerous Delusion post, but I thought the response was also worthy of it’s own blog post, so with the Skeptic’s permission, here it is.

Update: 3rd January 2012

You’ll note that the rest of this post has now gone.  Mike Hallowell has received advice that some of Skeptic’s comment is ‘definitely actionable’, so I’ve removed the comment from this post.  Similarly, in the interests of self preservation other response comments which Mike Hallowell has been advised as being ‘definitely actionable’ on other threads will be unapproved, and one of my own posts slightly edited.

Some of the comments may return after further consideration.

However, Skeptic’s link to the excellent XKCD site on the ‘current state of the findings of parapsychological research’ still stands:

Update 2: 3rd January 2012

I’ve been told that Skeptic will be starting his own blog on science, skepticism, philosophy and sociology.  Maybe he will revisit this discussion.

 

Three the magic number?

The past couple of weeks has seen the release of two first person shooter games (FPS) which are part of two separate franchises which have been around for nearly ten years: Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.  Both games, whilst being first person shooters, have different gameplay styles and have been competing with each other since they first launch.  The launch of the ’3′ games within two weeks of each other means a lot of gamers (including me) have parted with their pounds.

Battlefield 3

I’ve followed the Battlefield series since Battlefield 1942 on the PC back in 2002.  Through Battlefield Vietnam to Battlefield 2, then onto the console with Battlefield 1943 and the Battlefield Bad Company games.  Battlefield 3 (or BF3) is the latest installment, and one which has been eagerly awaited.

The singleplayer campaign mode is disappointing.  The plot went from one linear firefight – chase – set piece to the next, with the set pieces very much a Simon-Says style follow the screen prompts sequential button press-a-thon which would be embarrasing on a children’s game.  The game designers learned nothing from last year’s Medal of Honor, which whilst still linear, offered the player some flexibility in routes and flanking positions, which was sadly lacking in BF3.  In the previous incarnations of Battlefield before Bad Company the campaign mode was little more than a series of training missions for online play, with a plot which was little more than a series of battle locations around the world.  However, whilst a cinematic plot driven campaign is welcome, it also has the disadvantage of not giving enough practice with weapons and vehicles before going online.

Online multiplayer has always been what Battlefield was about.  The first Battlefield 1942 had no character progression or weapons and kit development; you had a choice of five character classes, each class with a different weapon and kit loadout between Scout, Assault, Medic, Anti-tank, and Engineer.  But this simplicity meant everyone started with the same choice of kit loadouts, so skill, tactics and team playing rather than the advantage of superior upper rank firepower sorted out the noobs from the top guns.  As well as the classes, there was an array of vehicles to spread mayhem with.  From jeeps, to to tanks, to aircraft, all the way to battleships.

This theme has continued throughout the series, and BF3 has all the vehicles and equipment of the modern battlefield and more: tanks, helicopters jets and even dune buggies.  However, I feel this game is less a Battlefield 3 and more like a Bad Company game.  It has much the same weapons and class progression as BF:BC2 as you rise through the ranks online and even the same environment physics.  There is I feel a step backwards in this game, which drops the tactical command features of BF2 which were so integral to encouraging team play rather than the lone run-and-gun style so prevalent at the moment on BF3.  Perhaps this will be addressed in future downloadable content packs.

However, BF3 is still enjoyable, provides plenty of game modes and options for your I’m particularly looking forward to release of the Return to Karkand add-on pack, particularly as Karkand was one of my favourite BF2 maps and it’ll be interesting to see what the developers have done in their reboot of a fan favourite.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Like the Battlefield series, MW3 has a long heritage going back to the first Call of Duty game in 2003.  Like the Medal of Honor series, the CoD singleplayer campaign mode was tightly scripted, a feature that has followed the game’s incarnations over nearly ten years.

The MW3 campaign continues the MW story of Capt Price and ‘Soap’ MacTavish in their mission to end a war between Russia and the West, and resolve an ongoing personal grudge with evil warmonger Makarov.  It’s definitely not one for the kids.  Even though it’s 18-rated, many parents buy MW games for their children, but this episode in the series takes it even further than the civilian murder carnage of MW2, and being very cinematic it places the player right inside the action, witnessing events you wouldn’t want children to see.

The online mutliplayer mode has always featured smaller maps than the Battlefield franchise, which made for fast and frantic gameplay, often the fortune of games flipping in moments.  The game is called MW3, and it’s a worthy name for the campaign, but in terms of the online play it’s definitely MW 2.5.  It features much the same weapons, perks and upgrade options of MW2, albeit with a revamped interface and lobby.  Even the infamous ‘quick-scope’ remains.  I thought that some tips would have been taken from CoD: Black Ops in which the weapons were much more balanced, and the perks were purchased with upgrade points rather than achieving challenges, allowing the player much more choice rather than being forced through a restrictive upgrade path.

The new online maps seem to be much smaller than their MW predecessors, although they are graphically more complex and structured in such a way to discourage camping and encourage more ‘run-n-gun’, making hold points almost a thing of the past.  However, it’s early yet, definitely too early for me to identify particular map areas which give a tactical advantage.  It’ll be interesting to see how this develops in future map releases.

There are some weapon aiming issues and some weapons seem too overpowered, but hopefully these will be patched.

However, MW3 offers some new online game modes, including the new ‘Kill Confirmed’, where you collect enemy dog tags after killing them, and I predict this will be the big hit of MW3 online.  There’s also an upgraded ‘Survival’ cooperative game type, which is probably aimed at the fans of Zombies in World at War and Black Ops.

Summary

Both of the ’3′ games are fun, whilst at the same time a little disappointing in what they could have done; missed opportunities.  One thing both games have failed to do is to add anything startingly new.  They are simply a slight evolution of what came before, and while you give the fans what they want, the first person shooter market is so saturated that it needs a game to shake things up a bit.  Even the ‘Elite’ optional addon for MW3 is merely an iteration of a feature first launched as a beta with Black Ops.  One of the things missing from both games is online character customisation allowing you to create a unique looking online playable avatar.  Medal of Honor went a small way allowing you to unlock a couple of character skins, but games like SOCOM and Brink have shown what is possible with character customisation.

Despite these minor irritations, I’ll still be playing both ’3′ games, and probably get sucked into rising through the ranks and completing challenges, enjoying meeting people around the world, and fragging them to bits.

Circumcision: suffer little children

A few months ago I made a comment on Curly’s blog, where I made a somewhat clumsy yet robust case against Curly’s call for blind respect for religion in the interest of social cohesion, where I argued that there are many features of religions that aren’t worthy of our respect in a liberal civilised society.

A respondent on Curly’s blog, Lalon Amin, took my comment as being anti Islam, and tried to engage in some spirited apologetics against something I didn’t say.  Nowhere in my comment did I specifically mention Islam as most of the features I described could be found in several religious societies, although some of the behaviours can be seen in some Islamic subcultures.

An aspect I wanted to explore further is non-therapeutic routine infant circumcision.  Infant circumcision is a hot-button topic in the USA in the moment, after San Francisco was denied the opportunity to hold a referendum on the banning of non medical infant circumcision, and a petition to ban non-therapeutic routine infant circumcision on the Whitehouse website is generating plenty of debate.

Fortunately, male infant circumcision is much lower here in the UK than it is in the USA, but like the USA, the UK has banned female circumcision.  I think it’s long overdue for non-medical infant male circumcision to be banned in the UK.

To a large extent circumcision is a cultural phenomenon, but one which is often justified through the interpretation of religious texts, and supervised and enforced by clerics and social pressure.

Freedom of and freedom from religion are necessary in a civilised society, but religious freedom should not include the right to inflict ritual surgical alterations on children.  Outlawing non-therapeutic routine infant circumcision would protect children and allow them to make their own choice when they become adults.

There’s an argument that it’s up to parents to decide if their child is circumcised or not.  However, the same logic could be applied to parents who want to withhold medical treatment from their child.  To some people it might seem like an intervention too far, but in some cases children need to be protected from their parents’ beliefs.

In terms of the claimed medical benefits of male circumcision, the evidence is far from conclusive.  Circumcision advocates seem to cherrypick the research that confirms their biases.  It’s not without irony that some people will try to use science to find confirmation for their religious doctrine.

However, even if the evidence did confirm that circumcision provided some protection from HIV/AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, circumcision doesn’t provide anywhere near the same protection as barrier protection methods, and it still should be the decision of an adult to have a circumcision.

That’s the key point.  Non-medical circumcision should be an adult’s decision over their own body.  Circumcising children takes that basic right away from them and makes an irreparable change to a child’s body.  Individual right to freedom requires that such physical abuse on those who can’t defend themselves from religion, culture or social convention should not be permitted in a civilised society.  Non medical circumcision children should be banned.

Dennis Ritchie: Plan C

Last week the computer world was shaken by the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.  A giant and a visionary with an eye for design and usability.  The original iMac was a revolutionary in-your-face design, its successor, like the MacBooks, a lesson in hard stylish simplicity.  Until the iPhone, smartphones were business tools with limited and specialised functionality.  Similarly, tablet computers had a narrow appeal outside technical and industrial environments until the iPad came along and reinvented the tablet as a consumer product.

Steve Jobs was responsible for all that.  Well, mostly.  Whilst he was a giant, he was standing on the shoulders of another, quieter giant: Dennis Ritchie.

Outside the world of computer programming few people will have heard of him.  His death today will be overshadowed by that of Jobs, despite the fact that it’s arguable that Ritchie has had a much more significant impact on the world of computing.  The programming language ‘C’, probably the first modern programming language, was developed by Ritchie.  As if that wasn’t enough he developed the Unix operating system along with Bell Labs colleague Ken Thompson.  I’m writing this blog on a laptop running Ubuntu Linux, a descendant of that original Unix box.

C was the first ‘proper’ programming I learned and I’ve never looked back.  I still can’t believe my luck that I work as a programmer and some of it was was due to lessons learned from Ritchie’s book ‘The C Programming Language’, which still sits on my bookshelf.

I’m not alone in benefiting from Ritchie’s creation.  The Mac’s OS X is a Unix variant, as is Android that sits on smartphones and tablets, and the descendants of the C language run on so many consumer devices that it’s hard to think of another language that had so much impact on computing.  A multi-platform language, it even compiles and runs on Windows machines.

Along with that of Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing, Dennis Ritchie’s legacy will be with us for a long time, long after the consumer electronics world has moved on from Apple’s pretty toys.