human bits » pointy bits

WMDs

mike — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:31:38 +0000

At this time of year it is not safe to ride without at least one WMD – or ‘Weapon of Magpie Distraction’ for the uninitiated. I find magpies particularly distracting while I’m riding, so I’d really like to return the favour by making a few of them feel really distracted. On many days lately when I have been distracted by magpies I have felt very very strongly that my magpie distractor of choice would be a bazooka. A bazooka is probably not the ideal choice however – and I haven’t used one so far – for at least the following reasons:

While the actual blast can be quite distracting – particularly if well targeted – a bazooka may take a while to reload. I read somewhere that a recent survey showed that at least 98% of magpies don’t actually know what a bazooka looks like. This probably means that during the reload time a magpie is not likely to be distracted by the mere presence of a bazooka.
There is also a good chance that the recoil from the bazooka blast will knock your bike over. This is probably more distracting for you than it is for the magpie, unless of course you are being closely followed by an inattentive car or truck driver (who may have been distracted by the magpie.) In that case the subsequent sirens and flashing lights and traffic chaos might be quite distracting for the magpie.

I have heard of at least one case of a tennis racket being used as a very effective WMD. I usually don’t have a tennis racket with me when I am riding so I haven’t tried that distraction yet. On a couple of occasions I have picked up a small tree from the roadside and carried that with me for the rest of my ride. That kind of works, but for me it has never had the impact I imagine a tennis racket would, and small trees don’t make good riding companions.

So lately I’ve settled on the less satisfying but mostly effective distractor of looking just plain silly.

There are of course many many ways of looking silly. If some other nameless cyclist had not come to my rescue I may have had many years of trial and error ahead of me in the search for exactly the right kind of silliness to effectively distract magpies. Fortunately there are many other cyclists doing their best to look silly (that is why lycra bike pants were invented after all) and somewhere along the line some one of them decided to look silly by wearing a hedgehog on his head. Lo and behold he discovered – by chance – that this was an effective magpie distractor. Of course we don’t have hedgehogs in Australia – and the echidna is a protected species – so I’ve had to make do by adding spiky bits to my helmet. So far it seems to be working. There is one magpie about 1km down the road from our place who likes to swoop at least a dozen times each time I ride by him, and I’d say he definitely looks distracted every single time he swoops.

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

mike — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:01:57 +0000

This time 40 years ago I was nine years old, discovering Jazz at night on the old valve radio my parents had given me (and yet to discover or have any particular interest in popular music) and breakfast cereal boxes had charts and pictures and cards and models of rockets and lunar modules. I remember Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’ playing on TV so many times during – or in between bits of – broadcasts of moon mission stuff. We all had the day off school. That is my Monday morning recollection of my part in that slice of history.

Much closer to the actual events is this – http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html – an amazing resource – a real treasure.

From the foreward:

Hour upon hour of the astronauts’ conversations with each other and with Mission Control in Houston, as well as television scenes taken during their lunar expeditions, were recorded as they occurred from July 1969 to December 1972. For all the years since then, these recordings were available but, for the most part, remained “on the shelf” to collect dust. Now, through the dedication and hard work of historian Eric Jones and the lunar astronauts, the aural and visual history of the Apollo lunar expeditions is being taken off the shelf, dusted off, and presented in a way which everyone can understand and enjoy. Besides cleaning up the voice transcripts, Eric is conducting exhaustive interviews with the lunar astronauts and inserting their recollections of the events which took place more than twenty years ago.

the digital divide

mike — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:03:49 +0000

There were two surprises to come out of the announcement of the national broadband network this week. The first was that the government got it right. I’d been hoping and praying for the last few months that they would have the balls and the vision and they have exceeded my expectations on both counts. Real leadership – who’d have thought! The second surprise has been the petty mindedness and utter lack of vision on the part of the opposition and some ‘analysts’. This also has exceeded my expectations. The implications of affordable high speed internet access across Australia are enormous. This is not about downloading movies – it is about what will be produced. It is about what will be possible. It is about unlocking potential. If there is a digital divide it is between those who can only see what now is and those who are ready to make what will be.

(writing this as we drive into Canberra for the weekend.)

maybe facebook is finally becoming interesting

mike — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 04:29:33 +0000

People who mainly talk about themselves are hard to be around. Anything that tries to exist just for its own benefit gets to be pretty pointless after a while. It is one of the basic facts of the universe that things are most useful, most significant, most themselves when they point outside of themselves.

It is true of people and it is true on the web. The more you give the more you get. The more you send people away the more they come back. Imagine if google had links only to google. The more facebook points outside of facebook – the more it makes other things useful to me – the more likely I am to use facebook.

live in your head

mike — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:54:54 +0000

love is … a room full of razor blades

mike — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 05:57:42 +0000

If you’re wondering how that could possibly be both true and a good thing, think of Eustace Scrubb in Lewis’ “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.”

love is loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong suffering.
love is not nice pictures of sunsets and flowers.
pretending that everything is OK is not love.
pretending to love is not love.
saying that you love is not love.
not loving is not love.
and everything else is bullshit.
and you know that is true!

I’d been thinking about these things this week – dealing with the consequences of not love (make of that what you will) – feeling the pain of love deal once more with the pain of not love – wondering how far this goes on. Three things remain, and one of them is love.

This then, is a sample from one of our lectures this week.
Lecture snippet “Spirituality of Christian Ministry” Cornerstone Community

Desert island iPod

mike — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 22:10:08 +0000

This is in reference to this discussion on Cornerstone Interactive.

Please! Not an ipod. The battery will die – which will be a particular pain in the butt on a desert island. At least let me hack a solar panel or something on to it before I go. But more importantly it symbolises and re-enforces so much of what is bad about the ‘music industry’.

Does anyone understand what that phrase ‘music industry’ means?

It means that once we made music. Now all we have is a ‘music industry’ to do it for us. I almost wrote ‘to do it to us’ – talk about a Freudian slip! It means that we have out-sourced the things that music is really about: our imaginations, our passions, our intimate longings, our sense of belonging and identity.

Girl: “Listen honey – they’re playing our song.”

Record company: “Listen honey. They’re playing OUR song!”

Cash register: ka-chinggg.

Band: (heard somewhere in the distance) “Whose song did he say?”

The ipod is a product of a culture that assumes you are here to consume. Some people get to make music, some people get to listen to it, and some people get to decide who does what. In a world of producers and consumers, god makers and god breakers, a world with a hungry empty manipulated public looking for something to worship, your role is to be a good little consumer.

In that kind of world there is no need for an ipod to be good at helping you make music – even though it could easily have been made that way (and there are some good alternatives that are.) In that kind of world there IS a need for the ipod to be good at controlling and enforcing what someone else says you are allowed to do with the music you have paid for. And that is what the ipod IS trying to be good at.

intelligent design

mike — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 06:45:35 +0000

Should intelligent design be taught in school science classes?

Personally I am amazed at the fanatical – almost fundamentalist – response that has come from otherwise level headed scientists and science educators on this issue. I really am amazed. I have no time for ‘creation science’ in general, and I applaud the work of people like Ian Plimer in his ‘Telling Lies for God’, but the knee-jerk reaction against ‘intelligent design’ has been anything but intelligent as far as I can tell.

For starters there are lots of things that should be taught as part of science education that are not science. The history of science, the philosophy of science, scientific method, questions of ethics and the cultural ramifications of the outworkings of science – all of these things are absolutely essential parts of any education in science. They are the bed-rock and the building blocks, the infrastructure and context of science, but not one of them is open to validation by scientific method. Test the reliability of scientific method by using scientific method itself?? Bullshit! Science works within a philosophical and cultural framework that is larger than itself and intimately connected with every other part of human life. How intimately? Well ask any scientist how and why they chose science, and listen to his or her answer. From most you will hear a deeply passionate and personal response. The others probably should have become accountants.

A theory of intelligent design as part of the evolutionary process in the development of life on earth is clearly dealing with issues that are part of science even if it cannot be shown to be addressing those issues scientifically. It should be obvious also that it is dealing with ethical, philosophical and cultural issues that are very relevant to those scientific issues. On that basis alone it is probably worthy of discussion in a science classroom.

But is a theory of intelligent design a scientific theory or is it some other kind of theory? Is it more essentially in the realm of philosophy or theology or history, or maybe even mathematics? There are two questions that need to be answered in getting to the bottom of this. The first is ‘can the theory be tested?’ and the second is ‘how can the theory be tested?’

For a theory to be a theory at all, it has to be falsifiable or testable. In other words it has to ‘stick its neck out’ and say something that might be able to be tested and shown to be true or false. If nothing could ever prove a theory wrong, then really nothing could ever prove it right either. For instance if I say "rabbits can jump further than mice" then someone could put that claim to the test; but if I say "imaginary rabbits can jump further than imaginary mice" I’m not saying anything true or false; because there is nothing – even in theory – that anyone could do to test things one way or the other. If nothing can conceivably show it to be false, then equally nothing can really show it to be true. I am not saying anything that could be true or false even though it might sound like I am. In the same way unless a theory is falsifiable, it is not really a theory even if it may at first sound like one.

How a theory could be tested depends on what kind of theory it is. Historical events are – by definition – not repeatable, so scientific method isn’t much help in directly telling us who did what where and why at some specific when in the past. For that you need historical and archeological evidence – ‘left-overs’ that can then be collected and interpreted. Scientific method may well be useful in evaluating and interpreting that evidence. No amount of collecting, analysing and counting apples will ever prove that 1+1=2, or anything more complex in mathematics. Mathematical theories aren’t tested in the lab, but they are certainly used there. And so on.

So: is a theory of intelligent design really a theory? Is it falsifiable? Does it make claims that can be tested? And if so, is it a scientific theory rather than some other kind of theory? Are its claims testable by scientific method? What kind of claims does it make? What kind of evidence could prove or disprove those claims?

I’m going to stop here for the moment. I will continue this later and I think the answers get a bit exciting. Well they are to me anyway. (I’ve always been a bit nerdy. As a 12 year old I was reading everything I could get hold of on high energy particle physics. ) But tell me if you haven’t already had to do some solid thinking about science in considering the issue thus far.