Welcome to the thoughts that wash up on the sandy beaches on my mind. Paddling is encouraged.. but watch out for the sharks.
About Me
- CyberKitten
- I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
2011 is UK 's
second warmest year on record - Met Office
From The BBC
30 December 2011
This year was the second warmest on record for the UK ,
the Met Office says. Provisional figures show that only 2006, with an average
temperature of 9.73C (49.5F), was warmer than 2011's average temperature of
9.62C (49.3F). This year saw high temperatures for lengthy periods; including
the warmest April and spring on record, the second warmest autumn and the
warmest October day. Early figures suggest 2011 is ending with a "close to
average" December. The Met Office said its figures were a mean temperature
taken over day and night.
John Prior, national climate manager at the Met Office,
said: "While it may have felt mild for many so far this December,
temperatures overall have been close to what we would expect. It may be that
the stark change from last year, which was the coldest December on record for
the UK ,
has led many to think it has been unseasonably warm." All bar one of the
top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997 and all the UK 's top seven
warmest years happened in the past decade. The warmest temperature recorded
this year was 33.1C (91.5F) on Monday 27 June at Gravesend in Kent . The Met
Office said it was the warmest temperature recorded in the UK for five
years. Apart from January, the other months that had below-average temperatures
were June, July and August.
Gravesend was the location for the warmest October
temperature ever, when 29.9C (85.8F) was recorded on 1 October, beating the
previous record of 29.4C (84.9F) in the Cambridgeshire town of March on the same day in 1985. The coldest
temperature was -13C (8.6F) at Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands on 8
January, while the strongest gust of wind was 165mph (265.5kph), recorded at
the highest point of the Cairngorms mountain range on 8 December.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Just Finished Reading :
Valentine's Resolve by E E Knight
In 2075 Earth is under new management. For over 50 years the
alien Kurians have ruled with an iron fist and an insatiable lust for blood.
They are effectively immortal, living in high places around the world they send
out their Reapers to gather the life force of their human subjects to enhance
their own. But for years now a human resistance has been growing. Winning small
victories here and there they finally seem to be turning the tide. With the aid
of Lifeweavers, who have enhanced the innate capabilities of some humans such
as Valentine himself, they have taken the fight to the hated enemy.
But now Valentine is on his own. Abandoned by Southern
Command he pursues his own agenda striking at Quislings working for the Kurian
Order. However, when he is apparently captured by a special unit he thinks his
days are finally numbered. But it is not to be. The ‘unit’ is made of serving
Southern Command soldiers who offer him reinstatement if he accepts a covert mission
from them: Travel to Seattle
where a new force is successfully pushing back the territorial ambitions of one
of the worlds most feared Kurians. Valentine’s mission is to join this new army
and to discover its secret and to confirm the existence of a Lifeweaver amongst
them – possibly the last of its breed. But as usual in a world turned upside
down not everything is exactly like it seems.
This is a welcome return to form after the disappointing
Valentine’s Exile. I suppose that after 6 books in a series it’s difficult to
maintain the required focus and forward momentum. But the lacklustre Exile
seems to have been a wobble (or quite possibly the fact that I wasn’t really in
the mood at that time for another Vampire Earth novel). I found Resolve to be a
more tightly scripted affair than its predecessor which certainly helped. The
format (or formula) was a familiar one. We didn’t learn a whole lot more about
the new world – except regarding Kurian death games and in-fighting and the
rather surprising remnant of human government living deep undergrownd. We were
presented with a few more mysteries regarding the apparent demise of the
Lifeweavers (which I suspect are simply a different faction of Kurian) and
interesting hints that the invasion of Earth was part of a much larger attack
on other now Kurian occupied worlds – which of course opens up literally whole
other worlds of possibilities. There are also hints of a reuniting of Valentine
with his alien side-kick who apparently died in a previous novel. These things
are never exactly great works of literature and should never be viewed as such.
This was however an entertaining enough novel to keep me interesting in the
next volume and, probably, the next 2-3 after that. Reasonable.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Monday, December 26, 2011
My Favourite Movies: Déjà vu
My regular readers will realise that I’m a big fan of films
starring Denzil Washington
and an equally big fan of clever well thought out movies. In Déjà vu we have an
excellent example of both.
Seemingly we are, at first, presented with a by the numbers
Jerry Bruckheimer visual spectacular. But the fact that the movie is directed
by Tony Scott should hint that something more than explosions and clever camera
effects will be forthcoming. In the opening sequences we see a New Orleans ferry filling with hundreds of
Navy personnel and their families on the way to a celebration. Before they
travel too far down the river there is a huge explosion and the ferry sinks
with a large loss of life. It is very soon obvious that this was no accident
and that terrorism is involved. Enter ATF officer Doug Carlin played by Denzil Washington . We see him
investigate the crime scene before being pulled away on an apparently
unconnected death of a young black woman identified as Claire Kuchever played
by Paula Patton. While trying to understand how her death firs in with the
unfolding tragedy he is approached by FBI Agent Paul Pryzwarra played by Val
Kilmer. He is the head of a new Task Force set up to investigate such events
and wants Carlin to join the team as a local expert. Carlin quickly discovers
that the new Task Forces technology is not exactly as advertised. Let in on the
secret he is told that scientists working on optics at NASA accidentally
discovered a way to see back in time. Although though limited in range – both
in distance terms and in time – this could be a valuable tool in the war on
terror. But they need to know where to look. Carlin decides to look into the
life of Claire Kuchever during the 4 day window prior to her death and the
attack on the ferry. As he learns more about Clire’s life he realises two
things – he is beginning to discover that she can sense them watching her and
he is starting to fall in love with her. When he asks if any information could
be sent back to notify the authorities of the upcoming attack he is given an
ambiguous answer. But the more fundamental question remains completely unknown:
Can you change the past and if you can what then happens to the present?
Even without the time-travel aspects this would have been a
very creditable police thriller. With those aspects added in it knocked it out
of the park for me. I’m a sucker for a good cinematic portrayal of time-travel
(even if its just viewing the past as it happens) and this was a very good
example of that. My favourite bit – without spoiling things too much – is a
‘car chase’ along a freeway where Carlin chases the suspects car ‘now’ but also
4 days in the past using a head-mounted unit to see where he was and what he
did. That to me was very clever indeed and very dramatic. All in all this was a
gripping police thriller, a race against time and with more that a little SF
thrown in for good measure. Good acting throughout along with high drama and
rather inventive camera work add spice as well as a host of other aspects to
admire. If you missed this at the cinema back in 2006 I’d recommend you fix
that oversight as soon as you can. I’ve watched it three times now and have
enjoyed it just as much on each viewing. Enjoy.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
NASA
MARS ROVER FINDS MINERAL VEIN DEPOSITED BY WATER
From
NASA
Dec.
7, 2011
"This
tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the
rock," said Steve Squyres of Cornell
University , principal investigator for
Opportunity . "This stuff is a fairly pure
chemical deposit that formed in place right where we see it. That can't be said
for other gypsum seen on Mars or for other water-related minerals Opportunity has found. It's not uncommon on Earth, but on
Mars, it's the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their
chairs." The latest findings by Opportunity were presented Wednesday at
the American Geophysical Union's conference in San Francisco .
The
vein examined most closely by Opportunity is
about the width of a human thumb (0.4 to 0.8 inch), 16 to 20 inches long, and
protrudes slightly higher than the bedrock on either side of it. Observations
by the durable rover reveal this vein and others like it within an apron
surrounding a segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater. None like it were seen in
the 20 miles (33 kilometers) of crater-pocked plains that Opportunity
explored for 90 months before it reached Endeavour, nor in the higher ground of
the rim. Last month, researchers used the Microscopic Imager and Alpha Particle
X-ray Spectrometer on the rover's arm and multiple filters of the Panoramic
Camera on the rover's mast to examine the vein, which is informally named
"Homestake." The spectrometer identified plentiful calcium and
sulfur, in a ratio pointing to relatively pure calcium sulfate.
Calcium
sulfate can exist in many forms, varying by how much water is bound into the
minerals' crystalline structure. The multi-filter data from the camera suggest
gypsum, a hydrated calcium sulfate. On Earth, gypsum is used for making drywall
and plaster of Paris. Observations from orbit have detected gypsum on Mars
previously. A dune field of windblown gypsum on far northern Mars resembles the
glistening gypsum dunes in White Sands National Monument
in New Mexico .
"It
is a mystery where the gypsum sand on northern Mars comes from," said
Opportunity science-team member Benton Clark of the Space Science Institute in Boulder , Colo.
"At Homestake, we see the mineral right where it formed. It will be
important to see if there are deposits like this in other areas of Mars."
The Homestake deposit, whether gypsum or another form of calcium sulfate,
likely formed from water dissolving calcium out of volcanic rocks. The minerals
combined with sulfur either leached from the rocks or introduced as volcanic
gas, and was deposited as calcium sulfate into an underground fracture that
later became exposed at the surface.
Throughout
Opportunity 's long traverse across Mars'
Meridiani plain, the rover has driven over bedrock composed of magnesium, iron
and calcium sulfate minerals that also indicate a wet environment billions of
years ago. The highly concentrated calcium sulfate at Homestake could have been
produced in conditions more neutral than the harshly acidic conditions
indicated by the other sulfate deposits observed by Opportunity .
"It could have formed in a different type of water environment, one more
hospitable for a larger variety of living organisms," Clark
said.
Homestake
and similar-looking veins appear in a zone where the sulfate-rich sedimentary
bedrock of the plains meets older, volcanic bedrock exposed at the rim of
Endeavour. That location may offer a clue about their origin. "We want to
understand why these veins are in the apron but not out on the plains,"
said the mission's deputy principal investigator, Ray Arvidson, of Washington University
in St. Louis .
"The answer may be that rising groundwater coming from the ancient crust
moved through material adjacent to Cape York
and deposited gypsum, because this material would be relatively insoluble
compared with either magnesium or iron sulfates."
[If
water flowed on the surface of Mars for long enough it might, just might, have
been around long enough for life to emerge within it…. And if that life was
around for long enough to evolve diversity some of it might have survived the
drying conditions by, possibly, living below the surface. Mars might not be as
dead as it looks at first sight. As our probes become more numerous and more
sophisticated maybe one day [soon?] they will stumble upon definitive proof of
life. Here’s hoping!]
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Just Finished Reading :
Bad Voltage by Jonathan Littell
In early 21st Century Paris Lynx, founder of the Livewires street gang, is considering his
future. Now in his 20’s he’s beginning to wonder if a life causing trouble,
taking drugs and playing violent war games in the underground caverns beneath
the city is enough. Things come to a head when his lover is killed by the
police during a daring race through the crowded city streets. Falling under the
spell of rich socialite Angelique he learns how the other half, the rich and
decadent, live. They have moved beyond simple pleasures into the realms of the
gothic where they literally feed on the poor. Horrified at what he has
witnessed he runs back to the streets but not before his spurned new lover vows
that she will use her considerable resources to hunt him down and watch him die
in front of her. In order to survive Lynx must draw on all his street survival
skills and convince the Livewires to go to war on his behalf. Lynx also
discovers he has a most unexpected ally – Angelique’s dead brother who is out
for revenge.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Just Couldn’t Finish Reading :
Catholicism – A Very Short Introduction by Gerald O’Collins
I have been accused (more than once) of simply not
understanding religion which is the reason I laugh and poke fun at it as if it
makes no sense. I have also been accused (more than once) of being an Atheist
because of my ignorance. If only I made the effort to understand (I am told)
rather being simply dismissive I would appreciate the religious viewpoint more
and decide to join them. There is at lest some truth in these statements. I am
largely ignorant of the religious viewpoint on things. I have never lived
inside ‘the bubble’ (as I call it) that religious people seem to inhabit. I
have tried, from outside the bubble, to understand exactly where they’re coming
from. Even in Europe it’s hard not to come
across religious people from time to time and just like rats you are never that
far from a church of one denomination or another. So having a general
understanding of religion in all its myriad forms can come in handy when you
try to understand the world around you. After all the past at least has been
deeply shaped by religious considerations and if we do not understand the past
it makes understanding the present and the future much more difficult.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Thinking About: Christmas
As some of you will remember last Christmas didn’t work out
exactly as planned. Because of heavy snowfall around this time 12 months ago my
journey north stopped at the half-way point after being informed that my family
had been snowed in – leaving me snowed out. So I decided this year to have my
Christmas trip home in September and my actual Christmas here rather than
there. Rather typically, apart from a few hail showers and the occasional
episode of sleet, we’ve seen no snow here and, as far as I’m aware, not a lot
around where my family live. None is forecast until after the middle of next
week at the earliest. But so it goes….
So here I am at the beginning of a 17 day break over
Christmas and New Year. It’s a break I really needed and I have been looking
forward to the time off work for several months now. My plans, such as they
are, are simple ones. I’m looking forward to:
Getting up on 17 consecutive days in the daylight without
the ‘aid’ of an alarm clock.
Watching around 10 movies on DVD – some of which I haven’t
seen before.
Reading 6-8 books. It would’ve been many more (I think I
read 12 last year) but as I’m here and not at my Mum’s I have both Internet
access and my computer games to occupy my time.
Listening to lots and lots of music.
Having lots of computer game time.
Eating far too many snacks and other things that are
generally bad for me. I also picked up some nice real ale and a few bottles of
alcoholic ginger beer which I’m looking forward to.
It is, all in all, going to be a very relaxing 17 days.
There is even a slim possibility that I might get bored. Fortunately over the
years I have become quite adept at entertaining myself. I have also, though
necessity, developed a pretty high boredom threshold. By the middle of next
week I’ll be fairly humming along, coasting into the New Year and totally
chilled by the time I’m back in office on the 3rd Jan…… and relax…. [grin]
Friday, December 16, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Just Finished Reading : The
Fly in the Cathedral – How a small group of Cambridge scientists won the race to split
the atom by Brian Cathcart
The history of 20th Century science –
particularly that of physics – has long fascinated me. At the end of the previous
century it was considered that just about everything about the physical
universe was understood. Only a few niggling problems remained to be solved.
One of these problems concerned the nature of light whilst another sought to
understand the structure of the atom. As scientists throughout the world delved
into these areas instead of answering questions they generated more and worse
still produced mysteries that seemed to be beyond anyone’s understanding.
In Cambridge the great New Zealand
eccentric Lord Rutherford determined that the only way any of this would be
understood is by experiment after experiment until something shook free. But
first his team needed to build sophisticated enough apparatus to produce the
effects that generated enough results for the theoreticians to work with and
that apparatus was at the very edge of existing technology. They were stuck in
the classic chicken and egg scenario. But slowly throughout the 1920’s and into
the early 1930’s they managed to push forward the underlying technology they
needed to run experiments at high enough voltages to produce the effects they
needed. On lab desks throughout Europe and the US scientists, technicians and
engineers built the very first particle accelerators – atom smashers – that
first chipped away at the atomic structure and later smashed it completely.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
My Favourite Movies: Streets of Fire
After posting a few very recent movies reviews we move back
into one of my favourite eras – the 1980’s. Now the 80’s as decades go was
shitty on several levels but it did manage to produce some great music and more
than a few great films. Although this example can hardly be called great it is
very typical of the age and did have some really good songs – so much so that I
bought the soundtrack which remains one of my favourites.
Oddly this example of 80’s style is based in a very stylised
50’s New York (at least it seems like New York ). As the movie
opens the singing sensation Ellen Aim (Diane Lane ) is about to go on stage in
her home town. During the first song the concert is disrupted by a violent
biker gang called The Bombers intent on kidnapping the singer. Raven, their
leader (Willem Defoe), is obsessed with her and wants them to ‘fall in love’
for a few weeks. In desperation a local dinner owner Reva Cody (the lovely
Deborah Van Valkenburgh) calls her brother – Ellen’s old flame – so save her.
So enters the hero of the piece – Tom Cody (Michael Pare) – who proceeds to
annoy just about everyone he meets in his quest to get Ellen back. Tagging
along for the ride is McCoy (Amy Madigan) and Ellen’s manager/boyfriend Billy
Fish (Rick Moranis). They need to travel deep into Bomber territory and make it
back in one piece, something that Raven is not going to let them do easily.
This is one of those films where the style outshines the
actual story which is fairly basic and the acting which honestly isn’t that
great. But it is the look, the feel and most of all the sound of it that struck
a cord with me when I first saw it over 25 years ago. Filmed in a mix of
intense colour and shades of grey deepening to black it is visually arresting
if not unique. In step with the rest of the film the 50’s look is oddly
contrasted with a clearly 80’s soundtrack (some of which is lip-synched by
Diane Lane in concert and – rather surprisingly in one scene – on a video juke
box) from artists such as Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, Ry Cooder (who did the
incidental music) and at least 3 songs by Jim Steinman which I’ve been humming
bits of since watching this movie on Saturday.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Kepler 22-b: Earth-like planet confirmed
From The BBC
5 December 2011
Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like
planet in the "habitable zone" around a star not unlike our own. The
planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the
size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C. It is the closest confirmed
planet yet to one like ours - an "Earth 2.0". However, the team does
not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas
or liquid.
During the conference at which the result was announced, the
Kepler team also said that it had spotted some 1,094 new candidate planets -
nearly doubling the telescope's haul of potential far-flung worlds. Kepler 22-b
was one of 54 exoplanet candidates in habitable zones reported by the Kepler
team in February, and is just the first to be formally confirmed using other
telescopes. More of these "Earth 2.0" candidates are likely to be
confirmed in the near future, though a redefinition of the habitable zone's boundaries
has brought that number down to 48. Ten of those are Earth-sized.
The Kepler space telescope was designed to look at a fixed
swathe of the night sky, staring intently at about 150,000 stars. The telescope
is sensitive enough to see when a planet passes in front of its host star,
dimming the star's light by a minuscule amount. Kepler identifies these slight changes in starlight as
candidate planets, which are then confirmed by further observations by Kepler
and other telescopes in orbit and on Earth. Kepler 22-b lies 15% closer to its
sun than the Earth is to our Sun, and its year takes about 290 days. However,
the planet's host star puts out about 25% less light, keeping the planet at its
balmy temperature that would support the existence of liquid water. The Kepler team had to wait for three passes of the
planet before upping its status from ‘candidate’ to ‘confirmed’.
"Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this
planet," said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at Nasa's Ames Research
Center . "The first
transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft
operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010
holiday season." The results were announced at the Kepler telescope's
first science conference, alongside the staggering number of new candidate
planets. The total number of candidates spotted by the telescope is now 2,326 -
of which 207 are approximately Earth-sized. In total, the results suggest that
planets ranging from Earth-sized to about four times Earth's size - so-called
"super-Earths" - may be more common than previously thought. As
candidates for planets similar to Earth are confirmed, the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) has a narrower focus for its ongoing hunt.
"This is a superb opportunity for Seti observations," said Jill
Tarter, the director of the Center for Seti Research at the Seti Institute.
"For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that
those stars actually host planetary systems - including at least one that
begins to approximate an Earth analogue in the habitable zone around its host
star.
[Brilliant news! Let’s hope that SETI is pointing their
radio telescopes at that sucker right now…… Who knows what they pick up….?]
Friday, December 09, 2011
Thursday, December 08, 2011
Just Finished Reading :
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
On the streets of a not too distant future Bangkok
undercover company man Anderson
Lake has made a startling
discovery – a new kind of fruit seemingly completely immune to the host of
bio-engineered plagues running rampant across the globe. Millions of people are
already dead and billions more live on the edge of starvation or in constant
fear that a cough or otherwise innocuous rise in body temperature might be the
first stage in a frightening new disease. But the fruit holds out some hope
that mankind can once again dominate the world’s ecosystems rather than
constantly react to the every changing and ever more deadly environment.
Meanwhile the Japanese are developing a different response to the bio-crisis.
In their labs they are producing New People - ‘more Japanese than the Japanese’
- used as slaves, soldiers and sex toys. One such toy is Emiko – a Windup Girl
designed to bring endless pleasure to bored Japanese executives working away
from the Homeland. Abandoned on the teeming streets of Bangkok where her kind are outlawed she must
face daily degradation to survive. When she meets Lake
in a seedy nightclub he gives her hope for a better future by telling her of
villages deep in the hills where the Windups live without masters. But Emiko
has a different fate ahead of her, one that is deeply entwined with the future
of the city itself.
This was another of those books I picked up in one of the ‘3
for 2’ offers at my local bookshop. It’s a great way to experiment with new
authors or less read genres. Initially I thought this was either Cyberpunk or
possibly future based Steampunk (if that isn’t an actual contradiction): I found
to my surprise, and honest delight, that it was neither. I don’t know if this
sub-genre has a name yet but I’m going to coin the term Genepunk. With luck
I’ll be the first person to use the term and I’ll be remembered for decades
because of it. Anyway, the future world brilliantly imagined by the author is
one where the old oil-based economies have collapsed. At the time of this story
the old Great Powers are at last resurgent thanks to genetic engineering and a
world wide ruthless use of industrial espionage. Whole countries have fallen in
the wake of agents from the various western agricultural conglomerates. Bangkok is determined not
to be numbered amongst them. It is in the offices and on the streets of this
incredibly detailed and totally believable city that the well drawn characters
play out their parts in the great drama to come. You can smell the rotting
decay, feel the crushing humidity and the constant jostling of the millions of
refugees who will do anything to live just one more day. It is not a place I’d
like to live in nor one I’d like very much to visit except in my imagination
but I couldn’t help but be drawn into this detailed, well rendered and above
all else heartbreakingly believable world. The memory of those few virtual days
in future Bangkok
will remain with me for many months. One of the best books I’ve read this year
and in consequence highly recommended.
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Monday, December 05, 2011
My Favourite Movies: Limitless
In some ways (actually in many ways) this is an odd film.
But in another way it is very modern. This is a film about instant
gratification – or at least practically instant. It’s a film about someone who
gets almost everything he wants with the minimal effort required to swallow a
pill. This is a film about drugs pure and simple. Eddie Morra is a struggling
writer – struggling indeed to write the first word. His long suffering
girlfriend (played by the gorgeous Abbie Cornish) has decided to leave him and
he’s at a low point in his life. Enter the rather seedy brother of his ex-wife
who offers him a ‘FDA approved’ drug called NZT. Thinking he has nothing to
lose he pops it and finds to his amazement that all of his mental facilities go
into overdrive. But how does he use this new found ability? To get his
landlords girlfriend into bed! Desperate for another ‘hit’ he contacts his
ex-brother in law and that’s when everything starts to spiral out of control.
Eddie now has a stash of NZT but both the police and the mob want to know how
he’s involved. Using the drug to make money – after finishing his book in a few
hours of frantic typing – he begins to get noticed by the rich and powerful. It
is only then, as things start to get very good indeed, that the side-effects
and stories of what happened to previous users come to light. Eddie now has a
choice – stay on the drug to keep gaining money and power or come off it and
possibly die from withdrawal symptoms. That’s if the mob doesn’t find and kill
him first.
This is an interesting film in many ways. It deals with
personal, political and philosophical issues in ways you don’t often see in
modern movies. It looks into the mind of an average no future, no hope
individual and shows what would probably happen if you could light up their
mind like a Christmas tree. Inevitably because, as the rather wasted Robert De
Niro character rightly said, he hasn’t earned any of his abilities through hard
work and experience he responds as a child would respond in a candy store –
reaching out for the most obvious objects. In Eddie’s case it was sex, money
and finally political power. These were shallow dreams from an essentially
shallow man. He achieved his aims but where they really worthy of achievement by
someone who could see peoples moves before they even thought of making them,
for someone who could see patterns in data that no one could even conceive of
never mind see. Eddie largely got what he wanted but personally I don’t think
he got very much. He certainly wasn’t using his newly enhanced brain power for
anything productive. He merely used it to use the system to his advantage which
I thought was a huge waste of talent. At least that’s what I took away from the
film. Other people might just see it as a cool film about what money and power
can get you – basically more money and more power. To me this was a kind of
morality play saying that getting what you want is less important than knowing
what you want. To me it was saying that sex, money and power are all very nice
but that’s not the point. I think that Eddie was just beginning to realise this
(or was just about to start realising this) at the end of the movie. He was
beyond the manipulation of others, had sorted out his supply issues and had conquered
the side effects. Now he could start using NZT properly – if only he could
figure out how to do that! Looking beyond the razzmatazz and deeper into the
sub-text this was an interesting look at what it means to live in a modern
capitalistic society and, more importantly, how not to live.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says
By Jason Palmer for BBC News
22 March 2011
A study using census data from nine countries shows that
religion there is set for extinction, say researchers. The study found a steady
rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. The team's mathematical model
attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious
respondents and the social motives behind being one. The result, reported at
the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas ,
US , indicates
that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries. Nonlinear
dynamics is invoked to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a
number of factors play a part. One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University , put forth a similar model in
2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world
languages.
At its heart is the competition between speakers of
different languages, and the "utility" of speaking one instead of
another. "The idea is pretty simple," said Richard Wiener of the
Research Corporation for Science Advancement. "It posits that social
groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it
posits that social groups have a social status or utility. "For example in
languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead
of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru , and similarly there's some
kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not." The
team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in
which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia ,
Austria , Canada , the Czech
Republic , Finland ,
Ireland , the Netherlands , New
Zealand and Switzerland . Some of the census
data the team used date from the 19th century "In a large number of modern
secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in
the Netherlands the number
was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic , where the number
was 60%," Dr Wiener said.
The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model,
adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of
membership of the "non-religious" category. They found, in a study
published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries
studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of
them. And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed
toward extinction. However, Dr Wiener told the conference that the
team was working to update the model with a "network structure" more
representative of the one at work in the world. "Obviously we don't really
believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the
other people in society," he said. However, he told BBC News that he
thought it was "a suggestive result". "It's interesting that a
fairly simple model captures the data, and if those simple ideas are correct,
it suggests where this might be going. Obviously much more complicated things
are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages
out."
[Whilst I’m sceptical enough not to base much on statistical
modelling it is interesting that nine countries could be effectively religion
free - if trends continue - in an (admittedly) indefinite period in the future. It makes you
wonder…….]
Friday, December 02, 2011
Thursday, December 01, 2011
Just Finished Reading :
The Buried Soul – How Humans Invented Death by Timothy Taylor
This is actually quite a difficult book to write a
meaningful précis of. As the sub-title suggests it’s about death – or rather
the human cultural construct our species has designed around it to help
societies cope with our inevitable mortality. Yet as with most things human
there is a hierarchy of responses determined by social standing. Slaves seem to
have been casually discarded almost without further thought. Human bones – both
adult and children – have long been discovered in tribal rubbish heaps. For
most of human history women have generally been treated similarly unless they
are particularly highborn and even then their burials seem to reflect more the
wealth of their husbands rather than their own status (with notable exceptions).
It is only when the powerful die that the full impact of human mortality comes
to the forefront of our cultural response to death. It is here that we are
presented with leaders buried in their ships often surrounded by their dead
servants and retainers. It is hear that we see the construction of innumerable
barrows throughout Europe and the great pyramids of Egypt . It is here that the author
presents an interesting hypothesis – that burial, with all of the associated
ceremony and the final internment of the body is only partially the result of
grief on the part of the leader’s subject population. Primarily, the author
maintains, it is because they fear that the now disembodied soul will return to
cause harm amongst the living. This is the reason for the elaborate tombs of
the ancients with their hidden passages and dead ends. Not to keep grave
robbers out – which they generally failed to do – but to keep the souls of the
angry dead confined and confused. The dead were confused by the noise and pomp
of ceremony, then bribed by the burial of grave goods, then locked away beneath
the earth where they could do no harm. It’s certainly an interesting twist on
what seems on the face of it a reverence for the recently departed tribal
leader.
Attitudes to death and the dead have varied widely (and
wildly) across the world and across the eons. There appears to be a great deal
of evidence that we have eaten our dead until comparatively recently. Some societies
literally live on top of the graves of their ancestors, others give up the
bodies of their relatives to carrion birds and then reverently keep the bones
of their dead as mementoes. We in the modern West are odd in that we distance
ourselves from death with many of us never actually seeing a dead body (I
personally have never seen one). This distancing is, again, a very recent
phenomenon. Throughout the book the author never fails to make the point that
our attitudes to death, despite being driven by the same fears and anxieties
founded on the mysteries of mortality, have ranged through a very wide range
indeed because, like much else, they are culturally and historically
determined. The reaction to the universal fact of death is filtered through the
accumulated culture of each society. Activities which seem strange, bizarre or
just plain wrong when seen from the outside can seem perfectly reasonable when
seen from the inside. Picking your way through that particular cultural
mine-field is far from simple. Books like this, however, make such endeavours at
least a little easier by bringing to the notice of those who might encounter
such things some explanation of why certain groups act as they do. This is a
must read for anyone interested in cultural anthropology or for those
interesting in how humanity has tried over its long and bloody history to cope
with death. Not always a fun read or a comfortable one it is however simply
fascinating.
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