Scieligion

You could be amazed by the vastness and beauty of the universe, and wish to explore it further. You may think it wonderful that we can predict the development and motion of both immense and miniscule bodies with simple heretical scientific rules. You may also think that observation and measurement of systems may give us lessons to be learned about the history and future of life itself. Your predictions may be conservative or radical, but they are verified or rejected depending upon the evidence.

Or you could think the particular revelation of a particular being will individually affect the future of humanity in ways that only the spiritually chosen can understand. You live your current existence as though it were some sort of test for an imagined future existence. You dismiss statistics and genetics that you cannot comprehend by calling them part of a higher plan. Your revealed predictions are either worthless platitudes or simply wrong. You are aware that the cognitive system of the human mind looks for patterns that can be matched to known objects, but your endless search for supernatural guidance means that you attribute spiritual meaning to these patterns.

Combining the two makes as much sense as Astrolomy.

Auto-bituary

As I mentioned before, my drive to work spans the BBC thought for the day, which instead of being a genuine alternative viewpoint on the day's news is usually just a short snatch of religious dogma. And today the speaker gave a short lecture on organ donation.

There are victims who are suffering and dying every day because of a lack of sufficient people who are willing to donate organs after they die. Some members of parliament have proposed that we amend the process from the current "opt-in" system to an "opt-out" system - so you would still be allowed to insist that essential organs should not be removed from your dead body, but that denial option would no longer be presumed as it is today.

But instead of using his privileged slot to argue for the benefit of real diverse people instead of for the benefit of imaginary christian souls, the speaker blathered about "both sides being right" and came down with the recommendation that the opt-in process should stay. Pathetic.

Recently posted on the web was the obituary of a soldier who just died in Iraq. Interestingly, the obituary was self-penned, the soldier kept a blog, but had requested that one post be held back until after his death. But I think that things should be said while you are alive to hear the response to them.

I don't even know if I have a donor card. But when I am gone, do whatever you like with my body. Cut it, burn it, sell it, whatever. Please just wait until I'm dead first.

Astrolomy

There is no such word.

You could be amazed by the vastness and beauty of the universe, and wish to explore it further. You may think it wonderful that we can predict the development and motion of immense celestial bodies with simple heretical scientific rules. You may also think that observation and measurement of other systems may give us lessons to be learned about the very earliest steps in the evolution of stars, planets, and of life itself. Your predictions may be conservative or radical, but they are verified or rejected depending upon the evidence.

Or you could be so narrow minded as to think that the relative visual positions and brightness of stars and comets as seen from a small backwater planet will individually affect specific human beings in ways that only higher powers can understand. You are aware that the visual recognition system of the human mind looks for patterns that can be matched to known objects, but your desperate search for supernatural guidance means that you attribute personal meaning to these patterns. You cannot see massive black holes and dark matter so you dismiss them from your charts. Your predictions are either worthless platitudes or simply wrong.

The words do not mix. The worlds do not mix. You choose one or the other.

The war on x

mas. On behalf of every true conservative in this land.

We have had enough of these foreigners. We have had a tradition in this country for hundreds, no thousands, of years.

But recently a bunch of immigrants have come in and hijacked those glorious ancient traditions. Bloody aliens, bringing their weird eastern practices. They have no real relevance to this island. They don't belong here.

I wouldn't mind if they were doing their own thing, keeping their own rituals and not interfering with our great traditions. But they won't rest with that. They want to hijack our ancient festival and gloss over the real meaning of it.

Enough is enough.

A Prayer for the Living

Nothing original today. It seems that my thoughts have already been divinely revealed to the meme machine:

Let us take responsibility for our own actions, inactions, strengths and frailties and not project them onto ghosts, spirits, stars, portents and gods unseen.

Let us have the courage to accept that one person's faith is another person's bloody-minded pig-headed refusal to accept the obvious.

Let us have the courage to accept that the person at the front of all crowds, including this one, doesn't know all the answers.

Let us have the wisdom to accept that if our ancestors had fared differently in wars our communities would be holding different absurdities up as sacred truths, and the willingness to accept those absurdities would be seen as the badge of social trustworthiness or even the right to be allowed to draw breath.

Let us accept that the difference between a prophet and a madman is not what they say but whether the crowd accepts the story and tells their children to believe it.

Let us have the courage to accept that wanting to believe in something with every fibre of our being does not and cannot make it true.

Truth needs no help, no believers, no bowed heads and no amens.

But it does need thanks to Martin Willett.

Who hid the elephant?

A few days ago I said that a good magician must be a good actor. Today I discover there is a film in production about a great magician.

Yet many historians do not rate Harry Houdini very highly for magical technique, though they concede his skill as an escape artist. They seem to have a mental image of the ideal magician as someone who must be tall, elegant, debonair, eloquent.

Eric Weiss was not like that at all. He was short and bowlegged and awkward and he spoke with a jarring accent. Yet I rate him the very best.

Because he really pushed the boundaries of what the human body could do and what the human mind could comprehend. His illusions often involved genuine danger. His escapes included real police shackles and real prison cells.

And unlike many who exploited the bereaved and vulnerable, he bravely spoke out against the cheats and fraudsters who claimed supernatural powers. He knew that they were all just evil vultures. They still are.

Can I play with madness?

I know that there are easy targets. But they are like invasive weeds in your garden, every time you think they've been controlled, they crop up again in unexpected and unpleasant places.

And I try to stay topical. Unfortunately, today's lunchtime talk was about the benefits of complementary therapy. The speaker preferred the word complementary rather than alternative words such as untested, unsafe, ineffective, lunatic, stupid.

It all started fairly innocuous although very obvious - drink lots of water, exercise, eat a balanced diet with less processed food. Everyone knows that anyway. Then the presenter veered off onto her own strange planet of reiki and chakras and reflexology. She even seemed to be taking some of the audience with her.

I'll be kind to the presenter. I'll call it salesmanship. She must have been hawking us unverified codswallop to boost her own bank balance rather than because of mental condition. It's ridiculous as science, but fair enough in marketing.

DNR

It would be too easy for me to take apart the leaders from the tabloid press, still easier for me to echo their populist outrage ... but maybe I can start from there to make a more sophisticated yet even more controversial suggestion.

A sick murderous cruel brute tried to kill himself in jail. And like most people I think we should have let him do it instead of spending a fortune on eternal "suicide watch". So does that make me like the red top editors?

In fact it's probably the sickest most vengeful members of the public who want him alive, just so they can drag out his torment.

Back to the villain of the piece, he was not even allowed to starve himself to death. Even though starvation is surely a horrible slow painful miserable tortuous way to die.

So why do we let our dying loved ones go that terrible way instead of hastening the end?

ESP

Following on from last week's incident on the roof, today I heard from another psychic. I don't even know his name, he is some sort of expert on living underground, but this guy's extra-sensory abilities seem comparable to any celebrity psychic.

I need to put in context and give specific facts to prove the point. Today I had lunch at my parents' house with some old friends from Zambia. It was more than just lunch really, I picked them up from their home in East London, drove them down South, spent the afternoon there, then drove them back in the evening.

The psychic was on the radio. I don't normally listen to Radio Four at weekends, but the conclusion to the cricket provided interest and entertainment on the long drive back. Then, on conclusion of the match, it switched back to rejoin with the normal Sunday programming. And then I heard this guy waffling about going down a mine. And then he said the mine was in the copperbelt of Zambia.

And I had just spent the afternoon listening to old stories about Zambia. The probability must be so astronomical as to rule out coincidence. There was no way the guy on the radio could have known that. Sally Morgan eat your heart out!

Yogi

Faith in God through Jesus Christ may appear harmless or even beneficial, but it is encouraging people to think that there is a way to wholeness of body and mind through human techniques - whereas the only true way to wholeness is by yoga. No, that is just ridiculous.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2358035.ece

Full House Team

Let's pull the recent strands together. The house detective had a team of three classic muses, it worked for him. It is too soon for me to talk about my current team.

But I have managed many in the past. What is the ideal composition for the small team?

I was one of five consultants managing a trade processing project for a global merchant bank. Five apparently random names. But remarkably, in order of seniority, the surnames of the five of us ended with the letters A (the managing partner), E (me), I (the lead technical analyst), O (the lead business analyst), and U (the lead programmer).

In my mind, it was the ideal management team for an IT project. What were the chances of five people having abilities that complemented so perfectly? What were the chances of our surnames ending with those letters in that particular order? Multiply up the probabilities and we get one in zillions. It can't be a coincidence that we all seemed to gel so well. It was pre-destiny that brought us all together. Same conditions apply.

House MD

Here in the UK, it was the season finale yesterday. Well done Channel Five.

I've indirectly referred to the protagonist a few times now. I don't aspire to be the guy, we know he is an asshole. We are so different. I can't imagine him striving for honesty and integrity. He has no life outside of work whereas most of my life is outside of work. I watched it for entertainment, not do draw parallels. But something resonates...

He is rational and sensible but seems incredibly radical. He is sometimes wrong, of course, but he is right more than anybody else. He is right partially because he has far more experience and much greater breadth and depth of knowledge than the rest of the team. But mainly because he seems to be the only one who can make the necessary decisions without prejudice or superstition. The only one who seems able to resolve the myriad conflict pressures without freezing. It is a demonstration of management decisionmaking under pressure.

Incidentally the doctor had a team of three. A gentle young lady who seemed pure niceness but she hid a turbulent past. And two very different young men, one of whom at first appeared to be a mini-clone of the boss, but actually turned out to be a very different character. But the team has broken up now ...

Rogue Traders

The Office of Fair Trading has many functions of the US Department of Justice, it exists to protect the consumer from anti-competitive or fraudulent behaviour.

On a smaller scale, there are plenty of televsion programmes in which fraudsters and con artists are exposed. Often it's a cross between extortion and theft, so a harsher term than hustler is probably needed. These people exploit victims who are confused and vulnerable.

Typical scam, point to a loose tile on the roof or a damp patch on the wall, warn about tremendous potential damage unless hundreds of pounds of remedial work is performed as soon as possible. The victim is initially scared, but the problem is fixed, the money is paid, and the victim feels better. We see even swifter results if the initial diagnosis was ridiculously overblown or maybe just a simple lie, then no real work at all needs to be done, but the victim can still pay their money and then be reassured that the house is structurally safe (again). The hustler gets his money and the victim feels better. Great?

But those cowboys practise theft and extortion. They should be locked up.

Swap victim's house for victim's health in this story. Would you care for some "alternative" medicine or "complementary" therapy?

The enemies of common sense

A few years ago I was speaking outside work with a senior manager in a large consulting firm and the subject somehow came round to organ donation after death. He genuinely said that he would not allow anyone in his family do it, even to save another life, because his religion had prohibited it. Was he pious or stupid?

Anyway, there are other kinds of madness...

Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment - in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere - reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies", praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently.

Well I don't. "Spirituality" is what cretins have in place of imagination. If you've ever described yourself as "quite spiritual", do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you're incapable of speaking aloud ever again. Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?

That was Charlie Brooker previewing tonight's TV. Hmmmm.

Self Help

I don't usually talk about personal stuff here. This blog is mainly about common sense, not personal opinion.

It is obvious that I despise the fatuous meaningless platitudes that pass for all unscientific spiritualism and most scientific "counselling". But could even someone like me do a deep meaningful concise message of personal philosophy? I can try.

For everything I write here, I sometimes hope that certain people don't see it, but I accept that those people may see it. It is the same for every conversation that I ever have with anybody, at work or at home or at the pub. Sometimes, inevitably, talk is about people outside of those in the discussion. And I am completely prepared for anything that I have ever said about anyone, even in a private meeting, to be relayed to the people discussed in that meeting.

If you say or do anything anywhere, would you feel any guilt if it was made public?

It's a way to live. It may sound very obvious on reflection. But then so should everything else here.

Flesh and blood

OK, a "cheery" thought ;)

Imagine someone you know is in a monstrous accident. I'm not sick. You're only imagining, not hoping.

This is not your average car crash , but an enormous splurge of blood and guts, the like of which is only seen in X-rated movies and video games. Perhaps one saving grace, the head and brain are instantly crushed to a pulp, so instant death and no pain.

However, the rest of the body is splattered into a thousand pieces, with bits of flesh and bone and bone marrow all over the place.

Now, if you are the sort of strange person who thinks every potential human life is a life worth saving, then every bit of that bone marrow needs to picked up and cared for separately. Because each individual bit could have individual stem cells that could grow up into completely independent human beings.

Dumb eh?

It's elementary my dear wilson

A few days ago I mentioned the fictional detective disguised as a TV doctor. And around the same time I also described my work. And I regularly refer to the power of spirituality.

When there is a problem at work, whenever you need to figure something out, when there is no obvious answer, there is really only one way to get to the bottom of it. That way is the scientific method.

Even if the whole issue appears unsolvable, you need to break it down into smaller components. You cannot always replicate history to fully prove every theory against every scenario. But if you have a hypothesis that could explain the result, it is only worth anything if it can be replicated or tested. The problem must be reduced to common sense.

Professional scientists might grumble about the broadness of my definitions. And I'm only talking about how to resolve the daily questions of "my report shows 250 units, I was expecting 200" rather than the direction for evolution of the human race.

Or am I?