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Xfm meets 20six…

So I’ve got my hands on an excerpt from a press release that announced that Christian O’Connell from Xfm (a UK alternative radio station) was starting a new weblog for his breakfast show using 20six‘s service. Whatever you may think of 20six – they’ve got one thing right – they know how to promote themselves. Blogger certainly never courted celebrities (as far as I remember) as a core part of their strategy:

“What’s a weblog? A weblog is the best new thing since sliced bread, thanks for asking. It’s a journal, a diary, an online record of your likes, your loathes, your jokes and your photos. A weblog can be whatever you want it to be; an ever-evolving account of your life, a collection of your poems and short stories or your most voracious reviews and opinions.”

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Random

It's Sunday afternoon entertaining link time..

A few entertaining links to compensate for the religion piece:

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Gay Politics Religion

On the existence of God…

I’m an atheist. I have been for nearly twenty years, and before that I wasn’t really anything – I didn’t really have a position on God vs. No God. I suppose I just hadn’t thought about it properly. I can’t really understand how anyone can be anything other than an atheist, but – despite my incredulity – people do still seem to conjure for themselves other non-atheistic options from the spiritual ether.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t understand how people can even vaguely justify theism (or even agnosticism) that I find myself continually in debates about the issue. I find myself explaining my stance on religion at least once a month. At one stage – while I was at University – I went through a bit of a phase of reading other people’s books on why they didn’t believe in ‘god’ either. These books were routinely extremely boring, because fundamentally the intellectual labour involved in making a highly convincing ‘anti-god’ case is so trivial that it feels out of place in the mouths or books of scholars. Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian was one of those books. I read it to see if I could find a new way to translate the obviousness of atheism to the people I routinely found myself in argument with. But fundamentally, it was the same as every other book of its kind. Obvious. Self-explanatory. Tedious. Repetitive. And yet – despite the banality of the arguments, religious people just don’t seem to get it.

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that the experience feels real to them and that they derive value from it, and I have to confess that as long as religious reasoning is kept completely separate from policy decisions, logic and the like (ie. as long as people’s personal beliefs have absolutely no impact whatsoever on the rest of the world), then I have no problem with it. But unfortunately that’s very seldom the case. Every so often something frustrating happens to remind you exactly how unresponsive religion is to societal development and our increasing understanding of the world around us. Case in point? There is now around a hundred years of evidence that people who are gay are not gay by choice, and that their sexuality is not infectious in any way (and hence not – in any way – a risk to ‘moral fibre’). A hundred years of evidence accumulated – leading to the conclusion (reached by sets of researchers across the world, health organisations, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, geneticists and ethologists) that someone being gay causes no one any harm. And what do you have on the other side? A couple of lines in a book written in the middle east several thousand years ago (filtered through a wide variety of cultural contexts which managed to cheerfully mutate meanings in all kinds of intriguing and implausible ways). And it’s this dubious translation of a few words of a several thousand year old work of historical fiction that prompts the Vatican to declare their profound dismay at the possibility that gay couples might come to enjoy the same legal rights as heterosexual ones – rights that fundamentally come down to being the default person that inherits when the other dies, or the right to have some kind of say in the health care of your loved-one if they happen to fall dangerously ill.

According to that document from the Vatican, I’m suffering from a ‘depravity’, I undertake ‘grave sins’, I’m ‘intrinsically disordered’. And that’s within the first screenful. Not only that, “all persons committed to promoting and defending the common good of society” should be working to stop me have sexual consenting relationships with other people. Because – of course, how foolish of me – I can obviously have no interest in the common good of society. The document talks about the need to “safeguard public morality and, above all, to avoid exposing young people to erroneous ideas about sexuality and marriage that would deprive them of their necessary defences and contribute to the spread of the phenomenon” as if heterosexuality were such a trivial and slight state-of-being that even the merest whiff of same-sex action could tantalise even the most apparently straight white-bread down-home farm-boy or girl. Moreover, the document states that, “Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.” Tolerating our evil is one thing, apparently. Approving of it is something else entirely.

Frankly, it is the evil in the Vatican’s document – the fact that it will have a massively negative effect in some people’s lives and no positive effect on anyone else’s – that I don’t approve of. And increasingly I find myself no longer interested in tolerating it either. Still more even than that – I feel increasingly close to losing any tolerance of religious dispositions per se. Because while I’d like to say that it’s just Catholicism that’s seriously pissing me off, it’s not really Catholicism at all – it’s any approach to anything that would put more credence in statements (not even arguments) written thousands of years ago than in the accreted wisdom of hundreds of years that’s at our disposal now.

A few weeks ago I collided with a group of Christians proselytising their religion through song in Leicester Square. I was with Cal and Katy at the time. We’d just been to see a film. In the middle of the street, with no apparent prompting, a smart mobbish group of people started praising their Lord. I ended up explaining to one of them that Christian philosophy had sizable origins in Neo-Platonist collisions with the Semitic tradition, and that it had incredible analogues with some aspects of Dionysian Mystery cults. I pointed out that it was created in a moment of history and that its interpretation had changed dramatically over the years. I pointed out that it might very well not have existed in any plausible form any more if it hadn’t been for the Emperor Constantine using it as a binding agent for a failing Roman Empire – and that the same emperor hadn’t found their Christianity enough of a barrier to stop them murdering their own wife and son. I explained that while Christianity seemed transhistorical and transcendent – that originally it was just one of many different cult practices that exploded in a region at a certain time in history. And that none of these things made it untrue as such – but that they certainly challenged the monolithic image of Christianity as a pure beam of message from God – and that anyone who was going to seriously consider dedicating their life to a religious practice should probably do some bloody research beforehand…

But when we get right down to it, that kind of argument doesn’t really seem to help anyone any more than the debate I’ve been engaged in on Barbelith for the last couple of weeks (On Religion) or, indeed, the extremely entertaining 300 proofs for the existence of God which are derived (often) from actual philosophical positions over the centuries, and which I’ll append to the bottom of this post, because they’re so good. In fact I don’t know of anything that’s going to do any good in this situation, except a faith – not in divinity – but in humanity’s capability to tell its arse from its elbow. Unfortunately, this too is a faith I lost a number of years ago…

From 300 proofs for the existence of God:

COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
(1) If I say something must have a cause, it has a cause.
(2) I say the universe must have a cause.
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (I)
(1) I define God to be X.
(2) Since I can conceive of X, X must exist.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (II)
(1) I can conceive of a perfect God.
(2) One of the qualities of perfection is existence.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM CREATION
(1) If evolution is false, then creationism is true, and therefore God exists.
(2) Evolution can’t be true, since I lack the mental capacity to understand it; moreover, to accept its truth would cause me to be uncomfortable
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM FEAR
(1) If there is no God then we’re all going to die.
(2) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM THE BIBLE
(1) [arbitrary passage from OT]
(2) [arbitrary passage from NT]
(3) Therefore, God exists

Other stuff I’ve written about religion: On American Science and Fundamentalist Christianity, God as plot device.

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No prostitutes in Broadcasting House!

There are no prostitutes in Broadcasting House, and why? The reason is explained in a brief aside in an altogether more serious article about The BBC’s relationship to architecture and property. Nonetheless, the bit that stuck in my brain was the bit about there not being any brothels or fellmongers on the premises. There’s still a dentist in the building though. And Television Centre resembles nothing more than a massive fully-equipped colony ship of people from planet BBC, stranded here when their vessel collided with White City…

Before it occupied the whole of Broadcasting House, the idea was to let out space to pay for the running costs of the building. In a delightful Reithian touch, the BBC drew up a list of prohibited lessees: “Slaughtermen, sugar baker, fellmonger, beater of flax, common brewer, quasi-medical or quasi-surgical establishment, brothel or bagnio keeper.”

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Random

Gratias tibi ago, Domine…

Gratias tibi ago, Domine. Haec credam a deo pio, a Deo justo, a Deo scito? Cruciatus in crucem. Tuus in terra servus, nuntius fui; officium perfeci. Cruciatus in crucem – eas in crucem.

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Technology

Quick thoughts about global undo…

If only I had time to give this the attention it deserves – but alas, I must soon get drunk. Neat Chris from anti-mega has brought into public attention that massive and aggravating UI problem that is what happens when you accidentally quit an application (like Safari) that allows you to have many different pseudo-documents open that are lost immediately without any kind of dialogue when the application quits. The reason I call them pseudo-documents is because the standard behaviour for something that you can edit in an application is to ask if changes should be saved before quitting. That’s not the case with tabs in browsers. If you accidentally press Apple-Q instead of Apple-W (to close an individual tab), you lose all the pages that were currently open in the browser (and – because the windows you have had open recently doesn’t map neatly onto the things in your history you can also lose all information about how to easily find out both what they were and any information about them).

Chris’ answer to this problem is the OS-wide global-undo facility, where you could simply undo your quit. Hammersley’s been talking about it too. I think this is the wrong approach – and not just because I think that it’s not going to happen for the next ten years at least, even if it’s possible – but also because I think there’s a better way.

So here’s my question: Why does your browser lose its current status when it quits? Or to put it more precisely, When I restart my browser, why doesn’t it still have all the pages that were open in it when I last quit? Certainly this should be possible – and it would solve the problem (although it might be considered non-standard behaviour). NetNewsWire doesn’t forget my subscriptions when I restart it – so why should my browser? (It’s not a direct analogy, but it makes a point.)

I’m sure there are a number of privacy reasons why this kind of thing could be a problem, and it might break the ‘session’ / ‘global’ distinction if not handled appropriately – but you could make it a preference that people turned on or off on their own computers, with the sites refreshed when you logged back on again, perhaps? I mean, that should work, right?

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Let it all out, Tom… Just let it go…

Here’s a few things that I’ve found on the internet recently and really wanted to be able to write about in something vaguely resembling detail, but let’s just face it, it’s probably not going to bloody happen. Which is a shame. So here are the links, all the links and nothing but the links:

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Random

Post-structuralist Wifi?

So in the dream I’m back at University and I’m in one of those literature classes that you actually only get at school, where people are supposed to give their massive critical insights on a chunk of a play that’s about twenty lines long. I remember getting extremely irritable when someone cited a massive bastardisation of one of my favourite critics, but somehow the fact that people were applying theoretical approaches to Wifi to literature passed me by…

Categories
Journalism Personal Publishing

The Balkanisation of Blogdex…

The last couple of days have seen a Daypop and Blogdex Top 40s that are totally overwhelmed by political articles from the States. If it wasn’t for the fact that many of these articles are concerned with the war in Iraq, you could be excused for thinking that nothing else was happening in the world at at all – even perhaps that there was no world outside the US.

Three years ago – back in the days of Beebo.org’s metalog – it was quickly observed that the various aggregation sites on the internet had a reinforcing effect on people’s browsing – that when they started, the popular links were getting two or three links a day, but that a month later they were getting up to ten or twelve. People linked to good things that they were exposed to – and they decided that aggregators represented an efficient way of finding those good things, prefiltered on the basis of popularity by the community at large. The effect? Sites that appeared on these sites got a significant extra amount of trafic, links, exposure. There’s significant value in this mechanism – it produces a manageable amount of links each day that an individual has a chance of being able to read. It also provides a sense of the overall community of webloggia and what they care about.

The problem comes when these aggregators don’t have enough granularity. Let me put it this way – Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati and the like are no longer simple reflectors of a community’s activities – they are also one of our community’s best mechanisms for news discovery. To some extent they’re gradually becoming one of the most significant ways we find out what’s going on in the world around us.

Unfortunately it also means that the country with the most weblogs sets the international community’s agenda. There are only two obvious results of this – (i) that these aggregators will (or have) become less interesting or useful to people who don’t live in America or (ii) that the international community becomes used to the hideous unrepresentation of their own local news and debate. It used to be said that America had no idea of what happened outside its own borders. Can we really be working towards a new way of distributing and discovering media that means the rest of the world has no idea what happens outside America’s boundaries either?

There are a couple of ways that we could address this problem. Firstly there’s sampling – we could create a version of Blogdex that doesn’t work purely on the basis of popularity, but samples geo-coded weblogs from across the world in such a way that we are presented with a balanced world-wide view of what’s important. It’s a nice idea, but I think it’s impractical – for a start the linguistic barriers would make it less useful for many of us, but also because there would an infinity of ways of determining sampling rates across the world, none of which would likely be ‘fair’ or ‘clear’ to people.

No – the most practical way of approaching this problem is to find mechanisms which allow us to balkanise our aggregators – slice their responses – on the basis of metadata. There are many ways of geocoding weblogs in such a way that aggregators could have a sense of your nationality, location, language, time-zone and the like. And above and beyond such meta-tagging there are dozens of directories that include information based around clumping weblogs around interest groups and/or site locations. So I’m putting out a call now for someone to balkanise Blogdex. I want to be able to see the most popular links generated by people in my country – wherever the links themselves are based. I want to be able to slice these links in different ways, to see popular links mentioned on all English language sites (for example) or just those within the European Union. In fact I’d like to be able to see what gay webloggers are reading too. And people within my age group. All of this stuff should be possible, one way or another. I’d build it myself, if I had the expertise required… Can’t someone help me out?

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Random

Music from the Diet Coke advert…

It’s been driving me mad for weeks, but now I finally know the music that’s playing in the diet coke advert where the girl is on a train and everything she reads around her seems to be suggesting that she gets down and dirty with the guy opposite her… The song is by the Brothers Johnson, is called “Strawberry Letter 23” and is available on the Jackie Brown soundtrack. Bits of the song sound creepily like “I wanna sex you up”. Other bits sound like Supertramp only with more soul. Weird song. Cool, though…