With a stroke of the pen, the British government created a sub-class of citizens and stigmatised a previously commonly accepted passtime, all based on questionable science and the demands of a vocal minority. Rob Lyons goes inside the crazy world of England’s smoking ban.
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If Amazon are supposedly smart enough to know what I like, why are they too stupid to figure out they don’t sell that stuff in the country I’ve been ordering from for eight years?
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The great and irreplaceable George Carlin died yesterday. His comedy was smart and often cut to the bone. Like all good comedians he realised that the purpose of comedy was not to make people laugh but to make them think. Carlin was a jester, a prophet holding up the mirror and forcing us all to take a good look at ourselves.
Obligatory YouTube clips follow after the fold.
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According to German researchers, absinthe neither is nor ever was a hallucinogen. The hallucinations experienced by bohemian hipsters in 19th-century Paris? Alcohol poisoning and probably more often than not a touch of syphillis.
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The average British teenager, according to researchers at the University of Hertfordshire, has 842 illegally copied music tracks on his or her MP3 player. This is based on an average total of 1,770 tracks per player. In addition, the researchers found that “14 per cent of CDs (one in seven) in a young person’s collection are copied”. But doesn’t that mean that this person legally purchased the six other CDs? If an average CD has 10 tracks, and the MP3 player has 842 illegal tracks on it (or 10 CDs’ worth), this young person would have 60 other legally purchased CDs in his or her collection. At the current price of CDs, surely this is a good result for the music industry?
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Now, let’s be honest. This is a bit silly. Were it not for the comic genius of the Pythons, Holy Grail could so easily have been another Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Yet it’s not. It’s funny. Very, very funny. You don’t think “I fart in your general direction!” is funny? Then you don’t know from funny. Try saying it out loud in a crowded public place, and I’m willing to bet the snickers outweigh the concerned and horrified looks. If you’re feeling eloquent, consider an encore of “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
Buy Monty Python and the Holy Grail at Amazon
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “polymath scholar of randomness and knowledge”, on the global financial meltdown:
[...] most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. [...] These guys are dangerous. They’re not qualified in their own field. [Times Online]
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Is the United States government hiding detainees on prison ships, where the Red Cross and human rights campaigners can’t find them? How morally bankrupt does a country need to be to stoop to this level?
According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.
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Good god, this is funny! Hardball’s Chris Matthews corners conservative radio show host Kevin James on the usual empty Republican rhetoric, exposing that James—like the U.S. President he defends—knows squat about history. Click for the video clip:
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Sam Harris raises a valid and increasingly pressing point: why do skeptics and those critical of religion hammer soft targets while shying away from fundamentalist Islam? The answer is self-evident, of course, although many of us will deny it. Being critical of fundamentalist Christianity will get you vilified and possibly punched in the face in Texas, but being critical of fundamentalist Islam can get you into really serious trouble.
The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for “racism” and “Islamophobia.”
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Phil the Greek has long been known for his inappropriate witticisms and cultural ignorance. Here are ten of the worst collected on Wikipedia:
10. Speaking to a driving instructor in Scotland, he asked: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?”
9. When visiting China in 1986, he told a group of British students, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed”.
8. After accepting a gift from a Kenyan citizen he replied, “You are a woman, aren’t you?”
7. “If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.”
6. To a British student in Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
5. On a visit to the new National Assembly for Wales in Cardiff, he told a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band, “Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.”
4. At the University of Salford, he told a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut: “You could do with losing a bit of weight.”
3. At the height of the recession in 1981 he said: “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.”
2. In 2002, speaking to a blind, wheelchair bound woman who was accompanied by her guide dog, he remarked : “Do you know they’re now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?”
And at number 1: In 1997, the Duke of Edinburgh, participating in an already controversial British visit to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre Monument, provoked outrage in India and in the UK with an offhand comment. Having observed a plaque claiming “This place is saturated with the blood of about two thousand Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were martyred in a non-violent struggle.”, Prince Philip observed, “That’s a bit exaggerated, it must include the wounded”. When asked how he had come to this conclusion Philip said “I was told about the killings by General Dyer’s son. I’d met him while I was in the Navy.” Reginald Dyer was the commanding officer who ordered his soldiers to open fire on the unarmed gathering of men, women and children, a massacre the Jallianwala Bagh Monument was built to commemorate.
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Not very new, but definitely worth revisiting: Dark Horse present H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.
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As any self-respecting geek within the respectable sphere of the BBC1 broadcasting radius knows (and most self-respecting geeks within the ever-so-less respectable sphere of Bittorrent) a new series of Doctor Who has started. But what not everyone knows yet, is that Richard Dawkins will be featured on one of the new episodes. Finally, someone with the skill and knowledge to take an informed look at those two hearts, and perhaps wager an opinion on the odds of reaching the ripe old age of 900 without either of the tickers turning out dicky.
If you’re in the UK, you can watch the first episode of the new season on the BBC’s iPlayer (for a limited period). If you’re not within the UK, or your ISP uses non-UK servers, the BBC would like it to be known they couldn’t care less.
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Dr. Temple Grandin on the relationship between Asperger’s Syndrome and IT, quoted in an excellent article entitled Asperger’s and IT: Dark secret or open secret?
Is there a connection between Asperger’s and IT? We wouldn’t even have any computers if we didn’t have Asperger’s. All these labels—“geek” and “nerd” and “mild Asperger’s”—are all getting at the same thing. ... The Asperger’s brain is interested in things rather than people, and people who are interested in things have given us the computer you’re working on right now.
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