Tetherd Cow Ahead

Acowlyte Ed points me to this late breaking news from India which I just know you all need to know.

It appears that traffic police in Nagpur have decided that the best way to deal with road accident black spots is to install 30 centimeter tall pyramids by the roadside in order to disperse ‘negative energies’. Cos’ everyone knows that’s what causes car accidents right? Bad vibes.⁽ⁱ⁾

The brains behind this scheme is one Sushil Fatehpuria, an ‘expert’ in Vastu, a kind of Indian feng shui. “I will energise the pyramids,” he says,“I will transfer my positive thoughts into the pyramids.” Mr Fatehpuria has (quite surprisingly, considering) offered his services free of charge.

I can see the reasoning behind Mr Fatehpuria’s idea – how many car accidents did the Ancient Egyptians have? Yeah – find fault with that logic if you can!

Personally, though, I think that Mr Fatehpuria is not really making a big enough commitment. Why not campaign for the the introduction of pyramid-shaped cars such as the one above featured on Geekologie?⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ Surely these cars would be completely accident proof!!!! And why stop at piddly little 30cm pyramids? What about putting in some really big motherfuckers – that’s unquestionably going to have a much greater effect! I’m sure there are some statistics to show the dramatic reduction in car accidents in Cairo and Las Vegas!

Of course it is conceivable that pyramid power works on some kind of homeopathic principle, meaning that the smaller the pyramid is the more effective its powers. In which case, Mr Fatehpuria is wasting his money with those whopping huge 30cm behemoths.

Damn. This new-fangled science is SO confusing!

(Quite coincidentally, while I was writing this, a documentary came on the History channel about pyramids. The basic gist of it was that the Ancient Egyptians couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids with the technology they had to hand, and the purpose of these huge stone monoliths was to generate microwave power via hydrogen⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ to communicate with aliens. I have three observations to make:

1. This is not HISTORY.

2. I’m scared that because it’s on the HISTORY channel, some people think it is.

3. There is a lot of stuff on the HISTORY channel that is like this…)

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Footnotes:

1. It could have NOTHING to do with the huge number of untrained Indian drivers, the atrocious roads or the lax law enforcement – factors that contribute to the deaths of more than 114,000 people in India every year… [↩]
2. You should go visit Geekologie – they are cool dudes. [↩]
3. I didn’t quite follow that bit… [↩]

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This just in from NASA:

On August 1st, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a tumult of activity. There was a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection and more.

The solar flare has spawned a coronal mass ejection heading in Earth’s direction due to hit about the time you read this. Everybody duck.

What is is with techy people when they come across robots? It seems that a machine merely has to bat a servo-driven eyelid for normally sane, balanced geeks to completely drop their brains on the floor.

Take this recent article over at the usually-sensible Engadget.

The photo you see above is of Bina48, one of the most advanced humanoid robots around. Bina48 resides at the Terasem Movement Foundation in Bristol, Vermont, and while she doesn’t exactly excel at conversation, she’s far more coherent than many we’ve spied… her existence and nearly constant evolution is pretty impressive and we’re going to keep our eye on her as we move toward the future.

In case you couldn’t figure it out, Bina is the one on the left. I know, I know, the astonishing human likeness makes it tricky to pick the robot from the New York Times reporter, but you’ll have to take my word for it. The spastic wobbling head on a plinth is in fact a machine.

Engadget’s acknowledgement that Bina ‘doesn’t exactly excel at conversation’ is somewhat of an understatement. The New York Times reporter attempted to ‘interview’ Bina and the effect is less of a conversation than something like an attempt to interpret the ravings of a simpleton on peyote.

I encourage you to watch the video of the interview now, to experience the full effect of Bina’s striking humanness.

I fail to see how this is in any way more impressive than the numerous other ‘realistic’ robots we’ve examined previously on The Cow. Engadget really needs to get out more. Perhaps on a date with Aiko or Roxxxy, who, even if not as ‘anatomically correct’ as their makers would have everyone believe, at least have bodies.

The New York Times reporter starts out bravely with Bina, but realises in two sentences that she’s been sent out on one of those stories that has little salvaging.

“Hi Bina,” she says, cheerily.

“Er… so where were we?” asks Bina, like a junkie being roused from an opium dream.

“I’m Amy. I’m a reporter,” says the NYT girl, with the sinking feeling that she’d have been better off doing the kitten-stuck-up-a-tree story.

“There is probably more to you than just that,” interrupts Bina, with a sneer.⁽ⁱ⁾

Poor Amy cuts her losses by having the story go to a voiceover:

I had lofty goals for my interview with the Bina48 robot. I imagined me, the intrepid New York Times correspondent, communing on camera with a new kind of intelligent silicon species.

Yes, dear Amy, and I bet that’s just how your editor sold it to you. Well, you’ve learned your lesson about robots haven’t you? You could have saved yourself a lot of grief if you’d been a constant reader of The Cow. We’ve covered all this in depth on numerous occasions.

Amy persists, to her detriment. She asks Bina several times if she’s ready for a conversation while the robot wobbles its badly-wigged head around, doing an uncanny impression of Parkinson’s patient trying to get out of a straight jacket. It finally decides on the well-worn AI strategy of rephrasing the question, which Amy takes as an affirmation.

“Cool!” says Amy.

“Ambiguous,” replies Bina, in an astonishingly embarrassing 1950s ‘does-not-compute’ kind of way. “Cold weather or cold sickness?”

Oh dear. That’s a big fat ‘F’ for you on the Turing Test, Bina.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

After an hour of ‘exhausting’ rapport with Bina, Amy calls it quits. Bina has lolled her head around,⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ interrupted the conversation with baffling observations, misinterpreted questions, and advanced her ‘opinions’ on artificial intelligence in a completely unconvincing manner, all the while effectively demonstrating that she is anything BUT intelligent. Eventually, she attempts to explain her poor performance away on ‘having a bad software day’.

“You know how that is,” she pleads.^(iv) NO WE DON’T, Bina. We are humans. We don’t have ‘bad software’ days.^(v)

As I see it, every day is a bad software day for Bina. I’m perplexed when things like this get wheeled out time and time again as evidence of how the robotic future is just over the horizon. Bina is really nothing more that a mechanical appendage of software routines that have been around for decades. There are a few ‘physical’ additions (Such as Bina’s attempts to smile which are so creepy that I think makers of horror movies would do well to take notes) but all in all Bina is no more impressive than Fake Captain Kirk or Eliza. Obviously Engadget has a very different idea to me of what the future with robots ought to be like.

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Thanks to Atlas for providing more robot-spotting fun.

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Footnotes:

1. Seriously – we are SO attuned to facial gestures that, in my opinion, it’s way better to just forget them than to take the risk that they will be inappropriate. Watch someone closely next time you have a conversation, and see how much of the intent is carried by facial movement. You may be surprised. [↩]
2. Lesson Number 2: Make sure your robot knows the difference between literalness and colloquialism. My first question to a being who I suspected of masquerading as a human would be something like ‘How’s it hangin’ dawg?’ [↩]
3. Maybe if they programmed her to drool? It would complement the overall effect, that’s for sure. [↩]
4. The programmers are obviously going for wit here, but succeed only in bathos. [↩]
5. That excuse is going to go down really well when the first robot babysitter to drown someone’s child in the bath tries to blame it on ‘a bad software day’. [↩]

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In the United States of America, around 30 kilograms (66lb) of beef is eaten per capita every year.⁽ⁱ⁾ That’s over 9 million metric tons of cow meat.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

That’s a lot of cows. And a lot of cows take up a lot of space and use up a lot of feed. The Guardian reports this morning that Professor Richard Gradwohl of Washington state has come up with a solution to this problem by spearheading a drive for miniature cattle. Gradwohl’s farm boasts 18 breeds of miniature cows, including ‘microminiature’ varieties that stand just over a meter (one yard) tall. He claims that 10 miniature cows can be raised on the same amount of land as two full size cows, using just one third the feed and producing half the amount of methane. Sheer genius. Not only that, the tinier the cow, the better it tastes, according to the Guardian article.

Of course, here at the Tetherd Cow Ahead laboratories, the boffins were quick to see the potential of this scheme. “Why stop at merely ‘miniature’ cows?” asked the Head Boffin, “Surely if you make the cows even smaller you can make even greater savings and get even tastier beef!”

That’s why he earns the big bucks! To this end, I have set the laboratories to work creating the first nano cows. By my calculations, using the savings in feedstock and land that Gradwhol’s reductions in size have achieved, the shrinking of cows to nanoscale should mean that a million cows could fit on one square centimeter of farmland and would only need a blade of grass per year. On the five acre pasture that Gradwohl uses to raise ten mini cows, TCA Labs can raise trillions of cows, producing a billionth of the methane of conventional cows and yielding enough beef for one thousand billion billion McDonalds’ all-beef patties every month.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

I also have the labs investigating what happens when the miniaturization process ‘goes homeopathic’ (as we say in the science business). What this means is that once the cattle are shrunk past a certain size, Gilbert Einstein’s famous equation E=M¾ kicks in and the cows become ethereal. The beef yield simultaneously becomes infinite. Needless to say, the taste of flame-grilled steaks also improves immeasurably via this process.

Here in the Land of Shoo!TAG, I don’t see how I can possibly fail to get some investment interest.
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Footnotes:

1. According to the Guardian article linked here. A search around the web mostly gives numbers higher than that. [↩]
2. Or more than 10 million ‘short’, or US, tons. [↩]
3. Quoted statistics may or may not be entirely accurate – strange things happen at subatomic levels. [↩]

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This extraordinary creature is a Benthic Holothurian. It was photographed swimming in the waters above the mid-Atlantic Ridge where scientists have discovered ten possible new species of marine life.

See more beautiful pictures by David Shale on The Guardian site, and marvel at the mysteries of our beautiful planet.

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Photograph: David Shale/University of Aberdeen/PA. Used respectfully without permission in the interests of promoting science.

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You will remember that a little while back we learned that Rupert Murdoch, using his needle-sharp insight into how people use the internet, stumbled on the notion that it would be a good idea to start charging visitors to read the online version of his flagship newspaper The Times. Consequently, the last month has seen The Times subscription gateway come into operation and readers have been asked to sign up (without paying) before they can get access to stories on The Times site. Here’s a graph that reflects the status of readership figures for various online UK newspapers since April.

Notice anything? And need I point out that this graph reflects only the sign-up process – no money has so far changed hands. Now, to my eye that looks like The Times online has lost nearly half its readers in a month. And the curve doesn’t look like it’s intending to taper off anytime soon, and that’s before we get to the point of actual money being forked out.⁽ⁱ⁾

Rory Cellan-Jones, on his blog at the BBC, has speculated that The Times really only has to hang on to about 5% of its former readership ‘to have the champagne corks popping in Wapping’. I predict that the readership will fall right through that number and bottom out at nearly zero. Rory puts his finger right on it in his post:

My suspicion is that the main problem with this experiment is what I’d call friction. Web users have got used to clicking simply from one page to another without hindrance. Any element of friction – the aggravation of having to pay or just log in – acts as an incentive to head elsewhere in a hurry. I tried an experiment this morning, posting a link on Twitter to an article by the very funny Times columnist Caitlin Moran. Plenty of people clicked on the link – but when they were taken directly to the Times pay-station, they all appear to have left without paying.

To anyone who’s been looking at web media for any length of time, this is truly a no-brainer. Why would you bother? Rupert is pinning all his hopes on one single idea: that people care enough about the quality of the journalism (and whatever else The Times has to offer) to pay for it.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

Rupert, I’m sorry to say that the 21st Century is going to give you a bigger ass-walloping than you ever thought possible.

Let me explain it in a way that even Mr Murdoch might understand. Are you sitting comfortably? Very well, let’s begin.

Once upon a time, when horses and buggies were the fastest forms of transport and people cleaned chimneys by crawling up them with big brooms, accounts of what was happening in ‘the world’ started to get circulated via a system called ‘the newspaper‘. The newspaper gathered up a collection of what its publishers deemed the most relevant and interesting bits of news and gossip of the moment, and then distributed them to the community. The newspaper was a marvellous idea for its time, but, for all its charm and utility it did have some limitations: it was largely a local phenomenon, it cost money to make and deliver to the people who wanted it, and it had a kind of inbuilt time delay (if news happened, you had to wait till the next newspaper was made in order to know about it). But because it was a physical object, and it was a convenient way of learning about the latest goings-on in the world, people were prepared to pay some small amount of money to take possession of their daily newspaper. Plus, you could wrap fish & chips in it when you’d finished reading it. (It also had another limitation, but one that few people were aware of at the time: it was a one way street. That is, the newspaper could tell you things, but you could not reply to those things, nor enquire after their veracity.)

Eventually, after a few decades of news distribution of this form, a few cunning people realised that if they could gain control of the newspaper business on a large enough scale, they could earn themselves quite a bit of money. And so newspaper tycoons came into existence. The object of being a newspaper tycoon was to gather up as many small local newspapers as you could find, and either put them out of business, or amalgamate them into your empire. This concept made a small number of crafty men (for they were ALL men) very wealthy indeed. It had the added bonus, for those men, of giving them extraordinary political power, because after all, they controlled what people knew about the world. This state of affairs existed for the better part of a century, with the newspapers becoming more and more ubiquitous and the newspaper men more and more wealthy and more and more powerful.

But then, late in the 20th century, a completely unexpected thing happened – a wonderful piece of technology called ‘the internet‘ came along. The internet was really nothing more than a way in which everyone on the planet could easily and instantly talk to everybody else, no matter how geographically separated they were. It was a simple but powerful idea. And the more people who understood this idea, the more powerful it became. Before anybody really even knew what was happening the internet became connected to all kinds of places across the whole world, and people happily discovered that news and gossip and all kinds of other information could now be exchanged rapidly and for free. People liked that! And the internet was unlike the newspaper in one very important way: nobody ‘owned’ it and nobody could own it.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

So who do you think were the most unhappy about this state of affairs? That’s right – the newspaper tycoons. They were VERY VERY upset, indeed. People were talking to each other and learning about their world for free! What a terrible, terrible thing!

Thanks to their innate carnivorous business instincts, though, the tycoons became aware very rapidly that this ‘internet’ was something quite big and important, and they could see that people had taken to it like ducks to water. Unfortunately they could only see this through spectacles that had little dollar signs embossed all across the lenses, and so their vision was not very clear. The first thing they did was to nab themselves some real estate on this internet thingy. After all, it was FREE, what did they have to lose? Of course, the people who were already on the internet were happy to see their old friends from the newspaper business there and started visiting these new sites from the old guard – but they didn’t just hang out at one newspaper… oh no! They were now reading six or seven or maybe even ten newspapers, and not just newspapers from their home town either! And not only that, they were getting news from sites that weren’t actually newspaper sites but had news anyway, like blogs and ezines and social networks and all manner of other strange ideas! All for free!

The newspaper tycoons weren’t used to the concept of ‘free’. It was not something that was in their world view. When they said the word ‘free’, as they sometimes did, they meant ‘we’re giving you a nice little morsel but it has a hook hidden inside it’. The concept of ‘free’ as in ‘you can get it with no strings attached’ was as alien to the newspaper tycoons as was the idea of travelling economy class, so they looked upon what was happening on the Internet with a great deal of bewilderment and frustration. All these people were here doing stuff and hanging around but the tycoons couldn’t figure out a way to make money from it! How they hated that! How dare people amuse themselves!

So instead of making some kind of effort to understand what was going on with the Internet, as some of their cleverer and less mercenary colleagues did, the tycoons contrived to do the least effective thing possible: they attempted to make the Internet play by their Old Rules. Unfortunately, the people using the internet could see immediately that the Old Rules really suited no-one except the tycoons. The only option open to the tycoons now was to try and make their Old Way look more enticing than all the New Things the Internet was offering. They did this mostly by telling everyone how TERRIBLE the New Way was and how much BETTER the Old Way was. They said this loudly and often.

‘If you continue to get your news for free,’ they cried ‘You’ll only get TERRIBLE quality news. WE are the keepers of GOOD quality news!’

Unfortunately, the people using the internet already knew that this was a stupid and desperate tactic. They knew that not only was the news from the New internet way just as good (and sometimes even better) than the Old newspaper way, but that the Old newspaper way gave them TERRIBLE quality news as often as not too!

In spite of this obvious failing, the tycoons quite idiotically convinced themselves their argument was good enough to charge money for their Old News, just like they used to do when the world was all nice and simple, before smoking tobacco caused cancer and when it was perfectly acceptable to feast on endangered species of quail and unsustainable caviar stocks. And so they said to the Internet people:

‘Now we want you to PAY for our Old Ideas, even though we have made exactly NO CONTRIBUTION to this new way of doing things…’

Well, we’ll have to leave our story there for the moment, because the last words have not quite been written. I suggest that ‘Happily ever after’ is not on the cards for those old newspaper tycoons, though. They are facing the end of their dynasty and they stand, as emperors have often done, bewildered in the empty halls of their palaces while the revolutionaries hammer at the gates.

Will Rupert get his 5% faithful? Will the champagne corks be popping in Wapping? Will the line on that graph level out before it hits sea level? Six months is about what I think it will take to give us the ending to this story.

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Footnotes:

1. Quite interestingly, the curve visibly trends downwards well before the subscription requirement kicked in. I surmise that this indicates people started abandoning the Times pretty much as soon as they heard that it was going to start charging money. If I was head honcho, I would have taken this as an extremely worrying omen. [↩]
2. It also breaks one of the most important pieces of functionality of the web, and very few of the Old Guard understand this because it is such an alien concept to them: the ability to cross-link. Anyone who writes a blog (or anything written specifically for online diffusion) understands automatically how powerful a utility this is. The web is a ‘web’ because it builds itself on connectivity. If I want to write something on Tetherd Cow I can easily bolster my story with examples, references and asides that anyone can check instantly. But there’s NO WAY I can do that with the Times any longer. If I cross-linked to an article in the Times, my readers would simply behave as those in Cellan_Jones experiment, above. Murdoch’s idea is fundamentally destructive to the very foundations of the internet. Where we see the awesome power of the building up of information structures, he wants to create cloistered communities that he can control. This, in my opinion, is what will ruin him. He does not grok the net. [↩]
3. You can bet your humidified Havana cigar that there are those who, if they’d known how it was going to turn out, would have moved heaven and earth to have gained control of it… [↩]

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Good morning Faithful Acowlytes! I hope you got plenty of restful sleep last night because today you’ll need to have your wits about you as we start off with a quiz. This is the kind of quiz where I show you two images and you have to spot the differences between them. I’m sure you’ve done one of those before. OK, are you ready? Here we go then:

No? Look very very carefully. Still nothing? Hahaha! I apologize dear friends – I’ve tricked you with this one because image #1 is a teapot and image #2 is ALSO a teapot! In fact the only tiny difference between them is that the first one is a Royal Doulton, and the second one is a royal dolt.

Generally I try to refrain from picking on Royalty⁽ⁱ⁾ here on The Cow because, well, it’s a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, it’s not their fault, really, is it? All those centuries of inbreeding does tend to take its toll. Luckily, most Royals are safely out of harm’s way for the most part, but sadly it doesn’t stop them from opening their mouths and gabbing when they have an audience.

If you know anything about the Prince of Wales you will be aware that he’s not a stranger to elliptical thinking. He has campaigned on behalf of homeopathy, freaked out about GM technology and now, in his latest escapade, blamed Galileo and science for the ills of the modern world.

In a presentation last week to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Prince Charles places culpability for all our climate problems on ‘mechanistic thinking’ which ‘goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion’. The prince thinks that the reason for our current environmental difficulties is because the Western world is having a ‘deep, inner crisis of the soul’.

This is a banal piece of reasoning that is as antiquated as the concept of the Royal Family itself. The Prince of Wales pulls one of the classic tricks of the religiously-inclined of equating a quest for knowledge with an abrogation of moral responsibility. In other words, science equals heartless amoral exploitation; religion⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ equals warm and fuzzy caring and sharing. Even a schoolkid can see the stupidity inherent in this simplistic notion.

Prince Charles’ view of science as ‘cold and mechanistic’ is one that is beloved of science detractors and shows no understanding at all of scientists or scientific pursuit. Additionally, the Prince is either willful or stupid by ignoring (in favour of its perceived ills) the extraordinary benefits so obviously brought to us by science. How about the science that gave us the cure for smallpox, Your Highness? Or the science that has allowed millions of people access to clean water and nutritious food? How about the good deeds of the scientists who figured out how to clone insulin so that diabetics can have affordable treatment? How about the wonderful achievements of science that let us talk to our friends and family wherever they may be on the planet, at any time of the day or night? Or the science that allows us to make great adventures inwards to our consciousness and outward to the cosmos?

Like many of the purveyors of woo, the Prince of Wales wants it both ways; he eschews science because it is ‘evil’, but is quite happy to enjoy the countless improvements it brings to our lives. He blames science for our creating our ‘materialistic culture’ and for the ‘damaging way it is used to exploit the world’, yet offers no practical alternatives – just notions of vague, superficial, wistful magical thinking.

He advocates a world without science and without individual material aspirations.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾He pines for a world with a folky agrarian culture where superstitious thinking rules.

It’s not surprising in the end. Royalty has always done very well in such climates.

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Footnotes:

1. Well, except for King Willy of course – but he’s such good sport. [↩]
2. The Prince doesn’t specifically campaign for religion as such, but it’s the same kind of thinking – the mention of ‘souls’ and the faux surprise when he says that he finds it ‘baffling that so many scientists profess a faith in God yet this has little bearing on the ‘damaging’ way science is used to exploit the natural world’ all mixes in to his diffuse religious view of how things work. [↩]
3. For the peasants, at any rate. [↩]

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Yes, I know I’ve talked about it several times already, but this time it’s serious.

‘Cyber sickness’ warning ahead of 3D revolution’ screams the headline. Again, you will not be at all surprised to learn that it’s from the Melbourne Age.

Up to 10 per cent of people who watch 3D images on television, at the movies or while gaming suffer ”cyber sickness” symptoms such as blurred vision, nausea and dizziness, health experts have warned.

Those experts! If it wasn’t for them, the world would be a much cheerier place. But wait! It’s WORSE THAN YOU THINK:

But they say the number of people affected by cyber sickness could rise to unknown proportions with the advent of the 3D TV era…

Did you hear that? UNKNOWN PROPORTIONS! It could be a veritable cyber-sickness pandemic. Forget getting immunised for swine flu – if these experts are right we’ll all be taking major doses of stereoids to fend off the 3DTs.

The article gushes breathlessly onward:

Virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce, an honorary lecturer at the University of Sydney, said the majority of occasional 3D viewers would love the experience, but he warned that the health effects of heavy use of 3D media – which trick the eye by changing the depth perception of a person’s vision – had not been tested.

Um… actually, that’s not how 3D works at all – there is no ‘tricking the eye by changing depth perception’ Mr… who wrote this damned thing… let’s just scroll back up to the by-line… oh, WHAT a surprise. It’s Stephen Cauchi, King of the the Non-News at the wheel again. Geez. Have they hired this guy specifically to reduce the Age’s credibility or something?⁽ⁱ⁾ Anyway, to continue, 3D works by exploiting the effect of stereopsis which is the natural way we achieve depth perception. What Mr Cauchi just said is word fluff. It is completely free of actual meaning.

Like last post’s Government Weather Control article that we saw from Mr Cauchi, as the story continues the sensible people start to appear, and we find Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital ophthalmologist Lionel Kowal saying that the number of people who reported problems with 3D is ‘probably closer to 5 per cent than 10 per cent.’ Then, we hear from Kathryn Rose, an associate professor in orthoptics at the University of Sydney, who thinks that ‘about 3 per cent of the population would not be able to watch 3D TV’.

3 percent? 3 percent? Do I hear 2 percent? 2 percent over in the back? 1.5 percent? Can I get a 1?

The article ends with a quote from Newcastle University neurobiologis Alan Brichta:

‘Right now we don’t have all the information but my gut feeling says [cyber sickness] is not going to be a major issue.’

Are you with me here in this insanity, dear Acowlytes? We’ve gone from an epidemic of ‘cyber sickness’ of UNKNOWN PROPORTIONS to ‘er.. actually, not a major issue…’ in the space of one information-free waffle fest.

Like the Government Weather Control story, I propose this whole air-headed notion could have been summed up in one short sentence:

A tiny minority of people might find 3D media a little unsettling but most people won’t.

Again, short on pizazz, but it’s exactly the same content and it would have saved precious digital bits for something that was actually worth calling NEWS.

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Footnotes:

1. I swear I’m not witch-hunting this guy. I literally did what I just wrote – I was reading the article and thought ‘Man this is terrible!’, looked at the byline… [↩]

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Anomalous Radar Activity Around Melbourne


I just love it when event transpire such that I can bring you two of my favourite subjects in one Tetherd Cow Ahead post. Today’s is such a post and it’s brought to you by the Melbourne Age which is carrying an article that combines the stupidity of the newspaper business with the beliefs of a loony. It runs under the headline ‘Weather has conspiracy theorists strung out’

INEXPLICABLY odd images⁽ⁱ⁾ on Bureau of Meteorology radar. Cyclones off the Australian coast and the most intense storm to hit Melbourne in living memory. A controversial US military facility in Alaska suspected of research into weather control … It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi conspiracy thriller.

Yes, there’s no quibbling there – that’s exactly what that hodge-podge of unrelated factoids sounds like (although I’d be inclined to add the word ‘bad’ just before ‘sci-fi’). So the implication here is that it’s going to turn out to be The Truth, right, as opposed to the fiction of a ‘sci-fi conspiracy thriller’? Well, you’d be totally wrong if you were thinking that.

The story goes on to detail the following points:

•The Bureau of Meteorology radar has been recording ‘a number of very strange patterns – rings, loops, starbursts’ around Melbourne.

•There have been some big storms here.

•The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility in Alaska has powerful transmitters and radars.

From this, the correspondent spins up a vacuous story that says in essence that websites ‘specializing in pseudoscience’ have ‘leapt on the notion’ that the three things above are connected and the ‘government’ is trying to control the weather.

Is anybody else feeling the need to stick their head in a bucket of ammonia?

To simplify: this is a story which is actually just a free plug for the nutty ideas of lunatics, while all the while pretending to ‘news’ by distancing itself from aforementioned lunatics. And, to put the icing on the cake, the story is embellished with an image of the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, which has exactly NO relevance to anything at all.

As I’m reading this, I find myself thinking ‘Who the hell is responsible for this guff and how do they get to be working on a news desk?’ So I scroll up to the byline. It will probably come as no surprise to you at all to find that the literary genius behind this story is none other than reporter Stephen Cauchi, who has provided us with much mirth previously here on The Cow with his non-news style of journalism.

Which brings me to the second of my favourite Tetherd Cow subjects – insane people. Mr Cauchi’s main source for the above-mentioned conspiracy turns out to be someone who is very familiar to anyone who’s spent time around the pseudoscience traps – a fellow who goes by the name of Colin Andrews. Now, just to set you up, Mr Andrews has about ZERO credibility as any kind of authoritative source. In fact, if you were actually trying to find a less credible spokesperson (for anything except nutty ideas I guess) you’d have your work cut out for you.

Colin Andrews first came to prominence as an ‘expert’ on crop circles back in the 1980s, and contrary to all common sense, still believes that they are made by ‘aliens’. Since that time, he has advanced all manner of implausible conspiracies across numerous disciplines. In this case, Mr Andrews’ ‘government weather control’ paranoia centers on some ‘anomalous’ radar screen captures from earlier this year when the south coast of Australia suffered some unusually fierce storm activity. This is a couple of them:

Well, yeah, sure, these ones are from the Bureau of Meteorology radar in Broome in Western Australia, but close enough, right?

These are the ‘inexplicably’ odd radar images to which Mr Cauchi refers in his first paragraph. Rather than conclude (as might any rational person) that the radar images are simply quite explicable as imperfections in the way that a meteorological radar functions, Mr Andrews’ brain oscillates to the most wildly improbably alternative – that the images are some kind of government weather control experiment that has been cunningly contrived to appear like a radar imperfection.

Mr Andrews persists in this belief even when told as much from someone who works for the Bureau of Meteorology:

Re: The round radar prob in WA, it is a BOM Radar unit which has its lower rain level threshold setup too low, ie, too sensitive, which gives the noisy radar reading like that. Nothing to do with HAARP, which, as you know, is in Alaska. I see images like this a lot, as I work for the Bureau of Meteorology in QLD.

And you know what? You too can see images like this on Australian meteorological radars if you feel like clicking on every radar station that the BOM offers. If you think like Mr Andrews, you’re likely to find a LOT of government hanky panky. It’s a wonder the government has any time for actual governing.

After giving plenty of airing to Colin Andrews’ hair-brained ideas, the Age article goes on to seek opinions from authoritative skeptics, who quite reasonably call the idea ‘silly’. We could have started with that conclusion and made the whole story one sentence long, viz:

We asked a sensible person, Mr Tim Mendham (president of the Australian Skeptics), what he thought of noted loony Colin Andrews’ idea that the government is controlling the weather, and he said it was silly.

I guess that doesn’t make for ‘pizazz’ but the content is exactly the same as the story as it stands.

Anyhoo, after a lot of stupid waffle, the article rounds off with:

The Sunday Age tried to contact Mr Andrews, who is based in the US, but there was no reply. That could be because, according to his website, he was in Oregon for last weekend’s 11th annual UFO Festival.

Smirk smirk smirk. Well if that’s your attitude Mr ‘cynical’ Stephen Cauchi, why are you making this nitwit’s ideas out to have any credence at all?

It makes me feel quite nauseous to note that this was No. 1 on the ‘most read’ list of Top National Articles in The Age today.

Well done Melbourne Age! Another pin on the board for the Great De-Braining of the Human Race.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

UPDATE: At the time I wrote this yesterday, there were no comments on the article. Now there are 19. After reading them I actually feel like walking over to the train line near my house and throwing myself in front of the 10:15 to Flinders St Station. WHY WAS I BORN INTO A WORLD WITH THIS MUCH STUPID?!

The comments are now closed and the one I left was evidently deemed unsuitable for inclusion – evidently it made a little too much sense.

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Footnotes:

1. Why, why, why do reporters continue to use this kind of language? The images are ENTIRELY explicable in any number of ways. They are ONLY inexplicable in the mind of Colin Andrews. Stephen Cauchi, you are an IDIOT. [↩]
2. Or, one optimistically hopes, another nail in the coffin of the old news media. [↩]

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Sometimes the minds of really bright people can think really dumb thoughts.

Francisco J. Ayala is an evolutionary biologist of quite some expertise, a critic of creationism and intelligent design, and an active petitioner for the advancement of stem cell research in the US and throughout the world. And yet, as he reveals in his post on the Guardian blog this week, ‘Religion has nothing to do with science – and vice versa’ his accomplishments as a scientist don’t stop him from having bewildering thought processes.

The basic thrust of his piece is that science has no business occupying itself with the domain supposedly reserved for religion (and vice versa, but as we shall see in a bit, that’s nothing more than a sop to the unthinking). That is, science should butt out of matters of good and evil, right and wrong, purpose or none. It takes him about three paragraphs to reveal that he’s playing with a marked deck.

The scope of science is the world of nature: the reality that is observed, directly or indirectly, by our senses. Science advances explanations about the natural world, explanations that are accepted or rejected by observation and experiment.

Outside the world of nature, however, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose.

Did you see the card go up his sleeve? He has simultaneously put religion outside our natural world and forbidden science from that domain. In other words, science can’t know the Mind of God, because.

It’s such a breathtaking piece of religious bias that I almost stopped reading right there.

What he’s advancing is in fact the very foundation of the concept of religion: give up (for reasons that cannot be expressed in any rational manner) everything you know and can demonstrate to be true, in preference to concepts that you (or other people, usually) suppose might be. That’s called ‘Faith’ and it goes by another name too: ‘Magic’. Ayala simply cannot make a claim like that and retain any level of credibility. If you allow that as a piece of valid reasoning, you allow ANYTHING to be possible. And I’m willing to wager a large amount of cash that Ayala doesn’t believe that huge numbers of Americans are being abducted by aliens, or that Xenu is going to come to Earth and smite us all, or that a little green man lives in the peyote plant or any number of other equally preposterous ideas. Yet, by his argument he has no choice but to believe them all because they are ALL outside his allowance for the realm of science!

The above quote also carries with it the implicit endorsement that religion does have something decisive to say about economic, aesthetic or moral values, and about the meaning of life and its purpose. That’s plainly hogwash. Which religion? Says what? For every one thing that a religion says, a contradiction can be found in another. Religions can’t even make up their minds internally about what they think about many things. Religions say stuff about all these things that’s for sure, but whether what they say is valuable, or ‘decisive’, or even worth paying attention to, is a highly questionable conjecture.

Further on he takes the words of Richard Dawkins and bends them to his already-decided will:

The biologist Richard Dawkins explicitly denies design, purpose and values.

In River out of Eden, he writes:

“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

Dammit – did you see that? He palmed another ace!

Firstly, Dawkins is talking here about the mechanics of the Universe, as Ayala must surely understand. Dawkins does not say that we should expect to find no purpose or evil or good or blind pitiless indifference in humans. Dawkins is saying that there is no reason to suppose that those things are inherent in the Universe, and that this is in fact exactly what we see.⁽ⁱ⁾ Ayala’s argument is based on a religious misrepresentation of scientific thinking, and, as a scientist, he should jolly-well know better.

Let’s see if Ayala is dealing anything else from the bottom of the deck. He goes on to conjure the spirit of William Provine, noted evolutionist and atheist:

William Provine, a historian of science, asserts that there are no absolute principles of any sort. He believes modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society.

There is a monumental contradiction in these assertions. If its commitment to naturalism does not allow science to derive values, meaning or purposes from scientific knowledge, it surely does not allow it, either, to deny their existence.

Zip! Now that’s a hand that’d get you shot in a saloon game of poker!

Let’s just clarify things a little. Ayala is making an explicit statement here that there are two kinds of worlds in which we live: the natural world (which is defined by science) and the supernatural⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ world which is out of the reach of science. Because science can make observations about the natural world such that there appears to be no inherent meaning, morality or purpose, it has, therefore, no right to deny the existence of such things.

What total corn syrup! Science has every right in the world to put up a case for the non-existence of these things! Let me re-write that sentence slightly to make it clear why it’s so incongruous:

Because science can make observations about the natural world such that there appear to be no inherent reasons to believe in pixies or unicorns or fairies, it has, therefore, no right to deny the existence of such things.

This idea of putting such abstract concepts as ‘meaning’, ‘purpose’ or ‘morality’ outside of nature is just religious sleight of hand. Who says that should be so, and by what criteria? Ayala begins by drawing up rules that suit his argument and then criticizes science for not playing by them!

It’s a bit of a straw man, in any case. He’s attempting to distract us from a much more pertinent point: the fact that science finds no ‘natural’ morality does not imply that a social morality is not possible (it clearly is) and most importantly, it certainly does not automatically stamp an imprimatur on religion to take that role. In fact, I would argue that a great deal of our current social morality is held in place not by religion, but by the social constructs we’ve developed under cultures that hold largely scientific world-views. We don’t, for example, find mobs of atheists going around behaving amorally (as much as I’m sure a lot of religious people think that is what happens), primarily because people like me who don’t hold with religion can actually maintain good moral lives without it, believe it or not.

Religious thinkers just love to believe that it is religion that holds our morality in check and stops the world from spinning into unmitigated and wanton chaos, but if they buy into that notion they must necessarily buy into a paradoxical uber-belief: it doesn’t matter what kind of religious belief you hold, as long as it’s a religious belief.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾ This is plainly a ridiculous and indefensible stance. For a start, there are plenty of religions that adhere to questionable morals.^(iv)

I’ve attacked the versa part of Ayala’s essay first because I think by doing so it casts illumination on another piece of his prestidigitation. Let’s look at the ‘Religion has nothing to do with science’ part. Here, Ayala invokes Augustine, the emperor who rearranged Christian religion because it didn’t really suit his taste:

As he [Augustine] writes in his commentary on Genesis:

“If it happens that the authority of sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning, this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly.”

Is anyone else rolling on the floor laughing?

Again, let me clarify: If anything that makes sense appears to be in conflict with the Scripture, then that’s because the Scripture isn’t being properly interpreted. It can’t possibly be that the Scripture is nonsense!^(v)

It baffles me that a smart person can even indulge in such poppycock. From the start, it makes a ridiculous presupposition that the Scripture, like Ayala’s conditions for religion itself, lies outside nature – particularly outside human nature. How can a person with scientific training possibly believe that?

Ayala now throws a bone to the wolves in allowing that religion has nothing definitive^(vi) to say about the ‘precincts of science’:

Religion has nothing definitive to say about these natural processes: nothing about the causes of tsunamis or earthquakes or why volcanic eruptions occur, or why there are droughts that ruin farmers’ crops. The explanation of these processes belongs to science. It is a categorical mistake to seek their explanation in religious beliefs or sacred texts.

It’s a banal dismissal of superstitious thinking of the gross kind. Of course we know that God can’t be blamed for earthquakes and eclipses and droughts and plagues of locusts. The only people who believe that kind of thing are the same ones who believe that God sits outside the realm of nature and can accomplish miracles!

Ow.

No matter how he might frame his argument, Ayala does not care about balance. He is concerned only with propaganda. Like all religious people he is scared that the truth is frightening and ugly and something he doesn’t want to hear, and that if science turns its sights on ‘matters of Scripture’ it might reveal, not that the Scripture is being interpreted incorrectly, but, as it has done time and time again, that the Scripture is wrong.

Ayala is only paying lip service to science, and to justify his already formed beliefs (Ayala is a former Dominican Priest) he seems compelled to attempt to somehow shoehorn science into the religious framework of a worldview that was formed half a millennium ago. His version of science is, for an evolutionary biologist, a puzzlingly simplistic mechanical one. It’s a science that doesn’t ask hard questions. It’s a science that obligingly looks the other way when religion walks into the room. It’s a convenient kind of science.

As we all know, though, science doesn’t care about convenience. Science doesn’t care how we think the world should be, or how we wish it was. It just shows us how it is. The way I see it is that we have two choices – we either side with science, look bravely on the Universe and be awed and humbled by our ignorance, or we cower behind our fingers with religion and make pretend everything will be OK. Either way, the world itself does not change.

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Footnotes:

1. Why isn’t Ayala arguing that point? Because as an evolutionary biologist, he knows he can’t win. ‘God’ – at least no kind of God that cares a hoot about us – is not apparent in the natural workings of the Universe. [↩]
2. I’m using the word in its most literal sense here: ‘of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural’ [↩]
3. Or, perhaps more accurately: ‘It doesn’t matter what kind of religious belief you hold, as long as it’s MY religious belief’. [↩]
4. The majority of them, I would contest. [↩]
5. There are so many things wrong with this reasoning that I can’t begin to enumerate them all. The Bible, for example, makes explicit statements about the natural world. By Augustine’s reasoning, if any of these statements are thrown up against convincing scientific refutation, then there must be some interpretive error – it’s NOT an error of Scripture. What an astonishing ‘get-out-of-jail-free-card’ that is! In this way, the Bible can be eternally revised to fit with the way the natural world is shown indisputably to be and always remain correct! How can the rigorous process of science even begin to compete with such absurdity? [↩]
6. Anyone else notice that card go to the bottom of the deck? ‘Definitive’ is a slippery term, especially in the light of Ayala’s other slipperiness. ‘Definitive’ allows that religion can have all kinds of things to say about the realm of science if it likes – just not ‘definitive’ things. [↩]

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