Douglas inspires

Alun Politics No Comments , , ,

Often the delete key is my friend. A thou­sand word post has dis­ap­peared. I was going to post a response to someone else’s post, and use this video of Douglas Adams as an example of pos­it­ive athe­ism. I’m tired of yet another post from someone who says “I’m an athe­ist, but you mustn’t talk about athe­ism or offend the reli­gious because athe­ists are nasty.”

Then I thought if that’s the case why bother? The people who tend to write such posts don’t have any­thing inter­est­ing or pos­it­ive to say apart from scowl­ing at other people who do. Reli­gious people can pro­duce great works, like Handel’s Mes­siah which has a reli­gious mes­sage in it some­where. Then you get books like Dawkins’ Unweav­ing the Rain­bow, that show the sense of won­der you can have in the work­ings of the uni­verse. Yet I can­not think of any­thing remotely inspir­a­tional writ­ten in the heart­felt belief that com­prom­ise is by its nature the goal. No one looks at a beau­ti­ful land­scape, sighs, and says, “It’d be so much bet­ter if there was a small indus­trial estate in the way. Y’know to bal­ance the envir­on­mental and eco­nomic needs of society.”

So instead I’ll just put up the video that TED made pick of the week. If you’re intent on some Sunday athe­ism it’s around 1h 10m in, I think. It’s only a short bit about God. That’s fair enough because it’s a big uni­verse with lots fas­cin­at­ing stuff in it includ­ing his Last Chance to See project.

Celebrating one year of blogging

Alun Digital Academia, The Past No Comments , ,

Chris­topher O’Brien is cel­eb­rat­ing one year of blog­ging at North­state Sci­ence. I have to admit I’ve only been read­ing it reg­u­larly for the past few months, but its a fas­cin­at­ing site. I like his recent posts on Apo­lo­get­ics Archae­ology (Part One) (Part Two), but theres more there, like this part of a dis­cus­sion on how her­it­age pre­ser­va­tion works in the USA. Or how about this on Bone Frag­ments and Archae­ology? If you’re bored of archae­ology then there are entries on those pyr­am­ids instead.

But if you read just one entry then make it this one on Zooar­chae­ology and Fam­ily Liv­ing.

Another reason why Leicester is an interesting place

Alun Life, Science 3 Comments , ,

iScience Menu
Derek explains the recep­tion menu at the pi-CETL launch

I sup­pose this should go up on the i-Science blog, but it would seem odd. I know Derek doesn’t read this site so I can say what I like about him here. I was at the launch of the Leicester branch of pi-CETL. pi-CETL is a multi-university con­sor­tium look­ing into teach­ing Phys­ics in innov­at­ive ways. It was quite a big do and we had the vice-chancellor in to open the centre. I feel there’s not enough vice in my life, so I would have liked to have talked to him about get­ting some more, but he was busy. I also got to hear Derek Raine, the brains behind the Leicester sec­tion of pi-CETL and I thought he gave a stel­lar demon­stra­tion of the kind of thing that makes Leicester inter­est­ing. Derek has a pas­sion for Phys­ics, but that’s no sur­prise, any lec­turer is keen on their own sub­ject. What he also has are pas­sions for the sci­entific method and passing this on to other people. Those two are rarer.

For instance there are sci­ent­ists who decide to work with some ancient his­tory or archae­ology and end up pulling any­thing that looks like their interest out of the past. So you end up with gyn­ae­co­lo­gists who announce that Stone­henge is a giant womb. It tells us noth­ing about the past only about the researcher. Sim­il­arly you get phys­i­cists who’ll talk about pos­sible life on other worlds purely in terms of their phys­ical prop­er­ties without enga­ging with the bio­logy. Did you know there could be life on the Moon? Someone sneezed on some of the Apollo 11 Sur­veyor 3 equip­ment and when Apollo 12 brought a sample back they brough back some Strep­to­coc­cus mitis which sur­vived on the Moon. It didn’t flour­ish as far as I know, but life is a lot har­dier than many people believe. It came as a shock, at least to phys­i­cists, because microbe sur­vival didn’t fea­ture in any of the ques­tions they were ask­ing.
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Creating Myth

Alun The Past 1 Comment , , , , , , , ,

This is a slightly re-written ver­sion of a short piece I wrote else­where. I’m put­ting it up here because it tackles a timely prob­lem. What do you do when you want to attract tour­ist dol­lars, but keep los­ing out to that big archae­olo­gical site down the road? The cit­izens of Chucuito saw at the bus­loads of vis­it­ors going to Tiahuanaco and decided to build their own temple. The prob­lem is that Tiahuanaco is pretty impress­ive so any com­pet­i­tion would either have to be equally large, or else some­thing pretty noteworthy.

Inca? Temple
Chucuito Fer­til­ity Temple. Photo by Moon­bird.

Wel­come to the Inca Ullo temple of fertility.

A researcher invest­ig­at­ing Inca sites dis­covered that twelve years ago the people of Chucuito decided to build their own authen­tic ruins dat­ing from the 1500s. They then con­coted a legend that women would visit the temple to ask for fer­til­ity. Twenty four stone phal­luses later, they had one killer photo oppor­tun­ity and thou­sands of vis­it­ors. You can see more pho­tos at Jerry Peek’s site, or Rhymer.net. You might be won­der­ing, “Is this safe for work?” but how unsafe could a temple devoted to penis wor­ship be?

The story made a small splash on the web, with brief notices from Anan­ova and The Com­mon­wealth Times. The Sun had a big­ger story, com­plete with pic­ture. We can only be thank­ful the reporter didn’t know that the early 1500s in some parts of Peru is known as the Wanka period. The Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tribune only seems to have picked up the story this spring.

The decep­tion raises some inter­est­ing ques­tions about con­sump­tion of the past. Is it a fake site? The answer might seem to be pretty obvi­ously yes, but what does it mean for a site to be fake? A lot of the myth sur­round­ing King Arthur is made up. Yet people would accept Gla­ston­bury as a genu­ine Arthur­ian site but reject Milton Keynes as hav­ing any role in the myth. Surely a lot of Milton Keynes would be explained by an Arthur­ian curse on the land. The bound­ary between real and fake isn’t hard and fast when look­ing at mythic sites, as Cor­nelius Holtorf noted in an earlier ver­sion of this post. Does a myth accrue authen­ti­city with the passing of cen­tur­ies, or can myths be cre­ated today?

I sus­pect the rev­el­a­tion will only increase vis­itor num­bers because now it’s a ‘con­tro­ver­sial’ site. Indeed if Dis­ney made a heart­warm­ing film of plucky vil­la­gers build­ing a fake temple to save the local orphan­age from clos­ing then it would become even more of a draw. Is this site, and her­it­age sites in gen­eral, selling know­ledge or exper­i­ence? One for Michael Shanks or Cor­nelius Holtorf I think. For a less post-modern approach to exper­i­ence there’s the Tri­reme Vet­er­ans for Truth.

Library Thing

Alun Digital Academia No Comments ,

I signed up for this ages ago, but my lib­rary stalled at four books. I thought it was an excel­lent idea, but cata­loguing prop­erly would take a lot of time. I had some unex­pec­ted free time today and found that agood thing has become even bet­ter. With a bit more of an explore I can now see lists of tagged books for a sub­ject like ancient his­tory. It’s just very very won­der­ful. I’m mak­ing a note now to remind myself when I get home to sign up for a sub­scrip­tion account. Books from my pro­file will be appear­ing in the right bar shortly.

Isn’t Anaximander Wonderful?

Alun Science, The Past 2 Comments , , , , ,

Mosaic Depicting Anaximander
Mosaic depict­ing Anax­i­m­ander with a sundial.

Tangled BankIt’s hard to know how to open some­thing on Anax­i­m­ander. Hero­dotus had the right idea. “This is the dis­play of the inquiry of Hero­dotus of Hali­carnas­sus, so that things done by man not be for­got­ten in time, and that great and mar­velous deeds, some dis­played by the Hel­lenes, some by the bar­bar­i­ans, not lose their glory…”

Unfor­tu­nately Hero­dotus, whose his­tory is the earli­est that sur­vives, was writ­ing a couple of cen­tur­ies too late to record Anax­i­m­ander and that’s shame. From the scant inform­a­tion that does sur­vive Anax­i­m­ander may be one of the all-time greats of sci­ence, up there with New­ton, Dar­win and Ein­stein. Unlike Archimedes or Pythagoras none of his ideas remain in use in sci­ence today, but his achieve­ment is that he is argu­ably the man whose work made sci­ence possible.

There are plenty of reas­ons to like Anax­i­m­ander. One is that he should be a very easy philo­sopher to be an expert on. Only two frag­ments of what appear to be his own words sur­vive.

1. ‘Immor­tal and indes­truct­ible,’ ‘sur­rounds all and dir­ects all.‘
2. ‘(To that they return when they are des­troyed) of neces­sity; for he says that they suf­fer pun­ish­ment and give sat­is­fac­tion to one another for injustice.’

Trans­la­tion by Arthur Fairb­anks, The First Philo­soph­ers of Greece

By them­selves they look pretty mean­ing­less and short. Apart from mem­or­ise them there’s not a lot else you can do. Job done. How­ever you’re sup­posed to look at them in con­text, and Anax­i­m­ander has an awful lot of con­text.
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Isn’t the Gospel of Saint Mark Wonderful?

Alun The Past 6 Comments , , ,

The Good Book
The Good Book. Photo by Xer­ones.

Carnival of the Godless ButtonAs a fire and brim­stone athe­ist I sup­pose I should berate the Gos­pels as pil­lars of an out­moded super­sti­tion. Yet while I don’t find the reli­gious mes­sage in them com­pel­ling, there is some good writ­ing and some good tales. I don’t see any more con­vin­cing evid­ence for the exist­ence of gods in the Gos­pel of Saint Mark than I do in Hero­dotus but, like Hero­dotus, Mark can tell a tale well.
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Isn’t Kraftwerk Wonderful?

Alun Life No Comments , ,

Kraft­werk have just released a new live album Min­imum Max­imum which pretty much under­lines the obvi­ous. They’re geni­uses. Live albums can be awful, with the band drop­ping the gui­tar, singing off key or at their worst tak­ing the oppor­tun­ity for ter­minal drum solos to see if the song can out­live a fair pro­por­tion of the audi­ence. This is the only album I know of where people com­plain that a track, Auto­bahn, is a mere nine minutes long, rather than the twenty-two it was on the ori­ginal album.

In terms of influ­ence they’re the elec­tronic Beatles. A new band could carve out a suc­cess­ful career rip­ping off their works. This isn’t just true of eighties bands, com­pare The Robots to Daft Punk’s recent Robot Rock.

The com­mon com­plaint by poodle-rockers is that elec­tronic music lacks soul. Listen­ing to Trans-Europe Express whilst trav­el­ling, even if it’s into Leicester, is an awe­some exper­i­ence. I can’t ima­gine Bön Jovi cap­tur­ing the eurphoria of adding and sub­tract­ing like Kraft­werk can on Pocket Cal­cu­lator. And then very few bands could also pull off some­thing with the fra­gile beauty of Neon Lights.

But most won­der­ful of all they have proper hair­cuts. Who cares if they’re not in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame? They’re too good for that.

A band with proper haircuts.
A band with a proper haircut.

…and now I’ve dis­covered you can’t link to audio clips at Amazon. Ho hum.

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