Barefoot in the wilderness
in search of understanding

Just a word

Not enough time for a good post today – various things conspired together to mean that I had no time to think of a good blog post! Not least of which was trying to get through to the Inland Revenue to pay my tax! I know, I know, leaving it to the last minute…

pax et bonum

Cultural superiority

An excellent response here to some rather silly ideas about the supposed superiority of “western civilisation” over all other systems.

Science and consensus

There’s a tendency I’ve seen fairly often, and that features in a recent blog debate I’ve been involved in, to misunderstand how science works. This is a bad thing because it causes people to misuse scientific evidence and, even worse, to base political positions on incorrect or even dishonest grounds. The issue is what science actually is. Science is not, as is often imagined, the discovery of universal Truth. Rather, science is a search for understanding.

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Reactions

Randomly browsing this afternoon, I stumbled across this post from the Strong World blog. In my opinion, this is a flawed attack on a worthy target – the Kyoto protocol. As the only international agreement aimed at reducing climate change, Kyoto is a laudable effort. The fact that it’s come into effect late and will have marginal effect anyway thanks to the political compromises involved in drawing it up do not negate the immense achievement of getting something like this agreed in the first place. However, I wanted to reiterate some of my reaction to this post here.

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Spring

I was definitely getting mixed messages this morning as I was walking. I needed my hat and my coat to keep warm – it was one of those mornings that Britain specialises in, with damp cold that creeps through the warmest clothes to chill your flesh. Despite this, there were signs that it must be spring already – the first snowdrops were out and birds were singing furiously in the trees. So far, so normal. But the eternal progress of time’s wingéd chariot sometimes seems rather too slow – if it’s spring please warm up soon!

pax et bonum

Sausages

After a fair bit of work, we now have home-made salami and sausages, made from our friends’ pigs. The sausages are jolly nice (we had some for dinner tonight!), but we’ll have to wait a few weeks to see how the salami turns out – one basic garlic sausage and one chorizo. I was especially pleased that I worked out how to twist the sausages into groups to hang them – otherwise, they just untwist and you get a very long, lumpy sausage instead!
So, for the first time in this blog, photos (click for larger versions):

For a sense of scale, the salami are about half a kilo each at the moment – they’ll obviously shrink a bit as they dry. We got three good batches of sausages, too – one pepper, one spiced pork and apple, and one pork and leek.
‘Twas a fun, learning experience, and shoving that quantity of meat through a funnel by hand means that I’ll enjoy the sausages that much more

pax et bonum

Spyware and Media Player

If you’re a Windows user who uses Media Player, you could be at serious risk of spyware, thanks to Microsoft’s incredibly useful (!) digital rights management (DRM). The aim of this stuff is to stop you playing music (or reading ebooks or whatever) in any way that the seller doesn’t want – regardless of your legal rights and the entire history of music. For example, they can ensure that you only play music on one PC (bad luck if it crashes or gets stolen), or only on your birthday.
However, one “nice” feature of Media Player is that, faced with a file that it doesn’t understand, it will head off to a web page specified in that file and download software that will decode the file. All well and good – except that it does no checking at all that the software it downloads does what it’s supposed to. A recent report shows that this new version of Media Player (which is billed as an “anti-piracy” version!) is vulnerable to Trojans – and that these Trojans are already out in the wild. A single “Yes” click, to try and play a file in Media Player, installed an incredible 58 folders, 786 files and 11,915 registry entries in the investigator’s PC! Spyware is software that can steal your credit-card and bank-account details, pass your passwords on to someone else, and even peruse your email. And there’s worse – some of this nasty software will also use your PC to help in mass attacks on other people’s computers, often in order to blackmail companies for their internet access. So, be warned – say No to DRM. And, especially, to badly designed DRM. If you don’t know it’s safe, don’t run it. And, sadly, that includes Microsoft’s own flagship software.

pax et bonum

Nits

The joys of parenthood – you don’t usually think of nits (head lice) as one of them. And for good reason! Adam’s little gift from someone at the new nursery has, with typical generosity, spread itself around the family.
So, we’re going to be combing and washing our hair rather more assiduously than usual for the next couple of weeks. Shame that Adam hates hair washing almost more than anything else Coupled with the assurance that he’ll probably pick them up again from whoever gave them to him this time, this doesn’t augur well for the next few years. Children – who’d have them?

pax et bonum

Buckets

Our new bucket arrived today!
Not that exciting, you might think, but I’m excited about it because it means we can get some blood from our friends who keep pigs – which means I can make black pudding Anne hasn’t had black pudding for 25 years because it isn’t available gluten-free and, being coeliac, she’s reluctant to make herself ill by eating wheat just to try black puddings again. But, with a bucket, we can make our own black puddings, because our friend can bring us the blood from the next lot of pigs that they take to the abattoir in a couple of weeks. Expect to hear about it when that happens!
However, you wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find a bucket with a lid! There used to be several shops around here that sold them – whether for household cleaning, for nappies or for home brewing – but there don’t seem to be any these days. So we had to resort to ordering one from the net, which seems a little odd for something so everyday. But, there it is – a nice new 10 litre bucket from an internet homebrew site. Just needs washing out and it’ll be all ready.

pax et bonum

Safe places

Sometimes, efficiency is its own worst enemy. Banks send us cheque books months before we need them and so we put them somewhere safe, somewhere we’ll remember, so that they’re ready when we need them. Except that I can never find that “safe” place when I need to! My cheque book has run out, and I couldn’t even order a new one without calling the “lost chequebook” line to ask that the old one be cancelled. All very secure, no doubt, but it would actually be easier if they’d wait until I asked before sending the new cheque book out in the first place!

pax et bonum

Silly warnings

Warnings exist for a reason – to protect us from harm. Or, at least, that used to be the idea. These days, warnings on things we buy seem to have a different purpose – to protect the manufacturer from being sued by people who do stupid things. As evidence, try these prize-winning “warnings”.
A toilet brush bearing the warning “Do not use for personal hygiene”.
A scooter with the startling legend “This product moves when used”.
And even a thermometer with the stupefying “Once used rectally, the thermometer should not be used orally”.
Well, I never!

pax et bonum

Huygens looking good...

The ESA’s Huygens probe seems to be doing fine as it enters Titan’s atmosphere. Actual information should start to arrive in a few hours. Link

Real vegetables

At this time of year, when the car needs scraping free of frost if you want to use it in the morning and warm coats are a must, it is hard to remember those summer days when there were real vegetables in the garden. Last year, we had sweetcorn growing and, it was wonderful – far better than the stuff you get in the shops, which has been picked days earlier. Baby beetroot with their subtly red-veined leaves, salad crops (tomatoes from your own vines are one of the best snacks ever) and green beans. Yummy!
But wintertime is when you’re supposed to do the dreaded digging. And, somehow, with frost on the ground, I find it hard to drag myself outside to do it. So, we now have a weed-covered vegetable patch that needs something doing to it before I can plant new veg in the spring. Which means I start thinking along the lines of carrots (so I don’t need to manure the ground!) and potatoes, and definitely more sweetcorn. The seed catalogues dropping through the door remind me to order seeds for next year, but I mustn’t forget the winter veg – there is still broccoli in the ground, and the trek outside to see whether it’s ready to pick yet is easy to forego in the winter. But those greens are wonderful when you do bring them in.

pax et bonum

New schedule

One week in and Adam is still enjoying the new nursery! Indeed, he is eager to go (“Me go to nursery? Me go to nursery now?”), which makes the whole thing easier.
The hard part for me is getting adjusted to the new schedule. Previously, he went to nursery full time on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, which left me free to work all day Monday and Tuesday (and Wednesday, obviously). Now, however, he can only start nursery at 11:30am, which means I look after him for the morning on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, so that I can work half of each of those days and the whole of Wednesday and Friday (while Anne looks after the children on Wednesday and Friday). This should bring me out slightly ahead, but has thrown me slightly at the moment!
This isn’t helped by the fact that Anne’s had parents’ evenings twice this week, on Tuesday and Thursday, which has meant that I’ve had to finish work early to pick up the children and cook dinner! Still, I’m very lucky to be able to spend so much time with my children and I do enjoy it. And, once I’ve got my work schedule sorted a bit better, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it even more

pax et bonum

Tax shouldn't be taxing

The deadline looms for me to submit my tax return for last year – being self-employed, I need to tell the Revenue each year how much I’ve earned and spent in the past year so that they can take their pound of flesh.
Fortunately, I have a very nice accountant who takes my accounts, fills in the forms and tells me how much tax I need to pay. Anyone else who is self-employed: I would heartily recommend that you find yourself a good accountant who’s familiar with your type of business. It’s far cheaper on an hourly basis than doing it yourself!
My only difficulty this year is that I’ve changed accounting programs, so I need to make sure that I get all the necessary reports sorted out. And this is complicated by the fact that the old accounts are on an old computer running a different operating system! Wouldn’t have been a problem had I not lost the emulator that would have run the old package on the new OS at some point! Still, it’ll be easier now to plug the old computer in, export the reports and use those!

pax et bonum

Mac Mini

The new Apple Mac is here – the Mac Mini. Only £329 for an amazingly small and powerful Mac! If only I needed a new computer…

Clusty

Need a new search engine? Try Clusty.
A nice new approach to searching the net that harvests results from various search engines and organises them into heirarchies, hopefully making it easier to find the result you want. It even lets you create your own search tabs to search the sorts of things you want (like eBay or BBC News).

Open Source takes Venezuela

The Register is reporting that Venezuela is moving all government IT systems to Open Source software. Another nail in the coffin of Microsoft’s monopoly on computer use

Fictionwise

If you’ve not come across Fictionwise before and you feel even slightly inclined to read ebooks, go and give them a whirl. They have a huge stock of ebooks in many formats (both open and secured) for desktop PCs and PDAs, Even better, there are lots of free ebooks, and also cheap ones
I never used to think ebooks were much use but, since I got my Palm Tungsten T with its higher-resolution screen, I read loads of stuff on it because it’s easier to carry than paper books. You still can’t beat a real book, but sometimes the electronic version is very convenient!

New nursery

Adam (who’ll be 3 in February) started his new nursery today. He’s been going for 3 days a week so that both Anne and I can work, and he’s really loved it. Which made it hard when they announced at the start of December that the nursery would close at the end of the year. (The nursery was in the parish-church hall, and they had hoped to buy the hall from the church. However, they were eventually unable to reach an agreement for that, with the church unwilling to sell outright. But the loss of the income the nursery generated means that the church will probably have to sell it now. Go figure!)
Anyhow, after the usual panic (“How will we cope?” “Will one of us have to stop working to look after him?” And “someone” here would pretty much have to be me because I’m a freelancer rather than a teacher, as Anne is), we found that the local primary school has a nursery with places, and costs about half as much as the nursery Adam was at – although it lets children in at an older age.
So, this morning, we were slightly worried about how Adam would take it. But we needn’t have worried – he didn’t bat an eyelid when I dropped him off at 11:30 (oh yes, that’s the other problem with this nursery!) and was also fine when we picked him up this afternoon. Which was nice

pax et bonum

New beginnings

Well, that blog hiatus was rather longer than I’d expected! Real Life^TM became rather more busy (and sleep deprived) than before and blogging was something I could put to one side.
With the new year, however, comes new determination – as well as a new blogging tool (PyQLogger) which should hopefully make it easier by letting me write entries without having to fire up my web browser (Firefox). So, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get plenty of blog entries up this year. Whether anyone reads them, of course, is more of a question

pax et bonum

Uncomfortable thoughts

Maggi Dawn’s blog pointed me at this article by Mike Todd of Waving or Drowning? It makes good reading – some profound thoughts. But it’s also disturbing because of the cost it implies that we must pay – that issues like the tsunami over Christmas demand of us not charity but justice. Charity is easy: a one-off donation that salves our conscience with the knowledge that we’ve “done something”. The real problem remains, however. The real problem is ongoing and lasting; it will take years, decades even, before anything resembling normality returns to these areas, and some areas may never return to how they were (there are islands where there are now no inhabitants because they were all removed after everything was destroyed, and to which the people are unlikely ever to come back).

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Hot and cold

The lectionary reading for Morning Prayer this morning was from The Revelation of John (3:14-22). This is writing to the church in Laodicea and laying into it for being “luke-warm”, “neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other!”
The interesting thing about this is that I’d always been rather confused about it. I’d only heard it explained as being about enthusiasm (“hot”) or the lack of it (“cold”), but this never made much sense, because why would God be looking for a church without enthusiasm?
A friend who’s training to be a priest was talking about this a while ago and said that, in fact, this was talking about water. In those days, water that was cold was fresh from the spring and so safe to drink. Water that was hot had been boiled and was again safe to drink. Water that was luke-warm, however, was in danger of being tainted, poisonous, because it had been lying out in the sun. So, the church was being condemned for being tainted, for being neither fresh nor purified.
There’s also a likelihood that John was referring to the spring waters in the town, which were famously warm (neither hot nor cold). Cold spring waters were good to drink. Hot springs were sought after for their healing properties (think about all those Roman baths!). But the spring in Laodicea was good for neither nourishment nor healing. Just like the church there.

pax et bonum

Understanding and control

I’ve just been rewatching Light Fantastic, a history of the human understanding of light by Simon Schaffer that was broadcast on BBC4 over Christmas. Mostly, it’s a very nice, clear documentary covering thoughts and ideas from the ancient greeks right up to the present day, showing both how our understanding has changed and how those changes have affected society.
However, there is a thread running through parts of the programmes that irks me – the perennial idea that science and religion are somehow enemies; that science shows that there is no god simply because it offers a model of the world. First off, I’d like to distinguish between the Church and belief in God – although I’m a believer in God, I have my doubts about the church!
The more serious issue is this odd one about science (and I speak as someone who took a science education through university and now works in science journals). In particular, Schaffer said that, thanks to science, people now have a much better understanding of the world than they used to – the study of light has led to an understanding of stars, the earth and life itself that is far better than our forefathers had. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is true, for two reasons. First, “people” these days do not have a better understanding than they used to. Most people don’t understand stellar evolution, the physics of radio waves or the structure of living cells. They are, however, far more aware that there is vast realm of human knowledge about which they are ignorant. And this is not a spreading of knowledge but a concentration of power in the hands of a new group of people – the scientists and those who provide them with money.
Second, I believe that this does our forefathers a disservice. Most people had a very good understanding of the world – they knew about weather, about food, about life and death. They understood the things that were important; and the rest (about which we are now so proud) was simply not on their map, whether they were rich or poor, clever or stupid. They weren’t less intelligent or less aware – it was just that there were distinctions that hadn’t been made yet and so were simply not available to think about.
What I mean is that people in those days understood the world that they knew far better than people do now – largely because the world that needed understanding was far smaller. In those days, the knowledge was guarded by the church, which often reacted badly when challenged. Nowadays, the knowledge is hoarded by corporations and governments, which react just as badly when challenged as the church once did. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.

pax et bonum

Faith and reason

This quotation seems to me to sum up the relationship between these two very well:

“Faith and reason are like the shoes on your feet – you can go further with both than with either by itself.”
(J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5 episode The Deconstruction of Falling Stars)

pax et bonum

Christians should have more sex

This sounds like a translation of the Bible I would really like to have a look at
There’s always a danger with trendy translations that they become too trendy for their own good and read oddly as a result, but they can be very useful sometimes for shedding new light on familiar passages.

pax et bonum

All-powerful?

I’m a member of the Greenbelt Forum mailing list, where we’ve been talking about something that is a huge issue for many people – how we can believe in an all-powerful, all-loving God who nonetheless allows disasters like the recent tsunami. In particular, the idea that if God doesn’t intervene then God must either not care or be unable to do anything. I thought I’d reproduce some of my thoughts here.

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Suffering

I found this Blog entry when I got back to reading my blogs after the holidays, and the news of the destruction wrought by the tsunami around the Indian Ocean. In particular, I was struck by Kathryn’s comment:

I’m having enough problems of my own along the lines of “how does a loving God allow this?” without having to come up with coherent answers for other people.

I’m sure many of us are feeling this emotion at the moment, but I can’t help being struck again by the results of a survey of worldwide religious attitudes I read last year (can’t remember where, sadly – possibly The Guardian newspaper). This was a huge survey, canvassing attitudes about religion from people of many faiths and none from many countries around the world. The interesting part for me now was a question along the lines “Does the suffering in the world make it harder to believe in God?” For Westerners and those from rich countries in general, the answer was overwhelmingly “Yes”. But for those in poor countries and the suffering in general, the answer was an overwhelming “No”. That is, for those who are actually suffering, a belief in God is a natural comfort. It is only the comfortable who find the idea of suffering harmful to a belief in God.
Why should this be? Is it perhaps because we rich think that our comfort is some sort of divine right, and that any chink knocked in our armour by the suffering of others makes it more difficult to believe in a nice, clean God who keeps us happy and well fed? And that, for the suffering, their belief in God is a source of strength and comfort in the midst of their pain, because they know that this world is not comfortable by nature but rather filled with pain? And should one answer to such suffering not be for we rich to examine our own comfortable beliefs and allow the reality of pain in the world to wash away our easy assumptions of superiority and entitlement to an easy life?

pax et bonum