2004

Singapore was a good place to visit. I’m not usually a fan of hot places, but since more or less everywhere is air conditioned, there’s always somewhere to retreat to if the 30 °C heat and 70% humidity become too unbearable.

A colleague today referred to what turns out to be William Gibson’s description of Singapore in Wired: Disneyland with the death penalty. Gibson’s article is over 10 years old now, but some of what he says still rings true. What makes Singapore a nice place to visit is that it is Asia-Lite: cheap (at least in Sterling), yet clean and safe, with ethnic areas laid out for the visitor to browse around. The people are friendly and pretty much all speak English to some extent. We saw few policemen about the place: the opinion of our party was not, as Gibson said, that the people had succumbed to the policemen of the mind, but rather that the policemen were among us, plainclothes. But who knows? We weren’t about to drop some litter and find out.

Wired is too hip to like the place, but for all the Disney, Neal Stephenson (him again) and Orwell resonances, I can’t help but admire the vision behind the place. I doubt I’d want to live there, but that’s not because of the problems Gibson has with it. I can imagine that after a while the island would start to seem very small and lacking in scenery. The beauty spots that exist are cheek-by-jowl with construction sites and container ships offshore, just out of shot. But given the choice between what seems a benevolent, if paternal, government and one which mucks around with foreign misadventures while people back home are getting murdered for their mobile phones (a headline to welcome me back, there), it’s not really obvious that the latter is the right one.

The hotel had a phone in the loo. What’s up with that?

The CDC Ball on Thursday was fun. Erin and Anton demoed together, and were very good. There was also a bloke wearing a paper helmet on his head. I think he was some kind of cabaret. The old favourites like the Elimination Waltz were back, too. This was a Good BallTM.

In other dancing news, the chap from Eastenders is still in Strictly Come Dancing, but it’s the public vote that’s keeping him there, so he probably can’t win that way. Clever media management by some of the other contestants, too.

I met Safi and robhu on Saturday afternoon. Rob seems to be some kind of paparazzi stalker figure. cowe had a party on Saturday night. It rocked.

Saw the new Harry Potter on Monday. Darker than the previous film, yet somehow lacking in substance without Voldemort around.

I’m off to Singapore on Friday for a week, with work.

The 28 Days Later scenario is examined by Straight Dope, who tell us when the electric power would run out.

That’s all.

I had an enjoyable weekend. Had dancing and college friends over for a barbeque on Sunday. PaulB turns out to be quite paternal :-). There was an unexpected after-party when some more people arrived just as I’d cleared everything away. We watched Phone Booth, which was suspenseful, short, and, as Salamander pointed out, quite arty for a big release film.

<lj-cut text=”A Fire Upon the Deep”> I finished Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep this week. Vinge is famous for his treatment of the Singularity. He copes with the narrative problem of having inscrutable post-Singularity gods around by positing that the galaxy is split up into concentric zones, with godhood only possible in the outer layers. The book gets rave reviews on SF sites, so it was probably impossible for it to live up to the hype. Like another reviewer out there, I found the manipulation of supposedly sophisticated humans by primitive aliens a bit unrealistic. Nevertheless, it’s worth reading for the ideas. Some similarities between this and Iain M. Bank’s Excession, although I’d say Excession was harder to read.

<lj-cut text=”A History of God”> I also finished Karen Armstrong’s A History of God recently. Armstrong takes us through the history of three monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The book is heavy going at times, but worth perservering with. Armstrong has a clear bias towards the personal, inner experience of the divine rather than rationalist religious systems. The book shows that the struggles between the people the mystics and the rationalists have been going on for centuries. She also argues strongly against a personal God.

A quotation from Holbach which struck a chord with me as an ex-evangelical. He writes that poets and theologians had done nothing but:

make a gigantic, exaggerated man, whom they will render illusory by dint of heaping together incompatible qualities. Human beings will never see in God, but a being of the human species, in who they will strive to aggrandize the proportions, until they have formed a being totally inconceivable.

In other news, a controversial display of burnt work has divided the world of art into non-identical halves, like a dead bisected animal. Martian.fm has the full story. Classic.

This is your brain.

This is your brain on evangelicalism.

Any questions?

Wired did an article on xxxchurch.com, a Christian organisation which has apparently decided that, what with the state of the world and so on, the best thing they can do is start a crusade against wanking.

I’ve been trying to work out whether XXX Church is a spoof. I just can’t tell. I should like to announce my own adaption of Clarke’s Law, namely that “any sufficiently Christian website is indistinguishable from Landover Baptist Church. I think I’ll call it “Wright’s Law”, unless that’s already the name of a TV cop show where I fight crime using ballroom dancing moves. But I think I’d remember that.

I have memories from my time “on the inside” of just how weird the attitudes to sex were. Being gay is right out, but being straight and doing everything-but is OK as long as you don’t ask and don’t tell. The leaders come out with statements like “no heavy petting” (a phrase which seems slightly 70s for some reason) and back them up with Bible verses about pornea (usually translated “sexual immorality”, which seems to be begging the question). Meanwhile, if you’re married it’s your positive duty to go at it like rabbits, but if you’re a teenager with hormones raging, you’re stuffed. Many of them marry young after very short courtships, an understandable reaction but not one I’m convinced leads to happy marriages.

I’ve been clean of the meme for over 2 years now. If I can do it, so can you. Just say no, kids.

(S notes that all good Internet memes have kittens in them).

A packed weekend. “Special” General Dancing on Friday was fun (it was special because it was in a bigger hall and there was a bar, both of which count as good things). Lots of orange people around, all fake tanned in preparation for the Varsity match.

We watched Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday night. It was hugely good fun. The new format is pro-celebrity rather than having professional couples dancing against each other. Predictably, the couples where the man was a professional did best. Girls have it so easily in ballroom 🙂 CDC’s own Erin was the best out of the couples with a celeb bloke, with her partner Martin Offiah pulling off a creditable waltz. Full marks to them, nil points to the East Enders “star” who mostly stood there bowlegged while the woman did around fancy stuff around him. Pshaw!

The BBC’s site helpfully points at CDC, but alas, the first news item you see on the CDC site at the moment tells prospective beginners to bugger off and come back next year. Sort it out, readers. Update: they sorted it.

Didn’t watch the Eurovision, we went to Trinity for Formal Hall instead. Our host was most apologetic about the racuous behaviour of the undergraduates, who belted out “Happy Birthday” to one of their friends in 6 part harmony (I think it was a choral get together). I was shocked, I tell you. Bring back the birch and National Service.

CDC’s Tea Dance today was at Downing, which turns out to be a pretty college. Dancing on a sunny Sunday afternoon is a pleasingly civilised experience. The room had a little balcony to disappear onto. All very Jane Austen. We lost Varsity, of course, but I know which club I’d rather be in.

Rounded off the weekend’s cultural delights with a concert from CUSO. I’m not really an expert on classical stuff, preferring death thrash metal, but Elgar’s Enigma Variations was good, and the bassoon concerto from Holloway was interesting.

Photos from lisekit and terriem‘s Karoake party are up. The close-ups of faces are courtesy of S, who does that composition thing (as well as being a talented pianist). Thanks for a good party, Terrie and Lise.

I promised Terrie a link to Milkbusters, so there it is.

My computer is unhappy. It freezes or resets itself about 20 minutes after it’s powered on. After that runs for the rest of the day. I’m getting kernel oopses just before the bad stuff happens, which seem to be related to memory paging, so I suspect dodgy hardware.

I could just replace the memory modules and see whether that helps. However, Drogon people have been attempting to convince me that what I really want is one of these fine Apple computers. Apple’s OS X has Unix underneath, and the Fink project makes a variety of open source stuff available to it using the Debian package tools. The PowerBooks look rather nice. They’re also rather expensive. If anyone’s used one, do let me know what you thought of it.

The ensuing discussion of laptops, 802.11, and hence using the computer on the loo made me think of Anthony Hopkins, for some reason.

A locked posting in Another Place asks where morality comes from. So, let’s polish that off in an LJ posting, shall we?

I find something like Ken Macleod’s so-called True Knowledge tempting, at least as a fall back position (as the author of that page says). In the absence of a God, or at least, of one who cares enough to show herself plainly, what matters to you is what matters. If love, charity and loyalty are important to you, you should act to advance them as far as you can. Morality is whatever you can get away with, where “getting away” doesn’t necessarily mean swindling people (although it might, there being no absolutes here), but merely advancing things which you consider good. If enough people agree with you, the power of your argument grows.

<lj-cut> It’s not clear the MacLeod himself thinks the True Knowledge is a good thing (believers in it commit what I’d regard as genocide in his book The Cassini Division). I found some interesting discussion of quite what it is he does think of morality, which makes reference to the True Knowledge idea. Graydon’s views seem particularlty apposite.

Isn’t this the bad old “might makes right” philosophy, which, taken to its logical extension, will lead to us driving around on smoke-belching killing machines while wearing leather and listening to Tina Turner? I’d like to hope not.

My own morality is based on my long term self interest. Being content, finding things out, having friends and loves are all things I enjoy, so I act to maximise my chances of such things persisting. That includes being part of a group and of a society which will allow such things to continue. I’m surely not unique in thinking that the Mad Max war of all against all isn’t going to help further my aims. As Graydon says, power rests of peace.

In Greg Egan’s rather good Distress, there’s an artificial island which floats unsupported in the middle of the ocean (that’s like, a bleedin’ metaphor for existence, you see: keep up at the back). The society on it is one of your standard SF capitalist anarchies, although a little less hard nosed than the sort of thing you find in other authors’ works. The response to the narrator’s question “Why doesn’t someone try to exploit the system and take over?” is amused condescension from the islanders, who point out that that the question amounts to “Why don’t you all try to make your lives as miserable as possible?”

That’s not quite the full story, of course: there are bad people out there, so whatchya gonna do when they come for you? The book’s islanders have their own answer, which I won’t spoil. The sort of biology based ethics which MacLeod seems to have in mind advises being nice to everyone you meet and walloping them if they wallop you. There are people who’ve not worked out that it’s in their own best interests not to be an asshole, but eventually everyone else will move out of their way and defend their walls. I’ve made comments about burbclaves and things of that nature before. As I’ve been talking about Neal Stephenson, what I’m thinking of is more of a phyle (from his book The Diamond Age) than a burbclave, really. It’s not about living with people who all like ballroom dancing, but rather about living with people who share your outlook.

Surfing around the other day, I found a Christian response to Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian, in which the author points out that saying Jesus’ belief in hell was immoral presupposes some sort of morality. The same goes for the Problem of Evil: where does your definition of evil come from? In both cases, my answer is that morality comes from within me by the process of considering what I want my life to be about. Ignoring Calvinism (which has huge moral problems of its own), it is my choice whether or not to accept Christianity’s morality. I find the infinite torture of relative innocents to be unjust. There are other people who can accept this idea, and so be a part of the Christian phyle, but I’m not one of them.

AD&D is 30! Rejoice and be glad. Slashdotters’ comments on the story predictably revolve around how little sex AD&D players (or other geeks) get. This is reverse psychology applied to the universe at large: if the Slashdotters make enough jokes about it, the universe will feel compelled to prove them wrong. Or so they hope.

Among the votive offerings to an uncaring universe, there appeared RPG player staples like Eric and the Dread Gazebo and The Dead Alewives sketch. I’d like to add The Lord of the Rings: The RPG to the list.

Darque Dungeon (spot the LJ Goth references) is a parody of Jack Chick’s Dark Dungeons, a Chick strip in which the best part is Mike praying for her… That’s Christian for “I’d like to be buried with you [shurely “in you” – Ed.]. Up to the balls”. It’s funny, because you know it’s true.

While we’re on Chick, it seems he lawyered the original site of Cthulhu Chick, a parody of Chick’s The Choice. Luckily, Eric S Raymond has a copy. Chick vs ESR! Fetch the popcorn. Fetch the precedents cited by Brad Templeton. And remember: ESR has guns. Lots of guns.

Had a fine barbeque at PaulB’s last night. I’ve put up some pictures of the goings on. For terriem, here’s the perfect Chris de Burgh karaoke song, from Bill Bailey (I’ve linked to it before, but it seems some people shockingly don’t read all the crap I write).

We also visited Milton Country Park again yesterday. The weather’s just too nice to be indoors all weekend.

In blogland, ladysisyphus posted this and then this about The Passion of Christ, wherein it is revealed that it’s a very bad film. I don’t really like horror films, so I’m not in a desperate hurry to see it.

A copy of a letter to the Grauniad from a raging fundy led me to Steve Locks’s huge site on leaving Christianity. And you thought I was verbose. Lots to read there.

I was quietly moved by aldon‘s posting on the war in Iraq. S sang No Man’s Land to me a little while ago. Unk… I’m divided between admiration of people who will make the ultimate sacrifice for what they believe and Diziet Sma’s far more cynical explanation (it’s in the signature of that posting).

Let’s play out on badgers.

I had a pleasant weekend of eating out. S and I hit the town on Saturday; I went out with robhu and Safi on Sunday.

Much discussion of religion on Sunday. I remember mentioning James Fowler’s Stages of Faith (surely begging for a Quizilla meme), and N.T. Wright’s thoughts on what the Apostle Paul meant by the word gospel.

If I’d had time, I would also have mentioned this article on Process Theology which I found after Googling for stuff ladysisyphus mentioned. It’s good to see my own thoughts about Romans 1 being thought of by someone else too. As usual, I find myself asking why don’t you just give up? when I read this sort of thing, but it’s also kind of interesting.

No great insights from all this discussion, apart from Slartibartfast’s: that I’d far rather be happy than right any day. Logic is occasionally over-rated.

Update: The discussion continues in the comments, with contributions from me, robhu, and someone called FoaF.