Planet TermiSoc

Conspiracy nuts have the NWO to explain everything, the converatives blame…pretty much everyone that isn’t middle/upper class and white.

We apparently live in constant threat of terrorists. Airport security is just silly these days. New laws are passed to “protect” our freedoms. We even invade random countries to “protect” ourselves.

except…the thing is….with the exception of 9/11 and 7/7, theres been bugger all terrorist acts in the last 5 years. By no means do I think 9/11, 7/7 and madrid etc. should be forgotten, but if a group was really determined to cause terror, they could do worse things and more often easier than we could possibly imagine…

The IRA showed how much havock a terrorist organisation can cause and that was before the days of the internet and ebay and a group that at least vaguely tried to go for legitimate targets (they killed a lot of innocent people too, but the current “threat” is solely aiming at civilians).

Iraq is utter meyhem at the moment with car bombs a daily occurence and yet…Britain and the US rarely see anything.

bombs can be made from household materials using GCSE chemistry in an afternoon, and yet…they don’t.

one person could easily leave dozens of home made bombs around london in a day and yet…they don’t.

the exeter, glasgow and liquid bombers have all been so completely and utterly incompetent that they were unable to even use google to check if their chosen methods were even remotely sensible…

for bonus points: Whats with all the fuss over blowing up aeroplanes? Theres so many things to blow up in this world, many of them easier and more effective to creating terror than planes and yet airport security barely stops short of anal probing, but you can wander into a shopping centre or a nightclub unchecked…

I’ve had an idea for a blog/zine/thingy that I could do with some feedback from people on…

The idea is to show the sides of issues and systems that people normally don’t see.

For example, with the emergence of blogs and the anonymity, its become far easier for people on the inside of systems such as the police, NHS, education system, restaurants, bartenders, anarchists, strippers to tell the true story of their worlds without the spin of the PR and the bias of the media. I’d like to highlight these blogs and collate some of the best posts to show the best and worst of the worlds.

On many issues there are quite vocal people on both sides, but they’re rarely put together. For example, to do a piece on the Iraq war with articles from the soldiers on both sides, the civilians caught in the crossfire, maybe even some people who understand the struggle in Ireland to give some perspective. I doubt many westeners really understand what its like on the ground in Iraq, living with the bombs and the troops. I for one don’t.

Examples for issues are pirates vs content creators, students vs faculty vs management vs the world in universities, various sections of the government vs everyone that has to deal with that section.

one of the issues I need to solve is that frankly, most people don’t care. (Genocide in Africa? Terrible! Shocking! Oh look, Big Brother is on the other channel). Those that care are so polarized they don’t want to listen to the other side in case they find themselves sympathising with their enemies.

This becomes even more of a problem when discussions start. Discussions=good. Mindless flame wars=bad.

What I want is suggestions for what to do with the idea, issues that you think would make interesting and informative reading, if you think you could write about your job, hobby, world that most people never see I’d love to put your post up.

Again, inspired by the legions of crazy, I feel the need to rant about the basic rules of reality.

When we have differences and argue with people, we have a tendancy to become polarized. Once we take up a position, our egos really don’t like the idea of being wrong, so we tend to end up believing that “we” are “right” and “they” are “wrong”.

One of the most useful lessons I take from taoism is the concept of balance, which is similar to the buddhist Middle Path. Its like believing “never say never” in the same way christians believe in “love your neighbour”. its not just a good idea, its pretty much compulsory if you want to live a happy life.

A real world example I’ve recently hit is anarchists vs the police. I know people on both sides. Some of them are good people, some of them are tossers.

The anarchists believe “all police are bastards”. They’ve had run ins in the past and they haven’t exactly been polite.

The police know the anarchists are all drugged up violent punks. They know this because they’ve seen the drugs and have the scars from the “peaceful protests” to prove it.

And yet…I know both sides and they’re both good people, so what gives? I know people on both sides who would risk their lives in a riot/ex-peaceful protest to save me from the other side without a second thought

The problem is that neither side understands the other, they only see what they want to see so they can keep justifying their actions. Try and explain to an anarchist that a fight is the last thing a copper wants at 2am on a friday night and they’ll look at you like you just licked their mother. Tell a constable that those squatters are fighting for his freedom and he’ll tell you stories of the trail of destruction they can leave.

So go find your enemies and understand them. Work out why they do what they do what they do. Victory comes so much easier when you realise you never have to fight them in the first place.

This post goes out to religion bashing scientists and people who think conspiracy theorists are nuts, because people on both sides of those issues have been giving me all kind of crazy lately…

The point I want to make is that even if something is completely wrong and completely flawed, it can still be just as important as whats right.

Take for example, the concept of a centre of gravity. You can measure and predict the centre of gravity of an object, you can change where it is and how it affects things, but you can rip apart the world and never find one. The centre of gravity doesn’t exist, but it’s there nevertheless.

We hit this same thing in the taoist concept of Chi. You can do all kinds of scientific studies to prove chi doesn’t exist, but when a tai chi instructer focuses his chi and pushes you so hard you bounce off the opposite wall, that won’t be much consolation. One of the great things about taoism is that even if you don’t believe it literally, as a metaphor it still works. Chi is a great way of getting your mind to understand how to move muscles better. Its damn near impossible to conciously control your muscles, but as a metaphor, chi helps you feel the kinetic forces in your muscles, the blood in your veins and the spinning wheels in your mind to help you deliver a more powerful punch, a stronger stance and a better grip on reality.

But what does all this mean in the real world?

It means that sometimes you have to give up on trying to be right on principles all the time and learn to relax and accept, allow and use what you disagree with to make your world a better place, solve your problems faster and easier.

Even if God doesn’t exist, religion can provide meaning to life that science has yet to do, conspiracy theorists rant about the new world order that rules our life without us knowing and even if they are just crazy, we need to crazies making noise and asking awkward to keep the government on their toes so the conspiracies don’t come true.

look at the crazies, the ones you oppose and ask if either of you are really getting doing what you claim to be doing or getting too distracted by being “right”.

Sometimes you need your enemies more than you realise…

reply with comments (especially if I completely failed to make sense) and arguaments!

http://www.badscience.net/2008/06/all-time-classic-creationist-pwnage/

Biologist Richard Lenski recently published a paper describing the emergence of new traits in bacteria (they evolved the ability to metabolise new food sources when kept in an environment without food they could already metabolise). Andrew Schlafly, founder of that paragon of scientific endeavour Conservapedia [1] [2], got very upset by this and demanded to see the evidence. Lenski responded quite politely, but after further demands, threats, and insults, replies with an impressively snotty letter.

[1]

He’s also, apparently, teacher of “one of the largest homeschool classes in the country”; isn’t that a contradiction of terms? When you’re teaching 58 kids, that’s not homeschool; that’s actual school; presumably, the claim to be “homeschool” is to avoid the necessity of teaching the kids actual science.

[2]

Because we wouldn’t want people to actually correct Conservapedia, it’s actually very difficult to get to edit a page, despite the fact that it’s a wiki; for example, the page on Phyllis Schlafly, mother of Andrew, is locked, preventing people changing the statement from the (true but inaccurate) “a fraction of people present protested her honorary doctorate” to the more-accurate “a third of people present, etc.”; this despite that the numbers in question are in a news report cited elsewhere in the article. Hurray for selective blindness to the facts!

I’ve completed two games to 100% this weekend, Lego Star Wars II and Lego Indiana Jones.

For Lego Star Wars II all I had to do was to complete the Super Story modes on each film which basically means playing through the entire of the story mode again except you get timed. I was under the impression that because the best time was defaulted to 1 hour that if you took longer you wouldn’t get the associated golden brick. This meant that I was restarting the Super Story mode if I felt I took too long on a level. I finally decided to play it all the way through to see what times I was currently getting and then found out that the under 1 hour completion time wasn’t mandatory. So off I went to get the last golden brick in Return of the Jedi which allowed me to complete the spigot outside the cantina which spews studs so I could finally afford the multiplier extras in the shop.

This Friday I got a copy of Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii. It is very fun and I spent the whole weekend playing it finally completing it at 100% on Sunday evening. It’s a fun game and like the Star Wars II Lego game you play through the original three films collecting characters, minikits and posting parcels (which unlock the extras).

Unlike the Lego Star Wars in the Indiana Jones Game I found it much easier to get the treasure multipliers. There was also a sub quest that unlocked Han Solo which involved finding Star Wars characters hidden in the levels. Here’s where I found 4 of the 5 characters (can’t remember the last one)

• Princess Leia I found in a detention cell in the Temple of Doom (ladder down a cliff face, metal barrier to blow up, nazi needed for guard)
• Chewbacca - desert city in Raiders of the Lost Arc, door is behind where you find the vehicle which you use to smash the gate near the end of the level (door opened by academic, need short person)
• C3PO in the first level of Raiders of the Lost Arc next to a minikit.
• Luke Skywalker - found hanging by feet in snowy cave down a cliff face in ‘Into the Mountains’

Also if you are on the level battle on the bridge the minikit detector will make it appear that there are two minikits beyond the gate just before the end of the level. I think what it’s actually showing are the two minikits hidden in the very beginning of the level, one requires you blow up a metal fence, the other requires you outrun the water.

I liked it better than Lego Star Wars II because you only needed to get the “True Adventurer” (like the Star Wars “True Jedi”) once per level rather than once in story mode and once in free play. I also liked that there wasn’t a Super Story Mode which had to be completed for 100%.

I’m a little amazed that, after eight years of Bush, there’s actually the possibility that the USA will have a presidential candidate who doesn’t suck. I’m still not convinced that Obama would be a better president than Clinton, but either one of them is fine by me (or, even better, either one of them with the other as vice-president).

At nearly Two and a Half Thousand views it's this image from my Flickr account, which made an appearance on TUAW:


Flickr Link

TUAW Story, which links to the Picture

[UPDATE 1 - The Picture's hit count is now pushing 3,200]

[UPDATE 2 - The Picture's gone up to 3,600, and this picture has over 1000 hits]

Just a Quickie Today (Or a shameless plug for a new Business in Plymouth). I was in the recently opened Computer Exchange and to my delight, sitting on the shelf was an original copy of one of favourite games on the original Playstation, the afore mentioned Ridge Racer Type 4.

For One Pound.

So, with Giddy Delight, I proceeded to the desk, and quickly ran home with my new purchase. I admit, the game has dated a lot, but the soundtrack is still as great as I remember and the stories of the Race team mangers are still as compelling as ever.

Proper Blogging to resume soon!

Chris

From Twitter Blog:

Masai tribesman Joseph Kimojino (@maratriangle on Twitter) is using Twitter as one way of raising awareness for the Mara Triangle wildlife park. For more information, read Life, Death and Twitter on the African Savannah.

Very cool indeed. He’s also on Flickr and has a blog.

University Organiser

• Organise University Life within Facebook
• Connect with People on your course
• Track Coursework Deadlines, Communicate, and Collaborate on group work
• Integrate with an online office application (e.g. Google Docs)
• Publish Important events and information in the News feed.

What do you think? Leave a comment or even @thisisthechris me on twitter.

Chris

Wow, what an astonishing lot of bollocks this Cardinal Rouco has come out with. Typically for a Catholic spokesman [1], he manages to make a lot of claims (about how wonderful and perfect “God’s law” is) without even a shred of evidence — after all, why would he need evidence? He’s speaking on behalf of God!

I especially love the nonsense he’s spouting about “biological limits”. Though he’s far from clear, I think he’s trying to make two points: a) that legal rights for gay people have come about because of “gender ideology” — feminism? — and b) that “gender ideology” is somehow opposed to human biology. I can’t be bothered commenting any further on this bigot.

[1]	I actually wrote spokesperson there without thinking, but I doubt the Catholic church has many, if any, women who speak on its behalf.

[A] Podcasts
[B] Listen to..

In the First of a new series of continued internet whorage, a list of all the podcasts I Listen to (or Watch, in some cases)

• Best of Chris Moyles
• Best of YouTube
• Cool Hunting Video
• The Digg Reel
• Diggnation
• Digital Planet
• Doctor Who: The Commentaries
  
• Experiment of the Week
• The Kojima Productions Report
• LOGin - The TermiSoc Podcast
• MacBreak Weekly
• Mahalo Daily
• New Yorker: Fiction
• One Life Left
• Pets
• PlayDigital
• Radio One Chart Show
• Radio One Mini Mix
• Rocketboom
• Science Weekly
• Skeptoid
• Stephen Fry's PODGRAMS
• Tech Weekly
• this WEEK in TECH
• Tiki Bar TV
• The PSP Show
• Windows Weekly

I Haven't Yet added links for all these (that'll follow in an update), but they should be 'Googleable' just now.

Enjoy

Chris

If you’re ever in plymouth late at night and feel like really creeping yourself out, head to the bombed out church next to the shopping centre late at night.

Its really well lit, which just adds to the creepyness, screwing with your night vision enough to give anything that might want to eat your soul (or your wallet) plenty of shadows to hide in. Its in the middle of a roundabout and with all the windows long since blown out during the war, you can just hear random snatches of voices from people over the sound of the cars, giving a ghostly haunted voice effect.
The whole place was bombed out during world war two, taking the windows, roof and furniture to a better and temporarily airborne afterlife. Open plan is not the word to describe it. Exposed would be more accurate. As in the military definition of exposed. As in the kind of exposed where your animal sith sense is constantly checking ever corner and expecting something to sneak up behind you.

also, there was a complete set of womans clothes strewn about in there…I can easily imaging why they came off, it seems like a good place for some late night hanky panky, but the question is why didn’t they put them back on afterwards?

Wrote a script to display Twitter updates via notification-daemon (used quite heavily in Gnome, I believe, but I’m not sure about KDE). It’s written in Python, and it’s here.

Dan fell over.

Rick Santorum has been whinging about the recent California Supreme Court decision to legalise same-sex marriage:

The California judges also ruled, for the first time in American legal history, that sexual orientation is just like race.

The California court just declared that those of us who see marriage as the union of husband and wife are the legal equivalent of racists. And openly racist groups and individuals can be denied government benefits because of their views, including professional licenses (attorney, physicians, psychiatrists, marriage counselors), accredited schools, and tax-exempt status for charities. Have fun with the rest.

So, he’s upset that the Roman Catholic Church (and others, obviously) will be subject to legal sanctions if it continues to spread anti-gay hate speech. How sad for it. If the RC Church was openly racist, it would be subject to these sanctions; as it is openly homophobic it should be too. While we’re at it, why not force it to be an equal-opportunities employer, too — where are all the female priests?

Bigotry is not okay just because your God says it is.

Ellen Degeneres interviews Sen. John McCain; he’s completely unable to give a reason why gay people should be allowed to marry other than “it’s my belief! you can’t argue with my belief! lalalalala!”. (To be fair, he does support civil unions and opposes the banning of same-sex partnerships, but that’s sort of the point — he supports everything except calling it marriage, with no readily-apparent reason).

The F-Word talks about why viability shouldn’t matter. It’s argued that forcing a woman to carry an unwanted child to term is exactly like forcing someone to donate an organ against their will — no matter how worthy the recipient, the donor always has the right to refuse to use their body to support another person’s life.

Some whisky company came out with adverts promoting stone-age gender roles, and this was the response, including things like “your mom built fighter jets”, “your mom played sports”, and “your mom was a pilot”.