A million pointless candles

A useless cash-in on the craze for mawkish sentimentality and denial.

Applied maths case study

Who says probability theory has no bearing on real life?

Archbishop Cranmer, although a dab hand at being burned alive, is a relative newcomer to UK blogging. He must be good, as he’s been namechecked in the Sharpener’s New Blood Roundup – although he’s perhaps a little extremist and religious for my taste.

However, one Cranmer post is so monumentally weird I felt the need to tackle it head-on, not for its ideological slant (arguing against faith-based positions is among the most futile tasks known to humanity) but for its relationship with fact – and also because it gave me a chance to use economic data to address a couple of bizarre EUphobic myths. Read More

It’s now a few days after Lords Reform Day and Paul has already written another, well-worth-a-look piece here, which makes this attempt to fulfill my pledge by writing a related article a little late. Still, hopefully it’s of some relevance and interest…

The idea behind Lords Reform Day and its sponsor organisation, the Elect The Lords Campaign, is fairly obvious: to the extent that we have any kind of checks and balances on the laws passed by our combined executive-and-legislature at all, they’re provided by a mottley crew of retired worthies, ex-MPs and political donors (plus a couple of bishops for good measure); and this doesn’t make for representative government.

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The BBC website has a reasonably sensible, if not impartial, article by a sports shooter about guns – specifically, on how they’re fun and basically safe, except for the very rare occasions when evil people get hold of them and go massacring.

Unsurprisingly, the ‘have your say’ comments are full of the usual suspects saying things like “aha, you said ‘except sometimes’. How dare you expect even one innocent person to die for your fun?” This argument is generally hard to refute without sounding callous, but it’s wrong.

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Google Trends is rather an impressive new piece of software. In the style of late-90s favourites like Search Voyeur, it allows you to see what other people are hunting for. But instead of merely providing a list and allowing you to marvel at others’ illiteracy and perversion (these days, a function that Sitemeter is admirably capable of providing instead), it allows you to track the historical popularity of different words – and hence concepts.

For example, the concept of EUrabia, which gained popularity last year, is the serious belief, expressed by people who aren’t obviously insane, that Europe is soon going to become an Islamic or possibly Islamist (you can’t really expect these types to understand the difference) state. Fortunately for all concerned, it seems like the world has lost interest in this concept: searches for ‘EUrabia’ peaked in late 2004, tailed off throughout 2005, and have been negligible for a good six months. Read More

The BBC has got into bed with Microsoft to provide its planned “download everything BBC TV shows for a week after the event for free” service.

The BBC and Microsoft? Surely the BBC is a public service organisation, digital rights management (DRM) is evil and Microsoft is worse? Why not use Ogg or some similar open-geek format? We’ve already paid our licence fee… surely this goes against the free-to-air ethos that the Beeb stands for?

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Richard Dawkins’ new show is on tonight. The Root Of All Evil is entertaining. If you believe yourself to be intelligent-ish, and are somewhat anti-fundamentalism and pro-science, it’s obviously a joy to watch a well-read academic who understands logical argument debate a succession of hardcore religious types who have little concept of logic, argument or evidence.
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London isn’t like other cities. It’s better than all the others put together, for a start. More importantly, like the one or two places that could mistakenly be considered its peers, London depends on trains and buses to survive, while cars are an irrelevance. However, our creaking public transport network is held together by gaffer tape. This is partly because the government prefers to squander money on Celts, but also partly our own fault…
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I’m going to start my Lords Reform Day post on something of a dissenting note: I don’t believe that an elected House of Lords would be the best possible second chamber for the UK. Democracy has little merit beyond its empirical tendency to produce less awful governments than most real-life alternatives. As opinion polls regularly highlight, the popular will is something that should be kept well away from the corridors of legislation.

Democracy has less dire consequences than other systems because public outrage generally prevents governments from doing too many utterly egregious things, whereas tyrants can do whatever they like under the impression that it’s beneficial. This hardly suggests a Mystical Wisdom of the People, merely that the people don’t much like Stalinist or Mugabe-ish behaviour… Nonetheless – no, not even nonetheless, because of that – it’s vitally important that the House of Lords should be reformed.
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