squarecow

I've made a couple of posts about religion before, and if you read them you'll know that I really don't have much faith (ha!) in people who insist that following their imaginary friend is the only true way to live, or in fact that their imaginary friend actually exists in the first place. Most of the time trying to have a discussion with these people about religion becomes exceptionally circular within just a few sentences. Richard Dawkins does a much better job of going into the details on why it might be that humans have a propensity to invent this kind of shit, and why those people will selectively choose the sections they like from their couple-of-thousand year old books that they insist were created by their god ... even though historically we KNOW they were created by many different men in many different time perdiods and translated and edited based on the politics of the day.

The God Delusion

Anyway, this post wasn't to have another go at religion but point out some nasty violence by a group of people who insist that they are gods chosen people and that they have been given land by him. All too often terrorism is equated with Islam, and Palestine, without actually looking at why those people really might have some legitimate gripes. A politician in this country got into trouble for saying that she could understand why a Palestinian suicide bomber might do what they do. It doesn't make it right, but understanding is the key to finding a solution.

So a 58 year old woman and a 70 year old man are legitimate targets for four settlers to beat up are they? Did god say it was ok? My skin crawls at the acts humans will do to each other, and the feeble half-baked not-taking-responsibility-for-my-life kind of bullshit system they think is ok. Stand up Atheists and proudly proclaim that religion is a mental disorder. But of course we don't, because it is only fundamentalists and nut-cases who think they can convert the world to their belief.

* By the way, as a sideline, do fundamentalist American Christians realise that the Judaism doesn't recognise Jesus Christ as their saviour? So they will burn in hell, according to your belief? If so, why the big support for them. You'd have thought if would be the other way around, with Christianity backing Islam, because they at least believe Jesus was a special person, just like Mohammad.

Blatantly copied from 1000 Comedians:

The Instructions:

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

The Questions:

Mosaic

1 comment

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

Meaningless

I did A-level maths-with-statistics at school and always remember the words of wisdom from the teacher. Whenever you are confronted with a graph (or other scientific metric) in the popular media, take a closer look. Remember the media is often sensationalist and sells more papers with a scaremonger headine, than with a truthful or balanced one. Does the graph have a label and so actually tell you what it is supposed to be about? Are the axis labelled with units? If they are labelled, is the scale linear or distorted? All of these tactics can present what looks, with a superficial glance, to be a really extreme situation when actually the truth is a lot more mundane.

Anyway, with this in mind I opened the local paper to see the headline "Sharp rise in crime at railway stations". The story then went into the figures for various train stations in the region. One of them had a doubling in crime (yes, twice as many!) in just a year. This indeed sounds bad, until you realised it doubled from 2 to 4. Two incidents of crime at a train station that sees a couple of hundred people every day, for over 300 days a year. Interspersed with the crime stats are comments from people using the train stations responding to the headlines, with comments like "I just don't feel safe and am concerned about travelling on my own".

Misleading vertical axis

Lets assume that there are 200 people using the station every day (it isn't a busy train station) and that the station is open for 360 days a year, this means last year there was a 4:72000 (or 1:18000) of you being a person that gets affected by crime here. That seems like pretty good statistics to me.

Oh my god, I'm back. Yes, it's been months. Yes, my computer works just fine now thanks. Yes, the only reason I'm here is because I've got something to get off my chest.

I am a bit of a car snob. I am in the fortunate position of not needing a car to exist. I live in a pedestrian friendly city and within walking distance of all the grocery stores I need. I could also cycle to work, as it is only a half-hour bike ride away. I own a car because I enjoy driving and all my cars have reflected that, from my poor Mini Cooper to my current MX5.

I had the misfortune to be stuck behind the hideous Fiat Multipla today on the way home, and was reminded just how much I think this car is quite possibly the ugliest car in the world. Sure it might be practical and have very clever interior space, but seriously ... have you looked at the outside? It looks like it had an accident, then was put into a crusher and then pulled out just before it was turned into a cube of waste metal. It's as if someone welded the top of a small hatchback onto a sedan, and then used the lights from an estate car to hide the join.

Multipla

And then there's the name. Multipla? What is that about? It's as if even the designers got bored and halfway through the naming brainstorm just gave up. "Well it's versatile, it's spacious, it can be used for many things ... multiple things! We can call it the multi-, er, multi ..., um. Multi-pleugh."

Show us a photo that requires an explanation.

Surfing fish

Look closely at the wave and you can see a shoal of fish, surfing the wave. These fish were bunched up and leaping out of the water ... presumably because there was a predator hassling them. Surfing the wave seems to be another way to avoid predation.

Baiji

From the BBC news site today:

"A freshwater dolphin found only in China is now "likely to be extinct", a team of scientists has concluded.

The researchers failed to spot any Yangtze river dolphins, also known as baijis, during an extensive six-week survey of the mammals' habitat.

The team, writing in the Royal Society Biology Letters journals, blamed unregulated fishing as the main reason behind the dolphins' demise.

But the WWF campaign group said the research was not conclusive."

So I still have tech problems, and after spending many days trying to reclaim the data from my failed hard-drive myself I am resigned to sending it off to a specialist.

Anyway, I was feeling like I had neglected this here blog (1 post for the whole of last month?!? Outrageous) and was wondering what I could post about. It's not that I don't have anything going on in my life, quite the opposite in fact, but that particular subject is private and between me and the other person concerned. So what's left? Well, just I've finished reading the latest Harry Potter book - yeah me and the rest of the world - and had managed to avoid hearing any plot spoilers. What I had heard though was that someone dies, and also that helplines had been set up for the poor distressed kiddies to phone up and talk to a sympathetic ear.

Which leads me to the actual point of this post, and it is about a relatively recent research project into the benefits (or not) of counciling and therapy. The specific research was directed at trauma counciling ... the kind of thing where someone is involved in a massively traumatic experience and then has sessions going over it with a therapist. Common wisdom says that it is wrong to keep things inside, and that sharing your pain helps you get over it. The research though showed quite the opposite, and that patients that attended these sessions on a regular basis became worse ... they never got over the experience because they were essentially being forced to relive it every week. Those that didn't attend the sessions were much more able to get on with their life, whereas those that received the therapy were unable to move on and the traumatic experience remained a big part (and in many became the defining part) of their life. Having to recount and think about the bad things that happened to you, or those around you, just imprints it further into your brain ... whereas trying your best not to dwell on it helps it lessen in importance in your thoughts until it fades away into the 'back catalogue' of thoughts we all have.

So are the words "you need to move on", or "I don't want to talk about it" bad things ... or are they in fact the right course of action? When it comes to certain kinds of experience, it would seem that moving on is definitely the best course of action and not a symptom of denial or delusion.

No, to those that are interested, this post isn't related in any way to what is going on in my life at the moment! My life is full of love and joy, and amazement at how lucky I am to find the kind of person I have. This post comes purely from the Harry Potter link, and my general dislike of the idea of therapy, and that actually most people need to learn the powerful ability of 'just getting over it' and moving on with their life.

... since I rock'n'rolled.

Er, no, since I Vox'd.

I've been having a bad time with computers and technology lately. My living room Shuttle PC is refusing to display on either of my monitors because of an 'unsupported VGA mode' error, despite working happily on them for years. My main PC has decided to blow up and I've managed to get it to boot at least, but it is refusing to acknowledge the second harddrive which has all the important data and personal files. My camera also decided it wouldn't change from 'take picture' mode to 'show picture' mode either, but a swift kick and it at least is behaving now. My TV has also decided that my XBox 360 display looks better if the image is offset by about 6 inches off to the right, and nothing I can do will correct it.

So yeah, that's the excuse for my absence - blame technological failure. I've been told there is a UFO parked nearby and that it is causing massive interference with all electrical devices. With the way things have been going I wouldn't doubt it.

That aside, here's a couple of cool flash games to enjoy:

Castle Wars

Desktop Tower Defence

Dead Bonzai

There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically. "Maybe," the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed. "Maybe," replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "Maybe," answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "Maybe," said the farmer.

There is no such thing as good or bad luck, just the interpretation you give to it and the way you respond to it. You will never know whether something is good or bad without hindsight, and even then maybe you are being analytical too soon. This is something more people need to be made aware of ... spread the word.

Show us something fluffy. 
Submitted by little♫miao.

Meerkat family