Other July celebrations...

I won't be queuing tonight for the seventh and final (?) release of the Series That I Shall Not Name. While I haven't particularly enjoyed the last few installments, my copy will eventually be shipping from AmazonUK, to match my earlier editions. I'm not that bothered with reading it right now, any more than I'm terribly concerned about seeing the fifth film. They're ubiquitous: it will happen, probably whether I wish it to or not. In any event, I've many other things to read, including John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience, The Essential Spike Milligan, and Lawrence Durrell's elusive second novel, Panic Spring, of which my local library has managed to find a copy, thus saving me a tidy packet (until I decide that I must have it at any cost)...

However, something struck me today, when the conversation in a meeting turned to a certain juvenille warlock. One of the engineers present, a dejected looking steatopygous sort in its late 20s or early 30s, said "Don't plan on getting any sleep tonight. Be in line waiting to buy the new H___ P___. Reserved mine."

Now, in some circles, it's fashionable to besmirch the good name of the bespectacled little git-wizard (to borrow a delightful phrase). And I've both thought and agreed with others in the past that there's something slightly odd about people who are purportedly adults, self-consciously holding up their copies of the latest adventure on the train or the bus or in the cafe and trying to look unselfconscious about it. It is, I would assert, far easier to look unassumingly intellectual caught reading a book by Gore Vidal or Henry Miller or Richard Dawkins (to name but three at random). Nevertheless, I wondered: is it possible that these are well-informed citizens, who just happen to have been caught up in the story? Were they otherwise intellectually bright and shiny and active?

So I posed a question. It's the 20th of July, what famous anniversary is it today? Anyone? And when I was met with five blank stares, and one suggestion of "was it Victory-in-Somewhere Day?" (which is wrong, Victory-In-Somewhere Day isn't for months yet), I had to gently say: "It's the 38th anniversary of the moon landing."

Now I grant you, right out of the box, that the sort of mind which would be aware of the anniversary of the first time a human being put foot on another world, even one so close and familiar as the moon, is probably uncommon. Thirty-eight years later, yes, it's an unfair question. I know that. This post might even qualify as a straw-man arguement, or a self-indulgent and self-fulfilling prophecy, but I still find it interesting. The excitement engendered by the Apollo era is not what it was, and I can understand that. The trivialisation of space travel has been the death of manned space flight - instead of making it seem to be a grand adventure, it has become something more of a seemingly extravagant expense. The idea of useful research being done on a ramshackle construction like the ISS is slightly risible (although we can hope that much good comes of it), and practically light-years away from the elegant wheel projected in "2001" - how optimistic we were, then! And how quickly optimism dies: how quickly the deeds of the past are forgotten for the transient pleasures of a regression to childhood and some mediocre prose.

So no, I won't be queuing tonight. P___-mania will not take me, although, as I've said, I'll read the book eventually, if for no other reason than to look for editing and grammar mistakes (because, let's face it, I'm clearly a killjoy). But instead, tonight I will be outside, pointing a telescope at the distant face of the moon and thinking of what was... and what might have been.

Undermining the Attack Mice

After an eventful few months, I'm back to writing and hoping to carry on with the blog. More on recent events later, in the meantime, here is my review of that least entertaining of mendacities, the "ID the Future" podcast:

"Singularly unimpressive... and breathtakingly banal. Although Luskin & Co. are great pretenders to liberty and free inquiry, there is an almost audible smirk to be heard in each of these recordings (along with the rather disagreeable theme music). While the DI podcasts are interesting exercises in how best to construct dishonest polemics and logically flawed arguments, and therefore useful for those who need to create the latest "squirrel-killers", as we used to call them in secondary-school forensics, please don't confuse DI method with scientific method. There is nothing of science at the Institute, unless it is the science of deception and chicanery, as the previously mentioned Wedge Document all too clearly indicates. This should be easily detected: consider the level of proof demanded of science by those who create this effluvium of drivel. Is it not curious, when one takes into account that similar proofs are not demanded of their own few supporting texts; Behe, Dembski, Johnson, the Bible... ID proponents are fond of demanding greater and greater levels of experimental evidence from the work of real scientists (and let's be clear, science repeatedly rises to that challenge), while producing neither experiement nor predictive hypothesis of their own. Their answer to any seemingly insoluble conundrum in any science? "It must have been the Intelligent Designer." They routinely resurrect the "god of the gaps", because they have nothing to show for their effort, and at last "Intelligent Design" is revealed for what it is, old-school creationism in a cheap frock, wearing too much rouge and self-consciously adjusting her over-permed hair? Creationists and ID-ophiles allow no room for questioning of their position, while, painful as it might be, any given science can be turned upside-down overnight by verifiable, reproducible evidence that directly controverts a given tenent of any scientific theory. For example, finding a genuine fossil hominid in the midst of the Burgess Shale would up-end the foundations of several sciences at a stroke, but once it could be verified and agreement reached by a majority of the scientific community, it would be accepted, and science, not to mention scientific understanding, would change.

"At the end of the day, I can't help but feel a slight pity for people who are so deluded by a cobbled-together patchwork of nomadic superstition about the last of the angry sky-gods, and who refuse to submit themselves to the most basic philosophical self-examination. How pleasant it must be to be free of that self-doubt which afflicts the rest of us, the naturalists, scientists, non-theists, philosophers, and anyone who cannot accept the dogma of a single, inflexible position. Nevertheless, they are at liberty to believe whatever nonsense they like, right up to the point when their attempts to subvert education and curricula impact me, or my children, or anyone else who rejects their attentions. Let them witter on in darkness and miss the splendour all around them of the natural world and the universe if they wish - it's their loss."

As the casual reader can probably tell, I'm not half annoyed by these people. We'll see how long the fervour and enthusiasm last this time... For those wondering about the title, it's a reference to comments made in another blog which some people might have read before...