Codified Claptrap

One thing that has always annoyed me is the way that the mass-media constantly misinterprets or misconstrues science and scientific knowledge in order to bring sensationalism to their stories. In The Demon Haunted World, the late Carl Sagan describes how governments and public institutions have also often been guilty of this, such that, in his opinion, some societies have become increasingly scientifically illiterate.

This month's Sci. Am. has a short opinionated article in it by Michael Shermer, that I felt was worth mentioning, about this phenomena with respect to The Bible Code series.

The latest and most egregious example of the (mis)use of science in the (dis)service of religion is Michael Drosnin's Bible Code II, enjoying a lucrative ride on the New York Times best-seller list, as did the 1997 original.
[ Codified Claptrap -- Michael Shermer, Sci. Am., 228:6, p35, 2003. ]

Also, check out Feynman's classic Cargo Cult Science regarding this topic.

Zero Circle

Today I found myself in Waterstones. That was a mistake. I'm such a book junky, I only went in there to look for Barabasi's Linked, but ended up spending an hour just browsing. An hour! Just browsing. Just looking at each and every shelf, seeing what I've read, what I'd like to read and what other people are currently reading. I found myself ooh-ing and aah-ing over the latest fiction and non-fictional delights, thinking of people I know who might read them or might like to read them or might have probably read them already.

There is something about books that you don't get from other media such as the net, the television, the radio, or even the print media. I'm not sure what it is, whether it's because of the physical manifestation of the book itself: information encoded (hopefully in a language that your brain is able to decode) and solidified in large chunks (books are SO digital!). Or is it that feeling of being transported and suspended in the author's own dimension? The ultimate virtual reality. I don't know.

Anyhow, my time in Waterstones wasn't completely wasted. I ended up buying two books (2 for £10 -- Woo-hoo!). I'll tell you more about them later (probably once I've finished them) but in the meantime I just thought I'd share a neat poem with you, that I found in Ten Poems To Change Your Life:

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
[ Zero Circle -- Jalaluddin Rumi ]

Isn't that kewl? Rumi was a 13th century Sufi poet who lived in Afghanistan. I like the way he uses the concept of zero (a largely unknown entity in the West at that time), and the closure of the circle (the Arabic symbol for zero is actually a dot) as a metaphor for a state that is completely neutral. Such a state, he says, will allow you speak with "tremendous eloquence" despite being "mute". "We shall be a mighty kindness," he says. Wow. Good stuff!

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates.

There's a great article by Arundhati Roy in today's Guardian, where she brings together alot of anti-war sentiment.

I didn't much like Roy's God Of Small Things because her prose was so embelished, and this made it hard for me to follow. So I never finished it. But her emotion (and sarcasm!) comes through graphically in this article, which makes it thought provoking and readable, whatever frequency of the war-spectrum you happen to be tuned to. I highly recommend it.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will.
[ Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates. -- Arundhati Roy ]