Year: 2014

Interesting piece because of the suggestion this affects its advertisers, but a large number of twitter users are “bots”.

But by its definition, I’m a bot.

The reason I like Twitter compared to that other useless piece of social media, is precisely because it’s a “channel” whose UI I can avoid using at all costs. Everything I post to or read from Twitter I do as a human, but the feeds are automated from other UI’s. This blog for one thing, outbound posts and with embedded readers on other pages, and more recently Tweetdeck both in and outbound and other WordPress plug-ins. So yes “promoted” tweets sometimes make it into the inbound channel as well as the humanly “followed” tweets. But I can dismiss these. There are no other UI widgets trying to second guess what commercial or “sex” driven content to put in front of my eyes, alongside the user content on my desktop.

Twitter is great because it’s a channel without inherent content.
Please make your business model out of that fact.

After the “Relaxed About Theology” post, I largely drafted this one in response to another twitter exchange involving a tweeter who clearly wasn’t at all relaxed about the religious connections between the Sheldonian and the recent World Humanist Congress (#WHC2014) held there. Having drafted it I decided not to post it, since although he had a point his aggressive motive wasn’t clear, and no-one from BHA or other humanist organisation seemed to have engaged. So maybe better let sleeping trolls lie. Well I discover today BHA did engage – totally defensively and dismissively, so I feel moved to share my view:

@getyourshare1 was making the point that the Sheldonian as a “religious” building was not appropriate as a humanist venue. Of course troll-style, he was making his point with emotive terms like “hypocrites”,  “betrayal”, etc. and making claims that were exaggerating what may (or may not) have been partly true. My initial tweeted response was that 1000 humanists taking over the (ex-religious) asylum had a certain delicious irony to it. But, he responded suggesting the church may have made rent out of the event at the expense of humanism. After one attempt to put a positive spin on it – “OK if that were true, what would you suggest we do about it” (other than hurl abuse)? But the hint wasn’t taken, so I shut up – Monday I think.

Anyway, it seems BHA have as recently as today simply been denying and dismissing his claims. My take is this:

The Church(es) are massive landowners in the UK. The major ancient universities were to a great extent founded by the churches, and as well as having that heritage, if Oxford is anything like Cambridge and Durham, we can be sure the churches still own a great deal of the property with ground rents and covenants and the like where the whole buildings are no longer owned. No doubt the concerns that run the academic institutions as businesses and charities have quite complex relations to their landlords, so whilst the Sheldonian is not “owned” by the church, or any hiring rents paid directly to the church, I wouldn’t be surprised if the church did benefit indirectly to some extent. (Tried to research that out of interest, but very difficult to bottom out the detail.)

What is undeniable however, is that the Sheldonian has religious heritage and a “congregational” layout, not to mention the organ and other religious artefacts, symbols and mottos all over it. Denied by the BHA.

The congregational element of humanism’s congress, and indeed of its Sunday “assemblies”, was one of the features that led Andrew Brown to point out similarities between humanism and a religion. Denied and indeed attacked with ridiculing and dismissive rhetoric by the BHA members.

Clearly not everyone in humanism is Relaxed About Theology, but the worry is that so many voices associated with humanism feel the need to attack or deny it every time some point of contact arises, rather than engage in reasonable dialogue.

[Links to all the twitter tags, handles and tweets deliberately omitted here, anyone following who has interest in reasonable dialogue knows how to make contact. Stoking trolls in 140 character sound bites is not reasonable dialogue.]

[Post Note : a particularly “shrill” denial of any case comparing humanism to religion, as a response to the Andrew Brown piece, posted at almost exactly the same time as this post.]

Sad to hear, but have to agree – wanted to give the artist Imogen Heap a chance – but this review says what I’ve been feeling about her recently.

I first came across her in Jeff Beck’s Ronnie Scott event with Eric Clapton and Tal Wilkenfeld. Some real magic delivery of both a blues-rock standard and one of her own numbers with this stellar “backing band”.

Saw her live with her own “friends” on a tour (in Oslo) 3 or 4 years ago, and found it very self-indulgent, having jolly good fun with whacky musical ideas and instruments – but sorry, not really delivering much entertainment or “soul” to an audience. Maintained an interest – because after all, quality will out – and followed her recent tweets to her self-made promo-videos, and oh dear – none too promising musically. Didn’t write a detailed review, assuming maybe this was a project in progress that needed some space to develop.

It’s like Clive James says – it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing – you can take the creative improv too far. The opening para of Grauniad review by Rebecca Nicholson of the album “Sparks” therefore comes as no surprise:

Imogen Heap‘s fourth record is less a coherent album than a collection of crowdsourced collaborations, generated through methods and techniques that include a running app and a pair of gloves that turns the wearer’s body into a human harp. Sparks was written in a community garden in Hangzhou, China, and in the Himalayas in Bhutan. There’s a song called The Listening Chair that will never be finished, with Heap promising to add a new verse every seven years. If you uploaded images of your footprints to her website, you’ll find them reproduced on the cover. (As fan interaction goes, it’s definitely one up on a T-shirt.) Musically, Sparks is a bit of a mess.

You don’t want to kick a girl when she’s down, but take note Imogen, we know you can do it.

[Post Note : rewatching that could’a had religion / rollin’ and tumbin’ with Jeff Beck – happier times, and Tal’s expression and body language within seconds of Imogen opening her mouth says it all. But do watch Blanket too.]

I’ve often used examples of football events and stories as parables for morality in life in general – if I’d tagged them more carefully you could find them; I’ll dig up a few examples. Anyway, today a great piece by Mark Kettle in the Grauniad, that frankly I could have written myself. Football has got too big for its fancy-coloured boots.

The whole stupid, stretching 10-month juggernaut of Premier League excess is about to grind back into action this weekend — a return that’s about as welcome as a drunk on the late bus home.

Don’t get this wrong. I like football. I always have. I watch a lot of games. I always did. I still have my season ticket and, though I regularly think about giving it up and putting the money to other uses, I’ll be back in the stands again this year too. But without real enthusiasm, at least until the weather gets colder, wetter and darker — when the real football weather begins. The truth is that football is just way too big for its fancy-coloured boots …

The charge sheet against modern football is not difficult to draw up. Too much money. Too many mercenaries. Too little motivation. Too few roots. Not enough skill or nurture. No moral compass.

Still, I guess the counter-example to day is that thankfully, the football arbitrators have upheld Suarez long ban for his (third) biting offence.

Letter in the Telegraph with an interesting list of signatories from the clergy and atheists of many colours. Hat tip to BHA for sharing.

As usual the letter is considered and eminently sensible, if necessarily thin on detail given the broad agreement, but the comment thread is mostly the knee-jerk critics conflating every religious issue they can think of, with a few hopeful people trying to point out the error of their views. Voted a few comments up and down, but didn’t dive into this one, so a few thoughts here:

This is basically a question of secularism.

I don’t believe any “faith-based” schools should be government supported at all. They should simply meet standards for national curricula. Faith-based schools, and indeed all forms of private schooling, raise many issues but this is not what the letter is about.

Faith-based or not-faith-based curricula should include RE “about” religion generally. This is what the letter is about – what that “RE” standard should be – according to national and global standards. The main point – it seems long overdue to recognise that the curriculum should not be tied to the official Anglican religion – “established” religion practically in symbolic name only and important primarily from a national (and international) cultural heritage standpoint. Even the Anglican church itself sees the error in being formally “established”.

The encouraging thing in the letter apart from it’s breadth of support is the implication that theology – understanding what belief means or “the place of religion & belief” – is the core of the agenda, not just some PC value-free cultural history of a balanced selection of specific religions, valuable though these also are.

I hope those signatories that are the formal voices of atheism and humanism ( eg @andrewcopson ) will be open to dialogue about what makes a good belief system, whilst no-doubt rejecting “religious” and “faith-based” labels themselves. Even belief systems wedded to their own definitions of rationality find they need some declared “credo” or basis of values, wherever these come from. They’d need to shed all such declared values if they wanted to reject even the tag “belief system”.

[Post Note : And as I said the key issue is secularism – disestablishment. The above is one aspect of getting our own UK house in order, but this is main issue in so many religious problems around the world. Hat tip to Secularism UK for reminding us of the Boko Haram example – I’m sure you can think of many more.]

‘Tis. ‘Tisn’t. ‘Tis. ‘Tisn’t …. One reason the left / right brain myth persists is because there is of course some truth to it. The problem is the simplistication of reality leading to the wrong myth, one that’s fairly easy to “debunk” as people often do, but one reason the left / right brain myth persists is ….

Some Common Facts …. Sure enough, calling people left-brained or right-brained is just a label for the balance between real thinking-behavioural traits – the wrong part of the myth is that it’s because we predominantly “use” that half of the brain in the label. We use pretty much all of our brain in most “left-brained” or “right-brained” tasks as any neural correlate scans will show (and do show). And of course the brain is tremendously plastic in terms of both development and repair of different physical sites for functional processing – different things can and do happen in multiple places in both halves anyway. OK so that’s debunked the myth that right and left brained people USE predominantly different halves of their brains. Job done ? Well, no.

But There’s More …. Whilst using both halves, the communication between the two halves and the sum-total of the processing that is elevated into our immediate consciousness is controlled (permissively) by the corpus-callosum – it’s practically the only structure that physically connects the otherwise entirely divided halves of our brain. We couldn’t “know” what our brain is telling us without this connection and its connection to our wider nervous and somatic systems. Whatever we think our mind is, it is surely illogical not to recognise that it must involve the integration of all our brain resources. No?

So The Reality Is … What is really being captured in the left/right brain labelling is the relative dominance of the different processing tasks and styles happening in the two halves making it into the integrated whole picture our consciousness picks up through that split-but-connected architecture. The processing happening in the two brain hemispheres provides the whole mind with different views or perspectives. In the same way that there are neural correlate scans that debunk the idea that processing itself is happening in one half more than the other, there are scans of accidental and deliberate lesions affecting the halves and the connecting structures that correlate the lost connectivity to functionality with the thinking-behaviour traits. That is NOT a myth, it’s the true part of the more generally misunderstood myth.

I’ll Need Some Evidence …. All of the above is my paraphrase of what I’ve learned mainly from Iain McGilchrist – and in fact he has a very accessible 15 minute animated lecture that says all of the above much more eloquently than I. If you care enough to argue further about it, then please do also read his deeply referenced work for all the empirical scientific support. The Master and His Emissary is the book for popular science reading, but that doesn’t mean the papers and scientific texts don’t also exist. Don’t dismiss. Do the research. Follow the references.

Let vs right-brained-ness is NOT a myth.
It’s not WHICH halves of the brain are functioning.
It’s HOW the two halves are connected in the conscious mind.

[And my brain ? You’ll find it here. And a zillion more links to the topic here.]

[Post Note : Connectivity of right-brain more dominant in autism?]

Excellent FT Essay by Rosamund Bartlett on Tolstoy and Constance Garnett‘s first English translations. Picked-up from an equally interesting piece by Language Hat.

Apparently the teaching of Sanskrit is controversial in India because of its association with Hinduism, but as the article notes much ancient Sanskrit literature is non-religious anyway.

Part of the Indo-Aryan language group and indeed phonetically rooted in Proto-Indo-European language, it is the root of many. But it’s not a living language, so I can’t imagine anyone is suggesting it’s a language everyone should be taught to read, write and speak. It’s a bit like classical Greek and Latin in the English&European-speaking context. Everyone should be taught something about it, and some should be encouraged to study it for what it is. A “Sanskrit Week” celebration sounds reasonable?