Would any kind person out there have a copy of last Friday’s Green Wing on video they could lend me? I had an accidental-taping-over-disaster before we had watched it.

Other formats are acceptable too, of course.

Thanks.

I’ve had the devilgate.org domain for nearly two years, now. But it has taken me this long to actually start using it for more than a source of throwaway email addresses.

At last, though, I’ve put some readable stuff up there. So far it’s just a main page and a blog. In time, though, I might put up some stories, pictures or other material.

WordPress, which I’m using for the blog, has a nifty little plugin that allows you to automatically crosspost to LiveJournal. So you should shortly start seeing posts here with links back to original posts over there.

Pop on over and have a look; or why not add the RSS feed to your favourite feed reader?

To summarise, then: the site; the blog; the feed for posts; the feed for comments.

Technorati Tags: blog, personal site

I went out for a drink with some people from work last night.  We went to a place in Covent Garden called The Porterhouse.

It’s a very curious place.  It extends across three or maybe four floors.  Or maybe only two, but with lots of mezzanines.  It’s full of alcoves: everything, it seems, is an alcove.  I have no idea, for example, how many bars it has.  And in fact, I didn’t go to the bar all night.  That, though, is because they have something that is remarkable in a British pub: table service.

Yes, it’s very strange.  waiters come and go, collecting glasses and trays, but also, when asked, taking orders and returning — very quickly — with trays of beers.

So I spent the night drinking Caledonian 80/-.  A taste of home, perhaps, but a) it was bottled; b) it was too cold to taste right; and c) it’s been such a long time since I drank it back home that it hardly counts.  And I always preferred McEwan’s 80/-, anyway.  Oh, and pizza.  They serve food, too, and claim a woodburning oven.

It was a good night.  But that pub.  You know the old computer game that used to say, “You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all the same”?  It was a bit like that.  But mostly it reminded me of the house in HP Lovecraft’s ‘Dreams in the Witch-House.’

Oh, I suppose the angles weren’t really that wrong; that the walls were quite straight. But there were definitely too many rooms, and bits, and stuff: if not angles.

But not cards, for a change. I was listening to a programme (essentially a religious one) on Radio 4 recently, about ‘Intelligent’ Design (ID).

It was the second time that day that I had heard SETI pulled in to support ID. The thesis seems to be that, since SETI searches for meaningful information hidden within random noise, it is “the same as” the search for a designer amidst the seeming randomness of the universe. The proponents of ID think that the complexity of the real world means that there must be an intelligence behind it. But the main thing these people need to learn is that complexity does not equal design.

Or not necessarily, at any rate. They are doubly confusing themselves — and others, who may be unsure about the realities of science and the tricks of creationists. They look at the search for order among the chaos, and liken it to — really, identify it with — the belief that order lies behind the chaos.

Let’s put it another way. SETI searches through random noise and attempts to find ordered data, all the while aware that the ordered data may not be there; indeed, to date it has not been. It further proposes that, if ordered data is found, then that may imply that there is an intelligence behind it.

The ID proponents observe the order in the universe and assume that there must be an intelligence behind it; they also see the randomness in the universe, and jump to the conclusion that SETI is doing the same thing as they are.

It is arrant nonsense, of course, but then ID is, from start to finish. Oh, don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing in the laws of physics, chemistry or biology that precludes the existence of a designer, a creator, a supreme being: a deity, in short. As, indeed, there is no need for science to be incompatible with belief in, or the existence of, a deity. Back when I was a Catholic, I remember one of my primary-school teachers explaining that, while the Bible says that God created the world in six days, a day to God might be a million years to us. Don’t take it literally, in other words.

And therein lies the problem: creationists and believers in ID (who are just very thinly-disguised creationists) take the Bible (though which version, I have to ask?) literally.

Which is a bit like taking any of humanity’s great history of myths literally. Why stop with the Christian Bible, and their strange god, “God”¹? Let’s take the Norse gods literally, for example. So the next time you’re caught in a thunderstorm, remember, it’s not just the random discharge of static electricity in the atmosphere: Thor is after you.

Or the Greeks: they had some great ones. When you light the gas to cook tea tonight, say a prayer of thanks to Prometheus, OK?

Oh look, we seem to be back at my latest Book Notes post, American Gods. Which makes sense, since it is American fundamentalist Christers who want to foist their god on the rest of their country — and by extension, on the rest of the world. By the not-so-subtle device of using the law to control what can and can’t be taught in schools. What is wrong with these people? Have they never heard of the separation of church and state?

Fortunately the US courts seem to be holding the line of sanity so far; but oh my non-existent, speculative all-powerful creator-figure: I hope we don’t get a branch of the Christian Taliban trying to introduce this shite into our schools over here. I have children to bring up, so I have a direct interest in these things.

Let’s not teach our kids to be stupid.