Saints Alive!

You know what? You don't cure cancer with magic. You cure it with medical procedures. You take thousands of scientists, thousands of doctors, and they work on the problen night and day for decades and decades. They train for the best part of a decade, they devote their lives to chipping away at this monstrous problem, they spend their whole careers doing it, just so they can pass a few, precious scraps of new knowledge down to the next generation of scientists and doctors.

And, after decades of intense, worldwide recearch, the results start to come. When I was a child, cancer was a death sentence. If you had it, you asked, "How long have I got?" These days, the rate of curing cancer is about 50%. If you get it you ask, "Can it be fixed?" It's one of the triumphs of our age that we have come so far in fighting this hideous disease.

So it really pisses me off that the Catholic church, has canonised an Asutralian woman because she cured cancer by a miracle. A miracle! Those fat cat bishops, controlling vast fortunes, running an organisation that has only last week scandalised us all by its sexual abuse of small children in Germany, have said that this woman cured cancer by magic!

Magic!

Well, I'm sorry. You don't cure cancer by magic. You cure it by applying brilliant minds and inconceivable amounts of hard work and resources for year after year after year. That's how you do it. You don't cure cancer by magic! And it's an insult to all those men and women who have worked so hard all their lives to even suggest that you do.

If the Catholic bishops really want to do something about cancer, they should give up their silly mumbo-jumbo canonisation rituals, stop talking crap about magic cures, sell some of their staggeringly huge assets, and invest the money in cancer research. That might actually help someone.

TimeSplash Twitter Tour Starts Now!

The TimeSplash Non-Stop 24-hour Round-the-World Twitter Tour starts soon. The process is complicated but all you need to know is that I'll be in your timezone between 7pm and 8pm during the next 24 hours. To shout out to me as I go by, send me a tweet on Twitter.

This is my Twitter ID: @graywave ( http://twitter.com/graywave )

I'll be using the hashtag #timesplash if you'd like to follow the whole thing (and have lots of stamina and a very high tolerance for me saying "Hello New York", "Hola Argentina" "Gruetzi Switzerland" and such for the next 24 hours.)

Don't forget to shout. And if you know people in odd places, tell them to shout out too. I've a feeling some parts of this are going to be very lonely :-}

My First Novel is on Sale Now!

At last, it’s February 15 New York time, and Once Upon a Bookstore, my publisher’s own online bookshop, is selling copies of TimeSplash.

Get your copy here

Please, everybody, pass on this message. Retweet it, Digg it, Stumble it, and tell all your friends on Facebook. You can even mention it to people in real life, if you like.

And, if you do me the great honour of buying it and reading it, I’m dying to hear what you think of it.

(If you haven’t heard me talking about TimeSplash before and don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the website of the book that tells you everything you will ever need to know. And if you find you need to know more than that, there is also a blog of the book. Enjoy!)

Irish Government Throttles Free Speech

Hello, and welcome to 2010! Or should that be 1010? I'm a bit confused. The Irish government has just extended its blasphemy laws, you see, taking the world just a step farther back towards the Dark Ages.

Fortunately, not all the Irish are insane - just the government. Some are actively opposing this new law and the constitutional basis for it. Have a look at the Atheist Ireland website for more information, including their deliberate attempt to provoke a prosecution from the government.

You know, I really hate people telling me what I can't say - especially governments and religious nuts.

And, just in case you thought the people who introduced this new law were sincere, God-fearing fundamentalists, here's a quote from Micheal Martin, Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, opposing attempts by Islamic States to make defamation of religion a crime at UN level, 2009:

“We believe that the concept of defamation of religion is not consistent with the promotion and protection of human rights. It can be used to justify arbitrary limitations on, or the denial of, freedom of expression. Indeed, Ireland considers that freedom of expression is a key and inherent element in the manifestation of freedom of thought and conscience and as such is complementary to freedom of religion or belief.”

Governments and hypocrisy, eh? Who'd have thought?

Hope For Intelligent Kids Who Are Unhappy

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post called "Why Ordinary People Make Intelligent Kids Unhappy". It was immediately, and still is, one of my most popular posts. It is clearly an issue that concerns many people. Yet, looking back, I see it is a post in desperate need of a follow-up. The original post merely analyses the problem and offers no solace, and certainly no solutions. Most likely, many of the people who read the post felt worse after reading it rather than better. That's OK, I suppose. The world isn't here to make us feel better. It's just a place we need to cope with, and understanding what is going on in the world can only help us cope better. However, there are some things I could say that might make some people feel better, and it's about time I said them.

So here they are:

1. There is hope. I was a bright child. I was rejected to greater and lesser degrees by my family, my schoolmates and my teachers. Being clever doesn't win you many friends. Sometimes none at all. I grew up in a working-class city in the North of England. The people around me were poor, ill-educated and, almost without exception, ignorant. Most of them were also very stupid. Yet I found a way through. I was certainly luckier than many - my mother was bright and supportive, and I got a free, university-level education. I left the place I grew up in and went in search of better places. Eventually I found them. It's a very big world and there are many, many niches in it. Keep looking and you may find yours. It helps the search if you move to a major city.

2. Other bright people can sustain you, even if you never meet them. I'm not just talking about the Internet, here, although it's an obvious place to look for like-minded people. I didn't have the Internet when I grew up, but I had books. Read widely and read good stuff (on- and off-line). You will find that many of the people who became great writers also went through what we did. One of the best moments in my reading life was when I discovered J.D. Sallinger. In his short stories in particular, I often got that heart-stopping moment of recognition when I realised that this man knew my pain. Maybe Sallinger will do it for you too. Most likely it will be someone else. Just one word of advice - especially about the Internet. While it is easy to find fellow sufferers, and wallowing in misery together can be a relief for a while, in the end, you will get more of a lift out of positive, strong people. However bright you are, you're only human and you have the same psychology as we all do. Don't get locked in a downward spiral of self-pity with someone else. You'd both be better off on your own.

3. Work can help. Clever people tend to be good at certain things. They make good scientists, engineers, writers, and so on. Even in less intellectually challenging jobs - as administrators, planners, managers, etc. - they tend to shine. They might not get the promotions, they might not get the big bucks - for that you also need social skills which cleverness does not guarantee - but they do their jobs so well that they earn the respect of their peers. Respect isn't love, it isn't necessarily acceptance, it isn't even kindness, but it's something and it is not to be sniffed at. Respect from others helps you respect yourself - and self-respect helps in many different ways.

4. Don't worry about the meaning of life. There is none. Bright people are their own worst enemy when it comes to seeing through the crap. Sooner or later, you will conclude that there is no god, there is no deep meaning to the Universe, you have no destiny, and, in fact, there is no point to anything at all. That's fine, but you shouldn't let it worry you.

'Purpose', 'meaning', 'point' and so on are ideas that people come up with , they are not things we find in nature. The 'purpose' of the rain might be to make the crops grow, but we all know that is just a semantic confusion. The physical word doesn't have purposes, only people do. In the long term - the next ten billion years, say - nothing about humanity matters at all, not least your own little wants and needs, your hopes and ambitions, your loves and hates. However, we don't live in the long term. We don't live ten billion years. We live tiny, proscribed little lives. We flicker into self-awareness and are gone in a moment.

Yet, to us, in that moment, our own feelings, desires, and purposes are everything to us. And that is important - by definition. We are the creatures who give meaning to the world. We are the ones who provide purpose to the Universe. We are the ones that imbue existence with value. While we live, while we think and feel, we bring this into reality. You and I create the meaning of the Universe, quite literally. It is ours.

So don't feel shy about the purpose of your life. If you want an iPod, if you love the boy or girl next-door, if you have a craving for a swim, or to work in outer space, each of these is, in a very real sense, the highest purpose in the world - because it's yours, right now, and that, literally, is what matters in this otherwise indifferent Universe.

5. Find out who you are and accept it. The biggest advantage of being clever isn't that you can make money, or design cool stuff, or argue everyone else under the table, it is this: you can understand yourself and the people around you. If you don't understand yourself, you will always be doing stupid things that don't make you happy. If you don't understand other people you cannot love them and you will always be doing stupid things that don't make them happy either. It took me a couple of decades of very hard work to get a deep and thorough understanding of myself and to accept who I am, warts and all. It was the most difficult intellectual challenge I have ever faced - the most difficult emotional challenge too - but it was worth it. Well worth it. It requires strict intellectual rigour. It requires ruthless, painful honesty. It may require you to throw out many myths about yourself and your world that you cherish and hide behind. Don't waste that glorious brain of yours. It's caused you a lot of pain and heartache, set you apart, driven people away. Now, for once, get some good out of it. Use it for something that will really benefit you and everyone around you.

6. Never forget what you are. You are a human being. You evolved from ape-like creatures, who evolved from other creatures. As clever as you are, you are still an animal. You have the physiology of an animal and, importantly, the psychology of an animal. The kind of animal you are has psychological needs for the company and intimacy of its fellow animals. You can't fight your own psychology so try not to. Being cut off from the society of people is what is making you feel bad. Going along with that and cutting yourself off even more will only make you feel worse. The smart thing to do is to understand your animal nature and to start organising your life so that its needs are satisfied. I'm not talking about sex and eating and sleep and all those other 'drives' - although they are important - I'm talking about social interactions, social approval, gossiping, sharing rituals, and finding friends. Right now, those things may seem a million miles away from where you are - but that's what all the points above are about, getting yourself into a societal niche where you fit, finding people who like having you around, ditching false notions that will add to your troubles, and becoming so comfortable inside your own skin that you can face the world on equal terms and get what you need from it.

It will always be the case that you are in a minority. Always. But you don't need six billion people to accept you. You can make a great life with just a handful of close friends and family who see the way you are as a desirable quality, not a freakish aberration.

The Price of Christmas

I see that a priest in York, England has recommended that his parishioners steal the things they need this Christmas since no-one else is going to help them out. Is conspiracy to commit a mortal sin a sin too? The theology could get tricky. However, the humanity is plain and simple. The plight of the homeless in the UK - while not nearly so bas as that of the homeless in the USA - is heart-wrenching. No decent person can witness it without revolting against the system that creates and sustains it.

And that system is capitalism.

Christmas may be a good time to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The food heaped on our plates, the mostly-unwanted gifts, the treats and indulgences, the lights and the shiny, plastic baubles, all have to be paid for.

In a capitalist society, the payment is made by the consumer - you and me - from money we get by selling our labour to the people who control the capital. They get their money by selling the product of our labour back to us in the form of meals, plastic baubles and so on. The magic of capitalism is that, by this process, capital increases. Somehow value is added by the act of production. Where does it come from?

It comes from various kinds of exploitation, but two in particular: the exploitation of workers, and the exploitation of the environment. Workers are exploited by not paying them anything like the value of their product would suggest they should be paid. The excess goes to the owners of the capital. These days, when workers in the consuming countries ask to be paid more fairly, their jobs, and the exploitation, are moved overseas to places where workers are paid even less and can be more thoroughly exploited. That this leaves people with no source of income because they have lost the ability to sell their labour, might be seen as a bad thing, but for capitalism it is good, it means that labour becomes a plentiful commodity that can now be bought more cheaply. (This is also one of the reasons why capitalists like population growth.) It means that the workers who were once in danger of earning enough that they were no longer so badly exploited, but who lost their jobs, are now forced get new jobs at lower wages and be properly exploited again. To keep capital growing, exploitation of workers has to be increasingly efficient and widespread. It is called 'productivity'.

Even so, you can only take the exploitation of workers so far before the rate of increase declines. For capital to keep on growing you have to keep pumping new wealth into the system. That's where the environment comes in. Along with people's work, the environment is the source of all wealth. Fuels and materials dug from the ground, animals and plants taken or farmed in the seas and on the land, are the raw feedstock of capitalism. To keep capital growing, the people with access to these resources, must keep acquiring them in ever-larger amounts. The consumption of raw materials by our 'primary industries' is nothing less than the consumption of our planet. With increasing speed, capitalism is taking whatever is usable from the world, using it to fuel growth, and dumping the rest as polluting slag - on the land, in the seas, and in the air. What's more, like the exploitation of workers, the exploitation of the environment must also be driven to ever-greater efficiency.

It is clear to everyone who thinks about these things, that capitalism cannot survive forever - or even for very much longer - without finding more things to exploit. The 'global market' has now, pretty much included every possible worker on the planet in capitalism's web of exploitation. There is plenty of of opportunity for growth there still, but the resource - us - is finite. The environment is starting to show signs of breaking down under the strain. Global warming, peak oil, extinctions of fish stocks, and global food shortages, are all signs that we are using up what is there at an unsustainable rate.

Technology has always been capitalism's friend. The need for more efficient exploitation has always driven technological development. The people who control capital - and the people who depend on its products - are in a precarious position just now. It looks as if the environment might collapse, or run out of key materials, before technological fixes have been found for these problems. We need new places to exploit - the asteroids? other planets? - before this one runs dry. We need ways to keep the environment patched up long enough to bring these new resources online. And, we need more efficient ways to exploit labour (global recessions are good for capitalism, but they do carry the risk of revolution.)

Capitalism is great for the owners of capital, it's not bad for many of the rest of us either (as long as we temper its worst excesses with democracy,) but it isn't a free lunch. In the end, we will have to pay the price for all this wealth.

Some, like the homeless, the people on welfare, and the working poor, already pay that price for us. It is by putting a certain proportion of us in such misery that capitalism ensures the low cost of labour and hence adequate returns on investment for the owners of capital. The suffering of the starving and the homeless in our cities is helping to put the lights on our trees, the iPods in our pockets, and the piles of food on our plates this Christmas.

Is it really so bad if they snatch a can of ravioli from a supermarket shelf in their desperation?

“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” (William Blake)

I don't want to get all hard-nosed and cynical about it but why do people insist that you can achieve your dreams if you just believe in yourself and work hard? I know there are some cases where this has happened, but surely there are a thousand cases for every one of those where it hasn't.

I suppose ideas like this can persist because there is no evidence. How do you run a study where one group believes in themselves and works hard and another group doesn't - keeping all other variables matched between the groups? What's more, 'true believers' in the doctrine can always say of a failed case, "Well, she obviously didn't believe in herself enough, or she didn't work hard enough." So it's one of those irrefutable doctrines. And it simply doesn't square with my experience.

Certainly self-belief and hard work can be a big help when it comes to success, but so can blind luck, physical beauty, great talent, and good connections. Beauty? Oh yes. Trust me, I'm a psychologist. I've seen the studies that show that physically attractive people have more friends, more self-confidence, and are more successful. For men, it is also a big advantage to be tall. Tall men rise higher in life. If I hadn't been so tall and handsome, I might have had even less worldly success!

It isn't even a confusion between necessary and sufficient causes. As I say, working hard might help, but it is neither necessary, nor sufficient, for success. Some of the most downtrodden people in the world also have to work the hardest. That's why they're called the 'working classes'.

Yet some people believe it to be true, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Or do they? Maybe the people who insist that, if you follow your dream, you will, one day, succeed, are deliberately ignoring the evidence because they have emotional needs that won't allow them to accept it. Maybe they say these things because they are too naive or too dumb to be aware of the many cases where they are patently false. A lot of people seem to say it (especially in self-help books and autobiographies) because they succeeded and would like to persuade themselves, and us, that it was their mighty moral fibre, the stuff that kept them believing in themselves and working hard despite all the setbacks, that led to their triumphs.

Here's a little quiz:

1. If you are born in America, work hard, and believe in yourself, are you:
a) more likely to become rich and famous than someone similar born in an African village?
b) more likely to become rich and famous if your parents are already rich and famous?
c) more likely to become rich and famous if you are young, beautiful and talented?

I think people who say that self-belief and hard work are all you need to succeed actually mean well. They're probably thinking of a case they've heard about where someone who was immensely talented and, by hard work and belief in themselves (and with some luck, and, probably a bit of help from some well-off and well-connected friends or family members) managed to achieve their dream. And then they've seriously overgeneralised it to apply to the rest of the world. They don't actually want to buoy people up on waves of false hopes just so that those people can come crashing to earth in late middle age and spend their declining years in a state of bitter regret and depression. At least, I hope not.

My Novel TimeSplash Discussed at the e-Fiction Book Club

The e-Fiction Book Club has very kindly let me guest-blog with them. Jump across to that wonderful site and see what I had to say about opting for electronic publishing for my upcoming novel TimeSplash.

While you’re there, why not browse the site? In a world where mainstream reviewers still won’t review anything but paper, e-Fiction Book Club is providing a great service to people who want to see reviews of e-books.

He who begins many things finishes but few

You know that thing women are always telling blokes about how men can only do one thing at a time while women can multi-task? Well I think I now know why. Women are taught to cook and men aren't.

In the past few years I have taken over all the cooking in my household. Unless there is something very special needed on a very special occasion, I do it all; breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all snacks in between. It's not so bad, really and beats just about every other kind of housework I can think of hands down.

The greatest challenge that I faced as someone who didn't do a lot of cooking before, is synchronising everything. Even fairly simple meals need a great deal of planning to esure that every sauce, side and vegetable is ready at the same time so they can be served together. This means their cooking times and methods need to be planned and synchronised and, before that, the preparation of each item has to be started at the appropriate time. (And, before all that, you have to make sure the meals are all planned and the shopping is all done!)

And, this is the part that really caused me trouble, you often have to look after several parts of the meal, each at a different stage of its process, all at the same time.

At first, this seems like a wild juggling act, but, with practice (I don't know how many thousands of hours of cooking time I now have under my belt - as it were) it gets easier and better co-ordinated. If any of this multi-tasking skill rubs off onto other areas of my life, I suppose I must be getting better at all kinds of things.

But if (the vast majority of) women are expected to master cookery and practice it every day of their lives and (the vast majority of) men are not, it is easy to see where a real difference in multi-tasking ability might emerge.

Picture by nataliedee.com

TimeSplash the Motion Picture

I just wanted to let everyone know that my soon-to-be-published novel, TimeSplash, now has its own website - and its own blog! It also has its own promotional video :-)



And, while I'm here, let me just share this great quote from Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Spot the ridiculous argument he's lampooning.

Sea-Walls and Dykes Are Not The Answer

The Australian government is considering measures that would force property owners close to the sea to give up their properties if threatened by coastal erosion or repeated flooding. It is estimated that about 80% of Australians live by the coast. The figure is not so high for other countries but everywhere faces the same problem: global warming is causing sea levels to rise, possibly by as much as 2 to 4 metres in the next fifty years. Coastlines are being eroded and flooded and it will get worse and worse.

Of course, property owners are incensed. There has been a recent 'sea change' rush to the coast and coastal properties have soared in value over the past decade. Owners believe the government should build coastal defences. Failing that, they believe the government should compensate them in full if it pulls them off their land.

Here's what I think. Anyone moving to the coast in the past 10 years must have been off their heads. Anyone investing in coastal properties in the last ten years has made a truckload of money but now the party is over. We've known for a very, very long time that global warming was happening and that sea-level rises were inevitable. If people want to gamble on global warming not happening then that's fine, but it's a gamble they have lost. Tough luck. Maybe next time they'll buy an ostrich farm.

Anyone who has continued to live on the coast despite the sure and certain knowledge that sea levels are going to rise, is also nuts. How many times have they moved house in the past 20 years? How many opportunities have they had to move inland? And now they want the government (i.e. you and me) to build futile sea defences, or to pay them to move elsewhere?

I don't think so.

A compassionate government should provide rehousing assistance to the feeble-minded or gamblers who end up with nothing. As a nation, Australia needs to build more low-rent housing anyway. But no-one forced anyone to buy investment properties near the beach and throw up monstrous high-rises. No-one forced well-off city-dwellers to grab up coastal properties and build million-dollar houses there, turning every seaside town into a yuppie retirement community.

And no-one can force the tax payer to bail all these gamblers and fools out now their 'investment' has turned bad. Surprise, surprise! Climate change is real. Even at the beach you can't bury your head in the sand forever.

Help Me Out, America

Calling all Americans. I need your opinion on something.

I've written a book and it's going to be published in February 2010. It's a near-future thriller set in Europe. The background to the tale is that the world is just recovering from a very serious depression brought on by us hitting peak oil. The depression, which lasted fifteen years, was worse than anything experienced yet - millions starved, resource wars were fought, governments toppled.

It's a very minor part of the story but it is mentioned that of all the countries of the world, worst hit was the USA. It's dependence on oil and its strongly consumer-driven economy meant that the effect of peak oil was worse there than anywhere. The economy collapsed. Tens of millions were unemployed and most of them were starving. Riots and civil unrest threatened to turn into civil war as an ineffectual government dickered around with fiscal stimulus. Things looked bad until a strong, right-wing government, with fundamentalist Christian roots was elected and immediately took a firm grip of the situation. (Imagine a strong George W Bush, or a Sarah Palin with brains.) Unfortunately, they use their emergency powers and a mandate from a population scared to death about what is happening, to push through some constitutional changes - abolishing the separation of church and state and ensuring that only candidates affiliated to the official church can run for office.

Over the next couple of decades, the new government does, in fact, stop the country from plunging into chaos, but at enormous cost. Opposition parties are banned, many universities - hotbeds of anti-government sentiment - are closed down under the new blasphemy and insurrection laws. The ones that remain are 're-focused' on theological teaching, with the closure of many 'blasphemous' science departments, especially the biological sciences, geology, astronomy, philosophy, and physics. Theology replaces science teaching in schools. Many, many people are arrested and executed for anti-government and anti-religious crimes and the FBI is turned into a feared and energetic prosecutor of the new laws and policies.

Ironically, although peace returns to the streets and Americans are being returned to work and the homes they had lost, the country's prosperity, without the leading edge science and technology that once powered it, has nose-dived. With GM crops and livestock classed as 'abominations', the (future version of the) Internet strictly censored, and other countries surging ahead in the recovery, America is actually receiving massive food aid shipments from Europe and Asia - a fact the Christian fundamentalists in power are suppressing through their control of all media.

OK.

Here's what I need help with. As an American, does this scenario seem so far fetched, so completely unbelievable, to you that you would have a low opinion of a book in which it occurs?

Brazillian Prostitutes Doing Something Special

This article made me smile. It's about a group of prostitutes in Rio who are running their own fashion label called Daspu. The inspiration behind it is an activist called Gabriela Leite, who says, "When my hooker girlfriends parade pretty and proud, they are speaking about themselves and become revolutionaries." Why did I smile? Because it was just so damned heartwarming that these people were taking control and fighting back, even in a small way.

Prostitutes get a pretty raw deal from society. Not only is their work degrading and unpleasant, dangerous and unrewarding, but they are then vilified for providing a service that is in high demand. The Daspu 'revolutionaries' made me stop and think about prostitution and its role in our society.

Ideally, prostitution would disappear forever. It is inherently degrading to women to sell their bodies for money. It is a service that only men with no empathy, men who can only see women as objects could buy. But there are a great many men like that. Perhaps most men are like that. So, while women possess bodies and men lack sensitivity, while we live in societies where the means of a decent living are denied some while being lavished on others, while we allow that goods can be traded for services, prostitution will continue.

Probably the best we can do in an imperfect world is to educate men to have more regard for women, educate women to value themselves more highly, and do what we can to protect women who turn to prostitution. This last, essentially, means legalising prostitution. It is complete and utter hypocrisy not to. Legalised prostitution helps protect vulnerable women from exploiters (again, usually men), it helps protect their health, it can help them move beyond prostitution into other kinds of work, it can help keep them away from drugs, and it helps keep prostitutes away from the society of criminals.

Choosing Books for Children

Someone asking for recommendations for good speculative fiction for children and teenagers got me thinking. As a culture we tend to feed young people the most awful rubbish in this genre. I don't mean books that are badly written or poorly plotted, I mean unrealistic fantasy.

People picking books for youngsters tend to avoid sex and violence, quite reasonably, but will not balk at choosing a book full of unicorns or angels, talking animals and walking trees. Does anybody ever stop to wonder which will do more harm to a young mind, the reality of sex and violence, or the unreality of fantasy and religion? Truth? Or make-believe?

How can we expect children to mature into adults who can understand and cope with the real world if we feed them bizarre fantasy worlds and strictly-censored distortions? As a society we warn parents that TV shows might contain 'themes' - usually meaning the story deals with drug abuse, incest, torture, sex, or some other set of issues that many children could use our help in understanding. Yet there are no warnings for shows that involve magic beings (vampire stories, religious broadcasts, talking dogs, psychics, etc.), vigilanteism (Batman, for instance), or state-sanctioned violence (cop shows, P.I. shows, and war stories).

I'm sure that finding suitable books for children is hard but that doesn't mean we have to feed them the strange fare that currently passes for acceptable. Forgetting the complete abandonment of reality most of these stories represent, just consider the political statements that most fairy stories (and fantasy novels) make about the legitimacy of inherited power, or the complete abnegation of personal moral responsibility implicit in any story involving 'higher powers' (as gods tend to be called in fiction these days) who dictate or enforce moral absolutes.

We can't expect a world full of morally responsible, socially skilled, and politically sophisticated adults if we give our children unrealistic, nonsense to read.

Just for fun...

I don't usually post videos here - in fact, this is the first one. Mostly that is out of consideration to people who have slow Internet connections (for example, Australians using Telstra's NextG wireless 'broadband' service.) However, this one just made me smile and I thought you might like to see it.

It was filmed in Antwerp's central railway station. It features over 200 dancers and is a promotion for a Belgian TV programme.

Australia is Endangering Global Democracy

Just thought I'd point this out in case any Rudd government ministers are reading.

Even children's groups like Save the Children oppose the Australian government's plans to censor the Internet. Since the government censorship plans are ostensibly to protect children, surely this should give them pause.

Or maybe they would rather just go ahead and put their censorship technologies in place and then come clean about the real reason they're doing this? On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't. Their whole attitude seems to be, "Stuff you, Australia, we're going to censor the Internet and nobody can stop us."

Maybe other Western countries should start agitating against this move. After all, once one Western democracy has taken complete control of the Internet and what its citizens can see there (yes, just like China) won't other Western governments want to do the same? Once there is a precedent, it will be much easier for this to happen in the USA and the UK too.

The scary thing is, no-one seems to understand the danger that government-controlled Internet filtering poses to Australian democracy. Why is there no national and international outcry against this?

Letting Marketers Loose on Language

Language evolves. New words are coined; old words change. The end result is the rich and complex lexicon we have today. Some of this growth and change is acceptable and understandable. New words are needed as new concepts arise, as new social activities develop, and as new objects are made. But some of it arises for less acceptable reasons. Sometimes the person who coins a word - and the people who then use it - are ignorant of a word that already exists with the same meaning. Sometimes new words arise from a misunderstanding of an existing word. (Consider the modern use of the word 'showstopper' which has the opposite connotation of the word in its original meaning.) Sometimes a new word arises from laziness (e.g. when people would rather use 'text' as a verb than say, 'send a text message') sometimes from a desire to draw a strained and unwarranted analogy.

In this last category, consider how the suffix '-gate' has entered the language since 'Watergate'. In Australia in the past few weeks we've had a storm-in-a-teacup political scandal the press has dubbed 'utegate' ('ute' being a local contraction of 'utility vehicle' + '-gate' meaning a political scandal). Also consider the experiments underway at MIT to record and analyse the first three years of a child's life in order to track every utterance the child makes along with every utterance it might have heard. This has been called 'the human speechome project' by (a very strained) analogy with the human genome project. It seems that '-ome' is a new suffix which means something like 'scientific endeavour that produces an extremely large and complete data set in some field'.

It is understandable that scientists would want to associate their work with the human genome project. It isn't quite so easy to see why they would coin a word quite so ugly as 'speechome'. It is interesting to look at how we got to this sorry neologism.

The word 'genome', originally meant the 'sum total of genes in a set,' and was coined (in its German form 'genom') in 1920 by German botanist Hans Winkler. It comes from gen, short for 'gene' + om from 'chromosome.' It was Aglicised to 'genome' in 1930.

Looking back, the word 'chromosome' was coined in 1888, also by a German, anatomist Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz. He constructed it from the Greek words khroma, meaning 'colour' + soma meaning 'body.' ('Colour' because chromosomes contain a substance that stains easily for microscopic viewing.)

A recent addition to this family of words is 'proteome'. This is the set of all proteins that can be expressed by an organism's genes in a particular environment, or under any circumstances (more properly the 'complete proteome'). It derives from prote(in) + (gen)ome and was coined by Marc Wilkins in 1994. Notice that the '-ome' suffix has now taken on a life of its own. It is no longer an abbreviation of 'soma' but of 'genome'. It has stared to become like '-gate', a suffix which emphasises a flattering comparison the user wishes to take advantage of, rather than one that contibutes to the interpretation of the word.

And so we come to 'speechome'. This was probably coined by marketing people at MIT within the last couple of years, simply to aggrandise the project which bears its name. Marketing people, like journalists, use language to sell things. They don't care about etymology - or indeed meaning. They have other rhetorical motives for choosing words than to educate or inform. Now that '-ome' is in the hands of marketers and journalists, expect it to move farther and farther away from the sense in which it was originally conceived.

OMG, I'm a Troll !

Yes, me. I just realised it. I jump in on people's blogs with comments that are (somewhat) off topic and (sometimes a tiny bit) rude. I even do it on blogs and to people that I like.

Maybe it's a sign of my extreme old age, or maybe just an unpleasant side to my otherwise-perfect personality. The thing is, I have a number of strongly-held opinions. (No, really.) Sometimes I read things that trigger them and, in an almost reflexive jerk of the fingers, I blurt them out.

Like the other day when a writer I admire did a post on the psychology of how to change people's minds. It was a perfectly unexceptional piece, reporting the research in a nicely balanced way. But I jumped in with a small rant on why people waste their time trying to change society when it all comes to nothing in the long run. (And then some air-head responded, saying he 'fully understood me' and making several other patronising comments which got right up my nose, to which I foolishly responded, and suddenly there was a (rather polite) flame war going on on someone else's blog!)

Then, today, I read another writer's blog and my fingers twitched into action. She had explained part of the 'world' of her new story and it involved mind transfers. These are very common in sci-fi but I have a serious problem with them (i.e. they are intrinsically impossible.) I wrote several hundred words on my obsession before I got a grip and dragged my hands off the keyboard.

That's when I knew. I am a troll. (Hvat's troll nema þat? as the Old Norse might have asked.)

Now I must strive to curb this tendency. The first thing I need to do is to ask myself, every time I comment on anything, whether I'm actually contributing to the discussion or whether I'm taking it into deeper, darker places no-one else wants to go. When the answer is the latter, then I must close the blog of the poor innocent and open this one. For this is where my obsessions properly belong. This is where people expect me to rant and rave. This is my proper place, under the bridges of the data highway, lurking here for unwary travellers.

Good on ya Joanna

I was born just ten years after World War 2 ended. I was raised in Hull in Yorkshire, a major fishing and cargo port and one of the worst-bombed cities in England. When I was a kid, my friends and I played 'Jerrys and English' in the bombed out ruins of buildings still not yet rebuilt. Every adult male I knew back then had been in the army or the navy. All my friends' fathers, and all their grandfathers too. My own paternal grandfather was bed-ridden all the time I knew him because of injuries sustained in the war.

I don't know how kids view war these days. I imagine they don't see it in the way we did. Since World War 2, wars have become shabbier and less honourable. The disgraceful invasion of Iraq makes even Vietnam seem marginally reasonable. Yet everyone I knew as a child was proud of what we did in World War 2. We had stood firm against oppression. We had saved the world from tyranny. We had been brave and strong.

And among all the many stories I heard in those days, of bravery and courage and skill, the stalwart loyalty and fierce bravery of the Gurkhas was often mentioned.

I think, like many other Brits, I was astonished to discover that Gurkhas who had served in the British Army Brigade of Gurkhas had no automatic right to settle in Britain on leaving the army. I was also shocked to discover that a sly deal at the time of Partition had left the Gurkhas with a reduced pension compared to other British Army servicemen.

For some years now, there has been a campaign to achieve better rights for Gurkha ex-servicemen. Small wins have happened from time to time but the big battle - for their right to settle in Britain - has only just been won. After a surprise 'first day motion' defeat for the Government (the first since 1978) the British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, announced that "All Gurkha veterans who retired before 1997 with at least four years service will be allowed to settle in the UK". As Nick Clegg, a UK politician quite rightly said, it was "a victory for decency" and "the kind of thing people want this country to do."

Certainly it is what people of my generation would want, people who heard the admiration and respect in the voices of our forebears when they spoke of the brave and loyal Gurkhas.

But there is still work to be done on the Gurkha's behalf. We still need to ensure that Gurkha Brigade veterans receive full pensions in the UK. But, as 'Gurkha Justice Campaign' lawyer David Enright says, "that is for tomorrow". Today, he and other campaign leaders - including figurehead and active campaigner Joanna Lumley, whose father was an officer in a Gurkha regiment - are celebrating yesterday's tremendous victory.

Not A Twit After All

I'm not saying I'll never twitter again, but I have noticed that I havent tweeted for several weeks now. So the grand experiment is over. It seems I'm not the twittering type...

...unlike millions of others. According to research by A C Nielson from March this year, unique visitors to the Twitter site grew by 1,382 percent year-on-year, from 475,000 in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. Plus, there were another three-quarters of a million people accessing Twitter via their mobile phones and about a million sending and receiving Twitter SMS messages. I guess you could say it has become popular. It all adds up to about 240 tweets per user for the quarter to Feb '09. That's more than 2 per user per day. (No variances were given but I suspect there is a broad spread of usage patterns.)

I averaged just over half a tweet per day i the four months since I started.

Mind you, I picked up some interesting followers, including one young lady whose picture shows her posing in a latex catsuit.

I won't be closing my account or anything but I think I should acknowledge that this is not for me. Honestly, I don't care what someone I barely know in Indiana is having for breakfast, or that their dog just threw up on the carpet. And that @reply feature, where you get to see half the conversation someone you follow is having with someone you don't (about poetry markets in Belgium, or their holiday plans) is about the most useless load of nonsense I've ever seen. You'd think it would be intriguing, wouldn't you? Well, it's not.

Maybe when I've got something to sell, I will start stalking following hundreds of people the way everyone else does. Until then, I just don't see the point.