no soup, no clouds
Helen’s been obsessing with her new iPod, and with iTunes. Her most recent delighted discovery has been how easy it is to make themed playlists using the iTunes search and filtering functions. In the case of her new Fibonacci Playlist, she had to go and buy an MP3 for number 34.
See how you do: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34…
Try as I might I can’t stop reading Tom Coates at plasticbag.org. He has some thoughtful things to say about the new BBC R3 website and its URL design.
For those of you at the back not paying attention, this is about a careful effort to make sure that the valuable and often wonderful content the BBC makes available remains available.
Managing weblog URLs is a doddle in comparison to the things Tom & everyone else has had to consider. Every episode gets a page, not everything is repeated, date-based URLs won’t work for multiply repeated broadcasts. Should you consider episode numbers? Subject?
They’ve gone for a URL structure that hasn’t pleased everyone but as Tom says, they’re in it for the long haul and really are planning a URL structure to last a quarter of a century. By which time, presumably, Tom’s thoughts and Bach cantatas will appear spontaneously in my head at appropriate moments.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. A what? It’s kept me obsessively refreshing Sharpreader these past few weeks.
Once you’ve registered with del.icio.us you can add sites of interest to your list via a quick bookmarklet you’ve dragged onto your browser’s toolbar. The social thing comes from the fact you can see everyone else’s lists and can consume them as RSS feeds.
To begin with it had a high geek / powerblogger takeup. As it becomes more well-known the signal-to-noise ratio diminishes, of course. It’s still fun for the moment.
Going on a road trip soon, to California, Colorado and Nevada. So I went iTunes shopping.
As Jo (Dr Cavagin), an colleague of Helen from the research unit at the Royal Holloway used to say, Shy bairns get nowt
. So I asked a few psychologists if they’d help out with the Psychowiki and have the ok so far from the fantastic Prof Elizabeth Loftus, Prof Noam Chomsky and Prof Baron-Cohen, with the proviso that they’re all v. busy people.
Loftus has been responsible for work on false memories and devised a wonderful experiment that sidestepped the ethical issues involved in deliberately implanting false memories by persuading people that they’d shaken hands in Disneyland with Bugs Bunny.
Chomsky, of course, has had the most profound influence on Psychology with his devastating critique of Skinner and his paradigmatic description of generative grammar.
Simon Baron-Cohen of the Autism Research Centre has been in the news recently with some exciting work on autism and prenatal testosterone.
Wonderful that these three – and others with any luck – will spare some time and effort to help provide us with content for Helen’s Psychowiki.
Installation of MediaWiki (v1.3beta3) was easy but configuring it to my liking’s a bit more of a problem.
After Helen noticed how high on Google we were for phrases like Freud is Rubbish (1st) and Zimbardo Milgram (1st) she decided we should use the placing responsibly. So we’re setting up a Psychology Wiki for her students.
The fantastic WikiPedia uses the open source MediaWiki, which is written in PHP, which we have installed here. So I’ll be installing it and if it proves to be tricky I’ll include some details here on the problems and how to solve them.
This is why I think I could have some installation difficulties. It’s from MediaWiki’s INSTALL file:
---- \"Classic\" install instructions: ---- THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW ARE OLD AND MAY BE INACCURATE. THIS INSTALL METHOD IS NOT RECOMMENDED, IT MAY RUN OVER YOUR DOG.
State-funded secondary school Emmanuel College hit the headlines when it was discovered that senior staff, including the Head Teacher, promoted fundamentalist creationism.
To teach creationism to children as if it were a serious competitor to science is worse than irrational, it is educationally and morally irresponsible
Dr A C Grayling
Birkbeck College, University of London
In March, 2002 a UK secondary school – Emmanuel College, Gateshead – hosted a creationism conference organised by the international fundamentalists AnswersInGenesis. The conference had the support of the Head Teacher, who said it was not an improper focus
for the school.
The evolution of species through natural selection operating over very long times simply doesn’t happen, say YEC supporters. Starlight was created by God to look as if it had travelled through space for millions of years, although it hadn’t really done so (because the Bible said it hadn’t). Kangeroos and Koala Bears trekked from Mt Ararat in the Middle East to their home in Australia immediately after a worldwide flood 4,000 years ago. Coal beds were laid down at the same time.
In January 2002, AiG publicised a creationism conference to be held in March at Emmanuel, a state school in Gateshead (in the north-east of England).
attempts to reconcile evolutionary theory with the Biblical account of creation strain and distort scripture.
Nigel McQuoid
Head teacher
Emmanuel College
Head Master McQuoid’s support for Young-Earth Creationism shocked people who thought the school should steer clear of what one critic dubbed intellectual dishonesty
. Headmaster McQuoid responded that it was fascist
to suggest that schools shouldn’t consider YEC.
The Guardian newspaper published an exposé of Emmanuel College and of the extreme beliefs held by some teachers there. The Telegraph joined in, as did The Independent and others. The BBC and Channel 4 ran tv news stories about the affair. The British Humanist Society helped organise opinion and sent its letter of concern to the Prime Minister, signed by such luminaries as Professors Francis Crick, Antony Flew, Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert, Colin Blakemore and others.
To begin with it hadn’t been realised that some of the school’s senior staff were enthusiastic opponents of evolution – and opponents, too, of most of modern anthropology, geology, physics and cosmology.
But we discovered that McQuoid and others from the school had published their strange views for all to read on the website of the Christian Institute.
Governors can question science and geography teachers about their treatment of evolution
John Burn
‘Faith In Education’
July 2001
The Christian Institute, based in Newcastle (very near to Emmanuel College) happens to be chaired by Nigel McQuoid’s predecessor at Emmanuel, John Burn. McQuoid and Burn have contributed a number of essays published on the Institute’s website, where you can read McQuoid’s claim:
attempts to reconcile evolutionary theory with the Biblical account of creation strain and distort scripture
The Institute used to publish essays by others from Emmanuel College but it removed them from the website when the school made the headlines. A spokesman for the Institute said at the time that the essays had been removed temporarily. They haven’t reappeared.
Note every occasion when an evolutionary/old-earth paradigm (millions or billions of years) is explicitly mentioned or implied by a text-book, examination question or visitor and courteously point out the fallibility of the statement and, wherever possible, give the alternative (always better) Biblical explanation of the same data.
If you’d like to read more of Layfield’s remarkable essay, you still can, thanks to Google and Andrew Brown.
There are Christian scientists who have … provided convincing scientific counter evidences of the Evolutionist’s position.
A Christian teacher of biology, for example, will not (or should not) regard the theory of evolution as axiomatic, but will oppose it while teaching it alongside creation.
So we have a Headmaster who opposes evolution; a Head of Science who urges opposition to evolution; a Vice Principal who thinks that evolution has been convincingly opposed; and a Maths teacher who, again, urges opposing the theory and teaching creationism at the same time.
These four pretend their opinions are scientifically credible. They aren’t. They’re simply a consequence of bizarre religious beliefs.
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)
Professor Richard Dawkins
Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford
To teach creationism to children as if it were a serious competitor to science is worse than irrational, it is educationally and morally irresponsible
Dr A C Grayling
Birkbeck College, University of London
Myth and fairy tale are the stuff of creationism. To dress it up as science is an insult to centuries of human rationalism and to the mountain of evidence that unequivocally places mankind and all other organisms on this planet within a single evolutionary continuum of life. To deny children this marvellous world view is a perversion, particularly from teachers whose role must be to broaden young minds, not fill them with nonsense
Professor Sir Alec Jeffries, FRS
Leicester University. Professor Jeffries is the inventor of DNA fingerprinting
Creationism is a puerile lie and comes with the fundamentalist baggage of xenophobia, homophobia, the dismantling of the welfare state … and is an attack on pluralism
Ralph Levinson
Institute of Education
The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are ‘alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data’, which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty
Professor David Deutsch
Professor Deutsch is considered to be the ‘father’ of quantum computing
Creationism is not science. Evolution theory is. As Karl Popper pointed out, you can tell scientific ideas from non-scientific ones because the former make predictions, and so would be falsified if the predictions don’t hold up. No conceivable fact could falsify creationism – one can always say God made it that way. But, as my teacher Haldane pointed out, a single fossil rabbit in Cambrian rocks would falsify evolution.
Professor John Maynard Smith FRS
University of Sussex
The so-called “creation science” is not only bad science it is also bad theology. My friends of faith should base their beliefs on something much stronger than the outcome of a scientific debate on the age of some fossil bone fragment or the details of some obscure enzymic reaction. In the short term the arguments of creationists may seem to be a useful straw to grasp in search for answers of how to teach students civilized behavior or respect for our fellow men, but think ahead of the letdown of your pupils who might come to associate important and valid concepts of morality with flimsy arguments which will continue to wither in the face of new discoveries.
Dr Charles Simonyi
Cloudsoup is now 1st on google.com for Freud Rubbish.
For the phrase, Rubbish Freud we’re only number 2, being beaten by some creaky old Geocities site far less interesting than either our previous Freud is Rubbish post or the one that started it all, The Freud Challenge. We will prevail!
On the Psychology thing, Helen’s first student to graduate in Psychology has finished with a 2-1 and a dissertation on Cognitive Psychology that got a 1st and was partly dedicated to Helen. At least, the version he sent her had that dedication…
Happy 21st Ben and congrats on the degree.
When you define a font in CSS you should always use one of the generic fonts, either as the only option or as the last option in the font-family. For example:
font-family : Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
No doubt everyone knows about serif and sans-serif generic fonts in CSS. But wait. There’s more. CSS specs give five generic fonts. Here we are then:
This is an example of your generic serif font.
This is an example of your generic sans-serif font.
This is an example of your generic monospace font.
The effect is similar to a manual typewriter, and is often used to set samples of computer code
This is an example of your generic cursive font. It’s supposed to be reminiscent of handwriting. What do you think?
generally have either joining strokes or other cursive characteristics beyond those of italic typefaces. The glyphs are partially or completely connected, and the result looks more like handwritten pen or brush writing than printed letterwork
This is an example of your generic fantasy font. An ‘unusual’ or ‘exotic’ font.
Fantasy fonts, as used in CSS, are primarily decorative while still containing representations of characters