cloudsoup

When Blair was challenged about the faith school in the North-East of England, Emmanuel College, which happily supported fundamentalist evangelicals and young-earth creationists, he said that diversity was necessary in education. That’s such a dumbfounding response that it’s difficult to understand that Blair really did seem to be supporting the teaching of nonsense (that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old) as if stupidity and sense needed equal curriculum time.

He’s now said, The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. Blair himself is an Anglo-Catholic and is married to a Catholic. So here’s my question, to Muslims or Christians: how is your faith not superstition?

Hume argued that superstition and fanaticism are the sources, or causes, of religion. Time for a definition.

Superstition:

a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.

a system or collection of such beliefs.

a custom or act based on such a belief.

irrational fear of what is unknown or mysterious, esp. in connection with religion.

any blindly accepted belief or notion.

Surely, religion is superstition, especially to someone who’s not of a particular religion. As Blair isn’t a Muslim, how can he say Islam abhors superstition? According to the dictionary definition, for a Christian any other faith is just superstition.

I saw that Nick Robinson is leaving the BBC for ITV and told Helen, who said

He is a cheesy little shitster

She’s in a bad mood at the moment. I might ask her views on this news tomorrow to see if she sticks to the same line.

Ok, so I know I should update Ubuntu and I’ve read that Breezy isn’t the best for sound but I’ve finally – after an afternoon of messing about – managed to coax Audacity to use my Logitech USB microphone.

First of all, I downloaded the (beta) source for Audacity 1.3.2 and following the helpful advice on mics in Ubuntu here, compiled the source with:

./configure --with-portaudio=v19 --without-portmixer

– which didn’t do the job. Not quite. The problem is that Audacity’s recording preferences appear not to let you change the device from /dev/dsp to /dev/dsp1. According to reports, Audacity won’t find /dev/dsp1 unless there’s a /dev/dsp0. And this is the final fix that worked for me; change to root and type:

ln -s /dev/dsp /dev/dsp0

which creates /dev/dsp0 as a symbolic link (like a shortcut to you Windows folk) to /dev/dsp

then Audacity picks up the USB mic and everything works. Check out this forum entry too.

Might do another podcast now that’s sorted. Still got a problem with my Olympus Digital Voice Recorder on Ubuntu, though.

For the first time since taking up Ubuntu, I’ve been lost in the content of work and forgot completely the OS I was using. I was on autopilot, on Linux ,and thought for a moment that I was Helen’s laptop rather than my own. She uses XP at home.

I haven’t been able to use Ubuntu as much as I’d like – I’m not able to use it at work – and this is the first time that Ubuntu’s presence has been absent (© J.P.Satre). Until now, all those little differences and difficulties have been as if I were wearing someone else’s shoes.

It’s a start. Next: write some extensions for Amarok…

A long time ago I struggled to understand what the clique controlling my University’s student newspaper were on about in an issue published after they’d all been taught about Barthes, Lacan, Derrida et al. I guess this was shortly before the world stopped taking notice of the absurd Continenal postmodernists and before Alan Socal’s great Social Text hoax (Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) and the publication of Intellectual Imposters.

When Helen was taking her first degree she had to write an essay on PoMo. She met me at the train station from work one day, almost in tears after she’d spent the afternoon trying to comprehend Lyotard. By that time I’d read quite a bit about it and was able to calm her down by agreeing that Derrida, de Mann, Lacan, Lyotard, Foucault, Kristeva and the rest wrote meaningless nonsense. She had really believed there were substantial thoughts lurking under that dense and pretentious French prose, concepts so subtle and clever that she was simply too dumb to understand.

I say, before the world stopped taking PoMo seriously but I’m amazed to see that there are still sub-intellectual redoubts, usually in the less impressive academic institutions, where writing and reading bollocks is still a requirement for a good degree. Try this, for example:

This practice of intensifying bodily potentials to act and become is an affirmation of desire without lack which signals the nonclimactic, aimless circulation of bodies in a symbiotic assemblage

Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex

Apparently, and it would be difficult to satirise such absurdity, Parisi has been working on the bionic transformation of the perceptive sensorium. As Treece, in Eating People Is Wrong ponders, there are people who do this and call it thinking?

Difficult to satirise such absurdity – but not impossible. Here’s a fragment from the wonderful Postmodern Essay Generator:

If one examines realism, one is faced with a choice: either reject textual neodialectic theory or conclude that sexuality is used to marginalize the underprivileged, given that the premise of subcapitalist theory is invalid. Many deappropriations concerning textual neodialectic theory exist. It could be said that Derrida’s analysis of realism states that the goal of the participant is deconstruction.

The Postmodern Essay Generator

I’ll leave you with another, real, gem. This is not a spoof or satire:

each molar organization is composed of and cut across by parallel dynamics of molecular production that define its paradoxical nature. Simultaneously, each molecular dynamics under certain conditions may arrange itself into a microfascist assemblage spreading through all organizations -i.e. given the conditions it may become molar. In this sense, the commodification of biological processes cannot be disentangled from the wider dynamics of desiring assemblages act to deterritorialize and reterritorialize the biological strata.

Luciana Parisi interview

A while back I mentioned Brazilian songster Caetano Veloso. Today I saw on Andrew Sullivan’s blog an entry posted by Clive Davis about a peculiar YouTube video, a mashup of Michael Jackson dancing to Veloso’s bossa nova cover of Billy Jean. Very odd it is indeed:

Annette’s finally persuaded the LSE to award her a PhD. This on top of producing Leo, seen here, and Sofia. Well done Doctor.

We’re moving into a new house and need to sort out phone and broadband as soon as we can. At the moment, our land line is provided by (rented from) British Telecom (BT) and ADSL broadband comes from Virgin. Both services have been fine so I tried to set up a similar arrangement at the new address.

BT – the former state-run monopoly supplier in the UK – told us that the earliest the phone line could be enabled for broadband was mid-January, a month away, and only then if an engineer could visit the house during daytime on a weekday. If we wanted a weekend visit then thay had no idea when an engineer could come out – their availability calendar didn’t extend beyond the end of February.

So BT’s lost a customer and we’re signing up for cable instead. It’ll take two days.

I started listening to the Notes From Spain podcast (RSS etc here). It’s so engaging I’ve been downloading all the past podcasts and consequently learning loads about Spain.

Ben Curtis and his Spanish wife Marina bring you travel secrets, sound seeing tours, news, interviews, culture and more, from all corners of Spain.

Marina has a beautiful voice and a gorgeous accent; hubby Ben gets each podcasts chugging along on every topic under the Spanish sun. Lovely and interesting, go listen.

I think, after some initial reserve about their first projects, it would be difficult for me to find fault in the work that MySociety have done recently.

Tom Coates on MySociety

WTF? Perhaps, just perhaps, if Coates had mentioned what were his initial reservations with MySociety’s earlier projects such as TheyWorkForYou or DowningStreetSays; or if he explained why his difficulty in finding fault in recent projects should interest us, then this comment of his might be less irritating. But no, all we have from Coates is a mention of his various mental states as if they were fascinating enough in themselves for the blogosphere to swoon.

I met MySociety’s Tom Steinberg up Scafell Pike once, just after I’d setup a site copying DowningStreetSays to cover the Welsh Assembly, needed because the Assembly’s website, especially back then, was so bloody awful. Some might call it synchronicity, I call it coincidence.

MySociety’s early efforts to make the content of political debate easily accessible, using web technology and blog-like features to encourage conversations, were well-intentioned, innovative, widely-admired, sometimes copied, and interesting. I still receive emails whenever my MP, Patrick Cormack speaks in Parliament. It’s interesting to me that he seems a traditional shires Tory and it might be very interesting, personally, to Coates that Cormack seems to have a quite strong bias against equal rights for gays.

So what would Coates’s reservations have been? No idea, he just had them, much as I might have flatulence.