Sensible Marks of Ideas

Only Turks and serious Euro 2008 followers will get this ....

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:08:35 GMT

What I just ~~twittered~~ e-mailed to a colleague:

I can't believe I am still drinking beer and thinking about student registration at 4 a.m. (as opposed to, say, drinking beer and playing Guild Wars). I blame Rüştü for putting me in a bad mood. Bir deli kuyuya taş attı ...

Are Muslims the new Catholics?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:28:03 GMT

After witnessing a bout of Islamophobia in, of all places, a Stoic forum, it occurred to me that Muslims today occupy a place in popular demonology equivalent to that held by Catholics in Protestant Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From popular broadsheets to Gothic novels like The Monk, Catholics were favourite bogeymen, and the popular view of Catholics had some uncanny similarities to the way Muslims are often perceived now.

Catholics abroad are bent on attacking our countries; Catholics at home owe loyalty to the Pope, not the King. Muslim nations are "rogue states" (unless we want to buy oil from them). Muslim immigrants are a fifth column whose loyalty is to mad mullahs rather than our democratic governments.
Catholics are always hatching evil plots. Guy Fawkes was the Osama bin-Laden of his day. Muslim clerics are the Jesuits of our day.
Catholics are simultaneously ascetic and licentious. Popular fiction of the day (either Protestant or, in the French case, secularist) often featured philandering priests, poking fun (with some justification) at the contradiction between the celibacy preached by the Church and the sensualism of some of its members. Similarly, Muslims are condemned simultaneously for restricting sexual behaviour and indulging in it. Again, Orientalism aside, there is some justification for this, but we should not forget that it is a nigh-on universal phenomenon found amongst Protestants too.
Catholics are irrational, superstitious and opposed to science and social progress. In the seventeenth century, science was strongly identified with Protestantism (see Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment) and Catholic dogma was seen as its antithesis. Now it is Islam which is seen as a dark force trying to drag us back to pre-Enlightenment days.

On this last note, here is part of what I posted to the forum.
[Note that "dispreferred indifferent" is a technical term in Stoicism; the Stoics believed that events outside our control cannot be truly good or evil and are thus termed "indifferents" (adiaphora) but these are divided into events which are "preferred" or "dispreferred", corresponding roughly to what non-Stoics would call "good" or "bad".]

I agree that there are Islamic groups (and individuals, of course) who
are actively involved in the promotion of dispreferred indifferents,
not to mention thoroughly vicious in their own right (though again, in
Stoicism, another person's vice is at worst a dispreferred indifferent
for you, as was discussed on this list a short time back). Here I am
of course referring to the likes of Hammas, Hizbullah and al-Qaeda, as
well as less colourful and more moderate Islamist groups, including
the party currently ruling my own country of residence (which is
currently facing closure for violating the constitution). Three
questions we need to answer are how great this "danger" is, who it is
a danger for, and whether this danger is inherent to Islam.

1. In some places, there is a definite danger that certain groups of
Muslims have considerable potential to bring about a large number of
dispreferred indifferents, both for their fellow-Muslims (as in
Malaysia) and for non-Muslims (as in Israel). In other cases, we can't
really talk about a "danger", since the damage has already been done.

2. The main danger of Islamic extremism is to other Muslims. A notable
exception is Israel, which is a unique case of a non-Muslim state
established on territory claimed by Muslims. I have yet to see
evidence that other non-Muslim countries are under serious threat from
Islamic extremism. All we have seen is a few acts of terrorism and
civil disorder, and certainly nothing to justify the comparisons I
have seen here with Europe on the brink of WWII, the siege of Vienna
or Thermopylae, all of which involved an adversary of unparalleled
military power, not a bunch of rag-tag terrorists. Israel has been
taking the worst that the Arab world can throw at it for sixty years
now, and is still no closer to destruction than it was in 1948. I
should also note cynically that Islamic terrorism has existed for
decades (anyone here remember Black September?), but it was only when
non-Jews started to be targeted that we started to hear about the
Great Islamic Threat.

Of course "danger" is about _potential_ harms, and it is possible that
some of the people we've been talking about may become more dangerous
in the future, e.g. by acquiring nuclear weapons. Obviously it makes
sense to do what we can to frustrate their ambitions.

3. The crux of the matter seems to be whether there is something in
the very nature of Islam as a religion that makes it dangerous _in a
way that other religions are not_. (As I said in a previous post, you
can take the view that all religions are bad, but that is a completely
different argument.)  This argument tends to focus on one or more of
three points.

(Quotations below are from the Quran or hadith, but from memory - I
don't have time to look them up right now.)

3.1. Jihad. It is frequently claimed that all Muslims are under a
religious obligation to forcibly convert or kill all non-Muslims. This
is quite absurd, given the oft-quoted line from the Quran: "There can
be no compulsion in religion." Jihad _is_ incumbent on all Muslims but
only in two senses: (i) the "greater jihad", or struggle for
self-improvement; (ii) the "lesser jihad", or fighting the enemies of
Islam _when a war actually exists_. Such a war cannot be a war of
aggression: "God does not love the aggressor." (This is the theory, of
course; in practice, Muslim rulers have been just as expansionist as
rulers of other faiths.) Even terrorist groups are careful to frame
their actions as a defensive response to what they present as
incursions on Muslim soil, a case reminiscent of the Romans' habit of
portraying every war of conquest they waged as a response to
aggression on the part of those they conquered. Even the lesser jihad
has to be fought under strict rules (which current terrorists violate
blatantly); for example, one may not attack those with whom one has
made a treaty (unless there is evidence that they are planning to
break the treaty themselves), nor may one kill women, children, old
people, cripples or even able-bodied men who are working in the fields
or drinking water. "If one kills an innocent person, one has killed
all of humanity." To cut a long story short, the actions of
contemporary jihadis are evil and, to an extent, dangerous, but this
kind of jihad is not an inherent feature of Islam.

3.2. Oppression of Women. Western criticism of the status of women in
Muslim societies is of course justified (though sometimes ignorant of
the facts of any one particular society;e.g.  there is a tendency to
take Saudi Arabia as typical whereas in fact it is an extreme case).
But again, we need to ask if this is intrinsic to Islam, and again I
think the answer has to be "no", or at least "not entirely". The Quran
states explicitly that the rights of a husband and wife are equal with
the sole exception that a man may remarry immediately after divorce,
while a woman has to wait until it is clear that she is not pregnant
by her former husband. Male and female believers are equal in the
sight of God, who has no gender (except for grammatical gender, since
"lah" is a masculine noun in Arabic). On the other hand, the Quran
does contain some verses which contradict this, such as the one which
says that men may manage the affairs of their wives, since they
provide for their material welfare (though not of course exclusively -
Mohammed's first wife, Khadija, was his employer). On the notorious
verse that appears to give men permission to beat their wives, there
is much debate, this focussing on the meaning of the word "darp" or
"daraba", which is sanctioned as a last resort when a wife is
"rebellious" (another hotly disputed word). This normally means "blow"
but could equally mean "slap" or "divorce". In contrast, there are
several hadiths explicitly condemning the beating of women. e.g. "How
can you beat your wife like a camel one moment then make love to her
the next?" or "If a man beats his wife, I [Mohammed] will stand
witness against him on the Day of Judgement."

To cut a long story short, I'd say that the inferior status of women
in Muslim societies is, like the inferior status of women in Christian
or Buddhist societies until recently, the result mainly of having a
predominantly agricultural economy where land is owned by men;
religion simply serves to back up the status quo. It's a nigh-on
universal rule: agriculture + metallurgy = feudalism + patriarchy.

3.3. Dogma and Intellectual Stagnation. Islam is portrayed as being
dogmatic, superstitious and opposed to science, the arts and political
freedom. It occupies a place in modern demonology similar to that of
Catholicism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant Europe.
It follows from this view that Islam is not primarily a physical
threat but an intellectual one, with the potential to drag us back to
pre-Enlightenment times. As a critique of many current Islamic
societies, this carries considerable weight: these societies want some
of the benefits of the modern world, like cars, vaccines and mobile
phones, but don't want to pay the price, which is freedom of inquiry,
tolerance of different ideas and a generally scientific worldview. (To
be fair, this is a prominent attitude in America too!)

However, again we need to ask if this is intrinsic to Islam, and again
the waters are muddy. On the one hand, the belief that the Quran is
the final and undisputable word of God would seem to put the dampers
on intellectual inquiry, and throughout history many Muslim writers
have used this belief to dismiss new opinions and knowledge as
"bi'dah" (heretical innovation). On the other hand, Mohammed himself
said "Seek knowledge, even if you need to go as far as China," and of
course we have the so-called "Islamic Renaissance" (roughly from the
8th to the 13th century) during which the Muslim world was a hot-house
of scientific, medical, economic and artistic activity while Western
Christians still hadn't got the idea of washing themselves regularly.
(King John tried to import the Byzantine custom of steam baths, but
his subjects took it as proof of his wickedness - he sinned so
gravely, he needed to be baptised every day!) What caused the end of
this intellectual flourishing is a matter of debate: some scholars
blame the effects of barbarian invasions (notably the Mongols in the
East and Spanish in the West) while others point to the increasing
centralisation of Muslim states and their concomitant need for
religious and intellectual conformity. In any case, it is obvious that
while Islam, like any religion, can be used to stifle dissent and
innovation, it does not inevitably lead to this.

I have officially lost my Trekkie status

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:00:31 GMT

Some time back, a student once told me in shocked tones that he had just found out that Gandalf was gay. After a puzzled pause for thought, I replied, "Ah, you mean Sir Ian McKellan is gay, not Gandalf. Gandalf is not a real person, and even if he were, I don't think he has a sexuality of any kind. Sir Ian, on the other hand, is famously gay."

I had a similar moment just now when (thanks to insomnia) I found that George Takei has just married his partner Brad Altman, and my first thought was "Sulu is gay? Well I never!" Yes, I've been a Star Trek fan since the 1960s and didn't know that George Takei is gay. Shame on me. Anyway, may the happy couple live long and prosper.

Still Too Young To Die

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:45:42 GMT

One of the good things about globalisation is that, in addition to watching a dance troupe from Senegal performing Turkish folk dances on TV last week, I was able to see Jethro Tull in Ankara last night. It was nice to see that Ian Anderson, at sixty, is still too young to die and by no means too old to rock and roll—he still does his leprechaun dance and indeed looked fitter and more energetic than most of my students. Musically, it was a great performance, with a strong bias to the early stuff, with a lot of tracks from This Was, plus, of course, Thick As A Brick and Aqualung. Anderson's patter was also on form:

[Introducing "Dharma for One" ...]
"Back in the days when your parents listened to this kind of stuff, we had things called drum solos."
[Introducing "Bouree" ...]
"Unfortunately it got turned into light cocktail jazz, the kind of Bach you'd hear on a cruise ship."
[Introducing "Thick as a Brick" ...]
"Remember 1972? That was a funny year. Well, of course you don't remember 1972. I suppose some of you might have been an uneasy stirring in the womb then. Anyway, this is what they called ‘progressive rock’, but I think it's just a nice little tune."

Decisions, decisions ...

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:30:56 GMT

I would really like to go to the cinema with Nalan tonght; the problem is which film to go to. Showing at our local are:

Indiana Jones, which would be my normal choice except that IMDB is full of reviews - well, rants - by disappointed Indy fans;
The Other Boleyn Girl, which looks like it has gorgeous costumes and locations (and Natalie Portman) but has also been panned by the masses at the IMDB;
Sex and The City, which we probably wouldn't understand because we haven't seen the TV series, or if we did understand it, would be a spoiler in the event that we watch the TV series.
El Cantante - hmm, not sure I like salsa that much
The Orphanage, described as a "Beautifully Sad Catholic Fairy Tale". Double hmmm.

More Lies About Kosovo

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:13:04 GMT

From an article on Alternet (of all places!):

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about "rights." In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official "good guys," being oppressed by the official "bad guys," the Serbs. At least that's the way the nave [sic] American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the "victims," which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

This is not just inaccurate, it's positively evil. Let's leave aside the historical fact that Albanians are descendants of Illyrians, who occupied most of the Adriatic region some time in the Iron Age, while the Serbs only turned up in the sixth century—it's still ancient history (well, early medieval history). As Flashman says in one of George Macdonald Fraser's novels, if we'd all stayed put, Ur of the Chaldes would be pretty crowded by now. As I see it, your homeland is wherever you were born, and the idea of a "historical homeland" (or "ancient heartland"), whether it's for Serbs or Albanians or, for that matter, Arabs or Jews, is a dangerous idea.

What amazes me is that someone is still trying to portray the Serbs as victims. OK, they've had some rough times throughout history, largely as a result of being batted about between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, but that's a bit like saying the Nazis were victims because of the Treaty of Versailles. Yes, I'm sure Serbs spent a lot of blood holding off the Turks a couple of centuries ago, but that doesn't win them any brownie points now, and it's certainly no excuse for all the "ethnic cleansing", massacres, torture and mass rape they've been up to in more recent times. Neither is there any excuse for denying it by blaming fast-breeding Muslims.

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:20:57 GMT

Pastor John Hagee has declared that the Antichrist will be gay and at least partially Jewish. This presents us with an eschatological problem. Aren't the Jews supposed to be converted in the Last Days? And if this happens, won't the Antichrist be converted? Or, if he's only partially Jewish, partially converted—at least enough to give him second thoughts. That could really rain on the parade.

Racial vagueness

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:47:07 GMT

I just had a look at an online survey, which contained the following question:

What is your primary racial/ethnic background?
White/European American
Black/African American
East Asian/East Asian American
South Asian/South Asian American
Latino/Hispanic American
Native/American Indian
Middle Eastern/Arab American
Other/Can't remember (specify below).

"Can't remember?" That implies that once upon a time you knew where your roots were, but somehow you just forgot. Now I can just about understand that with a family as complicated as my wife's, which is Turkish/Kosovo Albanian/Bosnian/Kurdish (with possibly a dash of Armenian). But given that the choices there correspond pretty closely to physical types, it's decidedly odd. I'm trying to imagine someone looking in the mirror, and saying "Hmmm, so does my olive skin mean I'm Hispanic American or Arab American? Never could remember that one. Oh hang on, a lot of people from the South of Spain or Italy look a bit like me, so might that make me a European American? Damn my bad memory!"

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:33:26 GMT

Ah sweet freedom. All grades are in, and no work for a week except for a little leisurely ironing, which I am doing while watching old Buffy DVDs. I have never know a TV series that made me want to write down so many lines. For example,

"When did you die? You never told me you died."
"Well, it was just for a few minutes."

"Ladies, gentlemen ... spiny-headed-looking creatures ..."

"Why do I put up with this?"
"Because it's your destiny. And because I just bought twenty Cocorrific chocolate bars."

Firefly

Sat, 31 May 2008 22:45:58 GMT

Forget the iPhone; I want one of these!

Eurovision

Mon, 26 May 2008 06:18:22 GMT

It's a bit late to be commenting on Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest, but I was busy all day yesterday grading student participation on online forums, helping my wife write an aesthetics exam and fixing my printer. So I'll just say that

as usual, the winning entry sucked:
I was surprised that the Greek Britney-clone didn't win, even though she didn't suck as hard as the Russians;
the Turkish entry by Mor ve Ötesi was excellent;
they should have a special "Spirit of Eurovision" prize, which should have gone to those Baltic pirates;
just like last year, the former Yugoslav countries all voted for each other, which makes you wonder why they bothered splitting up Yugoslavia in the first place—as the poet Atilla the Stockbroker said, a lot of politicians should have "Tito was right" branded on their foreheads.

The contest must have imprinted itself on my subconscious, since I've just woken up after a dream in which our very own rodneyorpheus was performing at Eurovision and blowing everyone away with multilingual techno-metal. The only thing that wasn't quite right was his hair, which made him look like one of the Goth kids from South Park.

8 REASNOS Y TEH PREVIOUST GENARATION WZ TEH DUMBEST EVAH!!11

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:54:23 GMT

Dear me, yet another academic has published a book complaining about how the Internet is making us stupid. I haven't had a chance to read Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, but there's a summary at the Boston Globe: "8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation". It seems to be the usual stuff: young people are stupid because they can't spell, do maths or remember the name of the President, and what is making them stupid is progressive education and ~~rock'n'roll~~ ~~TV soaps~~ ~~LSD~~ the interwebs. Now there may be a grain of truth in Bauerlein's book (I'll let you know if our library buys it) but from the synopsis, it looks like he is simply taking a few of the skills prized by his generation, noting that the new generation don't seem to possess them to the same extent, and concluding that young people are "dumb". (By the way, is that really the sort of vocabulary one expects from an English professor?) I could use the same methodology to show that the previous generation is not that bright.

1. Computer Illiteracy

In a sample of 50 white, college-educated males* between the ages of 40 and 60, only two respondents were able to correctly explain the difference between the regular expressions "?" and "*", and none were able to read "#!/" as "hash bang slash". Similarly, in a study conducted among members of the Faculty of Humanities at Emory University, 77% were unaware that Java was not only a type of coffee or an island in Indonesia but was also a computer language, 58% thought that C++ was a grade somewhere between C+ and B-, and 18% failed to complete the questionnaire because they could not navigate to the web page.

2. Poor cell-phone skills

Most people over the age of thirty either cannot use SMS at all, or type so slowly one would think they did not have reversible thumbs.

3. Impoverished vocabulary

Large numbers of middle-aged and older people are completely unaware of words like "anime", "machinima" or "mashup".

4. Orthographical fixedness

Many older people are unable to decode even the simplest of letter-transformations, such as "teh" for "the". They also tend to be poor at phonics: in the aforementioned Emory University survey, less than half of the tenured faculty were able to read "ur" as "you're", though TAs did much better here.

5. Lack of critical thinking

Many older people are so uncritical of what they read that they send money to people claiming to be trying to smuggle funds out of Nigeria.

6. Inability to multi-task

Psychologists at the Stanford Research Institute recently conducted an experiment to measure the multi-tasking abilities of subjects aged over fifty from a variety of ethnic and educational backgrounds. In the first phase of the experiment, subjects were asked to write an essay on well-known subject; the answers were then graded by Freshman English instructors to provide a standard metric. In the second phase, a similar essay task was given, but this time it had to be performed while holding a conversation on a cell phone, chatting using IM and listening to indie rock: performance dropped dramatically.

7. Cultural sterility

Walk into any retirement community in America and you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who can name three characters from Battlestar Galactica. You might do better with Star Trek, but only TOS.

8. Ignorance of local geography

To be fair, older people often have an impressive knowledge of national and even world geography, but they are alarmingly ignorant of the geography of their home towns. In a series of interviews conducted on a typical suburban street, CNBC found that most older people were unable to give directions to well-known locations like the best park for skateboarding or a cool mall to hang in.

* All statistics are invented.

Thu, 15 May 2008 10:30:30 GMT

Happy birthday redngold!

Still grading papers ...

Tue, 13 May 2008 20:53:08 GMT

I just wrote "Your body is rather amorphous," then hurriedly changed it to "The body of your essay is rather amorphous."

Silly Matrix Joke

Sat, 10 May 2008 16:57:11 GMT

Q: What does Smith say to Cypher after he's finished his steak?
A: "Welcome to the dessert of the real."

More Nit-picking

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:13:35 GMT

I commented before about grammar errors in adverts for English teachers. Here's another case: "Middlesex Universities’ regional office is offering an excellent remuneration package and the possibility of further studies to successful applicants for positions on programs run at our partnership institution in Zhuhai, southern China." Contrary to what the advert implies, there is only one Middlesex University.

Kernel Hackers Save Universe

Sat, 03 May 2008 10:45:15 GMT

Is there nothing Linux developers cannot do? When the latest bunch of Ubuntu updates arrived a few minutes ago, I glanced at the notes on the upgrade to the kernel headers and noticed "prevent time from going backwards." Now that is reassuring.

Internet Michés

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:10:06 GMT

Reading through the latest essays in my "virtual worlds" course, I expected to find, despite my repeated warnings, the usual crop of Internet michés. "Michés?" I hear you ask. A miché is a conceptual blend of "myth" and "cliché": something that is untrue but is unthinkingly accepted because it is so quotable. It's a kind of condensed urban legend. "Anyone can access any information they need through the Internet," is a favourite miché among my students because it is something they can put in the introduction to almost any essay on the Internet without thinking about it; of course if they did think about it for even a second, they would recognise it as a blatant falsehood. Even though the amount of information stored on-line is now so great that if it were written down on parchment by medieval monks it would take them a million years just to do the illuminations for e-bay, there is still some information that you cannot access through the Internet. For example, once in a while a particularly innovative but not particularly ethical student hits on the idea of plagiarising from a book that is not available on-line. And then I assume that there are some details about my personal life which are unknown even to Google (at least I hope so, given that my wife has finally started using that Macbook we bought last year). But even if we ignore this little hyperbole, where does the "anyone" come from? I've reminded the class several times that most people do not have Internet access, and they have even read a chapter of Snowcrash containing the following pithy description of the state of technology in the near future: "In the real world—planet Earth, Reality—there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer." Even so, when it comes to writing an essay, students have an uncanny ability to forget everything they have learnt in class and fall back on a kind of mental template for essay-writing.

Another miché is "Paedophiles use the Internet for grooming their victims by pretending to be teenagers." If I set an essay about the advantages and disadvantages of any online service, this will come up. All legends, they say, have a grain of truth, and this is no exception: there certainly have been cases where something like this has happened. But not only is it hardly typical of adult-teen online relationships (adults also talk to teenagers about things like World of Warcraft, Xena or Perl hacking), it is probably not even typical of those involving sexual predation; apparently the majority of adults wanting to find teenagers for sex present themselves as adults because teenagers—or at least the kind of teenagers they are looking for—are more flattered by the attention of adults than by the advances of their fellow teens. Then of course there is a blatant contradiction in the sentence itself. A paedophile is an adult who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children, so he would be wasting his time chatting to teenagers.

On the other hand, some of the essays I received actually managed to challenge some assumptions about online behaviour. For example, I had assumed, along with the rest of the class, that people generally constructed avatars that were much better-looking than their real-life selves: "Awesome You", as David Wong puts it. In some online environments, like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, it's pretty hard not to do this, since all the characters are so damned good-looking: you can't role-play an ugly elf, and even the half-orcs have a certain panache. But where users have a bit more freedom, it looks like they don't beautify themselves as much you'd expect, or at least they don't think that they do. In a poll conducted by Zogby International for Second life, people were asked if and how they would alter their avatar's appearance to make it different from themselves. Only 15% said they would want to create a radically different avatar; 18% said that they would enhance their masculine or feminine characteristics, while 44% said they would want their avatar to look pretty much like them (the rest were not sure). On the other hand, if that's true, how come there are so few podgy avatars in Second Life, and why is everyone so tall and youthful? Perhaps the mid-points of the sliders are misplaced.

Penises for Peace!

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:42:27 GMT

People do the most extraordinary things for world peace, not least because the most obvious things to do to attain this goal—like getting rid of national governments—are rather too difficult for the average well-intentioned citizen. In my time, I have marched, chanted slogans and mantras, attended music festivals ("Yeah, but when we did it we actually stood for something. I mean, remember Woodstock, Sharon?"), marched, stood up, sat down, got down, marched some more, chained a friend to a gate (Oh hang on, that was ~~a BDSM convention~~ an environmental protest), marched across the Pennines ... I think I might even, so help me God, have been in a drum circle. The latest unusual act for peace, and my favourite so far, took place in Pune in India, where Yogiraj Siddhanath has constructed a thirty-inch shivalingam out of solidified mercury. However much conservative Hindus try to gloss over the fact, a shivalingam (or shivling, for short) is basically a stylised penis, and mercury is well known in alchemical literature as a symbol of semen. But according to Siddhanath, the shivalingam is also a symbol of "earth peace".

Now I like this symbolic reversal. Penises, over the ages, have acquired a rather bad reputation, not least because of some men's habit of trying to stick them where they aren't welcome. Specifically, they have been associated with weapons, with whimsical epithets like "gun" or "pork sword"; in Tantrik literature the penis is even referred to as a "missile", which evokes a rather strange mental image ("Sorry dear, crashed on lift-off"). So it's nice to see this organ being symbolically rehabilitated.

[Thanks to Shivanath and Lal for putting me on to this one.]

BUDDHISTS OUTNUMBER PLYMOUTH BRETHREN!

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:53:48 GMT

From my favourite source of statistics, the Daily Telegraph, comes the shocking headline "Muslims 'to outnumber traditional churchgoers'." This comes in the wake of the Bishop of Rochester's assertion that there are now non-Muslim no-go areas (take a pause to figure out the double negative). Put the two together, and we face a scenario where large parts of of Britain (say, Yorkshire) are, like Mecca, ruled by Shariah and closed to unbelievers.

But of course, this is the Telegraph, which would perhaps like its readers to be shocked by this prospect, but doesn't really have any evidence for it. What we have is a prediction that by 2020, the number of people going to Mosques will be 683,000, while attendance at Catholic services will have fallen to 679,000. Leaving aside the fact that both of these figures are very low compared to the total population of sixty million (only 38% of whom believe in a god of any kind), since when did "regular churchgoers" equal "regular Catholic churchgoers"? I knew that membership of the Church of England was going down when I left Britain in 1991, but has it been completely wiped out my absence (perhaps by some Papist/Muslim plot)? In any case, it's a bit sneaky to compare figures for a whole religion with figures for a denomination (and one which I assume is still a minority). We might as well get alarmed that there are more Buddhists than Plymouth Brethren.

Following links to related stories reassured me that the Anglican Church does still exist, since Rowan Williams, the wonderfully Satanic-looking Archbishop of Canterbury, has raised hackles by saying that the British legal system should take account of some aspects of Islamic law. Again, this sounds scary, conjuring up a situation where if you steal from Tescos you get a fine and/or an ASBO, but if you steal from the local Pakistani supermarket, you get your hand chopped off. But of course, this isn't what he said at all; what he said was that Islamic courts should have the power to declare people married or divorced. No stonings, no beheadings…in fact not much more than Christian and Jewish religious organisations are already allowed to do.

I still disagree with Dr. Williams, not because I am worried about Britain going down the Malaysian route, but because no religion—Muslim, Christian, Jedi or whatever—should be involved in the legal process. Except perhaps Thelema. That would simplify the law wonderfully, since there would be only one law on the statue books—"Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law"—with one amendment—"Love is the Law, Love under Will."

Nudity is violence ...

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:07:24 GMT

... and the female body is a weapon: "When women strip themselves naked and stand by a major highway, that is not a peaceful demonstration," says Ghana's Interior Minister, after deporting a group of Liberian protestors.

Fire in the Hold

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:39:55 GMT

Looking quickly through my spam folder for false positives, I noticed the following message subject: "Put fire in your bedroom just one time!" I would have thought so—setting fire to your bedroom is not the kind of thing you could do on a regular basis.

Game addiction redux

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:30:10 GMT

It had to happen: one of the students in my "virtual worlds" course has decided to do his term paper on game addiction (specifically World of Warcraft addiction). In my last ENG 102 course (which was on games in general) I banned the topic of gaming addiction because I didn't want to get a load of badly written papers based on personal prejudice, popular journalism and anecdotal evidence. But this guy is bright and has a reasonable knowledge of his subject, so I'll let him try it.

The problem seems to be that either very few people are doing serious work based on quantitative data, or their methodology is kooky, or their work just isn't getting out to the public. This is odd, considering that for obvious reasons it is a lot easier to collect quantitative data on online gamers than, say, mountain climbers. If you search the web for "game addiction", you'll keep finding references to the factoid that 40% of WoW players are addicted (to WoW, that is—I'm sure a lot of them are also addicted to caffeine, but we don't have stats on that). This figure turns out to have originated in an interview with Maressa Orzack, a psychotherapist specialising in treating computer game addicts, who says "I'd say that 40 percent of the players are addicted." Mmmm, now how's that for strict experimental protocols? I checked her list of publications and found an article in Psychiatric Times, a brief piece in Harvard Mental Health Letter and a letter to Clinical Psychiatry News. These contain plenty of opinions but no hard data, and certainly nothing to draw the conclusion that 40% of WoW players are addicted.

In the absence of quantitative data, it's the anecdotal evidence that draws attention. Teenager dies while playing WoW. Girl sells her body to pay WoW subscription. Boy murdered in argument about magical sword. All of those are real, believe it or not, but they mean absolutely nothing, except that people sometimes do really stupid things, which is something we all knew. Substitute online gaming for some more popular activity, and they become mundane: Teenager dies while mountain climbing. Girl sells her body to buy jewelry. Boy murdered in argument about football. Not stuff that would make headlines outside the local paper.

Anyway, that's enough blogging for now—I really need to ~~get my Guild Wars fix~~ read some more research proposals.

Drool

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:50:04 GMT

I think am getting shallow. Nerdy shallow, but shallow all the same. Following on from my "I love Dexter" post, here is the latest object of my desire:

Yes, that is a DVD boxed set of various Dalek episodes with Doctors William Hartnell, Tom Baker and Colin Baker (no Patrick Troughton or Jon Pertwee though, which is a hell of an omission). But the really groovy thing? Embossed rubber Dalek bumps!

hfx_ben recently accused me of having swallowed the blue pill and opted into consumer society. I guess he's right, but come on, embossed rubber Dalek bumps! Forget Cypher, even Morpheus would have chosen to be re-inserted into the Matrix if Agent Smith had offered him a special collectors' edition Dalek DVD boxed set with embossed rubber Dalek bumps.

omg hury up liek ystrday??!!

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:38:21 GMT

I'm turning into a Bittorrent whore. Up until a few days ago, I'd pretty much forgotten that Dexter had a second season. Then the second season came to Turkey, and I missed the first episode, so I downloaded it. Then I downloaded the second episode. Now Episode 3 is 87% downloaded, I'm saying "Come on, damn you, give me that other 13% NOW! I WANT MY DEXTER!!!!"

I could go into why I love Dexter so much, but it might disturb people.