Effortless Incitement

Caption Contest

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 19:10:00 +0000

As always, place your entries in the comment thread below. (As always, the only prizes around here are fleeting fame and the admiration of regular readers.)

Background: This week’s contest is in honour of David Bullard, who took to Twitter in early February to accuse Michelle Solomon of fabricating the account of her rape. It’s hard to believe that anybody would sink so low. But if you missed the ruckus and don't believe me, here’s the Tweet:

(Bullard starts, as you can see, with a call to “face facts”. When challenged later -- also on Twitter -- about how he could possibly know what he implied, he said that he didn’t “claim to know any facts”. We leave the task of working out whether or not Harry Frankfurt's analysis of bullshit applies in this case, or whether this falls into some other category, to the reader.)

Some related links:

No thanks, rape NGO tells Bullard.
Bullard slammed over rape talk tweet.
Bullard criticised for tweets over rape.
David Bullard provokes outrage over offensive rape tweets.

A T-Shirt design that I never got around to having made up.

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 18:43:00 +0000

Actually, there are a fair number of these. Fooling around with graphics software is a minor therapy for me, along the lines of working on a bonsai tree, except that the images don't die if ignored for months or years on end.

Daddy, what did YOU do in the war on Drugs?

New blog on Philosophy and Sport

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 17:40:00 +0000

So, my mate Dave's mate David (Papineau) has started a blog about philosophy and sport. He's written some papers recently on topics related to sport, including In the Zone (link to PDF), and Choking and the Yips (link to .Docx). The opening salvo of the blog is also about choking and the yips. You can find the blog here: More Important Than That.

(The name of the blog is evidently a reference to this remark by Bill Shankly: "Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that".)

Local professor’s coffee mug washed

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 14:45:00 +0000

Emotional crowds lined the corridor of an academic department today to celebrate the once-a-semester coffee mug washing by a member of the academic staff. After the varnish-like residue coagulated at the bottom of the mug had been scrubbed off, the mug was carried back to the professor’s office atop a velvet cushion. The gathered celebrants added to the festive atmosphere by throwing plagiarised undergraduate assignments into the air, and mumbling such words as they could recall from "Guadeamus Igatur."

The un-named professor responded to enquiries by confirming his intention to wash the mug again at the end of the next semester, "whether it needs it or not."

Postmodernists, relativists, to save the world

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:50:00 +0000

We hear a lot about the big challenges we’re up against. There are now over seven billion people on earth. Cheaply extractable fuel is running out. The effects of burning all that carbon-based fuel are transforming the climate, which will compromise agricultural production just when our need for food at its greatest. Other vital materials are becoming scarce. Our own medical science is helping to cultivate pathogens resistant to our most powerful drugs. We have our work cut out.

Or do we?

What if these so-called ‘challenges’ were no more than one way of looking at the world. What if science was just ‘one kind of knowledge’ along with others, and the others were equally valid? In that case, maybe everything would be just fine.

The great postmodern hope

It is not clear that any of the millions of ways of describing this
picture of a bit of space-time occupied by what we call a Richard
Rorty is closer to the way things are in and of themselves than
any of the others.

Postmodernists, social constructivists and relativists have been saying, for some time, that there are no facts independent of human construction.

So, there aren’t really giraffes, independent of our deciding to talk about the world in a certain way. That, at least, is Richard Rorty’s view:

“More generally, it is not clear that any of the millions of ways of describing the bit of space time occupied by what we call a giraffe is closer to the way things are in and of themselves than any of the others.” (Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. xxvi.)

This doesn’t just apply to giraffes. According to constructivists, it holds pretty generally. Here’s Nelson Goodman:

“Now as we thus make constellations by picking out and putting together certain stars rather than others, so we make stars by drawing certain boundaries rather than others. Nothing dictates whether the skies shall be marked off into constellations or other objects. We have to make what we find, be it the Great Dipper, Sirius, food, fuel, or a stereo system.” (Nelson Goodman, ‘‘Notes on the Well-Made World,’’ in Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism, ed. Peter McCormick (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 156.)

Forget giraffes, and constellations, though. Here’s a much more policy relevant example. We might say that the tuberculosis bacillus was ‘discovered’ by Koch, in 1882. But that’s a very objectivist way of thinking about it. That is, it presumes that there are some objective facts of the matter no matter what we think, or even whether we think about them.

If you think that this image in
any way encodes what were once
a set of mind-independent
facts about the world standing
in any orderly relationship
with the individual
conventionally called ‘Bruno
Latour’ you’re probably so
gullible that you think
the Sun is objectively
larger than the Earth.

A constructivist might say, instead, that the tuberculosis bacillus was invented, or created in 1882. In that case the claim that Ramses II (who died about 3000 years earlier) probably died from tuberculosis couldn’t be true. I’m not making this up. This, in fact, is precisely what constructivist Bruno Latour has said:

‘‘Before Koch, the bacillus had no real existence.’’ [Reference 1] Bruno Latour, ‘‘Ramses II est-il mort de la tuberculose?’’ La Recherche, 307 (March, 1998), 84–85. Quoted in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador Press, 1998), 96–7.

So, we might say: disease, schmisease! If we constructed the facts about disease, we can just un-construct them, and construct some much more fun facts where we don’t get sick or injured.

After all, if we construct the world, let’s make it be the way we want it to be.

Instead of spending loads of money trying to work out how to combat infections that we constructed ourselves, let’s just not construct them in the first place!

Frankly, too many of the facts constructed so far are downright pretty gloomy and depressing. But if the postmodernists are right, then there’s no reason why the Malthusians should be writing the main storyline.

So here’s the postmodern world-saving plan:

Let’s just construct the fact that humans are immune to disease!
Or, maybe, we could construct the fact that no diseases exist!

Postmodernists agree that they’ll need a good few coffee breaks to decide which of the above two plans is the best. But either way, as far as disease goes, we’re sorted.

Whatever the details, the idea is that we can construct ourselves (us seven billion or so people) a much happier set of facts to live with.

So, once disease is unconstructed, or reconstructed, we can move on to energy and climate. Remember Goodman – “We have to make what we find, be it the Great Dipper, Sirius, food, fuel, or a stereo system.” Fuel! Think about it! Why, oh why, did we ever construct the fact that there wasn't lots more fuel (not to mention constructing the fact that so much of the little there 'is' happens to be under ground controlled by misogynistic anti-democratic creeps...) Here's the plan:

Maybe we should construct the fact that there’s all the cheap fossil fuel we need, and construct the fact that there’s no such things as climate change.
Or, we could construct the fact that there’s lots of cheap fuel, and that burning loads of fossil fuel will prevent climate change!

Either way: Sorted.

Population, schmopulation

Gaze in awe into the two,
or three, (or four, or thirteen)
eyes of Hilary Putnam.

Anyway, constructivists say that there’s not even an objective fact about how many people there are. This ‘seven billion’ talk is simply how it looks given one discourse about the world. Hilary Putnam makes this point in his 1990 Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Putnam asks his reader to contemplate a toy universe consisting of three individuals (call them I1, I2, and I3). Then we can ask how many objects this universe contains:

“Suppose . . . like some Polish logicians, I believe that for every two particulars there is an object which is their sum . . . . [then] I will find that the world of ‘‘three individuals’’ . . . actually contains seven objects.” (Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 96.)

So, there’s no objective fact about how many objects (including objects of some specific kind) there are. There are only facts relative to some chosen scheme. Now, if we went ‘Polish’ on the human population, we’d end up with vastly more than seven billion. But there’s no need to go there. It’s totally up to us.

This is why a key plank of the postmodern world-saving plan is to adopt a policy where the number turns out to be much less than seven billion.

Postmodernists haven’t yet worked out the details. One option on the table is that we’ll only count relatively affluent people who can afford the luxury of relativist speculation. Another idea is that we’ll adopt a simpler counting scheme that goes “one, two, three, four, MANY”.

Either way: Sorted.

An un-named senior representative of the S.E.C. has
poured water on the postmodern proposal. “We’ve got
rules against trying to construct facts. If you break some of them
you can go to jail. Seriously. Ask Bernie Madoff.”

Acknowledgments

Several of the examples of constructivist views here can be found – along with careful arguments against them – in Paul Boghossian’s terrific 2006 book Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press.)

Common Currencies

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 08:23:00 +0000

My mate Dave has a new blog. It's called Common Currencies. Maybe it will be more active than this one has been for a while.

Hipster scientists postulate existence of ‘ironic matter’

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 21:23:00 +0000

Senior hipsters have announced that they believe it likely that the universe is filled with massive quantities of ‘ironic matter’ on the analogy of the ‘dark matter’ hypothesized by physicists.

Dark matter has not yet been directly observed, because it neither emits nor absorbs light. That’s why it’s called ‘dark’ matter. The behavior and distribution of objects that can be observed points to large and unexplained gravitational forces acting on what we can see. As that gurning science pin-up Brain Cocks puts it:

“If we only refer to the matter that we can see, then we just have no idea why that matter is carrying on the way it is. It’s fucking weird is what it is. So, we have a choice. We can accept that the universe is very weird, or we can propose that it only seems weird because there is some very weird and difficult to detect stuff in it, and that we physicists could find this stuff if we got handed trillions and trillions of dollars to build insane toys. And it’s not just the expensive toys. We need money to fly around getting hammered at conferences, and money for a tiny number of female post-docs who we cluster around like vultures near the bloated rotting remains of a bull hippo that’s been dead for five-days. Obviously we thought about it really carefully. Can we have our money now?”

Figure 1: Physicists say that the large-scale distribution
of observable matter makes no fucking sense at all, unless
there is a whole lot of dark matter distributed in blobs
like those in this image nicked from Wikipedia. They also
say ‘we need more money’.

In a little more detail, the speculation favored by the physicists is that there are very large quantities of this dark matter in the universe, engaging only in gravitational interaction, and perhaps the ‘weak’ force, but not electromagnetically. A leading hypothesis in the field is that dark matter consists largely of ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particles’, or WIMPs. If this hypothesis is correct, then substantial numbers of WIMPS must pass through every part of the earth almost every second. A number of (very expensive) experiments to test this hypothesis are underway, but WIMPS of the required sort have yet to be observed.

It is also well known that hipsters neither emit nor absorb anything genuinely useful. Indeed do not spontaneously interact with anything recognized as interesting or entertaining by the vast majority of people. Even so, the observed behavior of hipsters demands an explanation, just like the observed behavior of galaxies. Why the fatuous obsessions with retro hats, poorly functioning energy inefficient and sometimes unsafe, albeit visibly non-contemporary vehicles, unsuccessful bands and movies without plots? Why devote so much effort to sourcing and wearing T-shirts with badly rendered logos of defunct products and quotations from movies nobody ever watched? Why, when the world is so exciting and scary, pay so little coherent attention to things that matter to everyone else, and work so hard to cultivate a disposition of bored indifference?

Figure 2: This also makes no fucking
sense. None. At all. Holy living fuck.Picture taken from here.

‘Ironic matter’, the hipster scientists argue, would answer all of these questions. The brainwave came while a hipster affected complete indifference to a room-mate’s explanation of his ‘horrifyingly mainstream’ physics PhD. As the resolutely unsmiling hipster put it, “the physics problem was that the ‘dark matter’ theory said there should be loads of WIMPs, but the WIMPs had not been observed. And then it hit me. If you look at hipsters, it’s clear that there are loads and loads of observable wimps. But the mainstream just can’t ‘get’ our interests and priorities.’ Later, while listening to a bootleg cassette of some staggeringly obscure Amish ‘shun core’, his thinking went a little further:

“The physics guys could explain what visible matter does if they could detect the WIMPs. And the mainstream can detect the hipster wimps, it just can’t explain them. But what if there is a whole lot of invisible ironic matter, which only hipsters respond to and interact with?”

The analogy with physics and hipsters breaks down about here. Mainstream, and dorky, physicists work very hard to figure out how to detect dark matter if it does exist, and spend a lot of time trying to secure massive funding for massive experimental tools to conduct the tests. (And getting hammered at conferences, etc.) Hipsters say that even if ironic matter could be observed, the mainstream just wouldn’t understand it. Some Hipsters speculate that that the act very of observing ironic matter would bring it into the mainstream and thereby eliminate its ironic properties. And nothing would more clearly establish that ironic matter was no longer performing its function than a massive research grant. As one hipster “all that funding shows that physics is the opposite of hip. They should call what they’re looking for ‘dork matter’.”

This Blag Will Rise Again...

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:31:00 +0000

... mark my words.

How Homeopathy Works

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Sun, 16 May 2010 18:32:00 +0000

There's a very useful resource on how homeopathy works here at www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com.

This informative and thorough account is the work of the fiesty and fun 10^23 campaign.

And yes, I know, it's been a while, and this is just lazy linking. But hey, less is more, right? ... Er ...

"Let it be" - the ultimate idiocy?

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:02:00 +0000

It's hard to imagine a famous song written and performed by one or more undisputed geniuses that is as astonishingly daft and lame as "Let it Be" by the Beatles. This just came around on the old iPod earlier, and for the first time in a long time I gave it a proper listen.

Remind yourself what it sounds like here:

And observe the lyrics here:

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

And when the broken hearted people
Living in the world agree,
There will be an answer, let it be.
For though they may be parted there is
Still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be.
Let it be, let it be.

Yeah There will be an answer, let it be.
And when the night is cloudy,
There is still a light that shines on me,
Shine on until tomorrow, let it be.
I wake up to the sound of music
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Let it be, let it be.
There will be an answer, let it be.
Let it be, let it be,
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

What astonishing, pathetic, emo bollocks. How about, when you find yourself in times of trouble, hurl yourself enthusiastically at the obstacles with all the damned cunning and creativity and courage you've got. Try every blasted thing you can think of, including at least a few ridiculous ones, until you know for sure that you'll never, ever look back and think "if only I'd been a
little braver or more willing to seem like an idiot". Then, maybe, and only just maybe, let it be.

Like the wise fellow over at Gaping Void says:

Unbelievable Paper Spam

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Not all spam is electronic. Some comes in professional looking printed form. My mate Dave just received a real doozy, from the 'International Biographical Centre'. He was told that he was being reocgnised as an 'Icon' in the field of philosophy, and had the 'International Socrates Award for Philosophical Achievement' bestowed upon him by IBC.

Jolly serious sounding stuff.

Except that to formally complete the bestowment, you need to cough up for the certificate. And that costs ... wait for it ... USD635! So it must be a very, very nice certificate indeed. Or (much more likely) the IBC are in business because enough sad little people out there are prepared to pay for an ego boost. As long as that remains the case, it's worth the Ibc sending these letters out to anyone who crosses their radar.

So Dave wrote in to ask for an explanation:

Hello IBC,

I recently received [...] a letter advising me that I had an 'International Socrates Award for Philosophical Achievement' bestowed upon me by IBC.

Could you please tell me a little more about how decisions to bestow the award are made? (Do you have a panel of reviewers? Which specific parts of my work were considered?)

Also, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know the names of other recent recipients, so I know just what kind of league I'm now playing in.

Thanks and Regards,

D[...]

Let's see what they have to say for themselves. After that, we can try to find out what they can say to justify the spectacular cost of the certificate. They do say that it is 'laminated', but that hardly warrants the price of over 600 Dollars.

For a bit more on the IBC, take a look on Wikipedia, and on this blog post, and this one.

Hitting the bottle

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:53:00 +0000

Bottled water is pretty popular among the middle classes in South Africa. There are various brands, but one of the biggest here is Bonaqua. (Maybe the biggest by market share - I'll check in due course.) So I'll start with them.

If you go to the Bonaqua website you'll see bits of the usual horrendous bollocks that media people are paid to produce. Apparently an "ice-cold bottle of Bonaqua" is "the coolest accessory around". That's presumably news to people who might have suspected that a labrador puppy, or a convertible was very cool. Not to mention people who thought that an accessory was a durable item like a pair of sunglasses or a handbag. Of course, this is advertising, and the people who make it are paid to abuse the language, in order to achieve an effect. It's striking that the "coolest" claim is almost completely free of content. There's no objective standard of cool which you could use to check it. And if it was false, it's not clear how you would have been harmed for following it (except by having the fact that you're a moron thereby revealed). So it's hard to see that it could even be misleading - it doesn't say anything definite enough.

What bothers me isn't coolness, though. In some places in the world there really is a problem about getting access to safe drinking water. Sometimes there is tap water, but it isn't really safe. In such places you really do need to filter or treat the water you can get, or have safe water brought in.

South African cities are not such places. The tap water is almost always perfectly healthy. So there's no systematic need to buy bottles of water. And there are good reasons not to buy bottled water. The process of making bottles pollutes directly, consumes water, and creates plastic waste. Driving the bottles around creates more pollution. When there's perfectly good water on tap, those environmental costs are completely optional. And they should be avoided, unless you have some special reason to drive up atmospheric carbon or get more plastic into the oceans and landfills.

Bottled water, though, is profitable. And it sure helps to encouage the punters to think that it's healthy, and to downplay the environmental costs.

So back to the website. Consider the following (from the section called "The world of water":

Consumers all over the world are realising how important it is to take better care of themselves, to balance their fast-paced lifestyles. Worldwide, people are eating better, exercising more and seldom seen without a bottle of their favourite brand of mineral water.

Well, many millions of people are horribly poor, and have almost no choice about what to eat. Many could feed a family for the price of a bottle of water. Leave that aside and look at the paragraph, though. People are taking care of themselves. People are eating better, exercising and drinking bottled water. Suppose the first claim is true. And we all agree that exercise and diet make an impact on health. What about bottled water? What's the link? The site doesn't explain. Read on:

In South Africa, this trend has caught on fast. Gyms are packed, restaurants that serve healthy food options are popping up all over and bottled water is in ever fashionable consumer's hand.

Again - what's the link? Why not go to gym, eat some salad, and drink tap water? Keep reading:

There is an abundance of bottled water brands available on the South African market, but funky, refreshing Bonaqua has proven to be a favourite lifestyle accessory for those who demand both quality and taste.

Oh hell. How the hell could one kind of water be specifically funky? Anyway, I was hoping to find a link about the link between bottled water in general, or Bonaqua specifically, and health. I didn't find one, just more flim flam about accessories.

If you follow a link at this point, you get told a bunch of stuff about how important water is for the body, and how to be healthy you need water. None of the claims made specifically relate to bottled water. I discussed all this with my mate Dave, and he decided to send an email to Bonaqua. (There's a "contact us" link on the website).

Here it is.

Subject: Bonaqua Query

Hello Zanele, Michelle,

The Bonaqua website makes a few claims about Bonaqua that I find interesting. I wonder if you could help me make sense of them.

(1) The site says that an "ice-cold bottle of Bonaqua" is "the coolest accessory around". What does this actually mean? How do you measure cool?

(2) In the section "The world of water" the following text appears:

"Consumers all over the world are realising how important it is to take better care of themselves, to balance their fast-paced lifestyles. Worldwide, people are eating better, exercising more and seldom seen without a bottle of their favourite brand of mineral water."

Of course many many millions of people on Earth are terribly poor, live in awful conditions, and have almost no choice about what to eat. Many of them could feed a family for a price of a half litre of bottled water. Maybe you don't regard them as 'consumers'. Leaving them aside, as your website clearly intends, here is my question: What does taking care of yourself specifically have to do with bottled water, as opposed to clean water from any other source?

(2a) Can you direct me to any research you have done showing a measurable health benefit of your bottled water over municipal tap water in a South African city?

(2b) In particular, consider my case. I eat a healthy diet, and exercise regularly. But I don't ever drink bottled water - I only drink tap water. Can you direct me to any research you have done, or are aware of, that would explain what mistake I am making as far as "taking care of myself" goes.

Thanks and regards,

David

I'll post an update once Dave has told me about the response.

PS: The image of a pile of used plastic water bottles was flagrantly stolen, by me, from this site.

Time vs The Economist (Economist 1, Time 0)

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:41:00 +0000

Travel does terrible things to a person. Take an otherwise rational being, and stick them in a succession of economy class seats and airport concourses for long enough, and they'll start shopping in completely idiotic ways, endorsing intelligent design and otherwise showing that they've abandoned their senses.

That's how I ended up buying a copy of 'Time' magazine, for the first time in ages. I was desperate. Jet lagged, unwashed, rumpled, crabby and also (perhaps the airport food, or the diet in Las Vegas) flatulent to the level of a superpower, if only I'd had any control over it. Worse, I'd finished the novel I had with me (Cormac McCarthy's riveting, dark, spectacularly violent Blood Meridian) and read the current and previous weeks' editions of The Economist cover to cover, including the advertisments.

It was awful. So bad I struggle to explain it. Think of a cross between news-lite and vacuous celebrity drivel. They had a 'Technology Roundtable' where they rounded up some people who had made a lot of money, and asked them dumb questions, leading to answers that were barely coherent sometimes, and rarely interesting when they were. Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg) had this to say about 'The future of free news':

Increasingly, over time, I think information is ubiquitous. I think that I will be able to get a lot of that data - sometimes not even assembled by an individual - to give me the answer that I want. And for that, I will not have to pay.

Clearly he spent more time on getting his hair right for the 'interview' than on the answers, and Time spent more on photography than editing. If anyone can see an argument here, or even a hint of an analysis, please let me know. The best answer gets a free (slightly used) copy of Time magazine.

Anyway, it's easy to take pot shots. The cool thing is that there is one story, a review of an exhibition, that was covered in the Time and one of the two issues of The Economist that I had just read. So my weary flatulent self read the one with the other in recent memory. And the comparison is most instructive.

The exhibition is currently at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It is covered in in Time on November 23, 2009 (pp112-2) and in The Economist on November 12th.

The Economist says something coherent, historically informed and useful. In 650 odd words. Time take a bit over 1050 words, and chuck around pomposities like 'rectitude' and barbarisms like 'Bauhauslers'. Sigh. And there's some outright vacuous smoke. For example:

... there's a color photograph of Gropius' righteously Cartesian office, with a right-angular chair resting on a grid-patterned carpet and a grid-patterned tapestry hanging on one wall.

Uh. Well. No. That's bollocks. Regular geometric patterns are a staple of ancient art from all over the world. They massively predate Descartes. And a 'Cartesian' set of co-ordinates assigns every point an address, it has axes so that points are identified by signed distances along the two (or three) perpendicular axes. Calling a rug with a grid on it 'Cartesian' is just pseudo intellectual tosh.

Next time I'm buying the National Enquirer.

Effortless Incitement comment spam policy

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:15:00 +0000

I've been getting some comment spam. That is, irrelevant comments on blog posts here, containing links to sources of Viagra, Escorts, and so on.

For the record, I'm going to delete them from now on. (I deleted a few just before I made this posting.)

Mendacious spam from 'science.org'

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:53:00 +0000

The life of a blogger, even a lazy scoundrel with a shameful recent track record like me, is a life with a few different kinds of spam in it. I've had kooky invitations to review dodgy products (including things allegedly having sex pheremones in them). The latest one really takes the buscuit, though. Here's the text:

Dear Blog Owner,
Our website Science.org is a informational databases and online news publication for anything and everything related to science and technology. We recently ran a poll asking our website users regarding what online informational resources they use to keep up to date or even to simply find great information. It seems many of our users have labeled your blog as an excellent source of Science information. We have reviewed your blog and must say, we absolutely love the information you have made available to the public and would love to make your blog a part of our top science blogs. After browsing your blog, our research team has decided to award you a Top science Blogs award banner.
It is a distinction we offer to the blogs that our team feels is ahead of the curve in terms of content.
Thanks again for the great information and we look forward to the great responses your blog will receive from our site. Your blog presence will be very effective for our users (top science blogs).

We have put great efforts in making this decision to give deserving with award acknowledgment. For listing please reply to request banner.
Sincerely,
--
William Lee
Research team
Science.org

What a load of bollocks. There's occasionally some decent stuff here at Effortless Incitement, but nothing that would warrant this effusive gushing. So no, I won't reply to the request banner. Sod off and find some other way to drive traffic to your rather lousy site, why don't you. Ouanquerres.

(My mate Dave tells me this reminds him of the periodic dumbass 'invitations' to appear in directories of important people. These seem to get sent to just about anyone who publishes anything. And you have to pay. So they're really offering you the chance to appear in a directory of 'people so depressingly sad and stupid that they'll pay to appear in a directory containing only such people'.)

Oh, and a quick Google showed that Larry Moran over at Sandwall has receive the same invitation. He's a biochemist, but the blurb was effusive about his 'PHYSICS' information.

More Mad Ads - Prof Bumba and Nangi Herbals

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:30:00 +0000

Here are a few more pamphlets making crazy magical claims, as handed out on streets in South Africa. I'm not going to describe these mad ads in much detail - these things get kind of repetitive at some point. Thanks to readers who sent in contributions and links, whicih will all be added eventually.

First up, we have Prof Bumba, based in Johannesburg. The Professor seems to have the power to be in four places at once, given the list of premises. Helpfully, you can use sms to make appointments.

Then we have Nangi Herbals, including the thoughtfully bundled package of schlong related services, the '3 in 1 Penis Combo':

Someone should be printing these things on T-Shirts.

Robophobia in The Grauniad

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:16:00 +0000

Last week's Guardian has a blog piece by Mark Lawson about the composer Emily Howell, who has a forthcoming album. Part of what is interesting about Emily is that she isn't a natural person, but a trained computer program. She's the successor to Experiments in Musical Creativity (EMI, or 'Emmy'). Both are projects of David Cope, himself a composer. There's a lot you can read (including a lot that’s on line) about the history of Cope's work, and the music produced by the systems he has developed and trained. I'm not going over any of that here, but I do want to take issue with some things Mark Lawson has to say. Lawson doesn't care how good Emily's music might sound. He says it's "worthless" because it's not made by real people. I think that he is being a silly anthropophile robophobe twerp.

After some rather disorganised paragraphs in which Lawson half-heartedly faces up to the fact that much creativity is a matter of re-arranging elements that are not themselves original, he turns to banging the table. Along the way are a few telling bits of rhetoric that show honesty is not a big priority for him, including the gem that when Emily produces a work it is by “simply randomly reshuffl[ing]” bits of another. Clearly he’s simply ignored the fact that Emily is laboriously trained, and that the process of construction is guided by the set of constraints produced by the training. Anyway, here comes the table banging:

So logic is on her side. Art, though, is illogical. Although she can be defended intellectually, the creator of From Darkness, Light is no more a composer than a synthetic sperm knocked up in a laboratory would be a father.

Oh. So a traffic light isn't a “real” instruction, because it's just a machine. Calculators don't tell us arithmetic truths, because they're not people. I haven't really been to Scotland because I didn't walk there. It’s not about what happens, it’s about where it comes from. Why should we think this? Lawson continues:

Music, writing or art is a communication between two humans. This does not mean it has to be emotional or warm – a delusion industrialised in large parts of Hollywood – but that there is some sort of conversation between two members of the same species, even if the artist's side of the exchange is "go away and leave me alone".

Paradoxically, it was JD Salinger, a novelist who has refused any rapport with his readership outside the pages of the books, who most beautifully captured this truth when the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye suggests that reading a really good book makes you want to phone up the author. A composition by Emily Howell might make us want to email her, but we know that she could not reply. Admittedly, we also know that Salinger wouldn't take our phone call, but the crucial difference is that he could if he wanted to.

A computer, cleverly programmed, could probably produce the Doubting Thomas Passion by JS Bach or More Snow on Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway. But the exercise would be worthless because the works from the software would not be informed by being a God-fearing kapelmeister in 18th-century Germany or a suicidal macho male in mid-20th century America.

Our shelves may be full of composers and writers who could be accused of having only artificial intelligence, but their efforts are still more worthwhile than art created by AI. "From the heart – may it go to the heart," wrote Beethoven on the manuscript of his Missa Solemnis. From the byte to the brain can never be equivalent to that.

This is a pretty strong set of claims. No matter how beautiful, or moving, or exciting, or anything else music, including Emily Howell’s, might make us feel, it's "worthless" because it didn't get to us by being passed through the brain of a natural person. And the reason for that being important is that we could (in some fabulously diluted sense of could, which covers long dead people who can't talk to anyone now, and living ones who don't want to talk to us, etc.) talk to them about stuff.

It's interesting that no matter how it got here, and irrespective of whether anyone could (or would want to) talk to where it came from, that is surely the most lousy justification for a claim that I've seen all week.

Lawson is, I’d argue, perfectly free himself to have a silly prejudice to the effect that he prefers music that in some sense came out of a brain. But it’s arrogant and absurd for him to declaim that such much is in general “worthless” just because he’s prejudiced.

More than that, it’s confused. People, and their brains, are physical systems. Their basic working parts are mechanisms – mechanisms of DNA transcription, protein construction, ion channelling, neurotransmitter action. Their interesting functions are the product of gigantic co-ordinated action among these myriad mechanisms. This means that if having in some sense been produced by mechanisms guarantees being “worthless” then everything made by any person is worthless.

Besides all that, it’s fascinating to learn more about music, and what sorts of process can compose it. There’s little reason to think that what goes on in Emily will be strictly analogous to what happened in Bach’s skull, but there’s at least a tantalising suggestion that we have more idea that we used to about what might have been in there. And there’s exciting work to be done – I for one would like to see computers capable of sophisticated ensemble improvising.

Here are some links:

Lawson’s article (comments unfortunately closed).

David Cope's mp3 page, with material by EMI. (In particular, see 5000 works in Bach Style.)

Article on Ars Technica.

Article on Times Online (includes streaming media with short clips from the forthcoming album).

Article on Vox.

(The image at the top was lifted from an image challenge on B3TA.)

Lint - some lazy linking

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:53:00 +0000

There's more for fans of Lint on YouTube. First, the following brief monologue by Bell Ectric, which regrettably sheds almost no light at all on either Lint's "Belly" phase (if phase it was) or his alleged period of regular lemon consumption:

Second, the following work by "Seven Inch Stitch" entitled "I eat Fog" (a reference to one of the first works Lint published under his own name, rather than by the expedient of submitting stuff to Sci Fi publishers as 'Isaac Asimov' or 'Arthur C Clark'). It's closer to the Beach Boys in idiom and content than the famous and difficult to find acoustic (the term 'musical will not suffice) efforts of "The Energy Draining Church Bazaar". Still, it shows genuine admiration of Lint. We must assume that the "Jeff Lint" identified as a collaborator on this is someone else of the same name:

Lint: The Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:43:00 +0000

The details of the production and scheduling of Jeff Lint: The Movie are foggy at best. Those non-waiters and mimophobes who are waiting expectantly can pass the time with the teaser trailers that have recently become available.

Exploiting gullible South Africans (BPSDB)

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:50:00 +0000

Over the past month or so I’ve published brief accounts of a series of what I’ve called mad ads. There’s a full list of links to the ones I’ve written up so far at the bottom of this article. These are mostly simple and naïve looking pamphlets handed out at traffic lights and stuffed into mail boxes. A few appear in the print media, and so far there’s also been one web site. All of them offer a range of treatments for genuine medical conditions (including diabetes, HIV infection, fertility, sexual function). Almost all offer to effect anatomical changes, including penis enlargement, vaginal reduction. A very high fraction claim to be able to help influence events in the world at large, including finding employment, finding love, achieving business success, winning court cases, preventing or effecting divorce, winning lotteries.

The supposed means of achieving this impressive range of services varies in detail, but is always some kind of mish-mash of divination and magical intervention, and often involves herbs.

I admit that these adverts are, to a critical and naturalist eye, pretty funny, which is part of why I scan them and write them up. The typos and spelling mistakes and bold claims are easy to laugh at. (‘Dr Raju’ apparently ‘has the power to sit on a crocodile & lion skin while floating on water and communicating with the dead’.) The clearly naïve presentation encourages finding this amusing.

This is also rather serious stuff. Almost all of the claims are close to guaranteed to be false. None of them are supported by anything that looks remotely like good evidence. For this reason I expect that most or all of them would be found to be in breach of advertising standards regulations in South Africa.

Even so, they keep on being produced and distributed. I’ve mostly described ones from Durban, which is where I live. But similar material can be found elsewhere in South Africa. It has been like this for some time. The most obvious explanation for this is that enough people are willing to pay for the bogus services. Why else would those who try to sell them keep on promoting them? How else could they afford to keep on advertising?

It would be surprising, therefore, if there weren’t some people with genuine and sometimes serious medical conditions (diabetes and HIV among them, damnit) who were wasting their time and money, and harming themselves, by responding to these adverts and being charged for rubbish instead of seeking proper medical care. That's not acceptable. It also seems likely that there are people wasting their time and money trying to get semi-magical solutions to problems at work, or in relationships, or in efforts to make money. These people are being shamefully exploited, and that’s not acceptable either.

I will, I promise, get around to reporting at least some of these adverts to the Advertising Standards Authority in South Africa, and I’ll report on the results of those reports. In the mean time, please keep on sending me additional examples, and try not to forget to be outraged as well as amused.

The list of mad ads (to date):

Professor Madu. I kid you not

Brown-nosing

The less awesome Dr Jadhu

Study in Brown

Dr Jose Buba - all the way from Mauritius

But still, they come: Dr Mama Hafisa & Dr Hashiraf...

The incredible 'Dr Maama Mzei Ndimungoma'

The amazing 'Dr Mama Simba'

The amazing 'Dr Raju'

Professor Madu. I kid you not

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:33:00 +0000

I've been collecting more mad ads for the current series, including a few print ads, which I'll scan and comment on soon. A big thank you to those who've sent me links and scans of additional examples. This one really is a cracker - spotted by a reader in Gauteng. It's also unusual in being a web-site. Yup, you can email this guy, and specify what spell you want casting.

And there's a pretty cool menu of spells. You can apparently make people marry you, or just be your Valentine. You can get luck, or be a 'Warlock Lover'. The 'Krakow Spell' will help you 'Become the master of your life and determine the course of your destiny!' which seems pretty cool. Obviously there's much more than this, including 'Aura cleansing', some 'Authentic Voodoo Spells' (clearly there's a worry about the efficacy of fake voodoo...), and the 'Black Curse Spell' that, because 'it can bring about horrendous times for the person to whom' it is directed, you are thoughtfully asked not to request 'unless it is absolutely necessary'. Not only can you, as always, get an enlarged schlong, the Professor will also help you get a 'more vascular look' for your member. If your intended is into veins or something. (Sings: "You're so vein...".)

There's loads more, including a startling biography of the good Professor, who, among other things, was 'anointed' by the 'gods of his fore father's ancestral powers' to 'heal and solve most of the problems and ailments that are failed to be healed by others doctors'. It's awesome, and it's all in delightful clunky web 0.6 style, with flashing stuff and lurid backgrounds, and bizarrely selected images.

You can check out the site here: http://www.profmadunativehealer.co.za/index.htm

My favourite odd image on the site is the one at the top of this posting. Except it flashes

The Sorting Room

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:54:00 +0000

Steve Aylett is undoubtedly the best of the Jeff Lint impersonators currently stalking the earth. Here's an extract from "Only an alligator", volume 1 of a series called "Accomplice". It describes the misery of a group of individuals (not all human) who work in a basement facility called the sorting room. Chew on this, Max Weber:

It just kept coming, every day. Miscellaneous objects wrapped in paper and card. Magazines. Notes and forms full of writing. But none of it related to anyone here in the basement. Nothing was mentioned but strangers and their obscure affairs. Why were these objects turning up? What did it all mean? And what, above all, what was expected of them here?

They had devised a number of means of disposal. Some they burnt as they covered their faces with rags. Other stuff they tried to eat. The big objects they sculpted into an angular sentinel in a conical hat, which they pelted with cans until everyone became sort of embarassed and fell silent. Fang would stuff it all in a car boot and drive it over a cliff. Gregor had taken to baking the things in a high-tech ceramics kiln. He would remove the ingredients before the process was complete, and form this mush into a poultice for his arse. Near the cabinet was an open corner, a stale etheric fold gaping into seemingly bottomless space - this blot of shadow they called the Drop and it was invaluable, swallowing just about all the stuff they could dump there. But throughout they suspected that there was something more specific and important that they should be doing with it all, and sometimes, in private, they wept with the build-up of sheer, unspoken stress. At other times one of the group would go into a hysterical screaming jag at the unstoppable flow of stuff sliding down from the chute above. They never openly communicated their doubts. Inadequacy, depression and fear of discovery grained the gloomy air.

For more, you'll need to get hold of the books. A decent place to find out what they are is here, at SteveAylett.com.

Friend Magnets

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Quite some time ago I had a few postings about Roger Coghill, who sells magnets that are supposed to have various medicinal powers, spreads alarm about power lines, and offers a large prize for an experiment on a human infant, in his ethically alarming eponymous 'Challenge', a caper with no scientific merit. My mate Dave had one of those generically pointless correspondences with him, which are covered in the earlier postings. (And here.)

Dave now tells me that he's received a friend request, via Facebook, from one Roger Coghill. Torn between curiosity about what jollies might be found in the Dodger's status updates and posted items on the one hand, and lively aversion on the other, Dave asked Roger to 'jog his memory' since he couldn't seem to place him. I wonder what if anything will come in reply?

Anyway, here's the request:

Lint? Or one more bastard?

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:17:00 +0000

I suspect this one of being an amatuerish piece of fakery.

Dr Jose Buba - all the way from Mauritius

noreply@blogger.com (Doctor Spurt) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:24:00 +0000

Here's one more mad ad before the week is done. I hope to set the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (see earlier post) on a few of these next week if I can find the time to prepare complaints.

This time we've got Dr. Jose Buba. Here's another guy who can apparently do divination with a 'mirror and water' (although unlike the good Dr. Raju he does not claim he can 'sit on a crocodile and lion skin while floating on water and communicating with the dead'). And he can supposely organise you the usual things like a large penis, a job, winning the lottery, not to mention less common services like treating epilepsy and sorting out any hassles you might have with "bewitched people".

Note, if you can be bothered to check out the small print, that this guy gets his leaflets printed by the same establishment as Dr Raju, and Dr Mama Simba, not to mention Dr Mama Hafisa & Dr Hashiraf and Dr Jadhu (and associates). This print shop is getting the lions share of the trade in quack flyers, at least the ones that have come to my attention. The phone numbers for the quacks are all different, though. And the indicated places of business differ too. So it seems as though the number of quacks is large, but for some reason they're using one print shop to do most of their work. I'd be interested to know more about what that is about...

Here are the two sides of the flyer - one in isiZulu, the other in English. Notice the AIDS ribbon in the top left corner of each version. (Larger versions display when you click on these ones.)