A few people asked if I was interesting in training as a celebrant, and while it definitely appeals I figure I’m too young. The average person there was probably ~50, with the youngest (hopefully I’m not offending anyone here) in their late 30s. I said so, and was independently told this wasn’t true – in fact, youth could well be a positive thing. I wondered whether a funeral might require a certain gravitas that can only come with age, but the celebrants I spoke to thought people who wanted a humanist funeral wouldn’t be bothered by something like that. Interesting. It’s certainly an incredibly positive, fulfilling thing to do, and I’d like to help. Maybe when uni’s over.

—

Photographically, it was a big job, so I hired a few toys useful bits of equipment, which were great fun very useful on the day. My friend Young Jim helped me test it all on the Friday, then came along to help at the weekend. Jim is just completing his PhD in physics at Oxford, so I used him as a voice-activated light stand. He was invaluable – enduring endless lighting test shots, managing queues of people, holding reflectors, spotting people walking off with my pen; it would have been far more difficult without him, and I owe him many thanks.

We went for a high-key look, with a completely white background and a bright subject, and I was very pleased with the results. This was especially pleasing as they came from a very lightweight Strobist setup of one umbrella, two flashes and a sheet. Our lighting setup covered quick-fire individual shots of all the attendees, and was pleasingly adaptable to a few couple-shots.

The only problem we had was a group shot of ~75 people, which we cleverly decided was best slotted in just before dinner. Note: do not ever try to slot in anything just before dinner. We had maybe two minutes to arrange everyone into something vaguely neat, and Jim handled this while I quickly became aware my wide-angle wasn’t going to be wide enough without standing on chairs, moving tables and backing off halfway across the room, all while 75 people looked hungrily at the bread rolls. The shot came out ok, although not great, and we’ll certainly know to do things differently next time.

Overall, it was great. I learnt a lot and met some fine people. I could get used to this.

For starters, one of the teachers was pretty hostile. She immediately asked if I’d heard the modern view that science just ‘proves’ whatever it wants to prove¹, and later called skeptics ‘annoying’. Another was clearly unconvinced but didn’t argue, while the third listens to Little Atoms but sometimes finds it a bit ‘fundamentalist’. I think my maybe-a-little-contemptuous response of ‘fundamentalist?!’ stopped him arguing further, but I’m not sure he was any more won over than the others.

I’m not really bothered what the teachers think of me, though – I’m more concerned that I came across a bit too strident to my classmates. I’m unused to speaking about skepticism to non-skeptics, and I worry I didn’t pay enough attention to we-attack-ideas-not-people. I spent ages trying to define modern skepticism², when I should perhaps have concentrated more on the general impression. I used the example of a recent lecturer who claimed racism is caused by stress over parental genitalia³. I called it a highly dubious realm-of-science claim, about an issue that actually matters, and said she needed to offer some evidence to back it up. This might have seemed a bit know-it-all. Plus, arguing with the teachers in front of everyone is probably self-indulgent. Given that organised skepticism genuinely isn’t unfriendly, I’m annoyed that I may have promoted it badly. Sigh.

That said, I’m somewhat sleep-deprived after the past week and it’s possible my judgement is off, but I’ve felt slightly abashed all evening. Grmph. Still – they approved my idea!

1. I replied that I didn’t think any scientist would recognise this, when I should have just said ‘how would that work?’
2. eventually coming up with ’skepticism is the study of things that are interestingly or harmfully wrong’, which I was quite happy with
3. standard psychoanalytic stuff

“I am talking about a long-standing discipline—an art and a science—that has been with us since ancient Egyptian, Roman, Babylonian and Assyrian times. It is part of the Chinese, Muslim and Hindu cultures… Criticism is deeply offensive to those cultures,” says Tredinnnick: “and I have a Muslim college in my constituency.”

That’s Conservative MP David Tredinnick defending his view that the moon is evil. To cleanse:

The honourable Member for Braintree cited evidence from The Sun, so I want to refer to a recent edition of the British Medical Journal.

That’s Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP for Oxford West & Abingdon (from a different debate).

Really. It’s exactly what you’re thinking. And yes – the first ten seconds actually happened.

The short-lived show was renamed Captain Janeway Kate Loves A Mystery – I am not making this up – before getting swiftly cancelled. I am now on a mission to find a full-length episode.

(info originally found in the pleasingly positive It Is Just You, Everything’s Not Shit.)

Isn’t it beautiful? I hadn’t heard of sea dragons before this evening, and I’m now hooked. I now know sea dragons are 30cm long, related to sea horses, live off the coast of southern Australia, and come in two types: weedy and leafy. These somewhat meek adjectives fail to do the creatures justice:

And do you know what they do in their mating ritual? They dance. Honest to goodness – there’s video. And the babies are excessively cute.

If I’m wrong about this whole religion thing and it turns out Buddhism is true, I’ll be a sea dragon, please.

It’s from a friend’s front door. I was able to restrain myself for maybe 6 seconds before pointing out the obvious, and said friend is now unable to leave / arrive home without certain thoughts occurring. A job well done, I think.

1. albeit, a little more crudely than was perhaps necessary

GeoCities is much maligned for its low quality page design and general weirdness, but back in 1997 it was the basically only way to get an online presence for free. I loved it. I had a page all about magic, with a few online mathematics-based ‘tricks’, magician biographies, and a guestbook(!). I learnt HTML building websites on their service, blink tags, extraordinary backgrounds and all. XKCD has redesigned in tribute. Thanks, GeoCities – it was fun.

Ever since setting up W7 I’ve had issues with large files transferring very slowly from my external firewire drive. Smaller files fly across, but anything over roughly 100mb seemed to get bogged down, and took way longer than it should have – a 450gb transfer last month was very frustrating. I forgot all about the problem until this evening, when I finally got around to setting up my backup system; SyncBack reported it would need 10hrs to transfer 200gb, and I could see it stalling on large files. I wondered whether there was a problem with the firewire drivers, and a bit of googling turned up this forum post, which seems to have fixed it.

It recommends changing the firewire drivers to the ‘Legacy’ versions. To do this, go to Device Manager and find your firewire device. In my case it was ‘1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller’. Right-click it and hit ‘Update Driver Software’, then ‘Browse my computer for driver software’ and ‘Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer’. Select the version with (Legacy) at the end and click-through to install it.

For me, that was all it needed. I didn’t even have to restart. My backup is now going to take 4hrs, and it’s not pausing. In fact, lots of smaller files are increasing the estimated time, which is the complete opposite of its previous behaviour. Wish I’d discovered this last month…

It is this cultural re-definition of ‘chemical’ that has transformed organic produce from a niche market into a booming, multi-billion-dollar industry, and why the word natural has become the preferred adjective of corporate marketers, no matter what they’re selling. ‘The tobacco in most cigarettes contains additives drawn from a list of 409 chemicals commonly used in tobacco products’ reads an ad that appeared in American magazines in 2006. ‘Natural American Spirit is the only brand that features both cigarettes made with 100 percent organic tobacco as well as cigarettes made with 100 percent additive-free natural tobacco.’

Yes, heaven forbid you ingest any chemicals from your cigarettes. That would be really bad for you. And tobacco commonly contains additives commonly used in tobacco? What? And how could something be less than 100% additive-free? And does this advert imply that organic tobacco is not additive-free? And PEOPLE WANT TO BUY CIGARETTES WITHOUT CHEMICALS?! Ok I have to stop now in case I break.