Holy Statistics, Batman! When regular blogging topics collide!
December 8th, 2007 at 16:59

I noticed something peculiar earlier – Facebook network pages have lots of statistics about the people in the network – percentage male and female, a breakdown of political leanings, that sort of the thing, but there is one obvious statistical breakdown they’ve missed though, which strikes me as odd considering they collect the data in a regimented, easily counted way: religion.

I find it slightly perplexing that at a glance I can discover that 8% of my university colleagues define themselves as liberal, and 3% of them are married, but not find out which strand of bullshit most of them believe. I’m actually tempted to play the “political correctness gone mad” card.

So given that I love facebook, pie charts and slagging off religion, I took it upon myself to generate the statistics myself. As I am a man of science, I don’t want to create the impression that this pie-chart is at all accurate, fair, or representative. There’s the usual caveats of this is only made up of the 1126 people who are less feckless than the 5359 other people at my university who have neglected to enter a religion in the religion box on their profile.

This basically means that the people (women) who have it listed that they’re “spiritual” because they occasionally buy scented candles don’t count. Likewise entries like “none” and misspellings haven’t been counted because I’m not willing to count this manually. The benefit of this though is that the people who do count have clearly at least thought about their religious position enough to fill it in with something coherent, so they can probably explain their beliefs (but probably not justify them in the case of the theists… zing).

As you’d expect, the big religions – Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have the largest market share of the theists, with 38%, 14%, and 18% respectively. Excellently though, it appears that there are lots of Atheists and Agnostics (and Pastafarians) – about 29% of people are going to be predisposed towards acting rationally in all situations. This probably isn’t surprising unless like me, you spend your free time on YouTube getting annoyed at creationist videos, though.

What I find slightly surprising is that considering there’s five Jews, which is a sort of proper religion, there’s 5 “Wiccan” people. Or to give them their proper name “attention seekers who used to be goths when they were teenagers”. Similarly, there’s four “pagan” people, which is slightly bewildering, as they can’t even use the theist, cough, “reasoning”, cough, that loads of people believe what they believe, “so it must be true”.

So there you have it – a breakdown of the religions at my university, as derived from some unreliable statistics.

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Quiz II
November 29th, 2007 at 21:40

I’d love to tell you what I got up to yesterday, but I’m contractually not allowed to. Today though, I took part in my second quiz of the week – it was a bit more of a humble affair. It was a charity rip-off of University Challenge hosted by my University.

I put together arguably the most formidable quiz team in the country – who coincidentally were my university friends Katy, Sean, Sarah and Michael. And I, as the most experienced quiz player, was the Captain.

I’d been training the team for over a week. This didn’t actually involve any practice quiz questions, and was more a case of drumming motivational slogans into their heads. “It’s not the taking part that counts, it’s the winning”, “We can’t do it if we really try – we can only do it if we know the answers to the questions that we are asked”, “I’ll hate you forever and not be your friend if we lose”, and so on.

Things got off to an unfortunate start when Michael failed to turn up – but as luck would have it, so did someone from the opposing team.

So the quiz began, and we got our first starter question right – but then the other team got two in a row, and it went on like this – much like you’d expect a quiz to. There were bonus rounds on identifying the Simpsons guest stars, and a music lyrics round, a bit like a lower-brow version of the thing on the telly (we are a former Polytechnic, you know).

It got a bit farcical though during one round which was “identifying the place from an aerial photo”. The first slide said “Where in Britain…”, so we thought that all of the locations were in Britain. The first one was Wimbledon, the second was Alton Towers (I thought it was Jodderell Bank) and the third location looked really, really like the Hoover Dam. It turns out that it was the Hoover Dam. Damn.

And so it went on – with us eventually losing by something like 85 points to 65… which is fairly respectable. It was interesting to see Sean, who’s usually calm and collected, and the sort of person who can “work the room” without feeling ridiculous lose his cool slightly as he confronted the host about the aerial photo fiasco, or photogate, as I hope it will become known. She wouldn’t change her mind and admit that it was a travesty worse than naming a teddy Muhammed.

Still, at least there wasn’t any massive cash prizes at stake this time – and it was apparently for charity, so I can’t really complain. The team tried their best, so I can’t fault them. Just a shame its reduced my quiz shows participated in to quiz shows won ratio to 2:1 (50%) for this week, really.

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More tedious “I hate students” stuff.
November 7th, 2007 at 20:30

Far be it from me to complain about the activities of the corrupt student union elite at my university, but thanks to the magic of Facebook, I’ve stumbled upon a terrible idea – and I fully intend to describe it here and exaggerate my outrage.

They’ve invented “Flash Shopping!” – a derivative of the media’s favourite buzzword in 2003: Flash Mobbing. Here’s a paste of their explanation of what it is:

“Flash Shopping involves gathering quietly close to a pre-determined shop at a pre-determined time. A bell (or other cue of suchlike) will sound and everyone will enter the shop, pick up one item and proceed together to checkout en mass! Another bell (or suchlike) will sound and everyone must look at their watch, tut, drop said item (without damaging it!) and walk out!”

So, a flash-mob basically. The thing that bothers me about this is that it seems so unbelievably cruel.

Sure, it sounds fun – flash mobbing is. The fun is in doing something silly, like having a pillow fight or whatever. No-one gets hurt or pissed off. Unfortunately, this “flash shopping” idea, which at the time of writing, 52 people have signed up to, seems to have a more sinister motive:

“Hopefully this will involve hundreds of people! You watch the shopkeepers eyes light up as they think all their Christmas’s have come at once only to find everyone just takes off!”

Yeah, great idea! Why not target a struggling independent store that’s worried it can’t compete with brand name rivals? Give them some false hope? Better still, needlessly mess with the stock without buying anything! Yeah, that’ll be hilarious!

This all just seems completely not in the spirit of what flashmobbing was intended.

And what makes this more bewildering is that it has been dreamt up as a feature for a radio show. How the hell does that work? “This is what 50 morons needlessly bothering someone trying to do their job sounds like”?

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Things that have happened lately
October 21st, 2007 at 23:50

My blogging has been pretty light lately, and I’ve been trying to figure out why. I’d love to be able to give a definitive excuse, like “the dog ate it”, or “I’ve been really busy working”- but I think its fairly obvious that I’m workshy and dogless. I guess it is because I’ve been stuck in a routine, doing normal boring things that have happened without anything notable happening – or when things vaguely have, I’ve worried about the focus of the blog.

Every time I post a tale about something I’ve been doing, I worry that people who are for my, er, political insight aren’t going to care – and what if I want to write about politics? Will the people who are after drivel or stupid videos care? I know you’re all very fickle people, and in all likelihood, get distracted by other, more exciting things, before you think about scrolling down to see what’s below.

This blog entry is quickly turning into the first type of blog entry: things I’ve been doing lately. Here are the things I’ve been doing:

Krisha Consciousness Society

Don’t worry, I haven’t gone all theist – it hasn’t been God telling me to refrain from blogging. A couple of weeks ago I received e-mails promoting a debate at the university KC society: “Does God exist? If so, prove it!” – something that seemed to pander directly to my interests. “This will be an easy win”, I thought.

I spent the afternoon watching videos of Christopher Hitchens on Youtube, making myself angry and spoiling for an argument. I then drove 15 miles looking for this particular argument. I arrived at the building and got to the room the argument debate was to be held in, only to find the lights switched off and with no indication that the debate existed at all. It was annoying – as only hours earlier I’d read an e-mail from the society telling me the debate existed, and that seemed like a credible source as it was from the voice of the debate organisers, but there was absolutely no observable evidence suggesting that the debate did in fact exist. A bit like God, really.

“They’re not going to get much peace and love from me if they’re not going to turn up to their own debate”, I thought. I did make a point of going into the darkened room and declaring that there is no evidence that God exists though, and because I was the only person in there, won by default.

Animé Society

As luck would have it, on the same night as the debate, the animé society were also having a meeting. I don’t really like animé, but I feel like its one of those things I should like more, being as it is dead geeky and can be elitist – and I already have some cred in their field of study as it is. So I went along to see what was going on, as a sort of second best option, and not waste a journey.

I say “I went along” in a casual way, but it actually happened in the most horrendously awkward way possible. I turned up late (because of the Krisha Consciousness farce), so spent twenty minute standing outside the room dithering about whether or not to go in. What concerned me was that because I’d never been before, I’d have to first clarify that they are the animé society (it’d be embarrassing to discover it was the LGBT soc after sitting there for twenty minutes), then explain that I’m not a paid up member and would like to join, then faff about with money, before finally noisily taking a seat – all whilst 20 other people were trying to watch telly.

So there I was dithering, and someone else turned up and as they walked in I said “are you here to watch animé?” – she was. So she went in and I stood outside for a few more seconds hearing her explain to the people inside that there’s someone else standing outside – so now not only did I have all of the above to worry about, but now when I went in, the people inside would have the preconceived idea that I was mentally ill, and incapable of walking through a door. Which probably isn’t that far wide of the mark… but you don’t want people to know that!

So in the end I took a deep breath, walked in, and discovered that they were all typical animé people. I don’t mean two-dimensional with exaggerated movements and a low frame rate – but you got the impression they were all really into their animé. They laughed at animé jokes – which mostly tend to be cuts of one of the characters committing acts of violence, or growing a large raindrop of sweat – whilst I felt dead inside for not quite getting it.

So I spent two hours watching animé, full of built up anger about religion that I was unable to get rid of in a safe manner. I’m still spoiling for an argument.

Zelda

I got the new Zelda game the other day. I’ve already completed it. It is incredible. I think this is where all of my time has been spent.

More exciting blogging soon!

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Revolutionary Graffiti
October 3rd, 2007 at 18:22

The great thing about being at university is that you’re (hypothetically) surrounded by people who actually care about issues and politics and so on. This is reflected in the graffiti in the surrounding area:

Scrawled on to the above building are “No Trident”, “Free Palestine”, and perhaps the most revolutionary statement of all: “No Parking“.

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Expanding Markets
September 29th, 2007 at 23:10

Yesterday afternoon was great fun – I spent a bit of it hawking my university’s Globalisation Society.

In other words: I became everything I hate. I became one of the awful people who bother stop people they don’t know and bother them, trying to get them to join up to some crazy scheme. But it was fun – and we were doing this at the societies fair, so people should have expected it, really (that’s my flimsy moral justification).

I wasn’t sure whether I’d be up to harassing people I didn’t know – its not the sort of thing you do as a matter of course. It turns out though that I become surprisingly confident when holding a clipboard.

The difficulty was in the pitch. The Globalisation Society is a society about a fairly abstract concept. And annoyingly, globalisation is quite a difficult concept to explain, succinctly at least. Going up to people and saying “Excuse me, do you like GLOBALISATION?” was never going to work – even if they understood that globalisation is about the deregulation of global capital and the transfer of power from national governments to multinational non-state actors, the question implies that we’re pro-globalisation. Which we’re not really, we just like talking about it, and hopefully getting celebrities to come and talk about it too.

So knowing this, how did I approach people?

“Excuse me, do you like GLOBALISATION?”.

I like a challenge.

It turned out that it is quite easy to get people to sign up – all you have to do is wave a clipboard in their face and shout buzzwords. Which is exactly what I did: “Politics! International Relations! Tackling issues! Poor people!”, I cried as they wrote their e-mail addresses down.

I got a bit arrogant about the whole thing, getting Sean, Sarah and Miriam, the Gsoc co-conspirators to challenge me to “get” certain people. My downfall was when I tried to get the people on the Ballet Society (ballsoc?) stall to sign up. “Do you like globalisation?” and the explanation that followed was met with the blankest faces this side of Madame Tussauds’ 19th Century German Royal Family wing.

In the end I got about thirty names. In exchange for some of them, I offered to sign up for societies the other people were running. It turns out that I’m capable of feigning interest in joining the Catholic and Islamic societies. Atheists have no moral compass? Who said that?

I just need to put them all into the database now. Like a common data-monkey. Gah.

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Lost? Confused?
September 27th, 2007 at 00:22

A couple of weeks ago I complained about how during last year’s freshers week, the Christians used free pizza to try and lure unsuspecting punters into their evil Christian trap. Walking around the campus the other day, surrounded by hundreds of other students – most of them distributing leaflets promoting nightclubs, a placard being held up on a proper wooden frame stood out.

“Lost? Confused? We’re here to help!”

It was hand made – and if it wasn’t for my sixth “brand synergy” sense (aka: Probable Mild Autism Power) spotting the non-corporate nature of the fonts used, I’d have thought it was an official students union or university thing.

What the sign, as well as the “I’m here to help” badges everyone near it was wearing, failed to point out was that it was actually a front for the evil Christian Union. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve got no problem with them promoting their evil organisation (well, actually I have, but its marginally less justifiable), but I don’t think they should be allowed to deceive people into talking to them.

Besides, if they were asked a banal query like “can you tell me where the library is please?”, “You’ll find out if you open your heart to God” or whatever, isn’t exactly the most concise possible answer.

What they’re doing is like putting up a sign saying “Partners” to reel in depressed single people only to try and flog them stationary instead of finding them a significant other. Or going to see Doctor Marten to ask him why your face is bleeding and falling apart, only to have him “prescribe” you some leather boots with an air-cushioned sole.

I think its particularly bad that its during freshers week that they’re doing this – loads of new people are going to lonely, depressed and vulnerable because they’re all alone in halls of residence and don’t know anyone… what better time is there to be sucked into a cult?

The Christian Union at my university are apparently affiliated with the UCCF, who as far as I can tell, are pretty hardcore evangelical Christians. I’m not going to imply that they’re creationists, as I can’t find anything to back that up, but I assume they are. And I think a baseless assumption is a good enough reason as any to go on.

If you look at the UCCF principles (I’d link to the version on my uni’s CU site, but I don’t want them to check the refers, find me slagging them off and then condemn me to hell), they sound a lot like those awful Biblical literalists, with things like this:

“The Bible, as originally given, is the inspired and infallible Word of God. It is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behaviour.”

“Since the fall, the whole of humankind is sinful and guilty, so that everyone is subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.”

“The Lord Jesus Christ will return in person, to judge everyone, to execute God’s just condemnation on those who have not repented and to receive the redeemed to eternal glory.”

I hope they’re not end-timers, or young earthers, or one of those other more evil branches of Christianity that are so off-the-beaten-track that they require a more detailed description than “Christian”.

If I had the inclination, or the delusion that I’d be able to persuade people to join, I’d set up a university secular society. We could have a sign saying “Lost? Confused? Tough.”

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Looking for a nemesis
September 19th, 2007 at 15:11

The university year is fast approaching, and I’m trying to think of some ways I can liven it up. Don’t get me wrong, studying International Relations is infinitely more thrilling than your plebeian minds could ever dare to comprehend, but much like how Heroes adds superpowers to give a twist to what would be an otherwise pedestrian human drama, I’d quite like to add a clever twist the forthcoming university storyline. To this end, I’ve decided I’d quite like to find a nemesis to battle against over the next year.

Much like how Wolverine has Sabretooth, The Doctor has The Master, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch has the popular cheerleader as their nemeses, I think it’d be fun to have my equal and opposite, my Moriarty, constantly trying to undermine me. I’m not looking to be violently assaulted here – that’d be hideous, I’m talking about a more low intensity conflict akin to Walter the Softie and Dennis the Menace.

My nemesis needs to be witty and cutting, and the sort of person who is capable of firing tens of veiled digs a minute. Someone who will say to me, whilst in the earshot of other people, something euphemistic, that on the surface sounds friendly and pleasant, but if you know the back-story like I do, is actually a a clever burn. For example, perhaps my nemesis could say something like, “I think parking fines should be increased to encourage people to Pay & Display more regularly, don’t you think, James?”

The nemesis will also be required to exhibit all of the standard nemesis behaviour so that people look unfavourably on them instead of me, the hero: they need to be a glory hog, ridiculously arrogant, convinced that they’re the best and have no problem with constantly pointing out my flaws.

Of course, being my nemesis wouldn’t be all glory. A pre-requisite to being a nemesis means that by the end of each story, I ultimately come out on top, as I’m the hero and underdog after all. My nemesis should be prepared to end up each time inadvertently falling head first into a cake in front of the whole student population or something – and this is especially likely to occur after the nemesis has just remarked about or demonstrated their supposed superiority over me.

So would anyone be interested in filling the position? If you submit your CV in the comments selection below, I’ll be interviewing next week, and if you get the job, you can expect to start on October 1st with the new uni term.

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Threshers Week
September 17th, 2007 at 23:11

At long last, it appears that the university year is finally getting going. Well, I’ve still got two weeks to go until I go back, but I’m now actively counting down because I’ve got practically nothing else to do. The glitz and glamour associated with unemployment has, surprisingly, worn off.

This week or next week is Freshers Week in a lot of universities – its the sort of singularity moment in the year when the vast majority of new students begin (or perpetuate) their binge drinking habit, and an unfortunate tiny minority of students realise that university isn’t all its cracked up to be, and that the insufferable wankers who you thought wouldn’t qualify for any higher education are in fact outnumbering you and have the entirety of student culture based around pandering to their needs. Guess which description describes me.

I think freshers week is particularly bad for the environment – at my university at the start of the year there’s (approximately) fifty billion people outside the student union building, handing out flyers promoting nightclubs, pubs, and societies and so on. Last year I remember being handed a flyer, being told that there’s “Free Pizza” inside the students union. Only when checking the flyer did I find out that the event was being run by the Christian Union.

Clearly eternal salvation isn’t quite the attention grabber it once was, and they now need to offer people bribes to go in and listen to their undoubtedly evil propaganda. It must be pretty cheap to run though, as they can presumably just order the one pizza and have more than enough to feed up to 5000 people.

You’re supposed to spend freshers week joining clubs and societies like this – annoyingly for me though, I couldn’t find something that suited my interests. The sports clubs were a bit of a non-starter for someone who gets tired out simply watching sport (especially tennis when the ball is constantly moving back and fourth so you have to keep shaking your head), and the Salvador Dali society never got off the ground because of scheduling issues due to melted clocks.

Likewise, I had to rule out the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transexual) society because I’m none of those things – although it does make you wonder… could a heterosexual person join? Surely if they’re not allowed they could complain that they’re being discriminated against? And I think the world would implode into a cloud of irony if that were to happen.

Its annoying really that there isn’t an “arrogant smartmouth with needlessly controversial opinions” society. Apart from the Conservative Society, of course. But I wouldn’t really fit into that.

I think I have a bit of an irrational problem with freshers week though – presumably because mine went so badly. It took two days living in halls of residence (essentially a filing cabinet containing students) before I realised that I didn’t know how to use a dishwasher or and oven, and that I was essentially useless without parental intervention. It wasn’t even just using appliances – on first day, I actually forgot to eat because there were no parents there to remind me.

So if there’s any freshers reading, good luck and that. You’ll probably need it. I mean, unless unlike me, you have a basic level of common sense or a wider range of more mainstream interests.

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Adam Hart Davis is brilliant
August 24th, 2007 at 20:03

As you might know, I’m doing a BA at the moment, so as you might imagine, science isn’t my strong point – and isn’t the strong point of the other people on my course either. There’s one guy on my course, who I think it is fair to say I have a pretty “combative” “relationship” with, who once claimed that the Moon is approximately half way between the Earth and the Sun.

I was discussing this the other day with my friend Michael, and we were wildly speculating about the possible implications if the universe really were like that. I speculated that if it were the case, then the Moon would have to be massive in order to appear the same size in the night’s sky – and that it probably wouldn’t be orbiting us, it’d probably be orbiting the Sun. Maybe we’d have a binary star system… but I don’t really know what I’m talking about. We both didn’t really know enough about cosmology (surprise, surprise) to commentate.

So we thought, who would know about something like this? Then it struck us: who has been recently on TV with an excellently informative yet accessible TV series about the Cosmos? Adam Hart Davis, of course. I’d already pestered him with stupid questions via e-mail before, so we tried it again. Confirming his place as the best celebrity, he sent this excellent response:

“Hi there,

What a simple question, and what a complicated answer. If the Moon were 46 million miles away, instead of a quarter of a million, there would be many consequences.

First, we would scarcely be able to see it, since it would look about 200 times smaller than it does now. Second, it would probably take much longer to orbit the Earth – so out months would become many times longer.

Third, at that distance it would be closer to the Sun, in part of its orbit, than Venus; so it might well get captured by Venus, by Mercury, or by the Sun; in which case we would lose it altogether.

Fourth, the Earth’s tilt and magnetic field are probably stabilized by the Moon; if we lost the Moon we might wobble and waver, and our seasons might become chaotic or disappear completely.

There is more information in my book The cosmos – a beginner’s guide.

Good luck,

Adam”

I don’t know what I like more: the fact that a celebrity took the time to send a fairly detailed response to an obscure question, or the fact that his answer more than disproves the “hypothesis” that the Moon is half way between the Earth and the Sun. Maybe he just wanted to plug his book.

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