Archive for December, 2009

Please, please buy Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name this week.

In case there are people out there who haven’t heard about it, there is a campaign to get RATM’s Killing in the Name as the Christmas number 1 in the UK singles chart in an attempt to beat the X Factor single.

I’m sure many of you are either aware or can figure out the reasons why we would want this to happen. X Factor predictably wins every year off the back of a TV show rather than genuine popularity of the music. This is evident from the fact it’s called the X Factor single rather than actually mentioning the song title or artist.

Not to mention the fact that the campaign for Killing in the Name has also raised £30,000 for charity Shelter.

However given you’re smart enough to know all this, what I really want to talk about is whether you should go out and actually buy the song. Many people will probably be thinking that it won’t make a difference and the X Factor single is obviously going to win so it’s pointless buying it.

But it isn’t.

Here are some stats. The Christmas number one normally sells around 400,000 copies, that is around half the number of people in the Facebook group for the campaign. If everyone in the group bought just one copy it would have twice the sales that the X Factor single would have.

Of course you’re thinking that most of the people in the group won’t buy it and so it won’t get nearly that much sales. I thought the same thing but apparently that simply isn’t the case. As well as the group growing exponentially (it’s gained 50,000 members in the past 24 hours) it is actually outselling X Factor currently according to BBC News.

It has been ahead of X Factor on the Amazon, HMV and Play.com sales charts and this afternoon finally overtook X Factor on the iTunes chart as well. It’s winning.

The reason we aren’t counting our chickens just yet though is because the X Factor single comes out in hard copy tomorrow, which is likely to give it a boost in sales.

However physical sales account for only 10% of singles sales these days and according to the BBC News article Killing in the Name is just over 10% ahead currently. This means that with the boost X Factor will get from physical sales it will amost be a dead heat.

Therefore we can draw two conclusions from this. Firstly is that you actually buying the single will actually make a difference as Killing in the Name can win this thing. Secondly it isn’t too far ahead that it makes it pointless you buying it because it’s obviously going to win. It’s going to be very close to the point where you actually buying the single could not make more of a difference.

So there you have it, buy it, it will make a difference. Also if you aren’t aware, it is only 29p on Amazon! For that kind of cash if you bring me your receipt when I next see you, I will actually refund you the cost of buying a single.

For those of you that really want to get involved, while chart rules prevent you from just buying loads of copies for yourself (although one wonders how they would know, especially if you buy from multiple sellers), you can gift extra purcahses to your friends and family. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group and invite all your friends too.

Oh and one final thought in case everything I have written has yet to sway you – just imagine how much Killing in the Name willing will annoy Daily Mail readers 😀 .

In November we hosted an interfaith panel inviting speakers from all major faiths to come down and field questions from an open audience. We had speakers from Buddhism, Baha’i, Humanism, Sikhism, Christianity and Judaism.

While the new billboard campaign from the BHA at first glance seems to be a final attempt to squeeze a bit more publicity out of the Atheist Bus Campaign, on review it’s quite a remarkable idea – they’ve only actually paid for four billboards and from it have generated a wealth of publicity, that’s rational thinking in action.

The Freethinker published a good news story on the event quoting several religious figures reacting to the news. While it would be easy for me to have a go and those that use it as an opportunity to attack humanists the comment that really draw my attention was this one.

One positive thing that could come from this is if it opens a debate on faith. I am not offended by it, but perhaps the money used for it could have been channeled better into a humanitarian cause.

At first it seems like a harmless, even supportive comment. But of course it isn’t. It’s a grasping desperate attempt to reclaim the higher ground from the bottom of the cesspool religion has found itself in.

Think about what has just been said here – you should stop wasting your money on religious issues and give it to charitable causes. The church, the Catholic Church no less says we should stop channeling money into religious issues and start giving it away to better causes!

From the church who has it’s own sovereign state containing streets lined with gold comes the message that we should stop wasting our money and use it to feed the hungry, build shelter for the poor and help the downtrodden. What a beautiful, humanist message.

This is a much wider issue of course – have you seen how much churches rake in these days? Tithing, the donation of 10% of your salary is still common practice and with the average salary in the UK now being £26,000, that means the average church patron is giving £2,600 a year to church! That’s more than I bet you spend on food.

Luckily though there is a salvation. The figure won’t actually be that high on average because atheists are statistically more likely to be on above average salaries which will drag the average up a bit though not much. But more importantly atheists are earning large amounts, they are more likely to he charitable with it. Just look at the stats on Kiva.

I knew there was going to be a fairly painful adjustment phase as I got used to OS X but there are some things that are really bugging me.

Like bugs. For example when I close my final tab on Opera it should go back to my quick launch screen so I can access a shortcut easily. But it doesn’t, it closes the window meaning that if I want to get back to my start screen I have to close the window and open a new one.

Then it’s the little things. For example if I’m selecting a series of files to upload, I move my select file dialog to just over the file boxes to make it a lot easier. But in OS X the file dialog box jumps back to it’s old location between every file.

The image viewing is rubbish as well. On XP I just clicked an image and it opened and then I could just use the arrow keys on my keyboard to navigate through them. No such luck on OS X on any of Preview (the default application), Quick Look (the integrated OS X viewer) or Xee (a little image viewer I grabbed to try and solve the problem). Indeed OS X has nothing that can stand up to the might of IrfanView.

I’m sure I’ll figure it all out in the end and a lot of the problems I will find a workaround or just get used to. I’m sure I’ll eventually find a convenient one keystroke way to lock my screen and remember not to use the scroll bar. But until I do they’re irritating problems.

This sounds far too negative though, in general I’m quite enjoying it, much like having a fly in your drink on a tropical beach – it’s annoying but you’re still on a tropical beach.

I love spaces (same as workspaces for you unix geeks, I can’t for the life of me understand why Windows doesn’t have them), I love the fact I can get 7 hours out of the battery, I love the fact it shuts down in 2 seconds flat rather than the 2 minutes XP takes and I love gestures. Stick with it and good times are ahead.

I’ve added a new category named essays to my blog.

It will house all of my long whiney posts that you probably won’t reach the bottom of but should because that’s where the message is. It will hopefully be sufficently different from the thoughts category in a number of ways.

First off, they should be longer and more involved. I’ve gone back and categorised a lot of old posts into the category but rejected a lot of them simply because they were too short even though they perhaps otherwise fitted the bill.

Secondly they should be relevant to the wider audience. A lot of the posts in the thoughts category are just literally stuff I have thought about or which is relevant to my life but anything categorised into essays should have meaning for at very least a group people who don’t know me personally.

Finally they should be on some kind of important topic or aspect of life. As such many also share the categories of politics and religion, but not all of them do.

If you think there is something I should write about, why not suggest it in a comment.

For those of you that aren’t aware, due to some unfortunate events that have befallen my recently I now have a new laptop. This one is going to be named Tolima and is a rather shiny MacBook Pro.

I went for the higher spec 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo with the extended hard drive and so far performance seems reasonably swish. I haven’t really put it to the test beyond some big installing but it potters along quite nicely and does some lightening fast shutting down.

The battery life is also very nice, I squeezed around 7 hours out of it last night, a small amount of that time it was on sleep but I certainly wasn’t taking it easy installing going on 20gb of programs and I began to put my life back together. It’s also not much heavier than my old laptop while squeezing another inch into the screen which makes quite a difference to the point I wish I could run it at a higher resolution than 1280.

Only time will tell if I love it or hate it but I’m planning to duel boot it anyway as 7 really is a sexy piece of work.

I love the environment. I love the planet. I think we need to take action in order to prevent human caused climate change.

But like so many of the causes I support, I hate the people who also support it.

Of course, I don’t actually hate them. I just said that for dramatic effect. I suspect they hate me and I’ll come on to that later. It’s more that they irritate me. Much in the same way as religion they arrogant self righteous actually cause more harm than good and I feel a need to stand up against this.

So, I guess we should start at the beginning.

Global warming, human caused climate change is happening. I should say it’s almost certainly happening to be more accurate, there is always that .1% chance it isn’t, but to the best of our knowledge it is happening, it is having an adverse affect on the planet we’re living on and as we are planning to continue to live her for quite a while we should really do something about it.

But the current climate change movement isn’t helping matters. Indeed they’ve become so dug in to their beliefs that it has almost become a religion. Indeed, it has become a religion – earlier this year a belief in climate change was held up to be in need of the same protection as those afforded to religious beliefs. Of course the fact that these beliefs need such protection is the giveaway.

Much like religious stories, the ideas of the climate change movement are just so crazy and far out there it’s almost “too unbelievable to make up.” Take a minute to consider them. The planet, the whole planet, and the very future of the entire human race is at stake. It’a future rests on you. You can save it – if only you would switch off that light bulb that draws only a 1/200th of the power your kettle draws in that room you are not using.

But it’s gets far, far worse. From this very dubious idea we have an entire world view building up around it which mirrors religion – and in particular Catholicism far closer than anything ever should to the point where you would expect a scandal a decade down the line involving small children and sexual acts which should never have taken place.

It’s the concept of original sin. The idea that you’re born into the bonds of inequity as St Paul put it. That you have some kind of penance to pay to a greater body which you will always be trapped in.

Think about it. You’re a new born baby brought into the world. Into a hospital surrounded by bright lights, of intensive electrical equipment in a city so full of light pollution you can’t even see the stars. You’re already a sinner – using up energy! Do you need that incubuator? Won’t a blanket do?

We live our lives every day using up power, turning lights on, running our computers and it’s all just climate change sin. You can’t escape it – you can’t not use electricity. Or gass. Or paper which is still bad even though it’s a renewal energy source. You’re sinning every minute of every day of your life.

You might think you lead a good life. You’re trying your best – you turn lights off in rooms you’re not using, you turn your TV off rather than putting it on stand by. But honestly, have you recycled everything? Have you scraped the cheese off that pizza box so you could recycle the cardboard? Have you turned the computer off the minute you finished using it? Left a charger plugged even after your phone was fully charged? Have you even just thought about it in your head?

Of course you have. So I have I. Right now I’m running my laptop and my desktop and only using my desktop because I’m going to use my laptop again soon. I also have a light on in my kitchen so I can see where I am going when I go in there to take my dinner out of the oven. And where, where is the global warming jesus character to take this climate sin away from us?

We need to pay penance for our sin, sin which we generate every day by just trying to live our lives because quite frankly the modern world just isn’t stressful enough.

For the love of the god I do not believe in, it’s 2009, the UK is a 1st world country, we shouldn’t be in this situation.

I was at a York Brights meeting last month and there was a discussion going about the real way in which people could control their footprint – by not having another child.

And they’re right. Having a child has a huge environmental impact. Every new human does. It’s probably the number one thing we could do to stem climate change, just stop having kids.

Of course, this is just stupid. I don’t even need to make a reductio ad absurdum argument, because we’re already here. We shouldn’t have to prevent ourselves from having children if we want them, we should be able to leave our computers on all day if we want to, we should be able to light our homes without feeling guilty about it.

What we need of course, is a serious approach to climate change.

Stemming climate change isn’t going to come from stumbling around in the dark or using paper bags even though the productuion methods use almost as much natural resources as just making plastic ones.

It’s going to come from technology and innovation. From human creatively, from pushing back the boundaries of science and engineering, from creating new ways to generate the energy our society needs which don’t damage the world around us. Remember all that stuff? Or are we so dead inside that we have forgotten we are the same people that put man on the moon, split the atom or transformed Planet Earth with civilizations and cultures more advanced than anything we know of?

But it’s blasphemy to say this. It probably offends people’s beliefs for me to express these opinions. Like the religious fundamentalist the idea that I might take a position based on reason and evidence rather than their carefully constructed dogma threatens their fragile world view which can so easily be blown away by the winds of logic.

Well it’s about time people stood up and called them on it. There are ways we can solve these problems – amazing ways. Look at nuclear fusion (not to be confused of course with nuclear technology at the moment which operates on nuclear fission). Here we have the potential to unlock virtually limitless supplies of energy without harming the environment. Why, why are we not literally pouring money into such research?

We should be, we need to be – for our own sake, as well as the planet’s.