Categories
Month: June 2008
BBC News: Councils warned over spying laws
Sir Simon Milton, chairman of the Local Government Association, has warned councils that the powers granted to them under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act should not be used for “trivial offences” such as dog fouling.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was designed to regulate the powers of public bodies to carry out surveillance and investigation for the purpose of detecting crime, and was pushed through parliament under the banner of combating acts of terrorism and organised crime.
Astonishing talk given by Hans Rosling about poverty and the relative rises in the standard of living and prosperity of countries around the world over the last century.
Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He demos Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. Then he does something really amazing.
Unconventional cosmologist Max Tegmark says mathematical formulas create reality.
I think Tegmark is correct about this and I’ve been thinking along similar lines for years that the more you look at the universe the more you can break it down into its constituent parts and at the bottom of it all is just mathematics.
Similarly I think consciousness will be discovered to be an effect of quantum entanglement and parallel universes.
Ridiculous awful movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Mark Wahlberg. I would get into how awful a movie this is, but someone has already written a far better review than I ever could which pretty much sums up my own feelings and thoughts.
Categories
The War on Kids
The War on Kids continues apace with a scared-straight exercise designed by officials of an El Camino High School to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving. Highway patrol officers were asked to come to the school and announce that several students had been killed over the weekend in car accidents. The students reacted as you might expect they wept and some became hysterical.
Michelle de Gracia, 16, was in physics class when an officer announced that her missing classmate David, a popular basketball player, had died instantly after being rear-ended by a drunken driver. She said she felt nauseated but was too stunned to cry.
However throughout that day news spread that in fact no car accidents had occurred and no one had died, it was merely an exercise to scare the students into not drink driving. Students were understandably shocked and angry upon learning the truth.
“You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust,” said 15-year-old Carolyn Magos.
I think the only lesson that the kids will learn from this is that authority figures are not to be trusted and that they will lie to you.
ColdChef a commenter at Metafilter describes a similar but I think more effective method to reduce drink driving amongst teenagers.
Every year, around prom time, my family funeral home participates in a “mock accident” that is staged in front of the local high school. The students are called into an assembly, and while they’re in the building, and with the assistance of local government and law enforcement, we arrange crashed cars on the roadway in front of the school. Every effort is made to make the accident as realistic as possible, including fake blood and (admittedly) crappy make up.
When the students come outside, they see the wreck, which is usually peppered with popular students for maximum effect. At first there’s some laughter and gawking at the students they recognize. They are given a moment to take in the scene, and then police and firemen arrive, with lights and sirens, securing the perimeter. An ambulance comes, removes the bodies from the cars, attempts treatment and then pronounces them dead.
Then, it’s my turn. My brother and I drive up in the hearse, solemn and grave-faced–full black suits. Much more serious than we would be at an actual wreck. First, we cover the body with a white blanket. We gently lift the body of the student onto our cot, into a zippered black bag. We slowly zip it up, place the body into the back of the hearse and drive off.
At no point does anyone try to pass this off as reality. It’s a tableau…something to stick in their minds. This past year, they included as part of the scene a hysterical mother, arriving at the scene and going apeshit at the sight of her “dead” daughter. And, just like all of the kids there, I knew it was all fake, but it still affected me. The mother played the part well. She screamed and cried and fought the police officers to get to her child, finally collapsing into a heaving heap on the asphalt.
I’m sure that the imagery of such a tableau along with the reaction of the ‘mother’ is something that would affect teenagers and would stay with them for a long time and thus would be a far more effective deterrent. [via]
This morning I happened to catch a repeat of the Channel 4 documentary The War of the World presented by historian Niall Ferguson.
He is a controversial figure arguing amongst many other controversial things that the British Empire was a force for good in the world.
I agree with his analysis of the events that led to the Second World War which he quite rightly points out started in July 1937 with the Battle of Lugou Bridge
Quite by chance I discovered FORA.tv via The Long Now blog because of the million dollar Warren Buffett bet. FORA.tv hosts videos of debates and speeches given around the globe on the world’s most interesting political, social and cultural issues. As well as hosting a very interesting debate between Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz as part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars about Long-term Thinking there is the following video of Niall Ferguson’s speech given to the Hoover Institution with the title The Old Man and the (Blue) Sea: Why America Needs a McCain Presidency.
Here Niall Ferguson unusually for him fails to present a compelling argument. He barely presents any kind of argument on Why America Needs a McCain Presidency, but instead attempts to make a case as to why the conventional thinking on the three major candidates (at the time of his speech Hillary Clinton was still in the race) is wrong.
In trying to counter the argument that John McCain at 72 is too old to become U.S. President, Ferguson contrives a statistic that in terms of age relative to the median age of the U.S. population McCain is no older than most of the previous Presidential candidates because the median age of Americans has risen over the decades. This is a spurious argument as clearly if you extend it maintaining the same relative age difference then for a population of median age 46 a candidate aged 90 would still be acceptable by Ferguson’s metric.
For as arduous a job as President of the U.S. the health of the candidate has to be a consideration and as people get older there is a tendency for their health to decline so age is definitely an issue. All this being the case I don’t believe that John McCain is not in the required health for the job.
Another of Ferguson’s major arguments concerns an area where he does have expertise, foreign policy. Specifically the argument in this case concerns Iran and its nuclear ambitions, this being an important issue where there are clear differences between Barack Obama and John McCain. Ferguson mentions the Barbara Ann/Bomb Iran incident and he views the dissemination of this video as a positive thing. The argument is that a hawkish president would have the upper hand in talks with Iran as there would be no doubt as to his commitment to follow through with military action should Iran not accede to the US demands.
This is only true if there are lines of communication open and if Iran believes that the U.S. President can be reasoned with. The crucial question here is how does the leadership of Iran view McCain and Obama? Will Iran view a casual reference and a jokey song about bombing them as McCain being a guy that they should take seriously in any possible future talks? I think not.
But putting the video aside there are still reasons that diplomacy is more likely to break down with Iran under a McCain presidency than if Barack Obama were president. McCain is tarnished by his association with President Bush and the current U.S. government’s failure to find a solution to the Iran question, he has said diplomacy is the preferred path but has ruled out talks with Tehran. In contrast Obama has stated that he believes strong presidents talk to their enemies, including the Soviet Union which posed a greater threat to the United States than Iran. Indeed the world was pulled back from the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the willingness for Kennedy and Khrushchev to ignore the hawks and open up lines of communication.
I don’t think that Iran would ever believe that any President of the United States would lack the resolve to launch military action. Obama’s willingness to talk is I believe a strength and not an indication that he is too weak to consider the military option.
Contrary to the claims of some, I have no interest in sitting down with our adversaries just for the sake of talking. But as president of the United States, I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place of my choosing if, and only if, it can advance the interests of the United States.
In closing it comes as no surprise to me that Niall Ferguson would endorse John McCain as President as in fact he is now an advisor to McCain on Foreign policy. But I expected more substance from him on the question of Why America Needs a McCain Presidency?