by cameron | Aug 29, 2008 | Australian politics, Christianity, environment, science
From the “Houston We Have A Problem” department… Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on radio today:
“For me, it’s ultimately the order of the cosmos or what I describe as the creation.
“You can’t simply have, in my own judgment, creation simply being a random event because it is so inherently ordered, and the fact that the natural environment is being ordered where it can properly coexist over time.
“If you were simply reducing that to mathematically probabilities I’ve got to say it probably wouldn’t have happened.
“So I think there is an intelligent mind at work.”
So basically we have a Prime Minister who doesn’t understand 5th grade science using the term “mathematical probabilities” to defend his belief in God. I would love to know what he thinks the “mathematical probabilities” are for God? Who designed the designer? Even my kids worked that out independently at about age 6. “But Dad, if God made everything, who made God?” I should put my kids (who are now 7) in front of Rudd for ten minutes. They’d sort him out.
So why is having a creationist Prime Minister a problem?
What mostly concerns me is that someone who cannot or does not accept rudimentary science (in this case, Big Bang theory and the laws of physics) is someone with a major intellectual blind spot. This is someone who refuses to accept evidence and rational thinking and instead prefers a primitive mythology. Can someone like that effectively govern a country in the 21st century? If he doesn’t accept evidence and rational thinking in this instance, how do we know in what other subjects he prefers to ignore evidence? Foreign affairs? The budget? Does he sit in meetings with Treasury, here them say “well if we do x and then y will happen to the economy” and reply “well I don’t believe that, I think it’ll just work because God wants it to”? Is his approach to foreign policy based on logic and reason or his interpretation of God’s will?
It’s profoundly disturbing to me to know that our most senior government official believes in superstition and supernatural causes for the world around him.
I’d be interested to see what the reaction would have been had he said “I believe the Rainbow Serpent created the world”. Why is one primitive mythology superior to another?
by cameron | Aug 20, 2008 | environment, Melbourne, Podcast
This morning I was given an opportunity to interview Hilary Mine, Alcatel-Lucent’s Managing Director Australasia and North Asia, about the launch of the Alcatel-Lucent Broadband Environment Challenge 2008 they did this morning in Melbourne with Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
The Challenge looks to award the Eckermann-TJA Prize ($10,000 provided by Alcatel-Lucent) for the best paper on broadband telecommunications applications and/or solutions that have the potential to deliver significant benefits to environmental sustainability.
Hilary and I discussed how the Challenge came together (this is its second year) and some of the ways that broadband might be able to contribute positively to environmental sustainability. Hilary mentioned that she telecommutes one day a week to show her senior team that it is possible and practical. I think more large Australia companies should be encouraging their staff to telecommute. As I mention in the show, we were talking about this stuff back at Ozemail in 1996 and it surprises me that it isn’t more commonplace yet.
More information about the competition can be found at www.tsa.org.au. Entries close Monday 6 October 2008.
To be completely up front (as you know I always am), this is a paid gig and my client is Alcatel-Lucent.
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by cameron | Jul 3, 2008 | climate change, Melbourne, Podcast
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======================================================
My guest today is Peter Singer.
He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement.
I invited him onto the show to talk about the recent news from Spain that they will soon probably extend basic legal rights to all non-human hominids, an idea that has been driven by an organization that Peter co-founded, The Great Ape Project. We also talk about the basic ethics of utilitarianism and how the best thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat.
The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
by cameron | Jun 5, 2008 | climate change, environment, Podcast, Video
I had the pleasure once again today to catch up with Dr Peter Ellyard, Australia’s leading futurist, one of our most popular public speakers and, of course, author of the historic first book published by TPNTXT:
“Designing 2050: Pathways to sustainable prosperity on spaceship earth”.
The auction for two signed proof copies of the book can be found here. The auction ends 15-Jun-08Â 22:11:27 AEST.
You can buy a new copy of “Designing 2050”, either in paperback or ebook format, here.
Watch the video interview:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_iRu1uOx8A&hl=en&fs=1]
by cameron | Dec 13, 2007 | environment, Uncategorized
So I launched the idea of Twittories late last week while suffering from a creative outburst fuelled by rage and caffeine. We actually started the first story, “The Darkness Inside” on Tuesday this week, and since then I’ve been fascinated by how people are moving the story along and the sense of anticipation that I feel and, judging by some of the things I’m seeing written on Twitter, others are feeling as well.
I wrote the first line of the story but I have no idea (or control) what it is even going to be about? Since my first line we’ve already seen the introduction and murder (perhaps? he isn’t dead yet, just poisoned) of a second character. And we’re only up to submission #16!
Duncan wrote about Twittories on TechCrunch yesterday and it got the usual bullshit TechCrunch criticisms in the comments. It makes me laugh how many people are the living embodiment of Comic Book Guy. Anyway, it was hopefully great exposure for us. Most of the TC criticism tends to come from two angles: it isn’t original and it isn’t “literature”.
I think both of these are worth exploring further because they are what I expected the doubters to say. Duncan, as he usually does, also wrote some profoundness about the idea which made me think about it in more detail.
“It isn’t original.” Mitts Kane sez “People have been doing this kind of round robin story forever, both on and off the internet, so I guess this is interesting just because it’s Twitter? And just as I am one of those who never got the point of Twitter… I don’t get this either.” The point, Mitts, is that we have 140 people contributing to a story as a form of entertainment. I had a terrible time trying to write the first line, it was very daunting. I don’t know if the other authors have felt the same kind of pressure to write something that not only needs to take the story somewhere, but is going to do so in a very public environment. I’m also enjoying the tension waiting to see where the story will go next. What genre will it be? Already we seem to be veering from Hammet to Asimov to Stross and back again to Hammet. Will the story deteriorate into complete crap? Perhaps. Many might say it already has. But I’m enjoying it a lot. Getting back to originality… writing books isn’t original either Mitts. If I wrote a book today, would you diss it because someone did it before? Being a cheap critic isn’t original either but you seem happy in the role.
“It isn’t literature.” On TechCrunch, Marc wrote: “Besides the fact that this was invented years ago by the surrealist group in Paris under the nice knickname of “cadavres exquisâ€, it also is a very nice way to ban litterature from the end result. Just figure out that with Proust for example, you wouldn’t even have reach the main verb with 140 digits. It is SMS style logorrhea, and definitively not writing. Sorry.”
According to Wikipedia (tranlated from French into English),:
It was invented in the house of 54 rue du Château inhabited Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. It has changed from a fun activity, according to André Breton: “Although, as a defense, sometimes, this activity has been called, by us,” experimental “, we are looking for first and foremost entertainment. What we have been able to discover valuable in relation to the knowledge no one came then. “(Medium No. 2, 1954)
Entertainment! Aha! Literature my ass. Bite me, Marc. “Definitely not writing”. Jesus, what a dickhead.
Anyway, as David Lee Roth once said “If you stick your head above the crowd, someone’s going to throw a rotten tomato at it.” I love getting my philosophy of life from DLR. He da man.
SO what are the normal people from around the world saying about Twittories? Here’s a few snaps from across Twitter:
descentintomael in love with twittories.wikispaces.com
chrisvdberge zijn er mensen hier die meedoen met Twittories?
nickellis Meu post sobre o Twittories…
plivings Interesting to view the Twittories history because it reflects time zones – hoping I’m awake when it comes around!
genarobardy check twittory très drôle
JBO Historias Twitter – http://twittories.com – Realidad o ficcion 140 caracteres a la vez
Pixites bekijkt http://twittories.wikispaces.com/ ideetje om roman (netje?) te schrijven
Kodo glad i didnt sign up for twittories, no way i couldkeep up the high standard being set
dpn is it just me or has twittories increased everyones tpm rate? (twits per minute) Everyone seems to just be hanging around on twitter.
jjprojects @Warlach Added quite a few of the Twittory participants who I weren’t following – many have reciprocated.
thadeum e os filhotes de twitter continuam a surgir: http://twittories.wikispaces.com/
I like this post by Josh Spear as well:
It was only a matter of time before someone started leveraging the phenomenon that is Twitter for something more creative than a branded RSS feed of daily specials. That someone is Twittories, and despite their decidedly lo-fi look, the idea behind the project is awesome. Think of it as the SMS version of those stories you had to write in English class, where you’d write for two minutes and then pass the paper on to someone else. Twittories is the same thing, only it happens 140 characters at a time. And each person is only allowed to make one entry per story. A story is finished when it reaches 140 entries (just to keep the numbers nice and round). The first Twittory is called The Darkness Inside, and it’s started off pretttttttty interesting. There’s already talk of killing a man…
The whole Twittories thing exposure, combined with the general explosion of Twitter over the last couple of days with Jeremiah’s post hitting Techmeme, has pushed me up the in the Tweeterboard rankings. It won’t last, trust me. I’m not that popular.
And if I needed reminding of that fact, some gutless wonder is using TwitSecret to say I’m up myself. All I have to say to gutless is… fuck, you are so gutless. If you want to bag me out, put your name on it, chickenshit. Do it to my face. Fucking punk-ass bitch. I’ll rip your half-empty achondroplasian head off and stick it up your ass. And then we can BOTH be up ourselves.
by cameron | Dec 7, 2007 | environment, free will, Podcast
We had a massive debate at TPN HQ last night (until my internet access dropped out at midnight and didn’t return) about the subject of free will which was kicked off in a massive twitter debate during the day.
My central postulate was this: if every decision you have is a thought: and if a thought is an autonomous electro-chemical process in the brain: then to claim to have free will, you have to be able to explain how you create a thought outside the process of causality.
The discussion got fairly heated at one point when I (probably wrongly) threatened to eject Dave from The Global Geek Podcast if he kept interrupting me. Sorry Dave, probably harsh. Belinda says I get like that during debates.
Anyway, nobody in the room was able to explain to me how they create a thought except to say “I think them”, which, in my opinion, is a circular argument, because the next question is “how did you decide to think that thought?”.
My other suggestion was that if you are in control of your thoughts, you should be able to stop having them. I suggested everyone in the room stop thinking for ten minutes, and when everyone agreed they couldn’t do that, I asked how they could claim to be in control of the creation of thoughts if they couldn’t stop them at will also? This lead to lots of angst and “but but but” retorts, none of which held any water.
Second Life is a pretty good environment for having discussions like this with people from around the world in real time, although you still suffer from the issue of having 20 people trying to talk at once at times. We need a virtual talking stick to pass around or something. Perhaps someone should create one.
