Most of you will probably have read my territorial description of the friendship group in a text to Sanna a couple of weeks ago. Delightfully, Sanna subsequently produced a map which arrived in my pigeon hole this afternoon:
Ye Olde Map Of Ye Olde Friendship Group(e)
The next stage is clearly the writing of some children’s stories…
It was a hot, lazy summer’s morning in the Enchanted Lands of Friendship, and not a soul was stirring, from the snow leopards of the icy peaks of Sanna and Niamh to the simple sheep of Dominic & Lucy valley, the warrior guards of Emilydom or the watchmen on the most distant lookout tower on the Outpost of Robert. But as the creatures slept, the heavy scent of smoke began to drift across the lands. A cry went up. Calamity! The Forest of Fagan was on fire! And if no-one could fetch pails of water from the Lake of Saoirse in time, the whole countryside would soon be ablaze!
Just had a wonderful weekend with Lucy, who came up to Cambridge on Friday night in time for a fabulous Pizza Express dinner. We’ve become rather brilliant at getting uni work done in each other’s company by now, so visits to the library are now much more productive than they ever are alone. On Saturday evening we also went some way to paying back my meal debt to Oliver as Lucy lead the production of some delicious pigs in blankets and leak-filled mashed potato. Finish off with Oliver and Abi’s chocolate cake and a troll-infested episode of Merlin: hurrah! 
I like the tea-towel look…
The other thing bringing great joy to my life right now is Windows 7. Against all my better instincts I ran an upgrade installation on Thursday night (yes yes, the release date). But rather than consign my laptop to messy Windows oblivion all of my programs, settings and files emerged out the other end without a scratch. And Windows 7 itself! Yes, Vista had an unjustified reputation: it was always a decent advance over XP with the right hardware. But Windows 7 makes my laptop sing! Everything is so sleek and fast! And Vista features which never quite worked, like the Sidebar, are suddenly transformed – I 
it. Plus it’s only a £30 upgrade for students… do it, people! (Even Lucy thought it was pretty, and that’s high praise for an operating system.)
Jeez, how does anyone cope with the pretentious brushed metal of OS X? Whatever.
(For the purposes of historical record, and since clever tweeters have just figured it out, I want to clarify that my previous post – which did strike some people as a tad odd! – was written not by me but by (tada!) Sanna. Her own post was, of course, penned by yours truly.
There were clues. I mean, above and beyond the fact that I’m unlikely to refer to the ‘palace of my soul’ any more than Sanna typically performs cheerleading chants for the Orthodox church. The titles were also cunningly interlinked, you see, and the very alert might also notice that my post appeared at 52 minutes past the hour.
So to those who thought I was drunk, or just posting “the weirdest thing I have read in a loooong time”, or simply proving insufficiently skilful at imitation, a great big 
)
I feel like I should apologise for not blogging more often. However, I have just a short while ago returned from some excellent gaming fun (Worms, Worms! Be still my heart) with my beloved Simon, so I’m not in a very apologetic mood.
We went to the Caius bar after dinner: Chris, Simon, Eamon and I (btw, Emmanuel peeps get their laundry done for them! I know the whole waiter thing at Caius is a bit much, but come on!). The beat of the music echoed in my head on the way home. So unapologetically nineties (there again the lack of remorse – perhaps my choice of music says more than at first glance) and yet, something in it, something sticks. The beat going around and around – no, not around, over and over, the running of old-fashioned trains comes to mind, rolling smoothly forward over the rails. Convection, convolution; what’s the word? The Youth Group version of ‘Forever Young’ rocks my world atm. That nineties soaring stickiness.
Some are like water
Some are like the heat
Some are melodies
Some are the beat
Sooner or later they’ll all be gone
Why don’t they stay on?
It’s hard to get without a cause
I don’t want to perish like a fading voice
Youth is like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever
So many adventures couldn’t happen today
So many songs that we forgot to play
So many dreams swimming out in the blue
Let them come true
Forever young
I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever, forever
I wanted to work today, I really did. To get going with the writing and the reading, reading, reading which characterises Caius History (the stacks of books on my desk: part of the furniture in more ways than one); much as I complain, I do love it. Alas, ’twas not to be. All the libraries were closed! Despite being the palace of my soul, somehow following the shape of my mind, unless it’s the other way around: that the shape of my mind is affected by the rooms themselves… despite this, I was sick of the sight of my walls. So that’s how I ended up hanging out with Simon, Chris and Eamon from Emma. Eating together at hall, then le bar; later, Youtube Top Trumps with Simon. It was always going to end in Worms.
The bar music. The beat, the nineties stickiness of it. The bluey-white glow of the computer screen on Simon’s face as we played. A good night.
So many adventures couldn’t happen today
So many songs that we forgot to play
So many dreams swimming out in the blue
Apologies for cannibalising my own Twitter and Facebook content, but this could just change your life.
Evolution by natural selection. Known as ‘Darwinism’ to those who like inappropriate naming conventions, it’s an uncontroversial theory with a Jupiter-sized body of evidence behind it, accepted by almost the entirety of the subset of the population who are, shall we say, ‘not crazy’. Its basic mechanisms are well understood, even by those with no professional scientific background whatsoever, and it stands as one of the single greatest advances in human understanding about the world at least since whoever-it-was discovered how to make cheese.
Or… is it?!
I thought I knew. I thought I’d heard all of the lame-beyond-lame arguments against it: you know, from the people who gleefully announce that there are GAPS IN THE FOSSIL RECORD!!111, as if the ‘fossil record’ was an audit of expenses meticulously prepared by an expensive consultancy firm rather than ‘the sum total of all the stuff we’ve found in the ground and various peat bogs’. But this was before I’d heard Ben Stein.
Ben Stein, for those whose lives have not already been immeasurably enriched by knowledge of the man, started out in life as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon. Indeed, he retains a touching loyalty to his early boss, asking the American Spectator in 2005 “can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible?” and – presumably having been reminded of one of the single most toxic scandals to wreck public confidence in its elected representatives – going on to suggest that “he lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded”.
(The eagle eyed amongst you might note that the purpose of the Watergate burglary might – just perhaps! – have been related to the occupants of the building being the Democrats, the party against which Nixon was about to contest a presidential election. It might also have crossed your mind that Nixon’s ‘success’ in creating ‘a world where there was a generation of peace’ is rather unhelpfully challenged by the rather substantial amount of conflict that then took place, some of which is detailed by Ben Stein in that very same article. But no matter. Sarcasm is sometimes a convenient linguistic tool to ‘disguise’ contempt.)
Stein’s grasp of history is rivalled by his penchant for wise economic advice. In August 2007, appearing on the venerable Fox News, Stein opined the following:
Ben Stein: […] subprime is tiny. Subprime is a tiny, tiny blip.
Peter Schiff: It’s not tiny. And again, it’s not just subprime. It’s entire mortgage market.
Ben Stein: You’re simply wrong about that.
Peter Schiff: No, I’m not.
Ben Stein: Defaults for the whole mortgage market are tiny.
The time was right, apparently, for a great ‘buying opportunity, especially for the financials’. Especially for the financials! This is clearly a man whose good judgement knows few, if any, bounds (even, perhaps, if they are the bounds of ‘rationality’).
But it is Ben Stein’s contribution to the world of biological science that I would like to return to, because his great mind has identified a flaw of such magnitude in the theory of evolution by natural selection that the whole thing is blown clear out of its boggy peat-heavy water. How this has been missed by scientists for generations is a mystery we may never be able to solve. Without further ado, here it is:
“…but darwinism explains so little. It doesn’t explain how life began, it doesn’t explain how gravity works to keep the planets in their orbits, it doesn’t explain how thermodynamics works, it doesn’t explain how physics or the laws of motion work…”
(Watch from about 3.40 in.)
Nooooo!
I must concede. Darwinism doesn’t explain any of those things. In fact, thinking it over, I think Stein was just describing the tip of the iceberg. There’s actually a veritable cornucopia of things that Darwinism just leaves completely unanswered! For the education of the ignorant, I have played my part by preparing a small illustration of some of what I now think are the most egregious holes in the theory, but please do feel free to suggest some more.
Perhaps over time we can build up enough for a whole wallchart.
Things That Darwinism Doesn’t Explain (Incomplete)
(P.S. This video is hilarious.)
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
