Greetings!
I am composing this blog entry late on Friday night (in sexy Notepad no less) with no available Internet connection with which to post it. But it feels long-overdue to write, and if all goes to plan tomorrow morning I shall head down to a marvellous little café down the road which offers free wireless connections – and sockets, and Louis Armstrong in the background – and blog away. Sadly, I only discovered the ‘free wireless’ quirk tonight and have spent the rest of the week jumping through innumerable hoops to try and get the Internet in my room! It is coming, honest… though I suspect nothing will arrive over the weekend, so a semi-permanent residence sipping hot chocolate in the café it is!
Oh, my room? It’s fine and very decently sized, though nothing spectacular, as with the house itself. But since Oliver and Owen arrived on Wednesday – along with Abi just down the road – there’s been a really good house spirit of cooking (still without hobs though, sorry Saoirse) and eating together which probably approximates to a ‘normal’ university experience without all the drinking. Almost a shame that Hall will return soon 
I shall blog photos soon!
The first few days of living here were very weird, mind you, without either the Internet or many people. Although in general this was Not A Good Thing it did allow me to join Abbi in discovering the strange delights of solo cinema visits: I only can’t remember if I’ve ever done it before! But on Sunday night I decided to take advantage of the last night of the Cambridge Film Festival to see Conversations With My Gardener. It’s a French film (an oh-so-very-French film) about an unlikely friendship between a ‘respected Parisian painter’ (I’m copying from the booklet here) and a retired railwayman who happened to have been schoolmates together. There’s a strange freedom involved in going to the cinema alone which allows you to really immerse yourself… now what I really need is the energy to additionally immerse myself in the swimming pool opposite the house for some high-falutin’ ‘exercise’ 
I hope everything is going wonderfully for all you freshers! And thanks to my blogging friends who filled up my Outlook tonight via the magic of RSS with their lives – happy or sad – allowing me to feel connected to home again. (Seriously, how cool is technology really? All I have to do is let Outlook bring in its trawl from across the web when wireless is available and it’s all waiting for me to read and digest in my room with no Internet to be found. Yay!)
Right, this has probably turned out to be very long without the ever-present temptation of the post button, so I shall bid you all goodnight now – or should that be good morning? – and sleep silly dreams. Like last night when I dreamt that Brown had discussed socialism in a party conference speech. Worrying.
Ahem.
And so I’m almost at my final day of the ‘summer’ left in London! There’s nothing like going out in style though, with lots of nice things like social gatherings, the Torchwood soundtrack (try listening to it whilst walking in the dark) and a surprise (yay!) Lucy visit, which we used to go and see The Wave (Die Welle). This German film based on a ‘possibly’ real-life experiment in the 1960s sees a trendy German high school teacher set up a dictatorial club in order to prove that Nazism could always reoccur, and by the end of the week it’s fallen completely out of control. Not well enjoyed by critics according to the reviews I’ve read, but nevertheless I enjoyed it – although finding bits of it strangely and probably unintentionally funny…
Tonight was the first of an annual re-jigged prizegiving evening at the school (y’know, my old school!) as Katie’s guests (hurrah for her) and it was lovely to see lots of faces again. Including Nirrup, the guy who went to Cambridge a couple of years before me We shared a bond! Also I should give a shout-out to good old Kingz for his successful dealings with the dangerous urban world of Bradford
Bad Science
Although I confidentially wrote a mere two blog posts ago about how much I loved book club, a part of me is clearly in a full-scale rebellion against all of that fiction since last week I ordered both Queueing for Beginners and Bad Science in a non-fiction book buying ‘spree’ (albeit not a numerically very impressive one). The former, by Joe Moran, was actually set for my final essay last term and is just a huge amount of fun, so it should be good to have around in the unlikely event that somebody comes running to me demanding to know more about the history of everyday life. But Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre, is a more important and thus even more wonderful book.
The Bad Science ‘brand’ has actually been around for a while, most prominently as a column in the Guardian, and it’s well worth looking at its own website for more. Essentially, Ben Goldacre is a doctor who devotes some of his life to exposing and debunking a few examples from the vast world of journalistic rubbish written about science, and health in particular. The book is designed to ‘help everyone become a more effective bullshit detector’ (according to the nice quote on the front) and it helpfully outlines everything you need to know to investigate ‘scientific’ claims for yourself. Sadly, it’s also the kind of book which I read – think “but I knew all that!” – and then fail to convince anyone who doesn’t to read it or take it seriously. *sigh*
(It also seems deeply and unsettlingly ironic that now two of my favourite books, The Rebel Sell and Bad Science, tackle psychological issues, logical fallacies and general reasons why people believe strange and untrue things, and of course confirmation bias – or picking out things which agree with what you already believe – is top of the list. But oh no! Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing? I certainly can’t deny that reading things which cleverly and wittily argue things I already believe makes me happy. And whilst it is really annoying when people conceive of great conspiracy theories which they alone can perceive – MMR will kill me! Everyone is so conformist and doesn’t think for themselves! – does being ‘one of the few’ (ahem) to debunk those ideas morph into being exactly the same thing? Argh! The perils!)
But seriously, Bad Science touches me deeply because it taps into one of the things I find most depressing of all in the world: attitudes to science. And I say this in the position of not being a scientist myself. I’m hugely ignorant about (statistically speaking) around 100% of how things work, and so are most people. But so what? Just because you don’t understand any one particular scientific theory, why does that have to impair an understanding of science itself – which is, I try to say again and again and again, a method, not a body of facts. Science is so often accused of being:
(a) boring
(b) closed-minded
(c) complicated
which I just utterly fail to understand. To take them one by one:
(a) scientific explanations are invariably more interesting than any ‘alternatives’. As Bad Science notes along with many other people, evolution is just simply a more interesting thing than creationism. The placebo effect is so, so much cooler than rubbish like homoeopathy. In fact, why people believe homoeopathy in the first place is vastly more interesting than homoeopathy.
(b) science is the only system of knowledge acquisition I can think of which is not just perpetually changing but has perpetual change built right in. Any theory can be toppled with enough evidence, and the real business of science is lots of human, utterly fallible scientists all shouting and disagreeing with each other. For some entirely inexplicable reason, this is ‘closed-minded’.
(c) when someone asks me to fix their computer, I tend to keep everything the same apart from one thing which is changed. So if the ‘Internet isn’t working’, you don’t buy a new router and network adaptor, reinstall Windows and switch broadband providers all in one go and then see if it works again. Obviously. I was taught to try and keep all variables bar one the same in something like Year 4, and surely that’s just common sense anyway. And science should make sense most of the time, since it’s only trying to describe the same real world that we all live in. Even when it initially seems counterintuitive, it shouldn’t be too hard to see beyond that. After all, just about everyone in the world has marvelled over the optical illusion where one line looks longer than the other, and people don’t walk away from that confused.
Anyway. Just read the book
(And finally, in the interests of showing that science is not about the inevitable fallacies of individual scientists, here’s one paragraph from the book which, to quote the sensible person who noted it, “commits many of the sins he spends a whole book castigating bad reporters of science about in just one paragraph”.)
“The argument was whether you are a body or have a body…”
“And you said you are a body, right?”
“Of course. Obviously your name stands for an abstracted personality and so on, but ultimately it’s all comes down to the physical. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Well yes… I am a materialist too”
“I thought so”
“Although it is confusing when I say that, and people ask how a communist can be a materialist”
“Yeah, but those people are idiots. And I suppose that materialism is the common root our beliefs branch from…”
“Exactly”
“High five for materialism!”
*high fives*
[Note for extreme pedants: we’re not necessarily talking materialism in the ultra-strictest sense – i.e. troubled by dark matter and quantum physics – but certainly no place for the soul. As if anyone read this and was subsequently deeply troubled by that thought…
]
“Ah – this isn’t a good feeling. I have a week before I go back to Cambridge and so many things to do! Many of them are fun things – little, cool projects to complete – but somehow it all seems to take ages to get through and the to-do lists never shrink, even when I’m in a productive mood. Argh… hopefully tomorrow will bring better fortune with this “
…Well, indeed it did. For this was how my blog was going to begin last night, before writing a blog got added to the list of things I hadn’t managed to achieve during the day. By comparison, today was masterfully productive! I still have lots of things to do, but it’s not the counsel of despair of last night and this is a Very Good Thing.
Way back last Saturday night I went to see The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas with Josh(ua), Sanna and Dom from a parallel universe. It was a rather appropriate film to see given the previous blog post, and whatever its flaws (and it did have flaws) it was the kind of film which makes enough brave choices for you not to care. Without wanting to spoil anything, I can’t remember the last time I sat through a film’s credits in sombre silence, and even after we’d left no-one really wanted to say much. So consider it recommended – through try to see it in a cinema without a loud couple who clearly weren’t affected enough by the prospect of the Holocaust to shut up.
Book Club! I love book club (although I just wrote boob club by accident, which is obviously what racier people do with their lives) even though unsynchronised summer holidays have delayed our progress a bit, and on Sunday we compromised with a book club meeting involving no books and Futurama’s The Beast with a Billion Backs instead. Which was much better than my initial impressions allowed for, actually. But tomorrow should see a proper meeting, depending on whether Saoirse really can speed through Lady Chatterley’s Lover in one night, and then that’s sadly probably it until the next round of holidays! (I do have opinions about Lady Chatterley, but I shall reserve them until after the official discussion.)
Wednesday was Lucy’s birthday (happy birthday!) and we ended up rather curiously at Warwick Castle, which contained a particularly sensitive and delicately presented exhibit on a sad tale of murder and intrigue. Well actually, it was called ‘Ghosts Alive!’ and consisted of actors jumping out and shouting at you, and I only bring up the issue of Lucy’s jumpiness for the following reasons:
(a) I have inadequate faith it will be reported in all accuracy on her own blog
(b) It led to the utter hilarity of a French man quite openly pointing, laughing, conferring with his friends and then pointing and laughing a second time. Hehe
Finally, I have to report I have finally reached the exciting milestone – with Oliver and Abi’s careful encouragement – of having watched all of the original* Star Wars films. Woo!
(*Please do not comment with something along the lines of: ‘Pah, you’ve just seen the endlessly-tinkered-about-with-versions, where somebody shot in the wrong order!’)
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
