Here’s some video from a Current TV segment about a biodiesel boat race to circumnavigate the globe. The boat featured in the video runs on a mixture of fuel from various sources — 4 gallons of the stuff was produced from liposuctioned butt blubber (a hundred grams of that came from the captain’s own backside). Welp, there’s a renewable fuel source America has plenty of. Here’s a blog post with more info. (Thanks, Jay)
Sometimes a simple flow chart can make things so much clearer..
Well, the one on the right certainly looks more, er.. elegant. Nice confluence of events this morning. Just finished reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Page 417 contains this passage..
“… Karen finds the culprit on Bonnie’s coffee table. Weber’s new book, which the girl has been dutifully ploughing through at the rate of half a page a day over the last seven months.
“This is what’s upset you?” Karen asks. “Something in here?”
One more denying shake of the head, then the girl breaks down. “There’s a God part of the brain? Religious visions from some kind of epilepsy storm?”
Karen is all over herself, comforting the girl. And the girl takes some comforting.
“You can turn God on and off with electric…? It’s just some built-in structure? Did you already know this? does everybody? Everybody smart?”
Karen shushes her, strokes her shoulders. “Nobody knows. He doesn’t know.”
“Of course he knows! He wouldn’t put it in a book, if he didn’t. He’s the smartest man I’ve ever met. Religion is just a temporal lobe…? He’s saying belief is just an evolved chemical thing you could gain or lose…? …Oh shit. Shit. I’m too stupid to get this!”
Ha! I like the idea that, in the battle between The Darwinists and the believers, those in favour of evolution are not just saying that those with faith are wrong, but that the reason they believe is simply a mechanism caused by evolution itself. Now that’s my kind of argument..
While we’re at it – an interesting article in today’s Guardian in which the Dean of Southwark is quoted as saying “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England…” Oh really?
And then, as if by some ordained fate, I stumbled upon this clip. I think I might start worshipping Richard Dawkins. That oughta get his back up. Here he is, ripping Liberty University a new one..
.. in the classic taxicab scene from On The Waterfront. That’s right, the marvellous Rod Steiger. Oh sure, Brando is good and the contender speech is legendary now, but Steiger is better. It’s Leonard Bernstein’s score that secretly does all the work for Brando here. No-one ever remembers it’s even there, but listen to the way it builds throughout this now-rightly-famous screen moment. And, as William Goldman points out, that’s the only New York cab ever to have had Venetian blinds fitted in its back window..
During the making of our last long-player, Corinne, Paul and I would often break to dine at a local pizza place round the corner from the studio in Hoxton. Our estimable producer Mr. O’Duffy is the youngest in a family of boys, while I on the other hand am the eldest. As a consequence, he is one of the fastest eaters in the world, while I am among the slowest. He never eats the crust on his pizza and, on the many occasions when he was forced to wait for me to finish, a habit began to form. He would fashion his leftover bits of crust into a likeness of Our Lord Jesus Christ in a ritual that we came to refer to as the making of the Turin Pizza. They were primitive attempts at first but, over time, he became so dexterous and the portraits so lifelike that eventually members of staff who came to collect the dishes would run in horror, while others would kneel reverently in silent prayer. This picture conjures up what might have happened had we regularly eaten at an Indian restaurant rather than an Italian one..
Best entrance in movies. Great cinematography too. Welles and Cotten look like they’re trapped in some weird Escher creation, all dark corners and impossible angles. And the music..
Saw them at the Barbican years ago. Unbelievable. At one point they broke down the harmonies and introduced them one by one. Cedric Dent (the little guy with glasses) had all the inside notes – his part was like some 12-tone piece by Schonberg. Quite remarkable..
If nothing else, surely we can all agree to love Penn Jillette..
“Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else’s vision.”
– Penn Jillette
Not that it’s any concern of mine, but Amazon in the US has Vista Home Premium Upgrade on sale for $153.99 which, at today’s exchange rate, would work out about £78.63 in the UK. Amazon in the UK has the exact same item listed at.. what do we think? How about.. £144.99. As someone on wordpress whose name I can’t remember points out, that works out at a rate of $1.06 to the pound – the last time that rate was actually in effect was March.. 1985..
“Belief is a cognitive state; believing something is a matter of having a certain kind of positive mental attitude towards it, of thinking that it is true. There are, however, numerous propositions that we believe to be true even though we have never entertained them. Paradoxically, it seems that belief is independent of thought.
Take, for example, the proposition “I have more nostrils than noses.” You know this proposition, and have known it for a long time (and, as the tripartite theory of knowledge explains, belief is necessary for knowledge). However, until you read this page you had never entertained it.
This shows that belief is independent of thought, that you do not need to think a thing in order to know it. You have never engaged in any mental activity that could be described as assenting to the idea that you have more nostrils than noses, and yet you have long known that proposition to be true.
The same can be said of many other propositions: “flamingos have fewer feet than elephants”; “42 has two fewer digits in it than 1966”; etc.
If you are tempted to suggest that before reading this page you did not know these propositions, then consider the following:
You now know that you have more nostrils than noses, that flamingos have fewer feet than elephants, and that 42 has two fewer digits in it than 1966. This page did not teach you any of these things. Therefore, you must already have known them.
It seems that you can know things without ever having entertained them; belief is possible without thought.”
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Same programme – Red Hot Chilli Peppers are on now, who no longer have the excuse of youth. One of them just said..”I listen to everything. I love the Clash’s Sandinista, and I love the second Van Halen album. I don’t put one above the other coz it’s, like, more intellectual than the other..” Fuckin’ idiots, the lot of them – these people are 40 years old, goddammit..
