New Art Prints available (very soon)
The prints are looking nice – after many hours of backwards and forwards we think we have them perfect. Hopefully this run will be the ones we use and we can launch the new art site and party on in to the night.
Watch this space.
Sleeping on a complex decision may be a bad choice
SLEEPING on a complex decision may not help you make the best choice after all. So say two studies that question the evidence for unconscious decision-making.
The “unconscious thought” theory for making complex decisions was proposed in a 2006 study by Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues. The team showed volunteers a series of cars and their attributes on a screen, before asking half of them to think carefully about choosing the best car, and the other half to solve anagrams – a distraction technique to allow unconscious processing. Those in the anagram group were more likely to choose the cars with the best attributes, leading the researchers to conclude that it is best to leave tough choices to the unconscious (Science, vol 311, p 1005).
Or you could of course just try reading this.
Full report over at New Scientist
Funny feet shoes
Someone got me a pair of these as a present. They are hilarious and the cause of much silliness and laughter at BT, but at the same time they’re pretty comfy.
I’m told that they are common amongst surfers – you lot seem like a clever lot so maybe you can help confirm this. I just like standing in the shower in them and running down the corridors – it looks like a yeti escaped.
Dawkins funds atheist summer camp
Arch-atheist Richard Dawkins has helped launch a summer camp aimed at changing the way children think.
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, has helped launch an atheist summer camp for children. Alongside the more traditional activities of tug-of-war, swimming and canoeing, children at the five-day camp in Somerset will learn about rational scepticism, moral philosophy, ethics and evolution.
Camp-goers aged eight to 17 will also be taught how to disprove phenomena such as crop circles and telepathy. In the Invisible Unicorn Challenge, any child who can prove that unicorns do not exist will win a £10 note – which features an image of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory – signed by Dawkins, Britain’s most prominent atheist.
Dawkins is not personally involved in Camp Quest, which originated in the United States, but helped subsidise the cost of the camp through his Richard Dawkins Foundation. The former Oxford professor said Camp Quest provided children with a summer camp that was “free of religious dogma”, unlike many adventure breaks which are run by the Scouts and faith-based groups. All 24 places at the camp, which runs from July 27 to 31, have already been filled and more camps are planned for next year, including Easter.
Extreme lego art
Nathan Sawaya is a New York-based artist who creates awe-inspiring works out of some of the most unlikely things. His recent North American museum tours feature large-scale sculptures using only toy building blocks. LEGO® bricks to be exact.
Above is just one of the incredible examples of his work.
See the full gallery here.
Is there a 20p coin in your pocket worth 50 quid?
Did you know that some of the shiny new 20p coins feature a rare error and The London Mint Office (this is NOT the Royal Mint) will pay you £50 for one?
How it happened: Last year there was an incredibly unusual lapse in the strict quality control at the Royal Mint. A batch of 20p coins were issued with mis-matched sides. The result is a number of 20p coins have entered circulation without a date. Read more about how it happened here >>
Identifying one of these rare 20p coins: Not all the new 20p coins are error coins – in fact, very few of them are. To be an Undated 20p it must have the new design on the front, and on the Queen’s head side the date must be missing.
You can find help identifying the right coins here >>
Agnosticism – copping out?
Nigel Warburton will be on the Richard Bacon show on Radio 5 live, Tues 30th June from midnight, talking on the subject of agnosticism and whether it’s a cop-out. I recently posted a flyer for his talk with the group Dialogue with Islam about whether we need religion. I have heard from a source that there was ‘a symptomatic moment… when the Humanist association organizer without irony asked the Muslims to the pub to carry on the conversation.’
A while ago I was interviewed by Jon Ronson, and since then have met him a few times at a friend’s barbeques. A fascinating and funny man to talk to. Last night I watched his ‘Revelations’ documentary on the Alpha Course, which exists to turn agnostics into Christians. It was on C4, and is well worth a watch if you can find some way of doing so. He followed eight agnostics attending the course, who, through the clever structure of the course days, had Jesus gently and relentlessly sold to them. It became increasingly uncomfortable to watch. Certain things struck me in particular:
1 – Each of the attendees was clearly unhappy. Hence, one imagines, their attending such a course. The relentless and structured selling of any solution to unhappiness in that sort of environment would clearly be effective. Any message could have been offered. In fact, the 1 in 8 success rate the Alpha Course apparently boasts would seem rather low, compared to other life-changing happiness secrets (bogus or otherwise) which could have been proffered instead. Having attended several courses, religious or otherwise in my time, I can testify how quickly one falls in line with thinking, and starts to think and speak as a devotee, enjoying the bonding of the group. It’s a pointer to perhaps how ultimately mundane and misguided the message was at this course that not more attendees were ‘spoken to’. Loads of unhappy people ready to accept God, and the perfect environment to find him: you’d imagine a least as much enthusiasm and ‘conversion’ as from an NLP course, surely?
2. I can’t reconcile in my mind the person of Jesus, whoever he was in history, and the modern need to have a course as manipulative as this one. It’s a shame that God seems to need salesmen, and a structure as ultimately cynical and carefully thought-through as the Alpha Course to connect with people. There were parallels with a time-share ‘talk’ that I once went to, and echoes of plenty of brain-washing techniques from history. What a shame that people, especially unhappy ones, need to be broken down in such a familiar way. The Christians involved I’m sure, don’t see it as remotely cynical, just preparing a ground for God to do his best work. But if they don’t also stop and honestly wonder if they’ve been recruited into a persuasion exercise, then they’re doing themselves an injustice. I spoke to an ex-pastor recently from a Charistmatic church who left his calling out of disgust at the manipulative techniques he knew he was employing, and expected to employ, with his congregation. The placing of the music, the manipulative nature of the music itself, the timing of the emotional pleas, the whipping up of the crowd hysteria, the pushing over of people to suggest they’d been ‘slain in the Spirit’, the transparent nonsense of getting everyone to talk in tongues and the arbitrariness of so-called ‘interpretations; the heightening of suggestibility: he had the honesty to realise that nothing separated him from a stage hypnotist or a revivalist showman. He still privately believes, but is disgusted at the manipulative techniques that are used. At the time, it’s hard for him to say if he was being ‘cynical’ or not. Probably not – he was just letting God do his work and providing a rousing experience for his congregation. It took a moment of brave honesty to see what was going on.
3. There was an interesting exchange between a questioning attendee and one of the Christians designated to gently persuade them during the small group meetings. The Christian said that God had spoken to him on a bus. He had been asked to carry out an assignment which he felt was probably too much for him, and God has spoken to him, ‘as a voice inside his head’, to say ‘you can’t do it’. The question was asked – a perfectly sensible one – how did he know it came from God, as opposed to from himself? The question was treated as patronising and offensive, by the very people placed there to answer sensible questions. It was brilliantly symptomatic of the problem: that rational discussion has no place at the table. Just believe it because it’s true. End of story.
Fascinating stuff.
Vanishing head illusion – Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman has produced a series of great little optical illusions to mess with your eyes. This one is to promote his new book 59 seconds. Watch as his little head disappear as he frantically waves his massive wand over it. (The bigger your monitor the further away you need to stand – or it wont work).
Einstein on the tube
Following up from our last post is the news that service announcements on the London Underground are to include the words of great thinkers such as Gandhi, Albert Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Turner Prize-nominated artist Jeremy Deller has compiled a list of quotations to be used by Tube drivers. The phrases will be included in communications with passengers on the network’s Piccadilly Line.
The initiative is said to be an attempt to make travelling on the Underground more enjoyable and thought-provoking. The Tube system already has Poems on the Underground, launched in 1986, featuring written verse on advertising space inside carriages.
Check out the video in the link below where one woman suggests “If she (the driver) did it every day I might want to cave her head in”
Theory of Relativity explained using juggling
I’ve done this as a thanks to Kaite S who delivers me so many links. She loves to juggle and I love special relativity theory – the video is a really nice little way to start off your week and make you all feel a bit brainier.
"
