I was listening to No Agenda (podcast) the other day and they touched on the topic of Wilhelm Reich. This guy sounds like a proper pseudo-science nutcase who blessed the world with such concepts as Orgone energy and cloudbusting. Not so much ’standing on the shoulders of giants’ as chucking out the mass of accumulated knowledge and starting again, making it up as you go along. Genius or crackpot?
The Wikipedia artical is well worth a read.
Watching University Challenge on the Beeb tonight, there was a question about Pascal’s Wager which reminded me of an almost exactly opposite philosophy I have been developing over the last twelve years or so. Pascal’s posed that even though the existance of God cannot be disproved, a person should believe in God as doing so has everything to gain and nothing to lose. Bascially, a life times false belief in a God is better than eternal damnation. After a weekly debate with some Jehovas wittnesses that bothered me every Sunday when I was studying for my final exams, I was frustrated by the fact that every argument I made about life the universe and everything was followed by a ‘God made it that way’ sort of argument. I finally got to the point of asking ‘if the existance of everything in the universe is because God put it there, what put God there in the first place?’. There was no answer to this and they gave up admitting that you just ‘have to have faith’. Ha!
Since that early success of logic over dogma, I have come up with what I am going to call “Campbell’s Wager”. That is: if there are so many religions in the world with incongruent beliefs (mono/polytheistic etc. etc.) then they cannot all be right… but they can all be wrong. In the absence of evidence to support one religion over another, the odds are that they are all wrong.
And that is why I am a happy atheist 
Blaise Pascal (left), James Campbell (right)
I am loving this simple but really playable iPhod Touch/iPhone game called Boxed In. It is free, has about 100 levels and (at level 25) has yet to get dull. You are a small robot whose aim in life is to collect cogs and get to a goal. The maze is scattered with boxes that you can push about (but not pull). There are also colour coded blocks that will disappear when an object (a box) is pushed into the corresponding coloured square area.
Boxed In
Why did I not think of this first?
I have to hand it to Maxton for finding some of the most suprising information available on the interwebs… With this email, he has surpassed himself:
Subject: Couple of links for your blog From: Malcolm Saxton To: me http://ihatemymessageboard.com/2009/04/23/a-whole-chicken-in-a-can/ http://ihatemymessageboard.com/2009/03/29/pork-brains-in-milk-gravy/ -- http://thedemocraticboyfriend.blogspot.com/
The first link is to a write-up of a can that actually had a whole chicken in it… Incredible and disgusting!
The second is a link to a write-up of a can that contained pork brains in milk gravy. To me, that reads pig brains.
I just stumbled across a little easter egg function on my iPod Touch. If you briefly press the home button and power button at the same time, it takes a screen shot and adds it to you photos. Why would you want this? Getting to a point in a game that you may want to remember? Who knows but it is there.
This made me google for other easter eggs in the iPod Touch and I found this link. Sigh…
A Wordpress update… Phew!
Dave and Kanari brought us back these quail eggs that were sort-of pickled in soy sauce. They were pretty tasty and if you like soy sauce and pickled eggs, I would recommend them to you.
The whites of the eggs were completely brown all the way through but the yolk was still fairly yellow. In addition to the eggs, there was a sachet of what appeared to be activated charcoal (it got hot when the packet was opened…) which is presumably to mop up any oxygen and stop them from going bad.
We expect it of Twitter but Gmail?