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It6rsquo;s distinctly odd seeing near-hysterical news reports about Stephen Hawking’s religious views, or, rather, lack thereof. It’s not exactly a reverse Road to Damascus experience; this is a physicist, not the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I sometimes wonder if journalists ever stop to think what they’re writing. To look at the headlines, and even to read the articles attached to them, you’d think this was a scandal on a par with the Queen saying she thought the monarchy should be abolished, or Osama bin Laden renouncing terrorism. Hawking hasn’t even changed his mind: he’s just stated it a bit more emphatically than he usually does (and not even for the first time).
The “scandal” rests on the fact that in A Brief History of Time he made an offhand comment about “knowing the mind of God”, but that’s a figure of speech. One commentator I read did concede that he was being metaphorical, but insisted nevertheless that it was “a bit rich” of him to subsequently rubbish the notion of God.
In point of fact, he hasn’t exactly rubbished God. He’s made two points, to wit:
- it is possible to explain the origins of the universe without supposing that it was created by an intelligent being; and
- Professor Hawking doesn’t believe in God.
The first of these is pretty much established scientific fact, and has been for decades. It’s not that science has decided to disprove the existence of God; rather, that science has (so far at least) not had to have an opinion on the matter of the existence of any deity. God is not part of the remit of science.
The second is Hawking’s personal belief. I would beg to differ (as I believe differently), but it should come as no surprise that Hawking is, essentially, an atheist. When did he ever suggest otherwise, aside from the odd meaningless turn of phrase? And why even make such a fuss about it? Why is this news?
Sometimes, a single news article can speak volumes about the area it comes from. Not a million years ago, for example, I was tickled to see a report from the village we used to live at about the theft of a couple of violets. Crime was so rare in that village, that this actually accounted for about three column inches in the local paper.
The headline that caught my eye, when it popped up on the BBC News RSS feed, was “Two drivers die in two separate car crashes”. To which the obvious question, if you live in a part of the world that has been asphalted over (and I do), would be: What, only two?
Turns out, this happened in the Grampian region of Scotland, an area of about nine thousand square kilometres (give or take). This is a large chunk of western Scotland where fatal accidents are so rare, that if two happen on the same day, that fact alone is worth a headline.
There’s an online game I like to play so that my mind can freewheel. It’s not very challenging, and it really just amounts to matching up little coloured squares to collect stars and, therefore, points. Most of the time I play it pretty much on automatic, and still manage to whizz through twenty levels in the space of about fifteen minutes. If, by way of an analogy, we were to think of a game of chess to be the intellectual equivalent of Crime and Punishment, this game is Green Eggs and Ham. No disrespect to Dr Seuss, but there you are.
Like so many online games, it’s financed by advertising, and it’s sometimes rather entertaining — often more entertaining than the game itself — to see what’s being advertised just to the right of the board. And one advert that frequently pops up is for a very special kind of dating agency.
Unlike most dating agencies, which simply promise me the chance to meet sexually attractive people, this one promises me the chance to meet sexually attractive people from the upper middle classes — exactly the kind of people, in short, who would not be playing this game and probably wouldn’t want to meet people who do.
They are managers, doctors, architects and graphic designers. And surreally stereotypical. I can’t say that I am an expert on the upper middle classes, but I have met quite a few members of that particular group, and there are certain things I cannot imagine any of them doing or saying. Yet these really very attractive women and distinguished-looking men with hobbies like sailing smile at me from their little pictures accompanied by texts that say things like: “Good evening. I have two tickets for the theatre, and I was wondering if you would care to accompany me.” My favourite is the young lady offering me the chance to attend the opening of an art exhibition with her.
Each to his own, I suppose; but for my money, and as far as I know for everybody else’s money, anyone who thinks that standing around with glasses of cheap champagne looking at pictures and trying to chat with experts is the ideal way to a man’s heart is either a crashing bore, or mentally unstable. I can’t help but wonder what kind of people they really do have on their books. Probably not so much the kind of people they advertise, but the kind of people who would like to meet the kind of people they advertise but don’t move in the right circles. It’s a depressing thought.
Recently, YouTube got into a spot of trouble with a security flaw, which they had to fix in a hurry. Without getting too technical, somebody discovered a way of inserting HTML in video comments, causing all sorts of mayhem.
Because the exploit involved typing <script> in the comment, part of the brute-force fix the powers that be have forced upon innocent users simply edits out any occurrance of the word “script”.
It’s similar to the way a profanity filter works, except that these filters normally replace the offending string with a row of asterisks. YouTube has decided simply to make it vanish, as if it had never been typed.
Of course, the problem is that the word “script” occurs in ordinary English, so a comment like “Was the script difficult to write?” becomes the unintelligible “Was the difficult to write?” which allows much to the imagination, to the enrichment of all.
It gets better. Not only is the word itself filtered out, but any occurrance of the sequence of characters embedded within a longer word is similarly edited. People often refer in their comments to the video description, which must now be called a “video deion”.
This is a variant on what is known as the Scunthorpe problem after a town in England whose name regularly falls foul of profanity filters. It contains, you see, an obscenity, which most people are completely unaware of until it is pointed out to them by obliging profanity filters which render the name as “S****horpe”.
How much more entertaining it would be if profanity filters worked on the same principle as the YouTube security patch. Because then the name would be “Shorpe”, which doesn’t shove the presence of foul language in your face, and, as an extra bonus, has readers engaged in a fruitless search of Google Maps for the place in question (I’ve checked: the nearest match is Thorpe).
There are so many other words that inadvertantly include naughty words, and instead of being defaced by the classic — sorry, “clic” — asterisks, we could make entirely new words and abbreviate our language in the process (making books a tiny bit shorter and thus saving paper and other valuable resources).
It would be great. City-dwellers could live in skysers, people wanting to know the time would simply glance at their wrisches, and borderline alcoholics could be discouraged from drinking by the knowledge that rum is made from fermented moles. I don’t know why nobody thought of this sooner.
For those bamboozled by recent events in British politics. Thanks to somegreybloke and Sugartalker for finding this.