Tuesday, March 28, 2006

The Mutual Dorsal Itch Removal Operatives

She hates this song you know. Oh sorry! Dizzy by Throwing Muses

It is apparently “Untrue”.

I have noticed that I am listening to whole albums at the moment after having been pointed at them by unexpected tracks coming up on the shuffle. I am sure that I have not heard 20% of the tracks on this PC even once. I just want to dance.

Was that Richard Dawkins daughter on University Challenge last night? She certainly looked like him and she is about the right age. Pity that St Hildas bombed against Manchester who didn’t even do the gentlemanly thing and let the women get a few in at the end. And so we switched over before the end in good time for A for Andromeda. This had a great claustrophobic atmosphere and despite it being based on an original by Fred Hoyle of the Steady State Theory (which always makes me worry pompously about his scientific credentials), was quite believable in terms of how the remote signal could be turned into a live, walking, talking human being. There was some fast editing which made it slightly disjointed – you cannot build a computer like that without contracting out – and a few points after the arrival of Andromeda herself which seemed a bit far-fetched. But hey – it was a drama, the acting was good, the sets were less gee-whizz than they could have been and the pace was almost right.

Maybe it tried to introduce a few ideas regarding the philosophy of the whole thing which were not developed as they should have been but we are not all scientists or thinkers. Anyway, Arthur C. Clarke did it better with the Conversations with Starglider in The Fountains of Paradise, though Andromeda did raise the question of why an alien intelligence would try to give us all this knowledge for free. (You can actually find the entire text of the conversations here.) Actually no! Starglider withheld knowledge that it considered damaging to humankind. I suppose the question is whether aliens who have developed technology to allow them to communicate or travel over the vast distances that must exist between any civilizations would also have developed the intelligence to totally rid themselves of the petty and limiting behaviour that makes intelligent entities think that behaviour that promotes the existence of the individual over the collective whole is better. Maths, logic, chaos theory applied to societies comes down on the side of long-term altruistic behaviour being better for survival. I really need to re-read The Selfish gene though who says Dawkins is right, not that he says things are in any way as simple as I have maybe suggested they are. Having said this, what if an alien society was so different that things we would find totally unacceptable, were the main trunk of survival?

I am now angry all over again about that teacher from The Learning Curve the other week, the upholder of traditional teaching methods over the holistic approach who complained about a discussion which resulted in the existence of aliens being raised in a project about space. This is a perfectly legitimate part of discussion which would fire any great scientists. We are all held back by the tank-tops who seem to have inherited the institutions which decide on how we are to be taught. We all start out cleverer than our teachers and they know it. The tragedy is that they succeed in beating this out of us.

Not literally in my case – I was once slippered for throwing curry powder, though the punishment was the humiliation rather than any pain inflicted.

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