Braney Man

I suppose this photo is in the spirit of these images from David Sylvian but his just seem so much better - so much more mundane and yet so much more interesting. It might be of course that there are just so many of them and the continuous flow of similar subjects makes them better than a single image of something "boring".

Anyway, enough of my failings and desire to copy someone else's brilliance. Stephen Hawking has dismissed God from his view of the Universe. I do remember in A Brief History of Time that Hawking left room on the "other side" of The Big Bang for God to have started things off. Having seen mention of various theories regarding possible scenarios for the trigger for TBBT, I was already aware that this view had been challenged quite strongly already. In fact I would imagine that many if not most scientists in the field would already have taken the mention of God to have been a convenient placeholder until something more scientific came along - sort of God of the Prefix rather than the Gaps I suppose. If this depressed you, then for a laugh I suppose you could read the comments attached to The Daily Mail article about this. I'm certainly not linking to it.

Years ago I might have descended into a long pseudo-philosophical discussion and while I might still want to, I think that my gradual realisation that I know nothing compared to some people has made me think twice about posting such rants. The proliferation of comments against articles that always appear to polarise the opionions suggests that there are many people who would hold views somewhere in between and who do not post because they realise the futility of any argument. I don't consider myself a good critic of anything but I could quite happily put together a decent and cogent argument for many of these things. It would of course only reflect my opinion but at least it would be more intellectually rigorous than most posted comments. There has been a spoof message board section in Private Eye in recent issues, which satirises the worst of the rabid commenters. I'm not sure if the letter to this esteemed organ recently, enquiring whether this message board was real, was ... err ... real. I suspect not as there is too much consistency in the punchlines but the spirit and level of bile is perfectly believable apart from the fact that it never seems to adhere to Godwin's law.

Again I return to the view that most people have no idea how big the world actually is - or more accurately how many people there are in it- it is a collective lack of self-awareness you might say. However, thinking about this makes me wonder that if everyone had perfect self-awareness, the human world would stagnate because we could never get anything done for worrying about who it would upset. I therefore do NOT apologise if anything in this post upsets you.