Looking Out To Sea

I’ve just had a look at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=believe for the meaning of the verb ‘to believe’ and I found a number of very interesting definitions — to have confidence or faith in, to hold true, to suppose or assume — but none of the definitions fit this sentence (my emphasis):

Last week we learned that a family of at least three children had come down with measles because their family didn’t believe in vaccinating them …

There are other examples — just think of all the things people object to. “I don’t believe in sex before marriage”, “I don’t believe in abortion”, “I don’t believe in drugs”.

It should be fairly obvious that this type of person does actually believe in the existence of vaccination, pre-marital sex, abortion or whatever. They might even be involved in protests against them. But it’s not that they don’t actually believe in them. It’s that they don’t approve of them. So why do people use ‘believe’ when they mean ‘approve’?

And just as interesting, why does this very common usage not appear in dictionaries? (I also tried Urban Dictionary and Wiktionary, two sources I thought might mention ‘unofficial’ usage. But nothing.)

All this brings up some interesting thoughts when people make “belief” claims. If an otherwise smart person says “I don’t believe in evolution”, what do they mean by that? Many creationists argue against evolution on the grounds of moral consequences — that Hitler was an evolutionist, that Darwinism is a cruel and inhumane philosophy leading to genocide and eugenics, etc. It’s perfectly possible that “I don’t believe in evolution” has a strong element of “I don’t approve of evolution” or “I don’t like the moral consequences of evolution”.

And since few people seem to make a clear distinction between “belief as faith” and “belief as approval”, there are further consequences. Is “belief in God” entirely to do with faith, or is there an element of approval? A case of “I approve of God, because that is how I would like things to be”. An important element of religious faith is the comfort that people derive from it.

I have to admit this is all idle conjecture. But one final thought: whenever I find myself trying to find support for a belief of my own, I have to ask myself why it’s so important. And the only honest answer I can give myself is that, it’s important because this is the way I’d like things to be. If an important part of my world-view is removed, then I have to re-evaluate it all for consistency. That is a lot of work and may reveal things I don’t like — about myself, my friends or life in general.

The other day I subscribed to a new podcast, Thought for the World. It’s a three-minute monologue in the style of the BBC’s Thought for the Day. It’s produced by the Humanist Society of Scotland and bills itself as a humanist reflection. Recent contributors have been Arthur Smith and AC Grayling. Next week there’s one from Christopher Brookmyre!

Today’s thought mentioned, among other things, the purpose of funerals and grieving. If someone specifically asked not to have a funeral, should their wishes be respected — or is the funeral for the needs of the people left behind?

• Podcast feed
• iTunes page

The weather is rather grim out there. It’s not bad, just very lifeless. Going out for lunch put me in mind of being in a Soviet spy movie, meeting my shady contact on the bridge over cold grey water.

“The weather remains chilly late in the year.”

“The bay is frozen in Vladivostok year round.”

“Do you have the package?”

“A BLT and McCoy’s ridge cut cheese and onion. Travel safely.”

“And you, comrade.”

This evening we made our first use of the BBC’s iPlayer “watch again” system to see the first episode of Ashes to Ashes, the sequel to last year’s retro-modern cop show Life on Mars.

We watched it on the laptop over wireless, and received full-screen playback for almost the entire episode. The only “loading…” pause was during the opening credits, for which I’ll happily forgive them. The quality was excellent and I was pleasantly surprised that it even works on Linux-based machines, provided you’ve got the latest Flash player.

I’m not sure what I think about the show yet. It was very jarringly edited — open a door into a different room, the person walks into a different building. I have already developed a healthy dislike for the protagonist’s daughter. I hope she will remain merely a spectre for the rest of the show.

Nothing much happened, though they’ve got a good character for the main part. Like Sam Tyler in the previous, Alexandra Drake should be a good person to base a series around.

You know the optical illusion type thing which has a word repeated at the end of one line and the beginning of another?

   This is exactly the
the kind of thing I mean.

They’re always horribly difficult to spot. I’m pretty sure I noticed one in the blurb on the back of one of my books at some point, but I don’t know which one. I just had a quick look at some of the potential culprits — I had a feeling it was William Gibson — but couldn’t find it. But then, maybe my eye just skipped over it?

Either way, I just reported this bug in GeSHi, in the Haskell highlighter. This is taken from the middle of a long list of standard functions…

      'zip3', 'zipWith', 'zipWith3', 'unzip', 'unzip3',
      'unzip', 'unzip3', 'lines', 'words', 'unlines',

…and notice how unzip and unzip3 are in there twice? Well, it causes the linking tool (which creates web links to the Haskell API for these functions) to break on these two functions. It never ceases to amaze how silly some bugs can be. ;-)

There was a thread on Reddit recently that briefly landed in a [discussion about the terse nature of Haskell variable names] [comment].

It doesn’t matter what language you’re in, you should be naming the pieces something meaningful. You don’t have to program Haskell that way. You can still use meaningful variable names, and meaningful names for a lot of other things too, pretty much without penalty.

[comment]:

I am as guilty as the next person of this kind of shenanigan. I wrote this piece of code today before reading this thread, so let’s see how badly it fares on the code-as-documentation scale:

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Last night we went to see Keri and Beard and took with us some home-made bread and a chocolate/pear sponge concoction. Helen will probably have photos eventually, but not yet because the camera died while we were there. We’re relying on Beard’s camera phone to get us evidence of the pudding.

There are some real special characters to see at our local Somerfield, if you go at the right time of day. And some of them work the tills… but anyway. When we were picking up ingredients for the sponge there was one malnourished looking ned with a peaked cap pulled down low over his face and a massive yellow jacket that could hold a three-person tent. He sidled up to the biscuit shelf, pulled down a packet of Penguins and walked away, stopped and lifted up the front of his jacket, then looked in a furtive manner. I was staring right at him from the other end of the aisle. He spotted me, turned round, put the biscuits down and walked off. In the kind of exaggerated John Wayne walk that could only mean he had three packets of spaghetti, a loaf of bread and two pints of milk stuffed down his trouser legs.

It’s the little things like that which keep me amused.

We invited some friends round for tea tonight, but by the time we got round to inviting them they had already started preparing a wild goose, and we hadn’t decided what we were going to make. So they reversed the invite on us. So we’re off to see Keri and Beard this evening to eat goose.

We’ll be taking pudding, which we have to get moving on. I also baked a couple of loaves of bread just before lunch so we can take one of them round. Apparently the goose has much less meat on it than they were expecting, so the more food the better.

We then went out to look at flats for sale, in the 2–4 Sunday afternoon viewing slot. There was one over in Morningside that was okay, but really messy and full of junk, so hard to get an idea of the scale of it. It was an old guy selling it, who said — quoting from memory — “write your details on that sheet, but don’t write your phone number. Being an ex policeman I don’t like having phone numbers floating around”. What the hell this might mean was left unexplored.

On the way down from this top-floor flat another viewing was happening, so we thought we’d pop in. It was done out properly in the way the one upstairs wasn’t. It had a massive kitchen instead of one of the bedrooms, which has made us want to re-evaluate where our emphasis lies. We really feel that a proper kitchen-dining area is important, but would also like two bedrooms. For our money, it seems unlikely we’ll get all of what we want.

The interesting thing was that both places were designed on identical floor plans but completely different inside. It’s so hard to imagine how things could be when viewing a place. The final flat we visited was nearer the centre of town, and was positively ancient (mid 1700s) but quite large. However, it needed a lot of work. Nothing was horrible except the kitchen, but it was very depressing all the same. Every single room would have to be re-done. And I don’t honestly know I have the stamina to live in a building site for N years.

I feel that I could put the effort in to turn the first flat we saw into the one downstairs of it. The only room that would need completely redone is the kitchen; the rest would only require decoration. But the third place was a full project in every single corner you looked.

It’s given us more to think about, so maybe we can home in on what we really need. But now we’ve got some pudding to create.

Recently [PZ Myers from the Pharyngula blog] [pharyngula] was involved in a couple of debates, both interesting in their way. The first was an [on-air debate with Gene Simmons, a medical doctor and supporter of the Intelligent Design movement] [iddebate]. (If you’re still in the dark on the ID front, I wrote a post about it [a long time ago] [id] which should give you the background.) Dr Simmons was soundly beaten on every point. Apparently the big Intelligent Design blog, Uncommon Descent, noted that their player was shown to be a complete fool. (That is, before they deleted the thread in a bout of PR-friendly revisionism.)

In the end Dr Simmons had to take umbrage at Myers’ language in order to claw back some dignity. After demonstrating that he was happy to talk about the lack of transitional whale fossils without having done any research into the large body of knowledge on whale evolution, he was called “ignorant of whale evolution”. This seems only right and proper: he knew nothing about his chosen topic but was happily spreading lies and nonsense. But Simmons got angry at being insulted and deflected the point that he really didn’t know what he was talking about. Personally, I think that being offended by such a statement is a really cheap trick — and instead of warning PZ Myers about his language, the hosts should have ticked off Gene Simmons for trying to derail the conversation with further untruths and emotional appeals.

You might have expected that kind of petty ill-will from the start anyway. Especially as they changed the topic of the debate at the last minute at Dr Simmons’ request. That’s not cricket, chaps. You can [download the whole debate from the radio station’s website] [radio] — though it might disappear sooner or later. The station itself has creationist leanings and invited Dr Simmons back for another session on his own a few days later. It’s much easier to seem knowledgeable when you don’t have people poking holes in your arguments, don’t you find?

[pharyngula]: “Pharyngula: Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal” [iddebate]: “Debate with Gene Simmons” [id]: “A brief history of Intelligent Design” [radio]: “An MP3 of the debate between Gene Simmons and PZ Myers”

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Helen went off to do some singing this morning so I was left with exciting things to do like scrubbing the bits of dried plaster dust left behind from when the bathroom ceiling was fixed. I know, my life is full of joy and fun.

There was nothing in the house for lunch so I cheated and went to Greggs for a sausage roll. I also popped into Shelter and picked up (1) a double bill of Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season and Double Whammy and (2) Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, a comic biography of an oil rig worker.

There were other books I didn’t buy. For instance, this charming looking little book:

We haven’t decided what to do this evening. I’m pretty stuffed with doughnuts and can’t bring myself to cook anything. Battlestar, perchance?