Things I’ve Seen

Tony Blair last week said (as summarised by the Guardian):

the fanatics who struck in London and launched other attacks around the world were driven by an “evil ideology” rather than opposition to any policy, and that it would be a “misunderstanding of a catastrophic order” to think that if we changed our behaviour they would change theirs.

There’s a lot that could be said about this, but one simple confusion in the debate has been bugging me. We can and should distinguish between the effect that ‘our behaviour’ could have on those who have already signed up to an ‘evil ideology’, and the effect that it might have on the ability of proponents of that ideology to gain new recruits. Even if it were to turn out to be the case that nothing we could do would alter the bombers’ desire to wipe us off the face of the earth, it might nevertheless be the case that we could alter our behaviour so as to encourage fewer people to develop this desire.

There’s another confusion as well, slightly more deeply buried. On the one hand, we are told that we should not change our behaviour because that would be to capitulate to the terrorists’ demands, and treat their bombs as legitimate political statements. On the other hand, we are told that these terrorists have no demands, and are driven simply by the desire to eradicate us (or ‘our way of life’). The latter argument cancels out the former.

This is a rant I’ve been meaning to write for a couple of years now…

A common debating point in Iraq war arguments, here in Australia, at least, is “We are now a greater terrorist target than we were before”. As far as I’m concerned, both sides in this argument are wrong.
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Best source for anyone wanting to know about John G. Roberts Jr. (Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court) is here

Harry Potter battles it out with Karl Rove on google news….

Graph shows number of search results returned for each day this month.

I’ve just started to evaluate ActiveWords, which claims to be able to automate a whole load of tasks that you find yourself doing on a Windows PC. So far it strikes me as being harder to use than should be the case, but potentially very powerful (perhaps its just a learning curve?).

The first non-trivial thing I wanted to do was to run a standard command on whatever file I had selected (in this case, the command was ‘cleartool co -c “” [filename]’, to check the file out in our clearcase system). Getting the filename of the currently selected file was the hard bit (which really ought to be easy) - with a bit of help in the excellent forums I came up with:

<F2><ALT>c</ALT><ALT>d</ALT><END><ALT>v</ALT><SHIFT><HOME></SHIFT><ALT>c</ALT><F5>

…which does actually describe a sequence of keystrokes you could do to copy the full path into your clipboard… Naming that function (which I think I’ll need again!) “copySelectedFilename”, my final command was the relatively simple (for backslash-quote, read quote … I’ve not figured out how to stop WordPress from doing that…)

< =copySelectedFilename= ><DELAY:100><WORKPAD>
<LT>"cleartool" co -c "" "<ALT>v</ALT>"<GT><CTRL>s</CTRL>

Once again, Ross, at Less Travelled puts a nagging thought into much better words than I could…

…It is bad theology to mistake the promises of God to those who are oppressed and destitute and interpret them as being promises of blessing to vindicate our precious middle class existence.
…If we construct theologies of triumphalism from the hope born in desperation, then when we ourselves are desperate our theology will fail us. We will see tsunamis, earthquakes, bombings, and look to our triumphalist God only to find he isn’t there. Our idol of God which we have constructed and exalted has been brought low, and we are disappointed, and are shamed in our idolatry.

Nicola, at pledgebank, is asking 400 people to join her in a pledge to give 1% of their income to charity

I worked how much 1% of my salary was last week and I realised that if I gave it to charity on a monthly basis the worst it would mean for me would be one less night out a month. It could do some good for someone elsewhere though. If 400 people do the same imagine the difference that could make! Visit my blog at http://justonepercent.blogspot.com/ to see more about my campaign.

I’d encourage everyone to consider joining this effort… and spreading the word.

I hadn’t noticed this part of Bush’s response to the London bombings (my emphasis):

Bush said the London attacks were a reminder of the “evil” of the Sept. 11 attacks and underscored that the United States and its allies were fighting a “global war on terror.”

“We will stay on the offense, fighting the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them at home,” Bush said.

Anyone in a nation supporting the USA in Iraq might want to consider the implications.

I half heard a statistic on the radio the other day, about children having TVs in their bedrooms. The point being made was that as parents upgraded to a new TV - especially, at the moment, to a plasma screen - the old TVs were ending up in kids’ bedrooms. I couldn’t believe the figure quoted, so I did a bit of a search, and found this CBS story

Kaiser Family Foundation surveys [in the US] show that 68 percent of children 8 and older have a TV in their bedroom, as do 36 percent of children 6 and under.

The context, of course, was this

Among these third graders, we saw that even when controlling for the parent’s education level, the child’s gender and the amount of media used per week, those who had bedroom TV sets scored around 8 points lower on math and language arts tests and 7 points lower on reading tests. A home computer showed the opposite relationship—children with access to a home computer had scores that were around 6 points higher on the math and the language arts test and 4 points higher on the reading test, controlling for the same variables

Best summary of what is known about the London bombing that I’ve seen is in the Wikipedia.