Personal, PoetryO, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd, Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing! For Hecuba! ... Hamlet: Act 2 : Scene 2
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." -- Charles Kingsley
"I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
PhotoStock-Israel posted a photo:
Tifillin and elaborated decorated tfillin bag, Tifillin are either of two boxes containing Biblical verses and black, leather straps attached to them which are used in rabbinic Jewish prayer. They are an essential part of morning prayer services, and are worn on a daily basis (except the Sabbath and festivals) by religious Jewish males above the age of 13 years
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." -- Charles Kingsley
"I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is a podcast I recorded for Talis’ Nodalities series of talks. Because Facebook has recently made announcements about moving in a Semantic Web direction, I spoke with their Senior Open Programs Manager, David Recordon, about Facebook’s perspectives on many of the technologies they’re beginning to use. We ended up discussing Social Networking as a graph—that is: a network of related things. We also spoke about the Open Graph Protocol they’ve worked on and touched on privacy and walled gardens.
As you listen to the podcast, you can have a look at the source code for my site. (Just don’t run any validators on it and complain about what a poor developer I am: I already know 
). In the head, you’ll notice a few lines of metadata that are discussed in the podcast:
<meta property="og:title" content="Blogging Perspective" />
<meta property="og:type" content="blog" />
<meta property="og:email" content="contact@zachbeauvais.com" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.zachbeauvais.com" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Zach Beauvais' home on the web: his perspective, images and ideas." />
For more information, you can also read the Nodalities Magazine article I wrote about Facebook’s announcements.
The Open Graph Protocol page has information about the protocol itself. Facebook’s f8 developers’ conference site also has links with more information for developers.
Many thanks to David Recordon for having this conversation with me for Nodalities, and to my employer Talis, who has made this podcast available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3 license. 
Here are a few shots taken from around the place I grew up in Colorado. It’s been a long time since I lived here, but I have never forgotten just how arid and stark it can be. There is a beauty here, but it’s a harsh, unrelenting beauty. The plants are tortured and frail or designed to torture others. As are the animals. Behind everything is the backdrop of the mountains, from where our hope comes (here, in the form of water).
I hope you enjoy.
Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey says people have never paid for content and never will. What they have paid for — and will pay for — is access to content. The lesson for product strategists: make more content available, on more devices, in the most convenient ways possible.
access, content
Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education — and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world’s poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.
This is a very useful short talk by Charles Leadbeater, there’s a wonderfully poignant moment in the talk when he makes the assertion that “Well, education is a global religion. And education, plus technology, is a great source of hope.” which struck me as a rather profound statement. With so much of the worlds population unable to access education through “traditional” means we are now seeing the rise of grass roots led, transformative, and potentially highly disruptive new forms of education.
How do you get learning to people when there are no teachers? As Charles suggests you have to find ways of getting learning to people through technology, people and places that are different. That’s part of the rationale behind what some of us are trying to achieve through projects like The Peer 2 Peer University.
Charles also makes a very important point about the difference between push and pull models of education:
When you go to places like this what you see is that education in these settings works by pull, not push. Most of our education system is push. I was literally pushed to school. When you get to school, things are pushed at you, knowledge, exams, systems, timetables
If you want to attract people like Juanderson who could, for instance, buy guns, wear jewelry, ride motorbikes and get girls through the drugs trade, and you want to attract him into education, having a compulsory curriculum doesn’t really make sense.
He’s also right in identifying that the reason education fails to reinvent itself is that it focuses on formal solutions that will sustain the existing institutions and establishment:find a way to do what we today better. The problem with this, of course, is that is simply doesn’t scale:
Almost all our effort goes in this box, sustaining innovation in formal settings, getting a better version of the essentially Bismarckian school system that developed in the 19th century. And as I said, the trouble with this is that, in the developing world there just aren’t teachers to make this model work. You’d need millions and millions of teachers in China, India, Nigeria and the rest of developing world to meet need. And in our system, we know that simply doing more of this won’t eat into deep educational inequalities, especially in inner-cities and former industrial areas.education, p2pu, ted-talk
So that’s why we need three more kinds of innovation. We need more reinvention. And all around the world now you see more and more schools reinventing themselves
If you just edit your MOTD (Message of The Day) file it will get overridden following a reboot and you will lose your changes because /etc/motd is a symbolic link to a file which gets written to during system start-up. So to make the change permanent, create a new file with your new message, remove the old symbolic link and replace it with a symbolic link to your new message file.
This worked for me:
// Create your new file
$ vi $HOME/my_special_message.motd
// Remove the old symbolic link
$ sudo rm /etc/motd
// Put in a link to your new file
$ sudo ln $HOME/my_special_message.motd /etc/motd
// Reboot and check it out...
$ sudo reboot
If you want to also remove the last logged in message (not recommended for production systems, but I did it for my local Ubuntu VM) then edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change:
PrintLastLog yes
To
PrintLastLog no
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." -- Charles Kingsley
"I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Following my post about using the iPad recently, I’ve spent some time using more of the content-focused apps. As I mentioned before, the iPad has turned out to be a great device for consuming, reading and just experiencing media. This has obvious benefits for video, and many of the examples I’ve seen have made use of multi-media and show off the screen. But I tend to read a lot. I tend to read news from content publishers (BBC, Guardian, Gizmodo) and blogs.
One of the first apps I downloaded was Stephen Fry’s “FryPaper” app. It’s basically Stephen Fry’s blog manifested as an iPad app, and it’s one of the most exciting things I’ve seen. This isn’t because it’s swish, flash, or gimmicky. Indeed, it is none of those things. It simply provides the content from Stephen’s blog in a format that is very, very easy to read on the iPad. It seems to focus on simple design, and that’s it. It’s got a very limited set of features, all of which I’ve used—like using the sharing feature to tweet or email links to individual articles.
So, why is this so exciting?
Because it’s a glimpse of the future of well-published stories. It’s a snapshot of a time when anyone can buy/download an app for a single blog, and get all this content beautifully laid out.
So, I contacted Stephen’s FryPaper person, Andrew Sampson of SamFry about building FryPaper.
Here is that quick interview:
Zach: Why make an app for a blog? What does the iPad bring to the table that a browser doesn’t?
Andrew: Stephenfry.com’s blog is a very popular website in its own right. We wanted to offer that content in a newspaper format, for free on the iPad. We wanted to show how you could strip back other contend and concentrate on what was popular. Less is more, was our rule. It was a good first stepping stone for our company to develop an iPad App on our own.
Zach: What did you have to consider in designing it?
Andrew: We considered that the iPad is a new device and that whilst newspapers and magazines are glamouring for it, many would argue that a user interface is yet to be defined. We went for the most elegant and simple user interface we could develop. We also wanted to make sharing it easy. I might add that I don’t see how magazines and papers will be able to sustain the large multimedia elements of their initial iPad offerings. It’s brilliant that they did but it cost them a fortune to produce the content, let alone the app itself.
Zach: Any major challenges or hurdles?
Andrew: Cost. We were very lucky to find a Canadian firm that presented their credentials and production pipeline from the beginning. We’ve had many false starts on app development in the last year, primarily because of cost. Marco Tabini and his team became SamFry’s partners for FryPaper.
We were also lucky to secure the sponsorship of G-Technology by Hitachi. This was the first time we’ve ever had another company believe in what we were doing. They showed extraordinary faith and trust in us, even to the degree of letting us design the sponsorship placements within the app. It only adds up to two ads but boy, it’s allowed us to fund the FryPaper for iPhone, which is due out in the next few weeks.
Zach: From your experience, is there any advice you’d give to someone wanting to build a similar content-focused app?
Andrew: Be confident in the depth of your content. Stephen, Nicole, our graphic designer and I, have a strong focus on design. We think content and the user interface synergy is the single most important aspect in delivering electronic content. It harks back to our traditional theatrical beginnings.
Zach: Thank you Andrew!
Image taken from stephenfry.com.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gait,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley
From time to time we all need a little inspiration.
Personal, Poetrymmmmmrob posted a photo:
I was just having a look at my Vodafone account to see how I’ve managed to use 2GB of data this month (oops), and noticed these series of entries:
...etc
That’s about 60M in the space of 10 minutes. Which seems like a lot. Similar patterns appear at regular intervals..
Looking at the times of the entries, the data usage is due to Google Maps running on my HTC Hero, which I’m using for sat nav.
If that happens on, say, 10 days in the month, then that’s already 600M of data used. Hm. (Add to that the Spotify usage, and 2GB starts to make sense..)
Anyone know if Google Maps can cache its data on Android?
In his ongoing series of niggles about Linked Data, Rob McKinnon claims that “mandating RDF [for publication of government data] may be premature and costly“. The claim is made in reference to Francis Maude’s parliamentary answer to a question from Tom Watson. Personally I see nothing in the statement from Francis Maude that implies the mandating of RDF or Linked Data, only that “Where possible we will use recognised open standards including Linked Data standards”. Note the “where possible”. However, that’s not the point of this post.
There’s nothing premature about publishing government data as Linked Data – it’s happening on a large scale in the UK, US and elsewhere. Where I do agree with Rob (perhaps for the first time 
) is that it comes at a cost. However, this isn’t the interesting question, as the same applies to any investment in a nation’s infrastructure. The interesting questions are who bears that cost, and who benefits?
Let’s make a direct comparison between publishing a data set in raw CSV format (probably exported from a database or spreadsheet) and making the extra effort to publish it in RDF according to the Linked Data principles.
Assuming that your spreadsheet doesn’t contain formulas or merged cells that would make the data irregularly shaped, or that you can create a nice database view that denormalises your relational database tables into one, then the cost of publishing data in CSV basically amounts to running the appropriate export of the data and hosting the static file somewhere on the Web. Dead cheap, right?
Oh wait, you’ll need to write some documentation explaining what each of the columns in the CSV file mean, and what types of data people should expect to find in each of these. You’ll also need to create and maintain some kind of directory so people can discover your data in the crazy haystack that is the Web. Not quite so cheap after all.
So what are the comparable processes and costs in the RDF and Linked Data scenario? One option is to use a tool like D2R Server to expose data from your relational database to the Web as RDF, but let’s stick with the CSV example to demonstrate the lo-fi approach.
This is not the place to reproduce an entire guide to publishing Linked Data, but in a nutshell, you’ll need to decide on the format of the URIs you’ll assign to the things described in your data set, select one or more RDF schemata with which to describe your data (analogous to defining what the columns in your CSV file mean and how their contents relate to each other), and then write some code to convert the data in your CSV file to RDF, according to your URI format and the chosen schemata. Last of all, for it to be proper Linked Data, you’ll need to find a related Linked Data set on the Web and create some RDF that links (some of) the things in your data set to things in the other. Just as with conventional Web sites, if people find your data useful or interesting they’ll create some RDF that links the things in their data to the things in yours, gradually creating an unbounded Web of data.
Clearly these extra steps come at a cost compared to publishing raw CSV files. So why bear these costs?
There are two main reasons: discoverability and reusability.
Anyone (deliberately) publishing data on the Web presumably does so because they want other people to be able to find and reuse that data. The beauty of Linked Data is that discoverability is baked in to the combination of RDF and the Linked Data principles. Incoming links to an RDF data set put that data set “into the Web” and outgoing links increase the interconnectivity further.
Yes, you can create an HTML link to a CSV file, but you can’t link to specific things described in the data or say how they relate to each other. Linked Data enables this. Yes, you can publish some documentation alongside a CSV file explaining what each of the columns mean, but that description can’t be interlinked with the data itself, making it self-describing. Linked Data does this. Yes, you can include URIs in the data itself, but CSV provides no mechanism that for indicating that the content of a particular cell is a link to be followed. Linked Data does this. Yes, you can create directories or catalogues that describe the data sets available from a particular publisher, but this doesn’t scale to the Web. Remember what the arrival of Google did to the Yahoo! directory? What we need is a mechanism that supports arbitrary discovery of data sets by bots roaming the Web and building searchable indices of the data they find. Linked Data enables this.
Assuming that a particular data set has been discovered, what is the cost of any one party using that data in a new application? Perhaps this application only needs one data set, in which case all the developer must do is read the documentation to understand the structure of the data and get on with writing code. A much more likely scenario is that the application requires integration of two or more data sets. If each of these data sets is just a CSV file then every application developer must incur the cost of integrating them, i.e. linking together the elements common to both data sets, and must do this for every new data set they want to use in their application. In this scenario the integration cost of using these data sets is proportional to their use. There are no economies of scale. It always costs the same amount, to every consumer.
Not so with Linked Data, which enables the data publisher to identify links between their data and third party data sets, and make these links available to every consumer of that data set by publishing them as RDF along with the data itself. Yes, there is a one-off cost to the publisher in creating the links that are most likely to be useful to data consumers, but that’s a one-off. It doesn’t increase every time a developer uses the data set, and each developer doesn’t have to pay that cost for each data set they use.
If data publishers are seriously interested in promoting the use of their data then this is a cost worth bearing. Why constantly reinvent the wheel by creating new sets of links for every application that uses a certain combination of data sets? Certainly as a UK taxpayer, I would rather the UK Government made this one-off investment in publishing and linking RDF data, thereby lowering the cost for everyone that wanted to use them. This is the way to build a vibrant economy around open data.
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I resist upgrading my work machine as much as possible, as whenever I do, everything I rely on stops working properly. A few notes on my particular pains this time round as I upgraded to Fedora Core (FC) 13:
sudo, so I uncommented this line in /etc/sudoers:%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALLusermod -G wheel -a ellsudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpmsudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-ugly -ysudo yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-pluginsudo yum install wget gitmkdir ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/cd ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/wget http://users.tkk.fi/~otsaloma/gedit/trailsave.pywget http://users.tkk.fi/~otsaloma/gedit/trailsave.gedit-pluginSo what's improved in FC13? Erm...
That's about it. (My main reason for upgrading is so I can more easily build other people's software, rather than for application upgrades.)
There would probably be more if I wasn't so old fashioned about the applications I use...
The screen is bright, clear, and amazing. It looks like a proper book. The overall appearance is familiar from the iPhone, but tuned for the much bigger screen. The setup was a breeze, apart from it complaining about not having a SIM card in. Hopefully, that'll show up soon-I ordered it last night from O2.
Otherwise - well, calling it magical and revolutionary makes it sound like the lovechild of Che Guevara and Harry Potter. But I think it will be a game changer, and it will be important, even if only to see what uses people find for it.
As for me-well, my beloved PowerBook is rather long in the tooth now. I plan to see if the iPad will mean that I don't need to buy a new laptop. Could it work? Feel free to leave me a comment, but so far it's going well-I wrote this blog post on it, using the on-screen keyboard.
Contributed from my iPad!
Well, all the talking is over and the battle for a trinket the size of a pot plant has started in Africa. Thirty two nations, some playing entertaining football, some playing measured football, some playing dull football are taking part in the 
quadrennial festival of football that enlivens my TV screen. Most of the time I don't really give a rats-ass about England 's (or to be more accurate Eng-er-lund's) fortunes in these competitions. The hype and hyperbole are wearing and misplaced, I'm of an age whereby I can still remember the racist connotations of a number of those who follow Eng-er-lund and the horror of riots at various competitions in the past. 
Two weeks ago, I counted myself one among the hoards of silly sods who queued early in the morning for the chance to see, touch and indeed buy the much-hyped iPad. My justification for this lameness is that the next day, I was scheduled to fly out for a week-long conference and wanted to try the new device in that context. Talis, my employer, has purchased a few now, but I was the only fool to queue for one. No doubt this is something the support team continues to find justifiably humorous.
Standing in the line and being offered croissants, coffee and advice by brightly T-shirted and strangely too-good-looking Apple staff, my expectations were mixed. As I’ve tweeted before ever actually seeing an iPad, I’m not entirely convinced by the form: the tablet layout and touch screen. It looks slightly awkward to hold, and even that huge keyboard doesn’t look particularly useful for anything beyond quick notes. A screen that big that you’re supposed to touch pretty well continuously will surely be begrimed very quickly. I kept trying to work out what the iPad would be for. Does it replace the laptop for most things? Does it replace the TV, the book, the bedside lamp? (In fact, the thing it’s most usefully and utterly replaced is the shaving mirror, but more on that below.) The fact that it needs the now hugely-inflated iTunes to sync and run, and the fact that it’s running iPhone OS are both factors I’ve been unhappily anticipating for a few months.
But I was exceedingly interested in trying it out, in seeing the way the designs are different, and the way content feels when it’s not part of a computer. The idea of holding a page in your hands, and flicking through images, text and ideas does appeal enormously. Also, the power behind the device, the clear display and proven track-history of innovation piqued my curiosity to see how clever developers will put them to use.
So, with all these factors swirling around in my mind, and the desire for my not having to take a stack of printed books, papers and PDF files with me overseas, I looked into the Kindle and a few other e-readers. The Kindle is expensive, virtually impossible to justify given the multi-purpose nature of the iPad. Even if it proved to be a poor overall experience, the iPad would at least allow me to do everything the Kindle does, plus check email, twitter, blog and browse the whole web of content for only a little more money. The Kindle’s main advantage in the market, however, is access to far more books and resources than any other. So, with the announcement of the Kindle for iPad app, and my boss’s suggestion I pick up an iPad to test for Talis, I found myself among 50 or so pony-tailed die-hards and chirpy Apple Geniuses waiting for my chance to be kitted out with the most lusted-for piece of kit since the last Apple device.
Below are the notes I sent to the Sysadmin team after two weeks of use.
The iPad has been a very interesting thing to use, with it’s novel form-factor and innovative UI (though it’s like nothing more than a big iPhone…). It’s a brilliant device for consuming information, so long as one is indoors. I’ve been very happy to read whole academic papers and about 1/4 of a novel so far on it, and for that alone, it’s been a useful tool for travelling and research. Also, it’s more interactive than the iPhone for email/twitter and, surprisingly, colloquy [IRC client].
So, for being exceedingly portable and present at conferences, it’s been great. Also, because the battery life is actually up to scratch, you don’t have to join the fray of geeks fighting over the single power strip in an undignified yet necessary battle in the corner of any given keynote presentation.
It’s got some strong shortcomings which have proven annoying, however.
While it’s great for consuming, it’s cumbersome and slow for producing. It’s OK for taking quick notes, and perfect for tweeting/short emails, but I wouldn’t want to write a whole blog post on it. (I got the bluetooth keyboard and WordPress app, which together work a treat, but require you to drag around an external keyboard).
It fails in even the tiniest bit of sunlight. So, on Crete [where I was for a week at the ESWC conference], it made a fantastic shaving mirror.
I think there may be some potential for RSI, too, if one types for any extended period of time on it. I touch-type, meaning that I end up resting my fingers on the screen, printing many ffffffffffffffffff’s and llllllllllllllll’s and needing to tap the backspace again and again.
Finally, as a team device, I’m not sure how useful they’d be. So far, the majority of the benefit this has made has been through personalising it a lot. So, if I wanted to share a quick photo with folk, I need to sync it with my photos. If I wanted to blog, I’d need to sync with flickr or similar to have a ready supply of licensed images to use. Likewise with reading (Dropbox, Kindle and Goodreader) all need to know who I am and what I want to read. Same with video, Keynote etc… Unless Talis made them into extremely corporate-oriented devices (which would suck, methinks) and filled them all with Talis-only designs, images, videos and generic slides, they’re pretty person-specific.
So, after just under two weeks of use, I’d say it’s great for travel (I’m looking forward to having it on the 14hr flight to and from San Francisco in a couple weeks, for example), and it’s great for reading (Kindle App, GoodReader and Dropbox). I could see, with additional apps, it being an interesting device for sharing information to a small group. As another colleague pointed out, as a presenting tool for a large audience, it fails at a few hurdles. Firstly, the Keynote app that is so fantastic to use on OS X is woefully lacking on the iPad. Any presentations imported from the Mac lose fonts and transitions (even if they’re possible to re-create in the iPad itself!), and the presenter’s screen doesn’t display next slide and presenters notes. It lacks all the things that make Keynote so great to use. The VGA tie-in means it’s even more awkward to hold, so you’re left leaning it against the lectern in exactly the place your laptop would have been. The form factor is exceedingly social, however, so showing a bunch of select slides at a table, or having a shared mini-whiteboard could be cool.
It’s made much, much better with the bluetooth keyboard, and I couldn’t imagine using it without the Apple cover (which props it up in a variety of ways, and makes it less slipperyf). Some key apps are: sketchbookpro (for white-boarding), Kindle, Goodreader, Dropbox, Colloquy and the twitterrific twitter client.
I couldn’t see it replacing a laptop at any time soon, and if it weren’t for the vast amount of reading I tend to do, I probably wouldn’t feel particularly comfortable with Talis buying this one for my sole use. As it is, I’m happy to use this one for the trip over to the States, and it is growing on me the more I use it for reading and consuming information on.
I hope, as has been said, that version 2 will be more useful, and that OS4 will be a lot more useful even before then.
6ftmama posted a photo:
There will be no comment from the Board regarding the purchase of players.
There will be no comment from the Board regarding the sale of players.
There will be no comment from the Board regarding ongoing contract talks with players presently at Newcastle United Football Club or with those that the club may enter into negotiation with.
Will only serve to pique the interest of the press pack. What is the phrase about keeping your friends close, but your enemies even closer? A certain amount of openness and transparency can only benefit the understanding of what the current Board are trying to achieve... How does this help?
I had my first go on an iPad today as we're got one at work in the Talis Education team. It's the top of the range 64Gb WiFi + 3G model and I've got the pleasure of having it at home for the evening.
It's (obviously) a beautifully crafted and usable bit of kit, as are all Apple products and I'm normally a big fan with my own iPhone, iPod, MacBook Pro and another MacBook Pro for work but I'm currently still wondering what I'd regularly use the iPad for.
It probably doesn't help that there isn't much installed on the device yet as it was only purchased at the weekend and I don't have the iTunes account password to install anything else on it but after the initial "Oooh!" factor I was longing for my laptop again to actually do things on.
Yes, YouTube looks great on it, The Times iPad app is great and very usable/readable and iBooks is also very nice to use but, for me, personally, I don't think I'd make use of one on a daily basis to justify the expense.
I'm probably not the target audience though. I can imagine that if I did a lot of travelling on public transport or stays in hotels then I'd probably love it just because of the bigger screen and decent web browsing, reading of books/docs and watching some BBC iPlayer stuff. Right now though I hardly ever use public transport and don't travel through work.
We've got it at work to investigate the device now that they are starting to be used in educational contexts and it'll be great to try some app development on it but I think my money will stay in my pocket for now for one of my own.
I'm looking forward to using it more over the coming weeks/months and my opinion may change as we get more apps on it but right now my MacBook Pro and iPhone do what I need perfectly.
Did I write this blog post on it? No, I did this on my MacBook Pro :-)
|This is based on a post which appeared on formspring.me/zbeauvais
I think the instinct—for lack of a better word—that draws people to act religiously can also affect people with no official religion. While there may be no organised creed, there is organisation in a sort of tribal way. This may be in some way related to a culture of the tribe. It’s the same thing that allows me to identify the tribes of midwestern Christians from America by their handshake, clothing, and sociolect. It’s the instinct that makes people buy into a group mentality like Apple fanboys, football supporters, and wine snobs.
I believe there to be a culture developing around Dawkins and Hitchens and others. There are events like Godless and books like An Atheist’s guide to Christmas which are somewhat organising, I suppose. Also, given the list of people who have contributed (among whom are many people I admire) I would be surprised if they don’t make compelling, interesting and probably very funny reading. But I think the compelling and funny part of the atheist culture is not part of being fundamentally against others’ beliefs, or against God or “a god”. I think the idea of “antitheism” is a far less compelling mindset. I don’t like the idea that one sets their belief and rhetoric as an antithesis.
A possibly relevant illustration would be to look at this in terms of other antithesis positions, like political rhetoric based entirely on the principle of “not being them.” It makes your position one relative to the existence, status, and nature of your opposition, which I think is at least silly and at most dangerous. If I were to consider myself to be an “antiTory,” then I am simply diametrically opposed to the ideas of a party over which I have forfeited any constructive influence. What then for instance, if they do something I agree with? Being convinced for yourself that there is no god is different from setting yourself against the whole notion as the basis of your beliefs.
I don’t think all people who disbelieve in God are “fundamentalist atheists.” I don’t equate a person’s belief and perspective with religiosity. What I do think is that people can religiously follow a group or concept. The word fundamentalist itself is difficult to work with. It’s something that is understood to be positive by people I wouldn’t always think of as fundamentally fundamentalist themselves. For some, the idea of being fundamental is to be true to an idea, and this is not a bad thing in itself. I can fundamentally believe it is best to to act selflessly, to edify others, and this would clearly not be negative.
But I think the word has been used commonly to refer to a kind of self-subsumation into the tribe, culture and ideology of a group. News reports of “fundamentalist terrorists,” which is probably unhelpful, but the word seems to convey a meaning that is useful sometimes, when talking about individuals who surrender their own perspectives to the tribe.
So, in a similar way to how I think of fundamentalist religious people, I would probably consider a “fundamentalist atheist” to be one who believes strongly that there is no god. One who believes that he is in a superior position for believing this way, and that those who believe otherwise are in some sense inferior (pagan, heathen, barbaric perhaps?). And, it would be a person for whom atheism fills a sociological need to belong to a tribe more than it fills the answer to a personal question about the meaning(s) of life.
I fully understand the desire to break free from religious thinking and teaching, and the need to feel unconstrained by a tribal group. I also understand the social desire to feel looked after, cherished and loved and affirmed by being part of something bigger than myself. These tensions are difficult to balance, and I think people find their own ways to do so. I think the balance shifting uncontrollably toward seeking the approval or support of a social group organised around a set of ideas (teaching, creed, reasoning, books and the rest) can only lead to a loss of one’s own, unique perspective. It’s a loss to the world.
For the past few months, I’ve been a member of the Shropshire Community flickr group, where a bunch of friendly photo-folk share pics and tips via the excellent networking features on flickr. Saturday, I was privileged to join them for the first time in person as twenty or so of us took a photo-romp around the Long Mynd and Church Stretton.
Below are a few of the photos I took on the day, and I apologise in advance for the number of buttercups: the sun was just so bright they lit right up.
I don’t believe in it. I don’t know what I think about the afterlife entirely—it’s not something I feel I can know; but everything I have experienced, read and encountered leads me to believe that it’s the end of (at least) communication.
I don’t believe mediums can communicate with the dead, nor that they can receive information from those who have died. I tend to think of them as either showpeople or charlatans, and feel something beyond skepticism. I think it can be dangerous to make such claims, because it plays on the vulnerable and particularly on vulnerable topics. The loss of someone we know is one of our life-story’s saddest parts, and grief often overwhelms judgement: leaving us open to suggestion and trickery.
I think the claim is either nonsensical or despicable, and the people who make it are either vulnerable themselves or preying upon the credulous for control or money.
