Local professor’s coffee mug washed

Emotional crowds lined the corridor of an academic department today to celebrate the once-a-semester coffee mug washing by a member of the academic staff. After the varnish-like residue coagulated at the bottom of the mug had been scrubbed off, the mug was carried back to the professor’s office atop a velvet cushion. The gathered celebrants added to the festive atmosphere by throwing plagiarised undergraduate assignments into the air, and mumbling such words as they could recall from "Guadeamus Igatur."

The un-named professor responded to enquiries by confirming his intention to wash the mug again at the end of the next semester, "whether it needs it or not."

"Let it be" - the ultimate idiocy?

It's hard to imagine a famous song written and performed by one or more undisputed geniuses that is as astonishingly daft and lame as "Let it Be" by the Beatles. This just came around on the old iPod earlier, and for the first time in a long time I gave it a proper listen.

Remind yourself what it sounds like here:

And observe the lyrics here:

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

And when the broken hearted people
Living in the world agree,
There will be an answer, let it be.
For though they may be parted there is
Still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be.
Let it be, let it be.

Yeah There will be an answer, let it be.
And when the night is cloudy,
There is still a light that shines on me,
Shine on until tomorrow, let it be.
I wake up to the sound of music
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Let it be, let it be.
There will be an answer, let it be.
Let it be, let it be,
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

What astonishing, pathetic, emo bollocks. How about, when you find yourself in times of trouble, hurl yourself enthusiastically at the obstacles with all the damned cunning and creativity and courage you've got. Try every blasted thing you can think of, including at least a few ridiculous ones, until you know for sure that you'll never, ever look back and think "if only I'd been a
little braver or more willing to seem like an idiot". Then, maybe, and only just maybe, let it be.

Like the wise fellow over at Gaping Void says:

Unbelievable Paper Spam

Not all spam is electronic. Some comes in professional looking printed form. My mate Dave just received a real doozy, from the 'International Biographical Centre'. He was told that he was being reocgnised as an 'Icon' in the field of philosophy, and had the 'International Socrates Award for Philosophical Achievement' bestowed upon him by IBC.

Jolly serious sounding stuff.

Except that to formally complete the bestowment, you need to cough up for the certificate. And that costs ... wait for it ... USD635! So it must be a very, very nice certificate indeed. Or (much more likely) the IBC are in business because enough sad little people out there are prepared to pay for an ego boost. As long as that remains the case, it's worth the Ibc sending these letters out to anyone who crosses their radar.

So Dave wrote in to ask for an explanation:

Hello IBC,

I recently received [...] a letter advising me that I had an 'International Socrates Award for Philosophical Achievement' bestowed upon me by IBC.

Could you please tell me a little more about how decisions to bestow the award are made? (Do you have a panel of reviewers? Which specific parts of my work were considered?)

Also, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know the names of other recent recipients, so I know just what kind of league I'm now playing in.

Thanks and Regards,

D[...]

Let's see what they have to say for themselves. After that, we can try to find out what they can say to justify the spectacular cost of the certificate. They do say that it is 'laminated', but that hardly warrants the price of over 600 Dollars.

For a bit more on the IBC, take a look on Wikipedia, and on this blog post, and this one.

Hitting the bottle

Bottled water is pretty popular among the middle classes in South Africa. There are various brands, but one of the biggest here is Bonaqua. (Maybe the biggest by market share - I'll check in due course.) So I'll start with them.

If you go to the Bonaqua website you'll see bits of the usual horrendous bollocks that media people are paid to produce. Apparently an "ice-cold bottle of Bonaqua" is "the coolest accessory around". That's presumably news to people who might have suspected that a labrador puppy, or a convertible was very cool. Not to mention people who thought that an accessory was a durable item like a pair of sunglasses or a handbag. Of course, this is advertising, and the people who make it are paid to abuse the language, in order to achieve an effect. It's striking that the "coolest" claim is almost completely free of content. There's no objective standard of cool which you could use to check it. And if it was false, it's not clear how you would have been harmed for following it (except by having the fact that you're a moron thereby revealed). So it's hard to see that it could even be misleading - it doesn't say anything definite enough.

What bothers me isn't coolness, though. In some places in the world there really is a problem about getting access to safe drinking water. Sometimes there is tap water, but it isn't really safe. In such places you really do need to filter or treat the water you can get, or have safe water brought in.

South African cities are not such places. The tap water is almost always perfectly healthy. So there's no systematic need to buy bottles of water. And there are good reasons not to buy bottled water. The process of making bottles pollutes directly, consumes water, and creates plastic waste. Driving the bottles around creates more pollution. When there's perfectly good water on tap, those environmental costs are completely optional. And they should be avoided, unless you have some special reason to drive up atmospheric carbon or get more plastic into the oceans and landfills.

Bottled water, though, is profitable. And it sure helps to encouage the punters to think that it's healthy, and to downplay the environmental costs.

So back to the website. Consider the following (from the section called "The world of water":

Consumers all over the world are realising how important it is to take better care of themselves, to balance their fast-paced lifestyles. Worldwide, people are eating better, exercising more and seldom seen without a bottle of their favourite brand of mineral water.

Well, many millions of people are horribly poor, and have almost no choice about what to eat. Many could feed a family for the price of a bottle of water. Leave that aside and look at the paragraph, though. People are taking care of themselves. People are eating better, exercising and drinking bottled water. Suppose the first claim is true. And we all agree that exercise and diet make an impact on health. What about bottled water? What's the link? The site doesn't explain. Read on:

In South Africa, this trend has caught on fast. Gyms are packed, restaurants that serve healthy food options are popping up all over and bottled water is in ever fashionable consumer's hand.

Again - what's the link? Why not go to gym, eat some salad, and drink tap water? Keep reading:

There is an abundance of bottled water brands available on the South African market, but funky, refreshing Bonaqua has proven to be a favourite lifestyle accessory for those who demand both quality and taste.

Oh hell. How the hell could one kind of water be specifically funky? Anyway, I was hoping to find a link about the link between bottled water in general, or Bonaqua specifically, and health. I didn't find one, just more flim flam about accessories.

If you follow a link at this point, you get told a bunch of stuff about how important water is for the body, and how to be healthy you need water. None of the claims made specifically relate to bottled water. I discussed all this with my mate Dave, and he decided to send an email to Bonaqua. (There's a "contact us" link on the website).

Here it is.

Subject: Bonaqua Query

Hello Zanele, Michelle,

The Bonaqua website makes a few claims about Bonaqua that I find interesting. I wonder if you could help me make sense of them.

(1) The site says that an "ice-cold bottle of Bonaqua" is "the coolest accessory around". What does this actually mean? How do you measure cool?

(2) In the section "The world of water" the following text appears:

"Consumers all over the world are realising how important it is to take better care of themselves, to balance their fast-paced lifestyles. Worldwide, people are eating better, exercising more and seldom seen without a bottle of their favourite brand of mineral water."

Of course many many millions of people on Earth are terribly poor, live in awful conditions, and have almost no choice about what to eat. Many of them could feed a family for a price of a half litre of bottled water. Maybe you don't regard them as 'consumers'. Leaving them aside, as your website clearly intends, here is my question: What does taking care of yourself specifically have to do with bottled water, as opposed to clean water from any other source?

(2a) Can you direct me to any research you have done showing a measurable health benefit of your bottled water over municipal tap water in a South African city?

(2b) In particular, consider my case. I eat a healthy diet, and exercise regularly. But I don't ever drink bottled water - I only drink tap water. Can you direct me to any research you have done, or are aware of, that would explain what mistake I am making as far as "taking care of myself" goes.

Thanks and regards,



David

I'll post an update once Dave has told me about the response.

PS: The image of a pile of used plastic water bottles was flagrantly stolen, by me, from this site.

Time vs The Economist (Economist 1, Time 0)

Travel does terrible things to a person. Take an otherwise rational being, and stick them in a succession of economy class seats and airport concourses for long enough, and they'll start shopping in completely idiotic ways, endorsing intelligent design and otherwise showing that they've abandoned their senses.

That's how I ended up buying a copy of 'Time' magazine, for the first time in ages. I was desperate. Jet lagged, unwashed, rumpled, crabby and also (perhaps the airport food, or the diet in Las Vegas) flatulent to the level of a superpower, if only I'd had any control over it. Worse, I'd finished the novel I had with me (Cormac McCarthy's riveting, dark, spectacularly violent Blood Meridian) and read the current and previous weeks' editions of The Economist cover to cover, including the advertisments.

It was awful. So bad I struggle to explain it. Think of a cross between news-lite and vacuous celebrity drivel. They had a 'Technology Roundtable' where they rounded up some people who had made a lot of money, and asked them dumb questions, leading to answers that were barely coherent sometimes, and rarely interesting when they were. Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg) had this to say about 'The future of free news':

Increasingly, over time, I think information is ubiquitous. I think that I will be able to get a lot of that data - sometimes not even assembled by an individual - to give me the answer that I want. And for that, I will not have to pay.

Clearly he spent more time on getting his hair right for the 'interview' than on the answers, and Time spent more on photography than editing. If anyone can see an argument here, or even a hint of an analysis, please let me know. The best answer gets a free (slightly used) copy of Time magazine.

Anyway, it's easy to take pot shots. The cool thing is that there is one story, a review of an exhibition, that was covered in the Time and one of the two issues of The Economist that I had just read. So my weary flatulent self read the one with the other in recent memory. And the comparison is most instructive.

The exhibition is currently at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It is covered in in Time on November 23, 2009 (pp112-2) and in The Economist on November 12th.

The Economist says something coherent, historically informed and useful. In 650 odd words. Time take a bit over 1050 words, and chuck around pomposities like 'rectitude' and barbarisms like 'Bauhauslers'. Sigh. And there's some outright vacuous smoke. For example:

... there's a color photograph of Gropius' righteously Cartesian office, with a right-angular chair resting on a grid-patterned carpet and a grid-patterned tapestry hanging on one wall.

Uh. Well. No. That's bollocks. Regular geometric patterns are a staple of ancient art from all over the world. They massively predate Descartes. And a 'Cartesian' set of co-ordinates assigns every point an address, it has axes so that points are identified by signed distances along the two (or three) perpendicular axes. Calling a rug with a grid on it 'Cartesian' is just pseudo intellectual tosh.

Next time I'm buying the National Enquirer.

Mendacious spam from 'science.org'

The life of a blogger, even a lazy scoundrel with a shameful recent track record like me, is a life with a few different kinds of spam in it. I've had kooky invitations to review dodgy products (including things allegedly having sex pheremones in them). The latest one really takes the buscuit, though. Here's the text:

Dear Blog Owner,

Our website Science.org is a informational databases and online news publication for anything and everything related to science and technology. We recently ran a poll asking our website users regarding what online informational resources they use to keep up to date or even to simply find great information. It seems many of our users have labeled your blog as an excellent source of Science information. We have reviewed your blog and must say, we absolutely love the information you have made available to the public and would love to make your blog a part of our top science blogs. After browsing your blog, our research team has decided to award you a Top science Blogs award banner.

It is a distinction we offer to the blogs that our team feels is ahead of the curve in terms of content.

Thanks again for the great information and we look forward to the great responses your blog will receive from our site. Your blog presence will be very effective for our users (top science blogs).

We have put great efforts in making this decision to give deserving with award acknowledgment. For listing please reply to request banner.

Sincerely,
--
William Lee
Research team
Science.org

What a load of bollocks. There's occasionally some decent stuff here at Effortless Incitement, but nothing that would warrant this effusive gushing. So no, I won't reply to the request banner. Sod off and find some other way to drive traffic to your rather lousy site, why don't you. Ouanquerres.

(My mate Dave tells me this reminds him of the periodic dumbass 'invitations' to appear in directories of important people. These seem to get sent to just about anyone who publishes anything. And you have to pay. So they're really offering you the chance to appear in a directory of 'people so depressingly sad and stupid that they'll pay to appear in a directory containing only such people'.)

Oh, and a quick Google showed that Larry Moran over at Sandwall has receive the same invitation. He's a biochemist, but the blurb was effusive about his 'PHYSICS' information.

I am not a horse

In case anyone was wondering, I am not the "Doctor Spurt" that won the Satsuki Shō horse race in Japan in 1989. We are not even related.

I may be some time...

So I don't usually stoop to autobiography, but I'm facing a possibly blog-threatening event, and figured if it came to the worst, there should be a record. Some of my bestest friends constitute a "wine society" where we mostly gather to be humiliated at the abilities of the minority who taste wines with any sophistication, and enjoy each others' company. But not all of us even like wine that much - some of us mostly like each other. So there have been occasions where a few fortifying margaritas have kicked off proceedings, and for some time rumblings about a meeting focused on other booze.

Friday night is a cocktail evening. There's already a bewildering and lethal list forming, not to mention reckless talk of consuming digrizfizzes, and even "Swagger Slings". The latter contains:

1 bottle champagne
1 bottle claret
1 glass brandy
1 glass Grand Marnier
lemon
sugar
no ice

Apparently (quoting Kingsley Amis, whose "Everyday Drinking" I am ... er ... working my way through) the Swagger Sling tends to "put young ladies completely at their ease".

The digrizfiz

Some time ago I was extensively involved in the testing of a formidable cocktail. The last time I checked, I was unable to smell the mixture with any equanimity, and this was a full 8 years after an episode culminating in what I knew (from experience) to be alcohol poisoning rather than the more humble hangover. That the road is thus blocked to me is a matter of some frustration, because the recipe is patently in need of refinement. The most pressing reason for this is that the current mixture is, frankly, pretty foul tasting.

In this brief posting I shall describe the recipe, make some observations about the effects of the cocktail, and call for further experiments.

The digrizfiz (yes, that is the correct spelling, and no it isn't capitalised) is named in honour of the Stainless Steel Rat in the series of science fiction books by Harry Harrison. The anti-hero of those diverting works goes by various names, most notably and commonly James Bolivar DiGriz.

Recipe

In the canonical form the drink is served in a highball glass, with at most a few ice cubes, and comprises equal proportions of dry white sparkling wine, and bourbon. (It really is a waste to use genuine Champagne, which tends to be over-priced anyway.)

It is permissible, indeed advisable, to take it in a short glass, with a corresponding reduction in volume.

Effects

In dosages greater than or equal to two large ones, the digriz fiz is known to lead, inter alia, to accidental swimming face first into the side of swimming pools as fast as you can, leaping off low balconies, leaping into foliage including thorny shrubs, yelling, and ill-advised experiments in echolocation (involving sprinting with eyes closed making chirping noises).

The need for further research

(1) As already noted the digrizfiz tastes bad. It is possible that the addition of small quantities of something else (bitters, mint leaves, industrial solvents) would improve matters. No additions that take the result too far from the 50:50 sparkling wine and bourbon essence should be contemplated.

If it really makes a major positive difference, a different spirit could be contemplated, but this would mess with some of the key design principles of the digrizfiz, which includes a mixture of old world and new, and also the purported alcoholic drinking error of mixing grain with grape.

(2) If the taste problem is solved, and the drink becomes the sort of thing you can sip, instead of chucking back to get the experience over with, its tendency to warm up will be a problem. This may be an argument for making the short glass canonical, or even switching to a glass with a stem, that prevents the hand from warming the drink. This is a minor matter compared to the taste problem.

Conclusion

I was roused from my dogmatic slumbers to the extent of writing this posting because I'm reading Kingsley Amis's "Everyday Drinking". I'm reading that, in turn, because I thought some homework would help me form a credible plan to keep my New Year's resolution to consume more alcohol in 2009. Amis's book is splendid stuff, and it includes the following awesome recipe:

The Tigne Rose

1 tot gin
1 tot whisky
1 tot rum
1 tot vodka
1 tot brandy

The drink, we are told "owes its name to Tigne barracks, Malta, where it was offered as a Saturday lunchtime Apértif in the Sergeant's Mess of the 36th Heavy A.A. Regt., R.A., to all newly joined subalterns. The sometime 2nd Lieut. T.G. Rosenthal, R.A., from whom I had the recipe, says he put down three of them before walking unaided back to his room and falling into a reverie that lasted until Monday-morning parade."

Note on the picture: It is increasingly my policy to select an image for a blog post by taking one of the first things that come up for a Google Images search with a few key words relevant to the post. On this occasion the policy led to a very happy accident. The picture above is a bit of laboratory equipment, more specifically a Stainless Steel Rat Brain Slicer, made and sold by Zivic Instruments. If ever there was a brain slicer in a glass, the digrizfiz was it...

The Caterer

You can now buy volume 3 of the ill-fated and enraging Jeff Lint comic "The Caterer" in a reprint edition. And I, for one, think that you should. I've got several copies. Here's some of the boilerplate that the peeps in marketing came up with:

Described by Alan Moore as “the holy barnacle of failure”, The Caterer dragged Pearl into a legal hell when its hero spent the whole of Issue 9 on a killing spree in Disneyland. The smirking Jack Marsden became a cult figure and role model for enigmatic idiots in the mid-70s. His style and catchphrases were such an insider code that hundreds of people got beaten up by baffled or enraged onlookers.

Add it to your cart here.

Oh crap...

... there I was striving for accessibility:

TV Reviews

Take Spurtotox!!!

So, there's a moderately amusing tool to create a spurious advert for a non-existent drug over at CEDRA, which is kinda fun to play with. It's worth going through the process once to see how your choices are used. Here's the ad for Spurtotox, a highly desirable cream.

And here's Jeffitol, a Jeff Lint tribute that rather strains the limits of the canned humour that the site is based on.

Sadly there's no option to save the result as an image file, or even a decent print option. Always a drag to see a decent idea with its own bootlaces wrapped around its neck.

The Google Images Dylan Search String Challenge

Sometimes I chuck odd sets of words into Google to see what comes up, especially under Images. You can find some pretty peculiar stuff.

(For example, and in case anyone was curious, the top result (on 15 August 2008) on a Google Image search for [quantum arse camera] is what is alleged to be a picture of Morrisey's posterior with "YOUR ARSE AN ALL" written across it in an unspecified pigment. The proportions in the image suggest that it was not taken recently.)

One of my sets of words returned only three image results, the top one of Bob Dylan smoking a joint. The set is [yodel metaphysics jelly deflowered]. Can anyone find any other odd looking strings that return images of famous rock stars (ideally his Bobness) consuming narcotics?

(The Tubes are an odd place - changing one word in the the set to [yodel metaphysics jelly dildo] gives 11 images, two of them of cats, and one of a concentration camp.)

SA Science and Scepticism Carnival

So Michael Meadon over at Ionian Enchantment was, according to my mate Dave, all long-faced today over the fact that a day or two had passed after his rallying call about pro-science and woo-smiting bloggers in (or from, or in other unspecified ways connected to) South Africa, and I still hadn't waxed joyful over it here at Effortless Incitement.

(At the time Dave neglected to point out that this was a very good illustration of Effortless Incitement - in this case vexing by inactivity. Failure to do anything at all is, of course, not the only way of achieving effortlessness, as Jeff Lint fans are well aware.)

Anyway, the initiative is a welcome one. The ANC figured to leave evolution out of school biology for more than the first ten years of democracy. (Thereby simply keeping the biology part of the travesty of a school science curriculum left by the ideological whack-job architects of Apartheid.) Leaving that aside, levels of basic comprehension of science are low, and levels of credulity for spooky, magical, and other 'super'-natural things depressingly high. (See the second half of this post for a preview of a recent study on the topic.)

Michael wants to get up a carnival of SA sceptics and woo-smiters, and (a) is looking to find participants and hosts and stuff, and (b) desperately needs help improving on the rather clunky name proposal that's on the table now ("South African Science & Scepticism Circle").

I hereby suggest (since my first proposal went down like a streaker at Easter Mass at the Vatican) the following:

Southern Exposure. (Regrettably also the name of a group in NZ dedicated to exploring "Polyamory, Intimate Communications, BDSM, Alternative Lifestyles and more...")
[The] Sceptics of the South.
[The] Southern Fried Sceptics.
Doobeedoobeedubitable.

And, finally for now:

The Azanian Rational and Scientific Expeditionary force (Or the A.R.S.E. Carnival for short) .

Also, I'll be hosting the thing, whatever it's called, in late November.

Intermission

I'm about to take a short break. This will involve plenty of sleeping, epic eating, reading at least one novel (I'll finish Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing" and I've got an issue of "The Caterer" by Jeff Lint as well), and some breakfast-time alcohol consumption. I'll just fritter the rest of the time away. This much needed R&R will take place in an undisclosed and rather primitive location with no access to the Interwebs. I figure I'll be back on the Tubes in about a week, and already scared to think of my inboxes upon my return. But I figure there won't be any blagging from me until about 11 July. Good thing hardly anybody reads this (yet).

Good/expensive vs. Bad/cheap wine - follow up

So, as I said in my entry on Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness, my (very) informal Wine Society was doing an expensive versus cheap red wine tasting event last night. We had 16 wines, half very cheap, half varying distances into the price range above merely decent wines. We had the bottles in front of us, but the contents had been carefully shuffled around, and we were set the task of sampling all 16 and recording (a) whether we thought any given one was good or bad, and (b) what we thought the actual contents were.

In the good vs. bad condition we scored one point for a correct answer and lost one for an incorrect answer. The best score was +10, and the worst was -8. (Full disclosure, I got -4.)

The best anybody did in the "what is this, really" task was 3 correct items.

It's not clear what, if anything this suggests. Having the bottles in front of us confused the cues mightily. Starting off the evening with brightly coloured cocktails and curried snacks may not have been the best preparation for our pallates. It is clear that sampling 16 dry red wines in rapid succession led to most members of the largish gathering becoming more opinionated and animated. I definitely became, temporarily, more good looking and charming.

More research is required. Billionare eccentrics with a mind to sponsor this important work should declare themselves in the comment thread. I'll likely be running our next meeting, and will report the results here.

(The cartoon is from Savage Chickens - check it out.)