Rolling on

I'm a bit sad that 2008 is ending; it's been a great year. New qualifications, new jobs, new projects, and new hobbies. I'm 'complete' again after the troubled 2007.

Which makes my New Year's Resolutions rather easy, somehow...

- Formalise the new roles into a new career: Chief of Staff or Marketing Director.
- Lay out my plans for creating £1bn of shareholder value for someone.
- Rejoin a gym and maintain tri-fitness.
- Continue the 99 each morning - 3 x 33 pressups, crunches, and squats.
- Progress beyond Practitioner in Krav Maga.
- Get my FS1 skydiving certification.
- Do 3 x GMAT questions each day to keep reasoning skills sharp.
- Absorb at least one case study each week, PDF or Podcast.
- Meditate for 10 minutes a day.
- Add 9 people a week to personal network.
- Get away for one weekend each month and explore somewhere.

2009 is going to make 2008 look like 2007. I can hardly wait.

What the law giveth...

The legal department is the bane of any financial copywriter's life, but I shudder to imagine what it must be like to work for a company where lawyers have this sort of power. A legal disclaimer along the lines of 'A free pig is not actually part of this offer' in a tiny Facebook adbox? Sheesh.

Why Richard Dawkins is wrong

I haven't read much Dawkins recently, largely because it feels like the eminent zoologist has been submerged beneath the militant atheist and it's all getting a bit silly. (Why define yourself by something you're not? I mean, I can't play the piano, but I don't call myself an 'apianist'.)

Here's why I believe his voice of reason is now doing rationalism a disservice.

If you debate religionistas by asking them to prove their theories, you're giving the assorted god hypotheses (all 250,000 of them) an authority they don't deserve. Can a few ancient myths written down by Hebrew scribes match the modern scientific method as a means of explaining nature? Of course not. Yet Dawkins tries to debate those myths in terms of their scientific accuracy. Not only is he using the wrong weapons; he's in the wrong bloody arena.

What Dawkins should be doing is taking the debate up a notch: to the 'meta' level.

In short: stop applying the scientific method to the god theory, and start applying it to belief.

If you recontextualise the argument, by trying to understand why people believe in the various god theories, it suddenly becomes much easier to get at the truth. Where Dawkins goes wrong is thinking it's about guys with halos or pitchforks, and whether they exist. It's not.

At the meta level, understanding religion is a simple matter of understanding the forces that drive people to believe the totally intangible. Because those forces can be easily understood in rational, scientific terms.

And amusingly, those scientific terms are in the subject area Dawkins knows best: evolution.

100,000 years ago, homo sapiens scratched along by foraging; life was nasty, brutish, and short. If you formed into a small group, life was slightly less nasty. And if that group became a tribe - with divisions of labour and shift systems forming - life became less brutish still. By 5000 years ago, life in some societies could even be called pleasant.

And how do groups form? Simple: people come together when they share a belief.

The most powerful shared beliefs, in prehistory, were those that 'explained' the world around us. Great stories that told a tribe's members who corrugated the land into mountains, who poured rain from the sky, who split the night with lightning. Over time, these shared beliefs became part of the tribe's culture, holding it together. And making life slightly nicer for its members.

People with nicer lives tend to live longer and have more children. The children who survive (and go on to have children themselves) are those who share the same life-improving beliefs as their parents.

In other words, religious belief is just a useful evolved trait.

This simple thought explains religion, in its entirety.

As an atheist, I can therefore be grateful for the god theory, because I wouldn't be here without it. Almost every society and civilisation, including my own, grew out of religious belief. It creates a seed bed for culture, enabled cities to grow in medieaval Europe, allowed a man to walk freely across the entire Middle East. Over time, the thousands of creation stories went through their own process of natural selection, and a few big ones - like the Abrahamic religions, variations on a theme - survived and prospered. The stories hardened, got written down, turned into organising structures, and became the scaffolding of a thousand societies.

Definition of an evolved trait: something useful enough to survive into the next generation. And for most of history, being a member of a shared belief system gave you much better survival prospects than not being one. Religion is just an evolved trait.

And that's the full and complete explanation of religion. If someone protests they 'have faith', I can just smile tolerantly and accept it, because I understand why. (I'd prefer it if they embraced rationality instead - I'm troubled by the volume of energy that intelligent and hardworking people devote to such intangibles - but at least I comprehend why they hold the beliefs they do. The sense of comfort that comes from shared belief is hugely important, to many, many people.)

Most importantly, viewing religious belief at the meta level puts such beliefs in proper context: as a component of human behaviour that can be studied and tested. (NOT putting up the straw man of whether it explains reality or not; that's irrelevant.) In this meta context, someone stating they 'believe in (a) god' is perfectly understandable, because you can see why.

It's possible Dawkins has written about this himself, but he seems to be having a lot of fun simply debunking, which means he's missing the point.

In my opinion, there's more fun to be had by taking it up to the meta level. Take one of Dawkin's pet hates, the USA's young-earth creationists. Isn't it fun to know that their opposition to evolution ... is itself just an evolved trait?

As one year turns into another

I've got a lot to do in 2009.

2008 went well: gained a gold-plated business qualification, two new roles, and learned to skydive while taking a year out on a university campus; I also realised why some people are religionists, and finally forgave them for it, gaining an understanding of the subject at a 'meta' level. A year when I proved to myself I wasn't settled into a comfortably-numb thirtysomething rut and still had a fresh mind. A great year. But it's set me up for a busy 2009.

Next year's goals: get my FS1 skydiving qual, progress from Practitioner to Expert in KM, get back into triathlon. All good. There's a host of little ones too: turn five-a-day into rock-solid daily routine (with a banana, berries, and Innocent, I can get three before even leaving the house), read one case study and do five GMAT questions a day to keep my brain on edge, practice ten minutes of meditation a day. But the biggest ones are financial: turn one of the roles I'm in into an invested partnership before 2009 closes.

I've a feeling my big score lies in 2009, and I already have an idea what it is. Hundreds of little components, lots of decisions, but all of them inexorably pointing towards genuine wealth as opposed to income. The financial knowledge I picked up on the MBA; the businesses I'm now involved with; the broader economics and demographics that dictate which sectors are going to go like gangbusters over the next decade. This year, it's just a case of positioning myself in the right streams and driving hard along them.

More dried prune than man

Beat. Aching bones, quivering flesh, blocked sinuses and dry, reddened skin, all combining to make me feel about 100.

Yes, the winter flu, which I usually avoid or shake off in a day, has hit me hard. 3pm and I'm barely an hour out of bed, with a few flights of stairs giving me heart palpitations.

It's significant that in the last three months I've had more coughs and colds than in the previous ten years. Diving straight into two jobs scant hours after handing in my MBA dissertation, and that after a solid year of effort, must have weakened me somehow, immune system shot to hell and back. That's my resolution for 2009 then: return myself to full ass-kicking health. Much more of this, and I'm in danger of descending to the level of a normal person.

Round robins: shoot them, shoot them

Ha ha, here's a neat summary of why I hate those Christmas round-ups of what people you know have been up to all year.

The wonders of life

Wow, this pic of the part-formed foot found inside a baby's brain is absolutely beautiful. Some small error in the transcription process caused a couple of cells to be misplaced, but they just blindly carried out their programme of building feet until there were no longer the resources to continue.

The process of building a human body is stunning, but blind: just ribonucleic acid taking instructions from DNA and directing strings of amino acids to join together and fold up along a timeline. Each step evolved and improved over the generations, random mutation combined with nonrandom natural selection, the least-worst designs surviving and passing their attributes to the next generation where it all begins again. Most mutations are useless, like this one: but some are useful, like light-sensitive patches that over millions of years become eyes. And through these conflicts the human story - one small part of a larger story - continues to be written.

The natural processes of biology and evolution are wonderful enough. We certainly don't need any god theories to explain it.

The Economist on education

This week's Economist has a brilliant piece on the further dumbing-down of British under-16 education.

It's all very well organising the curriculum into six 'learning areas', and it might seem like a good idea to teach things beyond the three R's. But how effective can such soft skills be, if they're not built on a sound bedrock of reading, writing, and doing sums?

My £0.02: British education has been getting softer since the 1950s. Look at any GCSE paper today and it's startlingly simple compared to the ones I did just a decade or two ago. The emphasis now is on 'being interesting' and engaging the student's mind in creative thinking. But the best creativity grows in the strictest, most disciplined analysis of facts and figures - and we're raising a generation of soft-edged muppets without the basics to build on.

Teleporting

One of my ultra-vivid dreams has just re-entered my head. Last night, I was teleporting! Both as an onlooker - was sitting at a table of four in a restaurant and was rocked by the rush of air filling the vacuum left as my neighbour teleported out - and as a teleportee myself.

Being teleported isn't just a case of disappearing in one place and appearing in another, it seems. It feels like a giant hand has grasped you from behind and whisked you rapidly upwards, then you sort of crumble into a mass of particles like a swarm of blackfly which then do the whole dematerialising thing. The dream didn't last long enough to find out where I went, though.

Just saw a very strange poster outside a bank, warning people of ATM fraud. It read,

"Attention customers. If this machine does not look like an ATM, do not attempt to use it and inform bank staff."

Presumably bank staff are kept busy by the constant reports of pillarboxes, phone booths, large wheeled mechanical vehicles, and other objects which do not look like ATMs?

Hanging out in Babylon

The Babylon exhibition at the British Museum is a feast.

It's one of those rare cities where the reality seems to have been in tune with the myths built up over the centuries: lost until the 1850s, the dimensions and descriptions given by (largely Greek) sources seem to have been surprisingly accurate, like the height of the walls and the size of the ziggurat. The only things missing (which, of course, became the biggest parts of the myth) are the Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel. In some lists of the Wonders of the Ancient World, the gardens are replaced by Walls - which were pretty impressive in themselves, so that could be the reason the Hanging Gardens are the one Wonder we don't have modern evidence of.

The exhibition's borrowed some brick friezes from the Louvre, and they're the best bits. Fragments of Babylon's walls, glazed blue bricks patterned with designs: several squares metres of things Nebuchadnezzar himself once gazed upon in quiet satisfaction, running his hand along the smooth glazes, 2,500 years ago.

They're impressive enough removed from the walls and viewed in the age of the Internet: just how incredible would they have looked to people far more attuned to the earth and seasons than ourselves, people used to subsistence farming and lives spanning a bare forty years, when they walked across the desert and saw a shimmering blue city in the distance, parts of which rose seventy metres from the desert floor? Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.

Hitting the floor

All right, I'm calling it. The UK's property market has finished its freefall.

It's just an impression I get: slight tinges of optimism in estate agents' windows, somewhat more people talking about buying, a growing realisation that most people still have a job and the dip has enabled a large number of people who couldn't buy before to get on the ladder. As credit eases over the next few months, I believe the property market will stay constant until March, then start growing at approximately the level of inflation for the rest of 2009.

My own patch of the market hasn't really suffered: being near a massive Tube rebuild and the Olympic area it's stayed fairly insulated from the plummet. Perhaps by 2010 I'll actually be in profit on the thing.

You'll have someone's eye out with that

Now here's an interesting use of language and a lesson in the importance of nuance.

It's a pretty horrendous situation - kids practicing archery resulting in a (much too) near miss with someone's brain. The text, however, puts an unfortunate slant on it.

"If the arrow had been shot with just a bit more force, it would have come out the back of his head," said doctors at Jida Hospital in Changchun, eastern China

This paragraph suggests that the doctors didn't think the shooter fired the arrow with sufficient force and should have tried harder. Well, the Chinese push their athletes to extremes, but this is something else.

Aboard the 7.27

This week is the best week to catch the 7.27am.

It may be cold when I tumble out of bed too close to six; my limbs may creak as I do the 33 and stomach may churn as the Innocent sluices into my pre-awoken system. And the wind as I lock and leave may be hard-edged and squeeze ice from my eyes as I trek to the station, stumbling blindly through the whey-faced dawn. But this week, anyone catching the 07.27 from my local station rides into town through the awakening day. And it's magical.

Passing the stations of South London, sitting on the right hand side of the train facing backwards, I watch the sun struggle skywards. In those few minutes, the scene over the rooftops morphs from dim greyness like TV static into the deep red of the awakening day, then the strengthening flames of daylight, and finally the harsh torch of winter triumphs over the town, just before the train pulls under the hood of Victoria to dock with a thousand others as London's new week begins.

Seize the moments. They're all we have.

Oh Salesforce, get a grip

Oh dear. Just noticed that Salesforce.com, the world's greatest online application, has adopted a new slogan: "The Leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Cloud Computing." This is wrong is so many ways.

First, what's with that (CRM)? Your first paragraph may need it; your slogan doesn't. It just makes the line less punchy. But that pales into insignificance over the appalling mistake of 'Cloud Computing'.

AAAARGGGH!!! What, precisely, is customer-centric about the phrase 'Cloud Computing'? NO CUSTOMER CARES ABOUT YOUR ADHERENCE TO THE LATEST TECHNOLOGICAL BUZZWORD. The phrase adds not one jot to the customer experience and just clouds the issue: the whole point of cloud computing is that it isn't a product benefit; it's 'simply there' and you don't have to worry about where your crunch is coming from.

Look, Salesforce, you 'do' customer relationship management. This is what your product provides, and it does it very, very well. You don't 'do' cloud computing; that's the means, not the end. Your slogan - and therefore the first impression countless potential customers will have of you - obscures this strong, singular, shining fact.

Salesforce.com should sack its marketing director immediately. And hire me instead. And if it was forced through by Benioff himself - shame on you, Marc!

'Crapland' closes down

Sad for the kids, but I just can't help laughing at this.

I have very little sympathy with businessmen who push ahead with events that are obviously underfunded. At most he had a £45K budget - barely enough to finance a grotto of any distinction - yet promised all manner of goodies on his website.

But the hilarious part is in the way such stories are reported. The journalists always try to sound sober and serious while inserting passages of high comedic content. For example:

The "tunnel of light" was described by some people as a line of trees with some fairy lights hanging from them.

Elves did not meet visitors at their cars as promised, and "there was no Seamus the elf to take us to santa", another woman complained.

"He also said staff were subjected to violent outbursts by irate customers, including Santa being attacked and one of the elves being "smacked in the face and pushed into a pram"."

I wouldn't mind knowing who the 'professional troublemakers' apparently responsible for turning it into a media event are though. Are they the same people who turned the Ross/Brand double act into a nationwide crisis?!

But you'll note one thing from this photo: at least lip service has been paid to factual accuracy. Santa's North Pole 'hood is often pictured on Christmas cards as inhabited by penguins, which are strictly an Antarctic species; note there are no penguins at Crapland, but it does feature a polar bear. He may look a bit sad, but at least he's in the right hemisphere.