And Slaters Go Plop

Fight!

Sal and I like to avoid TV shows while they are, er, showing on TV and, instead, like to get them out on DVD and blob out for days on end without the constant stream of adverts and without the delay of a week between episodes.

For many years, people who’s opinions on films I value greatly have been telling me I really ought to get into Battlestar Galactica (BSG). I’ve never been into watching sci-fi but enjoy the occasional well-written sci-fi novel so it made sense to give it a go. And so we did.

Now, for fans of BSG this is probably going to hurt a little. I apologise in advance.

The coolest thing about sci-fi (as compared to, say, fantasy) is that you sort of have to work within the limits of the known laws of physics which is not all that limiting as it leaves the imagination wide open for some really creative concepts. Sure, some boundaries are overstepped, mainly the whole issue of getting around in this giant universe of ours where almost every sci-fi writer will invoke some form of instantaneous zipping from place to place. But, other than these understandable exceptions, most of the concepts should be plausible.

BSG is a bit quirky in that people still use telephones with cords aboard their space craft but are capable of teleporting willy-nilly across the universe. I quite like this aspect though. It works. It’s also got some interesting interplay between characters. And for those who have not already given thought to what makes a human a human and whether a being that is made qualifies there are some intriguing concepts too. However…

A good friend of mine said “the coolest thing is the way the space fights don’t make any noise!!1!”. But, Simon, they do make noise. All the time. Even their little side-puffers make little side-puffing noises. For frack’s sake, they managed to get this right back in 1968. Perhaps the lack of noise is only in comparison with the skwarking of the fighters in Star Wars but they definitely still make noises in the noiseless vacuum of space in BSG.

And what’s with the fact that every bit of paper has it’s corners clipped? Is the printing ship run by bored-but-OCD staff? I’ve operated a guillotine in a print shop and there’s a very valid reason for why books and other forms of paper have corners.

There is a scene where Lee has landed on a windy and forsaken planet and is dragged along the ground by his parachute, painfully hitting his legs against rocks. He struggles to cut the cords of his parachute and finally manages to do so before breaking any more bones. You can feel his sense of relief. I turned to Sal and said, “well there’s something, if this had been any other cheesy sci-fi he’d have narrowly avoided a massive precipice”. I spoke too soon. Right then the camera pans out and up… strike three, you’re out.

So, I’ve reached the end of season one. Sal abandoned it halfway through but I feel I’ve given it a fair trial.

And in the red corner. We’ve just got out the first DVD of season one of Dexter, we’re only two episodes in and we’re hooked. Dexter is a sociopath (or is that psychopath? I never remember the difference) who lacks feelings but charmingly, yet insightfully, understands the social niceties ordinary people need to get along. Oh, and he butchers people who’ve (literally) gotten away with murder.

I feel a little bad for bagging BSG. It’s got a lot going for it and my frustrations are slightly exaggerated for the sake of the telling. But, alas, it’s up against Dexter for a share of our viewing time and Dexter has neatly dismembered BSG and kept a drop of its blood on a slide as memorabilia.

Dexter wins.

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Here’s a video that has been on the InterTubes for a while now but it’s a good example of tilt-shifting done properly. Well, almost properly; the helicopter during the rescue should have remained in sharp focus as it was on the same plane as the section of water which was in focus. I also like the fact that it’s sped up a bit as it adds to the feeling of the surreal. Nice song too.

Tilt-shifting is a photographic effect where a faraway shot is artificially blurred in such a way as to give it a depth of field effect usually only found in close-up photography. This is because lenses (cameras and eyes) have different depths of field depending on how far away the object is. [A good demonstration of this depth of field effect is to move your head closer to the screen, close one eye and hold your finger up halfway in between your eye and these words. Focus on the words and you'll see that your finger is fuzzy. Now, leaving your finger where it is in relation to the screen, gradually move your head back and you'll see that both the screen and the finger become reasonably sharp.]

When used properly it can produce surreal shots with a hint of cutesy nostalgia.

Now, wind the clock back to the mid-nineties and to the glory days of lens flares.

An often unwanted effect of photography in bright light was that little orbs  (i.e. lens flares) would appear on the photo due to the source of the light hitting the lens directly. It wasn’t long before photo editing programs like PhotoShop realised that some artists were using this effect to give a shiny thing a bit more ‘bling’ and before you could say “Bob’s your sugardaddy” wannabe artists (myself included) were putting lens flares on anything and everything. Including things that didn’t shine. Like fur for example. Want to make your cat look more expensive? Put a big ol’ lens flare on its shoulder.

Return to the present and we have the same thing happening with tilt-shifting.

If you have, say, a photo like the above, the tilt-shift effect works pretty well because when you track vertically up the image the actual horizontal depth of field is fairly consistent. But imagine the same photo where one of the people in the crowd in the foreground is holding up a banner that takes up half of the right side of the photo. Applying a gradual blur-everything-vertically-away-from-the-middle will mean that the bottom of his banner will be blurred (as it should be because he’s in the foreground and the focal point is somewhere out on the field) but the middle of the banner will be nice and crisp which simply never happens in real miniature photography.

The crux of the matter is, inappropriate use of tilt-shifting is exactly as silly as whapping a lens flare on your cat’s shoulder. Learn from my lens flare crimes. Just because it can be done it doesn’t mean it should be done.

I’ve only recently discovered LibraryThing. It’s a website where you build a library of books you own (or have read), rate them and then receive useful recommendations based on what others with similar tastes like.

It’s noice and I loike it. I loike it a lot.

This video gives a reasonably good summary of the content of Peter Singer’s new book, The life you can save – Acting now to end world poverty.

See the book review below.

I’ve just finished reading Peter Singer’s new book, The life you can save – Acting now to end world poverty. In it he presents his arguments for why we ought to be acting to help those below the poverty line, discusses the obstacles and suggests methods for making sure that the money you give is effective.

Singer is a philosopher and an ethicist and, as such, presents a robust case for the need for charity as well as the wrongness of withholding aid when it is within our means.

He sets the scene with a scenario where you are passing by a pond and notice a toddler drowning in it. Most of us would be prepared to ruin our new shoes and clothing as well as make ourselves late for work in order to save the toddler. This would indicate that we actually value the life of this child over the cost of our clothing and over the interruption to our everyday lives.

But why don’t we act with the same urgency when we know for a fact that for a similar cost and/or inconvenience we would be able to save the life of a real child in, say, Africa?

Here Singer addresses many of the psychological issues that surround immediacy, perceived unfairness when others don’t give, balancing our legitimate selfish urges, being more vocal about our charity to create a better culture of giving and much more.

Having established that if we are able to help and we have no good reasons not to he then goes on to examine how to invest your aid wisely and ensure that your money is being used for what you intended. (I’ve often chosen my charities based largely on how little is wasted on administration – he deals with this and shows that it is more complicated than that).

The last part of the book is dedicated to establishing how much it is reasonable to expect us to give without turning us all off. Singer holds himself to his own standards and admits that even he can’t live up to them (he doesn’t mention it in the book but according to a radio interview I listened to he gives around 30% of his income). Think of it; if you can afford to buy a coffee when you could have had tap water then you have diverted potential aid from those who clearly need it more than you. Instead, he suggests a more realistic scale of percentages which, for most reading this, would be between 1-5% of our incomes before tax.

And all is not lost as he points out: in 1981 there were 1.9 billion people below the poverty line whereas today there are only 1.4 billion. Those numbers may seem close but consider that the fact that the world population has increased in the time and what this amounts to is that we have almost halved the percentage of people living below the poverty line in 30 years. Ending world poverty is achievable.

I thoroughly recommend you read this book.

The Golden Rule. Treat others how you’d like to be treated. Almost every culture in the world has a version similar to this and the only real variation is in the definition of who the ‘others’ are. In most primitive cultures, ‘others’ didn’t include the tribe over the mountain but, as we have formed larger and more inclusive societies, we are extending the boundaries of who qualifies as an ‘other’.

Most people reading this will likely have a boundary that now includes all humans. Some may extend this boundary to other animals capable of suffering to various degrees. Everyone I’ve met agrees that The Golden Rule is a good rule to live by but there are a large range of interpretations as to who the ‘others’ are.

A question I have is, should chimps and orangutans belong to this group we call ‘others’? What about other animals such as cows and sheep? Should we treat them as we would like to be treated? If not, why not?

This is a touchy topic and one I’ve given a bit of thought to over the last few years in examining whether I ought to become a vegetarian. In short, I still eat meat. I’ve decided that my boundary for ‘others’ is largely dependent on the issue of suffering. This is a fuzzy line however and roughly translates to an unwillingness to eat the meat of animals who, in killing them, has caused unnecessary suffering to either them or to others. I’ve found that there is no easy answer and that much of this is because we expect to be able to draw nice, clear-cut lines in what is (as is usually the case in matters like this) essentially a gradient. And I’ve found that it’s a good idea not to even try to draw too distinct a line and to be prepared to shift it regularly depending on the many factors that can apply (i.e. I would kill and eat a chimp if I were starving to death and had no other option but wouldn’t dream of it in my current status.)

In my current status I don’t like animal experimentation that causes suffering. I prefer to eat chickens that have had freedom to roam. I don’t mind eating sheep and cows so long as they are treated well. I don’t want to encourage cramped pig pens so avoid pork unless it’s free range. Chimps, orangutans, elephants, whales and dolphins (to name but a few) are very much in my group of ‘others’ and I would see the hunting and killing of one as causing similar suffering to killing a human.

Roughly, where is your boundary and why?

No one believes that they are dogmatic. We’re all far too reasonable for that carry on. But we can all point to a number of other people who we would term as dogmatic and, with a little imagination, we should be able to understand that they probably don’t think they are dogmatic. This leaves us with a dilemma; how do we know that we are not being dogmatic ourselves? If we can see others acting dogmatically who are unaware of it then, chances are, we could be too.

By ‘dogmatic’ I am describing an absolutist kind of belief that, if I could summarise in my own words, boils down to the fact that you would really rather hold to what you believe than accept an alternative even if the alternative is true. Dogma is the belief you refuse to interrogate.

Dogmatism can get in the way of new truths. The reason for this is that if you are unwilling to honestly put a belief to the test then you will never find out if that belief happens to be false. A valid argument can be made that perhaps there are some beliefs that we’d be better off clinging to rather than risking finding out a truth that would cause you great unhappiness. Would you like to find out that your partner cheated on you all those years ago? What if we discover that we are really just a brain in a jar somewhere living a simulation? What if God really is imaginary? What if God really is real? Whether we dare to search for the truth of a particular matter is a personal decision. But if we refuse to honestly put our beliefs to the test then we ought to show a little more humility when telling others what we ‘know‘ to be true.

So, assuming we do want truth, how do we avoid dogmatism? The best way I can think of is to actually value truth over any existing belief. This can be excruciating, especially when a belief is foundational to any meaning you get out of life. I found it very difficult many years ago to say to myself in all honesty that I would hold truth higher than my belief in the existence of God. If you’ve never believed in God you’ll probably struggle to understand the significance of this but, to a believer, God is truth and so it can seem a kind of fundamental blasphemy to say that you would even challenge the idea. If you do believe in God, fear not, many respectable people have done what I did and kept their belief afterwards and I greatly respect them for it.

Other than valuing truth over existing beliefs I’ve come across another technique that can help to break the emotional attachment we often develop with our dearly-held beliefs. That is to regularly switch perspectives or, “state the opposite”. An example of this is to first say what you believe i.e. “Labour has the best health policies” and then say the opposite i.e. “National has the best health policies” or, “Act has the best health policies” and try to mean it. You can do this with just about any belief in which you are tempted to take sides and it really can help to make you more objective because it can lessen the effects of the ‘in-group/out-group’ factor.

Does anyone have any other good tips or tricks for finding truth that can be used by anyone regardless of their starting assumptions?

In a perfect world, when faced with a contentious issue, we would assimilate the facts, weigh them against each other and come to a reasonable consensus (pending further information, of course). We don’t live in a perfect world however and I’ve observed in myself and in others that we often tend to treat our existing beliefs about the way the world works as if it were our favourite football team; we’ll stand behind them through good times and bad, through confirmatory and contradictory evidence.

This is a fairly natural thing to do and if we are aware of our own confirmation bias we can do a lot to gradually eliminate those ideas we previously held to be true but which were, in fact, false.

However, I’ve noticed that when two people attempt to discuss a contentious issue from two very different starting assumptions, instead of fostering a willingness to seek the truth regardless of the impact to our existing beliefs, we are driven further toward defending them against this new ‘enemy’.

I think that if our goal is truth then we ought to spend most of our time challenging our existing beliefs in dialogue with people with whom we have much in common. That way we’ll be less inclined to go into defensive mode and more likely to gracefully discard what was previously an incorrect belief.

This would mean that in many cases there would have to be a certain level of exclusivity to discussions but I think it would go a long way toward self-improvement even though it may take a very long time to unravel long-held presuppositions.

I want to be able to thrash out what I see as difficulties to do with consciousness or first causes without having to deal with the distraction of religious dogma or new age pseudo-science and, more importantly, I’d imagine that there are many conversations that other people would like to have without me jumping in and blurting out what I know must be true.

So, for those of you who have found me an irritation in the past, I hope to be less in your face with what I perceive to be the absolute truth. If you think I’ve got something wrong and you hold very similar starting assumptions to me then please feel free to rigorously discuss your ideas with me. If you hold very different starting assumptions please try to allow for the fact that you may be wrong and I will try my best to do likewise. We may, after all, both be wrong.

In a perfect world we should be happier to learn that we have been wrong than that we have ‘won’ an argument.

The Otago Bike Trail takes advantage of a decommissioned rail track that used to run from Middlemarch up through Wedderburn and down into Clyde from 1879 until 1990. The rails and cycle-unfriendly rocks have been removed and it now provides the perfect gradient and stunning scenery for leisurely cycling.

It’s relatively inexpensive, relaxing, safe and the perfect way to see some of the most beautiful countryside New Zealand has to offer.

Sal and I did the trail a couple of weeks ago. Read on if you’d like to know what we thought were the highlights, lowlights and, most importantly, how not to win at curling.

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