Are bloggers journalists?

A federal court says yes. This is being spun as a victory - it meant that the person could use a company logo within an article that he had written.

Well, that strikes me as a pyrrhic victory. I suspect that if you are a journalist, then your accountability for the things you write will be considered to be higher. I suspect there are many bloggers who don't consider it necessary to properly source comments, to differentiate between opinion and fact or to present information in a way that is reasonable. As usual, I suspect the real winners will be the lawyers.

Gonzalez and the need for critical thinking

What is truth? Is truth the same as received opinions? Is there no such thing as truth? Or is there a definite version of events that is more representative of reality than any other?

I would argue for the latter, and I guess most of the people who read this and comment here would agree - even if they have a different opinion as to what that truth is. If this is the case, they believe that it is meaningful to seek to persuade me of the rightness of their idea of what truth is, just as when I write this, I am seeking to an extent to persuade readers of the rightness of my ideas.

This ties in with the headline, by the way - "Data isn't information; information isn't knowledge; knowledge isn't wisdom; wisdom isn't truth." In that, I am seeking to draw attention to the fact that truth is ultimately something "external" - something "beyond" the observer - even the most reliable of observers can go no further than his or her observations allow. You can infer from the headline that this blog expresses a view which is at its core anti-empiricist!

Of course, people will have different perceptions of how things are - the same event observed by different observers will result in their drawing different conclusions. This is a point I have already made regarding science - that the difference between proponents of ID and proponents of naturalism isn't fundamentally one of science (both can do the same experiments, and make the same observations) but one of presuppositions/worldviews/metanarratives. If you exclude the idea of external agency, then you are bound to interpret your observations in this light. Hence Dawkins' famous comment to the effect that if he saw a statue of the virgin Mary move, he would be more likely to believe in a vastly improbable quantum phenomenon than in a miracle of divine origin. And vice versa. Scientific experiments are almost certainly not going to have an impact on people's presuppositions - this is a part that scientific experiments simply don't reach.

However, people on both sides of the ID/naturalism debate accept in principle that there is the possibility of a definitive answer. Both Dawkins and (say) Dembski would be prepared to say that something happened to the statue (contrast "There is no spoon" - The Matrix) - a measurable change has occurred, and further that this requires some sort of explanation - that events are contingent.

For most people, "truth" is something that they apprehend from all sorts of sources, and few these days are prepared to engage sufficient critical faculties to come to a sensible conclusion as to what real truth is. For the few who are prepared to engage critical thinking skills, it is easy to underestimate the power and perceived authority of these sources of information - which include web references and search engines. "You can't possibly believe the nonsense being put out by such-and-such a group," we often think to ourselves. Oh yes they can! Somebody, somewhere, must be making it worthwhile to spammers putting out those silly emails promising to pay a million pounds into your bank account if you will just send the details.

I didn't post about Gonzalez below because I thought I was adding to the debate in any way. Neither was it because I thought that Discovery Institute is somehow authoritative in a way that (say) Panda's Thumb isn't. The reason for the post was to make more visible an alternative perspective - so that hopefully people searching the internet for information will not only look up the anti-ID writings of bloggers and then assume that this is reliable.

"Oh, that wouldn't happen!" Don't you believe it. Urban myths gain currency rapidly. Was the cabin boy in Captain Pugwash called Roger? No. Are the park keepers at the Grand Canyon really being told not to talk about the age of the Grand Canyon? No. Does the fact that this is so stop the stories going round and round, as somebody finds a reference to the incorrect facts on the internet and repeats it? No.

This isn't confined to the internet. "Inherit the Wind" was written as an anti-McCarthyite film, but the story of the film was the Scopes trial. The film is factually inaccurate - but people still assume that when they see it, they are seeing a historically reliable presentation. And the same could be said on a non-ID related theme of "JFK", the Oliver Stone film. Or the supposed historical references in "The Da Vinci Code". Or the Gnostic Gospels. Or Brecht's "Life of Galileo". Or Shakespeare's Histories.

By posting below - and even by posting this - I am not assuming that people will take what I have written as being reliable or true. I don't expect anybody to take anything they read as reliable or true. What I want to do is make sure that when people read things, they engage critical thinking skills, and don't just accept things because they fit with their presuppositions.

See, be and flee

From Miss Mellifluous - thanks for asking, Mell!

1. Three characters you wish were real so you could meet them

Nancy Blackett. Probably Peggy, actually - Nancy was a bit fierce, whereas Peggy was cute. Oh yeah, I forgot. I grew up. Darn it.

Meg, from A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, by Madeleine L'Engle - who started as a lovely girl and grew into a lovely woman and mother. Those books enriched my life.

Hermione Grainger - who is probably basically an alter ego for J.K.Rowling, I guess - intelligent, but once she comes to terms with herself, far more human than most of the other characters in Harry Potter. Please don't kill her off, J.K.

Let's put another few in, as also-rans. Mycroft, from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein - though his approach to probability left something to be desired, IMO. Faramir. Lola (as in Charlie and Lola, not the other one).

2. Three characters you would like to be

John Walker, master of "The Swallow".

Aragorn, son of Arathorn, Isildur's heir. Though not if I had to marry Liv Tyler.

Christopher Robin.

3. Three characters who scare you

IT, from A Wrinkle in Time. (I think that was IT's name).

The possessed horse thing from The Owl Service, by Alan Garner. I didn't finish the book, and can't remember what the horse was or did, but I'm still terrified of the memory of the bit where the horse looks round at the girl riding it, and its lips curl into a smile before it gallops off with her on its back and leaps into the quarry.

Um .... let's think. What was the name of the character in Nineteen Eighty Four who talked to Winston about a boot stamping on the face of humanity for ever? Him, anyway. Although I think Orwell was fundamentally wrong, and Aldous Huxley much closer to the truth.

Three more people to tag? Well, Jon, Bec and Alan, I guess.

Quick update

A pile of reading-related posts ought to appear at some stage - but I need a while to muster my thoughts and type them out ....

In the meantime, some reaction to the interview questions I asked Tom and Jon below. Firstly, thanks both for the replies. Secondly, interesting that the reaction of both was that the questions are "hard". I think what you mean by that (since I experienced the same thing) is that the answers required some thought. Most posts don't require thought in the same way, I believe - they reflect people's state of mind and in many cases almost write themselves. But responding to somebody else's questions in a formal way isn't a process that we often carry out.

Jon described the interview as the "Paul Fernandez show", which was a neat title. But the value of carefully chosen questions is that they don't focus on the interviewer, but the interviewee - and I hope I managed to do that.

Miss Mellifluous asks if I have missed my vocation. Well, Mell, the pattern for my questions was really pretty much that of the questions you asked me - I am doing no more than reflecting you! But regarding my vocation, I don't know what it is - if you have any clues, do tell!

And I'm still happy to ask other people questions, if they want an interviewer. It's fun, though not as easy as it sounds. However, Tom is also looking for candidates ....

An antidote to Burns Night ...

... in the form of another meme. Since I was at university, I have had it pretty forcibly drawn to my attention that my birthday is Burns Night. Occasionally, this has been accompanied by haggis, neeps and whisky. So here is another meme, to show that there's more to my birthday than a Scots poet.

Enter your birthday in Wikipedia
January 25

List three events that occurred on that day
41 - After a night of negotiation, Claudius is accepted as Roman Emperor by the Senate.
1533 - Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn.
1919 - The League of Nations is founded.

List two important birthdays
1627 - Robert Boyle, Irish chemist (d. 1691)
1900 - Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ukrainian-American geneticist and biologist (d. 1975)
(Better than obscure rulers and actors, IMO)

List one death
1640 - Robert Burton, English scholar (b. 1577) (The Anatomy of Melancholy - not that I've read it)

List a holiday or observance
Tatiana Day, celebrated as the Day of Russian students since 1755, when the Moscow University was founded. (Two for the price of one there, methinks)

There's the usual stuff about tagging five other people - to which I will add my usual thing - if the hat fits, wear it. :)

Random book meme

... from Miss Mellifluous.

"It must be someone who knows us. But how could they know we would come here on this particular day?"

Joanna was by far the more scared of the two.

"Sophie's World", Jostein Gaarder

HERE ARE THE RULES:

1. Grab the book closest to you.

2. Open to page 123; go down to the fourth sentence.

3. Post the text of the following three sentences.

4. Name the author and book title.

5. Tag three people to do the same.

Actually, I cheated a bit - the nearest book was "Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2007", which would have been boring and pretentious. So I took the second nearest. Consider yourself tagged....

Another WordPress hint

How to make a WordPress blog have a static front page...

The best technique I've found is here. Better than some rather messy plugins.

Work on Wordpress registration

Sorry, this is technical. I've written a small modification for the Wordpress registration screen. This is because I am (already) fed up with what I assume are spambots registering accounts on a Wordpress blog/website that I have set up (here), in the hope that they can put comments full of adverts for Cialis, cheap mortgages and other less pleasant things on posts. The hope is forlorn, since all comments have to be moderated - but I wanted to find a way of blocking the registrations.

So here goes ...

I think the bots work by searching for the file "wp-register.php" in domains, and using the known default behaviour of this file to register accounts automatically. So make the default behaviour not work ....

In wp-register.php, find:
$user_email = $_POST['user_email'];
and add:
$user_verify = $_POST[user_verify'];
as the next line.

Find:
$errors['user_login'] = __('<strong>ERROR</strong>: This username is invalid. Please enter a valid username.');
$user_login = '';
}

and add:
if ($user_verify == '')
{
$errors['user_verify'] = __('<strong>ERROR</strong>: You can only register if you are real!');
$user_verify = '';
}

Find:
<label for="user_email"><?php _e('E-mail:') ?></label> <input type="text" name="user_email" id="user_email" size="25" maxlength="100" value="<?php echo wp_specialchars($user_email); ?>" />

and add:
<label for="user_verify"><?php _e('Are you real?') ?></label> <input type="text" name="user_verify" id="user_verify" size="10" maxlength="15" value="" />

Unless the person registering puts anything non-blank in the "verify" window, the registration won't work, I think - and a spambot would not know to look for this yet. However, by putting particular words in for verification - change the question on each website, or whatever - this fix could be made non-generic.

I'll let you know if it cuts down the spam.

UPDATE: A more usable (as it is a plugin), but less effective (as it is reactive rather than proactive), method of achieving the same thing can be found here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's another plugin that works by blacklisting.

YAA: Due to the way special characters are formatted, you're probably better off reading the code for this on the WordPress.org Suggestions site. Here is a link to the relevant page - the code is about half way down.

Devotion to duty

I fell asleep last night trying to write a post. I woke up again at twenty past midnight - Liz was already asleep. The last two lines I had written before nodding off were complete gibberish. I'd better go and investigate whether the rest of it makes any sense.

I hope you know how much I suffer for my art!