Who’s the bigger monster: Jimmy Savile or me

Jimmy Savile presenting “Top of The Pops” in 1964. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The past few months’ news have been variations on a theme, and not a pleasant one.

Jimmy Savile has starred along with the many skeletons in his closet, some of which seem to have belonged to other people. Apparently as of last week the police had him down as having committed over 200 sexual crimes. 28 of his victims were under ten years old. Doesn’t it make you want to burn all those VHSs of Jim’ll Fix It?

But there’s a problem with that strategy. He certainly did something wrong, but hasn’t everyone? Of course, over 200 sexual crimes is pretty extreme, but I wonder where we should draw the line. Ten? One? How about adultery, does that count? How about imagining doing it – would that still be bad?

Where would you draw the line?

Let’s stay on the safe side, and only buy, watch, listen to stuff made by Christians. Surely that would solve the problem? No, not really; Christians are just as likely as non-Christians to fall into any sort of sin.

There’s only one thing for it: we’re going to have to stop buying, watching, listening to, supporting anyone who isn’t as good as me. Hm. Doesn’t feel like I’ve really set the bar high enough.

How about we just admit that everyone has got problems? I mean real, serious problems. For Jimmy that worked itself out in a particular way that wasn’t very pleasant for those involved or for us, but if I’m honest I’m pretty certain that if people went digging around in my past they’d come up with some stuff I’d rather wasn’t seen by the entire world. Maybe the same’s true for you.

Turns out Jimmy Savile wasn’t that much of a monster after all. No, wait, that doesn’t sound right. Turns out I’m just as much of a monster as Jimmy Savile was. That’s more like it.

Thank God he doesn’t judge us based on what we’ve done, but on what Jesus has done in our place. It’s all about grace.

Six degrees of separation

Me, My friend and The Chuckle Brothers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m sure you’ll have heard of the theory that every individual on the planet has a maximum of six degrees of separation from every other individual. In layman’s terms, a friend-of-a-friend is someone who is one degree separated.

So in a partially fictional way I’m friends with someone who’s friends with the Chuckle Brothers (1), who are friends with some producer at the BBC (2), who plays golf with the FD of a national baker (3), whose brother-in-law’s (4) family (5) lives in Uganda and know a witch doctor there (6).

The theory goes that I could get to absolutely everyone on the planet in a maximum of six.

And surely Facebook etc has shown this in real-life. One person says something interesting, it’s ‘liked’ by his friends, and suddenly the audience for this comment is multiplied exponentially. Apparently some salesman called Joe Girard (he’s meant to be a Big Deal) claimed that everyone has 250 important contacts, which means that only two friends away we know 15 million people.

A lot.

Is the effect that we have on our closest friends significantly greater than it first appears? I think it might be.

Don’t pay homophobes

Image by Abode of Chaos via Flickr

A recent story caught my eye: David Cameron has said that the Government is considering withholding aid from countries in which homosexuality is illegal. Fair enough, it’s the Government’s job to steward their own money. Just don’t mention the expenses scandal.

In particular, he said that:

British aid should have more strings attached.

Now, can we get one thing clear? If the UK Government is handing out money to countries who follow a set of rules, that’s not ‘aid’. That’s a wage. Aid, according to the fountain of knowledge Wikipedia, is ‘a voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another, given at least partly with the objective of benefiting the recipient country’.

Cameron clearly sees his comments as fair and good but there’s a touch of irony in them. I’m not for a second going to say that I side with countries who are intolerant of minority sexualities, but there’s certainly no way I can agree with Cameron on this, because I think he’s guilty of exactly the same.

Here’s Cameron’s issue with the countries in question: they’re intolerant of people who are not straight. Of course, this attitude towards sexuality is one which came from Britain in the first place – the BBC gets it right when they say:

Some 41 nations within the 54-member Commonwealth have laws banning homosexuality. Many of these laws are a legacy of British Empire laws.

…and the British Empire laws were generally founded on an understanding of Christian morals. Don’t worry, I’m getting to the point. Many have claimed that religion is just a way of controlling the masses: ‘If you practice homosexulity you’ll suffer for all eternity.’ But the attitude of the Government I think goes one step worse: ‘If you practice these laws bannning homosexuality I will make you suffer right now.’ Who’s more intolerant? The intolerant one, or the one who’s intolerant of intolerance?

In effect, our secular, humanist Government is doing exactly the same as hated organised religion, it’s just that the role of God has been taken away from an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-good, all-powerful God, and into the hands of an imperfect group of people.

Thank God he’s really in control.

Music copyright laws are ridiculous

Image via Wikipedia

Ok, so the BBC ran a story a week or so ago about the fact that the Government was dropping the whole website blocking thing. Couple of thoughts.

1. I like this quote from Fergal Sharkey – I also like the name:

Who wants to tell the 80% of music businesses that employ fewer than five people, and the thousands of artists who self-finance the production of their own albums, that to enjoy the protection of the law, all they need now is to have millions of pounds and spend years in court to protect their work.

2. I also like the fact that the law in the UK forbids people from changing media formats. So if I buy a CD, but change the format to .mp3 so that I can listen to it on my iPod, I’m breaking the law. We like to have a good ol’ laugh at the ridiculous American state laws forbidding people from facing north on a Thursday while wearing a hat and riding a pig, but have our own which would forbid me from having 90% of my own, legally-bought music on my mp3 player.

3. Simon Levine, head of the intellectual property and technology group at DLA Piper, is a little bit silly. He said:

if you have a situation where 90% of your population is doing something, then it’s not really a very good law

In this case, we clearly do have a bit of a silly law, but the fact that 90% of the population is breaking a particular law doesn’t make it silly. If 90% of the UK population decided that we should all burgle on another, it wouldn’t stop that from being wrong.

4. What I probably like best are the unnecessary examples of Newport State of Mind and Doctor Who. The former was a ripoff of Jay-Z/Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind, and was removed from YouTube for copyright violation. The latter, in its current form, is written by two guys who wrote Doctor Who fan fiction when they were younger – which of course was illegal.

So back to the actual point of the article. The Government is unable to prevent a website from illegally sharing films, why? If 90% of the UK population is breaking the law, surely they are too?

Maybe capitalism just doesn’t work.

Entropy, evolution and logic

Image by Dave Pearson via Flickr

I’ve been watching Wonders of the Universe, the new BBC series presented by Professor Brian Cox (who, of course, I know better from his days as the keyboard player in D:ream).

The first episode was about time, and our mate Brian explained to us the second law of thermodynamics – entropy. Cleverly using a pile of sand compared to a sandcastle, he showed that you could mess around with the pile without changing much, whereas messing with the sandcastle would turn it into the pile. Left to nature, everything moves from a state of order (the sandcastle – low entropy) to a state of chaos (the pile – high entropy). Using this law, astronomical physicists have predicted how the universe will go in future.

However, the second episode was about how stars created the elements and eventually us, how the chaos and simplicity of hydrogen on fire (in a star) become more and more ordered and complex until new stars and planets are born.

Now, I’m not being funny here, I’m genuinely interested in how these two go together! Are there any scientists out there who understand cosmic evolution and entropy enough to explain the matchup?

Thank you.