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Here are a few things that, while they’re promoted as being amazing new inventions or ingenious improvements upon an old, tired product, they’re not always as impressive as people make out.

Power Tools

Electric power tools are all very well and good for someone who likes to throw around a lot of money for not very much reward. But they’re marketed at people who do little jobs, like putting one screw in the wall to fix a shelf, or something similar. Maybe if this person were doing it frequently or as a way of life, they’d need these supertools that can drill and screw and hammer and sand and kill you all at once, but the way they’re placed tends to make the poor man look wistfully at them and imagine that DIY is forever out of his financial grasp. There are bargain tools for such consumers, but when have you ever seen a Black and Decker advert for “NEW DRILL. IT DRILLS HOLES.”? Never. Because you think that you don’t want anything that doesn’t do the entire job for you with the squeeze of a trigger.

Fitted Sheets

This might just be a pet hate, but I really think we’re declining as a culture because of these things. I mean, seriously, wrapping the sheets under the mattress worked fine in the old days. The weight of the mattress kept it tucked under. Why did people then decide we needed them to fit a size of mattress perfectly and have that annoying little elastic edge? Mattresses aren’t standardised like your common hard drive is, however, so “fitted” sheet is really open for interpretation. That crappy edge too… The first two corners are a breeze, but try for the third and all your hard work is going to be undone. Eventually, the sheet inevitably ends up discarded in the corner, possibly with scorch marks if you happen to emit fire when you’re infuriated (like dragons do) as you sleep in a crumpled heap on the floor.

Touch-Operated Phones with Miniature Hard Drives that are Made by Apple

Trust me, you don’t need an iPhone. They are a waste of the industry’s research money and manpower. People throw all this effort into cramming features and storage into phones and cameras and MP3 players and curious hybrids of any two or three of those, and they do all this with very comfortable success, if it’s measured in terms of following the specification laid down by Steve Jobs’ team of ‘idea rectums’ that shit out ideas all day long into Steve’s outstretched hands while he fondles through the excremant looking for gold.

The iPhone is the pyrite of the mobile phone world. What you think you’re getting is something that’s as powerful as a laptop with the convenience of it being pocket-sized, but what you’re getting is reasonable functionality but only a few hours to actually use it, since you’ll need to stop when the damned thing runs out of battery.

Why is Apple’s money, or anyone’s, for that matter, going into whacking all these features together in one device when we’re still having the problem that we’ve been having since the first digital cameras - the batteries last for twenty or thirty seconds and then you’re fucked, with little more technology than any standard-length common or garden ape? What are you going to do, take pictures with twigs? Listen to music with rocks? Text someone using leaves? Whenever I get to use a digital camera when out with friends, it doesn’t matter how charged it thinks it is to start with, it never lasts the night. We have 8GB memory cards, but we can only fill up 200MB before the battery dies… does anyone else not see that we’ve headed down the wrong branch of technological development? Ok, we get it, you can make small hard drives with a big capacity. Now for fuck’s sake, Jobs, pull your thumb out and start inventing something we can actually use.

ToolComicles

The stick-figure drawings have been flowing from the end of the pen more frequently than the lengthy, boring prose for this stupid, narrow, white-on-green column just recently, and I want to get my money’s worth out of the blue-covered, ring-bound notebook that I bought. All I need is a nice Still Image Digitiser (i.e., a flatbed scanner) to get them out of the notebook and onto the internet.

There’s a cost though. I don’t want to buy a scanner that I’m not even going to use that much. New, they’re far too much, and you can’t trust these dirty auction sites… anything that can break in the post, will break in the post, so a nice glass-paned scanner is going to be a clear target for bored, underpaid postmen (postpeople? That just sounds like a children’s TV programme about fenceposts with faces painted on them) to vent their boredom upon. A nice game of flatbed scanner catch? Cricket perhaps, where the scanner is the ball, bat, stumps or wicket-keeper? Flatbed darts? Flatbed… horeshoes? Flatbed kayak oars?

Ok, but seriously - if anyone’s got an old scanner they don’t want, and they want someone to take it off their hands, maybe even make a small monetary donation, I’m your guy. Just drop me an e-mail sometime. Webmaster[at]toolchronicles.co.uk.

I came to accept the Warwick Atheists Society as a home, a group of friendly people who shared some key life outlooks with me. I came to this conclusion quickly, and maybe it’s time to rethink a little of what people are assuming are the reasons that I am here.

Now, I don’t mean to criticise anybody for their way of thinking - I’m sure it serves their purposes just fine. But there are some things that just don’t cut it for me. There’s nothing worse than self-doubt. Self analysis is fine, particularly in a retrospective sense, for how else can you evaluate and learn from your past? But this constant self-doubt and self-questioning that seems to be apparent in the more prominent society members makes me believe that they may have come to atheism from the wrong direction.

I’d like to first point out a few discrepancies in the way we think. I’m sure many of you know my position on free will; I’m a strong believer in the ability to make a choice. This conflicts with what these presumably wiser (and I say presumably because it can be presumed that wisdom increases with age - we know this is not true in all cases, which leaves a nice ambiguous statement for people to interpret how they wish) people are preaching: we can’t possibly make a difference to anything (a bleak paraphrasing, I know).

Next blow dealt: someone tells me that it’s impossible for human beings to be rational. Ever. This is a straightforward lie. It’s his belief that there are too many external factors that make people unable to abstract a situation down to simple logical and rational components. Frankly, this was insulting more than anything else, because I feel that it is perfectly possible, and in some cases common, to be able to take a situation, isolate it and convert it into a set of rational steps, considering the effects of the outputs on you as a person (and this is where we can find irrationality - some effects may be pleasing, others not, but they are taken as given effects because they are outside the scope of the rationalising system) and making a decision based on those known effects. Saying that a human being can’t be rational is like saying they can’t be logical. It’s simply wrong.

I know where these maligned views have come from. They’ve come from that heinous demon self-doubt. That’s the process that is best undergone in strict moderation. The key thing we have to remember here is that when you start to doubt even the things your senses are telling you, you’re starting on the slippery slope to madness. What’s the point in questioning the reliability of your senses to interpret the world around you? There is no other way for you to realise anything, so if you doubt your self, you doubt your self-doubt. That means: you may as well go along with things the way you’re built to - taking inputs from sense receptors and processing the data with your uniquely complicated mind.

We all feel like we have free will and can be rational. So why do people question themselves? Is there a correlation between this and questioning the presence of a god? If these people arrive at the conclusion of “there is no free will” because there’s no evidence of free will, despite them clearly feeling the ability to decide, what’s to say that they’re not all secretly feeling like there is a god, and they’re denying their own feelings due to this awful habit of doubting everything?

And this is why I think they’re all at atheism from the wrong direction. They don’t feel like there’s no higher power out there, they just doubt every singe thing that happens unless someone has theorised it and put an equation to it.

Doubting when people tell you things is a very good approach to life. By all means be sceptical of everything people tell you if they’re delivering it as fact and it can be checked. Verbal conversations are the ones you need to watch out for here, because people will never cite sources. At least if it’s written down you have a record that can be checked. But when you apply the same scepticism to everything your senses are telling you is right, there’s really no point to your life anymore. If you can’t accept that what you sense is right, you’re doubting the validity of everything you think, say and do, and I don’t see how you can possibly enjoy life.

It’s housing time for students. We’ve had three months within the university, and this is apparently enough time to get to know people well enough to decide that you want to live in a house with them. Ok, that part was fine. Now there’s the issue of the house itself, or more particularly, the location (since all houses are pretty much the same on the inside anyway).

When I say the “issue” of location, I don’t mean my issue. I mean everyone else’s issue. My house next year is located in Sydenham. Now, had I said that in the presence of the oh-so-wise sages of Leamington Spa residence who have an entire year (and in some cases, two years) up on me in terms of “experience,” I’d probably hear the collective groan and ensuing questions of “why there?”

Now, the two main “reasons” for such a rude and intrusive question, as far as I can tell, are these:

Reason One

According to various uncited and unverified sources, the “area is rough.” The first flaw with this is that it’s just a rumour. I’ve heard others that say North Leamington is the “rough” area, and sources that say it’s actually really nice. So, I guess the people who have no idea about it are the ones to ask in this case, right? The very fact that there are conflicting rumours on a similar topic discredits this entire argument.

Not to mention, I come from Basingstoke. For those of you who don’t know it, the next three proper nouns aren’t going to mean a lot to you, but to those of you who do, I’ve lived in Oakridge, Popley and Brighton Hill in my life. Every place I’ve lived in, I’ve heard described as “rough” or “dangerous” some time in my life. Trust me, this is one of those things that we can safely disregard.

Reason Two

The next point people make is that Sydenham is “far away” from the Leamington Parade (the centre of the town, essentially, where all the shops and pubs are). Let me tell you what a definition of a pussy Leamington resident’s interpretation of the phrase “far away,” (and this is a direct quotation): “ten or fifteen minutes’ [walk].” What the fuck? Back at home, I would walk for three quarters of an hour to get into the town centre to go out in the evening. I did a similar walk to and from sixth form every single weekday and to get to work, it was half an hour on foot. That means for my three-hour evening shifts, a quarter of my time outside of my house was travelling.

I had heard that students were lazy, but I just thought it was a stereotype playing to people’s senses of humour. I never thought I’d actually encounter someone who thought that an under twenty minute walk could be considered as “far.”

The Coventry estate of Earlsdon is a more practical place to live than anywhere in Leamington, simply because it is within walking distance of the University. It could be as much as an hour’s walk to get right on to campus, but I would easily prefer relying only upon myself than relying on expensive and inconsistent buses to get me into University every morning. The only reason we’re living in Leamington is because it’s closer to friends, but everyone should ideally be living in the other direction. Especially with the closure of Gibbet Hill Road imminent, the only way through campus, right on every one of the bus routes that serves Warwick University…

As a general rule, I don’t stand by the effectiveness of a democratic system where everybody, no matter how uneducated or corrupt, gets an equal voice in a system. But then there are the days when it pays off, and I realise that things aren’t so bad after all.

For example, I was present during our Students’ Union’s Annual General Meeting. Some liberal hippie fool wanted to open up the Union’s doors and arms to members of our beloved British Nationalist Party and actively invite those racist pigs into our university to let them address the students, the entire body of which is sourced by about 120 countries, 116 of which are not part of Britain. The indicative vote taken at the time showed a slim majority tending towards keeping blacklisted speakers from being invited and endorsed by the Union.

I am not against free speech. I heavily endorse an individual or group’s right to express whatever they want - otherwise there would be people outspeaking against this very website. But the defence I use whenever people voice their misgivings about the unsavoury nature of this site is: if it bothers you, don’t read it. I believe that such a policy is best for everyone, because it provides each person with a choice.

Were the Union to invite speakers from the BNP on to campus, it would lend them both credibility and support. It says to them “it’s ok to publicly broadcast these views,” which will undoubtedly be interpreted by some as “it’s ok to have these views,” and the message on this part couldn’t be further from the truth. Judging someone because of their race is almost universally agreed as unacceptable, and it doesn’t have any real arguments in its favour.

I don’t think that, as a university that is striving to become one of the top internationally accredited academic institutions worldwide, I feel that inviting the British Nationalists on to campus to our Union, a place that’s supposed to provide a good service and fair treatment for all students, we’d be denying that policy.

And to all of you weed-smoking, jobless, transient, liberal, bleeding-heart hippie scum who think that by barring them from campus we are somehow restricting “free speech,” to start with I will say a giant FUCK YOU, followed by a more coherent and logical argument.

The BNP have more than enough freedom. They can canvas people in the streets, they can go to people’s houses and talk racism at them for hours if the people are interested. But if they aren’t, why should their representatives in the Union permit and invite the BNP onto campus?

Furthermore, any of you who say that it would be a great opportunity to shout them down is heavily ignorant. Students generally aren’t motivated enough to get up and shout them down, and the few that might be will not want to, simply because it means they’d have to show up to the speech and put another tally on the total. If people were passionate enough to want to ask difficult questions and really put the speaker on the spot, they’d actively seek out the speakers they wish to protest against and do their whining there. The same goes for those people who actually want to hear what said speakers have to say. They are not needed here and they are not wanted here, and our students should not have to suffer being insulted.

During discussion with a friend over some of the finer points of proper urinal etiquette, the topic shifted slightly to bring up the shared conclusion: it’s better to look or be embarrassing around people you don’t know and will never see again than it is to do the same around friends or colleagues that you’ll see regularly, if not on a day-to-day basis.

This got me thinking, as most conversations do. Last night, I was talking with someone who was building up a personal relationship with one of the domestic staff here in the residence. Now, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want to have anything to do with the same person who goes into my bathroom and room and cleans up, and who will undoubtedly hand out judgements on people’s cleanliness. As far as I’m concerned, they won’t see the people they’re speaking to, they’ll see the person’s cleanliness out of ten every time you speak to them.

Besides, I don’t want to make friends with people that are providing a professional service for me! That would be like getting your mates round one evening to wash your car for you, while you do nothing. I’d feel guilty if my friends were doing a thankless and nasty job for me - anyone would.

And what if your friends were working for you? What happens if they aren’t doing a great job, or if there’s someone who could do it better? What happens if they don’t want to work there anymore? Do you take it personally? Professional and social lives have a clear distinction in my mind, and it’s my view that they should be separated with an impenetrable line.

As a scientist, the concept of naming a number after a person is nothing new to me. For example, there are physical constants (such as the Planck or Boltzmann constants) that are very precise and long-winded to write, and the discovery of each one’s significance is attributed to a person, whose name gets placed on the number, and usually a symbolic Greek or Latin letter is used to represent that number in equations.

I was reading around that vast (mostly empty of quality content (previous link, in case you were wondering, is a related topic and not an example of the emptiness of the internet)) space, labelled “the internet” and I discovered something called “Dunbar’s Number.”

If you’re not familiar with it, Dunbar’s Number is explained on its Wikipedia entry, but essentially, it’s the most friends anyone can have (and anyone with a Facebook friend count over this limit is a liar - caught out by science, this time) at one point. I’d like to go deeper into such a concept, for sure, but now is not the time. Now is complaint time!

Robin Dunbar has had his name applied to, not a long-winded, scientific number, nor even a formula used to calculate a number from a given set of variables. The number is one hundred and fifty.

What? This guy has placed his name smack-bang on an integer on the numberline. Why should he deserve a place amongst such greats like one hundred and thirteen, or seventy-three? He doesn’t. He belongs nowhere. If his number was something cool and neverending, like 150.45218719101974111998682872394…, then perhaps I’d throw him a scrap of respect. But no, just a whole, even, multiple of ten! If we’re going to start naming normal numbers after people, we’ll have no end to the list of words we can reel off… it’s utterly ridiculous, numbers are supposed to be nice and sequential and logically represented by our Arabic decimal system, not random and silly words thrown in wherever we please.

Non-secretive people sometimes really piss me off. I literally feel the blood beating in my arteries, and it hurts. I had the misfortune of hearing some sissy poetic jackoff talking to some cheap bit of skirt while I was walking today, and one of the snippets of conversation that I caught went a little like this: “…and do you know where I learnt that? I was watching Bill Bailey and he did a song about it…”

Your source of knowledge is a comedian’s musical piece? Firstly, there’s absolutely no credibility gained from that. Secondly, even if it can be crossreferenced as fact, why are you stating this source as your original? You sound like a complete idiot! Not only should you keep your sources to yourself, but you should especially keep your sources to yourself when they are this stupid! What is wrong with you?

People throw around sources of knowledge all the time. While this is useful in sorting out the lies people tell you from the bullshit, in everyday conversation, nobody is trying to learn stuff from you. If you were in a debate and you were citing references, sure. But a casual chat? Come on, just cut the crap and say what you think without trying to justify yourself endlessly. You’ll ruin the conversation if you try and link in when someone else has thought the same as you every time you want to make a point. It doesn’t move things along, it branches. And you’ll just have to backtrack along the branch to carry on with the main stem of conversation, which takes time and patience. Maybe you’re not that enjoyable to listen to - did you ever consider that? I thought not.

What’s more, disclosing all your sources of information is just going to make people check them. Then what? Chances are this isn’t the only opinion you’ve plagiarised. Then everyone will know the game is up. Those clever and witty sayings that you picked up from that website or that DVD won’t seem so clever any more, will they? You may as well stop speaking, because now everyone’s dipped their toes in your neck of the woods*, your individuality will evaporate. And people will also scrutinise everything you quote for discrepancies. If you mis-quote, boy you’re in for one hell of a time.

Now, you might (if you are a careful reader) be thinking “this is all very interesting, Mr. C, but why does this make him a ’sissy’?” The answer is: he went on to say “…it’s a very beautiful metaphor.”

What? Who died and made you a poet? Or are you just a literary genius? Chances are, neither are true. You’re just some dumb guy with too much air in your lungs. Cool it, Shakespeare, just quit giving me your vomit-inducing interpretations of things. I don’t want to hear it, and neither does that bitch you’re talking to. That’s why she mumbled an agreement and let you carry on, her eyes slowly becoming unfocused and glazing over as autopilot takes over her basic motor functions and her consciousness is lost in the more interesting realms of her own dull imagination. And how do I know she has a dull imagination? Just trust me, you can spot these bland types from a mile off.

What a waste of time and air. Both of you.

*I threw in a mixed figure of speech like that to keep the people who don’t speak English as their first language on their toes a little bit. Not because I’m a racist and I hate them, mind you.

I was reading up about the Rorschach test - I’m not sure if I remember how I got onto it, it might have been one of those long Wikipedia treks. But it took my attention and grabbed my interest, so I read on, careful not to look at any of the ink blot images in case I spoiled the test for myself in the future, in case I get a chance to take one.

How can interpreting things from blots of ink really tell whether you are insane or not, and what your personality is like? I’m not sure it can, so I am still a skeptic on such things.

In order to indulge this curiosity of mine, however, I did take a look at Tickle for their “PhD certified” inkblot test. And I took it. And this is why you can’t trust any of those stupid tests that you find online (be they personality tests, IQ tests or anything else). This will give you a laugh:

You have a deep desire to be kind and fair to others. You are preoccupied with finding kindness in the world around you, far more than you may realise on a conscious level. This makes you unusually empathetic and very sensitive to other people’s feelings. Your kind nature makes you an optimist at heart and allows you to see the best in the people around you.
Because you’re not judgmental, others seek you out when they need a friend. Your psyche is very rich; the more you learn about it, the more you will understand who you really are…

I got an e-mail through recently… it was so vile it nearly made me gag. It was entitled “Why boys and girls make out,” and it was full of some girl’s “advice” pertaining to relationship approach. It starts off by telling the dear reader that they are loved and thought about by one person every night. This is the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard. There are people who will be longed by nobody throughout their whole lives and will have to settle in love. I can’t believe there are people out there who would be convinced by this bullshit to write an e-mail and have it sent straight to me… It kills my faith in humanity that little bit more when I see something like this.

“When she acts shy, say ‘I love you,’” - Yeah, ok, the girl’s feeling insecure and reserved, is she really going to want your oafish and clumsy attention? She’s probably trying to restrain from throwing up over your feet, don’t push her any closer to the edge. A few more are after this, and then:

“When she kicks and punches you, hold her tight.” - What the fuck? That’s not good advice! How about you don’t irritate her to insanity in the first place? Then she won’t go apeshit on your whipped carcass and deal some ass-kicking. If you’re at a point in the relationship where she’s fighting you off of her, you need to rethink your definitions of “relationship” and “rape,” maybe switch bits around.

“When she ignores you, she wants all your attention.” - This one is a blatant lie. If you’re in for the ’silent treatment,’ you may as well break up or consider murder/suicide/all of the above, because it’s really not worth the hassle. You’re going to have to figure out how you fucked up and make reparations… Don’t even worry about it - there’s a simple way out that involves a neat pair of concrete shoes and a river.

“When she pulls away, grab her by the waist and never let go.” - Again with the brutal rape… what’s up with this? She’s probably got a good reason for pulling away. Just leave it, you don’t need the jail time.

“When she screams at you, tell her you love her.” - I really don’t think that she is screaming “at you”… especially when the cry is “help, somebody, please!” This turned from a soppy piece of trash into the rapist’s handbook.

“When you see her walking, sneak up behind her, grab her by the waist and give her a kiss.” - Ok, I think I need to stop it here, or I’ll be getting into trouble. Really, people, let’s not take this advice seriously (and I warn you, my readers, of this, because I know there are those of you around who are stupid enough to take the advice cited from an anonymous source about a subject he or she knows nothing about), instead let’s hit the ‘delete’ button in our e-mail clients.

Please… stop sending forwards.

Peace out.