arts, books, topographical

Magnificent Maps


Image by courtesy of The Guardian.

Thanks to IanVisits I’ve just spotted what looks to be a fascinating exhibition at the British Library, from April 2010.

Maps can be works of art, propaganda pieces, expressions of local pride, tools of indoctrination … Opening in April 2010, Magnificent Maps showcases the British Library’s unique collection of large-scale display maps, many of which have never been exhibited before, and demonstrates why maps are about far more than geography.

And it’s free!  Has to be worth a visit.

memes

Thing-a-Day

I’ve just signed up for this year’s Thing-a-Day which means I also now have a Posterous account.   Aarrrgggghhhhh!!!!  Yes this is another blogging tool I really didn’t need.  But hey, ho!

This is really by way of a test message to see how posting by email to Posterous actually works – and where the results end up!

Keith

memes, personal, photography

My Friends Meme


My Friends Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.

This week’s Flickr meme is to use the first names of 12 friends and see what we get.

So I chose: Gabriella, Sue, Stephen, Rob, Tom, Christine, Malin, Ziggy, Prue, Les, John and Katy.

1. Don’t Go Yet, 2. Sue W., 3. tempest three, 4. Very sticky flip-flops that don’t flop!, 5. Naked Bill But Still Beautiful, 6. In A Dream With You, 7. encadrée, 8. Angelic Fruitcake, 9. Parisian Stories 5 – The Brawl 15, 10. NYC – MoMA: Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery), 11. INTO THE SUN. PAINTING BY JOHN P. BUTLER, 12. Katy Kitchen

As always the photographs are not mine so please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and normally 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys

beliefs, medical, science, thoughts

The Dawkins Delusion

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As regular readers will know I don’t do God or gods (of any gender).  In fact I don’t do dogmatic belief systems at all, preferring to find my own way and my own ethics, intellectually.  Which of course does not mean that I can’t appreciate many of the great things which have been done in the name of religion; that I don’t abhor the many bad things; that I am amoral; or that I would ever deny anyone’s right to believe whatever they wish as a crutch to get them through this life.

I am not a theist; neither am I an atheist.  I prefer to say that, while I find the notion of some all-supreme being inherently unlikely – literally fantastic – I simply do not know; and further I doubt that we can ever know.  Which should not stop us seeking and pushing back the intellectual envelope.

I am as suspicious of atheists as I am of theists.  For atheists are just as bigoted – sometimes more so – than theists.  Richard Dawkins is a case in point.  His aggressive “new atheism” is just as dogmatic, inflexible and demanding as the belief system of any theist fundamentalist.  Indeed I would go so far as to label Dawkins himself a fundamentalist – albeit one who doesn’t fly plane-loads of innocents into office blocks.

I was pleased therefore to see in next week’s Radio Times (23-29 January) the most measured and comprehensive demolition of Dawkins and his ilk under the title The Dawkins Delusion.  It was written by novelist Howard Jacobson who presents the first programme in Channel 4’s series The Bible: a History.  And it isn’t that Jabobson is a believer: he describes himself as an atheist “who fears all fanaticism bred by faith” which includes Dawkins et.al.

Sadly the Radio Times article isn’t on their website, but I feel sufficiently enraged by Dawkins’s bigoted anti-bigot stance that I’ve broken the rules and put a scanned copy online here (although it will be removed forthwith if I am requested to do so by Radio Times, or if I spot that the article is available elsewhere online).

Jacobson’s opinion, although not new, is important and deserves a wider airing.

current affairs, quotes

Law and Lawyers

Law and Lawyers is a new weblog, devoted to interesting UK legal things.  In the first post the writer quotes from Utopia by Sir Thomas Moore (1478-1535).  It bears repeating here:

They have but few laws, and such is their constitution that they need not many. They very much condemn other nations, whose laws, together with the commentaries on them, swell up to so many volumes; for they think it an unreasonable thing to oblige men to obey a body of laws that are both of such a bulk, and so dark as not to be read and understood by every one of the subjects.

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters, and to wrest the laws; and therefore they think it is much better that every man should plead his own cause, and trust it to the judge, as in other places the client trusts it to a counsellor.

Every one of them is skilled in their law, for as it is a very short study, so the plainest meaning of which words are capable is always the sense of their laws. And they argue thus; all laws are promulgated for this end, that every man may know his duty; and therefore the plainest and most obvious sense of the words is that which ought to be put upon them.

UK government please note!