Stuff and Nonsense

This story from the BBC seems to highlight what to me seems an intractable problem with faith schools and religiosity in general. Is anybody really surprised that the report commissioned by Ed Balls found that schools from faiths with opposing views of middle east conflicts explained their age-old enemies’ faith using “inappropriate” and “inflammatory” language? Why would they do anything else? Those faiths believe they are fighting a religious war. Actually I applaud them. How the schools in the report describe other faiths is how the parents who send their children to a faith school describe those other faiths so at least it’s consistent for the kids and it’s honest even if it’s not healthy. By “not healthy” of course, I mean no more unhealthy than the brainwashing of children that religious doctrine of all faiths depends upon for that faith’s continued existence. You see, even I’m not averse to a bit of political correctness  - or at least even-handedness.

Pandering to Governments’ desire to appease everyone and offend no-one is not high on the agendas of most faiths and consequently not high on the agenda of most faith based schools. Until the G-men come knocking and their central funding is at risk a faith schools is going to do what its community of parents and donors expects it to do – educate its pupils in the same way as they are “educated” at home.

To any secular onlooker, all religions of the world suffer from one obvious problem. They each believe they are right. Of course in these days of political and multi-cultural correctness that invades every aspect of our daily lives, you will find religious leaders clamouring to be the first to declare how their faith understands and accepts different cultures and viewpoints. This is of course completely inconsistent with the tenets of most faith groups. The very thing that marks them as a faith group is their belief in one god or another, one messiah or another or one interpretation of their chosen scripture against another. To say that they believe, that they have FAITH in this view or that view (or “facts” as some will falsely represent their views) and then in the same breath to say that they understand and accept the views of another group is nothing more than a bare-faced lie. They are simply paying lip-service to the media and government who will “crucify” (insert your preferred method of mutilation and murder here, I intend no religious bias) them if they don’t follow the line about tolerance.

So the report’s outcome hold no suprises for me and perhaps for no-one. It has just highlighted a much broader issue. Should faith schools exist at all? I have some views on that you won’t be shocked to hear, but that’s for another post.

p.s. Whilst I’m sure you will find typos or genuine grammatical gaffes above, the lack of a capital G for god is intentional. A capital implies that “God” is a thing or someone. I don’t believe this and since I’m doing the writing, I will decide which words I will treat as proper nouns.

So, I took my six year old son to the Cheltenham Literature festival again last weekend, this time for an audience with Johnny Ball.

Who is Johnny Ball? Those of you of a certain age will remember him from the eighties as the ebullient presenter of BBC children’s program “Think of  Number” and others (full details at Johnny’s website if you need a reminder). To younger folks, he is probably as well known for looking slightly tearful on Strictly Come Dancing as his Radio Presenter daught Zoe Ball was voted off.

It’s a little sad that an entire generation have missed out on the infectious enthusiasm of JB’s maths and science based output. I’m a maths head and science enthusiast anyway so I guess it’s no surprise that as a child the impending arrival of Think Of A Number had me totally giddy. To see JB’s performance “in the flesh” was an absolute privilege and took me right back to lying on the lounge carpet, riveted to the show, blocking out all distractions. The hair is thinner and greyer of course (mine too), but the pliable, lively, friendly face and glinting eyes are unmistakable, familiar and reassuring.

Most impressive is, the energy of it all; his presenting style; brash, lilting, full on and animated and then suddenly slow, deliberate, contemplative and smooth as he reveals a beautiful , simple, mathematical truth is absolutely captivating and has not been dulled by the years one bit.

In all too brief a time he covered multiplying large numbers just by knowing your two times table, binary number base, geometrical methods of multiplication and division, the great pyramid, Eratosthenes, Pythagoras and finally, atomic theory. My Son loved it, as did I.

The show was marred by only one thing. Right at the end, with 10 minutes or so to go, Johnny who by this time has the audience in the palm of his hand launches into a lecture on the big business/government conspiracies that say carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for global warming. Now, he has a point, he really does. Many aspects of climate change are indeed over-hyped and in many scientific journals you will find some tempering views on aspects of climate change. Unfortunately though, good argument or not, this was not the platform to do it. My Son, who was keen to ask a question or three after a few minutes of climate change bashing had totally lost interest. He was tired, cuddly, fuzzy Johnny now seemed altogether just too grown up and unhappy all of a sudden and the boy was not impressed.

By the end when Johnny was finished, a lot of the audience left, as did my Son and I. When we came in my Son was keen to have his booked signed and I was keen to shake the hand of someone who was no less than a childhood hero. By the end we just had to get out.

It was a sad end to a brief evening but I don’t blame Johnny for taking his chance when on stage. Unfortunately, this stage, at this time with a audience consisting of a large number of under-10s was the wrong one for much of that audience.

He’s still a hero. You should still buy his books for your children. The BBC should release all his TV output on DVD. Or, better still, on iPlayer! come on BBC!, no distribution costs, little production costs a mention on the website home page and at his book publishers and you will soon see if there is a market for the DVDs.

Johnny is, quite simply the maths and science teacher every parent would wish for their children. His TV shows are as relevant today as they were when first broadcast and enthusiasm for learning never gets old or out of date. There is always a generation who will benefit from exposure to teachers like Johnny Ball.

I didn’t mention his spot-on views on the bland and narrow national curriculum but suffice to say he’d get my vote for schools minister and judging my the applause on this subject, I’m not the only one who agrees with him.

So, like the iTunes newbie that I am, excited with my new car’s ability to play MP3 CDs I tried to burn such a thing from within iTunes. I hit the message that you are not allowed to do this for protected tunes, only stuff that was already in MP3.

Hmm… surely, I think to myself, a virtual cd burner would be useful here. I’d like to tell iTunes to burn an audio CD all the while having a virtual process take this output and convert to MP3 on the fly and save to disk.

Well, it exists and it works. It’s called Noteburner and you can try it for free then pay a modest $40 approx.

I just “burned” a 10 hour playlist (a load of purchased Richard Feynman Physics lectures in case you’re wondering) and lo, now I have all the stuff that I paid for sitting pretty as MP3s. Resulting files fit on a single writable CD so my travelling world is complete.

The rest of my music/audiobook collection, such as it is, is being converted as I type this.

One note of caution though, there is not much CPU to go around as iTunes sends out CD data and Noteburner rips it. Using a browser to post blog entries is fine but nothing else is going to get done.

So I’ve finally visited the new CineWorld in Cheltenham on the site of the old brewery.
Generous seating with low seats and high arms perfect for first class slouching.
The picture was good as expected as it was digital 3d but sound also astounding and the screen must be much larger than Stroud or Gloucester.
Whole experience very pleasant and the film Up wasn’t half bad either.
The crop of 3d films of course are using closeups much more than traditional because I guess a face in the middle ground doesn’t have much depth to speak off. I find this new perspective very watchable. It definitely adds something over and above the 3d element.
All in all a good afternoon.