Now that the Dutch cabinet has fallen and new elections are on the horizon, Dutch digital rights organisation Bits of Freedom has started a Digital Rights 2010 campaign to create awareness among political parties of the issues of internet freedoms.

As any regular reader of this blog knows I’m a fierce advocate of digital freedom, firmly believing in the ideal of an open, free, and unregulated Internet.

Nefarious closed-door treaties like ACTA are threatening to destroy everything that made the Internet so successful.

Now more than ever we need political strength and vision to oppose corporate forces. Media corporations, focused single-mindedly on profit and profit alone, will always choose greed over freedom, lawsuits over expression, and censorship over innovation.

So I would urge you all to support Bits of Freedom. Put the banner on your site, spread the word via Twitter/Hyves/Facebook, and spam your political party of choice with questions about their stance on digital rights.

The next Dutch government may last the full 4 years - an eternity on the Internet. If we get it wrong this time, we might have missed the opportunity entirely. In 4 years’ time the corporate lobbyists may have succeeded in pushing their greed-inspired agenda, and the open & innovative nature of the Internet may be destroyed for good.

But only if we let them.

Once more I am ashamed to be Dutch.

The Dutch cabinet has fallen over the Iraq issue. The left-wing PVDA has chosen the fleeting comfort of public opinion and opposes an extended mission for Dutch troops in Afghanistan.

The result is that at the end of the current mission in August all Dutch troops will withdraw from the Uruzgan province.

This is a Very Bad Thing. I could try to explain why, but this NY Times opinion piece does a much better job. An excerpt:

“The war in Afghanistan is not just about America’s security. It, too, is about denying sanctuaries to Al Qaeda, which has also carried out deadly terrorist attacks in Europe. NATO is stronger when it stands together. The Netherlands weakens itself and all of its allies by choosing to stand alone.”

The irony is that the PVV, the party of Geert Wilders, also opposes the Dutch presence in Afghanistan. This is stupendously ignorant of them.

Wilders keeps on pointing out the dangers of Islamic extremism in the Netherlands, but utterly fails to realize that this is exactly why we need to oppose Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Geert. The success of our struggle for western values over Islamic fundamentalism doesn’t end at the Dutch borders. You either get on that train all the way, or not at all.

In Afghanistan we’re fighting for much more than our own safety. Our withdrawal from that fight makes us nothing short of spineless ignorant cowards.

We should all be ashamed. I certainly am.

Last night when I left the office I noticed a huge sign going up on the pub next door. This morning I saw the sign in all its glory:

Click for a bigger version on Flickr

It’s for a scene in a new film called Killing Bono, whose final scenes are due to be shot just outside my office building this week.

Apparently they’re still looking for extras.

I’ve written before about the influence of Internet use on our brain functions:

» Digital Overload
» Is Google Making us Stoopid

The BBC now adds to the debate with an upcoming episode of their documentary series The Virtual Revolution. The Telegraph has done a piece on it:

» Students brains ‘rewired’ by the internet.

An excerpt:

“Documentary presenter and social psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski said: ‘It seems pretty clear that, for good or ill, the younger generation is being remoulded by the web.

‘Facebook’s feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate.

‘There is empirical evidence now that information overload and associative thinking may be reshaping how they think.’”

I still haven’t made up my mind whether time spent online is good or bad for me. I do sometimes have difficulty with concentrating on large pieces of text. But whether this is because my brain function has been affected by time spent online, or the text in question is just mind-destroyingly boring, I can’t say. A bit of both, perhaps.

And if the Internet is rewiring my brain, I’m doomed anyway. My whole career is based online, and I like it too much to change tracks and do something offline.

Last week I wrote a perfectly respectable article for the Belfast Telegraph which got published under the unassuming headline ‘The changing face of SEO’. That original version of the article contained no images and only one reference to Britney Spears to illustrate a point.

Then the digital editor of the Belfast Telegraph decided to ’sex up’ the article a bit. On Friday he added a Beyoncé Knowles reference and a bunch of pictures of Beyoncé and Britney.

Obviously not content with this minor assault on my reputation as a serious (*cough*) search engine optimiser, the editor decided on Monday to spice it up even more and added Angelina Jolie in the article’s headline.

The end result is this:

My article on the Belfast Telegraph site

By virtue of the Belfast Telegraph’s status as an official and respectable news site, the article has since shown up consistently in Google search results for the term ’seo’, both under its old headline and the various sexed up versions:

Now I could claim this was all done without my knowledge and consent and that I severely object to this abuse of my professional reputation just to score pageviews.

But then I’d be lying.

I was informed of these changes beforehand and I wholeheartedly agreed. Having one of my articles serve as a live test case on a high traffic news site is a wet dream come true. I love this stuff.

Last weekend I spent about 10 hours playing Mass Effect 2. I won’t bore the non-gamers out there with superlatives on how fantastic it is, what a totally immersive gaming experience it provides, and how utterly compelling the story is.

Except I just did, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make today.

For most of videogame history you as the gamer didn’t have any moral choices to make in a game. You were the Good Guy and the goal of the game was to defeat the Bad Guys.

This gradually changed as gamers grew up and videogame designers got more comfortable with moral ambiguity in a game’s storyline. Now a lot of games allow the player to make choices that directly or indirectly affect the plot and outcome of the game.

Back in the day when these types of games first came out, I always chose the ‘evil’ options. In any Star Wars game I was the Sith Lord, choosing the Dark Side of the Force while betraying friendships and killing good guys.

In the first Fable I was so thoroughly evil that halfway through the game my character had already spawned horns and caused entire villages to evacuate at the first sight of me.

When World of Warcraft came out I only chose an Alliance Night Elf because my buddies played Alliance, but I really wanted an Undead Warlock to wreak havoc with. (I’ve since become totally committed to my NE Druid but that’s mostly because of the class’s überness.)

And don’t even get me started on one of my all-time favourites: Carmageddon.

But games got more refined, and what started out as simple black & white choices between good and evil has now turned in to a landscape of shades of grey. The Bioware game studio is considered a master of games with moral choices, and their latest product has left me feeling rather, well… confused.

The game I’m talking about is of course Mass Effect 2, and the confusion stems from a sudden inability on my part to make ‘evil’ choices.

Mass Effect 2 is a sequel (of course), and I played the first Mass Effect twice - one as the ‘good guy’ and one as an evil bastard. I thoroughly enjoyed both versions. The ending of the game wasn’t affected too much, but the whole feel and mood of the game changed. Overall I wasn’t too bothered by the choices I made, I just wanted to play the game to its full potential.

Mass Effect 2, however, has changed things. ME2 offers abundant opportunities to make moral choices, and many choices are pretty straightforward - kill or let live, steal or give back, lie or be truthful.

But some choices you have to make aren’t so monochrome. Do I intimidate and hurt this man to give me vital information that can save lives, or do I go easy on him? Do I kill this repentant bad guy, or do I let him go and trust he won’t commit more crimes? Do I shoot the frightened hostage aiming a gun at me, or do I try to talk him down from his panic?

And those are just the direct choices. The game is rife with choices that have deeper meaning and longer-lasting repercussions. Do I take the quick and often violent way through missions, bullying and intimidating my way around, generating more money for myself and my team members so the better, bugger guns are available faster and I can save the universe more efficiently? Or do I walk the straight and narrow path which invariably makes it more difficult and challenging, but the trail of corpses and devastated lives in my wake will be considerably thinner?

What used to make these choices so easy is the realisation that it really was just a game I was playing. Pixels on a screen, bits and bytes, lines of code, all that jazz. But Mass Effect 2 is such an advanced game, graphically and gameplay-wise, that you don’t feel like you’re playing a game. You become immersed in it, you are part of the game, and the choices you make in the game somehow reflect on you as a person.

And because of this I find myself unable to make any choice in the game that could be considered ‘evil’. Sometimes the morally grey choices leave me almost paralysed because I can’t figure out what the best option is. Occasionally I loathe myself for shooting the bad guys, even when they’re shooting at me, because the game succeeds so magnificently in painting its characters as real living beings. Even the aliens seem real, which is a truly amazing feat of game design.

So I’m confused. As with the first game I want to play Mass Effect 2 twice, making radically different choices in each session.

But I already know I won’t. Not this time. The game is too good, the voice-over acting too convincing, the digitally generated facial expressions too real. A part of me wants to be the bad guy again, rampaging my way through the gameworld, uncaring and unfeeling.

But that’s not who I am in the real world. And because of that, in Mass Effect 2 I can’t be that person in the game world either.

There are lots and lots of things going on in the world right now to be depressed and whinge about - the Haiti disaster, the official handover of political power in the USA to corporations, the failing peace process in Northern Ireland, the Brangelina breakup - but I couldn’t care less because all is good and well in my world.

You see, I found this today: Connosr - a social network for Whisky lovers.

If a psychic were to delve in to my deepest thoughts and extract my greatest dreams and hopes, they’d find something very similar to Connosr. It’s a combination of two of my greatest non-human loves: whisky and the Internet.

So from now on if you’re looking for me online, this is probably where I’ll be.

If you want to know why homeopathy doesn’t work - cannot work, ever, except as a placebo - let me try to explain the concept of homeopathy to you:

Homeopathy, you see, is based on dilution. You take an ingredient believed to be a remedy for an ailment, and then you add water until there are 99 parts water and 1 part remedy. You end up with what homeopaths call a 1C dilution - 99% water, 1% original remedy.

You then take this 1C dilution and repeat the process - you add 99 parts water. That’s a 2C dilution. It means the original active ingredient is now 99.99% water, 0.01% remedy.

You take this 2C solution and repeat the process again, and again, and again. The average homeopathic remedy has a dilution of 30C, meaning that the original active remedy has been diluted with 99% water thirty times.

Homeopaths believe that the more you dilute a substance, the more powerful it becomes. Which seems pretty weird, as a 30C dilution doesn’t contain a single molecule of the original active remedy.

To get a grasp on the mind-boggling numbers involved, read this post on the Times Online blog. A quote:

“To put homeopathy in a medicinal context, if you wanted to consume a normal 500mg paracetamol dose you would need ten million billion homeopathic pills. Where each pill is the same mass as the Milky Way galaxy. There is actually not enough matter in the entire known Universe to make the homeopathic equivalent of a single paracetamol pill.” [Emphasis added]

Homeopaths who understand their craft’s insane underlying assumption, claim that water somehow ‘remembers’ the healing properties of the original remedy.

That sounds like a nice, New Age-ey load of crap. Literally, because all that water has somehow ‘forgotten’ the properties of all the humongous loads of shit (feces, urine, chemicals, you name it) that has floated in it at one time or another, and only ‘remembers’ that infinitely tiny amount of remedy it may have come in to contact with.

If that sounds stupid to you, you’re right. It is stupid. Homeopathy is fucking ridiculous.

Think of it next time you are tempted to buy some homeopathic ‘remedy’. You’re paying good money for water. Just water. Or, more accurately, sugar that has been soaked in water, and then stamped into pills.

Homeopaths are either total imbeciles, or the worst kind of thieves - thieves that prey on the weak and helpless.

(Via @NewHumanist)

Christopher Hitchens is one of my heroes. He writes and edits superb books, he verbally destroys stupid people with quintessential Britishness, he loves to drink, and he has quirky hair.

Now we can add another reason to that list: He speaks truth about airplane security (one of my pet peeves). An excerpt:

“For many years after the explosion of the TWA plane over Long Island (a disaster that was later found to have nothing at all to do with international religious nihilism), you could not board an aircraft without being asked whether you had packed your own bags and had them under your control at all times. These two questions are the very ones to which a would-be hijacker or bomber would honestly and logically have to answer “yes.” But answering “yes” to both was a condition of being allowed on the plane! Eventually, that heroic piece of stupidity was dropped as well. But now fresh idiocies are in store. Nothing in your lap during final approach. Do you feel safer? If you were a suicide-killer, would you feel thwarted or deterred?”

Read the full thing here: The truth about airplane security measures (Slate.com)

(Via Unreasonable Faith)

I may need to retract an earlier statement where I proposed that “we shove the whole complacent Irish population into containers and ship them to Afghanistan where they can join their Taliban brothers in the stone age.”

It seems Ireland is not populated entirely by brainwashed religious nutcases, as evidenced by Atheist Ireland. To start the new year in proper fashion they’ve published a series of 25 blasphemous quotes on their website in an effort to provoke a lawsuit over Ireland’s newly adopted and utterly backwards blasphemy law.

These blasphemous quotes are not the rantings of random bloggers (such as yours truly) but come from a fairly respectable bunch of folks: Mark Twain, Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, and even some quotes from the prophet Muhammed, Jesus Christ, and the Pope.

Each of these quotes can be interpreted as being blasphemous towards one religion or another. It demonstrates the utter stupidity of this law against blasphemy. I hope Atheist Ireland gets their trial - whether they win or lose, it will definitely serve to demonstrate the stone age thinking currently prevailing in Irish government circles.