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.

Recently, as part of the Intelligence Squared debates, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry took on an archbishop and a conservative politician in a debate on the question: “Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world?”

The whole debate can be viewed on the IQ2 website, but if you can’t spare the full 50 minutes I at least wanted to share Stephen Fry’s passionate speech:

The answer to the debate’s central question is, as you may have gathered, a resounding no.

Let’s take stock:

• Copenhagen, despite the moderately positive statements from politicians, has failed.
• Climate change denialists are increasingly polluting the airwaves with their anti-scientific rhetoric.
• Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise exponentially faster than ever before in the history of our planet.
• We don’t have a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

We see it coming, we know the repercussions, and we’re not doing enough. Most of us aren’t doing anything at all.

The universe doesn’t care about disinformation. It doesn’t care about political rhetoric. It doesn’t care about who can shout the loudest on national TV and sell his point of view to the masses.

Our planet is an exceedingly rare gem, providing an exquisitely fragile environment precariously balanced to provide us with the conditions in which we can survive. The rest of this unimaginably vast universe is extremely hostile to human life. We can’t live anywhere else but here on this planet.

Let me repeat that so you really get it: There is nowhere else for us to live except right here, on this earth.

And we have tipped the balance. Our planet is changing from a world hospitable to human life to one that is increasingly unable to support human life.

We are failing the Great Filter.

In May 2009 Ireland was shocked to its core by the Ryan report that revealed systemic and pervasive child abuse in Catholic-run boys’ schools since 1936.

Since then no effort has been spared to find suitable scapegoats. This frenzy of accusation and incrimination has resulted in the Murphy report published last month, which states that the leaders of the Irish church deliberately covered up reports of abuse of young boys by priests.

And now an apologetic Vatican has announced that, in an act of penance, it will ‘significantly reorganise‘ the Irish Catholic church. There might even be some resignations.

Let me clarify this for you in plain, uncensored language:

Adult men have beaten, assaulted and raped hundreds of young boys over many decades, and this fact has been deliberately covered up by other adult men. The appropriate penance is deemed to be ’significant reorganisation’.

I don’t expect ’significant reorganisation’. At the very least, as an absolute bare minimum, I expect to see excommunication, followed by swift criminal prosecution, culminating in severe prison sentencing!

I expect heads to roll. I expect the guilty to be publicly named and shamed and thrown in jail for the remainder of their natural lives. I expect enormous sums of compensation money to be paid to the victims. I expect every party even vaguely complicit in the cover-up to be punished as severely as possible under the law.

But instead we get ’significant reorganisation’? Are you fucking kidding me?!

If Ireland as a nation has its collective head so far up the Catholic church’s anal orifice that it accepts apologies, reorganisations and token resignations as sufficient penance for these unspeakably horrific acts, the Irish people have truly lost their way.

A country that deals with these heinous crimes in such an inexcusably lame and cowardly way doesn’t deserve to be called civilised.

I propose 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. Then we can repopulate the island with truly civilised people and can continue to enjoy its natural beauty, without having to deal with these toothless, spineless cowards.

Few things get me riled up as much as deliberate ignorance about science. Every time I hear someone promoting homeopathy, talk favorably about energy healing, or spew forth some other pseudo-scientific nonsense, I try (and often fail) to control the urge to set them right.

Ask my girlfriend. If I had to give her a penny for every time she asks me to stop yelling at the TV because of some mind-numbingly ignorant piece of ‘news’ (I’m looking at you, BBC Breakfast), she’d own substantially more than just my heart.

The reason I get so enraged at such displays of wilful ignorance is because it’s so terribly easy to check if any given scientific ‘fact’ is true. All you need is an open mind and a web browser.

But people as a whole are lazy, enjoy being ignorant, and suffer from a phenomenon known as confirmation bias that makes them focus on the few scraps of information confirming their pre-conceived notions, while ignoring the mountains of evidence that contradict their point of view.

We can’t fix this by showering people with real, verified facts coming from genuine, evidence-based science.

We can only fix this by teaching people to think rationally, clearly, and with an awareness of their own biases and limitations.

The book Bad Science by Ben Goldacre is a goldmine for sceptics. It effectively demolishes homeopathy, deconstructs nutritionists, and delivers staggering blows to the media’s horrendously flawed reporting of science news.

But it does all this almost carelessly, as an added benefit, in the course of its real goal: educating the reader in spotting the fallacies in medical science as it’s reported in the news, in advertisements, and on TV.

The real goal of the book is to teach people to think for themselves, to not allow themselves to be manipulated, and to base their decisions about medicine on valid scientific evidence.

Bad Science is a very important book. It’s so important that I think everyone should read it. Unfortunately I don’t have the resources to buy six billion copies, so I can’t send this book to everyone. But I can buy this book for the readers of this blog, as few as there are.

I’m going to give away ten copies of Bad Science. The first ten commenters on this post will get a free copy of Bad Science, paid for entirely by me.

All I ask you to do is when you receive the book to read it, and then lend it out to someone who you think will benefit from reading it. Spread the word.

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Control desktop: …

Check.