Christopher Hitchens, one of my heroes, is dying. Everybody is dying, but for Hitchens “the process has suddenly accelerated”.

He’s been diagnosed with a particularly ferocious form of throat cancer and is currently undergoing chemotherapy. Yet he still continues to write, and even found time to do a video interview with The Atlantic:

Hitchens is not shy about his cancer, choosing not to retire in to obscurity to wage his war against the disease but to fight it openly and in plain sight, for all to see.

For this I admire the man even more than I already did. He has always been a public figure, and the fact that he’s not letting a little thing like cancer get in the way of that says volumes about his strength and determination.

I’ve been eagerly emphasizing the point scholars and sceptics such as Nicholas Carr have been making: that the Internet is changing the way we think.

Today it’s time to shed light on the other side of the debate. In today’s Guardian there’s a superb interview with Clay Shirky in which he explains why he believes the Internet is a force of good in the world.

The interviewer, by her own admission, doesn’t really ‘get’ social media:

Unfortunately, I am precisely the sort of cynic Shirky’s new book scorns – a techno-luddite bewildered by the exhibitionism of online social networking (why does anyone feel the need to tweet that they’ve just had a bath, and might get a kebab later?), troubled by its juvenile vacuity (who joins a Facebook group dedicated to liking toast?), and baffled by the amount of time devoted to posting photos of cats that look amusingly like Hitler.

But Clay Shirky’s boundless optimism is infectious, to say the least:

“If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.”

Shirky also makes the point that new technology doesn’t create entirely new behaviour, but instead enables already existing motivations to be expressed in new behaviour:

“Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I’m saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it’s because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours – but they don’t cause them.”

On the debate about whether the internet is changing the way we think, he makes an interesting point:

“But the alarmism around ‘Facebook is changing our brains’ strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. Riding a bicycle changes our brains. Watching TV changes our brains. If there’s a screen you need to worry about in your household, it’s not the one with a mouse attached.”

He also has some interesting thoughts on the ‘pay-for-news-online’ debate, but you’ll have to read the whole interview yourself for that. I recommend you do - it’s remarkably insightful.

…according to Charlie Brooker, is newspapers:

“In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often “cut” the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards.”

After having made the inexcusable mistake of glancing through copies of the Mail, Sun, and Mirror lying around here at the office, I can only conclude that Charlie is, of course, entirely correct.

Newspapers can kill your intellect and ravage your critical thinking skills. Beware what you read.

Best article I’ve read all week. I’d say more about it but yesterday was St Patrick’s Day and I haven’t recovered yet. Read it for yourself:

NYTimes.com: Reading and the Web - Text Without Context.

An excerpt:

“Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.”

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.

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.

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.

You’ve probably heard of the so-called ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch‘, a giant floating debris field in the Pacific ocean believed to be twice the size of Texas. Apparently vast oceanic currents circle this patch and cause all sort of plastic garbage to gather and float there, as a testament to excessive human waste.

Now I’m as eager as the next cynical bastard to denounce humanity’s treatment of the planet, but has anyone ever seen this great garbage patch? It should be pretty hard to miss, being twice the size of Texas and all. We sure don’t seem to have a problem spotting Texas on a map.

Yet there are no pictures or videos of any kind of the garbage patch anywhere to be found. No visual evidence at all.

Yes, say the environmental pundits, that’s because it’s all floating just beneath the surface! Clever, eh?

But hey, fish float beneath the surface too, but we’re not lacking any photographic evidence of their existence, are we? If this garbage patch really is so huge and so full of plastic debris, why aren’t there hundreds of Cousteau-type marine explorers coming back with rolls of underwater film shot full of pictures and images?

Because, *drum-roll*…. the garbage patch doesn’t actually exist. At least, not as we imagine it. Apparently the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is an area with “elevated concentrations of microscopic plastic particles” too small to see with the naked eye. So this is really the Great Invisible Pacific Garbage Patch.

Not quite so dramatic, is it? Invisible microscopic pieces of plastic don’t make good Greenpeace protest banners or background shots for CNN headline news.

The moral of this story? Don’t believe everything you’re told. Whether it’s right-wing propaganda excremented by Faux News or left-wing treehugger nonsense, submit it to a healthy dose of skeptical enquiry before you start repeating it.

Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, but no one is entitled to an uninformed opinion.

The BBC, that hallowed UK institution of broadcasting, seems to be the target of an ever- growing storm of criticism. This is nothing new of course - if you’re not pissing someone off, you’re not doing it right.

However, much of the new recent criticism seems aimed not at the quality of BBC’s broadcasts, but at their cost. “It’s too expensive”, critics proclaim, “we deserve to know where our taxpayer money goes!”. They’re right, to an extent. Citizens have a right to know where their tax dollars, or in this case pounds, are being spent.

However, I find the BBC a bit of an odd choice of targets. Surely there are more obvious areas where public scrutiny should focus? The BBC, after all, makes great quality television that is critically acclaimed around the globe.

From Top Gear (the best car show on earth, no contest) to Dr Who (the longest running sci-fi series of all time), from The Office to Mock the Week, from Horizon to Panorama, the BBC makes some of the best television available to us today.

So why aim such venomous barbs of criticism at an organisation that provides us with high-quality television & radio programmes without any commercial breaks, and gives us superior news reporting with minimal bias, all for a budget that is earned back easily through international programme licencing and DVD sales?

It all becomes painfully clear when you look at the origins of this criticism - conservative news sources that compete with the BBC on various different fronts.

Many of these conservative critics are owned by News Corp, Ruport Murdoch’s global propaganda machine aimed at eliminating critical thinking and promoting conservative political agendas.

And we all know that the news reported by the BBC is liberally biased. After all, reality has a well-known liberal bias and it is up to the conservative news agencies to counter this by polluting the airwaves with their distinct brand of brain-destroying garbage.

I for one sincerely hope the BBC remains immune to this criticism and keeps doing what it does best - make good programmes. Three cheers for the BBC!