I had that yesterday when I was walking towards my bus stop on my way home. I saw this mural in the Cathedral quarter in Belfast, and for the first time I really saw the mural.

click for large version

click for large version

Now that probably needs some explanation. As you most likely know, I’m an atheist. I consider myself to be a sceptic, and my atheism is a result of my scepticism. So as an atheist I naturally don’t believe in angels of the spiritual kind.

I do however believe in a different type of angel, one that I’ve had the immense honour and privilege of having known for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

I am of course talking about mentally handicapped people, specifically people with Down’s syndrome.

Now I have to be honest here and admit that I didn’t always like going on that camp. A part of me felt obliged to do it, for my family. The camp was hard work and could be quite challenging at times.

But it was immensely rewarding. Every smile on every participant’s face made it worthwhile. And now that I’ve stopped doing it since I moved to Northern Ireland, I miss it. I miss the kids. I miss their smiles.

Because these people, often considered ‘inferior’, are actually the brightest, happiest, and most intensely alive humans I’ve ever met.

And every time I went on that camp with them, I came back changed. I came back with new knowledge and a fresh perspective on things. A fresh perspective on what’s really important, and what really isn’t important.

From these people I’ve learned more about life and the things that really matter than I’ve learned from any school or any number of books. These mentally handicapped kids have been my greatest teachers. They’ve been my angels.

So yes, I believe in angels.

The problem is that research analysts are human, complete with human biases and preconceived notions.

Which means that they will often, knowingly or otherwise, focus on the data that supports their preferred hypothesis and ignore or disqualify data that contradicts it.

Here’s where Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) comes in. Based on a methodology originally developed for the CIA, ACH is an open source software package that allows researchers to filter the data and derive plausible, unbiased hypotheses.

Here’s a short video that explains the methodology behind ACH:

ACH has applications all over the spectrum. Journalists for example are often forming hypotheses based on shards of evidence they gather from their news sources.

The ACH software can help researchers avoid many pitfalls of manual data analysis, and might result in better, more accurate hypotheses being formed in a wide range of fields.

And that is a good thing indeed.

[This is a post by Barry Adams from Adamus.nl. For the best viewing experience, I recommend you read this post on Adamus.nl]

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.

Yet the 3-part TV series recently aired on the BBC seems to have managed exactly that. Or, actually, it’s so bloody good and ingenious that no one even bothers to compare it to the Downey Jr film. The TV series, you see, is an entirely different animal.

The producers of the series have moved the setting to modern times, and have cleverly adapted the Holmes mythology to fit nearly flawlessly in this 21st century background.

They’ve also managed to cast spectacularly good actors in the roles of Holmes and Watson (and, as one producer remarked, have succeeded to cast an actor in the role of Holmes with a name even sillier than that of the detective himself).

What they haven’t managed is to conceal the fact that they’re the same people behind the current Dr Who. Some of that series’ flaws emerge in Sherlock as well, such as the amazing coincidences that move the plot along, and the protagonist’s apparent omniscience.

Also depending on your taste the character of Moriarty, when he finally makes his appearance, is either utterly brilliant or campishly disastrous. (I’m squarely in the former camp, by the way - I thought he was superb.)

I always thought Sherlock Holmes was a bit of a silly character. A Victorian age superhero of sorts, his observational deductionism as unlikely as Superman’s x-ray eyes.

But despite all this, I thoroughly enjoyed the re-imagined Sherlock series. With three 90-minute episodes ending on a cliffhanger, I sincerely hope there’s more to come.

If you live in the UK you can watch the series on BBC’s iPlayer. If you don’t, I’m sure your torrent/newsgroup site of choice will be of help.

Mensa, in case you weren’t aware of this organisation - which is entirely plausible so don’t feel bad about it - is the self-described ‘High IQ Society’. There is only one prerequisite for membership in Mensa: your IQ has to fall in the top 2% of the world’s population.

This effectively means one in fifty people can become Mensa members. Not many actually do become members. In a country such as the Netherlands, with 16 million inhabitants, the potential membership number of Mensa is over 300,000. Last time I checked Mensa NL boasts only around 6,000 members.

I joined Mensa for a purely egotistic reason: I wanted to know if I was really as smart as I thought I was. The answer was ambiguous. Yes I passed the Mensa test and can call myself a ‘high IQ person’, but the margin was narrow and I barely made the cut.

Of course I had preconceived notions about Mensa before I signed up to do the test. I bought in to Mensa’s promotional slogans and envisioned it as a society of intellectuals sharing and debating ideas and coming up with notions for the betterment of all mankind.

This was, after all, the concept on which the society was founded.

It didn’t quite turn out that way. The first thing I noticed when I joined Mensa, and orientated myself on its online discussion forums, was that many Mensa members perceived themselves as victims.

Apparently these high IQ people felt persecuted in some way. Misunderstood from a young age onwards, many Mensans saw themselves as left out of ‘normal’ society, unable to connect with their peers and struggling to conform to society’s norms. They felt themselves as being ‘different’ and often bullied because of that.

Now I’ve seen this type of self-victimisation too often to simply accept it at face value. Everyone from teenagers to Christians, from civil servants to top-level executives, are eagerly casting themselves in the roles of victims.

This is readily amplified by humanity’s innate tribal attitudes (’us’ against ‘them’) and you realise how easily people form social groups centred around (often vaguely defined) characteristics that help separate them, in their own perception, from the ‘rest of the world’.

It was disappointing to see this self-victimisation and tribalism in Mensa. I thought that as a consequence of a high IQ, Mensans would be less likely to succumb to such base urges and dangerous social patterns.

Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that Mensans aren’t at all different from the masses of humanity - aside from that high IQ of course.

That high IQ is actually part of the problem. You see, I believe it serves as a shield for people’s convictions, a vindication for their beliefs no matter how strange and deluded.

For example, I was appalled at how many Mensans are in to what we collectively term ‘New Age’ spirituality. From astrologers to energy healers, from psychics to homeopaths, Mensa boasts a frightening abundance of people who have thrown every last remnant of rationality and common sense overboard and have committed themselves entirely to plainly ridiculous ideas.

Not only that, I got the distinct impression that these people felt that their membership of Mensa - their high IQ - was a vindication of their beliefs. “I’m smart,” they seem to argue, “so what I believe is right.”

This extends all across the spectrum of beliefs, from spirituality to ideologies and political convictions. Climate change deniers on the Mensa forums are as ferociously delusional as anywhere I’ve seen, as are blatant Islamophobic racists (more commonly referred to as PVV/BNP voters). And they see their high IQ as validation, a protective shield that allows them to ignore or discard any criticism.

Rational thought and skepticism (real skepticism - i.e. not taking any proclamation at face value), which I’ve always associated with intelligence, is no more common on Mensa’s discussion forums than it is on the Daily Mail’s comment section.

So I’m fairly disillusioned. I thought Mensa would bring me great joy, that membership of this high IQ society would help me grow as a person and enlighten me.

Unfortunately Mensa does no such thing. If anything it allows its members to dig themselves deeper in to their own personal convictions, warding off any challenge with the protective blanket of a high IQ.

I’d renounce my Mensa membership today, if only it didn’t look so damn good on my CV….

I have a preference for certain types of books. Science fiction, specifically. One of my favourite SF authors has always been Dan Simmons. His 4-part Hyperion saga is one of the finest works of SF to date.

Recently I picked up a copy of the 20th anniversary edition of Carrion Comfort, Dan Simmons’ horror masterpiece about mind vampires. Yet after reading the new introduction Simmons wrote for it, I’m loathe to continue reading it.

You see, the introduction reminded me of the fact that Mr Simmons is actually not a particularly nice man. For starters in the introduction Simmons is guilty of a certain type of barely veiled chest-thumping that doesn’t sit well with me. I’m no fan of false modesty, but some of the phrasings in that introduction felt a little too much like arrogance and conceit.

Additionally, it reminded me of why I stopped visiting his official website years ago. One glance at the forum’s “Hot Button” category quickly reveals a certain type of right-wing nutcasery usually associated with the worst excesses of Fox News, ranging from revisionist Iraq-invasion apologetics to climate change denialism and raving anti-socialised healthcare madness.

Mr Simmons himself is an eager participant in this orgy of Glenn Beck-style paranoia and douchebaggery, especially when it comes to the topic of Islam. He’s the exact opposite of anti-Semitic - he’s plainly Islamophobic.

Now I have my own issues with Islam, primarily on civil liberties, women’s rights, and freedom of speech. But the vileness of the particular brand of Islamophobia rampant on those dansimmons.com forums is nauseating to behold, as it’s rooted purely in ignorance and hatred.

So my challenge now lies in separating the books from the author. So far I’ve received great satisfaction from reading Dan Simmons’ books, but I can’t deny that his political opinions are what I’d consider horrendously hateful and misinformed. I’m afraid my continued enjoyment of his works relies on my ability to forget about the author when I’m reading the book.

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.