After Paradise - Contemporary Art in Iran

October 21st, 2008 1 comment or link to (permalink)

A documentary about Iran’s nascent contemporary art scene which started to re-emerge 20 years after the revolution. This was largely due to Iran’s baby boomers growing up, creating one of the youngest adult populations on Earth.

The fact that Iran has a very young population is very often overlooked. It gives hope for a more progressive secular culture as suggested by the odd fact that Iran was the third biggest country after the US and Brazil, on Google’s social networking service, Orkut.

Running time: 36 mins.

1 comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: art

Gary Null’s Anger Management

October 17th, 2008 25 comments or link to (permalink)

Today is FEBL day, and our last example is this from Gary Null. Null communicates all manner of nonsense about health and has a huge axe to grind against doctors. His ideas are widely accused of being very dangerous.

Null speaks in a a very soft, unnaturally calm voice, which scares me, and runs a class on anger management which we show at the top.

In the clip below, we see him becoming very angry and losing his shit altogether. The anger is directed against vaccination, something that individuals undertake for the welfare of the community, an act which has saved the lives of millions.

Null has a problem with the astronomical amount of evidence about the benefit vaccinations which seems oddly personal, and his rage seems to point to a slight flaw in his anger management teaching. Like many of the people in the FEBL category, however, he doesn’t seem to have a sense of irony or humor.

This for me sums up Null as an extremely unstable charlatan. He goes into the FEBL hall of shame.

25 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: FEBL pseudo science

Laughter Yoga

October 17th, 2008 1 comment or link to (permalink)

From the laughing instructor in the video “the laughter does not need to be sincere, it can be faked or simulated”.
In other words, laughter yoga is like a comedy for people with no sense of humor. Anne Coulter fans will be right at home.

[Update - someone kindly dug up an example of this preposterous crap in action, I've added the clip below the original]

1 comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: FEBL religion

Ben Goldacre Interview

October 17th, 2008 3 comments or link to (permalink)

I’ve just finished Reading Ben Goldacre’s book, ‘Bad Science’, that lambasts various forms of quackery and pseudo science. Here is a New Scientist interview with him. I have also embedded a clip of Gillian McKeith a well know TV presenter in the UK, who encourages people to eat healthily, but does so in a way that is wrong and deceptive. A whole chapter of Bad Science is devoted to her.

For example, McKeith calls herself (or used to call, before the Advertising Standards Authority had a draft adjudication against her) a doctor and refers to her patients. She is neither a medical doctor, nor does she have a PhD from an accredited university. She does have an accreditation from a Nutrition institute that Goldacre managed to obtain membership for his dead cat for $100. The award hangs in his toilet.

Gillian McKeith is our latest recipient of the Smashing Telly FEBL (Fucking Entertaining Big Lie) award, which consists of being tagged FEBL

3 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: FEBL pseudo science science

Design Classics, The London Underground Map

October 16th, 2008 8 comments or link to (permalink)

There was a period, between the wars, when European refugees like Gropius stopped in Britain. This stimulated a brief flourishing of modernism resulting in the design aesthetic of London public transport, from the Routemaster bus (the only piece of British ‘architecture’ that Corbusier liked) to moderne Tube stations such as Arnos Grove.

But the pinnacle of London Transport’s modernist design was the Tube map which rearranged distances to produce a supremely navigable schematic diagram that is little changed today. (I have been looking for this documentary for ages).

8 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: architecture