Bot­tled water is for dum­mies. Any­body who has held a bot­tle of Evian up to a mir­ror knows that. It’s a joke per­pe­trated and per­pet­u­ated on us by the major soft­drink labels — for whom it rep­re­sents a license to print money.

If you buy bot­tled water (and I do) for any rea­son other than the fact that it’s a hot day, the water is cold, and soft­drink is sug­ary and bad for your teeth, then you should check out this infographic.

If you live in that Aus­tralian town that banned bot­tled water (or Mag­netic Island) then you should read this graph so that you have great sta­tis­tics to use in your next argument.

Pre­sented by Online Edu­ca­tion

The head­ing is only true if you’re a teenage boy and obsessed with pass­ing gas and want to know more about your flat­u­lence. I learned new things.

Source: Online Edu­ca­tion

A com­pre­hen­sive guide to how to be bad at Face­book. If you’re one of these peo­ple you may have lots of Face­book friends but the num­ber who think of you as a real life friend is prob­a­bly decreas­ing. From the Oat­meal (where else?) (thanks Ali).

This per­son will prob­a­bly also cor­rect you on your grammar.

This is me. But mostly about this blog.

I wrote this in the car today while mulling over a talk we lis­tened to yes­ter­day. Why do some new athe­ists hate the Chris­t­ian faith?

I was going to use the word “reli­gion” in that ques­tion. But I hate reli­gion too. Jesus spends a whole lot of time rebuk­ing peo­ple for their reli­gion. Reli­gion, for those scratch­ing their heads, is the idea that one’s actions win them sal­va­tion. It is what dis­tin­guishes Bib­li­cal Chris­tian­ity from any other form of faith. For the sake of clar­ity I should have prob­a­bly used “antithe­ists” rather than athe­ists in the title. But I’ll stick with the label the peo­ple I am think­ing of apply to themselves.

At the heart of almost every objec­tion to faith that I read from athe­ists is that peo­ple of faith use their beliefs to stymie the desires and actions of peo­ple with dif­fer­ent faiths. Which is kind of a fair enough crit­i­cism. Until you think about it.

What would hap­pen if the new athe­ists were in the major­ity and their moral frame­work (which basi­cally comes down to “if it feels good, do it”) was the yardstick?

Moral­ity is always the stan­dard of behav­iour set by the high­est power one chooses to acknowl­edge – be it the indi­vid­ual, com­mu­nity stan­dards, gov­ern­ment or a deity. To sug­gest that moral­ity is set inter­nally is disin­gen­u­ous and results in a really odd and self­ish deci­sion making.

The moral out­come and con­clu­sion of nat­ural selec­tion is either vio­lence or sub­mis­sion. How else does one sur­vive? As soon as one entity, be it an indi­vid­ual or a com­mu­nity, acts in a way that threat­ens the sur­vival of another the only nat­ural response at that point is to act vio­lently – or to sub­mit and pos­si­bly die.

Richard Dawkins has famously sug­gested that our cul­ture is beyond the “evo­lu­tion­ary” need for reli­gion. That we’ve some­how moved past the need for our behav­iour to be mod­er­ated by a higher power. Hogwash.

Even if the higher power is a fig­ment of the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tions of believ­ers through­out human his­tory, even if each “imag­i­nary friend” causes their fans to act in an irra­tional man­ner towards the other teams, and even if moral­ity that flows from a posi­tion of faith is an arbi­trary and less “good” moral frame­work than one’s own “harm based” equa­tion – the alter­na­tive to a planet with faith looks much worse than the cur­rent state of affairs.

Peo­ple would no doubt find other rea­sons to kill one another. Believ­ers must admit that reli­gious codes have caused con­flict (and con­tinue to) since the begin­ning of time. This says noth­ing about the truth of the beliefs.

I think the rea­son the new athe­ists hate faith is not that they think faith is harm­ful – that can­not pos­si­bly the rea­son. If faith is an evo­lu­tion­ary sur­vival mech­a­nism then peo­ple are sim­ply out­work­ing their inher­ent and instinc­tive vio­lent natures.

Until the New Athe­ists come up with a sys­tem of moral­ity that cur­tails this inner vio­lence bet­ter than reli­gion they should shut their mouths, to decon­vert peo­ple can in fact do more harm than good.

It is illog­i­cal to oper­ate with a harm based eth­i­cal frame­work and a philo­soph­i­cal frame­work grounded in nihilis­tic sur­vival (pro­tect one’s abil­ity to do what feels good) and to call for the removal of the influ­ence of faith from pub­lic life. It is irra­tional, and stems from prejudice.

It can be log­i­cal to decide that one­self, on an indi­vid­ual level, does not need to believe God to sur­vive and pros­per – but to apply your own per­sonal moral frame­work to every­body else is dan­ger­ous. It only works until some­one wants some­thing dif­fer­ent to what you think they should want and they decide to take it for themselves.

For many antithe­ists the ques­tion isn’t so much of moral­ity but that they find posited gods immoral. With their supe­rior inter­nal moral frame­work. These slightly more con­sis­tent athe­ists hate the God they don’t believe in for send­ing bears to ren­der injus­tice to intem­per­ate youths. They hate the God they don’t believe in for com­mit­ting geno­cide by flood­ing the world. More accu­rately they hate that peo­ple are will­ing to describe such a God as loving.

How can a lov­ing all pow­er­ful God allow or cause suf­fer­ing? How can a lov­ing God send peo­ple to Hell?

I com­mend this talk (MP3) by Tim Keller to those ask­ing that ques­tion (he touches on the nat­ural selec­tion = vio­lence idea in this talk).

The key to both these ques­tions hinges on the unjust suf­fer­ing and death of Jesus for his enemies.

I don’t under­stand how antithe­ists can be angry at a belief that calls for this sort of action – John 15 says…

“My com­mand is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

Where Jesus did not just walk the walk – he ran it — Romans 5 says…

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still pow­er­less, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will any­one die for a right­eous man, though for a good man some­one might pos­si­bly dare to die. But God demon­strates his own love for us in this: While we were still sin­ners, Christ died for us.”

That’s what, in my mind, makes Chris­tian­ity impos­si­ble to hate. How can you argue with a per­son who is will­ing to fol­low that same model? (Luke 9).

“Then he said to them all: “If any­one would come after me, he must deny him­self and take up his cross daily and fol­low me. For who­ever wants to save his life will lose it, but who­ever loses his life for me will save it.”

It’s com­pletely counter-instinctive to take that posi­tion. Par­tic­u­larly if instincts are defined as actions that con­tribute to one’s sur­vival under a nat­ural selec­tion model. Chris­tian­ity doesn’t seem to bear the hall­marks of a tool of nat­ural selec­tion because it rails against the basest ele­ment of nat­ural selec­tion — self­ish­ness, and works against our nat­ural incli­na­tion to vio­lently defend­ing our rights. I can’t see how the con­tin­ued exis­tence of such a mind­set can be bad for soci­ety — even if some believ­ers use their faith to call for dif­fer­ent stan­dards of behaviour.

Seri­ously — if you can’t tol­er­ate a lit­tle bit of moral crit­i­cism — or per­se­cu­tion — from those with oppos­ing views to you (just because you don’t have evi­dence to sup­port their deity) — then move to France. It’s really not that bad — and the mod­er­ate Chris­t­ian voices will even­tu­ally gain trac­tion as they try to encour­age other Chris­tians to put Jesus at the cen­tre of the gospel not reli­gious acts.

I don’t want to go down the path of the “no athe­ists in the fox­holes” fal­lacy – but how many athe­ist mar­tyrs are there? How many athe­ists are dying in Chris­t­ian nations? I’m sure there are athe­ists dying for their lack of belief in Islamic nations – but they’re not get­ting spe­cial treat­ment, the Chris­tians are dying there too.

That is all.

We’re “home”. Well, home for the next four years. After two days of exhaust­ing dri­ving we have arrived safely in Bris­bane. We’ll be unload­ing the truck at our new house in Grov­ely tomor­row morn­ing if any­body read­ing really wants to swing by to help.

We left Townsville at lunch time today. We were going to leave first thing this morn­ing, but our removal­ist no showed yes­ter­day (they called to tell us at 3pm).

It’ll be spo­radic blog­ging only today and tomorrow.

I used my phone for this post.

The cor­rect response, when con­fronted with some­one cor­rect­ing your gram­mar, syn­tax or spelling, is an appeal to author­ity (Shake­speare) with a simul­ta­ne­ous request for their con­tra­dic­tory evi­dence from a supe­rior author­ity (con­fi­dent in the knowl­edge there is no greater author­ity on the writ­ten word). This may not work when it comes to obvi­ous spelling or punc­tu­a­tion mis­takes — but it should help keep the wolves at bay.

I have two slightly con­tra­dic­tory pet peeves. On one hand, I hate read­ing bad gram­mar — par­tic­u­larly their/there/they’re, its/it’s and your/you’re. This is mostly because I hate mak­ing the mis­take myself. I feel so incred­i­bly stu­pid when an error is pointed out. I think, deep down, that I am a per­fec­tion­ist. On the other hand — I hate when peo­ple point out bad gram­mar — mine or oth­er­wise. Noth­ing raises my online hack­les more than the supe­ri­or­ity of a gram­mar pedant. I tried being one once. It didn’t make me feel nice. I don’t know how oth­ers can do it — it must come from hat­ing bad gram­mar more than one hates appear­ing like a com­plete and utterly supe­rior prig.

If know­ing how stu­pid you feel when some­one points out your error does not stop you point­ing out the errors of oth­ers (sticks, logs and all that jazz), and if you’re so sure that you will never make your own scorn wor­thy mis­take so that you run no risk of hypocrisy, then per­haps you should con­tinue read­ing — and remem­ber that peo­ple actu­ally think less of you when you cor­rect your/their friends in pub­lic. Not more.

I will say that I think the excep­tion to this rule is when an insti­tu­tion makes a mis­take — and the closer the insti­tu­tion is to the rules of gram­mar the fun­nier it is. When gov­ern­ments have gram­mar style guides and stuff up bridge inscrip­tions that is funny. When we laugh at Chi­nese trans­la­tors man­gling Eng­lish while mak­ing their coun­try more open to vis­i­tors that is cul­tural imperialism.

I’ve read a cou­ple of arti­cles today cour­tesy of Twenty Two words that help­fully reminded me that being a “Gram­mar Nazi” does not make one supe­rior — nor does it actu­ally make some­body a bet­ter writer. Imag­ine how the very Bard him­self would be remem­bered if he had bowed to the pres­sure of the gram­mar pedants of his day.

Firstly, gram­mar pedants speak too early too often and pro­vide no evi­dence for their claims. They expect us to sit idly by and accept their views on the mov­able feast of lan­guage while pro­vid­ing not a sker­rick nor shred of cor­rob­o­ra­tion for their claims. Up with this I shall not put.

Here’s an arti­cle that com­pares gram­mar experts with eti­quette experts who make claims and then move the goal posts when some­one disagrees.

This arti­cle pro­vides recourse for peo­ple like me who want to rid them­selves of pesky com­ments from friends who suf­fer from bad­gram­mari­tis (symp­toms include the inabil­ity to let bad gram­mar pass unpunished).

We have all heard admo­ni­tions at some point or other that the word unique can­not be mod­i­fied — a thing is either unique or it is not. This would be con­sid­er­ably more con­vinc­ing if it were not so obvi­ously untrue, as peo­ple mod­ify unique quite fre­quently, and have done so for a long time. Through the magic of Google Books you can now search through enor­mous num­bers of books and mag­a­zines from the 19th cen­tury and see lit­er­ally hun­dreds of writ­ers who use more unique, less unique and even that bug­bear of the purists, some­what unique.

(And speak­ing of lit­er­ally, the next time some­one tells you that it can­not be used to mean aught but lit­eral, you might point out that it has been used in var­i­ous fig­u­ra­tive and non­lit­eral senses for hun­dreds of years, by such lit­er­ary fig­ures as Jane Austen, Charles Dick­ens and Richard Mil­hous Nixon.)

The arti­cle points out that most gram­mar con­ven­tions and cor­rec­tions are given with­out any sense of evi­dence — in fact, on Face­book where both bad gram­mar and pedantry runs ram­pant, cor­rec­tions are given with a sense of supe­rior sat­is­fac­tion but no ref­er­ence to any rules or con­ven­tions that actu­ally back up the criticism.

The eru­dite con­clu­sion from the NY Times arti­cle is proof that a predilec­tion for pedantry does not give you the exclu­sive rights to good writ­ing. It’s today’s rule break­ers who become tomorrow’s rule mak­ers. To use an anal­ogy — pedants are the engi­neers of the writ­ing world while the rest of us are the artistes — the archi­tects and inte­rior design­ers, the painters, the land­scap­ers and the Feng Shui consultants.

So I say out­pedant the pedants, and allow your­self to glut­to­nously revel in the lin­guis­tic impro­pri­eties of yore as you famil­iar­ize your­self with the nearly unique enor­mity of the glo­ri­ously mis­taken her­itage that our lit­er­a­ture is com­prised of. For those of you keep­ing score at home, that last sen­tence con­tained a ver­bal noun, a split infini­tive, an improper –ize, an inflec­tional com­par­a­tive, a bla­tantly mis­lead­ing word choice, at least one exam­ple of cat­achre­sis, an unnec­es­sar­ily pas­sive con­struc­tion — and it ended with a prepo­si­tion. All of which I’m will­ing to bet appear in Shakespeare.

I have no idea how many media releases I put out in the last four years — it would be close to a thou­sand. I had a pretty prodi­gious out­put in my first cou­ple of years (this isn’t actu­ally a good thing — I didn’t feel like I could refuse to write a release on a dumb  topic back then). Occa­sion­ally I was allowed to put out releases with puns in the head­ings — when they weren’t too cringe­wor­thy (or rude, I might post my rud­est (and fun­ni­est) one in the comments).

1. Kopi cats drop­ping an inim­itable brew — This one was spe­cial because it is my biggest and most suc­cess­ful story of all time. It’s also about cat poo. Cat poo cof­fee. This release made it to Indone­sia, India, the UK and Europe. Kopi is Indone­sian for cof­fee — and the cat poo cof­fee is called Kopi Luwak.
2. Oper­a­tors hit a Homer — Ulysses beds locked in — I had a lot of fun writ­ing really high brow head­ings about this story. There was a saga where Townsville couldn’t secure enough advance beds to house the Ulysses Motor­cy­cle Club’s AGM. They wanted to be able to book guar­an­teed beds two years in advance. Other head­ings included — Ulysses offer not a Tro­jan Horse, and Space prob­lem means Ulysses Club may take 2008 odyssey elsewhere.
3. Be blown away by North Queens­land — a release about help­ing the tourism indus­try recover from the per­cep­tion that we were dam­aged by Cyclone Larry.
4. Cum­mins: recipe for mar­ket­ing with bite — Adver­tis­ing guru Sean Cum­mins came to Townsville to run a mar­ket­ing workshop.
5. TREC joins star­ship Enter­prise — I really like puns based on acronyms. I don’t know why. This one was about the Townsville Regional Engi­neer­ing Clus­ter join­ing Townsville Enter­prise. Here are some oth­ers. ACASPA: a friendly host (about a con­fer­ence that came to Townsville because it was a friendly city), ATEC’s mes­sage for tourism oper­a­tors (about the Aus­tralian Tourism Export Council’s con­fer­ence), Townsville oper­a­tors AIME for suc­cess (about the Asia Pacific Incen­tives, Meet­ings and Events expo) and Tourism indus­try hunts pieces of ATE trea­sure with island rebrand­ing (about the Aus­tralian Tourism Exchange — a Tourism trade show).
6. Regions join fel­low­ship of the zing — I wrote a lot about energy gen­er­a­tion. This one was about Townsville join­ing with Mackay, Mount Isa and Cairns to lobby for energy.
7. Solar plea: don’t stick it where the sun don’t shine — K-Rudd’s solar flag­ship pro­gram will put bil­lion dol­lar power sta­tions around Aus­tralia. Townsville wants one.
8. McDon­ald no longer on the farm — our new Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment man­ager (at the time) had a back­ground in agriculture.
9. Dream time becomes a vir­tual real­ity* — About a local indige­nous tourism oper­a­tors use of some grant money for AV equipment.
10. New flights to boost cap­i­tal expen­di­ture* — About Vir­gin Blue launch­ing four new routes to Townsville in one day.

* These ones had rude or polit­i­cally incor­rect alternatives.

I like this info­graphic from Flow­ing­Data. Click it to see the full size (for those see­ing this in the sidebar).

The Oat­meal tack­les all sorts of gram­mar issues for your edi­fi­ca­tion and improve­ment. This time round it’s the semi­colon. Check out the whole thing here.