It’s strange coming back to Cardiff and seeing Freshers’ Week from the other side, in particular the stuff that the Christian Union and Navigators are putting on. I’ve begun to realise the blood, sweat and tears that goes into a fortnight of activities!

Last week I was helping with the events put on for International Students – helping to carry their bags, handing out flyers, helping with social events in the evening. When I arrived in Cardiff this was my first contact with the Christian Union, so it was strange to realise that I’m now exactly one year on from that point. A lot has changed, not least all the friendships that have formed from that point of knowing nobody.

At the weekend, I went away on the Navigators weekend away up to a bunkhouse near Brecon. (Amusingly, the Students’ Union thought that the Navs are an orienteering group, and so rather than giving us the standard budget for religious societies regardless of size in the name of “fairness”, we got a bit more than the Christian Union despite being much smaller!) We had a great time looking at the Bible together, discussing the year ahead and just chatting and enjoying each other’s company. Unfortunately, I lost my mobile phone, probably while on the walk up in the hills. As we were leaving, Phil was saying that it still might turn up, to which Dean replied “Oooh yes, a friendly squirrel is going to come along and hand it in!” So I’m not holding much hope for it turning up! But amazingly, just last week I copied all the numbers in my phone into a notebook for safe-keeping. Blimey, I must be becoming organised or something. Wait, no, a brief glance at my room puts paid to that idea!

It’s been great returning to Mackintosh Evangelical Church and receiving a warm welcome there, and renewing the friendships I have in that fellowship. I really enjoyed the harvest thanksgiving evening service on Sunday evening. It was a great time of sharing what we are thankful for, and I found Philip Fayer’s talk, looking at principles of thanksgiving from the Old Testament law, interesting and helpful. And it was fun chatting about stuff like “why aren’t there any British superheroes?” in Shot in the Dark café afterwards with Philip, Claire, Dave, Peter and whatshername (apologies! Her name has slipped my mind).

My main contribution to the CU’s proceedings has been designing, editing and writing the Christian Union Freshers’ Magazine. I’ve spent many an hour chasing various CUites for information on their plans for Freshers’ Week and beyond and for their contributions to the publication, and writing material myself and putting it all together in Microsoft Publisher. But finally my work paid off, as the finished product rolled off the presses on Monday afternoon! (Or at least, off the university photocopiers). I’m pleased with the finished product, apart from a few typos and a few bits of information I haven’t been able to get, most notably details of the Welsh CU’s meetings this year. The other thing I was slightly disappointed about was the prohibitive cost of having the cover printed in colour, and so having to have it in black and white on coloured paper. But the finished item looks pretty smart, even if I do say so myself, and I think that design-wise is a definite improvement on last year’s version. If you want to have a look at it, you can download a compressed PDF version of the magazine, though it is still a fairly large file at almost 700kb.

I’ve also been settling in to my new home with my housemates, all of whom have now moved in, and doing social stuff like going to Bev’s birthday party and going out in to Lloyd’s bar with my housemates, and other fun stuff… Tomorrow I’ll be on the Freshers’ Stalls of both Navigators and the CU at different points, as well as going up to Tal-y-Bont to enroll. And I’m trying to get hold of the Debating Society to discuss some of my ideas about doing some of the “big questions” stuff under the umbrella of the Debating society activities.

So I’ve been, and continue to be, pretty busy. Have I started getting ready for my studies yet? Hahahahahahaha.

Well, here I am in Cardiff, after my first night in the house that I’m renting with four friends.

I travelled down from Dolgellau yesterday with my Dad. Dad recently got a satellite navigation gadget, which we used to navigate to Cardiff. Well, tried to – I had trouble navigating the menus to set the destination, so it wasn’t until we stopped at Hay on Wye (where I had a quick look round a couple of the bookshops for stuff on my reading lists, plus anything else that took my fancy) that Dad could sort it out! It then showed a three-dimensional map of our position which updated in real time, and told us where to go at each turning.

We arrived around 3:40pm, and Mr Thomas the landlord was waiting to show us such things as the meters and how the heating works and so on. After he’d done that, Dad and I moved in all my boxes and rearranged the furniture in my room to my liking. We went out to get a takeaway of chicken and chips – so I’m throwing myself into the student lifestyle straight away! He then headed off home, and I wandered out to do some shopping, before coming back to continue unpacking.

It’s strange being on my own again after living at home with my family over the summer. Once again it’s up to me what I do, what I eat, when I go to bed and the like – and also up to me to cook, wash up, tidy up and do whatever else needs doing. The sudden freedom of being at university feels rather strange. It’s like that moment when you’re driving when you realise you only need to spin the wheel around in your hands to veer off the road and probably kill yourself. With the independence university brings, you realise that there’s nothing stopping you from wrecking your life but you yourself. Stupid amounts of booze, drugs, terrorist groups – all are out there if you want (I saw on the papers yesterday that “extremist/terrorist groups” are active at many universities). But you can’t dwell on that – you just carry on, enjoying the drive, your eyes on the road in front of you. I’m glad to say I won’t be alone for long, since my housemate Ian will be arriving tomorrow afternoon. Steve, Ben and Tom will follow over the next few days.

It’s quite different from my arrival last year when I didn’t know anybody and when the city of Cardiff was new to me. I spent the first few days just wandering about and exploring. This time round I’m looking forward to seeing friends again – I’ve already seen Ian and Tom (hmmm… familiar names!) from over in Cwmdare Street, plus Ben, a fellow historian and Debater who has been working for Jenny Willott, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cardiff Central who was elected in the last Election. Tomorrow I’ll be returning to Mackintosh Evangelical Church, and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there. And that’s just the beginning…

Ah, the chaos of packing. Everything is beginning to fall into order (or at least, be stuffed in boxes which are then forced shut so the disorder is hidden within them).

My housemates and I have been trying to achieve some degree of co-ordination by emailing each other to say what we’re planning on bringing. I’ve been compiling this information into a spreadsheet so we can see what nobody is bringing so we can try and bring it and what everybody is bringing so that hopefully only one person will bring it.

I’m looking forward to going back to Cardiff. Although it’s nice to be with my family and see friends at home again, it was a bit dull just working at Somerfield and working away on my writing and on the CU Freshers Welcome Magazine in the time I had left. It’ll be great to see the many friends I’ve made at Cardiff again, get back into student life, meet this year’s intake of freshers and have the challenge of fresh studies.

Well, I hope to keep track of what I’m up to on here, but it’ll be pretty busy – I’m helping with the CU’s Internationals events, going to the Navigators weekend away and am involved with the Freshers events of both groups. And there’s so much more to be doing, too! The challenge for me is choosing the best things and not biting off more than I can chew…

Grr… I only have to update my blog to get annoying spam comments, so I’ve just been deleting the latest lot. I’ve now turned on “image verification”, where you have to type in some slightly garbled text from an image to prove that you’re a human and not an evil spam-spreading piece of computer programming.

But what will happen if programs are developed sophisticated enough to do any such task thrown at them? What if artificial intelligence becomes

But it takes something very sophisticated, like a human brain, to think on a high enough level to be able to make mistakes, as opposed to just automatically following a set of instructions. Of course, if the instructions are flawed then you’ll get the wrong answer, but the program will do what it is supposed to.

So here’s how you could devise a new test to outwit a super-intelligent AI. Set a super-fiendish Su Doku puzzle as a test, which an automatic programme will easily be able to solve but any normal human will find impossible, and make making a mistake the criteria for testing humanness. Perhaps in future actual stupidity will be the best way of testing that something isn’t artificially intelligent.

Tags: Spam artificial intelligence

I’ve been looking at my accounts for last academic year (reckoning from 23rd September 2004 to 22nd June 2005, since my bank statements are calculated on the 22nd of the month for some reason, but that matches my time in Cardiff almost exactly). In those 39 months, I spent around £100 pounds more than I budgeted for myself, which isn’t bad – I earned a couple of hundred quid working over Easter, plus got some money at Christmas and Easter, so ended the year on a slightly better financial note than I expected. That is, I’m not quite so deeply into debt as I’d calculated I would be!

Since I’m moving out of halls and into a house this year, the financial picture changes somewhat this year. I know that the rent for the year will cost more than I paid to be in halls, but I don’t know what the subtle impact of sharing a house with four friends will be. There will be bills to pay which we didn’t have to worry about in halls, but on the other hand, could sharing the cooking reduce our food costs? It’s swings and roundabouts, and until we’ve been there a couple of months, it will be difficult to judge our likely living costs.

I recently came across the NUS’s estimated average student expenditure for academic year 2005/2006, and found it rather astonishing. Although my costs in some areas, such as rent, are pretty much average for outside of London, in others I find the predicted “average amount” to be far beyond what I’ve spent or would even consider spending.

Take the amount spent on “Leisure”, for example. The NUS has an average figure of around £1500 for a 39 week academic year, which works out at around £38 pounds per week. That’s not all that many pounds off my weekly budget for all my general expenses – i.e. for food, clothes, stuff for my course and leisure as well. I might spend that much on leisure per month, I’d guess, between stuff like going to the cinema, meeting friends for a drink, the occasional book to read or DVD to watch, and so on. But there’s so much to do as a student that doesn’t require spending loads of money (and indeed, any money at all) – there’s loads of student societies which are free once you’ve paid to join.

I guess seeing those figures helped me to realise just how big a culture gap there is between me and many of my fellow students. Someone once said “It’s the empty soul that craves constant entertainment” and if that’s true, looking at our entertainment-obsessed culture should make us weep for the emptiness gnawing at the heart of our society. As I said in one of If in the nineteenth century, religion was “the opiate of the masses”, by the twenty-first it has surely become the media.

Despite reading numerous articles telling me that as a student, my overdraft is my best friend, so far I’ve not needed to have any debt beyond my student loan (which is non-commercial and is only repaid as you earn the money to do so, and as such I’m not going to worry about paying it off until after I’ve finished my studies).

So don’t believe the hype – you don’t need to spend loads of money to have a great time. I had the time of my life in my first year at university, and without all the sex, booze and big spending that many will tell you are the essential parts of the university experience, because such people are sadly mistaken.

Tags: University Student life Finance

It’s been a while since I blogged. I started writing about Hurricane Katrina a few days ago, and still have the draft of that blog entry floating around, but I couldn’t finish it. What can be said? I may comment on the tragedy at a later date, but not now.

Instead I’m going to talk about Gair Rhydd, Cardiff University Students’ Union’s award-winning newspaper, to which I am a contributor. The new website is now online, complete with PDFs of last year’s issues, and will soon be home to all the wonderful new articles and features to be published over the coming months.

I’ve tracked down the various articles for the paper that I have yet to post on my blog, and can now present them to you for your reading pleasure.

I couldn’t resist crowing in triumph when Doctor Who trounced Celebrity Wrestling in the ratings (in fact, it did so badly it was also beaten by the repeats of Porridge on BBC2!) as I discussed the current state of television.

When the election came around, I looked at some of the problems with our system and the need to hold politicians accountable, asking if we have Delusions of Democracy?

I managed to provoke a letter in response to one of my articles when I set about rubbishing the silly superstition of Astrology in my article Horror-scopes. I committed the cardinal sin of “not being tolerant of other people’s beliefs” in the eyes of the letter writer, apparently called Claire Voyant. I responded with a rebuttal of her comments, saying that I respect people’s right to their beliefs, but not necessarily their beliefs themselves.

On that note, I wrote my article defending The Right to be Wrong, explaining why tolerance must be based on a respect for people’s right and responsibility of making their own minds up, rather than on any inherent value of their beliefs. I went on to say how true tolerance is “agreeing to disagree” rather than “agreeing never to disagree”.

In my final article of the year in the broadsheet edition of the paper, I discussed whether Freedom without Chaos is a sustainable possibility. Drawing on some of the ideas from the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares and the thinking of Francis Schaeffer, I argued that Western civilization is rapidly losing the Christian moral consensus that made freedom without chaos possible. The ever-increasing fragmentation of belief and morality leaves us in a situation where governments need to implement increasingly totalitarian measures to preserve social order. (The Government’s drive to promote “Respect” is just the latest manifestation of this necessity).

I hope you enjoy reading those – your comments are, as always, very welcome.

Tags: News Gair Rhydd Opinion Student newspapers Journalism

Well, I’m back from Contagious 2005. For those of you who don’t know about Contagious, it is a Christian youth conference for 14 to 19 year olds. Not so much a holiday as a Bible boot camp, the teaching really gets into the Bible in depth. The speakers are really great, delivering really hard-hitting, practical and moving messages. It’s great fun, too, with a packed schedule of activities.

I’ve had a great time, and met some lovely people – some for the first time, some who I have been friends with now for years. I’m really tired after such an intense week, so I won’t give a full rundown on it just yet, but stay tuned.

MP3s of the talks will be available to download for free online soon from the official Contagious website. If you’ll be aged 14 to 19 this time next summer, and want to have a great time getting into the Bible in a fun environment, then why not come along? Next year’s subject is The Cross of Christ, the very heart of the Christian message.

Searches that have brought people to my blog over the past few days have included:

Claire Fayers; Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen; Caleb slave Christ; how are Slitheen born?; Picasso – friendship analyse picture; Rhiwbina Baptist Church.

To avoid disappointing these visitors, I will comment on each of these. Firstly, I see that my association with a famous writer like Claire Fayers has its benefits! There’s a link to her blog on the right, why not give it a visit? But no little men here, I’m afraid, nor any hunting. Yes indeed, I am a slave to Christ, which is the thing that sets me free. Slitheen hatch from eggs, and you can find out more about them in the Doctor Who Monsters and Villains book. I don’t know much about Picasso, unfortunately, so “pass” on that one. Ribena Baptist Church runs a minibus for students from behind the Students’ Union because it’s rather too far to walk from where most the students live – I’ve only been there once, though.

Well, I’m away on Contagious next week so might not get chance to blog again for ten days or so. But be patient and stay tuned, because I’ll be back!

Recently, I’ve joined in a discussion on the Outpost Gallifrey forum on Intelligent Design. The question of origins is a very important one when considering the truth of Christianity. Whether the story of creation as described in Genesis is true, and in what sense (literal, symbolic, allegorical etc.) it is supposed to be true, has big implications for the way the rest of the Bible should be interpreted and for its credibility as the word of God.

So I’ve been reading that discussion, looking at various links given, and have concluded that there is no reason why science should exclude the possibility of an Intelligent Designer if there is evidence for it. I think there’s a great deal of squeamishness about the idea of “design” among many in the scientific community because of the blatant religious motivations of the Intelligent Design movement. However, this does not automatically invalidate their arguments or claims. Crick and Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA, set out to be scientists because they wanted to find naturalistic explanations for things that had been used to support religion, such as the difference between living and nonliving things. That they had ulterior motives doesn’t in any way undermime the value or importance of their contribution. So if the ID crowd have any evidence for their claims, their motivation is scientifically irrelevant.

The Intelligent Design movement claims that there is evidence to support the hypothesis of an intelligent designer of life. One of the books I’m reading at the moment covers some of these. It isn’t solely about the question of origins, so I’ll give a general introduction first.

The book I’ve been reading is Total Truthby Nancy Pearcey, with a foreword by Phillip E Johnson of ID movement fame. Subtitled “Liberating Christianity from its cultural captivity”, it is aimed at breaking down the division of truth into two different realms – on the one hand, the realm of public, objective facts and on the other, the realm of private, subjective values. It argues against the confining of religion to the private, subjective realm, arguing that if religion, in particular Christianity, is true, then it needs to be true in the realm of facts and not just the realm of values, and indeed, that if Christianity is not true factually then it cannot be true in the realm of values. Truth cannot be neatly divided in such a way. The book argues the need to put the case for Christianity to be true as a comprehensive worldview, which impacts every area of life, not just the private and personal. It argues that the real conflict lies on the level of worldviews. Although it sometimes oversimplifies or overgeneralises in its overview, the book presents an excellent case here on why Christianity is so ineffective in our culture, and what we should be doing to make Christianity intellectually robust and relevant to the whole of life.

Pearcey then takes the question of origins as an example, and devotes a section to the impact of the Darwinian worldview. The book claims that Darwinism is only so compelling on the basis of various philosophical/religious assumptions. She argues that the Darwinian worldview means the death of objective truth, and attempts to sketch a positive case for Intelligent Design.

Pearcey claims “There are three main areas where exciting new evidence for design is being uncovered: (1) the world of the cell (biochemistry), (2) the origin of the universe (cosmology) and (3) the structure of DNA (biological information)”.

Her arguments for design include:

• Irreducible complexity – some biological structures, especially the cell, only work if all the complex, interdependent components are fully working, and so in principle cannot develop in small, gradual steps.
• The universe is “fine tuned” for life – The universal constants and so on are all fine-tuned to be able to support life. There are many different variables, that if slightly different, would make life impossible. (However, the book doesn’t answer Douglas Adams’ “Puddle” argument, that life develops to fit the universe it is in, and so for us to say that the universe is designed for life is like the water of a puddle saying the hole in the ground it is in is designed for it to fit into)
• The highly specified, complex biological information of DNA displays “specified complexity” – under Dembski’s “Explanatory Filter”, which purports to give criteria for deciding whether something is due to chance, law, or design, DNA displays a complexity that in principle cannot be generated merely by chance plus law-like processes.
• Information requires an intelligent source – most of the sequences of chemical “letters” in DNA are chemically arbitary. So where does the cell’s “linguistic convention” come from? DNA is the medium, not the message, and to look for the origins of the information necessary for life on the level of natural causes is to address the problem “at the wrong conceptual level”. Genetic information must come from the realm of information and intelligence.

Anyway, I’ve not yet decided either way on this, so I’m going to continue reading up on the subject to try and give both sides of the argument a fair hearing. Any comments, arguments, links to books or articles warmly welcomed – just use the comments feature!