Ghost hunting with Derren

I have to confess Derren Brown has gone up in my estimation. Just based on his shows, I thought this stage magician/mentalist was rather a pain, but his recent series investigating various paranormal claims have shown him to be an effective sceptic and (apparently) quite a nice guy.

Two interesting points came out of his recent piece on ghost hunting. One was a shocking statistic. Apparently nearly 50% of the population believes in ghosts. That doesn't surprise me, it's about what I would have guessed. But was does it that it seems this has quadrupled since the 1950s. Now that is worrying.

The other was when Brown was dealing with an American ghost hunter (or demonologist as he classed himself). I was fascinated by the way Buffy style fiction seems to have taken over people's lives. It's fiction folks! We had a house with demon possession, where the owner was certainly seeing things. But it was also a house with a picture of a demon on the mailbox and the word HATE as a decoration on the sideboard. Might the owner be a teensy bit inclined a certain way?

The ghost hunter, who definitely believed in what he had seen, had two big physical proofs (leaving aside a video of someone having a fit). One was photographs. The one he thought was best 'showed' a human face in the mist in a graveyard. But as Brown later pointed out, you could make out all sorts of shapes from the mist. And given how we are programmed to recognize faces, it's hardly surprising you could see one. (In fact Brown could see another face, and I saw a third.) They were just random shapes.

The other biggy was EVP, Electronic Voice Phenomena. These are produced by asking questions to a voice recorder then leaving a space. When the recording is played back there are strange noises in the spaces. Only these noises sounded like static or wind noise. The ghost hunter interpreted them to be what he wanted to hear - but to the unbiassed ear (including Brown's) there was no information there.

What wasn't pointed out, but I thought was telling, is that there wasn't one recorder present there were two. There was also the recorder used by the TV crew. And strangely that one (which unlike the ghost hunter's handheld hadn't got automatic volume control, so didn't boost the silences) didn't pick up anything. Hmm.

When I first heard about EVPs I was really interested. They sounded like a genuine physical proof of some sort of phenomenon. As Brown claims, though I'm a sceptic, I genuinely would like there to be something to ghosts and such - I've been fascinated by ghost hunting since reading about Borley Rectory in my teens. But if the sort of random noise produced on the show is the best you get, I'm afraid they aren't worth the bits they're recorded on.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

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