THERE have been some fairly wacky experiments done to get an empirical handle on religion, from photographing seances to the electrically wired “God helmet” that makes people swear they feel the presence of the Almighty. But among the oddest is a series funded by the Pennsylvania-based Templeton Foundation at Baroness Susan Greenfield’s Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind in the UK.
The idea is to see if religious feelings change the perception of pain. This is, with respect, a no-brainer. Researchers have been finding profound differences in people’s perception of pain according to any number of cultural variables since the 1960s – one study found Jewish mothers to be especially resilient. But what tickles us is the way the Oxford researchers intend to test this: by burning people’s hands with chilli gel while they look at religious images. We assume the control will be images of something unreligious – we don’t know what. Suggestions on a postcard please.
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The potential spoiler here is that sensitivity to capsaicin, the active ingredient in chilli, is reduced by one’s exposure to it. People who eat lots don’t feel its burn as readily. So we predict that the best religion, as measured by the chilli test, will turn out to be Thai Buddhism. This will be followed by Ethiopian Coptic Christianity, Gujarati forms of Hinduism, and Bangladeshi (but not Afghani or Saudi) Islam.
“According to Kenneth Phiri, in the antenatal department at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, UK, there is a notice on one door that reads: “Please do not enter when door is closed””
We also predict that a number of Anglicans, especially those from the English Midlands, will be right up there in the spiritual toughness stakes. Some may say their faith is wishy-washy, but the vindaloo curries they consume on Saturday nights are anything but.
FANS of Inverclyde Council’s morally spotless website will be delighted to know that the guardians of public virtue at the Scottish local authority are still bleeping out even remotely questionable words. Although, as we reported two weeks ago, its web pages no longer describe the “mussels and *bleep*les” to be found on the Clyde estuary, it still hosts an Entertainment page that lists the pubs and clubs in the area, one of which is a bar called Norseman that offers “half price *bleep*tails” on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Jim Randell, who gleefully discovered this, suggests visiting the page quickly before they de-censor that one too as a result of reading this item. It’s at .
Yet another *bleep*-up.
SONY’s PR people recently invited journalists to try one of the latest Walkmans, a player the size of a packet of chewing gum that manages to contain a battery, a socket for headphones and 1 gigabyte of memory that can store a stack of CDs.
The music has to be squirted into the Walkman from a PC, using Sony’s SonicStage software. So we duly installed the software on our PC and connected the Walkman to the PC’s USB socket as instructed. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Sometimes the computer crashed, sometimes not.
Then up on screen came a Microsoft error message. We can only speculate on the acrimony of the dialogue between Sony and Microsoft that produced this message, because we have never seen one like it: “Error Caused By Sony Corporation: No Specific Solution Found…An analyst at Microsoft has investigated this problem and determined that an unknown error occurred in OpenMG-SonicStage Jukebox. This software was created by Sony Corporation:Microsoft has researched this problem with Sony Corporation, and they do not currently have a solution for the problem”.
Little doubt there: Microsoft thinks Sony was to blame. So we contacted Sony to ask if there was a solution yet. A technical expert was delegated to talk. “We hadn’t seen the Microsoft message,” he confessed. “I wasn’t aware of any problems and our customer information line isn’t aware of any either. And if Microsoft says there isn’t a solution, then presumably there isn’t one”.
Call us technologically challenged, but we are now rather at a loss what to do next.
FINALLY a company called Westwind Energy sensibly consulted the local community over its plans to construct a wind farm on Mount Mercer in Victoria, Australia. It bussed a group of people from the area to a working wind farm in nearby Challicum Hills. The result, according to site manager Geoff Collins in the online news report Peter Woods alerted us to, was an endorsement of the company’s plans – but not, perhaps, of its command of arithmetic. “We took 40 people down there,” says Collins, “and 99 per cent of them were unconcerned once they’d seen a wind farm in operation.”
