Daily Archives: April 30, 2017

One of the presenters of this years Sofia Science Festival is the British science communication and public engagement specialist Malcolm Love. He hosts his own radio show entitled Love and Science. Healso advises CEOs, politicians, academics and campaigners, travels the world and works as a freelance producer for the BBC. During his early career, Love worked as a pastor in London (Battersea). Today he describes himself as a devout sceptic. Some two weeks before his event in Sofia, entitled Religion and Science Mapping the Conflict Zone, we interviewed Malcolm Love.

The Sofia Globe (TSG): You will be giving a speech on one of the most interesting topics of the Science Festival: Science and religion. Obviously the Dawkins approach is not yours. So, how can religion, which works entirely without proof, coexist with science?

Malcolm Love: Wow to answer that Id have to give you my entire talk! But I can say a few things about it. Firstly, I am simply going to try and clarify the state of play and try to define key positions in the current debate between religious and scientific world-views. Despite appearances religion and science have co-existed quite happily for most of their history (including recent history). We are familiar with a few high profile spats Galileo being forced by the inquisition to recant his view that the earth orbits the Sun in the 1600s; The Huxley and Wilberforce debate in 1860 (around Darwins theory of evolution) and the Scopes Monkey trial (where a teacher was prosecuted in Tennessee in 1925, for teaching Dawinian evolution, as contrary to the Bible). These events would make you think that their relationship was pure conflict, but actually, science and religion have rarely been at war. As we speak Pope Francis has just declared his view that Big Bang theory and Evolution theory are true theories and that God should not be regarded as a magician with a magic wand. The story does get more complicated however because it depends on what you think passes for religion and what you take to be solid scientific rationalism. For the rest youll have to come to the talk!

TSG:You advise scientists on communication. How accurate is that clich about the tight-lipped scientist, who hides in a lab in some university basement while doing research and has no clue how to bring his message across? And how do you help him or her?

Malcolm Love: Well, a few scientists would rather self-select to talk to computers rather than people. Thats true. But its because those particular people are very gifted at focusing down on mathematical and technical detail. We really need people like that, and sometimes the trade off for them is with sociability. But the vast majority of scientists though are just regular people struggling with the fact that science requires a special language mathematics and technical terminology and this makes it hard to translate. So essentially I try to inspire them by showing them some of the brilliant role model examples of science communicators you can find all over the place now (including at the Sofia Science Festival). I point out that science communication primarily attempts to enthuse its audience with bite-sized information and inspires with the stories of science rather than engages in a programme of science education. Science communication is also diverse so it has a place for writers, designers, event producers, TV and radio presenters, scientists who can give talks or put on shows of various kinds and so on. In my work I often run workshops and seminars to help people develop public communication skills for working with or talking to live audiences or interacting with mass media etc. Its important to give scientists both self confidence to communicate as well as the know how.

TSG: What are the topics you cover in your popular show Love and Science? What kind of feedback to you get? Is it possible to make science more interesting for everyone? How? What should happen in schools, in this regard?

Malcolm Love: Yes, Love and Science might sound like a dubious show about sexual relationships! But actually we look at science in the news and behind the news. Its a show based in Bristol (West coast of UK) on a station called BCfm. Which is a fabulous station full of diverse programmes and amazingly committed radio and community enthusiasts. (Its also broadcast on the internet and can be streamed at bcfmradio.com). Ipresent it with my friend andcolleague Andrew Glester. Andrew is also our resident astronomer. In our show we cover as many of the current science stories as we can. We do sometimes end up majoring on one thing such as what Trump means for American science. But thats not usual. The idea is that the listener is sitting having a tea or a coffee (or driving in their car) in the company of a small group of friends who are having accessible and interesting chats around science stuff. Its very conversational. We have guests in the studio and on the phone and wherever possible (because its a locally based station) we try first to get local comment. So if a new dinosaur fossil is found for example we would try first to get a paleontologist from Bristol University to tell us about it. But weve had some high profile TV presenters on the show and have even spoken to people on NASAs Curiosity team after it landed on Mars and started roaming about. (I remember their work shifts were following Martian days not earth days).

To answer you other question science IS interesting. It just needs liberating from real and perceived barriers. Science education invites people to a vocation. It is a long hard route that requires commitment and demanding work. We need plenty of people to go that route. But science communication tries to reach everyone. It tries to fill people with enthusiasm and the pleasure of understanding a little science. It tries to show people that although they are not experts they can discuss science and have views on science in the same way that non artists can appreciate art and have art in their home and talk about art with others. As for schools I say the same applies. Science has to be taught well and imaginatively to potential scientists. But most kids wont become scientists. However, they can still know that having some science in their lives could be an enriching and rewarding experience. I am aware this necessitates some kind of teaching revolution but, hey, why not?

TSG: You were a freelance correspondent in Central America, including El Salvador and Nicaragua. This must have been about the revolution by the Sandinistas, who later failed, when they were in power. What do you remember about the Somoza tines and the revolution?

Malcolm Love: The Sandinistas did an astonishing thing with unbelievable intelligence and courage when they overthrew the Somoza regime. The Somozas were an incredibly cruel and oppressive family of dictators. A favourite trick was to dropdissisdentslive into an active volcano by helicopter. The Sandinista revolution was before my time. WhenI eventually got there, Ronald Reagan had already formed and funded the Contra. This was a band of ex Somoza National Guard and various bandit mercenaries who harassed the Nicaraguan borders. They were extremely unpleasant people and although I had a few near misses, managed to avoid them. The Contra effectively formed a blockade and nothing worked. Most of the vehicles were un-roadworthy. If you went to a food shop or a bar or a restaurant the question was not what do you want to eat? you just asked que hay? what do you have to eat? Somehow there was always chicken! And I remember that butter and cheese were incredibly rare which seemed to me a great privation. People were just tired and weary. The main intention (certainly for young people) was to get out. If you were a gringo (possibly American or Brit) you became amazingly attractive! I remember being struck by the fact that Americans (in the US) insisted on talking about the Sandinistas and their leader, Daniel Ortega, as communist atheists. They refused to talk to them. The fact was that Ortegas administration was full of priests like the artist and poet, Fr Ernesto Cardenal minister for culture. These worker priests believed that radical politics were the only way to be Christian in that terrible time, in that terrible place. These people in my mind are heroes. But I dont blame Nicaraguans for eventually turning away from the Sandinistas they had been the revolutionary solution to an awful problem. But Reagan then punished the country for their revolution and just simply wore them out. So a new government had to come along. Such is the way of things, but at least Somoza and his appalling thugs were gone.

El Salvador was a different ball game. There the government and army was intent on crushing any sign of opposition. It was still a time when people were shot on the spot for not having correct ID papers on them. Salvador was a neo-feudal society where it was said just fourteen families (La Catorce) owned absolutely everything. It was at that time one of most dangerous places on earth and I still find it difficult to talk about some of things I saw there.

TSG: You seem to be travelling like crazy. Within three weeks, you have been to Portugal, Brazil and Uganda. In Uganda, tensions, corruption, poverty, rigged elections and other problems have affected the population for decades. What is your take on the situation there?

Malcolm Love: Ha! You missed out Azerbaijan! Well this time of the year I travel a lot for Famelab a science communication competition that encourages early career scientists to be better communicators. Their challenge is to wow a non-specialist audience with a talk about science in just 3 minutes. The wonderful British Council has promoted the event worldwide so we are now in up to thirty-three countries on all continents except Antarctica (and I note they happen to have a research station!!). Part of Famelab is to run a 2 day communication skills training event for the country finalists. Thats where I come in.

As for Uganda I really am no expert. It is still a very poor country with a weak infrastructure. So without that its hard for them to get things done. I know Museveni is regarded by many as a dictator, but by most measures people seem better off than they were. Thats certainly not me endorsing authoritarianism Im just saying things are generally getting better not worse, at least as far as I can tell. This is the guy who helped get rid of Idi Amin, for goodness sake, who was an out of control, homicidal, delusional psychopath. Like most places I was met in Uganda with nothing but kindness, goodwill and generosity.

TSG:Do you have a connection to Bulgaria? Have you worked here?

Malcolm Love: Yes, I have indeed worked in Bulgaria. And the main connection is my friend, the amazing Lyubov Kostova. Lyubov is now the country director of the British Council in Bulgaria. She is a force of nature and the person who had a big vision for Famelab that made it international in scope. Now thousands of people all over the world can be grateful to her because they have been part of Famelab the competition that tends to change peoples lives. She is also behind the Sofia Science Festival. Lyubov is definitely on the short list of the most inspiring people I have ever met.

TSG: Thank you, Mr. Love.

There is, of course, much more on the crowded programme of the 2017 Sofia Science Festival, including the numerous presentations in Bulgarian. For further details of the programme, and on how to buy tickets or reserve free seats, please visit theFestivals website.

The Sofia GlobeandBulgaria Noware media partners of the2017 Sofia Science Festival.

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Sofia Science Festival 2017: "Religion and Science" with Malcolm Love - The Sofia Globe

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Make no mistake, these marches today are no more about global warming than last weekends were about defending science. Theyre just an anti-Trump protest by the same people who in January this year were marching around dressed as vaginas, and who in Berkeley the last few weekends have been beating people up wearing facemasks.

Its no coincidence that many of the organizations on the Peoples Climate March steering committee are in receipt of millions from Democrat donor, arch-globalist, and Agent of Evil George Soros.

Mr. Soros, who heads the Open Society Foundations, contributed over $36 million between 2000 and 2014 to 18 of the 55 organizations on the marchs steering committee, according to an analysis released Friday by the conservative Media Research Center.

Six of the groups received during that time more than $1 million each: the Center for Community Change, the NAACP, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Peoples Action, Public Citizen and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Even if you didnt know this, the clues are in the signs, spotted by Collegians For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) an organization which tries to bring rationalism, facts and sanity to the climate debate and Steve Milloy.

Yes. Administration Change. That will totally stop non-existent global warming from happening.

See also: Tooth Fairy; Santa Claus; yes, of course, Ill still love you in the morning

Communism. Yup: just whatthe world needs to sort out its environmental problems.Thats why Beijing is so famously unpolluted; why there are so many fish in the Aral Sea; why Chernobyl is today such a thriving nature reserve

And this has to do with global warming what, exactly?

Aka Watermelons green on the outside, red on the inside.

Aw! How sweet! They want to behead the President. Arent environmentalists just the cutest, most sensitive and CARING people?

Meanwhile in Vienna, theyre not even pretending its about anything other than Marxism.

How is this even possible? Do these Greenies really know as little about science as I fear?

See the original post:

DELINGPOLE: The People's Climate March - AKA Watermelons ... - Breitbart News

Bleakly absurd acts of violence Kill List. Photograph: Allstar/Optimum

Folk horror sounds like a contradiction in terms, like a blend of Aran knitwear and paranoia, morris-dancing and carnage. Mark Gatiss popularised the phrase, which is apt, since The League of Gentlemen helped seed the genres recent revival. The League found the funny in The Wicker Man, though it wasnt hard to locate: it was always difficult to take seriously a movie where a strutting, bewigged Christopher Lee sonorously orders Edward Woodward, disguised as a dour jester in a Punch costume, to: Cut some capers, man! Use your bladder!

According to Gatiss, folk horrors central trinity consists of three films from the late 1960s and early 70s: Michael Reevess Witchfinder General, a brooding tale of sadism and revenge in East Anglia during the civil war; Piers Haggards Blood on Satans Claw, in which a cult of adolescents hundreds of years ago commit a series of murders in order to incarnate Satan in the countryside; and Robin Hardys The Wicker Man, about a policeman lured into being a human sacrifice for island-dwelling pagans.

However, a new wave has appeared in the last decade. It includes: Ben Wheatleys Kill List, which begins like Get Carter, with hitmen out on a job, and ends with a terrifying twist; David Keatings eerie, gory Wake Wood, about a couple who move to a village after the death of their daughter; and, in print, Andrew Michael Hurleys recent sombre masterpiece The Loney, in which a family go on a pilgrimage to a shrine, seeking a cure for the elder brother.

Folk horror, which is the subject of a new season at the Barbican, presents the dark dreams Britain has of itself. The films pick up on folks association with the tribal and the rooted. And our tribe turns out to be a savage one: the countryside harbours forgotten cruelties, with the old ways untouched by modernity and marked by half-remembered rituals.

It is a place that is both enticing and threatening. The films are symptoms of the disease they purport to diagnose: manifestations of our troubled, citified response to anything natural, beautiful and not mechanical. Sometimes, these works seek to unnerve us through fear while still reaching for an enchanted vision of landscape and rural peace. But the ecstatic quietness of Samuel Palmers paintings of Shoreham, or Wordsworths universal Cumbria, do not sit well with gothic shudders. The anxiety undoes the idyll and, rather than imagining a visionary Britain, folk horror evokes a land haunted by the past, by old nightmares, by sex.

They may lurch into the ludicrous, but with surprising earnestness these films nonetheless play out a three-way philosophical debate: between enlightened rationalism, orthodox Christianity and renewed paganism. Sex is at the heart of this debate: just as these films both adore and recoil from natural beauty, so human loveliness entrances and repels them.

Hence the repeated moment when a young, beautiful blond woman (Linda Hayden in Blood on Satans Claw, Britt Ekland in The Wicker Man) tempts some ascetic outsider, like a pale imitation of Salome trying to seduce John the Baptist. So we have tight-lipped Woodward sweating in his neatly ironed pyjamas while a nude Ekland cavorts and croons in the neighbouring bedroom.

In the best of such films, in Kill List for example, the conspiring coven are merely jokers busy manipulating the lonely dupe, and duping the audience in the process. The agnostics and Christians are perplexed and doubtful, while the pagans and satanists are smugly knowing. Theyre in on the gag.

The films feature a recurring archetype: the arrival of a stranger, the discovery of a secret cult, then a vicious murder, perhaps a sacrifice, designed to propitiate pagan gods. The metropolitan visitor, the outsider from the mainland, comes into a situation strange to them and to us. Here the enlightened laws of the nation do not pertain. In these forgotten spaces, there are other laws: rules and rituals that are both familiar remnants of some tribal memory yet utterly strange. The locals understand, while we do not. Their rootedness in place becomes uncanny. Once, almost everyone was so rooted. But now in the discontinuous world of modernity, where relationships are casual and work comes and goes such belonging feels strange and even sinister.

As the stories progress, that solitary figure gets caught up in a myth and a rite. Alan Garners marvellous novel The Owl Service, which was adapted for TV, follows this pattern: its based on a Welsh myth about a woman created from flowers who betrays her husband and is turned into an owl. Here, as in other folk horror tales, being inside a myth is terrifying, a fall from the industrialised, supermarket world into one possessed by abysmal powers. In these dramas, The Golden Bough turns gothic.

For, if it were only a matter of sex versus asceticism, wed just have a load of re-enactments of Lady Chatterleys Lover. But in folk horror, the crowd destroys the individual. You are not up against some forlorn witch, but a cult. It is not the government thats out to get you, but your neighbours. You are going to be killed, but you cannot protest, for it is the will of the people. The majority prevails.

But this victory for decent people looks manic: the grins are forced, all doubt is suppressed. In their portrayal of the crowd, these films display a kind of power worship the mob over the individual. Later, we may side with another crowd, the revengers, but that identification will be just as dehumanising. As long as there is blood and suffering, we are supposed to be satisfied.

In two works on one edge of the genre David Rudkins BBC drama Pendas Fen and Peter Shaffers play Equus sexual confusion is also at work. But, although there is horror, there is no murderous crowd. To the jaded psychiatrist in Equus, the young man he is treating possesses an enviable ecstasy, even if the youths sexual feelings and instinct for worship are directed at a horse. Behind all Freudianism, the play taps the root of a connection to the wild.

Pendas Fen, meanwhile, somehow manages to bring together Edward Elgar, a coming out in 1970s rural England, religious doubt, cold war paranoia, and an encounter between a grammar-school boy and the last pagan king of England. It is a dream of renewal: the countryside stands against cold rationality, against industry. Like Equus, which was filmed in 1977 and recently revived with Daniel Radcliffe, this is folk horror at its most fruitful . The connection the religious experience belongs to a solitary figure. There is no crowing crowd. These are not stories of coercion, nor of human victims, but of selves dark, true, impure and dissonant as Rudkin has it. In both, a lonely boy tries to summon up a mystical intensity, as vision and reality blur.

Whats different, and striking, here is that it is almost a rule in folk horror that the supernatural is banned. In The Wicker Man or Kill List, no one expects some gloomy god to appear. The evil is entirely human. There is no divine appearance in Kill List, no conjuration, just bleakly absurd acts of extreme aggression, suicidal and murderous all at once.

In fact, in the folk horror revival, the mystery no longer draws on fecundity and rebirth. Now the secret is violence. Wheatley is undoubtedly the master here. Both Kill List and A Field in England, his psychedelic fable set during the English civil war, transform cinema into a nightmare imbued with history and politics. Although he lives a drab suburban life, one built on and paid for by violence, Kill Lists returned soldier protagonist has become an essentially murderous man. He and his partner may think they are crusaders, King Arthurs knights executing horrible people, but we quickly realise they are just vicious killers themselves.

When they finally appear, the cultists are empty, faceless, uninterested in their own self-preservation, thanking the men who torture them, charging carelessly into a hail of bullets. Only mayhem, cruelty and violence engages them. As one, they politely applaud each extreme act of violence, their bland automatic approval part of the ritual.

Ultimately, this ghastly applause tells us that the cultists are the cinema audience. The pagan rite we are witnessing is the film itself. A sense of complicity was always part of folk horror. The gang-rape and murder in Blood on Satans Claw begins from the victims point of view, but then plays out through the watching mobs lascivious gaze. The killing crowd in these movies is us.

Into the Woods is at the Barbican, London, 3-25 May.

See more here:

Cults, human sacrifice and pagan sex: how folk horror is flowering again in Brexit Britain - The Guardian