Now, as the feeder and cleaner (I am sure they own me, and not the other way around) of three unruly rabbits, rulers of the household, destroyers of furniture, I understand the importance of household pets in the hierarchy of daily life. In my household, there are for instance few more important items to discuss than the mood of the patriarch of our rabbit menage a trois, Friedhelm:

Hint: sulky.

However, my household is not a major national newscaster. Nevertheless, the BBC’s Wales news division decided to dedicate bandwith and airtime to the story of Sooty, the guinea pig who decided to abscond from his cage and enter the living quarters of his 22 female compadres and have 2 days of passionate lovemaking (or ‘menage a vingt-deux’ in the language of love). Quote his owner, Ms Carol Feehan, 42:

“We knew that Sooty had gone missing and we looked for him everywhere but never thought of checking the pen where we keep the females.

“We did a head count and found 25 guinea pigs – Sooty was fast asleep in the corner.

“He was absolutely shattered – we put him back in his cage and he slept for two days.”

So there you have it: The world’s media (and this blog) provided Sooty with his 7.5 minutes . Long may he rest on his laurels.

Last night, when I couldn’t sleep and needed some entertainment, I listened to Steve Mirsky from the Scientific American Podcast talk to Stephen Asma. Dr Asma works at Columbia College’s Department of Liberal Education and recently published an article about his visit to the creationist museum in Kentucky (no, there will be no link to the museum. Find it yourself. But the link to the article is here).

While I am not going to recap all the hilarious stories that young earth evolutionists want you to believe, I was reminded of a talk that I heard two years ago at the New Zealand Conference of Psychiatrists in 2005 about the fine line between delusion and ‘firm belief’. In the U.S. of this century, having the firm belief that aliens are abducting people and that there is a zionist world conspiracy will probably not even get a raised eyebrow in certain parts of Montana, while in Europe people would move away from you rapidly. Believing devoutly that a man, born by a virgin was able to raise the dead and did so himself on easter, is a completely acceptable concept for billions of Christians, though Richard Dawkins and other sceptics would scoff at that story.

So, there is a fine line between ‘firm beliefs’ and delusions. That of course makes a psychiatrist’s job not particularly easy, but it also raises the question about how to behave in the presence of a young earth creationists. Let’s say you meet a nice young couple at a party: they’re friendly, well educated, have a delightful family, a nice sense of humour and a steady job, and then tell you that earth is 5800 years old, made by a super intelligent, benevolent entity and that Noah fitted a pair of every species into the ark to save them from a giant flood (btw, I think I remember the last species count was around 1.5 million. And what about the amoebae? And Gardnerella?). What do you do? In my personal view, there are three strategies.

• You smile and mention that you’re not religious at all and try to move away from the topic because, apart from the creationist thing, they’re really nice.
• You smile and say goodbye, citing bladder problems.
• You laugh your head off and leave.
• You stay and argue.

These strategies all have inheritant flaws and will potentially upset a perfectly nice couple. But then, should you really care? Dealing with our fellow humans who have ‘firm beliefs’ tests us everyday: it challenges our tolerance, our argumentation skills and our own beliefs.

I hold the firm belief that Matt Bianco is the best band ever, but if I mention this on parties, people start rolling their eyes and start inching away from me. That makes me feel like an atheist on a prayer meeting but then I at least don’t try to convince everybody from my absolute correctness in this matter (ok, so I send the odd cd around, but nobody gets hurt, do they?).

That of course puts Matt Bianco dangerously close to evangelical christianity. I don’t think that was the intended outcome of this entry.

Oh well…

Professor Paul Patterson from the California Institute of Technology has presented some data at a neuroscience conference in Melbourne last week, indicating that flu like illnesses in pregnancy can cause schizophrenia or autism later in life of the child. He leads by example. Savour this quote from an interview with the ABC’s Barbara Miller:

BARBARA MILLER: Women, pregnant women, hearing this would be extremely worried. Do you think they should be?

PAUL PATTERSON: I don’t think it’s a matter of alarm, I think it’s just a matter of commonsense really.
You know, I do it myself because I don’t like to get colds. So when I go shopping, after I get in my car I wipe my hands with a disinfectant and when my child is sick with a cold, I’m always washing my hands after touching him and contacting his clothes and so on, I wash my hands.
These are commonsense measures. It’s just that we don’t do them normally because we’re not hyper worried about a cold; we just accept it as a fact of life.

Now, this raises multiple questions about the good Professor’s life: does he use public transport? Has he ever visited London without a full body armour? How has he been able to procreate without getting exposed to evil viruses? Does he permanently smell of Dettol?
And how often does he cuddle his child when it is ill?

Eau de Dettol, the Aftershave for concerned hygienist.

I recently got handed a nice Presario 2600 notebook by a friend. Apparently it was too slow to be usable, took 15 minutes to boot and was pretty much as useful as a stuffed rabbit with too many holes in it to contain its sandy filling. I booted up Knoppix and ran F-Prot over it, but apart from a couple of cookies no malware or rootkits. The machine had a Pentium 4 and 256 MB of Ram on board, so not particularly speedy compared to today’s machines, but still enough to run Windows XP comfortably. There were the usual unnecessary background applications, but even after switching these off, the machine only crawled along. Then it dawned o me: somebody thoughtful had installed the whole Symantec security suite. This would even slow a modern machine to a grinding halt, so after a quick save of the most important data I reformatted the drive, divided the partitions and reinstalled windows and (of course) Linux. The machine is now very happy to run XP again with the lovely free Avira suite guarding against malware (and of course Spybot S&D) and the owner is happy to use firefox, Opera and Openoffice. And as soon as the user is comfy with those applications on windows, the switch to Linux will be a doddle.

It doesn’t always to have to be a Linux with a sledgehammer: sometimes little steps are easier and less frustrating for the user.

This morning, due to the increasingly hostile temperatures at night, our little rabit family was kept indoors. While Karl and Friedhelm were allowed to tear up the pantry, the less smelly Clara made herself comfortable in the living room. At 6:50 in the morning, as it is suppoosed to, my Nabaztag suddenly started to kick into life, bathing the living room in its characteristic purple ‘wake up’ lights when the best girlfriend ever suddenly yanked out the AV adaptor, saying ‘the rabbit will be scared senselessly and probably thinks she’ll get visited by little rabbit shaped aliens’.

Which raises the qustion: do rabbits think that aliens should be rabbit shaped?

Or are they far too busy contemplating the state of America’s involvement in Iraq?