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When you find yourself emailing a couple of links to enough people it usually turns out that it makes sense to just post it to the Web. That way you can happily assume that everyone has seen the stuff you're linking to, while they can all happily and obliviously move forward with their lives and leave you sitting quietly wibbling to yourself in the corner. Or, as they say, "blogging".

In that spirit, here are two Japanese origami videos on YouTube. One shows in time-lapse the making of a phoenix, the other shows a few models including a couple of dragons. The artist's name is Satoshi Kamiya.

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No, the title isn't a reference to Alan Carr or Graham Norton. It refers to a quote by biologist J.B.S. Haldane, that the world is "not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." It is also the title of a talk by Richard Dawkins, given at Oxford in July last year.

Clearly this talk was given at a time when Dawkins' was consolidating and preparing his thoughts for The God Delusion. For the benefit of those who are put off by the title of that book, neither the talk nor the book carry the degree of negativity that you might suppose. Both are, as anyone who has read Dawkins before will expect, more about promoting a scientific world view than it about denigrating a non-scientific one.

The central point of the talk is the proposition that our view of the universe is dependent on our position within it, specific that we exist on a medium scale neither small enough to innately comprehend quantum effects nor large enough to grasp galactic scales. That therefore we are naturally unable to grasp the nuances of the oddness of the universe.

Anyone else who likes to play a game of "Where's Douglas?" when listening to or reading Dawkins will note that the game is becoming increasingly easy. To be fair, if I had been friends with Douglas Adams I'd go on about it the whole time too.

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My copy of The God Delusion is in transit from Amazon, and I expect that many of my readers are in similar circumstances. While we all wait, there's a video on YouTube of Jeremy Paxman interviewing Richard Dawkins about the book.

Interestingly, I find it very difficult to tell what Paxman's own beliefs might be. He doesn't go easy, but neither does he appear to simply feed Dawkins the questions he most happily address. I suppose that can stand as a testament to his journalistic integrity, something that begins to stand out for me as I see more videos of American interviews. Dawkins makes a typically sturdy defence of his position. Not terribly surprising given the strength of the position he's defending.

Paxman gives some time to the question of whether the sense of worth and happiness that many people derive from their faith should be ignored. Dawkins, quite rightly in my view, maintains not only that that question has no bearing on the truthfulness of religious claims—which is inarguable—but also that to him truth is more valuable and more desirable than comfortable ignorance.

A brief TV interview obviously can not address the entire topic of the veracity of religion. I doubt even that a whole book can make a serious dent in the subject, vast as it is. But Dawkins is most certainly the person I would favour in framing our side of the argument, and I look forward to reading what will be his first book solely dedicated to the subject.

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