Doc Rampage

fact checking Politifact

2012-01-14T11:08:00.000-08:00

Politifact has given a "mostly false" rating to this statement:

New energy standards will take away "our freedom of choice and selection in the light bulbs we have in our homes."

Yet the statement is 100% true as Politifact notes:

the standards will ultimately bring about the end of traditional incandescent bulbs

Which means that we will not have the freedom to chose traditional incandescent bulbs. How is that not a taking away our freedom of choice? Apparently, Politifact doesn't consider it "taking away our freedom of choice" if no one is taking away the choices that they (the people at Politifact) prefer.

I've got to score this statement by Politifact as "pants on fire".

parables

2012-01-07T15:07:00.000-08:00

Marcel comments on my previous post that he thinks the birds in the mustard tree are gentiles. This suggested to me a thought on the interpretation of the parables (take this for what it is, I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, claim to be an expert on parables).

My thought was that I try to think of a justification for viewing the birds as gentiles, and it goes something like this: "well, the tree represents the kingom of God and there are only good things in the Church so the birds must be something good that are sort of added after the main church --hey, the gentiles were the latecomers, so..."

But that seems rather a backwards way to interpret a parable. Recall that Jesus had a specific purpose in speaking in parables --he wanted to confuse people. He want people to hear without hearing. If you can figure out the whole meaning of a parable just by logic, it seems that Jesus wasn't doing a very good job of hiding things.

It seems that to understand what Jesus was saying, you have to have access to the secret key. Part of the key is his surely the private explanation that he gave to his disciples of how to interpret the parable of the sower. That parable also had seeds which grew into plants, which represented the kingdom of God. In that parable, the birds represented Satan which ate the seed, snatching the word of God away before it can bear fruit. What do you think birds do in mustard trees? I'll bet they are eating the new mustard seeds.

Bearing fruit is another thing. In other parables, plants that represent the kingdom of God or believers show that they are in God's will by bearing fruit. There is nothing in this parable that says the mustard tree is bearing fruit, just that it is sheltering these mysterious birds.

Is there any other parable where sheltering birds represents something good? Well, there's the metaphor of a chicken sheltering her chicks under her wings, but that's not a parable, the meaning is manifest, and it's really exploiting the relationship of motherhood, not the mere fact of sheltering.

Finally, there is the fact that in a number of other parables, Jesus clearly is talking about bad influences in the Church, such as the parable of the wheat and the tares and the parable of drawing in the net. This seems to have been a point that he wanted to stress: just because someone is among the believers does not mean that he is a believer.

The parable of the wheat and the tares seems to teach that it is not our responsibility to sift out the unbelievers --that is a task for God. I propose that the point of the mustard seed was slightly different --that the entire Church as a body would grow into something unnaturally large that sheltered evil.

apologia for protestantism

2012-01-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

The following is my response to John C. Wright's argument for the primacy of the Catholic Church. You should probably read his argument first, because my excerpts are pretty minimal.

I know of no prophet who claims to be teaching a new doctrine that improves upon the past and is disconnected with it

I think all of them do (other than Protestantism). Every one of the other Christian-derived religions has new scriptures that came centuries or more after Christ that offer new and unheard-of revelations.

All a man concerned with the return to the uncorrupted beliefs of the Early Church need do is quote the writings of the Early Church

To Protestants, the "Early Church" is the first-century Church during the lives of the apostles and the writings that they consider reliable from this period are called the "New Testament". Where we disagree is in your assumption that there was a single organization known as the Church in this period. To Protestants, the Church is simply the aggregate body of all believers; it is not an organization and there is no special "approved" set of doctrines that could be checked. Every individual church had its own peculiarities. Again, there simply is no authoritative source other than the New Testament.

and then a long gap where nothing was written and nothing was said worthy noticing, until the rise of the founder of the breakaway Church, whose words are studied with care

If there are earlier writers who don't propound serious theological errors then I'm sure that they would be read with respect if not deference, but the errors of the Catholics are considered very serious by modern Protestants. Taking religious advice from a man who prays to Mary seems as dubious to a Protestant as taking religious advice from a man who prays to Zeus would seem to you. You can't really appreciate the Protestant view without appreciating how appalled they are at Catholic practices. When they accuse Catholics of idolatry and worship of false gods (aka "saints") --that is not just mean-spirited rhetoric; it is a description of their honest position on the matter. And it is not a capricious position but one that is soundly supported by scripture and history.

The older the date on the claim, the less believable it is. I am more willing to believe an argument that the Church of AD 1400 went astray than that the Church of AD 400 or AD 40

Again Protestants don't accept the idea of a single organization called "the Church" so there is no single point of failure to map this to. That is, there is no single time when the Church went astray. The Church has always contended with false doctrines and there have always been false brethren among the true. We know this from the Epistles and from the teachings of Christ who predicted exactly that. You agree with this presumably, but where we differ is that to Protestants the solution to this problem is to test every teacher and prophet in the light of Scripture as Jesus instructed, while you believe that there is a special authority, an organization that does not need to be tested because it is the God-ordained Church. (Actually, I'm not really sure what you think about that because you must be aware that there have been some extraordinarily evil things done by the Catholic Church, so you must agree that the Catholic Church and the Pope cannot be trusted without reservation, right?)

In a game of Russian Telephone, the boy who hears the message first is, statistically speaking, less likely to be suffering from accumulated errors

That doesn't really apply --or only very weakly-- when the communication is written rather than oral. By that consideration, the oral traditions of the Catholic Church are much more questionable than the written scriptures.

It is less unbelievable to say the followers of a student of a disciple of an apostle of Christ mistook or corrupted the teaching of Christ than to say that the disciples of the apostles mistook or corrupted it; still less the apostles; still less Christ Himself.

Only Christ is without error. We know for a fact that the Apostles erred. Peter denied Christ three times. Even in later years, Paul writes of having to correct Peter for hypocrisy. And we know that direct students of the Apostles erred because lots of the Epistles were written to correct them. this idea of some Golden Age of Church Perfection is just not something that Protestants believe, and frankly it's not at all credible.

a mere theologian claims to have deduced the original and uncorrupted teaching of the Church using no other source than official Church teachings, and the reflections of natural reason

And many prayers and supplications for the Holy Spirit to give guidance and wisdom. Protestant theologians and teachers are, for the most part, very humbly aware of the solemn task that they have taken on. They do not have the confidence of a Pope or a Priest that he has been granted a special dispensation to speak for God. They are just regular, error-prone men who have to rely on the grace of God to do anything good because good comes only from God. Really, ask a Protestant preacher some time how he can be so sure he's right and I bet you will be surprised at the humility of the answer. The idea that Protestants rely purely on natural reason is a distortion that, I speculate, comes from conflating the Reformation with the Enlightenment.

If the one, true, catholic, and apostolic Church Christ founded is corrupt and heretical, then Christ is forsworn of his word to send a comforter to guide his disciples in to all wisdom, or, to be precise, that the Church disobeyed this spirit.

I'm not sure how the Church disobeying the Spirit amounts to Christ being foresworn. He often predicted that such things would happen and that's probably why he never created a single hierarchy of leadership for the Church. Instead he created 12 leaders, each to found dozens of churches, each church to send out missionaries to found dozens more. And as the Enemy corrupted one church, other uncorrupted churches would spring up to replace them and carry on the Good Work. To Protestants, the Catholic Church is just one of the Enemy's biggest successes --a mustard seed that grew out of all proportion and the birds of the air (which represented Satan in Jesus's parables) nested in its branches. The Protestants are not without historical justification when they call the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon --the whore (a people unfaithful to God) who was drunk with the blood of the saints (a Christian, anyone who partakes of the Holy Spirit). The Catholic Church murdered many Christians during her time of dominance --a difficulty that it seems is much more pressing for you than your hermeneutic difficulties are for Protestants.

by what right can that one next claim that the revived church resisted corruption for a season, a decade, or a century or three, or however old it is now?

They don't. There is, in this corrupt age, no single Church, pure and uncorrupted. The wheat will continue to grow with the tares until the final harvest. At most a Protestant would say "I believe that this church, today, is within the will of God because I have tested it and it is true to Scripture." That's why many Protestant churches have what they call a "statement of faith". It is not, as some outsiders believe, intended to teach doctrine, rather it is their test answers, to be handed out to anyone who wants to grade how well they conform to Scripture.

economics 101

2012-01-02T19:09:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Bill Whittle's "Firewall" videos. One of the best is this one on economics. He explains one of the fundamental misunderstandings of Leftists: that wealth is something that is created by work, not just passed around from person to person.

This is something that I have tried and failed to explain to people who believe in "economic stimulus". Their theory is that wealth somehow magically appears just because money is moving around in the economy. The idea is that the government takes money from people and gives it back to them (or other people with better political connections) and that this makes the money get moved and spent more, thus increasing GDP.

But real wealth is created when two people engage in a voluntary transaction and both go away feeling that they are better off than they were before. They both have given up something, but they both have gained something that they value more. Wealth has been created because both people feel that they are wealthier.

Taxes don't do that. When you take taxes from one person and give the money to another person, only one person is better off and the other person is worse off. You have not created wealth, you have only transferred it from one person to another.

Drift Away

2012-01-01T07:19:00.000-08:00

I just read that Dobie Gray died on December 6th. His song, "Drift Away", is one of the most moving secular songs ever performed. The lyrics are melancholy, the melody is haunting and Dobie Gray sings it with so much soul that you can share the anguish and the relief of the singer, a man who craves meaning but settles instead for temporary solace in the joy of music.

Dobie,

Thanks for the joy that you've given me
I want you to know I believe in your song
And rhythm and rhyme and harmony
You help me along
Makin' me strong

Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock n roll
And drift away

quote of the year

2011-12-01T20:11:00.000-08:00

By Marcel:

A preacher can almost never be persuaded by rational argument not to use fashionable technology. Hiding the extension cord is only a short-term fix. If the projector disappears or “accidentally” doesn’t work, they’ll just buy a new one. Something like TV B Gone might help in some cases, but often these things are hard-wired. Really I think PowerPoint, once in the church, does not go out except by prayer and fasting.

why I despise LinkedIn

2011-11-14T00:15:00.000-08:00

LinkedIn is a career networking site that supposedly helps you find jobs. I guess it's because their business revolves so much around finding jobs, that they don't give a damn if they get people fired.

The site is filled with little traps that make it almost impossible to use it to look for a job without letting your current employer know that you are looking. Add a head hunter as a contact? Your current employer gets an email about it within the week. Ask someone for a recommendation? When you get the recommendation, it shows up on your profile and your boss gets an email about it. You can, if you know about it, hide recommendations that you receive, but the guy who sent you the recommendation can't hide it from his side. It shows up on his profile also, and if your boss is connected to him, your boss gets the email.

They don't tell you this stuff. And they keep adding things about you to the list of public information without telling you that they are doing so. You have to check your profile page regularly to see what they are telling the world --and especially business contacts and possible future employers-- about you.

Although LinkedIn is heavily used by employers in my area, I'm seriously thinking about deleting my account. Their despicable attitude towards user privacy makes Google look like a radical privacy advocate.

No. I'm not looking for a job. :) I just happened to look at my profile and noticed that it contains recommendations that I have given to other people even though I had no idea it was going to do this. In my world a "recommendation" is something private that is only seen by the person that you send it to. In LinkedIn, there is no such think as privacy.

a former engineering student speaks out about the cruelty

2011-11-12T23:44:00.000-08:00

Douglas Kern thinks that engineering schools are doing a bad job of teaching (link from Instapundit). His main complaints revolve around the fact that it is so hard to retain a good GPA and that the teaching tends to be poor. A similar article by Kenneth Anderson recently talked about how inflated grades in other disciplines are making it less attractive to go into science, math and engineering disciplines where grade inflation has not happened.

I don't think I agree with either assessment. People who hire engineers know about engineering classes and take it into account when they evaluate GPAs. The comparison of GPAs between departments is primarily of concern to extroverts and career climbers, but people like that would not typically make good engineers (there are exceptions of course).

Good engineers are people whose self image is bound up in the difficulty and the quality of their work, not on their level in the company hierarchy. They are people who focus on the problem, not on whether their customers or employers like them. Anecdote time: once upon a time, a sales rep told me a story about "successful" problem solving; it went something like this:

once upon a time, there was a tall building with a slow elevator. The building manager was beset with complaints about the slow elevator, so he installed mirrors in the elevator lobbies. People were distracted by the mirrors and stopped complaining about the slow elevators.

The sales rep thought he was telling me about a clever, out-of-the box solution to a problem. I, an engineer, was horrified. That building manager had completely misinterpreted the problem. Being a self-centered little prick (this is my engineering-based assessment of the building manager), he thought the problem was that people were complaining about the slow elevator. He didn't want to be bothered by the complaints. His solution was to reduce the complaints.

But the complaints were not the problem. The complaints were only an indicator of the problem. The problem was that the elevator was too slow. What occurred immediately to me, is that I hate slow elevators but have never complained to building management about them. I also don't enjoy looking at myself in the mirror. Yes, I am awesomely good looking but I don't get distracted by awesomely good-looking men. Now if he had put some good auto and hardware cheesecake calenders in the lobby, ... wait. I'm getting off of my point here.

The point is that I suspect there is a strong correlation between people who complain about slow elevators and people who are easily distracted by seeing themselves in a mirror. You may call this an introvert prejudice if you like. Yes, I do think extroverts are both the kinds of people who think that their minor inconveniences merit complaints more often than introverts do, and also that extroverts are the kinds of people who tend to be distracted by seeing themselves in the mirror. Also by small shiny objects. But regardless of who these people are, the manager only solved the trivial problem that some people were nagging him, while ignoring the real problem that was causing the nagging. It would probably have been cheaper for him to just ignore the nagging if he could not afford to fix the elevators.

So with that background, I'd suggest that engineering schools are doing a pretty good job at selecting for people who will be good engineers --namely introverts who love math, science, and making things work.

The hard grading and lower GPAs select for people who don't care much about how other people evaluate them. This will not be good for their career in general, but it makes them better engineers because it means that they tend to focus on solving the problem rather than on avoiding complaints. Good estimates (rather than optimistic ones), taking the time to get the job right, spending the money needed to do it right --these things tend to get complaints from customers and managers, but overall they make you a better engineer.

Even the poor teaching is beneficial at weeding out people who are not self learners or are not interested in the subject matter. Most of my teachers in math and science were horrible but I learned from the textbooks and from doing the problems. In fact, I preferred it that way. This is a very useful attribute as an engineer because modern science and technology change at a dizzying rate. If you aren't a self learner or are not personally interested in the subject matter, you have little chance of keeping up with it.

So you guys who where driven out of engineering should not feel that you got a raw deal. More than likely, if you were not cut out for an engineering education then you were not cut out for an engineering career. You should be glad that you found this out early rather than late.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I ought to tie this in with Instapundit's crusade on the education bubble. Glenn Reynolds has been arguing that some higher-education schools have been deceiving students with highly optimistic promises of career success to get their money. Now he is linking to these two posts that criticize engineering schools, effectively for not taking money --by forcing people out of the program. Aren't the engineering schools doing the ethical and honest thing by making a serious attempt to weed out the kids who aren't cut out to be engineers? Do law schools do that?

I just did a quick DuckDuckGo search and found rates of passing the bar exam listed anywhere from 40% to 80%. I think that's appalling given how much the people taking the bar exam have spent on law school. From this (admittedly sparse) information, it looks to me like law schools are either making no effort to weed people out or they are doing a piss poor job of it.

Former law students are complaining about law school because they didn't have the career success they thought they should have, and former engineering students are complaining that they were forced to go into another field, while the engineering students who were able to graduate are all pretty happy with their educations. Who is doing things right here?

another melancholy milepost

2011-11-06T20:47:00.000-08:00

I went to see a movie yesterday and the guy at the ticket counter asked me if I wanted a "senior" ticket. First time for me. Made me so depressed I had to go buy dark chocolate.

pretzels, fries, and cinnamon buns

2011-10-26T22:57:00.000-07:00

This foody post by Marcel made me think, "Why are Obama and Romney giving out rice-and-bean recipes?" There is probably some subtle subtext to the post, but it is beyond me.

More importantly, Firefox mentioned pretzels and that naturally made me think about chili-cheese fries. Seriously. I'm talking about food here, not making culinary metaphors. The reason I tie these two things together (pretzels and chili-cheese Fries, not food and metaphors) is because they are the two snack foods that I never tried for a long time.

When bacon cheeseburgers came out (yes, I have changed the subject again, please try to keep up and I will tie it all together at the end), I was among the first the try them. This was fairly easy since I was eating fast food for 10 or 12 meals per day anyway. They were woefully disappointing. I mean, I love bacon, and I love cheeseburgers, but the best way to eat a bacon cheeseburger is to take out the bacon and eat it, then eat the cheeseburger. Bacon just doesn't add anything to cheeseburgers.

It was with this history of crushing disappointment that I first became aware of these new-fangled chili-cheese fries. Sure, I love chili, I love cheese, and I love fries, but putting the three together didn't sound all that promising, especially given how much I love just plain fries with copious amounts of ketchup and/or tabasco sauce. Mmm.

Where was I? Oh, yes. So although I am a man of adventurous nature, looking ever to the next frontier, scorning the settled life and striving ever after the next range of unknown mountains, the next untamed sea, yet even for me, I thought the chili-cheese fries might be a bridge too far. The problem is not that I feared to taste them, it was the opportunity cost. If I ordered chili-cheese fries then I could not order regular fries, and given that don't allow myself to eat fries that often, this is a severe negative cost. So for years --decades even-- I labored on in ignorance of the taste of chili-cheese fries.

One day that all changed. For no reason, I decided to take my meal in my hands, brave the specter of crushing disappointment, and order chili-cheese fries. I won't keep you in suspense; I'll tell you right now how I felt about them. Not for me the cheap writer's trick of building up to a climax and then stretching it out, annoying the reader with pointless filler. You, dear reader, wish to know how I felt about these chili-cheese fries and I shall tell you: they were amazing. More than amazing, they were stunning. More than stunning, they were fried-potato nachos. Have I mentioned that I love nachos? Well, consider it mentioned.

I had been thinking of these chili-cheese fries all wrong. They weren't some bizarre combination of chili, cheese, and french fries, they were nachos, substituting french fries for corn chips. Looked at like that, how could you go wrong? Not that chili-cheese fries will steal my heart away from fries-with-ketchup or from traditional nachos, for that matter, but they have earned a place in my heart like the bacon cheeseburger could never do --a place warm and spicy and salty, with onions and jalapenos. And to be eaten with a fork, because fries are too narrow to scoop up the chili on their own.

And this inevitably brings us back to pretzels. Like chili-cheese fries, pretzels have long been on my radar as a potential snack adventure. I'm talking about those humongous twisted pretzels with topping on them, not the little pretzels you buy by the bag when you don't feel you deserve the true joy of potato chips. Like chili-cheese fries were, pretzels are an adventure that I have yet to taste because they are fraught with opportunity costs. Near every pretzel stand is a Cold Stone Creamery or a Cinnabun or some other snack-food place with known sugary goodness. Buying a pretzel would foreclose the opportunity to have a snack that I already know that I love.

Is it worth the risk? I know not. The struggle continues with every visit to the mall. One day, perhaps. Yes. One day, perhaps.

two earthquakes in one day

2011-10-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

There was a 4.2-magnitude in San Francisco around 2pm today. At my place it was just a sudden jerk like you would get if you were in a car going two or three miles per hour and slammed the breaks.

Just now (about 8:30pm) there was another one. It felt a big more vigorous and lasted a lot longer. Maybe 5 seconds or so. I'll have to wait a while for the news to tell me what the size was.

Well, the main reason I moved to the Bay Area was to experience an earthquake. I've experienced about 5 now, so maybe it's time to move to some place that has hurricanes.

3-wheelers

2011-10-16T19:50:00.000-07:00

I've been browsing through this wonderful web site called 3-wheelers.com. They have a list of hundreds of historic and current 3-wheel vehicles and some of the historic ones are amazing. I was surprised to find that one of the first cars ever manufactured was a 3-wheel steam vehicle invented in Phoenix, AZ in 1887.

What is surprising about this, is that Arizona was so distant from the manufacturing world in 1887 and I have always thought of Phoenix as being a small town before about 1920. It's amazing that one of the earliest motorcycles and earliest cars were both invented there by an interesting individual named Lucius Copeland.

Even older is the Stream Dray built by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, an engineer in the French army.

The Steam Dray was built in 1769! That's over a hundred years before Copeland's tricycle. I'm not sure how Copeland's can count as possibly the first car, but I imagine automobile historians have certain criteria for what makes a self-propelled machine a car or not.

The brief history given at 3-wheelers.com suggests that the French were ahead in steam technology until the French Revolution, when Cugnot was exiled. After that Great Britain became the most advanced nation in steam power.

Finally, there is the 1942 Arzens L'Ouf.

This French vehicle is primarily interesting because it looks like the inspiration for the Jetson's flying car.

old horrors

2011-10-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

For all of my reading of speculative fiction, I had never read anything by H. P. Lovecraft before two weeks ago when I bought a big E-book collection of his stories for something like $3. I've read quite a few by stories by now, including the famous "Call of Cthulu" and "The Dunwich Horror", and I have yet to get even a faint shiver of fear or loathing, not to mention any nightmares.

I guess I have to put it down to movies. I think I've become so jaded by Hollywood monsters that poor Mr. Lovecraft doesn't have much hope of impressing me. In fact, I find his drawn-out description of disturbing and unnatural landscapes, buildings, and artefacts to be a bit tedious, with a faint odor of desperation in mood-setting.

But I don't think movies explain my impatience with his frequent horrors that drive men insane just by seeing them, or just by hearing about them. I find the very notion a bit silly.

The stories are good, but they could all be improved by cutting out half of the mood-setting.

I guess conservatives get to distort the truth too

2011-09-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

This bothers me: San Juan Capistrano Fines Family for Reading Bible without Permit (link from Instapundit). What bothers me is not that the city is requiring a permit to read the bible, but that Reason is lying about what happened. If you read carefully, you will see that the family was having regular Bible studies with up to 50 people in a residential neighborhood.

Fifty people! That's enough to cause plenty of parking and other problems for their neighbors. Not only does that sound like a good reason to fine them, it sound like a good reason to censure them for being rude to their neighbors --even if they did get a permit.

the perils of unconstrained creativity

2011-09-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

One of the most damaging features of the computer age is creativity. Creativity must cost the world thousands of man-hours of wasted productivity every day as experienced computer users have to constantly learn new interfaces for no good reason.

Microsoft is common offender, changing interfaces with each new release of every major product. Almost none of the changes have been an improvement and more than a few have been worse than the previous interfaces. I suspect they do it just so that new users have something to talk about, thereby creating buzz about the new release and enticing other users to try it --even though the functionality changes are not really worth an upgrade.

Unfortunately, open source projects follow the Microsoft lead. I just spent five minutes trying to figure out how to shut down a machine running Gnome. Eventually I gave up and spent too long trying to figure out how to bring up a shell window so I could type a shutdown command. When someone who has been using multiple different kinds of computers for thirty years can't figure out how to turn off a computer with five minutes of searching then there is something seriously broken about the user interface of said computer.

None of this innovation in user-interface design is either necessary or useful for the large majority of users. There has not been a notable improvement in computer interfaces since Windows 95. I don't care if people want to make up odd little places to put menus and buttons, but every computer system should start up with an option: "Use Win95 Interface?" for people who don't want to deal with their crap.

the poor and the pseudo-poor

2011-08-11T23:38:00.000-07:00

Foxfier does great rants when she really gets her dander up.

What is dander, anyway?

UPDATE: Eww. According to Wikipedia, "Dander is material shed from the body of various animals, similar to dandruff. It may contain scales of dried skin and hair, or feathers." Who would make up a disgusting saying like that? Maybe I heard it wrong and it's really something else.

the mysterious lack of motivation on the Katrina Bridge case

2011-08-06T05:27:00.000-07:00

Instapundit links to this article about some police who were convicted of civil right violations for shooting some unarmed civilians on Danziger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina. Reading the article, I was starting to become more and more outraged about the officers actions, and then I started to notice something --I had no idea why the officers would open fire on a group of civilians.

The article gives no hint. In fact, it makes no effort whatsoever to give the officer's side of the story or relate any facts whatsoever that are sympathetic to the officers. It leaves you with the impression that you had six police officers standing around doing nothing. They see a family of civilians crossing a bridge and then decide, "Hey, let's shoot those guys!" So the police open fire, killing two and wounding four more.

Well, that's ridiculous. Whether the officers had a good reason or not, they had a reason. Why doesn't the reporter want to tell me the reason? I suspect another media coverup. So I did some googling and found lots more articles that also don't explain why the officers started shooting.

The Wikipedia entry didn't tell my why the officers shot either but they had a link to another article on another mysterious unmotivated post-Katrina shooting by police. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. But then, wait: the Wikipedia article slipped up and added this damning quote by the judge: "Henry Glover was not at the strip mall to commit suicide. He was there to retrieve some baby clothing. You killed a man. Despite your tendentious arguments to the contrary, it was no mistake."

Baby clothes? Isn't that special. The looter was only looking for baby clothes. I'm sure that if he ran across a flooded jewelry store that he wouldn't have pocketed anything. He was just going to take advantage of the lawless situation surrounding the flooding to throw a rock through a window and grab some cute clothing for his baby. The fact that he was only looking for baby clothes make all the difference. This quote is damning, not for the police officer but for the judge. It demonstrates that the judge is making a political decision rather than a judicial decision.

When I added the word "looting" to the google search, I found a CNN article that mentions that the people who were shot were crossing the bridge towards a place where looting was going on and where the looters were armed. Did the police order them to go back and they refused because they figured that the police could not enforce the order due to the breakdown of civil control? Were they actually crossing the bridge in the other direction, coming from the looted area pushing shopping carts full of loot? I have no confidence at all that CNN would tell me the truth if this were the case.

Here is one article that explains that there was wide-spread looting after the flooding and that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin had declared martial law and ordered the police to "take back the city". Apparently Nagin had no legal authority to do that, but would regular police know that? Some of the police captains are reported to have ordered officers to shoot looters. But Nagin and the police captains aren't being tried. The only people being tried here are the police officers who were in the middle of it after three days on insufficient sleep and watching looters tear the city apart, adding a human-caused disaster to the natural disaster.

Charges against these police were originally dropped by a judge for prosecutorial misconduct. I guess the judge, like me, suspected that a lot of this was political. But that's not the end of it, because, as we know from the Rodney King case, the US has an exception to the double-jeopardy rule of the constitution: when white police officers are accused of attacking black people and get off, then the feds get another crack at it. I'm only guessing that the victims were black --the news accounts carefully do not give any information about the people who were shot.

I don't really know what happened at Danziger Bridge that day. The police claim that they were being shot at, and although they planted a gun, that does not prove that they were not shot at or did not believe that they were being shot at. It's frankly a bit unbelievable that an officer would empty the clip of an AR-15 without thinking that he was being shot at. The news reports indicate that there were witnesses who said the civilians were not shooting at police, but the reports are careful to give no information about these witnesses --information such as "what were they doing there?" and "where the witnesses looting too?"

I am starting to suspect that a great injustice has been done against these police officers.

the first avenger

2011-07-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

I never read a Captain America comic book, so I don't really know much about the character, but the new movie, "Captain America: the First Avenger" is very good. It doesn't flinch from making Americans the good guys like some recent films have done (ok, like GI Joe did). It has a good guy that you want to cheer for and a bad guy that you want to boo. The action scenes and 3d effects are fun and entertaining.

The romance between the female lead and the hero is very much like what one might have seen in a move from the 1940s. Thankfully the screen writes managed to resist the cliche of having the couple end up in bed together just before the climactic battle. Unfortunately, they didn't resist the cliche of making the woman be "as good as a man" at fighting.

This cliche annoys me as much as the knife-throwing cliche. Knife-throwing is really hard. I know because I've spent time practicing it. Yet 9 out of 10 action heroes is able to whip out a knife in an emergency and throw it thirty feet into the throat of the bad guy. Look, screen-play writers, the whole reason that knife throwing used to be dramatic is because in real life it is a very hard thing to do. It requires hundreds of hours of dedicated training to get good and regular practice to stay good. Because the skill is so hard to acquire, it made the hero more impressive for having the skill. But by now it has been so over used that it's just another cliche. No one even thinks about how hard it would be to do that because it is just one of the arsenal of skills that every action hero is expected to have.

Same thing with women fighters. In real life, there are very few women who could last even two minutes in the ring with any reasonably athletic man. It would require the same sort of dedicated training that professional athletes engage in and even then the woman would not do very well against men who are trained fighters. Consequently, a warrior woman who could kick the crap out of a male warrior was an impressive and dramatic character. Now, it's just the expected thing of women in action movies. Hollywood screen writers have ruined the drama by turning an impressive character into a cliche.

Er. Back to the movie review ... actually, this isn't so much a review as a recommendation. I give the move 4 out of 5 stars.

running on the water

2011-07-19T23:46:00.000-07:00

When I was young, I used to tease my younger brothers by making up wild stories to see how much I could get them to believe. It wasn't really fair since they were considerably younger than me (and yet today they both look older, how sad is that?), but I had a good time with it.

You've got to hand it to the real pros, though. A group of guys have made a fake documentary about the new "sport" of liquid mountaineering. The sport involves running into a pond so fast that you actually run on top of the water for a few steps. It's a well-made spoof and they have managed to pick up some believers.

You can see the video here.

Sarah Palin on Down's syndrome

2011-06-14T03:06:00.000-07:00

Here is an excerpt from a letter that Sarah Palin sent to her family a few days before her son, Trig, was born (link from instapundit). She writes the letter as if a note from God to her family, explaining his purpose in giving them a child with Down's syndrome:

Then, finally, I let Trig's mom and dad find out before he was born that this little boy will truly be a GIFT. They were told in early tests that Trig may provide more challenges, and more joy, than what they ever may have imagined or ever asked for.

At first the news seemed unreal and sad and confusing. But I gave Trig's mom and dad lots of time to think about it because they needed lots of time to understand that everything will be OK, in fact, everything will be great, because I only want the best for you!

I've given Trig's mom and dad peace and joy as they wait to meet their new son. I gave them a happy anticipation because they asked me for that.

I'll give all of you the same happy anticipation and strength to deal with Trig's challenges, but I won't impose on you... I just need to know you want to receive my offer to be with all of you and help you everyday to make Trig's life a great one.

This new person in your life can help everyone put things in perspective and bind us together and get everyone focused on what really matters.

The baby will expand your world and let you see and feel things you haven't experienced yet. He'll show you what "true, brave victory" really means as those who love him will think less about self and focus less on what the world tells you is "normal" or "perfect°.

How can you not love a person who is capable of writing such a beautiful letter? More disturbing, what dark sickness of the soul could lead so many people to such unreasoning hatred of Sarah Palin, of the sort of woman who could write this letter?

This letter only came out because the state of Alaska (for reasons entirely unclear to me) has released all of Palin's private correspondence from the time that she was governor of Alaska and various old-media outlets have swarmed the letters looking for ammunition to bring down the hated Sarah Palin. With the United States in three wars, with a dozen Republican presidential candidates to cover, with a badly sagging economy, with Communist China becoming a growing military power, with at least three sitting Congress people involved in current scandals, with a presidential administration filled with tax cheats, former lobbyists, and people with radical political histories --what our national media wants to spend their time investigating is a pile of daily private emails of the former governor of one of the smallest-population states and vice presidential candidate who lost an election three years ago. This is how driven they are to attack her. This is how deep their hatred is.

am I anti-intellectual?

2011-06-09T00:17:00.000-07:00

Am I anti-intellectual? That may seems a strange question to ask for someone who has a PhD, who reads philosophy for entertainment, who likes to discuss Kant, thermodynamics, artificial intelligence, foundations of mathematics, ... and well, you get the idea ... why would someone like that be asking if he is anti-intellectual?

It's because I've been described as anti-intellectual by Larry Sanger (link from Instapundit). I don't mean that he described me specifically as anti-intellectual, but that he described what he sees as an anti-intellectual movement among "geeks", and I seem to fit his description to a large extent. Like his anti-intellectual geeks, I am employed in the computer industry. Like them, I am not particularly impressed by or intimidated by credentialed experts such as college professors. Like them, I am not too worried about an "information glut". Like them, I think reading "War and Peace" sounds like a colossal waste of time. Like them I think memorization is not very valuable in a world where facts are so easy to check and it is enough in many cases to simply remember a broad outline. If you need details, you can always refresh your memory on-line. I also tend to think that college educations today are over-rated and a lot of people would be better off if they did not feel that they had to go to college to be a success.

However, I seem to have a somewhat different take on these things than Sanger. He summarizes what he takes these views to be. I'll quote his summary below with my response in italic

1. Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known. Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be.

I would not say that experts have no role at all but that experts with traditional credentials no longer receive the same level of deference that they used to receive. This is partly because there are so many credentialed experts, and partly because it is so easy to go on-line and find another credentialed expert to contradict whatever your credentialed expert says.

2. Books are an outmoded medium because they involve a single person speaking from authority. In the future, information will be developed and propagated collaboratively, something like what we already do with the combination of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Wikipedia, and various other websites.

I don't think books will vanish, but they will become less and less important relative to other information sources.

3. The classics, being books, are also outmoded. They are outmoded because they are often long and hard to read, so those of us raised around the distractions of technology can’t be bothered to follow them; and besides, they concern foreign worlds, dominated by dead white guys with totally antiquated ideas and attitudes. In short, they are boring and irrelevant.

He has the reason wrong. The classics are not outmoded as knowledge; to the contrary they never were of any particular value as knowledge. Their only value was as a cultural indicator to demonstrate to others what social class you were in. They are outmoded not because their knowledge has become antiquated, but because no one any longer wants to be a member of the social class that they define.

4. The digitization of information means that we don’t have to memorize nearly as much. We can upload our memories to our devices and to Internet communities. We can answer most general questions with a quick search.

yes

5. The paragon of success is a popular website or well-used software, and for that, you just have to be a bright, creative geek. You don’t have to go to college, which is overpriced and so reserved to the elite anyway.

Once again, Sanger misses the point because he misses the class implications. College is not primarily about gaining knowledge except in certain limited fields such as engineering. Primarily it is about establishing class membership and a marker of success. Modern geeks have largely dispensed with college as a marker of success and have largely constructed their own class system which --while it does still offer some deference to education-- offers more deference to other signs of success.

Sanger displays what I think is his greatest misunderstanding of the geek mindset a few lines later:

You don’t really care about knowledge; it’s not a priority. For you, the books containing knowledge, the classics and old-fashioned scholarship summing up the best of our knowledge, the people and institutions whose purpose is to pass on knowledge–all are hopelessly antiquated.

I've never seen any sign of this attitude. Instead, geeks value knowledge highly, but they they value only certain kinds of knowledge. In particular, they do not value the knowledge to be found in the classics, viewing it as a mere bit of arcane culture. Objectively speaking, "War and Peace" is no more valuable as knowledge than say, knowledge of ancient Japanese theater or the Talmud or an encyclopaedic knowledge of baseball statistics. The fact that Sanger picks one of these things and arbitrarily assigns it the status of Important Knowledge strikes me, and probably the average geek, as simple cultural prejudice.

Furthermore, I think it is not just geeks that feel this way. Sanger has simply hit upon the process of cultural evolution. The old cultural elite tries to solidify their authority and power by surrounding themselves with tokens of power and Signs of wisdom. Whether by accent or skin color or clothing, or ability to quote scripture, or the ability to quote Leo Tolstoy (I found the author of "War and Peace" by googling), the current set of elites try to recognize each other and keep each other in power.

While the elites hire everybody, those who show the Signs are those who are destined for promotion and greater things. They vote for other cultural elites and appoint cultural elites to their boards. Sure, they may let a few who are not of the Blood into the halls of power, but only those who grasp after the Signs, who do whatever they can to learn and mimic he Signs, panting after the affirmation of the true elites like loyal puppy dogs. Such people the elites suffer, on occasion, to rise.

Then one day a new opportunity comes along, whether a technology, or a trade route, or a new land to exploit, and great wealth flows to some among the non-elite. Even worse, this great wealth flows to some of those of the great unwashed who not only are non-elite, but do not even grasp at the approval of the elites. Some even show contempt or !gasp! condescending amusement at the Signs! When such barbarians gain enough wealth then they gain power. They gain power on their own, not as a favor from the elite but despite the contrary efforts of the elite. And then the elite are shocked that these people do not hold the traditional Signs in proper respect.

So if intellectualism is to be understood as an appreciation for the cultural knowledge of the elites, then I am proud to be listed among the anti-intellectuals. Well, my attitude is not so much against intellectualism as it is condescending toward intellectualism. Isn't that cute how they all think their classics are so important? It's fun to watch those intellectuals talking, like watching baseball fans argue about who was the best left fielder of all time, so absorbed in their little cultural minutia.

But fear not. Our day will come as well. One day I, or a spiritual descendent, will record a vocaleet (a vocally recorded comment that is automatically grammer-corrected, reduced to text, and posted on the Idea Circle --a concept somewhat related to a world-wide group blog) complaining about those disrespectful punks who think they are so smart because they made their money mining astroids but they don't know any QRHTML76.2 so they have to hire people to manage their on-line life and they couldn't recognize a Monty Python quote to save their life. What a bunch of maroons.

how I would have done it

2011-05-02T22:55:00.000-07:00

It looks like Osama bin Laden is dead; killed by an American military assassination squad. People are cheering Obama as the great hero who made this happen, but it looks like a major goof to me.

Here is how you run an operation like that.

Phase 1 at 0 - 12 hours, General Alert: put all of your intelligence and counter-terrorism operations on high alert. If you have been thinking about bugging any terrorist telephones, now is the time to do it.

Phase 2 at 0 hour, Ground Mission: The Seals land, grab Osama and anything that looks intelligence-worthy, then beat feet. They work as quickly and quietly as possible with silenced or suppressed weapons. They are wearing and carrying nothing but generic equipment so there is nothing that would identify them as American in case any witnesses survive Phase 3.

Phase 3 at approx. 0 + 1 hour, Create Confusion: As soon as the Seals are out of the blast zone, hit the site with a huge bomb or two. Maybe cruise missiles.

Phase 4 at approx 0 + 1 hour, Interrogation: begin waterboarding the hell out of Osama until he gives up everything he knows. Have the intelligence teams that were standing by begin analyzing all of the security information, tracking down the numbers in his cell phone, everything.

Phase 5 at 0 + 4 hours, Foster Confusion: Have a general get on TV and announce that a few hours ago, US forces bombed a site in Pakistan where we believe Osama was hiding.

Phase 6 at 0 + 5 hours. Sell the Confusion: Publicly and formally demand that the Pakistani government give us access to the site to look for Osama's remains.

Phase 7 (time depends on prisoner cooperation and investigative success), Double Scoop: have all of those counter-terrorism units that were standing by act on the intelligence information that they got from Osama to capture more terrorists.

Phase 8 at 0 + 3 days, Mess With Heads: Announce that Osama was actually captured alive and has been cooperating with terrorism investigators. Announce that we are about to start rounding up terrorists all over the world (note that phase 7 has already completed, though). Listen to phone traffic to find out who is scared about this announcement.

OK, confession time: I'm not exactly a counter-terrorism expert. But doesn't the above make sense? Why in the world would you give up the chance at a major intelligence coup like that? Is Obama just worried that he won't know what to do with an Osama prisoner now that he has worked so hard to delegitimize the tools of hard interrogation, military detention and military trials?

multiple forwards in Firefox 4

2011-04-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

Ever since I upgraded to Firefox 4 I've been seeing this weird bug. I will follow a link to a site, read the site and then hit the back button, but the back button does nothing. So I look at my history and see that somehow the site I am on still has two to four entries in the history --meaning that I would have to hit the back button some three to five times get away from the page. And that is assuming that more history items don't get added each time I hit "back".

I'm not sure that this is a browser bug. It may be some trick used by the web sites to defraud their advertisers over how many hits they are getting, but I almost never saw it before I upgraded.

And I am running the noscript plugin which prevents the sites from running javascript, so if they are doing this deliberately, I don't know how.

space --the final frontier

2011-04-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

I remember the first moon landing. I was very young and I confess that the memory is shrouded by time. I can recall a small television set up on the crafts counter in my class room. I recall watching with my classmates as a man in a bulky white suite with a sinister dark face plate. He made an awkward little hop from the ladder down to the ground and that was it. A man stood on the moon. I don't remember if there was any cheering in the classroom. We were too young anyway to really understand what a remarkable thing had just occurred. The television picture was jerky, overcome occasionally with static and the occasional loss of horizontal sync so that the picture would start slowly scrolling off the top of the screen and then entering back at the bottom.

If I did not fully grasp the miracle of this triumph of the rocket age, displayed live on television --small-screen, low-resolution, television with an unstable picture, but television nevertheless --what I did grasp was the excitement. What I did grasp was that this was that this was the beginning --the opening of a new age, an age where physicists and engineers would control the direction of society, an age of a vast new frontier, an age of exploration and enterprise. What I did grasp was completely and utterly wrong.

What I did not understand at the time was that the real challenge of the moon-landing generation was never the moon, but was Communism. The moon landing, like Vietnam, like Korea, like the Olympics, were really all about the fight of the free nations of the world against the creeping darkness of totalitarian empire. That battle against Communism, I understand today, was far more crucial for the future of mankind than was space exploration and that the resources used in space exploration were really meant to defeat a deadly enemy of civilization.

I understand this but still, I confess, it hurts. The space landing was a pivotal point in my young life. It was what made me decide to become an engineer. Growing up in the days of Apollo, nothing to me seemed nobler than to be an engineer, advancing the capabilities of the human species. I read every science fiction book I could find in the juvenile section of the local library. I was introduced to Tom Swift, EE Doc Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, the concepts of time travel, faster-than-light travel, aliens, psionics, teleportation, robots, space stations, undersea cities, asteroid mining, beautiful space princesses that needed rescuing by good red-blooded American men, and many other things too marvelous to believe. When I had read all of the science fiction in the juvenile section, I went to the adult section where I was introduced to Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clark, and the concepts of dystopias, solipsism, group sex, libertinism, anti-heroes, human evolution into something non-human, and other ... now that I think of it, all of the good stuff was already there in the juvenile section.

But even though a lot of adult science fiction was pretty disappointing to me as a juvenile (and still is to me as an adult), I still read all that I could. I also read books on physics and other sciences. I subscribed to Science News. I read encyclopedias. All of this was not because I wanted to be an intellectual but because I wanted to be an adventurer and I thought that scientists and engineers had adventures. I blame Tom Swift for this misunderstanding.

When Skylab came along, I was thrilled: the first real Space Station! Sure, it was only an experimental living quarters but it was the first step towards opening up the space frontier. Soon there would be commercial applications like asteroid mining, orbital power stations, orbital factories, and the like. Then Skylab was allowed to die a fiery death through neglect, and there were no plans for a successor.

When the Space Shuttle came along, I was thrilled: a low-cost reusable space vehicle! Sure, it was only for astronauts and government launches, but in a few years --ten at the most-- there would be another generation, one that would open up space to commercial applications like asteroid mining, orbital power stations, orbital factories, and the like. A-a-a-a-and nothing. The shuttle was, frankly, a sad failure that never spawned any new technology and never even delivered many of the benefits that it had promised.

Over time, it became painfully clear that the window had closed and that there would never be an opportunity for me to go to space; to join in the great adventure of helping to open a new frontier. The world had failed to deliver what it had promised me all of those years ago when I was encouraged and guided into a life as an engineer.

It's not that I haven't enjoyed being an engineer --I have-- but I didn't become an engineer to help deliver SMS messages faster and more reliably or to create practical systems for police to investigate phone-call histories; I became an engineer to help open the next great frontier. I got screwed.

What happened? There were only about 25 years between the first airplane flight and the first trans-oceanic commercial airline service. The first space flight was in 1961. It is now 2011 --50 years later-- and there is no sign of any sort of regular commercial service. Why hasn't space flight followed the path of air flight? I think that the reason is, at least in part, NASA.

Imagine that you are an investor and sometime over the last few decades someone came to you with a proposal to build a fleet of ships capable of carrying cargo into orbit and back. What would you say to him? I think that you would say, "Space is too big for a single company! Look at NASA. They are the freaking federal government and even they can't make space flight practical. A single flight costs a half billion dollars. Don't you have an idea for a web site? Maybe one that would attract the profitable female demographic with pictures of fuzzy kittens or something?"

NASA's failures, I speculate, discouraged others from trying and suppressed investment. I also speculate that this is why a lot of space fans weren't too upset when Obama cut NASA's budget. I think a lot of us would just as soon see this bloated and failed monstrosity die. Saying such a thing is not easy for me. I was a big fan of NASA during the Apollo and Skylab days. There was a time when I very much wanted to work for NASA. But those days are over. The days when NASA contributed significantly to space technology are over. Let NASA be swept out the door to make room for new players who may do a better job.

So all of that was just an introduction for this speech by one of the new players in the space program, Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace (link courtesy of Instapundit as most of my links seem to be...). This speech is tremendous. I confess it made me a bit misty. I'm not sure most people would get that, unless their own lives were impacted by the space program as mine was.

Maybe I should call XCOR and see if they have any openings for astronaut engineers...

professional protection for religious beliefs

2011-04-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

Arizona is considering a law that would provide very broad protections for professionals who find their religious beliefs in conflict with their professional licensing boards and other certifying bodies. This law, for example, seems to protect a doctor from losing his license to practice medicine because he refuses to discuss the option of abortion with patients, even if the medical board thinks he has a responsibility to do so.

Eugene Volokh is concerned that this religious immunity is too broad and offers several examples that he considers problematic. Let's take one of the more outrageous ones:

Even a doctor who feels a religious motivation to affirmatively lie to a patient to prevent an abortion — on the theory that lying is religiously justified when necessary to prevent murder — would be free from professional discipline, unless this somehow fits in the category of criminal fraud (which I doubt).

Presumably, this is problematic because Eugene thinks that a doctor who does this should lose his license to practice medicine. But let's put things in perspective: what we have in the real world is not typically a set of undisputed facts, but a dispute. The doctor may say one thing and the patient another.

Eugene seems to want the situation where if the patient can convince the medical board of her side of the story, then the doctor loses at once both his means of making a living and his enormous investment in medical school. Doctors, therefore, are subjected to a huge risk, far beyond the risk that most other professionals have in disputes with their customers.

What would happen if a computer programmer did something similar? Suppose that a computer programmer wrote a program for a medical doctor that is intended to send out emails reminding women about their appointments. Suppose he deliberately wrote the program so that instead of sending a reminder notice for an appointment for an abortion, it would send an email telling the woman that the doctor had determined that an abortion was unsafe for her and she has to have the baby.

What would happen to this programmer? Well, he might have committed a crime and could be prosecuted for that. If not, and if some harm actually resulted from his actions, he could be sued. He could also be subjected non-legal consequences such as being fired and being unable to use his former employer as a reference. If he owned his own consulting firm (as many doctors own their own practice) he could be subjected to negative publicity and have his office picketed. Such things could very well destroy his business.

What would not happen is that the state would not tell him that he could never again program computers for money. They would not take away his means of livelihood. They would not take away his educational investment and his years of experience and turn him essentially into an unskilled laborer.

Nor should they. The primary justification for state licensing is that it protects consumers from professionals who can not or will not perform the services properly as expected of such a professional. It should not be an extra-judicial mechanism for the state to punish wrong doers. It is too lopsided for such a purpose, effecting only certain restricted classes of people and subjecting these people to much harsher punishments than other people face for similar offenses.

With this, let us return to Eugene's example. Does the doctor's lie to his patient mean that he is incapable of carrying out his professional duties as a doctor? Clearly not --does not effect his ability to practice medicine. Does it mean that he is unwilling to carry out his professional duties? There's the rub. What the doctor's professional duties are depends on who his patients are. If his patients do not want any abortion services or abortion advice, then the doctor's unwillingness to provide such services or advice do not effect his ability to provide medical services to his patients.

If the medical board takes away his medical license, they are doing so because he is unwilling to provide service for some patients, not because he is unwilling to provide service to any patients. But that is not a reason to deny anyone a license. Some licensed doctors cannot provide effective medical care to patients who need heart surgery. Should they lose their license over this? Clearly not.

However, a doctor who was not qualified to perform heart surgery could lose his license for attempting to perform heart surgery. Similar rules should be followed in the religious exemption cases. If a doctor is unwilling to even discuss abortion with a patient, then he is obligated not to take patients that want an abortion. This is not always easy to do, and there will be issues involving treatment of minors where the state does not give parents full discretion over the minor's medical care, but reasonable steps can be taken.

In general, the state should not prevent anyone who provides a service, whether a licensed professional or not, from modifying his service to comply with religious beliefs as long as he restricts his service to people who want (or are willing to accept) that modified form of service.

Pepsi, Kraft, and Nestle use cells scraped off of dead babies

2011-03-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

Apparently Pepsi hired a company to do some sort of taste-testing for it using cells scraped off of dead babies. No, horrifyingly enough, I'm not making this up.

I've had my last Pepsi. And frankly, it doesn't matter to me if they change their minds. My own personal boycott will be over when the people who make this decision are fired without a golden parachute. That will never happen, of course, so I've had my last Diet Pepsi.

Other companies that have done this include Kraft and Nestle. As a junk-food junkie, I used to buy a lot of the products of all three of these companies. The other one, Solae, I've never heard of and probably won't remember to boycott.

Michael J. Fox famously promoted the idea that we should go ahead and use cells scraped off of dead babies for medical research because it might save people's lives and might offer cures for horrible diseases. This argument appealed to a lot of people who felt that possibly saving their own life was important enough to justify sacrificing the life of a helpless infant that had no friends or relatives to complain about it (since their own mother is the one who killed them).

I always thought the argument was horrifyingly selfish. I wonder if they really grasped what we are talking about here: medicine based on the body parts of murdered babies. A thing so utterly grotesque and macabre should be confined to stories of black magic and devil worship, not enshrined in the methodology of modern medicine.

As horrifying and selfish as that argument was, we now know that it wasn't even the truth. Cells scraped off of dead babies are to be used, not just for the most critical medical emergencies, to save lives and save people from debilitating conditions, but for whatever is convenient --even something as trivial as finding the optimum level of sugar to put in a soft drink.

UPDATE: I just remembered that PepsiCo is actually a big conglomerate so I went to the internet to find out what they own. To my great relief, they sold off Taco Bell so I don't have to boycott one of my favorite restaurants, but they do own Quaker Oats and Frito Lay --both companies that I used to buy a of food from. They also own Tropicana and Gatorade, which I use less, but will still be an inconvenience. Well, nuts, but civilized people just don't do business with the sort of people who use the body parts of dead babies to enhance their products. I'm just glad that I don't work for one of those companies or I would be in a serious moral quandary.

on being dizzy

2011-03-19T19:12:00.000-07:00

I spent the last 24 hours aboard a boat and now that I'm sitting in my living room, it feels like the couch is moving up and down on waves. On the boat the waves didn't bother me most of the time, but these non-waves are really annoying. It's like my inner ear is saying "Wow, there goes a wave." and my muscles are saying, "What, where? I didn't feel it!" The internal argument is making me feel a little light-headed.

I was on a 40' power boat. Spent yesterday afternoon and evening driving around, spent the night at Pier 39 in San Francisco and spent the morning driving around again. The water at the Pier-39 marina is extremely choppy. It didn't make me sea sick but the random rolling and the loud creaking kept waking me up and making it hard to get back to sleep.

This morning I did get a little sea sick --only the second time in my life. The water was rough and I was trying to take a written test while the boat was underway. I was also dressed too warm for the interior of the boat. The combination of three things brought me as close as I've ever come to hurling from motion sickness. After I finished the test, I took off some of my under layers and got up to watch out the forward port and it went away eventually.

Oh, and I ate two oatmeal cookies. In retrospect I can't really recommend oatmeal cookies for motion sickness. They sit a little heavy in the stomach.

old TV --Primeval

2011-03-17T22:47:00.000-07:00

Primeval is a British TV series. The premise is that temporal anomalies start opening up at random in England and various prehistoric beasties come through and start eating people. The Government sensibly decides that that this information is far to important to let be spread around to the common people who might [gasp] start buying guns to protect themselves and their families from being a lunch-o-saurus for some random monster. Instead they hire a group of rebellious scientists and zookeepers to handle matters and keep it all under wraps. Apparently, only the Government can be trusted with handling this crisis but only people who despise the Government can be trusted to handle it for the government ... or something.

Politics aside, it is a tremendous idea for a series. The actors are good, the special effects are tolerable, the stories are engaging, and I really enjoyed the first three seasons in spite of the head-pounding stupidity of all of the smart characters. After Firefly and Avatar --the Last Airbender, this is my next most recommended series.

Just ignore the fact that the leader, Nick Cutter displays his genius by making wild-ass guesses, committing all efforts and resources to the the guess, and then getting lucky. All of the other characters view this as a sign of his genius; I viewed it as a sign that the team desperately needed to reassign him to a less responsible position before his lucky streak ran out.

Also, don't spend a lot of time wondering why this brilliant team, weeks after their job starts still don't carry basic equipment for capturing dangerous animals, items like capture poles, ropes, chains, nets, net guns, cages, traps, snares, and bait. They carry no life-support equipment for hostile atmospheres, no mosquito netting, no cold-weather gear. They carry no night-vision equipment. The temporal anomalies have electric and magnetic effects and the only instrument they bring with them for the entire first seasons is a magnetic compass. If they had been prepared, nothing much interesting would have happened.

There are other things you shouldn't ask yourself. Let your problem-solving faculties relax, and you will enjoy the series a lot more.

old TV --Lost

2011-03-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

Well, I've finally waded through the end of the Lost series. If you don't know about this TV series, it ran from 2004 to 2010. It told a story about a group of people in a plane crash trapped on a tropical island. Over all, I recommend it as a good TV drama. By the end, you will be tired of Jack's half-tear-filled eyes as he deals with some emotional trauma, and Sawyer brushing blond locks from his eyes to glare his glare of steely rage, and you while be very, very tired of Micheal, but overall, it's far better than your average TV.

Although it takes place after a plane wreck on a tropical island, the story isn't really a Swiss-family-Robinson story. It's not really about survival on a deserted island. In fact the survivors do a lot of things that are pretty inexplicable or even dumb given the circumstances.

Also, there is some sort of monster in the jungle. They can hear it rampaging through the jungle at night, tearing down trees. Among the inexplicable things they do: no one tries to figure out what the monster is, no one seems especially concerned about going into the jungle after hearing the monster, no one thinks about trying to put up barricades to defend themselves from the monster.

It is impossible to imagine that anyone could have actually survived the plane wreck that is pictured in the show (and this fact is pointed out by someone in the show) so some viewers speculated that the "survivors" were really all dead and that the Island was Purgatory or something similar. The producers of the show denied this while the show was going on, but to tell the truth, I think they lied. I think that was the original intent behind the series and when someone guessed it, they decided to change the story rather than have their thunder stolen.

The first season is just a sequence of morality plays, various characters are dealing with the sins of addiction (Charlie), lust (Boone), gluttony (Hugo), greed (Sawyer), pride (Jack) and anger (John) to name just a few. Several of the staring cast are murderers.

Jack is the star of the show and I don't think the writers realized what an insufferable glory-hound he is. They seem to think that he is just courageous, but he is the only doctor on the island (at first) and he consistently takes outrageous risks that other people should have taken instead. If Jack gets killed, everyone will suffer, but he refuses to take that into consideration. He always has to be the one at the forefront taking the most cinematic risks.

I have to say I was pretty disappointed in the ending. Actually, I knew I would be disappointed with a couple of shows yet to go because it was obvious they would not be able to answer all of the outstanding issues in just two more shows --and they didn't.

It seems that my suspicion was right --many of the cases where current characters had visions or other sorts of interaction with former characters turned out to be nothing but make-work for the former actors. Most of those events served no story purpose at the time and now that I've seen the whole thing it is obvious that they were never intended to. In particular, the whole sub-story of how "special" Walt was went nowhere. Instead, they turned the audience favorites into the special ones for the last season.

[SPOILER ALERT]

In fact, the last season as a whole was pretty disappointing. They forked off two versions of history with no coherent bridge at the climax. I claim this is because they wanted to have the ending that was originally planned for the show --where you find out that everyone was dead-- but they also wanted an ending that went along with their promises that everyone wasn't dead. So they just had two endings. It seriously mucked things up.

There was never really an explanation of the Dharma initiative, and never a real explanation of where the "others" came from or an explanation of why they were so vicious. There was no real explanation of what "infected" meant or how it was that the two stars were seemingly able to overcome it while the end-credit actors were not.

This is odd, too because the natural explanation was that the "infection" is what made the others so vicious. The infection happens at the temple of the others. One of the others (Richard) tells Kate that if he takes Ben to be healed at their temple the boy will "lose his innocence" and be permanently one of them. This sounds like he is describing the infection. But no, the infection turns out to be something else. We never find out what he meant about Ben if we don't have this explanation.

There was no explanation of why the others could summon the monster when the others were supposedly working for the enemy of the monster. There was no explanation of why pregnant women died on the island. No explanation of why Charlie had visions that a baby needed to be baptized. No explanation of why Eco was killed. No explanation for having a person pushing the button rather than having it automated. No hint at what the button did or what the failsafe did.

All in all, the authors cheated the viewers over and over by presenting mysteries and then never having a solution to them. It's a shame, too, because it was otherwise a very well-done production.

don't go there

2011-03-06T17:38:00.000-08:00

Just a friendly warning: if you like television but also value your time, do not under any circumstances follow this link. I just wasted an entire Saturday --I'm talking from about 11am to 5:30 with a break for lunch-- reading this site. Let my experience be a warning to you.

Especially do not go to this link to make sure that they correctly listed Wesley Crusher as a Scrappy, or look to see if Ben Linus is listed as a Magnificent Bastard because you will find yourself sucked into the endless links to variations on themes, characters, and plot devices. You have been warned.

You are welcome.

the truth in obligations amendment

2011-02-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

I've seen several proposals lately for Constitutional amendments to fix problems with the current political system. Frankly, no constitution will ever fix the problem of greedy people who go into government to gather power and force their will on others. This should be obvious to anyone who can read our Constitution and see how blatantly and unapologetically the federal government violates it. Still, it is useful at times to put in specific amendments to fix specific abuses.

My idea focuses on the current financial crisis that we are facing and the fact that the crisis is lergely due to two factors: entitlements (at the federal level) and the wages and benefits paid to public employees (at the state and local level). These separate problems have something in common: they are ways for a current set of elected officials to get support by obligating future elected officials to give away money. This creates a perverse incentive for future elected officials. If they show responsible stewardship by trying to reduce the scope of these obligations then they create enemies among the people who expect the money. If they expand the irresponsible obligations then they make supporters among those same people.

In politics no one is more highly motivated than someone with money on the line, and politicians do not want highly-motivated political enemies. They love highly-motivated supporters. Even people who go into politics with the best of intentions have a hard time fighting this very simple equation: create irresponsible obligations for the future and you win; show fiscal responsibility and you lose.

My proposal is to reduce the power of this dynamic by a Constitutional amendment. The amendment would prevent any federal, state, or local official from doing anything that would create financial obligations for the government other than by normal borrowing against bonds, and all bonds must be equal --that is, it would be unconstitutional to pay off some bonds in preference to others. Any default on bond payments would have to be done in the same percentage across all bonds.

If this had been in place when Social Security was created, then this would have prevented it from being done in its current form (assuming that Congress didn't simply ignore the Constitution as they so often do). The could not legally have taken money from your paycheck on the premise that they were going to pay you back after you retire. They would have to have issued you federal bonds for your retirement and your bonds would be as good as anyone's.

Similarly, pensions for public employees would be unconstitutional. Governments would have two options for setting up pensions: they could make payments to private pension-providers with clear contractual provisions that the pension provider was solely responsible for payment of the pension. Or they could issue bonds that mature after retirement.

Now it might seem that this would make things worse because it takes away any discretion on the part of current governments to fix debt problems created by previous governments. For example, there would be no way to reduce payments to social security recipients as a way of balancing the budget because all of the recipients would own bonds, but that is a feature, not a bug.

What this amendment would do is give the bond market and the voters a clear and unambiguous idea of what obligations are being made when they were being made instead of years later when the bill comes due. Part of the reason that the US has the good credit rating it does is because of speculation by bond holders that the US will stiff retirees before they stiff bond holders. Politicians have been cynically relying on this perception and have been cynically kicking the pending disaster down the road to future politicians.

If retirees had instead been bond holders equal to all other bond holders then the bond market would have taken into account the real financial obligations that the US was accumulating instead of sequestering off the bond debt as the "real" obligation. And why shouldn't Social Security recipients get equal treatment to bond holders? Do they rely any less on payment of the federal government's obligations than bond holders do?

In addition, if all government financial obligations were in the form of debt then politicians and the news media would not be able to lie to voters about the obligations that are accumulating. The voters would be able to see a single national debt number as a percentage of GDP. They would be able to see the rising interest that the US would be paying for debt (as the bond market took into account the real obligations), and voters would be able to make more informed choices in voting.

When Roosevelt began Social Security, he immediately began making payments to people who were already retired and immediately incurred obligations to people who had already worked a large part of their life without paying into the system. If Roosevelt had been required to issue billions of dollars in bonds, I don't think he could possibly have created such outrageous obligations. I don't think he would have even tried.

I call this the "truth in obligations" amendment because it makes it more difficult for governments to hide, distort, or downplay the financial obligations that they make. This not only prevents them from deceiving voters about what they are doing, but also prevents them from deceiving the people that they are making the obligations too.

I am one of those people who is likely to bear the brunt of the corrections needed on social security and medical programs. It isn't fair to me that I've been paying in huge amounts of money my whole life into a system that never had any real legal obligation to pay me back, and where I most likely will not be paid back. Congress should have been forced to issue me bonds in return for my payment so that their obligations to me would be as legally solid as their obligations to China.

really bad movies --Dragon Wars

2011-02-18T21:30:00.000-08:00

As a part of my on-going program to inflict my loyal readers with all of my Netflix experiences, I present a review of Dragon Wars. This is the kind of movie that I would normally love. I mean, it's got ancient prophesies, dragons, battles between mythological creatures and modern US military forces, a reincarnated hero, and a babe. What's not to love about this movie? Well, before I tell you that, let me add that the realistic animated scenes are terrific.

There are huge masterfully-done battle scenes between tanks and and giant Horned-toad-like creatures with ancient Korean rockets strapped to their backs. There are flying dragonets battling in the air with helicopters. There is a scene stolen from King Kong with a serpent-like dragon chasing a pair of people up a sky scraper instead of a giant ape carrying a girl up a sky scraper. Then the dragon goes tearing through the city ripping up the streets and bashing the cars to the side. The realistic 3D is absolutely amazing; it's A-movie special effects in a B movie.

So what makes it a B movie? The first hint is the scene stolen from King Kong. Half of the movie seems to have been stolen from other movies. Time and again as I watched it, I thought, "Oh, that scene was stolen from X" or "Oh, that plot element was stolen from Y".

Still, the derivative screenplay wouldn't necessarily make it a bad movie if it not for the terrible, unendurable, worse-than-Chuck-Norris-in-his-first-few-movies bad acting. And it was not just the hero, but almost all of the American actors who just stunk up the screen whenever we weren't watching those titanic special-effects scenes. Oddly enough, the first twenty minutes or so of the movie takes place in ancient Korea and the Korean actors seemed to be pretty good (it's a little harder to judge since it was in Korean with subtitles) but the American actors were awful.

Yet in all fairness to the American actors --the dialog that they had to work with was pound-your-head-against the wall horrible. No one could have done anything non-humiliating with that dialog. It was beyond bad; it was ... well ... really, really bad. Words have failed me.

My advice on this movie: if you are a fan of realistic 3D animation involving mythological creatures getting shot up by modern auto cannons, and you have great tolerance for really, really bad movies, it is worth your time. If you are a fan of realistic 3D and don't have the requisite tolerance then Netflix has a way to skip forward; just watch the battle scenes. If you aren't any particular fan of 3D animations then I recommend that you watch something else.

UPDATE: Oh! Oh! I forgot! The most annoying thing about the movie? The "hero" does absolutely nothing effective through the whole film. Everything he tries to do fails and someone always has to rescue him. This pattern hold all the way through to the climax where the hero tries something to defeat the evil dragon, fails, and is then rescued one more time. The hero accomplishes nothing. No victory over his external enemies, no victory over internal struggles, no victories, no growth, no accomplishment.

old TV -- Avatar

2011-02-13T13:03:00.000-08:00

Avatar is a Japanese animated series (the first season of this series was made into the movie The Last Airbender).

[UPDATE: oops. Donald points out in the comments that although the animation is anime-style, it was not made in Japan and I verified that he is correct. I thought that I recalled someone saying during the controversy over the movie that it was made in Japan, but I must be mistaken. Actually, this helps explain Aang's pacifism, which I thought was more characteristic for a US production than an Asian one.]

The premise of Avatar is a world populated by four nations, one for each of the four elements: earth, air, fire, water. In each nation some of the people are benders --people with an innate ability control the element of their nation.

Bending is not just a matter of mental control; it also requires the use of body actions. The interesting thing is that the actions for controlling the elements are not patterned on Western-style hokus-pokus magical incantations, but on Asian martial arts. I fancied that I could see various differences in martial-arts styles. The air and water benders seemed to use the more subtle, flowing Chinese styles with lots of large circular movements for attack and evasion for defense. By contrast the earth and fire benders used the hard, driving Japanese and Korean styles based on straight-line attacks and hard blocking for defense.

Overall, I thought the bending was well-done dramatically, but it was lacking in ... let's call it "strategic value". What I mean by this is that there turned out to be little difference in what the benders could do in a battle. All benders could hurl chunks or sprays of their own stuff at the enemy and block the stuff that the enemy hurled. An air or fire bender could put up a wall of air or fire to deflect a huge rock that an earth bender threw at him. It would have been more interesting if the various elements had more dramatic strengths and weaknesses that had to be taken into account.

But you can only expect so much in a children's TV series. Avatar is really a children's comedy/adventure, but don't let that discourage you from watching it. The characters are very engaging and if the humor gets a bit silly at times, the silliness is usually short-lived and quickly followed by dramatic events to keep the interest of a grownup. Also, the fact that this is really intended for children and has a comedic element means that I didn't mind the childish plot devices like the two or three impossible coincidences per episode that would normally annoy me.

One thing that did annoy me was the main character's enduring faith that he could save the world from a cruel despot without hurting anyone. Such pacifist beliefs may be admirable in people who have some rational theory to back it up --say a belief in an omnipotent God-- but in this character it simply comes across as an arbitrary convention. You can't expect too much philosophy in a children's show but it would be nice to see some attempt at justifying the moral calculation that says, "better millions of people suffer horrors and murder under a brutal dictator than that I should sully my pure hands with any blood."

Fortunately, there was only one pacifist in the show (among major characters at any rate). There are a huge number of great characters and great villains. There is a demon that steals faces, a moon goddess, an evil blood bender, an ancient toothless earth-bending king with the energy and enthusiasm of a teenager, a giant flying bison, and much more. The imagination behind this series is tremendous.

The plot takes you all over the globe, from the Antarctic to the Arctic and from the great Eastern Continent to the Western Continent. The characters include everyone from village nomads to the royalty of the greatest civilizations on the planet. One of the things that I value most in a story is its ability to invoke a sense of wonder and Avatar does a very good job at that.

superspeed and my obsessive/compulsive need to organize

2011-02-09T20:41:00.000-08:00

I've missed Donald's blogging at Back of the Envelope since he slowed down his rate a lot (sort of like I did...), but he seems to be picking up a bit lately. I was almost inspired to write a long response to his post on Superspeed, but I rested a bit and the ambition went away. So just a few thoughts:

If you are assuming that superspeed and superstrength work simply through normal physical processes, then Donald is right that superspeed requires superstrength, but it also requires enormous energy and more oxygen than normal lungs can take in (assuming that you extend it for any length of time). It also requires superendurance since a person who is running really fast will go a very long way in a very short time. Additionally, superstrength requires supertoughness.

How about:

1. super energy (this could have applications on its own like holding your breath indefinitely or surviving blood loss).
2. super endurance
3. super toughness
4. super strength (requires 3)
5. super speed (requires 1,2,4)

Of course all of this could interfere with a story, so maybe it's better just to let it go...

Kant, irrationalism, and the defense of religion

2011-01-17T10:38:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I discussed the idea of Stephen Hicks that Kant in his book, A Critique of Pure Reason used irrationalism in order to defend religion from science. I disagree with Hicks on two points: Kant was not any species of irrationalist and Kant had no interest in defending religion. Here is what Kant wrote in the first preface to his book:

Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds of exemption from the examination of this tribunal. But, if they on they are exempted, they become the subjects of just suspicion, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.

In the previous post I said that Kant was not concerned to rescue religion from the onslaught of science but to rescue science from the onslaught of empiricism. I confess that this is something of an exaggeration. A truer account might be to say that Kant was concerned to rescue metaphysics from the onslaught of metaphysics.

Kant wrote that the purpose of writing "Critique of Pure Reason" was to set metaphysics on a sounder basis and make it like a science. "Pure reason" here refers to abstract reasoning of the type that is done in mathematics, logic and theoretical physics. Pure reason is also called speculative reason, and is contrasted to practical reason which is reason applied to actual things and specific events as opposed to abstractions.

Kant was motivated by the work of David Hume who had argued against metaphysics in general and who said that all of metaphysics is meaningless. Kant said that David Hume had missed something important --that Hume's criticism applied as well to all sorts of pure reasoning including mathematics and theoretical science. Kant therefore had to rescue science from Hume before he could rescue metaphysics from Hume, which he had to do before he could rescue metaphysics from itself.

Now, this is not to say that Kant did not think his new method would help religion. He remarked in a few places that once his theory was accepted, people would stop making unjustified inferences about things that they could know nothing about and that religion would benefit from this, but I think he had in mind as much the attempts to prove that God exists as the attempts to prove that God does not exist. Furthermore, this is an occasional side theme, not the main drive of the book.

As to whether Kant was being an irrationalist, here is the paragraph containing the quote that Hicks takes out of conext (in fairness to Hicks, it is practically impossible to quote Kant in context because he relied so much on precisely-defined terms with definitions that are very hard to explain. You are about to read an example of this problem):

The positive value of the critical principles of pure reason in relation to the conception of God and of the simple nature of the soul, admits of a similar exemplification; but on this point I shall not dwell. I cannot even make the assumption- as the practical interests of morality require- of God, freedom, and immortality, if I do not deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insight. For to arrive at these, it must make use of principles which,
in fact, extend only to the objects of possible experience, and which cannot be applied to objects beyond this sphere without converting them into phenomena, and thus rendering the practical extension of pure reason impossible. I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the presumption that it is possible to advance in metaphysics
without previous criticism, is the true source of the unbelief (always dogmatic) which militates against morality.

[I have highlighted the controversial quotation in bold type.]
Kant is making a technical point here about knowledge that requires that you understand his theory of knowledge --a theory that he spent hundreds of pages of dense German run-on sentences to explain. I only have a few paragraphs to accomplish the same task, so if you read on I congratulate you for your fortitude.

Imagine that you are looking at a red ball sitting on a table. The ball might be made of rubber or stone and the two images would still be the same. Maybe it is not a ball at all, but just a half of a ball. Without moving, you can't tell what is on the other side. Apparently there is a distinction between the thing that you sense and the thing that is really there. Let's call the thing that you sense a "phenomenon" and what is really there the "noumenon" (the plurals of these words are "phenomena" and "noumena"). Notice that not only can one phenomenon apply to two different noumenon (that is, two different things might look the same), but also two different phenomenon can apply to one noumenon --that is, the same thing looks different from different perspectives.

So, apparently noumenon is a physical object and a phenomenon is just what it looks like. Let's look a bit more closely at this. What if you are wearing 3D glasses and looking at a computer-generated 3D image, what is the noumenon? There isn't really a ball there at all. If the ball rolls across the table, you aren't seeing the action of physical mechanical forces; you are seeing the complex effects of digital electronics. The noumenon is explained in terms of digital circuits or computer programs.

Now consider a third possibility: you are dreaming. In this case you can see the same phenomenon but now the noumenon is something in your brain activity. In the case of dreaming or 3D computer animation, the noumenon doesn't look anything like the phenomenon. Not only doesn't it look like it, they don't even have similar relationships. Just because one phenomenal ball is above another phenomenal ball, that does not mean that the noumenon associated with one is physically above the noumenon associated with the other. If you are dreaming, you have no idea how the related brain states are related to each other, or even if they are distinct brain states. That is, just because you see two different balls in a dream, that does not mean that there are really two distinct brain states that these balls are phenomena of.

If you think about it, we really have no idea, even in the normal world, what noumena are really like. We think we know what a volleyball is like --it is spherical, it weighs a certain amount, it behaves a certain way when you hit it-- but when you think about it, all of those things are phenomena. What is really there under the appearance, underneath the information that we get from our senses? Any time that you try to answer this question you come back to sense information. You just cannot explain what is there without talking about phenomena. You can't even say where the noumenon is, as shown by the computer and dream examples. In both of those examples, the noumenon was in a completely different place from the phenomenon. In fact, space itself is a phenomenon. Ultimately, you can't even know for sure that the noumena exist. You can't say for sure that there is any distinct underlying reality underlying what you perceive as a ball.

This is a real philosophical problem (meaning that it doesn't really matter to anyone except philosophers). How can we ever get past appearances, past phenomena to find out what the noumena are really like? Kant's answer is that we can never have true knowledge of noumena. Kant called access to the noumena "transcendent insight" in the quote above.

Kant is using the work "knowledge" to apply to what we know about phenomena rather than what we know about noumena. This might seem backwards: shouldn't knowledge be about the real thing instead of just about the appearance? But that is impossible; according to Kant, we have no transcendent insight. We can think about the real thing. We can form beliefs about it, but we can't have any knowledge because our knowledge about the world comes only from one source: sense data (there are other kinds of knowledge as well, but they do not apply to the world, only to concepts or abstractions such as in mathematics). Since all of our knowledge about the world comes from sense data and sense data is all phenomenal, it follows that all of our knowledge about the world is about the phenomena rather than about the noumena.

In the sentence just before the one about abolishing knowledge is this: "For to arrive at these, it must make use of principles which, in fact, extend only to the objects of possible experience, and which cannot be applied to objects beyond this sphere without converting them into phenomena, and thus rendering the practical
extension of pure reason impossible." In other words, "to arrive at these" (to assume the existence of God, morality and immortality or the soul) Kant cannot use principles that apply only to "objects of possible experience" (only phenomena are objects of possible experience) without first converting the noumena (God and soul) into phenomena which would render the practical extension of pure reason impossible.

I think what he means by that last bit is that although you can reason from the phenomena to talk about what something is like, the phenomena alone are not enough to tell you that something actually exists because existence is a property of the noumena. In effect, you can never have true knowledge that something exists, you can, at most, have belief. Now this applies to rocks and trees as well as it applies to God and the soul, but the difference is that for rocks and trees it doesn't really matter if the noumena exist. If a rock is nothing more than a phenomenon, it is still going to hurt your head if someone throws it, so you'd better duck. After all, your head is only a phenomenon too. It doesn't matter what the "real underlying truth" is because in the physical world all we have are phenomena and that is what really matters.

So this is what Kant is saying: We can never have true knowledge that God and the soul exist because (noumenal) existence is not something that we can have true knowledge about.

This is not an expression of irratinoalism. Quite the contrary, it is an attempt to use rational thought to carefuly demarcate what we know from what we merely believe.

in defense of Kant

2011-01-15T02:55:00.000-08:00

Dr. Sanity --a great blogger by the way who I'm going to add to my sidebar the next time I experience a fit of reorganizational enthusiasm-- has repeated an old slander of Immanuel Kant on the way to endorsing a bit of historical revisionism.

The slander involves taking an out-of-context quote and making it mean pretty much the opposite of what Kant was trying to say. Dr Sanity seems to be largely relying on Stephen Hicks who writes:

By the late 1700s religious thinkers had a choice—accept evidence and logic as the ultimate court of appeal and thereby reject their deeply-cherished religious ideals—or stick by their ideals and attack the whole idea that evidence and logic matter. “I had to deny knowledge,” wrote Kant in the Preface to the first Critique, “in order to make room for faith.” “Faith,” wrote Kierkegaard in Fear and trembling, “requires the crucifixion of reason”; so he proceeded to crucify reason and glorify the irrational.

(as an aside, I suspect that Kierkegaard is also being taken badly out of context here).

UPDATE: My interpretation of Kant's sentence was completely wrong due to the fact that I carelessly read "reasoning" where the translated word is "knowledge" (In my defense, it was well past my bed time when I wrote that post). The word change completely changes the meaning of the phrase, but it still does not support Hicks's revisionism. I stand by everything in the following except the parts where I am trying to understand what Kant meant.

I'll write another post where I take the novel approach of actually presenting the sentence in context.

Kant is not saying what the a simple reading of this sentence suggests: that he has to ignore the facts because they make it hard to believe in God. The reasoning that Kant is referring to is not reasoning that tries to show the non-existence of God --he is referring to reasoning that tries to show the existence of God.

In Kant's time, there was a common belief that reasoning could be used to prove all truths, including the existence of God. There were various "proofs" of the existence of God considered persuasive by influential thinkers. Although there were some who didn't buy any of the proofs that they had heard, it was widely believed that the question of God's existence could be settled, one way or another, by logical proof. Kant rejected this idea.

What Kant is saying in that quote is that since reason can never, even in principle, prove the existence of God we should give up the attempt and rely instead on "faith", by which he means another way of arriving at the knowledge of God.

More generally, Kant argued that we have different ways of arriving at different kinds of knowledge. There is no single faculty that is the ultimate source of all knowledge. This is in contrast to a very popular view in his day (associated with Descartes) that pure reason was the ultimate arbitrator of knowledge. In fact the title of the book that contains this out-of-context quote is "A Critique of Pure Reason".

Kant was, in fact, correct. I've written before about the program of the Logicists who tried (and failed) to disprove one of Kant's examples by proving that all of mathematics can be derived from pure logic. Mmathematics seems to be as close to pure reason as you can get and yet the axioms of mathematics cannot be derived from pure logic. Logic cannot tell you that if A is less than B and B is less than C, then A must be less than C. This is knowledge that you must be able to acquire through some faculty other than logic.

So, it is not true that Kant was endorsing religious faith based on closing ones eyes and shouting "I can't hear you" over and over.

But lets get back to that Stephen Hicks quote: "By the late 1700s religious thinkers had a choice—accept evidence and logic as the ultimate court of appeal and thereby reject their deeply-cherished religious ideals—or stick by their ideals and attack the whole idea that evidence and logic matter". This is wrong in two important ways.

The first mistake is in the false dichotomy. Hicks offers the choices (A) accept evidence and logic as the ultimate court of appeal or (B) drop the idea that evidence and logic matter. Obviously there is a third option, one accepted by most rational people today, (C) accept that logic and evidence matter but don't assume that they can settle every question.

The other mistake is Hicks's assertion that the intellectual crisis that Kant was responding to was a crisis of "deeply-cherished religious ideals". Religion wasn't even under serious intellectual attack at the time. There were certainly rigorous debates about the existence of God, but the atheists had made no more progress in the debate than the theists had. It was an intellectual crisis in science and not any crisis in religion that motivated Kant to produce a work that arguably inspired post-modernism. I don't believe that Kant was even particularly religious.

What was under serious intellectual attack was not the deeply-cherished religious ideals but the deeply-cherished ideal that evidence and logic is the ultimate court of appeal. The empiricists such as Bishop George Berkeley (CofE) and David Hume had fairly demolished the idea that science (or any body of belief) could ever be at the same time (1) about the real world, (2) based entirely on evidence and logic, and (3) certain. Hume, in particular, had already killed this eighteenth-century concept of science but in Kant's day they still kept it around like the corpse in "Weekend at Bernie's". Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" was an attempt to read the last rites to this false conception, but he wasn't entirely successful. The corpse continues to be dragged out for all the parties even today.

UPDATE: I've done a better explanation of the quote here.

old TV

2011-01-01T02:17:00.000-08:00

I've been watching a lot of old TV on Netflix lately and thought I'd post some reviews. If Marcel can review old movies, I can review old TV.

Firefly is a series from 2002. I never saw it when new but I had heard a lot about it from other SF fans and now I know why --it was a tremendous series. If there were any justice in the universe, this show would still be running. The casting was perfect, the acting was excellent, the stories were great and it was hilarious as well as dramatic. The plots were credible, tight and fairly original. The motivations of the characters were plausible for the given characters and villains were interesting and entertaining.

The science was a little strained and implausible. Supposedly all of humanity migrated to another solar system and terraformed a bunch of planets and moons. Terraforming was so easy that they overdid it and ended up with a bunch of sparsely-inhabited planets. Yet with the tremendous levels of technology that required, many of the planets can't afford even 20th-century technology and they are riding around on horses. Then there is the problem that the "outer" planets aren't any colder than the "inner planets" and that whenever they want to go to another planet it is only a few hours away. It all adds up to the need for a competent technical consultant.

But overall, this is one of my favorite TV series ever. If you get Netflix, I'd recommend adding the two seasons of Firefly to your "instant queue" first thing.

Babylon 5 is an SF series from 1993. You can really see the age of the film in the way that they handle technology. For example, station personnel have small personal communicators, but most people --even VIPs-- do not have anything like a mobile phone. The plots are pretty good except that there is a tendency for supposedly smart and experienced military people to make ridiculous security mistakes. At least these mistakes are only used to heighten the suspense and not to create artificial plot points. In other words, they do stupid things, but usually nothing bad happens because of it.

My biggest complaint is that all of the main characters come off as self-indulgent drama queens. For example, a group of people who are supposed to be experienced leaders and military people are on a very time-critical mission to save the galaxy from being destroyed. One of them disappears from the ship. They have no idea how to get him back or even if it is possible to get him back, but there is still a huge amount of drama over whether they can bear to complete the mission after the loss or will abandon the universe to total annihilation while they stop and grieve. When they decide to go on with the mission it is played up like a great act of courage, sacrifice and dedication that they aren't going to let everything they have ever known be destroyed by sentimentality.

Despite the hyperdrama, the show is still entertaining and I'd recommend adding it to your instant queue, but not among the first selections.

mechanics, thermodynamics, and gravity

2010-12-29T17:15:00.000-08:00

Apparently there is a new physical theory that gravity arises out of entropy (link from instapundit):

A few month's ago, Erik Verlinde at the the University of Amsterdam put forward one such idea which has taken the world of physics by storm. Verlinde suggested that gravity is merely a manifestation of entropy in the Universe. His idea is based on the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases over time. It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises entropy. This is the force we call gravity.

This is interesting because I've always thought physics should concentrate more on thermodynamic-style theories rather than mechanical-style theories, and up to now mechanical-style theories have been far more dominant.

Consider a box divided into twochambers, A and B. Chamber A has high-pressure air and chamber B is avacuum. You can extract useful work from this system by putting a fanbetween the two chambers and allowing air to run through the fan fromchamber A to B. The moving air turns the fan and you can use a beltattached to the fan to turn something else. This system does work.I'm going to be a bit coy about how “work” is definedhere, but think of it as doing something like running a car orgenerating electricity or cooling a house.

This two-chamber system will do workuntil the pressure in the two chambers is equalized. After that,there is no longer any organized motion of air from one chamber toanother to turn the fan (there may be random microscopic motions ofair, but these cannot be used to perform work). As the two chambersbecome more equal in pressure the system loses some of its potentialto do work.

There are many other examples oftwo-chamber setups that can do work. For example, you can have achamber with hot water in one side and cold water in the other. Youcan put a heat engine between the two sides and extract energy fromit until the temperature of the two sides is the same. You can alsoget work from a system where there is fresh water on one side andsalt water in the other. It will do work until the salinityequalizes. You can get work from a system having one side full ofoxygen and the other full of nitrogen at the same temperature andpressure. You can extract work until the two sides have the samemixture.

Now the reason that you can extractwork from these systems is that in each case, there is some sort offorce or tendency that tries to change the state of the two chambersuntil the two chambers are the same, are uniform. We call thistendency potential energy. By controlling the tendency of the twochambers to become uniform, we release potential energy and get work.

Entropy is sort of the opposite ofpotential energy. Entropy is at a minimum at the beginning when thetwo chambers have the greatest difference. This is also whenpotential energy is at a maximum. Once the two chambers are uniform,the entropy is at a maximum and the potential energy is zero.

The systems I've talked about up to noware classical thermodynamic systems. Now lets think about a differentkind of system, what would be considered a classical mechanicalsystem. Consider a two-chamber system of astronomical proportions.There is an entire planet sitting in chamber A and a chunk of spacerock sitting in chamber B. The rock will want to fall towards theplanet and you can extract work from the falling rock.

Classical mechanics is about masses andforces and acceleration. Classical thermodynamics is about heat andenergy. You can talk about masses and forces in thermodynamic systemby bringing in a very complex theory called statistical mechanics. Oryou can go the other way and use the notions of heat and energy totalk about mechanical systems. In this way of talking, we don't talkabout the force of gravity, instead we talk about the potentialenergy that exists between the rock and the planet. This potentialenergy can be extracted as work, much like the potential energy ofthe other systems can be extracted as work. Once the rock is sittingon the planet, there is no potential energy left.

Throughout most of modern physics,there has been a strong preference for the mechanical type of theoryover the thermodynamic type of theory. This is because there has beena strong tendency to view mechanical-type theories as beingexplanatory while thermodynamic-type theories were merelydescriptive. For example, in the two-chamber experiment with highpressure air in one chamber and a vacuum in the other chamber,physicists have felt that what is really happening, the realexplanation goes something like this: the chamber with highpressure has a lot of gas molecules bouncing around in it. Once youopen a hole in the wall, the molecules that are headed in the rightdirection to hit that part of the wall will now pass through and hitthe fan blades instead. Each molecule that hits the fan blade willbounce off of the blade, imparting a tiny bit of momentum. The sum ofall of those molecule-sized momentum changes add up to enough tocause the fan to turn.

This is plausible as an explanation,but now consider applying the same idea to the planet/rock example.By similar reasoning we might say that the reason that therock falls is because there is a gravitational force between the rockand the planet and that potential energy is just a mathematicalfiction. Is that plausible? Why not say that the potential energy isreal and the force is just a mathematical fiction? What makes one ofthese descriptions more real, more explanatory than the other?Frankly, I don't think that there is any rational basis to choose.Both force and potential energy are theoretical entities, as aremolecules and momentum changes.

Now, as I said above, potential energyis sort of the opposite of entropy, so when you apply thethermodynamic theories to the mechanical system, it amounts to thestatement that the planet/rock system has low entropy when the planetand rock are distant, and that once the rock is resting on the planetthe system has maximum entropy. This notion seems to be incompatiblewith the statistical notion of entropy.

Recall from my original examples withthermodynamics that high entropy is always associated with uniformity–a state where the contents of both chambers have the sameuniform contents. This has led physicists to associate entropy withjust this state. They say that entropy is equivalent todisorganization and by their theories uniformity is equivalent todisorganization (I know that isn't entirely intuitive, but that's howit is defined).

Now consider the planet/rock systemagain. In this system the lowest entropy was when there was matter inboth boxes. The highest entropy is when there is matter in only onebox (which contains both the planet and the rock once all of thepotential energy has been expended). This seems to contradict thetheory that identifies entropy with disorganization unless you definedisorganization as just that state of matter that has less potentialenergy. In other words, you could make a definition like this: Astate S1 is more organized than a state S2 if and only if state S1has higher potential energy than state S2. However, if you defineit that way, then your definition is not an independent theory –itis just a set of code words to talk about potential energy. It hasn'tadded anything to our knowledge.

An independent theory of entropy (orpotential energy) in terms of disorder would let you decide howordered or disordered a system is before you know anything at allabout how potential energy works in that kind of system. That wouldbe exciting because it would show a genuine mathematical relationshipbetween energy and organization. I don't know if such a thing existsor not since I never studied that area, but I find this new theory ofgravitation interesting because it seems to imply that there is agenuinely independent definition of entropy that applies not only totraditional thermodynamic systems, but also to mechanical systemsinvolving gravity.

UPDATE: after doing some more reading, it seems that I had the basic idea wrong. This new theory is about microscopic events, statistical mechanics, rather than macroscopic thermodynamics.

and the near-sighted shall see

2010-12-25T21:32:00.000-08:00

This morning after waking up I spent a few minutes as usual seeking vainly for renewed somnolence before I rolled over and reached for my glasses on the bedside stand. They weren't there where I usually keep them, so I started patting around for them without looking --I can't see much without my glasses anyway. I couldn't find the glasses and my mind was starting to go over the places that I might have left them. I turned my eyes to the bathroom door and I could actually see the bathroom counter clearly enough to look for my glasses. Then I remembered: "Oh, right. I don't wear glasses any more".

I got Lasik eye surgery three weeks ago but the habit of reaching for my glasses in the morning is ingrained by decades of practice. Last week I finally threw away my glasses and contacts. Normally I'm a pack rat --I still had contacts from three prescriptions ago-- but I couldn't come up with an scenario where I might possibly need them again. Even if something goes wrong with the surgery, you aren't going back to the old prescription.

Over all, I am pretty amazed at the results. I spent less time in the office on the day of surgery than I had in my pre-surgery exam --about 45 minutes. Of that only about 10 minutes was in "the chair".

The surgery was more painful than the websites or the doctor had led me to believe. That is not just pressure you feel while the doctor is wedging that glass plate against your eyeball to flatten it out, what I felt, at least, was pain. Or maybe it's just me. The last time I had a root canal, the dentist was not able to numb the area completely no matter how many times she gave me the needle. She called it a "hot tooth", but I wonder if I just don't respond well to local anesthetics.

The first week was really inconvenient. Among other things, you have to tape eye shields over your eyes before bed. If you are tying to do it yourself, be aware that doing it properly takes three hands and if you try to make do with only two hands and some clever finger positions as I did, you should either not do it in the bathroom or make sure your toilet lid is down unless you don't mind fishing for a roll of medical tape in your toilet bowl. Just saying.

It's pretty amazing, though. Not only is my distance vision close to 20/20, I can read better too (I've been using reading glasses with my contacts for several years). If you have correctable vision and aren't too risk-averse for the very small chance of complications, I highly recommend Lasik.

Two things to do before you go in though. First, practice staring at a small dot of light. Turn off your laptop and stare at the power LED in a dark room, for example. The doctor recommended that I do this, but I ignored the advice. How hard can it be to stare at a light? Well, it turns out to be hard. At first I would stare at the light and let my mind wander. My eyes wandered when my mind did. Then I decided to focus on the dot and concentrate, but when I did that it was almost worse. My eye, having been given the message that the dot was important, seems to have decided on its own that it wasn't getting any useful information from the dot and started to carefully examine the area around the dot. I kept telling it that we were only interested in the dot itself, but my eye was pretty stubborn about the whole thing. Stupid organ.

The other thing to practice is putting drops in your own eyes. You have to have drops every hour for the first day or two and with multiple kinds of drops, so unless you have a very patient person to help you out, you have to do it yourself. If you have never put in your own eye drops before it is going to be frustrating to figure out when you aren't feeling very well and can't see very well.

My technique is the following: if I'm putting drops in my left eye, I hold the bottle on the threads (where the cap screws on) with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. I close my eyes (in case I judge the distance wrong) and hold the bottle up to my left eye, positioning my hand against my forehead and nose to hold it in place. Then I open my left eye and try to position the bottle so that when I'm looking straight ahead, I am looking right down the nozzle.

Once I have the aim right, I lock my right hand against my face, close my left eye again (just in case my judgment is off...) and tilt my head back with my right hand holding the same position against my face. I open my left eye to make sure the nozzle is still in place, then I look off to the left so that I can't see the drop coming (otherwise I'll blink) and squeeze the bottle slowly with my left hand until a drop hits my eye. It's really not that bad once you get used to it, but it takes some practice. Reverse everything for the right eye, of course.

There are lots of other things to know, of course. Follow the doctor's instructions because he really, really wants you to have no complications, for his own self interest as well as yours.

Modern medicine is pretty incredible. In a former age, a person with eyes like mine would be condemned to a life in a small cubicle doing nothing but reading, writing and mathematics. Today, I can ... sit in a small cubicle ... working as a software architect ... which mostly involves reading, writing, and mathematics...

But! I can stand up and see from my cubicle if the coffee pot is full before I go over there. That's progress!

Microsoft Silverlight and open standards

2010-12-12T19:24:00.000-08:00

I made a side comment about Microsoft Silverlight on a previous post and foxfier asked if I just don't do Silverlight.

I try not to. It isn't terrible technology. In some ways it's worse than Flash, in some ways it's better. Microsoft likes to say that Silverlight is "based on" open standards because they use XML packaged up in a zip file. Two comments about that: first, it is a terrible way to do things from a technical point of view, and second, it is a trivial sop to open standards given the enormous barriers to competition that Silverlight creates.

Frankly, Silverlight represents an attempt by Microsoft to create an internet platform that they can control. Given their history, Microsoft is not a company that you want controlling any more platforms. Unless you own stock or work for Microsoft, of course. And they don't support the platform anywhere except Windows and (sort of) Apple.

Now, Adobe isn't any better than Microsoft and Flash isn't any more open, but it is, at least, much more widespread on the internet and the clients are available on more platforms. People interested in open standards can copy a single platform more easily than two. So if you have to use an application like Flash or Silverlight, and you care about keeping big companies from controlling technology that they didn't create (which is what happens when a company controls a platform), then you should go with Flash.

decency

2010-12-12T00:34:00.000-08:00

From instapundit, this link about a critic of Sarah Palin who has been arrested for incest. Look, I think the guy was probably unfair in his comments about Sarah Palin and he may have been a real jerk in his other political writing, but there is really something indecent about taking this sort of personal revelation and using it for a political gotcha.

There is no rational connection between this man's crime and his politics. I can pretty much guarantee you that there are Sarah Palin fans who are involved in incest, not to mention child abuse, rape, and murder. Sarah has millions of fans, how could there not be?

Look, I've defended Ann Coulter from other conservatives who thought she was being too mean, and I haven't exactly pulled punches much myself on this blog, but there are lines that should not be crossed and this is one of them. Don't take family tragedies and exploit them for political gotchas. This is a family tragedy. Yes, it was deliberately caused by members of the family, but that makes it no less a tragedy. If a man tries to commit suicide and fails, is that not a tragedy to him and his family just because he acted deliberately? Would it be OK to exploit that for political gotchas?

I don't think so, and I don't think this is much different.

netflix sux

2010-12-07T00:16:00.000-08:00

Netflix suffers from the same problem that afflicts so many large internet companies: they are so successful that they don't have to care about their customers and it shows. Their "contact us" menu item gives you a runaround where they try to avoid having you contact them. In the end, the only way to contact them is to call customer service and wait on hold for seven minutes. Obviously the wait is a punishment for bothering them.

For dealing with customers, email is cheaper per contact. The disadvantage is that it leads to more contacts. If you can put your customers through a painful telephone experience, it acts as a disincentive and they won't bother you unless their problem is really serious or they have a lot of free time.

My problem isn't really serious; it's just an annoyance. It's something Netflix management probably doesn't even know about and if they did they could fix it easily and thereby avoid annoying their customers. But they don't want to hear about it because their customers are just such a bother. So instead of letting them know about the problem I'll just drop my membership when my free month is up.

Maybe I can find a similar service that doesn't require Microsoft Silverlight. Frankly, I have little hope of finding a service that doesn't view their customers as a bother.

how to make a dugout boat

2010-11-14T14:47:00.000-08:00

The Pirogue maker

This answered a question that has tasked me ever since I read about dugout canoes: how do they know how much to take off from the inside and outside to get the hull thickness they want? What they did in this film is drill a hole through the boat to judge the thickness as they were planing it down. Once they got it right, they sealed the hole with a plug.

Now why didn't I think of that?

in defense of Saw audiences

2010-11-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

John C. Wright posts a description of a torture porn movie that I think is the latest episode of "Saw". He comments:

I solemnly assure you that even the Imperial box, front row center, at a Roman gladiatorial game did not show wounds and torment so vividly and closely. As I said above, the point is not to drive our civilization down to the point of paganism, nor to the point of barbarism. Barbarians are still human. The point is to drive civilization lower, to the subhuman.

OK, first a historic comment: John is forgetting the horrors of the Roman Coliseum. The most traditional entertainment was a fight to the death, often between a well-armed and well-trained gladiator and a poorly-armed untrained slave. It is arguable that the fighting events were less violent than the scenes depicted in Saw but there were other entertainments which I am not going to describe here. Suffice it to say that Christians were commonly tortured to death by the most cruel tortures that the Romans could devise.

What I really want to talk about, though, is John's criticism of the genre. I accidentally saw one of the Saw movies a few months ago while I was flipping around channels late at night. I had no idea what it was until I was absorbed in the movie, so I ended up watching a good part of it. It was not the torture that I found so absorbing. I would rather not see that level of violence. I never deliberately watch a movie that I know will contain explicit scenes of torture or other extreme forms of violence or that I know has a horrifying ending. What was absorbing about the move was not the torture but the drama. In his previous post John gave these components of a drama:

1. A protagonist with a goal or dream or need or mission, who is facing…
2. An obstacle (it can be a person, as an evil villain, or a situation, as life in an evil village) presenting a real challenge, perhaps an overwhelming challenge, blocking the protagonist’s achievement of this goal. Facing this challenge initiates…
3. Rising action, perhaps with unexpected yet logical plot-turns to astonish the reader’s expectations, leading to…
4. A climax, a crescendo or catharsis, which in turn brings about…
5. A resolution that not only…
1. Makes intellectual sense, with no plot threads forgotten and no plot holes showing but also…
2. Makes moral and emotional sense, it shows the cosmos the way it is or the way it should be, but also…
3. Makes thematic sense, such that it can be used as an example, or a model, or a reflection of life or some aspect of life.

The Saw movie (I keep calling it "the Saw move" because I don't know which one it was) involved a collection of subplots, each a drama according to John's description. In each subplot:

1. the protagonist has the goal of not being tortured to death and preventing someone else from being tortured to death

2. the challenge is that he has been put in a grotesque dilemma by a sadistic madman --a situation where someone is going to end up dieing a horrifying death and the protagonist has to make some very hard decision which will effect the outcome. Sometimes the protagonist can save himself by doing something horrible to someone else, or sometimes he can save someone else by doing something horrible to himself.

3. there is rising action, small victories, small defeats, plot twists, and --believe it or not-- character development. At various points there is hope that maybe they can get out of the trap, and then there is a twist that shows that the hope was just another aspect of the trap. Everything has been planned to perfection by the villain.

4. there is a climax when the deadline arrives and someone dies a horrible death.

5. The resolution was very tight and it made sense logically, morally, and thematically.

I believe that a lot of the appeal of these movies is not so much the torture itself as it is the way that the torture heightens the suspense for an audience that has become jaded by depictions of violence. By the time you see one of these movies, you have seen Dirty Harry blow a guy's head off with a .44 Magnum about a ten times. You have seen samurai and immortals cutting peoples heads off with swords. You have seen a huge cruise ship roll over and a sky scraper burn down and about twenty planes crash, killing thousands of people in all. You have seen terrorists take hostages and eventually murder them. You have seen Darth Vader blow up an entire planet full of people.

Modern audiences with this sort of background are hard to impress. They have emotional calluses over their sensitivity to depicted violence. If you want to use violence to raise the stakes of your drama, it is not going to be easy. If you have an extraordinarily talented cast you can make even an audience of regular TV watchers forget that they are watching a movie, you can set up a situation where even a small level of violence is unthinkable, and then bring in that level of violence. That way is hard. An easier way to get a visceral reaction from your audience is to use a level of violence more extreme than their emotional calluses can handle. That's the solution used by torture porn and slasher films.

In general, people who enjoy these kinds of movies don't really enjoy watching torture or extreme violence for itself. Rather, the attraction of the film is that the extreme violence raises the stakes to where they actually care about what happens. The audience members are jaded rather than sadistic. Just shooting someone in the head so they can see the blood spurt, or drowning a thousand men, women and children in a cruise ship is ho hum. But an explicit scene of someone's guts being ripped from their body --even a modern jaded audience reacts to that. The point is that they don't want to see the character suffer, and that is why the threat of suffering makes the audience care about the movie.

I'm not a slut

2010-10-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

Christine O'Donnell's next political ad: Same setting as the "I'm not a witch" ad. She says,

I'm not a slut. Does this seem familiar to you? Why do I keep having to defend myself against personal attacks based on things I did or said years ago and that have nothing to do with being a United States Senator?

Let's be honest. This latest personal attack is not even intended to effect this election. This is about humiliating a conservative woman in the most offensive way they can, in order to frighten other conservative women away from politics.

But there is another reason why they want to focus on the personal, and that is to distract away from my opponent's policies. If you are running a business, Chris Coons doesn't think you should have the right to hire who you think you need, pay what you think is fair, sell the things or provide the services that you think people demand. Chris Coons wants the federal government to control all of that. If you are a consumer, Chris Coons thinks the federal government should control what you can buy, who you can buy it from and what you can do with it. In the case of health insurance, he even wants the federal government to force you to buy a federally-approved policy whether you think you need it or not.

To distract you from Chris Coons's frightening authoritarian belief system, my opponents try to frighten you with stories about my personal moral beliefs. I do have conservative ideas about how people should behave, but I haven't been talking about that in this campaign for the very good reason that it has nothing to do with being a United States Senator. The federal government should have nothing to do with controlling your personal moral decisions.

This is the important difference between me and my opponent: I do not want to use the overwhelming power of federal government to force you to follow my beliefs, and Chris Coons does.

I want to go to Washington to cut back on the bloated federal government and get it out of your life. When you are living your own life or running your own local business, you should never once have to think about what those guys in Washington want you to do. It's not their life, it's not their business, it's yours. Chris Coons wants the federal government to control even more of your personal and business life --endless paperwork and endless regulations.

The difference is that I want to increase your personal freedom and Chris Coons wants to take your freedom away.

I'm Christine O'Donnell and I approve this message.

And I'm not a slut or a witch and I don't want to make masturbation a federal crime. I just want freedom.

If you want freedom too, please vote for me on Tuesday.

Some background, in case you don't get the references: Gawker, a on-line leftist "news" site, has posted a story about a one-night stand that Christine O'Donnell didn't have. She got close, though, and Gawker does their best to describe the event in the most humiliating way possible. I'm not linking the story and I encourage you to read about it from other sites rather than reading it yourself. Instapundit (who always has the best links) recommends Allahpundit and Katie Granju. Michelle Malkin discusses the slimy history of this site and the people who run it. Malkin also has a list of Gawker's major advertisers. Some of these companies might respond well to polite phone calls or emails, asking them if they really want to be associated with this kind of hate speech.

The idea for the ad and the "witch" references come from this campaign add by O'Donnell. Apparently O'Donnell made the mistake of telling someone that she had dabbled in witchcraft in high school and the left was trying to make that a campaign issue.

of owls and batteries

2010-10-18T00:25:00.001-07:00

Speaking of things that you should take out of your pocket before scuba diving, I would also add your Owl Wallet Light to the list. The Owl Wallet Light is a credit-card-sized magnifying glass with a small light.

It's a neat idea with a relatively poor implementation. You can't see very much through the magnifying glass and you have to carefully hold it at the right angle and distance to see anything, so it's a bit tedious to try to read anything as large as a restaurant menu.

Part of the visibility problem is caused by the fact that the Owl uses a Fresnel lens. A Fresnel lens doesn't have varying thickness like a normal lens; instead it uses many small ridges to focus light. The ridges make it very hard to clean that side of the lens and the lens tends to get foggy when rubbing up against the sides of a leather wallet.

Another issue with the Owl is that the light is not bright enough in the dim lights of your typical cloth-napkin restaurant (I think cloth napkins are disgusting, by the way), but there is a new version out that has brighter lights.

Still another issue is that the Owl is disposable. There is no way to replace the batteries once they go out. Or is there? In the Owl that went scuba diving with me, the front of the card was coming up. I peeled it back and found what look like two stock hearing-aid cells underneath. It looks like you could replace them with a bit of effort. You would have to find some way to loosen the front of the card without destroying the circuitry.

My Owl is so rusted inside that it is not worth trying, but if anyone else wants to send me one with a dead battery, I'd like to give it a try. Anyone?

the scuba scheme

2010-10-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

I love scuba diving, and I highly recommend anyone who lives near the water or likes to vacation near the water to take lessons and get certified. However, be careful in taking advice from your scuba instructor on what to buy.

Beware of the "I think I'm going to buy that myself" scam. As you casually browse in a dive shop, some scuba instructor (often the one who taught you) will point out a piece of equipment to another instructor, completely ignoring you. The instructor will talk about how great it is and how he wants one. Often he is saving up to buy one or he has been waiting for the device to hit the shelves and now that it is here he is are going to sell his old device to buy the new one. My first scuba instructor tricked me into buying a dive bag by that method.

A related trick is that as you ask a shop employee about some item, a dive instructor will come over and say something to the shop employee, hardly even noticing you. He will say something like, "Have those finally come in? I'm going to buy one tomorrow." I don't know how the incentives are structured, but these events happen too often to be coincidence.

The scuba world is structured a bit like a pyramid scheme. When you first start diving, the equipment is very expensive, but dive instructors get huge discounts. This provides an incentive for divers to keep taking lessons so that they can eventually become an instructor and not only get the discounts, but make some money as well. Of course, they only make money if they talk other people into taking more advanced lessons, which gets other people more into scuba, who eventually decide that they want to be instructors too.

a tip for Droid owners

2010-10-04T00:00:00.001-07:00

-- or --

what I learned on vacation

Take your Droid out of your pocket before scuba diving. It turns out that this can damage certain models of mobile phone and even void your warranty.

I'm referring here specifically to the first version of the Motorola Moto Droid. I have no specific experience with other sorts of mobile phones.

Also, it's a good idea to take your wallet out of your pocket, especially if you have any of those electronic keys that look like big white cards. Something about the environment seems to ruin their ability to open doors. Regular credit cards with the magnetic strip seem to survive immersion down to 100' with no ill effects as long as they are properly rinsed and dried.

study habits

2010-09-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

Instapundit links to an interesting article about study habits. I read the article mainly because I had some very unusual study habits in college and I was very successful with them, so I wanted to see if this article had research showing that I had hit on some great technique. Not so much. My study habits in many of my classes went something like this:

(1) go to all of the lectures and pay attention
(2) read the assigned work right after the lecture
(3) go to the library and read science fiction (the University of Arizona library had one of the largest science fiction collections in the world).

This study technique only worked for non-technical classes and technical classes such as calculus, intro chemistry, and intro physics that contained a lot of review material from high school. In most of my advanced mathematics, chemistry, physics, engineering, and computer-science classes I added a fourth step:

(4) do the minimum assigned homework

I like to think that if I had been paying high tuition at a private college instead of minimal tuition at a state school, I would have worked harder to make the investment worthwhile. I also like to think that if I had spent a little more time working on my jump shot that I could have played in the NBA. I also like to think that I am an extraordinarily good-looking and desirable man who women can't resist. Of the three, probably only the last one is really true.

But back to study methods. It turns out that modern cognitive research does not provide a lot of support for my study technique --no mention of science fiction at all. But the article did support my preferred teaching method which nearly got me lynched by my classes.

I taught several summer-school classes when I was studying for my Ph.D. One of the classes that I taught a few times was a 300-level class that involved formal logic, mathematical induction and other simple mathematics that is useful in computer programming (that is, no advanced stuff like difference equations or automata theory).

My eductional theory involved two parts

(1) cramming for tests is a poor way to learn
(2) taking tests is a good way to learn

Apparently the cognitive science backs up both of these ideas. To be honest, I may have gotten these ideas from some cognitive science classes that I took rather than from intuition and innate brilliance. I no longer recall.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have come up with a good way to apply them. My technique was to assign homework frequently and have it due in two or three days (this was summer-school, recall, so all the students were taking just one six-week class and had no work assigned from other classes). In addition, I had frequent pop quizzes. Each quiz contained minor variations on problems from the homework that was due that day. My theory was that if they had just done the homework in the last couple of days, then they should have no problem with the quizzes.

Boy was I wrong. First of all, it turns out that a lot of people don't do their own homework. They join "study" groups which apparently work like this: a bunch of parasites latch onto one effective student, either a smart kid who is able to do the work easily or a hard-working kid who is willing to put in the effort to do the work. They assign each member of the group to do one of the problems but the effective student does all of the problems anyway, either because it is easy or because he actually wants to learn, and the parasites do half-assed jobs on only the problems assigned to them. Then they get together in their "study" group, pass around their work, and all of the parasites copy all of the answers from the effective student.

Now, you might be wondering why, after six or seven years of college, I was unaware of this practice until I started teaching. Was I really that anti-social that I was never in a "study" group? Yes, I really was that anti-social. I was asked several times to join "study" groups but I didn't see how studying in a group could possibly be useful so I always declined.

Next you are probably thinking, "Gee, Doc, no one could be so dense that they don't realize that these study groups were also an opportunity for social interaction and getting to know people with similar interests and career paths." But you are wrong. Someone really could be that dense and I am living proof of it.

It's just as well that I never joined such a group. The people who invited me to join their "study" groups almost certainly expected me to be the effective student in the group, but they would have been sorely disappointed at both my work ethic and at my attitude towards sharing my work (as you can probably surmise by the term "parasite").

Anyway, I didn't understand how "study" groups worked until I became a teacher and started seeing the obviously-copied homework. When I discussed this with fellow instructors, they explained to me how study groups work. All of them, of course, had been in great demand as the smart kid in study groups so they had a lot of experience.

Now let's get back to the reasons for the failure of my teaching method. The second reason that it failed is because students really hate tests. This came as a great surprise. I will spare you another long digression on how I could have gone through six or seven years of college and not known how much other people hate tests. Suffice it to say that this was something of a shock to me.

Apparently many people find tests to be stressful and unpleasant activities. Naturally, these people found the method of taking two or three tests per week to be beyond the bounds of acceptable academic torture. They complained. They revolted. Worst of all, they cried. OK, no one actually cried, but I thought they were babies anyway. Not fair of me, really. Just because I personally did not find tests to be unpleasant, is not reason to be unsympathetic to those who do.

I was convinced that all of the complaining had more to do with the fact that my technique had the side-effect of rendering their usual cheating methods ineffective than any real antipathy towards test taking. I'm still convinced that I was half-right on that. Still, the rebellion was so wide-spread that I eventually had to relent and go back to normal teaching methods.

It's a shame, though. I think if I could have carried out my plan then those kids might actually remember some of what I tried to teach them. As it is, I doubt it.

the sentimentality argument against the Ground-Zero mosque

2010-08-28T18:15:00.001-07:00

The people who are calling opponents of the Ground-Zero mosque "bigots" have a point.

No, seriously. And literally. I'm not joking here, or setting you up for some sort of ironic twist. I'm serious.

Seriously.

Look, I'm opposed to the Ground-Zero mosque. In fact, I'm one of those extreme reactionaries who thinks that despite the First Amendment, the government ought to prevent the mosque from being built, but I have a sound non-bigoted reason for thinking so (which I'll get to later) while most of the opposition that I've heard from fellow mosque-opponents, does sound like borderline bigotry to me.

Also, I'm not pulling a Charles Johnson here and looking for approval from leftists by calling my fellow conservatives bigots. I have no interest whatsoever in getting approval from leftists. What I do have an interest in is getting conservatives to make honest arguments about what is wrong with the Ground-Zero mosque rather than using the politically-motivated argument from sentimentality. The argument from sentimentality smacks of bigotry and it sets a poor precedent.

The argument from sentimentality goes like something like this: "Muslims blew up the World Trade Center and killed thousands of innocent Americans. The families of the victims, and indeed, many Americans are justifiably sensitive about these events, even now, ten years later. Therefore, Muslims should respect that sensitivity and build the Mosque elsewhere."

Look what is happening here: just because some Muslims killed Americans, we don't want other Muslims building a mosque there? They should respect the sensitivity of bigots who blame all Muslims for the actions of a few? That really is a weak argument, and essentially calls for sensitivity towards prejudice.

A better reason, the justified reason, to oppose the mosque is not sensitivity or a desire to keep Muslims away from an area where they killed thousand of people; the justified reason is strategic.

To start, let's make the politically risky move of observing openly that the United States is in a war against Muslims. Oh no he didn't! Did I actually say that after worrying about prejudice against Muslims? Yes, I did. I don't say that we are at war against all Muslims, but we are at war, and the people we are at war with are Muslims, and the fact that they are Muslims is an essential characteristic of the enemy because they justify the war on religious grounds. There are some Muslims that we are not at war with. A (distressingly small) number of Muslims are even on our side in the war, but that does not effect that fact that our enemy is Muslim and views other Muslims as their allies in the war. It doesn't matter if American Muslims are their allies, it matters that the enemy views them as allies.

My statement that we are at war with Muslims is not bigotry; it is simply a statement of fact. It does not mean that I hate all Muslims (I don't hate any Muslims, actually), or that I want to kill all Muslims (I only want to kill the ones who are a threat), or that I think all Muslims are too icky to build mosques near a site where their co-religionists murdered 3,000 innocent Americans.

My reason for opposing the Ground-Zero mosque is purely strategic. I oppose the mosque because enemy Muslims* will view the building of the mosque as a great victory. It will give them an impression that they are winning --and for good reason as it will give further evidence that America is too afraid or too decadent to defend itself. This in turn will encourage those who are already active enemies to work harder to kill Americans and/or prevent the active enemies from becoming discouraged and give up on their attempts to kill Americans. Further it will help active enemies to recruit more enemy Muslims* who are currently only passive enemies and turn them into active enemies who are actively trying to kill Americans.

Since this reason for opposing the Ground-Zero mosque is a matter of war, it overrides the otherwise very important issue of religious freedom in this very trivial special case. We are not preventing Muslims from following their conscience; we are not preventing them from worshiping; we are not taking away their other First-Amendment rights; all we are doing is stopping them from building a monument to their greatest victory on our soil while the war still rages.

One thing you can count on is that whenever the United States comes up with a strategy that is effective at eliminating enemy Muslims*, the American left will worry openly and endlessly that it will be a "recruiting tool for terrorists", but when the Muslims put together their own recruitment plans, the Left suddenly has no concern whatsoever about it. Funny, that. It's almost like they are on the other side.

* the adjective "enemy" is intended to specify a subset of Muslims, not to describe all Muslims

UPDATE: from the comments, it seems that I failed to make myself clear. The argument from sensitivity begins with the presumption that the mosque is being built in good faith, and that no one intends for the mosque to be a monument to the Muslim victory of 9/11. If that premise were correct, and if the enemy Muslims gained no benefit from the mosque, then the opposition to the mosque would be prejudiced because there would be no reason left to oppose it other than distaste for Muslims.

Foxfier and Marcel not accept that premise, so they are not making the sensitivity argument. In fact, I don't think any conservatives accept those premises. Instead they use the argument from sensitivity in an attempt to persuade those who do accept the premises. This is a losing strategy since the the same fools who accept those ridiculous premises are also the ones who are constantly looking for signs of bigotry among the right.

the endless struggle against spam

2010-08-28T17:36:00.000-07:00

I was in an unusually curmudgeonly mood today (OK, may not so unusually). The Sony Reader bookstore is concerned that I haven't been spending enough money there, so they sent me spam even though I specifically set my account to not receive any promotional email. I went to the trouble of tracking down a way to email Sony (like many modern companies, they make this difficult because they don't want to actually have to deal with their customers) and sent the following email:

I recently received a spam email from Sony with the following false statement: "You are receiving this email because you have subscribed to receive promotional information from Reader Store."

No, I did not subscribe to receive spam from Reader Store. Some asshole in marketing decided that they _really_ needed to send out emails to people who haven't been buying books, so they decided to just pretend that they had permission to do so.

You may consider this as my notice that I do not do business with spammers, so even thought I've been planning to buy some more of John C. Wright's books from the Reader Store, I'm going to buy a book reader from a competitor instead.

The note about buying a new book is true. I've been planning to read "The Golden Age" books, but now I'm not going to be reading them on my Sony.

Anyone want a used ebook reader?

black, white, and checkers

2010-08-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

Foxfier suggests an interesting analogy of moral confusion for optical confusion.

I'm not sure how well the analogy holds up, but it is certainly thought-provoking.

UPDATE: oops. Fixed the link.

ancients, moderns, and ineffability

2010-08-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

In a thread on John C. Wright's discussion of the classification of fantasy fiction, montecristo claims that the difference between the modern worldview and the ancient worldview is that to the ancients the world and its causes were "ineffable" by which he means something like "hidden", "beyond our ability to understand", or "ultimately inexplicable". He says the ancients considered the world ineffable in contrast to the modern who believes that everything can, in principle, be explained and understood.

I claim that this is a misunderstanding based on a failure to appreciate the much deeper differences in worldview between the moderns and the ancients. The ancients simply had a different idea of what it means to understand things.

To the modern, the world is mechanical, a clockwork universe. Everything is springs and levers and gears. When the modern wants to understand something, he looks to physical, mechanical causes: forces, energy, mass, waves, particles.

The modern world view is also compositional. When the modern wants to understand the whole, he does so in terms of the parts. You want to know how a car works? He will explain it to you in terms of the engine and the transmission and the electrical system. You want to understand the engine? He will explain it to you in terms of the pistons and cylinders and crankshaft. You want to understand what goes on in the cylinders? He will explain it in terms of molecules. You want to understand molecules, he has atoms. You want to understand atoms? He has subatomic particles. You want to understand subatomic particles? He's working on it.

Furthermore, the modern thinker believes in universal laws. Every particular cause is just an instance of a universal law. If you know all of the universal laws that apply in a specific situation, and you know all of the initial conditions, then you know what is going to happen.

To the modern, all real causes are simply instance of universal laws that can be pictured in 3D with moving parts. Anything else is just an illusion or epiphenomenon. This is the sense in which the modern person thinks that the world of the modern conception is more comprehensible than the ancient one. It is because he believes that everything can, more or less be reduced to this one limited paradigm, universal laws that operate mechanically on physical pieces. Since ancient explanations did not reduce things to this mechanical paradigm, moderns find the explanations unsatisfying.

The ancient view of the world is quite different from this. Although the ancients did understand mechanical causes, they did not try to put all explanations in mechanical terms --not even all physical explanations. Things in nature might have explanations that are teleological, moral, intentional, or semantic.

A teleological cause is a reason in terms of ends. Why does a human have two hands? A modern would explain this in terms of evolution and fitness --a mechanical explanation. An ancient might explain it in terms of function: we have two hands because a warrior must hold both a sword and a shield, a craftsman must hold both a hammer and a chisel, a woman must hold both a baby and a child's hand.

A moral cause is a reason in terms of rightness or propriety or beauty. Why do the heavenly bodies move in perfect spheres? Because that is their right and proper motion.

An intentional cause is a reason in terms of the deliberate intentions of some thinking being. Where did everything come from? The gods created it all.

A semantic cause is a reason in terms of representation or meaning. A voodoo doll is supposed to work by being a representation of something else. Words are supposed to have power in virtue of their meanings.

To a modern, these sorts of causes seem like magic when applied to the physical world. We have no problem talking about teleological, moral, intentional or semantic causes in their proper scopes --it is when these kinds of causes are applied to physical nature that they seem wrong. To the ancients there was not such a sharp line between mind and nature. I imagine that it would be a bit difficult to explain to an ancient exactly where the dividing line is.

Not only did the ancients believe in teleological causes, they also believed in capricious and singular causes --not everything has to be explainable by way of universal laws. The ancients believed in a genuine cause-and-effect relationship between sin and punishment but did not believe that there was any universal law about it. They were fully aware that some sinners live long lives full of good fortune.

Although to a modern thinker the ancient worldview seems ineffable, that is because he has been trained from early childhood to think in the modern way. To an ancient, who had quite a different upbringing, it might be the mechanical explanations that seem ineffable: "You keep telling me that x happened because y happened first, but that is just a sequence of events. What I want to know is WHY x happened."

it's just a building, right?

2010-08-12T01:51:00.000-07:00

Marcel over at Monday Evening sounds a bit critical of the planned Muslim Mosque near where Muslims murdered three thousand non-combatants in New York. In a comment he writes:

It would be nice to be able to trust Imam Feisal, take him at his word, and believe he is building a Mosque near Ground Zero to spread the love. So far, that doesn’t seem to be the result. Besides the apparent confusion over goals (just a handy space, or a symbolically important location?) another part of the problem is his equivocation and reticence about where the money is coming from; another part is Imam Feisal’s apparent inability to clearly and consistently say what he thinks about 9/11, Hamas, and armed Jihad. Questions persist about the Imam’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and people are just beginning to ask about his current and previous trips to the Middle East, funded by the US State Department.

I think you are being too harsh and suspicious, Marcel. When I'm involved in negative emotional situations with someone, I find that doing something that pisses him off is a good way to start the healing process. This technique works especially well when I've done something really horrible to someone and I want him to get over it already. What I do is find some way to symbolically declare my horrible actions as a sort of victory over him. Typically, that calms him right down.

This Mosque is just an example of Imam Feisal, a wise and peaceful Muslim, applying to political life the interpersonal techniques that work so well in private life.

In fact, I am so inspired by his generosity that I think we should encourage other groups to use this same technique to smooth over some rough spots in group interrelationships. OH! Brainstorm! How about if some modern group of Nazis would build a Hitler museum near Auschwitz? Is that brilliant or what? You can see the healing start immediately.

Oh! Another brainstorm! Anyone know what the real-estate situation is on the site where Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered? Perfect spot for a chapter house of the Ku Klux Klan.

And while we are at it, the Christians should show that they can be as sensitive and wise as the Muslims by finding old Mosques to buy, raze, and build Christian churches over. The Muslims would love that, right? Because they are the ones claiming that buildings like this don't really have any symbolic meaning.

It's just a building, right?

deception in science

2010-08-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

Instapundit links to this article: "Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence". Practically everything that the article says about the experiment is literally false. The statements may be figuratively true, but the figurative language is misleading because it is intended to be taken as factual or at least reflective of facts and it is not at all reflective of facts. I'm not going to call this a lie because I think the researchers and the author of the article are themselves confused; they are not deliberately deceiving anyone, but it is false and misleading.

Let's start with the title : "Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence". First, the things that they are talking about are not "artificial life forms". They are not alive in any sense. They do not have any organic structure or any physical structure at all. They are nothing but tokens in a computer program, marks in digital memory much like the marks on the screen you are reading represent words.

Second, these marks did not "evolve". They did not reproduce at all. What happened is that a computer program created a set of marks and then created another set of marks based on a set of rules. Those rules were set up to reflect what happens in reproduction and evolution, but the process was not reproduction and evolution. Just as the marks merely represented life forms, the operations merely represent reproduction and evolution. The author is making the very same mistake that ancient magicians made --confusing the symbol for the thing symbolized.

Third, the end result of all of this did not display intelligence in any literal sense. If the marks had been real life forms rather than just abstract representations of life forms, and if the events had been real reproduction rather than just abstract representations of reproduction, then the events would have suggested what biologists call irritable behavior --behavior that is influenced by outside sources. In other words, the events represented irritable behavior but were not irritable behavior. The behavior symbolized is a long way from anything that would be called "intelligence" in any case.

So what did they actually do, in real, rather than symbolic language? These sorts of experiments work something like this: the marks are random 5-letter words like "kwdez" and "qsbjl" (don't bother trying to pronounce them...). Each of these marks represents one organism. You start with a collection of these marks and the computer program goes through the collection periodically and adds new marks. Each set of new marks is a generation.

The way that they make the generations represent reproduction is by having each mark in the new generation based on a mark in the previous generation. You use a rule such as "take the previous mark and get a new mark by randomly changing one letter". The new mark would be called a descendant of the previous mark. For example, descendants of "kwdez" might include "kadez" and "kwdqz".

Notice that this reproduction is entirely figurative. The marks are not doing anything. It is the computer program that is creating new marks based on the old marks. There is nothing wrong with symbolic language but in the field of artificial intelligence they have a long history of confusing representations with reality.

Here is an example:

In early memory experiments, Laura Grabowski, now at the University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, set up a food gradient in a computer environment made of a grid of cells. First-generation Avidians were placed at the low end of the gradient, in a cell that had minimal food. Straight ahead of them, however, lay a cell that had more.

Note the continuing confusion between symbol and thing symbolized. There was no food. The "food gradient" would have been something like this. When the program is going through the list of current marks to create a new generation, each mark is reproduced 0 or more times based on some rule. For example, you might make a rule like this: to decide how many descendants to produce for a word, you flip a coin 5 times plus 1 more for each time that the letter "q" appears in the word. In other words a word with no "q"s gets 5 chances to reproduce and a word with 3 "q"s gets 8 chances to reproduce. Since the number of "q"s effects how many descendants a mark gets, this symbolizes "how close they are to food".

Notice how arbitrary the symbolism is. Instead of the number of "q"s representing "how close they are to food", it could just as well represent anything else that leads to more reproduction. The marks could symbolize bull elephant seals and the number of "q"s could represent the number of cow seals they inseminate. Just as easily, the marks could represent companies, the descendants could represent copy-cat companies and the number of "q"s could represent the profits.

This particular experiment seems to have had a more complex generation rule with some features representing genetic abilities and other features representing physical movement, but that doesn't matter to the primary point. The point is that the symbolism is completely arbitrary. Any process that can be mapped into the same abstract structure could just as easily be the thing symbolized. Instead of writing an article about the evolution of intelligence, they could have taken the exact same experiment and written an article about economics.

is it too late to bash Windows Vista?

2010-08-06T21:51:00.000-07:00

With my impeccable sense of timing, I bought a computer with Windows Vista on it just about a month before Microsoft starting offering free upgrades, so I'm still suffering with Vista. It's not that bad most of the time, but Vista is the nth version of an operating system that is almost 15 years old and they have put millions into developing it. You would think that after all of this time they would have found a way to fix the long-standing, and very serious bug so that if your file browser tries to access a drive that is not responding, it doesn't HANG YOUR WHOLE FREAKING DESKTOP.

HOW THE HELL DOES THIS HAPPEN?! YOU MORONS HAVE MILLIONS TO SPEND ON FANCY GRAPHICS AND TRANSPARENCY AND SIDE BARS AND FUTZING AROUND WITH THE USER INTERFACE MAKING CHANGES THAT AREN'T IMPROVEMENTS BUT YOU CAN'T FIND RESOURCES TO FIX FREAKING BASIC FUNCTIONALITY? YOU CAN'T FIX A SERIOUS BUG THAT HAS BEEN IN YOUR FREAKING OPERATING SYSTEM FOR FIFTEEN FREAKING YEARS? WHO THE HELL IS SETTING PRIORITIES IN MICROSOFT DEVELOPMENT? STICK A CROWBAR IN YOUR CORPORATE ASSETS AND PRY OUT ENOUGH FUNDING FOR A MID-LEVEL ENGINEER TO SPEND A WEEK FIXING THIS, DAMMIT!

Ahem.

I guess I got a little exasperated there.

reflexive conservative-bashing

2010-07-31T15:29:00.000-07:00

The following quote (link from Instapundit) displays two pernicious misunderstandings of conservativism:

Tea Party 365 is eager to gain more members, turning to a demographic often ignored or even persecuted by conservative activist groups: immigrants.

The first and most obvious is the liberal lie that conservatives "persecute" immigrants. Conservatives have expectations about immigrants: that they will follow the law (including immigration law) and that they will adapt to their new country by learning the language. Any immigrant who meets those expectations can walk into any conservative group in the country and be well-received. The idea that conservatives are against immigrants just because they are immigrants is a lie that is spread by liberals.

More subtle, but just as pernicious is the suggestion that conservatives "ignore" immigrants. This is the viewpoint of people who view the Democrat spoils system as normal politics. Democrats give government handouts and other special considerations to immigrants, to blacks, to hispanics, to women, to teachers, to policemen, to union members, to gays ... and to any other identifiable group who has enough money and/or votes to help the Democrats gain more wealth and power. This system is a corruption that eats at the foundations of a democracy and conservatives reject the system entirely. So, yes, conservatives "ignore" immigrants, just like they "ignore" blacks, hispanics, women, teachers, policemen, union members, gays, and everyone else. There are a few halfhearted attempts to reach out to particular groups in order to counter the pernicious Democrat spoils system, but true conservative really don't have their heart in it because they ultimately don't like the idea of dividing Americans into groups and classes like that.

In the Democrat's class-based view of the world, the Republicans have their own protected classes: angry white men, and religious nuts, but the Republicans do not do what Democrats do --they do not try to raise the groups that vote Republican above other Americans, do not try to direct government money to these groups, and do not create institutions dedicated to influencing these groups, and do not preferentially hire from these groups. Conservatives do not judge you based what groups you are a member of, but only what you yourself do and express and believe.

That's why it why it is silly to suggest that conservative groups "persecute" immigrants or anyone else based on group membership. Conservatives oppose people based on who they are and what they do, not based on what groups they are members of.

the Shirley Sherrod war

2010-07-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

Civil war among conservatives! And some of it none too civil. Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of emailers using the word "coward".

There a few basic facts that most conservatives ought to be able to agree on:

1. When the video first came out, people were saying based on the video that (a) Sherrod had once had a (presumably government) job where she was supposed to help poor farmers; (b) she had refused to help white farmers, and (c) she thought it was funny. That turns out to have been false, and it was the editing of the video that led to that false impression.

2. The Obama administration was wrong to fire someone based on an edited video without allowing the accused a chance to defend herself and without doing even the most superficial investigation to verify the accusation.

3. The NAACP is showing astonishing hypocrisy in their criticism of people who took this video at face value because they themselves took the video at face value and issued an official statement condemning Sherrod based on the edited video --again without investigating and without letting Sherrod defend herself.

4. Breitbart never pretended to be an unbiased reporter. He was engaging in open advocacy and any responsible person would have viewed the video in that light. Whatever his fault was in releasing the video, it pales in comparison to the faults of the NAACP and the Obama administration.

5. All of those liberals who are criticizing Breitbart but not the NAACP and administration are, as usual, hypocrites. They don't really care about justice and fairness. Their pretension to do so is just a pretext for them to criticize their political foes.

6. Sherrod may not be guilty of what the video seemed to imply, but she certainly is a racist, she does endorse class warfare, she does believe in Marxist conspiracy theories of history, and she did use her government position to advocate for racism, class warfare, and Marxist conspiracy theories. She arguably should have been fired for that even though the original story was false.

As far as I can tell, there is no real disagreement over these points, but that there seem to be some misunderstandings where people think there is disagreement on some of these points.

There is also an actual disagreement going on over what the rules ought to be for political advocacy, and whether Breitbart violated those rules. This is a real and ongoing argument within the conservative community. I've had my own arguments with Patterico over whether Ann Coulter violates rules that advocates ought to follow. I'm somewhat in the middle on this. In matters of decorum, conservatives ought to strive to raise the level of public discourse, but they should not be held to some absolute standard of civility that the other side ignores. We should not be fighting with one hand tied behind our backs --not when the stakes are so high.

Being truthful and consistent are much more important. Conservative ought not to tolerate lies and hypocrisy from the right any more than they tolerate it from the left. In addition to the obvious ethical reasons there is a good tactical reason for this --the left controls the big megaphone in political dialog, so any falsehoods of the right are likely to become far more widely known that the constant falsehoods of the left. This is the field we fight on: the advantage of the left is their big megaphone; the advantage of the right is that we are telling the truth. Let's not squander our big strategic advantage for some temporary rhetorical advantage.

Was Breitbart untruthful or does he owe an apology? If he had been pushing the story that I described in item 1 then he would have been untruthful and would have owed an apology, not only to Sherrod but to all of his readers. However, that is not what Breitbart was doing. His focus was on the audience, not on the speaker.

Was Breitbart careless in posting a video that was edited in that way? If he edited himself or had access to the full video, then he was careless and he owes an apology. If he just received the edited video and posted it, then he was not careless and the most he owes Sherrod is an expression of regret that she came to harm over it. The video was news, edited or not, and if Breitbart could not evaluate it properly within a short time frame then he was still entitled to post it while the story would still be hot.

These opinions are a close call and I can still respect someone who differs in their judgment. Look, we are fighting an unprincipled foe who is a grave danger to ourselves and our descendants. Let us not distract ourselves from that important work by assuming that our allies are unprincipled whenever we have disagreements.

another sacrificial lamb for Obama's sins

2010-07-21T00:05:00.000-07:00

Shirley Sherrod was fired from the USDA after Andrew Brietbart posted a video of her apparently bragging about not helping a white farmer who came to her non-profit organization for help (Mrs. Sherrod is black). Now the NAACP has posted the full video of the speech and it turns out to be a rather touching story of a black woman whose father was murdered by white racists, and who had to struggle with her own racism.

Stephen Spruiell at the NRO says that she should not have been fired. So do Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, and apparently the redoubtable Allahpundit himself.

But not the White House. No, the Obama administration doesn't seem to want to dig the poor woman out from under the bus that they threw her under. This is not so hard to understand. To Obama, people don't have intrinsic value in and of themselves, but only in what value they serve to him and his goals. Shirley Sherrod isn't a person to Obama but just a symbol --a symbol to use against the critics that worry about the black racism in his Justice Department. Now Obama can hold up poor Mrs. Sherrod as proof that his administration doesn't tolerate discrimination.

Obama could have fired an actual anti-white racist at Justice, but those anti-white racists at Justice are serving Obama's goals. Instead he sacrifices someone who is not really important to his administration, someone who is not important to his goals.

I'm sorry, Shirley. Know that your fatal mistake was not in being a racist, but in being unimportant to Obama and being available at a time when he needed another lamb. No one gets fired the first day that a potential scandal breaks, not without any investigation at all, not when the victim denies all wrong-doing, not when it will only take a day or so to check the facts, not unless they were looking for some way to send a signal and you are just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Obama doesn't want you to be innocent, Shirley. Obama wants you to suck it up like a good little liberal soldier and ride off into the sunset. Frankly, if you don't have any integrity, that is exactly what you should do. In a few months you will get offered a crazy-good book deal by a New York book publisher (a Democrat), or you will get hired by some university for some secure and high-paying position (by a Democrat), or some Democrat lawyer will offer you a cushy job at an expensive law office. The Democrat machine has lots of ways to reward their patrons. No loyal Democrat ever suffers much career trouble even for serious ethical lapses, so you haven't much to worry about.

On the other hand, if you fight for your integrity and your rights, you can expect the teabagger treatment from the entire Democrat/media/entertainment establishment (you know the treatment I'm talking about because you participated in it during that video. You know ... when you made vague and unsubstantiated accusations about really mean things that the Tea Party has done that Democrats never did during the Bush years. Stuff like that where people accuse you of things without evidence). Most people in your position wouldn't have to think hard about which way to go here. Still, I have hopes that you will show the same honor and integrity here that you displayed in that story you told in the video --and much more integrity than you displayed in your political comments in the same video.

McAfee malware

2010-06-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

Someone who sounds unusually defensive responded to my post on Security Scan Plus --the malware that McAfee and Adobe installed on my computer. I'll use the comment to explain just what the problem is.

Your blog post, and in particular the headline, is extremely misleading--and bordering on slander. You clearly have some catching up to do when it comes to the right terminology in the security world. You are linking to an article on techie-buzz.com and to the Wikipedia definition of "malware"--neither of which you seem to understand.

Side comment: someone needs to study the source of the internet phenomenon of people on the internet always jumping to the conclusion that other people on the internet are ignorant. It is a thousand times more prevalent in internet conversations than in face-to-face conversations, and I wonder why.

To quote Wikipedia, "Malware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate a computer system without the owner's informed consent."

Which is exactly what the McAfee malware does. It is deceptive in several ways which I will get to later.

If you read the techie-buzz.com article carefully, you will notice that this description does not apply in this case.

I didn't get my information from the techie-buzz article; that was just for reference so I didn't have to go into details in my post. I got my information from personal experience.

Yes, the author concludes that he would classify the McAfee software as "adware"--everyone is entitled to his opinion. However, nowhere does he talk about "malware" (or "DISHONEST adware," which is included in the definition of malware).

The author of the article is obviously a lot more circumspect than I am. Most people are.

Plus, you actually DID give your consent to install the software. A word to the wise: Read what you sign!

I did not give my "informed consent" and this is because of a deliberate and dishonest ploy by Adobe and McAfee.

Here are the ways that the McAfee malware is dishonest:

(1) The name is intended to mislead people into thinking that it is a virus scanner. It is not a virus scanner; it is an advertisement. If people knew that it was an advertisement, they would ignore it.

(2) The software misleadingly claims that it is providing a service for the user but it is not. It is providing a service for McAfee. Not only is this dishonest, it is arguably criminal. McAfee is using misdirection in order to appropriate my computer resources for their own purposes.

(3) My "consent" to download and install the software was obtained via subterfuge. I asked to download the Adobe update and nothing else. In order to avoid installing the McAfee malware, I would have had to read all of the garbage that the Adobe installer spewed out and take a specific action to avoid the malware. McAfee and Adobe intend that people do not read all of the crap --otherwise they would make it an opt-in rather than an opt-out. Unfortunately, although I know from experience that Adobe is not a trustworthy company, I was in a hurry at the time.

So, you see that it does meet one of the definitions of malware: "dishonest adware". In fact, this is exactly what dishonest adware is: adware that is installed on your computer without your informed consent. Adobe circumvents the "informed" part by burying the "consent" in another operation and McAfee circumvents the "informed" part by misleading you about what the software does.

Adobe and McAfee are installing malware

2010-06-13T21:52:00.000-07:00

The Adobe update to my computer installed malware on my system.

A few days after I did a regular Microsoft security update, a dialog box popped up to tell me that "the security update" had installed McAfee Security Scan Plus which would do a "security scan" of my computer. I thought, "Really? Microsoft is giving away a free McAfee virus scanner with updates? That's a pretty impressive addition to the operating system."

It wasn't a virus scanner. Security Scan Plus is a malware program that checks if you have the entire McAfee security suite installed. If you don't then it gives you a big scary warning message "COMPUTER AT RISK" and tells you to fix it right away. I didn't push the button that said I want to "fix" my non-existent security problem, but I'll bet that if I had, it would have sent me to the McAfee sales web site. This program is malware because it is of zero value for the customer; it is nothing but an advertisement for McAfee.

I was pretty angry that Microsoft had installed this malware on my system as part of a security update, but apparently, it wasn't Microsoft. Just before I did the Microsoft update, I did an update to Firefox, and the Firefox update recommend I do an Adobe update. So I did. According to this web page, there was a check box in the Adobe update that installed the McAfee malware. It must have been checked by default, because I did not chose to install it.

So here's the scoop: Adobe and McAfee are installing malware as part of an Adobe "update". I wonder how much Adobe was paid to risk their corporate reputation on this. I also wonder why a security company like McAfee is willing to advertise via malware. They have to know that a lot of security-conscious people will never use their software again. I know I won't.

I also would like to say that I'll stop using Adobe products, but I already avoid them as much as possible because they have have a history of disrespecting their customers. McAfee didn't have that reputation before, but they will now.

they don't really care about women's rights

2010-05-30T16:40:00.001-07:00

Liberals don't really care about women's rights. This fact became blatant during the Clinton impeachment when the same people who had been preaching in the most intolerant terms about how men in authority should not even flirt with women that they have authority over defended a man for doing just that.

But that was always just political theater, right? Sure, sexual politics is subject to political considerations, but there are some hard and fast rules about serious things like violence against women, right? They have these marches against rape and want harsh prison sentences against wife abusers and those things, so they really care about violence against women, right? Except that when a black man, O. J. Simpson brutally murdered his wife, the Democrat establishment rushed to defend him. Oops. It looks like in the liberal pecking order, being black and politically connected trumps being a murdered woman.

But that was a special, personal case, right? Sure, in particular cases, they may make political decisions that overrule their more general views, but one thing that they absolutely stand for is that society in general must show respect to women and give them equal treatment, right? Well, not so much. Liberals and even, amazingly, dedicated feminists have absolutely refused to criticize Islam or Islamic countries for the brutal political suppression of women that they endorse and practice.

Not only do they not criticize Islam for this, they actively defend it against critics. Here is a post about the latest disgusting example (link from Instapundit). I've always been a big fan of Hirsi Ali. It is absolutely disgraceful the way that liberals --and especially so-called feminists-- have treated this courageous woman as she struggles for freedom for the women who are so brutally enslaved by Islam.

Katrina, the Big OOSE, and Iraq

2010-05-28T13:09:00.000-07:00

I have taken flack in various blog comment sections for defending the Bush administration on the Katrina disaster so I was happy to see a blogger on The Corner take my side.

I always claimed that that the administration's response was adequate on Katrina, just like his effort in the Iraq war was adequate, and that the criticisms are all based on outrageously inflated expectations of what is possible. Yuval Levin says it better than I do:

Let’s say a major hurricane hits a large and densely populated American city with five hundred thousand inhabitants. Much of the city is below sea level, and the flood-waters that follow in the wake of the storm quickly overrun it, filling nearly every street with water, in many places fifteen feet in depth. The magnitude of human suffering and destruction of property is mind-boggling. But within six days, everyone is out of the city and in total approximately one thousand people—one in five hundred residents—lost their lives in the calamity. Hour by hour, the government response was messy and ugly—it could hardly be otherwise given the magnitude of the disaster. But looked at with a little perspective, is that really a story of a failure of government response, or is it an example of how to contend with an immense natural disaster in a densely populated urban center? Is it a model of incompetence, or the most effective mass evacuation in human history?

Read Yuval's post for the parallel comments on the big Obama Oil Spill Event which I like to call the Big OOSE (pronounced like "ooze" + "y"). It is discouraging to me that disasters, like almost everything else, have become part of politics.

I would also add similar comments about the war in Iraq. Readers of my blog (all four of you, thanks guys) know that I was never a fan of George Bush, but fair is fair. The war in Iraq was one of the most successful invasions and counter-insurgency operations in history based on the criteria of eliminating the enemy and of preventing civilian casualties, given the situation that he faced. You have to take into account the support for the enemy by foreign powers, the tactics of the enemy, and the political situation.

I don't think thaat any Republican could be expected to have done better. A Democrat could have done better because Republicans would not have played politics with the war and the country would have been united around a Democrat president. Without the encouragement of the strident anti-war sentiment in the US and the hope of a new administration that would surrender, the Muslims might have been discouraged earlier. With a Democrat president, the American news media would not have been filled with stories designed to enrage Muslims and encourage them to enter the war against the United States. You have to judge Bush's success against an enemy that included among its allies the opposition party and the news and entertainment media of his own country. Given all of that, George Bush did an astounding job in Iraq.

census bulldogs

2010-05-15T15:21:00.000-07:00

I ignored my first letter from the census. I also ignored my second letter from the census. Then I ignored the friendly note on my door that informed me that some census worker had been by and would I please call to schedule another stop. Then she stopped by last Saturday and I made the mistake of answering the door so I had to answer all of the dumb question.

I've never filled out a census form. For the last two censuses I was living on my own in Arizona and I don't recall even getting a form and if I did, no one ever stopped by to make sure it was filled out. I'm wondering if this special bulldog tenacity is something that the Obama administration is practicing everywhere or is it getting a slightly more tenacious effort in areas with a reliable Democrat vote.

The Democrats have been making this census a critical part of their strategic plans for a decade. Even someone like me who doesn't follow their plans that closely has seen many references to Democrat efforts to make sure that the counts in Democrat-controlled areas are high.

I didn't use to be this paranoid, but I've been paying attention to scandals since Bill Clinton, and here is the ugly truth: when a Republican gets caught doing something illegal or unethical, other Republicans call for him to resign. When a Democrat gets caught, other Democrats rush to his defense and do everything they can to keep him in power. The consequence is that dishonest people know that they are better off as Democrats than as Republicans and so corrupt and dishonest people tend to gravitate towards the Democratic party.

affirmative action and racial profiling

2010-05-08T16:32:00.000-07:00

Ilya Somin on the Volokh Conspiracy says that it is inconsistent to be opposed to affirmative action but in favor of racial profiling. This is one of those surface inconsistencies that only appears if you make shallow assumptions about the reasoning behind the positions. There is no inconsistency in the conservative position when you go beyond the shallow description of the policy preferences and get to the underlying reasoning. Conservatives believe that the government should be a neutral referee in society, not only in race but in religion, in wealth, in employer/employee relations, in renter/landlord relations, in buyer/seller relations, and in general (there are other areas where conservatives do not believe that the government should be neutral, but those are each individual issues).

On on the issue of race, when the government supports affirmative action it is not being neutral. It is taking sides with one group of Americans against another group of Americans. In the conservative view, affirmative action is morally wrong for much the same reasons that union-shop laws or rent-control laws are morally wrong (independently of any economic effects) and that reason is that the government is unfairly taking sides between its citizens.

By contrast, racial profiling is not an example of the government taking sides with one race against another or one religions against another. Airline security is supposed to protect all Americans of all races and religions equally. In order to do execute this task as effectively and as efficiently as possible, with the least overall burden to the public, the government should use all of the information it has available on who is likely to be a threat. If that information includes racial and religious indicators, then the government should use that information. It is not the government which is taking sides; it is nature that is taking sides. The state of the world is such that the best security practices involve profiling Muslims and people from the Middle East. For the government to take cognizance of this fact is not racist, not prejudiced, but merely pragmatic.

It is much like the alleged government failure during the Katrina disaster. This supposed failure of the federal government had a disparate effect on black people but only someone who is conspiracy-minded and creepily obsessed with race would really believe that the federal government actually intended to hurt black people. The reason that black people were disparately harmed is because more black people lived in the area. This racially disparate result was caused by brute fact, not by government choice.

It is the same in the immigration area. The purpose of immigration law is to benefit all Americans and legal American immigrants. If enforcing this law effectively has disparate consequences on one particular race, this is not the choice of the government; it is not the government that has decided to take the side of one race over another; this is just what the facts on the ground require as a form of enforcement.

The conservative position is consistent here. The government should not takes sides of one race against another, but if the government in the course of carrying out its proper functions is required to do things that happen to effect people of one race more than another, it is no concern of the government to take this into account. In all cases, the government should ignore race as a matter of government concern, and but government actors may take account of race when necessary to do their race-neutral job.

the banality of atheism

2010-05-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

Adam Savage, my favorite Myth Buster, is an atheist in the grand old tradition of too-smart-for-religion atheism. He recently gave a talk aimed at showing how smart and logical his world view is. Going by the comments, it seems to have been critically acclaimed by the too-smart-for-religion community, so this gives us a brief look at what these people think constitutes smartness. I decided to take this opportunity to do a little forensic analysis of their version of smartness. Adam says

I want to start by saying that, to me, any discourse from me about how one can live a moral existence without religion or the church would sound improperly defensive. That there's an opposite to be defended is absurd and based on a provably false premise. So let's dispense with that.

(To be clear: I'm referring to the humanist axiom "Good without God," whereby "good" means morality. It's provably false that there exists no morality outside of religion, therefore the statement sounds defensive to me.)

This sounds like a promise to deliver a positive disproof of the proposition that one needs religion or the church to live a moral existence. Unfortunately, Adam never delivers on his implied promise to give us a proof, so I cannot evaluate his statement that it is provable.

By what route does anyone come to believe what they believe? We all like to imagine that it's based on a set of logical facts, but it's often a much more circuitous route.

For me it was pretty simple. I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion.

It sounds here like Adam is admitting that he doesn't actually base his beliefs on logic or reasoning, but isn't this admission inconsistent with his talk of proofs and his attitude of certainty and condescension?

Notice something more significant here. Adam signals that he is about to wander off of his promised subject --how an man can be moral without religion-- and onto one of the favorite topics of the too-smart-for-religion crowd --why do people less smart than us believe in religion? In fact the rest of the speech will be largely on this side topic and he will never really get back to his proposed topic.

Here are a few things I've learned.

Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening.

Adam goes on at some length, speculating that people only think that prayer works either because the act of praying focuses their attention or because the act of praying is correlated to paying attention (which of the two he intends is not clear) and that it is the attention that makes things work out. I don't think that this speculation deserves much in the way of comment. In the first place, it is just unsupported speculation. In the second place, answered prayers are not usually a significant reason for believing in God. In the third place, where answered prayer is a significant reason to believe in God it is because of the perception of something miraculous occurring --something which could not have been effected by "paying attention".

I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences. At least I have. (And in the empirical study I'm performing about interacting with the universe, I am unfortunately the only test subject I have complete access to, so my data is, as they say, self-selected.) While nobody's going to take care of us, it's incumbent upon us to take care of those around us. That's community.

Here Adam comes back briefly to his intended topic with a bold statement of moral imperatives, but he never says why it is incumbent on us to take care of those around us --he merely asserts it. He is begging the question. He started out to tell us how moral duty can exist without religion and he has just slipped in the existence of duty as a given. Whence this moral responsibility? What does it consist of? What physical processes come together in what ways to create duty? Is duty something that radiates from matter like heat and light radiate from a glowing ember? Is it a force like magnetism that arises from the motion of charged particles, perhaps particles charged with morality? Is it an abstract state like entropy that is emergent from complex interactions of matter? What is it and how do we know about it? If you cannot answer these questions then you are not even close to explaining how duty can exist in a Godless universe.

The fiction of continuity and stability that your parents have painted for you is totally necessary for a growing child. When you realize that it's not the way the world works, it's a chilling moment. It's supremely lonely.

So I understand the desire for someone to be in charge. (As a side note, I believe that the need for conspiracy theories is similar to the need for God.) We'd all like our good and evil to be like it is in the movies: specific and horrible, easy to defeat. But it's not. It's banal.

There are several comments to make on the above quote. First with the last: there is certainly evil that is banal and it is important to acknowledge the existence of such evil, but not to the extent that one forgets about evil that is specific and horrible. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Castro --these are not just movie characters.

Second, the point about conspiracy theories coming from the religious instinct sounds plausible to me. As people give up mysticism, they do not give religion. Instead they replace mystical religious beliefs with pseudo-scientific religious beliefs. I call these "mechanical mythologies" because they are mythologies designed to be compatible with a mechanical world view. Examples are alien visitors who will be the salvation of mankind, a Marxist future history which will be the salvation of mankind, a benevolent world government which will be the salvation of mankind, evolution which will be the salvation of mankind or science which will be the salvation of mankind. In addition to the salvation mechanical mythologies, there are the adversarial mechanical mythologies such as the evil Jews who want to dominate mankind, the evil Christians who want to dominate mankind, the evil government employees who like fallen angels work within the all Good and Holy Creation of Civil Service to pervert it to evil and murderous ends --perhaps to dominate mankind.

Finally, Adam assures us that he understands the desire for someone to be in charge. This condescending gesture is a common trope of the too-smart-for-religion believers. I think that many of them actually view their ability to offer psychological theories of a religious instinct as some sort of refutation of religion. To the extent that they think this, it is unworthy of their extreme smartness. First of all, it is a capricious form of argument that can be turned in any direction with equal ease. For example: "atheists want to believe that there is no God because they fear being held responsible for their behavior". Or how about "atheists are just like high-school kids playing goth who want to be different and shocking to everyone else". Or we could reverse the argument with respect to religious people, "Religious people don't want to believe in God because they are afraid of judgment, but they believe anyway so there must be some explanation besides psychology."

Furthermore, there is no logical connection between the desire to believe something and the likelihood that that the thing is false. I want to believe that I have a hundred dollars in my wallet. Does this imply that I don't have a hundred dollars in my wallet? Does it imply that I my belief that I have a hundred dollars in my wallet is just wishful thinking? Does the fact that I would like to believe this make you think that I don't actually have sound reasons for believing it? Yes, there is such a thing as wishful thinking, but there is such a thing as pessimistic thinking too.

Yet another reason that this argument is not worthy of smart people is that hundreds of years before any atheist came up with this argument, Christians already knew that there is a religious instinct (and they used the existence of that instinct as an argument for the existence of God). Since Christian theology has a coherent and functional place for the religious instinct, the existence of this instinct cannot be used as an argument against Christianity without begging the question and assuming that Christian theology is wrong.

No one is in charge. And honestly, that's even cooler.

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

Now this is a curious passage. Having proposed that people believe in religion because they want to believe in religion (and implying that this is a psychological malady of some sort), Adam goes on to tell us why we should want to believe in atheism. Why? If the desirability of theism is an argument against theism, isn't the desirability of atheism an argument against atheism? Is Adam being clever here and slipping in the same argument against atheism that he just made against religion?

The nearly infinite set of dominoes that have fallen into each other in order for us to be here tonight is unfathomable. Truly unfathomable. But it is logical. We don't know all the steps in that logic, but we're learning more about it every day.

Here we have Adam's statement of faith. He may not recognize it for what it is but "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" and that is what Adam appeals to here. He doesn't know how the world came to be or how we came to be or how his sense of right and wrong came to be, but he has faith that the answers are to be found in mechanical interactions of a purely natural (meaning "not spiritual") world and that science can in principle answer all questions because all things are fundamentally just things that happen in time and space and can therefore be observed and measured. And like the adherents of other many other faiths, he thinks that his faith is peculiarly right and true, and that those who cannot see it, just will not see it.

Learning, expanding our consciousness, singly and universally.

As far as I can see, the three main intolerant religions in the world aren't helping in that mission.

Adam doesn't name the three religions he has in mind. If he had actually said Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I would have had a lot to say about this statement, but since he is obscure and I do not want to risk putting words in his mouth, I will only assume that one of the three is Christianity (which I am certain is the case, given Adam's intellectual roots). First, what makes him think that this mission of learning and expanding consciousness is good? He has just affirmed that a man is nothing more than a flimsy bag of biochemistry, an accidental byproduct of the interaction of solar radiation with the various chemicals on the surface of a random planet, at best possessing for a brain a biological computer that evolved to make him more successful at evading predators and impregnating females, where any potential for abstract reasoning or joy is just happenstance and is irrelevant to the underlying processes. Given this, how can you possibly argue that (1) expanded consciousness has any value, (2) life itself has any value (3) random social processes (such as religions) can be judged as less or more "good"? Adam started out to answer questions along these lines, and at the end, he just assumes the truth of his thesis.

For all their talk of charity and knowledge, that they close their eyes to so much—to science, to birth control education, to abuses of power by some of their leaders, to evolution as provable and therefore factual (the list is staggering)—illustrates a wide scope of bigotry.

Ah. I'm a bigot. Well, we've rather quickly descended from fatherly, well-meant condescension to name-calling, haven't we? Notice that I am the bigot even though it is Adam who just assumes that I don't have any reasons for my position other than that I "close my eyes". Has he ever bothered to actually try to find out why intelligent Christians believe what they do? I am reasonably certain that I, as a man of intellectual tendencies, having grown up in a society where my teachers and professors, my news media, my favorite SciFi authors, the writers of the majority of my science, mathematics, and philosophy books, and the majority of my most highly-educated friends all think I have a silly and archaic faith, that I with that background have done considerably more introspection and thinking on these matters than most of the too-smart-to-be-religious people have. When one of these people, many of whom have never met a serious intellectual challenge to their own beliefs tells me that I "close my eyes", I take exception.

As to the "abuses of power by some of their leaders", I have no idea what Adam means by this. Christian leaders outside of the Catholic church have little power and the only arguable "abuse of power" I can think of involving the Catholic church is the cover ups when homosexual priests seduced teenage boys (and once Catholics found out about that one they certainly did not ignore it), but I should not have to defend Christians against vague accusations like this. I could just as easily make vague accusations against atheists by veiled references to the excesses of Communist mass murders, terrorism, suppression of science and other things. Adam is not offering an argument here, he is bonding with his fellow too-smart-to-be-religious-ers. They will all bring to mind their own pet peeves and all nod sagely as if they were thinking of the same offenses.

Now, just to be clear. If you want to believe, or find solace in believing, that someone or something set these particular dominoes in motion—a cosmic finger tipping the balance and then leaving everything else to chance—I can't say anything to that. I don't know.

And yet he does say something to that, almost as if he thinks he does know...

Though a primary mover is the most complex and thus (given Occam's razor) the least likely of all possible solutions to the particular problem of how we got here, I can't prove it true or false, and there's nothing to really discuss about it.

The primary mover is also the only solution that is actually a solution. Every naturalist solution ever offered, when you press it far enough, eventually comes down to, "that's just what happens". This is not a solution in the normal meaning of the word.

If Daniel Dennett is right— that there's a human genetic need for religion— then I'd like to imagine that my atheism is proof of evolutionary biology in action.

This is a common conceit of the too-smart-for-relgions people, but it doesn't make much sense. Evolution is random mutation with selection by survival and reproduction. If atheism is a "proof of evolutionary biology in action" then it is a proof that atheism is not a survival trait because it is not a growing characteristic of the population. In fact it seems to have be declining. But even if it were a survival trait, that would not make it true.

At the end of The Eagle's Gift, Don Juan reveals to his student that there's no point to existence. That we're given our brief 70-100 years of consciousness by something the mystics call "The Eagle," named for it's cold, killer demeanor. And when we die, the eagle gobbles our consciousness right back up again.

He explains that the mystics, to give thanks to the eagle for the brief bout of consciousness they're granted, attempt to widen their consciousness as much as possible. This provides a particularly delicious meal for the eagle when it gobbles one up at the end of one's life.

And that, to me, is a fine mission.

Adam fantasizes that we are created by some cold, killer supernatural being and raised like poultry to sate its malignant appetites. Adam is happy to cooperate and make himself a nice tidbit for this creature and to have no other purpose in life. This hideous specter is the best that Adam Savage can come up with as a reason to live. His religious instinct is at war with his beliefs. He yearns for a greater meaning, for a purpose validated by a greatness that is beyond himself, and so he sees beauty in the ghastly nightmare of being consumed by a malicious god. Being consumed, contributing to the cycle of life --that is a noble end for an animal, but not for a man. A man is too great a thing --in potential-- to be simply a bit of spiritual protein in some grand cosmic ecosystem. God created us to know this instinctively, but when we reject the possibility that there could be a Creator who cares personally about us as individuals, then we are reduced to such pathetic fantasies as this --to end up a tidbit in the maw of some uncaring, unloving, alien thing, with no greater goal to our brief existence than to provide a really satisfying cosmic belch after the final repast. How evil. How banal.
------
Acknowledgment: I found the link to the speech here.

false advertising

2010-04-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

I may write a more complete review later, but just a note to tell you that the movie "Kick Ass" had the most deceptive advertising campaign that I've ever seen for a movie. "Kick Ass" is not a family comedy. This is not "Mystery Men" with teen heroes. It has more in common with "Sin City" than with "Sky High".

This most definitely is not a movie that you want to take your kids to --at least see it yourself first. It is a violent, bloody movie with lots of gore and a body count in the dozens. Just for example, a woman is graphically murdered by the "good guy" as she tries to run away and an eleven-year-old girl has the crap beat out of her by a six-foot man. And then there is the five painful minutes where they dwell, entirely too graphically, on the masturbation habits of a teenage boy.

I'd like to see parents who take their kids to this movie bring a class-action suit against the studio for false advertising. Although they would have to admit they were dumb not to notice the R rating, I guess.

The odd case of Light Blue Optics III

2010-04-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

Last year I had several posts about a company called Light Blue Optics and my suspicions about their press announcements. It seems that they have yet another neat new product for the press to rave over.

Someone left a comment on one of my previous posts to tell me that Light Blue Optics had a live demo at CES 2010. I didn't bother investigating it at the time, having lost interest in the subject, but now LBO has made the big-time with an Instalink to PopSci. Now they've got my attention again.

So I engaged in some sleuthing. In other words, I googled for "CES 2010 Light Blue Optics". First, kudos to them for answering one of my biggest criticisms. Previously, I was not able to find any articles about LBO where it was clear that the writer of the article had actually seen the products and demos that they were writing about. I even sent emails to a couple of these writers to ask them, and got no replies. LBO had a habit of private demos, only for investors and insiders --people who had an interest in promoting their products. Now LBO has turned its cards and we can see if they really do have what it takes to fill out that straight.

The latest gadget is not a cell-phone-sized device that can project an image several feet across as in their 2003 announcement, nor is it matchbox-sized like their 2006 product that never shipped, nor is it the even smaller device announced as part of their "product line" back in 2008 which never shipped, but it does have touch detection. In other words, you can interact with the projected image as if it were a touch screen.

In the Engadget review the reporter, Thomas Ricker, actually notices that the light level is very low during the demo and bothered to ask about the brightness. You can see from Engadget photo that reality doesn't look much like the publicity photos. It turns out that the projector only produces 15 lumens which renders it of limited use except in very dim lighting. If you read the PopSci article you will see that all of the competitors are smaller and brighter.

If all of the competitors are smaller and brighter, why the excitement over the LBO projector? Clearly their only claim to fame is the touch-screen functionality. This is a neat feature and one that I'd like to see repeated in similar products, but it is not especially revolutionary. I don't remember when the KBD virtual keyboard first came out, but it must have been around ten years ago. It projects a laser image of a keyboard and lets you type on it using the same sort of technology as LBO is announcing.

So is LBO actually going to ship this time? The cards don't look good. They claim to be looking for an OEM for the product, but really, even if all of this is above-board, why would any consumer buy this device? The actual projector is very bulky and dim compared to the competition. The idea of a projectible touch screen is cool, but the main advantage of projectors is that you get a large image from a relatively small device. From the photos it is clear that for the Light Blue Optics projector, the projected image is really not much larger than the device itself.

An Apple iPad give a slightly larger touch screen in a slightly larger device, and since both devices are too big to fit in a pocket, the slightly smaller size doesn't gain much. The iPad can be held in any position --you don't have to be sitting at a desk. The iPad can be used in a much larger range of lighting conditions. Given all of that, what is the upside of the LBO touch-screen projector? I have to confess that I don't see much of one and I doubt that any manufacturers will either.

someone else always does it better

2010-04-15T00:51:00.001-07:00

When I started this blog several years ago, I had a feature called "I really need one of these" where I would have links to interesting vehicles. I had maybe ten or so vehicles before I lost interest. But whoever did this page managed to find several dozen.

almost had it

2010-03-20T16:11:00.000-07:00

I just saw Repo Men. It is a film set in the near future when artificial organs can be bought on credit, but if you fall behind on your payments, a repo man comes and takes the organ back. The hero is a repo man who develops moral qualms about his occupation.

The two main characters and the bad-guy/boss are terrific characters. Those three characters are men; the two top female roles are played by actresses who are reasonably good, but not in the same league as the men, leading to a lopsided film where the men carry the film.

The premise of the film is interesting, the plot is pretty good, and the action moves along well with some interesting psychodrama thrown in. On the negative side, there is too much gore and despite the good acting, the nonchalant attitude that the repo men take towards killing is not quite believable. As a whole the movie is pretty good --at least up until the last twenty minutes. In the last twenty minutes, there is an extremely violent, bloody knife fight played for laughs, then a bloody mutilation scene that the director tried to make erotic, and then an ending that made you sorry that you had watched the movie.

It's like a relatively talented director made the first hour and a half of the film and then got bored and turned it over to his high school kid to finish.

A bit more on the mutilation/sex scene. This wasn't a sexual mutilation scene like you might have in a move about a sexual serial killer. It was a mutilation scene that the director really tried to make sexy. It was extraordinarily creepy and if it had occurred earlier in the film I would have walked out. I only stayed because I knew the movie was almost over and I kept thinking the scene was almost over. But no. It went on and on. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences that I've ever had in a movie.

I always wonder when I see some creepy sexual scene in a movie if the director is into that. Why else would a director think anyone wants to see a bloody mutilation scene mixed up with sex? I had the same thought during Stargate, an otherwise terrific movie with a creepy pedophile theme --especially the teenage boys dressed up like slutty teenage girls.

I have a high tolerance for gore. I don't particularly like it, but it doesn't usually turn me off on an otherwise good movie. Still, unless you are into the gore/humor and the gore/sex thing, I recommend that you skip this one. The first hour and half isn't worth having to sit through the last twenty minutes.

Nancy Pelosi and all the king's knights

2010-03-11T00:29:00.000-08:00

Allahpundit at Hot Air quotes the following excuse by Nancy Pelosi

The speaker told reporters that she did not learn about the Massa allegations until Wednesday.

“I asked my staff; I said, ‘Have there been any rumors about any of this before?’” Pelosi said. “There had been a rumor, but just that, no formal notification to our office that anything — a one-, two-, three-person-removed rumor that had been reported to Mr. Hoyer’s office that had been reported to my staff, which they didn’t report to me, because, you know what? This is rumor city. Every single day, there are rumors. I have a job to do and not to be the receiver of rumors.”

When I read this, I was thinking, where have I heard that before? Oh, I know! On an essay by Tom Simon about Michael Moorcock's criticism of Tolklien. "What does Michael Moorcock have to do with Nancy Pelosi?" you may ask. Well, the answer is "nothing that I know of." However, in the essay there is a wonderful passage quoted from Tolklien's Farmer Giles of Ham:

But more news came in next day. The dragon, it appeared, was exceptionally large and ferocious. He was doing terrible damage.
‘What about the King’s knights?’ people began to say.
Others had already asked the same question. Indeed, messengers were now reaching the King from the villages most affected by Chrysophylax, and they said to him as loudly and as often as they dared: ‘Lord, what of your knights?’
But the knights did nothing; their knowledge of the dragon was still quite unofficial. So the King brought the matter to their notice, fully and formally, asking for necessary action at their early convenience. He was greatly displeased when he found that their convenience would not be early at all, and was indeed daily postponed.
Yet the excuses of the knights were undoubtedly sound. First of all, the Royal Cook had already made the Dragon’s Tail for that Christmas, being a man who believed in getting things done in good time. It would not do at all to offend him by bringing in a real tail at the last minute. He was a very valuable servant.
‘Never mind the Tail! Cut his head off and put an end to him!’ cried the messengers from the villages most nearly affected.
But Christmas had arrived, and most unfortunately a grand tournament had been arranged for St. John’s Day: knights of many realms had been invited and were coming to compete for a valuable prize. It was obviously unreasonable to spoil the chances of the Midland Knights by sending their best men off on a dragon-hunt before the tournament was over.
After that came the New Year Holiday.
But each night the dragon had moved; and each move had brought him nearer to Ham. On the night of New Year’s Day people could see a blaze in the distance. The dragon had settled in a wood about ten miles away, and it was burning merrily. He was a hot dragon when he felt in the mood.

The lame excuses of the knights remind me more than a little of Pelosi's excuses for why she has continued to tolerate all of the crooks in her caucus. It's going to be the most ethical Congress in history, real soon now.

the curious case of the birther movement

2010-02-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

Redstate has just banned truthers and birthers (link from Instapundit). Can somebody explain to me why the words "truther" and "birther" keep showing up in the same sentence?

Truthers believe that the United States government engaged in a plot involving hundreds if not thousands of people to murder three-thousand innocent Americans, cause billions in economic havoc, and blame it on innocent Islamic terrorists, all in order to precipitate a war to make money for defense contractors and oil tycoons (how oil tycoons made money out of it is a bit murky).

Birthers believe that a woman who had a child with a Muslim from a third-world country conspired with her mother and maybe some sympathetic record-keeper in order to make it appear that the baby was born in the US so as to help protect him from any custody claims by the father. Muslim fathers from Saudi Arabia are notorious for taking children from their American mothers and the mother never seeing the children again, so it was understandable that there was some fear about this.

How are these two conspiracy theories in any way comparable? One of them involves hundreds or thousands of conspirators who commit mass murder on an appalling scale for shadowy and implausible motives. The other involves two or three conspirators who falsify a single document of no major importance (at the time) for motives that are not only plausible but sympathetic.

Where the truther story is a dark fantasy of ultimate evil, a justification for paranoia and unbalanced hatred, the birther story is a plot line for a family comedy, a sympathetic tale of courage in defending a helpless baby. Birthers don't hate the conspirators. Surely one of the reasons that birthers find the story so compelling is because they feel that they would do the same thing in the same situation. That is pretty much the opposite of paranoia and hatred.

But isn't it mean and undemocratic to doubt the legitimacy of the elected president? Well I suppose so ... wait. Wait a minute, that sounds familiar doesn't it? Where have we heard people doubting the legitimacy of the elected president? Oh, I know! How about the eight years of carping by Democrat extremists about the Florida elections? Why aren't the birthers compared to those people instead of to the truthers? Isn't that a more fitting comparison?

It is clear why the Democrats and mainstream media want to compare birthers to truthers rather than to people who sported "re-defeat Bush" bumper stickers on their SUVs: it is because truthers are whackos who are an embarrassment to the Democratic party and Democrats want people to say, "Well, sure, the Democrats have their truthers, but the Republicans have birthers."

What surprises me is not that the Democrats and MSM want to do this; what surprises me is the number of conservative and libertarian bloggers who went along with it, helping their political enemies to marginalize their political allies. It's not just that these conservative and libertarian bloggers disagree with the birthers, it's the condescending, sneering, and hostile tone with which they do it.

Too many on the political right are quick to take on the tone of the political left when they encounter disagreements within the right. We saw this in the immigration debates when some on the right adopted the leftist slanders of racism and nativism against people who just want the government to control our borders and enforce immigration law. We saw it in the global-warming debates when some on the right joined the left in accusing the skeptics of being against science. We've seen it elsewhere too, but I don't want to provoke further controversies by bringing up more examples.

Depending how much credibility you give to the poll, as many as 36% of committed Republicans are birthers. Republican bloggers who have insulted birthers have therefore offended somewhere around a third of likely Republican voters. Is that politically smart?

What political gain do they see that offsets the potential loss of alienating 1/3 of their allies? I presume their thinking goes something like this: "The birthers are nuts and it is damaging to our reputation that they are associated with us. So if we insult them and disassociate from them then we can limit the damage that they do." If this is the reasoning, then it strikes me as short-sighted.

Sure, if the birthers really were nutcases, then this would make sense. It would be like if a conservative candidate really endorses the 9/11 truther movement, or even fails to distance herself from it adequately, that should end her candidacy. I'm all for that. But --and I can't emphasize this enough-- truthers believe that the president of the United States conspired to murder thousands of Americans for profit; birthers believe that a mother conspired to protect her baby. The problem with truthers is their extreme paranoia and the horrific nature of what they believe (and their associations with with anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, which are seldom mentioned).

By letting the left decide which conservatives would be thrown to the wolves, the right is playing into their hands, as some have done on global warming and immigration. How has that worked out for us so far? When have we ever gained by giving the left their pound of flesh? By throwing some decent, if imperfect allies to the dogs?

Instead of just conceding the point to the left, the right should defend the honor of birthers even if they cannot defend the theories. Birthers a generally nice, reasonable folk --the kinds of nice folk who think a young mother might forge a birth certificate to protect her baby. Yes, the birthers have a belief that is not well-supported by any evidence, but what's new about that? How many horoscope watchers are there among those who display their contempt of the birthers? How many who are afraid to walk under a ladder or who think that poverty leads to crime? Everyone has beliefs that are not well-supported by evidence.

How about a little charity here? How about standing by your political family instead of taking the other side whenever they embarrass you a little? You don't have to defend their beliefs, just defend them against the leftist slander that they are comparable to 9/11 truthers. And when someone is just appalled at how birthers could doubt the legitimacy of the elected president, point out that this sort of doubt is hardly unprecedented. And when you argue with them yourselves, be respectful. Is all that really so hard?

cute fuzzy kitten

2010-02-01T02:19:00.001-08:00

Martin Cambell predicted Scott Brown Victory

2010-01-31T22:06:00.000-08:00

Martin Campbell's new film, "Edge of Darkness" has a startling character: a Republican Senator from Massachusetts. The film was released on Jan. 29, only ten days after Scott Brown was elected. When the film was made, there hadn't been a Republican elected Senator in Massachusetts in 40 years. Two of the five or six most famous senators in the country were the two Democrats from Massachusetts. Any politically aware person could have told you the name and party of both Massachusetts senators. When the film was being made, any politically aware person would have laughed at the idea that there would be a Republican Senator in Massachusetts.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Yet despite all of this, Campbell was courageous enough to make the evil, conspiring, murdering senator from Massachusetts a Republican instead of making him a Democrat like everyone would expect. For Campbell's prediction to be completed, all we need next is for Scott Brown to be killed for his part in a plot to set off a nuclear weapon somewhere and blame Islamic terrorists. Which, as anyone in Hollywood can tell you is a lot more likely than Islamic terrorists actually being guilty. No, really, I've seen several movies involving plots to do mass murder with a nuclear weapon, and the vast majority of them make the CIA or Republican corporate bigwigs the bad guys. Yeppers, if a nuclear device goes off somewhere and all the evidence points to Islamic terrorists, then it's a lot more likely that it was the CIA and their Republican corporate pals who did it than that Islamic terrorists would actually do something that mean.

But if the Islamic terrorists did to it, then it's still the fault of the Republicans for being so racist.

According to Martin Campbell and his Hollywood pals, I mean.

help wanted

2010-01-23T12:19:00.001-08:00

I want to start a new site to discuss computers and technology but I don't want to do any work. I just want to write.

I'm looking for someone to manage the web site, do some editing, help me with research, and maybe write some posts if they want to. If you know anyone who has the necessary skills and might be interested in earning some extra cash, please ask them to email me. Pay is negotiable.

the briefs bomber

2009-12-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

My favorite quote so far about the man that tried to blow up a plane with explosive underwear is from Monday Evening:

What could go wrong? Well, if the device functions as designed, you could kill a bunch of innocent people and yourself, and then go straight to hell. If it doesn’t function at all, you’ll go to prison for a long time. If it partially functions, you’ll set fire to your crotch, the other passengers will beat you down, and then you’ll go to prison for a long time

I'm going to call him the "briefs bomber". The other options are "the underwear bomber" which doesn't alliterate and "that 'tard who tried to blow up a plane with his underwear" which is too long.

I'm sure it was uncomfortable having his genitals on fire, but where I really sympathize with him is in having to wear the ashen underwear until they got him to the hospital. Maybe that's just because I've never had my genitals on fire so I don't know how uncomfortable it is --at least I can't recall that ever happening-- but I have had to wear ashen underwear and believe me, that is no fun at all.

We may all think we can joke about this because no one was killed and no one was even injured except for the murderous 'tard who burned his own pecker off, but I'm concerned about a very serious side effect. Because of the Shoe Bomber, the 'tards in airline security force all airline passengers to take off their shoes and pass them through the scanner separately. Are we now going to have to do that with our underwear?

You might thinks this is silly, but taking off shoes is just as silly. It would be easy to form explosives so that they did not show up in a scan. In fact, I doubt that it would require much special effort at all. The reason we have to take off our shoes is because the people making decisions about these sorts of things are not trying to solve the problem of keeping people from being killed. They are trying to solve another problem which they consider much more important: protect their jobs.

These bureaucrats fear that if another shoe bomber tried and succeeded in bringing down a plane and they did not have this policy, then their jobs might be in danger. They are afraid that the media, which would obviously be looking for a villain other than the bomber himself, would latch onto the fact that the shoes were not scanned and blame whoever made that policy. A media blitz like that can overwhelm all reason in politicians, sending them screaming in a panic to punish someone else before their voters punish them. And if the scanning would have made no difference at all, well, no amount of protests like that are going to get through a full-scale media Storm of Righteousness.

But really, how serious a threat is that? No one gets fired for security lapses in the US government. Good grief, no one was even fired for 9/11 --a grotesque security failure which resulted in the deaths of 3,000 people. In fact, I recall that one of the screwups in the FBI was actually promoted shortly afterward. These media storms never happen to US civil servants any more, only to Republicans and pro-life Democrats. I speculate that this is because reporters have come to see the US bureaucracy as an ally in the war against Republicans.

Oops. I guess I got a little off-topic there. So back to the briefs bomber. Let's see, I need some more comments about a dumbass who sets flames to his underwear...

I'm hopping the dumbass is now qualified for the Darwin award, which only requires you to take yourself out of the gene pool, not die. Making yourself sterile would qualify.

I hear when the dumbass is at a barbeque he likes to grill his own weaner.

Maybe instead of the briefs bomber we should call him the Oscar Meyer bomber.

I hear that he had a syringe of igniter in one pocket and a squirt bottle of mustard in the other. (sorry, but you should have quit reading after the barbeque line).

the color purple

2009-12-12T03:02:00.000-08:00

Well, I haven't reverted all of the colors back to the exotic yet subtle purple/gold/turquoise scheme, but at least the post titles are in purple. I just want you all to feel at home.

changes

2009-12-12T00:43:00.000-08:00

Well, my old comment system is going away so I'm having to make some changes. The easiest way to enable Google comments was to install a supported template. That's why my beautiful color scheme is gone.

I'm going to try to import the old comments into Google, but frankly I don't have much hope for success so they are probably history.

Meanwhile I decided to look for my old Doc Rampage picture and it reminded me once again of what morons they have at Microsoft. I've been using Microsoft Windows for fifteen years. In that time, I've probably done thousands of file searches. Now with the new and "improved" Windows Vista, I can't figure out how search for ".jpg" files within a specific directory. What kind of mega-twit changes the most basic functionality of a user interface like that?

I really don't have any need for Microsoft and I think I'm going to try going back to Linux again. I was happy on Linux for several years but I was sucked back into the Evil Empire when I bought a laptop. Linux support for laptops was always a bit spotty and I didn't want to mess with it, but that was several years ago and I think it's time to give it another try.

ornithopters

2009-12-07T22:23:00.000-08:00

An ornithopter is a flying machine that works by flapping wings like a bird. Did you know there have been some man-sized ones that have actually flown?

Here is a fun web site devoted to the subject (it's the same place you get to by clicking on the image).

Bono and the Scottsman

2009-12-05T00:17:00.000-08:00

I don't know if this is a true story, but it's funny enough to repeat anyway:

Bono, lead singer of the rock band U2, is famous throughout the entertainment industry for being more than just a little self-righteous.

At a recent U2 concert in Glasgow, Scotland, he asked the audience for total quiet. Then, in the silence, he started to slowly clap his hands,once every few seconds.

Holding the audience in total silence, he said into the microphone, "Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies."

A voice with a broad Scottish accent from the front of the crowd pierced the quiet...

"Well, foockin stop doin it then, ya evil bastard!"

high-tech, high-speed hypocrisy

2009-12-02T18:50:00.000-08:00

The picture is a picture of Earthrace, the current record holder for traveling around the world in a power boat. They have one of those horrible, buggy, slow-loading, active-content websites designed by someone with more enthusiasm than taste or talent, so getting the following information was painful (in fact I ended up getting most of the information elsewhere).

Before I talk about the part where he killed somebody with his hobby, let's talk about the environmentalist hypocrisy. This guy is trying to sound like Earthrace is some sort of Green Machine. He brags about three things in this regard: biodiesel fuel, a solar panel, and non-toxic bottom paint. To take them in order:

1. Biodiesel is just diesel made from plants. There is no technological innovation needed to use it. You put it your standard diesel engine and go (for some kinds of biodiesel you may have to prewarm it). Using biodiesel in an enormous high-polluting engine is just tokenism. And to add insult injury Earthrace doesn't use pure biodiesel, it adds a product of animal fat. That sort of fuel isn't even sustainable because you could not possibly build a fuel infrastructure based on animal fat.

And don't forget: this guy created a 1,000-horsepower boat with no purpose other than to go really, really fast --an enormously wasteful, expensive, hi-tech toy designed to gratify his desire to break a world record. Just to be clear, I don't have any problem with that, but this biodiesel gimmick is clearly just a bone that he is throwing to the environmentalists in an effort to keep them from vilifying him like they normally would anyone who did something like this.

And here is the final irony. With those huge biodiesel engines, they still couldn't beat the overall around-the-world record which is still held by sail boat.

2. The solar panel is just laughable. Those two 500 horsepower engines are running at cruising speed almost the entire time someone is aboard the boat, and an alternator capable of serving all of their power needs would probably make no measurable difference in fuel usage. The only purpose of a solar panel in a power boat is for when the boat is sitting idle for long periods with people living on it. This boat was never meant to be used like that so the panels provide nothing useful, but manufacturing them was expensive in terms of energy and other environmental damage.

3. Bottom paint is intended to keep barnacles and other things from attaching to the bottom of the boat and slowing it down. Some of these paints have substances like copper that are toxic to many marine species. It's really great that an organization that can afford a multi-million-dollar boat as fancy toy is willing to hire people to go and scrape the crud off the boat rather than add toxic substances to the water. I'm serious about that, not sarcastic. All rich yacht owners should do that. But it's not the sort of financial sacrifice in the name of the environment that justifies bragging how green you are with your 1,000-horsepower boat. Nor is it any sort of demonstration that non-toxic bottom paint is a viable solution for average boaters.

On their first record attempts, Earthrace collided with another boat and killed a Guatemalan fisherman. It was just an accident, right? Who ever could have thought that racing along a coast at 20 knots at night in an area where fishermen still fish in low-tech boats with a helmsman who is probably exhausted by many days at sea in a high-speed motorboat might be dangerous?

Well, if they didn't know it was dangerous the first time, they surely knew it was dangerous the second time. Fortunately, on the second attempt they didn't kill anyone, but they were willing to risk other people lives again. But I guess that's not hypocrisy if you only care about the environment and not about other human beings. It's just living your beliefs. Except, of course for all of the environmental damage you are doing in that 1000-horsepower boat.

And now this goofball is lending the boat to those Sea Shepherd goofballs who harass Japanese whalers. They are going to use a 1000-horsepower powerboat to interfere with boats pursuing whales. I see another killing in this boat's future. Accidental, of course. Who could have thought that racing around at high speed, deliberately interfering with other people who are running at high speed while trying to concentrate on a job might lead to an accident?

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the 21st Century

2009-12-01T12:10:00.000-08:00

I loved the car in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There were two things about Chitty that appealed to me. First, I've always had an obsession for multi-purpose technology such as amphibious vehicles and flying cars (Chitty was both). Second, I liked the idea that it was built by a back-yard hobbyist from an old wreck. I've always wanted to do those kinds of projects but never had a back yard :-).

So naturally, I think the Maverick is super cool. This is a flying car put together by Christian missionaries to reach remote areas in South America. Here is a video of a test flight.

In the Popular Mechanics article they imply that it is amphibious as well because you can replace the tires with floats, but I get the impression that they haven't actually done any work on that aspect and it would be cheating anyway. The floats have to be built-in for the car to really be amphibious.


Maverick	Chitty

climategate

2009-11-30T20:07:00.001-08:00

This is the first good, comprehensive summary I've seen of the recent global-warming scandal. Thanks to John C. Wright for the pointer.

I've seen little pieces of it all over the internet, but this is the first article that really draws it all together, identifies the players, and explains the implications.

Huckabee parolee murders four cops

2009-11-30T10:32:00.000-08:00

Maurice Clemmons, a man who is out of prison thanks to a Mike Huckabee clemency has murdered four police officers. Apparently he just walked into a coffee shop and started shooting.

Huckabee comments on the shooting:

He [Maurice Clemmons] was recommended for and received a commutation of his original sentence from 1990, making him parole eligible and was paroled by the parole board once they determined he met the conditions at that time.

Real leaders don't try to brush off their responsibilities onto others like this. The parole board members also deserve blame for their bad judgment, but that doesn't lesson the blame of Huckabee who was the one that second-guessed the judgment of the court in the first place and made Clemmons eligible for parole. The court thought that Clemmons should spend the rest of his life in prison and that is what would have happened without Huckabee's intervention. Huckabee second-guessed the court. He put the welfare of the criminal ahead of the welfare of potential future victims, and the future victims have suffered horribly as a result. Huckabee was the chief law enforcement officer of the state, the chief man responsible for protecting his citizens from criminals, and he failed miserably at his responsibility.

Huckabee doesn't just try to pass the blame off onto the parole board, he tries to pass it off onto the diffuse "criminal justice system" as a whole

He [Maurice Clemmons] was arrested later for parole violation and taken back to prison to serve his full term, but prosecutors dropped the charges that would have held him. It appears that he has continued to have a string of criminal and psychotic behavior but was not kept incarcerated by either state.

Those sorts of failures of the criminal justice system are so commonplace that they were predictable. The justice system had already dealt with this violent man and there are already so many obstacles to getting dangerous people out of society, and the process is so unreliable, that it was reckless for Huckabee to throw that work away and require it to be done all over again.

And this isn't an isolated issue, rather it is an illustration of Huckabee's general bad judgment on law-enforcement issues. As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee gave far more pardons and commutations than other governors in similar states.

Islam and civilization

2009-11-29T22:27:00.000-08:00

Anyone as ignorant of history as Arthur C. Clark should be more reticent to make statements about it in public. I got this quote from a link at Roger L. Simon:

A Chat With Arthur C. Clarke

FI: What appeals to you in Islam?

Clarke: Historically, Islam had a great deal of tolerance for other views and offered the world its priceless wisdom in the form of astronomy and algebra. And, as you know, Islam helped rescue Western civilization from the Dark Ages by preserving classical texts and transmitting them to the West. We, on the other hand, burned the library at Alexandria. If Islam hadn’t fallen into internecine warfare and had gone on to conquer the rest of Europe, we’d have avoided a thousand years of Christian barbarism.

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/clarke_19_2.html

I thought I would add a few notes from someone (me) who is also ignorant of history, but apparently not so ignorant as Mr. Clark.

1. Muslims never invented anything of note. During their empires, there was some knowledge distributed between Europe, India, and China, but it's not clear who distributed the knowledge (except that we know in one important case it was a Christian, Macro Polo) or how it might have gone if there had been a different empire.

2. Muslims had little to do with preserving Greek writings during the Middle Ages. The influx of Greek writings happened after the fall of Constantinople and the ensuing flood of Christian refugees into Western Europe. It was Constantinople that preserved the Greek writings.

3. No one knows for sure who burned the library at Alexandria, but most likely it was during a Muslim sack of the city.

4. The thousand years of "Christian" barbarism was, more than anything else, just a period of extreme poverty caused by endless invasions from (mostly) non-Christian barbarians and Muslims. And the barbaric activities that Christians are so often accused of were all commonplace in the non-Christian world at the time.

5. Over the centuries of Muslim dominance, some of the most civilized places in the world (Persia and Egypt, for example) were reduced to barbarism --not from wars but just from social failure. The beginning of the downfall was when Europeans found sea routes to Eastern Asia. The Muslims had squandered the accumulated wealth of centuries of pre-Muslim civilization, and without the constant infusion of new wealth from trade between other, more productive areas, the Muslim regions collapsed. Meanwhile, modern civilization grew from the battered survivors of Christianity. With this historical evidence, the idea that Islam could have saved Christian Europe from barbarism is laughable.

boats made out of pumkins

2009-11-28T21:37:00.001-08:00

I thought the pumpkin-boat races were a gag at first, but no, there are pumpkins big enough to make boats out of, and people, er, ambitious enough to do it.

Even the Germans are doing it so you know an Olympic event can't be far behind. What would you call this event? Pumpkonavigation? Vegi-aquatics? Nautifruit racing?

a sex scandal that the press won't cover

2009-11-23T21:18:00.000-08:00

Whenever you accuse the press of being biased, they and their defenders like to claim that they just follow the stories that the public is interested in. But they also claim that stories involving sex are always popular, so why aren't they covering this one?

The American Spectator reports that Kevin Johnson was accused of sexual misconduct with at least three underage high-school girls who were effectively working for him when he was running the local chapter of Americorps. This was part of what Inspector General Walpin was investigating when Obama fired him illegally (the firing was illegal according to a law that Obama himself had sponsored). Kevin Johnson is a friend and supporter of Obama, and the man who let Johnson off the hook (with nothing but partial restitution) both for this crime and for stealing government money is a big Democrat supporter also. There's lots more; read the article.

As Instapundit says, "WHEN THE PRESS CAN IGNORE A SEX SCANDAL, you know it’s covering for politicians, not covering them."

I have a tactic to suggest for Republicans to use in the next election: concentrate on all of the shady stuff that has gone on at in the Obama administration, at ACORN, at Eric Holder's Justice Department, at the polls in swing states and elsewhere. Always ask why the press isn't covering these scandals like they cover allegations of Republican corruption. Point out that the press is 90% Democrat and that they can't be trusted to watch Democrat politicians. But they watch Republicans like a hawk, so if you want clean government, you should vote for the party that the press will watch: the Republicans.

The press is supposed to be the social institution that protects us against corruption in government. That is in large part why the press has special protections in the very Constitution. But the press has become so monolithically attached to a single party that they can no longer fulfill that function when Democrats are in power. That is why people who care about honest government must vote Republican. Not because Republicans are inherently more honest than Democrats, but because our civil watchdogs will only watch Republicans.

the attack of the European X-wing swallow

2009-11-09T23:24:00.001-08:00

Remember that ridiculous plot element in Star Wars where there is this huge moving fortress, the Death Star, but if you shoot a little missile in exactly the right spot, you can blow up the whole thing? George Lucas is a dundering idiot for that. What a maroon. Huge mega-expensive mega machinery doesn't have one tiny little spot out on the exterior that can be used to sabotage the whole thing.

Oh, wait...

I'm sorry, George...

pushing roads around

2009-11-07T15:11:00.000-08:00

In this time-lapse video, they are moving a huge section of the San Francisco Bay Bridge and replacing it with another huge section. I wish I'd known this was going on, I would have gone to watch.

(Hmm. Although I tried to copy the link to the video, the link only seems to take you to the page, not the video. You have to search for "time-lapse" then click on the link there.)

DDWFTTW - Directly Downwind Faster Than The Wind

2009-11-04T20:23:00.000-08:00

Did you know that it is possible to make a wind-driven vehicle that goes down-wind faster than the wind? Here is an interesting discussion. Some skeptics can never be convinced. They sense intuitively that it violates some conservation law. Conservation of motion is not just a scientific theory, it is something built into our mechanical intuitions. There are actually two different conservation laws that correspond roughly to our intuition: conservation of momentum and conservation of energy. Neither one is really violated by DDWFTTW, they only appear so to the intuition. Our intuitions can lead us astray when considering situations that are well outside of normal experience, and this is one of those cases.

So let me try my hand at making this reasonable. Take a cart with a propeller that is physically connected to the wheels with a gear so that when the wheels turn, so does the propeller. Lets say that for any speed that you move the wheels at, the propeller turns fast enough that it would, by itself, push the cart at half that speed. This does not violate any conservation laws. Suppose that you are pushing the cart at 10 mph in still air. The propeller turns fast enough that it would, by itself be pushing the cart at 5 mph. But the cart is already going faster than 5 mph, so the propeller is not adding any speed to the cart, in fact the drag of the propeller may actually be trying to slow the cart down.

What happens if you stop pushing the cart? Well the only thing driving the cart is the propeller which is trying to drive the cart at 5 mph, but the cart is going 10 mph. So it gradually slows down to 5 mph. But when it is going 5 mph, the propeller is only trying to drive it at 2.5 mph, so it slows down to 2.5 mph, and the cycle continues until the cart halts.

Now suppose the cart is being pushed at 10 mph and there is a 5 mph tail wind. The propeller is now trying to push the cart at ten mph because the speed of the propeller through the air is 5 mph and the propeller is turning fast enough that it wants to go 5 mph through the air. So what happens if you stop pushing the cart now? The cart is going ten mph along the ground. This causes the wheels to turn fast enough to turn the propeller fast enough that it is pushing the cart along at 5 mph through the air --which is 10 mph on the ground. With a 5 mph tail wind, this is a steady state: once you stop pushing the cart, it will continue to move along at 10 mph which is faster than the 5 mph wind that is pushing it.

There is no violation of conservation of energy here: the propeller is slowing down the wind, taking energy from the wind to move the cart. There will be friction losses of course, but those are figured into my premises. That is, if not for friction losses, maybe the propeller could move the cart at .65 times the wheel speed rather than .5 times the wheel speed.

And of course these numbers are just made up. Maybe it's not possible to have the propeller move the cart at one half of the wheel speed. (But if not, then you can do it at 1/3 or 1/4 or something. For any speed you pick, there is some wind speed that will make the cart move under wind power faster than the wind.) And of course I am neglecting the complex interactions of friction and thrust which vary with wind speed and ground speed, but the point of this thought experiment is not that that DDWFTTW is physically possible, but only that it does not violate any conservation laws.

To find out if it is physically possible, you do an experiment.

The very strong skepticism towards DDWFTTW that you see on various forums is caused by the fact that the skeptics think of this as an energy problem when it is really just a leverage problem. There is plenty of energy in the wind to move the cart faster than the wind, you just have to find a way to apply the leverage to make it happen. One way to do that (maybe not the only way!) is to gear the relationship between the wheels and the prop in such a way that the air speed of the propeller for a given ground speed of the wheels will give you a limiting speed faster than a tail wind.

everything you always wanted to know about eggs and then some

2009-10-26T01:45:00.000-07:00

Did you know that chicken breeds with white feathers and ear lobes lay white eggs while breeds with red feathers and ear lobes lay brown eggs?

Did you know that the blood spot you see on the yolk sometimes has nothing to do with fertilization? It is an actual spot of the chicken's blood caused by a ruptured blood vessel during egg production.

Did you know that a chicken takes 24 to 26 hours to produce an egg and then starts over again 30 minutes later?

Did you know that there are no egg-related words beginning with i, j, or k, but that, by contrast, o is heavily used?

You would know all of these things if you, too, had read "All about the egg" by the Iowa Egg Council.

bad web sites

2009-10-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

Why do some companies spend thousands of dollars to turn their web sites into poorly-designed flash sites where you can't find the information you are looking for. Are they deliberately trying to hide the information in hopes that they will force people to email them? That seems unlikely since in many cases it is just as hard to find their email addresses as any other information. I'm guessing that they just don't have anyone whose job it is to evaluate the web site as a potential customer who is looking at dozens of web sites for information. They always evaluate it as people who think that their web site is the center of the world and worth spending hours getting to know.

Google Chrome

2009-10-14T21:40:00.000-07:00

It's not what I expected. I never read any of the hype about Google's new web browser because I assumed that it would just be Mozilla with a Google bar built in. And the name led me to believe that its main selling point was flashy appearance. I visualized a nightmare of animated partially transparent doodads rotating and sliding around the screen every time I moved my mouse. Google Chrome is the opposite of that. It's actually a very bare-bones browser with some nice features.

There's nothing amazing about Google Chrome, but I think Google is taking a page from Microsoft's playbook. When you are that big, you can be a lot worse than your competition and still grab a significant number of users. Then over time you improve the product enough that it actually deserves all of the users. That's how they did it with Blogger, which started out as a pretty stark blogging platform, far behind other products in terms of features. But Blogger has caught up to other blogging software over the years. Google Docs seems to be following that plan as well. It really isn't very good compared to Microsoft Office or Open Office, but it has some interesting features, it is just good enough to be usable, and it is from Google.

So I expect Google Chrome to follow the plan and gradually add features. They will be smart about it and only add features that users complain about not having. In the end they will be left with something that has all of the important features but is still leaner than the competition.

I like the idea behind Google Chrome. I downloaded it and tried it out, thinking that I might become a beta tester. But a half hour of experiencing the web the way website designers think it should be experienced put that plan away. I just cannot read web pages with moving things on them. It is so distracting to me that I have several Firefox extensions dedicated to shutting things down. If Google wants users like me to use a minimalist browser, they could make a single configuration option on it that stops all motion on web pages --all animated gifs, all movies, all flash, all Javascript animation, everything. Then they could have a single button that you press for a given page that allows the page to run. That would be my dream browser. But until Chrome gives me some control over how web pages are displayed, I'm afraid that I'll have to stick with Firefox.

speaking of spite...

2009-10-14T06:25:00.000-07:00

Speaking of spite ... an anonymous commenter just tried to out me in the comments to this post to punish me for speculating about Light Blue Optics and their mysterious lack of anything to ship even after announcing products and evaluation kits. Doc Rampage is only semi-anonymous anyway, so the threat has less effect than he probably thinks it does. Still it seems like bad strategy if he wants to put a stop to bad publicity for Light Blue Optics. I was only interested in finding out the truth about LBO, good or bad. If my speculations are wrong, all he had to do was email me in his own name to answer my questions. Assuming that it really answered my questions (in unambiguous language) I would have published the letter, said "there you have it" and gone on to other interests.

But whoever is making these marketing decisions at LBO seems to have chosen instead the strategy of trying to piss me off. I'm not sure how he thinks that making this personal is going to help Light Blue Optics with their image problems. They think a pissed-off critic is going to give them less bad publicity than an idly-curious critic? The only way this would be good strategy is if they really are trying to hide something and they figure that their only option is to try and scare me off.

on spite and apologies

2009-10-13T19:19:00.001-07:00

Anonymous commenters on my second post on Light Blue Optics have suggested that I should apologize for my posts about LBO. One accused me of "spiteful and unfounded insinuations". I haven't yet read the latest links that have been left for me to peruse, but given the quality of the previous links, I'm not expecting much. Still, I will read them eventually and if I decide that they answer my questions, then I will write another post acknowledging the new information and update my previous posts accordingly.

However, it is hard to imagine a circumstance that would make me feel that I had to apologize for what I have written about LBO. There is an argument to be made that people are entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and that you don't post suspicions about random people without some sort of evidence. I am more sympathetic to this view than not. For example, I think the ridiculous speculations about Gov. Palin's child not really being hers would never have been published by a responsible person.

But LBO is not an individual; it is a company that goes out to investors and asks them for money (large amounts of money) based on their own reports of their own achievements and potential as a company. When they do this, they give up the presumption of innocence. They have to be ready, willing and able to confront criticism openly and effectively. If the best that they can do is to post anonymous links and outraged comments then they need to grow a thicker skin. I'm a pussycat compared to an angry investor.

In addition to my criticisms and suspicions of the company, I did question the credentials of two individuals who work for the company. However, these two individuals are high-level employees (one is a VP and the other is the CTO) who have lent their prestige to the company, so their credentials are also open to criticism on the same grounds as is the company itself. Furthermore, none of my published comments would do them any harm at all if I am wrong and if I am right the only harm it would do them is to make it more difficult for them to deceive people. In fact, if I am wrong, I imagine that they would find my suspicions more amusing than troublesome.

And finally, I would like to say (again) that there is no spite or ill-will in any of my remarks. Those who see spite here are just projecting their own anger and spite onto the person who is making them angry and spiteful.

the odd case of Light Blue Optics II

2009-10-06T22:58:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I gave a list of reasons to wonder if Light Blue Optics really has the technology that it claims to have. It is very cool technology and if it is for real then LBO is going to be big. But is it for real? Among the reasons for doubt, I gave a list of announcements that the company made: claiming that they had a working prototype, claiming that they were selling evaluation kits and announcing a product line, even though in a dozen articles about the prototype demo, no one claimed to have seen it personally and Light Blue Optics has never shipped a unit.

Now all of this could be just bad luck, but I noticed other issues like slippery language discussing the qualifications of the contributors to the technology. Now, I'm not a degree snob. A lot of very smart people (like myself, just for example) have gotten their PhDs from second-rung schools. Lots of other very smart people don't have PhDs at all. So I'm not suggesting that just because Adrian Cable and Edward Buckley may not have the degrees that are implied on the company website that this would mean that they are not smart guys. But it would mean that Light Blue Optics is trying to trick people. And that is a bad sign --I don't believe in harmless marketing lies. A lie is a lie, and if a company lies to you about one thing, they will lie to you about something else.

And finally, there is the non-existence of any real explanation of the technology. All I could find are the usual gadget-porn sites with the usual gee-golly half-coherent buzzword-laden but not really informative company-supplied pitch and some whitepapers with the above along with some scary math that doesn't really explain anything either.

So, hating to waste all that research time, I decided to write a post about what I had not discovered. I edited the post three times to tone it down and not look like I was outright accusing the LBO of fraud. All I have at this point is suspicions, so I didn't want to write anything that would negatively impact the LBO if I were wrong.

A couple of people have objected to the post anyway. One anonymous commenter speculated that I had been turned down for a job at the company and called me a baby. As luck would have it, I am older than twelve and so this reproach did not cause me the angst that it otherwise might have. The other commenter was kind enough to contribute to my research by giving me some more links to read. The purpose of this post is to discuss that additional information.

First, the commenter gave me three patent links to look at:

1. http://www.faqs.org/...
2. http://www.wipo.int/...
3. http://www.faqs.org/...

These are patent applications, not patents; they haven't been granted yet. And there are only two applications represented here. Light Blue Optics Patent application 1 is mostly about noise reduction in a holographic 2D projector once you have the 2D projector. It doesn't really say how you make one in the first place. Patent applications 2 and 3 are essentially the same appliation, one to the US patent office and one to the WIPO. It only claims the general idea of a projector based on holograms and suggests some fairly standard technological means to solve various standard problems of projections. How you get real-time moving-picture holograms is left as an exercise for the reader.

The other links seem aimed at establishing the bonafides of the two people I wondered about. The first is this:

http://www.sid.org/chapters/uki/ ...n_sturgeon.html
"The Ben Sturgeon Award for 2009 has been awarded to Dr Edward Buckley....
Edward graduated with a first class Masters degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from University College London. Following that, he began his Ph.D. research into real- time holographic projection systems at Cambridge University in 2003. While at Cambridge, he jointly invented a method for real-time holographic laser projection on which the company Light Blue Optics was founded in 2004."

I have two things to say about this: first, although it clearly implies that Buckley got his PhD at Cambridge, it doesn't really say so. This is the same kind of slippery language I complained about before. Second, this award is by SID, the Society for Information Display. More about that organization later.

The other link is this

http://www.sid.org/chapters/uki/.../uki/ sharp.html
"The winner of the Sharp-SID Best Student Award 2007 is Dr Adrian Cable of Light Blue Optics, who completed his PhD under Tim Wilkinson at the University of Cambridge. Adrian's work has resulted in an algorithm, which allows binary phase holograms to be generated in real time."

Three things to say about this one. First, this one is a little harder to explain away as fishy language, but, as luck would have it, I am up to the task. Second, this award is also granted by those ubiquitous SID persons. And third, that comma after "algorithm" really bugs me. Don't they edit these things? So, in more detail, why is this language slippery? Doesn't it say that he "completed his degree" at Cambridge? Doesn't that mean that he was given his degree at Cambridge? Well, not exactly. The wording is odd. You don't say that you "completed" your degree at an instution, you say that you "earned" or "were granted" your degree. Of course this is England where they haven't kept up with modern trends in the language, so this could be an Englishism. But it is also possible that he started his degree under Tim Wilkinson at the University of WTF, that Wilkinson subsequently moved to Cambridge and took his students with him to finish their WTF degrees. So although they were working at Cambridge, and may even have been working on Cambridge salaries working for a Cambridge professor, they would actually be granted their degrees from WTF. At least that's how it works in the US sometimes.

I hasten to add that this is all mere speculation spurred by tortuously ambiguous language; I don't have any actual inside information. But tortuously ambiguous language makes me suspicious because I'm just a suspicious kind of guy.

Now what about those ubiquitous SID folks? They publish all of LBO's whitepapers and give all of LBO's awards. It looks like this group is just all-to-hell impressed with Light Blue Optics. Or maybe they're just getting paid? I don't know, but looking at their web sited I wonder if SID is just a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering society (see last sentence of previous paragraph).

Well, that's enough for now. Reading patents and awards testimonials is not really exciting stuff so I'm done for the moment. I'll do some more research on LBO and SID and post again if anything interesting comes up.
UPDATE: more as of 4/2010.

AARP and Obamacare

2009-09-28T21:39:00.000-07:00

People have been amazed at how persistently the AARP continues to support Obamacare despite the anger that it has caused among their membership. Michelle Malkin may have the answer: bribery.

the odd case of Light Blue Optics

2009-09-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

Light Blue Optics is one of those young companies with an exciting technology that all of the gadget sites want to write about. Imagine a normal-size cell phone that could project a touch-sensitive picture on any wall or table top. You could use it to show movies, give quick presentations, make video calls, or, with a projected keyboard, just use it as a computer.

But is this cool new technology for real or is it just a promise intended to relieve unwary investors of excess capital? Now, the technology of miniature laser projection, in general terms, is for real. VKB has been selling their virtual keyboards for years (I even own one) and another company, Microvision, has demonstrated a real device. Laser-projected images is old stuff. The only real challenge is the miniaturization. But is the peculiar 2D hologram technology of LBO for real? Everyone assumes that it is, but I've seen some disturbing warning signs.

Ever go to a company website and after reading some of it, start to think that it looks fishy? That's the feeling I got from the LBO site. Now, I'm not an optical engineer and I don't know the inside scoop on this company, so I'm not saying affirmatively that LBO's technology doesn't really exist, I am only saying that I'm suspicious.

What first made me smell something fishy was the overall impression that I got from the website. None of the issues alone would mean much, but taken together, they form a suspicious pattern. And the suspicious pattern led me to a more thorough investigation which I'll detail later.

Here are the things that seemed fishy to me. First is the news that is highlighted on their starting page. This is supposed to be an exciting new technology company about to come out with a revolutionary new technology --and the news they see fit to highlight is how good they are doing at attracting investors. It looks like whoever is in charge of marketing at LBO views the technology as a secondary consideration.

Second, various other aspects of the site seem more aimed at investors than at customers. For example their "vision" is "to become the world's leading supplier of miniature projection systems". A company with a revolutionary product in the near future should be focused on customers. They should have a vision like "to produce the world's best, brightest, most efficient, and least expensive miniature projection devices". If they really do have something great then the investors will come to them; they won't need the hard sell.

Third, the explanations of the technology are vague and fishy. They have several white papers on the site. The three that I downloaded and read are about the applications of the technology; they are written for a non-technical audience. But they all include a section on the technology (pretty much the exact same text and pictures for each paper) where they give scary mathematical formulas and assume that the reader is familiar with advanced optics, vector equations, and Fourier transforms. Clearly the author expects almost all of his readers to scan quickly past this part and be left with the impression that there is a detailed explanation in the paper that is beyond their comprehension. But there isn't a detailed explanation. I don't fully understand those sections either, but I understand enough to see that there are nothing but some basic formulas of interest only to theoreticians and some vigorous hand-waving. I conclude that these papers are deliberately intended to make non-technical readers think that they have been shown a detailed technical explanation when they haven't.

Fourth, there are several references to patented technology, but no patent numbers. Why not? Anyone who has the resources to compete with LBO can easily find the patents if they exist, so there is no reason not to give them. And giving patent numbers lets your non-technical readers see that you actually do have a patent and lets your technical readers evaluate how significant the patents really are.

Fifth, the emphasis on "holograms" seems designed to be deceptive. Everyone in the world thinks "3D" when you say "hologram". I can't help but speculate that when the company started out they really did intend to sell investors on the idea of a laser 3D holographic display and that when this became untenable, they invented the idea of 2D holograms as a fallback position. But, that's only speculation. Maybe they really did start out intending to cause confusion between 2D and 3D.

These warning signs, and a few others, led me to do a bit more research. That research revealed some more warning signs.

* LBO supposedly had a lab-based demo going back as far as December, 2003. This demo already had their revolutionary algorithm implemented in hardware, which means that the production step to a chip is very quick. But the reporter doesn't say that he saw the demo, only that it exists. I wonder. Still, LBO seemed to think that the technology was close enough to justify starting a buzz in the tech world. Today, five and half years later, Light Blue Optics is still not shipping.

* LBO supposedly was providing evaluation kits to technology companies back in January, 2006. Those kits are supposed to be at least fully functional prototypes so that other companies can design products around it. But today, three and a half years later, Light Blue Optics is still not shipping.

* LBO announced a product line back in January, 2008 but today, 18 months later, Light Blue Optics is still not shipping.

* In January, 2009, one year after it "announced a product line" and three years after it was supposedly offering evaluation kits, LBO announced that "it will demonstrate its latest miniature projection systems to key customers and strategic partners". Not an open demo, but a controlled demo to a specially-chosen audience. There is something inconsistent in this time line.

* Now that other companies are coming out with real products in this area, Light Blue Optics is trying to change the game. They've started talking about touch-enabled projections. This could be a response to slipping shipping schedules, but if they can't ship even the technology that they have been working on for the past 5+ years, why are they adding new complexity which will delay the product even more? That is at the very least abysmally poor judgment. Come out with a solid competitive product as soon as you can, even if it is no longer the knockout that you were aiming at. And once you have proven yourself, then add the bells and whistles.

* They claim that their patents came out of research at the Photonics and Sensors Group at the University of Cambridge. But of the four researchers who supposedly came up with this technology, only one (assuming that Nic Lawrence is N. A. Lawrence) had any publications with that group. And none of those publications are directly related to the LBO technology. So apparently, this revolutionary technology was invented by four minor researchers who didn't bother to publish.

*It's not that they can't publish. One of the four, Dr. Edward Buckley seems to be responsible for all of the technical material that I could find. According to LBO, Buckley "holds a Masters degree in electrical and electronic engineering from University College London and a PhD from the University of Cambridge". Is it significant that they say what his masters is in but not his PhD? If he had a PhD in EE from Cambridge wouldn't he be more clear about that? And if he does, why is he VP of business development rather than having a technical position? Why is the VP of business development writing all of the technical documents put out by the company?

* Their CTO is Adrian Cable who "has a degree in electronic engineering from Cambridge University and his PhD focused on holographic optics, projection technology, and simulation and modelling of complex optical systems". Again, I note slippery language about the degrees it seems to imply that he has a Ph.D. from Cambridge but doesn't say so. All it says is that he has a degree in EE from Cambridge and he has a Ph.D. They could be two different degrees. I found two patent applications for Cable, only one of which applies to LBO. And that patent is just for the idea of a 2D holographic projection system --there is no clue how they solve the fundamental problem of calculating the interference pattern needed for the projection. I didn't find a patent for that, or any description of the algorithm anywhere.

So, does all of this prove that LBO just scammed 15 million dollars out of foolish investors? No, of course not. But I can say that I hope those investors were able to get a lot more and better information on the company than I was able to get and that they hired an independent optics expert to review the technology. If they didn't, then I think they were being a bit reckless.

UPDATE: even more LBO speculation here
UPDATE: more as of 4/2010.

presidents and race baiting

2009-09-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

As pointed out in the comments to this post, my prediction hasn't turned out exactly correct. It isn't the administration itself that is using false charges of racism to attempt to suppress dissent, it is other members of his party. And in fact Obama has tried to get the race baiters to shut up.

My prediction also is not panning out in another important way: namely that these false accusations of racism don't seem to be making race relations in this country worse. People actually seem to be seeing these charges for the slanders that they are. The effect may actually be beneficial if it can get Americans used to evaluating charges of racism on the merits and not just believing whatever the liberal press tells them.

told ya

2009-09-17T00:25:00.000-07:00

Conservative blogs have been complaining lately about how Obama's critics are always accused of racism. I'd like to point out that one prescient blogger, namely me, predicted before the election:

Many Americans seem to be under the impression that if we elect a black president, then this will somehow lessen racial tensions in the country by showing that the country is non-racist enough to elect a black president. In other words, many Americans are hopelessly naive. If Obama is defeated in this election, there will be the usual condemnation of the Great Racist Satan, America, and we can look forward to at least a decade where liberals toss out allusions to this election whenever they are losing the argument in order to distract us and make us once again defend how the elections was not about racism.

But if Obama is elected, we can look forward to four years of intensely racial politics that will change the political landscape very much for the worse. Race will become an Obama administration's goto charge for anyone they are angry at, anyone who opposed a substantive policy initiative. And that's just policy initiatives; imagine if Obama or any of his Chicago cronies are caught in corruption or other misbehavior in office. Racism will be their armor against all criticism.

I'm persuaded that for intelligent liberals, one of the primary reasons they are so excited by the idea of a black president, is because they know that it will give them leverage for four years and create an environment where the charge of racism can be used more freely beyond that.

Frankly, I was a little surprised at the time that this was not talked about in the conservative blogosphere --it seemed obvious to me. Now, here is a hint possibly of why it was not talked about. Ann Althouse writes:

Imagine if, before last year's election, someone had argued: If a black man becomes President, anyone who dares to criticize him will be called a racist.

1. I would have viewed that argument itself as racist.

(link from Instapundit).

Several people in the comments claim that they warned about this too, but I don't recall it. I recall a lot of people criticizing Obama and his supporters for using that tactic during the election, but I don't recall anyone else worrying about this being used as a tactic to shield a sitting president from all criticism. No, only your wise interlocutor was so gifted as to predict this eventuality.

But far be it from me to brag about it.