Author: geoff

Memo to self: always read and re-read your itinerary…

I’m in Silicon Valley this week for a variety of meetings. I flew in this morning, and I’ll be returning on the Friday night red-eye. Fortunately I had plenty of advance warning about this trip, so I was able to book window seats (F westbound, A eastbound) before the flight filled up – which it did. There was a large talkative guy in the middle seat next to me, and a shrill spread-sheet wizard behind me; thank goodness for my iPod with Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I dozed to Buddha Bar for the first half of the flight, then made notes for one of my Tuesday meetings on my Treo (attracting frustrated glares from the middle seat guy who was wrestling with his laptop). We got a smooth routing, and with minimal headwinds and light traffic we arrived 35 minutes ahead of schedule.

Having got in so early, I was all set to grab my bags*, jump in my rental car, and scoot down 101 to Sun’s Menlo Park campus in time to grab a bite to eat before my first meeting. I’d requested an Avis car, and I’m a member of their Rapid Rental program, so it should have been a no-brainer. Alas, no.

As I rode the Air Train to the SFO Rental Car Center, I re-read my itinerary. What’s this? Budget Rent A Car: Car pickup: San Francisco, CA. And I’m not a member of Budget’s (somewhat anemic) express program. Cursing our travel agency, as well as myself for not catching this, I got into the long line at the Budget desk to rent a car the old fashioned way. It was 45 minutes before I was on my way. So much for lunch….

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* I always check my bag – a probably vain effort to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

No point

Normally I would be posting my thoughts about the latest Formula 1 race: the U. S. Grand Prix, which was scheduled to be run today at Indianapolis. However since what actually happened does not deserve to be called a race, I don’t think I have anything more to say…..

Actually, I do have one thing to say:
“Earth to FIA: remember that the fans come first. Without an audience, you have nothing.”

[UPDATE] You can see here just what the Michelin problem was.

Globalful

New addition to the blogroll: Globalful (a.k.a. Tim Caynes), because… oh, what the hell, I can’t explain it. It’s like one of those songs you wake up with playing in your head, and you can’t get rid of it even by listening to audible emetics like It’s A Small World After All. You have to read it the same way Archangel Michael has to sniff the whiteboard markers in the PSP/PVS/BFF episode of South Park. Sorry.

Open everything!

Congratulations to my colleagues who were involved in today’s OpenSolaris launch. The biggest single OSS release in history! From Sun!! (A tip o’ the hat to Rob Gingell, wherever he might be.) But surely Microsoft, IBM and HP aren’t going to take this lying down; they’re not going to give in without a fight – are they? C’mon, you guys: I want to see OSS releases of Windows XP, z/OS*, and VMS! And… oh heck, why not throw in OS/2 Warp as well – just for old time’s sake? (But don’t bother with AIX or HP/UX, because… well, I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out.)

And why stop at operating systems? Earth to Larry (probably in his jet somewhere): it’s time to open source Oracle before IBM gets around to opening up DB2. You know it makes sense! In fact, I bet there’s more lines of code in that sucker than everything else put together!!

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* I want to try running z/OS on my laptop. A quad-boot setup with Solaris, Linux, z/OS, and WinXP: that’s a configuration to really get a geek’s pulse racing….

Conformance

In response to my posting about the BBC’s “greatest philosopher” vote, Mark suggested that I should take a look at a fascinating piece by Paul Graham entitled What You Can’t Say. After a short preamble comes the challenge:
Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
Now this is fascinating, because in a conversation with a friend last week I mentioned that I was thinking of posting a piece challenging people to say whether or not they subscribed to any unorthodox or “fringe” beliefs. Graham’s formulation is much better: it avoids the awkward judgment as to what would count as “unorthodox” by framing it in terms of behaviour.
Graham’s essay is about how we see ourselves, and how we might want to reconsider our confidence in our contemporary beliefs by comparing them with others times and other cultures. It’s really well-written, and I strongly recommend it. I, on the other hand, would like to pause a while with his challenge, and invite people to “come clean” about opinions that they might be reluctant to express in front of their peers. The nice thing about blog comments is that they can be anonymous, so your peers will never know that it’s you….
I’ll kick this off with my own personal “reluctant admission”. I am a firm believer in the Aquatic Ape Theory proposed by Alister Hardy and documented by Elaine Morgan. Today it is often treated as an example of weird fringe science, but I am convinced that, in time, it will become part of the orthodox account of the evolution of homo sapiens.
Your turn.

Same rights, same rules?

I don’t understand cyclists. (Massachusetts cyclists, anyway.)
I was driving home from work last week, and took a short cut along a slow road with three or four traffic lights in the space of a couple of miles. The lights seem to be timed so that one is forced to wait for a few moments at each of them. I was in a group of about five cars, waiting at the first light, when two cyclists, riding expensive-looking bikes, wearing the requisite amount of Spandex, and eyes hidden by mirror shades, flashed past us and ran the red light. The signal changed, the cars started off, overtook the cyclists, and stopped at the next red light. Once again, the cyclists flashed by and ran the red light at full speed. And so on.
This was not an uncommon experience, just a dramatically clear instance of a familiar pattern.
Now I was under the impression that the cyclists’ cri de coeur was “Same roads, same rights, same rules”. So what gives? Yes, I know about signals with detectors that don’t respond to bicycles, but that didn’t apply in this case. And I’ve come across detailed explanations of how – with toe clips and other gear – it’s unsafe to force cyclists to come to a full stop (which seems an extraordinary admission, and an invitation to ban such dangerous equipment). And I’ve read comments by cyclists who claim that drivers are picking on them, and ignoring the far more numerous violations committed by drivers. This seems simply false to me. When it comes to observing red lights, stop signs, and the like, the vast majority of drivers follow the rules; the vast majority of cyclists (here in Massachusetts, anyway) do not. And the police…?
I don’t understand.

The "greatest philosopher" vote, part 2

As I mentioned a few days ago, the BBC is running a poll to find out who we think the greatest philosopher is. The first phase is over, and we can now choose from the final list of 20 nominees. It’s a fairly predictable list (it would be interesting to find out which of the members was “most unexpected”):
Aquinas, Aristotle, Descartes, Epicurus, Heidegger, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Popper, Russell, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein.
And my vote? Well, I’m not quite ready to make up my mind….

When a short story gets the full treatment….

Hands up if you’ve ever thought of this plot for a science fiction story:

You discover an ancient device, frozen in a glacier, or embedded in fossils, or whatever. You’re amazed to find that despite its age it seems to be mostly in working order, and shows evidence of having present-day components. It must be a time machine of some kind. You repair it. Eventually you inadvertently activate it, and find yourself, with the device, back in the Pleistocene. You realize that the bones found with the device were yours….

I’m sure that I’m not the only person who read H. G. Wells, extrapolated along the lines that I just indicated, and had a chuckle about the paradoxical implications. Where did the machine come from? Could the contemporary scientist choose not to take the action that causes the machine to operate? What are the precise scientific objections to the sequence (loop?) of events? And maybe there’s a short story to be written about it.

This little speculation is the starting point for John Varley’s new book Mammoth. He adds several twists, which I’ll leave you to discover, but the basic plot is as I’ve described it. To flesh out the short story into a full length novel, Varley has used this tale as a vehicle for satire: satire of corporate capitalism, of entertainment-driven culture, of people’s willingness to be manipulated. Along the way he makes a stab at the scientific and philosophical issues of time travel and causality, but – like the culture that he is satirizing – such reflective moments are swept away by the impulse to action, preferably accompanied by special effects.

The self-causing time machine is still a good idea for a short story, preferably without the Hollywood treatment. Varley has shown us that he is one of the best writers of short science fiction working today. Unfortunately this one got away from him, like a runaway mammoth.

"US views of international law vary…."

Juan Cole posts a lengthy analysis of the latest story in the London Times about US and British intentions concerning Iraq.

“US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful. We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council.”

Hence the need for extensive PR work:

“Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action.”

The bottom line: the British government had agreed to support regime change, knew that this was contrary to international law, and was prepared to engage in a PR campaign to convince people that there was justification for the war. And all of this time Bush and Blair were publicly claiming that they were doing everything in their power to avoid war. The documents prove that they were lying. Even if you supported the war, you should be angry about that.

UPDATE: There’s an excellent summary, and a list of links to blogs discussing this further, at Freiheit und Wissen. Following one link, Stephen Bates concludes: “Think this is not much? I speak as one who lived through Watergate: at a comparable point in that story, it didn’t seem like much, either. But this is moving much, much faster. Pass the popcorn…” (Thanks Majikthise.)