Author: geoff

Sullivan on religion and politics

Following his thoughtful piece in The New Republic on faith and conservatism, Andrew Sullivan has been responding to some of his critics. Here’s the core of his argument, which has nothing to do with right and left, and everything to do with how we live together. Quoted at length, because it deserves it:

“A conservative of doubt” [or indeed any sincere person – c’mon, Andrew] “may believe that he has a very clear grasp on moral truth. He may believe he is in the grip of divine revelation. He may believe he is so brilliant that he has solved the riddle of truth for all time. But he is also aware that he is not the only one on the planet, that others may have equally certain views of the truth, and that turning politics into a place where one eternal truth is pitted against another is a recipe for civil war and social conflict. The result would be a religious war…. Avoiding this kind of conflict was the crux of the liberal state and of the American founding. It requires bracketing your own moral truth in favor of political peace and pluralism. This is a big sacrifice, as Hobbes and Locke and the American founders fully understood. It may even, as Nietzsche suspected, sap religious faith of much of its power. But they were prepared to make it.”

False generalization

a380-small.jpgMy colleague Tim Bray posted a revealing little rant today about the first flight of the Airbus A380: “On this page there is a frightful lie, namely that the plane will seat 555 passengers with lots of room for lounges and shopping and so on. This claim is oblivious to the facts that most airlines are losing money and most travelers are highly price-sensitive; ergo, this turkey will carry 800-plus suffering souls packed in like sardines”

Now I always thought that Tim, as a Canadian, would be less prone to the typically American habit of assuming that “US = world”. If you check the current orders for the plane, you’ll see that the vast majority of the customers are non-American companies* that are not losing money. Furthermore it’s clear that many of the first A380s will be deployed on the routes between Europe and south-east Asia, which are much less price-sensitive than, say, BOS-SFO. Airlines like Singapore and Emirates aren’t going to emulate Ryanair any time soon; they’re going to compete on service and amenities. Just because the U.S. domestic airline industry is a shambles….

The bottom line: I expect that there will be plenty of 555 seater A380s with bars, shops, and casinos. Just not here, unfortunately.

* In fact the only U.S. customers for the A380 are FedEx and UPS; presumably their packages don’t mind being “packed in like sardines”….

Keeping abortion rare

On one of the mailing lists to which I subscribe, the (semi-annual) abortion debate reared its head, and one participant asked, rather aggressively, why people wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare”. Why “rare”, he wondered. If it’s not immoral…. This pushed a button for me, and I replied as follows:
Because not all issues are simple dichotomies: yes/no, black/white, good/bad. One of the main causes of conflict around social issues, issues of conscience, moral issues in general is that there are some people (often the loudest) who refuse to recognize this.

Everybody except for the sociopath or the simpleton has personal opinions that conflict with one another. Aggregate people into a community, into a society, and the same will be true. People make trade-offs, choose the lesser of two evils, try to split the difference, whatever. Sometimes it’s obvious, a zero-sum game, or a mutually-exclusive choice. Sometimes it’s a question of log-rolling: I need your help on X, so I’ll give up some of my Y. In all of these cases, reasonable people (i.e. not sociopaths, not simpletons) will recognize and feel regret for the fact that their choices are less than ideal.

All of these considerations play out in the case of abortion. The first person I ever knew who’d had an abortion was a fellow student at Essex, back in 1970. Abusive father, impoverished background, she’d performed miracles to get to university, to get away from home. Condom broke. (No, it wasn’t me. I was just a neighbour and friend in need.) Her choice was simple: get a first trimester abortion, or (almost certainly) drop out of school. (Even carrying the kid to term and getting it adopted would have been too much – she was on the edge.) She chose to have the abortion, toughed it out. A few months later, a group of us dropped acid for the first time. I had a great trip, but she spent the whole 8 hours sobbing, mourning her lost baby. She got through school, got a good degree, married, raised a family, everything worked out. But OF COURSE I wish she hadn’t had to go through the abortion. Contraception should be so ubiquitous and reliable that nobody has to face the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.
Anyway, I wanted to share that.

Table-top fusion? Hmmmm

Shades of Pons-Fleischmann, 1989, perhaps? Or possibly not…? Newsday is reporting UCLA Researchers Produce Nuclear Fusion: “In the latest attempt to create nuclear fusion under laboratory conditions, scientists reported they achieved it in a tabletop experiment that uses a strong electric field generated by a small crystal.”

Coincidentally, last night I was finishing up the wonderful new book A Different Universe by Robert Lauglin. His comments on the cold fusion scandal:

The cold fusion example is dear to my heart because I was in an office with a nuclear expert when a journalist phoned him and asked him for comments on the [Pons-Fleischmann] paper. It was probably the closest I have ever come to dying of a heart attack, for we were both suffocating with laughter reading the pages, each funnier than the last, as they slowly crept out of the FAX machine…. [Their] claim made no sense at all quantum-mechanically. The energy scales of ordinary chemistry are not right for catalyzing nuclear reactions. But it turned out that enough people did not believe in quantum mechanics, were willing to distort its complexities to their own ends, or simply viewed its practitioners as con artists that the voices of reason went unheard…. [This led to work that] wound up squandering between $50 million and $100 million of taxpayer money.

In the present case the claims are more modest, but a healthy skepticism is definitely warranted.

PZ Myers on Intelligent Design

The biologist PZ Myers (who blogs as Pharyngula) has a beautifully written op-ed piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. After contrasting how real science is done, compared with the unproductive sniping of “the hodge-podge of lawyers, philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians, and rare scientists willing to abandon scientific principles found in the ID movement”, and giving a quick tour of the state of evolutionary biology today, he concludes:

“ID is a sterile philosophy whose proponents spend their time lobbying school boards, producing nothing new, and with no promise of new ideas for the future. Asking our schools to teach ID is like suggesting that they offer instruction in buggy whip manufacture – it’s a futile exercise that is going to leave the students unprepared for both college and the real world. As a university instructor, I want my incoming students to be well versed in the fundamentals of biology, which includes evolution but not the empty pseudoscience of ID, so that we can move quickly to the real excitement of modern biology…which is almost entirely informed by the concepts of evolution.”

(Via Evolutionblog.)

Thread convergence: Formula 1 and Jini

Regular readers will have noted that two of my greatest enthusiasms are for Formula 1 motor racing and Sun’s Jini™ distributed computing technology. So one item in today’s quarterly “customer wins” press release from Sun is particularly sweet:

“Magneti Marelli Holding (Italy) — Sun designed, for Magneti Marelli Racing Department, a new system to manage telemetry data for Formula 1 teams in real time, using Java and Jini(TM)/Rio technology with the aim of achieving the required performance, to support multiple platforms, such as Linux and Windows, and to provide high availability and location transparency of components.”

I don’t think I’m supposed to identify individual teams, but every time you see a car with this logo, think Jini. MM logo

How to be an elementary school teacher in America

I always thought that teacher training included basic skills in coping with wayward children. I wasn’t aware that it was acceptable practice to call the police to handcuff a 5-year old who’s throwing a tantrum. (Note that two staff were present, including an assistant principal, and a camera was rolling.)
[And yes, I know that a teacher can easily get into trouble for simply trying to enforce discipline. But this cure is worse than the disease. Mad. All mad.]

NP: Hang on Little Tomato

Discovered in Provincetown last weekend:tomato.jpg Hang on Little Tomato by Pink Martini. As an Amazon reviewer put it, “Somewhere between a 1930s Cuban dance orchestra, a classical chamber music ensemble, a Brazilian marching street band and Japanese film noir is the 12-piece Pink Martini.” The title track from Pink Martini’s last album, Sympathique, also shows up on another CD that I bought at the same time: Hotel Costes: Best of Costes, selected and mixed by Stéphane Pompougnac.

[However those who think I may be getting too deep into this “lounge” stuff can relax: the new albums by Porcupine Tree and Al Stewart are on the way….]

Go Alonso!

Time for the 4th round in the 2005 Formula One season: the San Marino Grand Prix. (San Marino? Relax: it’s just an excuse for the Italians to get two races in the season.) Here in the US, most GPs are televised live on Speed TV, with pretty knowledgeable commentators who treat the audience as fellow enthusiasts. However four of the races are shown on network TV (CBS) instead. This was one of those, which meant (1) it was tape-delayed until 1PM EST, and (2) we had to put up with inane, hyperactive commentators who assume that the viewers know nothing about the sport. So turn the sound DOWN, and make sure you have a good book to read during the interminable commercial breaks.
Fortunately I managed to avoid hearing the results in advance, so I was able to enjoy the thrilling battle between Alonso and Michael Schumacher over the last few laps. The Ferrari was clearly quicker, but Alonso never put a wheel wrong, and he was able to make it four out of four for Renault. (Of course if Schumacher hadn’t screwed up during qualifying, he’d have run away with the race.)
(As for my man David Coulthard, let’s just say that it wasn’t one of his best days….)