Be careful what you wish for….

From polling Report

Theos, a new Christian think tank, heralded their launch by commissioning a poll from Communicate Research. They started by taking one of Richard Dawkins’ more confrontational statements and asking if people agreed with it: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”…. Obviously people were going to think that “faith” was nicer than “smallpox”.
Rather surprisingly though, 42% of people said they agreed with Dawkins with only 44% disagreeing….

[Hat tip to Alec.]

Atheists: The New Gays

From Scott Adam’s The Dilbert Blog:

Prior to 9/11, it would have been career suicide for a public figure to come right out and say God is a fairy tale. Now it’s a feature of popular culture…. I think the hidden benefit of Islamic extremism is that it freed the atheists from their closets. The old mindset in the United States was that almost any religion was good, and atheism was bad. But since 9/11… [ask] a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.

And then he goes and spoils it all by supporting Bill Gates for POTUS….

Two terribly English films

Two weekends, two films.
Last Saturday I went to see “The Queen” up on Capitol Hill. When I told my mother about it the next day, she was incredulous: how could Helen Mirren play Liz? She looks nothing like her! Well, all I can say is that it worked. Helen Mirren was wonderful, and after a few minutes I was quite happy to accept that she was the character she was playing. The key was that she absolutely nailed the voice and a few obvious physical mannerisms; the rest just followed. (I imagine experimental psychologists could explain this in terms of the various and complex ways in which hominids actually recognize one another.) Even the guy playing Tony Blair was convincing, and once again it was mostly based on the voice.
Overall it was a very enjoyable and satisfying movie. I’m not sure why some American critics are gushing over it: it was good, but not great, and I can’t see it garnering any Oscars. (“The History Boys” looks much more like Oscar material; after seeing the trailer, I’m really looking forward to the film.)
Then today I read the review of the new “Casino Royale” in the New Yorker magazine, and decided that I wanted to see it. I think it was because the reviewer emphasized that this Bond was relatively true to the book, in both plot and characterization. I first read Ian Fleming around 1963-1965, when I was in my early teens. He was one of a number of authors, most notably Len Deighton and John LeCarre, who introduced me to the genre of spy fiction with a deeply flawed protagonist. (It’s become a cliche, but back then it was a gritty revelation.) The sex was a factor, of course: this was only a few years after the “Lady Chatterley” court case. And then there was the card-playing: Bond played cards, including bridge, and I was an avid bridge player.
I enjoyed the first couple of Bond movies with Sean Connery, but the later films (and, indeed, the later books) were just silly, and I didn’t bother with them. As several writers have pointed out, when directors like Tarantino upped the ante in violence, the Bond franchise simply turned into a campy parody of itself.
So this afternoon I saw the movie at the AMC downtown. And I have to report that the new Bond works for me. Yes, it’s too long: a couple of the chases should have been trimmed, and the poker game meanders a bit. But it feels like the Bond I remember from the second-hand paperbacks with the lurid covers. Daniel Craig is an excellent 007: much more convincing than Moore or Brosnan. Vesper is played by the erotically enigmatic Eva Green; if you saw her in Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers”, you’ll know what I mean. And she’s definitely not a classic Bond girl.
Both films: highly recommended.

Dissonanced

secularsouth expresses rather nicely one of the things that amazes me about anti-evolutionist Christians:

[Even though] many christians support dna evidence to prove identity in trials or to indicate kinship such as paternity, they reject the same techniques, the same types of genetic markers, the same evidence when it proves in the same way that we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees.

(Yes, Chris, I know there are some Christians who “get” science, but you seem to be in a minority in the US.)

"I came here for an argument." "No you didn't!!"

I was pulling together material for a presentation I’m giving today, and found myself reviewing the WS-* loyal opposition debate. You may remember Tim’s rant:

No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard to secure. ¶

I look at Google and Amazon and EBay and Salesforce and see them doing tens of millions of transactions a day involving pumping XML back and forth over HTTP, and I can’t help noticing that they don’t seem to need much WS-apparatus.

And then I stumbled upon “S stands for simple”, a delightful (and newly posted) piece in dialogue form by Peter Lacey. A short extract won’t do it justice: you must read the whole thing.

A couple of years ago, Guillaume Lebleu made a great point in a comment to a piece by Simon St. Laurent:

Standards are great, but most of the time, they get crazy by trying to put everybody’s need into one document, bringing extremly complex abstractions along the way, or tons of optional fields to avoid semantic collision, that 99% of people don’t need. This is true for tech and industry standards. In a way 90% of us need ultra-simple standards, and 10% have very complex needs that are too expensive to standardize.

Amen, brother.

50 years ago today: High Court Rules Bus Segregation Unconstitutional

Some things are worth remembering, and celebrating. This is one of them. And, pace Andrew, this was not the product of any kind of conservatism. It was the product of liberal consciousness: the kind of “liberal” whose opposite is “illiberal”.

High Court Rules Bus Segregation Unconstitutional
Alabama and Montgomery Laws Held in Violation of the 14th Amendment
SCHOOL DECISION CITED
Case Involves Bus Company Boycotted by Negroes- Some Whites Bitter
By LUTHER A. HUSTON
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
Washington, Nov. 13: An Alabama law and a city ordinance requiring segregation of races on intrastate buses were declared invalid by the Supreme Court today.

Dawkins and the delusions of theists

I was reading the latest RSS feeds from blogs.sun.com and came across an entry by my friend Chris Gerhard that began, “I’ve been waiting for Geoff’s review of The God Delusion“.
Oops. Mea culpa. Let me fix this right now….

I did mention Dawkins’ book in passing, and said that I basically agreed with it. The fact that it’s #2 on the Amazon best-seller list is a good thing; it’s going to get a lot of people talking – and hopefully thinking – about atheism as a practical alternative. Structurally, it’s a “horizontal” book, a series of essays on various topics related to theistic belief. There’s something for everyone, as it were. This means, however, that it lacks the structural coherence of, say, Dan Dennett’s Breaking The Spell – or of most of Dawkins’ earlier work. It’s closer to Sam Harris, an author who alternately delights and infuriates me.

Those few of us that have read widely on the topic of atheism (from authors such as Russell, Flew, Michael Martin, Wells, and Dennett), will find nothing new in Dawkins’ book. But we’re in a distinct minority, of course: most people have not encountered these ideas, and for them the book is to be highly recommended. I applaud Dawkins for using his well-earned reputation in evolutionary biology to advance this controversial message, and for exposing himself to clueless reviewers such as Marilynn Robinson in the latest Atlantic Harper’s.

However if I were allowed to take only one work of Dawkins to the fabled “desert island” along with my discs, it would not be this one. I’d be agonizing over the choice between the magnificent Extended Phenotype and the inspirational Ancestors’ Tale. If I’m lucky, perhaps I’ll be allowed to take both.

Good Math, Bad Math,… Theosophical Math!

Check out this wonderfully wacky piece at Good Math, Bad Math on Rudolph Steiner and Theosophical Math. For example:

In normal projective geometry, there’s an interesting kind of duality, where you can take theorems involving lines and points and switch the lines and the points in the theorem, and the result is also a theorem. So, for example: given two distinct points, there is exactly one line that crosses through both of them. The dual statement of that is: given two distinct lines, there is exactly one distinct point that they both cross through.
Steiner insists on carrying duality to silliness, and that’s where the really crazy math comes in. Since there’s normal space where parallel lines converge and intersect at infinity, there must be a dual space where everything is at infinity, and things converge towards the finite.

Wow. Where can I get some of that stuff…?

Rain? In Seattle?

Yes, of course I knew that Seattle was notorious for its rainy climate. But this is ridiculous:

“Rivers in at least nine of the region’s drainage systems are expected to peak at levels up to 20 percent higher than anything on record”, said Johnny Burg, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Seattle… [D]uring a typical November, an average of 5.9 inches will be recorded at [SEATAC]… Not even a full week into the month [they’ve] recorded 7.38 inches at the airport — including about 3 inches that had fallen between midnight Sunday and 5 p.m. Monday.

USENIX OSDI is in town

[Note: shameless name-dropping follows.]
The grand-daddy of all operating systems conferences is in town this week: USENIX. 20 years ago this was a forum for trumpeting the importance of Unix in a marketplace that was still dominated by vendor-specific operating systems (VMS, Domain, MVS, and even this insignificant upstart called MS-DOS…). I remember demonstrating PC-NFS at USENIX (and the related show for “suits” called UniForum), and everybody was amazed that these toy systems could actually play with the big guys. O tempora, o mores… Today USENIX is about operating systems in general, and this week’s symposium is OSDI’06, on operating systems design and implementation. (The other big USENIX event is LISA, where sysadmins for Really Big Systems get together.)
I didn’t actually sign up to attend USENIX (Amazon.com is much more frugal about these things than Sun used to be), but several of my friends are involved in the event, and I arranged to have breakfast this morning with Jim Waldo. We were joined by Margo Seltzer, and had an interesting discussion about varieties of systemic errors in large-scale distributed systems. Jim and I had planned to meet for dinner, but during the day he emailed me to suggest that I join him for the poster session that evening. So I did. I had a great time, met a lot of old friends, and made some new acquaintances including Jim Thornton of PARC, who used to work with my Amazon.com colleague Marvin Theimer, and Liuba Shrira from Brandeis – it turned out that she was an ex-neighbour from Brookline!
I’m actually not very good at poster sessions. I find that I want to actually read the interesting ones, which usually conflicts with the expectation of the poster presenters who want to talk. And sometimes (rather too often, unfortunately), when I finish reading the poster, I realize that most of the ideas have already been incorporated in some other piece of research, or perhaps even a commercial product. It’s really hard to tell a bright-eyed grad student that they need to go back and redo the literature search phase of their project. (Marvin is better at it than I.)
Having said that, there were two initiatives that I definitely want to follow up in the cold, clear light of day: Shirako from Duke, and Plush from U.C. San Diego. The problem statements look exactly right; I’ll be interested to see how much progress they’ve made.