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.

The best ever?

As I was walking home in the rain from tonight’s Pet Shop Boys show, I found myself thinking about all of the acts I’ve PSBseen over the last 40 years. It’s an interesting mix, from Pink Floyd, King Crimson, and the original Genesis, through Depeche Mode and OMD, to October Project and Porcupine Tree, with repeat performaces by Al Stewart, the Grateful Dead, and the Legendary Pink Dots sprinkled across the years.
But tonight was, without doubt, the best show I’ve ever been to, the one that brought me the greatest delight. It was simply splendid.
It was also the first time in their 21 year career that the Pet Shop Boys have played in Seattle, and there were a lot of people who were clearly experiencing that “they’re playing our song” feeling. Listening to the HNRG of songs like Suburbia, Opportunities, and Shopping it’s strange to realize that they were hits in the mid-80s.
The production was excellent: singers, dancers, constumes, staging, and so forth. But it was the songs that we were there for. Seven cuts from the latest album, “Fundamental”, several of the early hits, and three of the big anthems: Always On My Mind (Maybe I Didn’t Love You), Where The Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You), and the grand finale Go West. I’m reluctant to pick any favourites, but I particularly liked the understated presentation of Rent and the relentless power of Integral.
The setlist:
Psychological
Left To My Own Devices
I’m with Stupid
Suburbia
Can You Forgive Her?
Minimal
Shopping
Rent
Dreaming of the Queen
Heart
Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)
Integral
Interval
Numb
Se A Vida É (Thats The Way Life Is)/Domino dancing
Flamboyant
Home and dry
Always On My Mind
Where The Streets Have No Name (I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You)
West End Girls
The Sodom And Gomorrah Show
Encore
So hard
It’s a Sin
Go west
Whew! The PSB always did give good value for money, didn’t they?

at the PSB

So I’m at the theatre for the Pet Shop Boys show, starting in 12 minutes. I’ve bought my t-shirts, found my seat…. And I’ve managed to navigate my blog menu in this weird little BlackBerry browser. More after the show

Kinsley on intellectual dishonesty in politics

On the eve of the US mid-term elections, Michael Kinsley diagnoses the problem at the heart of American (and, sadly,British) politics. Money quote:

The biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. […] And it seems to me, though I can’t prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse.
A few days before the 2000 election, the Bush team started assembling people to deal with a possible problem: what if Bush won the popular vote but Gore carried the Electoral College. They decided on, and were prepared to begin, a big campaign to convince the citizenry that it would be wrong for Gore to take office under those circumstances. And they intended to create a tidal wave of pressure on Gore’s electors to vote for Bush, which arguably the electors as free agents have the authority to do. In the event, of course, the result was precisely the opposite, and immediately the Bushies launched into precisely the opposite argument: the Electoral College is a vital part of our Constitution, electors are not free agents, threatening the Electoral College result would be thumbing your nose at the founding fathers, and so on. Gore, by the way, never did challenge the Electoral College, although some advisers urged him to do so.
Of all the things Bush did and said during the 2000 election crisis, this having-it-both-ways is the most corrupt. It was reported before the election and is uncontested, but no one seems to care, because so much of our politics is like that. […] The only way it can be brought under control is if people start voting against it. If they did, the problem would go away. That’s democracy.

In other words, there are no consequences for exhibiting a lack of principles, for saying things that you don’t mean. The whole thing is like a high school debating club in which the arguments you advance have nothing to do with what you believe, or what the facts are, and everything to do with winning.