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!!

—
* 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.)

Congratulations Kate and Mark (and Tom!)

My daughter, Kate, had her first child* this morning: Tom. Tom-with-mum.jpgHe’s shown here in a rough phone-cam picture curled up on his mum at 3 hours old. Despite dire predictions of a 10 pound baby, he was actually 8 lbs. 9 ozs., of which about a pound seems to be hair. Congratulations to all.

—
* And my first grandchild

UPDATE: There are some more pictures here. Enjoy.

A clean, shiny Tiger

As I blogged over the last few weeks, my upgrade to the latest Mac OS, Tiger, went pretty smoothly. However I had this nagging feeling that things might be even better if I did a clean installation. For one thing, I had been upgrading this machine ever since I got it a couple of years ago, and there were a number of obsolete bits and pieces lying around. I’d also installed many, many version of different applications – all of the flavours of OpenOffice for the Mac, various releases of NetBeans, every dot and dot-dot version of Java, various bits and pieces downloaded with fink – and it was increasingly difficult to figure out which bits I could safely discard. One or two applications hadn’t survived the upgrade to Tiger as well as they should have, and I wanted to give them a fresh start. I’d started to notice a few odd error messages in the console log and when shutting down – messages about xinetd, which had been obsoleted in Tiger. And finally free disk space was down to 8GB out of 60GB, which in today’s calculus is “getting close”. (When I think about how I would have killed for 8GB of disk just a few years ago….)

So I decided to perform a clean installation of Tiger. Overall it went very smoothly, even if some of the steps took a while to complete:

  • Make sure I had the license information from all of the licensed apps I use – NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, iWork, iLife, PGP, SuperDuper, etc.

  • Turn off networking, purge caches, delete temporary files.

  • Clone my hard disk on a partition of my external FireWire disk using SuperDuper; boot from the clone to verify that it’s complete.

  • Install Tiger from the DVD, carefully choosing the bits and pieces I want (yes to X11, no to some of the more obscure printer drivers and localizations).

  • Plug the FireWire drive back in and use Migration Assistant to move over just the user files and network settings – NOT the applications.

  • Still offline, install the various Apple applications.

  • Now go online and run Software Update several times to pull down all of the updates for OS X, QuickTime, iTunes, iWork, and so forth. Remember to repair permissions after each update.

  • Install the remaining applications.

  • Wrestle with the inevitable glitch – in this case, why aren’t the PGP actions appearing on the toolbar for Mail? Discover that I need to shut down Mail and run two commands in a terminal window:
    defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
    defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2

  • When happy with the result, make a bootable backup copy with SuperDuper.

The bottom line? More free space, the system feels snappier, no ugly console messages on shutdown. The only frustrating thing is that one particular application is still broken….

Book notes: "Radiant Cool"

Last year a friend recommended a “curious book” to me: Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. I started it back in December, but I couldn’t get into it and set it aside. Last week I came across it and finished it in a couple of sessions. C’est la vie.

It’s an odd book. The first two-thirds are a novel: a thriller/mystery involving a philosophy grad student, theories of consciousness, experimental stimulation of various cortical areas, overdoses of SSRIs, and a hyperfictional element which eventually engulfs the characters and the story. Some bits worked, some bits didn’t, and overall I was a bit frustrated.

Then there’s the last third of the book: the appendix. In this, Lloyd (professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT) expounds a theory (or at least a programme) of consciousness which has two primary strands: a recursive retention (and hence representation) model derived from Husserl, and a view of the distinctive role played by the representation of time. Now this fascinated me. Early in my Phil.of Mind course with Dennett, I asked several people about exactly this issue – what is the state of thinking on the philosophy of time, and its relationship to the mind. I was pointed at the work of Bas Van Frassen as representing perhaps the best view of the philosophy of time as it applies to science, but I found no satisfactory account of time in mind. Maybe Jerry Fodor can explain how temporal notions are handled in a LOT, but I’m still waiting.

Does Lloyd nail it? No, but that’s just fine: he’s asking the same questions that I’m interested in. I note that David Chalmers has published a piece on Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap; it will be interesting to compare his attempted rebuttal of a phenomenal account of consciousness with Lloyd’s ideas. Anyway, the book is RECOMMENDED, mostly for the appendix.