Another month, another trip. On Tuesday I’m off to Chennai, to visit some of the engineers from Amazon’s development centres in India. I’m flying Lufthansa through Frankfurt (my home away from home!), but fortunately I’m going to be on A330 and A340-600 planes, not their awful 747-400s. I’ll get to Chennai late on Wednesday night, recover and prepare for the meeting on Thursday, meet on Friday and Saturday, spend Sunday as a tourist, do more stuff at the office on Monday and Tuesday, and then fly home on Wednesday, leaving soon after midnight and getting back to Seattle in the evening.
This will be my first visit to Chennai, and my first to any tropical coastal city. I’ve got a full day earmarked for doing “touristy” things – beach, temples, art, that sort of thing. I gather that there are only two seasons in Chennai: summer (hot and humid) and monsoon (wet). And it’s not monsoon, so that means highs around 92F, lows around 78F, and scattered thunderstorms every day.
Turning conventional questions around
Here’s a nice piece by Christopher Hitchens in Slate, in which he muses about the implications of blind cave-dwelling creatures: species that once had eyes but have lost them. Obviously such cases are going to be difficult for creationists. People who get all misty-eyed at the improbability of the evolution of such complex organs are unlikely to be happy with nature’s obvious “easy come, easy go” approach to adaptation. And Hitchens makes another, more general point:
I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?"
Even many atheists still cling to the idea of Progress, with a capital “P”. Of course it’s a more sophisticated, less species-centric notion of progress: the old notion that humans represented the summum seems… quaint. Nevertheless there is often an assumption that, over time, complexity and functional sophistication will increase. But… “ceteris paribus”, dear boy, “ceteris paribus”. As Hitchens reminds us, the blind salamander is evidence that such things are contingent. It’s fitness that wins, not sophistication. And sometimes there is no “win” available.
The cruellest meme
There’s a really cruel blog-meme going the rounds: list your favourite album for every year of your life. (Bonus points for those you actually own.) Where the hell do you find the data? Various sources, including Amazon.co.uk, have got the number one albums for every year, but the charts only go back to 1956, and few of my favourites ever made it to number one. Wikipedia to the rescue: they have information about every year from 1950 to 2008. So in principle I could use the following procedure: scan each year’s releases in Wikipedia and pick my favourite. Then go through my top hundred or so albums ((My iTunes library has 706 albums, but only about 60% of my collection has been ripped.)), check the release date, and decide whether it beats out the current choice for that year.
I’ll be getting back to you on this, when I’ve found a couple of hours to crank through the data!
Souls shrivel under the spotlight
Here’s another straightforward, common-sense piece by Greta Christina on why she doesn’t believe in the soul.
I mean, even when we didn’t know what gravity was (which, if I understand the science correctly, we still don’t fully grasp), once we got the idea of it we understood that it was a physical phenomenon. Once we got the idea and began studying and observing it, we didn’t try to explain it by invisible spirit- demons living inside objects and pulling towards each other. We could see that it was physical objects having an effect on other physical objects, and we understood that it was a physical force.
In other words, we don’t need to completely understand a phenomenon to recognize it as a physical event, governed by laws of physical cause and effect.
And when you start looking at the “soul,” you realize that that’s exactly what it looks like, too.
Everything that we call the “soul” is affected by physical events in our bodies, and those events alter it, shape it, and eventually destroy it.
My emphasis. Or, to put it more crudely, we don’t need no stinkin’ “god of the gaps”, thank you very much!
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Testing the iPhone app for WordPress
Just a quick posting to test the WordPress client for the iPhone. The main advantage over a web-based client is that it supports the caching of local drafts, so I can blog from the plane…. I can also add photos from the iPhone camera.
The state of American health care
From Marty Kaplan’s HuffPo piece, Beyond Sicko:
“I had a colonoscopy the other week,” the CDC’s Dr. Gerberding told the 400 public health officials, business leaders and nonprofits she was hoping would sign on to a “healthiest nation alliance.” “Actually,” she added, “I was billed for two colonoscopies, though I’m sure I only had one.”
So much for "there's never any passing in Formula 1"!
It’s a good thing when a team has complete confidence in their driver. On the other hand, it’s possible to get carried away with this. Today’s German Grand Prix was a good example. Lewis Hamilton took the pole, and at the start of the race he simply ran away from the field. Only one thing could spoil his domination: a Safety Car period. And sure enough, Timo Glock’s suspension broke, his Toyota snapped into the pit wall, and out came the Safety Car. Everybody lined up, and waited for the pit lane to be opened. The obvious strategy was going to be to pit under yellow, take on the final set of tyres and enough fuel, and then wait for green. Inexplicably, McLaren told Hamilton to stay out, not to pit. They seemed to think that he’d been going so quickly that he would be able to pull out over 20 seconds in just eight laps, so that he could refuel under green without losing the lead. Lewis did his best, but he could “only” pull out about 14 seconds. He rejoined in fifth, and provided a thrilling finale by passing his team-mate, muscling his way past Massa, and then blasting by Piquet to take the win.
Coming so soon after his British Grand Prix win, this was another crushing victory. The Ferrari team must be feeling really demoralized. Even though they still lead the Constructors Championship, Raikkonen could only finish sixth, while Massa was unable to put up any resistance and couldn’t even run down young Piquet for second. ((According to Massa, he had brake problems during the closing laps, and this sounds quite reasonable – it seemed that every time we got a cockpit shot of Raikkonen’s car, he was fiddling with the brake balance.)) So Hamilton has opened up a four point gap over Massa at the top of the Drivers Championship, 58 to 54.
There’s two weeks until the next race, in Hungary. I’ll be on the road then – I’m heading back to India, visiting Chennai on business – so I’ll be relying on my trusty electric monk DVR to urge on Lewis to victory.
UPDATE: From the official FIA post-race press conference:
Q: Lewis, on behalf of all race fans we have to thank you for making that such an exciting race by not coming in with the safety car. You gave yourself so much work to do in the latter stages of the race.
Lewis Hamilton: Well, thank you. I didn’t plan on doing that.
Common sense and nonsense about taking offense
The Barefoot Bum takes a look at the notion of taking offense. First, it’s OK to feel offended; in a society of diverse views, beliefs and cultures it’s inevitable.
If you’re offended, you’re free to say so. It might be important that you’re offended. Sometimes I offend people unintentionally, and a civilized person should never give offense unintentionally. A civilized person also never gives offense gratuitously, for no other reason than to make someone else feel bad. If you’re going to give offense, you should do so intentionally and with reason and purpose.
(And that, I think, should be PZ Myers’ retort to Andrew Sullivan.) The point is not whether we feel offended, but what we do about it. Civilization is about talking, not rioting.
So far, so good. But then The Bum makes an interesting leap:
Fundamentally, all ethical beliefs are about being offended; without the concept of taking offense, each person would object only to physical harm he or she personally suffered. It is taking offense when we care about harm caused to others and condemn acts that harm others.
I don’t think that this quite works. First, there’s a large class of ethical beliefs which have deeply non-rational roots. (Yes, I’m thinking of Fischer and Ravizza’s famous “trolley” problem.) In such cases, expressions of being “offended” are almost certainly no more than social convention (One is expected to express ethical conflicts in this kind of language.) There are other ethical dilemmas which don’t seem to fit The Bum’s broad brush. Consider what we might call the “ACLU problem”, Evelyn Hall‘s “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The “disapprove” bit fits The Bum’s model, but “defend” is also viewed as an ethical stance.
To get a full picture of this, I think that we need to go beyond “offended”, and introduce another one of today’s “fighting words”, “disrespect”. “Offense” is generally a reaction to an action by another person, while “disrespect” speaks to the other’s attitude. With “offense”, the situation is clear: X did Y, Z was offended by Y, and we can debate about the ethics of Y. The problem with “disrespect” is that it is… well, “inchoate” feels close, though it’s not quite right. X did Y, Z felt that this showed that X disrespected him, and even if we resolve the question of Y we can’t clear the air about Z’s perception of X. Typically Z demands a compensating action from X to demonstrate X’s respect.
So I think that The Bum’s attempt to define ethics in terms of taking offense is backwards. We take offense over questions of an ethical nature which also arouse feelings of disrespect. (Not all ethical questions do.) And the way in which we act when we’ve taken offense is strongly (completely?) determined by the feelings of disrespect that are triggered, and may have little to do with the “Y” of the matter.
This is the punk cabaret
The DVD of the moment is the zany and eclectic recording of the party that the Dresden Dolls hosted at the Roundhouse in London back in 2006. I’ve only seen them perform live once, opening for the Legendary Pink Dots in the early oughts, oops, years of this decade a few years ago. Here’s a clip to whet ((No, not “wet”, but “whet”.)) your appetite:
Getting the blog sorted
OK, it seems to be coming together now. The header is working: I like the picture of Tommy, and I don’t need any fancy nav features. I had to hand-craft the page links when I changed the default font to a nice serif; for some reason the page nav inherited from the body style rather than the blog title. Mandigo includes some cute features to let you hide or reveal the body text and sidebars; I’m not sure how you’d use them (or know how to use them), so they’re gone. I’ve updated and reactivated some of the standard plugins, including footnotes and Fluency, and I replaced the moribund WP-CC feature with WPLicense, so I’m properly CC-compliant again.
The Shiny New Toy Of The Moment is Nerdaphalia’s Nerdaphernalia’s Pull-Quotes, implemented in Javascript. ((If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out this Wikipedia article.)) I think that they look really cool; the downside is that the Javascript that implements them runs right at the end of the page rendering. On most blogs that will be just fine, but on my widget-loaded page the load time is already pretty bad. The resulting user experience is that you start reading the page while things are still loading, and suddenly a pull-quote appears in the middle of what you’re reading. What’s happening is that when the pull-quote Javascript finally runs (after all of the Amazon and Google content in the sidebar, and maybe even after the analytics stuff in the footer) it builds the pull-quote, injects it into the DOM for the article, and the browser reflows the text body material around it. Ugh. That’s a good argument for reducing the page weight.
Still to do: replace some of the glyphs and tweak the colours.