Fisking Davies' metaphysics

John Wilkins has just posted an elegant take-down of that silly “science depends on faith” op-ed piece in the NYT:

I have a rule (Wilkins’ Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times.
Davies wants to argue something like this:
Premise: there are laws of the universe and we cannot explain the existence of laws
Premise: the assumption that laws are to be found is the basis for doing science
Conclusion: Ergo, science rests on an act of faith

As Wilkins points out,

This is what Alfred North Whitehead once called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, also known as the Fallacy of Reification (by me, anyway). Take words and declare them properties of the universe.

I’ve always felt that this fallacy lies at the heart of the Bible-based religions Christianity. Take, for instance, the very first sentence in their book. “In the beginning was the word.” Rubbish. In the beginning was the world, or the cosmos, or whatever you want to call it. Recently, certain organisms evolved a capacity for language, and used words to describe the world. Sometimes the descriptions work well enough that we can treat them as law-like. Mostly not. Their accuracy, or otherwise, doesn’t affect the facts of the world. Wilkins again:

As Maynard Smith used to say to lunchers in his cafeteria, “Are you discussing words, or the world? If it is the world, I will stay, but if it is words, I will go”.

MarkCC tackles Erlang

This should be fun. Mark Chu-Carroll, best known as the author of Good Math, Bad Math, is “going to start writing a series of tutorial articles on Erlang”, probably the hottest language around right now. ((Ruby is so 2005, you know.)) I suspect we’re going to hear some fairly strong opinions…. Don’t miss ’em!

Apologies for temporary loss of service

Steve has been migrating all of the accounts on grommit to the new SuperMicro box, and it took a couple of hours. Everything should be working now (and working much faster!).
Apart from installing the new box, Steve made a raft of useful changes:

  • Installed OpenSolaris Nevada, build 75
  • Replaced uw-imap with Dovecot
  • Upgraded Squirrelmail
  • Moved from PHP4 to PHP5
  • Cleaned up and regenerated all keys and certs

Many thanks, Steve.

Slippery

From my favourite pilot’s blog ((Well worth bookmarking – only one or two posts a week, but always with a nice photograph.)), Flight Level 390: See what happens when you try to manoeuvre 75 tons of A320 ((“Fi-Fi” to her friends.)) on a sheet of ice:

After we loaded 150 passengers and bags, the tug crew pushed our aircraft shaped iceberg back while the co-pilot started number one engine. Ground control cleared us to taxi to the ice pad. As I advanced number one throttle, Fi-Fi slowly slid on the icy ramp in the direction of the thrust vector. Ooops! Not good… We are forced to start number two for symmetrical thrust. Slowly, very slowly, I taxied to the Ice Man’s ramp which was full of airliners being sprayed with hot de-icing fluid. Ice Man, actually a woman, asked us to proceed to spot #9 and configure the aircraft for de-icing fluid. Then, in a last second change of plans, she asked us if we could proceed to spot #7. I turned the nose wheel left but Fi-Fi kept going straight.
“Tell her we can’t accept spot #7.”

No kidding.

Kindle – first impressions

The first thing I did last Monday morning Amazon Kindle– even before having breakfast – was to order myself a Kindle ebook reader. I had seen a prototype some months ago, and I knew I was going to want one. At the same time, I ordered a 2GB SD card; I figure that should hold me forever. While waiting for delivery, I read the various “reviews” and blog comments, most of which seemed to be written by people who had never seen a Kindle, and who kept repeating the same rhetorical questions which they could probably have answered very easily if they’d bothered to think. ((History lesson for Cory: the first Apple iPod came out in 2001, priced at $399. It took another six years for the major music businesses to abandon DRM. See also Neil Gaiman’s perspective.))
Also while I was waiting, I arranged for some downloads to be in the queue when I powered up the device for the first time. I bought one book (“The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman), and ordered previews of two others (“Takeover” by Charlie Savage, and “Arsenals of Folly” by Richard Rhodes). I also practiced transcoding a couple of files into Kindle format using the free non-wireless approach. ((You mail a suitable file as an attachment to NAME@free.kindle.com, and Amazon emails you a link from which you can download the file to your PC or Mac; then you can transfer it via USB to the Kindle.))
At 5:45pm today it finally arrived. (Yes, I was like a little kid waiting for Santa.) I opened it up ((Admiring the gorgeous packaging – this is an area where I think Apple has raised the bar for the whole industry.)), turned it on, and found myself reading the pre-loaded user guide. By the time I located the “Home” key, the content I had pre-ordered was already installed. Then I turned it off, removed the back panel, and plugged in the SD card. At this point, I encountered the only glitch so far: when I turned it back on, I couldn’t get a wireless signal. I checked the various menus to see if I could see any wireless settings ((No, of course I didn’t read the manual. Who do you think I am??)), spotted a “Restart” option, clicked it, and the Kindle came right back up with an 80% signal. Not a big deal.
Reading on the Kindle just feels right. There are six font sizes, and I picked the smallest, which works for me. ((I could perhaps have used a seventh, even smaller, setting, but that might have been pushing it.)) People have described the design as “bland”, but for me that’s actually the point. After using the Kindle for a few minutes, you don’t notice it any more, which is as it should be. Intrusive, edgy styling would be exactly wrong for this kind of device. The controls work well, and I especially like the “silver strip” cursor.
I started reading “Arsenals of Folly”, and kept reading until I reached the end of the preview chapter… And that’s when it became expensively seductive. Because there’s a link there inviting you to buy the full book, and one click, $9.99, and 30 seconds later you’ve done exactly that. My advice: choose those previews with care, because it’s far too easy to buy. (Or perhaps I should just say that it’s a very compelling user experience!) ((Speaking of prices, the Amazon Kindle store has a remarkably long tail, priced from $0.01 (really!) to $1,079.96. And of course you can also get 20,000+ free titles from Project Gutenberg.))
This is easily the best ebook solution I’ve encountered. I’ve tried reading ebooks on my PC or Mac – wrong, wrong, wrong: reading a book is a “sitting back” activity, while using a PC is a “sitting forward” thing. (That’s a fundamental dichotomy, which is why you can comfortably watch a DVD on a laptop but not a desktop.) I’ve tried various PDAs, but the screens are too small and the fonts are always ugly. I’ve never tried a tablet PC, but that seems far too heavy and bulky. The Kindle just works. The size and weight are appropriate, I find the fonts “comfortably satisfying”, if that makes any sense, and the e-paper screen is unobtrusive, the way that the page of a book is supposed to be.
Things to try tomorrow: the New York Times, the dictionary, the web browser, and loading up Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall…”. Oh yes, and reading some more of “The World Without Us”. Because that’s what this is all about.

Another one bites the dust

Earlier this month I wrote about the resignation of the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, Stephen Bates, and his poignant essay Demob happy. And now I read in Reuters that William Lobdell of the LA Times has also quit. Read his farewell essay, “Religion beat became a test of faith“, in which he explains how his experiences destroyed his faith and left him feeling “used up and numb”.

The iTunes/iPhone/Starbucks business model seems to work

Here’s a nice example of a successful bit of business synergy. (Pardon the “stream of consciousness” style; this is exactly how it went.) I was sitting in Starbucks this morning, sipping my quad espresso macchiato, and listening to a podcast ((It was one of the excellent “Semi-Coherent Computing” pieces from The Register. Highly recommended – the conversation with Dave Patterson was incredibly good.)) with on my iPhone. During a moment of quiet, I heard the music that was playing in the store: “Needle and the Damage Done” by Neil Young. I pause the podcast, listen to the song. Hmm… which version is it – the original studio recording, that “Live at Massey Hall” disc I picked up a few months ago, or something else? I select iTunes on my iPhone, up comes the Starbucks icon, I touch it, and I can see from the “What’s Playing” box that it’s the Massey Hall recording that I already own.
OK, while I’m logged in to iTunes, what’s in the “Featured” category today? Oh yes, the new Led Zeppelin collection, “Mothership”. I browse the tracks, and see that I have all of them (from the “Led Zeppelin Remasters” box set) except for one: “When The Levee Breaks”. I’ve always liked that track, and post-Katrina it acquired a special significance, but for some reason I never got it on CD. Never mind: I touch the title, confirm “Buy”, re-enter my Apple password ((I had changed it recently.)), and download it. A few seconds and 99¢ later, I’m listening to Robert Plant’s plaintive harmonica over that menacing beat and Jimmy Page’s shimmering guitar. And half an hour later when I get home, I drop the iPhone into the cradle and the track is sync’d back into my regular iTunes library.
Apple has successfully redefined the process of buying music. Now we’re going to try to do the same for books. Should be fun.

Meanwhile, back in England the paranoid obsessive-compulsives seem to be running the asylum

I know, I’m being unfair to real sufferers from paranoia and OCD. But how else to describe these pusillanimous nincompoops? Honestly: I don’t recognize the country I was born in. I know this story is from the Daily Mail ((And they get it wrong by describing this as a “PC” issue, which it isn’t.)), but even so…

A leading children’s author was told to drop a fire-breathing dragon shown in a new book – because the publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations.
It is just one of the politically correct (sic) cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories.
As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

At least these idiots are only screwing around with books. Here in the U.S.A., the paranoid idiots are playing games with people’s lives.
UPDATE: This ridiculous dumbing-down of material for children is in full swing on this side of the Atlantic, too. Today’s NYT reports that DVDs of the original Sesame Street are not suitable for children:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
[…]
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Aldous Huxley nailed this ghastly kind of insipid ((As he put it, “All of the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”)) mind-control in Brave New World:

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions… Suggestions from the State.”

Desmond Tutu sticks it to the Anglican leadership

From the BBC:

Archbishop Tutu referred to the debate about whether Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, could serve as the bishop of New Hampshire.
He said the Anglican Church had seemed “extraordinarily homophobic” in its handling of the issue, and that he had felt “saddened” and “ashamed” of his church at the time.
Asked if he still felt ashamed, he said: “If we are going to not welcome or invite people because of sexual orientation, yes.
“If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.”

Seems kind of obvious to this atheist, but then what do I know about such matters? Shouldn’t textually obsessive Christians be stoning the adulterers and divorcees rather than the gays?