Absolutely nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12 today.
I repeat, nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12.
I repeat, nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12.
Wednesday, April 30
Headline News
I love this headline from Slashdot:
Kraken Infiltration Revives "Friendly Worm" Debate
It's like a newspaper headline taken from a 70's science fiction novel to show that we really are in the 21st century. You get a few items that you understand, like:
California Expands DNA Identification Policies
India Launches 10 Satellites At Once
First Superheavy Element Found In Nature
And then they drive the point home, with one that doesn't even give you a frame of reference.
Mind you, Usability Testing Hardy Heron With a Girlfriend is pretty obscure as well.
I love this headline from Slashdot:
Kraken Infiltration Revives "Friendly Worm" Debate
It's like a newspaper headline taken from a 70's science fiction novel to show that we really are in the 21st century. You get a few items that you understand, like:
California Expands DNA Identification Policies
India Launches 10 Satellites At Once
First Superheavy Element Found In Nature
And then they drive the point home, with one that doesn't even give you a frame of reference.
Mind you, Usability Testing Hardy Heron With a Girlfriend is pretty obscure as well.
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The Derb Delivers
In this case, he delivers a righteous serving to Ben Stein and the Intelligent Design movment as a whole.
And quotes yours truly in the process. (And pops the bubble on the worst-kept secret in the blogosphere, but hey...)
I may disagree with him on quantum consciousness, but he's right on the money on this one.
Oh, and NRO have truly hideous URLs. Worse even than Youtube.
In this case, he delivers a righteous serving to Ben Stein and the Intelligent Design movment as a whole.
And quotes yours truly in the process. (And pops the bubble on the worst-kept secret in the blogosphere, but hey...)
I may disagree with him on quantum consciousness, but he's right on the money on this one.
Oh, and NRO have truly hideous URLs. Worse even than Youtube.
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Tuesday, April 29
Global Warming, Come Home
Overnight lows of 3 degrees? In Sydney, in April? July, okay, but April?
We had about two weeks of lovely Autumn weather this year. Six months of Summer, two weeks of Autumn, then foom, it's Winter.
Overnight lows of 3 degrees? In Sydney, in April? July, okay, but April?
We had about two weeks of lovely Autumn weather this year. Six months of Summer, two weeks of Autumn, then foom, it's Winter.
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Sunday, April 27
To Sleep, A Chance To Successively Approximate
I'm sure that many of my readers are quite capable of figuratively extracting square- and cube-roots in their sleep, but does anyone else literally do this?
Just woke up from a nap with an accurate but unhelpful answer to a problem in my head...
I'm sure that many of my readers are quite capable of figuratively extracting square- and cube-roots in their sleep, but does anyone else literally do this?
Just woke up from a nap with an accurate but unhelpful answer to a problem in my head...
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07:36 PM
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Saturday, April 26
The Triumph Of Technology Over Talent, Part XVIII
I was pretty impressed by this. I showed it to my cousin - a SMPTE Fellow - and he was impressed. That probably means it's impressive.
(I mistakenly filed this under Books, and got Ermintrude the cow as an icon. Which was cool-looking, but not quite what I'd intended.)
I was pretty impressed by this. I showed it to my cousin - a SMPTE Fellow - and he was impressed. That probably means it's impressive.
(I mistakenly filed this under Books, and got Ermintrude the cow as an icon. Which was cool-looking, but not quite what I'd intended.)
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11:58 PM
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Fuzzy Kittayns
Kittens at this stage of development are known as "meepers", for reasons that shall shortly become evident.
Kittens at this stage of development are known as "meepers", for reasons that shall shortly become evident.
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The Historical Stupid Files
Much nonsense has been written on the subject of human consciousness, from both those whom we would expect to know better, such as Roger Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind* and those whom we wouldn't, such as John Searle in his Chinese Room piffle.**
But one of the stars in this particular field of nonscience has to be Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Jaynes claims that until very recently - as late as the 10th century BC - the human mind was not unified as we find it today, but bicameral, the left hemisphere disconnected from the right. Humans of the day were effectively schizophrenic, not in the soap-opera sense of having multiple personalities, but in the genuine clinical sense of paranoia and hearing voices.
Jaynes' evidence for this is literary. He argues that older works such as the Iliad display no sign of such modern mental faculties as introspection, where more recent works, such as the Odyssey, do show this.
Now, perhaps it happened that in both translations of the Iliad that I have to hand*** the obvious implications of introspection were the result of careless editing. Jaynes is a psychologist, not a historian or linguist, but perhaps he reads fluent Ionic Greek. Never mind that.
Never mind that even if these two poems were not the work of the same man (which is historically uncertain), they were likely created only about a century apart, not a very long time for such a significant evolution of human mentality. Never mind that people not only write poems and stories like this today, but act like this today, and yet are often not diagnosably schizophrenic. Never mind either that this is not at all the behaviour we see in unfortunate individuals who do suffer from a bicameral mind or split brain.
Never mind that.
Instead, let's go to the oldest one in the book, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In the story, Gilgamesh rejects the advances of the goddess Ishtar because he has read the myths and knows that this never ends well for the hero.
Yes folks, it's a trope subversion, and one that predates the Iliad by hundreds of years, if not a thousand and more. This particular passage is only found in the Akkadian version of the Epic; the much older Babylonian version is incomplete and doesn't appear to refer to this part of the tale. Nevertheless, the entire tale of Gilgamesh is deeply and incontrovertibly introspective, rendering Jaynes' thesis incoherent on a literary basis as well.
And the whole topic arose only because I was browsing the TV Tropes wiki for a subject that I have now entirely forgotten.
* Penrose argues three points: First, that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, which is very likely true; that human-like consciousness could not arise from a Universal Turing Machine, which is unsupported by logic or evidence; and that human consciousness is directly dependent on quantum events, which is impossible.
** Searle's argument goes like this: Suppose we have a man locked in a room with a library full of books. He receives via a slot in the wall, pieces of paper covered with illegible symbols. Following instructions in the books, he writes a new set of symbols on another piece of paper and feeds that back out through the slot.
Unbeknownst to the man in the box, the symbols are Chinese; the pieces of paper he receives are questions, and the pieces of paper he returns are answers. He neither speaks nor reads a word of Chinese, and yet via the Room he is conducting fluent conversations.
Searle argues that since the man does not understand Chinese, artificial intelligence is impossible.
If you experienced a Huh? moment there, you are not alone. The argument rests on a multitude of fallacies, including - depending on where how you slice it - self-contradiction, circularity, assuming the consequent, the fallacy of composition, and a good old-fashioned helping of non-sequitur.
To put it most simply, though the man doesn't understand Chinese - because Searle stipulated that - the room does - because Searle stipulated that. There are more subtle arguments to Searle's incorrectness, but it's not necessary to go into those here, because Searle's response is always the same, to wit, "Artificial intelligence is impossible because I said so."
*** E. V. Rieu's prose version and Richmond Lattimore's verse translation.
Much nonsense has been written on the subject of human consciousness, from both those whom we would expect to know better, such as Roger Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind* and those whom we wouldn't, such as John Searle in his Chinese Room piffle.**
But one of the stars in this particular field of nonscience has to be Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Jaynes claims that until very recently - as late as the 10th century BC - the human mind was not unified as we find it today, but bicameral, the left hemisphere disconnected from the right. Humans of the day were effectively schizophrenic, not in the soap-opera sense of having multiple personalities, but in the genuine clinical sense of paranoia and hearing voices.
Jaynes' evidence for this is literary. He argues that older works such as the Iliad display no sign of such modern mental faculties as introspection, where more recent works, such as the Odyssey, do show this.
Now, perhaps it happened that in both translations of the Iliad that I have to hand*** the obvious implications of introspection were the result of careless editing. Jaynes is a psychologist, not a historian or linguist, but perhaps he reads fluent Ionic Greek. Never mind that.
Never mind that even if these two poems were not the work of the same man (which is historically uncertain), they were likely created only about a century apart, not a very long time for such a significant evolution of human mentality. Never mind that people not only write poems and stories like this today, but act like this today, and yet are often not diagnosably schizophrenic. Never mind either that this is not at all the behaviour we see in unfortunate individuals who do suffer from a bicameral mind or split brain.
Never mind that.
Instead, let's go to the oldest one in the book, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In the story, Gilgamesh rejects the advances of the goddess Ishtar because he has read the myths and knows that this never ends well for the hero.
Yes folks, it's a trope subversion, and one that predates the Iliad by hundreds of years, if not a thousand and more. This particular passage is only found in the Akkadian version of the Epic; the much older Babylonian version is incomplete and doesn't appear to refer to this part of the tale. Nevertheless, the entire tale of Gilgamesh is deeply and incontrovertibly introspective, rendering Jaynes' thesis incoherent on a literary basis as well.
And the whole topic arose only because I was browsing the TV Tropes wiki for a subject that I have now entirely forgotten.
* Penrose argues three points: First, that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, which is very likely true; that human-like consciousness could not arise from a Universal Turing Machine, which is unsupported by logic or evidence; and that human consciousness is directly dependent on quantum events, which is impossible.
** Searle's argument goes like this: Suppose we have a man locked in a room with a library full of books. He receives via a slot in the wall, pieces of paper covered with illegible symbols. Following instructions in the books, he writes a new set of symbols on another piece of paper and feeds that back out through the slot.
Unbeknownst to the man in the box, the symbols are Chinese; the pieces of paper he receives are questions, and the pieces of paper he returns are answers. He neither speaks nor reads a word of Chinese, and yet via the Room he is conducting fluent conversations.
Searle argues that since the man does not understand Chinese, artificial intelligence is impossible.
If you experienced a Huh? moment there, you are not alone. The argument rests on a multitude of fallacies, including - depending on where how you slice it - self-contradiction, circularity, assuming the consequent, the fallacy of composition, and a good old-fashioned helping of non-sequitur.
To put it most simply, though the man doesn't understand Chinese - because Searle stipulated that - the room does - because Searle stipulated that. There are more subtle arguments to Searle's incorrectness, but it's not necessary to go into those here, because Searle's response is always the same, to wit, "Artificial intelligence is impossible because I said so."
*** E. V. Rieu's prose version and Richmond Lattimore's verse translation.
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, then a long time approaching fixation. The time frame is exactly what you'd expect for something with a selection differential of around 10%, of which we have several established examples in humans. Again, not controversial.
No Habla PHP
Just got a spate of error reports from Minx...
Because someone's trying to run a phpBB attack against my blog. The gobbledegook that's supposed to decode into a code injection decodes instead into a request for a null page, which raises an exception.
Just got a spate of error reports from Minx...
Because someone's trying to run a phpBB attack against my blog. The gobbledegook that's supposed to decode into a code injection decodes instead into a request for a null page, which raises an exception.
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The Stupid Files
Today's dose of burning stupid comes to us courtesy of Lynne McTaggart of The Intention Experiment.
What is The Intention Experiment? Well, about 13 hours from now, McTaggart plans to change the spectroscopic fingerprint of a sample of water by thinking at it.
Yes, you read that correctly.
She's planning to point a Raman spectrometer at a beaker of water, and think good (or perhaps bad) thoughts at it for a few hours, in hopes that it will change. Change what? Well, she doesn't exactly say. There are three things that can change a spectroscopic fingerprint: A change in the actual chemical structure of the compound you're studying; uneven mixtures of impurities; and random variation because you're running an experiment with no controls and no clearly stated goals.
It's a bit like modern "ghost hunters": Get hold of an extremely sensitive scientific instrument that you don't understand, and wave it about until it registers a reading that it wasn't showing before. It doesn't matter what the reading is, because you haven't bothered to make any predictions or set up any controls. Any reading at all will do.
More generally, this is termed a unicorn hunt: Go out, find something, and call it a unicorn.
McTaggart brings real scientific expertise to the table, in the form of, well, I'll let her tell it:
In short, it's unicorns all the way down.
McTaggart is no fool: She's using the notoriety of this ludicrous bit of pseudo-science to flog her books and DVDs, which I can recommend highly to no-one at all.
Today's dose of burning stupid comes to us courtesy of Lynne McTaggart of The Intention Experiment.
What is The Intention Experiment? Well, about 13 hours from now, McTaggart plans to change the spectroscopic fingerprint of a sample of water by thinking at it.
Yes, you read that correctly.
She's planning to point a Raman spectrometer at a beaker of water, and think good (or perhaps bad) thoughts at it for a few hours, in hopes that it will change. Change what? Well, she doesn't exactly say. There are three things that can change a spectroscopic fingerprint: A change in the actual chemical structure of the compound you're studying; uneven mixtures of impurities; and random variation because you're running an experiment with no controls and no clearly stated goals.
It's a bit like modern "ghost hunters": Get hold of an extremely sensitive scientific instrument that you don't understand, and wave it about until it registers a reading that it wasn't showing before. It doesn't matter what the reading is, because you haven't bothered to make any predictions or set up any controls. Any reading at all will do.
More generally, this is termed a unicorn hunt: Go out, find something, and call it a unicorn.
McTaggart brings real scientific expertise to the table, in the form of, well, I'll let her tell it:
Scientists like Dr. Rustum Roy, who is an expert on water, at the University of Pennsylvania, have recorded the structuring of water with electromagnetic radiation.Professor Roy is an elderly but respected materials scientist specialising in ceramics, which is not notably a category featuring water among its members. He famously lent his name to a paper proposing structures in water as a potential mechanism for homeopathy based entirely on Raman spectroscopic analysis of alcohol. Which is not only not a ceramic, but also not water. Said paper also lacked any proper controls, or any relevant discussion of what was being measured and how. Again, all they were looking for was anomalies, with no prior definition of what would be considered anomalous.
In short, it's unicorns all the way down.
McTaggart is no fool: She's using the notoriety of this ludicrous bit of pseudo-science to flog her books and DVDs, which I can recommend highly to no-one at all.
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Friday, April 25
Joy In The Mid-Afternoon
CPanel does its daily update thing, and promptly commits suicide by segfault. I've managed to get CPanel going again, but WHM is still down. Bleh and double bleh.
Update: Nothing I tried seem to fix it, so I waited a day and did a forced update of the entire mess. And now it works.
Automatic updates: They're good for you. Yep.
Well, to be fair, that's the first time in four years of running CPanel that it's spontaneously combusted in that fashion. Which is rather better luck than I've had with Windows.
CPanel does its daily update thing, and promptly commits suicide by segfault. I've managed to get CPanel going again, but WHM is still down. Bleh and double bleh.
Update: Nothing I tried seem to fix it, so I waited a day and did a forced update of the entire mess. And now it works.
Automatic updates: They're good for you. Yep.
Well, to be fair, that's the first time in four years of running CPanel that it's spontaneously combusted in that fashion. Which is rather better luck than I've had with Windows.
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Why People Laugh At Creationists
Part 23,The Larch Ben Stein
Which reminds me - we need to add another letter to the Latin alphabet; either that, or standardize on duodecimal arithmetic. At the moment, the upper and lower case letters plus the digits give us 62 symbols, which is not enough for handy base-64 encoding, which is what Youtube uses for their public IDs. Which means a Youtube ID can begin with -, which is not exactly obvious when you're cutting and pasting. (Not in this case, but in general.)
This article at Real Detroit Weekly includes some snippets from an interview with Expelled associate producer Mark Mathis (scroll down to the bottom to find the section titled Unevolved) who shows a depth of understanding of Evolutionary Theory rivalling Stein's. True masochists can find an hour-long discussion betweent Mathis and the editors of Scientific America here.
Part 23,
Which reminds me - we need to add another letter to the Latin alphabet; either that, or standardize on duodecimal arithmetic. At the moment, the upper and lower case letters plus the digits give us 62 symbols, which is not enough for handy base-64 encoding, which is what Youtube uses for their public IDs. Which means a Youtube ID can begin with -, which is not exactly obvious when you're cutting and pasting. (Not in this case, but in general.)
This article at Real Detroit Weekly includes some snippets from an interview with Expelled associate producer Mark Mathis (scroll down to the bottom to find the section titled Unevolved) who shows a depth of understanding of Evolutionary Theory rivalling Stein's. True masochists can find an hour-long discussion betweent Mathis and the editors of Scientific America here.
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ANZAC Day
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:This is why.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
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Of Cheetahs And Men
A little background is needed for this one.
I was recently arguing in the comments at LGF with someone who claimed that the Theory of Evolution provided the basis for the Holocaust, much as Ben Stein does in Expelled.
He (the commenter, not Stein) provided a blatantly racist quote from T. H. Huxley in support of this claim. I countered that Huxley was morally and scientifically wrong; that such racism was endemic in the mid-19th century, even among abolitionists; and that the quote was taken from an essay Huxley wrote arguing for the abolition of slavery. And I provided a similarly racist quote from a abolition speech by Abraham Lincoln.
So said commenter asked me - rather condescendingly - what grand change had taken place in Evolutionary Theory since Huxley's day to make him scientifically wrong in this. And I pointed out that while race is a valid evolutionary concept, it doesn't apply to humans, because we lack sufficient genetic diversity. We're all one race.
The response asked, don't I think that this is miraculous? Clearly implying the hand of you-know-who.
And I said no; it just means we went through a genetic bottleneck in recent times, evolutionarily speaking. Much like cheetahs, which almost went extinct. But, I speculated, humans are more diverse than cheetahs, so we likely weren't as close to extinction as they.
But still too damn close for comfort. Just 70,000 years ago, our species may have been reduced to as few as 2000 individuals.
(via Slashdot)
A little background is needed for this one.
I was recently arguing in the comments at LGF with someone who claimed that the Theory of Evolution provided the basis for the Holocaust, much as Ben Stein does in Expelled.
He (the commenter, not Stein) provided a blatantly racist quote from T. H. Huxley in support of this claim. I countered that Huxley was morally and scientifically wrong; that such racism was endemic in the mid-19th century, even among abolitionists; and that the quote was taken from an essay Huxley wrote arguing for the abolition of slavery. And I provided a similarly racist quote from a abolition speech by Abraham Lincoln.
So said commenter asked me - rather condescendingly - what grand change had taken place in Evolutionary Theory since Huxley's day to make him scientifically wrong in this. And I pointed out that while race is a valid evolutionary concept, it doesn't apply to humans, because we lack sufficient genetic diversity. We're all one race.
The response asked, don't I think that this is miraculous? Clearly implying the hand of you-know-who.
And I said no; it just means we went through a genetic bottleneck in recent times, evolutionarily speaking. Much like cheetahs, which almost went extinct. But, I speculated, humans are more diverse than cheetahs, so we likely weren't as close to extinction as they.
But still too damn close for comfort. Just 70,000 years ago, our species may have been reduced to as few as 2000 individuals.
(via Slashdot)
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Thursday, April 24
An Exemplar Of Exactitude
Not.
Ben Stein, quoting Charles Darwin in Expelled Exposed in an effort to tie Evolution to Nazism:
(Thanks to Scientific American, who go on to list five more things that Ben Stein doesn't want you to know.)
Not.
Ben Stein, quoting Charles Darwin in Expelled Exposed in an effort to tie Evolution to Nazism:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.And what Darwin actually said:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.Quote mining is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
(Thanks to Scientific American, who go on to list five more things that Ben Stein doesn't want you to know.)
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Wednesday, April 23
Nonstandard Library
(xkcd, obvy.)
(xkcd, obvy.)
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