Geoff Arnold

Happier New Year

Over the last 12 hours a flu-like bug has attacked, so while Merry goes out to celebrate with some old friends (as I insisted), I'm sitting here with a temperature of 101.5F and delirium-style tremens. Oh well, mustn't grumble.... Happy New Year, everyone.

Nuptials successfully concluded

Chris and his fiancée Celeste were married this morning in the Thomsen Chapel of Saint Mark's Cathedral here in Seattle. Their good friend, The Reverend Ann Holmes Redding (shown here with the happy couple; click for full-size image) presided. It was an intimate and beautiful service, with family and friends doing all of the readings. After lunch at the Café Flora, the newlyweds headed off to the airport in a vintage London taxi - see cameraphone pics below.

Geeks preparing for nuptials

I spent yesterday evening at the Joe Bar with Chris and a bunch of friends, getting nicely mellow and shooting the breeze in advance of Chris's wedding to Celeste today. Jon Lasser (author of Think Unix) was there; he's already blogged about it, and posted a couple of pictures to Flickr. It was a nice, low key, geek kind of evening, with talk of music, PDA software, the benefits of seamless WiFi-GPRS, Unix file system APIs, and puppetry. Oh yes, and embarrassing confessions from all of us (like Chris admitting a fondness for the music of Garth Brooks, and a certain person's recollection of a schoolday "chastity pledge"....).

(The photo on the right was taken outside St. Dunstan's church in Carmel Valley last February.)

Seattle public library

This morning we visited the new Seattle Public Library building. It's an extraordinary, surprising and inspiring work of architecture. We took the strange, green-yellow escalators up to the reading room, and then walked down the spiral stacks structure, emerging into the stunning womblike meeting room level. Rather than posting any of the inadequate photos that I took, let me recommend that you check out the photo gallery and virtual tour at the Seattle Times' page.

The science behind the earthquake

For those who want a more detailed explanation of the massive Sumatran earthquake than you'll get from CNN, the BBC, or the NYT, check out the US Geological Survey page for the quake. Not only was it a huge quake; it was the result of a huge shift: "Preliminary locations of larger aftershocks following today's earthquake show that approximately 1000 km of the plate boundary slipped as a result of the earthquake." The accompanying map shows the location of the plates and faults; the Indian plate is moving northwards into the Burma plate at 6 cm a year.

I couldn't find much on the web about seismic activity in this area. Roger Bilham's history of earthquakes in India is a reasonable starting point. If readers know of other good studies, could you link to them in comments to this blog entry? And please consider making a donation to the Red Cross, or the emergency aid organisation of your choice.

Finally I set foot on Concorde...

We visited the Museum of Flight this morning. I was last there 4 or 5 years ago, I think, and it's grown significantly. The new Personal Courage Wing focusses on combat aviation of the two World Wars; a dreadful title, but a stunning exhibit. The section on World War One does a great job of relating the air action to the grinding, bloody mess that was trench warfare. (Too often the affairs of men like Bishop and von Richthofen, and machines like the Sopwith Camel and Fokker Triplane, are portrayed as if in another world, unconnected with the slaughter below.)

There was an interesting presentation by two docents entitled Blackbird Tip-to-Tail, in which they described the history of the Lockheed Blackbird program and conducted a detailed walk-around of the unique M/D 21 variant in the Museum. How fast could that thing really go? It was designed for Mach 3.2-3.5, and according to the docents none of the pilots really pushed it beond that, even though they were only using 70% throttle at that speed. Despite rumours to the contrary, it was never actually taken to Mach 4 - nobody wanted to be the one to find the actual limits.

And then across the road from the main museum is the Airpark, with a Concorde, Air Force One (the VC-137B version of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), the first Boeing 747, and others. So after dreaming for years that one day I might get to fly in a Concorde, I finally got to walk through one....

(Click the thumbnails for the full-sized images.)

2004 - the answers

Many of my colleagues have blogged on the "best of 2004" (I particularly liked Hal's and Craig's.) I was thinking of doing the same. Then I thought I'd do it in question and answer format. Then I decided to skip the questions (for now). Enjoy.

• Because she woke up with a bat in her bed.
• It was a large one, but we managed to get it all.
• How d'you feel about being a grandfather?
• A thousand pounds of rusty cast iron hanging from the ceiling.
• Spending more time in church than since I was a 12 year old altar boy.
• Reading all seven volumes of Stephen King's The Dark Tower?
• The tension between autonomic behaviour and "choreography" or "orchestration".
• Groove Armada, Blackfield, Morrissey. (But why did Al Stewart have to slip?)
• Philosophy. Poetry. Blogging.
• Flying to Seattle for my son's wedding; then hanging out with The Fellowship watching the extended edition of "The Return of the King" while sipping Laphroaig.
• Yes - but only if there's a meaningful way of expressing semantics without simply showing us the code. Otherwise, no.

And finally:

• Nailing Robert Wright over the Dan Dennett interview.

I may not be blogging for the next few days, as I've explained in one of these answers. Have a great winter solstice, wherever you are and whatever you celebrate. (Memo to those who want to "reclaim Christmas": this celebration predates you by thousands of years. Don't be greedy.)

Now the truth comes out

A few days ago I noted here that American popular opinion seems to have shifted sharply against the war in Iraq. This provoked a plaintive - indeed anguished - comment from Mark: "Why oh why did they have to wait until AFTER the election to decide this?" It's a good question, and Josh Marshall has an interesting take on it over at Talking Points Memo.

Josh first agrees with Kevin Drum that the main reason is quite simple: support has been declining ever since the initial invasion, and the latest numbers simply reflect that trend. But why did pro-war sentiment seem to to hold up during the election campaign? Josh suggests that "during the slugfest of the campaign, supporting Bush just meant supporting the war and this is what people told pollsters when they were asked, because one question was almost a proxy for the other." Given that "close to 50% of Americans were dead set on voting for President Bush almost no matter what", it's clear why support for the war stayed above 50%. (Imagine "how many conservatives [...] would have been so staunch in their support for the war if it were being fought under a President Gore or a President Clinton.") And the result is that "the end of the campaign season has departisanized the war, [and people] are now freer to see the situation in Iraq a bit more on its own terms".

(Memo to self: During the run-up to the election, I used to read TPM all the time. I think that after November 2nd I tuned out a lot of the political blogs. Bad idea. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow.)

Scott's back

The Register just gave Scott some space to share his Xmas dream. Although it's pretty goofy, it's nice to see the old familiar Scott back. (A little gentle bashing once a year isn't going to hurt.) Memo to Jonathan: the "11 words" are necessary but not sufficient. And Scott clearly has his priorities right: he wants "an NHL hockey season ticket and a new set of irons to knock a couple of strokes off my handicap" I think he'd settle for just one NHL game....

A blast from the past: CaveBear (a.k.a. Karl Auerbach)

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when I was working on NFS, Windows Sockets, and other TCP/IP related stuff, I would often run into Karl Auerbach, network tools wizard and latterly ICANN member-at-large. Many of our encounters took place in the NOC during that strange, timeless period the night before the opening of each Networld+Interop show. The first Interop took place in San Jose, but as it grew, and merged with Networld, it moved to the Moscone Center in San Francisco and eventually headed off into the desert at Las Vegas. Over time it went the way of all trade shows, and puffed itself up into a content-free carnival, whereupon I stopped attending and lost touch with Karl.

Today a serendipitous blog chain led me to the following gem, reproduced in full:

CaveBear Blog: Sartre meets ICANN

I notice that ICANN issued a press release with the title:

ICANN successfully concludes Cape Town Meetings

Which makes me wonder: What would an unsucessful conclusion be?  Would the ICANN board and staff have to be trapped forever in the meeting room like the characters in Sartre's play No Exit?

It's an attractive proposition, isn't it?

An embarrassment of riches...

One of the joys problems with all of this cool stuff that we have at Sun is figuring out how it all fits together... or doesn't. Case in point: I was reading John Clingan's piece about Zones on an E25K, and I started to think about how one might use such a beast. Suppose one was running a horizontally-scaled load-balanced Sun Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition 7 2004Q2 (surely there must be a simpler name) configuration on a cluster of V880s. Can I rehost this in a collection of zones on an E25K? What works? What breaks? How much of my administrative model carries over, and how much has to change? (Everybody talks about ABI compatibility, but compatibility of administrative models is just as important. It's one of the major issues with Linux today, and it's bound to affect how we run Linux apps in Solaris x86.)

And that got me thinking about clustered data bases (we use the Clustra technology to support App Server failover), and from that to storage and file systems. (I'm an old NFS guy.) One of Sun's hidden gems is QFS (OK lawyers, Sun StorEdge QFS software), a massively scalable high performance file system. Although designed for (and mostly used in) high performance technical computing, it's getting a lot of attention in other applications, due in part to the symbiosis with SAM-FS (Sun StorEdge SAM-FS software), a policy-based archiving system. (Think SarbOx. Think Infinite Mailbox.) Do QFS and SAM-FS work in zones? I turn to the on-line documentation: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones: "Mounting File Systems in Zones: Options for mounting file systems in non-global zones are described in the following table. Procedures for these mounting alternatives are provided in Configuring, Verifying, and Committing a Zone and Mounting File Systems in Running Non-Global Zones." Followed by a long table, which doesn't include SAM-FS or QFS. Hmmm. Can't tell from this. More reading required, I guess. And so it goes.

There's nothing wrong with this. It's just an inevitable combinatorial explosion, exacerbated by our commitment to preserve backward compatibility. (In other words, you can never take a feature out of Solaris.) The challenge is in managing unrealistic expectations. (It isn't all going to work together seamlessly from day one; in fact some combinations may never work together. It all depends on the business case.) The upside lies in the opportunities for serendipitous synergy. (Or should that be synergistic serendipity?)

What Social Security 'crisis'?

In today's Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner nails the myth about "The Social Security Crisis". It's just that: a myth. There is no crisis. Key quote: "In June, the bipartisan Congressional Budget office used more realistic assumptions about economic growth. CBO puts the first shortfall year at 2052, not 2042, and it projects Social Security's 75-year shortfall at only about four-10ths of one percent of gross domestic product. Currently, that's about $40 billion a year, or one-fifth of the revenues that the Bush administration gave up in tax cuts for the wealthy. Simply restoring pre-Bush tax rates on the richest one percent of Americans could bring the Social Security system into balance indefinitely, without reducing promised payouts by one penny."

And why do so many Democrats as well as Republicans use the language of crisis? Kuttner's explanation is that "many well-meaning Democrats who defend the Social Security system want to be absolutely [certain] that its funding is rock solid. So [they] talk of its shortfall and offer different ways to make up the gap. Unfortunately, that tends to play into Republican hands."

If Republicans are ideologically opposed to the idea of Social Security, that's their right. But if the only way to argue for the position is to lie about the situation, that doesn't say much for their case.

Now everybody will know about IP addresses

As all news-junkies will know, the press is reporting that: "Police zeroed in on Lisa Montgomery [by] tracing an IP address, 65.150.168.223, to a computer at her Melvern, Kan., home." Which reminds me of a recent trip to California....

I was at San Jose airport, en route for Boston, and I was wearing my favourite ThinkGeek t-shirt: the one that says "There's no place like 127.0.0.1". As I was waiting in line at Starbucks, a PHB type walked past, read my shirt, and said, "Hey, that's cool. Is that the IP address of your website?" And since I have no shame, I replied with a straight face, "Yes it is. And it's the address of your website... and his (pointing), and hers (pointing), and Yahoo!, and...." And I walked up and ordered my usual quadruple espresso macchiato, leaving the poor guy looking terminally confused.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Must... resist... temptation... to say "I told you so"

Poll: Most Americans Think Iraq War Not Worth Fighting (washingtonpost.com): "[A]ccording to a Washington Post-ABC News poll [...] 56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake."

(And they want Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Doh!)

A year of blogging

This blog is one year old today. This is the 360th entry, which translates into almost exactly one entry per day. Checking the logs, I see that there are 349 entries in the database, so I must have deleted 10 entries. (Most of these were due to blogspam incidents.) There are also 493 comments: a fair number of these are from me, but that still leaves around one comment per day.

I started out hosted at logjamming.com, and by the summer I was bumping up against the limits (bandwidth and operational) of my account there In August I rehosted at Steve Lau's grommit.com - thanks, Steve! Bandwidth has continued to grow: the last complete month saw 55K hits and 616MB transferred. I have absolutely no idea how many readers I have, for two reasons. First, the vast majority of the hits are from software agents: search engines and RSS aggregators. Second, I know that quite a few people read me through the planetsun.org aggregator (and perhaps others - how would I know?). After all, that's how I read most of my colleagues' blogs.

I'm still using the same software - Movable Type 2.6.4 - that I started out with, and I have no plans to change. It's pretty solid, and with the tweaks that I've made the blogspam problem seems to be under control. Most of my authoring these days is done with MarsEdit on my Mac, although I'm actually writing this using the native MT interface.

My overall impressions?

• I've enjoyed blogging even more than I expected to: it's become a regular part of my life. I'm actually thinking of firing up a second blog just for technical (software engineering) stuff, using http://thecomputeristhenetwork.com. If I do, I'll probably use a different software system - maybe MT 3.1, maybe Roller. We'll see.
• I've spent less time on visuals, underlying technologies, tools, and so forth than I expected to. This is good: I've been able to focus on the content, and expressing myself, without the medium getting in the way. There are at least two consequences, however. First, the site is stylistically rather bland. I should tweak the CSS some time. Secondly, rehosting was A Big Deal. Even though both sites used Linux and Apache, each had slightly different configurations, virtual hosting setups, Perl versions, and so forth. If you have to do it, plan carefully, and test everything twice. And don't even think of trying to do it without shell (ssh) access.
• Right now, there is no standard content interchange format. This means that unless you are prepared to (a) lose your old content or (b) do a lot of grunt-work with scripts, you're going to be stuck with the software that you start out with. My original scheme of playing around with a free (blogger) account and then setting up my own one seems to have worked just fine.
• When Sun offered blogging at blogs.sun.com, I jumped on the bandwagon and grabbed myself a blog. It didn't work. Trying to maintain two non-specialized blogs is just too much: what goes where? should you duplicate stuff? In the end I just put my b.s.c blog on ice; if they're smart they'll clean up all of those vestigial blogs some time.
• I've really enjoyed the interactions with those who have visited and commented or emailed. I expected more flames and bozos, but I've only had a few. I've reconnected with friends from my past, and established promising connections. It's been a lot of fun.

Antony or Anthony? Confusion reigns.....

If you look at my two recent blog entries on "l'affaire Flew", you will see that the first spells the philosopher's name Anthony Flew and the second Antony Flew. Which is correct? I'm pretty sure that the answer is Antony Flew, but it's by no means as clear as it should be. First, that unreliable but influential yardstick - the Google hit count - gives Anthony 36,300 and Antony 32,800. (Curiously there are 618 pages that include both forms!) How about publications? Amazon lists his books under both names, but I assumed that this was simply data entry error. But then I consulted my bookshelf, and found both forms!

Perhaps we should simply use the construction which appears in much of his professional vita: A. G. N. Flew (or even AGN Flew).

Turkey and the EU

I've been watching the current debate on EU admission for Turkey with a fair amount of confusion. Understandably, much of the discussion has revolved around such issues as European "identity", religion, the effect on the labour market, human rights, Cyprus, Armenia, the military in politics, and so on. The question of precedent is also critical: if Turkey, why not Russia? Etcetera. Things have also been complicated by the insensitive meddling of the US administration.

Setting aside such issues, I am surprised that there hasn't been much said about the sheer volatility of the Turkish economy. Even the Economist profile doesn't discuss this as one might expect. The latest EU report makes sobering reading. Recent inflation rates between 28% and 101%; public sector deficits between 10% and 28%; exchange rates oscillating wildly, dropping 50% and then gaining 12%. In part this seems a consequence of the fact around 50% of all business falls into the "underground economy" category. It is hard to imagine how to integrate such an economy into a supra-national body that has been defined since day one by economic convergence.

More on Antony Flew

Update on my recent blog entry about Antony Flew:

The Raving Atheist published an unhelpful satirical piece, and in a comment to this someone posted a link to an interview between Flew and the philosopher/theologian Gary Habermas. In the interview, Flew accepts Habermas' description of him as a "deist", in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and other 18th century thinkers.

Perhaps the most disheartening statement by Flew was this: I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. [in Schroeder's The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom] That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation. The idea that Flew believes Schroeder's laboured interpretation of Genesis might be "scientifically accurate" simply shows how little Flew knows of science. Schroeder's bizarre notions of probability would cause him to fail Statistics 101, and his howlers in genetics and relativity are equally juvenile. (For a thoughtful analysis of Schroeder from a religious - Jewish - stance, I recommend R. David Hazony's review in Azure.)

Towards the end of the interview, Habermas asked: "Do you think any of [Bertrand Russell, J. L. Mackie, and A. J. Ayer] would have been impressed in the direction of theism? " Flew replied, enthusiastically: "Russell would have regarded these developments as evidence." On this, I think Flew is dead wrong. Russell was, first and foremost, a mathematician: he would not have been taken in by the innumeracy and illogic that pervades the works of Schroeder et al.

The bottom line seems to be that Flew has decided that the scientific evidence demands a designer. It's unfortunate that he doesn't seem to have bothered to ask any real scientists: cosmologists, geneticists, geologists. What a pity.

Bill O'Reilly the self-described coward

David Brock of MediaMatters.org just posted a scathing attack on Bill O'Reilly (King of the Unfair and Unbalanced). After listing the numerous occasions on which O'Reilly had attacked both Brock and MediaMatters, Brock calls him out:

As you can see, Mr. O'Reilly, you have repeatedly and personally attacked me, Media Matters for America, and my fine staff, calling us "vile," "despicable," and "weasels," and comparing us to the Ku Klux Klan, Castro, Mao, and the Nazis. And you have refused my repeated requests to appear on your broadcast.
You once offered your viewers your definition of the word "coward." On the January 5, 2004, O'Reilly Factor, you declared: "If you attack someone publicly, as these men did to me, you have an obligation to face the person you are smearing. If you don't, you are a coward."
Well, Mr. O'Reilly, you have attacked me publicly on numerous occasions, and you refuse to face me. You, sir, are a coward -- by your own definition of the term.

Frankly, I don't know why anyone would want to share the same studio with that bombastic bigot, but if O'Reilly continues to refuse Brock's request we'll know him for what he is. No surprise, of course.

(Via Sully)

Why anything instead of nothing? We load the dice....

In his latest contribution to this discussion, Masood asks why I feel that the question "Why is there anything rather than nothing?" is incoherent. It's because I find it breaks down under either of the common senses of "why" - the causal or the teleological. In each case, the question self-destructs in two ways. Causality presumes a cause - something that made the "anything" happen. Teleology presumes an agent: one cannot have agent-less purpose. In each case, we presume "something". Now, either we are faced with an "infinite regress" - "why does the cause/agent exist rather than nothing?" - or [my favourite] by invoking some antecedent "thing", the "nothing" alternative is rendered moot! (Simultaneous annihilation of the antecedent and creation of the consequent feels like a stretch!)

The traditional way to make headway with the question is to constrain the universals ("anything" and "nothing") to some category, assigning the causal or teleological agents to a different category. (This is the supernatural or religious turn.) Thus, "Why is there a universe rather than nothing? God made the universe, but God is not of the universe: She transcends it". But this simply pushes the question back - why is there an agent/cause rather than nothing? At this point, most people adopt the device of decreeing that the two categories are causally or teleologically different; that it's OK for a Prime Mover to be self-caused and eternal but not for everyday stuff. Of course this proposition is arbitrary and entirely unverifiable.

Those who believe that the orginal question must have an answer are pretty much forced into this dualism, of course. For myself, I have no need of that hypothesis; the question is not meaningful to me. I imagine that a psychologist would say that we actually start with the Weltanschauung of our choice/heritage (theist/dualist or atheist/materialist); we then interpret the meaningfulness of the question based upon our stance. Thus a theist believes that there is a Prime Cause, and therefore the anything or nothing question must be coherent. Etcetera.

Register 1, Merrill Lynch 0 - game over (on Sun & RH)

My colleague Jim Grisanzio noted Ashlee Vance's piece in the Register about the Merrill Lynch analyst who thinks Sun should buy Red Hat or Novell. Surprisingly, Jim only cited the Merrill Lynch argument; he failed to mention Ashlee Vance's devastating rebuttal. Key quotes (with my emphasis):

Merrill Lynch ignores how messy Sun's purchase of a Linux vendor could be. We doubt that open source zealots would warm to the idea of Sun controlling the dominate [sic] version of Linux as quickly as the analyst firm suggests. We doubt that IBM, HP or Dell would let such an acquisition happen in the first place.

Merrill Lynch's myopic focus on what Red Hat might mean to Sun is also totally absurd. The entire IT community would be shaken by such a buy. Sun would pay a premium for something it doesn't really need. It can ship Linux on servers just as easily as Dell can.

Backing Linux in a major, major way would make Sun look like every other vendor, and this is not a role Sun is well suited to handle. At times, it seems that Sun exists for no other reason that to be different from the herd and offer customers a choice.

This last point is important. As I've mentioned before, people expect Sun to be the industry's creative, iconoclastic contrarian. A "me too" Sun would confuse (and disappoint) them. We at Sun need to meet this expectation in our conversations with them - this is simply cluetrain 101 stuff. And this fits with Ashlee's bottom line:

Sun has got to out-invent, not out-acquire its rivals to be "hot" again. Customers will pay more attention to a screaming fast, cheap Opteron box that can run either Solaris x86 or Red Hat than they will to Sun buying an expensive open source software unit in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Why settle for less?

Check out The Applestore of the future. I particularly liked AppleTherapy and the ThoughtPort....

There's something about Alabama...

First, racist language in the constitution. Then trying to ban books with homosexual characters in them. And now we have the Alabama judge in court "wearing a judicial robe with the Ten Commandments embroidered on the front in gold". (As one wag put it, "don't worry as long as the robe isn't white and doesn't have a matching hood".) What next, I wonder?

When do politicians take electoral issues seriously?

When their own ballots are affected, naturally! From The Seattle Times: "The King County error came to light Sunday when Larry Phillips, chairman of the Metropolitan King County Council, was looking over a list of voters from his neighborhood whose ballots had been disqualified. Phillips spotted his own name on the list, prompting an investigation by King County elections workers that turned up 561 improperly disqualified ballots." So Gregoire may still win....

(Via E-Voting News. Their story included a grammatical howler: somebody used the word fluctuant, presumably under the impression that it was an adjectival form of fluctuate. In fact it's a term from biology, meaning "movable and compressible — used of abnormal body structures (as some abscesses or tumors)".
UPDATE: The author of the piece assures me that the usage is blessed by the OED, even if it is a little archaic. My apologies: I have no objection to the creative revival of archaic language.)

The Anthony Flew brouhaha

While I was visiting my mother, she mentioned that she'd heard that "Anthony Flew has got religion". This means that the rumours of Flew's possible recantation must have spread from the phil. of religion blogosphere to BBC Radio 4, so I thought I'd check out the state of play.

In October, Richard Carrier documented the history of Flew's supposed conversions in a piece in SecWeb, and reported that Flew was questioning whether an "impersonal spirit" of some kind might be the best explanation for "why a universe exists that can produce complex life". Carrier's recently updated the piece with some quotes from Flew himself, explaining this Deist-like position:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

Is this simply an argument from incredulity? In his 1993 Atheistic Humanism, Flew points out that "Absent excellent evidencing reasons [...] it becomes preposterous to postulate a" CEB [Cosmos-Explaining Being]; in the same chapter he also argues against the uncritical use of various forms of the anthropic principle. Recently Flew has admitted to being impressed by Gerald Schroeder's The Hidden Face Of God, but Schroeder's (widely criticised) arguments seem to fall short of the "excellent evidencing reasons" that Flew demanded 12 years ago. (See Perakh and Carrier.)

Various religious types have been running around claiming Flew's supposed "conversion" as evidence for the supernatural. J. P. Moreland made this argument on PAX TV, and Carrier quotes Flew as emphatically rejecting it: "my God is not his. His is Swinburne's. Mine is emphatically not good (or evil) or interested in human conduct".

However Flew seems to have gone beyond the position that he described to Carrier, although it should be noted that the source is a story in Fox News. Last May Flew took part in a debate organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas; a video of the debate has been released under the title Has Science Discovered God?. Typically, the press release from Varghese's "Institute" is triumphal in tone, and does nothing to distinguish Flew's "impersonal spirit" from popular religious notions of god. And to increase the confusion (according to Fox),

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

All of this is frustratingly incomplete, of course, and I hope the arguments will be fleshed out in the new edition of Flew's God and Philosophy, coming next year. Presumably if Flew is postulating an intelligent designer, he has an answer for the question of "who designed the designer", as well as all of the other arguments that he himself has articulated over the years in books such as the account of his debate with Terry Miethe. Nonetheless it's hard to know how to reconcile alignment with "intelligent design" with his assertion that he "has in mind something like the God of Aristotle, a distant, impersonal 'prime mover.' It might not even be conscious, but a mere force." Perhaps we expect too much: as Carrier wrote:

Flew's tentative, mechanistic Deism is not based on any logical proofs, but solely on physical, scientific evidence, or the lack thereof, and is therefore subject to change with more information -- and he confesses he has not been able to keep up with the relevant literature in science and theology, which means we should no longer treat him as an expert on this subject.

Of course such a disclaimer is unlikely to prevent people like Moreland and Varghese from using Flew as a poster child for their causes.

POSTSCRIPT, 12-Aug-05: To my amazement, this entry continues to attact comments 8 months after I wrote it. The sad thing is that so many of the comments raise points that I addressed in later postings. So please: if you stumble over this entry, and feel compelled to comment, please read the other entries on Flew before you do so. See here, here, and here. And thanks.

CD of the week: "The Best of Groove Armada"

A couple of days ago I was checking out late night TV shows in England when I came across a video of a concert with a really exciting and energetic band. I didn't know who it was, but the singers (a soulful woman and a stunning rapper) had the crowd in their hands, and one of the keyboard players would occasionally step out front to play trombone. I watched, mesmerized. At the end of the program, I saw that the name of the group was Groove Armada. For some reason I'd never heard of them before, even though they've been around for at least six years. (The official web site is a little spartan; try the BBC profile instead - at least unless and until the Beeb's web goes away.)

Anyway I picked up a copy of their "Best of" CD at Heathrow this afternoon, ripped it into iTunes and transferred it to my iPod so I could listen to it on the flight home. Very tasty. Recommended.

Back home from England

I just arrived back in Brookline, MA after flying from LHR to BOS. The flight was late, due mainly to fierce headwinds: we took an extremely northerly route, up to the southerly tip of Greenland (around 60N 45W) and then over to make landfall over central Labrador before heading SSW towards Boston.

On Saturday I drove my mother to visit some friends in south-east London; a gruelling drive through patchy freezing fog down the M40, round the M25, and up the A21. It didn't help that the rental car - a Fiat Uno - really sucked: the pedals were too far to the left and too close together. Not only did this mean that I occasionally caught the accelerator when I was braking; there was nowhere for me to rest my left foot, so I had to hover over the clutch or put my foot flat on the floor. (And the car had no torque, and the gear ratios were rubbish, necessitating more shifting than usual.) By the end of of the drive (2 hours each way), my left ankle was showing signs of unaccustomed fatigue.

We got back to Oxford about 7, and I was feeling desperately tired. However my brother and his wife were there, and we decided to try out a new Chinese restaurant for dinner, to see if it would revive me. That did the trick - even though sake doesn't really go with Chinese food! (Better with Cantonese than with other styles, I suspect.)

And to round off the evening, I stayed up to watch Match Of The Day and saw a thrilling game between Southampton and Middlesbrough. Southampton was 2-0 up as the match drew to a close, and it looked as if the hapless Saints (next to the bottom of the Premier league) were finally going to win against a strong opponent (currently 5th). Then in the 89th minute an inadvertant deflection from a corner (recorded as an own goal) made it 2-1, and seconds before the final whistle Downing thumped in a beautiful shot for Middlesbrough to snatch a draw.

New Iain M. Banks: "The Algebraist"

From my list of "authors whose works I'll buy sight unseen", there's a new book by Iain M. Banks: The Algebraist. This is a sprawling space opera, possibly stand-alone, possibly starting a new series - it's not a Culture book. It's set in a world galaxy in which all A.I. has been banned.

[Hardback edition just published in the UK; per Amazon.com, they don't seem to have scheduled a US release date.]

The Economist on the dollar's decline

The Economist on what happens if the dollar's fall means that it loses its status as the reserve currency for the world: "The dollar's loss of reserve-currency status would lead America's creditors to start cashing those cheques — and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price."

(Via Talking Points.)

Rowan Atkinson on the right to offend

In today's Daily Telegraph, there's coverage of a press conference including Rowan "Mister Bean" Atkinson. He and others criticized proposed changes to UK "hate speech" laws that have been interpreted as covering criticism of religious ideas. "The freedom to criticise ideas - any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed." Exactly.

(Via Sully.)

At the Jini Community Meeting

Live at the 8th Jini Community Meeting at The Brewery in London; listening to Jan Newmarch of Monash University talking about a variety of Jini based projects at Monash.

(Sign of the times: 90% of the laptops here are Macs....)

Bizarre stuff: hearing references to Geoff Arnold that resolve not to me but to the other Geoff Arnold (who's not here).

Bob Scheifler is now presenting the changes and new features for the next Porter release of Jini. Cool stuff.

Update: After the coffee break, Dennis Reedy is talking about Rio, the policy-based service provisioning framework based on Jini.

Better late than never, I guess

According to San Diego's 10News: "Kenneth Starr says he never should have led the investigation that resulted in the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton."

(Via Salon.com.)

Tarnished silver bird

As I noted, I flew on Friday night from BOS to LHR. The trip was probably the most uncomfortable I've done across the pond. First we got away 90 minutes late, because of a faulty spoiler indicator that had to be replaced. Then the seats proved to be too short in the leg, and the placement of the IFE [in-flight entertainment] equipment meant that even though the nominal pitch was reasonable it was imposible to get comfortable. And then the meal service was slow, and things were pretty bumpy from about 20W to the Irish coast. Bottom line: I got less than an hour's sleep. Not surprisingly I slept like I log on Saturday night - from about 6pm to 8am!

I'm posting this from the Sun office at 55 King William Street in the City of London, a few yards from The Monument (see right).

I out-eek Alec Muffett

alec muffett :: dropsafe :: articles : life : I have worked 1/3rd of my life for Sun Microsystems (12 out of 36 years). For me, the numbers are 19 and 54, meaning that I've worked here for 35% of my life. "eek", indeed. I'm still having fun, though....

Silver bird

I'm off to England this evening for a week: AA108, BOS-LHR, 777-200. Here's a nice image from Airliners.net.

(I think this is the first time I've included third-party Javascript in a blog entry - I wonder how the RSS aggregators will handle it. UPDATE: It doesn't validate properly according to the W3C tools.)

First racism, now censorship

Not content with preserving the racist language in their state constitution, those wacky Alabamians are at it again. State Representative Gerald Allen is proposing to burn (OK, ban from libraries) all books that include homosexual characters. Neil Gaiman has blogged about it, as has Sully. So much for Tennessee Williams' southern classic "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". (And Dave Thompson's book on "Last Tango in Paris" would also be excluded: the proposed ban would also cover books containing heterosexual "actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama".)