Geoff Arnold

Caught by the marketing machine: Moby "Hotel"

On the strength of a slick sampler download from iTunes, I bought Moby's new album "Hotel". Oh dear. (British understatement, that.) Kelefa Sanneh wrote an unsparing review of the album in today's New York Times: This music isn't just dull, though. Like much of what Moby has produced since "Play," it's condescending, too. Much of it sounds like the work of a producer who thinks pop music is supposed to be kind of idiotic, and who thinks pop audiences should be glad that he deigns to give us what we want. Do we like sex? O.K., here's "I Like It," four singularly unpleasant minutes of heavy breathing. Do we like songs about how the world is happy and sad and good and bad? O.K., here's "Slipping Away," with a wispy beat and Moby crooning, "Open to everything, happy and sad/Seeing the good when it's all going . . ." - you can finish the couplets yourself. And, knowing that we like familiarity, Moby has his collaborator, Laura Dawn, sing a slowed-down version of the New Order hit "Temptation."

Fortunately, my car has a 6-disc CD changer, so it was a matter of a click of a button to get away from this stuff to music with real soul - Final Straw by Snow Patrol, or Sunday 8 PM by Faithless. And now Chris tells me I should pay attention to The Futureheads, and from the videos on the website he's right. And the Pickle thinks I should dive into the Avenue Q Soundtrack and accept that It Sucks To Be Me and Everyone's A Little Bit Racist. So much music, so little time.

Serendipity: Irshad Manji

This evening I emerged from my philosophy class and turned on my cell phone to call back in to a meeting in California. Instead, I saw an unfamiliar message: No service: SOS only. What to do? I decided to join Dan Dennett and others in attending a talk and book-signing by Irshad Manji, the author of The Trouble with Islam Today : A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith. And I'm really glad I did. She's an excellent speaker: energetic, passionate, witty, uncompromising. Dennett asked her how she dealt with critics who saw her open discussion of Islam with "infidels" as a betrayal; how she negotiated that "fine line". She rejected the premise: she's not interesting in balance, in compromising with bigotry. She's not trying to convince those who disagree with her: she's seeking to empower and encourage those who share her beliefs but are afraid of speaking out.

No, I don't share her faith, nor do I agree with her qualified support for the invasion of Iraq, but I applaud her commitment to universal human rights, her integrity, and her courage. A wonderful event. Do hear her if you get the chance.

What does this mean for iWork?

Many, many Sun employees are now working from their homes in every corner of the USA world. Many have chosen to live in low-tax states. How is this New York ruling (reported in Slashdot) going to affect this? Will Alaskan telecommuters wind up paying California income taxes if their VPN connections terminate in Menlo Park? Once again, technology meets tax policy, and the result is going to be a mess....

"hal9000(jr) writes 'The Boston Globe is running this story on an out-of-state programmer working for a New York company who had to pay state taxes. ''New York has the right to tax 100% of a nonresident employee's income derived from New York sources,' according to the 4-3 decision by Court of Appeals. The court relied on a fairness rule called the 'convenience of the employer' under law that says a worker's income is taxable if he chooses to live outside the state, as opposed to if he or she was transferred there.' "

Playing it safe

I just submitted my first written coursework since - oh, I don't know, 1974? - for my PhilOfMind course at Tufts. The format was a dialogue between three philosophers on a particular topic. The choices were limited: I couldn't simply pick any philosophers and any topic. I chose Fodor, Millikan and Paul Churchland on mental representations.

I started off routinely - read the lit, capture what each participant had to say on the topic, figure out a sub-topical flow that I could use to organize their ideas. And then I read some exchanges (Fodor & Pylyshyn vs. Smolensky on systematicity in connectionist models) that I thought would be a great way of contrasting Fodor and Churchland. A priori language of thought, symbolic, and pristine on the one hand; distributed representations, activation vectors, fuzzy combinations on the other. There were only two problems: I couldn't see a role for Millikan in the debate, and at least 80% of the dialogue would be fictitious: there wasn't a lot of material I could directly quote.

Which to do? Safe but pedestrian, or edgy but speculative and incomplete? In the end, I played it safe - but I think I'll write up the other one anyway, just for my own satisfaction.

Getting a sense of perspective

In his weekly opinion piece for the BBC, the British political commentator (and ex-Labour MP) Brian Walden wrote: "Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: 'It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.'"

Now, why should this chill someone to the bone? After all, we've known for about a century that humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of this planet, let alone the universe. Furthermore the extrapolation of this pattern to the future is not scientifically hard. There's no reason to believe that evolution stopped once homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

But then Walden brings in religion. "A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense - a belief in the value of human life. [Don't use those code-words, Brian.] Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what's permissible and what isn't. We need a moral consensus. Most emphatically, I don't mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn't survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency."

I'm all for a robust debate about ethics, for creating a coalition that will survive. But I'm not sure that religion as we presently understand it is capable of adapting to this role. We've just gone through a series of religious holidays in which everybody - bloggers, magazine editors, broadcasters, politicians - seem fixated on a handful of people, events, places, and ideas from a brief period of time, roughly 2500 to 1500 years ago. It's going to be hard to open your mind to the future if you insist that some historical events are uniquely privileged. Forget about six billion years: a hundred thousand years from now, nobody will remember, or care about, any of those ideas.

If Walden wants to talk about "religion in its widest sense", I suspect most of his opposition will come from those who espouse religion in the narrowest and most retrograde sense. Perhaps we need a new label. Humanism? In the meantime, he might want to contemplate the role that religion's historically narrow perspective may have played in creating an intellectual climate in which cosmology "chills him to the bone."

Thought for the day: "When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions: that is the heart of science." - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The dirty little secret of the computer biz

I spent several hours on Saturday replacing the CPU fan on my wife's computer. The old one had started making a noise like a vacuum cleaner that you could hear all over the house. It's an middle-of-the-road PC, a bland eMachines box with a ~900MHz Celeron. We talked about replacing it with a Mac Mini, but there's plenty of life in the old system and it seemed wasteful to replace it unnecessarily.

While I was disassembling the innards to get at the CPU, I took the opportunity to clean out the dust from the power supply fan and replace the video adapter with something a little more functional. When it was all back together, I ran some tests and spent a few minutes upgrading her copies of Firefox and Thunderbird to the latest releases. Nothing earth-shattering: the parts cost about $60 at CompUSA. The biggest challenge was bending the spring clip on the fan to fit more securely onto the tabs on the CPU's ZIF socket.

The point is, there's no way she could have done all of this stuff herself: it's just too complicated. A nice piece on the BBC website makes the point: "But all the people who called me had one thing in common: they were at their wits' end because they had bought computers after being seduced by advertising into thinking that they would be easy to use and fun, but had found them to be much more complicated than they had expected. And most importantly, none of them knew what to do or where to turn for help."

I've decided that in future I'll recommend that people get laptops. Not because they need the mobility, not because it's cheaper (it isn't) or more comfortable (most laptop keyboards suck), but because if when things go wrong, they can simply fold up the computer and carry it to a human being, to get help.

Oi! US TV!! We want our Doctor Who!!!

The first episode of the new Doctor Who series just aired in the UK. Reports from colleagues such as Chris and Dave are positive. So why are we in the US having to wait? From the BBC's FAQ:

Q. Will the new series be aired outside the UK?

A. So far, we only have confirmation that the new series has been bought by CBC television in Canada, who air it on Tuesdays at 7pm, starting on April 5, and Prime TV in New Zealand, who have not yet announced an air date. No Australian or US broadcaster has picked up the series yet.

AARGH!!!!

Tim, Rio, Jini, Rob

Over in ongoing · Java, the Grid, and Rio, Tim was "thinking about how you’d run a big distributed Java system as a service across a whole lot of networked computers". Dan Templeton pointed him at Rio, and I followed up with a link to the papers from last December's Jini Community Meeting in London. And I remembered a comment by Rob Gingell, adapting Santayana: "Those who do not use Jini are doomed to reinvent it."

Balkin on the lessons to be learned from the Schiavo case

In a series of pieces in Balkinization, Professor Jack Balkin of Yale Law School goes into detail on the constitutional aspects of the Schiavo case. But his closing words on one particular entry were particularly acute:

"Finally, the Congressional Republicans' moves also suggest that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, the matter would not be left to the states, as so many pro-life politicians have advocated in the past, but would quickly become a fight over federal legislation outlawing abortion nationwide. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Indeed. This is more than just Tom DeLay and his henchmen grandstanding to please their base: it's a real test of the US Constitution.

An offer I couldn't refuse....

What Classic Movie Are You?
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Crumbs!

Merry complained that I'm always blogging about unpleasant things - why can't I blog about something nice? How about the crumb test dummy? I think that qualifies. Now, how do I get my hands on some of those McVitie's Milk Chocolate and Orange Digestives?

Republican or Islamist? Beats me....

Don't miss this fascinating piece by Juan Cole: "The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them."

The similarities are remarkable.

"Freedom is on the march" - unless you're a woman

From a Reuters piece on threats against progressive women: "Pharmacist Zeena Qushtiny was dressed in the latest Western fashion and wearing a sparkling diamond necklace when she was taken at gunpoint from her pharmacy in Baghdad by insurgents. Her body was found 10 days later with two bullet holes close to her eyes. She was covered in a traditional abaya veil preferred by Islamic conservatives.... During Saddam Hussein's regime, women could dress less conservatively in the big cities and would not be punished, according to female activists. But now women say they are no longer safe and decapitated female corpses have begun turning up in recent weeks with notes bearing the word 'collaborator' pinned to their chests"

Was this what America Bush and Blair went to war for?

(Via Juan Cole.)

That was then....

Salon.com Politics: "As Republicans plotted congressional intervention last week to extend the life of Terri Schiavo, a Texas woman named Wanda Hudson watched her six-month-old baby die in her arms after doctors removed the breathing tube that kept him alive. Hudson didn't want the tube removed, but the baby's doctors decided for her. A judge signed off on the decision under the Texas futile care law -- a provision first signed into law in 1999 by then-Gov. George W. Bush. Under the 1999 law, doctors in Texas can, with the support of a hospital ethics committee, overrule the wishes of family members and terminate life-support measures if they believe further care would be futile"

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #162

From today's Houston Chronicle.com: "Iraq needed fuel. Halliburton Co. was ordered to get it there — quick. So the Houston-based contractor charged the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating fuel. In the latest revelation about the company's oft-criticized performance in Iraq, a Pentagon audit report disclosed Monday showed Halliburton subsidiary KBR spent $82,100 to buy liquefied petroleum gas, better-known as LPG, in Kuwait and then 335 times that number to transport the fuel into violence-ridden Iraq."

(Via TomDispatch.)

(And Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #162 is Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.)

What the bleep was I doing?

For reasons that I won't go into, I found myself watching the DVD of What the Bleep Do We Know? this evening. After nearly an hour of increasingly nonsensical stuff, my blood pressure and I could stand it no longer. I skipped to the last DVD chapter to watch the credits, to find out which reputable scientists and philosophers had given their support to such hokum. Fortunately, the answer seemed to be "None".

The writers weren't even that creative in the way the fabricated the bleeping stuff. They mostly relied on two tricks:

• Take a term such as "observer", "consciousness", "unity", etc. and then use it interchangably in metaphorical and literal senses.
• Consistently use the term "possibility" in place of "probability", conveying a subtle suggestion of unboundedness and unpredictability.

So, if you want to get really drunk really quickly, get a bottle, a glass, and this film and take a shot every time someone recycles a metaphor as literal truth, or opens vistas of boundless possibility wherever a probability distribution belongs. Otherwise, stay away. (I thought we got all that New Age stuff out of our system last century, but I guess not....)

How to make sense of the world....

As I do most weekends, I phoned my mother in Oxford today. After exchanging family news, the subject turned to my philosophy course. "I just caught a story on BBC Oxford about a new philosophy group here," she said. "Of course wasn't able to read about it in the paper," [because of her blindness] "but I think it was about the study of consciousness." As we spoke, I quickly searched and came up with the obvious hit. "Are you talking about the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind," I asked. "The project that Susan Greenfield... sorry, Baroness Susan Greenfield is heading up? This led to a short digression about Tony Blair's habit of handing out life peerages like school prizes, and then discussing our disappointment at the lack of rigour in many of Greenfield's publications. After that, I told my mother about OXCSOM's approach:

Initially there will be eight academics on the payroll of the Centre from six different departments: Anatomy, Pharmacology, Philosophy, Physiology, the Ian Ramsey Centre (Theology), and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. The researchers will employ a wide range of techniques, including functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

"I wonder how the theologians will get on with fMRI," I mused, and my mother assured me that that as Oxford theologians they would embrace it enthusiastically. "By the way," I said, "do you know where OXCSOM is getting its money? It's hosted by the IAN RAMSEY CENTRE [studying the relationship of religious belief and science], and funded by the John Templeton Foundation." Both of us vaguely recognized the name - something about underwriting a scientific study of prayer. [Turns out he's a Tennessee-born investment manager.]

As we talked, I clicked on a few links... and then I couldn't contain myself any more. "So, let me tell you about another Templeton project I've just come across. It's called The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love." "What on earth do they mean by 'unlimited love', and how do you do research in it?" said my mother. "It all sounds very flakey." I clicked the About us link. "No problem," I said. "They've got all that covered. By 'unlimited love', they mean 'love for all humanity without exception'. And as for research, 'Just as we investigate the force of gravity or the energy of the atom, we can scientifically examine the power of unlimited love in human moral and spiritual experience.' Easy."

My mother sighed. "You know, a friend of mine, a newspaper columnist, told me that he was giving up on satire," she said. "He feels that nothing he can write matches up to the reality of today's world." And we agreed that satire is dead, and set a time for our next conversation.

The First Day of Spring

Today is the Spring Equinox, the first day of Spring*. It's the season when people have honoured various deities: Aphrodite from Cyprus, Hathor from Egypt, Ostara of Scandinavia, and others. Here in Brookline, Massachusetts it's a beautiful, sunny day, around 48°F or 9°C. It's really bright out, in part because the sun is reflected off the high banks of snow left by the snowploughs. In such circumstances, it seems almost churlish to note that the weather forecast for tonight and tomorrow calls for snow....

Oh no, not MORE bloody snow!!!
OK, I'll stop whining. I really will. It's a beautiful day, and the snow won't amount to anything, and the first robins have appeared.... **

* However when I was growing up, I was taught to reckon these things by the month. So winter was December, January and February, while spring included March, April and May. C'est la vie.
** Robins. That's another thing that's hard to wrap my head around. Back in England, robins were these cute (yet fierce) little birds that were resident the year round; many Christmas cards included pictures of "robin red-breast" in the snow. (Obvious religious connotations.) Here in the US, robins are simply a variety of thrush, with vaguely rust-coloured breasts, and they're wimps when it comes to severe weather. I find it hard to think of them as robins. Hmmm: perhaps this was all part of a fiendish plan by the first professors of Philosophy at Harvard back in the 17th century: they wanted to set up an ambiguous referential situation for their lectures on cognition. "Consider the mental representation robin. In England, this refers to...". Cue Jerry Fodor (closely followed by Dan Dennett).

Creative accounting at Microsoft

Tim Bray has been reading Brad's analysis of Microsoft's numbers. While Brad is bemused by the R&D (where's the beef ROI?), Tim is shaking his head over the SG&A, which seems to be out of control. (From FY2000 to FY2003, revenue rose 45%, R&D rose 77%, and SG&A zoomed 131%.)

My theory is that most of it is going in "special promotions" to try to prevent large-scale defections. (You may choose different terms; I'll stick to my euphemisms.) Beyond that, MSFT is clearly doing everything it can to keep the bottom-line income number down, to (1) resist shareholder pressure for even higher dividends, and (2) avoid further (mostly Euro) anti-trust challenges. However they don't seem to be too successful....

Another Grand Prix... but this time I'll sleep on it

The Malaysian Grand Prix takes place this weekend, and reports from the first qualifying session suggest that it's going to be a very interesting race. Once again the Ferraris seem to be out of contention. (Sadly, so is my man DC - though at least he was faster than Michael Schumacher.) However I think I'm going to put common-sense ahead of enthusiasm, and let the VCR watch this one for me - the TV coverage runs from 1:30am to 4am here in Boston....

SXSW Music

Steve turned me on to the massive BitTorrent download of new music sponsored by the south by southwest festival. Although I'm not a regular BT user, I cranked it up and downloaded all 2.75GB. It took three days. (And yes, I left BT running to share nicely.)

This morning I dragged it all into iTunes. 714 songs, 1.9 days playing time! Who's got time to listen to all of that? However, over (extended) breakfast and (several cups of) coffee, I managed to scan most of it. (I know it can be unfair to judge on the basis of the first few seconds, but when you also consider the artist's name, the song title, and genre....) I kept a window open to the SXSW Showcase page so I could follow up on particularly interesting artists.

From that vast collection, here are the 20 songs that caught my attention. If it looks as if I was biased... well, yes: the women singer-songwriters in this collection were very strong; the "pop", "rock", and "punk" offerings (though frequently mis-classified) were less distinctive. But there's all sorts of music here - you might be surprised. Enjoy:

"Betty" by The Lascivious Biddies
"Moving Pictures, Silent Films" by the Great Lake Swimmers
"I Do Dream You" by Jennifer Gentle
"Silver Screen Demos" by Jesca Hoop
"Move On" by Jessie and Layla
"Old Fashion Morphine" by Jolie Holland
"Not Going Anywhere" by Keren Ann
"Nutopia" by Meg Lee Chin
"mudpies and gasoline" by Patricia Vonne
"Take the Long Way" by Po' Girl
"Into My Heart" by Rachel Fuller
"Television" by Robyn Hitchcock
"Anonyme" by Samadha
"hard road" by The Shore
"Building a Road" by Spottiswoode and His Enemies
"I'm On My Way" by Theresa Andersson
"lie in the sound" by Trespassers William
"Beautiful Dawn" by The Wailin' Jennys
"The Ghost of the Girl in the Well" by the Willard Grant Conspiracy
"Mannequin" by The Witnesses

(You can also stream or download individual tracks from SXSW.)

On break

Not from real work... but at Tufts I'm on break for the next week; our mid-term papers are due on Monday March 28. Mine is a dialogue between Fodor, Millikan and Churchland (plus Simplicus). Fortunately it will be in direct speech, so I won't have to worry that said is dead.

(Is that weird or what? I picked it up on Neil Gaiman's blog, where he has a much more interesting perspective.)

Another web quiz... well, look at that!

What Famous Leader Are You?
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AOL responds

AOL reacted pretty quickly to all the negative publicity about their AIM Terms of Service. The new language is much better. The power of the web, eh?

The new text (with my emphases):"You or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to public areas of any AIM Product. However, by submitting or posting Content to public areas of AIM Products (for example, posting a message on a message board or submitting your picture for the 'Rate-A-Buddy' feature), you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. Once you submit or post Content to any public area on an AIM Product, AOL does not need to give you any further right to inspect or approve uses of such Content or to compensate you for any such uses. AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating Content posted to public areas of AIM Products."

AIM Terms of Service

Welcome to the revised AIM Terms of Service from AOL. The interesting thing is that AOL wants the benefits of being a common carrier (e.g. they disclaim all responsibility for what passes through their system) while at the same time gaining full rights over that content. Would you use a VoIP service from somebody that reserved the right to record your conversations and publish them? If these various communications media (POTS, VoIP, IM, email, etc.) are really converging, let's make sure that AOL doesn't set the standard for privacy:

"Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL... the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses."

(Via BoingBoing.)

Snow and zombies

Yet another snowstorm this weekend, bringing us to over 90 inches for the season. It snowed most of Saturday: big, wet flakes that stuck to all the trees and left inches of slushy stuff on the driveway. Very pretty... now go away!

Rather than venture out, I spent most of the weekend curled up with philosophy. Not only do I have a mid-term paper due in a couple of weeks, and my regular reading to do for class; I also received the new Dennett book, Sweet Dreams, on Saturday. (Amazon.com is hopelessly confused about this book: in some places it says that it's coming on April 1, in others that it's available now, shipping in 24 hours.)

Back in November, I blogged about David Chalmers and his obsession with zombies (philosophical and otherwise). In Sweet Dreams, Dennett discusses what he calls the Zombic Hunch: the intuitive idea that there might conceivably be zombie-like creatures that are EXACTLY LIKE ORDINARY PEOPLE except that they don't have consciousness. Personally I find the notion of zombies incoherent - even in principle - but apparently a lot of people take them seriously. Like Dennett, I find the idea of philosophers arguing about the number of zombies that can fit on the head of a pin to be slightly unedifying. Oh well. If you want to get a feel for the issue without buying Dennett's or Chalmers' books, you can read this account of their debate.

And now I have to finish my notes on Searle's infuriating Chinese Room. There are some interesting issues in this famous thought experiment, but ever since I first read it in The Mind's I (over 20 years ago) I've been frustrated by the blatant equivocation and contradiction in the way Searle presents it. Perhaps it's a useful discipline for me: learning to concentrate on [the important bits of] the message without being distracted by the lousy medium.

deadwing

Oh joy, oh bliss.

From the News section of the Porcupine Tree website:

The new Porcupine Tree album Deadwing is released on 28th March by Warner Music in Europe, and on 19th April by Lava in the US. [...] There are guest appearances by Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth, and Adrian Belew of King Crimson.

The European tour starts at the end of March, and a US tour will commence in mid May.

You can download a 19MB QT video mashup of some of the tracks from the album here; the single Shallow is on iTunes. And I just received email from Ticketmaster:

Porcupine Tree
Somerville Theatre, Somerville
Wed, 05/18/05 8:00pm
On Sale Fri, 03/11/05 10:00am

(Thanks for the corrections from the men from the ministry....)

How the FSF really gets its money?

Arriving at Google this morning for a routine search, I noticed that they were highlighting a new feature, Google Local. "I wonder what kind of local resources they cover," I thought, and I tried a few sample entries. Plumbers? Boring. Restaurants? Lots of them. Escort agencies? The first result was the Free Software Foundation. Hmmm. And the second result was for the local Veterans' Hospital. Career opportunities for those returing from Iraq? Earth to Google....

[Click image for screenshot]

Oddity du jour: zombie Linux badger

Words fail me.

[Curiously, a Google for "Duppy card" came up with 17 hits, all as part of this joke, and it's not clear who was the original author. Welcome to the web.]

On how to react to good news

Back in January, Andrew Sullivan announced that he was taking a break from blogging, and so I stopped visiting his site. (A degree of "political burn-out" may also be responsible.) But today, I popped over to see what was new, and I came across an email that he's received that captured my feelings exactly. I have no idea who sent it - I wish I knew - but I hope it's OK to quote the entire thing here:

Respectfully, Andrew, I beg to differ on the alleged churlishness of Democrats on progress in the Middle East.

The result is that the first reaction any Democrat has to good news in the Middle East (or anywhere else) is to think, "How can Bush be denied political credit for this, since you know he's going to claim it." And the important thing to emphasize is that it is Bush's own political habits that have created this dynamic, and it started right after 9-11.

Exactly.

SEED meeting

I'm involved in Sun's engineering mentoring program, known (inevitably) by its acronym SEED (Sun Engineering Enrichment & Development), and today we're having an all-day meeting for the participants, both mentors and... hmm. What word should I use? I know that some people use mentee, and I've even seen it in a dictionary, but it doesn't work for me.

Anyway, we've got various speakers scheduled, including executives and domain specialists. There's also going to be a session consisting of short presentations by the mentees program participants. As I blog this, Greg Papadopoulos is reprising his CEC presentation "The Future Is Not What It Used To Be", in which he highlights the shift in software/service business models and the implications for innovation within the company.

Naturally this is a distributed meeting. Most participants are in our Menlo Park campus, and the agenda runs from 9-5 Pacific time. There are five of us in a conference room here in Burlington, Massachusetts; we're going to have to decide whether to stay until 8pm, taking into account the winter storm that is bearing down on us....

[UPDATE: After a careful risk analysis, I drove home around 3:20pm; it took me about an hour. It started out as snow; by the time I got home it was ice, ice ice. And now I'm dialled back in to the meeting.]

[Blogged on my Ferrari running Solaris 10, using the web interface to my blog. Now I need a good Solaris blogging tool, as good as MarsEdit on my Mac. And despite Alec's comment. I don't regard EMACS as an alternative. Maybe it's a platform on which to build a solution, but...]

Formula 1 the way it's supposed to be

I just watched an excellent Grand Prix in Australia. [My sympathy for my SunUK colleagues: if they stayed up to watch, it's now 4:45AM over there.] Close competitive racing, plenty of passing, general uncertainty because of all the new rules.... In the end Fisichella scored a solid win for Renault, while Michael Schumacher's Ferrari was in the garage.

I've always been a David Coulthard fan, and I was disappointed when McLaren let him go at the end of last season. While it was gratifying that the new Red Bull (ex-Jaguar) team picked him up, nobody expected very much from them. I was therefore delighted that Coulthard was able to hold on to 3rd for most of the race, and finished 4th, ahead of the Williams and McLaren drivers. Stunning!

A moment in time

A quiet evening... sitting here waiting for the Australian Grand Prix TV coverage to start in about 20 minutes.

• Reading: "I, Lucifer" by Glen Duncan (author of Death of an Ordinary Man)
• Listening to: "No Roots" by Faithless. I love the way Maxi Jazz's quietly insistent raps cut through Sister Bliss's solid groove, how Dido adds ethereal gracenotes to the songs
• Drinking: a couple of fingers of 10 year old Talisker, a single malt that captures some of the qualities of my two favourite - but radically different - Scotches: Macallan and Laphroaig

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds..."

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of" RJ-45 connectors and CAT-5 wiring. Thanks to the folks at Sun's Beijing office, the internal WiFi on my Ferrari is now working. Only in 32 bit mode at this point, but I'll take it. Now for suspend/resume (he said hopefully).

[Since Broadcom doesn't release specs or source code for its devices, we're using the "ndiswrapper" technique, in which a Windows-style NDIS driver is wrapped in a little bit of magic to make it work like a Solaris driver. Wonderful what they can do nowadays, eh?!]

[UPDATED: Curses... foiled again. The drivers worked fine at the office earlier today, but when I tried to boot up just now to use my home network, I was unable to plumb the bcmndis0 interface; some kind of binding error. The only obvious difference was that I was running on batteries, but that shouldn't affect things. Oh well, more testing....]

[UPDATED: It turns out that it was inadvertent operator error: where the instructions said 43XX, I was supposed to use 4320 or 4324, depending on configuration. I have no idea how it could have worked yesterday. Anyway, 32 bit mode is working fine; I've tried the 64 bit drivers, but there are a number of issues to be resolved there.]

One more thought on Koch

I know that I shouldn't get hung up on terminology: these things are just arbitrary labels, aren't they? Well, no - we can't simply ignore the everyday meanings of words. So when Koch (and Block too) went on about the NCC, or neural correlate of consciousness during the symposium, it felt wrong. It was as if a biologist had been talking about the CCO, the chemical correlate of organisms, instead of cells. Yes, cells are made of chemicals, but no biologist would indulge in such a crude reductionism.

Talking about the neural correlates of consciousness sounds respectfully non-committal: after all, it just talks about correlation, nothing causal. But to my ears, there is certainly a strong implication of stable correlation, rather than (e.g.) a pattern that is stable at some higher level but is not bound to any specific neural elements. If such patterns exist, the minimal NCC would presumably encompass the entire collection of neurons which could potentially support them; this doesn't sound like what Koch is getting at.

In general, I would prefer to adopt a more flexible systems-oriented language for the working of the mind, and explore the constraints and preferences that flow from the properties of the neural substratum. It is easier to capture the relationships between concepts at several levels of [evolutionary] design than it is to tease apart a single idea into multiple elements at different levels.

(In computing we call this refactoring: it's hard enough at a single level, extraordinarily difficult when multiple levels are involved.)

Consciousness 2005

Excellent symposium at Harvard Medical School this afternoon. A few observations follow. (Interesting how it's easier to write about the positions with which you disagree, isn't it?) And a nice bonus was finally getting to meet Bryan Bentz, a long-time fellow member of the Al Stewart mailing list.

• Dan Dennett (Tufts): Qualia, Unsplittable Atoms? If we want to go on using the term qualia, we have to give up the idea that they are ineffable and intrinsic. I drank that Kool-Aid a long time ago: no argument from me. A surprisingly direct rap at Block (citing his infamous jazz metaphor), and a nifty ju-jitsu move in response to Block's attempt at a reductio in the Q&A. Thoroughly enjoyable.
• Patrick Haggard (UC London): Voluntary Action: Conscious Intention and Neural Activity: Updating Libet's classic experiments on the Readiness Potential, which measured the curious fact that your brain starts preparing to act physically up to a second before you are conscious of deciding to act. Elegant experimental design has a distinctive aesthetics; this was a delightful talk. (I was reminded of one of my favourite books: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Florman.)
• Ned Block (BYU): Two Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Block proposes a distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness - roughly, the stuff that we're aware of, and the subset that we can actually work with at the moment. This is a subtle distinction that some feel is either irrelevant (because in practice the categories coincide) or just plain wrong. My feeling is that Block overstretches when he tries to cite particular brain activation patterns as evidence of the distinction. (He also relies on Koch and Crick's NCC concept - see below.) In addition, it seems to me (after insufficient thought, I'm sure) that accessibility crops up in other ways than this particular dichotomy: it feels more like a property of a mental event which captures one way in which it stands in relation to other events and functional systems of the mind. I'm not convinced by Block's coupling of the idea to one aspect of consciousness, with a particular neurological implementation.
• Christof Koch (Caltech): Studying visual consciousness in humans using microelectrodes, magnets, and TV's: I guess that Koch is the kind of hyperthyroidal character that you either love or loathe. He's not my cup of tea at all. At the centre of his talk was a series of experiments in which the brain of an epileptic patient was wired up to explore the use of fine-grained electrical stimulation to control his seizures; a side benefit of this was that the same system could be used to detect the state of a few individual neurons. Koch showed the patient (and hence us) large numbers of faces, particularly those of celebrities; he found that certain pictures provoked neuronal activity. (In one case he found that the printed name of he person produced the same activity....) Rather than interpreting this data cautiously and skeptically, Koch started going on about "the Bill Clinton neuron" and the "Jennifer Aniston neuron". I wish I'd been able to ask him to admit that his catchy phrase "the XXX neuron" really stands for "a random neuron which plays an unknown role in a larger neural structure [the NCC, or neural correlate of consciousness] which is activated in some way by XXX". Even if it was a detector of some kind, it might play a functional role ("big nose", "green eyes", "sexy") or indicate some correlation ("like Aunty Flo", "seen on TV"). But Koch seems to be a true believer. In response to one question, he railed against "holistic" and "emergent" positions, or theories based on "patterns". He espoused "specificity", which for him seems to go down to the level of the single neuron. Unconvincing.

CEC - pulling it all together

I tried real-time blogging at last weekend's CEC (Customer Engineering Conference), using my Treo 650, but without a decent blog tool it wasn't really practical. I found myself wrestling with the web interface to MovableType rather than listening to the speakers - bad idea.

So here are my collected notes from CEC (slightly edited, definitely selective), followed by a few closing thoughts.

SATURDAY MORNING

One of the great traditions of CEC is the collection of video clips produced by various geo and functional orgs. It would be invidious to pick one as best, but the French piece - a Ken doll scaling the heights of a server to fix it, and earning the fulsome thanks of Barbie and her friends - got most applause. (But NZ had the best lip-sync.) And US PTS nailed the "piggybacking" joke perfectly. Best music (including alpenhorn) from Switzerland.

Next, Jim Baty & Hal Stern. Moving to utility model, refactoring business. Feels like it's 1995 - tectonic shift again. Key messages: Technology is cultural. Addressing the PE (principal engineer) role - align with DE model. Community is key - blogging, BOFs. At CEC: Engage - act - share. When you go home: Communicate - train - improve.

Bob MacRitchie - EVP GSO: Described evolution of sales model. Review progress of Project Genesis [reorg of sales, professional services, and field engineering launched 12 months ago]. Simplify, flatten, empower org. (I'd missed that the US sales headquarters is moving to Boston - most of our US sales are east of the Mississippi.)

Marissa Peterson - services: services revenue & gross margin are improving significantly

Jonathan Schwartz - who never uses sports metaphors - appears in a Dallas Mavericks shirt.

How do we grow? Sell more to existing customers, or steal other people's customers.

What's changed over 3 years?

• Sparc vs. Itanium
• Solaris
• Storage revival - 6920
• x86 - now #1 Opteron seller, more coming
• JES
• Utility computing & grid (compare with IBM OnDemand fiasco)
• Java on devices

In response to Q&A:

• How come the OSS community is never satisfied with Sun, while IBM can do no wrong? The GPL people will never be happy, but they're a minority. Second, we're going to open source everything - JES, N1, etcetera - and if IBM won't opensource WebSphere or Tivoli, they're going to be left behind.
• OSS grows revenue. The key is developers, and they have no money. (Jonathan has only one button on his blog - Download NetBeans)
• What about N1? The technology in N1 was right on; our mistake was in overestimating the readiness of existing data centers to buy in. They don't call them "brownfield sites" for nothing. On the other hand, the N1 technology is going to be critical to successfully creating a utility computing business

Greg Papadopoulos, CTO (via video): Computing becomes a commodity, but (network scale) computer systems aren't. Consequences: operational concerns dominate, scale matters.

Robert Youngjohns - utility grid: What we've done, where we're going. Great presentation - more material at the Sun Grid page.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

SOA and Jini - Tom Barratt & Larry Mitchell: Nothing unfamiliar, just wanted to see how people were presenting - and reacting to - SOA and Jini. Basic background, ray-tracing demo. Excellent discussion, good questions, lot of interest.

N1 SPS/SJS App Server - David Ogren: Talking about AppServer 8.1 + N1SPS 5.0. We got what David called the "Fire and Brimstone" to "Nirvana" presentation... Plus a nice demo.

InstallFest and Demo Room: Lots of cool stuff in the demo room. Re-installed Solaris 10 on my Ferrari from the latest flash archive.

SUNDAY MORNING

John Loicano, SW EVP: Big emphasis on Solaris, tools, restructuring JES Suites (especially Identity Management with Identity Auditor) Tag-team with Juan Soto (SW CTO & MktDev) for a deep dive on leading with SW for opening new customers. Emphasized importance of Netbeans vs. Eclipse. (Netbeans nailed all the recent tools awards.) Impressive performance numbers on the new TCP stack. Great demos of Solaris 10 Predictive Self-Healing and Identity Auditor.

Mark Canepa - network storage: Data management is more than storage.... Industry survey, strategy, product overview. Nice discussion of synergy between Solaris 10 zones and 6920 virtualization. Head-to-head comparison against EMC. Plea for help in improving remote monitoring connectivity. Java Storage System - not a technology, but a JES-style busness model. [The idea is interesting; I'm not crazy about the name.]

John Fowler & Andy Bechtolsheim: network systems: John summarized NSG history & progress. Stunning benchmark numbers, unveiled Galaxy: 8 socket (16-way, with dual cores) in new 4U packaging. BIG fans. The dual cores are coming very soon - well ahead of Intel. Full product line from 1U 2 sockets up to 4U 8 socket. Also blades - but no compromise in performance. Blades will support virtualized SAN port sharing, will save huge dollars. (Low cost, low speed blades aren't cost-effective because of software licensing costs.) Will mix-and-match AMD and SPARC blades. Box design is dramatically future-proofed. Also mgmt sw and Nauticus (N2000) switches.Many early sales have been driven by customer solution and Blueprint sales. Seed units work well. Challenge: every sale is an audition. We can sell the boxes, need to make sure service will be able to meet the challenge.

David Yen, scalable systems EVP: What's the difference between NSG and SSG? Ultimately, competence in system packaging vs. competence in silicon. SPARC roadmaps. Lots of interesting stuff: I wish he'd skipped the umpteenth repetition of "how chip-level multithreading works" to spend more time on the new material. Oh, well.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Real World Cluster Grids - Tony Kay: Disambiguating "grid", all the way back to Foster & Kesselman. Important to match language with customer expectation - we say grid, they (may) say cluster, for example. Detailed discussions of HPC grids, especially oil & gas biz. Importance (or not) of various technologies: OGSA, Globus; cluster, MPI libs, network fabrics, file systems, specialized protocol stacks. Had a chance to talk to my former SunLabs colleague Bruce Daniels who's now in PS.

ZFS - Nolen Hayden: (Jeff Bonwick was sick: his director subbed for him.) Interesting to hear the issues that were uppermost in the minds of the customer-facing engineers.

Grids for Financial Services - Alec Muffett: Intensely, relentlessly, and amusingly pragmatic and iconoclastic. But you knew that.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• An excellent conference - kudos to Hal Stern and Jim Baty, and their team.
• I really regret that I had to miss the Monday morning session, especially Scott's talk.
• While I understand the traditional focus on the field engineering organization, I really think that CEC has turned into something that speaks to all of engineering. How we could achieve this while preserving the value to the field I have no idea....
• The openness of the whole event was remarkable. At lunch on Saturday, I asked Hal whether it was all bloggable. "Absolutely!" he said.

Consciousness 2005

This afternoon I'm heading over to the Harvard Medical School in Longwood to attend a symposium exploring the neuroscientific and philosphical aspects of Consciousness. The speakers are Dan Dennett from Tufts (my PhilOfMind prof), Patrick Haggard from UCL, Ned Block of NYU, and Chris Koch from CalTech. I've read enough of Dennett, Block and Koch to know that they're pretty far apart on many issues, so it should be "stimulating"!