Geoff Arnold

Blog meme: five people you'd like to blog with

Over at total information awareness I encountered a new blog meme: name five people you'd like to blog with. I interpret this as "name five people, living or dead, whose blogs you'd like to read and link to"; only a supreme egotist would expect mutual blogrolling from a superstar. Anyway, here are my five, avoiding the obvious choices like Einstein, Mark Twain and Ben Franklin:

• Walt Whitman

• Erasmus

• William James

• René Descartes

• Richard Feynman

Hopefully these choices are self-explanatory. My guiding principle is that of the 17th century English diarist, John Evelyn: Omnia explorate; meliora retinete (‘explore everything; keep the best’).

The blogs where I read about this said something about "tagging" other bloggers, but that seems inconsistent with the spirit of blogging. Memes spread if they deserve to. Let's see if this one does. Your turn. (However, if I were tagging, I'd choose Terry, Alec Muffett, and Jonathan Schwartz.)

Congratulations Chelsea

I took a few minutes this afternoon to watch the culmination of a great season for Chelsea FC: defeating Bolton 2-0: "Chelsea sealed their first championship for 50 years with victory at Bolton. Frank Lampard struck twice in the second half as manager Jose Mourinho added the Premiership to the Carling Cup in his first season in charge." I watched all of the second half of the match, and I thought that both Lampard's goals were delightful. I'm not particularly a Chelsea fan (in fact I'm not a dedicated supporter of any one team: I'll cheer for Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool - sorry, Steve), but Chelsea's championship victory is very well-deserved.

Selective quotation

As I was finishing up my last blog entry, I decided to link the final word to Pastor Niemöller's famous "First they came..." quotation. And I stumbled across a page on Niemöller at Liverpool Community College which not only gives the quotation but points out the revealing way in which people have misquoted it over the years - not just casually, but in speeches, and even in memorial inscriptions.

Everbody loves to quote Martin Niemöller’s lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust: 'First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.'

But interestingly, people use the quotation to imply different meanings – even altering it to suit their purpose. When Time magazine used the quotation, they moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats. American Vice-President Al Gore likes to quote the lines, but drops the trade unionists for good measure. Gore and Time also added Roman Catholics, who weren't on Niemöller's list at all. In the heavily Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed on its Holocaust memorial. The US Holocaust Museum drops the Communists but not the Social Democrats; other versions have added homosexuals.

What could make Niemöller's point more eloquently than this selectivity? UPDATE Wikipedia gives the original German text and some of the variations.

Establishment clause? Never heard of it

Here's a press release from the mayor of Lebanon, Tennessee. Apparently we should "regardless of religion... come together as Christians". Note also that "tolerance" is singled out as evil....

"Man has achieved highs and suffered lows during our history of struggling with the wiles of Satan in Satan's quest for our souls.... When our only recourse was to have a savior, God sent us Jesus....tolerance by Christians has caused our nation to slide further and further away from God.... Let us call upon the Lord together by gathering on the National Day of Prayer.... We do this when we, regardless of religion, sing and pray together calling upon God to intervene and forgive our sin and heal our land. For one hour, surely we can leave the signs on the buildings and come together as Christians"

Coincidentally, I read that "cheerful piece of religious propaganda", as Andrew Sullivan calls it, just after I'd finished an article which provided the perfect context for it. In the May 2005 edition of Harper's Magazine, there's a piece by Chris Hedges called "Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters". After a thoroughly depressing account of the annual convention of the NRB, he concludes with a personal recollection:

"I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the 'Christian fascists'. He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance."

Exactly. Today, Lebanon, Tennessee and Colorado Springs. Tomorrow?

(All links and emphases are mine.)

Tiger Mail

The new email client in Tiger is... frustrating, but promising.

Thumbs down for the lack of keyboard accelerators, the weird toolbar icons (which totally violate Apple's own UI guidelines), the pale blue folder panel, and the funky animation when you choose a message from a set of search results.

Thumbs up for "Smart Folders", and the way they interact with the rules-based filing and filtering. A smart folder is like the smart playlists in iTunes: the contents of the folder are defined by an arbitrarily complex predicate.

I've defined two smart folders: ALL-UNREAD, and UNREAD-4-ME. (I'd like to colour-code them, but no....) The ALL-UNREAD folder contains all unread messages. UNREAD-4-ME contains those unread messages in which "Any recipient" contains "geoff". (I wanted to define it based on the "To:" header only, but no....)

For example: when a new message arrives from my boss, Samir, addressed to me, my rules cause it to be filed in the folder "Active/G2". The unread count for that folder is displayed in the folder panel. In addition, the message satisfies the criteria for both of my smart folders, so it will show up in both of them. Of course, as soon as I read the message it will disappear from those smart folders. On the other hand, the unending stream of messages on the "mac-users" and "solx86-interest" aliases will be filed away and will only show up in the ALL-UNREAD folder.

The bottom line is that this lets me see at a glance how many new messages are addressed to me, and how many I'm getting by virtue of list membership. If I'm in a hurry, I can simply scan the UNREAD-4-ME folder, and I can do this using just the space bar and delete key.

One song?

So I've got one free iTunes song from Apple. What should I get?

A quick summary of the first few hours with Tiger

I'm not going to comment on all of the new features, nor the changes to the GUI. These have been copiously documented all over the place. I particularly recommend John Siracusa's extraordinarily detailed writeup in Ars Technica. No, in this piece I'm just going to list the problems I've encountered with Tiger, in the hope that it may help a few others.

• I've already mentioned the first-time conversion issue for Mail.app. Most of you won't have as much email as I do, but if you're low on disk space, watch out. The new format takes a lot more space; my ~/Library/Mail now takes 1.7GB.

• Before you run Mail (preferably before you upgrade), remove ALL of your Mail.app add-ins. I caught most of them, but I forgot the PGP bundle. This caused Mail to crash hard the first time I touched a PGP-encoded message. Delete everything in /Library/Mail/Bundles (and also ~/Library/Mail/Bundles). Until we get a fixed version, you can decrypt a message by selecting the whole body and then choosing Mail→Services→PGP→Decrypt-Verify. If the PGP app isn't running, you may have to try twice. UPDATE PGP has posted a final candidate for PGP Desktop 9.0 which is supposed to be Tiger-compatible. I'll try it shortly. (Since they have my email address from when I bought the product, couldn't they have notified me?) UPDATE: PGP Desktop 9.0 works just fine. The only problems were: (1) It wouldn't accept my PGP 8.0 license key - will this be a paid update? (2) By default, it tries to secure email connections and squawked about my IMAP/SSL connection to Sun. It shut up when I told it to ignore it.

• Bluetooth seems to work OK; I was able to send some photos from my Treo to the PowerBook. However I use Missing Sync to synchronize my Treo over Bluetooth, and this didn't work: Missing Sync crashed with EXC_BAD_ACCESS half-way through a sync, and the Missing Sync Crash Reporter (which I didn't know existed) also crashed, with a BREAKPOINT (so perhaps that was deliberate). UPDATE Mark/Space has a page on Tiger issues; I'll try their suggestions a little later - maybe install the beta 4.0.5.

• I've had several other crashes, including an EXC_BAD_ACCESS in the X11 window manager, /usr/X11R6/bin/quartz-wm and another in iPhoto. Neither of these was obviously repeatable. UPDATE: I've also managed to cause the Dashboard to reset a couple of times; while manipulating a widget, the dashboard disappears, and if I hit F12 I see all of the widgets restarting. Weird.

That's it for now. More as I find 'em.

P.S. A couple of interesting things. First, I seem to be getting much better WiFi signal strength - 90% in a location where I used to get 40%. Safari RSS is very polite: it knows about NetNewsWire and lets it handle RSS feeds. And the latest X11 beta of OpenOffice 2.0 (the "Francophone version") seems to run just fine.

Tiger launch

Some pics from my Treo [hence poor quality] of the crowd at the Apple store in Chestnut Hill (just west of Boston). I got there around 5:35, and got in line (first two pics). There were a couple of reporters and photographers buzzing around, asking people who had laptops to fetch them out and "do something". The guy in front of me had a Compaq tablet PC that he was trying not to draw attention to.... The doors opened on cue at 6:00. Everybody got a "Scratch and win" card: mine was worth a one-song iTunes download. After hanging out and chatting for a while, I left at 6:20, and the line was longer than ever (third pic).

Tiger (why be different?)

Just installed Tiger on my PowerBook. Naturally the first app that I run is Mail, right? After all, it's where I spent a significant amount of my life time. But before I can experience the new Mail UI, it tells me that it wants to convert my existing mail folders to the new format (one message per file, for ease of Spotlight indexing). Since I cache my entire IMAP hierarchy locally, together with archives, this means converting 53,322 messages; Mail estimates that it'll take just over an hour. So I think I'll let it get on with the job.

(Perhaps I'll drive over to the nearby Apple store for the launch party... see if I can score a T-shirt or something.)

Sullivan on religion and politics

Following his thoughtful piece in The New Republic on faith and conservatism, Andrew Sullivan has been responding to some of his critics. Here's the core of his argument, which has nothing to do with right and left, and everything to do with how we live together. Quoted at length, because it deserves it:

"A conservative of doubt" [or indeed any sincere person - c'mon, Andrew] "may believe that he has a very clear grasp on moral truth. He may believe he is in the grip of divine revelation. He may believe he is so brilliant that he has solved the riddle of truth for all time. But he is also aware that he is not the only one on the planet, that others may have equally certain views of the truth, and that turning politics into a place where one eternal truth is pitted against another is a recipe for civil war and social conflict. The result would be a religious war.... Avoiding this kind of conflict was the crux of the liberal state and of the American founding. It requires bracketing your own moral truth in favor of political peace and pluralism. This is a big sacrifice, as Hobbes and Locke and the American founders fully understood. It may even, as Nietzsche suspected, sap religious faith of much of its power. But they were prepared to make it."

False generalization

My colleague Tim Bray posted a revealing little rant today about the first flight of the Airbus A380: "On this page there is a frightful lie, namely that the plane will seat 555 passengers with lots of room for lounges and shopping and so on. This claim is oblivious to the facts that most airlines are losing money and most travelers are highly price-sensitive; ergo, this turkey will carry 800-plus suffering souls packed in like sardines"

Now I always thought that Tim, as a Canadian, would be less prone to the typically American habit of assuming that "US = world". If you check the current orders for the plane, you'll see that the vast majority of the customers are non-American companies* that are not losing money. Furthermore it's clear that many of the first A380s will be deployed on the routes between Europe and south-east Asia, which are much less price-sensitive than, say, BOS-SFO. Airlines like Singapore and Emirates aren't going to emulate Ryanair any time soon; they're going to compete on service and amenities. Just because the U.S. domestic airline industry is a shambles....

The bottom line: I expect that there will be plenty of 555 seater A380s with bars, shops, and casinos. Just not here, unfortunately.

* In fact the only U.S. customers for the A380 are FedEx and UPS; presumably their packages don't mind being "packed in like sardines"....

Keeping abortion rare

On one of the mailing lists to which I subscribe, the (semi-annual) abortion debate reared its head, and one participant asked, rather aggressively, why people wanted abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare". Why "rare", he wondered. If it's not immoral.... This pushed a button for me, and I replied as follows:

Because not all issues are simple dichotomies: yes/no, black/white, good/bad. One of the main causes of conflict around social issues, issues of conscience, moral issues in general is that there are some people (often the loudest) who refuse to recognize this.

Everybody except for the sociopath or the simpleton has personal opinions that conflict with one another. Aggregate people into a community, into a society, and the same will be true. People make trade-offs, choose the lesser of two evils, try to split the difference, whatever. Sometimes it's obvious, a zero-sum game, or a mutually-exclusive choice. Sometimes it's a question of log-rolling: I need your help on X, so I'll give up some of my Y. In all of these cases, reasonable people (i.e. not sociopaths, not simpletons) will recognize and feel regret for the fact that their choices are less than ideal.

All of these considerations play out in the case of abortion. The first person I ever knew who'd had an abortion was a fellow student at Essex, back in 1970. Abusive father, impoverished background, she'd performed miracles to get to university, to get away from home. Condom broke. (No, it wasn't me. I was just a neighbour and friend in need.) Her choice was simple: get a first trimester abortion, or (almost certainly) drop out of school. (Even carrying the kid to term and getting it adopted would have been too much - she was on the edge.) She chose to have the abortion, toughed it out. A few months later, a group of us dropped acid for the first time. I had a great trip, but she spent the whole 8 hours sobbing, mourning her lost baby. She got through school, got a good degree, married, raised a family, everything worked out. But OF COURSE I wish she hadn't had to go through the abortion. Contraception should be so ubiquitous and reliable that nobody has to face the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.

Anyway, I wanted to share that.

Table-top fusion? Hmmmm

Shades of Pons-Fleischmann, 1989, perhaps? Or possibly not...? Newsday is reporting UCLA Researchers Produce Nuclear Fusion: "In the latest attempt to create nuclear fusion under laboratory conditions, scientists reported they achieved it in a tabletop experiment that uses a strong electric field generated by a small crystal."

Coincidentally, last night I was finishing up the wonderful new book A Different Universe by Robert Lauglin. His comments on the cold fusion scandal:

The cold fusion example is dear to my heart because I was in an office with a nuclear expert when a journalist phoned him and asked him for comments on the [Pons-Fleischmann] paper. It was probably the closest I have ever come to dying of a heart attack, for we were both suffocating with laughter reading the pages, each funnier than the last, as they slowly crept out of the FAX machine.... [Their] claim made no sense at all quantum-mechanically. The energy scales of ordinary chemistry are not right for catalyzing nuclear reactions. But it turned out that enough people did not believe in quantum mechanics, were willing to distort its complexities to their own ends, or simply viewed its practitioners as con artists that the voices of reason went unheard.... [This led to work that] wound up squandering between $50 million and $100 million of taxpayer money.

In the present case the claims are more modest, but a healthy skepticism is definitely warranted.

PZ Myers on Intelligent Design

The biologist PZ Myers (who blogs as Pharyngula) has a beautifully written op-ed piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. After contrasting how real science is done, compared with the unproductive sniping of "the hodge-podge of lawyers, philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians, and rare scientists willing to abandon scientific principles found in the ID movement", and giving a quick tour of the state of evolutionary biology today, he concludes:

"ID is a sterile philosophy whose proponents spend their time lobbying school boards, producing nothing new, and with no promise of new ideas for the future. Asking our schools to teach ID is like suggesting that they offer instruction in buggy whip manufacture - it's a futile exercise that is going to leave the students unprepared for both college and the real world. As a university instructor, I want my incoming students to be well versed in the fundamentals of biology, which includes evolution but not the empty pseudoscience of ID, so that we can move quickly to the real excitement of modern biology...which is almost entirely informed by the concepts of evolution."

(Via Evolutionblog.)

Remind me not to fly Air India....

The BBC reports that Air India is buying 50 Boeing 777 and 787 airliners. Apparently the 777s will be "a bit special": Air India "also gained agreement from Boeing to include nine seats across in economy instead of the usual eight." Ouch. No thanks.

Thread convergence: Formula 1 and Jini

Regular readers will have noted that two of my greatest enthusiasms are for Formula 1 motor racing and Sun's Jini™ distributed computing technology. So one item in today's quarterly "customer wins" press release from Sun is particularly sweet:

"Magneti Marelli Holding (Italy) -- Sun designed, for Magneti Marelli Racing Department, a new system to manage telemetry data for Formula 1 teams in real time, using Java and Jini(TM)/Rio technology with the aim of achieving the required performance, to support multiple platforms, such as Linux and Windows, and to provide high availability and location transparency of components."

I don't think I'm supposed to identify individual teams, but every time you see a car with this logo, think Jini.

How to be an elementary school teacher in America

I always thought that teacher training included basic skills in coping with wayward children. I wasn't aware that it was acceptable practice to call the police to handcuff a 5-year old who's throwing a tantrum. (Note that two staff were present, including an assistant principal, and a camera was rolling.)

[And yes, I know that a teacher can easily get into trouble for simply trying to enforce discipline. But this cure is worse than the disease. Mad. All mad.]

NP: Hang on Little Tomato

Discovered in Provincetown last weekend: Hang on Little Tomato by Pink Martini. As an Amazon reviewer put it, "Somewhere between a 1930s Cuban dance orchestra, a classical chamber music ensemble, a Brazilian marching street band and Japanese film noir is the 12-piece Pink Martini." The title track from Pink Martini's last album, Sympathique, also shows up on another CD that I bought at the same time: Hotel Costes: Best of Costes, selected and mixed by Stéphane Pompougnac.

[However those who think I may be getting too deep into this "lounge" stuff can relax: the new albums by Porcupine Tree and Al Stewart are on the way....]

Go Alonso!

Time for the 4th round in the 2005 Formula One season: the San Marino Grand Prix. (San Marino? Relax: it's just an excuse for the Italians to get two races in the season.) Here in the US, most GPs are televised live on Speed TV, with pretty knowledgeable commentators who treat the audience as fellow enthusiasts. However four of the races are shown on network TV (CBS) instead. This was one of those, which meant (1) it was tape-delayed until 1PM EST, and (2) we had to put up with inane, hyperactive commentators who assume that the viewers know nothing about the sport. So turn the sound DOWN, and make sure you have a good book to read during the interminable commercial breaks.

Fortunately I managed to avoid hearing the results in advance, so I was able to enjoy the thrilling battle between Alonso and Michael Schumacher over the last few laps. The Ferrari was clearly quicker, but Alonso never put a wheel wrong, and he was able to make it four out of four for Renault. (Of course if Schumacher hadn't screwed up during qualifying, he'd have run away with the race.)

(As for my man David Coulthard, let's just say that it wasn't one of his best days....)

Ratzinger and sexual abuse by Catholic priests

From today's London Observer: Pope 'obstructed' sex abuse inquiry: "Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had 'obstructed justice' after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church's investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret.... It asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger... [and] was co-signed by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone who [said] 'In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offence of paedophilia is unfounded.'"

One might have reasonably expected that such a letter would emphasize that the bishops should cooperate fully with the police and prosecutors in accordance with local laws. Apparently some Vatican officials still have the medieval attitude that the church is above the law.

Got the car

I finally picked up my new Legacy GT this afternoon after a couple of scheduling hiccups. The Subaru dealership kindly sent a young salesman over to pick me up; unfortunately he managed to get lost in West Roxbury. I still need to get an inspection sticker on it; I'll do that first thing tomorrow.

The car is a dream. (N.b.: this is a stock photo, but it's the right colour.) Handling and acceleration are just awesome: it corners as though it's on rails. It's a 2.5L turbo powerplant giving 250 HP; I didn't notice much turbo lag under acceleration, but it did catch me out a couple of times when the turbo came on strong before I expected it. This should be easy to adjust to, though. The transmission is a 5 speed automatic, with Tiptronic-style manual override using switches on the steering wheel (or the regular shifter, if you prefer). The sound system is pretty neat, too, with an in-dash 6 CD changer. I "baptised" it with a mix CD that started with Faithless doing God is a DJ and included Sunscreem, Groove Armada, and a couple of tracks from Free by Libera.

We celebrated by driving over to Lucy's for dinner, taking a longer, twistier route than usual....

Penn & Teller & Dawkins

Check out this account by Teller of how he and Penn received the 2005 Richard Dawkins Award from the Atheist Alliance International. I've had dinner with Doug Hofstadter; next on the schedule are P&T. (Hey, I can dream.)

(Via Susan - thanks.)

The joy of minerals

This morning I took the T to Harvard Square¹ to meet Kate and Tom for lunch, after which we headed over to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Our immediate objective was the exhibit "Origins: Life's First 3 Billion Years", which is closing soon. (Good exhibit, a bit smaller than I expected, but worthwhile.) However it was my first visit to the museum, so we explored. The famous glass flowers were breath-taking; it was interesting that I found the extraordinary accuracy of tangled roots, stalks and leaves more impressive than petals and stamens. The dinosaur fossils were fun, as always, and the ornithological section was remarkably comprehensive.

But the exhibition that stole my heart was in the Mineralogical and Geological collection. I took quite a few pictures: here are some thumbnails:

¹ A very dangerous place: I discovered the philosophy books section of the Harvard Coop, which cost me over a hundred dollars. More on that anon.

A quiet day

Still on vacation. This morning I closed the deal on the new car: I decided to go with the Subaru Legacy GT after all. Reasons? I spent a few days observing my driving style (with as little observer-induced change as possible), read the latest Wired magazine (all about hybrids), chatted to a few Prius owners, and decided that I really didn't have the right driving style/temperament for the Prius. Plus I remembered the advantages of AWD on our icy driveway in the winter. And finally our local Subaru dealer cut me a really nice sub-invoice deal. So I'm picking up the car first thing on Friday. (Not tomorrow, because I'll be in Cambridge all day.)

I spent this (unseasonably warm) afternoon at Tufts, working in the library and then going to class. The end of the semester looms, along with the due date for the term paper and the final examination. Lots to think about. Later. For now, I'm relaxing at the end of the day, watching Newcastle vs. Manchester United, sipping a finger of single malt, and ripping the Claude Challe Nirvana Lounge 03 double CD into iTunes.

That loon

Here's that picture I took at Harwichport Harbor yesterday of what looks like a Common Loon (Gavia immer).¹ From the size of the bulge above the bill, it's probably a juvenile, less than a year old. This is actually cut out of a much larger image, which you can find here; even that copy is flattened a bit to get it under the 1MB limit I've set for uploads.

--
¹Back in England Loons are called "Divers"; the Common Loon is known as the Great Northern Diver. This reminds me of a wonderful series of books from my childhood, Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons; the final volume was Great Northern?

Down on the Cape

No blog entries recently, because we've been down on Cape Cod for a few days R&R. I had planned to blog using my Treo, but every time I went online I found myself overwhelmed by trackback blogspam that needed cleaning up. (I'm writing this from the PC in the clubhouse of the time-share.)

Just got back from dinner in Harwichport; a fish restaurant overlooking the harbour. After eating, we went for a walk around the dock, and I saw my first-ever loon. (At least the first close enough to photograph.) I'll post pics when I get home tomorrow.

Ignoring science at our peril

Many of Thomas Friedman's recent op-ed pieces for the NYT have been silly or superficial, but today he hit a home run with Bush Disarms, Unilaterally: "At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before... what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs. We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry.... we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism... Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million... the National Innovation Initiative was virtually ignored by the White House."

And the punch line:
"It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era."

Exactly. But what do you expect if you elect a know-nothing, born-again, failed oilman? And by the way: this blog piece was brought to you by way of the Internet, created with DARPA tax dollars. And don't you forget it.

Open source, closed repositories, and snake oil

Over in the Register, Andrew Orlowski has a fascinating article entitled Torvalds knifes Tridgell about another bizarre outburst by Linus Torvalds. This time it's all about BitKeeper, the source code repository system. "Torvalds uses the pay-for proprietary software to manage the Linux source code (obliging other kernel developers to follow suit), but last week its owner, Bitkeeper CEO Larry McVoy, yanked the license, pushing Torvalds to look for an alternative. He's now going to write his own. For this inconvenience, he blames [Andrew] Tridgell", the genius behind SAMBA (the technology which finally killed my old PC-NFS product).

And what was Tridgell's crime? He wanted to reverse-engineer the BitKeeper protocols so that Linux developers could browse the repository metadata. This sounds innocuous enough - after all, BitKeeper's own website says that "Read-only users (people browsing the source, tracking progress, doing builds, etc.) still need a license but there is no charge for that license.", so it's not a question of money. Clearly there is something big at stake - something so important that McVoy is prepared to forego the prestige of hosting the Linux kernel repositories. According to Andrew Orlowski, "McVoy was adamant: 'sorry, we're not in the business of helping you develop a competing product.'" So that's it? The key intellectual property is in the protocols? That seems odd.

I had two reactions to this piece. First, why on earth is the acknowledged flagship product of the FOSS world relying on a proprietary, closed source repository - particularly one run by a guy who clearly has no sympathy with FOSS, nor any understanding of the related business models? I would (naïvely) have thought that BitKeeper would want to hang on to the data and proliferate clients like crazy. (A famous LBJ quotation comes to mind.) And second, what is it that makes BitKeeper so wonderful? Let's check out their web site. Truth in advertising? You be the judge:

Hardware costs: BitKeeper does not have this problem [of scale] because of its distributed model.... This model means that the hardware costs can be spread over a set of inexpensive PCs rather than a $300,000 SMP machine. BitMover hosts the Linux kernel repositories for thousands of users on a single inexpensive PC.

Human costs: An administrator is the person who makes sure that the hardware and the software is working, the repositories are backed up, etc. The distributed nature of BitKeeper removes the need for such a person.

Wow. Thousands of users on a single PC. No administrators. How cool. No wonder Linus was impressed. [That's sarcasm, in case you didn't notice.] I think that in the long term we'll see that Andrew Tridgell has done the FOSS community a service, by provoking Linus and Larry into falling out. Hopefully the community can create a better - and truly open source - repository. However I wouldn't rely on Linus to create it - he doesn't seem to believe in open source any more....

HHGTTG - I have a bad feeling

Among the Things that aren't in the film:

• The second part of the Guide entry on Babel fish, about proving the non-existence of God
• Most of the Vogon poetry scene, including most of the poem itself
• Talking doors (they sigh, but they don't talk)
• Eddie singing 'You’ll Never Walk Alone'

I shall go and see the film, of course. But I'm prepared for the possibility that I won't enjoy it.

(Via Chris, who sounds almost as depressed as Marvin.)

UPDATE: Reading all of those HHGTTG quotations got me all fired up, so when I came home this evening I hunted around in the basement, found the old (1992) VHS tape of the television version of HHGTTG, and watched it straight through - all 192 minutes. I sipped a gin and tonic while I watched it, but decided to skip the rubber ducky. I feel much better now. :-)

It's snowing.

Enough. Please.

More Hofstadter

One thing that Doug Hofstadter mentioned in his lecture yesterday was that many conventional ideas about physicalism - strict supervenience, law-like causality between the "levels" - are likely to be plain wrong: it seems likely that higher-level systems can be remarkably insensitive to changes in their physical underpinnings. So even though it is true that minds are implemented in brains, and brains are biological structures composed of cells and molecules and atoms which obey the laws of physics, that doesn't mean that one can (or should) look for law-like relations between mental properties and microphysical properties.¹ Of course functionalists don't have any problem with this. The objections seem to come, on the one hand, from philosophers like David Chalmers who see this gap as a reason to toss physicalism overboard, and on the other hand from neuroscientists like Christof Koch who expect to be able to build their house of neurobiological cards all the way up to the top.

While on this subject, Hofstadter recommended a new book by the Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe - reinventing physics from the bottom down. I picked up a copy this lunchtime. From the fly-leaf:

The edges of science, we're told, lie in the first nanofraction of a second of the Universe's existence, or else in realms so small that they can't be glimpsed even by the most sophisticated experimental techniques. But we haven't reached the end of science, Laughlin argues-only the end of reductionist thinking. If we consider the world of emergent properties instead, suddenly the deepest mysteries are as close as the nearest ice cube or grain of salt. And he goes farther: the most fundamental laws of physics - such as Newton's laws of motion and quantum mechanics - are in fact emergent. They are properties of large assemblages of matter, and when their exactness is examined too closely, it vanishes into nothing.

I suspect that this book may turn out to be more provocative than rigorous, but that's OK.

[UPDATE: I've now read the first 6 chapters of the book. It's WONDERFUL!!! Thought-provoking, mind-bending, funny, profound.... I'll post a full review in a few days.]

¹ If this sounds poorly worded, blame me - this is my interpretation, not Douglas's exact words.

Douglas Hofstadter in town [UPDATED]

Douglas Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach and many other books) is in town this week. He gave a lecture to our Phil.of Mind class at Tufts entitled "What is it like to be a strange loop?", and he's talking at the Media Lab in MIT tomorrow.

As to the subject of the talk:
(1) Hofstadter remains fascinated (as he was in GEB) with the interaction of two ideas: feedback loops, and systemic (explanatory) levels. In GEB, you may remember, the strange - and unexpectedly stable - patterns generated by pointing a video camera at the screen displaying its output were a powerful example (and metaphor) for the way these ideas come together. Doug's about to repeat a number of those experiments: how will the fact that the low-level technology has changed from analog to digital affect them?
(2) My interpretation of "strange loops" is that Doug is talking about feedback loops that cross various kinds of boundaries: between the physical and the cognitive, between the outside world and the I-in-the-world (in terms of action and perception), and across minds (from one person to another).

After the lecture, a bunch of us went out for dinner with Dennett and Hofstadter. Among the faculty and students, was an old friend, the novelist and tech writerJohn Sundman. He and I worked together at Sun from 1986 until about 1989; John did most of the writing on the first release of PC-NFS, and managed the writing for the 386i workstation program.

[Apologies for the quality of the pictures - taken on my Treo 650 in very poor light.]

Great - now I'm really confused!

Went test driving cars today. First stop was a Toyota dealership a few miles south of us. Their website said they had a couple of 2005 Priuses in stock, but no... they had a pre-owned 2004 (whose owner had traded up to a 2005), they were expecting one from a cancelled order to arrive in a week ("if you'd like to put down a deposit"), and otherwise the delivery time was around a month. (Longer for red - 36% of the Prius deliveries are in silver, only 13% in red.)

But at least I could test drive the 2004. Very smooth, very comfortable. I was a bit tentative, in part because I wasn't sure what would feel different, but in the end I was very pleased. The system status screen is fascinating, and the sensation of everything shutting down when you stop is... different. Dealership experience? We got a generic car salesman, no overt pressure but trying to weave a web of commitment.

From there we went down to the Subaru dealership where Merry has bought two out of her last three cars. Her regular salesman wasn't there, but we worked with a young guy who was both an excellent salesman and a complete geek. (We spent almost as much time checking out his PSP and my Treo 650 as we did talking cars.) I was interested in the WRX, but he steered me to the new Legacy GT - the one with the 250 hp 2.5 litre turbo and a Tiptonic-style automatic with shift switches on the steering wheel. Man, that was a fast car! We drove around some nice sweeping backstreet curves and then onto I-95, where I got to check out the acceleration from 40 to 80 fast.... Unlike my tentative, experimental drive in the Prius, I got out of the Legacy with a big, silly grin all over my face. That was fun! (Thanks, Cody!)

So: two great cars, two very different experiences; about the same price. Both Car of the Year winners - the Prius in the US, the Legacy in Japan. Decisions, decisions. Anyway, there's no rush. Maybe I should test a Mini Cooper.

4th digital camera

I just acquired my fourth digital camera. I got my first in Washington DC many years ago, a relatively simple Kodak. I can't remember what the second was; I lost it on a business trip. The third was a Fuji FinePix which I eventually gave to my son. And the fourth is a Nikon Coolpix 5600.

I've never been a real photography geek; I've tended to buy cameras that do the job required as simply as possible. For digital cameras, I've had a simple rule: buy the best possible for under $300. The Nikon qualifies. It came with a free 128MB SD card, which I've swapped for the 1GB SD card in my Treo 650. This means that I have room for 790 pictures (5.1MP) or 21 minutes of 640x480 video (with sound). That should be enough. (Typical British understatement.)

Catching up (philosophy department)

A good week. First, a thoroughly satisafactory result on my mid-term, made even more so by the fact that it was my first bit of classwork in 30+ years. Dennett's class on Wednesday was about Kripke ("C-fibers and pain", modal logic, essentialism reborn), and it was one of those lovely "ah-ha!" experiences. The account of the historic 1971 Irvine summer school was priceless. Great fun.

Then my classmate Richard Dub pointed me at the very useful Online Papers in Philosophy site, and from there I found my way to Megan Wallace's' delightful website and her provocative ideas about fictionalism and "slingshots" (not to mention the very useful Wussy/BadAss criterion and the priceless Acutetarianism).

And finally this afternoon I took some vacation time (I've accumulated a bit too much - use it or lose it) and went to hear Dennett deliver the 2005 Harvard Review of Philosophy Lecture at Emerson Hall. Excellent turn-out - probably around 200. The subject was familar (to those in his class): "Philosophers, Zombies, and Feelings: The Illusions of 'First-Person' Approaches to Consciousness.". The Q&A afterwards showed how uncomfortable some people were with computational models of mind; how strong the need for human exceptionalism - or perhaps essentialism - is.

Quick blog: death penalty

In response to Ideology, American style, Alec weighed in with"ok, here's a poser for you and jeff: 'death penalty' - in your enlightened self-interest, or not?"

I find this an easy one. Setting aside the moral issues, which are not significant in the utilitarian calculus implied by enlightened self-interest, I find that there are three stances to be considered:

• As a general member of society, I find that the death penalty is uneconomic (wastes my taxes), and offers no added societal protection (crime statistics). Since all human systems seem to be fallible, mechanisms for correction should be built in; the death penalty fails this test. It demonstrably distorts the policing and legal systems in countries where it is used, especially "equal protection" provisions. It impedes police work, since convicted criminals are likely to withhold information on additional crimes for fear of execution.
• As a victim, or someone close to a victim of a capital crime, the death penalty offers me nothing but crude revenge. It will not restore the dead to life, or offer practical compensation. Revenge seems an inequitable basis on which to design a legal system. For example, some victims' families might object to the death penalty: should the penalty depend on the whim of each family? In any case, enlightened self-interest is not generally assumed to include purely visceral satisfaction.
• The final stance to be considered is if I, or someone close to me, were accused of a capital crime. (Even if I believe myself incapable of such a crime, I must consider the possibility of a wrongful accusation.) In all cases, the rational thing for me to do is to oppose capital punishment. Even if I were in fact guilty, and believed that I deserved the death penalty, I could always kill myself. I have no reasonable basis for imposing this preference on others who might be guilty, and none for imposing it on those wrongly accused.

Ideology, American style

Earlier today, my colleague Jeff Kesselman posted a piece in which he despaired of the myopia of many Americans; of the way in which, at best, they can't see where their interests lie, and at worst actively work against them. He wrote:

Not long ago I had someone look at me in all seriousness and say, "You don't have kids. Why on earth do you want to pay for public schools?" Now there are all kinds of good reasons for having top quality schools. Reasons in my self-interest having to do with the health of the American economy, our ability to globally compete, and the ability of the masses to do any kind of justice to this thing we call democracy. For this person though I realized a more down to earth explanation was going to be necessary and I simply said, "If your kid has a good job, he won't steal my stereo."

On reading this, I was reminded of the fascinating piece in this month's Atlantic magazine: the first in a series of articles by Bernard-Henri Lévy entitled In the Footsteps of Tocqueville. I'm going to quote at greater length than usual, because the online copy is for subscribers only; I encourage you to pick up a print edition. Here he writes about visiting the Republican Convention in New York last summer; the emphasis is mine:

These people who say 'values matter more'; these activists for whom the struggle against Darwin is a sacred cause that should be argued in the schools; this blue-collar man from Buffalo to whom I explain that the promise of the current president to reduce federal taxes will have the automatic effect of impoverishing his native city even more, who replies that he couldn't care less, because what matters to him is the problem posed by inflation in a quasi-Soviet state. These are men and women who are ready to let the questions that affect them most directly take second place to matters of principle that — in the case, for instance, of the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts — do not have, and never will have, any effect on their concrete existence. Aren't they reacting as ideologues would, according to criteria that have to be called ideological?... What's the matter with Kansas? Since when has politics stopped obeying the honest calculation of self-interest and personal ambition? How can knowledgeable, reasonable, pragmatic men work for their own servitude, thinking they're struggling for their freedom? That, Thomas Frank, is what is called ideology. That is precisely the mechanism that La Boétie and Karl Marx described in Europe, which we, alas, have experienced only too often. Now it's your turn, friends. And as we say in France, À votre santé!—To your very good health!

What kind of person could think that a couple of gay men getting married in Provincetown, MA, was more important than putting books in the school library and cops on the streets? The same species that can't understand why a childless man would support public education, I guess.

To Prius or not to Prius....

I'm thinking of replacing my trusty Mercury Cougar (I've had it 7 years), and I've been doing some preliminary research. While I've always had a soft spot for the Subaru WRX, and the Scion tC looks like an amazing value, and the Mini Cooper is... well, a Mini, the geek in me keeps coming back to the Toyota Prius. Any Prius owner care to supplement (or contradict) the ecstatic opinions of the motoring press? Does that amazing powerplant work as well as they say?

(Of course the fact that my latest fill-up was at $2.29 a gallon has nothing to do with my thinking. It's the Prius's optional Bluetooth support....!)

Arithmetically challenged Google?

According to the Guardian: "Google is celebrating the first birthday of its free email service Gmail by doubling users' capacity to two gigabytes, with a promise to boost its email storage further in future." Sounds good. But why does my Gmail page say that I have only 1479MB? Am I not worthy?:

UPDATE: Thanks to Robin and Mark for pointing out that Google is doling out the additional space a few megabytes at a time. I'm now up to 1540 MB, and there's a cute graphic on the Gmail login page that explains what's going on. To infinity and beyond, I guess.....

The angels cheer: "They killed Kenny!"

No, I don't normally watch "South Park". I'm not sure why - we used to have an awesome "South Park" pinball machine here in the Labs. Anyway, the buzz was that yesterday's "South Park" was going to be a very special one - and it was. Andrew Leonard tells all over at Salon: "But wait! Kenny isn't dead! Doctors manage to resuscitate him! With a feeding tube! He's in a 'persistent vegetative state.' Heaven is doomed!... The feeding tube is pulled. 'They killed Kenny,' the angels cheer! Heaven is saved, as Kenny, using a gold-plated PSP given to him by Peter, defeats the forces of Satan."

Brilliant. Tasteless? Sure, but it's a breath of fresh air after the recent media circus.

And coincidentally Kenny popped up again today, over at Boing Boing: trench art from Iraq. (See thumbnail.) Full size pic at Flickr.