Geoff Arnold

What I love about the web

I was searching LinkedIn, idly looking for network connections in the UK, and at fiona robyn's blog A Small Stone I found: "No time for being today - too busy doing." A sobering reminder, or a celebration? It's hard to know. Being or doing. To be is to do. To do is to be.

Ten commandments that are worthy of respect

With all this blather about if and when it is proper to display the (Biblical) "10 Commandments" (but which version? there are so many), it's worth remembering that the "Ten Commandments" which truly underpin our system of ethics, democracy, and law come from a very different source. The commandments in question are those of Solon the Athenian. He lived from 638 BCE to 558 BCE (approximately), and in 594 BCE he was chosen to draw up the first written civil constitution, something that no prophet or rabbi did. Solon is the founder of democracy as we know it, and his commandments have stood the test of time. They don't include prescriptions that apply only to one small sect, nor do they include ideas (such as sabbath-keeping and proscribing graven images) which few acknowledge and vanishingly few actually pay any attention to. The only reference to religion is the good advice to be appropriately respectful of everybody's deities:

1. Trust good character more than promises.
2. Do not speak falsely.
3. Do good things.
4. Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.
5. Learn to obey before you command.
6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.
7. Make reason your supreme commander.
8. Do not associate with people who do bad things.
9. Honor the gods.
10. Have regard for your parents.

See Richard Carrier's The Real Ten Commandments for the whole story - including Solon's claim to fame as the author of the RKBA! If any set of ancient commandments deserve a place in our courtrooms, it is those of Solon.

Were there subtitles?

Pressure of work meant that I missed Bush's televised speech on Iraq, so I was forced to rely on the transcript and the pronouncements of the pundits to determine what he said. And that's a pity, because I'm sure I missed something - a subtitle, or an ad-lib that wasn't captured in the transcript. How else can one explain the following juxtaposition?

First, Bush promised that "If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job." So the troop levels are a matter of military judgment, right? And since quite a few officers have been saying that they don't have enough troops....

But wait. The President then said "Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever – when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave." Huh? So now we can't send more troops because that would undermine the strategy and send the wrong message? So it's a political decision then.

Well, no. Maybe Bush realized that he was speaking in front of a military audience, because he later said, "As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters – the sober judgment of our military leaders."

So which is it? Did they explain in the subtitles that I wasn't there to see? Or did the President manage to flip and then flop in the course of a single speech? Inquiring minds, etcetera...

How far we've come

Earlier today, I posted a little piece about a classic children's book on computing. When I got home, I found in my inbox an announcement of the latest edition of The Edge. It begins with a simple and thought-provoking assertion:

One aspect of our culture that is no longer open to question is that the most significant developments in the sciences today (i.e. those that affect the lives of everybody on the planet) are about, informed by, or implemented through advances in software and computation.

The piece that follows is a conversation with J. Craig Venter, Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks on biocomputation. It's fascinating as always. The Edge has become essential reading; I highly recommend it. In the meantime, I've just re-read the Ladybird book on computers from 34 years ago. Hmmm.

Michael Shermer channels the Intelligent Designer

Check out Michael Shermer's delightful creation myth parody over at the Huffington Post: all the way from:

"In the beginning - specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon - out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

to a satisfying conclusion:

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.

The scary thing is that there are people out there that might take it seriously....

How It Works...The Computer

Someone has scanned in all the pages of the 1971 and 1979 editions of the Ladybird book How It Works...The Computer. This is wonderful stuff. I remember using the 1971 edition to explain to relatives (elderly, young, and just plain confused) what it was that I did for a living; I also bought the 1979 edition for my son, Chris, who was five at the time (and a voracious reader). Both pictures and text are priceless.

(Via Boing-Boing.)

Reality TV

According to today's Guardian:

Channel 4 has teamed up with the award-winning film director Michael Winterbottom to make a docu-drama about three British Muslims who were incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay as "enemy combatants". The Road to Guantánamo will tell the story of the so-called "Tipton Three", who were released without charge from the US government's Camp X-Ray prison last spring after two years in captivity.

(I wonder if it will be shown on US TV? PBS seems increasingly unlikely; maybe HBO.)

Sad songs say so much

From Friday's Guardian Review, "Tom Reynolds, author of I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard... offers his top 25 miserable tracks." A classic list, including such ghastly dirges as Tell Laura I Love Her and Seasons in the Sun, as well as Bobby Goldsboro's excruciating Honey:

The world's wordiest dead wife song, Honey is jammed full of blooming flowers, puffy clouds, singing robins, planted trees, and a puppy, all of which just make you want to swallow a hand grenade. The narrator mourns Honey, his deceased spouse, while condescendingly describing her as kinda dumb and kinda smart. If you feel inclined to listen to Honey, please drink heavily and then bale out after Honey dents the car. Otherwise, you'll get hit with angels carrying Honey away and clouds crying on flower beds. You won't make it out with your senses intact. It is that bad.

(Via When Last We Left Our Intrepid Heroine... in Iraq.)

Somewhere, an Apple engineering manager is committing seppuku....

I just installed the latest version of Apple's iTunes on my PowerBook, along with an updater for the software on my iPod. Perhaps I should have read my horoscope first, or consulted the i ching. Whatever the reason, when I started iTunes it showed me an empty library, rather than the 18GB of music that I have, and it also warned me that my iPod was associated with a different library, and did I want to erase it and copy my new (empty) library? Aargh! No, cancel, quit, unplug iPod, back away from the keyboard really slowly.....

From browsing the Discussions section of Apple's support web, it seems that a number of us have had this problem with iTunes 4.9. (See, for instance, the thread entitled "iTunes 4.9 - lost library - please help".) The only remedy seems to be to back up the old Library files (before iTunes can mess with them), let iTunes build a new library, and then import all of the existing music. This requires that you have enough space for two copies of all your data, so I'll have to wait until I can get home to use a FireWire drive. (I only have 7GB of free space on my 60GB PowerBook.) And you'll also wind up losing all of your playlists, ratings, and "last played" information, which is a huge pain.

UPDATE: A Mac user called Dave Garrett just posted the following workaround:
1. Open your Music folder/iTunes folder/Previous iTunes Libraries folder
2. Re-name the file named iTunes 4 Music Library to iTunes Library
3. Drag your newly named file iTunes Library into your iTunes folder, replacing the iTunes Library that the new iTunes had created.
4. Voila.

Seems to work for me.

So long, 14th Amendment! Welcome to Scalia's two-tier USA

Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin discusses Scalia's uncompromising dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU, the courtroom 10 commandments case:

Scalia forthrightly explains that the Establishment Clause is not about preserving neutrality between religion and non-religion. It is not even about neutrality among religions. Rather, it requires neutrality among monotheistic religions that believe in a personal God who cares about and who intervenes in the affairs of humankind, and in particular, among Christianity (and its various sects), Judaism, and Islam.

Quite apart from its viciously divisive tone, Scalia's argument displays remarkable ignorance. For example, he asserts that "With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists". Yet the phrase "believers in unconcerned deities" clearly describes deists, a category that included many of the framers of the Constitution.

Balkin's analysis is much more detailed than my brief note. Among other things, he dissects the curious pretzel logic that Scalia employs in including Jews and Moslems. The (scathing) bottom line: "Justice Scalia's tradition of establishment of monotheism is, like so many other traditions, an invented tradition which he has made up to produce an outcome that he politically prefers."

Highly recommended.

Santorum on Catholic clergy sex abuse: it's all because of liberals....

In his attempt to beat out Karl Rove for the title of Most Shameless Fabricator of Guilt by Association, Senator Rick Santorum explains the origins of child molestation by Roman Catholic priests in Catholic Online: "It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning 'private' moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."

(Via Sully. But Josh thinks Santorum first said this back in 2002.)

UPDATE: Sullivan received a great email from a reader in the Republic of Ireland which emphasizes the sheer stupidity of Santorum's attempt to link priestly pedophilia with liberalism:

99% of schools were Catholic, 90% of the population were weekly mass goers and monthly confession was the norm for the majority. Divorce was banned by the constitution. There was no “plague of cultural liberalism”; there was no liberalism at all! It was almost a perfect Catholic State. Yet the physical and sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy was rampant. Indeed it has been the exposure of these crimes that has revolutionized Irish society in the course of 10 years.

Visualising chaos

Over at whitelabel.org there's a brilliant analysis of the state of the London Underground: "In Britain, where trains are so routinely late that punctuality has been redefined as 'within 20 minutes of scheduled time' and even then only around 80% can make it, the people have forgotten that it doesn't have to be this way, and that in the rest of world, including the really poor parts, it just isn't."

The writer grabbed the realtime disruption maps published by TfL and turned them into a three minute Quicktime movie. Tufte would be proud (I think).

While I sympathize with the author, I think he needs to get out more. The riders of the T in Boston would kill for any kind of information like that provided by TfL; disruption is a way of life over here.

(Via Boing-boing, of course.)

Sorted...

be sorted @ nimbo.net

[Via MissNewOrleans, via Susan.]

The world is watching

Now here's an interesting idea: a website devoted to foreign media coverage of the U.S.A. It includes English language original material as well as translated stories. I think I'm going to add WatchingAmerica's RSS feed to those that I monitor via NetNewsWire.

On the guilty pleasure of reading a really bad book

This is going to be long - skip it if you're in a hurry.

Today I was at Sun's Santa Clara campus for an all day meeting of the DEs. We finished up on time, just after 5pm. The last session had left me feeling exhausted: a 20 minute presentation stretched to a relentless 40 minutes, followed by a complicated debate. I felt like a drink and some food (my body is still pretending that it's on East Coast time), but 5:30 seemed a bit early to eat. I therefore decided to drive over to the nearby Micro Center store and do what geeks do: ogle hardware and software. There's a passable Mexican restaurant in the same plaza (the Mexicali Grill), and I thought I might find a book or magazine to read over dinner.

The store was very quiet, and the few customers seemed to be lowering their voices as if they were in a library. I found nothing of interest in the Mac section, or the PDA accessories, or the magazines, or even the discount DVDs. (I wonder who buys those boxed collections of 20 horror movies from the 1950s, not to mention The Neverending Story Volume 2.) And so I made my way to the book section.

It just so happens that I've been discussing the possibility of doing some work with Sun's Network Storage Division, the group that sells such products as the StorEdge 9990 array and the QFS file system software. I'm quite familiar with our products, and I used to work on distributed file system software such as PC-NFS, but there are parts of the storage business that I know little about. So when I came across a large book about storage systems, I started browsing it. The table of contents looked promising. I checked the price: $5.99, reduced from around $50. I put this down to overstocking, bought a copy, and went off to have dinner and a bit of a read.

By the time I'd finished my salad, and a Silver Bullet margarita, I realized that I had acquired a Really Bad Book. It was weird: the organization was plausible, and by speed-reading I could sustain the illusion that it more or less flowed and made sense. But if I slowed down and looked carefully at individual sentences, they were gibberish: ungrammatical, rambling, cliché-ridden, and full of non-sequiturs. At first it was annoying, but by the time I reached the end of the first chapter it had become simply hilarious. Some examples, with original punctuation:

"The corollary, or trade-off to this condition, is the economics of speed and capacity to price."

"Within the SAN, these operations become more logical and have to coexist with other servers that share the fabric network and devices connected."

"Finally, as the sophistication of the centralized mainframe computers was downsized, the capability to house larger and larger databases demanded the deployment of the database server."

It goes on and on like that. Verb agreement is a matter of happenstance; dereferencing a pronoun should only be attempted by trained professionals. At times we seem to enter an Alice in Wonderland world of topsy turvy relationships:

"The most critical element of performance for a business application is its availability to its own data."

And sometimes a sentence seems to have been assembled by a surrealist playing with magnetic fridge poetry pieces; here's a final, glorious example.

"Unless the hardware and firmware release levels are inventoried and tracked in conjunction with the network, the NAS systems become unassociated storage servers unbound to the confines of the network in which they operate."

I cannot shake off the image of a row of NFS servers growing large, colourful wings and fluttering away like butterflies towards the setting sun - unbound, free of the confines of the network!! Excelsior!!!

[I've done my best not to identify this book or its author. If you figure it out, please keep quiet. There's no point in stirring the pot.]

MIT blog survey

Evolving evolution

In discussing Pigliucci's review of Jablonka and Lamb's controversial book Evolution in Four Dimensions, Jason Rosenhouse (a.k.a. Evolutionblog) makes a key point that it's easy to overlook:

...the problem facing evolutionary biologists is never 'How could bit of anatomy X possibly have evolved naturally?' Rather, the question is 'Of the many possible mechanisms by which this system might have evolved, which is the correct one?' It seems that scientists are constantly discovering new mechanisms for explaining evolution....

Of course, any talk of fiddling with the neo-Darwinian synthesis tends to make the hearts of creationists go pitter pat. They know that any suggestion that the nineteen fifties version of evolution may have been incomplete can be spun into a statement that evolution is dying. They will conveniently ignore the fact that the discoveries that are persuading scientists of the incompleteness of the original synthesis are all in the direction of making evolutionary change easier, not harder, to explain.

[Emphasis added.]

Dramatic changes

This morning I had breakfast at a Hobee's in Mountain View. When I came out of the restaurant, I noticed that there was a Supercuts next door, and that it had just opened. On a whim, I went in for a haircut. Maybe it was the breakfast burrito I'd just eaten; perhaps it was a side effect of the Flexeril I've been taking for a pinched nerve in my leg. Whatever the reason, I threw caution to the winds. Not only is the ponytail gone; I'm pretty sure that this is the shortest my hair has been in at least 20 years....

[UPDATED: In response to requests, I've added a crude phonecam pic. The beard's a bit fluffy around the edges; I won't be able to trim it properly until I get home.]

Tim puts the U.S. GP into perspective

Molesworth channeling Raymond Baxter, as it were: "nobody in the crowd was really noticing a number of heated exchanges in the sand pits. we're english, we don't notice heated exchanges... out of the corner of my eye, I could see bernadette ecclescake and baxter moselyshoals striding into the maths room, waving their arms in the air and saying something about shoe shops". Sorted.

Memo to self: always read and re-read your itinerary...

I'm in Silicon Valley this week for a variety of meetings. I flew in this morning, and I'll be returning on the Friday night red-eye. Fortunately I had plenty of advance warning about this trip, so I was able to book window seats (F westbound, A eastbound) before the flight filled up - which it did. There was a large talkative guy in the middle seat next to me, and a shrill spread-sheet wizard behind me; thank goodness for my iPod with Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I dozed to Buddha Bar for the first half of the flight, then made notes for one of my Tuesday meetings on my Treo (attracting frustrated glares from the middle seat guy who was wrestling with his laptop). We got a smooth routing, and with minimal headwinds and light traffic we arrived 35 minutes ahead of schedule.

Having got in so early, I was all set to grab my bags*, jump in my rental car, and scoot down 101 to Sun's Menlo Park campus in time to grab a bite to eat before my first meeting. I'd requested an Avis car, and I'm a member of their Rapid Rental program, so it should have been a no-brainer. Alas, no.

As I rode the Air Train to the SFO Rental Car Center, I re-read my itinerary. What's this? Budget Rent A Car: Car pickup: San Francisco, CA. And I'm not a member of Budget's (somewhat anemic) express program. Cursing our travel agency, as well as myself for not catching this, I got into the long line at the Budget desk to rent a car the old fashioned way. It was 45 minutes before I was on my way. So much for lunch....

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* I always check my bag - a probably vain effort to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

No point

Normally I would be posting my thoughts about the latest Formula 1 race: the U. S. Grand Prix, which was scheduled to be run today at Indianapolis. However since what actually happened does not deserve to be called a race, I don't think I have anything more to say.....

Actually, I do have one thing to say:
"Earth to FIA: remember that the fans come first. Without an audience, you have nothing."

[UPDATE] You can see here just what the Michelin problem was.

Globalful

New addition to the blogroll: Globalful (a.k.a. Tim Caynes), because... oh, what the hell, I can't explain it. It's like one of those songs you wake up with playing in your head, and you can't get rid of it even by listening to audible emetics like It's A Small World After All. You have to read it the same way Archangel Michael has to sniff the whiteboard markers in the PSP/PVS/BFF episode of South Park. Sorry.

Open everything!

Congratulations to my colleagues who were involved in today's OpenSolaris launch. The biggest single OSS release in history! From Sun!! (A tip o' the hat to Rob Gingell, wherever he might be.) But surely Microsoft, IBM and HP aren't going to take this lying down; they're not going to give in without a fight - are they? C'mon, you guys: I want to see OSS releases of Windows XP, z/OS*, and VMS! And... oh heck, why not throw in OS/2 Warp as well - just for old time's sake? (But don't bother with AIX or HP/UX, because... well, I'm sure I don't need to spell it out.)

And why stop at operating systems? Earth to Larry (probably in his jet somewhere): it's time to open source Oracle before IBM gets around to opening up DB2. You know it makes sense! In fact, I bet there's more lines of code in that sucker than everything else put together!!

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* I want to try running z/OS on my laptop. A quad-boot setup with Solaris, Linux, z/OS, and WinXP: that's a configuration to really get a geek's pulse racing....

Conformance

In response to my posting about the BBC's "greatest philosopher" vote, Mark suggested that I should take a look at a fascinating piece by Paul Graham entitled What You Can't Say. After a short preamble comes the challenge:

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

Now this is fascinating, because in a conversation with a friend last week I mentioned that I was thinking of posting a piece challenging people to say whether or not they subscribed to any unorthodox or "fringe" beliefs. Graham's formulation is much better: it avoids the awkward judgment as to what would count as "unorthodox" by framing it in terms of behaviour.

Graham's essay is about how we see ourselves, and how we might want to reconsider our confidence in our contemporary beliefs by comparing them with others times and other cultures. It's really well-written, and I strongly recommend it. I, on the other hand, would like to pause a while with his challenge, and invite people to "come clean" about opinions that they might be reluctant to express in front of their peers. The nice thing about blog comments is that they can be anonymous, so your peers will never know that it's you....

I'll kick this off with my own personal "reluctant admission". I am a firm believer in the Aquatic Ape Theory proposed by Alister Hardy and documented by Elaine Morgan. Today it is often treated as an example of weird fringe science, but I am convinced that, in time, it will become part of the orthodox account of the evolution of homo sapiens.

Your turn.

Same rights, same rules?

I don't understand cyclists. (Massachusetts cyclists, anyway.)

I was driving home from work last week, and took a short cut along a slow road with three or four traffic lights in the space of a couple of miles. The lights seem to be timed so that one is forced to wait for a few moments at each of them. I was in a group of about five cars, waiting at the first light, when two cyclists, riding expensive-looking bikes, wearing the requisite amount of Spandex, and eyes hidden by mirror shades, flashed past us and ran the red light. The signal changed, the cars started off, overtook the cyclists, and stopped at the next red light. Once again, the cyclists flashed by and ran the red light at full speed. And so on.

This was not an uncommon experience, just a dramatically clear instance of a familiar pattern.

Now I was under the impression that the cyclists' cri de coeur was "Same roads, same rights, same rules". So what gives? Yes, I know about signals with detectors that don't respond to bicycles, but that didn't apply in this case. And I've come across detailed explanations of how - with toe clips and other gear - it's unsafe to force cyclists to come to a full stop (which seems an extraordinary admission, and an invitation to ban such dangerous equipment). And I've read comments by cyclists who claim that drivers are picking on them, and ignoring the far more numerous violations committed by drivers. This seems simply false to me. When it comes to observing red lights, stop signs, and the like, the vast majority of drivers follow the rules; the vast majority of cyclists (here in Massachusetts, anyway) do not. And the police...?

I don't understand.

The "greatest philosopher" vote, part 2

As I mentioned a few days ago, the BBC is running a poll to find out who we think the greatest philosopher is. The first phase is over, and we can now choose from the final list of 20 nominees. It's a fairly predictable list (it would be interesting to find out which of the members was "most unexpected"):

Aquinas, Aristotle, Descartes, Epicurus, Heidegger, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Popper, Russell, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein.

And my vote? Well, I'm not quite ready to make up my mind....

When a short story gets the full treatment....

Hands up if you've ever thought of this plot for a science fiction story:

You discover an ancient device, frozen in a glacier, or embedded in fossils, or whatever. You're amazed to find that despite its age it seems to be mostly in working order, and shows evidence of having present-day components. It must be a time machine of some kind. You repair it. Eventually you inadvertently activate it, and find yourself, with the device, back in the Pleistocene. You realize that the bones found with the device were yours....

I'm sure that I'm not the only person who read H. G. Wells, extrapolated along the lines that I just indicated, and had a chuckle about the paradoxical implications. Where did the machine come from? Could the contemporary scientist choose not to take the action that causes the machine to operate? What are the precise scientific objections to the sequence (loop?) of events? And maybe there's a short story to be written about it.

This little speculation is the starting point for John Varley's new book Mammoth. He adds several twists, which I'll leave you to discover, but the basic plot is as I've described it. To flesh out the short story into a full length novel, Varley has used this tale as a vehicle for satire: satire of corporate capitalism, of entertainment-driven culture, of people's willingness to be manipulated. Along the way he makes a stab at the scientific and philosophical issues of time travel and causality, but - like the culture that he is satirizing - such reflective moments are swept away by the impulse to action, preferably accompanied by special effects.

The self-causing time machine is still a good idea for a short story, preferably without the Hollywood treatment. Varley has shown us that he is one of the best writers of short science fiction working today. Unfortunately this one got away from him, like a runaway mammoth.

"US views of international law vary...."

Juan Cole posts a lengthy analysis of the latest story in the London Times about US and British intentions concerning Iraq.

"US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful. We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council."

Hence the need for extensive PR work:

"Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action."

The bottom line: the British government had agreed to support regime change, knew that this was contrary to international law, and was prepared to engage in a PR campaign to convince people that there was justification for the war. And all of this time Bush and Blair were publicly claiming that they were doing everything in their power to avoid war. The documents prove that they were lying. Even if you supported the war, you should be angry about that.

UPDATE: There's an excellent summary, and a list of links to blogs discussing this further, at Freiheit und Wissen. Following one link, Stephen Bates concludes: "Think this is not much? I speak as one who lived through Watergate: at a comparable point in that story, it didn't seem like much, either. But this is moving much, much faster. Pass the popcorn..." (Thanks Majikthise.)

Congratulations Kate and Mark (and Tom!)

My daughter, Kate, had her first child* this morning: Tom. He's shown here in a rough phone-cam picture curled up on his mum at 3 hours old. Despite dire predictions of a 10 pound baby, he was actually 8 lbs. 9 ozs., of which about a pound seems to be hair. Congratulations to all.

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* And my first grandchild

UPDATE: There are some more pictures here. Enjoy.

I see John Varley has a new book out....

Mammoth. Varley is one of those writers that I'll buy sight unseen.

A clean, shiny Tiger

As I blogged over the last few weeks, my upgrade to the latest Mac OS, Tiger, went pretty smoothly. However I had this nagging feeling that things might be even better if I did a clean installation. For one thing, I had been upgrading this machine ever since I got it a couple of years ago, and there were a number of obsolete bits and pieces lying around. I'd also installed many, many version of different applications - all of the flavours of OpenOffice for the Mac, various releases of NetBeans, every dot and dot-dot version of Java, various bits and pieces downloaded with fink - and it was increasingly difficult to figure out which bits I could safely discard. One or two applications hadn't survived the upgrade to Tiger as well as they should have, and I wanted to give them a fresh start. I'd started to notice a few odd error messages in the console log and when shutting down - messages about xinetd, which had been obsoleted in Tiger. And finally free disk space was down to 8GB out of 60GB, which in today's calculus is "getting close". (When I think about how I would have killed for 8GB of disk just a few years ago....)

So I decided to perform a clean installation of Tiger. Overall it went very smoothly, even if some of the steps took a while to complete:

• Make sure I had the license information from all of the licensed apps I use - NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, iWork, iLife, PGP, SuperDuper, etc.

• Turn off networking, purge caches, delete temporary files.

• Clone my hard disk on a partition of my external FireWire disk using SuperDuper; boot from the clone to verify that it's complete.

• Install Tiger from the DVD, carefully choosing the bits and pieces I want (yes to X11, no to some of the more obscure printer drivers and localizations).

• Plug the FireWire drive back in and use Migration Assistant to move over just the user files and network settings - NOT the applications.

• Still offline, install the various Apple applications.

• Now go online and run Software Update several times to pull down all of the updates for OS X, QuickTime, iTunes, iWork, and so forth. Remember to repair permissions after each update.

• Install the remaining applications.

• Wrestle with the inevitable glitch - in this case, why aren't the PGP actions appearing on the toolbar for Mail? Discover that I need to shut down Mail and run two commands in a terminal window:
  defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 2

• When happy with the result, make a bootable backup copy with SuperDuper.

The bottom line? More free space, the system feels snappier, no ugly console messages on shutdown. The only frustrating thing is that one particular application is still broken....

Book notes: "Radiant Cool"

Last year a friend recommended a "curious book" to me: Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. I started it back in December, but I couldn't get into it and set it aside. Last week I came across it and finished it in a couple of sessions. C'est la vie.

It's an odd book. The first two-thirds are a novel: a thriller/mystery involving a philosophy grad student, theories of consciousness, experimental stimulation of various cortical areas, overdoses of SSRIs, and a hyperfictional element which eventually engulfs the characters and the story. Some bits worked, some bits didn't, and overall I was a bit frustrated.

Then there's the last third of the book: the appendix. In this, Lloyd (professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT) expounds a theory (or at least a programme) of consciousness which has two primary strands: a recursive retention (and hence representation) model derived from Husserl, and a view of the distinctive role played by the representation of time. Now this fascinated me. Early in my Phil.of Mind course with Dennett, I asked several people about exactly this issue - what is the state of thinking on the philosophy of time, and its relationship to the mind. I was pointed at the work of Bas Van Frassen as representing perhaps the best view of the philosophy of time as it applies to science, but I found no satisfactory account of time in mind. Maybe Jerry Fodor can explain how temporal notions are handled in a LOT, but I'm still waiting.

Does Lloyd nail it? No, but that's just fine: he's asking the same questions that I'm interested in. I note that David Chalmers has published a piece on Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap; it will be interesting to compare his attempted rebuttal of a phenomenal account of consciousness with Lloyd's ideas. Anyway, the book is RECOMMENDED, mostly for the appendix.

Blogmapping

Following my colleague Pat Patterson, I've added a BlogMap to my blog - you can find it at the bottom of the sidebar. Click on the Bloggers nearby: total to see a map of other registered blogs. It feels slightly weird to translate this abstract web-stuff into the physical, but no matter.

"How America Lost Iraq"

I just finished Aaron Glantz's How America Lost Iraq. Essential reading. Like many others, including Glantz's editors at Pacifica, I opposed the war. What Glantz's account suggests is that - contrary to my prejudices - the U.S. actually had a chance to win the peace. They squandered the opportunity, and then came Fallujah.... What a stupid, incompetent, callous waste.

From Publisher's Weekly: The failure of the American adventure in Iraq is all the more tragic for its promising beginnings, according to this engrossing memoir of the occupation and insurgency. Glantz, a correspondent for the progressive Pacifica radio network, arrived in Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Against his editors' expectations, he discovered that, although tried by the chaos and lack of basic services, most Iraqis applauded the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Returning in 2004, he found that goodwill squandered, as Iraqis grew increasingly angry at the continuing absence of electricity and clean water, high unemployment, anarchy in the streets and mass imprisonment of innocent people by American soldiers who couldn't tell insurgents from civilians. With the brutal sieges of Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004, Glantz contends, the transformation of the United States in the eyes of Iraqis from liberator to oppressor was complete.

25 years on: Serendipity and "Death of a princess"

I just noticed what my local public television station is showing tonight: frontline: death of a princess: "It was perhaps the most controversial film in the history of public television -- the story of a young Saudi princess who was publicly executed for committing adultery." It wasn't just controversial: it changed my life.

Back in 1979-1980, we were going through a tough patch financially. (Most people were - this was the era of "stagflation".) I had a decent job at CMC, but I really needed something that paid a bit more. At that time most of the oil companies in the Middle East were starting to ramp up their IT and HPC activities, and the trade papers were full of advertisements for positions in Saudi Arabia. The typical deal was fairly complicated, but extremely lucrative. Contractors (male only) lived in company housing, were paid tax-free through numbered Swiss bank accounts, worked their tails off writing Fortran and PL/1, and got two 2-week vacations a year (either at home, or wherever the family wanted to holiday). The minimum contract was two years, with a nice bonus for extending. There wasn't much to do except work, although I had an idea of getting a personal computer (a Commodore PET or similar) and doing some applications development.

I contacted one of the "body shops" that handled the contracts, went through all the interviews, and was accepted. I was perhaps a week away from giving my notice at CMC and fixing a travel date to Riyadh. And then the BBC showed Death of a princess. The next day (May 7, 1980), the agency called me to say that the Saudi government had broken off diplomatic relations with the UK and had frozen all visas for UK nationals; my contract was therefore cancelled. A few weeks later I saw an ad for a job in the USA... and the rest is history. But it could have been very different.

The Netcraft toolbar

I recently installed the Netcraft Toolbar in the copy of Firefox that I use on my home machine. Hitherto I have mostly used Netcraft for their What's That Site Running? service (as a remote ping or to check a netblock owner). The Toolbar is new.

Every time you hit a new site, the toolbar displays five pieces of information:
- a "risk rating" (questionable)
- the date that the domain name was first noticed by Netcraft (highly unreliable)
- the rank ordering of the site by hits
- a link to a "Site Report"
- the netblock owner
I have to say that it's changing the way I surf the web. I find myself looking at a site's ranking, trying to understand why it's so high (or so low). For example, my blog ranking is (at this moment) 197836. Is that good? Well, here are the top 100. Other interesting sites: Neil Gaiman's blog is 69787, Planet Sun is 126763, and Alec Muffett's crypticide ranks 127559. But I'm closing in on Majikthise (182579), and I'm way ahead of Simon's Webmink (807108). Meaningful? Of course not, but it's fun. However it only aggregates at the domain level, so all of the Sun bloggers at blogs.sun.com are going to have to share their collective ranking of 19723....

SUNW+STK: now this is going to be interesting

We just announced that we're buying StorageTek. Over the years Sun has bought a number of companies, but this is a new scale of acquisition for us. StorageTek is a 7,000 person $2.2B company that was founded in 1969 - the year after I got into the computer business, and 13 years before Sun was established. Integrating the two corporate cultures is likely to be challenging - and stimulating - for all concerned. Nevertheless this feels like the right move for Sun.

The greatest philosopher?

The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time is conducting a vote "to find out who you think is the Greatest Philosopher of all time". You actually get to vote twice: the first time to nominate a candidate, and the second time to pick from the twenty most nominated philosophers. After seeing the large number who are choosing Wittgenstein (some for the strangest of reasons), I felt compelled to submit a nomination for David Hume.

"It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper told the band to play"

I just received an email beginning:

Dear Geoffrey:

Congratulations on your 20 years of service with Sun!

In recognition of this milestone, we are pleased to offer you an award for your contribution and dedication to our company. To view your award options, please visit the website below. [Etcetera.]

Who'd have thunk it? [And come to think of it, where did that expression come from?]

I remember one hot summer day going to see Barry Folsom at the Sun sales office in Waltham. Barry had just been hired by Bernie Lacroute to head up the planned-but-as-yet-unstaffed East Coast Division of Sun. I asked Barry if his job offer was still open (he'd tried to hire me into the Rainbow group at Digital); he responded by asking me if I had any thoughts about how to accomodate IBM PCs in this new Network File System stuff that Bill Joy, Bob Lyon and Rusty Sandberg had come up with. "Yeah, I think so; I've been looking at NFS for our [Mosaic] OS," I mused, and the rest is history.

Some thoughts on a new gadget

I just got myself a new Sony PSP. Here are a few random thoughts accumulated over the last couple of days.

• Sheer computing power. Two 32-bit CPUs (MIPS R4000@333MHz), a GPU capable of 35 million polygons/sec.... More specs here.

• As soon as I'd configured the WiFi to access my home network, the PSP phoned home for a software update.

• Where's the web browser? Yes, I know the trick with the embedded game browser, but that doesn't count. My guess is that Sony will wait until they're ready to support streaming video on demand.

• Standards, bloody standards. The PSP manual says that it takes a USB cable with a "mini-B connector". I bought one... it didn't fit. Eventually I got a different "mini-B" cable that worked OK.

• Several nice packages for the Mac to sync with the PSP, including PSPWare and iPSP. I'm testing them both before picking one and shelling out the registration fee. PSPWare is OK so far, though the iTunes integration needs work. (It only supports MP3, not Apple's AAC, but if you give it a playlist of AAC files to sync it does nothing, silently. It could let me know....) It uses Quicktime to convert video files into the special MP4 format used by the PSP, and the conversion rate isn't too good on my 867MHz PowerBook.

• Video blogging?! I found ANT, which is very cool. Engadget has a piece on how to make ANT and PSPWare play nicely together. The result? PSP-casting...

• The games, oh yes... I got Ridge Racer (auto racing) and Darkstalkers Chronicle (2D fighter). So far I've spent most of my time with Ridge Racer, alternating between game play and open-mouthed amazement at the graphics. I'm waiting for Ghost in the Shell, which looks like it'll be the hottest FPS.

• Good grief, not another proprietary disk format! Will they never learn? (Probably not.) And why does Sony have to keep pushing its own flash memory format, the Memory Stick Duo? Yes, OK, prices are competitive (it comes with a 32MB card; I bought a 512MB replacement), but still....

• Bottom line: it's stunning. Graphics are better than the PS2, WiFi, audio. Please can Namco do a PSP SoulCalibur? Pretty please? The only potential weakness I can see is the battery: Sony's claims of 4-10 hours have translated into 3-4 for gaming, less if the WiFi is in use.