Science 101

Suppose you did the following experiment: You take 20 test subjects and divide them into two groups of ten people each. To the first group you give an experimental drug. To the second group you give a sugar pill. One week later all of the people in the first group are dead and all of the people in the second group are alive and healthy. Is it reasonable to conclude that the experimental drug is dangerous?

Just from the information I have given you, the answer is "no". The reason is that based solely on the information I have given there are many other possible explanations for the results. Here are just a few possibilities:

1. The test subjects died because they were being taken to the test administration area in a bus, and the bus crashed.

2. The groups were not randomly selected to begin with. The test subjects were all terminally ill and the control group was all young and healthy.

3. The batch of drugs being used was accidentally contaminated by a poisonous compound during manufacture.

4. Both the test and control groups were terminally ill, the drug is safe but ineffective, and it was just random chance that all of the test group died before any of the control group.

I'll leave it as an exercise to come up with others. I've chosen these four alternative hypotheses because each one illustrates a different kind of pitfall that you can fall into when trying to apply the scientific method.

The first alternative seems like it would be easy to dispense with. If it were true there would be ample evidence: newspaper stories, photos of mangled bodies, death certificates. And yet, none of this evidence would actually "prove" that this hypothesis is true. It's possible to both fabricate and hide evidence, and so it is possible that the bus crash did occur even though no direct evidence can be found to show that it did. Likewise, it is possible that the accident did not occur even though one can produce evidence to show that it did. Eventually you have to apply Occam's razor and decide how far down the conspiratorial rabbit hole you are willing to go. The point is: nothing in science is ever absolutely proven. The best you can do is get to the point where all but one of the alternative hypotheses seem implausible to you. Ultimately, the threshold of plausibility is an individual decision.

The second alternative is an example of simple procedural error. It is a rather blatant example, but things just like this happen all the time, usually inadvertently. In fact, this kind of mistake is so common it even has a name. It's called a "confounding factor." Sometimes confounding factors can lead to serendipitous discoveries, like when it was found that copper may contribute to Alzheimer's disease. But more often confounding factors are just that: confounding, and you can't tell whether the results you got from the experiment are due to the influence you were trying to test or the confound, and you have to go back and redesign your experiment.

The third alternative hypothesis might seem farfetched, but things like this actually happen all the time too, especially in biology. Accidental contamination is like a confounding factor, except that it arises by a procedural error rather than by a mistake in the experimental design. Nowadays biological experiments rely on dozens or hundreds or in some cases thousands of reagents, and if what's in the bottle isn't what you thought was in the bottle then your results may simply be a reflection of that contamination. (A friend of mine currently working on a biology Ph.D. actually discovered a contaminated reagent in her lab which invalidated many months worth of work, not just hers, but all of her colleagues' as well. She was not a very popular person for a while.)

The fourth alternative seems the most farfetched of all, but it is not impossible. In fact, we can actually calculate the exact probability that this hypothesis is correct. (You might want to make an intuitive guess before I tell you the answer.) In the scenario I described it turns out to be quite small indeed: just a little under one in a million (1 in 1048576 to be precise). But it is extremely rare to get results this crisp. Suppose 8 of 10 test subjects had died and 3 of ten control subjects. The odds of that happening by chance are quite a bit higher. Figuring out what those odds are exactly is complicated (and occasionally controversial). The study of how to compute those kinds of odds is known as statistics and now you know why statistics are part and parcel of science, because "it happened by chance" is always an alternative hypothesis for any result.

The possibility of chance results is also the reason why only predictions are considered scientifically valid, and never postdictions. To be considered a valid test of a scientific hypothesis, you have to state the hypothesis you are purporting to test before you do the experiment, and you are not allowed to change your mind afterwards. The reason for this is that if you do enough experiments you will sooner or later get what look like interesting results purely by chance. If you are allowed to go back and cherry-pick just the experiments that gave you the results you were looking for, it is not just likely that you will fool yourself into accepting false results, it is inevitable. (This is why all day-trading schemes eventually fail. If you take historical stock data and feed it to any model with enough parameters you will inevitably find a strategy that would have made money in the past. But this is almost certain to be pure chance, and the model will almost certainly have no predictive power. This is not to say that it won't make successful predictions -- it might, but the probability that it will is almost certainly 50%. In fact, you can generate any number of models that will be successful on historical data. Half of them will be successful on future data as well. The trick is, there's no way to know which half until it's too late for that information to be useful. Of course, the same is true for models that *weren't* successful on historical data.)

This last phenomenon is actually very common, especially in today's pharmaceutical industry. Creating new drugs is so expensive that the temptation to focus on the experiments that show your drug is safe and effective is nearly impossible to resist (especially when your job description is to produce a good return for your shareholders by any means necessary). So debacles like Vioxx are not just unsurprising, they are all but inevitable.

It's even worse than that. The threshold for being considered a publishable result is what statisticians call 95% significance, that is, results for which there is less than a 5% chance that they could have come about by chance. But even if everything is done perfectly -- if there are no mistakes in the experimental design, no procedural errors, no bad luck, and no cherry-picking -- one published result in twenty is still going to be a result of chance alone! There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of biology studies published every year. At least one in twenty of them is almost certainly wrong.

So here's your final exam: suppose I give IQ tests to people around the world and consistently (more or less) find that white people score higher than black people. Is it reasonable to conclude that black people are genetically predisposed to have lower intelligence than white people?

Musharraf imposes martial law. What a surprise.

I wonder if this is a preview of what the U.S. will look like in a couple of months after the dollar collapses.

A test for Lynn's theory

Fortuitously, Slate just ran a story that suggests a test for Robert Lynn's theory that intelligence differences across races are (mostly) genetic. The focus has been on Africans, which makes it difficult to design an experiment to distinguish between genetic factors, and the self-fulfilling prophecy that blacks are inferior to whites, which leads to institutionalized discrimination against black people, which leads to lower performance on standardized tests (among other deleterious effects). But happily there is another "racial" group, Ashkenazi jews, who are genetically isolated but much less visually distinctive from WASPS than Africans are. Show me a group of descendants of Ashkenazi Jews who were raised as an assimilated population in a non-Jewish community where the average IQ is normal or below, but who still as a group sport IQs one full standard deviation above the mean and I will (tentatively of course, because nothing in science is ever final) accept Lynn's conclusion.

Spineless pussies cave again

It's hardly news any more when Democrats cave to Administration pressure. I propose a new law that anyone who claims that waterboarding is not torture must be subjected to it themselves before they can be appointed to any government job -- including (make that especially) Senator.

How fascism works

It's not with a bang.

Beware the plausible hypothesis

So I read Richard Lynn's book. He makes a rather convincing argument for the position that there are significant genetic differences in intelligence among different races. And yet, his argument is almost certainly wrong, and makes a good case study in how difficult it can be to properly interpret data. I'll start by restating Lynn's argument. In fact, I'll go Lynn one better and make an argument that is even stronger than the one he makes. Then I'll show you why it's (almost certainly) wrong.

Let us begin by observing that it is entirely uncontroversial that intelligence has a significant genetic component. Humans are more intelligent than any animal and that is clearly due to the fact that we're humans. Furthermore there are well understood genetic deficiencies in humans (like Down syndrome) that result in marked mental retardation. Furthermore, Down syndrome is also associated with distinctive and easily recognizable physical characteristics, so we have at least one example of a genetic mutation that causes changes is both intelligence and physical appearance. So the hypothesis that there are differences in intelligence among races and that those differences are genetic cannot be ruled out a priori (the way we can, say, claims of perpetual motion) since we have an uncontroversial existence proof that such phenomena do indeed occur.

Furthermore, it is uncontroversial that humans have migrated over periods of time long enough to induce genetic differences among populations. It is clear that differences in skin color is an evolutionary adaptation that has occurred in response to environmental pressures. Lactose tolerance is another very recent example, having evolved as recently as 3000 years ago so even creationists can sign on to that one :-)

Lynn begins his argument by observing that, "There is a widespread consensus that intelligence is a unitary construct that determines the efficiency of problem solving, learning, and remembering." He goes on to give a brief history of the definition of intelligence (which is too long for me to quote here), IQ, and the Flynn effect. He then devotes an entire chapter to discussing the concept of race, addressing the modern notion that the concept of race is a "myth" and showing that even those who advance that view acknowledge that races, as is intuitively obvious to everyone by the most doggedly politically correct, do indeed exist.

The rest of the book is a seemingly unassailable mountain of data showing an indisputably clear and consistent correlation between race and intelligence (as measured by IQ scores). He then shows that intelligence is almost entirely (75-80% depending on the study) a genetically inherited trait by citing studies of identical twins reared apart. Finally, he proposes a plausible mechanism (the evolutionary pressure of having to survive winter) for producing the observed differences in intelligence.

Have I convinced you? There is at least one glaring flaw in the argument above which I introduced on purpose in order to make a point. You might want to see if you can spot it before going on.

BTW, if you are convinced you shouldn't feel bad about it. It's a very convincing argument, and it might even be correct. (It might even be correct despite the flaw.) I am not aware of any data that would falsify it. But it is nonetheless almost certainly wrong. Here's why.

Let's start with my motivating example, Down syndrome, which is indeed a genetic disorder that produces both profound mental retardation and easily identifiable physical traits. However, while Down syndrome is genetic, it is not inheritable. Down syndrome results when an individual gets an extra copy of chromosome 21, which happens during meiosis or gestation. In fact, if you trust Wikipedia (which you really shouldn't, but what the hell) the non-inheritability of Down syndrome leads some researchers to use parents of children with Down syndrome as controls for studies of autism which is apparently at least partially heritable.

So the fact of the matter is that there are no precedent phenomena for the claim that there are genetic differences that result in correlated mental and physical differences within a species. (Obviously there are such differences across species.) This is not to say that it doesn't happen, just that if it happens it is not common. The a priori plausibility of the claim is much lower than the above argument would lead one to believe.

I introduced the Down syndrome argument as a deliberate red herring to make the point that even glaring flaws in an argument are not always immediately obvious even when you are primed for them. Lynn's argument has no flaws quite so glaring as that one (he's not a crackpot). Instead, Lynn's argument contains lots and lots of little flaws that together add up to an argument that is almost certainly wrong. Let's start to explore those.

The foundational flaw in Lynn's argument is the claim that intelligence "is a unitary construct", that it can be reduced to a single number (IQ), that that number can be reliably measured, and that the resulting measure has a causal relationship to something of consequence like the ability to survive winters or build industrial economies. If you read closely, he doesn't actually provide any evidence that this is the case (because there isn't any), he only says that "there is a widespread consensus." Now, this is actually true. There is indeed a widespread consensus. But just because there is a widespread consensus does not mean that it is actually true. As recently as a few decades ago there was a widespread consensus that homosexuality was a mental disease. At various times in history one could find a widespread consensus that bleeding, thalidomide, and Vioxx were effective treatments for various ailments.

In fact there is no evidence that IQ tests measure anything beyond a person's ability to do well on an IQ test. And there is a good reason for this. There are some cognitive abilities (like short term memory capacity, visual acuity, and spatial reasoning) that can be measured objectively, just as we can objectively measure certain physical abilities (like raw strength and speed). But the applicability of these abilities to real-world situations is limited. The holy grail of intelligence testing is a person's overall ability to solve novel problems, and therein lies the rub because a novel problem can only be novel once. I do really well on IQ tests but that's because I'm a geek and I spent a lot of time solving puzzles when I was a kid. I'm really good at solving puzzles, and particularly good at solving the kinds of puzzles that people tend to put on IQ tests. But it is far from clear whether my puzzle-solving skill is a result of some innate ability that I have, or whether it's simply because I've had a lot of practice. There is no way to know which way the causality runs.

It's like this for any kind of complex skill. Is Tiger Woods a superior golfer because he has the golfing gene (and does he have it because of or despite the fact that he's black), or is it simply because he's been golfing continuously since he was three? To really find out you'd need to do an experiment with a statistically significant number of subjects all going through the same intensive training that Tiger Woods went through, and even then you wouldn't really know because it's possible that one kid has a lot of innate golfing skill but just doesn't like golfing enough to really apply herself. The number of factors that go into making an effective golfer or an effective computer programmer or an effective businessman or an effective politician or even an effective puzzle solver are so diverse and varied that it would be impossible to design a study that could tease all these factors apart and give you a statistically significant result.

It gets worse. If you're testing the hypothesis that genes cause both dark skin and decreased "intelligence" (whatever that means) it is impossible to create a control group because it is impossible to hide the fact that a person with dark skin has dark skin. It is therefore impossible to eliminate the subtle effects of societal prejudices. Even if we take all of Lynn's data at face value, all we've shown is that people with dark skin don't do as well on IQ tests as people with light skin. But this could simply be due to the fact that people with light skin happen to live under circumstances that are conducive to the development of IQ-test-taking skills. And I don't just mean better economic conditions, I mean a pervasive belief shared by light-skinned and dark-skinned people alike that light-skinned people are somehow superior. Such a belief can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the problem with self-fulfilling prophecies is that they are actually fulfilled. Such beliefs can become self-reinforcing because they are actually true but not because of anything genetic, rather they are true simply because people believe them, rather like a mass (anti-)placebo effect.

None of Lynn's data refutes the self-fulfilling-prophecy hypothesis. Indeed, the widespread acceptance of Lynn's conclusions despite his obvious scientific sloppiness (like mistaking consensus for fact) lends support to it.

The problem is that there is no way to experimentally resolve this. To do so you would have to have a way to make black people look like white people (or vice versa), and that's just not possible. So at this point we have two equally plausible hypotheses to explain the data. How do we decide between them? And in particular, how do I justify my claim that Lynn is "almost certainly wrong"?

Well, let's look at the data. The first thing you notice is that the actual numbers are not nearly as consistent as Lynn would have you believe. To cite just one example that I found leafing through the tables, his data for Zambia are based on two studies, one of which puts the average IQ of Zambians at 77 and the other at 63, very nearly a full standard deviation of difference. And such discrepancies are not unusual.

But let's leave that aside for a moment and take Lynn's data at face value. Consider the unfortunate inhabitants of Cameroon, with an average IQ of 64. Or Equatorial Guinea with an average of 59. These figures are so low as to fall into the range of mild mental retardation. Compared to the Chinese at the opposite extreme with an average IQ of 105 the difference is more than two standard deviations. That seems like an implausibly high variance to be due to genetic factors. To be sure, differences of this magnitude in physical traits are certainly possible -- skin color comes to mind as an example -- but they are rare, and intelligence is much more complex than melanin production.

There's a lot more that could be said about this (and has been but I don't have time to write a treatise. I'll just point out one more problem with Lynn's methodology, one that is more serious than any I have cited so far.

On page 5 of Lynn's book he writes:


The metric employed for the measurements of intelligence f the races has been to adopt an IQ of 100... for Europeans in Britain, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand as the standard in terms of which the IQ's of other races can be calculated. The mean IQ's of Europeans in these four countries is virtually identical.


Notice anything oddly coincidental about those four countries? In all four, English is the native language. So Lynn's definition of intelligence, his gold standard, is the performance of English-speaking people on IQ tests. Don't you think that this definition might introduce just the teensiest bit of cultural bias into the whole endeavor? Besides the winter-induced-genetic-drift hypothesis and the self-fulfilling-prophecy hypothesis we can introduce a third plausible theory to explain Lynn's results, that "intelligence" is just a measure, at least in part, of the ability to learn to speak English. How well do the data support this theory? Well, the Chinese data seems to refute this, but how to explain e.g. the Lithuanians, who at an average IQ of 90 are significantly below their anglophonic cousins? And Lithuania is not exactly known for being a tropical paradise. If having to deal with winter makes you smart, why aren't the Lithuanians geniuses? Why are the Chinese so much smarter than the Innuit? Why are Italians smarter than the Portugese? In these last two examples the differences are huge: a full standard deviation.

The fact of the matter is that intelligence is a monstrously complex phenomenon governed by both genetics and environmental factors. The hypothesis that genetics are the dominant factor, and that adaptation for survival in winter is the driving force, is not in fact supported by the data. And in fact there is one final argument that I think puts the final nail in Lynn's argument: if intelligence is so crucial to winter survival, why do we not see the same differences in intelligence in animals? Why is it that the most intelligent land animals (great apes and elephants) evolved in Africa and not in Europe?

I am open to the possibility that the neo-eugenicists might still be correct. But until someone comes up with a much better argument than Lynn's (and Lynn's is the best they have) anyone who advances the position that blacks are genetically inferior to whites is a bigot in my book.

I love Leopard!

24 hours into a bleeding-edge upgrade to OS X Leopard I am in love. After getting past a few startup glitches (most notably a nasty interaction of Leopard with Spotless) everything is working perfectly. I'm even getting used to the look of the new dock! Some of the highlights so far:

1. Spotlight privacy settings survive volume dismounts, so Spotless is no longer needed.

2. After Time Machine does its initial backup, subsequent incremental backups are barely noticeable.

3. Safari now does spell checking in text areas. No more typos in my blog!

4. Lots and lots of little annoyances in Tiger have been fixed, too many to list them all separately. The network control panel has been streamlined. Download progress reports are more informative. The text search within a web page in Safari kicks ass.

5. Leopard is faster than Tiger. I see the SBBOD much less than I used to.

And most important from my geeky point of of view:

6. Objective C now supports garbage collection!

I am stoked! For anyone considering upgrading to Leopard, I say go for it. Just be sure to disable Spotless first.

First impressions of Leopard

I decided to just completely rewrite this post instead of trying to keep up with updates.

After about six hours of playing around with Mac OS X Leopard, here are my current impressions:

1. It's not a disaster (which puts it head-and-shoulders above Vista), but it's not a must-have upgrade either. If not for the fact that it contains one particular technical feature that I need for geeky reasons (64-bit Cocoa libraries) I could easily live without it for quite a while.

2. A lot of preferences get lost when you update. In particular, finder view preferences are lost, which I found pretty damn annoying.

3. Spotless plays very badly with Leopard. If you are using Spotless it is important to disable it before upgrading. Spotless ran despite announcing that it was incompatible with 10.5 and would quit, and subsequently spotlight (and hence all search, including mail search) was broken after the upgrade. I don't know for certain that Spotless was to blame, but it seems like a reasonable theory. It appears that I will be able to recover using mdutil to force spotlight to rebuild its indexes, but the jury is still out.

4. I hate the look of the new dock. Even after turning off the hideous 3-D effect (yeah, like that's still going to look cool three years from now) it still looks awful. The black background makes all the application icons disappear into a sea of gloom. It makes me want to slit my wrists every time I look at it. (Maybe Apple wanted to go for the goth market?)

5. Time Machine is cool, but annoying. As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn off hourly backups, so every hour your backup disk starts to spin... If this keeps up I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up disabling Time Machine, despite the fact that it's a pretty spiffy way to do backups.

6. Spaces has a weird bug that manifests itself when you open an application that opens a lot of windows over a significant time span (like Final Cut Pro). If you switch Spaces during the startup process you end up with some of the application's windows in one space, and some in another. The only way I've been able to figure out to recover from this is to quit the application and try again. It's damned annoying.

7. I ran into one really bizarre bug that resulted in movies playing with a sort Max Headroom jerkiness that I have never seen before (and hope to never see again). Restarting Final Cut made the problem go away, but it was pretty ominous looking at the time.

8. I have the general impression that things run faster under Leopard than they did under Tiger, which is no small thing.

On a technical level I have to say I'm pretty impressed with what Apple has done. I know how hard it is to make something like Leopard (it's really, really hard) and the fact that it doesn't seem to have any major problems so far is no mean feat, notwithstanding the odd annoyance. I'll probably get used to the new dock some day too.

David Perks misses the point

David Perks comes to defend James Watson:

James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA and a Nobel laureate, has become a scientific pariah in the space of a week. The cause of his downfall? He made comments on race and intelligence in which he implied that there are significant genetic differences in intelligence between Africans and Caucasians.

No, that is not the cause of his downfall. If all Watson had said was that there are significant genetic differences between Africans and Caucasians (and provided scientific evidence to back it up) there would not have been this outcry. But what Watson actually said is very, very different:


[Watson] said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.'"

...

"[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."


First, even the one scientific claim that Watson makes isn't true. It is simply not true that "all of the testing" says that blacks are not as intelligent as whites. It is arguable in fact whether any of the testing actually shows that blacks are as intelligent as whites. It is not even clear that the term "intelligence" can be adequately defined for such a claim to even make sense, let alone be tested objectively without cultural bias, let alone be true. But then Watson goes even beyond that unwarranted statement to imply that as a result of the alleged inferiority of blacks to whites, Africa is doomed, and anyone who deals with any black employee will find it self-evident that blacks are not as intelligent as whites.

Watson's statements were nothing more than bigoted nonsense, and he abrogated his professional responsibilities as a scientist when he said them. It is entirely appropriate for a science museum to withdraw an invitation to speak under those circumstances.

Blacks are treated equally. Yeah, right.

Can you imagine this happening to a white woman in the U.S.?


Elementary school principal Yvette Hayes will never forget the night of July 13, 2007. She was pregnant at the time and believes police jeopardized the life of her unborn child.

When Hayes was pulled over in the Kansas City suburb of Independence, Mo., on Interstate 70, she thought it was a routine stop. "I'm thinking they'd ask for my driver's license," she said.

Instead, police drew guns on the five months' pregnant mother — whose two children were in the back seat of the car — and told her to lie on the ground.

"Get your hands up," one officer shouted while another ordered her to "go down on to your belly. Arms out to your side! Palms up, palms up!"

Shocked and sobbing, all Hayes could say was, "I'm pregnant."

Hayes had just left a local JCPenney, where a store security guard misidentified her green Jeep as a vehicle involved in stealing cars from the parking lot.


I'll save Denis Bider some typing and anticipate his response: it is not unreasonable to target black people this way because black people commit most of the crimes in this country, just as it is not unreasonable to target young Muslim men as suspected terrorists because most terrorists are young muslim men.

As intuitively appealing as this reasoning may seem, it is false. Just because most people who fall into category A have characteristic B, it does not folow that people with characteristic B are likely to fall into category A. Neo-nazis are overwhelmingly white. It does not follow that a randomly chosen white person is likely to be a neo-nazi. So even if car thieves are overwhelmingly black (which is debatable) it does not follow that a randomly chosen black person is likely to be a car thief. (I note in passing that Denis Bider bears a striking resemblance to Ed Norton in American History X. But I'll wager that Denis would be quite upset (and rightly so) if I opined that this physical resemblance indicated that he might be a white supremacist.)

But this case is actually much, much worse than that because Yvette Hayes is not just a black person. She is a black woman. Not only that, she is an obviously pregnant black woman who had two young children in her car. Whatever else car thieves may generally be, they are generally not pregnant women with young children in tow. But these cops obviously didn't see a pregnant woman. All they saw was a black person.

Now, if there were any justice, these cops would not only be fired, they would be charged with assault under color of authority and do hard time. But of course that won't happen because policemen get to hide their racism behind the cover of "proper procedure." They pulled over someone fitting the description of an alleged car thief, and they did what they were trained to do with alleged car thieves. Trick is, this excuse only works when that description is "a black person."

But it doesn't even end there. Hayes's two young children now have to deal with the trauma of having policemen wave guns in their faces and forcing their pregnant mother to lie down on the freeway (and most likely get off with a slap on the wrist at worst). They have to live the rest of their lives with the not-unreasonable fear that this might happen to them again (and again and again and again and again). This is a source of stress that most of their white peers don't have to deal with. I stand foursquare with anyone who says that people have to take responsibility for their own lives. But there is not, there has never been, and there is no reason to expect that there will be any time soon in this country a level playing field.

My head is going to explode

George Bush says "If Iran had a nuclear weapon, it'd be a dangerous threat to world peace." So of course to prevent this dangerous threat to world peace we're going to nuke Iran.

Aarrrggghhh!!!

Bigotry masquerading as science

Just in time for Halloween.

Nobel Prize winner and DNA-discoverer James Watson says that black people are 'less intelligent' than whites' and that the difference is due to genetics. That is, blacks are not merely less intelligent than whites, they are inherently less intelligent than whites.

Now, that may sound like bigotry, but it isn't. It is possible -- likely in fact -- that intelligence is at least partially determined by genetics, and it is possible (though very unlikely) that the genes that affect intelligence are somehow correlated with the genes that control skin color.

But Watson is in fact a bigot. He reveals it when he goes on to say:


[Watson] said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.'"


Even if it were true that blacks are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than whites, the blanket statement that "people who have to deal with black employees find that [blacks are less intelligent than whites]" is, to summon as much diplomacy as I can muster, unjustified racism. Watson's antipathy towards blacks is revealed in his choice of phraseology: "people who have to deal with black employees..." as if black employees are some kind of problem that have to be dealt with rather than valuable contributors to a team irrespective of whether or not they are intelligent. After all, not all white people are Nobel Prize winners either.

Watson's statements are despicable. That they might -- MIGHT mind you -- contain a tiny grain of truth makes them no less despicable.

Well, that didn't take long

The other day I saw an interview on NBC with Scott Redd, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, where to my great surprise he admitted that the U.S. is not safer as a result of the war in Iraq. I thought to myself at the time, "Wow, there's a brave man." I should have followed my instincts and posted one of my Ron Prognosticates posts predicting that he would not be long for this world, because indeed today it was announced that Redd is resigning.

Irony overload

The old irony-o-meter didn't just blow a fuse, it exploded in a shower of sparks when I saw these two leading stories in the news today:


Supreme Court Won’t Hear Torture Appeal

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets


So the Supreme Court decides without comment that innocent people who have been kidnapped and tortured have no recourse because to hear their case might compromise national security. And on the same day it is revealed that the Bush administration itself leaked sensitive information that compromised national security.

Then there's this:

[A first strike on Iran by Israel] would get around the reluctance of large parts of the US establishment to support an American first strike. But helping poor little Israel would be much more popular, especially in the Democrat-dominated Congress [becaus u]nlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party could almost not exist without Zionist lobby organized funding.

In other words, there is no realistic hope of avoiding war with Iran because the U.S. government is effectively controlled by Zionists. Why does this peg the irony-o-meter? Think about it: the Zionists current influence is to a large degree a direct result of the holocaust, and yet the result of their influence is essentially a replay of 1930's Germany, with "national security" replacing "lebensraum" as the buzzword of the day.

I wonder how bad things will have to get before people wake up. History is not reassuring in this regard.

Sam Harris finally gets it right!

Looks like Sam Harris may have saved me from having to write the followup post to "How material wealth leads to spiritual poverty." Required reading.

If the shoe fits

As I noted before, sometimes the hardest things to explain are the ones that are self-evident to you. So it seems to be with Michael Medved's apologia for slavery. Denis Bider, who usually strikes me as a clear-thinking individual, rose to Medved's defense when I obliquely accused Medved of trying to roll the clock back to 1950. It seemed obvious to me that Medved's position was thinly disguised bigotry of the basest sort, but apparently this is not evident to everyone. So herewith a detailed critique of Medved's piece:

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation.

Note that Medved starts out by tacitly assuming that the only possible motive someone might have for focusing on America's bloody past as a slave-holding nation is that they "want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity" as if this is the most likely reason for anyone to be paying attention to this little historical incident.

Unfortunately, the current mania for exaggerating America’s culpability for the horrors of slavery bears no more connection to reality than the old, discredited tendency to deny that the U.S. bore any blame at all.

What "mania" and what "exaggerations" exactly? He doesn't cite any examples of who he considers manic, or what he considers current. But the idea of reparations if fairly contemporary, and later context seems to indicate that that's what he's talking about, so we'll go with that as a working assumption.

No, it’s not true that the “peculiar institution” featured kind-hearted, paternalistic masters and happy, dancing field-hands, any more than it’s true that America displayed unparalleled barbarity or enjoyed disproportionate benefit from kidnapping and exploiting innocent Africans.

Ah. So just because America's barbarity was not "unparalleled" or the benefits gained were not "disproportionate" that makes it OK?

SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION.

Granted, but so what? Since when did "but everyone else was doing it too" become a valid excuse according to conservative morality?

[Lengthy accounting of other slaveholding nations snipped.]

In other words, when taking the prodigious and unspeakably cruel Islamic enslavements into the equation, at least 97% of all African men, women and children who were kidnapped, sold, and taken from their homes, were sent somewhere other than the British colonies of North America. In this context there is no historical basis to claim that the United States bears primary, or even prominent guilt for the depredations of centuries of African slavery.

On this reasoning a murderer should be able to argue: "Hitler, Stalin, etc. have killed countless millions. I only killed one person. Therefore I do not bear primary or even prominent guilt for my actions." How well do you think that would fly in a Texas courtroom?

SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS.

The same argument applies: "It took only a second for me to pull the trigger, your honor. So I was only a murder for a tiny fraction of my life." To say nothing of the fact that the claim isn't even true:

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution put a formal end to the institution of slavery 89 years after the birth of the Republic; 142 years have passed since this welcome emancipation.

Why start counting from "the birth of the Republic"? The slaves surely didn't. And to draw the analogy back to to the individual case, this is analogous to a murderer claiming that all the people he killed before he turned 18 ought not to count. Or even to accept Medved's accounting, it's analogous to a serial killer who goes on a 9-year-long murder spree followed by a 14-year retirement and saying that everything is now square.

Moreover, the importation of slaves came to an end in 1808 (as provided by the Constitution), a mere 32 years after independence

Ah, so because at that point we were only enslaving people born here that somehow makes it better? That seems like some might odd balancing of the moral scales to me.

Slavery had been outlawed in most states decades before the Civil War.

That is simply false. There were brief windows during which free states outnumber the slave states, but great pains were taken to try to keep the number of slave and free states the same. The ultimate failure of this effort is one of the things that the civil war was fought over.

Even in the South, more than 80% of the white population never owned slaves.

So because only one in five people decides to murder people that makes it OK to make murder legal?

Given the fact that the majority of today’s non-black Americans descend from immigrants who arrived in this country after the War Between the States, only a tiny percentage of today’s white citizens – perhaps as few as 5% -- bear any authentic sort of generational guilt for the exploitation of slave labor.

Perhaps as few? Is there any basis for this number, or did Medved just pull it out of his ass?

Of course, a hundred years of Jim Crow laws, economic oppression and indefensible discrimination followed the theoretical emancipation of the slaves, but those harsh realities raise different issues from those connected to the long-ago history of bondage.

They do? Why? Note that I have elided nothing here. That is Medved's sole mention of Jim Crow in the entire piece. No elaboration on why "those harsh realities raise different issues." It seems to me that those harsh realities raise exactly the same issues: an entire class of people was systematically denied basic human rights and equal treatment under the law. The difference between slavery and Jim Crow is a difference of degree, not of kind.

THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT.

So just because it wasn't your intent to kill people that somehow makes it less heinous that they died as a result of your reprehensible actions? How exactly do you square that with the case of Kenneth Foster who narrowly escaped being put to death by the state of Texas not for killing someone but merely for driving someone else after they had killed someone?

[Details of slavery atrocities snipped]

Here, the popular, facile comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass death, not profit or productivity. For slave owners and slave dealers in the New World, however, death of your human property cost you money, just as the death of your domestic animals would cause financial damage. And as with their horses and cows, slave owners took pride and care in breeding as many new slaves as possible. Rather than eliminating the slave population, profit-oriented masters wanted to produce as many new, young slaves as they could. This hardly represents a compassionate or decent way to treat your fellow human beings, but it does amount to the very opposite of genocide.

[Emphasis added.]

At this point my ability to remain calm breaks down. Anyone who cannot see the absurdity in this is beyond help. Just because you intended to treat people like animals and end up killing a lot of them only inadvertantly does not mean that your actions were "the very opposite of genocide." Whether or not it was genocide is perhaps debatable. That it was every bit as morally reprehensible and unforgivable as genocide is not.

As David Brion Davis reports, slave holders in North America developed formidable expertise in keeping their “bondsmen” alive and healthy enough to produce abundant offspring. The British colonists took pride in slaves who “developed an almost unique and rapid rate of population growth, freeing the later United States from a need for further African imports.”

Ye gods, can Medved not hear himself? This is what he cites to make the case that "Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation"? Medved is essentially, saying, "We didn't intend to kill the slaves, we just intended to breed them like cattle. What you bleeding-hearts getting so worked up about?"

IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.

At the risk of getting tiresome (because I want to be absolutely clear that NONE of Medved's arguments are even remotely valid): because they didn't make money that makes it OK?

[Details of the negative ecnomic consequences of slavery snipped.]

WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION. In the course of scarcely more than a century following the emergence of the American Republic, men of conscience, principle and unflagging energy succeeded in abolishing slavery not just in the New World but in all nations of the West.

The United States was the last Western nation to abolish slavery, and the only one that had to fight a civil war to do it. I predict that if the United States ever switches to the metric system Medved will write an essay about how we deserve special credit for that too.

THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.

It is hard to imagine a more condescending claim. Even if it were true, so what? Isn't it supposed to be a conservative tenet that people should be free to choose their own course in life even if it results in undesirable consequences? If I kidnap a child of poor parents, should it be a defense that I was able to give that child a better life than his parents would have been able to?

The idea of reparations rests on the notion of making up to the descendants of slaves for the incalculable damage done to their family status and welfare by the enslavement of generations of their ancestors. In theory, reparationists want society to repair the wrongs of the past by putting today’s African-Americans into the sort of situation they would have enjoyed if their forebears hadn’t been kidnapped, sold and transported across the ocean. Unfortunately, to bring American blacks in line with their cousins who the slave-traders left behind in Africa would require a drastic reduction in their wealth, living standards, and economic and political opportunities.

Imagine that I kidnap a child of poor parents, an academic underachiever with no prospects, and hack off all their limbs. Imagine further that they manage to escape, sell their life story to Hollywood, and make more money than they ever would have been able to make had I not kidnapped them. Imagine further that because of my power and influence I am able to escape prosecution for my crime. (I know that kind of thing never happens, but bear with me here.) Suppose that the kid brings a civil suit against me for pain and suffering. Should I be able to use as an argument in my defense that the kid is better off because of what I did to him?

No honest observer can deny or dismiss this nation’s long record of racism and injustice

And yet that is exactly what Medved is doing. Well, if the shoe fits...

If we sought to erase the impact of slavery on specific black families, we would need to obliterate the spectacular economic progress made by those families (and by US citizens in general) over the last 100 years.

That assumes that no Africans would have emigrated to this country if it had not been for slavery, a dubious assumption at best. The rest of this argumnt thus becomes a non-sequitur, and I have elided it.

In short, politically correct assumptions about America’s entanglement with slavery lack any sense of depth, perspective or context.

No, it is Medved's straw-man that lacks any sense of depth, perspective, or context. The not-so-thinly veiled subtext of Medved's position is simply this: everything is fine, except for blacks being a little too uppity, along with the white liberals who support them, a class of people which in the 1950's were referred to as "nigger lovers."

If the shoe fits.

Conservatives show their true colors

Michael Medved says that slavery wasn't so bad after all. No, he really does. And not just in passing, the whole essay is an extensive apologia (NOT an apology) for slavery in the U.S.

I am appalled, but I am not surprised. If you really take the hard-core conservative position seriously then this is where you end up, back in the good old days, when family values were strong, when you could still pray in school, display the Commandments on public property, and lynch those uppity niggers.

There is no reason to believe today’s African-Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained in Africa.

And to think that some blacks actually want reparations for slavery. Can you imagine? Those ungrateful bastards. Slavery might actually have been good for them and all they can do is complain, complain, complain. Really, we ought to just ship 'em all back to Africa, and those white liberal nigger-lovers along with 'em.

More irony from the Pharisees of reason

If I only had a nickel for every time one of the Atheist Triumvarate (Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins) said something ironic. The latest comes from Sam Harris:

"Reason is a compulsion, not a choice. Just as one cannot intentionally startle oneself, one cannot knowingly believe a proposition on bad evidence."

Well, Sam, if that were really true, then why do so many people believe in God? There are logically only three possibilities:

1. All those people who claim to believe in God don't really believe it (which immediately begs the question of what motivates people to blow themselves up in God's name if not belief).

2. There is in fact good evidence for believing in God.

3. Your claim is wrong.

It seems like a no-brainer to me. Just because reason is a compulsion for Sam Harris doesn't mean it's a compulsion for everyone. It's pretty clear to me that many -- possibly most -- people are quite capable of self-delusion about a wide variety of matters. Moreover, self-delusion can actually be beneficial as the placebo effect demonstrates. Not only that, but there are evolutionary arguments that self-delusion actually has survival value, which means that evolutionary theory itself refutes Harris's claim. (More on that in an upcoming post.)

I despair when I read Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins. The world needs reason now more than ever. It is a tragedy that logic's greatest advocates are blind to their own irrationality.

How material wealth leads to spiritual poverty

I regularly rail against the rhetorical tactics of strident atheists like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins because they fail to realize that religion serves a legitimate human need, and that until atheism offers up a competitive substitute for that need it will fail to win hearts and minds. Yes, HH&D's books are bestsellers, but I think they're just preaching to the already unconverted. There is little evidence that they are actually winning over many people who were not already predisposed to rationality. Moreover, their conflation of relgion and fundamentalism is a dangerous fallacy. These are two distinct phenomena, and only one of them (fundamentalism) needs to be combatted.

The need that religion serves is the need to feel that life has a purpose, the need to feel that one is part of something greater than onesself, the need to quell existential angst. Let me concede up front that this need is wholly irrational, but just because something is irrational doesn't mean it isn't real.

When I was in college I had a serious relationship with a girl who lived 2000 miles away (I was in Virginia, she was in California). The rational part of me recognized that it was silly to expect monogamy in such a situation (to say nothing of the fact that I wanted to keep my options open) and I told her so. One day she told me that she had had oral sex with another man. The rational part of me said that this was no big deal. But deep in the dark evolutionary recesses of my brain there arose a powerful and completely unexpected emotion: jealousy. It took me completely by surprise and almost completely paralyzed me for days. At one point I tried to call her, but she was out, which of course made things worse. This was back in the 80's, before cell phones, before AIDS, before voice mail. I sat on the floor literally for several hours listening to the phone ring and ring and ring and ring and ring and ring and...

All the while, part of my brain knew that I was severely overreacting. But simply knowing that didn't make the feeling, or its physical impact on my life, any less real.

Of course, jealousy is irrational only from the point of view of a college student trying to carry on a long-distance relationship. From the point of view of my genes trying to compel me to help them reproduce it makes perfect sense. So too with existential angst. For most of their evolutionary history, humans existed at subsistence levels, always on the hairy edge of starvation. In such an environment, labor is a precious and valuable resource. Any extra hands available to hunt or gather or till or harvest contribute directly to survival. Such an environment selects heavily for instincts that in this modern age we would call a Puritan work ethic, and a belief that human life (which is to say, labor) is precious.

The advent of economic plenty brought about by the indusrial revolution changed everything. Suddenly everything became cheap including labor. It was suddenly possibly for members of the clan to engage in activities not directly related to the production of food without putting the other members in peril of starvation. People could become scholars or poets or even outright parasites (c.f. Paris Hilton) without being strongly selected against, at least not by evolution.

Moreover, labor, once a precious resource, became a commodity. Which is to say that people became a commodity. With division of labor, standardization and specialization, humans were essentially turned into machines, at least in the workplace. All this was enormously beneficial in societal and evolutionary terms (as evidenced by the fact that humans are now overrunning the entire planet) but from the point of view of the human instincts and emotions evolved during leaner times it was a disaster. Our genes evolved a wide variety of dirty tricks to make us want to work hard, to be useful, to be part of something greater than ourselves, to feel like our life had a purpose, to believe that God Himself wanted us to be fruitful and multiply. Barely an eyeblink ago in evolutionary terms these instincts had real survival value. Today they don't, but the gears of evolution turn slowly and those instincts and emotions are still with us, and no less real and impactful on our lives than jealousy.

The reality of these instincts is manifest -- there is no other way to explain the rise of fundamentalism in the modern world. Many authors have written about this, including Karen Armstrong and Michael Lerner. The modern resurgence of fundamentalism is an instrinctive response to the dehumanizing effects of modern industrial society. We evolved to believe that human life is precious because we evolved in a world where that belief had survival value.

Of course, DD&H understand all this. (This is actually the central thesis of "The God Delusion.") What they do not understand is that they are outliers. Random variation naturally produces some people in whom these instincts are less strong or even absent altogether, and with the old evolutionary pressures removed these outliers begint to survive and become more common. But DD&H apparently fail to realize that the vast majority of people cannot simply switch off their instinctive desire for meaning, community, and purpose, even if that desire has to be fulfilled by beliefs that are objectively fictional.

The objective fact of the matter is that human life is no longer precious, which is just another way of saying that labor is cheap. Most people are confronted with this harsh reality every day when they go to work. Modern industrialism has transformed humans from precious individuals to interchangeable components. Evolutionarily it has been a great success. We can now, for example, afford to slaughter each other wholesale with nary a blip on the exponential population curve. But evolution works slowly, and those not-so-old instincts are still with us, and it is very, very hard to shake off the burden of instinct. These feelings are wired deep into the dark recesses of our brain, and logic is a poor weapon against the power of evolution.

Until DD&H realize that for many people religion is just as much a compulsion as reason is for them they will continue to fail to win hearts and minds. And that is a damn shame.

The acid test

The Bush administration's rhetoric on Iraq is about to be put to a very stark experimental test. The administration says that its goal in Iraq is to establish a stable, sovereign democratic government, which implies that it wants to establish the rule of law. Well, the Iraqi government is about to file criminal charges against employees of Blackwater in connection with the recent shootings of 20 innocent civilians. The employees in question are still in Iraq.

Of course the idea that the Iraqi government is anything even resembling sovereign is a transparent sham. The U.S. has already strongarmed the Iraqis into rescinding their earlier decision to expel Blackwater from the country altogether. Now this latest attempt by the Iraqis to secure justice for their dead will determine just how transparent the sham is. If there is even the tiniest shread of truth to the administration's rhetoric, the merest vestige of honor left in the United States of America, then we will allow the prosecutions to proceed whether or not we believe that the employees in question are guilty. If we are truly fighting for democracy and the rule of law then those Blackwater employees must face trial. That is what it means to follow the rule of law. If, on the other hand, we are fighting for something else (did someone say oil?) and the principle that the United States is the world's last superpower and we can do whatever the fuck we want then those employees will be spirited out of Iraq back to their comfy home in the good ole U.S. of A.

Care to guess which outcome my money is on?

Where's my tin foil hat?

I don't normally subscribe to conspiracy theories, but this is looking pretty frickin' weird.

Heil Kerry

Fascism is alive and well in the United States. A University of Florida student asked John Kerry a longwinded question. In response he was arrested and tasered while the spineless pussy in chief looked on and did nothing. John Kerry, you disgust me and make me ashamed to call myself an American.

UPDATE: Daily Kos has an eyewitness account with a different read on the situation. Personally, I'm skeptical. Yes, the guy was being obnoxious. But there were four cops. Surely they were capable of removing one student from the room without a taser? (No one should believe anything they read on Daily Kos anyway :-)

The Northwest Passage is open

The Northwest Passage is open for the first time in recorded history. Stan Rogers would be proud.

UPDATE: Turns out this story may not be all it's cracked up to be.

Questioning my own sanity

Every now and then I stumble across something that makes me question my own sanity, and realize just how tenuous a grasp we actually have on the past.

I started college in 1982. I stayed for two quarters before going to California for the first of two six-month-long co-op jobs at IBM's Cottle Road facility in San Jose. On the second of those jobs, in 1984, I rented a room from my then-girlfriend's grandmother in Los Gatos and commuted to work in a 1969 Dodge Dart which I bought for $1700 and named Emily after a Simon and Garfunkel song that I had recently learned to play on the guitar. ($1700 might seem like a lot to pay for a Dart, but Emily had a brand new metallic-blue paint job and a like-new interior. She was a real beauty, almost showroom condition. They don't make 'em like her any more.)

My rent included room and board, and Grandma Betty would make me dinner every evening. At the beginning of the summer she asked me if I liked avocados, which I said I did. So every night for six months she served me half an avocado with a little puddle of Girard's champagne salad dressing in the hollow where the pit had been. It was actually quite tasty, but after six months of non-stop avocados it was about a decade before I could bear to face one again.

I mention all these trivial details to show that I have, at least apparently, a pretty clear recall of the time and the events, even if many of them seem a bit surreal to me now. And one of the things that I can recall very clearly is spending a lot of time watching MTV, which was the hot new thing at the time. And one of my favorite videos was Roxette's "Joyride". Marie Fredriksson was so hot, and the song just made me want to dance. I must have watched that video three dozen times in the summer of 1984.

Except that Joyride wasn't released until 1990. And the video wasn't made until 1991. In fact, Roxette didn't even release their first album until 1986. So although I can remember all of these events with absolute clarity and I would swear on my mother's grave that all of these things actually happened, it can't possibly be true (unless someone has rewritten the history of Roxette, which seems exceedingly unlikely).

It gets even weirder: in 1991 I was living in Southern California, and as far as I can recall I didn't have cable TV, so there's no way I could have seen the video at the time it was ostensibly released. And yet I definitely did see the video. I just pulled it up on YouTube after not having seen it for God only knows how many years and it's pretty much exactly as I remember it.

I wonder how many other things I remember that couldn't possibly have happened.

The elephant in the environmentalist living room

A tip o' the hat to Daniel Engbar who found the courage to stand up and state the obvious, that if we really want to save the environment we have to stop having so many babies.

The wrong headline

The Guardian has a story headlined George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb? I think the headline writer got it wrong. The right headline would be, "Why is George Bush so confident that Iran is going to build a bomb? Because the Iranians got the information they need to do it on his watch."

IAEA confirms the "peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear activities"

It's official, Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon. Of course, I predict that this won't stop the Bush administration from starting a war with Iran, they'll just ignore the report or find some other excuse.

I have never in my life wanted so much to be wrong.

UPDATE: The blogosphere is abuzz with speculation that an attack on Iran is imminent. So is the international press. But the mainstream U.S. press is completely silent about this as far as I can tell. So is the U.S. Congress. Some of the signs are looking quite ominous.

UPDATE2: Here's a good discussion of the monster SPY options trade and its implications.

Fighting the good fight at JPL

Part of me regrets no longer being at JPL so that I could join the fight against invasive background checks. Give 'em hell Dennis!

Spiritual bankruptcy defined

Ask and ye shall receive. Spiritual bankruptcy is when you are driven to "seek love in rank public bathroom stalls."

Dinosaurs, shminosaurs

On the recommendation of a fellow Xoogler I've been reading a truly excellent book by William Bernstein called "The Birth of Plenty : How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created". Although it's ostensibly about economics it relevantly touches on religion and philosophy as well. Bernstein argues (convincingly IMO) that scientific rationalism is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for economic growth and prosperity. (The other three necessary conditions are property rights, capital markets, and an efficient communication and transportation infrastructure.)

Berstein insightfully identifies the willingness to discard old ideas in favor of new ones as one of the defining characteristics of scientific rationalism, and indeed as the principal distinction between modern Western culture and all other human cultures throughout history. This is significant because if Bernstein is right (and it seems like a no-brainer to me, but read his book if you need to be convinced) then the potential dangers of fundamentalism go far beyond the fears of even the most paranoid among us. If Bernstein is right then the fundamentalist's rejection of scientific rationalism will lead us back to the economic dark ages just as surely as the Communist's rejection of private property did the same during the latter part of the 20th century. For that reason alone I believe that it is vitally important that fundamentalism be resisted by any means necessary.

I actually believe that there are fundamentalists who think that breaking the back of the modern capitalist economy would be a good thing, but I think these are a tiny, tiny minority. I think most fundamentalists -- certainly most Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. -- know in their heart of hearts that getting rid of science would be a Bad Thing all in all, hence the odd spactacles of so-called Creation Science and Intelligent Design, Al Quaeda recruiting on the Internet, and Pentacostals praying to God that their Power Point presentations will work properly.

The problem is that science is based on the premise that reality is the ultimate arbiter of Truth, and reality is a harsh taskmaster. You realy can't fool Mother Nature. That is why fundamentalists tend to focus on things like evolution where much of the scientific evidence is subtle or not readily accessible or even lost in the mists of time. Scientists (and I mean that with a capital "S") fall readily into the fundamentalists' rhetorical trap, which is one of the reasons that fundamentalism is gaining so much ground these days. Fundamentalism may not be correct, but fundamentalists are very, very good at making it feel as though it is. Fundamentalism has a much, much better marketing department than most of its competitors.

I have said it before but it bears repeating: I have no quarrel with religion, only with fundamentalism. I believe that religion serves a genuine human need, and the failure of atheists like Richard Dawkins to recognize this, let alone propose a credible alternative for fulfilling that need, is one of the reasons for the rise of fundamentalism. (Karen Armstrong thinks so too.)

One indication of the utter futility of rational debate when it comes to fundamentalism is the amount of effort spent on arguing about things like whether or not humans were contemporaneous with dinosaurs. If you're going to try to take Genesis seriously as an alternative scientific hypothesis you have much, much bigger worries than dinosaurs. Let's take a brief tour of Genesis, shall we?

In the beginning God created the heavans and the earth. And the earth was without form and void...

So... what shape was the earth at that point? Well, it didn't have a shape. That's what "without form" means. So what does it mean for the earth to have been created but not have a shape?

...and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

So earth didn't have a shape, but the waters still had a "face" for God to move upon. And how, exactly, does God "move"? I don't mean to ask by what mechanism God moves, I'm asking what it actually means for God to move. On the usual meaning of the word move it means to change location from one place to another. But that is only possible for a thing that has a definite location to begin with, and modern Christian fundamentalist dogma holds that God is everywhere at all times. So how can He possibly move?

We're not two verses in and already there are a host of questions that are perfectly legitimate to ask from a scientific point of view, but which are utterly unanswerable except by e.g. holding that words mean different things when they apply to God, at which points all bets are off. To quote Tom Stoppard, "The only point of using language at all is that words are taken to stand for certain thoughts and ideas and not for other thoughts and ideas."

And God said, "Let there be light" and there was light.

Where was the light coming from at this point? Remember, this is only the First Day, and the sun and stars don't get created until the Third Day.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Here in verse 5 we collide headlong against a scientific brick wall. What does it mean for there to be "evening" and "morning" in a universe where the earth has no shape and there is no sun?

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were above the firmament from the waters which were below the firmament. And God called the firmament Heaven.

Leaving aside the linguistic question of how God can create "heaven" on day 2 after already having created "the heavens" on day 1, this is quite possibly the most transparent indication that Genesis is just a bronze-age creation myth like any other. Bronze-age people thought that the sky was blue because it was full of water. Forget dinosaurs, where are the waters above the firmament?

There's so much just in the first chapter of Genesis which is utterly ridiculous from a scientific point of view that it is hard to know where to stop. God creates plants on day 3, but doesn't create the sun until day 4. The sun and the moon are called "two great lights" despite the fact that the moon is not a light, it's a big rock. The sun, moon and stars are created "to divide the light from the darkness" but the light was already divided from the darkness back in verse 4. And then we get to chapter 2 where the whole story is told over again, except this time man is created before the animals instead of after (the animals are created specifically to keep man company, but the plan doesn't work so God has to try again, at which point He creates Eve). As a scientific hypothesis, Genesis is utterly and transparently hopeless long, long before we ever get to Noah. It's not even a close call. And yet the arguments go on. And on and on and on and on and on.

The problem is not that Creationism is wrong, the problem is that it is wrong only from a particular point of view. Genesis is wrong from a scientific point of view, not from the point of view of faith. But Creationists are adept at flitting back and forth between these two points of view while the Scientists (and the scientists) are stuck in their Baconian and Popperian epistemologies. The success of science is so overwhelming that they cannot accept that there might be truth beyond science despite the fact that there is scientific evidence that this is in fact the case! The placebo effect, for example, is scientific proof that believing in things that aren't scientifically true can have materially beneficial effects.

Faith is a placebo, and I do not mean that in any sort of pejorative way. Placebos can be effective. Sometimes they are the most or even the only effective medicine available for certain maladies, and the modern world suffers from such maladies much more than atheists generally acknowledge. And in that regard atheists have their heads buried more deeply in the sand than the fundamentalists, with the net result that the fundamentalists are winning.

And as someone who enjoys the creature comforts that modern economies provide, that's bad. Really really bad.

My sentiments exactly

I'm too beaten down to compose my own words so I'll steal a few choice ones from The New York Times:

It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress, now led by Democrats, caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush's powers, this time to spy on Americans in violation of basic constitutional rights.

Hear hear.

Whoa!

The blogosphere is aghast that Karl Rove deputy Scott Jennings seems to be taking executive privilege a wee bit too far:

Transcript:


SENATOR PAT LEAHY, (D), VERMONT: Are you aware of any presidential decision documents since the 2004 election which President Bush decided to procede with a replacement plan for U.S. attorneys?

JENNINGS: Sir, pursuant to the president's assertion of executive privilege, I decline to answer at this time.

LEAHY: As special assistant to the president, deputy director of police affairs, what role do you have in the selection of nominees to the U.S. attorneys?

JENNINGS: Senator, I will decline to answer that question pursuant To the president's assertion of executive privilege...

LEAHY: Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. I'm just asking what role you have in the selection of nominees to be U.S. attorney. I'm just talking about what you do. I mean--let's not be too contemptuous of this committee. I'm just asking you what role do you have in the selection of nominees for U.S. attorneys. You work at the White House, you're paid for by taxpayers. You work for the American people. I'm just asking what kind of work you do.

JENNINGS: Sir, I understand. And based on my understanding of the letter I have from Mr. Fielding, this falls under the president's assertion of executive privilege and, therefore, I must respectfully decline to answer at this time.


But it makes perfect sense to me. The truthful answer to that question is very likely something along the lines of, "My job is to make sure that the Republicans win the 2008 election by any means necessary." Little wonder he's asserting executive privilege.

No, the puzzling part to me is not that Jennings asserted privilege, but that Leahy was surprised by it. I would have hoped that someone with Leahy's experience would not be so naive as to have been caught off guard by that. And so the logical next question in Leahy's rapid-fire sequence will now be forever unasked: "Are you asserting privilege because your job requires you to engage in activities that are ethically or legally questionable?"

Alas.

Who says rock stars are dumb?

Brian May, lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, has finished his Ph.D. in astronomy after a 36 year hiatus. Congratulations, Dr. May. I doff my hat.

This is what happens when you don't maintain your country

The Minneapolis bridge collapse surprises me not at all. The nation's infrastructure has been suffering chronic neglect for decades, and even if it turns out that the cause of the collapse was something else, it's only a matter of time before things like this start becoming regular occurrences unless America changes its priorities.

Yes, I can hear you laughing.

The presidential race is still close enough that a clever political trick might be enough to put a Republican in the White House in 2008. Think about that. It is hard to imagine a more destructive, corrupt, divisive, unmitigated collossal disaster of a presidency than George W. Bush, and yet enough people are still willing to vote Republican that it's a close call. Civil rights evaporate, freedom becomes nothing more than a slogan, New Orleans is all but lost to the sea, our bridges are crumbling, and enough people still want to stay the course that it's a close call.

Ye gods.

The land of the free and the home of the brave is rapidly becoming the land of the surveilled and the home of the fearful. Frankling Roosevelt got it right when he said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, I believe in that 100% and I'm scared. Our collective national freak-out over not quite 3000 deaths a little over six years ago continue unabated, and it's costing us everything that once made this country great. We are rapidly devolving into a third-world banana republic complete with crumbling infrastrcture, corrupt one-party rule, and an unbridgeable gap between rich and poor.

To say nothing of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

Go green! Nuke the world!

If we're going to save the world, so-called "renewable" energy sources won't help. The only way is to go nuclear.

(Some) Data belongs in revision control

I would like to address some of the issues raised in the recent debate over whether data belongs in tables or not. I think Honroy hit the nail on the head when he wrote, "It's important to consider the likelihood of change as well." But the issues are subtle and complex, which is the reason it has taken me a full day to get around to writing this response.

So let me begin with one of Jeff's responses, since he's the one I'm mainly picking on here :-)

there are no problems. That was an example. If you need historical reporting or tracking, you simply model it that way. As the article clearly says.

Ah, but the devil is in the details. How exactly are you going to model it? If you actually sit down to work it out you will find that the complications mount very quickly. For example, one way to model historical changes is to add effective-start-date and effective-end-date columns. But now you have to deal with the possibility that the time periods could overlap, or that there could be gaps between the periods. (Actually, you already have a similar problem even in the original simple example because there is nothing to prevent shifts from overlapping or having gaps, but that's another can of worms.) If you have an effective-end-date, how do you model the currently effective shift schedule? Do the current shifts have NULL end dates, or end dates far into the future (creating a Y2K-like problem)? What do you do if, due to an operational error, some incorrect data finds its way into the shifts table? What if that incorrect data was used in subsequent dependent calculations? Do you log all your database updates so that you can tell which calculations used the wrong data? Or do you have to go back and recompute everything from scratch?

I'm not saying that these problems can't be solved. Obviously they can. But the structure of the shifts table, and in particular the way in which the contents of the shifts table evolves over time, is such it is not at all clear that storing it in a database is really the best way to do it. The shifts table evolves over time in a very particular way. First, changes are rare. Second, retroactive changes are even rarer, and are generally an indication that some kind of mistake has been made and needs to be dealt with. And third, it is important to know not just what the shift schedule was on date X, but also what the system on date Y thought the shifts shedule was on date X. And it is not at all clear that that information might not be better stored in a config file under revision control.

The devil is always in the details, and it gets worse. What if your data volume is huge and performance is an issue? In cases like that it is not at all clear that it would not be best to hard-code certain rarely-changing parameters directly into the code instead of sticking them in a table and hoping that your database optimizes the join properly. What if you're writing an embedded system and the data is parameters that, if they are wrong, can make something blow up?

There are certainly cases where it is appropriate to put data in tables, and some of Jeffrey's examples (though not all of them) are good examples of such cases. But to extrapolate from there to claim validity for a general rule that "data belongs in your tables, not in your code" is a serious mistake.

Why storing (too much) data in tables is a Really Bad Idea (tm)

The world is full of Really Bad Ideas which look like good ideas at first glance. My favorite example of this is the Schick Slim Twin disposable razor. The Slim Twin is, as the name implies, a twin-blade razor. It has the "innovative" feature of having a small plastic tab between the blades. The tab is attached to a little button that lets you push the tab towards the business end of the blades thereby (ostensibly) forcing out the razor stubble and other assorted gunk that is trapped in the space between the blades. Schick actually had a series of TV commercials that touted this feature when the Slim Twin first launched many years ago.

It seems like a good if not particularly earth-shattering idea at first glance. That is, until you actually try it. What you find is that the Slim Twin actually collects a lot more gunk than other razors. This is because the plastic tab blocks the space between the blades and actually causes gunk to build up in the first place! When the tab isn't there, any accumulated gunk just falls out of the back of the blades. So this "innovation" actually causes the problem it purports to solve. (And in fact, it makes the problem much worse, because hair can get caught between the tab and the blades, at which point it becomes all but impossible to dislodge. Don't ask me how I know all this.)

Which brings me to this blog entry from Jeff Smith where he asserts that "data belongs in your tables -- not in your code." It seems like a plausible enough assertion on its face, kind of like the idea that having a little tab in the razor to push gunk out ought to be a useful feature. But he doesn't back up this assertion with any actual arguments, only with examples. And in those examples he looks only at the benefits of storing data in tables instead of code and none of the drawbacks.

There are a lot of problems with storing data in tables the way Jeff suggests, but there is one overriding uber-problem, but I won't spoil the fun by telling you what it is just yet. Instead, consider what happens if you follow Jeff's advice, for example:

Your company defines 3 shifts per day:  Shift 1 is 12:00AM-8AM, Shift 2 is 8AM-4PM, Shift 3 is 4PM-12AM.
 
So, when you need to evaluate a DateTime variable to see which shift it falls into, you write:
 
SELECT ..., CASE WHEN Hour(SomeDate) < 8 THEN 1
            WHEN Hour(SomeDate) < 16 THEN 2
            ELSE 3
       END as ShiftNo
FROM ...
 
Great, except you now have data stored in your code -- not in a table!  Let's store our data where it belongs by creating a “Shifts” table:

And now you simply write:
 
SELECT ...., Shift.ShiftNo, Shift.Description
FROM ...
INNER JOIN Shift 
  ON Hour(SomeDate) BETWEEN Shift.StartHour and Shift.EndHour

Now consider what would happen if the company's shift schedule were to change. Simple, you just update the SHIFTS table to reflect the new schedule and you're done, right?

Except that all your historical data is now wrong because it is based on the old shift schedule. And that old shift schedule is now gone.

So the first problem with storing data in tables is that relational databases don't have revision control. Code does. And if you have data that has the kinds of dependencies that revision control systems are good at tracking then you might well be better off having that data in your code so that you revision control system can track it.

But there is a much more fundamental problem with Jeff's advice, and that is that there is no sharp dividing line between code and data. Look at those SQL queries. They are just strings, and hence they are data. So should we store them in a QUERIES table? For that matter, look at the code itself. That is just data too. Why not store that in a table?

The fact of the matter is that the admonition to store data in tables is completely vacuous because the distinction between code and data is arbitrary. It is therefore, just like the tab in the Slim Twin, worse than useless because it seems like such a good idea but in fact it creates problems rather than solving them.

The right way to decide what to put where is to look at the properties of the data you need to store. If it's large quantites of identically structured data that doesn't change in ways that alters referential integrity then it probably belongs in the database. If it's small quantities of data whose structure defines the semantics of other data and which doesn't change at run-time, then it probably belongs somewhere else, if not actually in the code then probably in a configuration file under revision control.

But just because something "looks like data" doesn't mean it belongs in a table.

UPDATE: I do not deny that the problems with Jeff's original example can be fixed. But the point is 1) there are problems and 2) they have to be fixed and 3) the process of fixing the problems is, in this example and many others, essentially, re-invention of revision control. There is no magic that automatically accrues unvarnished benefits merely from moving "data" (whatever that means) out of code and into a database, and applying Jeff's advice uncritically is as likely to create problems as solve them.

What if Sara Taylor was telling the truth?

From the L'esprit_de_l'escalier department Rondam Ramblings brings you this:

Remember Sara M. Taylor's testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee? The part where she said that she "swore an oath to the president"? Senator Patrick Leahy pounced on that comment, lecturing her about how her oath was to the Constitution, not to the President.

Consider: what if Leahy was wrong? What if that wasn't a Freudian slip? What if Sara Taylor really had (secretly, of course) sworn an oath to the President? Perhaps Leahy should not have been so quick to correct her. Maybe he was on to something and didn't realize it.

Crazy? Maybe. Maybe not.

If this isn't grounds for impeachment, what is?

The Bush administration has denied a formal request from Congressman Peter Defazio to see the secret plans for operating the government after a terrorist attack.

WASHINGTON -- Oregonians called [Congressman] Peter DeFazio's office, worried there was a conspiracy buried in the classified portion of a White House plan for operating the government after a terrorist attack.

As a member of the U.S. House on the Homeland Security Committee, DeFazio, D-Ore., is permitted to enter a secure "bubbleroom" in the Capitol and examine classified material. So he asked the White House to see the secret documents.

On Wednesday, DeFazio got his answer: DENIED.

"I just can't believe they're going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack," DeFazio says.


Bush has also issued an executive order allowing the Administration to seize the property of anyone who opposes the war in Iraq. And so the fifth amendment bites the dust along with the first, fourth and ninth (to say nothing of Separation of Powers). Four down, six to go. (What, you really think the second amendment is safe just because the emperor calls himself a republican?) Meanwhile, the Democrats fiddle while Democracy burns.

Foursquare with Voltaire

My previous post is generating a surprising (to me) amount of controversy, and there were a number of comments that I thought deserved considered responses. But writing those responses in Blogger's tiny little comment window (Google people, are you listening?) was getting really annoying so I decided to escalate.

Do you consider their opinion to be more authoritative than any other obvious sources (say, a local christian bookshop or church committee or the bible), and if so, why?

This is a very good question, and I have three different answers for it:

First, the meanings of symbols have nothing to with authority. The meanings of symbols derive entirely from the intent of those who employ them, and from the perceptions of those who view them.

Second, it is fairly clear that the ring in this case is a Christian symbol. It is widely recognized as a Christian symbol, and it is inscribed with a reference to the New Testament, which should quell any remaining doubt.

But third, and most important, the ring is a red herring. If the girl had been wearing a crucifix on a chain the school's prohibition on jewelry would (presumably) still have applied. And surely no one would question that a crucifix is a Christian symbol.

So anyone should be allowed to take anything, call it a symbol of some religion

Yes, of course, as long as it is their religion. No one should be allowed to decide what is and is not a symbol of anyone else's religion.

(even though it isn't generally recognised as such)

Yes, of course. Some people have their own private religions with their own private theologies, symbols and rituals. Who are you to tell me that what I choose to be the symbols of my relgion are not valid?

it doesn't follow that you're allowed to say what you want, when you want, and where you want.

A straw man. No one disputes that freedom of speech has limits. You can't cry fire in a crowded theatre or commit libel. Clearly none of those circumstances apply in this case.

it doesn't entitle you to a free audience

It's a ring, for crying out loud. It's not like she's getting up in the middle of class with a bullhorn.

The real problem here is that the underlying prohibition on jewelry is inherently discriminatory against religions like Christianity which tend to render their symbology as jewelry rather than, say, clothing or makeup. Jews have yarmulkes. Sikhs have turbans. Hindus have Tilakas. But the principal symbol of Christianity is the Cross, and the principal means of displaying it on one's person (at least in the U.S.) is as a pendant hanging from a chain. So the issue is not the ring per se, the issue is that any blanket prohibition on jewelry necessarily discriminates against Christians, just as any blanket prohibition on wearing head-coverings indoors inherently discriminates against Muslims (and Jews and Sikhs).

Equal opportunity oppression

It's not just inarticulate teens who are being denied their right to free speech, it's Christians too.

I stand foursquare with Voltaire (or whoever it was who first said it): I may not (and in this case most assuredly do not) agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it. Or at least blog about it.

Required viewing

If you are on the fence about impeaching Bush and Cheney (and even if you aren't) then you should watch this.

The real reason the neocons want to attack Iran

Iran announced today that it will sell oil to Japan for yen instead of dollars.

Ron prognosticates: separation of powers is doomed

This is almost too easy. Here's how it's going to go down.

Congress has issued subpoenas. The White House has refused citing executive privilege. The fight will end up in the Supreme Court, which will side with the White House on the grounds that this is not a criminal investigation. (It doesn't really matter. If it were a criminal investigation they would find some other excuse, but this is the most defensible argument for not following the Watergate precedent, so that is the one they will use.)

At that point, Congress's only option to restore separation of powers will be to impeach Bush, Cheney, and at least some of the members of the Supreme Court. Which they could do. But which, of course, they will not do because the Dems are spineless cowards who are afraid of their own shadows.

At that point American Democracy will be well and truly fucked.

Have a nice day.

Prophecy done right

What will happen if you take a ping-pong-ball-sized sphere and fly it in orbit around the earth for eighteen months? The Bible won't tell you, but Albert Enstein predicted what would happen almost 100 years ago and got it right to within 1% (and that is most likely experimental error). Now that is a prophecy fulfilled.

Ron prognosticates: Kiss Roe v. Wade goodbye

Since I seem to be amassing a pretty respectable track record as a prophet I'll give it another go:

If anyone had any doubt that John Roberts's appointment to the Supreme Court is going to be yet another unmitigated disaster brought to you by the Bush administration, yesterday's decision overturning a 96-year-old precedent for no reason other than five Justices thought it was a good idea should put it to rest. It's not so much that the decision itself will be disastrous (though it is that as well) as that it shows conclusively that Roberts's testimony at his confirmation hearings that he respects precedent was false. Roberts is an utterly predictable reactionary idealogue with no respect for precedent, the law, or indeed anything other than neo-conservative doctrine: big business is good, the government can do no wrong, and the People are an annoyance to brought into line rather than the constituency that the government is supposed to serve. Acordingly, there can be no doubt that Roe v. Wade's days are numbered. I don't know exacly when Roe will fall, or what twisted "reasoning" (and I use scare quotes quite deliberately) will be used to overturn it, but fall it will. (I'll go out on a limb just a little bit and predict that it will be shortly after the next election.)

Not that it wasn't clear before, but this latest decision really puts the facts in stark relief: Bush & Co. care not a whit for anything the United State osensibly stand for: not for freedom, nor truth, nor justice, nor civil rights, nor the will of the People. They care for big business, for oil, for discipline, and for unfettered government power, and they will promote these "virtues" by any means necessary. They will lie, they will cheat, they will steal, and they will even burn the houses of people who oppose them. With a government like this, who needs Al Quada? Bush & Co. are the ultimate terrorist sleeper cell.

And they have nukes.

First Amendment? What First Amendment?

I'm blogging from a ship in the North Sea. The fact that I can do this at all is a freakin' miracle, but unfortunately, the quality of the connection is poor, so this post is not going to have the links and cross-references that it should. (I'm crossing my fingers that I get it out at all.)

The Supreme Court dealt another body blow to the First Amendment yesterday, ruling cryptically that student speech is not protected by the First Amendment if it is too cryptic, or if it "might" be construed as advocating illegal drug use, or something like that. Frankly, the "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" message makes more sense to me that the Court's decision. As near as I can tell, the legal principle that the Court is establishing is that the First Amendment doesn't protect any speech that any authority figure doesn't like, taking yet another giant step towards the day when we in the United States enjoy the kind of free speech they once had in the old Soviet Union.

What worries me most about this is that despite the fact that Bush, Cheney, Rove and their appointed cronies Alito and Roberts have so clearly gone rogue, that they so obviously and manifestly despise everything that America ostensibly stands for: Democracy, the Rule of Law, fairness, respect for human rights, government of the People by the People and for the People... despite all this, there is still no one marching in the streets (I know, I'm a fine one to talk, I can't even be bothered to be in the fucking country as it comes apart at the seams. But I feel bad about it. Does that count?) and Bush's approval rating is still north of 25%, an historic low to be sure, but it still means that there are tens of millions of people out there who think everything is just hunky-dory. To you 25% I say: are you insane? Have you lost your fucking minds? What does it take to get you to disapprove of this crew of incompetent megalomaniacal monsters? Ye gods, they could probably ship your own grandmother off to Gitmo and you'd probably just take their word for it that she was aiding and abetting Al Quaeda!

I haven't felt at this much of a loss for a long time. Does anyone know where I can order a "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" T-shirt on line?

And the staggering irony award goes to...

... Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistani religious affairs minister, who in response to the news that Salmn Rushdie was being knighted, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad:

"The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."

Ye gods.

Hello world redux

For those of you who may have been wondering why I seem to have fallen off the face of the earth, I can finally tell you. For the last year I have been working on a new startup company which just came out of stealth mode. It is Virgin Charter. Yes, I now work for Richard Branson. (No, I have not met him.)

Although you can't tell, there's actually a functioning beta site running behind the scenes that I have been working to bring up for the last few months (with a lot of help from a really great crew of software engineers). Getting ready for today's launch has been using up most of my mental energy, hence the relative blogging silence.

Things are still kind of intense for now, but I hope to be back in the blogging swing of things before too long.