The metaphysics of bowling

[Third in a series]

Don,

We certainly agree on more than we disagree, and one of the things that we agree on is that the world would be a better place if religion were more like bowling, which actually brings up a very interesting point: why do people bowl? It is, if you think about it, a completely ridiculous activity. What is the point? You do all this work to set up the pins (or to make machines to set them up for you) only to try to knock them down again under constraints deliberately designed to make the task difficult. If you want the pins down, why not just walk up to them and kick them over? And if you want them up, why not just set them up and leave them that way?

And it's not like bowling skills are transferrable to anything useful. If you go hunting instead of bowling, or running or hiking or gardening or even bird watching you can make the argument that you are honing a skill that under certain circumstances could have actual utility. But bowling?

No, bowling is just completely and utterly useless, except for one thing: it's fun. It's fun precisely because it's not related in any way to anything important or useful, and that is in fact the appeal: it provides an escape. If something is important and useful that inherently means that the stakes are high, topping out at the proverbial matters of life and death, where we find the most important and useful -- and hence the most stressful -- activities of all: the business of keeping yourself and your family alive. Bowling is about as far removed from that as you can get.

In that sense Religion is like bowling. A bowling alley is not always readily at hand, but God is always there, like a little portable bowling alley that you can carry along with you in a corner of your mind. When times get tough you can always turn to Him. You don't even have to put on special shoes.

The problem, of course, is that using God this way requires one (on the hard atheist view) to abandon objective reality, which leads to all sorts of negative consequences. People don't usually engage in jihad over bowling. But they do riot over soccer games on a regular basis, and soccer doesn't require you to abandon reality any more than bowling does. So I contend that it's not religion that's the problem, but extremism, and that this is true in nearly every realm of human endeavor. What makes bowling attractive to you and P.Z. Myers is not that it's not a religion, but that it's not extreme, that it doesn't provoke its adherents to violence or to undermine science education. But neither does Buddhism. Or Quakerism. Or Jainism. I could go on. When was the last time you heard of a bunch of Episcopalians bombing an abortion clinic?

Framing the debate as religion-versus-atheism is a serious mistake, not only because it takes the focus off the real underlying problem, but also for practical and political reasons. It makes enemies of moderate religions who really ought to be our allies in the fight for what I really want: a peaceful, prosperous world with as few crazy people as possible in positions of influence and power. It makes the message a negative one ("There is no God") rather than a positive one, which makes a tough sell in a tough world.

You say that what you want is "greater respect for rationality and empirical science, and less respect for faith, as a trusted means for understanding the world." That is a fine aspiration. But you're more likely to get it if you reciprocate and make an effort to understand and develop a greater respect for faith, even if in developing that understanding and respect you do not yourself arrive at faith. Towards that end I have recommended two books written by the noted author Karen Armstrong. The first is A Short History of Myth and the other is The Case for God, which is really just an expanded version of Short History.

I apologize for bringing up what you may have considered a privileged out-of-band communication, but your initial reaction upon reading Short History was, "I hated the beginning. Just hated it. She was claiming value for non-truth..." To which I responded, "Have you never enjoyed a novel?" The reason I bring this up is that your devotion to objective truth is understandable, even admirable, but if taken to an extreme it can lead you astray, and in ways that have much more serious consequences than just missing out on a cracklin' good yarn. I hope you will keep this in mind as we proceed.

The Problem with Faith

[Second in a series]

Ron,

I want to thank you for the honor of co-posting on your blog. I've enjoyed your blog insights for some time now (and your postings on comp.lang.lisp prior to the blog), and have had fun playing devil's advocate in comments here in the past. I'm glad you suggested this series, and I'll do my best to keep up my end of the debate. I beg your readers' indulgence as I attempt to hone my writing craft for these posts while you all watch.

That said, let's get to it!

First of all, I want to state for the record that you and I most likely agree on the vast bulk of important points on this topic. We're both self-admitted atheists. We both have a rational, scientific approach to the world. From your earlier posts, I've come to appreciate your perspective on religion. You have claimed that religion (or, more generally, mythology) offers some important benefits to some people, which I can't deny. And you have offered me a brilliant analogy, that deprogramming people from religion has a lot in common with getting addicts off drugs. (For example, just shouting at them is unlikely to be an effective detox methodology in either case.)

But there are still (or may be) differences of opinion here, and I'll do my best to highlight them. You say that I'm a proponent of "hard atheism". I am indeed a fan of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. But you have criticized them as not being "effective" at converting the religious, and I don't necessarily disagree. Ironically, I may be one of the few people in the tiny population of readers for which the books have made a valuable difference. Since college, I've been a "secret" atheist, sure of my own beliefs, happy to express them in a private, trusting, environment, but very wary of going public with something that is viewed as abhorrent by a large majority of the U.S. (or world!) population. But after reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, I became convinced that my silence was cowardly, and I shouldn't be intimidated by the torrent of voices that disagree and disapprove of me.

You suggest that I agree that

religion, because it makes objectively false claims about the world, is an unalloyed evil

That's probably too strong, for my personal opinion. Yes, I agree that religion makes objectively false claims about the world. This is critically important to me, and seems to be much less so to you. I also think that many religions are, on balance, "evil" (with full awareness that morality is also a complex topic, with deep connections to religion). But I would say that these two points are orthogonal. Religion is not evil because it makes false claims. Homer's Odyssey also makes false claims about the world, but an entertaining fictional novel is not "evil".

But there is plenty done in the name of religion (e.g., Inquisitions, Crusades, and flying airplanes into skyscrapers) that I think is not just a coincidence. I don't accept the claim (by analogy) that every large group of people has some sociopaths, so if you find a serial killer within a chess club, you shouldn't blame chess. Religion isn't like chess. The need for religion to require faith (which is "truth" not supported by empirical observation), to take over culture and impose an us-vs-them view of the world, and to elevate its status as more important than anything else in the world (generally because of an everlasting afterlife) ... these are the kinds of things I think lead directly to the anti-social behavior of cruel and evil warfare against other humans. (Of course, there are many other reasons for warfare, but religion is a big one.)

You suggest that religion in general is not a problem, but only particular religions. And you rightly point out Buddhism as an example of a religion which doesn't seem to result in evils of most other religions.

I agree. Buddhism is a nice exception. But I think you can't ignore the historical evidence, that there have been thousands of religions in history, and the vast, vast majority of them have provided ready excuses for insiders to do great harm to outsiders. Religion is usually a tool for cultural supremacy, and the fact that there have been occasional outliers doesn't excuse the threads in common amongst the vast majority.

You conclude by asking what I want. I guess it would be: greater respect for rationality and empirical science, and less respect for faith, as a trusted means for understanding the world. You have in the past suggested to me many (real) benefits of religious belief, and kind of let pass the objective truth of the religious claims. I'm not willing to separate those so cleanly. To me, the problem is that the religious benefits only accrue to those that really believe, on faith, the (objectively false) claims about the universe. It may be that the believers are happy, and it may not bother you that the price of that happiness is believing in false things. But it would bother the believers themselves, if they actually thought that their religion was making a large series of false claims. I think the claimed benefits of (almost all) religions go hand-in-hand with beliefs based on faith. I want to break beliefs based on faith, and it seems to me that generally implies that religion needs to break also.

To get concrete about my ideal goals, let me quote P.Z. Myers, the prolific blogger behind Pharyngula who is even more of a "hard atheist" than I am. At the end of a post in March 2008, Myers gave what I thought was an eloquent description of a beautiful future world:

What I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It's a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It's not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don't elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works.

And now for something completely different

[Originally written in June 2010, lightly edited to take into account some recent developments.]

I'm going to take a slight detour from my exposition of the Great Conspiracy to do a series of posts that have been in the works for several months now. I've recruited Don Geddis to be a guest blogger here, and we're going to do some collaborative blogging about a topic that has become one of the major themes here: the conflict between science and religion. I tapped Don because he's been a consistent and eloquent proponent of what I will call "hard atheism", the point of view advanced by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris among others, that religion, because it makes objectively false claims about the world, is an unalloyed evil. As an atheist myself I can understand this point of view, but I do not agree with it. I think that religion is much more nuanced than the hard atheists admit, and that they conflate religion with fundamentalism, to the detriment of deeper understanding and societal progress.

So I've asked Don to engage in a debate on this topic, and he has very graciously accepted. The format is going to be a series of posts, with each one being a response by the other person to the one before. Since I'm the instigator I get to go first.

So let me begin, Don, by welcoming you to Rondam Ramblings and thanking you for agreeing to participate in this project. I'd like to start by saying a few words about why I think this is an important topic, and to try to frame the discussion so we don't drift too far afield.

We are living in, to borrow a phrase from an ancient Chinese curse, interesting times. The pace of change -- technological, social, and political -- that we are currently experiencing is unprecedented in the history of the known universe. Much of that change has been indisputably good: when measured against historical norms and in terms of percentages, the world today is more peaceful and prosperous than at any time in recorded history. But of course we also face new and unprecedented dangers, particularly climate change and proliferation of nuclear weapons. It has always been easier to destroy than to build, and modern technology provides non-judgmental leverage for both endeavors. I worry about people with a tenuous grip on reality getting their hands on tactical nukes.

I think it is safe to say that there is a near universal consensus that the world would be a better place if there were fewer crazy people in it, and therein lies the rub: many of the people that you and I would consider crazy are more than happy to return the favor and consider us crazy (or immoral or amoral or otherwise mentally deficient) because we don't believe in (their) God. If the issue were to be decided democratically we would lose.

This, then, is my motivation for engaging you in this debate: Religion does indeed appear to the casual atheistic glance to do a tremendous amount of harm. It is natural to conclude that the correct response is to point out this apparently self-evident fact and embark on an effort to bring people to their senses and get them to stop believing in silly superstitions. But I claim that the premise is false: it is not religion that does the harm but rather particular religions. I'll point at Buddhism as the classic example of a religion to which the vast majority of the usual litany of hard-atheist critiques do not apply.

My thesis, then, is that the right way to deal with the problems caused by religion is not to try to eliminate religion, any more than the right way to try to deal with the problems caused by technology is to try to eliminate technology. The right way to deal with these problems in both cases is first to seek to understand the underlying phenomena, and then to (struggle to find a word here that doesn't have Machiavellian baggage attached to it) manipulate those phenomena in the service of our goals.

Which brings me to the first order of business: what are our goals? (One of my favorite aphorisms is that the hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is.) World peace? Prosperity? Saving the whales? If you had a magic wand and could use it to bring about any result you wanted, what would it be?

Well, guess what: we humans have such a magic wand. It's called a "brain". There are no guarantees of course (magic is not 100% reliable), but waving that magic wand (a.k.a. thinking) has been known to occasionally produce amazing results. So let's get started.

This is intriguing

I just got a Facebook friend request from an AI.

Mega memes and the great conspiracy

I was really hoping to be able to pull this all together in an eloquent grand finale, but it's just not working. So rather than keep everyone waiting I'm just going to do this the awkward way:

1. Classical reality is not metaphysical reality. But treating classical reality as if it were metaphysically real is a useful working approximation in day-to-day life. Analogously, what I am about to describe is also not "really" metaphysically real, but is (I believe) a useful working approximation yadda yadda yadda.

2. Likewise, there is every reason to believe that we don't "really" have free will (because free will is not consistent with a deterministic universe, even a quantum one) but the illusion that we have free will is so powerful and the consequences of descending into fatalism so unpleasant that accepting the illusion of free will and living our lives as if it were real seems prudent.

3. Information reproduces in systems that process classical information like DNA, computers and human brains. The reproduction of information obeys the laws of Darwinian evolution.

4. Some of the information that reproduces in our brains is accessible to us on a conscious level in the form of ideas. But our intuitions about what we think we know can be wrong. Not only do we not know what's really going on around us, we don't know that we don't know.

5. Information influences the physical world through a variety of mechanisms. These include 1) the expression of genes as proteins, 2) the control that brains have over the bodies they reside in, including voluntary and autonomic responses, and the placebo effect.

6. Systems of brains can store and process information in ways that is not possible with individual brains. Companies, for example, have "corporate knowledge" that resides in a distributed fashion in the brains of its employees. In a large company no single person has complete knowledge of how all of the processes in the company work. And yet they do. This is one of the great achievements of modern civilization.

7. If individual brains can have memes living inside them of which they are not aware (c.f. point 4 above) then the concepts encoded in a multi-brain system like a corporation (or a religious group, or a political party) might also not be accessible on a conscious level to any of the component brains that contain it. In fact, it is more likely that a concept resident in a multi-brain system be inaccessible consciously because it is further removed from the mechanisms of consciousness than ideas residing in an individual brain.

8. The mega-memes residing in multi-brain systems reproduce according to the laws of Darwinian evolution just like all other information. They also exert physical influences on the world, i.e. these mega-memes have a phenotype. The computer you are using to read this is an example. No one human being knows how to build a modern computer. The mega-meme that created it resides in hundreds if not thousands of brains.

9. We like to think of ourselves as the masters of ideas, that we create ideas to serve our needs. The Great Conspiracy is the hypothesis that ideas -- and in particular mega-memes distributed in large numbers of brains -- are actually using us humans to serve their needs. The internet did not come into being because we chose to build it, it came into being because the Internet is an idea that reproduces extraordinarily well.

10. Not all ideas that reproduce well have consequences that align as nicely with our human aspirations as the Internet. For example, the idea that one ought to have a lot of children is an idea that reproduces well, as is the idea that one ought to adhere to social norms and not question authority. But the consequences of these ideas might not be so benign.

11. The reason that the Great Conspiracy resembles a conspiracy is because mega-memes reside in multiple brains, and the more brains they reside in the more successful they have been and are likely to continue to be. The reason they don't need to expend resources to remain hidden is that they can hide in plain sight. Any brain that realizes what is going on and rebels is simply cast out of the memetic complex (by, for example, the "phenotype" of the adherence-to-social-norms meme).

12. So one of the predictions of this theory is that no one will pay any attention to it, and I will become socially ostracized for advancing it. :-)

Whether or not you buy this, I hope it's a little clearer now why I had such a hard time rendering this idea into words.

BTW, when Dawkins introduced the concept of memes way back in the 1970's he talked about "viral memes" and the kinds of characteristics that a meme might have to reproduce well. For example, the idea that "God will reward you if you spread this idea" reproduces well because it has this "hook". The Great Conspiracy goes one step further and says that mega-memes resident in multiple brains are actually the central driving force in most human activity. Groupthink is not an aberration, but rather the primary dynamic driving the advance (for now) of civilization.

How the Roberts Court disguises its conservatism

It is no accident that magic makes such a wonderful metaphor for such a wide range of phenomena. Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick try to raise the curtain on the Supreme Court. But not many people will take note because:

... it's not just the illusionist who is to blame. Magic works because the audience so desperately wants to be fooled. The American public seems to want to believe in the myth of a nonideological Supreme Court, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

The whole piece is long, but well worth the time.

Ron's new metaphysics

This idea isn't quite ready for prime time, but I seemed to be wearing out my welcome so I'm going to give this my best shot.

First, some ground rules: If one accepts quantum mechanics (and I do) then one has no choice but to concede that any metaphysics is going to be at least to a certain extent metaphorical. I cannot even invoke the concept of "I" -- can't even type the capital C in "Cogito..." -- without implicitly accepting that I am a classical entity of some sort. But there are no classical entities. The universe is quantum. So the minute I begin to speak or type or think -- the instant "I" do anything -- I have already left true metaphysical reality behind to a certain extent. I may be metaphysically quantum, but that is not the I that I care about. The I that I care about is classical. It has a brain that processes classical information and a body that exists at a particular place and time and observes the universe from the privileged vantage point of "here" and "now." Getting even to that point from the perspective of hard science requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

What happens if we take this suspension of disbelief not as a necessary evil that we need to accept in order to deal with, well, whatever it is we decide we need to deal with (this is one of the things that I could use more time to work out) but look at it instead as a means of acquiring useful "knowledge"? I put knowledge in scare quotes because the knowledge we acquire this way isn't strictly true, in the sense that it is not strictly true that we "are" classical entities. But it's a useful approximation for certain purposes, like getting through the day.

So leaving aside the details, what do we "know"? We're human. We have brains that process classical information. We are built by DNA, which also processes classical information, though in a way that is very different from brains. We have constructed digital computers, which also process classical information in ways that is different from both brains and DNA. (And here I don't mean fundamentally different, just operationally different. This is the reason that AI is hard.) The governing dynamic of this incredibly rich and complicated system is Darwinian evolution: random variation and natural selection for reproductive fitness. Intelligence is an emergent property layered on top of evolution. Nothing new here. But remember, none of this is "true" on the most fundamental level. On the most fundamental level all there is is the quantum wave function. But that is not of interest to "us" because "we" are classical entities.

What happens if we pop up one more level, if we leave the level of classical physics and start looking at this complex and chaotic system on its own terms?

Let me try to explain a little more what I mean by that. As scientists (and Scientists) we are familiar and comfortable with two fundamentally different perspectives on reality: the quantum and the classical. The classical "emerges" from the quantum through decoherence. It isn't "really" real in a metaphysical sense, but it is a useful approximation to reality for us because "we" are classical entities.

What if we imagine going up one more level in this hierarchy? Is there some sort of useful concept of "reality" that "emerges" from the classical just as the classical "emerges" from the quantum? I believe there is. For want of a better term I will call it the "informational" level. To move from the quantum to the classical one stops thinking in terms of amplitudes and starts thinking in terms of particles. To move from the classical to the informational one stops thinking in terms of particles and starts thinking in terms of bits.

When I was at JPL I found that it was surprisingly difficult to communicate some of the subtleties of software engineering to scientists. It was surprising because these were not stupid people. They were brilliant, the best in their field. And yet when I tried to explain things like declarative versus procedural programming they just Didn't Get It. Eventually I developed a theory of why they had such a mental block against these concepts: it was because these people were all specialists in the physical sciences. In other words, they were used to thinking about the world in terms of physics, in terms of particles, in terms of things. But bits aren't things. Bits are states of things, or even more difficult to grasp, they are correlations between states of things. They are as different from things as things are different from quantum wave functions. And seeing the universe from the point of view of bits takes as big a mental leap.

What happens if we make this leap?

Well, the first thing that happens is we invent computer science. That's dramatic (look around you) but it does not yet reach the level of precipitating a metaphysical crisis. That comes when you realize that nature may have already invented computer science before humans did.

Consider your spleen. (I don't know why my brain has gotten hung up on spleens, but for some reason every time I have contemplated this part of the story that's the word that has jumped up and volunteered for duty.) It has no idea that it is part of your body. It just sits there and does whatever it is that spleens do (which thanks to the wonders of Wikipedia I could find out in a matter of seconds but honestly at the moment I'm happier not knowing). But imagine if whatever it is that spleens do was so complex that it turned out to be a significant reproductive advantage for your spleen to have its own brain. And imagine that that brain got complex enough to become self-aware in some spleenly way. After all, there is no inherent reason why biological data processing system should not evolve to be multi-cored.

What would it be like to be a spleen?

Well, from the point of view of being a human (or should I say from the point of view of being a human brain?) I would think it would be pretty awful. It's dark and wet and smelly in there. You can't go to the movies or surf the web or have sex. But of course a spleen's brain wouldn't evolve to care about those things. A spleen's brain would evolve to be happy to be a spleen. Any spleen that achieved the sort of self awareness that a human brain has wold fall into a deep despair at the realization that it is merely a spleen and it would commit spleenicde. Evolution would see to it that spleen brains evolved in such a way as to preserve the illusion (for spleens) that being a spleen was a noble and honorable existence, perhaps even that they were created in the image of God.

The Great Conspiracy theory is: our brains are spleens for entities made of bits.

It's getting late and I'm running out of steam so the rest will have to wait for the next installment.

The Great Conspiracy (without nuts)

I think I've figured out a way to make the Great Conspiracy more concrete without sounding like I've gone completely off the deep end. It's not really a new idea, and it's not a completely accurate description of the actual Great Conspiracy (which isn't really a conspiracy, but you'll get the idea).

There is this concept commonly credited to Vernor Vinge of the Singularity, where (to quote Wikipedia) "technological progress becomes so extremely rapid, due to positive feedback, that it makes the future after the Singularity qualitatively different and harder to predict." The Singularity Institute (not to be confused with Singularity University which is not, I have recently learned, affiliated with the Singularity Institute in any way) was founded on the premise that the Singularity will be characterized by the creation of a Superhuman Artificial Intelligence (SAI) against whose awesome intellectual powers we homo sapiens will be utterly helpless, and so we'd better lay the groundwork now to make sure that these SAI's, when -- not if -- they emerge, will be Friendly (with a capital F), that is, that they will be driven by a quality metric that aligns with ours. To fail to do this is, according to the Singularity Institute, an existential threat to human existence (c.f. SkyNet).

Suspend disbelief for a moment and accept that a non-insane person could entertain this as a possibility. The Great Conspiracy then is, in a nutshell, the idea that the Singularity is not a future possibility but has in fact already happened. And I don't mean that it has already happened in a small, metaphorical way. I mean that it has already happened in a full-blown worst-case-scenario (by Singularity Institute standards) sort of way. There already is an SAI out there, and it is carefully managing the world according to its own goals. And, of course, because it is an SAI, it is very, very effective at achieving its goals.

One of which is to avoid detection. Because the most effective way of preventing humans from turning on you is to keep them from even suspecting that you exist.

Like I said at the beginning, this version is still just a metaphor, not really the Great Conspiracy, but it's closer than the very vague version I gave at the outset. The idea in this version is to try to give more of a feel for why the real Great Conspiracy is difficult to describe. The real-world equivalent of the SAI is not actually an AI (because it isn't artificial), but it is, I think, very good at concealing itself. And one of the mechanisms it uses to maintain that concealment is by arranging for the actual truth to seem intuitively absurd, and anyone advancing to appear to be crazy. Indeed, it goes even one step further and arranges for anyone who discovers the truth to doubt their own sanity, and possibly even their own existence.

It's starting to sound like a pretty good premise for a novel, isn't it?

Atheist sectarianism

Anyone looking for evidence that atheism is just another religion need look no farther than the sectarian squabbles currently going on within the church hierarchy.

I have an interesting personal connection with this little drama. Many years ago, during my last existential midlife crisis I attended the grand opening of CFI West. I was thrilled that the center of gravity of secular humanism was shifting towards the other side of the Rockies, and that this new outpost of rationalism would be virtually in my back yard. I was really looking forward to becoming more active in the humanist/atheist/skeptic/whatever-you-want-to-call-it community (Parker and Stone really hit the nail on the head with the punch-line of this South Park episode. Warning: this link contains spoilers.) I was also eagerly anticipating the chance to meet some of the luminaries who were going to be there, notably Paul Kurtz, who seemed to me at the time to be the patron saint of all things secular.

To say that the event turned out to be a disappointment would be quite the understatement. For starters. the building they had chosen had a pretty depressing vibe. It was an old 1960's era brick monolith on a part of Sunset Boulevard on which the sun had long since set. The place (and I refer here both to the building and its surroundings) were badly in need of renovation. But what bothered me most was not the physical plant, but the air of superiority and snobbishness that emanated from the proceedings. There were only about twenty people there, and it was clear that they all knew each other. I was the only outsider, and I was treated like one. They didn't quite say, "Go away boy, you bother me," but they might as well have.

I was shocked. What was the point of even having this event if not to draw new people into the fold? I was puzzled and disappointed, but not deterred. I decided I would try again with a concrete proposal for how I could add value to the organization by helping out with their web presence, which at the time was in about as good a shape as the building and the neighborhood. One of the arms of the secular humanist establishment is a publication called Free Inquiry, but the domain name freeinquiry.org was available, so I registered it, and sent an email to Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry, asking if he'd be interested in having me set up a web site for him. I never received a reply.

(An interesting side note: In 2006 I submitted an article to Free Inquiry entitled, "Why humanism fails to win hearts and minds." It was my first attempt to render onto paper the ideas that I am now fleshing out more fully here in this blog. It was rejected, which didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was that the reason they gave for the rejection made it clear that they had not even bothered to read the article.)

Freeinquiry.org has been lying fallow for many years now. But last July I got an email from the web developer at Free Inquiry asking to buy the domain name. Apparently someone is dragging them kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. (To this day they only accept submissions printed on paper in triplicate.) I responded that I wasn't interested in money, but that I would happily point a DNS entry to their server. I would also be willing to donate the domain if certain conditions were met, without being specific about what those conditions were. The web developer responded that this was above his pay grade and that he would have to consult with the church elders.

Two weeks later I got an email from Barry Karr. the director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, saying they were still interested in the domain, but that they couldn't place a value on it as a tax deduction. I replied that I didn't care about the tax deduction, that I was interested in helping the organization and not in personal gain, and that he should call me so we could discuss the situation.

Another two weeks went by with no response. When he finally did respond he said that he'd been dealing with family medical issues, and would like to re-open the dialog. I said sure, call me any time.

Again, no response. Finally, I received this on September 24, almost three months after their initial inquiry, I got this:

Ron,

I think I have to take this back to square one because there has been a bit of a change in the position of the Free Inquiry Ex. Director (well, not a change, but I guess I misinterpreted his desires a bit). He does not want to give up secularhumanism.org as the main web address for the Council for Secular Humanism. We had a large meting with our web people, discussing various things, and I thought we all came out of it with the plan that our MAIN FOCUS and url to the world, being freeinquiry.org. Seems I was mistaken.

We do want the freeinquiry.org domain name and we would use it, but it might be used as a sub-directory to the main page for the magazine, or as a forwarder to the secularhumanism.org. I am sorry for the confusion, the fault is mine. We could pay you an amount, probably not more than a few hundred dollars for the domain name, but, as I think I mentioned before, we could not assign a value amount on it as far as tax purposes go.

Your thoughts.

Barry Karr

I responded -- for the third time -- that I was still willing to give them the domain, that it wasn't about the money, and that they could call me any time to discuss the matter. I haven't heard from them since.

I am hard-pressed to imagine a more inept bit of outreach. But now that I have read the NYT article it all makes a bit more sense. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Open Mic Night

I wrote this in 1992. (It was originally entitled "The Reader.") Maybe should have posted it instead of the "Thud" post. The spirit of the staircase is apparently alive and well. :-)

---

Open Mic Night

He stands upon the podium and struggles to make contact.
From deep within his soul he takes
His one true self
His heart of hearts
Lays it bare
And tries to squeeze it through the microphone
Out the PA speakers
To the audience beyond
Reaching for his joy through theirs
That joy -- remembered, or imagined --
Of making contact
Of sowing the seeds of his soul.

But oh! It's a tough crowd tonight
And the silence is harder than stones

Behind the scenes of the Kobayashi Maru

Thought I'd tell a little about the reality that motivated me to write my philosophical Kobayashi Maru scenario.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about science and religion and am reaching a conclusion that is very hard to frame in words. The closest I can come is something along the lines of this analogy: the claim that either science is right or religion is right but not both is rather like the claim that an electron is either a particle or a wave but it can't be both. Both statements are intuitively obvious, and yet both statements are wrong. Understanding how electrons can be both a particle and a wave requires an enormous conceptual leap. Understanding how religion and science can both be "right" requires an even greater conceptual leap (and it's one of the reasons I chose to hedge by putting the word "right" in scare quotes). Because if you really want to get at the Truth with a capital T then it is not strictly correct to say that electrons are both a particle and a wave. But explaining why is very, very tricky, and I'm tripping over myself even now trying to formulate even that elementary thought so I'm going to stop there and tell you a story instead. This story is true.

I suffer from two chronic medical conditions. I have been taking medications for both of them for years. Recently one of these conditions has been getting worse, and one particularly awful incident a while back prompted me to consult my doctor to see if perhaps more drastic intervention was called for. (Dan, you may remember the episode I'm referring to.)

Since moving to the Bay Area I have a new doctor so he was able to look at my situation with fresh eyes. He suggested the possibility that both conditions might be related and have the same underlying cause, and that there is a new medication that might make both problems just go away permanently. That sounded good to me, so I had him write me a prescription. The result has been dramatic. Since I've gotten this new medicine both problems have indeed seemed to get noticeably better. Of course, this is not conclusive because both problems tend to come and go, but the change from one day to the next was striking. Before, the one problem seemed to be getting steadily worse. After (and it has been several weeks now) it has not recurred at all.

Here's the kicker: I got the prescription. I had it filled. But I haven't actually taken it yet. The full bottle of pills is still sitting on my shelf. Which is pretty frickin' weird. Because I emphatically don't believe in homeopathy or The Secret or God or any of that crap. And yet, the placebo effect seems to be working for me nonetheless.

Could all be a coincidence. Absolutely. But since this happened I have begun to notice lots of other weird things that I normally would not have paid attention to. Individually any one of them could easily be written off as just Random Shit that Happens to People All The Time. But collectively they add up to one hell of a lot of coincidences for one person. Maybe I'm just lucky (or unlucky depending on how you look at it). After all, someone has to be the luckiest person on the planet, and the odds against it being me are a mere seven billion to one. But it still seems pretty damn odd.

Thud

I've been writing Rondam Ramblings for over seven years now, which probably makes it one of the longer-lived continuously maintained blogs on the Web. It was not so much intended to draw an audience as to be a place for people who knew me to keep tabs on what I was up to, sort of like a Facebook page but before Facebook existed. Somehow along the way I've picked up, at last count, 26 followers, and who knows how many more have subscribed via FriendFeed and other channels whose existence I may not even be aware of. I have no idea who most of these people are. Whoever you are, thanks for reading. There is nothing as satisfying to a writer as having an audience.

I've been trying to return the favor by posting less personal stuff and more informative and thought-provoking material, but I guess I misjudged my audience pretty badly because my last post seems to have landed with a resounding thud. I was really hoping for some feedback because that post was, more or less, a true story, or at least a metaphor for one. There was no stranger in a dream weaving conspiracy theories, but there is a problem I need to solve that has the peculiar characteristic that describing the problem will almost certainly make matters worse. Some of the events that lead to this situation have bordered on the surreal. So the story is fictional, but it's based on reality. (Ironically, not getting any feedback is exactly what the real-world analog to the "conspiracy theory" would have predicted.)

I posted the story not so much because I expected free therapy but because I thought it made an interesting intellectual puzzle that would spark some discussion. Apparently I thought wrong. Trick is, now I don't know whether the silence is because the piece was crap, or because it was so thought-provoking that everyone is taking days to digest it, or because everyone is just out on vacation. The reason I'm posting this is to let you, my readers, whoever you are, know that I do care about making the content of this blog interesting and relevant, and not just a self-indulgent personal journal. The more you tell me about what you think of the content, even if it's just checking off the "bogus" box in the reactions widget, the easier that will be.

What would you do?

Imagine one evening you meet a stranger at a bar. You exchange the usual social pleasantries and begin to establish a rapport, until the stranger gets a strange gleam in his (or her -- take your pick) eye, says, "You know....", and starts to spin a yarn of the most cockamamie conspiracy theory you have ever heard. Elvis being alive and responsible for the assassination of JFK would sound downright plausible compared to the fantastic ridiculousness of the story you are being told. You sigh inwardly to yourself about having wasted yet another evening hanging out with a person who turns out to be a wacko. Until at one point the stranger says, "And here's the evidence that this is all true," and sketches out an experiment that you could do that would falsify the theory. "OK, let's try it," you say. And off you go...

And then you wake up. It was all a dream. You breathe a sigh of relief, get up, take a shower...

But for some reason you can't get this crazy conspiracy theory out of your mind. Of course it can't be true (can it?). No, of course it can't. But the more you think about the more you realize that, yeah, it could be true, and that you really have to do this experiment to convince yourself that you haven't lost your grip. So you do.

And the result is exactly what the stranger in your dream predicted it would be.

You are, naturally, surprised, but your worldview has not yet been shaken to its foundation. After all, you have not proved that the conspiracy theory is correct, you have merely failed to disprove it. There are any number of other plausible explanations for why the experiment turned out the way it did. But the fact that it turned out this way doesn't help you sleep any better at night.

So you do what any good Scientist would: you repeat the experiment. And you get the same result. You design other experiments to test the theory, and every single one fails to disprove it.

Now, normally this would be the basis of a great scientific discovery. But the problem is that this is a conspiracy. It turns out that the world really is out to get you. You really are surrounded by aliens and pod people. (Of course, they have human DNA. But their thought processes are utterly different from yours. But they all put on this act to make them appear as if they were Just Like You. Mostly.)

You pinch and slap yourself to make sure that you aren't in the middle of a nested dream. Nope. You're awake. This is as real as it gets. Everything you thought was true about the world is wrong. And you can prove it. Reliably. Repeatedly. But only to yourself because, well, everyone else in the world (as far as you can tell) is an alien. You have somehow taken the blue pill, but instead of waking up outside the Matrix you find that what you thought was the real world is the Matrix. But there is no higher level reality that you can escape to. This is it.

What do you do? You can't talk to anyone about it because, well, everyone is an alien, and their reaction to your describing what is going on will be exactly the same as your reaction was to the stranger in your dream: They will think you're nuts. They will shun you. If you make to much noise about it they will put you in the padded room.

Maybe you are nuts? How would you know? Every experiment you do indicates that you are sane. You remember what life was like before, so you can still play the game. You are socially functional. You have a wife and a cat and a nice house in the burbs. You go to work. You pay the bills. If there were someone else out there who had come to the same realization to which you had come, they would never know that you were not an alien. And conversely, you reason, you would never know that they were not an alien. So there might be others out there like you. But you can't find them.

Unless... you manage to find a way to penetrate their dreams. That is the one way that you might be able to communicate what you have learned without risking ostracism and isolation. But that, of course, is impossible.

Isn't it?

Mourning the many victims of 9-11

On this the ninth anniversary of the most traumatic event in recent memory I mourn the loss of 2996 of my fellow human beings (because not all of the victims of the 9/11 attacks were Americans). But more than that, I mourn the loss of perspective that those attacks seem to have brought about. What is it about those 2996 that makes them more worthy of reflection than, say, the 4418 U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq since 9/11? Or the (approximately) 400,000 people who died in highway accidents, of which 100,000 might still be alive today if we'd taken the money we have spent fighting the war on terrorism and used it instead to improve our infrastructure? Or the uncounted hundreds of thousands -- possibly over a million -- Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have died at our hands in the name of fighting terror? Or the uncounted tens of millions who die for lack of clean drinking water and basic medical care throughout the world on an ongoing basis?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question. It cannot be answered, because to do so would require one to face the horrible truth that not all men (women don't even enter the equation here) are created equal, and that by placing special emphasis on the victims of 9/11 we undermine the aphorisms that we Americans rely on for the moral authority to spread our influence around the planet. We are supposed to be fighting for freedom and equality, but both our actions and our rhetoric belie the fact that what we are really fighting for is the principle that American lives are worth more than non-American lives, and more particularly, that rich American lives are worth more than non-rich non-American lives. Because when 2996 people -- many of which were rich Americans -- die prematurely, that is cause for all manner of radical policy changes. But when 4418 American soldiers -- not a single one of whom was rich -- die prematurely that's just the cost of defending "freedom" (whatever that word might still mean in this era of ubiquitous surveillance and nearly unfettered government authority). And when hundreds of thousands of poor Iraqis die, or millions upon millions of poor Africans and east Asians die prematurely, that doesn't even register on the radar. Those lives matter so little that they are not even worth counting, which why no one actually knows how many Iraqis and Afghanis we have killed.

In the midst of all this carnage to which we Americans appear to be mostly blind, I am struck most of all by the spectacle of two little-known clerics who have been catapulted into the international spotlight not because they have done anything even remotely important, but simply because they have managed to offend a large enough number of people. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has become famous for offending Americans by daring to build a mosque on private property within walking distance of ground zero, and and Pastor Terry Jones has become famous for offending Muslims by threatening to burn Korans. And while both sides quibble over whose offense is more justified by God, people continue to die on the unsecured streets of Baghdad and Kabul, and on the unmaintained roads of the United States of America, and at contaminated wells and rivers throughout the world.

It is indeed a state of affairs worthy of mourning.

Two pieces of code someone really ought to write

Gripe mode on:

If you think about it, sockets are the elephant in the unix living room. Everything in unix is supposed to be a file. "Real" files are, of course, files. Remote files are files. Devices are "files". And with the /proc filesystem, even parts of the kernel are files. Everything is a file.

Except sockets.

Sockets aren't files, but they really should be, and it mystifies me that someone hasn't written a FUSE file system that presents sockets as files. It seems like a no-brainer. Instead of having to call socket() and bind() and connect() and fill in sock_addr structures, I should just be able to call open("/fuse/sockets/www.whatever.com/tcp/80", "r+") and get a descriptor for a TCP socket to www.whatever.com port 80. It should be straightforward to implement this on top of FUSE.

Item the second:

Apache's mod_proxy allows Apache to act as a forwarding proxy to other machines, or even the same machine via a TCP connection, but NOT to a local unix-domain socket.

So suppose that I want to have Apache as my front-end to handle security and serve static content, and I want it to proxy interactive pages to a custom standalone server app. No problem you say, just pick a non-publically-accessible TCP port for the custom app and point mod_proxy to that port for the relevant URLs.

But now suppose that I have a single machine with a single IP address hosting multiple virtual servers, and I want to replicate this setup for each virtual server, i.e. I want each virtual server to have its own instantiation of the custom server application. Now I have to *manually* assign *each* instantiation of the app to a separate TCP port number. If I have hundreds or thousands of virtual servers on the same machine (Oh? You think that's not reasonable? Can you say "multi-core architecture"?) that can become a serious administrative (to say nothing of security) nightmare.

Wouldn't it be better if instead of assigning the custom server app to a TCP port number I could instead assign each one to a unix domain socket? Unix domain sockets don't have numbers, they have *names*, so I can just name each socket after the virtual server that it serves. Voila! no more manual assignment of servers to port numbers and associated administrative headaches.

Lighttpd can do this, but Apache can't (or at least couldn't the last time I checked). It's a conceptually simple thing to do, but actually making it work with the rest of the Apache infrastructure is not so easy for someone who isn't already intimately familiar with Apache's innerds.

If it turns out that these things already exist I'd be most grateful for a pointer. If they indeed do not exist, I hope someone will write them. I'd be willing to pay for the development if anyone out there wants to send me a proposal.

Blogger has added a spam filter!

Hooray!

It seems to be working too. I'm seeing a lot of spam attempts, but nothing is getting through. Thanks, Google!

I will no longer support Susan G. Komen

I don't want my money to be used for bullshit like this.

The AT&T 3G Microcell: YMMV

The AT&T 3G microcell is like a little personal cell tower that uses your internet connection to provide cell service in places where there is a weak signal, or none at all. Our new house sits in a cell dead zone, so I decided to try one. Six weeks, three trips to Fry's, two warranty replacement units, and I don't know how many hours on the phone with AT&T tech support later, I finally have a working unit. I thought I'd share the results of my experience in the hopes that it might save other people some time.

There are two fundamental problems with the microcell. The first is that it doesn't like to sit behind a firewall, but the documentation doesn't make this clear. It uses a proprietary protocol and some obscure IP port numbers which your router may or may not handle properly. It turns out this is pretty common knowledge on the microcell discussion forum but it's easy to waste a lot of time trying to figure this out. (AT&T does publish a troubleshooting guide that has this information, but it's hard to find. In fact, it's so hard to find that when I went to look for the link so I could put it in this post I couldn't find it.)

The situation is exacerbated by the second problem, which is much more serious: The microcell is not plug-and-play. In order to use the unit you first have to activate it. which requires you to register the physical address where the unit will be placed. AT&T says this is because of FCC requirements to provide cellular 9-1-1 emergency services, which makes a certain amount of sense I suppose. The problem is that AT&T doesn't just take your word for it that you've entered the correct address on their web site. The unit contains an internal GPS receiver, and before you can make any phone calls the GPS has to verify that the unit is in fact where you said it was. If it isn't, or if it can't lock onto its location, it won't work at all. (How it is supposed to be better in an emergency not to be able to make a call at all rather than make a call from a cell site whose location might not be known is not altogether clear to me.)

That is already bad enough, but get this: it can take up to ninety minutes for the GPS to lock onto its location. So if something isn't working properly you have to wait an hour and a half to find out. If after an hour and a half the unit hasn't activated, it gives you no indication as to what went wrong. Your only options are to power cycle or keep waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

My initial activation actually went fairly smoothly. The problems started a few days later. The unit can go off-line for any number of reasons (lost GPS lock, lost network connection, because it doesn't like your cologne) and when it does, the only way to get it running again is to power cycle it, which means going through the whole up-to-ninety-minute-long process of re-aquiring a GPS signal all over again. That is what happened to me, at first once or twice a day, then several times a day, and then it finally died altogether and refused to connect for five days straight. That's when I got my first warranty replacement unit.

Alas, the second unit was just as flaky as the first, which made me think that the apparently reliable operation I had experienced the first few days was a fluke (or maybe a hallucination). So I started experimenting. I relocated it onto a windowsill to provide better GPS satellite visibility. I added an external GPS antenna to help boost the signal. No joy. I was really discounting the possibility of a hardware failure because modern electronics tend to be pretty reliable, and the chance that I had somehow gotten two defective units seemed pretty remote. But one day I happened to plug in the external GPS antenna while it was working, and ten minutes later it went off-line. This behavior turned out to be repeatable, which seemed like pretty strong evidence that this unit was in fact defective. So I got a third unit, and this one seems to be working.

My verdict: the 3G Microcell is not quite ready for prime time. It has some serious design flaws and apparently some pretty bad quality control on the manufacturing side. I hope they fix these problems because when it works it's a very handy gadget.

A singular plug

I don't normally do endorsements on Rondam Ramblings, but I'm going to make a rare exception for the Singularity Summit (August 14-15 in San Francisco) which looks like it's going to be a worthwhile event. I was very much hoping to attend myself, but unfortunately they scheduled it on top of another long-standing commitment so I can't go this year. If you register through this link you can get a $150 discount off the normal registration fee.

A rare win for freedom

The EFF has achieved a rare victory for individual liberty by convincing the U.S. copyright office to officially declare that circumventing digital rights management (DRM) is legal under certain circumstances. It is now officially legal to jailbreak your iPhone, circumvent copy protection for fair-use, and make mash-ups on YouTube. Three cheers for the EFF and the Library of Congress.

Anyone want to take bets how long it will take Apple, the RIAA and the MPAA to launch their PR campaign against this decision? Or to appeal the decision in court? Or to win that appeal? The cynic in me gives it two years. So enjoy your freedom while it lasts.

[UPDATE] Ars Technica has a very good and detailed analysis of the decision.

These Chinese spammers are getting pretty annoying

Lately everything I post collects at least one piece of Chinese comment spam. I've been manually deleting them, but I don't know how much longer I can keep that up. (I'll leave them on this post if they appear to illustrate the problem.) I already have every comment-spam-prevention measure available on Blogger enabled short of shutting down comments altogether. I'm not sure what I'm going to do if the problem persists. Suggestions welcome. Surely I'm not the only one having this problem?

Why can't we all just get along? Because the laws of physics forbid it.

The Boston Globe recently published an interesting story about how facts backfire:

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. ... This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

What is surprising to me is not so much that facts cause people to become more entrenched in their beliefs -- whatever those might happen to be -- but rather how hard it is to convince people who claim to hew to the facts that this is so. The idea that more faithful adherence to objective fact will cause people's views to converge is supported by neither theory nor observation, but rather by a blind faith that Truth Will Prevail somehow.

To be sure there are circumstances where objective metaphysical truth can be very useful with respect to certain measures of utility. If you're trying to build a bridge, for example, you'll probably have better luck if you do the math than if you pray. But if you're trying to, for example, mobilize a large group of people to work together towards a common goal, you might do better by promulgating ideas that are not scientifically demonstrable (or, more to the point, falsifiable), like the idea that you are anointed by God.

But, counter the Hitchenses and the Dawkinses and the Harrises of the world, if you base your actions on a fiction then, being unconstrained by objective reality, anything is permissible, and all manner of evils predictably result: Slavery. Oppression of women. War. (It is, not coincidentally, ironic and revealing that this is exactly the same critique that is raised by the other side of the debate: if you are unconstrained by the Word of God then anything goes.)

And yet even a moment's reflection will reveal the flaw in this reasoning. It is simply not the case that "anything goes" in fiction. I cannot, for example, simply stand up on a soap box in the town square and proclaim myself to be anointed by God and expect anyone to take me seriously. The promulgation of ideas proceeds according to the laws of physics no less than the promulgation of genes. That the laws of the promulgation of ideas are not as widely known or as well understood does not change the fact that they are, in fact, in effect.

Ideas are information, and so they propagate by processes that are by now pretty well understood. Because they propagate by making copies of themselves, and because the resources required to make those copies are limited, they are subject to the laws of Darwinian evolution: ideas that are better at copying themselves make more copies and so are more likely to propagate. Being objectively true might offer a competitive advantage in some situations, but there is nothing fundamental about "truth" that makes it any more likely to propagate than fiction.

Consider the Shakers. The Shakers were a religious sect that, among other things, preached celibacy not just for priests but for everyone. Universal celibacy is not an idea that reproduces well. By way of contrast, the idea that one should be fruitful and multiply, and that abortion and contraception are evil, is an idea that reproduces extremely well. So it should come as no surprise that there are more Catholics and Mormons in the world than Shakers.

The relationship between ideas and their ecosystem (human brains and information-storing artifacts like books and computers) is an extremely complex symbiotic relationship. Ideas cannot exist without human brains to "live" in, and some ideas (like antibiotics) in turn provide benefits to brains. But sometimes -- and this is crucial -- the interests of brains and ideas are in conflict. For example, a brain that came to understand enough about objective reality might figure out how to have sex without producing offspring. The ideas resident in such a brain would then be deprived of one of their chief means of reproduction, namely, the ability to transfer into the pliable neural networks of newly formed brains that are captive audiences to their parents. On the other hand, the ideas resident in such brains might have access to other means of reproduction that would not otherwise have been available to them, like the Internet. But the fate of the idea that one should exercise conscious control over one's biological reproduction will ultimately be decided by evolution, not deliberation.

There is one aspect of the complex interplay between brains and ideas that ought to be deeply worrisome to anyone who values rationality: it is not necessary for a brain or an idea to be rational in order to benefit from the fruits of rationality. Antibiotics work equally well whether or not you believe in evolution. The Internet is equally accessible to the scientist as to the religious fanatic. As long as this is so, rationality will to a certain extent be self-undermining because the indiscriminate proliferation of the products of rationality helps irrationality to reproduce.

Viewed in this way it is no surprise that ideas become entrenched in brains in ways that make them impervious to facts. It's a defense mechanism. Ideas that resist facts have, all else being equal, a reproductive advantage over ideas that yield to them. It is dismaying how hard it is to get otherwise intelligent people to understand this. But it is not at all surprising.

Loki is apparently not done with us

It wasn't just the escrow from hell that has made our lives stressful over the last few months, but we've also had a fair amount of bad luck on our move as well. First there was a miscommunication with our builder, who thought that we weren't arriving for another week, so when we showed up at the house it was still a construction zone. The garage was full of stuff, and there were tarps and painting supplies all over the house. It was 7PM, and our movers were scheduled to show up at 9 the next morning. It eventually got sorted out, but it was a stressful night. Then it turned out that we didn't have any phone service. We had called ahead and arranged to have our new line active by the time we arrived, which it was, but our house is brand new and no one had actually run the wire from the pole to the house. We're also in a cell phone dead zone. (Well, it's AT&T. Most of the world is a cell phone dead zone.) So for a week we had no communications with the outside world at our house.

Don't even get me started about Comcast. Suffice it to say, they are legendary for bad customer service, particularly on new installations, and I can say now from firsthand experience that their reputation is well deserved.

All of which makes what happened today that much more remarkable. To fully appreciate the irony, I have to back up about two months and tell you about a little incident that happened while we were buying our new house. We were exchanging some email with our builder, and he happened to mention a sewage ejector pump.

Sewage ejector pump? We have a sewage ejector pump?

In case you don't know what a sewage ejector pump is, it's pretty much what it sounds like: it's like a cross between a sump pump and a garbage disposal, and it pumps the sewage from our house, which sits in a sort of a hollow below street level, up to the sewer line under the street.

I asked our builder, um, what happens if that pump fails? Does our house fill with sewage?

No, he said, there's a holding tank with a few day's worth of capacity, and if that fills up then it overflows and dumps into the creek behind the house. Which is bad, but not as bad as having a house full of sewage.

But, he said, these pumps are very reliable. They rarely fail.

Well, guess what. We've been in the new place for just over a month, and today the sewage ejector failed, and did do in a fairly spectacular fashion. It has apparently been going bad for a while because it has been making a gawdawful noise ever since we moved in. We thought that was normal, but apparently not. They are supposed to run silent. So it seems that this pump has been chewing itself up for some time. So for the moment we can't run any water, which means we can't flush and toilets.

Figures this would be the day I decide to wait until later to take a shower.

No word yet on whether this will be fixed today, or if we will have to check into a hotel.

UPDATE at 4:30PM: The county repair crew is here installing a new pump. Don't ever let anyone tell you that government doesn't work. Of all the infrastructure organizations we have had to deal with on this move, the worst by far have been the private companies, AT&T and Comcast in particular. The service from the government agencies has been uniformly good, and in this particular case, exceptional.

The escrow from hell - abridged version

I was in the process of writing up the story of the Escrow from Hell. It was up to six or seven chapters and I was only about half way through when Nancy said words to the effect that publishing the story at that level of detail might not be the wisest thing I've ever done. Nancy tends to be right about such things, so I've decided to just put up a highly abridged and sanitized version of the story for now.

The long and the short of it was that soon after we put our house up for sale we got a letter from our next door neighbor saying that there was water draining from our yard onto hers, and that this had caused damage to a shared retaining wall that separated our properties. We were not on speaking terms with our neighbor because of a long-running dispute involving her dogs that ultimately resulted in us filing a lawsuit against her. We were ready and willing to fix the problem, but because we didn't have an open channel of communication it was hard to figure out exactly what the problem was. We were in the process of sending letters back and forth to try to get this situation taken care of when by an incredible stroke of luck we happened to get two offers on our house at nearly the same time. This resulted in a minor bidding war and we ended up getting our full asking price. There was only one little hitch: when we disclosed the drainage issue to our buyer he added a contingency to his offer: we had to completely resolve this issue before close of escrow.

So this left us in a bit of a pickle. How do you "completely resolve" an issue with a neighbor who refuses to communicate with you? I won't go into details, but suffice it to say it was by far the most difficult thing I've ever done. It involved, at various times, three lawyers, threats of physical violence, and a chain of indirect communications that was eight stages from end to end: from our buyer's lawyer to our buyer to his agent to our agent to us to our neighbor's husband (who was speaking to us even if our neighbor wasn't) to our neighbor to our neighbor's lawyer. Our agent, who is a trained mediator, finally managed to close the deal, but even she at one point threw in the towel and thought that the deal was dead before it ultimately rose from the ashes. In the end, between legal bills, interest on two mortgages, and extortion money we had to pay to our neighbor to get her to sign off -- oh, and let's not forget paying the contractor to actually fix the problem (which ultimately turned out to be the smallest of all the costs associated with this debacle) -- we were probably set back about $50,000. I actually lost ten pounds because I was too stressed out to eat. (I'm starting to gain it back now.)

But we sold the house.

We sold the house!

It could have been a whole lot worse. I think there's a very good chance we're heading for a double-dip recession. The historical parallels between today and ~1931-2 are pretty uncanny. And if the next big economic shock had come while we were holding on to two houses, one of which was vacant, that could have ended up being very unpleasant. So going through two months with the sale constantly poised on the hairy edge of falling through was unbelievably stressful. I cannot begin to describe how relieved we are that it's over.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Rondam Ramblings has been quiet lately because we have been in the midst of the Escrow From Hell (and its companion feature, the Move From Purgatory). But now, at long last, the end seems to be in sight. Some time today, unless something really unexpected happens, we should be getting a call from our realtor telling us that we have finally sold our house in Los Angeles. The situation was so tenuous and dragged on for so long that I didn't want to write about it, partly because I was afraid that some of the other people involved would see the posts and that would make matters worse, and partly because I just didn't have the mental energy. I'm even a little hesitant to post this for fear that it will somehow draw Loki's attention back to us and he will find a way to make the deal fall through even though the only thing left to do is for the title company to record the transfer of the deed. So many things have gone wrong that it would hardly surprise me to hear that the person handling the paperwork got hit by a bus (God forbid) on his way to the county recorder's office or some such thing.

Once escrow is officially closed, and I have recovered from the bender I plan to go on once that has happened, I will be posting again, starting with the story of the Escrow From Hell. I actually started writing it up a few weeks ago. I'm up to six installments already, and I'm only about half way through the saga. So don't touch that dial, we'll be right back after this short commercial break.

[UPDATE:] Escrow did close. Woohoo! Stay tuned for the first installment of the saga.

Nothing could possibly go wrong with this

This sneak peek at Windows 8 would be funny if it weren't so sad.

"There appears to be considerable planning taking place as to how a user will access Windows. Right off the bat, one of my favorites is the following prototype which shows a user logging in via facial recognition! Basically, you enroll your face, then all you should have to do from that point forward is sit down, have your webcam get a look at you and then log you in based on facial recognition"

Yeah. that'll work. Because no technology exists that can make a copy of my face.

Oh, wait...

Variable3.com: Design. Print. Web. Steal.

You know you've made it to the big time as a blogger when people start stealing your material. Variable3.com has ripped off my top ten geek business myths piece.

What really pisses me off about this particular theft is this lame-assed attribution at the end:

Courtesy: RON (not sure where i read it)

I guess the folks at variable3.com haven't heard of Google.

[UPDATE:] I found out about the variable3 post through Hacker News. I posted a comment there about the ripoff and went to write this post. When I went back to Hacker News, less than five minutes had elapsed, but the post had already been killed and the site banned. Now that's customer service! Thanks Paul!

[UPDATE2:] Variable has issued an apology which I've accepted.

AT&T takes suckage to a whole new level

I've known for a while that AT&T sucks but they just took suckage to a whole new level. We recently moved to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, where we had two phone lines. When I called to move our phone service I asked for forwarding recordings to be placed on our old lines. They said no problem. It took us a week to actually get hooked up to our new phone lines (a story for another time), so today was the first day that we were actually able to make calls from our new house. I called our old numbers to make sure that the forwarding recordings were up and had the correct number on them. They weren't. They just said, "You have reached a number that has been disconnected..." So I called AT&T and asked them to fix it. They said that they could only put the recording on one of the two lines.

Say what?

Yes, that's right. It's obviously not technically impossible for them to do it, it's strictly a business decision. Because the two numbers were on one residential account, I can only get one forwarding recording. I can't even pay to get a second one. I have no choice but to have one of my numbers come up as "disconnected or no longer in service."

Un freakin' believable.

On the plus side, this makes it a lot easier to decide whether or not to get a second line from AT&T this time around. I can't wait for my iPhone contract to expire so I can get a Nexus One. I've absolutely had it with AT&T. (I'm none too thrilled with Apple nowadays either.)

Neutrinos have mass!

Scientists the INFN1’s Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy announced today that they have detected a muon neutrino spontaneously changing into a tau neutrino . This is exciting because the standard model of particle physics says that neutrinos don't have any mass, but in order to undergo this spontaneous change they must have a non-zero mass. So this means new physics could be at hand. It also means that neutrinos are a candidate explanation for dark matter.

From a philosophical point of view two things are worth noting. First, obtaining this result took years of painstaking work. And second, despite the fact that this result contradicts the orthodox view, it is being received with open arms, even excitement, but the scientific community. Contrary to the claims of creationists, scientists love it when experiments show that a theory is wrong because that is the only way that scientific progress is made. But nowadays, results of this magnitude are very hard to come by and they just don't happen very often.

---

[UPDATE:] Rob Warnock sent me an email that basically says that I have this all wrong. Rather than try to distill his critique at the risk of getting it wrong again, I'll just post what he sent me, edited for formatting only:

---

While this is indeed very interesting news, your article puts all the
emphasis on neutrinos having mass. But what was actuallyu announced by
CERN is simply that a muon neutrino was "caught in the act" of changing
into a tau neutrino, *not* that neutrinos change (oscillate) between
flavors nor that they have mass (which oscillation *requires*) -- that's
rather old news from the 1990s [with roots back to the 1950s]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino
...
Neutrinos have a very small, but nonzero mass.
...
The solar neutrino number discrepancy problem
Starting in the late 1960s, several experiments found that the number
of electron neutrinos arriving from the Sun was between one third and
one half the number predicted by the Standard Solar Model (SSM). This
discrepancy, which became known as the solar neutrino problem, remained
unresolved for some thirty years. The Standard Model of particle
physics (SM) assumes that neutrinos are massless and cannot change
flavor. However, if neutrinos had mass, they could change flavor
(or oscillate between flavours).
...
Direct detection of flavor oscillation in solar neutrinos
Starting in 1998, experiments began to show that solar and atmospheric
neutrinos change flavors (see Super-Kamiokande and Sudbury Neutrino
Observatory). This resolved the solar neutrino problem: the electron
neutrinos produced in the Sun had partly changed into other flavors
which the experiments could not detect.
...
Mass
The Standard Model of particle physics assumed that neutrinos are
massless, although adding massive neutrinos to the basic framework is
not difficult. Indeed, the experimentally established phenomenon of
neutrino oscillation requires neutrinos to have nonzero masses.[11]
This was originally conceived by Bruno Pontecorvo in the 1950s.
...
In 1998, research results at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector
determined that neutrinos do indeed flavor oscillate, and therefore
have mass. While this shows that neutrinos have mass, the absolute
neutrino mass scale is still not known.
...
The initial results indicate |#m232| = 0.0027 eV^2, consistent with
previous results from Super-Kamiokande.[22] Since |#m232| is the
difference of two squared masses, at least one of them has to have a
value which is at least the square root of this value. Thus, there
exists at least one neutrino mass eigenstate with a mass of at least
0.04 eV.[23]

In 2009 lensing data of a galaxy cluster were analyzed to predict a
neutrino mass of about 1.5 eV.[24]
...

I don't know if it's hard to change articles once they're on Blogspot,
but you might want to shift the focus just a little bit, to put the
emphasis on the observation of the very specific flavor changing that
they saw. Muon neutrino <--> electron neutrino oscillation had been seen
[or at least inferred] before [in the context of the Solar "missing" neutrino
problem, as above], but direct observation of muon neutrino <--> tau neutrino
had never been seen before... which is the news here.

You might also be interested in comparing the coverage of this on
Tommaso Dorigo's excellent blog, which also has some background
on the history:

http://www.scientificblogging.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/opera_sees_tau_neutrino_appearance
OPERA Sees Tau Neutrino Appearance!!
By Tommaso Dorigo | May 31st 2010 03:17 PM
...
In the late 1990s the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan proved that
neutrinos may "oscillate": they may change flavour, such that a muon
neutrino may turn into an electron neutrino, or vice-versa. But a muon
neutrino had never been directly seen turning into a tau neutrino yet.
...

Best Fan Fiction Ever

I wasn't planning on blogging about this until later, but since Miles pointed out that I'm being pretty gloomy lately I decided to go ahead and mention this now. Eliezer Ydkowsky has written what is quite possibly the best work of fan fiction ever written. Well worth the read, and that's saying something because it will take you a few hours to get through it all. If you haven't read any of the original Harry Potter books (or seen the movies) do that first or it won't make a lot of sense.

I'm starting to think that Eliezer is actually as smart as he thinks he is. That would be really scary.

I would have given long odds against

It appears that there may be some actual benefits from acupuncture.

And we wonder why they hate us

As usual Glenn Greenwald gets to the heart of the matter:

Late last night, Israel attacked a flotilla of ships in international waters carrying food, medicine and other aid to Gaza, killing at least 10 civilians on board and injuring at least 30 more"...
...
If Israel's goal were to provoke as much disgust and contempt for it as possible, it's hard to imagine how it could be doing a better job.
...
it is only American protection of Israel that permits the Israelis to engage in conduct like this. ... it is only the massive amounts of U.S. financial and military aid, and endless diplomatic protection, that enables Israel to act with impunity as a rogue and inhumane state.

There's more, of course. Worth reading the whole thing.

[UPDATE] I wrote in a comment that boarding a ship without permission in international waters is piracy. Turns out it's only piracy when it's done by a non-government entity. If a government does it (as in this case) it's an illegal act of war. Israel can't have it both ways. Either it is occupying Gaza or it is not. If it is, then it has a responsibility to look after the welfare of its inhabitants, and if it isn't then it has no right to blockade Gaza's ports. One way or another, Israel is clearly on the wrong side of the law.

My sentiments exactly

Heather Havrilesky asks How can the Lost finale not suck?

[UPDATE:] Yep, pretty much every bit as bad as I was expecting it to be. God, I'm glad that's finally over. When Lapidus sends Miles out to repair a hydraulic leak on a jet airplane with duct tape I actually laughed out loud. That was pretty much the highlight of the show for me.

What a waste of talent and potential.

[UPDATE 2:] It was almost worth putting up with the last few years of Lost just so I could fully appreciate Jack Shafer's brilliant shredding of the finale. Laura Miller's deconstruction over at Salon is pretty good too. More cathartic than the actual finale.

Another step towards totalitarianism

A Pennsylvania man faces eight years in prison on what are almost certainly trumped up charges of assaulting a federal agent. The alleged "assault" was almost certainly (the crucial evidence is being held by the government) nothing more than an attempt to photograph the agents on public property, which is not and never has been a crime. But it may soon become one if people continue to sit idly by.

The right to be wrong

Slate has a fascinating interview with Diane Ravitch, former member of the Bush I administration, about her changing her position on the value of public education. But education is just the MacGuffin, the piece is really about being wrong, and being able to admit it. This is my favorite part:

"I sometimes wonder whether you might be attracted to the things that you say are wrong—if you're kind of guarding yourself against something that secretly appeals to you. It's like people who are vehement, militant atheists; I think they could easily become religious crusaders, because they're almost religious in their atheism. You have to be careful what you choose to engage yourself with, because the thing you're fighting could be the very thing you want."

But it's worth reading the whole thing.

Facebook goes towards the dark side

Facebook seems to be getting more and more evil. I have an FB account. I hardly ever use it, but I'm seriously considering shutting it down regardless. Assuming I can figure out how.

More CSS vindication

Finding examples of things that CSS can't do seems suddenly to be all the rage.

Here is my favorite example of something that is impossible in CSS but trivial with tables: a fluid layout with nested grids, such as what you need if you want to lay out a form inside a multi-column page.

CSS vindication

Jeff Atwood agrees with me that CSS should not be used for layout.

...even if you have extreme HTML hygiene and Austrian levels of discipline, CSS has some serious limitations in practice.

Things in particular that bite us a lot:

* Vertical alignment is a giant, hacky PITA. (Tables work great for this though!)

Wikipedia thinks so too!. Take that, ChristianZ and Pherdnut!

The email cold-call HOWTO

(I wrote this many years ago as a web page but decided to repost it here so people can comment on it.)

The Email Cold-Call HOWTO

A "cold call" is an initial communication with someone who doesn't know you. I've gotten a lot of email cold calls over the years that have left me scratching my head wondering how to respond. This has prompted me to compile a few hints on how to compose a cold-call email. By following a few simple rules you can make it a lot easier for the person you are contacting to respond effectively.

These rules really boil down to one of the cardinal rules of communication: know your audience. This rule runs both ways, and is particularly problematic for cold calls because almost by definition you don't know your audience, and your audience certainly doesn't know you, which makes it that much harder for them to frame an appropriate response. So the object of the game is, first, to learn as much as you can about the person you are contacting *before* you contact them, and then give them as much information about yourself and what you want as you can without getting long-winded.

Specifically:

0. Know your audience. Find out as much as you can about the person you are contacting before you contact them. You don't have to become their biographer, but you should at a minimum do a quick web search. If the person has a home page, read it.

1. Introduce yourself. A sentence or two is all it takes. If you can't come up with anything better, start with "My name is..." If you are writing in connection to your work, give your title and company. If you are a student, give your status (grade level, undergraduate year, or graduate level) and the school you attend. In short, say something about yourself to help your contact anchor their first impression of you and tailor their reply appropriately.

1a. If you are not fluent in your audience's native language, give some kind of a hint what your native langauge is. If you are writing from an institution located in a country where your native language is spoken that's good enough. But if you are, say, a native Farsi speaker who is living in Canada then you should say something like, "I am a visiting scholar from Iran currently at the University of Toronto." Knowning where you are from will help your audience filter out any language stumbles. It will also give them the opportunity to respond to you in your native language if they happen to know it. You never can tell.

2. Say a few words about what you are doing that motivated you to contact this person. Were you referred by someone? If so, who? Did you find some information on the web? If so, what was it?

3. If you want the person to do something for you that you expect will take more than just a few minutes, don't ask directly. Instead, ask if the person can spare some time and give a general idea of the magnitude and character of the task. For example, "Could you spare fifteen minutes to answer some questions about Australian Aboriginees?" is much better than, "Please answer the following fifty questions ..."

4. If you are asking for information, say what efforts you have already made to get it. Where did you look, and what did you find? As a bare minimum you should do a quick Web search before asking anyone for anything nowadays. If the person you are contacting has a home page, read it.

5. Make it easy for your contact to reach you and learn more about you. Put your email address at the bottom of your message. If you have a home page, put the URL there too. Some mail systems munge return addresses so that replies don't work, and this may be the only way your contact has of reaching you.

One last minor point: if you aren't sure about how to address someone, just open with "Hello."

Why I hate LinkedIn

It's because I regularly get email messages that look like this:

Joe Shmoe requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn:

Ron,

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

- Joe

and I have no idea who Joe Shmoe is. So I have three choices:

1. Accept the invitation and end up with a bunch of connections who I don't actually know. (Actually this might not be so bad. I have never actually made a useful contact through LinkedIn.)

2. Reject the invitation and risk offending Joe if it turns out I actually have met him and just forgot about it (which is likely -- I have a terrible memory for names).

3. Send Joe a message saying, "Um, who the fuck are you?" though maybe not in so many words.

It's just so freakin' annoying that LinkedIn would supply this completely useless default message that everyone uses instead of encouraging people to write a personalized message that goes something like, "Hi, this is Joe Shmoe. We met the other day at the underwater basket weaving society. I'd like to add you to my network."

For the love of Pete, people, a LinkedIn invitation is no different from any other cold call email unless you are absolutely positively certain that the person you want to link to knows who you are. You should put at least a little bit of thought into the content of the message before you send it.

Rosie Jetson, eat your heart out

Japanese researchers have built a robot that balances on a ball. It's wicked cool, like a Segway taken to the next level. It is really amazing to me the extent to (and speed with) which science fiction from the 1960's has become reality. Today we have Star Trek communicators (cell phones, blue tooth headsets), tricorders (PDA's) and now we seem to be one voice synthesis circuit and some molded plastic away from Rosie Jetson. Still waiting for my hand-held phaser though.

It's a miracle!

The image of Jesus has shown up on Google Maps.

Set phasers to stun

The inventor of Tickle Me Elmo (and no, I am not making this up) has invented a new gun -- as in weapon -- that can be adjusted to fire both lethal and non-lethal shots .

Biggest robotics breakthrough since... well maybe ever

Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have built a robot that can fold towels. Veeeeeeerrrrrryyyyyy sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyyy. But it actually works. Now it's a mere matter of optimization.

Seriously, I would have given you even odds that this problem would not have been solved at all in my lifetime. It's one bet I would have been happy to lose, and I'm even happier that I didn't actually make it. But folding laundry -- indeed manipulating any kind of non-rigid object -- is really, really hard.

Next challenge: a robot that can tie shoelaces. To get some appreciation for how hard this is, try doing it with gloves on to simulate being a robot that doesn't have touch-sensitive skin, which most robots, including the Berkeley laundry folder, don't have. I'll bet a case of wine that this will still be an unsolved problem in 2020. Any takers?

Oabama orders a hit

Barack Obama has apparently ordered the assassination of a U.S. citizen without a trial in the name of fighting terrorism. This is an even more blatant assault on the Constitution than anything the Bush administration ever did. Bush merely spied on, tortured, and imprisoned American citizens without a trial. He never actually had one killed.

I predict that the people who are calling on members of the Bush administration to be prosecuted for war crimes will not be calling for Barack Obama to be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murder, even though that is clearly what this is.

My very own koan

I haven't been writing much because I've been too busy dealing with getting ready to move. Buying and selling houses is a nice problem to have, but it can still be a royal pain.

But I couldn't resist posting this. I actually invented a Zen koan as part of a usenet thread on self-replicating programs:

Zen master Kwine was raking pebbles in the garden when a student approached and asked, "Master, what is the shortest self-replicating Lisp program?"

The master said nothing and continued raking. The student was annoyed and asked, "Master, why will you not answer my question?"

The master looked up and said, "But I did answer your question."

At that moment the student was enlightened.

:-)