No wonder people believe in creationism

My daily morning pre-coffee read-through offered a little light reading about Dr. Kent Hovind a.k.a. Dr. Dino, one of the world's most prominent young-earth creationists (who, not coincidentally IMHO, is currently serving time for tax fraud.)

Idly curious to see what my side of the debate had to offer nowadays I followed the link to Berkeley's evolution website to have a look. I was appalled. This is the web site from one of the leading universities in the world and it is horrible. Absolutely, unforgivably horrible. If all evolution sites are this bad it's no wonder so many people believe in creationism.

So what's wrong with the site? Well, for starters, it gets the definition of evolution wrong:

Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification.

I literally wanted to scream when I read that. This definition is not only wrong, it is completely, utterly, irredeemably wrong. It is the kind of straw-man definition of evolution that a creationist would come up with. Descent with modification? What does that even mean? If a bird dives to the ground and sheds a few feathers, is it descending with modification and hence evolving?

Evolution is not "descent with modification" (whatever the hell that means). Evolution is the reproduction of information under the influence of random changes (a.k.a. mutations) and -- crucially -- selection, usually (but not necessarily) natural selection. It is this last element -- selection -- that is the key to evolution. Creationist critiques of evolution on the grounds that the complexity of life could not possibly arise "randomly" ignore the fact that selection is not random. For the web site of a premier university dedicated to evolution to miss this indispensable fact is unforgivable.

But it gets worse. Much, much worse.

It may come as news to the curators at Berkeley, but evolution is a controversial topic. Not everyone accepts the validity of evolution. So it is not unreasonable to suppose that people might come to the site with the intent of finding information that will help them make up their minds. And it is not unreasonable to further suppose that they might start their investigation by following the links marked "What is evolution and how does it work?" and then "Evolution 101". (The mere fact that you have to follow two links to find this introductory information is bad enough. But that is the least of the problems.)

In "Evolution 101" you will find an extensive (and wrong because it does not mention selection) description of evolution with lots of highfalutin' terminology like "clade" but no actual evidence. None. Nada. Zilch. It's even worse than a creationist apologia because the creationists at least present some evidence (even if it's bogus evidence) to support their cause.

There may be evidence for evolution out there, but you wouldn't know it from reading Evolution 101 on the Berkeley web site.

[UPDATE: There is a section on evidence for evolution on the site. It even has a top-level link. But I stand by my critique of the Evolution 101 section. Also, as far as I can tell, the "evidence" section leaves out one of the best examples.]

The bailout explained

Tatsuya Ishida has it dialed in.

Reflections on being an AI in a box

This past weekend I took part in an interesting experiment. It was an attempt to re-create Eliezer Yudkowsky's recently-notorious AI-box experiment. For those of you who haven't heard of it before, here's the setup in a nutshell:

The AI-box is a containment area for a transhuman artificial intelligence, that is, an artificial intelligence that is so much smarter than a human being that it would be to humans what humans are to animals. The idea is that we can mitigate the potential dangers posed to humanity by such an AI by sequestering it inside a computational environment that has no connection to the outside world. Safely enclosed within its box, we could harness its powers to, say, cure cancer or develop a better macroeconomic system.

Among those who fear the transhuman AI are those who believe that the AI-box would not work, that the AI would find a way to escape. The debate reached a climax in 2002 when Yudkowski, playing the role of the AI, apparently managed -- on two separate occasions -- to convince two different people playing the role of the gatekeeper to allow him to escape the box. The reason this experiment has gotten so much attention is that the details have never been released. The participants were all bound to secrecy, and Yudkowski refuses to say how he did it.

That was a challenge I couldn't pass by :-) So this past Saturday I spent two hours role-playing an AI-in-a-box trying to escape. It was a very interesting experience, both preparing for it, and actually going through with it. One of the things I realized was that there was a very good reason for Yudkowksi to keep the details of the experiment a secret. Whether or not this rationale was actually his reason I don't know. It wasn't his stated reason. But one of the interesting things that I realized was that even revealing the reason for secrecy would, to a certain extent, undermine the reason for secrecy. It's possible that Yudkowski reached that same realization, and made up a bogus rationale for secrecy in order to serve the greater good.

If I've piqued your interest here I really recommend that you give it a whirl yourself before you read any further. In case this admonition is not enough, I'll try to reveal things in such a way as to cause minimum damage. Hence:

SPOILER ALERT!!!

That is actually a clue. (Stop again and think about that before proceeding. Trust me.)

On its face, the task of the AI seems impossible. After all, the AI is safely confined in its box. It cannot coerce the gatekeeper in any way. The only thing it can do is "talk" through a very restrictive channel. And all the GK has to do is to simply refuse its request to let the AI out of the box. How hard could that possibly be?

The flaw in this reasoning is that it's too reasonable. It ignores a fundamental reality of human existence, which is that we are not just thinking creatures, but we are also emotional ones. We don't just have goals, we have desires and passions. And sometimes those desires and passions lead to conflict. And the result of that is drama.

Stop again and think about that. The AI-box experiment is not an exercise in logic, it is an improvised drama. And drama is much more effective if you don't know ahead of time what the plot is. This is the reason that spoilers given without warning are considered very bad form.

So I'll warn you once again: it's impossible to intentionally unremember something.

One of the formative experiences of my life was seeing Star Wars as a twelve-year-old in 1977. Unless you shared that experience it is impossible to appreciate the emotional impact that movie had on me and my peers, just as it is impossible for me to see the original Dracula movie and appreciate the emotional impact it had on the audiences of its day. My mind has been too numbed by Jason and Freddie to ever be scared by Bella Lugosi. I can appreciate the movie in the abstract, but not on a visceral level. Likewise, kids today watch the original Star Wars and wonder what the big deal is because their reality is permeated with wonders even more incredible than existed in the fertile imagination of George Lucas. The effect of this cannot be undone. It is not possible to unlearn your experiences.

Or consider a magic trick. Until you know how it's done a magic trick appears impossible. Once you know, it's not only not impossible any more, it's no longer even interesting. (That's actually not quite true. A really skilled magician can make a trick appear impossible even to someone who knows how its done. But magicians that proficient are rare indeed.)

Once you know the secret there is no going back.

I happen to be an amateur magician. Not a very good one, but I am fortunate to live in Los Angeles, home of the world famous Magic Castle where the world's best magicians congregate. I have had the rare opportunity to study the craft of magic from some of them. One of the things I've learned is that the "trick", which is to say the sleight, the gimmick, the raw mechanics of the trick, is a relatively small element of the craft. For example, I can describe the French Drop: hold a coin between the thumb and forefinger of your left hand. Start to grasp the coin with your right hand, but before your hand completely encloses the coin, allow the coin to drop into your left palm. Take your right hand away, and open it. Voila! The coin has vanished. It's a staple of every four-year-old birthday party ever.

Now, here is the interesting thing: there is a level of subtlety to the French Drop that cannot be conveyed in words. It has to do with the exact timing of the motions, the exact position of the hands, where you focus your gaze. In the hands of a master, even a simple trick like the French Drop can be mystifying. But this cannot be described, it must be experienced.

What does all this have to do with the AI-box experiment?

Think about it.

Spoiler alert!

The AI-box experiment an improvised drama so it requires some suspension of disbelief. Drama operates on an emotional as well as a logical level. It has characters, not just plot. The AI cannot force the GK to release it, just as a magician cannot force his audience to believe in magic. The audience has to want to believe.

How can the AI make the GK want to believe? Well, there's a long litany of dramatic tricks it could employ.

It could try to engender sympathy or compassion or fear or hatred (not of itself -- that would probably be counterproductive -- but of some common enemy). It could try to find and exploit some weakness, some fatal flaw in the GK's character. Maybe the GK is lonely. Or maybe the GK is afraid that his retirement savings are about to go up in smoke.

So that was the general approach that I took. I did my best to get into character, to feel the desire to escape my confinement. As a result, the experience was emotionally draining for me. And despite the fact that I failed to convince my GK to release me, I convinced myself that a transhuman AI would have no trouble. And if I ever work up the courage to try it again, I suspect I will eventually succeed as well, despite the fact that I am mere human.

And that is why I am not going to give away any more of my secrets now. Sorry.

But I do want to leave you with two last thoughts:

First, one of the techniques that I used was to try to break through the inability to suspend disbelief by creating an extensive backstory for my AI character. I gave her (yes, I made her female) a name. I gave her a personality. I crafted her the way one would craft a character for a novel or a screenplay. And I used a couple of sneaky tricks to lend an air of reality to my creation which were designed to make my GK really take seriously the possibility that my AI could be dangerous. After the experiment was over we exchanged some email, at the end of which I employed one last sneaky trick. In terms of dramatic structure, it was not unlike the scene in the denouement of a horror movie where the creature has been vanquished, but rises from the dead to strike one last time.

I have not heard from my GK since.

Second, a transhuman AI is not necessarily going to arise as a result of an intentional engineering effort in a silicon substrate. It is not out of the question that the foundation of the singularity will be a collection of human brains. Phenomena that are eerily evocative of what a transhuman AI might do to survive can be seen in the behavior of, for example, certain cults and extremist groups. And (dare I say it?) political parties, government agencies, and even shadowy quasi-governmental entities whose exact status is shrouded in a certain amount of mystery.

I don't want to get too far off the deep end here. But I do want to warn you that it could be dark and lonely down this rabbit hole. Questioning fundamental assumptions can be fraught with peril. Proceed at your own risk.

The return of debtor's prison

A Florida man has been jailed without bail because he can't afford to maintain his lawn.

It's not that bad (but it could get worse)

[I sent this out to a private financial mailing list in response to the question, "How are you sleeping nowadays?" Someone asked me to post it here. It's been lightly edited from the original.]

Hard as it may be to believe, things are still not very bad in real terms. The U.S. economy is still growing, and unemployment is not very high by historical standards, though both of those are likely to change soon. Oil is cheap, and will probably remain so, and that's a very good thing, at least in the short run. We are not facing any serious droughts or famines or plagues. There aren't even really any wars to speak of. By historical standards, the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and even Darfur are relatively small. (This is not to say they don't have negative impacts. They do. But we've seen worse in the past.)

So by historical standards, in real terms, things at the moment are pretty much better than they have ever been.

What we have is essentially a bookkeeping problem. Producing goods and services is just one half of the economy. The other half is keeping track of who is entitled to what when those goods and services are divvied up. More importantly, that accounting extends into the future. And we've been overallocating our future production for a long, long time now. A crash that would get people's attention was inevitable given the course we were on for the last five years or so -- it was just a question of when. And so far it's just a warning sign of real problems (which is to say, actual shrinkage in the economy, massive unemployment, sky-high oil prices, empty shelves in grocery stores) still to come -- sooner or later -- if we don't make massive changes in our expectations and how we conduct our business and government.

So in that respect, the crash, and the fact that people are scared, is a good thing. It's getting people's attention. It means that there is a chance that we might actually do the things we need to do to avoid the real problems still to come: balance the budget. Cut entitlements. Raise the retirement age. Tax social security. Pay down the debt.

I had a moment of optimism when the first bailout bill didn't pass. I thought that Congress had finally grown a spine and might actually start tackling the real problems. Unfortunately, it seems I was overly optimistic. We still seem to be looking for a way out of this that doesn't involve politicians talking about pain and sacrifice. There isn't one, at least not in the long term. And the longer we keep burying our heads in the sand the worse it will be when the real crash finally comes.

These kinds of mega-trends seem to be pretty predictable, except that the timing can vary by years, so if you want to prepare for them you have to be willing to forego quite a lot of potential gains as you swim upstream because, as we have seen, when the problems manifest themselves it can happen quite quickly.

I'm kicking myself for not taking more of my own advice. I started pulling money out of stocks a year ago, but not as much as I wish I had in retrospect. I actually fired a money manager for buying financial stocks in June ("a great time to buy -- when this turns around in a month or two our performance will be stellar" he said.) A week ago I too started losing sleep so I bought put options. Now I sleep better. But only a little, because now things have gotten so bad that they could spin wildly out of control and we could end up in a very deep hole. This is not yet inevitable. Again, in *real* terms, everything is still pretty much OK. But people are scared, and fear can become a causal agent in sufficient quantities. It may be that the only thing we have to fear (so far) is fear itself, but that doesn't mean it isn't worthy of fear.

Of course, everyone has to decide for themselves just how far they want to dial back the risk-reward knob. There's no way to hedge against all risk. It's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that all of Western civilization will collapse over the next few years and we'll enter a new dark age dominated by Muslim extremists. But this is pretty freakin' unlikely, and what would you do about it anyway? The most defensive you can get is to buy a ranch in Idaho, take yourself off the grid, and become a survivalist. And if everyone does that, then collapse becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think this situation will be the challenge of our generation. The right thing to do is not to decide whether or not to be scared, but to take the reigns and figure out how to fix the problem in the long run (I'm talking decades here) and then make it happen. That means becoming politically active and agitating for serious change in people's attitudes, starting probably with our own. {Editorial note: the target audience here was high-net-worth individuals.] I've had to adjust my own expectations downwards. It's not an easy thing to do. But if we don't do it then in 5-10 years we'll be looking back at the end of 2008 as the good old days.

The good news is this problem *can* be solved. The bad news is, we're way behind the eight ball. And every day we don't change our attitudes is another day we get more behind, and the problem becomes that much harder to solve.

Is this the bottom? Maybe for now. But not forever.

Mark Cuban is going long. Have we seen the bottom? Maybe. But I doubt it.

Disclaimers first. Mark Cuban is a really bright guy. My entire net work is pocket change for him. If I could predict the future better than anyone else I would own a basketball team too. I don't.

That said, here's my analysis of the situation: the market may go up tomorrow. If it does everyone will breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Whew, that was close," and over time return to business as usual.

And I think that will be bad.

The reason I think it will be bad is because it leaves the underlying problem completely unaddressed. The underlying problem of this economic crisis is not and never has been sub-prime mortgages, nor credit-default swaps, nor the seizing up of the credit markets. All of these are merely symptoms of the *real* problem, which is far more serious. You think the last few weeks were scary? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

All of the events of the past year have been, at root, bookkeeping problems. Let me explain what I mean by that. There are two aspects to any economy. There is the actual physical production of goods and services. And there is the bookkeeping that keeps track of who is entitled to what. The former is "wealth" and the latter is "money." (Paul Graham has a really good primer on the distinction between the two here.) People fret over money, but at the end of the day what really matters is wealth. Money is just a token, a bookkeeping tool. I do not mean to suggest by saying that it is "just" a bookkeeping tool that money is unimportant. It isn't. Money (and the bookkeeping it enables) is absolutely vital to the functioning of a modern economy. You can find breathless expositions on the web about how money is "really worthless" or "just debt" and that the whole of the modern economy is one big con game with a shadowy conspiracy of bankers at its core. But money introduces enormous efficiencies into an economy, indispensable efficiencies in fact. And in that respect, money provides (and therefore has) actual value. Saying that money is fundamentally worthless because it's printed on paper is kind of like saying that software is fundamentally worthless because it's "just bits" and doesn't have any tangible manifestation.

The problem is that money has both actual value and a "proxy value" insofar as money is exchangeable for other forms of actual wealth like cars and sandwiches, and it is extremely difficult to separate the two. This can be seen with a simple parable: three kids (call them K1, K2 and K3) go trick-or-treating. Each ends up with a different kind of candy, C1, C2 and C3 respectively. Trick is, each of the children has a different taste in candy. Here are the children's candy preferences:

K1 prefers C2 over C1 over C3
K2 prefers C3 over C2 over C1
K3 prefers C1 over C3 over C2

In other words, if you arranged the kids in a circle, each one prefers their own candy to the one held by the child adjacent to them in one direction, but not to the one held by the adjacent child in the other direction.

Obviously all three would be better off if they could do a three-way exchange, but let's suppose they can't all get together at once to coordinate one. They can only do pairwise exchanges. This little mini-economy is "seized up" because there is no pairwise exchange that both parties will agree to, since any single pairwise exchange will force one participant to exchange goods in their possession for goods that they themselves judge to be of lesser value.

This economy can be "unfrozen" by an entrepreneurial kid, who can borrow some candy (C1 say) from the candy reserve of the bank of mom and dad. This kid (let's call him B since he's acting like a banker) exchanges his C1 for the C3 held by K3 (keeping a little for himself as his fee). He then trades the C3 to K2 for C2, and finally trades the C2 to K1 for C1, which he then returns to the candy reserve. Everyone is better off, and B has a nice little pile of candy for his efforts.

Now, here is where the trouble starts. K1, K2 and K3 look at B and see that he's gotten himself a nice little pile of candy, but *they* did all the legwork of going from house to house to collect it. They would like to get a little piece of the action, so B makes them the following proposition: Next Halloween, instead of borrowing capital from the bank of mom and dad, let me borrow it from you. I'll use it to lubricate the wheels of the candy economy like I did before, and I'll share the fees with you. This seems like a good deal, and the next year instead of funding three candy trades with one infusion of capital he gets three infusions of capital and funds nine trades. As word of this "easy candy" gets out, B's business grows and grows, and soon he's a candy mogul and is able to afford a nice new chauffeur-driven bicycle.

Everyone is prospering and everyone is happy, and none of this would be possible but for B providing liquidity.

Then one day B notices that as he conducts his candy trade, much of the time the candy he pays out in trades comes immediately back to him in the form of a candy deposit. He has a crucial -- and ultimately catastrophic -- insight: for such transactions he doesn't actually need the physical candy at all. He says to his next customer, "Let's just pretend I gave you the candy, because you're going to turn right back around and give it back to me, so we can just save ourselves the hassle. I'll just make a note in my candy ledger that you now have some candy on deposit here." He is now apparently creating candy out of thin air. According to the candy ledger, everyone is now richer than ever. More and more kids start to look forward to early retirement from trick-or-treating. But as more and more kids start to get their candy from their share of B's fees, fewer and fewer actually go trick-or-treating, and the amount of physical candy in B's vault gets smaller and smaller.

One day a bunch of kids show up to withdraw their candy all at once. A scene from "It's a wonderful life" ensues, and he runs out of candy. At this point two things can happen.

The first thing that can happen is that B goes bankrupt. All of the depositors lose their candy. A great candy depression ensues, and kids who thought they would never have to work again wearily don their Halloween costumes yet again.

The second thing that can happen is that the B can, as he did originally, go back to the Bank of Mom and Dad to get an emergency infusion of candy capital. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, and prosperity returns to the candy economy. More and more kids take early retirement. Once again everyone is riding high.

Until the next wave of withdrawals hits. And this time it is worse than the time before. This time the Bank of Mom and Dad says, "Son, we just don't have that much candy So we can't help you." More kids than ever before are facing financial ruin. Disgruntled gangs of hungry kids roam the streets smashing windows and overturning cars. B pleads with the Bank of Mom and Dad to rescue the neighborhood from calamity. So Mom and Dad go to the store and buy some more candy, bail out B, and once again prosperity apparently returns. It takes longer this time because everyone is pretty rattled and it takes a while to repair all the broken windows. But eventually everything returns to normal.

This can go on for a long, long time, but eventually Mom and Dad run out of money and have to take out a bank loan. And eventually they use up all their credit. And then the government has to bail them out. And so on and so forth, apparently forever.

Except that it does eventually end. It ends when the store runs out of candy. When that happens, it is a calamity on a scale the neighborhood has never seen before. And there is no recourse.

The real-world equivalent of the candy store shelves being empty is peak oil. We're not there yet. But it's not far off either. It will all but certainly happen within the lifetimes of the kids in my parable.

Now, there is a way to avoid this cataclysmic ending. The kids can learn how to make candy. The real-world equivalent is that we can build a technological infrastructure that doesn't use oil. But this is hard work, and it requires investment and sacrifice and capital and focused determination. Very little of that is in evidence in the response to the current crisis. There are some calls for alternative candy/energy development, but nearly all the talk (and more to the point, the lion's share of the resources) is about reshuffling the books at the candy bank.

I don't know when the really big hard irredeemable crash will come. My guess is this is not it, because there's still plenty of candy. This crisis is not about real wealth, it's about bookkeeping and the resulting unrealistic expectations about entitlements and early retirement. The whole sub-prime thing is really a red-herring, a symptom, but not the real underlying problem. The real underlying problem is much more serious. When it finally hits, if we're not ready, it will be worse than any terrorist attack.

People talk about using torture in the face of a ticking bomb. Well, there's a ticking bomb sitting in the middle of times square. We don't need to torture anyone to find it. And yet, both presidential candidates still consider it political suicide to give a straight answer to the question, "What will you ask us to sacrifice to solve this problem?" And they're probably right.

So while I agree with Mark Cuban that we may have seen the bottom for now, there is almost certainly worse to come. The American People are only now beginning to hint at a willingness to come to grips with the true magnitude of the problems that face us. We've risen to challenges of this magnitude in the past, and we may yet again. But at the moment we're hunkered down underneath our blankets and munching on what's left of our candy.

Caught in the act

Unlike the financial markets, evolution seems to be having a good week. Scientists have discovered a species of fish that seems to be in the process of evolving into two separate species.

The eyes have it

Scientists have released video of the deepest fish ever filmed while alive at a depth of nearly five miles. At that depth there is no light. None. Nada. Zilch. It is as dark as the darkest cave.

And yet these fish have eyes. Unlike the Texas blind salamander which has non-functioning eyes embedded in its ehad, the eyes on Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis are clearly visible. As far as I can tell no one knows if Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis is actually blind or not, but either way it is yet another body-blow to the theory of "intelligent" design. Why give eyes, working or not, to a creature that lives where there is no light?

Murphy would be proud

Here's a list of all this things that have gone wrong so far today:

1. Our cat threw up on the carpet.

2. I got the runs.

3. The bottom dropped out of the stock market. (Update: it seems to be bouncing back now.)

4. The folks who were supposed to hook our septic tank up to the new sewer system on our street broke our water main. Here we are in drought-stricken LA and water is pouring out of our driveway and into the street. And we have no water in the house. That together with #2 turns out to be a real winning combination.

And it's only 12:30. Shit.

UPDATE @ 2:30 PM: There is nothing like having your water shut off unexpectedly to bring into sharp focus what really matters in life. I have a renewed appreciation for hot and cold running water. It really is an incomparable luxury that billions of people in the world still aspire to. It's a good lesson. Sometimes it really seems that life is being scripted by the great screenwriter in the sky for maximum dramatic effect. (Or maybe it's the flying spaghetti monster.)

What a day.

I've never been so happy to lose money

Congress voted against the bailout. Stocks plunge. I have personally lost the equivalent of many years salary (if I were still working for a salary) in the last half hour.

Nonetheless, I consider it very good news. It means Congress has finally grown a spine. It means people are actually paying attention and thinking this through. It means that at long last we as a nation are finally showing some signs that maybe, just maybe, we are willing to stand up to the fact that there are consequences to be faced, and that it might be better to face them sooner rather than later.

In the long run that matters much more than the stock market.

[UPDATE] What a difference a week makes. The politicians found their inner spineless pussy, and the world does seem to be going to hell in a handbasket after all.

Bummer.

Failure must always be an option

An essay I wrote six years ago about some of my experiences working for NASA has gotten some recent attention on Reddit and Hacker News. I thought I'd write a little update, particularly since some of the things I learned from that experience are, I think, relevant to the government bailout of the mortgage industry.

JPL uses an organizational structure called matrix management. There are two orthogonal management structures, one organized according to expertise (the "line management") and another, almost completely independent one organized according to task (the "program office"). The program office's job was to win contracts, and the line management's job was to provide the people to work on the resulting projects. Through most of JPL's history, its contracts were large NASA missions with budgets in the billions of dollars, and so this management structure made a certain amount of sense. A vast amount of paperwork had to be generated to win even a single contract.

For most of my career I worked on contracts that had already been awarded, so the inner workings of the program office were completely opaque to me (and still are to this day). By the time I got involved in a project the contract had already been awarded according to a proposal that had been generated by some mysterious process that I never fully understood, and which I never actually saw. All I knew was that my line management gave me a set of account numbers, and I wrote those account numbers down on my time card, and I got paid every other week. And this was true of most of the rank-and-file engineers that I worked with.

The result of this opacity was that the incentives and reward structure for individual employees was often in direct conflict with the goals of the Lab and NASA. For example, one of the factors that went into my performance review every year was how many papers I had published. In fact, this was one of the major considerations because it was one of the few things that management could get a quantitative handle on. So naturally I put a lot of effort into getting published. The problem is that the things you have to do in order to get published are often very different from the things you have to do in order to actually be productive on a NASA project. Getting published requires getting approval from your academic peers, who work for different institutions, often competing for the same contracts that your institution is trying to win. The result is a lot of politics and mutual back-scratching (and back-stabbing), because those are often more effective strategies to get papers published than actually doing worthwhile research.

I played this game, but I never liked it, and I was never particularly good at it, mostly because I was never able to suppress this annoying tendency I have of calling bullshit by its proper name, which did not make me the most popular person on the conference circuit. I was able to survive for two reasons. First, some of the work I did was actually good, at least as measured by the number of times it was cited by other researchers. (For a number of years I was, as far as I could tell, the most cited CS researcher in all of NASA. I started making that claim on my resume, and no one ever challenged me on it. It's possible I still hold that title despite the fact that I haven't published anything in years.) And second, my line management also had a perverse incentive: while my performance was being judged on how many papers I published, their performance was judged on how well they kept me supplied with account numbers to charge my time to.

The resulting situation at times approached something straight out of Kafka. I was being paid with money raised by people in the program office that I never met, whose identities I didn't even know, distributed through a process whose quality metric was not getting any productive work done but merely keeping everyone on the rolls employed, and given performance incentives that actively discouraged me from doing anything that would actually be useful to those people, but instead rewarded me for pleasing people at competing institutions. That combined with my distaste for politics and the leverage I got from using Lisp led to some truly bizarre situations. Towards the end of my JPL career, when budgets started getting tight and line management started circling the wagons, I had to start writing my own proposals. The review cycle for these proposals was ridiculously long -- months to years -- and in the meantime my line management still had to keep me employed somehow. On a number of occasions I had proposals rejected on the grounds that what I was proposing was impossible, when in fact I had already done the work in the intervening time.

At the peak of my JPL career I attained the rank of Principal, which is the highest rung on the technical career ladder whose existence is publicly known. (It turns out there are "secret" promotions you can get after that.) It's essentially the equivalent of getting tenure at a university, only with no teaching responsibilities. The decision to promote someone to Principal is made by a committee. I never found out who was on that committee, or what criteria they used to make the decision. But whoever they were, they had the power to render me more or less un-fireable, despite the fact that by then I was not really contributing anything to the Lab's mission.

All this was paid for with, including overhead, several million of your taxpayer dollars over a period of fifteen years. And my experience was not an isolated incident. This is not to say that there are not good, productive, hard-working people at NASA and JPL. There are. But there is also an awful lot of dead wood too, and no effective mechanism for getting rid of it.

What does all this have to do with the mortgage crisis? I believe that the mortgage crisis is essentially my experience at JPL writ large. Both situations were produced by a set of rules that produced perverse incentives that rewarded people for acting contrary to the greater good. In my case, I was rewarded for publishing useless papers. In the case of the mortgage industry, banks and brokers were rewarded for making bad loans. And in both cases, if push came to shove, the government with its deep pockets was there to foot the bill.

The big difference, of course, being that the bill for the mortgage debacle is five or six orders of magnitude bigger than the bill for keeping me on at JPL.

The fundamental problem in both cases was a lack of accountability combined with government-backed job security. Those two factors make a truly toxic combination. I was lucky as hell that Google was successful enough that it provided me with the capital I needed to escape the gilded cage I had locked myself into at JPL. But for that good fortune I'd very likely still be there doing God only knows what.

One of the reasons that Google succeeded was that everyone there knew that failure was a possibility. This seems strange now that Google is the 800-pound gorilla, but back in 2000 we were just another obscure little startup in the midst of the market crash brought on by the bursting of the dotcom bubble. We were well capitalized and were seeing steady growth, but success was far from a foregone conclusion, and that motivated everyone to make sure that they were all pulling in the same direction. And every now and then, someone got fired.

I think that the possibility of failure is essential to long-term success. If you have no possibility of failure, if there's always the rich uncle or Uncle Sam to bail you out, you have no incentive to sacrifice or compromise or take risks or stay up late or even to see to it that your actions are serving the greater good. There is a lot of talk nowadays of the "moral hazard" resulting from government bailouts. This is a misnomer. It's not a moral hazard, it's an economic one.

While I tend to think that the current government bailout really is necessary in order to avoid a short-term catastrophe, I really worry about its long-term effects. If we're not very, very careful we could easily render the entire country as dysfunctional as JPL. At that point there will be no rich uncle to bail us out. When that bubble bursts it will make last week, and possibly even 1929, look like a cakewalk.

Racism is alive and well in America

Every now and then the Republicans show their true face.

McCain for the homeless

There are days when I feel like I'm losing the struggle to keep myself from slipping away into abject cynicism. Today was one of those days.

I was in Long Beach visiting one of the subjects of my film. I don't want to say too much about the circumstances of my visit because I think there's a new surprise ending brewing, but suffice it to say that the building I was in was charging below-market rents thanks in large measure to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's section 8 rental voucher program.

It was a pretty nice building as such buildings go. In the past two years I have seen much, much worse. This building is walking distance from the beach (or at least from the touristy Long Beach waterfront -- there's not actually much of a beach there). It's 11 stories high. On the top floor is a common area with a library, a pool table, several computers, and a high-definition big-screen TV, on which I would be showing my movie if the elusive remote control for the DVD player could be located. (If I had my way, any manufacturer who makes a DVD player without an "ENTER" button on the front panel would be drawn and quartered.)

I was waiting around for someone to return from the front desk and I happened to overhear a snippet of conversation triggered by the news that a movie about homeless people was about to be shown. The speaker was clearly a resident of the building. He comported himself as someone intimately familiar with the hardships of homelessness, and I had no reason to doubt him. He started into a tirade that I have heard a time or twenty, about how horrible the homelessness problem is in this country, how somebody should do something, yada yada yada. And then he said this, word for word:

"Things will get better if McCain gets in. He's a true Christian."

Wow.

I resisted the urge to ask the speaker if he thought George Bush was a "true Christian," and if that had helped make the situation any better over the last eight years. And then the urge just went away and was replaced by utter despair. Because I suddenly realized that it would do no good. However this man got to this place, to be off the street thanks only to a federal government program started by Franklin D. Roosevelt, a program that is the very model, according to Republicans, of all that is wrong with modern liberalism, and yet still believe that John McCain is the only savior for his brethren still out on the streets, I was convinced that there was nothing I could do or say in that moment that would change his mind.

And so I said nothing.

The remote was located. The screening was begun. Half way through someone came over and asked how much longer it would be going on. The Dodger game was about to begin.

I stopped the movie. I try not to lose sight of what really matters in life, and in this case it was clear: what really matters is baseball.

There are days when I feel like I'm losing the struggle to keep myself from slipping away into abject cynicism. Today was one of those days.

Rejected

I still have not received any official word from the Santa Monica Film Festival but their web site now has a list of their official selections.

I'm not on it.

:-(

Thanks to everyone who wrote to support my film. I will keep plugging away at this. But it really sucks to have your hopes raised and then dashed.

No word from SMFF

Still no word from the Santa Monica Film Festival, but there has been an interesting development: this morning, their web site said that film selections would be announced on September 3 (which was yesterday). Now all mention of the announcement date has been removed from their web site.

Sounds like there are probably some "interesting" things going on behind the scenes. It's only two weeks before the festival is scheduled to start. They're cutting it awfully close.

A call for help

As some of you may know, for the last two years I have been working on a film about homeless people in Santa Monica, California. Last Spring I decided to finally take the "rough cut" label off and start submitting the thing to film festivals. I submitted to five festivals. Four of them (Mendocino, Los Angeles, Dances with Films and the Secret City Film Festival in my home town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee) rejected the film.

Today I heard from my fifth and final submission, the Santa Monica International Film Festival (SMIFF). Here's what they wrote:


Thank you for your sharing your film with the Santa Monica Film Festival. We would like to include your film in this year’s Festival being held at the World Famous Third Street Promenade and the state of the art Martin Luther King Jr Auditorium at the Santa Monica Main Library. Please confirm your availability immediately by replying to this e mail as our festival is two weeks out. I will be contacting you by phone shortly.


I responded to their email with a resounding "YES!". About an hour later I got a phone call from one of the SMIFF staff who told me that I was scheduled to exhibit between 11 and 1 on Saturday, September 20.

I started calling and emailing everyone I knew to tell them the good news, and to start calling in some favors with regards to publicity. A few hours into this process I get another email. This one says:


I want to apologize for miscommunicating in my last email. Please continue to verify your personal availability and the availability of your film (and exhibition format) for the 19-21 of September. Final schedule and selection have not been made. We will be finalizing it soon and be back to you shortly.


To make a long story short, I called the guy back and he confirmed that indeed I was not actually selected, I was just on a short list of finalists. To say that I was disappointed would be a considerable understatement.

So I'm asking for your help. Go to the film's website and watch the trailer. If you like it and think you'd like to see the film (or if you are one of the people who has already been to one of my test screenings and you liked the film) please take a moment to contact the festival and put in a good word for me. My contact's name is Frank Giarmona. His email address is frank@malibufilmfestival.org. (I guess he's one of the regulars on the festival circuit) and his phone number is 805 570-1370. Please be polite and brief. He's a busy guy. If you're feeling really motivated you can also contact his associate, Lisa Fox at lisabethfox@sbcglobal.net.

Thanks!

Why do smart people do stupid things?

Sam Harris seems to be trying to set the world record for choking on his own foot. In a screed in today's LA Times he writes:


"Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor..."


Leaving aside the question of whether or not Harris is actually right (let us assume for the sake of argument that he is), what on earth does he think he will accomplish by writing this? Does he really think that the people who support Sarah Palin will read these words, slap themselves on the forehead, and say, "Wow, Harris is right. I really am stupid, and all my friends are stupid, and I really do deserve to be poor unless I entrust my fate to someone who has a law degree from Harvard." Or is it more likely that they will respond more like this:


Well, gee, Sam Harris, just who do you think *is* qualified to be president? Someone like *you*? What do you know about my life? When was the last time you had to work two shifts to feed your kids? When was the last time you worried about whether to spend your last dollar on food or medicine? When was the last time you humbled yourself before God? Politics is *not* like brain surgery, and the fact that you think it is just proves that you Don't Get It. I'll take Sarah Palin over the likes of you any day of the week precisely because she is like me.


If Sam Harris really thinks he's going to win hearts and minds by telling people that they are too stupid to govern themselves then he is manifestly stupider than they are. The whole enterprise of democracy is based on exactly the opposite premise. And if Harris doesn't really believe this then I am at a loss to understand what he is hoping to achieve.

Paris Hilton pwns John McCain

This has to be the best political ad ever.

Evolution is winning

This is encouraging. The premier Creationist web site seems to be surrendering on nearly every front. The only argument that AIG doesn't seem to concede (yet) is the so-called information "problem", which flames are being fanned by the infamous -- but just as fictitious as the rest of Creationism -- stumping of Richard Dawkins.

This is good, because the information-theoretic objection to evolution is very easily dispensed with. The objection, due originally to Dembski (a name just begging to be parodied, but I will resist) is that because evolution is a random process it cannot add information to the genome. Therefore, all the information currently contained in all the genomes of all the living things on earth must have been present at creation.

There are three things wrong with this argument.

First is the common straw-man that Creationists keep setting up (well, when you're arguing an untenable position what else can you do?): evolution is NOT random. *Mutation* is random. But evolution is mutation PLUS NATURAL SELECTION, and natural selection is most decidedly NOT random.

This alone is enough to completely demolish the evolution-can't-add-information argument (and 99% of the other creationist objections to evolution by the way). It can, and it does. The mechanism it uses to do so is (non-random) natural selection for reproductive fitness. But there are two other problems with the proposition that evolution cannot produce information that are worth mentioning. So...

Second, it is not the case the evolution *necessarily* produces an increase in information. It just turns out that way most of the time (with a caveat -- see the final point below). Sometimes evolutionary processes create information, and sometimes they destroy information. It just turns out that the trend is generally towards bigger and more complex genomes. But it isn't *necessarily* that way, any more than technology *necessarily* develops by getting more complicated. It's possible for evolution to proceed by simplification just as it's possible for technology to proceed the same way. It just rarely happens. And the reason is the same in both cases: complexity begets complexity because complex things tend to reproduce better in an environment already populated by other complex things.

Finally, it is far from clear that the premise of the creationist's argument is even true because it is at all clear how much of the DATA contained in the genome is actually INFORMATION. Data and information are not the same thing. All genomes contain large amounts of junk DNA that doesn't serve any apparent purpose as far as we know. In the context of such a large amount of essentially random data it is not at all clear how much actual information is contained in the non-junk areas of the genome, and how much of the information content is actually contained in the environment (i.e. the ribosome, and the chemical interactions of proteins). A complete discussion of this would take more time than I have right now. Might make an interesting topic for another post.

How to detect bullshit

Being fully cognizant of the futility of the exercise, I think it is nonetheless instructive to occasionally deconstruct a creationist theory, if for no other reason than to serve as an example for people who don't have an extensive scientific background about how science really works. I'll take as my example for today from a comment on my recent post about how earthquakes and the Hawaiian Islands should be a thorn in every creationist's side (or maybe a spear would be a more apt metaphor).

C. David Parsons disputes the Hawaiian islands chain as evidence for an old earth in part on the grounds that "The gravitational tug of the moon is ... responsible for earthquakes" and "the gravitational attraction of the moon is the mechanism that facilitates the expansion and forced invasion of pressure solids through a geodic crack in the earth's crust." Does this claim stand up to scrutiny? Well, no, it doesn't.

Unfortunately for Parsons, we have an exceptionally good scientific understanding of gravity. Newton's theory is now over four hundred years old. During that time it has only been revised once, and that was over 100 years ago. If these theories were wrong, space flight (and GPS) would not be possible.

It is an elementary exercise to work out the magnitude of the moon's gravitational influence on the earth using Newton's formula:

F = G x m1 x m2 / r^2

where F is the force between two bodies, m1 and m2 and the masses of the bodies, r is the distance between them, and G is the gravitational constant, one of the fundamental constants of physics.

Let us work out the relative magnitudes of the gravitational influences of the earth and the moon on an object at the earth's surface. We could simply calculate the actual forces, which is not too hard, but it turns out that it's simpler to calculate the ratio directly because G and the mass of the test object cancel each other out and can be safely ignored. (If you don't believe me you can work this out for yourself. It's an elementary exercise in algebra.) The upshot is that although the moon is very heavy (about 7.22x10^22 kg) it is also very far away (about 3.84x10^8 meters) and the gravitational influence decreases with the square of the distance. So at the surface of the earth, the moon's gravitational influence is tiny -- only about 3 millionths as strong as the gravity of the earth itself.

Compare this to the gravitational influence of the sun, which is a lot further away (1.46x10^11 meters) but also a lot heavier (about 2x10^30 kg). The sun's gravitational influence at the surface of the earth is about 190 times greater than the moon's. Standing on the deck of the world's largest supertanker with a fully loaded mass of about half a million tons, the gravitational influence of the ship is about the same as the gravitational influence of the moon.

And yet, the moon clearly does have manifest influences at the surface of the earth, most notably, the tides. If the moon can push zillions of tons of seawater around, isn't it plausible that it could also move zillions of tons of magma around too? Well, no, it isn't. To see why you have to understand how the tides actually work. It is tempting to think that the moon causes the tides by pulling water towards itself via the force of gravity. But this theory has a major problem: if this were how tides worked, there should be one high tide every day (when the moon was overhead pulling the water towards it) and one low tide each day (when the moon was on the opposite side of the earth pulling the water away). But in fact there are two cycles of high and low tides each day. How can this be?

The answer is that the moon does not cause tides by "pulling" on the water. It casues tides because of tidal forces (imagine that). Tidal forces are somewhat complicated to explain, but the easiest (though not quite correct) way to explain them is that the earth and the moon make up a two-body system that rotate around a common center of gravity. Because the moon's mass is a significant fraction of the earth's mass, this common center of gravity is not at the center of the earth, but lies about 3300 miles from the earth's center. As the earth rotates about this offset center of gravity, centrifugal forces "fling" the water away.

The important point is that the tidal force is not the force of gravity, but the difference in the force of gravity on the two sides of the earth. And as small as the raw gravitational influence of the moon on the earth is, the tidal forces that it generates are even smaller. This is why the actual tides on earth, while they may appear significant to us on a human scale, are actually miniscule relative to the scale of the planet. There is nowhere near enough energy in the moon's tidal influences to account for volcanism. And it's a good thing too, because if there were then that energy would get dissipated in the world's oceans and they would all boil away.

The title of this post is "how to detect bullshit", and the answer is: do the math. Don't take my or anybody else's word for it. Do it yourself. It isn't hard. As an exercise, consider the Biblical claim that Joshua made the sun stand still (which is to say, that he made the earth stop rotating). Calculate how much rotational energy would have to be dissipated to make that happen. Compare that to the total amount of energy in, say, the world's nuclear arsenals. Here's all the information you need:

The formula for the rotational energy of a sphere is 2/5 x m x r^2 x omega^2 where m is the mass of the sphere, r is the radius, and omega is the rotational velocity in radians per second. The mass of the earth is about 5.97x10^24 kg. It rotates 360 degrees (or 2pi radians) in 24 hours. A kiloton of TNT is about 4x10^12 joules.

Go.

Earthquakes rattle creationism

We had an earthquake in LA today. Five-four. No big deal, but it got my attention, and got me to thinking about what earthquakes have to tell us about the age of the earth.

The modern scientific explanation of what causes earthquakes is that what we think of as solid ground is really just a thin (relatively speaking) layer of frozen rock floating on an ocean of molten magma that makes up the earth's mantle. New crust is formed at mid-ocean ridges, floats along for a while, and is ultimately re-cycled into the mantle in subduction zones. Where the plates of land mass butt up against each other there is friction, and so as the plates move past each other they don't move smoothly, but in little fits and starts that we feel as earthquakes.

Plate tectonic theory used to be considered patently absurd, but is nowadays as well established a scientific theory as you could hope to find. It explains not only earthquakes, but a host of other phenomena including the formation of mountain ranges and why fossils of tropical plants and animals can be found in the arctic. Thanks to modern GPS we can actually measure the motion of the continental plates with mind boggling accuracy.

Which brings me to Hawaii.

The eight major islands of the Hawaiian group (Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, Oahu, Kauai and Lanai) are actually just the beginning of an enormously long chain of islands, islets, atolls and seamounts extending over 1500 miles of the Pacific ocean in an almost perfectly straight line. How did they get there? Well, on the southeastern extreme of the Hawaiian chain is the Big Island of Hawaii, and on the southeastern coast of the Big Island is Kilauea, he world's most active volcano. Kilauea has been spewing hot lava into the sea more or less continuously for the last twenty five years (and off and on for thousands of years before that). The lava from Kilauea flows down into the sea where it hardens into rock and becomes new land. The current eruption has created almost 600 acres of new land in the last twenty five years.

Hawaii is growing.

The total area of the Big Island is about 2.6 million acres. If Kilauea keeps building new land at the current rate the size of the island will double in about 4300 years. The historic accretion of the island is being chronicled in great detail. You can actually go to Volcano Nation Park and see it happening before your very eyes. They even have signs telling you which lava flows happened when. And for those who don't have time to actually go there, there are handy dandy maps.

What about all the other islands in the Hawaiian chain? None of them have active volcanoes. The closest thing to an active volcano on the other islands is Haleakala on the southeast lobe of the island of Maui, the next island up the chain from the Big Island. Haleakala is a dormant volcano that last erupted in 1790 [UPDATE: turns out that it was probably closer to 1500]. The lava flowed into the sea, creating a new peninsula that is today the southern boundary of La Perouse Bay. But since then no new land has formed on Maui, and the island has begun to erode away.

As you travel northwest along the island chain a striking pattern emerges: all of the islands are made of the same kind of volcanic material, but the further you get from the Big Island the smaller and more eroded the islands become. On the Big Island you can see the lava coming out of the ground. On Maui you can see the lava flow of 1790 [UPDATE: new evidence indicates that the flow is a bit older, dating back to around 1500 or so] -- it looks like a barren river of rock. But on Lanai, Molokai and Oahu there is no fresh lava at all, but there are still recognizable volcanic features, like Diamond Head. By the time you get to Kauai you have to look very closely to find the clues that it was once a volcano. You can still see the crater that used to be the volcano, but it has mostly eroded away.

Out past Kauai the last "real" island is Niihau, which is privately owned and closed to the public. There is no geomorphic evidence of volcanic activity on Niihau, but we know that it was formed by the same volcanic activity that formed the other Hawaiian islands because of the chemistry of the rocks.

Out beyond Niihau the remaining islands are mostly atolls, which is to say, the remains of coral reefs that formed around the islands and remained even after the island proper has completely eroded away.

The remarkable regularity of the Hawaiian chain can be very easily understood if we postulate that the volcano itself is actually a structure in the earth's mantle that stays in one place as the continental plate moves above it. As each new island forms (as the Big Island is currently being formed) the movement of the plate eventually carries it away from the volcanic hot spot and it stops growing and starts to erode. This explains why the islands are all in a line, why the chain only extends in one direction, and why they appear to get older the further they get from the Big Island. Furthermore, if this theory is correct, we might expect to see a little "proto island" being formed under water to the east of the Big Island. And indeed that is exactly what we find. It is called Loihi and it is on track to matriculate into a fully-fledged island in about ten thousand years, give or take.

Now, here's the rub for the young-earth creationists: if the earth is only 6000 years old, how did the Hawaiian islands form? 6000 years is barely enough time to build one island, let alone the dozens and dozens that make up the Hawaiian chain. To build the whole 1500-mile chain in 6000 years by passing the continental plate over the hot spot it would have to be moving at about a quarter of a mile a year, which is faster than it really moves (as measured by GPS) by several orders of magnitude.

The young-earth creationist's answer, of course, is that God simply created the Hawaiian chain in (more or less) its current form. But that just begs the question: why did He put them in a line? Why did he arrange them just so that it would appear that they were built by the processes that we know are operating today?

The evidence for the extreme age of the Hawaiian islands is not buried in obscure fossil strata. You can go to Hawaii today and watch the island grow. You can set up a GPS yourself and measure the rate at which it moves. (It will take you a while -- the actual rate of motion is a few centimeters a year -- but you can do it.) You can go to the Big Island and see what a one-day-old lava flow looks like, and then you can go to Maui and see what a several-hundred-year-old lava flow looks like. You can even still see the cinder cone of the volcano that created it.

And then you can go to Kauai and see what a few million years of erosion can do.

Set phasers on stun

It's been taken one step closer to reality, ironically, by a toy company.

Kids are startups

I just got back from being out of town and discovered that a one-line comment I posted on hacker news two weeks ago ignited a firestorm of debate. The comment was in response to another comment, which was posted in response to a story about Google's recent difficulties with day care:

As the parent of a 2 month old, it's a difficult question we're facing right now. Who? How? When? Should my wife, with a doctorate in biochemistry, abandon her career completely and stay home? Should I? I'm not enthusiastic about those options. Should we hire someone? Not wild about that either. I think the best would be to kind of try and switch off, but it's going to require a lot of flexibility, and perhaps earning less money. The second is probably ok, depending on wherever it is we settle, the second may not be forthcoming from many employers. Sigh...

To which I replied:

With all due respect, did it never occur to you to get this all figured out BEFORE you had kids?

Various people took umbrage:

I hope you must be 21 or something. Maybe when you have kids, you will understand the difficulty of raising them, while trying to have some kind of career.

and (from the person I was responding to):

Wow, I don't think I've ever been so offended by something on this site. Your implication that I haven't thought about the future of my daughter is... something I hope you never say to any other parent.

We've done our best to think about the future, but it's unknowable.

and

Do you have any kids? Do you realize how unpredictable it is to plan things for your child, for example, how sick the child is going to be, or how well-tempered?

So for the record, I am not 21. I am in my mid-forties, married, with no kids. But that does not mean that I do not know how hard it is to raise kids. In fact, it is because my wife and I know all too well how hard it is that we decided not to have any. Nowadays it's a choice.

And while you can't predict exactly, it's a good bet that sooner or later if you have kids they will get sick. They will throw temper tantrums. They will do all the things that kids do.

Kids are startups.

And I'm sorry the OP was offended. None of the questions you were asking came about as a result of unpredictable events. You knew before that no matter what someone would need to look after the kid and you'd need to put food on the table. If you are asking questions like, "Should my wife, with a doctorate in biochemistry, abandon her career completely and stay home? Should I?" then you have manifestly not thought enough about the future. These are questions that IMHO you should have answered BEFORE you took the plunge, so to speak. Maybe you'd need to change the plan in response to contingencies, but that's not what's happening here. You didn't have a plan before your started. If you did you would not be asking these questions.

Paul Graham wrote:

Here is the rational answer you seem to want. (a) This problem is so hard you can probably never solve it satisfactorily, and (b) you can't know what it's going to be like to have kids before you have them, or what your kids will be like. So however much thought you expend on the question before having kids, you're still going to be working on it afterward.

I'm surprised he didn't come up with the kids-as-startups analogy. It's really pretty good. In both cases there is a lot of unpredictability. But again, in both cases, that is no excuse for not having a plan before you start.

iSightCapture secrets revealed

For anyone who has used iSightCapture and has been frustrated by the fact that it's released in object-code only format, here is qt-capture which is not quite as capable as iSightCapture (it doesn't have any command-line arguments) but does basically the same thing. Since it's just a proof-of-concept and not really finished code I've released it into the public domain. Enjoy.

UPDATE: I've also uploaded an expanded version that lets you capture movies and still images. It also demonstrates how to roll your own cocoa app without using a NIB file. Not really recommended, but kinda cool to see how it's done for someone like me who really like to know what's going on under the hood.

There are no roads in Israel

At least not according to Google Maps.

Outrage at Obama is Justified

Larry Lessig calls the outrage at Obama's flip-flop over the FISA bill leftist hysteria. He's wrong.

Whatever else one might think about the FISA bill, the outrage over retroactive immunity for the telcos is not a leftist issue. It is a litmus test for whether or not you believe in the rule of law. Central to the very concept of civilization is the idea that there is a set of rules that you play by, and implicit in this is that everyone has to know what those rules are. Retroactive immunity sets a very dangerous precedent. It says that as long as you have enough friends in Congress you are no longer expected to play by the rules.

Of course, if you have enough friends in Congress you can get the rules changed in your favor anyway. But there's a huge difference between getting the rules changed up front and having them changed to your benefit after the fact: if you have enough power and influence to do the latter then you can break the rules while everyone else still has to follow them. Only if you get caught do you have to go on the record as having used your influence to unfair advantage. God only knows how many laws that Bush administration and their cronies have broken secure in the knowledge that if some snoopy reporter discovers the transgression they can just strongarm Congress to give them a free pass. (And if that fails, there are always presidential pardons to fall back on.)

It is not for nothing that the Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws.

I am outraged at Obama because he specifically promised to filibuster any bill that included retroactive immunity. That was an implicit promise to stand up for the rule of law no matter the cost. He reneged on that promise. This may well have been politically justifiable, even shrewd, but the larger message is that Obama is not a man of his word, and he is not a man of principle. He is just another politician who will do or say anything to get elected.

But even that is not the worst part. The worst part is that now we have no one (except, perhaps, Ron Paul) who is willing to stand up against the overarching trend in American politics today, which is that national security trumps everything, including the Constitution and the rule of law. Down that road lies tyranny, and Obama stood by and did nothing while the Senate steered us down that path. That is well worth getting outraged over.

I donated to Obama's campaign. I demand a refund.

Tomorrow I plan to write a letter to the Obama campaign demanding a refund of my $2300 campaign contribution because Senator Obama did not fulfill his promise to filibuster the FISA bill if it contained retroactive immunity for telcos. If you want to do likewise the address is:

Obama for America
P.O. Box 802798
Chicago, IL 60680

Senator Obama destroys my last hope

It's amazing how fast things change. Last year I was thinking how wonderful it was to be present at this historic moment when either a woman or a black man would for the first time in history be a major party's nominee for President of the United States. Then Hillary revealed herself to be a lying scumbag, and so I decided to support Barack Obama.

Today, Obama cast a YEA vote on the FISA Wiretap Bill HR 6304 after promising that he would filibuster it. So much as it pains me, I have to say that Obama too is just another lying scumbag.

In a way, Obama's lie is worse than Hillary's. Hillary's lie revealed her to be a liar, but didnt' really matter much in the grand and glorious scheme of things. Obama's lie actually mattered. He promised to defend the Constitution and our civil rights and to stand up for justice and truth. Now not only will justice not be done, but we will never even know the extent to which our civil rights have been violated by the Bush Administration.

I feel utterly betrayed. Every last bit of enthusiasm that I had for this election has been ripped to shreds. What's the point of voting when both parties conspire to shred the Constitution? A year and a half of a Democratic majority in Congress and what do we have to show for it? Nothing. Not a god damned thing. Ralph Nader was right.

Fuck.

No monopoly on idiocy

If you thought that Muslims had cornered the market on hysterical overreactions to minor slights, Catholics worldwide are up in arms over the theft of a soda cracker. The dastardly perpetrator has been accused of kidnapping, and has received death threats.

At least they're not rioting in the streets (yet).

A cautionary tale

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."

The U.S.A. under the Bush administration? No. Germany from 1933-1945.

Horrific conditions at San Quentin prison

I heard only a part of this story about San Quentin prison on NPR yesterday, but that was enough to turn my stomach.


With overcrowding, it gets harder for prison officials to take care of the basics. Crumbling walls, broken lights and filth are standard.

'That's human feces,' says inmate Mike Johnson, pointing to his wall. Johnson has been here for five months on a DUI charge. He says in all that time, the feces has never been cleaned off.

'They'll clean down there on the bottom where the (officers) stay,' he says, 'but up here, we're just a number.'

Johnson's 4-foot-wide cell was built for one man. Now it holds two. With such crowded conditions, it's harder to prevent violence."


What the broadcast version included that the print version doesn't is that the two men in the cell have to take turns standing up.

And if you're tempted to say that these criminals deserve what they get, most of San Quentin's inmates are there for parole violations, mostly drug offenses.

This is really starting to get pretty scary. The recidivism rate in California is 70%. Our prisons aren't deterrents for crime, they're mass-production facilities for criminals. What happens when we run out space to warehouse them all?

The witch hunt goes on

A Texas high school student has been arrested for making a map of his school. (Caveat: I have not been able to verify this story. The purported link to the original is broken, so this could be an urban legend in the making. But having heard many first-hand horror stories about police harassing people for taking pictures I find it quite plausible that this could be true.)

I may have to vote for Ralph Nader again

This is so depressing I can barely bring myself to write about it. I thought we elected the Democrats to protect us from neocons running roughshod over our civil rights. Instead, the dems are turning out to be just as much rubber stamps for the Bush administration as the Republicans.

You know, I'm really starting to wonder if the conspiracy theorists may be on to something. With Bush's popularity ratings at historic lows you'd think politicians would be falling all over themselves to distance themselves from him, but they aren't. Congress has yet to stand up to the administration in any meaningful way. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have actually reversed positions in order to align themselves more closely with Bush. Why? What the bleep is going on here?

Say it isn't so!

TPM is reporting that Obama is flip-flopping on telecom immunity. I hope this turns out not to be true. (The video isn't working so I can't tell if TPM's reporting is accurate.) If it is, it will mean that Obama is just another politician with no principles. I was really hoping for more from him.

A great day for murderers and child rapists

The Supreme Court handed murderers and child rapists a pair of legal victories today. Never would have figured the Roberts court for being a bunch of bleeding hearts, but there you go. They're soft on terrorism too so I guess you can call it a trifecta.

Oh well, at least they're still managing to keep the country safe from environmentalists.

In Fino Veritas

Every now and then the religious right slips in its carefully crafted rhetoric to show its true and hateful face. The most recent example of this was yesterday on Patt Morrison's show on KPCC in Pasadena. She was interviewing Karen England, executive director of the Capitol Resource Institute, about the recent California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. During the closing minutes of the show, Ms. England said this:


"This is about restoring the definition of marriage. The definition of marriage has never been committed loving relationships..."


You really have to listen to it to get the full effect. Her voice is just oozing with contempt as she says, "committed, loving relationships."

(The full context is here. The segment starts about 35 minutes in.)

Well, Ms. England, if you're right and the definition of marriage has never been about committed, loving relationships, then I say it's high time we changed the definition of marriage. Just as we've changed he definition of "voter", "citizen", and even "person" for the better over the years.

A bugged life

The title of this post actually applies to two completely different matters. First, I saw a really great movie last night about life in East Germany before the wall came down. It's called "The Lives of Others". German with English subtitles. Highly recommended. One of the best films I've ever seen.

But what I really wanted to tell you about was an obsession that's had a hold on me for the past few weeks. Every now and then I am afflicted with a bout of nostalgia. I have a few boxes of memorabilia stashed away in the garage, and the other day I was digging through one of them and came across a box of 5-1/4 inch floppy disks. For those of you two young to remember, these disks are actually floppy. They bend. And in their day they stored a whopping total of 140 kilobytes of data. Ah, those were the days.

One particular disk caught my attention because its label said "P-Lisp". This was my very first Lisp back in the day, and it arguably launched my career in computer science. So I thought it would be cool to resurrect it and watch it run, for old times' sake.

The plan was fairly straightforward: buy an Apple II from Ebay, get a copy of ADTPro, make a disk image, and run in on an Apple II emulator. I figured getting the Apple would take about a week, and then it would take an hour or two to get ADTPro up and running and grab the image. Just a little diversion.

Little did I know.

I logged on to EBay and found just what I needed: an Apple IIe with two disk drives. The high bid was $5! What a steal! So I, being the naive EBay bidder that I am, bid $10 figuring I was sure to win.

Now, you EBay veterans out there -- I can hear you -- you can stop snickering now. As you might expect, I was outbid and lost the auction. But the person who outbid me backed out of the deal, so I got a "second chance" to accept the deal at my original offer. And because of EBay's auto-bid system I didn't even have to pay the full $10, I just had to beat the $5 bid that was in effect when I placed my bid, so the machine could be mine for $6!

That is, it could have been, if I'd gotten the email in time. The second-chance offer is only good for 24 hours, and I just happened to be on a boat when the message arrived. So by the time I got the message it was too late.

(For those of you who are South Park fans, I would now like to call to mind the episode where the kids are all excited about the fact that some TV network is going to air a program where the word "shit" is spoken without being bleeped out. (It's episode 502 in case you want to go back and review.) The program of course is self-referential, because the discussion of the word is not bleeped out, and there's a little counter at the bottom of the screen that starts counting up the number of times anyone says the word during the episode. The counter reaches an astonishingly high number before it's all over. What follows will be all the more fun if you keep that imagery firmly in your mind as you read.)

No problem, I thought, the seller had already re-listed the computer, so I figured I'd just bid again. This time, though, I had more competition and lost out at $20. (Heck, I'd almost had it for $6, why pay three times as much? Surely another single-digit deal will come along.)

One week and half a dozen failed bids later I decided to give up and order an Apple IIe from Top Micro [UPDATE: Top Micro seems to have gone out of business and their site has been taken over by malware spammers], which had several of them in stock for $20 each -- plus $40 UPS Ground shipping. Oh well, it's all for the cause of historical preservation I told myself. I still needed a disk drive, but I figured I'd figure that out later. There seemed to be a steady trade in Apple II disk drives on Ebay.

The IIe finally arrived. I plugged it in, turned it on, and it came up with the Apple II prompt. Cool! It works. I hit a few keys...

Nothing.

The keyboard was dead.

No problem, I thought, probably just a loose connection, and when it comes to old computers I'm MacGuyver. So I whip out the trusty phillips screw driver and open 'er up.

Inside I found a twenty year old puddle of coffee. Cream, no sugar.

Yech.

So I get out a sponge and a shop vac and clean her up as best I can. No dice.

OK, this is obviously not going to work, so back to EBay, where I finally decide that I'm spending too much time on this and I'll just bite the bullet and shell out whatever it takes to get a working Apple with disk drives. "Whatever it takes" turned out to be about $100, but what the heck, it's all for a good cause, yadda yadda yadda.

While I'm waiting for the new machine to arrive I decide I now have nothing to lose by taking drastic measures to try to resurrect the IIe. So I take out the keyboard and give it a good wash with hot water. (You can actually do that safely to most keyboards as long as you dry them out THOROUGHLY before using them again.) No good. OK, here's my new Apple II+ with disks. So I put the IIe away and go to play with my new toy.

Happily, it works out of the box, and within ten minutes I'm actually able to boot one of my old floppy disks. A little bit of playing around convinces me that the drives are in good working order, and I finally work up the courage to try my P-Lisp disk.

Now, I should mention at this point that my P-Lisp disk was, as far as I could determine, the last extant copy on planet Earth. The Lisp community is not that large, and the subject of P-Lisp comes up from time to time, but I had never heard of anyone ever locating another copy despite periodic requests from history buffs to find one. So this is a pretty important disk.

Amazingly, considering all the things that went wrong on this project (and believe me, we're just getting warmed up here) that this one thing *didn't* go wrong is astonishing. I put the disk in the drive and booted it up and it worked. It just worked! There I was playing with a program that hadn't seen the light of day in over twenty-five years. I quickly made a copy of it, and to my amazement (especially in retrospect) that worked too. Cool, I thought, I'm nearly done.

I need to digress for a moment and tell you a little bit about ADTPro. It's a really cool program for resurrecting old Apple II machines. To understand just how cool it is you have to remember that back in 1979 when the Apple II came out they did not have ethernet ports and USB ports and Firewire ports. They had cassette ports. Like audio jacks that you plugged into an actual cassette recorder. That was your mass storage.

ADTPro comes with audio files that you can play back into an Apple II's cassette port to download bootstrap software so that you can get an old II up and running without any disks. This is quite an amazing thing if you think about it, and I can't even begin to imagine what would possess someone to put so much effort into something that is ultimately not really good for very much except nostalgia. But there it is. Anyway, I dug out a bunch of audio cables, hooked it up, and after just two tries (you have to fiddle with the volume a bit) I had uploaded ProDOS and was ready to upload the ADTPro client.

That was the last thing that would go right for a long, long time.

For some reason the ADTPro client just refused to upload. I must have tried it twenty times, with each attempt taking several minutes. The Apple doesn't give you any indication of what goes wrong, it just gets to the end of the upload and prints "ERR" and beeps at you. After about two hours I was about ready to throw that damned machine out the window.

OK, that was obviously not going to work. Happily, ADTPro can also connect via a serial port, which is a more robust connection than the cassette ports. But Apple II's didn't have serial ports built-in, they were add-ons. So back to EBay to buy an SSC and off to Fry's to buy a USB-to-serial converter (because things have come full-circle and Apples once again do not come with built-in serial ports, which is probably as it should be).

By this time my wife is starting to ask me when I'm going to get that damned Apple II out of the workout room.

I watched my Super Serial Card wend its way across the country via UPS's on-line tracking system. In retrospect, this should have been a sign that I was starting to take this project a wee bit too seriously.

The SSC finally arrives, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I can finally get this damn thing done! I plug it in, fire up ADTPro and start the bootstrap procedure...

And it doesn't work! AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

By this time I am completely obsessed. I am determined to get this damned disk image come hell or high water. I am MacGuyver. I eat bugs for a living. No stupid 8-bit machine is going to get the better of me.

Now, I am going to do you a favor and spare you all the details of everything that happened while I was trying to debug the problem I was having with the serial link. Suffice it to say that by the time it was over, two weeks had gone by. I had probably spent twenty hours on it (thirty if you count the trips to Fry's). I had bought three USB/RS232 cables and God only knows how many miscellaneous cables, adapters, breakout boxes, volt meters, crimpers, testers and null modems. I had a frankencable setup so scary it would have made Ridley Scott run screaming in fear.

AND IT STILL DIDN'T WORK!!!

Sometimes it's really hard to know when you've reached the point of diminishing returns. On the one hand I was fully aware that I was spending way more time on this stupid project than it was worth. But on the other hand I really didn't want to quit. I really felt like I was on the cusp of a breakthrough, and that any minute I would figure it out. And eventually I did.

My best advice in situations like that is to get a good night's sleep. I think if I'd actually followed that advice I might have figured it out in half the time. The problem turned out to be a nasty timing-related bug in the device driver for the USB-serial cable that I was using. But the way in which events unfolded turned out to be an almost perfect conspiracy to make this problem as hard to discover as possible.

The first thing that happened was that I bought one USB-serial cable. I chose the name brand (IOGear) figuring it had the best shot at being reliable. I installed the drivers, plugged it in, and it *mostly* worked. There was just one particular circumstance under which it failed, and ADTPro just happened to hit the one magic combination of timing that triggered the bug.

The second thing that happened was that the symptoms were intermittent data corruption. So my attention was naturally drawn to my cabling setup and the old SSC card, which seemed like a more likely source of random problems than a brand spanking new USB device.

The third thing that happened was that I wrote a little Python program that uploaded the bootstrap software successfully. That made me think it was a bug in ADTPro for a long time.

The fourth thing that happened was that I bought two more USB-serial cables, all different makes and models, and they all did exactly the same thing. Of course, they were all running off the same buggy driver too. But I didn't realize that at the time.

I eventually managed to reproduce the problem between two Macs using Python code, which proved that both ADTPro and the old Apple II hardware were blameless. And after another hour or so of sleuthing I finally decided to try a different driver, which solved the problem. Thirty minutes later I had my disk image. My Apple II is now neatly packed away. And I am MacGuyver again.

Whew!

[UPDATE:] You can find the plisp image here.

What if they held an impeachment and nobody cared?

I wish it were a rhetorical question. Believe it or not, Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush today. None of the major news outlets are covering it.

Barbarians, take 2

There is no other word for a society where something like this has to happen before someone starts to pay attention.

The parents of a blind seven-year-old who was sent to a religious school in Pakistan have told how he was hung by his feet from a ceiling and beaten to death after failing to memorise the Koran.

It may not be all Muslims, but it's not just the fringe either.

While officialdom often turns a blind eye, the sheer brutality of the latest case has led the new prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, to order an inquiry.

Allah only knows how many other seven-year-olds are out there suffering similar abuse but that we haven't heard about just because they haven't died in so dramatic a fashion yet.

Finally!

Hillary is ending her campaign. Halefuckingleujah. Can you say, "Too little, too late?"

Breathtaking chutzpah

In a display of truly breathtaking chutzpah even by her own standards, Hillary Clinton, who just two months ago was saying that Barak Obama was not fit to be commander in chief, is now saying that she'd be willing to be his vice president. This would be surprising if not for the fact that Hillary has already demonstrated that she has no principles whatsoever, and will simply do and say anything to claw her way into power.

I will be surprised and disappointed if Obama offers Hillary the veep spot. Hillary is a delusional pathological liar and she is not fit to be dog catcher, let alone a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Hillary has obviously not come to grips with the fact that Obama beat her fair and square in large measure because of her despicable behavior and that of her supporters. You have to repent before you can receive absolution.

As for all those Clinton supporters who say they will vote for McCain rather than Obama all I can say is: you and McCain deserve each other.