Minutes ago the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, the voter-approved measure that bans gay marriage. Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that I stand foursquare for allowing gays to marry, so this may come as something of a shock, but I think that in the long run this will prove to be a good thing for gay rights.
The overarching social trend in the United States is clear: the bigotry that drives people to deny gays the right to marry the people they love resides mostly in the older generation. Both are slowly but surely dying, and good riddance. It is therefore a matter of when, not if, Proposition 8 is ultimately reversed by the people and this shameful episode is relegated to the history books. But if the court had overturned Proposition 8 that would have energized the forces of bigotry and caused them to redouble their efforts. The fight would have been long and drawn out, probably over decades, just as it has been with abortion rights.
This way, it is those who support tolerance and freedom who are energized, as they should have been but weren't last year. Early polls showing Proposition 8 failing by 10 points caused supporters of gay rights to become complacent that the earlier California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage would simply stand. But this was naive. Court decisions enforcing radical social changes rarely stand the test of time. At the end of the day (or the decade as the case may be) it is the people who decide.
So what will happen now is that there will be another proposition on the ballot in 2010 to overturn Proposition 8, and it will pass. It will pass by an overwhelmingly greater margin than did prop 8. It will pass because this time supporters of gay rights will not be complacent. It will pass because by November of 2010 the tide of history will be clearly turning against bigotry. While California denied its citizens equal rights, three other states have granted them and two others are poised to do so in the coming months. Furthermore, Californians will have been living for two years with 18,000 married gay couples in their midst and they will see that the sky has not fallen. It will be impossible in 2010 to paint gay marriage as the bogeyman because the bogeyman lives only in the abstract. But gay marriage is here, and the unraveling of the social fabric that was supposed to accompany it is not. In 2010 it will be impossible to condemn gay marriage without appearing manifestly delusional.
Proposition 8 will be overturned in 2010 because the forces of righteousness will be on the march as they were not in 2008 and the bigots will have nowhere left to turn. So hang in there, my gay brothers and sisters, justice is coming. And it is coming a lot sooner and with greater finality than it would have if the court decision had gone the other way.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
It's the helium, stupid
Cold fusion is suddenly in the news again because of a recent 60 minutes story. For anyone who thinks that there is anything to this, I have only one word:
Helium.
Excess energy is a red herring. There might be excess energy coming from somewhere, but if you're fusing hydrogen, then you produce helium. No helium, no fusion. It's as simple as that. And I'm not talking about the trace amounts that have been reported, there should be gobs and gobs of it, certainly enough to float a toy balloon and remove all doubt. There's also the problem that all known hydrogen-based fusion reactions produce energetic neutrons. Really, cold fusion researchers should be dropping dead left and right from radiation poisoning, but failing that the radiation should at least be detectable on a geiger counter. So where are the videos of the cold fusion apparatus with a geiger counter buzzing away next to it?
If there's no fusion, there could still be excess energy, but it's almost certainly coming from some prosaic source, and it's almost certainly consuming palladium somehow. Palladium might be an economically viable catalyst, but it makes a mighty expensive fuel.
UPDATE: Here's the math.
The specific heat of deuterium fusion is about 1 MeV, which is about 10^-13 joules. To produce enough helium to fill a balloon (let's say a liter at standard temperature and pressure, or about 0.05 mole) we'd need to produce ~5x10^7 joules of excess heat. That's actually quite a lot, enough to raise the temperature of a cubic meter of water by 50 degrees C. Not enough to vaporize the lab, but definitely enough to get someone's attention.
But here's the thing: some of these experiments run for months at a time. Measuring small amounts of excess heat over long periods of time is very hard. But collecting and storing even small amounts of putative excess helium is very easy. Let's say that the excess heat is only one watt, it would only take a year to accumulate a liter of helium, and the fact helium was being produced would be inarguable after only a few days. So I still say if it were there someone would have exhibited it by now.
UPDATE 2:
I made a mistake in my calculations. There are actually two different deuterium fusion reactions. One produces 3He (helium 3, with two protons and one neutron) and an extra neutron, i.e. radiation. The other produces 4He, with two protons and two neutrons, and no extra neutrons. The second "clean" reaction also produces 23 times as much energy as the first one (or, equivalently, only about 4% as much helium per unit energy produced). It is also very rare. As far as I have been able to determine (which at this point means looking at a few Wikipedia articles) it does not occur in nature, and has not been achieved in more traditional "hot fusion" experiments. So I wrote off the possibility of achieving this reaction at room temperature as too good to be true. However, there are some plausible-looking reports of 4He production correlated with excess heat production in about the right amounts. So at this point I have to say that the possibility cannot be definitively ruled out. I still wouldn't bet my life savings on it, but if a policy maker were to ask me at this point I think I would recommend funding some of this research. These experiments are dirt-cheap by contemporary standards, and if it can be made to work it would be the single greatest technological breakthrough in the history of mankind. So it's worth putting some resources into it to determine definitively what, if anything, is going on.
Helium.
Excess energy is a red herring. There might be excess energy coming from somewhere, but if you're fusing hydrogen, then you produce helium. No helium, no fusion. It's as simple as that. And I'm not talking about the trace amounts that have been reported, there should be gobs and gobs of it, certainly enough to float a toy balloon and remove all doubt. There's also the problem that all known hydrogen-based fusion reactions produce energetic neutrons. Really, cold fusion researchers should be dropping dead left and right from radiation poisoning, but failing that the radiation should at least be detectable on a geiger counter. So where are the videos of the cold fusion apparatus with a geiger counter buzzing away next to it?
If there's no fusion, there could still be excess energy, but it's almost certainly coming from some prosaic source, and it's almost certainly consuming palladium somehow. Palladium might be an economically viable catalyst, but it makes a mighty expensive fuel.
UPDATE: Here's the math.
The specific heat of deuterium fusion is about 1 MeV, which is about 10^-13 joules. To produce enough helium to fill a balloon (let's say a liter at standard temperature and pressure, or about 0.05 mole) we'd need to produce ~5x10^7 joules of excess heat. That's actually quite a lot, enough to raise the temperature of a cubic meter of water by 50 degrees C. Not enough to vaporize the lab, but definitely enough to get someone's attention.
But here's the thing: some of these experiments run for months at a time. Measuring small amounts of excess heat over long periods of time is very hard. But collecting and storing even small amounts of putative excess helium is very easy. Let's say that the excess heat is only one watt, it would only take a year to accumulate a liter of helium, and the fact helium was being produced would be inarguable after only a few days. So I still say if it were there someone would have exhibited it by now.
UPDATE 2:
I made a mistake in my calculations. There are actually two different deuterium fusion reactions. One produces 3He (helium 3, with two protons and one neutron) and an extra neutron, i.e. radiation. The other produces 4He, with two protons and two neutrons, and no extra neutrons. The second "clean" reaction also produces 23 times as much energy as the first one (or, equivalently, only about 4% as much helium per unit energy produced). It is also very rare. As far as I have been able to determine (which at this point means looking at a few Wikipedia articles) it does not occur in nature, and has not been achieved in more traditional "hot fusion" experiments. So I wrote off the possibility of achieving this reaction at room temperature as too good to be true. However, there are some plausible-looking reports of 4He production correlated with excess heat production in about the right amounts. So at this point I have to say that the possibility cannot be definitively ruled out. I still wouldn't bet my life savings on it, but if a policy maker were to ask me at this point I think I would recommend funding some of this research. These experiments are dirt-cheap by contemporary standards, and if it can be made to work it would be the single greatest technological breakthrough in the history of mankind. So it's worth putting some resources into it to determine definitively what, if anything, is going on.
The trouble with shadow photons
Chapter 7 of David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality" should be considered required reading for anyone who wants to understand the scientific process. Unfortunately, it is embedded in a book that is full of some crazy ideas, at least one of which is wrong even by Deutsch's own standards. This one mistake, which Deutsch makes very early on, infects the rest of his reasoning like a virus. This is very unfortunate because I think this is at least in part to blame for the fact that the book as a whole has not gotten the attention it deserves.
It makes a very interesting intellectual exercise to try to uncover Deutsch's mistake on your own. You don't need to be a physicist to find it. Here are two hints to get you started: the mistake is in chapter 2, and everything you need to know in order to figure it out is in this paper, which is written to be accessibly to a lay audience.
So at the risk of sounding like a broken record, get ye over to Amazon and buy a copy of Deutsch's book. Read chapter 7. Then read chapter 2 and try to solve this puzzle for yourself before you read any further. I promise you it will be time well spent. This post is not just about pointing a finger at David Deutsch and saying "ha! ha!" I want to make a much deeper point about how challenging it can be to figure out what is "true". It will help if you have the visceral experience of reading Deutsch's argument and trying to figure out for yourself what is wrong with it even if (perhaps especially if) you don't succeed.
Last warning. Spoiler alert.
Deutsch's mistake is in this paragraph, which in my copy is on page 43:
"Could it be that the photon splits into fragments which, after passing through the slits, change course and recombine? We can rule out that possibility too. If, again, we fire one photon through the apparatus, but use four detectors, one at each slit, then at most one of them ever registers anything. Since in such an experiment we never observe two of the detectors going off at once, we can tell that the entities that they detect are not splitting up."
In my "Quantum Mysteries Disentangled" paper I use the metaphor of a magic trick to describe how popular accounts of QM spread confusion. Most people think that magic is all about gimmicks and skillful sleight-of-hand, but the heart of a good magic trick is a narrative that seems plausible but in fact does not reflect the underlying reality. The elements of this narrative can be quite subtle. I take the Queen of Spades and I turn it face down and I put it, uh, over here. But in fact the card that I'm putting over here is not the queen of spades at all; I've already switched it out for a different card. Much later when the true identity of the card is revealed, you will swear on a stack of Bibles that that card was the queen of spades. You saw it with your own eyes. And you were watching it like a hawk the whole time. Except that by the time you started watching like a hawk the trick was already done. It happened during that little moment of confusion, when I lost my focus and couldn't quite remember what I was supposed to do next. In fact, I didn't lose my focus. Every move was scripted in minute detail. I say "uh" to make it look like I've lost my train of thought. That makes you take your guard down because if I've lost my train of thought then I'm not doing the trick. I look around trying to decide what I'm supposed to do with the card, and your gaze follows mine because deep down in your brain there are instincts that say when a member of your tribe is focusing their attention somewhere you should check it out too because they might be looking at a saber-tooth tiger. In that instant, I absent-mindedly put the card briefly back on the top of the deck before I put it over here. And in that instant I make the switch. Except that I don't even have to make a switch because in fact that card that I put on top of the deck was not the queen of spades either, it was two cards, with the queen of spades on the bottom.
Deutsch's mistake is a sin of omission: he fails to mention the crucial fact that when you do this experiment with the four detectors the interference goes away. This is a devastating fact for Deutsch's theory of shadow photons, but before I explain why there is another important thing to take note of, namely, that at this point in the argument Deutsch has not yet introduced the theory of shadow photons. This is what makes it so easy to miss that Deutsch has omitted an important fact.
The fact that adding detectors destroys interference is fatal for the theory of shadow photons. To understand why, we need to recap exactly what it is that the theory of shadow photons says: something influences the behavior of "real" (what Deutsch calls "tangible") photons to produce interference. Whatever that "something" is behaves just like "real" photons, except that it is "detectable only indirectly through ... interference effects ...". So we might as well call them (shadow) photons. Since shadow photons exist (because they have observable effects), it must be the case that entire shadow universes exist spanning an incomprehensible gamut of possible configurations, including some (actually incomprehensibly many) where David Deutsch does not exist, and therefore -- and this is crucial -- some in which the detectors on the slits do not exist.
This is the odd thing about shadow photons: they behave just like photons that exist in parallel universes except that their movements correspond exactly to the movements of photons in this universe. There are only two possibilities. One is that our universe is somehow privileged, and what we do here produces miraculous effects in the myriad shadow universes. If we decide to cover our slits then the photons in all the shadow universes are blocked, even those in shadow universes where the slits are still open. Imagine how puzzled those poor scientists must be trying to figure out why light behaves as it does. There is no correspondence between how light behaves in their universe and the physical configuration of their universe. Sometimes light passes through blocked slits, and sometimes it fails to pass through open slits. From this behavior they could likewise infer the presence of what is to them a shadow universe (which to us is the real universe) that governs the behavior of photons in their universe, but that just begs the question of why we happen to inhabit the one privileged universe whose macroscopic configuration governs the behavior of light in all of the shadow universes.
The other possibility is to postulate a new rule for shadow photons: only those shadow photons that come from shadow universes whose macroscopic configuration is the same as the "real" universe are allowed to influence "real" photons. But if we postulate that then it immediately follows that shadow universes with different macroscopic configurations have no influence on our universe whatsoever and therefore, by Deutsch's own criteria, do not exist.
One way or another, there is no escaping the fact that our universe is somehow special.
Now, the interesting this about this to me is not so much that Deutsch was wrong per se, but the process by which he came to be wrong. Unlike a magician, I'm pretty sure Deutsch did not set out intentionally to deceive. I'm also pretty sure that Deutsch didn't get it wrong because he was simply being stupid. To the contrary, I think Deutsch is probably brilliant, a lot smarter than me. For one thing, he's actually a physicist, which I'm pretty sure even now still makes an effective filter for idiocy. So what went wrong?
I have no way of knowing for sure, of course, but here's my best guess: I think Deutsch actually managed to fool himself. Deutch's book is, notwithstanding that much of it is actually wrong, a model of clear thinking. To find the flaw in his reasoning is not easy, in no small measure because of subtle details of how he presents his argument. This is why I urged you to actually do the exercise yourself.
The real point of this essay is not to harsh on David Deutsch, but to show that even very smart people, even scientists (sometimes especially scientists) can and do get things wrong, and sorting out the resulting mess is not always easy. This is one of many reasons why both scientists and Scientists ought always to maintain a healthy measure of humility.
UPDATE:
Here's what David Deutsch had to say about this (via email -- I'm pretty sure he hasn't actually read this post):
My response:
1. I find it disingenuous to claim that the theory of shadow photons is "a.k.a. quantum theory." The theory of shadow photons is in fact a.k.a. Hugh Everett's relative state formulation of quantum mechanics, which was later renamed the many-worlds interpretation by Bryce DeWitt. To be sure it is taken seriously by a great many people, but to say without qualification that it is quantum theory is just flat-out wrong. I appreciate Deutsch's intellectual honesty in essentially admitting that my criticism is valid, but I'm puzzled by how he can rail against arbitrary complexity in scientific explanations on the one hand, and then accept as essentially inarguable the proposition that parallel universes are causally connected on a microscopic level by virtue of their macroscopic configurations. It seems plain to me that such an "explanation" of QM gets you exactly nowhere. But I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.
2. John Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics actually does consider photons that never interact with anything to be non-existent, so this is not as outlandish a notion as Deutsch implies.
UPDATE 2:
Deutsch just referred me to this paper which is the more formal formulation of his multiple-worlds theory. I must confess that on a cursory read it seems to be a compelling argument. So I may have to rethink this whole thing.
Just for the record, my (current) disagreement with Deutsch is not huge. It's clear from the structure of QM that the proposition that there is only one (classical) universe is untenable. But that still leaves you with the choice of an infinite number of universes (Deutsch's position) or zero (mine). It has always seemed to me that zero was the more parsimonious choice, but I'm now beginning to have some doubts.
It makes a very interesting intellectual exercise to try to uncover Deutsch's mistake on your own. You don't need to be a physicist to find it. Here are two hints to get you started: the mistake is in chapter 2, and everything you need to know in order to figure it out is in this paper, which is written to be accessibly to a lay audience.
So at the risk of sounding like a broken record, get ye over to Amazon and buy a copy of Deutsch's book. Read chapter 7. Then read chapter 2 and try to solve this puzzle for yourself before you read any further. I promise you it will be time well spent. This post is not just about pointing a finger at David Deutsch and saying "ha! ha!" I want to make a much deeper point about how challenging it can be to figure out what is "true". It will help if you have the visceral experience of reading Deutsch's argument and trying to figure out for yourself what is wrong with it even if (perhaps especially if) you don't succeed.
Last warning. Spoiler alert.
Deutsch's mistake is in this paragraph, which in my copy is on page 43:
"Could it be that the photon splits into fragments which, after passing through the slits, change course and recombine? We can rule out that possibility too. If, again, we fire one photon through the apparatus, but use four detectors, one at each slit, then at most one of them ever registers anything. Since in such an experiment we never observe two of the detectors going off at once, we can tell that the entities that they detect are not splitting up."
In my "Quantum Mysteries Disentangled" paper I use the metaphor of a magic trick to describe how popular accounts of QM spread confusion. Most people think that magic is all about gimmicks and skillful sleight-of-hand, but the heart of a good magic trick is a narrative that seems plausible but in fact does not reflect the underlying reality. The elements of this narrative can be quite subtle. I take the Queen of Spades and I turn it face down and I put it, uh, over here. But in fact the card that I'm putting over here is not the queen of spades at all; I've already switched it out for a different card. Much later when the true identity of the card is revealed, you will swear on a stack of Bibles that that card was the queen of spades. You saw it with your own eyes. And you were watching it like a hawk the whole time. Except that by the time you started watching like a hawk the trick was already done. It happened during that little moment of confusion, when I lost my focus and couldn't quite remember what I was supposed to do next. In fact, I didn't lose my focus. Every move was scripted in minute detail. I say "uh" to make it look like I've lost my train of thought. That makes you take your guard down because if I've lost my train of thought then I'm not doing the trick. I look around trying to decide what I'm supposed to do with the card, and your gaze follows mine because deep down in your brain there are instincts that say when a member of your tribe is focusing their attention somewhere you should check it out too because they might be looking at a saber-tooth tiger. In that instant, I absent-mindedly put the card briefly back on the top of the deck before I put it over here. And in that instant I make the switch. Except that I don't even have to make a switch because in fact that card that I put on top of the deck was not the queen of spades either, it was two cards, with the queen of spades on the bottom.
Deutsch's mistake is a sin of omission: he fails to mention the crucial fact that when you do this experiment with the four detectors the interference goes away. This is a devastating fact for Deutsch's theory of shadow photons, but before I explain why there is another important thing to take note of, namely, that at this point in the argument Deutsch has not yet introduced the theory of shadow photons. This is what makes it so easy to miss that Deutsch has omitted an important fact.
The fact that adding detectors destroys interference is fatal for the theory of shadow photons. To understand why, we need to recap exactly what it is that the theory of shadow photons says: something influences the behavior of "real" (what Deutsch calls "tangible") photons to produce interference. Whatever that "something" is behaves just like "real" photons, except that it is "detectable only indirectly through ... interference effects ...". So we might as well call them (shadow) photons. Since shadow photons exist (because they have observable effects), it must be the case that entire shadow universes exist spanning an incomprehensible gamut of possible configurations, including some (actually incomprehensibly many) where David Deutsch does not exist, and therefore -- and this is crucial -- some in which the detectors on the slits do not exist.
This is the odd thing about shadow photons: they behave just like photons that exist in parallel universes except that their movements correspond exactly to the movements of photons in this universe. There are only two possibilities. One is that our universe is somehow privileged, and what we do here produces miraculous effects in the myriad shadow universes. If we decide to cover our slits then the photons in all the shadow universes are blocked, even those in shadow universes where the slits are still open. Imagine how puzzled those poor scientists must be trying to figure out why light behaves as it does. There is no correspondence between how light behaves in their universe and the physical configuration of their universe. Sometimes light passes through blocked slits, and sometimes it fails to pass through open slits. From this behavior they could likewise infer the presence of what is to them a shadow universe (which to us is the real universe) that governs the behavior of photons in their universe, but that just begs the question of why we happen to inhabit the one privileged universe whose macroscopic configuration governs the behavior of light in all of the shadow universes.
The other possibility is to postulate a new rule for shadow photons: only those shadow photons that come from shadow universes whose macroscopic configuration is the same as the "real" universe are allowed to influence "real" photons. But if we postulate that then it immediately follows that shadow universes with different macroscopic configurations have no influence on our universe whatsoever and therefore, by Deutsch's own criteria, do not exist.
One way or another, there is no escaping the fact that our universe is somehow special.
Now, the interesting this about this to me is not so much that Deutsch was wrong per se, but the process by which he came to be wrong. Unlike a magician, I'm pretty sure Deutsch did not set out intentionally to deceive. I'm also pretty sure that Deutsch didn't get it wrong because he was simply being stupid. To the contrary, I think Deutsch is probably brilliant, a lot smarter than me. For one thing, he's actually a physicist, which I'm pretty sure even now still makes an effective filter for idiocy. So what went wrong?
I have no way of knowing for sure, of course, but here's my best guess: I think Deutsch actually managed to fool himself. Deutch's book is, notwithstanding that much of it is actually wrong, a model of clear thinking. To find the flaw in his reasoning is not easy, in no small measure because of subtle details of how he presents his argument. This is why I urged you to actually do the exercise yourself.
The real point of this essay is not to harsh on David Deutsch, but to show that even very smart people, even scientists (sometimes especially scientists) can and do get things wrong, and sorting out the resulting mess is not always easy. This is one of many reasons why both scientists and Scientists ought always to maintain a healthy measure of humility.
UPDATE:
Here's what David Deutsch had to say about this (via email -- I'm pretty sure he hasn't actually read this post):
RG: I know you probably hear this a lot, but I believe I have found a serious flaw in the theory of shadow photons. In a nutshell, the rules of motion for shadow photons are governed by the macroscopic configuration of *our* universe. If a slit is open in *our* universe, both tangible and shadow photons pass through. If a slit is blocked in *our* universe, both tangible and shadow photons are blocked. It seems to me there are only two possibilities: either the macroscopic configuration of *our* universe governs the movement of shadow photons (in which case shadow-scientists must be mightily puzzled why their tangible photons sometimes pass through solid objects, and sometimes fail to pass through open slits), or we have to postulate that only shadow photons from universes whose macroscopic configuration matches our own can interact with our tangible photons.
DD: The latter is, to a good approximation, the case.
RG: But if we postulate this, then shadow photons from universes whose macroscopic configurations do not match ours cannot interact with our universe in any way, and therefore by your own criteria do not exist. Or have I missed something?
DD: You're claiming there's an inadequacy in the criterion for existing that I presented, not a flaw in the 'theory of shadow photons' (which is aka quantum theory). However, that criterion was not intended as a criterion of what *doesn't* exist. If it were used in that way, then we would have to classify all the photons that have left the sun, and passed the Earth, and are never going to strike anything in the future, as being nonexistent.
My response:
1. I find it disingenuous to claim that the theory of shadow photons is "a.k.a. quantum theory." The theory of shadow photons is in fact a.k.a. Hugh Everett's relative state formulation of quantum mechanics, which was later renamed the many-worlds interpretation by Bryce DeWitt. To be sure it is taken seriously by a great many people, but to say without qualification that it is quantum theory is just flat-out wrong. I appreciate Deutsch's intellectual honesty in essentially admitting that my criticism is valid, but I'm puzzled by how he can rail against arbitrary complexity in scientific explanations on the one hand, and then accept as essentially inarguable the proposition that parallel universes are causally connected on a microscopic level by virtue of their macroscopic configurations. It seems plain to me that such an "explanation" of QM gets you exactly nowhere. But I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.
2. John Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics actually does consider photons that never interact with anything to be non-existent, so this is not as outlandish a notion as Deutsch implies.
UPDATE 2:
Deutsch just referred me to this paper which is the more formal formulation of his multiple-worlds theory. I must confess that on a cursory read it seems to be a compelling argument. So I may have to rethink this whole thing.
Just for the record, my (current) disagreement with Deutsch is not huge. It's clear from the structure of QM that the proposition that there is only one (classical) universe is untenable. But that still leaves you with the choice of an infinite number of universes (Deutsch's position) or zero (mine). It has always seemed to me that zero was the more parsimonious choice, but I'm now beginning to have some doubts.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Why I am not a Unicornian
The title of this post is a play on Bertrand Russel's classic essay, "Why I am not a Christian." But the content is modeled after Chapter 7 of David Deutsch's highly under-appreciated book, "The Fabric of Reality". Following Deutsch (who himself followed John Worrall) the essay takes the form of a dialog between me (Ron) and a Unicornian, one who believes in Unicorns.
A disclaimer: this piece is a poor paraphrase of Deutsch's argument. If it weren't protected by copyright, I would just cut-and-paste the entirety of chapter 7 of TFOR here and leave it at that. I asked Deutsch once to put Chapter 7 on the web as a service to humanity but he declined. I cannot hope to reproduce the clarity and completeness of Deutch's argument (which is really Popper's argument), though I'll certainly give it my best shot.
I will lift one passage verbatim from Deutsch as fair-use, which is his statement of the thesis, so at least I won't be able to screw that up:
Science seeks better explanations. A scientific explanation accounts for our observations by postulating something about what reality is like and how it works. We deem an explanation to be better if it leaves fewer loose ends (such as entities whose properties are themselves unexplained), requires fewer and simpler postulates, is more general, meshes more easily with good explanations in other fields and so on. But why should a better explanation be what we always assume it to be in practice, namely the token of a truer theory? Why, for that matter, should a downright bad explanation (one that has none of the above attributes, say) necessarily be false? There is indeed no logically necessary connection between truth and explanatory power. A bad explanation ... may be true. Even the best and truest available theory may make a false prediction in particular cases, and those might be the very cases in which we rely on the theory. No valid form of reasoning can logically rule out such possibilities, or even prove them unlikely [emphasis added]. ... [Nonetheless] I believe that we can justify our expectation that [good scientific theories make accurate predictions].
So here's my humble attempt at channeling Deutsch. But seriously, get a copy of the book and read the original. It's available in paperback.
The setting is, as with Deutsch and Worrall, the top of the Eiffel tower. The characters are Ron and a Unicornian. Ron has just eaten some bad mussels and come down with a very serious case of food poisoning.
---
Ron: I'm not feeling so good. I think I'd better go to the hospital to be checked out.
Unicornian: You know, the line at the elevator is awfully long. Why don't we see if we can find a unicorn instead? Their horns have curative powers you know.
R: If it's all the same to you, I think I'll take my chances with the elevator line.
U: You don't believe in unicorns, do you.
R: That's right, I am an a-unicornist.
U: I feel sorry for you. You are going to risk dying from salmonella just because you stubbornly cling to your faith.
R: I don't really think of a-unicornism as faith. My non-belief in unicorns follows from my belief in science, which is to say, in my belief that experiment and rational argument are the best paths to Truth.
U: But science can't disprove he existence of unicorns.
R: That's right, it can't. Science can't disprove the existence of anything. What science can do is to show, in a philosophically justifiable way, that certain things are extremely unlikely.
U: I don't see how that's possible. After all, any argument you could possibly make has to start with some unprovable and untestable assumptions. Even the belief that experiment is a reliable guide to Truth (with a capital T) is unprovable and untestable. So I don't see how one argument that rests on unprovable and untestable assumptions can be any more philosophically justifiable than any other argument that rests on unprovable and untestable assumptions. You have your faith, I have mine, and there's no way to determine who is right and who is wrong (except that I know that you are wrong).
R: No, that's not true. But explaining why is rather subtle and complicated.
U: The elevator line has hardly moved at all since we started this little chat, so it would seem that as long as you cling to your misguided beliefs about hospitals and modern medicine we have time.
R: OK, let's see how far we get. Have you read David Deutsch's book, "The Fabric of Reality"?
U: Nope, never even heard of it.
R: If you really want to understand this stuff you really ought to read it, especially chapter 7. But I'll do my best to explain it. I'm in a fairly dire situation here. Let us assume for the sake of argument that whatever it is that can save my life, be it unicorns or antibiotics, is only available down there at ground level. After all, if I'm not mistaken, unicorns have many magical properties, but they can't fly.
U: No, they can't fly, but they can ride elevators. There might be one up here. We really ought to look.
R: But then we'd risk losing our place in line.
U: Hm, good point. Maybe I should go looking and you could stay here?
R: If you don't mind I'd rather you stay. If I suddenly collapse I'd just as soon have the company.
U: It's your funeral.
R: Not yet, I hope. But there is another possible way of getting to the ground. We could jump over the side.
U: That seems like a bad plan.
R: Indeed it does. But *why* does it seem like a bad plan?
U: Duh, because you'd fall to your death.
R: And how do you know that? Maybe a unicorn would save me.
U: Dude, unicorns don't work that way.
R: I thought unicorns were magic.
U: They are, but their magic is limited. Their horns have curative powers (which is the reason I think you should seek one out) and they can, of course, become invisible (which is what makes them challenging to locate). But they can't fly, and they don't make particularly good backstops for a hard fall because of their horn and all.
R: And how do you know all that?
U: Because the Unicorn Bible says so.
R: And how do you know that what the Unicorn Bible says is true?
U: Because the Unicorn Bible is the Revealed Word of Uni, the omniscient and infallible unicorn who created the universe.
R: I see. Maybe if I jump over the side he'll break my fall?
U: Alas, no, that is not possible. Because while Uni is omniscient and infallible, he is alas not omnipotent.
R: How inconvenient. Though that does have the beneficial side-effect that you don't have to worry about the problem of theodicy.
U: Indeed not. All evil is the work of men, not unicorns.
R: OK, but even if Uni won't save me, something might. You can't prove that if I jumped over the side that I would fall to my death.
U: Sure I can. There are no exceptions to the law of gravity.
R: How do you know?
U: Because none has ever been observed.
R: But I've never seen a unicorn. You've never seen a unicorn. No one alive has ever seen a unicorn...
U: Duh, because they're invisible. I explained that already.
R: ...and yet you believe in unicorns. So just because something hasn't been observed doesn't prove it doesn't exist. How can we be sure that there isn't an invisible construction elevator just over there that would lower me gently to the ground?
U: Because that's ridiculous.
R: Is it? It seems no more ridiculous to me than the idea of invisible one-horned horses roaming the earth. Why should your intuitions about what is and is not ridiculous be so much more reliable than mine?
U: Because my intuitions are informed by the Revealed Word of Uni and yours are not.
R: That's not true. I've read the Unicorn Bible. I just happen not to believe that it is the Revealed Word of Uni.
U: "The fool sayeth in his heart: there are no unicorns."
R: Are you familiar with the concept of a circular argument?
U: Fair enough. But it seems to me that we have gotten exactly nowhere. It still seems to me that you base your beliefs on a set of unprovable untestable assumptions.
R: No. I base my beliefs on experimental evidence and rational argument.
U: Not so. No one has (as far as I know) ever conducted the experiment of jumping off the Eiffel tower, so you have no basis for believing that you would fall to your death. Sure, you may have seen lots of other things fall under the force of gravity, but to extrapolate from those experiments to this situation requires a leap of faith.
R: No, it doesn't.
U: Why not?
R: Because of the explanatory power of scientific theories.
U: What does that have to do with anything?
R: Scientific theories have value for two reasons. First, they allow you to make predictions about the world which can serve as useful guides for action. (For example, a fairly complex array of scientific theories, ranging from gravity to the biology, is currently guiding me to wait for the elevator so I can go to the hospital rather than leaping over the side.) Second, and more important, they provide explanations of how the universe *really* works (for some value of "really"). The quality of a scientific theory is judged not merely by how well its predictions match experimental observation, but also by the quality of the explanatory mechanism that it provides. For example, the problem with your theory of using unicorn horn to treat food poisoning is not that it is wrong, it is that it provides no explanatory power. It merely stipulates that unicorn horns are an antidote against poison, it doesn't say anything about the mechanism by which these curative powers arise.
U: Sure it does. Unicorns are magic.
R: But magic is not an explanation. Magic -- real magic, not the "fake" magic practiced by professional magicians -- by definition cannot be explained. That's what makes it magic. As soon as you explain it, it ceases to be magic and becomes science. Calling something "magic" offers no more of an explanation than saying that you simply don't know.
U: OK, but you still have to assume with no proof that "explanatory power" is a reliable guide to Truth. So your beliefs are still, at root, based on faith.
R: No, I don't. This is the really cool thing about science. It just turns out that theories with better explanatory power invariably make better, more reliable, more accurate, more precise predictions about the world than theories with poorer explanatory power. Why this should be is indeed a great mystery, but it is an incontrovertible fact.
U: Nothing is incontrovertible.
R: To controvert this you would have to resort to quite the extremes of intellectual dishonesty (some would say you'd have to be delusional or even clinically insane, though I'm not sure I'd go quite that far). The evidence that theories with better explanatory power make better predictions (mind you this is a very different thing from saying that these theories are actually true) pervades every aspect of modern life. Our modern technological society is utterly dependent on being able to make all manner of accurate predictions about what will happen if things like cars and cell phones and bridges are built in certain ways and not others. My life currently depends on my deciding whether or not to jump down to the ground or wait for the elevator. Historically, people who base such decisions on scientific theories that both 1) agree with experimental evidence and 2) have explanatory power have vastly better track records (in terms of the objective material outcomes of their decisions) than people who base their decisions on anything else. And over the centuries people have tried lots and lots of different things, prayed to lots and lots of different gods, listened to countless prophets, tried to gleaned meaning from myriad signs and portents. Compared to science, nothing else even comes close.
U: OK, but this still isn't proof that scientific theories are actually true.
R: I never said that scientific theories are actually true, only that they are reliable guides to action. In fact, one of the fundamental tenets of science is that nearly all scientific theories are almost certain to be false. For example, there are two theories on which all of modern physics rests: general relativity and quantum mechanics. Both of these theories have enormous predictive and explanatory power. Neither theory has ever made a prediction that was not confirmed by experiment. And yet the two theories are fundamentally incompatible with each other so we actually know that at least one of them must be "wrong" in some sense. But (and this is very important) scientific theories, when they are wrong, are almost invariably wrong in a very particular way. The way in which they are wrong is rather tricky to describe. Isaac Asimov did an excellent job of describing how scientific theories are wrong in his essay, The Relativity of Wrong, which happily has been published on the Internet.
U: I'll be sure to read it at the earliest opportunity. But it still seems to me that none of this has anything to do with Truth (with a capital T). It may be that the methods of science could be effective even if they are completely wrong in a metaphysical sense.
R: Yes, that's possible, but it's unlikely. It's much more likely that the reason that scientific theories are as reliable as they are is that there really is a metaphysical reality "out there", and that our scientific theories really are a somewhat accurate description of that reality. Moreover, there is actually a sound scientific reason to believe that this is the case. You can actually treat the metaphysics of science as a scientific theory and test its predictions. For example, one of the predictions made by the theory that science is an accurate reflection of metaphysical reality is that we ourselves are a part of that metaphysical reality. This has consequences in terms of our ability to construct scientific theories. I won't get into the details here except to say that the theory of scientific metaphysical reality makes certain predictions about the structure of scientific theories, all of which turn out (so far) to be true. (For example, it predicts that scientific theories will be constructed by physical entities that emulate Turing machines.) So there really are some very powerful reasons to believe that science is a not-wholly-inaccurate description of metaphysical reality.
U: Holy cow.
R: Yes, it's rather a lot to take in, isn't it?
U: It certainly is.
R: And actually I've barely begun to scratch the surface. Scientific metaphysics is intimately related to neuroscience, computer science and information theory, all of which are fields of study that are only a few decades old. The entire enterprise of science only goes back a few hundred years. Who knows what we'll know a few decades or centuries from now?
U: OK, how do you account for all the Unicornians out there? All the early martys who died for their beliefs? People's personal experience with Uni and his minions? Do you really think we're all idiots?
R: "Idiot" is putting it a bit strongly. I certainly think you're (almost certainly) wrong in a metaphysical sense. But interestingly, there is a very satisfying (at least to me) scientific explanation of why so many people believe in unicorns. Unicorns may not be real, but the belief in unicorns is very real, and can have actual physical effects on the body by virtue of the placebo effect (which is a real, physiological, scientifically verified phenomenon). It is not even out of the question that if I could summon a sufficiently strong belief in unicorns that that belief alone could cure me or at least make me feel better.
U: So why don't you give yourself over to the power of Uni?
R: Because I can't. The placebo effect relies on believing in the efficacy of the placebo, and I know too much to ever be able to fool myself into thinking that unicorns are real in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. Belief is very powerful, but its power is predicated on a level of ignorance that I am no longer able to muster. I don't know how to "unlearn" my Scientific worldview.
U: I'll pray for you nonetheless.
R: I appreciate the gesture, and accept it in the spirit in which it is offered. Hm, it looks like the line is starting to move. And you know what? I'm actually feeling a little better. Maybe it was just a touch of gas, not food poisoning after all.
U: Or maybe Uni just worked a miracle in your life.
R: Maybe. We could put it to the test and order another round of mussels.
U: I would think you would be reluctant to put yourself at risk like that.
R: I meant for you, not for me. I've had quite enough of this kind of experiment for one day.
U: But that wouldn't be a valid experiment according to you because even according to you I can summon the power of Uni by virtue of my belief even though you can't.
R: Good point. But the placebo effect will only get you so far. If these mussels really are contaminated with salmonella I think even the strongest belief in Uni will be impotent. You really will need antibiotics. (Christian Scientists occasionally do this kind of experiment on themselves or their kids, usually with unhappy results.) So while it would not be conclusive, I do think it would yield an interesting data point. Shall I place an order?
U: I think the elevator is here. We should go.
R: Yes, I suppose we should.
A disclaimer: this piece is a poor paraphrase of Deutsch's argument. If it weren't protected by copyright, I would just cut-and-paste the entirety of chapter 7 of TFOR here and leave it at that. I asked Deutsch once to put Chapter 7 on the web as a service to humanity but he declined. I cannot hope to reproduce the clarity and completeness of Deutch's argument (which is really Popper's argument), though I'll certainly give it my best shot.
I will lift one passage verbatim from Deutsch as fair-use, which is his statement of the thesis, so at least I won't be able to screw that up:
Science seeks better explanations. A scientific explanation accounts for our observations by postulating something about what reality is like and how it works. We deem an explanation to be better if it leaves fewer loose ends (such as entities whose properties are themselves unexplained), requires fewer and simpler postulates, is more general, meshes more easily with good explanations in other fields and so on. But why should a better explanation be what we always assume it to be in practice, namely the token of a truer theory? Why, for that matter, should a downright bad explanation (one that has none of the above attributes, say) necessarily be false? There is indeed no logically necessary connection between truth and explanatory power. A bad explanation ... may be true. Even the best and truest available theory may make a false prediction in particular cases, and those might be the very cases in which we rely on the theory. No valid form of reasoning can logically rule out such possibilities, or even prove them unlikely [emphasis added]. ... [Nonetheless] I believe that we can justify our expectation that [good scientific theories make accurate predictions].
So here's my humble attempt at channeling Deutsch. But seriously, get a copy of the book and read the original. It's available in paperback.
The setting is, as with Deutsch and Worrall, the top of the Eiffel tower. The characters are Ron and a Unicornian. Ron has just eaten some bad mussels and come down with a very serious case of food poisoning.
---
Ron: I'm not feeling so good. I think I'd better go to the hospital to be checked out.
Unicornian: You know, the line at the elevator is awfully long. Why don't we see if we can find a unicorn instead? Their horns have curative powers you know.
R: If it's all the same to you, I think I'll take my chances with the elevator line.
U: You don't believe in unicorns, do you.
R: That's right, I am an a-unicornist.
U: I feel sorry for you. You are going to risk dying from salmonella just because you stubbornly cling to your faith.
R: I don't really think of a-unicornism as faith. My non-belief in unicorns follows from my belief in science, which is to say, in my belief that experiment and rational argument are the best paths to Truth.
U: But science can't disprove he existence of unicorns.
R: That's right, it can't. Science can't disprove the existence of anything. What science can do is to show, in a philosophically justifiable way, that certain things are extremely unlikely.
U: I don't see how that's possible. After all, any argument you could possibly make has to start with some unprovable and untestable assumptions. Even the belief that experiment is a reliable guide to Truth (with a capital T) is unprovable and untestable. So I don't see how one argument that rests on unprovable and untestable assumptions can be any more philosophically justifiable than any other argument that rests on unprovable and untestable assumptions. You have your faith, I have mine, and there's no way to determine who is right and who is wrong (except that I know that you are wrong).
R: No, that's not true. But explaining why is rather subtle and complicated.
U: The elevator line has hardly moved at all since we started this little chat, so it would seem that as long as you cling to your misguided beliefs about hospitals and modern medicine we have time.
R: OK, let's see how far we get. Have you read David Deutsch's book, "The Fabric of Reality"?
U: Nope, never even heard of it.
R: If you really want to understand this stuff you really ought to read it, especially chapter 7. But I'll do my best to explain it. I'm in a fairly dire situation here. Let us assume for the sake of argument that whatever it is that can save my life, be it unicorns or antibiotics, is only available down there at ground level. After all, if I'm not mistaken, unicorns have many magical properties, but they can't fly.
U: No, they can't fly, but they can ride elevators. There might be one up here. We really ought to look.
R: But then we'd risk losing our place in line.
U: Hm, good point. Maybe I should go looking and you could stay here?
R: If you don't mind I'd rather you stay. If I suddenly collapse I'd just as soon have the company.
U: It's your funeral.
R: Not yet, I hope. But there is another possible way of getting to the ground. We could jump over the side.
U: That seems like a bad plan.
R: Indeed it does. But *why* does it seem like a bad plan?
U: Duh, because you'd fall to your death.
R: And how do you know that? Maybe a unicorn would save me.
U: Dude, unicorns don't work that way.
R: I thought unicorns were magic.
U: They are, but their magic is limited. Their horns have curative powers (which is the reason I think you should seek one out) and they can, of course, become invisible (which is what makes them challenging to locate). But they can't fly, and they don't make particularly good backstops for a hard fall because of their horn and all.
R: And how do you know all that?
U: Because the Unicorn Bible says so.
R: And how do you know that what the Unicorn Bible says is true?
U: Because the Unicorn Bible is the Revealed Word of Uni, the omniscient and infallible unicorn who created the universe.
R: I see. Maybe if I jump over the side he'll break my fall?
U: Alas, no, that is not possible. Because while Uni is omniscient and infallible, he is alas not omnipotent.
R: How inconvenient. Though that does have the beneficial side-effect that you don't have to worry about the problem of theodicy.
U: Indeed not. All evil is the work of men, not unicorns.
R: OK, but even if Uni won't save me, something might. You can't prove that if I jumped over the side that I would fall to my death.
U: Sure I can. There are no exceptions to the law of gravity.
R: How do you know?
U: Because none has ever been observed.
R: But I've never seen a unicorn. You've never seen a unicorn. No one alive has ever seen a unicorn...
U: Duh, because they're invisible. I explained that already.
R: ...and yet you believe in unicorns. So just because something hasn't been observed doesn't prove it doesn't exist. How can we be sure that there isn't an invisible construction elevator just over there that would lower me gently to the ground?
U: Because that's ridiculous.
R: Is it? It seems no more ridiculous to me than the idea of invisible one-horned horses roaming the earth. Why should your intuitions about what is and is not ridiculous be so much more reliable than mine?
U: Because my intuitions are informed by the Revealed Word of Uni and yours are not.
R: That's not true. I've read the Unicorn Bible. I just happen not to believe that it is the Revealed Word of Uni.
U: "The fool sayeth in his heart: there are no unicorns."
R: Are you familiar with the concept of a circular argument?
U: Fair enough. But it seems to me that we have gotten exactly nowhere. It still seems to me that you base your beliefs on a set of unprovable untestable assumptions.
R: No. I base my beliefs on experimental evidence and rational argument.
U: Not so. No one has (as far as I know) ever conducted the experiment of jumping off the Eiffel tower, so you have no basis for believing that you would fall to your death. Sure, you may have seen lots of other things fall under the force of gravity, but to extrapolate from those experiments to this situation requires a leap of faith.
R: No, it doesn't.
U: Why not?
R: Because of the explanatory power of scientific theories.
U: What does that have to do with anything?
R: Scientific theories have value for two reasons. First, they allow you to make predictions about the world which can serve as useful guides for action. (For example, a fairly complex array of scientific theories, ranging from gravity to the biology, is currently guiding me to wait for the elevator so I can go to the hospital rather than leaping over the side.) Second, and more important, they provide explanations of how the universe *really* works (for some value of "really"). The quality of a scientific theory is judged not merely by how well its predictions match experimental observation, but also by the quality of the explanatory mechanism that it provides. For example, the problem with your theory of using unicorn horn to treat food poisoning is not that it is wrong, it is that it provides no explanatory power. It merely stipulates that unicorn horns are an antidote against poison, it doesn't say anything about the mechanism by which these curative powers arise.
U: Sure it does. Unicorns are magic.
R: But magic is not an explanation. Magic -- real magic, not the "fake" magic practiced by professional magicians -- by definition cannot be explained. That's what makes it magic. As soon as you explain it, it ceases to be magic and becomes science. Calling something "magic" offers no more of an explanation than saying that you simply don't know.
U: OK, but you still have to assume with no proof that "explanatory power" is a reliable guide to Truth. So your beliefs are still, at root, based on faith.
R: No, I don't. This is the really cool thing about science. It just turns out that theories with better explanatory power invariably make better, more reliable, more accurate, more precise predictions about the world than theories with poorer explanatory power. Why this should be is indeed a great mystery, but it is an incontrovertible fact.
U: Nothing is incontrovertible.
R: To controvert this you would have to resort to quite the extremes of intellectual dishonesty (some would say you'd have to be delusional or even clinically insane, though I'm not sure I'd go quite that far). The evidence that theories with better explanatory power make better predictions (mind you this is a very different thing from saying that these theories are actually true) pervades every aspect of modern life. Our modern technological society is utterly dependent on being able to make all manner of accurate predictions about what will happen if things like cars and cell phones and bridges are built in certain ways and not others. My life currently depends on my deciding whether or not to jump down to the ground or wait for the elevator. Historically, people who base such decisions on scientific theories that both 1) agree with experimental evidence and 2) have explanatory power have vastly better track records (in terms of the objective material outcomes of their decisions) than people who base their decisions on anything else. And over the centuries people have tried lots and lots of different things, prayed to lots and lots of different gods, listened to countless prophets, tried to gleaned meaning from myriad signs and portents. Compared to science, nothing else even comes close.
U: OK, but this still isn't proof that scientific theories are actually true.
R: I never said that scientific theories are actually true, only that they are reliable guides to action. In fact, one of the fundamental tenets of science is that nearly all scientific theories are almost certain to be false. For example, there are two theories on which all of modern physics rests: general relativity and quantum mechanics. Both of these theories have enormous predictive and explanatory power. Neither theory has ever made a prediction that was not confirmed by experiment. And yet the two theories are fundamentally incompatible with each other so we actually know that at least one of them must be "wrong" in some sense. But (and this is very important) scientific theories, when they are wrong, are almost invariably wrong in a very particular way. The way in which they are wrong is rather tricky to describe. Isaac Asimov did an excellent job of describing how scientific theories are wrong in his essay, The Relativity of Wrong, which happily has been published on the Internet.
U: I'll be sure to read it at the earliest opportunity. But it still seems to me that none of this has anything to do with Truth (with a capital T). It may be that the methods of science could be effective even if they are completely wrong in a metaphysical sense.
R: Yes, that's possible, but it's unlikely. It's much more likely that the reason that scientific theories are as reliable as they are is that there really is a metaphysical reality "out there", and that our scientific theories really are a somewhat accurate description of that reality. Moreover, there is actually a sound scientific reason to believe that this is the case. You can actually treat the metaphysics of science as a scientific theory and test its predictions. For example, one of the predictions made by the theory that science is an accurate reflection of metaphysical reality is that we ourselves are a part of that metaphysical reality. This has consequences in terms of our ability to construct scientific theories. I won't get into the details here except to say that the theory of scientific metaphysical reality makes certain predictions about the structure of scientific theories, all of which turn out (so far) to be true. (For example, it predicts that scientific theories will be constructed by physical entities that emulate Turing machines.) So there really are some very powerful reasons to believe that science is a not-wholly-inaccurate description of metaphysical reality.
U: Holy cow.
R: Yes, it's rather a lot to take in, isn't it?
U: It certainly is.
R: And actually I've barely begun to scratch the surface. Scientific metaphysics is intimately related to neuroscience, computer science and information theory, all of which are fields of study that are only a few decades old. The entire enterprise of science only goes back a few hundred years. Who knows what we'll know a few decades or centuries from now?
U: OK, how do you account for all the Unicornians out there? All the early martys who died for their beliefs? People's personal experience with Uni and his minions? Do you really think we're all idiots?
R: "Idiot" is putting it a bit strongly. I certainly think you're (almost certainly) wrong in a metaphysical sense. But interestingly, there is a very satisfying (at least to me) scientific explanation of why so many people believe in unicorns. Unicorns may not be real, but the belief in unicorns is very real, and can have actual physical effects on the body by virtue of the placebo effect (which is a real, physiological, scientifically verified phenomenon). It is not even out of the question that if I could summon a sufficiently strong belief in unicorns that that belief alone could cure me or at least make me feel better.
U: So why don't you give yourself over to the power of Uni?
R: Because I can't. The placebo effect relies on believing in the efficacy of the placebo, and I know too much to ever be able to fool myself into thinking that unicorns are real in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. Belief is very powerful, but its power is predicated on a level of ignorance that I am no longer able to muster. I don't know how to "unlearn" my Scientific worldview.
U: I'll pray for you nonetheless.
R: I appreciate the gesture, and accept it in the spirit in which it is offered. Hm, it looks like the line is starting to move. And you know what? I'm actually feeling a little better. Maybe it was just a touch of gas, not food poisoning after all.
U: Or maybe Uni just worked a miracle in your life.
R: Maybe. We could put it to the test and order another round of mussels.
U: I would think you would be reluctant to put yourself at risk like that.
R: I meant for you, not for me. I've had quite enough of this kind of experiment for one day.
U: But that wouldn't be a valid experiment according to you because even according to you I can summon the power of Uni by virtue of my belief even though you can't.
R: Good point. But the placebo effect will only get you so far. If these mussels really are contaminated with salmonella I think even the strongest belief in Uni will be impotent. You really will need antibiotics. (Christian Scientists occasionally do this kind of experiment on themselves or their kids, usually with unhappy results.) So while it would not be conclusive, I do think it would yield an interesting data point. Shall I place an order?
U: I think the elevator is here. We should go.
R: Yes, I suppose we should.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Hooked on God: Religion as a Drug
Karl Marx famously quipped that religion was the opium of the masses. I submit that this aphorism should be taken more seriously, that considering religion as a drug can be a constructive framework for understanding religion both for believers and, more to the point, non-believers. Non-believers tend to focus on religious claims rather than the effects of believing (or even going through the motions of believing) in those claims, and thus tend to miss the forest for the trees. The result is endless cycles of useless thrashing, wasted emotional energy, and a lot of unnecessary pain.
To begin, let me be precise about exactly what I mean by "religion is a drug." I mean for this view to be taken literally, not metaphorically. Now, obviously I do not mean that religion is a chemical. Religion is a placebo, but that emphatically does not mean that it's "imaginary" or "all in your head." The placebo effect is a real, scientifically observable physical phenomenon with actual physiological effects. The placebo effect can, for example, measurably reduce physical pain, sometimes in cases where all other treatments are ineffective.
It is important to emphasize that the placebo effect is not mystical mumbo-jumbo. It is as well established a scientific fact as you cold hope to find. That double-blind studies are the gold standard of scientific proof in medicine is an explicit acknowledgement of the power of the placebo effect. To demonstrate the effectiveness of a pharmaceutical you have to explicitly and laboriously exclude the possibility that any observed benefit was due to the placebo effect. Doing a properly controlled double-blind study is difficult precisely because the mechanism by which the placebo effect operates is belief, which is very difficult to control with precision.
But religion is not just a placebo; it is in some sense the ultimate placebo, honed and refined over thousands of years to be vastly more potent and powerful than a mere sugar pill. Whereas the curative powers of a sugar pill can be undermined simply by revealing that it is a sugar pill, religions have built-in defenses against such anti-revelations, sometimes layer upon layer of defenses. Whereas sugar pills derive their power from the (presumed) authority of a medical doctor, religions derive theirs, if not from God Himself, at least from His authority. This is one of the most important things that non-believers miss about religion: because placebos derive their power from belief, it doesn't matter whether the thing being believed in is real or not. As long as the belief is genuine, it works. So it doesn't matter if the power of religion actually derives from God or merely from the idea of God; for the purpose of inducing a placebo effect, they are the same thing.
Placebos are particularly effective at producing relief from emotional pain, which is no less real and can be no less intense that actual physical pain. To this I can bear personal witness. I have (like many technically inclined people, I think) suffered from periodic bouts of severe, debilitating depression, even leading on one occasion back in grad school to a half-hearted suicide attempt. Even as a life-long confirmed non-believer, I find the odd prayer occasionally to be palliative. (I often tell people with tongue only half-way in cheek that I'm an unusual atheist: I talk to God. Moreover, He talks back. I tell Him that I don't believe in Him, and He tells me that's OK, that He's here for me when I need Him, but that He can get along without me.)
Within this framework a lot of seemingly intractable problems simply evaporate. Theodicy, for example, becomes a complete non-issue. The existence of evil is only a philosophical problem if one assumes that religious beliefs exist to describe objective reality. On the religion-as-a-drug view, that is not the reason religious beliefs exist at all, they exist to produce a placebo effect. The idea of an all-powerful all-knowing all-just all-loving God prevails not because it's (objectively) true, but because it's therapeutically effective. Moreover, it's a lot more effective if you believe it's actually, objectively true. So people believe it's actually objectively true. And they defend those beliefs against all reason because to do otherwise is painful, in many cases too painful to bear. This is not a sign of intellectual weakness or duplicity. It is simply an aspect of being human. We are both rational and emotional creatures, yin and yang. Militant atheism fails because it ignores this inconvenient truth. (It is no surprise to me that Christopher Hitchens is a chain-smoking alcoholic. Very few people can summon the courage to face the awful realities of life without some form of chemical intervention.)
The religion-as-drug framework helps make sense of many other normally vexing (to atheists) aspects of religious belief. Like any drug, it can be both beneficial (if it alleviates pain) and harmful (if it is abused). It comes in different forms with varying potencies and side-effects. It can be bought and sold. Because it's legal (mostly), there is a thriving economy in religious ideas catering to all segments of a huge and diverse market. It can be addictive, which is good if you make your living as a dealer, not so good if you become a junkie.
And, of course, like other psychoactive drugs, religion can make you crazy, even violent if not taken judiciously.
Finally, the religion-as-drug framework offers some useful insight into the likely outcomes of efforts to rid the world of religion, which are as likely to succeed as efforts to rid the world of other drugs have been. In particular, religion is very unlikely to yield to either reason, ridicule, or prohibition. It is important to understand that people don't adopt religious beliefs because they are stupid, they do it because self-deception can, via the placebo effect, actually improve quality of life. Until this is understood and accepted, the secular and religious will continue to be at loggerheads.
To begin, let me be precise about exactly what I mean by "religion is a drug." I mean for this view to be taken literally, not metaphorically. Now, obviously I do not mean that religion is a chemical. Religion is a placebo, but that emphatically does not mean that it's "imaginary" or "all in your head." The placebo effect is a real, scientifically observable physical phenomenon with actual physiological effects. The placebo effect can, for example, measurably reduce physical pain, sometimes in cases where all other treatments are ineffective.
It is important to emphasize that the placebo effect is not mystical mumbo-jumbo. It is as well established a scientific fact as you cold hope to find. That double-blind studies are the gold standard of scientific proof in medicine is an explicit acknowledgement of the power of the placebo effect. To demonstrate the effectiveness of a pharmaceutical you have to explicitly and laboriously exclude the possibility that any observed benefit was due to the placebo effect. Doing a properly controlled double-blind study is difficult precisely because the mechanism by which the placebo effect operates is belief, which is very difficult to control with precision.
But religion is not just a placebo; it is in some sense the ultimate placebo, honed and refined over thousands of years to be vastly more potent and powerful than a mere sugar pill. Whereas the curative powers of a sugar pill can be undermined simply by revealing that it is a sugar pill, religions have built-in defenses against such anti-revelations, sometimes layer upon layer of defenses. Whereas sugar pills derive their power from the (presumed) authority of a medical doctor, religions derive theirs, if not from God Himself, at least from His authority. This is one of the most important things that non-believers miss about religion: because placebos derive their power from belief, it doesn't matter whether the thing being believed in is real or not. As long as the belief is genuine, it works. So it doesn't matter if the power of religion actually derives from God or merely from the idea of God; for the purpose of inducing a placebo effect, they are the same thing.
Placebos are particularly effective at producing relief from emotional pain, which is no less real and can be no less intense that actual physical pain. To this I can bear personal witness. I have (like many technically inclined people, I think) suffered from periodic bouts of severe, debilitating depression, even leading on one occasion back in grad school to a half-hearted suicide attempt. Even as a life-long confirmed non-believer, I find the odd prayer occasionally to be palliative. (I often tell people with tongue only half-way in cheek that I'm an unusual atheist: I talk to God. Moreover, He talks back. I tell Him that I don't believe in Him, and He tells me that's OK, that He's here for me when I need Him, but that He can get along without me.)
Within this framework a lot of seemingly intractable problems simply evaporate. Theodicy, for example, becomes a complete non-issue. The existence of evil is only a philosophical problem if one assumes that religious beliefs exist to describe objective reality. On the religion-as-a-drug view, that is not the reason religious beliefs exist at all, they exist to produce a placebo effect. The idea of an all-powerful all-knowing all-just all-loving God prevails not because it's (objectively) true, but because it's therapeutically effective. Moreover, it's a lot more effective if you believe it's actually, objectively true. So people believe it's actually objectively true. And they defend those beliefs against all reason because to do otherwise is painful, in many cases too painful to bear. This is not a sign of intellectual weakness or duplicity. It is simply an aspect of being human. We are both rational and emotional creatures, yin and yang. Militant atheism fails because it ignores this inconvenient truth. (It is no surprise to me that Christopher Hitchens is a chain-smoking alcoholic. Very few people can summon the courage to face the awful realities of life without some form of chemical intervention.)
The religion-as-drug framework helps make sense of many other normally vexing (to atheists) aspects of religious belief. Like any drug, it can be both beneficial (if it alleviates pain) and harmful (if it is abused). It comes in different forms with varying potencies and side-effects. It can be bought and sold. Because it's legal (mostly), there is a thriving economy in religious ideas catering to all segments of a huge and diverse market. It can be addictive, which is good if you make your living as a dealer, not so good if you become a junkie.
And, of course, like other psychoactive drugs, religion can make you crazy, even violent if not taken judiciously.
Finally, the religion-as-drug framework offers some useful insight into the likely outcomes of efforts to rid the world of religion, which are as likely to succeed as efforts to rid the world of other drugs have been. In particular, religion is very unlikely to yield to either reason, ridicule, or prohibition. It is important to understand that people don't adopt religious beliefs because they are stupid, they do it because self-deception can, via the placebo effect, actually improve quality of life. Until this is understood and accepted, the secular and religious will continue to be at loggerheads.
Kids ruin marriage. Who knew?
Via LiveScience:
"An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born."
Imagine that.
"An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born."
Imagine that.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Dispatches from the jury assembly room
I've lived in Los Angeles county for twenty-one years now and I have never served on a jury. I've been summoned for jury duty probably a dozen times, but I've never actually been on a jury. In fact, until about two years ago I never even made it to the courthouse. I was always in the middle of some new startup or other that let me get excused from duty. They've cracked down on that kind of thing now and made it much harder to be excused. On the plus side, they've instituted a new system where if you don't actually get on a jury on your first day then you're done. They also have a new (and well hidden) way of going through the juror orientation on-line, which allows you to show up at the courthouse at 9:30 instead of 7:30. And the juror assembly room has free wireless. So all in all, while it's now nearly impossible to avoid, jury duty is not nearly the onerous chore that it once was.
Which is not to say that it's not annoying. I still have to sit here all day knowing full well that I will never be empaneled on a jury. I know this because of what happened to me the last time I went through this, about two years ago. I sat around all day, and just before quittin' time I and about thirty of my fellow unfortunate prospective jurors had our names called. We all filed out and went to where we'd been instructed (a process that took about half an hour because one of the elevators was broken and the staircases are inaccessible except in emergencies "for security reasons"). There was just enough time to give us yet another pep talk about how wonderful it was to serve on a jury and participate in this unique American institution, and that we had to show up again the next day for the actual start of voir dire.
The next day, after several hours of sitting around waiting for some delay whose nature was never revealed, they started questioning us. That went on for several hours. A few jurors got dismissed by peremptory challenge but I was still there at the end of the day. So on day three I shlep myself to downtown LA yet again, wait around for a few more hours for more mysterious delays, before finally being summoned back into the courtroom. The very first thing that happens then is that the prosecution attorney dismisses me by peremptory challenge. That's it. I'm done. Great, but couldn't you have figured that out yesterday and saved me this trip?
Since I had already set the day aside anyway I decided to stick around and watch our justice system at work. I met a family attending the trial of a man accused of killing a family member. It struck me how different this reality was from the way it's portrayed on TV. The drama and pain are the same, but real life moves at a glacial pace by comparison to television, and even if the killer is convicted, the victim is still dead. And this time it's a real flesh-and-blood person, not a thinly drawn character who evaporates with the closing credits.
During one of the breaks I asked the prosecutor why she'd gotten rid of me, though I was pretty sure I already knew. She confirmed my suspicions: One of the voir dire questions was, "Would you have a problem convicting someone if the only evidence against them was eyewitness testimony?" I had to answer that yes, I would, because I had done a lot of reading about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.
I'm not sure which I find more annoying, that I was barred from serving for being too well informed, or that I now have to spend a day going through this whole process over again with no reason to believe that the outcome will be any different this time around. I'm no less informed now than I was then. The evidence for the unreliability of eyewitness testimony has, if anything, only grown stronger. I've also been the victim of a violent crime, which I'm told makes me tainted goods for defense attorneys as well. I should be able to get some kind of permanent undesirable-juror designation.
There are two ironies in this situation that really drive me bonkers. First, unlike most of my colleagues in the juror assembly room who view being placed on a jury as drawing the short straw, I actually wouldn't mind serving on a jury. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I want to do it, but I'm certainly willing to do it. I do believe in the system, flawed as it is, and I believe in making the time to do my civic duty. I just wish it didn't have to be so damned inefficient. (I am also starting to have my doubts about whether or not, economically speaking, we can continue to afford to indulge ourselves in jury trials. There are an awful lot of people sitting around me being not terribly productive at the moment. And that damn video they just started showing with the sound cranked up to full volume isn't going to help end the recession any sooner either.)
The second irony: I'm pretty sure I'll never serve on a jury because both the prosecution and the defense think I'm prejudiced against them. Trick is, at least one of them must be wrong.
I wonder what would happen if they found out I believe in jury nullification.
UPDATE:
Just happened to stumble across this gem from Philip "Greenspun's tenth law" Greenspun:
"Today we have a legal system with many safeguards for defendants' rights. However, in our heart of hearts, we don't really believe that we could convict enough defendants if we actually gave all of them all of their rights. Consequently, we set nominal penalties for crimes at absurdly high levels, e.g., 'life plus 100 years.' The actual penalty received by 95% of the people who commit such crimes is in fact 12-15 years. This is what they get if they agree to a plea bargain. However, if they choose to exercise their right to trial, they face the nominal penalty of life plus 100.
Obviously having these really high penalties is more subtle than physical torture, but the basic idea is the same and probably a fair number of sensible people are pleading guilty to crimes they didn't commit."
UPDATE 2 (the following day):
Dismissed without ever making it into the jury box. A day and a half down the drain for nothing. There has to be a better way.
Which is not to say that it's not annoying. I still have to sit here all day knowing full well that I will never be empaneled on a jury. I know this because of what happened to me the last time I went through this, about two years ago. I sat around all day, and just before quittin' time I and about thirty of my fellow unfortunate prospective jurors had our names called. We all filed out and went to where we'd been instructed (a process that took about half an hour because one of the elevators was broken and the staircases are inaccessible except in emergencies "for security reasons"). There was just enough time to give us yet another pep talk about how wonderful it was to serve on a jury and participate in this unique American institution, and that we had to show up again the next day for the actual start of voir dire.
The next day, after several hours of sitting around waiting for some delay whose nature was never revealed, they started questioning us. That went on for several hours. A few jurors got dismissed by peremptory challenge but I was still there at the end of the day. So on day three I shlep myself to downtown LA yet again, wait around for a few more hours for more mysterious delays, before finally being summoned back into the courtroom. The very first thing that happens then is that the prosecution attorney dismisses me by peremptory challenge. That's it. I'm done. Great, but couldn't you have figured that out yesterday and saved me this trip?
Since I had already set the day aside anyway I decided to stick around and watch our justice system at work. I met a family attending the trial of a man accused of killing a family member. It struck me how different this reality was from the way it's portrayed on TV. The drama and pain are the same, but real life moves at a glacial pace by comparison to television, and even if the killer is convicted, the victim is still dead. And this time it's a real flesh-and-blood person, not a thinly drawn character who evaporates with the closing credits.
During one of the breaks I asked the prosecutor why she'd gotten rid of me, though I was pretty sure I already knew. She confirmed my suspicions: One of the voir dire questions was, "Would you have a problem convicting someone if the only evidence against them was eyewitness testimony?" I had to answer that yes, I would, because I had done a lot of reading about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.
I'm not sure which I find more annoying, that I was barred from serving for being too well informed, or that I now have to spend a day going through this whole process over again with no reason to believe that the outcome will be any different this time around. I'm no less informed now than I was then. The evidence for the unreliability of eyewitness testimony has, if anything, only grown stronger. I've also been the victim of a violent crime, which I'm told makes me tainted goods for defense attorneys as well. I should be able to get some kind of permanent undesirable-juror designation.
There are two ironies in this situation that really drive me bonkers. First, unlike most of my colleagues in the juror assembly room who view being placed on a jury as drawing the short straw, I actually wouldn't mind serving on a jury. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I want to do it, but I'm certainly willing to do it. I do believe in the system, flawed as it is, and I believe in making the time to do my civic duty. I just wish it didn't have to be so damned inefficient. (I am also starting to have my doubts about whether or not, economically speaking, we can continue to afford to indulge ourselves in jury trials. There are an awful lot of people sitting around me being not terribly productive at the moment. And that damn video they just started showing with the sound cranked up to full volume isn't going to help end the recession any sooner either.)
The second irony: I'm pretty sure I'll never serve on a jury because both the prosecution and the defense think I'm prejudiced against them. Trick is, at least one of them must be wrong.
I wonder what would happen if they found out I believe in jury nullification.
UPDATE:
Just happened to stumble across this gem from Philip "Greenspun's tenth law" Greenspun:
"Today we have a legal system with many safeguards for defendants' rights. However, in our heart of hearts, we don't really believe that we could convict enough defendants if we actually gave all of them all of their rights. Consequently, we set nominal penalties for crimes at absurdly high levels, e.g., 'life plus 100 years.' The actual penalty received by 95% of the people who commit such crimes is in fact 12-15 years. This is what they get if they agree to a plea bargain. However, if they choose to exercise their right to trial, they face the nominal penalty of life plus 100.
Obviously having these really high penalties is more subtle than physical torture, but the basic idea is the same and probably a fair number of sensible people are pleading guilty to crimes they didn't commit."
UPDATE 2 (the following day):
Dismissed without ever making it into the jury box. A day and a half down the drain for nothing. There has to be a better way.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Another domino falls
The Burlington Free Press reports:
"Vermont has become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature’s vote."
Four down. Forty-six to go.
Also, a tip o' the hat to Iowa state senator Mike Gronstal for channeling Atticus Finch.
"Vermont has become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature’s vote."
Four down. Forty-six to go.
Also, a tip o' the hat to Iowa state senator Mike Gronstal for channeling Atticus Finch.
Monday, April 06, 2009
Counterfeiters aren't too sharp (yet)
I would never have imagined that anyone would counterfeit a razor blade, and yet the other day I had the unfortunate experience of attempting to shave with what turned out to be a counterfeit Gillette Fusion razor blade. I think most high-end consumer products are mostly hype, but I have to tell you, if you have four-gauge whiskers like me you don't know what a comfortable shave is until you've tried the Fusion. It's horrifically expensive, but in my hirsute opinion worth every penny. (And no, Gillette is not paying me to say that. But if anyone from Gillette is reading this, I'll entertain offers.)
It was immediately obvious that something was wrong as soon as I took my first swipe. Instead of the normal effortless glide across my morning stubble leaving smooth skin behind it felt like my face was being ripped off. At first I didn't know what to make of it. It didn't dawn on me that there were counterfeit blades out there until I did a Google search and discovered that not only are there fake blades, there's an entire website dedicated to helping people ferret them out. Who knew?
Contrary to the information on that site, it was *very* hard to tell the counterfeit blades. I bought a package of known-good blades a local store so I could do a side-by-side comparison, and I was stunned and how close a match they were. About the only difference was the crappy shave, and the counterfeit's lack of the tell-tale serial number on each blade, which is supposed to be the smoking gun of genuine Fusion blades.
My latest acquisition is a package of Fusion blades ordered directly from Amazon. They also lacked the serial numbers, but they shave like genuine blades. So are they real or just good counterfeits? Does it matter?
I really wonder if 1000 years from now, when the technology to synthetically generate any object, any image or any video scene is available on electronic devices so cheap that they're given away as free premiums with your morning breakfast cereal, if anyone will be able to tell truth from fiction any more.
It was immediately obvious that something was wrong as soon as I took my first swipe. Instead of the normal effortless glide across my morning stubble leaving smooth skin behind it felt like my face was being ripped off. At first I didn't know what to make of it. It didn't dawn on me that there were counterfeit blades out there until I did a Google search and discovered that not only are there fake blades, there's an entire website dedicated to helping people ferret them out. Who knew?
Contrary to the information on that site, it was *very* hard to tell the counterfeit blades. I bought a package of known-good blades a local store so I could do a side-by-side comparison, and I was stunned and how close a match they were. About the only difference was the crappy shave, and the counterfeit's lack of the tell-tale serial number on each blade, which is supposed to be the smoking gun of genuine Fusion blades.
My latest acquisition is a package of Fusion blades ordered directly from Amazon. They also lacked the serial numbers, but they shave like genuine blades. So are they real or just good counterfeits? Does it matter?
I really wonder if 1000 years from now, when the technology to synthetically generate any object, any image or any video scene is available on electronic devices so cheap that they're given away as free premiums with your morning breakfast cereal, if anyone will be able to tell truth from fiction any more.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Announcing µWiki
I've been working on a coding project in order to keep my skills from completely atrophying. It's a little wiki called µWiki (pronounced micro-wiki). I started working on it because I needed a wiki for another project and none of the available ones met my needs so I decided to roll my own. Comments and feedback are welcome.
Friday, April 03, 2009
Some perspective on a destroyed career
Someone over on Hacker news posted a link to a comp.lang.lisp post that I wrote three years ago that's generating a lot of discussion. I found I had more to say about this than would comfortably fit in a comment, so I'm putting it here instead.
The gist of the original piece was that knowing Lisp gave my career an early boost because it was such a productivity multiplier, but later turned into a handicap because it led to frustration with the languages that were becoming the industry norms. The title of the piece was "How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career" but that's a bit misleading. To understand how it's misleading and why I wrote it that way I have to give you a little bit more background. In particular, you have to understand the context in which that piece was written.
"How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career" was a followup to an earlier and even more inflammatory piece that called How Common Lisp Sucks. That in turn was a follow up to literally years of off-and-on arguments about whether or not the Common Lisp standard ought to be revised. I thought (and still think) that it should be, but the overwhelming consensus in the Lisp community is that everything is just fine the way it is. (The argument is not unlike the one occasioned by my recent screed on CSS and several followup posts, including this one, which I think sums up both situations quite nicely. (One bit of evidence for this: of all the posts in the series, it is the one that has garnered the fewest comments.)
The important thing to understand about that post is that it was not intended to be therapy or a confession, it was intended to be persuasive. (It failed miserably, but that's neither here nor there.) The idea was to highlight the negative impact that knowing Lisp on the one hand and its failure to penetrate the market more deeply on the other had had on my career, in the hope that that might motivate some people to take market penetration more seriously. (Like I said, it didn't work. There is a hard-core group of Lispers who think Lisp is fine and dandy just the way it is and they honestly don't care whether Lisp is popular or not. These people wield enough influence in the community to effectively halt nearly all progress. But that is not what I want to talk about here.)
Anyway, that was the idea, and that's why I chose the gloom-and-doom title. It's misleading because the fact of the matter is that I never had a career as a programmer. My career up through the year 2000 was as a researcher. My product was academic papers, and if you'll pardon a bit of immodesty, I was pretty darn good at it. In fact, I was so good at it that by the time I was in my mid-thirties I had the equivalent of a tenured faculty position, and I was the most cited computer science researcher in all of NASA. (For all I know I may even still hold that title. I still held it in 2006 despite the fact that I hadn't published anything substantive for over five years.)
I say all this not to toot my horn, but to put my "destroyed career" in perspective. I quit JPL not because I wasn't successful, but because I was bored. I was successful not so much because I was good, but because I had figured out how to game the system. I figured out how to write papers that would get published, and how to write patents that would get accepted. (I successfully prosecuted three patents, including one on an invention that violates the laws of physics.)
Mind you, nothing I did was dishonest. I did not violate any laws or rules. Everything I did was completely aboveboard. What I did was to find the weaknesses in the system and exploit them. And one of the weaknesses that I exploited was an order-of-magnitude productivity increase in writing code. That let me do in a day what would take my colleagues a week, leaving me nine days free to do other things. Like study quantum mechanics.
Whatever problems I may have, an unwillingness to learn new things is not one of them. I love to learn new things. That's one of the reasons I hate Java, because learning Java didn't teach me anything except how truly brain-damaged a language can be. (I've never learned Perl, but I've never learned how to run the deep fryer at a McDonalds either. I like learning new things, but life is short and there are some things I'm content not to know.)
My problem is that I'm lazy. I don't mind working hard, but I mind very much working harder than I have to, especially if I know a better way. This is particularly a problem at an institution like NASA which, despite its reputation for innovation, is actually quite ossified and set in its ways, especially where software is concerned. So I quit and went to work for an obscure little Silicon Valley startup company named Google. And that worked out OK, despite the fact that I felt like I was borderline incompetent. I made some money, but more importantly, I learned more in my one year at Google than in the previous thirty. And when I was done I tried to bring some of those lessons back to where I had come from, back to JPL, and back to the Lisp community. They weren't interested, and while that saddens me, it doesn't paralyze me.
I may not be a particularly good coder (though I think I can hold my own) but I've discovered that I have one very marketable skill, and that is picking winners early. I've had two big wins so far in my life, Lisp and Google. Since Lisp "destroyed" my programming career I've started a new career as an angel investor and entrepreneur. I've been involved in over a dozen startups in the last four years, sometimes as a passive investor, sometimes as a co-founder. And I feel like I'm just getting started. I'm very new at this and I have a lot to learn. But I'm having a blast, so I say bring it on! I used to fret over not being able to program in Lisp; no more. If being in the Silicon Valley taught me anything it is that the world is planted thick with opportunity, and life is too short to worry about the road not taken.
The gist of the original piece was that knowing Lisp gave my career an early boost because it was such a productivity multiplier, but later turned into a handicap because it led to frustration with the languages that were becoming the industry norms. The title of the piece was "How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career" but that's a bit misleading. To understand how it's misleading and why I wrote it that way I have to give you a little bit more background. In particular, you have to understand the context in which that piece was written.
"How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career" was a followup to an earlier and even more inflammatory piece that called How Common Lisp Sucks. That in turn was a follow up to literally years of off-and-on arguments about whether or not the Common Lisp standard ought to be revised. I thought (and still think) that it should be, but the overwhelming consensus in the Lisp community is that everything is just fine the way it is. (The argument is not unlike the one occasioned by my recent screed on CSS and several followup posts, including this one, which I think sums up both situations quite nicely. (One bit of evidence for this: of all the posts in the series, it is the one that has garnered the fewest comments.)
The important thing to understand about that post is that it was not intended to be therapy or a confession, it was intended to be persuasive. (It failed miserably, but that's neither here nor there.) The idea was to highlight the negative impact that knowing Lisp on the one hand and its failure to penetrate the market more deeply on the other had had on my career, in the hope that that might motivate some people to take market penetration more seriously. (Like I said, it didn't work. There is a hard-core group of Lispers who think Lisp is fine and dandy just the way it is and they honestly don't care whether Lisp is popular or not. These people wield enough influence in the community to effectively halt nearly all progress. But that is not what I want to talk about here.)
Anyway, that was the idea, and that's why I chose the gloom-and-doom title. It's misleading because the fact of the matter is that I never had a career as a programmer. My career up through the year 2000 was as a researcher. My product was academic papers, and if you'll pardon a bit of immodesty, I was pretty darn good at it. In fact, I was so good at it that by the time I was in my mid-thirties I had the equivalent of a tenured faculty position, and I was the most cited computer science researcher in all of NASA. (For all I know I may even still hold that title. I still held it in 2006 despite the fact that I hadn't published anything substantive for over five years.)
I say all this not to toot my horn, but to put my "destroyed career" in perspective. I quit JPL not because I wasn't successful, but because I was bored. I was successful not so much because I was good, but because I had figured out how to game the system. I figured out how to write papers that would get published, and how to write patents that would get accepted. (I successfully prosecuted three patents, including one on an invention that violates the laws of physics.)
Mind you, nothing I did was dishonest. I did not violate any laws or rules. Everything I did was completely aboveboard. What I did was to find the weaknesses in the system and exploit them. And one of the weaknesses that I exploited was an order-of-magnitude productivity increase in writing code. That let me do in a day what would take my colleagues a week, leaving me nine days free to do other things. Like study quantum mechanics.
Whatever problems I may have, an unwillingness to learn new things is not one of them. I love to learn new things. That's one of the reasons I hate Java, because learning Java didn't teach me anything except how truly brain-damaged a language can be. (I've never learned Perl, but I've never learned how to run the deep fryer at a McDonalds either. I like learning new things, but life is short and there are some things I'm content not to know.)
My problem is that I'm lazy. I don't mind working hard, but I mind very much working harder than I have to, especially if I know a better way. This is particularly a problem at an institution like NASA which, despite its reputation for innovation, is actually quite ossified and set in its ways, especially where software is concerned. So I quit and went to work for an obscure little Silicon Valley startup company named Google. And that worked out OK, despite the fact that I felt like I was borderline incompetent. I made some money, but more importantly, I learned more in my one year at Google than in the previous thirty. And when I was done I tried to bring some of those lessons back to where I had come from, back to JPL, and back to the Lisp community. They weren't interested, and while that saddens me, it doesn't paralyze me.
I may not be a particularly good coder (though I think I can hold my own) but I've discovered that I have one very marketable skill, and that is picking winners early. I've had two big wins so far in my life, Lisp and Google. Since Lisp "destroyed" my programming career I've started a new career as an angel investor and entrepreneur. I've been involved in over a dozen startups in the last four years, sometimes as a passive investor, sometimes as a co-founder. And I feel like I'm just getting started. I'm very new at this and I have a lot to learn. But I'm having a blast, so I say bring it on! I used to fret over not being able to program in Lisp; no more. If being in the Silicon Valley taught me anything it is that the world is planted thick with opportunity, and life is too short to worry about the road not taken.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Fixing Spidermonkey's readline()
I had occasion to try out the Spidermonkey Javascript engine today and found an annoying misfeature for which I was able to generate a fix; so I thought I'd put it out here in case other people are as annoyed by this as I was.
Because Spidermonkey is designed to run as an interactive command-line shell and not in a web browser, it includes a readline() method for getting input from the user. It's a very handy feature, but it has a bug: there's no way to tell when you've reached the end of the input stream. I'm apparently not the first person to be annoyed by this. Awesome Andy tried to fix it with a horrible hack which just made me cringe and think that there has to be a better way. There is. That's the wonderful thing about open source. If you don't like the way something works you can change it.
The Right Way to fix Spidermonkey's readline is to simply have it retain the linefeed at the end of lines. That way, empty lines have length 1. When you get to the end of file (and only then) you get a result of length zero. The fix is absolutely trivial. It's a one-line change to the file js.c:
That's it!
Because Spidermonkey is designed to run as an interactive command-line shell and not in a web browser, it includes a readline() method for getting input from the user. It's a very handy feature, but it has a bug: there's no way to tell when you've reached the end of the input stream. I'm apparently not the first person to be annoyed by this. Awesome Andy tried to fix it with a horrible hack which just made me cringe and think that there has to be a better way. There is. That's the wonderful thing about open source. If you don't like the way something works you can change it.
The Right Way to fix Spidermonkey's readline is to simply have it retain the linefeed at the end of lines. That way, empty lines have length 1. When you get to the end of file (and only then) you get a result of length zero. The fix is absolutely trivial. It's a one-line change to the file js.c:
*** js.c.~3.93.2.15.~ 2007-04-20 11:45:18.000000000 -0700
--- js.c 2009-03-29 12:46:36.000000000 -0700
***************
*** 630,635 ****
--- 630,636 ----
/* Are we done? */
if (buf[buflength - 1] == '\n') {
+ buflength++;
buf[buflength - 1] = '\0';
break;
}
That's it!
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Different band, same old song
It's nice to be done with eight years of living under the repressive weight of George Bush and Dick Cheney's disdain for the Constitution, but don't breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Democrats are apparently no more reluctant than Republicans to jettison the Constitution when it suits them. Here's Rahm Emanuel speaking at a Brady Center event:
"If you are on the no-fly list because you are known as a possible terrorist then you cannot buy a handgun in America.... If you're on that no-fly list your access to the right to bear arms is cancelled because you're not part of the American family. You don't deserve that right. There is no right for you if you're on that terrorist list."
At least under the Republicans we could console ourselves by looking forward to the day when we could vote them out of office. But now we have voted them out of office, only to find that it might be a different band, but it's the same tired old song. Your rights end as soon as someone in the government decides you're not entitled to them any more. No due process, no right to confront your accusers (or even know who they are), no appeal.
Now what are we supposed to do?
"If you are on the no-fly list because you are known as a possible terrorist then you cannot buy a handgun in America.... If you're on that no-fly list your access to the right to bear arms is cancelled because you're not part of the American family. You don't deserve that right. There is no right for you if you're on that terrorist list."
At least under the Republicans we could console ourselves by looking forward to the day when we could vote them out of office. But now we have voted them out of office, only to find that it might be a different band, but it's the same tired old song. Your rights end as soon as someone in the government decides you're not entitled to them any more. No due process, no right to confront your accusers (or even know who they are), no appeal.
Now what are we supposed to do?
Saturday, March 21, 2009
What are the odds?
And no, these cars are not owned by the same family. "We write" is my wife's car. I have no idea who owns the van. (Besides, it's a Georgia plate. Click for the full-size original.)
Thursday, March 19, 2009
A glimpse of the future
The future seems to arrive in the Silicon Valley before the rest of the world, which is why although I make my home in Los Angeles, my heart lives in Palo Alto (and it commutes to Mountain View). So every six months for the past couple of years I make a pilgrimage up north to attend Y Combinator demo day. Lately the event has gotten so popular that they repeat it two days in a row so that all interested people can attend.
This past week I was able to attend both days, once in person, and once by robot, courtesy of Trevor Blackwell's AnyBots and their new QA telepresence robot. It's like a remote-controlled Segway but made with a controller designed by Trevor. With a sleek-looking white body, it looks like something straight out of the Jetsons but without the cheese.
Although there were quite a few rough edges (mainly having to do with connectivity problems) I came away quite impressed. In particular, I was surprised at how usable the system was even with the glitches, and how much being able to move around added to the richness of the experience. It wasn't quite like being there (couldn't help myself to the buffet) but it was much closer than I was expecting.
The most interesting thing about the experience was how much more aware I suddenly became of my sensorimotor limitations than I am when I'm on, say, a phone call, or watching a video feed, or even in a teleconference. I don't know how much of this was due to novelty and how much will remain over time, but on occasion when we lost the video feed I actually felt the same kind of visceral reaction that I would have if someone had put a blindfold over my eyes. When we needed to switch off my ability to control the robot so that it could be manually moved around, I felt like a gimp in a wheelchair. When I was able to move the robot in front of a mirror (not an easy trick -- there was a three-second round-trip communications delay that made precise positioning very tough) I felt in a weird transitive sort of way that I was looking at myself for the first time.
That's "me" on the right, along with the Anybots crew: Daniel Casner, Trevor Blackwell and Benjie Nelson (from left to right).
Some refinements are certainly needed before it's really ready for prime time, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit for these things to be in common use five or ten years from now. Who knows, maybe in 20 or 30 years when we run out of jet fuel we can "travel" through these avatars instead. Maybe by then they will have figured out how to transmit smells and flavors over the internet as well as sights and sounds so it can really be just like being there.
This past week I was able to attend both days, once in person, and once by robot, courtesy of Trevor Blackwell's AnyBots and their new QA telepresence robot. It's like a remote-controlled Segway but made with a controller designed by Trevor. With a sleek-looking white body, it looks like something straight out of the Jetsons but without the cheese.
Although there were quite a few rough edges (mainly having to do with connectivity problems) I came away quite impressed. In particular, I was surprised at how usable the system was even with the glitches, and how much being able to move around added to the richness of the experience. It wasn't quite like being there (couldn't help myself to the buffet) but it was much closer than I was expecting.
The most interesting thing about the experience was how much more aware I suddenly became of my sensorimotor limitations than I am when I'm on, say, a phone call, or watching a video feed, or even in a teleconference. I don't know how much of this was due to novelty and how much will remain over time, but on occasion when we lost the video feed I actually felt the same kind of visceral reaction that I would have if someone had put a blindfold over my eyes. When we needed to switch off my ability to control the robot so that it could be manually moved around, I felt like a gimp in a wheelchair. When I was able to move the robot in front of a mirror (not an easy trick -- there was a three-second round-trip communications delay that made precise positioning very tough) I felt in a weird transitive sort of way that I was looking at myself for the first time.
That's "me" on the right, along with the Anybots crew: Daniel Casner, Trevor Blackwell and Benjie Nelson (from left to right).
Some refinements are certainly needed before it's really ready for prime time, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit for these things to be in common use five or ten years from now. Who knows, maybe in 20 or 30 years when we run out of jet fuel we can "travel" through these avatars instead. Maybe by then they will have figured out how to transmit smells and flavors over the internet as well as sights and sounds so it can really be just like being there.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
A dog-shaped hole
In December of 1998 my wife Nancy and I moved from a cozy little townhouse into a new 2500 square foot house. No one outside of Stanford had never heard of Google. You could still take large bottles of shampoo onto airplanes in your carry-ons. Al Gore was still Vice President. And I was looking forward (or maybe "resigned" would be a more apt description) to a long career at JPL.
Now that we had some extra space, my wife wanted to get a dog. She didn't really want a dog, she wanted a cat. But I was allergic to cats, so a dog was the next best thing.
I didn't really want any furry creatures in the house besides me. We had had a cat when I was a kid, and once the initial charm wore off, taking care of it became a horrible chore. Emptying the litter box was the worst. I learned the hard way that I get terribly squeamish about the smelly realities of biology. But my wife promised to do all the dirty work and batted her eyelashes at me and I succumbed.
We made a list of the characteristics we wanted in our dog: He had to be a rescue animal. Neither one of us wanted to go to a breeder. He couldn't be too big or too small. We wanted a dog that we could take hiking with us, but not one that we couldn't pick up and carry if we had to. He had to have short hair. He had to be housebroken, and preferably already trained. No barkers, no diggers, no chewers.
We spent a year looking for the perfect dog. We must have visited every pound and rescue organization in Los Angeles. We researched all the breeds. We looked at akitas and malamutes, shepherds and sheepdogs. (Well, actually we didn't look at sheepdogs. Long hair, and all. But I couldn't pass up the alliteration.) We found out that there's a reason that all these animals end up in the pound. If someone has the perfect dog, they tend to keep them.
I finally threw up my hands in despair and agreed to get a cat and deal with taking antihistamines for the rest of my life. So we went to the Pasadena Humane Society and picked out a beautiful orange manx whom we ultimately named Purrcy. While Nancy was in the office filling out the paperwork I happened to notice a lady in the parking lot with a nice looking brown dog. To kill time I decided to go say hello. It turned out the dog wasn't her's, it was a stray that she'd found and was bringing in to the pound.
He was medium-sized.
He had short hair.
He looked at me with sad puppy eyes.
I said, "Hi boy, can you sit?"
He sat.
I said, "Can you shake?"
He held up his paw.
He never made it into the pound. We bought a leash at the humane society's store, put him in the back seat of the car and brought him home. Purrcy arrived a few days later, and after a few skirmishes the two negotiated a peace settlement that lasted for the next nine years. And I, who didn't want any animals at all, suddenly found myself with both a dog and a cat.
Nancy wanted to name him Hobo and I wanted to name him Mojo. We compromised and called him Mobo. In retrospect we should have named him Pogo because he bounced. He bounced when we fed him. He bounced when he walked. His floppy ears would wiggle up and down like Dopey and it would make me happy just to watch them as he trotted along. He was just a bouncy dog, and quite the hiker. We'd take him up into the Angeles National Forest and let him run off leash so he could chase chipmunks and squirrels and the occasional deer. (I don't know what he would have done if he ever managed to catch one.) I lost count of the number of times he vanished (which always freaked Nancy out) only to show up half a mile down the trail, panting furiously, with this huge doggy grin on his face saying, "What the heck took you guys so long to get here?"
But then, as all dogs do, he got old. His legs got weaker. We took him to the vet and learned that one of his hind legs was completely missing the ball part of its ball-and-socket joint. It was amazing that he could even walk, let alone run up and down mountains. But somehow he managed. We started giving him pain pills and that helped for a while. Then he had knee surgery. Then he started making these horrible hacking noises. This time it was a lung tumor, which turned out to be inoperable. That was two years ago.
Today, Mobo finally succumbed. He'd been in a pretty steady declined for a while. His legs were so weak that even standing was becoming a struggle. His breathing was getting raspy and labored. He was on four different kinds of medications. And then he had one horrible no good terrible very bad night and we decided it was time to say goodbye.
I never in a million years dreamed that I could become so attached to an animal. Taking him to the emergency clinic to be euthanized was the hardest thing I've ever done. (I've lived a pretty easy life.) I don't think I've felt so much emotional pain since I was a teenager and my first girlfriend dumped me. His passing has left a dog-shaped hole in my soul. I miss him more than I ever imagined that I could.
No more hikes.
No more sad puppy eyes.
I don't know how anyone who has been through an experience like this can't find at least a little bit of sympathy for people who turn to God for emotional solace. I am a non-believer to the core, and yet the temptation to ease the pain by saying, "You're going to a better place where you can chase squirrels to your heart's content" was overwhelming. And despite the fact that part of me knew it wasn't true, saying it (and I confess I did say it) actually helped. Imagine how much more effective it might have been if I actually believed it. And imagine how much more necessary it might have been if it had been a dying child I was dealing with instead of a dog. Even now I can't even begin to imagine what that must be like.
Mobo, I will miss you. You made a dog person out of me, which I didn't think was possible. Wherever you are now, I hope there are squirrels to chase.
Now that we had some extra space, my wife wanted to get a dog. She didn't really want a dog, she wanted a cat. But I was allergic to cats, so a dog was the next best thing.
I didn't really want any furry creatures in the house besides me. We had had a cat when I was a kid, and once the initial charm wore off, taking care of it became a horrible chore. Emptying the litter box was the worst. I learned the hard way that I get terribly squeamish about the smelly realities of biology. But my wife promised to do all the dirty work and batted her eyelashes at me and I succumbed.
We made a list of the characteristics we wanted in our dog: He had to be a rescue animal. Neither one of us wanted to go to a breeder. He couldn't be too big or too small. We wanted a dog that we could take hiking with us, but not one that we couldn't pick up and carry if we had to. He had to have short hair. He had to be housebroken, and preferably already trained. No barkers, no diggers, no chewers.
We spent a year looking for the perfect dog. We must have visited every pound and rescue organization in Los Angeles. We researched all the breeds. We looked at akitas and malamutes, shepherds and sheepdogs. (Well, actually we didn't look at sheepdogs. Long hair, and all. But I couldn't pass up the alliteration.) We found out that there's a reason that all these animals end up in the pound. If someone has the perfect dog, they tend to keep them.
I finally threw up my hands in despair and agreed to get a cat and deal with taking antihistamines for the rest of my life. So we went to the Pasadena Humane Society and picked out a beautiful orange manx whom we ultimately named Purrcy. While Nancy was in the office filling out the paperwork I happened to notice a lady in the parking lot with a nice looking brown dog. To kill time I decided to go say hello. It turned out the dog wasn't her's, it was a stray that she'd found and was bringing in to the pound.
He was medium-sized.
He had short hair.
He looked at me with sad puppy eyes.
I said, "Hi boy, can you sit?"
He sat.
I said, "Can you shake?"
He held up his paw.
He never made it into the pound. We bought a leash at the humane society's store, put him in the back seat of the car and brought him home. Purrcy arrived a few days later, and after a few skirmishes the two negotiated a peace settlement that lasted for the next nine years. And I, who didn't want any animals at all, suddenly found myself with both a dog and a cat.
Nancy wanted to name him Hobo and I wanted to name him Mojo. We compromised and called him Mobo. In retrospect we should have named him Pogo because he bounced. He bounced when we fed him. He bounced when he walked. His floppy ears would wiggle up and down like Dopey and it would make me happy just to watch them as he trotted along. He was just a bouncy dog, and quite the hiker. We'd take him up into the Angeles National Forest and let him run off leash so he could chase chipmunks and squirrels and the occasional deer. (I don't know what he would have done if he ever managed to catch one.) I lost count of the number of times he vanished (which always freaked Nancy out) only to show up half a mile down the trail, panting furiously, with this huge doggy grin on his face saying, "What the heck took you guys so long to get here?"
But then, as all dogs do, he got old. His legs got weaker. We took him to the vet and learned that one of his hind legs was completely missing the ball part of its ball-and-socket joint. It was amazing that he could even walk, let alone run up and down mountains. But somehow he managed. We started giving him pain pills and that helped for a while. Then he had knee surgery. Then he started making these horrible hacking noises. This time it was a lung tumor, which turned out to be inoperable. That was two years ago.
Today, Mobo finally succumbed. He'd been in a pretty steady declined for a while. His legs were so weak that even standing was becoming a struggle. His breathing was getting raspy and labored. He was on four different kinds of medications. And then he had one horrible no good terrible very bad night and we decided it was time to say goodbye.
I never in a million years dreamed that I could become so attached to an animal. Taking him to the emergency clinic to be euthanized was the hardest thing I've ever done. (I've lived a pretty easy life.) I don't think I've felt so much emotional pain since I was a teenager and my first girlfriend dumped me. His passing has left a dog-shaped hole in my soul. I miss him more than I ever imagined that I could.
No more hikes.
No more sad puppy eyes.
I don't know how anyone who has been through an experience like this can't find at least a little bit of sympathy for people who turn to God for emotional solace. I am a non-believer to the core, and yet the temptation to ease the pain by saying, "You're going to a better place where you can chase squirrels to your heart's content" was overwhelming. And despite the fact that part of me knew it wasn't true, saying it (and I confess I did say it) actually helped. Imagine how much more effective it might have been if I actually believed it. And imagine how much more necessary it might have been if it had been a dying child I was dealing with instead of a dog. Even now I can't even begin to imagine what that must be like.
Mobo, I will miss you. You made a dog person out of me, which I didn't think was possible. Wherever you are now, I hope there are squirrels to chase.
Never turn down a sales lead
I would not have even bothered to write about this -- it's so obvious it sounds patronizing -- had I not met with a startup company the other day (not a YC company) who actually did this. Sometimes even the obvious needs to be stated, so here's a bit of free advice for startup companies. (Actually, this is good advice for any company, but startups in particular.)
Never turn down a sales lead.
When someone offers to put you in touch with a potential customer, always accept, and do it graciously. You don't have to actually follow up on the lead (although you'd be foolish not to -- even if you're absolutely sure that the lead is worthless you never know when you're going to be pleasantly surprised). But under no circumstances should you tell the person offering you the lead that you have no intention of following up even if it's true. Most of the time honesty is the best policy, but not in this case. You are much better off saying, "Thanks for the lead, I'll follow up on it ASAP" and then not doing it than you are explaining all the reasons why you think the lead is useless. In the former case you can always plead schedule overloading or amnesia or something like that (assuming you are ever in a position where you have to explain why you didn't follow up, which is extremely unlikely). But if you start trying to explain why you think the lead is useless there are only two possibilities: either you're wrong, in which you will sound like an idiot, or you are right, in which case you will make the person who offered you the lead feel like an idiot. Either way it's not going to help.
So rehearse this line and add it to your repertoire of little white lies: thanks for the lead. I really appreciate it. I'll follow up on it as soon as I can.
UPDATE: There is one exception to this rule, and that is if the lead is one you have already followed up on, in which you can (and should) say, "We already tried them and it didn't work out because of X and Y and Z."
Never turn down a sales lead.
When someone offers to put you in touch with a potential customer, always accept, and do it graciously. You don't have to actually follow up on the lead (although you'd be foolish not to -- even if you're absolutely sure that the lead is worthless you never know when you're going to be pleasantly surprised). But under no circumstances should you tell the person offering you the lead that you have no intention of following up even if it's true. Most of the time honesty is the best policy, but not in this case. You are much better off saying, "Thanks for the lead, I'll follow up on it ASAP" and then not doing it than you are explaining all the reasons why you think the lead is useless. In the former case you can always plead schedule overloading or amnesia or something like that (assuming you are ever in a position where you have to explain why you didn't follow up, which is extremely unlikely). But if you start trying to explain why you think the lead is useless there are only two possibilities: either you're wrong, in which you will sound like an idiot, or you are right, in which case you will make the person who offered you the lead feel like an idiot. Either way it's not going to help.
So rehearse this line and add it to your repertoire of little white lies: thanks for the lead. I really appreciate it. I'll follow up on it as soon as I can.
UPDATE: There is one exception to this rule, and that is if the lead is one you have already followed up on, in which you can (and should) say, "We already tried them and it didn't work out because of X and Y and Z."
Friday, March 13, 2009
So much for openness
The Obama administration has taken the position that the details of a treaty on intellectual property need to be kept secret in the interests of national security.
Let's hope that this is the action of some lower-level bureaucrat left over from the Bush administration who didn't get the memo from the President explicitly directing a halt to this sort of bullshit. That's not a particularly good outcome given how much trouble Obama is having keeping things under control. But it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
Let's hope that this is the action of some lower-level bureaucrat left over from the Bush administration who didn't get the memo from the President explicitly directing a halt to this sort of bullshit. That's not a particularly good outcome given how much trouble Obama is having keeping things under control. But it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
It would be funny if it weren't so sad
What does it say about our society when the best investigative journalism comes from Comedy Central?
The link goes to John Stewart's final showdown with Jim Cramer. It's in three parts. Well worth the time to watch all three.
The link goes to John Stewart's final showdown with Jim Cramer. It's in three parts. Well worth the time to watch all three.
In praise of SpamSieve
I get a ton of spam, and it was starting to overwhelm the filter built in to the OS X mail client. I've recently started running my own mail server, so I started tweaking the settings to try to cut down on the processed breakfast meat, and discovered that Microsoft Outlook has a serious bug (what a surprise). One of the ways an SMTP server can cut down on spam is to require clients to connect with a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). This will prevent many botnet machines from connecting because they tend to not be configured to send a FQDN. Unfortunately, it works a little too well. As far as I have been able to determine, it is not possible to configure Microsoft Outlook on Windows to send an FQDN. I have clients using this server who use outlook, so I had to disable the FQDN requirement.
I could have installed a content-based spam filter on the server, but the problem is that spam is personal. One man's spam is another man's hot deal of the week from his favorite on-line vendor, and the training process can get really annoying if it's not integrated into the client. I was about to throw up my hands in despair and set up a second mail server for Microsoft users, when I decided instead to try SpamSieve. I was a little skeptical that it would work much better than Apple's built-in filter, but there's a 30-day free trial so I didn't have much to lose.
I've become a believer. I've only been using (which is to say training) it for three days, but the situation is already dramatically better than it was before. I've had one false positive during the training process, and the false negatives have rapidly dwindled to 1-2 a day. My spam problem is (I almost dare not say this for fear of tempting fate) effectively solved.
So I recommend SpamSieve. It's well worth the $30 it costs.
I do have one complaint: the instructions for the initial training process are a little unclear, and in one place downright misleading. The instructions say to delete the messages in your current spam folder before setting up SpamSieve. DON'T DO THIS! The training process requires about 600 representative spam messages. The instructions suggest fishing these out of your trash, but the problem is that if your spam is in the trash it's almost certainly mixed in with a lot of good messages and now you have to manually tease them apart. So if you're going to be using SpamSieve, keep a collection of spam in a separate folder for training before you begin. You'll be glad you did.
I could have installed a content-based spam filter on the server, but the problem is that spam is personal. One man's spam is another man's hot deal of the week from his favorite on-line vendor, and the training process can get really annoying if it's not integrated into the client. I was about to throw up my hands in despair and set up a second mail server for Microsoft users, when I decided instead to try SpamSieve. I was a little skeptical that it would work much better than Apple's built-in filter, but there's a 30-day free trial so I didn't have much to lose.
I've become a believer. I've only been using (which is to say training) it for three days, but the situation is already dramatically better than it was before. I've had one false positive during the training process, and the false negatives have rapidly dwindled to 1-2 a day. My spam problem is (I almost dare not say this for fear of tempting fate) effectively solved.
So I recommend SpamSieve. It's well worth the $30 it costs.
I do have one complaint: the instructions for the initial training process are a little unclear, and in one place downright misleading. The instructions say to delete the messages in your current spam folder before setting up SpamSieve. DON'T DO THIS! The training process requires about 600 representative spam messages. The instructions suggest fishing these out of your trash, but the problem is that if your spam is in the trash it's almost certainly mixed in with a lot of good messages and now you have to manually tease them apart. So if you're going to be using SpamSieve, keep a collection of spam in a separate folder for training before you begin. You'll be glad you did.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Can OS X really suck this badly?
I was playing around with Git because that seems to be what the cool kids are doing nowadays, and stumbled onto what seems to be a rather nasty bug in OS X. Apparently, creating a lot of files with names in a random lexical order is reeeeeaaallllyyyy slllooooowwwww. Here's a demo (in Python):
On Linux, both tests run in about the same amount of time (about a second on my machine). But on OS X, test(l1) is seven times slower than test(l2). This is enough to cause real pain when trying to deal with a large repository because Git uses the filesystem as sort of a poor man's database.
If anyone happens to know a fix for this, or how to get Apple's attention, I would be most grateful. I've reported this to Apple Feedback and also their discussion forums but I'm not holding my breath.
import hashlib, datetime, os
l1 = [hashlib.md5(str(i)).hexdigest() for i in range(3000)]
l2 = [x for x in l1]
l2.sort()
os.mkdir('test')
def test(l):
t0 = datetime.datetime.now()
for x in l: open('test/%s' % x, 'w').write('test')
os.system('sync')
os.system('rm test/*')
os.system('sync')
return datetime.datetime.now()-t0
test(l1)
test(l2)
On Linux, both tests run in about the same amount of time (about a second on my machine). But on OS X, test(l1) is seven times slower than test(l2). This is enough to cause real pain when trying to deal with a large repository because Git uses the filesystem as sort of a poor man's database.
If anyone happens to know a fix for this, or how to get Apple's attention, I would be most grateful. I've reported this to Apple Feedback and also their discussion forums but I'm not holding my breath.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Fun with numerology and the King James Bible
Not sure what inspired me to do this. Maybe it was the Hand of God. But for some reason I felt moved to see how long it would take to generate a histogram of the words in the King James Bible using a modern computer. The answer turns out to be about ten minutes of coding (in Python) and a second or two of run time.
The results have some interesting features.
The King James Bible contains:
789,634 words
31,103 verses
12,808 distinct words, of which 223 are possessives. Of those 223, all but four are also found in their root form. The four possessives that are not found in their root form are "barber's", "nachon's", "stomach's", and "fisher's". (The last one is, of course, found in the plural -- seven times in fact -- but the singular "fisher" appears nowhere in the KJV.)
4046 hapax legomena, including "onions", "cries", and "moist'.
The most common word is, naturally, "the", which occurs 63,919 times. The most common word that is not a conjunction, preposition, or pronoun is "shall" with 9837 occurrences.
The word "love" occurs 310 times and "hate" 87. "Good" and "evil" are more evenly matched at 720 and 613 respectively (with "holy" adding to the margin at 611). "Lord" appears 7830 times, "God" 4442, and "Jesus" runs a distant third at 983 plus 555 occurrences of "Christ". (Interestingly for Bible-code enthusiasts, no word appears exactly 666 times. The closest are "like" and "way" flanking the Number of the Beast at 669 and 664.) "Mary" rounds out the Catholic pantheon at 54, but not all those references are to the mother of Jesus. At least twelve of the 54 are to Mary Magdalene (I say "at least" because there are some unadorned references to "Mary" that appear to my unschooled eye to be references to MM, e.g. John 12:3), and some are to an assortment of other Mary's, like Mary the sister of Martha and Mary the wife of Cleophas. If God had really intended for us to pay a lot of attention to Mary the mother of Jesus, you wouldn't know it from the histogram.
You can explore the complete list yourself here.
The results have some interesting features.
The King James Bible contains:
789,634 words
31,103 verses
12,808 distinct words, of which 223 are possessives. Of those 223, all but four are also found in their root form. The four possessives that are not found in their root form are "barber's", "nachon's", "stomach's", and "fisher's". (The last one is, of course, found in the plural -- seven times in fact -- but the singular "fisher" appears nowhere in the KJV.)
4046 hapax legomena, including "onions", "cries", and "moist'.
The most common word is, naturally, "the", which occurs 63,919 times. The most common word that is not a conjunction, preposition, or pronoun is "shall" with 9837 occurrences.
The word "love" occurs 310 times and "hate" 87. "Good" and "evil" are more evenly matched at 720 and 613 respectively (with "holy" adding to the margin at 611). "Lord" appears 7830 times, "God" 4442, and "Jesus" runs a distant third at 983 plus 555 occurrences of "Christ". (Interestingly for Bible-code enthusiasts, no word appears exactly 666 times. The closest are "like" and "way" flanking the Number of the Beast at 669 and 664.) "Mary" rounds out the Catholic pantheon at 54, but not all those references are to the mother of Jesus. At least twelve of the 54 are to Mary Magdalene (I say "at least" because there are some unadorned references to "Mary" that appear to my unschooled eye to be references to MM, e.g. John 12:3), and some are to an assortment of other Mary's, like Mary the sister of Martha and Mary the wife of Cleophas. If God had really intended for us to pay a lot of attention to Mary the mother of Jesus, you wouldn't know it from the histogram.
You can explore the complete list yourself here.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
The CSS Holy War
I'm not sure which is more striking, the fact that people are still posting comments on my CSS article, or the degree to which the discussion has come to resemble a religious one. Computer programmers talk about having religious wars about programming languages, but the term is usually understood to be at least partially tongue-in-cheek. I used to think that no one really got religious about these things. Now I'm becoming less sure.
I was really hoping to leave this topic behind but a comment posted today by someone who calls himself Pherdnut just pushed me over the edge. I happen to have a free hour between meetings, so against my better judgement I'm going to take this on yet again.
Pherdnut writes:
I never suggested anything was impossible. Go look it up. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Did you find the word "impossible"? No, you did not, because it isn't there. What is there is an explicit acknowledgement that all these things are possible:
The problem with CSS is not that it makes it impossible to do the things people want to do. The problem with CSS is that it makes it hard. There is nothing inherently flawed about the CSS approach. The problem is in the execution.
But I don't want to talk about CSS. I want to talk about the tenor of the discussion. Consider this comment:
I have not read CSS Mastery. I have read a lot of other material about CSS though, including several books, a boatload of web pages, and even some of the original source material. Does it matter that I have not read CSS Mastery? Pherdnut thinks so.
Well, actually, no, it isn't. CSS Mastery is by Andy Budd. Eric Meyer wrote a book called "CSS: The Definitive Guide."
How can I trust your assurances when you can't even get the most basic facts straight?
(UPDATE: I made an inadvertent but crucial edit in the above exchange. Pherdnut's full quote was, "I recommend CSS Mastery, which gets straight to a lot of the stuff that confuses people about CSS and also the CSS pocket reference which very quickly gets to the point when it comes to the specifics of how things are rendered (or supposed to be rendered) by the browsers. It's by Eric Meyer." The CSS pocket reference is indeed by Eric Meyer. This was simply an oversight on my part. I just missed the second reference, and thought the whole passage was talking about one book. I regret the error, but I stand by the substance of this post.)
But the question I want to ask is not whether or not "CSS Mastery" or "CSS: The Definitive Guide" or any of the other 41,803 results from an Amazon book search for "CSS" is a higher quality source of information about CSS than any of the sources I've actually relied on to date. The question I want to ask is: how is someone who doesn't know CSS supposed to know? Let us suppose for the moment that everything I've read about CSS (including the original source material from the W3C) is crap, and only Eric Meyer (or is it Andy Budd?) can show me the One True CSS Way. How fortunate it is that Pherdnut came along to set me right! What would I have done without him? Among the over 1000 comments that this post has generated in various venues, not a single person suggested either book before now. If not for Pherdnut, I might never have seen the light.
I submit that that in an of itself is a problem. But that's not what I want to talk about either. What I want to talk about is the form of the argument, which is something along the lines of, "Your conclusions about CSS are wrong because you do not have the necessary information."
On its face this doesn't seem altogether unreasonable, but in fact it is a very problematic argument. How much information is enough, and how can you tell? Suppose I read Meyer and I still believed that on balance tables ought to be used for layout. What then? Would someone else come along and say, "Oh, don't listen to that Pherdnut character, he's a moron, and so is Meyer. The person you really want to read is Arglebargle. He'll set you straight."
Notice how similar in structure this line of reasoning is to a truly religious argument: God doesn't answer your prayers? That doesn't prove that God doesn't exist, it just shows that you don't have enough faith, or haven't read the proper holy text. Maybe if you believed just a little harder next time...
Such arguments can never be answered, because there's no way to prove that you've attained a level of faith/knowledge that would falsify the hypothesis. No amount of unanswered prayers will ever disprove the existence of God to a true believer. Likewise, no demonstration of difficulty will ever convince the CSS true believer that there's a problem. The cause will always lie in the person experiencing the problem because there will always be some book he hasn't read or some technique or hack he hasn't mastered.
I think the reason that my original CSS rant got so much attention is not necessarily because I'm right but because I introduced some actual facts into the discussion, and nothing is more threatening to the true believer than facts. Notably, that claim is a hypothesis that can be tested by introducing some more facts into the discussion and observing the responses. Let's give it a try, shall we? Here are some more facts:
1. It has been claimed by the CSS true believers that using tables for layout is bad for SEO. You would think that if this were true, Google would say so on their webmaster guidelines, but they don't. In fact, the only reference to CSS and tables that I could find on Google is this entry from the Google blog:
Note that this is not an admonition against tables, it's an admonition against deeply nested tables, which is an admonition that I thoroughly endorse.
There's another bit of evidence that the tables-destroy-SEO argument is bogus, and that is that if it were true there would be an absolutely trivial fix that Google could implement: simply standardize a class identifier that indicates that a table is being used for layout, e.g.:
I submit that the reason they don't do this is because there isn't actually a problem to be solved.
2. A second claim made by the CSS true believers is that tables make a site inaccessible. But the W3C's own guidelines on accessibility say nothing about this, nor do the W3C recommendations on the use of tables have any mention of this. To the contrary, the latter page provides a few specific recommendations on how to make tables accessible to non-visual user agents.
Oh, and if that wasn't enough to convince you that the W3C doesn't agree with the CSS fanatics, check out their quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There you will find a whole pile of recommendations on how to make web sites accessible, including specific recommendations for using tables. There's also this:
You'd think that if tables were so inherently awful the W3C would have given this item more attention.
You can actually test the effect of tables on accessibility yourself. There are publicly accessible screen readers out there. Pick one and run a table through it and you can see for yourself how bad the "problem" really is.
Let the experiment begin.
I was really hoping to leave this topic behind but a comment posted today by someone who calls himself Pherdnut just pushed me over the edge. I happen to have a free hour between meetings, so against my better judgement I'm going to take this on yet again.
Pherdnut writes:
This would have been a better argument if:
What you suggest is impossible wasn't possible.
I never suggested anything was impossible. Go look it up. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Did you find the word "impossible"? No, you did not, because it isn't there. What is there is an explicit acknowledgement that all these things are possible:
Of course, all of these things can be fixed. But the point is they have to be fixed!
...
It [creating a three-column layout that doesn't have one of the many problems I cited] may be possible. I don't have a mathematical proof that it's not.
The problem with CSS is not that it makes it impossible to do the things people want to do. The problem with CSS is that it makes it hard. There is nothing inherently flawed about the CSS approach. The problem is in the execution.
But I don't want to talk about CSS. I want to talk about the tenor of the discussion. Consider this comment:
I recommend CSS Mastery, which gets straight to a lot of the stuff that confuses people about CSS...
I have not read CSS Mastery. I have read a lot of other material about CSS though, including several books, a boatload of web pages, and even some of the original source material. Does it matter that I have not read CSS Mastery? Pherdnut thinks so.
It's by Eric Meyer.
Well, actually, no, it isn't. CSS Mastery is by Andy Budd. Eric Meyer wrote a book called "CSS: The Definitive Guide."
I can assure that he knows a lot more CSS than whoever hacked together those tutorials you linked to.
How can I trust your assurances when you can't even get the most basic facts straight?
(UPDATE: I made an inadvertent but crucial edit in the above exchange. Pherdnut's full quote was, "I recommend CSS Mastery, which gets straight to a lot of the stuff that confuses people about CSS and also the CSS pocket reference which very quickly gets to the point when it comes to the specifics of how things are rendered (or supposed to be rendered) by the browsers. It's by Eric Meyer." The CSS pocket reference is indeed by Eric Meyer. This was simply an oversight on my part. I just missed the second reference, and thought the whole passage was talking about one book. I regret the error, but I stand by the substance of this post.)
But the question I want to ask is not whether or not "CSS Mastery" or "CSS: The Definitive Guide" or any of the other 41,803 results from an Amazon book search for "CSS" is a higher quality source of information about CSS than any of the sources I've actually relied on to date. The question I want to ask is: how is someone who doesn't know CSS supposed to know? Let us suppose for the moment that everything I've read about CSS (including the original source material from the W3C) is crap, and only Eric Meyer (or is it Andy Budd?) can show me the One True CSS Way. How fortunate it is that Pherdnut came along to set me right! What would I have done without him? Among the over 1000 comments that this post has generated in various venues, not a single person suggested either book before now. If not for Pherdnut, I might never have seen the light.
I submit that that in an of itself is a problem. But that's not what I want to talk about either. What I want to talk about is the form of the argument, which is something along the lines of, "Your conclusions about CSS are wrong because you do not have the necessary information."
On its face this doesn't seem altogether unreasonable, but in fact it is a very problematic argument. How much information is enough, and how can you tell? Suppose I read Meyer and I still believed that on balance tables ought to be used for layout. What then? Would someone else come along and say, "Oh, don't listen to that Pherdnut character, he's a moron, and so is Meyer. The person you really want to read is Arglebargle. He'll set you straight."
Notice how similar in structure this line of reasoning is to a truly religious argument: God doesn't answer your prayers? That doesn't prove that God doesn't exist, it just shows that you don't have enough faith, or haven't read the proper holy text. Maybe if you believed just a little harder next time...
Such arguments can never be answered, because there's no way to prove that you've attained a level of faith/knowledge that would falsify the hypothesis. No amount of unanswered prayers will ever disprove the existence of God to a true believer. Likewise, no demonstration of difficulty will ever convince the CSS true believer that there's a problem. The cause will always lie in the person experiencing the problem because there will always be some book he hasn't read or some technique or hack he hasn't mastered.
I think the reason that my original CSS rant got so much attention is not necessarily because I'm right but because I introduced some actual facts into the discussion, and nothing is more threatening to the true believer than facts. Notably, that claim is a hypothesis that can be tested by introducing some more facts into the discussion and observing the responses. Let's give it a try, shall we? Here are some more facts:
1. It has been claimed by the CSS true believers that using tables for layout is bad for SEO. You would think that if this were true, Google would say so on their webmaster guidelines, but they don't. In fact, the only reference to CSS and tables that I could find on Google is this entry from the Google blog:
If you are using a complex, multi-column layout for most of the content on your site, you might wish to step back and analyze how you are achieving the desired effect. For example, using deeply-nested HTML tables makes it difficult to link together related pieces of text in a logical manner.
The same effect can often be achieved using CSS and logically organized <div> elements in HTML. As an added bonus, you will find that your site renders much faster as a result.
Note that this is not an admonition against tables, it's an admonition against deeply nested tables, which is an admonition that I thoroughly endorse.
There's another bit of evidence that the tables-destroy-SEO argument is bogus, and that is that if it were true there would be an absolutely trivial fix that Google could implement: simply standardize a class identifier that indicates that a table is being used for layout, e.g.:
<table class=for_layout_only>...
I submit that the reason they don't do this is because there isn't actually a problem to be solved.
2. A second claim made by the CSS true believers is that tables make a site inaccessible. But the W3C's own guidelines on accessibility say nothing about this, nor do the W3C recommendations on the use of tables have any mention of this. To the contrary, the latter page provides a few specific recommendations on how to make tables accessible to non-visual user agents.
Oh, and if that wasn't enough to convince you that the W3C doesn't agree with the CSS fanatics, check out their quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There you will find a whole pile of recommendations on how to make web sites accessible, including specific recommendations for using tables. There's also this:
Using CSS rather than tables for page layout (future link)
You'd think that if tables were so inherently awful the W3C would have given this item more attention.
You can actually test the effect of tables on accessibility yourself. There are publicly accessible screen readers out there. Pick one and run a table through it and you can see for yourself how bad the "problem" really is.
Let the experiment begin.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
A new look for Rondam Ramblings
I've finally updated my blog template so I could add a TipJoy button. This is more of an exercise in market research than a serious attempt to make money. This blog is not and was never intended to make money. It's just a place for me to express my opinions so that anyone who cares to know what I think can find out. But today I got a reminder email from TipJoy that I needed to pay my bill (which I did), so I thought I'd try it out. Any money I make will be donated to charity.
I've decided not to add AdSense ads, at least for now, because I'm afraid they will prove too much of a temptation to abandon my editorial independence. Also, Google has been getting kind of evil lately.
I've decided not to add AdSense ads, at least for now, because I'm afraid they will prove too much of a temptation to abandon my editorial independence. Also, Google has been getting kind of evil lately.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
CSS: the last word (I hope)
The flood of comments on my CSS versus tables rant has finally died down to a trickle. The final tally (as of 9 AM PST) was 146 on Hacker News, 198 on Rondam Ramblings, and a whopping 716 on Reddit (plus 921 karma points for Nicou). That smashed my previous record by a factor of four! There were also ~250 comments on my followup piece. Yowza! I wish I could say that I read every comment, but I didn't. After a while they started to get a little repetitive, and the ad hominem attacks in particular started to get annoying. But despite the fact that I didn't respond much because of the overwhelming volume, I did read a lot of them. And I wanted to thank everyone who commented, even the ones who attacked me. Notwithstanding accusations to the contrary, I did not write the piece as a publicity stunt. You will notice there are no ads on my blog, nor on my personal web page. [UPDATE: I've added a TipJoy button just to see what happens. Any money I make will be donated to charity.] I wrote it because I thought the CSS versus tables controversy could benefit from the injection of some actual data, and because I wanted to take a stand against what I saw as faulty arguments in favor of CSS. Nonetheless, as a writer it's always good to know that someone out there is paying attention, even if that attention is negative. So thanks to all of you.
I did want to take time to respond to some of the common themes that kept repeating themselves over and over in the comments. I doubt this will stop any of these memes from reproducing in the future, but everyone else is getting their two cents in so I figure I'm entitled.
Theme #1: CSS is hard, and you have no business expressing an opinion until you've paid your dues and spent five years learning all of the ins-and-outs.
I already addressed this point in a previous post but this theme kept showing up even in the comments to that post so apparently I was still being a little too subtle. I utterly reject this view, and not just when it comes to CSS, but in all aspects of life. This idea that only the experts have opinions worth considering is not merely wrong, it's corrosive. It is -- to cite but one example -- what got us into this economic mess. The idea that the crisis "could not have been foreseen" is absurd on its face. Not only could it have been forseen, it was foreseen. It was predicted at least as far back as 1992 and probably earlier than that. You don't have to be a rocket scientist nor an economist to see that if you spend more than you make, sooner or later you will wind up in trouble.
Likewise, you don't have to be a CSS expert to see 1) a lot of broken CSS on the web, 2) a lot of people tying themselves into knots trying to do conceptually simple things. You don't have to be an expert to know that if text is spilling out beyond div boundaries everywhere you look, and people are proving their CSS studliness by doing something as simple as a liquid three-column layout, something is wrong.
Now, tables are not perfect. Much of the criticism leveled at them is valid. But it is unsound reasoning to conclude that because tables have problems you should therefore use CSS. CSS has problems too. That makes the choice between tables and CSS a valid engineering tradeoff. My personal quality metric is that all else being equal the simpler solution wins. The situation could change as the technology landscape shifts, but right now, that calculus comes down on the side of tables. Reasonable people could disagree.
(BTW, if you are a fan of arguments from authority, you should keep in mind that just because someone chooses not to wield their credentials doesn't mean they don't have any.)
Theme #2: CSS does not really have the problems you think it has, you just need to study it more.
I anticipated this argument as well, but again people didn't seem to notice. I knew people would say this, which is why I used someone else's code to make my point. People still didn't get it. They attacked the code anyway and said that those people didn't know what they were talking about. Here's the thing: on that criterion, no one knows what they are talking about. There is not a single CSS-based solution to the "holy grail" problem that does not have some deficiency or other. The mere fact that people even talk about the "holy grail" in connection with CSS ought to tell you something.
I don't have anywhere near the time to deconstruct every putative solution to the three-column layout problem, so I'll pick just a few of my favorite examples. The first is ChristianZ, who I am choosing to pick on because his comments were particularly vituperative. He held out his website as an example of three-column layout in CSS. I must confess, I think his website is looks outstanding. Trick is, it's not done in CSS. Turn off Javascript and suddenly it doesn't look so hot.
The second is Matthew James Taylor's oft-cited solution. Once again I have to doff my hat to what is truly a heroic effort to rescue a hopeless situation. As a thought experiment you might want to ask yourself why it is that Taylor's solution (nor YUI grids, nor anything else) has not emerged as the definitive solution to the problem. If you can't come up with an answer, try this: take Taylor's "holy grail" solution and modify is so that the left and right columns are not always butted right up against the edges of the screen. (BTW, even Taylor's solution suffers from the ubiquitous CSS malady that text will spill out beyond the div boundaries if it's too wide to fit.)
Theme #3: CSS is not meant for dynamic content
This one I did not anticipate. It was not a common theme so it could be that the commenter was simply wrong. But I list it here just an case anyone else has something to say about it.
That's pretty much all I have to say on this. Thanks again to everyone who commented.
I did want to take time to respond to some of the common themes that kept repeating themselves over and over in the comments. I doubt this will stop any of these memes from reproducing in the future, but everyone else is getting their two cents in so I figure I'm entitled.
Theme #1: CSS is hard, and you have no business expressing an opinion until you've paid your dues and spent five years learning all of the ins-and-outs.
I already addressed this point in a previous post but this theme kept showing up even in the comments to that post so apparently I was still being a little too subtle. I utterly reject this view, and not just when it comes to CSS, but in all aspects of life. This idea that only the experts have opinions worth considering is not merely wrong, it's corrosive. It is -- to cite but one example -- what got us into this economic mess. The idea that the crisis "could not have been foreseen" is absurd on its face. Not only could it have been forseen, it was foreseen. It was predicted at least as far back as 1992 and probably earlier than that. You don't have to be a rocket scientist nor an economist to see that if you spend more than you make, sooner or later you will wind up in trouble.
Likewise, you don't have to be a CSS expert to see 1) a lot of broken CSS on the web, 2) a lot of people tying themselves into knots trying to do conceptually simple things. You don't have to be an expert to know that if text is spilling out beyond div boundaries everywhere you look, and people are proving their CSS studliness by doing something as simple as a liquid three-column layout, something is wrong.
Now, tables are not perfect. Much of the criticism leveled at them is valid. But it is unsound reasoning to conclude that because tables have problems you should therefore use CSS. CSS has problems too. That makes the choice between tables and CSS a valid engineering tradeoff. My personal quality metric is that all else being equal the simpler solution wins. The situation could change as the technology landscape shifts, but right now, that calculus comes down on the side of tables. Reasonable people could disagree.
(BTW, if you are a fan of arguments from authority, you should keep in mind that just because someone chooses not to wield their credentials doesn't mean they don't have any.)
Theme #2: CSS does not really have the problems you think it has, you just need to study it more.
I anticipated this argument as well, but again people didn't seem to notice. I knew people would say this, which is why I used someone else's code to make my point. People still didn't get it. They attacked the code anyway and said that those people didn't know what they were talking about. Here's the thing: on that criterion, no one knows what they are talking about. There is not a single CSS-based solution to the "holy grail" problem that does not have some deficiency or other. The mere fact that people even talk about the "holy grail" in connection with CSS ought to tell you something.
I don't have anywhere near the time to deconstruct every putative solution to the three-column layout problem, so I'll pick just a few of my favorite examples. The first is ChristianZ, who I am choosing to pick on because his comments were particularly vituperative. He held out his website as an example of three-column layout in CSS. I must confess, I think his website is looks outstanding. Trick is, it's not done in CSS. Turn off Javascript and suddenly it doesn't look so hot.
The second is Matthew James Taylor's oft-cited solution. Once again I have to doff my hat to what is truly a heroic effort to rescue a hopeless situation. As a thought experiment you might want to ask yourself why it is that Taylor's solution (nor YUI grids, nor anything else) has not emerged as the definitive solution to the problem. If you can't come up with an answer, try this: take Taylor's "holy grail" solution and modify is so that the left and right columns are not always butted right up against the edges of the screen. (BTW, even Taylor's solution suffers from the ubiquitous CSS malady that text will spill out beyond the div boundaries if it's too wide to fit.)
Theme #3: CSS is not meant for dynamic content
This one I did not anticipate. It was not a common theme so it could be that the commenter was simply wrong. But I list it here just an case anyone else has something to say about it.
That's pretty much all I have to say on this. Thanks again to everyone who commented.
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