cgranade::streams

Thoughts on canonical names.

2011-07-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

When I am wrong, it behooves me to be wrong as loudly as possible so that those able to correct me will be able to do so. The flip side is that when I discover that I am wrong, I must be every bit as loud in turning that around. After much deliberation inside my head, I have finally realized that I have come to another instance where I have indeed been wrong in my thinking, as some of my friends will well appreciate.

But let me provide some context. Google+ has entered into the already crowded world of social media, but is currently making huge gains in the "it's-not-facebook" market. The problem, however, that is rightfully ruffling a great many feathers is that Google decided to adopt a policy quite similar to Facebook's Real Names policy. Much has already been made of the disproportionate impact this decision has for women, LGBTs and others that may be subject to harassment if their Real Names™ are revealed so frivolously. One of the better posts on this has been by Bug Girl, who clearly lays out the impact that the Real Names™ ideology has for her.

As is my usual habit, though, I wish to take a tangent. You see, I used to place an absurd amount of importance on Real Names™, and was disdainful of my 'nym using friends. Embarrassing, but there it is. The problem with this attitude — well, one of them, anyway — is that it presupposes the existence of a single canonical Real Name™. This assumption is not supported by reality, though.

Even in a relatively "normal" (by Western standards, anyway) case like my own name, what should I put? Christopher Evan Granade? That is surely not what my friends call me— many probably didn't even know what my middle name was before reading that. If we go with what my friends, colleagues, bosses, family, etc. all call me, "Chris" would be much closer. That name is problematic, though, in that it is so vauge that there are three people with offices on the same floor as mine that share it, to say nothing of the broader world. If disambiguation is needed, then, we move on to "Chris G.", "Chris Granade" or even "C-Bomb" (that makes more sense if you read my last name aloud), which I feel very little ownership over. Moving online, it only gets worse. I try to use cgranade as much as possible for uniformity's sake, but sometimes I have to settle instead for cegranade. In gaming communities, where using outside names is often frowned upon, I rely on the much more generic "brokenmirror", but that often has conflicts with other users.

And I'm not even married or divorced! My mother adopted my father's last name rather than taking both or her own, there's no complications with transliteration of a name more at home in a non-Latin alphabet, no dramatic name changes in my life. I have a middle and a last name, so no issues there. Really, the problems stem from that my name is a product of the context in which I use it. I do not have a canonical name at all. No one string of Unicode code points encapsulates the complex and entirely contextual rules which lead to a name by which you should call me.

Why should we, though, even expect this to be the case? It isn't true for much simpler and more rigid systems like the Web. My website, for instance, is reached by either "http://www.cgranade.com/" or the much longer "https://sites.google.com/site/cgranade/". These two "names," though, fill very different purposes and get used in different ways. It gets worse if I were to share on Twitter or via a QR code, where either one would first be fed through a URL shortener. Thus this single concept, my website, has at least three "names" depending on the context you approach it from. When we move to something as complicated as a human identity, the preponderance of names is only exacerbated.

Any system which does not recognize the complexity that goes into names is thus doomed to fail, even if we set aside the ethics of strong-arming users into using a particular choice of name. Facebook has only survived this failure by haphazard enforcement of their own rules, but by actually practicing proactive enforcement on Google+, Google has stared this shortcoming in the face. Here's hoping that like I did, they can see where they've gone wrong in their thinking and in doing so, better serve the users whose trust forms the basis for so much of what they do.

Throwing two cents into a storm.

2011-07-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

The Internet is a curious beast. Some stories and arguments quickly ignite, then disappear as quickly as they started. Others seem to be perpetual in that as soon as it seems to have faded away, some newcomer to the scene causes whole histories to replay and flare up again.

Of these two very coarse categories, Elevatorgate definitely belongs to the latter. In many ways, I should like nothing more than to see the whole of the tempest pass by, recovering brain cycles for more important issues. The problem with this attitude, however, is that how we in the skeptical and atheist communities treat women is an important issue. As often as people misunderstand, misrepresent and mistake the issue, at its core, what is at stake in Elevatorgate is whether we want the communities we build to be defined by positive and rational values such as inclusiveness, respect and diversity, or whether we are content to define our movement in terms of a narrow and ill-understood notion of privilege.

Up until now, I've kept my involvement in this debate (or rather, what a debate has since devolved into) to a minimum. I am, after all, a beneficiary of the very privilege under question, being male, and hence have more to learn than to contribute in this particular exchange. (Just to preempt the inevitable, that does not for a moment mean that I am "apologizing" for other men, or that I am asserting that I should take the actions of other men upon myself--- we are all each individuals, are we not?) I am also white, learned English as my native language, and was born into a affluent family in first-world country, etc. My life has hence been one in which doors open to me that are shut in the faces of others, by no virtue of my intellect, my choices or my efforts. Were I to project my own experiences on the world, then, it would thus be all too easy for me to come to the impression that those opportunities that I enjoy are universally enjoyed. When something like Elevatorgate occurs, it should serve as a wake-up call, in that Rebecca Watson was denied a choice I almost certainly would have enjoyed in the same situation: the choice of when and how to disengage from a social event.

As a progressive, as an atheist, as a skeptic, when a wake-up call like that sounds through my social media neighborhood, what can I do but attempt to understand what dynamics of privilege and yes, of misogyny, lead to that failure to respect Watson's independence? Once I start to examine these dynamics, it becomes all too obvious that such failures add to the cost that women must pay in order to participate in communities and movements that I consider to be important. If I take seriously that central value of rationality, self-improvement, then I am led just as inescapably to try to understand how to change the social environment around me so as to prevent this cost being exacted against women in the future.

An alternative approach, however, is to become defensive and to assert that things are fine the way they are. When confronted with contrary evidence, I could have instead dismissed it, and attacked the credibility of those calmly pointing out the cost associated with privilege. I could have even tried to deny the very existence of privilege, instead casting the original incident into a false narrative of "men versus women," of feminism being a thin veil for misandry, or of Watson being a drama-queen (even that term should rankle a few nerves by now!) interested not in reducing the cost of privilege but in inflating her own popularity. Such tactics, however, are fundamentally incompatible with the positive valuation of rationality, as rationality demands entertaining the notion that one is wrong, and as rationality demands a continual effort to improve oneself and to more closely align one's beliefs with reality.

It is in this spirit that I am pleased to note that despite the many men (and even women!) that see no wrong in Elevator Guy's actions, that despite the many people loudly and vilely attacking Watson, there has been a venerable chorus of men and women working hard to shape this incident into a concrete improvement for women in our communities. The fact that this incident has so inflamed passions belies the importance that we place on hashing through disagreements, rather than letting important issues fall by the wayside. Slowly, painfully and fitfully, our communities are improving due to the hard work of activists within our midst. That is something to take solace in, and likewise, is something to encourage the rest of us to join in, even when it can be discomforting.

Notes: Please accept my apology for the lack of links here today. There's simply too many good ones for me to choose a representative set from. Also, a hearty thanks go out to the person that originally suggested the subject for this post, and that introduced me to the concept of "sitting with your discomfort."

Hints for the ethically challenged.

2011-05-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

For reasons that I shall explain later, my life has (again) been enough of a mess as of late to prevent me from blogging. I will break my too-long silence, however, to note my complete disgust with an article sent to my attention by Nancy Parmalee: Manliness and Morality, from that cesspool of pseudo-intellectualism known as The Weekly Standard. Seldom have I seen so bald an apologetic for rape and for the misogynist power dynamic that rape plays in our society passed off as a highbrow and "sophisticated" discussion of current affairs.

The author of this article, Harvey Mansfield, assures us from the outset that his article is not, in fact, a work of rape apologetics:

What with Arnold and DSK, male transgression is once again in the news. Let’s not equate the two cases—one is forgivable, the other, if the accusations are true, is not [emphasis mine]. Together with these male transgressions is the reaction to them, still more interesting.

His assurances ring hollow, though, as even this first paragraph ventures into the disgusting realm of making excuses for rapists. Indeed, Mansfield starts off by drawing parallels between the marital infidelities of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn that he raped a hotel maid. These parallels can only be held as valid if one ignores the victimization inherent in the act of rape and reduces what is an inherently violent violation of another human being to being a merely unwise decision about how to act out one's sexuality.

Equating a consensual but unwise sexual relationship with what is, by definition, a violation of a human being's right to meaningfully consent to sexuality activities is nothing short of a disgusting failure of human compassion and empathy. It is, in short, quite in keeping with the norms of the comedically misnamed "compassionate conservatism" of which the Standard is so proud.

In the very next sentence, Mansfield discards any hope he might have had for maintaining even the illusion of human compassion:

The reaction shows the power of morality to produce disgust and disgrace at the sight of these male weaknesses.

Let me make this point perfectly clear. Rape is not an example of "male weakness." Period. It is a violent and heinous act perpetrated against another human being, and no amount of sugar-coating by professional misogynists like Mansfield can change that.

Bizarrely, even Mansfield himself seems to be within reach of this basic truth, as he goes on to assert that men are inherently more violent than women, and thus inherently more capable of perpetrating rape. Where he goes with this dim shadow of understanding, though, is enough to make any compassionate person cringe:

It certainly seems strange that being capable of rape can make a person better qualified for greatness, but it’s probably true.

I cannot hope to do better here than to simply let that quote from Mansfield stand for itself. Indeed, Mansfield has laid bare his own view of the world, so that we may understand it for the hateful denial of human compassion that it is.

What else can I call it but a hateful abdication of empathy when Mansfield boldly declares that "[Women] are not rapists but victims of rape"? There is no compassion, no empathy and no understanding in asserting that women are inherently to be victims. Not content to leave things to be merely that disgusting, however, Mansfield continues in this vein:

Being mothers, [women] are closer to their children, and usually suffer more from divorce. Because women are weaker and closer to children than men, the equality of the sexes cannot rest on their being the same. Nor can women be independent, or “autonomous,” certainly not as much as modern women want to be. As vulnerable, they depend on law and morality for protection. The enforcement of law and morality is done mainly by men or by women with the strength of men. [...] Women need men to save them from men.

I could continue to highlight how deplorable and depraved a view it is that Mansfield espouses in this article, but I shall refrain, as I think his own words have made clear how little he is bothered by the hatefulness of his statements. Instead, let me turn this around and offer some hints that he (and other professional misogynists) might gain some insight from considering.

To start with, I should point out a very simple fact that escapes far too many people (as Mansfield so clearly demonstrates): women are human beings. As such, ethical considerations which take into account the suffering of human beings invariably must take into consideration the suffering of the fifty percent of the human population which happens to be female. Living with the rest of humanity must necessarily include, then, living with that half of society that is women.

Another hint for the ethically challenged amongst us is that if one uses phrases like "male weakness" to excuse and to downplay the crime of rape, then in the same stroke, one denies the ethical consequences of suffering on the part of victims of "male weakness." Insofar as ethics are concerned, rape is important and appalling not because it is a "weakness," but because it denies a victim sovereignty over her (or his, despite Mansfield's hetero-normative and misogynistic stereotypes) own body. Naturally, it is important to understand the causes that lead to such violence, but we should not fall into the trap of mistaking the cause for the crime. We do not, for instance, refer to murder by firearms as an instance of "gun-wielder weakness," for in doing so, we would obscure the issue of ultimate importance to ethical considerations: a person's life has been extinguished through violence.

Perhaps the most helpful hint I can offer Mansfield and others suffering from an ethics deficiency, however, is a hint about what ethics actually is. Ethics is a way of codifying and understanding the well-being of fellow human beings, and in particular, the consequences for others that result from our actions. Rape is a breach of morality and ethicality not because it makes us feel icky or outraged, but because it compromises the well-being of other humans. Covering this essential truth with empty and baseless assertions about women inherently being assigned the role of "victim" does nothing to increase our understanding of the suffering that is caused to a woman if she is raped. As such, these stereotypes do not enable us to reach a higher understanding of ethics, but obscures the violent results of a violent act. A woman is not a victim by virtue of the nature of her birth, after all, but because someone forces her to become a victim. This is no different from if a man is made a victim by some act of violence; a clear truth made foggy by the addition of roles imposed on the basis of gender, such as the assignment of "victim" to all women made by Mansfield.

In parting, I will leave two more hints. To those genuinely concerned with ethicality, I would advise that continuing to speak out in the face of malignant pseudo-ethical arguments such as those made by Mansfield can help to make a difference. There is naught to be gained, after all, by staying silent and letting spread an unethical standard such as is portrayed by the Standard. Finally, to the ethically-challenged, I advise that a bit of careful listening to the arguments made by the rest of society can help elucidate why certain actions, like rape, are ethically deplorable. Circling the wagons in the face of evidence of a violent act does not help anyone learn to better live in society, and closes one off to a deeper understanding of the ethics which can act to minimize suffering amongst our peers. In short, we should seek to understand rape, not excuse it.

In which I discuss Star Trek at the expense of another.

2011-04-30T14:47:00.000-07:00

Update: My sincere thanks go out to Emily (@seelix on Twitter) for recovering this post for me after it went offline.

Bill Watterson is a sort of personal hero to me for having created the Calvin and Hobbes strip and writing such wonderful stories for 10 years. Watterson once described that part of the charm of Calvin's character was his ability to precisely articulate very stupid ideas. This incongruence between Calvin's eloquence and his naive ignorance was the source of much of the strip's humor.

Well, today, I had the pleasure of reading some of the most precisely articulated stupidity that I have seen in a while. It is not every day, after all, that one gets to read a Tea and Crumpets Partier take issue with the utopian view that Star Trek puts forward and in doing so, lay bare the intellectual bankrupcy of the TCP movement. Truly, there is comedic gold buried in this bizarrely coherent but utterly stupid rant by Walter Hudson.

It is telling that our inadverent comedian opens with a quote from Roddenberry intended to demonstrate how Star Trek is a bad thing:

The whole show was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but to take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. We tried to say that the worst possible thing that can happen to all of us is for the future to somehow press us into a common mould, where we begin to act and talk and look and think alike. If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there. And I think that this is what people responded to.
Ironically, this multicultural meme leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tolerating every idea enables ideas which are destructive. As the franchise has progressed, it has (perhaps unwittingly) demonstrated this flaw in its own message.

Right out of the gate, Hudson has jumped the shark by presuming that his audience shares the same paranoia for the word "multiculturalism" that he does. Nowhere in the quote provided does Roddenberry state that he thought we should embrace or even tolerate all ideas equally, but rather that we should be willing to "take a special delight in differences in ideas." Multiculturalism does not preclude one from recognizing that some ideas have severely negative implications if acted upon, contrary to what Hudson seems to think.

The rest of this gem consists of a list of 10 supposedly destructive social messages espoused through Star Trek. Even a cursory glace at the titles of these ten sections gives one a startlingly blunt view on how Hudson sees the world:

The U.N. in Space
Prime Directive
No Money
Galactic Peace
Silly God, Tricks Are For Man
Occupations and Insurgents
Set Phasers on Stun
Cosmic Environmentalism
Resistance Is Futile
Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Only in the upside-down reality-starved community that is the Tea and Crumpets Party is this list somehow damning, but inside that petri dish of memetic insanity, words and names like "U.N," "peace," "trick," and "environment" take on the quality of nightmares induced by sleeping in front of one too many rants by Glenn Beck. Far be it from me to try and deconstruct such a perverse framework for understanding the world, for fear of being irrevocably damaged by the Lovecraftian horrors that lie dormant in such twisted logics. (OK, that last sentence was exaggeration bordering on purple prose, but it was fun to write.) Instead, I shall be content to address some of the more LOLworthy points that Hudson hits upon in his psychiatric disrobing so cleverly disguised as an article about Star Trek.

Let's start our journey into madness with the first "message": that the United Federation of Planets is much like the United Nations in the real world. Perhaps surprisingly, I agree! The UFP is transparently modeled after the UN, but I think it stands to reflect the unbridled idealism of Star Trek. Where the UFP differs from the UN is in that it works well to achieve it's intended purpose. That it achieves, finally, after so many false starts, the ideal of a cooperative body that spans across not only nations, but worlds and even species. To Hudson, this utopian idealism seems to be the whole problem:

While the occasional insurrection or insubordination was explored throughout the franchise, for the most part, no one within the Federation really questions their government. As we shall examine in more detail, in Star Trek, the government is a two-dimensional institution which works because it must in order to advance a particular political narrative.

In short, Hudson is arguing that aside from those times that people in Star Trek question their government so brilliantly and so passionately (take, for example, The Drumhead [TNG], The Measure of a Man [TNG], Star Trek: Insurrection, or practically all of Deep Space Nine's seventh season), no one ever questions their government! Hudson sees in the bold idealism of asserting a government that works well most of the time a spectre of timid uniformity. How markedly different from the Pickard, the Sisko, the Odo, the Data, the Spock, and all the other characters in whom I invested so much emotion are these timid spectres that haunt Hudson's Star Trek!

Next on the menu, we are served a deliciously absurd view of Star Trek's Prime Directive. For the uninitiated, the Prime Directive asserts that the Federation is not to go around the galaxy remaking technologically primitive planets into societies unto their own image. The Prime Directive is informed by a history of well-intentioned but disastrous interventions into the progression of other cultures, and aims to allow nascent cultures to get a chance to participate in galactic culture as equals and on the merits of what they offer, rather than to be damned by the accident of a slower technological progression. There are, of course, many points with which one can argue intelligently (and on which many Star Trek characters do!) with the Prime Directive, and I think it'd be a shame to accept the Directive as a given without critical thought. It will come as little surprise, though, that Hudson neatly sidesteps any intellectual basis for disagreeing with the Directive, instead connecting it back to the boogeyman of multiculturalism:

The defining aspect of Star Trek’s Federation is its Prime Directive, the law above all others which its officers are sworn to uphold even at the expense of their life and the lives of others. Stated simply, the Prime Directive is to never interfere with the natural evolution of another civilization. In the original series, this meant refraining from contaminating relatively primitive cultures with knowledge of Starfleet and its advanced technology. Over the years, the Prime Directive has expanded into a kind of galactic Tenth Amendment, assuring member planets jurisdiction over internal affairs.

While the latter may seem attractive to conservatives, it is worth noting that the supreme moral principle upon which the Prime Directive is based is not natural rights or individual sovereignty, but multiculturalism. In Star Trek, the one cardinal sin is applying your values to an alien culture.

Here, I have emphasized where Hudson seems to have been watching a completely different set of shows and movies than I did. What else other than "applying your values to an alien culture" is the whole Dominion War, or the earlier Cardassian War? The idea that the Federation has something to offer other cultures in terms of moral values is so omnipresent in Star Trek that picking a single example would be to miss the point. Where Star Trek differs from Hudson's wingnut world, however, is that the Federation also learns from other cultures. The interactions go both ways, unlike the one-sided ethnocentric and xenophobic ideas on foreign policy espoused by many of the TCP's most ardent supporters.

Since I don't wish to hash through this ridiculous article for the rest of my natural life, or even for the rest of the weekend, let me speed up a bit. I think you get the flavor of Hudson's approach already: isolate something that happened in Star Trek and connect it to a dog-whistle, boogeyman or spectre of the wingnut mind. To wit, "No Money" connects the absence of money in the Federation to communism (gasp!), missing soundly the point that the absence of money derives from an absence of scarcity. There's no point to money when there is no scarcity to drive economies. Whereas the Ferengi solve this "problem" by inventing new scarcities, the Federation embraces the promise of a world not held back by dollars and cents. A world freed to pursue its dreams and its ideals, no matter the price tag.

Hudson next misunderstands the ideals of the Federation rather dramatically by his characterization that "the Federation is a kind of galactic nation vying for power among hostile neighbors on all sides," and thus that "peace remains illusive." That the show documents how its characters deal with adversity in face of their ideals is not a criticism, but part of the wondrous utopia that the shows depict! Peace is so valued and well-understood by the Federation that they will work for peace even when so surrounded. One key transition depicted over the course of four shows spanning 26 seasons was the transformation of the Klingons from a violent adversary to an uneasy ally, then to a valued but misunderstood neighbor and finally to a celebrated friend in the Dominion War. What could better demonstrate the Federation's ideal of peace than their successful diplomatic efforts with a species whose cultural history celebrates violence and imperialism at every turn?

Skipping mostly past "Silly God, Tricks are for Man," I will pause just to note that it is so incoherent as to cite early Star Trek as following "Judeo-Christian tradition," as if such a thing existed outside of the weird premillennial-dispensationalism steeped mind of the modern wingnut. Far more interesting is Hudson's complete perversion of the Star Trek parables of the Cardiassians, Bajorans and the Dominion on display in "Occupations and Insurgents." No amount of analysis on my part could hope to improve simply quoting Hudson on this point:

When the United States deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, its mission was similar to that of the Federation at Bajor, keep the peace, defend the interests of liberty, and prevent old and new enemies from exerting themselves in the area.

...

[Deep Space Nine] became the Federation’s vanguard, defending a wormhole through which the evil Dominion could attack from across the galaxy. Iraq likewise became American’s vanguard in the global War on Terror. The Dominion’s leaders were shape-shifters who could appear as anyone or anything, and thus conduct insurgent warfare against the Federation.

Anyone who equates the Dominion's grand imperialist schemes with modern insurgents either never watched Star Trek, or suffered one too many concussions to comprehend it properly. The same complete and utter lack of understanding of the ideals of the show is on display in "Phasers on Stun":

Be that as it may, the ability to simply stun enemies rather than kill them lowered the stakes of the drama somewhat. Star Trek frequently failed to address the uncomfortable scenarios such an ability would present in real life. Even if you could stun someone who wanted to kill you, wouldn’t they still want to kill you once they recovered? Have you really dealt with the threat?

Such a flirtation with violence as being the best solution to a problem, rather than as being a poor substitute for understanding, diplomacy and rational discussion says quite a bit more about Hudson and his memetic environment than I might have wanted to see, but there it is. To Hudson, it seems that killing someone is truly the only way to "deal with the threat," and that our fiction should reflect this cruel "fact." It seems that Hudson's comedy now gives way to a brutal exposure of a genuinely unpleasant mind. Luckily, we are spared delving too much further yet by the section on "Cosmic Environmentalism":

A powerful alien probe has come to Earth looking for them, and starts trashing the place when they don’t harmonize with its cetacean song. The moral of the story is obvious. If we do not act to protect the environment today, a race of alien sea turtles may destroy our civilization tomorrow.

Admittedly, Star Trek IV was cheesy and campy, but it was wonderful seeing the denizens of a better future come face to face with their history: a people that treats their environs as immutable, exploitable and lifeless. Hudson describes this in decidedly less gracious terms:

As they peruse the landscape of ’80′s San Francisco, the crew wander about like bemused Westerners stranded among a primitive tribe.

Maybe that should give us pause, Mr. Hudson? How should our decedents see us, and how do we go about making that happen? If we don't want the future to think of us as a what you call a "primitive tribe," maybe we shouldn't act like one!

I'm happy to report that Hudson has saved the best for last, as his sections on "Resistance is Futile" and "Can't We All Just Get Along?" meld together into a single thesis so bizarre, so stupid and so astounding that it alone could have motivated me writing this post. He opens with this doozy:

In a franchise which has clearly been leveraged to promote leftist ideology, one of the most fascinating developments has been the introduction off a villain so plainly emblematic of the Left. The popularity of the Borg, an aggressive race of cyborgs who share a collective hive mind, is no doubt attributable to the psychological horror they represent.

The Borg seek to assimilate intelligent life into their totalitarian society, wholly subduing individuality in service to the collective. In doing so, they believe they are working toward the perfection of their species. Could there be a better metaphor for the Left than these cybernetic zombies?

I dare you to count the number of buzzwords, dog-whistles and boogeymen hiding in that quotation, then add to that the ridiculous characterization of progressiveism as "cybernetic zombies." Any pretense of sanity has now been fully left behind, leaving Hudson standing bare in all his nuttiness, but he's not done yet!

The Borg challenge the Federation’s Utopian ideals, and thus those of the Left, by presenting a threat which cannot be reasoned or negotiated with.

But I thought the Borg was the Left! Oh, wait, they are again a few moments later:

The Borg are also the enemy faced in Star Trek: First Contact. At that point in franchise continuity, Picard has encountered the Borg enough to know there is only one appropriate response.
We’ve made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here. This far, no further!

So no mention of how that hard-line stance nearly cost Picard his life, his crew, his planet, his Federation, his ideals? No, as Hudson goes boldly on to conclude with this knockout of a thesis:

Again, the Borg stand as a curious contradiction to this sentiment. Strictly speaking, they share the same objective as the Federation, galactic peace. The difference is that the Borg see peace as the end result of destroying or assimilating all free people in the galaxy (a perspective they share with Islam). In this the Borg are correct, because freedom enables distinctiveness, and distinctiveness breeds discord. We will never completely get along so long as some among us remain free.

Setting aside for a moment the obscene perversion of the word "freedom" on display here, note what I have emphasized above: Hudson equates the Borg with Islam, and also with what he calls "the Left," and thus he's done! Liberals are Islam, QED. What better punchline could you imagine for such a coherently stupid manifesto?

While I have done my best to illustrate the comedy of Hudson's tea-stained view of the world, I would be remiss if I left one with the impression that this was all one big joke. The worldview through which Hudson sees Star Trek as not a utopia but a dystopia is currently still seen as a serious contender in the American marketplace of ideas; so much so that we think of Obama as liberal by comparison, so much so that Bill O'Riley has become a voice of reason on his network, so much so that Donald Trump is not immediately laughed off-stage and so much so that Michelle Bachman currently has a job. Thus, my laughter at Hudson's fevered views comes with a barb. I laugh in the hope and the promise of discrediting a bankrupt movement, against which the ideals espoused by a brilliant series of TV shows like Star Trek stands as all the more essential.

Like herding cats.

2011-04-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

It must be a day whose name ends with a "y," for once again the Internet is abuzz with scandal du jour. This time, what seems to have set the fuse alight is Jerry Coyne's recent open letter to the NCSE and BCSE. While I found Coyne's letter to be well-written and compellingly argued enough to have been proud to add my name, there's bigger fish to fry at the moment.

Namely, I want to address the flood of comments directed at ν atheists that this melee has brought about. As Ophelia Benson has snarkily documented, this most recent shitstorm has prompted quite a few people to boldly define for their readers what ν atheism is. Perhaps my favorite contributed definition is that from Rob Knop, with whom I have had at least a few completely unproductive arguments:

Do the New Atheists really believe that they aren’t being argumentative, aggreessive, and generally dickish in their attacks on religion? Or, are the religious the “other” against whom any sort of rude behavior is justified?

With apologies to PZ Myers, the emphasis is mine, but the duplicitousness is all Knop's. Notice how Knop correctly notes that many atheists (including those often pinned with labels like "ν," "Gnu," "noo" or even "new") do not extend to religion the special privilege of immunity to criticism, but then immediately switches from talking about religion to talking about the religious. This bit of sleight of hand does the religious quite a disservice, as it implies that religious adherents are so incapable of separating themselves from their religion that criticism of their beliefs must necessarily equate to a personal attack against them.

By contrast, the view held by us νs is generally that religious adherents are, by and large, quite reasonable people, and in particular, are capable of engaging in arguments with those who disagree with them. Of course, one can point out examples where νs have engaged adversaries with more hostility, but as I have argued before, this is largely as a reaction to bad faith on the part of, well, some of the faithful. If you choose to call it "dickish" to point out that people like Knop are being duplicitous in their arguments, then I will admit that your definition of the word "dick" has little in common with any definition that I recognize.

While there is some judgment implicit in criticizing the positions of another, we rightfully do not let that stop us from criticizing political positions, accidental and intentional prejudices, breaches of ethics, illogical actions, etc. Why we should then suspend these actions where religion is involved eludes me. After all, criticism both at the level of society and at the level of one's immediate social circle is a valuable way of seeking a better world for everyone. At the same time, it is commonly understood in our culture that there is a time and a place for such criticism, but given the monumental importance that religious beliefs play in our world, I should rather err on the side of too much criticism of irrational beliefs than not enough.

To expound on that point just a little bit, let me direct your attention to one of Greta Christina's articles, in which she points out that even moderate and "sophisticated" religious beliefs must somehow deal with the genocide and infanticide on display in the holy books such as the Bible. That some widely respected theologians such as William Lane Craig decide to deal with the problem of evil in their holy books by actually making arguments that genocide isn't so bad after all should give us pause. Do we really want to leave unnoticed an elephant in the room that would render even well-educated and good intentioned people into apologists for the systematic destruction of a race? Now, before Knop or Staynard or someone else misinterprets the previous sentence, note that I emphatically did not just call all religious adherents genocidal. What I said, and let me make this precise, is that the process of rationalizing a religion with a modern understanding of morality can lead one to ignoring or attempting to justify atrocities. If criticism of the kinds of religious thoughts that lead to these problems can help make the world a better place by ensuring that we can continue to progress morally, without being bound to a the values written down in millennia-old book, then I will accept the label of "dick" that seems to come with the territory. I am, after all, in good company.

Returning to the original point, though, why is it that such dishonest and useless definitions as that quoted above still have such staying power? There are obviously lots of reasons for the unfortunate pervasiveness of the "New = Asshole" style of definitions, but I would like to add one more for your consideration: ν atheists are, for the most part, hard to characterize. Is ν atheism new? No; people have been loudly and proudly atheistic for quite a long time. Is gnu atheism well-characterized by a set of beliefs that are distinct from "garden variety" atheism? Not that I've been able to tell.

What unites noo atheists is mostly what unites many humanists, skeptics, agnostics, atheists, brights and what have you: a dedication to the positive power of rational thought as a tool for advancing human understanding. This comes along with quite a lot of consequences, naturally, which are adopted more readily by some rationalists more than others, but that's as basic an understanding of ν atheism as I've ever been able to achieve. Past that, there is a constant flux of arguments by which we refine and develop our understanding. We are, by nature, curious and exploratory. Many of us are feisty in our ways, celebrating not only in chances to show someone else wrong, but to be shown wrong ourselves. From my view, trying to characterize ν atheists is a project as doomed to failure as trying to herd a bunch of cats.

When good faith fails.

2011-03-07T22:21:00.000-08:00

My previous post notwithstanding, there are many times when one finds themselves arguing some position with someone that has little to no interest in seeking the truth. When one's opponent fails to reciprocate your good faith and intellectual honesty, what remains? One strategy is to shift your goal to demonstrate to your audience the lack of honesty exhibited by your opponent. In doing so, perhaps it can be demonstrated that their argument does not rest upon logic and evidence, but upon emotional appeal and on preconceived notions. If so, then the audience is enlightened for having seen the pretense and facade of rationality stripped from your opponent's counterarguments— assuming, that is, that they truly are violating the principle of intellectual honesty.

The question, then, becomes one of how best to strip away pretense and nonsense from what is claimed to be a logical argument. Enter humor. A long tested technique in discourse, the use of humor to defuse emotional appeals by one's opponent and to lay bare the flimsy pseudologic of their arguments has been elevated to an art form. Take, for example, a rhetorical device such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The FSM doesn't make its point directly through well-reasoned arguments, but by a sort of reductio ad absurdum that cuts to the essential absurdity of intelligent design creationism (IDC): the Christian god is added ad hoc without any justification, when any other deity (even a manifestly absurd one like the FSM) would do just as well in its place.

By ridiculing the intelligent design creationist argument, then, the FSM device makes room for a real debate (that is, one based on good faith and intellectual honesty) to occur as it adds a cost to introducing further irrational arguments of a similar kind. In this way, we can see that ridicule acts as a cultural tool to enforce good faith: when one deviates from the principles that enable a debate to be productive, ridicule and sarcasm can be employed to steer the argument back to a potentially constructive state.

One can also think of ridicule as a kind of memetic inoculation against bad-faith arguments such as those used to prop up IDC. Used as inoculation, ridicule works quite well along side well-reasoned and honest arguments, as the ridicule can serve as the mnemonic hook upon which an argument can be hung. For instance, following an argument about the methodological incompatibilities between science and faith, using a term like "faitheist" adds a social cost to using the same discredited arguments (such as "they must be compatible--- to prove it, here's a religious scientist") to justify complete compatibility. In order to be effective, one arguing for compatibility must either provide a novel demonstration of why the arguments packaged up in "faitheist" are wrong, or they must provide novel arguments not addressed in preceding discussions.

In a completely different context, economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman effectively uses ridicule in the same way: his use of the terms like "Serious People" and "Confidence Fairy" serve to keep readers in the context of a previously made argument. Whereas the Republicans (and neo-conservatives more broadly) rely heavily upon a small set of arguments even long after they have been discredited, the use of ridicule can serve as an expedient way of connecting such a discredited argument to its rebuttal.

Even beyond the importance to enabling discourse, there is another important aspect to ridicule and even outright scorn that we ignore to our detriment. Many humans implicitly measure the acceptableness of a position by how their peers react to it, so should we not use that mechanism to stymie the propagation of truly hateful ideas? Leaving the material questions of an afterlife aside, for instance, should we not ridicule and scorn the hateful notion that a being worthy of worship would ever create a place of eternal torment? Hidden in such a supposition is the truly despicable idea that people ever deserve to be tormented, much less for eternity. By ridiculing those advancing without evidence claims of a literal hell (see, for instance, George Carlin's hilarious rants on the subject), we can introduce a social cost not just for being illogical, but also for being hateful.

The danger, of course, in the use of ridicule to remedy bad faith and enforce social costs is that it can all too easily become another example of bad faith itself. Put differently, ridicule is a tool that can be used to manifestly delegitimize arguments that aren't actually legitimate in the first place, or it can be used to delegitimize arguments that are in fact made in all good faith. As a step towards addressing this danger, note that ridicule can be its own balance. Someone that uses ridicule poorly or as a bludgeon to cut off reasoned debate instead of fostering it should themselves be ridiculed. After all, the best of applications of sarcastic wit must necessarily draw upon reality, so having reality on one's side lends potency to their ridicule.

In an ideal situation, such a tool should never be needed, but in practice, I posit that there are many situations that call for tools like ridicule to make room for reasoned discourse to start. I look forward to the day where I can assume good faith by default, but until then, I shall have to be content to have a laugh at the expense of poor reasoning.

The importance of good faith.

2011-03-03T22:03:00.000-08:00

Listen long enough to any group of humans talking, and you're likely to hear an argument of some kind. It may be a small argument or it may be a loud and angry argument, but either way, it will very likely nucleate about a disagreement between the parties about some aspect of reality. After all, if all parties involved in an argument agreed with each other on their assessments of reality, there would be nothing to argue about. In much of our arguments, then, we should expect that our goal is to impress upon our peers that some claim is true and correct.
This process of disagreement and ensuing debate are thus potentially good and useful: to the extent that we are only convinced by logically and empirically sound arguments, then debate furthers our understanding of the world. Implicit in this assessment, however, is an assumption that both parties are actually interested in the pursuit of truth. That is, arguments are useful only insofar as the parties to an argument are practicing good faith.

If one is honest about their arguments, then that must necessarily include an understanding that they could be wrong and hence that they could "lose" an argument. Thus, one can violate good faith by disallowing for any change in their views as the result of an argument. This violation is especially common in discussions about religion, where one party to an argument (typically the more religious party) refuses to admit of any evidence or line of reasoning which could possibly budge them from their beliefs. It is simply not plausible that any individual human is infallible, even within some particular domain of knowledge, and so to argue from infallibility is to deny that one's understanding of the world could possibly be more complete. Such a denial is fundamentally incompatible with the goal of learning, and hence has no place in a discussion intended to bring enlightenment.

In a similar vein, good faith requires that one only advance arguments that they do not already know to be false. If someone shows that your argument is not in correspondence with reality, then continuing to use that argument is an affront to the pursuit of understanding and of truth. To be particularly blunt, the use of known-false arguments is simply dishonest, and is the practice of a liar.

It is concerning ourselves with good faith that we find it important to be aware of common logical fallacies. It hardly does anyone any good if an argument is tainted by mistakes which have been well-understood for centuries to be flawed. Appeal to authority, post hoc ergo propter hoc and confusion between correlation and causation, to name a few examples, should all be seen as undermining an argument and hence avoided.

On the other hand, it is similarly unconstructive to bludgeon others with a mistaken understanding of some particular logical fallacy, such as the ad hominem fallacy, that favored bludgeon of those arguing from bad faith. ("What? You called me a clueless gobshite? That means I won!") Focusing on name-calling, ridicule and other such patter comes at the cost of focusing on the merits of an argument. Taken to its extreme, critiquing a lack of decorum represents bad faith in that it distracts from critical evaluation of an argument. Of course there is a point at which a stream of ridicule or a particularly vile insult also disrupts useful debate; I call it a failure of good faith when this valid concern is exaggerated and perverted for the purposes of distraction or suppression.

Perhaps the most common and hence egregious violation of good faith, however, is the intentional mischaracterization of another's opinions for the purpose of delegitimizing their views. While there is room, of course, for arguing that one's opponent is being dishonest in how they describe their views, there is a wide gulf between such arguments and flat-out lying about what someone else does or says. By lying and employing such strawmen, one once again gives up discovering what is true. To wit, fighting a strawman doesn't expose holes in an argument, but rather is a strategy explicitly purposed to prevent having to change one's views in the face of opposition. Such dishonesty is by nature incompatible with reasoned and constructive debate, and should be disdained as strongly as any other form of blatant dishonesty.

Why is good faith so important to me, though? Because I actually care about learning more about the world. Because engaging someone in an well-reasoned argument is time-consuming, and should be reciprocated in kind. Because we, at a societal level, desperately need constructive discourse, no matter how much popular etiquette demands that certain views be kept out of the public sphere. Because constructive dialogue is much more about intellectual honesty and mutual respect for the truth than about how many profanities are spoken. Because we, as a culture, seem to have forgotten (if indeed we ever knew) that truth is something to strive for and that dishonesty is something to hold in contempt.

I don't ask that the whole world agree with me--- that would be boring and quite useless, after all. I don't even ask that people refrain from calling me an ignorant fucktard (or whatever the slang of the day might become). I merely ask of my peers that we all engage in good faith as we seek to improve our understanding of the world.

τ keeps on slipping...

2011-02-26T18:41:00.000-08:00

Apologies: this post is somewhat more specialized than my normal fare, and probably will be boring as hell without a some mathematical knowledge.

Electrons have a negative charge. When you think about it, this really doesn't make much sense; after all, electrons are the charge carriers for electric charge, and so we would hope to assign their charge a positive value. That electrons carry a negative charge isn't a fundamental statement about reality, though, but rather an unfortunate consequence of an arbitrary decision made early on when electricity was being studied, but when electrons were still undiscovered.

Similar cases of unfortunate arbitrary conventions can be seen in other areas of mathematics and science. Recently, for instance, Michael Hartl has argued that $\pi$ is not the right constant to use in the equations governing such things as circles, frequencies and angles. Rather, Hartl argues that $\tau = 2\pi$ is a much more natural choice. Using this convention, the circumference $c$ of a circle is $c=\tau\ r$, eliminating the awkward factor of 2 in $c=2\pi r$. It may seem that we lose something when considering the area $A = \frac12 \tau\ r^2$ of a circle in this notation, but in fact this is much more natural for expressing as an integral, as those familiar with calculus will be happy to note.

Today, I'd like to show you somewhere else in physics where changing notation makes things much more natural. Concretely, I'd like to argue that using a different $\tau$ makes quite a lot of sense, when we using $\tau = it$ as a replacement for the time $t$ in equations. In fact, I take it as a lesson of quantum mechanics that we should consider time to lie along an imaginary axis and not along the real axis. This notational trick, known as Wick rotation, simplifies many physical equations, such as Schrödinger's equation. I find that $\frac{d}{dt} \left\vert\psi\right\rangle = i \hat{H} \left\vert\psi\right\rangle$ makes much more sense expressed in imaginary time:
\[\frac{d}{d\tau} \left\vert\psi\right\rangle = \hat{H} \left\vert\psi\right\rangle\] Adopting this convention also makes it manifestly clear why complex conjugation is intimately related to time reversal, since $\tau^* = -\tau$.

It is, in fact, quite rare for $t$ to appear in quantum mechanics without a factor of $i$ attached. Even when describing a classical object interacting with a quantum mechanical system, such as an oscillating field introducing a time-varying term to a system's Hamiltonian (that is, the operator which describes the energy of a system--- if that makes no sense, don't worry), we write something like \[\hat H(t) = \cos(\omega t)\ \hat\sigma_x + \sin(\omega t)\ \hat\sigma_y.\] But wait!, you say! There's no $it$ in that equation! As it turns out, there actually is, but we've hidden it by using trigonometric functions where an exponential function is more natural: \[ \hat{H}(\tau) = e^{-\omega\tau\hat\sigma_z/2}\hat\sigma_x e^{\omega\tau\hat\sigma_z/2} \] This form also has the advantage of making it manifest that the oscillation of the classical field can be thought of as a coordinate rotation of a time-independent field.

Other key results of quantum mechanics become much cleaner with the imaginary-time convention. For instance, this convention along with the natural units convention that $\hbar = 1$ makes Ehrenfest's theorem much less awkward to write: \[\frac{d}{d\tau}\left\langle \hat A\right\rangle = \left\langle \frac{d\hat A}{d\tau}\right\rangle + \left\langle[\hat H, \hat A]\right\rangle\]

At the end of the day, such notational choices as the sign of an electron's charge, the choice of circle constant, or the axis which we use to represent time are all arbitrary. We can do physics quite well even when a choice lacks something in mathematical beauty. My point, then, in exploring the fun of $\tau$ is to show that even though our choice of notation is an arbitrary choice made for the convenience of the humans that work with it, by making our notational choices carefully, we can coax out and make manifest deep truths.

Testing MathJax support

2011-02-26T17:47:00.000-08:00

I have recently decided to add MathJax support using the techniques described at Dysfunctional. Unfortunately, math does not seem to be working in preview mode, and so I wrote this test post to see if formulas render when actually published. $H\left\vert\psi\right\rangle = E\left\vert\psi\right\rangle$. $x^2$ $\sqrt{x}$ $ |x^2| = x^* x$

Thoughts in the endgame.

2011-02-20T16:09:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the endgame of a long political play for electoral dominance in the United States. What do I mean by that? I mean that groups like The Family and Koch Enterprises, amongst others, have been playing the long game in American politics, and that they have nearly reached the culmination of their strategy. As Rachel Maddow brilliantly explained, the unrest in Wisconsin can only be understood in the context of a struggle for the survival of the Democratic Party. After all, unions are the last bastion of the left in terms of fundraising, and so cutting off unions means cutting fiscal support for the Democratic Party. Especially post-Citizens United, elections are won with money, and so marginalizing unions means disenfranchising voters from all walks of life.

What would it mean, though, for the Republicans to have won so thoroughly? To answer that, it helps to understand what the Republican Party (under all its guises) is and what they stand for. As much as the Democrats are beholden to the forces of irrationality, the Republicans mark themselves as being still less rational. As much as the Democrats are subservient to unbounded corporatism, the Republicans distinguish themselves as being still more enamored of model of the corporation as state. While the Democrats are weak on issues of human rights, the Republicans are plain monstrous.

This last point deserves some elaboration: witness the unabashed war on women, going so far as to seriously propose that it be legal to kill doctors for providing medical care to women that includes abortion. Faced with economic crisis, they would callously eat the future, all the while saying "so be it." Given the pro-democracy movements in many parts of the world, the Republican taking heads are by and large siding with the dictators and using the movements to inflame Islamophobia. What other word than "monstrous" can describe these kinds of actions and positions?

We must ask ourselves, then, whether we want future challengers in the political arena to be obliged to play by rules written by the current crop of Republicans; rules that increasingly leave no room for reasoned debate, or indeed, for any thought more complex than a sound-bite. Do we want to solve our problems, or are we content to let a small few make them much worse as they pursue their own self-interest? Those that have brought us to this endgame know full well that they will not reap what they have sown, for the consequences are still longer-term than their callous and wicked plays at power. Thus it falls to us, those who care about the world that we inherit and that we pass on to the next generation, to decide what the nature of politics will be.

It's not all so bleak, of course. Given that there's about 90,000 people protesting in Wisconsin against the latest round of union-busting, the Republican endgame may yet be averted or at least postponed. Let us not waste the opportunity given to us by this uprising, but instead use it to remind people of what the stakes really are.

Project Umbra Update for 19 Feb

2011-02-19T14:12:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd let you know what I've been working on with Project Umbra for the past two weeks.

Shadowtable

The biggest change in Shadowtable has been the addition of a new Combatant Details pane that provides more details about a selected combatant. In the future, this pane will also let the game master quickly change initiative scores and other details.

This pane will also be used for managing players connected to a given combatant via Shadowcloud.

Shadowcloud

Speaking of Shadowcloud, the mobile-web component of Project Umbra has been updated with several new mocked-up pages which in the future will allow for users to create characters and view their statuses.

The biggest update, however, has been that Shadowcloud is now available for use at http://project-umbra.appspot.com/. Many parts of this app are still non-functional, and those that are are quite alpha-ish, so please be gentle!

Some of the more interesting parts of Shadowcloud that can be viewed now are the character creation page and the character status page.

Wrap-Up

That's it for this update! I hope you enjoy following Project Umbra, and that as it matures, that you will find it useful.

(Speaking of useful, I could still really use some help from those amongst you more experienced at mobile web development than I am. Please let me know if you would like to join the Project!)

Scorching the common ground

2011-02-13T19:38:00.000-08:00

Only the most ardently Luddite amongst us deny that technological advances change our lives in myriad, dramatic and often unexpected ways. Western approaches to city planning post-automobile, for instance, differ in marked ways from before the introduction of cheap medium-range transportation. Likewise, the introduction of telecommunications technology like the telegraph and the telephone changed how people relate to each other, making distance that much less of an impediment to human interaction. Broadcast media such as radio or TV changed nearly completely the primary modes by which information and culture diffuse in Western societies.

Of course, too, many of the features of society which we take completely for granted now are the products of advances in technology as well. We use signage to indicate all manner of information, as it is reasonable to expect that the vast majority of adults are literate and thus will be able to understand such signage. Though nearly invisible in its prevalence, then, the use of signage is a feature of a society that has truly adopted the printing press technology to the point where literacy is a requirement for societal participation.

It thus behooves us to understand how technology reshapes society. We do this in many ways, not the least of which is by exploring technological impacts in fiction. Betraying my own literary interests, I feel compelled to point to science-fiction as being one of the primary vehicles for exploring how society--- even humanity itself--- change in the face of technological advances. To choose an example that has truly permeated into the culture-at-large, consider the technologically-driven optimism of Star Trek: the United Federation of Planets represents humanity at its best, thriving in a true post-scarcity economy enabled by fictional technologies such as the replicator. Whether or not we ever make a replicator, or whether such a thing is even physically reasonable, setting a show against the backdrop of a world in which replicator technology has banished scarcity helps us understand something very real and very timely today: rapid prototyping. Sites such as MakerBot, Shapeways and Thingiverse reflect that there are some kinds of scarcity being made obsolete by technological progress. Primarily, scarcity deriving from access to manufacturing equipment is becoming less and less pronounced, shifting scarcity onto raw materials. This obsolescence of scarcity was explored first in fictional worlds such as that depicted in Star Trek, and so we are at least somewhat prepared for its impacts.

Where, then, do we turn to understand how the line between human and machine becomes less obvious by the year? Where, then, do we turn to understand the changing of such concepts as "gender" from immutable to transient? Where, then, do we turn to understand the impacts of an ever increasing longevity? We turn to many things, including turning again to fictional realms. We turn to stories like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, to stories like Accelerando (free e-book, CC licensed), to stories like Ghost in the Shell. There are, of course, many many others that could and should be mentioned in such a list--- it is beyond my intent to provide such a list here, though. Rather, I wish to emphasize that the usefulness of a story to discussion need not hinge on its direct physical reasonableness. Indeed, fanciful tales help us understand quite a bit about the relentless advance of technology and of scientific knowledge.

Many issues of transhumanism and of a society transformed by access to information can be understood under that most controversial of umbrellas, the Singularity. There, we find stories and arguments abound to help us understand what it means to be human when our biology is a platform as fungible as any other. In discussing and understanding the arguments and stories that go along with the Singularity, we find new perspectives on the human condition, at least some of which shall hopefully be useful in the decades and centuries to come.

Here, I note that those defending the irrationality of religion make arguments that are, on the surface, quite similar. It doesn't matter if there exists any literal gods, so long as the stories help us understand ourselves. The primary difference in my argument, however, is that I do not advocate rejecting the application rationality and skepticism on the basis that temporarily suspending it can be a useful exercise. Indeed, it is well argued that the rejection of skepticism is a highly dangerous position to take, even at its best. Thus, I reject the "rapture of the nerds" approach to the Singularity as completely as I reject the whole thesis of religion.

The conflating of useful hypotheticals and of artistic endeavors with a religion-like dedication to a set of claims, even in absence of evidence, is why I take issue with the Kurzweil approach to the Singularity so rightfully mocked by PZ Myers today. By turning the Singularity from a discussion into a religion, Kurzweil and others like him obstruct the usefulness of Singularity thought. Rational and skeptical people, reacting to Kurzweilian nonsense like "immortality in 35 years," are inclined to sometimes also reject the usefulness of hypothetical thinking about posthumanism, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and of pervasive information networking.

My humble proposal, then, is to reject the scorched ground of religion-infused Singularity thinking and to instead find common ground well-supported by the rigors of evidence and yet informed by hypotheticals. We can have it both ways insofar as we are willing to refrain from magical thinking about technology that passes Clarkian thresholds.

Announcing Project Umbra: Mixing metaphors (in a good way).

2011-02-10T19:34:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that I am a gamer. I play board games, card games, video games, tabletop games... pretty much every kind of game this side of LARPs (I do have limits). As a gamer, I see games changing in response to technological advances, along with everything else in society. Video games, for instance, have transformed immensely into one of the richest new art forms available. At the same time, advances in small-run printing coupled with online fora for game reviews have allowed for many more unique board and card games ranging in complexity from stunningly simple (such as Zombie Dice) to mind-mindbogglingly complex (such as Arkham Horror or Battlestar Galactica).

What remains, however, is the conception that tabletop, board and card games are based on physical objects (dice, cards, boards, papers, tokens, figurines, maps, etc.) whilst video games are based on information processing. This divide means that the more complex games, like those mentioned above, require an awful lot of bookkeeping to play, dissuading all but the more passionate gamers such as myself. This is seen in extremes with many roleplaying game systems. The rulebooks for HERO System 6th Edition, for instance, cost $80 and weigh in at about 1,000 full-color pages. Players must keep track of endurance, body and stun damage, mental and physical defences, skill level allotments, initiative, position, etc., while the game master (GM) must keep track of all of this and more for each of the antagonists.

My question, then, is what power can be gained by mixing the physical and informational models. Let the computers do what they do best, keeping track of rules and statistics, while the humans do what humans do best: spin stories and build worlds. Of course, many tools exist that nudge in this direction, but very few embrace the fusion of information processing with physical metaphor and human creativity.

Enter Project Umbra: a suite of web-based tools for keeping track of stats and states in Shadowrun 4e. Players will be able to log in to a game hosted by a GM from their smartphones, and will be shown their damage levels, wound modifiers, initiative orders and other vital information. The GM, for his/her part, will be able to use an Android tablet (Honeycomb or later) to view and manipulate entire combats quickly and unobtrusively. Games won't have to be interrupted to ask for initiative rolls from each player in turn; they can simply tap a button on their phones to make that information available to the GM, keeping table talk focused on the characters rather than the rules.

A player can quickly see what games are available to them from their mobile phones using the web-based Shadowcloud client.

In the future, I plan on expanding Project Umbra to other roleplaying systems, but for now, focusing on Shadowrun 4e allows for the project to be developed organically--- that is, without having to understand the full scope before writing each line of code. The potential here is rather unexplored, after all, and so it's far from clear what the right approach will be to each problem.

A game master can quickly view and manipulate an entire combat by using an unobtrusive tablet, instead of a laptop whose screen blocks their view of players.

Like any truly community-minded project, Project Umbra is an open-source project based on open specifications and open platforms. The tablet-facing part of Umbra is based on the Android platform, and as such, can be run on any of the many forthcoming Honeycomb-powered devices. The web-based portion uses Google App Engine for Java (itself a derivative of the open-specification J2EE platform) to serve standards-compliant HTML5 content powered by the open-source jQuery and jQuery Mobile libraries. Communications between components are handled by JSON serialized data, generated by the Gson library. All Umbra-specific code is licensed under either the GPL or AGPL, as appropriate, and as such, is freely available to interested developers for reuse.

I think the potential for Project Umbra is quite exciting, frankly, and am looking forward to playing more with it and making the most I can of the technology. If you would like to be a part of the project and help in any way, please let me know. Just like any good game, Umbra isn't limited to just one mind.

Happy gaming!

An opportunity for self-improvement.

2011-02-07T19:41:00.000-08:00

The abstract is often easier to understand by way of concrete examples. It is all well and good to speak of a pattern, but without showing an anecdote that illustrates that pattern, it's difficult at best to understand the significance of that pattern. It is thus that I'd like to briefly revisit last night's post on moral blind spots, taking the time to point out one specific community that could benefit from some self-reflection about such blind spots.

I speak of the problem of sexism within the atheist community. To put my example in context, consider some of the reasons an individual might adopt atheism: a skepticism towards unsubstantiated claims made by religions, an understanding of and respect for science as a method of learning, and (perhaps most importantly) a dedication to the use of reason as a problem-solving and decision-making tool. Note that all three of these reasons by necessity involve some level of introspection, observation and rational thinking--- all tools essential to making good moral decisions. Moreover, by definition, atheism is absent the intense homeostatic motives of religion, enabling a greater responsiveness to advances in moral thinking.

One would thus be justified in suspecting that the atheist community would be, on the whole, less susceptible to the all-too-human biases, preconceptions and discriminatory divisiveness found in so many other human communities. Alas, however, there exist some stunning counterexamples, from which I wish to highlight a particular counterexample. Jen McCreight has taken a fair amount of her time lately to document examples of sexism in the atheist community, including accepting a guest post on the subject and documenting the deplorable behavior found at r/atheism (see here, here and here).

As I have said before and will likely say again, one of the quintessential features of scientific thinking and of rational thinking is the capacity to self-improve by recognizing errors. Here, we see a notable blind spot that many (but not all!) of my peers in the atheist community seem to share. If we are as truly dedicated to the cause of rationality as I would hope that we are, then this is a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that we need not be burdened by such irrational biases. We can make manifest our willingness to be wrong and to make amends by recognizing that our behavior is not as respectful of those women in our community that offer such potential to enrich and broaden our views. We can make positive changes to grow our community into a healthier and more diverse group, starting by eschewing sexism.

It is no secret that our culture is not always kind to women, girls and others that check the "female" box when filling out forms. If, however, we are to truly take the principle of self-correction seriously, then we must rise above the nonsense that is sexism. Please, don't squander this opportunity to do the right thing.

On weak points and blind spots.

2011-02-06T15:15:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I've written here, I know. I'd like to break the silence with some long, epic post composed of sheer brilliance, but I don't see that happening. Instead, I'd like to expound briefly on some themes that are by now familiar to readers of this blog.

In particular, I've been thinking a lot lately about how and why intelligent, well-meaning people can still do horrible things, or at the least, turn a blind eye to them. Even the most thoughtful of people can be seen to ignore the role, for example, that the Catholic Church plays in perpetuating the AIDS epidemic. Those that otherwise serve as prime examples of humanistic morals can still ignore or deem unimportant the moral issues associated with modern communication, such as censorship, DRM, or net neutrality. Passionate feminists can still take a sex-negative attitude (though many, thankfully, do not). So too can passionate advocates of science and education be misogynistic creeps.

In my experience, everybody, regardless of intelligence or compassion, is afflicted by moral blind spots and weak spots. It is important to remember this as we make decisions in life, as none of us is infallible, and as none of us have privileged access to the facts and logic that must direct our compassion. Indeed, there have been many times where I have been wrong in my thinking about ethics and morals, and where I have been happy to have been shown the errors in my previous modes of thought. (This is a theme that I hope to get around to revisiting soon!) To my mind, then, the most important part of moral thinking must be a willingness to be wrong, paired with a dedication to discovering and correcting such wrongs.

Of course, I have been a bit glib until now in using words like "wrong" to describe moral hypotheses, so allow me to rectify that. When I discover that my attitudes and morals imply a course of action that would unduly harm another sentient by infringing upon their ability to exercise their freedoms as they see fit, I call such attitudes "wrong." Just as surely, if I harm someone by unfairly restricting their opportunities, then that is also "wrong." If I base my moral thinking on suppositions which are found to be false, then that thinking is "wrong." Thus, self-correction takes the form of education: to avoid such wrong-headed approaches to life, I must be educated sufficiently to empathize with as many points of view as possible, and I must be educated such that I can well predict and understand the consequences of my actions.

Invariably, however, I will not achieve omniscience, and thus must by necessity commit to wrong modes of thought where ethics and morals are concerned. The drive to improve oneself is essential in coming to terms with this reality; if I cannot eliminate blind spots, can I not make them smaller?

Two wicked tautologies.

2010-10-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

The midterm elections in the United States are two days away. Unfortunately, the importance of these elections is not limited to inhabitants of the US and to its expats (such as myself). The interconnectedness of national economies and political systems that defines the modern world means that insanity in the country I call home can spread and upset affairs all over the world. Moreover, issues such as environmental protection know no such thing as political borders, and have consequences all the world over. Increasingly, the vast majority of the world has been effectively disenfranchised by the disproportionate level of influence wielded by the US in world affairs.

It is thus that I feel justified in saying that what I write of today is of the utmost urgency and importance. As I write this, a group of unqualified and militaristic right-wing candidates is poised to take power in the legislative bodies of the US, which would render the already too-moderate Democratic party completely impotent in solving the myriad problems facing the US and the broader world. The impact of this potential swing in political power has already been addressed by others, perhaps most profoundly by Keith Olbermann in his most recent Special Comment.

There is, however, a point that has largely been missed in much of the discussion so far. I myself have said that the Tea Party has no coherent argument, philosophical basis, policy position or political stance. This is, unfortunately, not completely correct, though. The Tea Party does indeed have a coherent basis; not one of politics or policy, but of theology.

To explain what I mean by this necessarily involves a bit of a tangent. In his beautifully written and profoundly chilling book The Family (affiliate link), Jeff Sharlet documents the rise to power of a secretive group of theocrats, both in the United States and globally. The Family (also known as the Fellowship) is largely characterized by their adherence to a theology of power. According to Family doctrine, the powerful people in the world today are powerful by God's will, and thus are to be followed implicitly in recognition of God's choosing them as his agents. This creates, as Sharlet so eloquently puts it, a tautology of power, in which the powerful are powerful precisely because they are powerful. Their religious belief is thus directly connected to their support of many of the world's most despicable men and women; would the people that they support be powerful if not for some quality that God had identified and chosen them for?

In the Tea Party, we see a parallel theology-- a similarly wicked tautology-- driving their actions. If one takes the efficient market hypothesis extremely literally, then the wealthy are rich because the Free Market has chosen them for some quality that they must possess, even if it is invisible to mere mortals. This tautology of wealth states that the wealthy are wealthy precisely because they are wealthy. This doctrine of the Tea Party betrays the faux populism to their movement. Indeed, adherents of this tautology of wealthy are perhaps better referred to as the Tea and Crumpets Party (TCP), as their every policy action seems driven towards accelerating the expansion of the gap between the wealthy and everyone else. For all their cries against the redistribution of wealth, that is precisely what the TCP wants: that as much wealth be transfered to the already-wealthy as possible.

The primary difference between the TCP and the Family, as far as I can tell, is that the TCP is not in the slightest secretive. It is, after all, not as of yet disreputable to put literal religious faith in the efficient market hypothesis, nor to support the whims of billionaires. That we have as a society progressed to the point of understanding that giving aid to genocidal maniacs (such as the literal Nazis that what would eventually become the Family protected following WWII) necessitates a level of secrecy on the part of the Family that the TCP has no need of.

Of course, wealth and power are not uncorrelated. These two wicked tautologies thus interweave in horrible ways, of which I fear we have seen but the shyest echoes. I would rather not find out the terrifying ends produced through such an interweaving by handing the reins of power over to the TCP.

On Tuesday, however, there is a choice put to voters in the US: whether to endorse a wicked hypothesis that parallels that of the Family's power theology, or whether to stand up for policies formed on a rational basis. Those outside the US also have a part to play in the next two days, for in speaking up and reminding your friends and loved ones what is at stake, a further crisis may yet be averted. Please do not allow these wicked tautologies to win out over rationality.

On an eccentric use of volcabulary.

2010-10-31T12:24:00.000-07:00

I want to write another blog post later today, but found myself wanting to use a word that I feared would be misunderstood. Hence, I am breaking my sickness and paperwork induced blog silence by talking not about something grandiose, but rather minute by comparison to my usual topics: two words, and why I prefer one to the other.

The first word, "evil," is one that I try to avoid using as much as possible. Not, mind you, because of some sense of moral relativism, but rather because of the connotations of the word. To many people, evil necessarily derives from some external evaluation of the world, be it by a god or authority figure. To me, however, being a utilitarian (at least to a rough approximation) means that any evaluation of what is good or bad must come from a rational argument and not the decree of another. Of course, this sense of the word "evil" is far from universally held, but it would be truly unfortunate for my writing to be misunderstood by virtue of such a colored meaning.

In preference, I choose to emulate Richard Dawkins in his use of the word "wicked." Specifically, I call wicked that which is directly, intentionally and needlessly harmful to other intelligent beings, their bodies and their rights. Moreover, I call wicked those value systems and philosophies that compel their adherents to wickedness towards others. On this latter point, I likely deviate from others, such as Dawkins, in applying the word to what is inherently a matter of thought rather than action. My motivation is not to ascribe to any individual a responsibility for the thoughts in their heads, but rather to examine what could compel an otherwise decent agent to act in a wicked manner towards their peers.

By using this word in preference to "evil," I hope to avoid my meaning being lost in the noise of cultural connotations. (Plus, the word sounds cooler, anyway.) It is important that my meaning makes it though, as something wicked truly this way comes.

Latest in the annals of false equivication.

2010-10-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

If there's two things that the media loves, it's a good sex scandal, and a cautionary tale about how the Internet is a dangerous, dangerous thing. Bonus points if they can remind people that there's not really any difference between opposing ideological extremes. That's why I'm in no way surprised to find that NPR has hit all of these points yesterday.

Honestly, I'll make this a very short post. I don't have much to say about an article that compares gallivanting around as a Nazi with a completely harmless sexual expression. Rather, I must simply shake my head and wonder what kinds of mental gymnastics or twisted ethics are required to equate these two activities, to treat them as equally noteworthy and newsworthy stories. Frankly, I find Nazis to be much more intimidating and vile than dildos; it astounds me that this even needs to be said.

On the emergence of an accidental narrative.

2010-10-02T19:18:00.000-07:00

Good writers of fiction will sometimes refer to being surprised at the actions their own characters take. After all, once a story takes a life of its own, in the way that good stories so often do, why should even the author be able to foresee everything that happens?

A similar effect is seen in tabletop gaming, where a good dungeon master (DM--- more correctly, game master) will present a carefully planned adventure to her players only to find that they fixate on details that the DM had thought to be inconsequential. Out of that interaction, a new narrative is drawn from the fibers laid down by the DM. Background material moves to the foreground as the story finds its own vibrancy at the hands of the players and the DM.

Up until recently, I had thought these kinds of emergent narratives to be the province of fiction. On Wednesday, however, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Ben Schumacher on his experiment with teaching quantum mechanics to undergraduates from a quantum information perspective. In his talk, Dr. Schumacher described how the book that he and Dr. Michael Westmoreland wrote, Quantum Processes Systems, and Information (note: associate link), had a hidden narrative that emerged as they proceeded through the writing process. So as to not spoil the story, I'll refer interested readers to Schumacher's talk for details on the form that this narrative takes.

For my part, I have found that in writing this blog, I tend to write each post relatively independently, with little thought of how they fit together into some cohesive whole. Even the name, cgranade::streams, belies some of this approach. It seems plausible, then, that a narrative could emerge not from careful planning but through recognizing the common concerns which motivate me to write on disparate topics.

That said, I was still surprised to find that when responding to a comment by Sarah Kavassalis on one of my recent posts, a small narrative had started to emerge. In three of my last four posts, I have either alluded to or directly dealt with problems that children face in society, pointing out that they are told that their life experiences are less than real, that the authority figures that abuse them can be defended and even celebrated, and that their nascent sexuality is disrespected and disregarded. In all three of these cases, we see a common strand: children are not always seen as being fully human, and the effects of that are as real and destructive as for any group tarnished as being less than human. Their rights are trounced upon, just as with any marginalized group, illustrating the peril in this disregard.

In this way, a narrative about the disrespect of children by society at large serves as a poignant case study of why recognizing the humanity of those around us is so important. Whether the victims of our disregard by marked by sexual orientation, race, religion or nationality, the end effects share much in common.

I don't know if I'll carry this emergent narrative any farther, or if it has served its useful purpose here. Others write on the modern plights of children better than I do, so that my contribution is to entirely to tie it to other threads of thought. This mission, which I have accidentally worked at, is one of many worthwhile missions. If I have more to say on the topic, then, I will say it and will otherwise be content to hunt for other emergent narratives.

In which I argue against a named Test.

2010-09-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

If you've been on the Internet more than a week, you've almost surely heard of the Bechdel Test. Named after artist that wrote Dykes to Watch Out For, the Bechdel Test is intended to filter out movies that fail to feature fully fledged female characters. A movie is said to pass the Test only if:

It has to have at least two women in it,
Who talk to each other,
About something besides a man.

There is some genuine insight here, as far too many movies do in fact fail to respectfully represent a whole half of humanity in their cast. The goal of encouraging more strong and interesting female characters is laudable, and likely a necessary step towards true equality. Thus, I without reservation say that the Test has contributed to the cultural conversation on equality.

On the other hand, I generally find invocations of the Test annoying, as it is far too easy to take such arguments too literally. I don't generally find much insight in discussing whether a particular movie passes or fails the Test, any more than I find that remarking upon a particularly warm day produces insight into climate change. Rather, I think the Test is best used as a means of making an argument, not as a metric.

To try and offer some support to this view, I want to list a few movies that I have seen and that definitely fail the Bechdel Test but which are nonetheless good movies which are hardly bastions of sexism. Such false negatives demonstrate to me that the Test cannot be taken overly literally without missing the rationale. Without further ado, then:

12 Angry Men: No female characters at all, as the movie is a jury drama set in a time when women on juries were very rare due to sexism.
Dr. Strangelove: The movie is a comedy of errors about the leaders of major world powers in the 1960s--- a group that is not well known for its inclusion of women.
Memento: The movie is narrated by a male character who speaks almost entirely to one person at a time.
Moon: There's not enough characters in the cast to pass.
Run Lola Run: This movie also has an incredibly tight cast. (And no, I don't count it when her neighbor asks Lola to pick up some shampoo.)
Voices of a Distant Star: Again, only two characters with lines, each of opposite gender.
Wall-E: The relative lack of human characters makes it hard for this movie to pass the Test, to say nothing of the movie being nearly a silent film.
Hush (Buffy episode): Not a movie, I know, but I'm too sarcastic not to include it anyway.

Note that these movies fail not for their content, but for how the Test happens to be phrased. To hold it against Moon that Sam lives alone on his space station would be patently ridiculous, for instance, but it technically fails the Test for its isolated cast.

Even more ridiculous would be to hold it against Wall-E for failing the Test--- it doesn't even pass the Reverse Bechdel Test:

It has to have at least two men in it,
Who talk to each other,
About something besides a woman.

No one should seriously think that the existence of movies which fail the reverse Test is evidence for a bias against men, so why is the mere existence of movies which fail the Test taken as evidence of such bias against women? Such a bias exists, to be sure, but it is not well demonstrated by applying the Test to this or that particular movie.

By continuing to fixate on the Test, I feel that we do ourselves a disservice. The problem of ensuring equality in media is not an easy problem, and isn't well suited to glib analysis. Arguments such as the Bechdel Test serve well to raise awareness, but at the end of the day, are a poor substitute for informed insight.

Sex negativity considered harmful, but to whom?

2010-09-24T18:36:00.000-07:00

For all our capacity for compassion, we humans can be rather bloody rotten to each other. It shouldn't be surprising that this duality is apparent in children as well. Indeed, it's disturbing to read this story on Salon about how a video of a teenage girl being raped was shared via the Internet by other teenagers. The rape of any person is a tragedy and an outrage; the continuing exploitation of a victim in such a manner nearly defies description.

The reason I bring this article up, however, is because of something far more subtle and insidious [emphasis mine]:

This is the typical predicament law enforcement faces when it comes to online child pornography: Once it's out there, it's usually out there for good. The digital trail is just too difficult to trace. We've seen a similar thing with teen "sexting." A boyfriend gets angry when his girlfriend breaks up with him, so he texts a naked photo of her to all his buddies, they send it to all their buddies, and so on and so forth. In the end, it's hard to know just how many people have seen the image and where it's ended up.

If that paragraph doesn't strike you as deeply wrong, then I suggest giving it another read through. How else other than "deeply wrong" is one supposed to describe the comparison between a brutal rape, child pornography and the fully consensual exchange of suggestive pictures between children. This latter phenomenon can go sour indeed when the relationship between two children changes, and can lead to abusive situations, but that's not what the neologism "sexting" refers to.

By equating the consensual activity to which "sexting" refers with the form of abuse described, the author communicates a decidedly sex-negative position, objecting to the very presence of sexuality in the lives of teenage children. I suspect that this is unintended, or a product of miscommunication and misunderstanding, but it is a common enough position to take that it's worth discussing, to be sure.

Many others have described much more eloquently than I ever could how sex-negativity such as the anti-porn movement harms adults, but children undeniably suffer as well. Even beyond the direct consequences, sex-negativity can tie into other problems, such as sexism, leading to young girls being shamed for engaging in a very natural aspect of human experience.

Perhaps more disturbing is that sex-negative motivated approaches to education leave children ill-informed about their own sexuality, leading them to engage in riskier behavior. Indeed, children often live in a virtual sexual Prohibition, so should we be surprised to find them drinking of moonshine? That this approach of keeping children in the dark is also being applied to higher education by sex-negative advocates is something that we should find very disturbing.

There's another way, however, of dealing with the complexities and problems inherent in teenage sexual relations: treat children as competent, but in need of education. Don't hide them from the complexities of sex, and don't fall into the trap of well-meaning but sex-negative approaches to education. I am glad to see that even a state like Alaska can work towards implementing sex and relationship education programs that deal with such complexities. Rather than engaging in the kind of sex-negativity which so harms adults and children alike by teaching them to be ashamed of their own sexuality, harm reduction based education starts from the radical view that children are people, too.

A few immoderate things.

2010-09-19T17:33:00.000-07:00

I like Jon Stewart. As far as understatements go, that's a pretty big one. Like with any other human being, though, there are some things that I don't agree with him on. One of these times occurred recently, when he announced a rally to restore sanity, where sanity is defined as political centrism. Glenn Greenwald rather well argues why this is problematic, and so I don't wish to flog that dead horse any further. Rather, I want to emphasize a somewhat tangential point: that the truth isn't always in the middle.

Sometimes the extreme position is the only correct option, or even the only morally defensible one. While I don't deny that the centrist assertion that truth always lies between the extremes is a decent heuristic, I flatly deny that is is true in full generality.

Take the pope's visit to the UK, for instance. What Richard Dawkins said about the pope is surely not moderate, but a moderate response would put one in the unconscionable position of defending someone who, by all available evidence, knowingly and deliberately protected those priests that raped children in their charge.

Similarly, though it isn't moderate to insist that Bush should be tried as a war criminal for his role in the torture of prisoners of the United States, a moderate position is one in which the laws and treaties that protect prisoners are fungible. Such a position ultimately allows for more people, both innocent and criminal, to be exposed to inhumane treatment in the future.

Should we sacrifice religious freedom on the altar of moderation by taking a position less extreme than that the Park51 facility (whatever kind of facility you wish to call it) be allowed? Should we put moderation above the well-being of future generations by taking the moderate "wait-and-see" approach to climate change? Should we deny the human rights of GLBT people by taking the moderate "civil unions, not marriage" route?

Don't get me wrong, though-- moderation in one's opinions is a fine and wonderful thing at times. What I cannot abide by, however, is when moderation is allowed to be the goal. One's opinions should, I submit, be aligned with reality, whether that reality is moderate or not.

Academia and the unreal.

2010-09-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

A little while ago, someone offered me advice on how to get a job in the real world after grad school. This advice, though unsolicited, was undoubtedly well-intentioned, but hidden in the offer is the germ of an idea that I find quite poisonous. Implied is that the academic realm is somehow disjoint from the "real world." This phrase is often, in my experience, used in a condescending way to separate and denigrate various environments from some set of environments that are sufficiently "real" to merit recognition.

Consider one particularly harmful example of this. Since children are often told that things aren't like their school environment out there in the real world, reality as recognized by this phrase must surely exclude the first 20 or so years of our lives. Years in which we discover much about ourselves and in which our bodies change and betray us in myriad ways. Years in which we undergo challenges that we are, almost by definition, unprepared for. Years in which we experience emotions and pains which are all too real. To add to those burdens the condescending dismissal of unreality is a tragic perversion of the good intentions that must surely underlie the use of a phrase like "real world." What is seen by adults as a promise of a better tomorrow comes across as a failure to empathize with the problems of adolescence. This is why I call the ideas epitomized by the phrase "real world" poisonous: they pervert and distort our intentions and empathies.

How, then, does such a term come to be applied to academia? To many people not in academics, I suspect that the academic world is unfamiliar and arcane. Many people are not concerned with funding proposals, postdoc applications, tenure reviews, or any other of the myriad distractions from research. Even more fundamentally, the goals of an academic researcher are very different from the goals of most people employed in industry. It is all too easy, then, to fail to recognize these goals and concerns as being as real as those associated with other pursuits. Likewise, it is all too easy to compartmentalize the concerns of academics to some mythical ivory tower, locked away from daily life as surely as the princesses locked away in the towers of our more misogynistic fairy tales.

What could be more real than learning? In all walks of life, we must learn and grow to succeed, and it is this process that academia tries to incorporate and cultivate. When we lock this ideal, however imperfectly realized, out of our conception of the real world, we do ourselves a great disservice. Rather than responding to the foreignness of academia by drinking the poison of the real world, then, I encourage my friends and loved ones to ask questions of their academic friends. It can be difficult to bridge divides, to be sure, and those of us on the academia side of this divide aren't always the best at empathizing with the rest of society, but we can all do better than to dismiss so thoroughly the concerns of those around us.

The flip side of DBAD: we can call people dicks, too.

2010-09-06T19:38:00.000-07:00

Who knew that Mass Treble's (Twitter) Golden Rule, don't be a dick, would be so controversial? Even stranger is that, due to how the word "dick" is interpreted so widely as to include many things which I find to be quite positive, I find myself often arguing against how DBAD is implemented. That said, I do in general think that not being a dick is a good and laudable goal, so long as one keeps a reasonable definition of the term.

In fact, I think it's a laudable enough goal that I'm quite willing to ask others to not act in asinine ways towards me and (more importantly) those people around me that I care about. To take one specific example, I'm quite content to demand that people not be misogynistic dicks. I consider it to be quite dickish to take prudish, sex-negative views about women and impose them on the world around you. Over at Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse points out a few particularly appalling examples of this, including a picture that drives the point home:

Let me make this perfectly clear: if you are to escape being called a dick by people like me, you don't get to demand that women sit at the back of the bus any more than you get to demand that blacks do. I really don't give a flip if your religion says that you have the moral obligation to be dicks to those around you or not, so much as I care that this behavior causes real and physical harm to other human beings. If there is a more clear sign of being a dick than being willing to subjugate half of the human race to appease your own twisted morals, I don't know what it is.

At its most basic, much of why I write the words I write and spill the pixels that I spill over religion come down to the DBAD principle. Evidence such as these examples shows that religion is a rather efficient machine for either turning people into dicks, or at least amplifying dickish behavior by insulating it from analysis and criticism. After all, it takes religion to get one to say that maybe gay kids shouldn't be as protected from bullying as everyone else. It takes religion to lead otherwise decent people to oppose a lifesaving mode of defense against AIDS and other STDs. And so on, ad nauseum.

In short, if we're to really take seriously, Mass' Rule, then that doesn't mean that atheists and other freethinkers should shut up, but rather, that we should be more vocal than ever about diskish and unjust acts, whether religiously motivated or not.

On ideas.

2010-09-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, my blog posting has been slow as of late. Blame working on funding proposals, a lack of good sleep or the phase of the moon if you like. The real problem, though, has been one far more mundane and frustrating: a lack of good ideas.

Ideas are the currency of my career, really, along with hard work and technical skills. Some ideas can be turned into research directions, others into specific solutions to technical problems, and still others become blog posts. Research is, after all, a creative enterprise. What to do, then, when ideas run dry?

The short answer is that I don't think that ideas ever do run dry. We are surrounded by a whole ether of ideas, after all. The trick is finding those ideas which solve your problem, ideas which motivate you, ideas which others may find interesting. It is less, then, that I am short on ideas so much as I am short on ideas that are applicable to the tasks in front of me, including blogging.

Or is it that I am lacking the discipline and energy to refine those ideas into proper posts? After all, writing (like research) doesn't stop with ideas, as Gaiman so gracefully puts it in an essay on writing:

The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.
[Source: "Where Do You Get Your Ideas," an e-book extra to the Kindle edition of Anansi Boys.]

If there's one thing that life on the Internet teaches, it's that any idea is interesting when placed in the right context and explored with passion. For instance, it seems that much of science fiction works by exploring perhaps mundane ideas in fresh contexts and thus making them new, as Gaiman puts it. Snow Crash doesn't thrive because (to pick a small example out of many from that book) Neal Stephenson invented the idea of a gated community, so much as because he placed it in the context of extreme corporatism and factionalism and thus makes the idea new again in a particularly terrifying way. Manifold: Time isn't a wonderful read because Stephen Baxter invented the idea of the end of the world, but because he puts it in the context of a physically manifest observable and explores the consequences.

Certainly, authors such as Sky McKinnon write based on wonderful ideas, but I think that they have something else to teach us as well: that successful writing is the synthesis of ideas and a dogged enthusiasm for exploring ideas. In that way, writing, be it for a blog or a book, isn't so different from research, even if the tools for exploring the consequences of an idea are very different.

All this leaves me, however, with nary an excuse for my protracted blog silence. Ideas aren't my problem, after all. Oh, well. Maybe I should write a post about how ideas aren't my problem?

Much needed closure.

2010-09-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

Closure is an important concept in mathematics, and is deceptively simple. If you have a set of things and some operation acting on those things, then the closure of your set is the smallest set that contains your original set along with everything that operation gives you.

The words get in the way, though, so let's consider an example. If you have the numbers zero and one, then their closure under addition would be all positive integers. Why? Because you can get to any positive integer by adding one to itself over and over. For instance, 2 is in the closure, since addition produces 2 from our set: 1 + 1 = 2. By the same argument, 3 is in the closure since 1 + 2 = 3, and since 2 must be in our closure.

We say that this set is the closure of our original set since it is the smallest set which is, well, closed. If, in our previous example, we omitted the number 2, our set wouldn't be closed any more, since addition could take us outside of the set.

As of late, however, the way that mathematicians use the word closure has started to be seen well outside of mathematics. Witness the rise of "epistemic closure" (closely related to deductive closure) as a useful term in political science. The word finds much use even outside of mathematics, as it gets to the heart of a very powerful technique in rational thinking: asking what, given some tool, one can produce. In epistemic closure, the tool is reasoning itself, while in our more pedestrian example, our tool was basic addition. In both cases, however, what remains is the use of closure as a mechanism for understanding and characterizing an operation.

In the spirit, then, of exploring closure, I'd like to bring some much needed closure forward. Specifically, I'd like to consider a kind of causal closure. If we consider some set of events which may or may not be causally related, we can for any specific event ask what events may be caused and what other events may cause it. Both of these are a kind of operation; extrapolating both directions in time to understand the causal structure of your set of events. The causal closure, then, of a set of events is the full set of events which caused the original set, along with the full set of effects caused by these events.

Luckily, we already have a term for this kind of causal closure. What we mean when we say that two events are causally related is that they lie within the same universe, so that the universe can be thought of as the set of all events which are causally related to an event representing our powers of observation. Under this realization, if A causes B, then A cannot be in a different universe than B.

All this is well and good, but why do I bring it up now? In a recent post, I asserted that religious claims were of a material nature, and thus amenable to the methods of science. That this is the case can be easily seen by invoking a principle of causal closure; if religious claims include any causal relation to the material universe, then they must, by closure, be entirely about the material universe. Of course, that alone does not mean that such claims are subject to scientific understanding, but that is an argument I have made before and don't wish to repeat here. Rather, my intent was simply to bring some much needed closure to bear on an argument that has gone on too long.

What is a gate? (Part 1)

2010-08-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

It's been a bit since my last "what is" post, but I'd like to return to talking about science by taking a pause from my build-up to quantum states and quantum computation to instead discuss something more classical: the notion of a logic gate.

One way of modeling classical computation is as a sequence of operations performed on some data. We can then consider each operation independently. Just as we can build up complicated equations from simple arithmetic operations, these computational operations, typically called gates, can be used to build up arbitrarily complicated computations.

Take a specific example, the NOT gate, also written ¬. This gate takes a bit and produced a bit with the opposite value. Since each bit can only have one of two possible values (either 0 or 1), we can completely specify the behavior of the NOT gate by listing what it does to each of these inputs. That is, if I tell you that ¬ 0 = 1 and that ¬ 1 = 0, then in principle, I have told you everything that there is to know about the NOT gate. If this reminds you of a basis, then your intuition serves you well— we will explore that connection more in due time.

For now, though, I would like to discuss a few more examples of gates: the AND and OR gates, often written as ∧ and ∨, respectively (if these symbols seem arcane, it may think of them in terms of set unions and intersections). Each of these gates takes two bits as inputs and produces one output. AND produces 1 if and only if both its inputs are 1 (1 ∧ 1 = 1, 0 ∧ 0 = 0 ∧ 1 = 1 ∧ 0 = 0), while OR produces 1 if and only if at least one input is 1 (0 ∨ 0 = 0, 0 ∨ 1 = 1 ∨ 0 = 1 ∨ 1 = 1). Finally, the XOR gate (short for exclusive or and written ⊕) returns 1 if and only if exactly one input is 1 (0 ⊕ 0 = 1 ⊕ 1 = 0, 0 ⊕ 1 = 1 ⊕ 0 = 1).

With these four gates, we can build up any arbitrarily complicated Boolean function; that is, a function from strings of bits to a single bit. Functions returning multiple bits can in turn be built up by representing each output bit as a Boolean function. We could actually do with less kinds of gates, but that's besides the point. Rather, the point is that together, NOT, AND, OR and XOR are universal for classical computation.

It takes some effort to prove this, but an example helps to make things concrete. The full adder circuit in particular can be used to add two one-bit numbers, and is built up entirely from two XOR gates, two AND and one OR gate, as shown in this circuit diagram from Wikipedia. These full adders in turn can be combined to add arbitrarily long integers. From addition, one can get to subtraction and multiplication, demonstrating the usefulness of the gate model in capturing arithmetic.

Even more compellingly, we can efficiently simulate Turing machines with these few gates, meaning that NOT, AND, OR and XOR are at least as expressive as Turing machines. Thinking about gates, then, is a powerful way of thinking about classical computation. As we shall see, this power carries very nicely to the quantum case as well.

On loyalty of a peculiar kind.

2010-08-28T18:29:00.000-07:00

The Scientific American podcast highlighted today research showing that members of "Generation X" (why is that Godawful name still around?) are on average more loyal to religion than are members of their parents' generation. Setting aside the question of how reliable this report is, since there are very few details given, let us instead treat the article as a launching point for discussion.

Indeed, it is uncontroversial that loyalty to religion exists in some sense. What does such a loyalty mean, however? What courses of action are demanded by such a loyalty? This is at best a problematic question to answer, as it is belief in a set of material claims that may be taken as comprising a religion. Under this view, religions are not adopted as matters of principle, but rather as a matter of that belief. One may as well ask what a loyalty to The Lord of the Rings implies.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is a bizarre notion that one can be loyal or disloyal to a set of claims about material reality. Such claims are ideally decided by consulting that self-same material reality, rather than loyalty to one or another set of claims. One that is loyal to a set of religious claims is then someone that is compelled by this loyalty to assert the primacy of their claims over evidence. Such loyalty is distinct from loyalty to a person, ideal or value in that it cannot be a matter of principle without falling into the trap of argument by appeal to consequences.

This sort of religious loyalty is, on the other hand, one onto which principles can be grafted. If some of the material claims to a religion are that certain modes of conduct are inherently morally superior to others by divine edict, then adoption of principles reinforcing those modes of conduct is a consequence of loyalty to those claims. Since correspondence to reality is not demanded from these religious claims about reality, such claims may be manipulated so as to imply any of a wide range of mutually contradictory principles. That is, religious loyalty is not a matter of principle so much as a vessel into which principle can be poured.

Witness, for instance, the latest absurdity from Glenn Beck, his I Have A Scheme speech. As others have noted, the attendees were indeed fiercely loyal, but to no particular principle. Rather, the Tea Party, in buying into and expressing loyalty towards material claims that are demonstrably false, has made themselves into so many empty vessels into which the hateful principles of the GOP may be poured.

Just as with religious loyalty, this political loyalty neither demands nor exhibits correspondence with reality, neither demands nor exhibits principle. As such, it is difficult if not impossible to apply reason to these views. This sort of blind loyalty, made without deference to what actually is, must be seen as a problem if we are to progress in our moral thinking as a society.

All that is sacred.

2010-08-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

(adj) sacred (worthy of respect or dedication) "saw motherhood as woman's sacred calling" [WordNet]

Leaving aside the implicit misogyny of the example given, the citation from WordNet for the word "sacred" demonstrates something very important: we can divorce what it means to be sacred from any sort of religious sentiment. Indeed, if we are to leave irrationality behind us, I assert that we must do so. Thus, I'd like to talk a bit about what is sacred to me. That is, what I find to be inherently worthy of respect or dedication.

In that spirit, then, knowledge is sacred to me in ways that nothing else is. Were I to be asked to identify the most quintessentially defining aspect of all that is good about humanity, I would likely respond that our ability to accumulate and record knowledge is what allows us to transcend not only the ignorance into which we are all born, but also the limits of our physical brains. All other human achievements are enabled by our accrual of knowledge in ways that outlast any individual human. At once, the acquisition of knowledge is a highly individual and highly collective pursuit, epitomizing what it means to achieve something of permanence. Towers crumble, words remain.

It is difficult for me to adequately justify my valuation of knowledge as uniquely sacred, as it is fundamental to the person that I've become. As someone that values rationality, however, I must work to increasingly do just that. If this valuation cannot be supported on its own merits, then it is no better than faith and other such anti-virtues. That said, I am in the awkward position that every rational person eventually finds themselves in of not knowing all the answers. Like everything else in my life, this valuation must be amenable to rational analysis, and yet I must have some notions which guide my actions in the interim. Put differently, I must employ some set of heuristics that I use to evaluate both my own choices and those of the society around me. These heuristics must then be refined by learning additional facts and must be discarded to the extent that they contradict reality.

On a more tangential note, I tend to suspect that it is these heuristics that often get confused with religious-minded beliefs, driving the "science is faith" fallacy that I find so detestable. The key difference is that the heuristics adopted by someone that values rationality are recognized as being mere approximations, and thus are malleable to the extent that the underlying reality is not known. Thus, while such heuristics superficially resemble beliefs, they are quite different in practice.

Of course, it's very easy to simply say that something is sacred; a more pressing question for someone dedicated to rationality and materialism is what this assertion implies. A heuristic which does not either directly imply action or imply other values and heuristics which in turn imply action is by hypothesis a vacuous and useless heuristic. Exploring this notion, then, consider what a heuristic of sacred knowledge leads me to aspire to.

Though it is somewhat circular, the first and perhaps most important consequence of this heuristic is the valuation of science, the formalization of the pursuit of knowledge. Disentangling this apparent bit of circular reasoning would take me still further afield, so I will be content to leave it for now with the claim that the sacred-knowledge heuristic and the scientific method are synergistic rather than truly circularly dependent.

Another important consequence of this heuristic is the additional heuristic that knowledge should be shared-- after all, knowledge locked away is knowledge that cannot help in the further pursuit of other knowledge. This is a large part of why the open access and open source movements excite me so, and why I oppose the locking away of human knowledge behind paywalls, military secrecy or other such artificial barriers. Additionally, knowledge kept secret is knowledge that is much more difficult to preserve.

With new approaches to information storage, computation and communication, we are blessed (if you'll forgive the pun and not read too much into it) with new opportunities to safeguard our knowledge against the relentless march of time. To exercise these opportunities, however, archivists must be recognized as a critical part of our societal infrastructure and knowledge must be accessible for preservation.

While I could continue in this vein, I think that this short exploration of the consequences of my sacred-knowledge heuristic is sufficient to demonstrate an essential point: rationality requires rather than precludes the adoption of strong principles to be applied to the world around us, insofar as these principles are derived from sources amenable to rational analysis. We cannot afford for religion to maintain a cultural monopoly on the respect and dedication that underlie the word "sacred," but rather must build our own sacredness in a rational way. All that is sacred, in short, must still lie within the realm of that which can be reasoned about if we are to maintain the primacy of rationality.

Poisoned ethics and used video games.

2010-08-26T19:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks to @saverqueen (blog) for inspiring this discussion.

Recently, I bought some used video games. I love buying used, as it saves me money and keeps perfectly fine games out of landfills, not to mention preventing more from having to be printed in the first place. These days, at least half of the video games I buy are used. Similar goes for me and movies.

With this particular purchase, however, some mixed feelings were brought forth. You see, these games were purchased as a gift. It seems almost instinctual that one doesn't give used games, movies, books, etc. as gifts. To do so is almost as bad a sin as playing with a toy before gifting it, or wearing clothes intended for someone else. At least, that's what the societal norm seems to be. Love is buying new things, goes the chorus.

I think we must, however, take a step back and ask if that is really the kind of ethical norm that we wish to adopt as our own. Why should our love for one another be expressed by continuing a destructive consumeristic cycle, where newness is its own reward? It is not even consumerism itself that I find so objectionable as the pointlessness of making consumerism the goal rather than the means. The philosophy of buying new for its own sake seems dangerously close to the vapid philosophy once espoused by a classmate of mine: "the meaning of life is to have kids!"

This is why my family has made a decision: used gifts are just fine with us! That decision affords me new opportunities to find unexpected gifts, such as classic video games for my brother that he wouldn't have found on his own, or out-of-print novels for my parents. Occasionally, yes, I do buy new things as gifts, even within the family, but when I do, I'd like to think it's because it's my decision to and not because I have let my sense of ethics become poisoned by the obsession with a growth-based economy. I give gifts to loved ones to bring them happiness; isn't that enough?

Accommodationism: A vexing asymmetry.

2010-08-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

In my last argumentative post, I slipped in a bit of a sarcastic point at the end that I feel is worth treating more seriously. In that post, I said that:

It is truly unfortunate, however, that [his] approach to arguing for this controversial claim is to build such silly and distorted strawmen of atheists who might otherwise be more inclined to ally themselves with him in fighting the woo that he so rightfully expresses a passion to fight.

When I originally put those words to pixels, I intended only a cheap laugh at the thesis that atheists should keep quiet so as to not scare off the religious from the goal of (for instance) science education. This thesis, broadly called accommodationism by its detractors, including myself, has been been quite pervasive as of late (making it all the way to the AAAS, for instance), and has been the center of much discussion.

What bothers me most about accommodationism, however, is something that is too seldom remarked upon: its strange and vexing asymmetry. While it is often claimed that anti-religious sentiment scares off the religious from worthwhile causes, irregardless of how well or poorly it is supported by rational argument, I have never heard it argued that people need to be more accepting of atheists for fear of scaring us away from these same worthwhile causes. Does it not cause accommodationists consternation that referring to "fundamentalist atheists" may be the precise kind of incivility that that they fear poisons communities? Anecdotally, at least, I can confidently state that I have a harder time partaking in communities where my atheism is rejected out of hand and treated with derision rather than argued against.

Don't get me wrong, however, as I wouldn't dream of asking for special privilege and exemption from criticism. Criticism, when delivered in an honest and clear manner, is the lifeblood of an intellectual community. Rather, I find disturbing the comparative lack of concern at the derision pointed at atheists that one would expect from an intellectually consistent position. Is it the case, then, that atheists are seen as less desirable by such accommodationists than are the religious? Is it that atheists are seen as a more direct threat to the goals of promoting science in society than are the true fundamentalists?

There is another possibility that seems much more palatable to me. Atheists are seen as mature enough being able to take such derision in stride along with the criticism. For obvious and self-centered reasons, I should like to think that this is the case. Why, then, is the assumption that people of faith are less able to deal with both legitimate criticism and the sort of derision that comes with any emotional issue? Such an assumption seems to me to be more insulting than any of the derision thrown about by the atheists.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I think we should not let the valid and laudable pursuit of civility and mutual respect lead us into the sort of asymmetric mire that is accommodationism.

What is a matrix? (Part 2)

2010-08-22T17:18:00.000-07:00

Now we have a new kind of mathematical toy to play with, the matrix. As I said in the previous post, the easiest way to get a sense of what a matrices do is to use them for a while. In this post, then, I just want to go over a couple useful examples.
Suppose you wish to make all vectors in ℝ² longer or shorter by some factor s ≠ 0. You can represent this by a function f(v) = sv. With a moment's work, we can verify that this is a linear function because of the distributive law. Thus, we can represent f by a matrix. To do so, remember that we calculate f for each element of a basis. For simplicity, we will use the elementary basis {x, y}. Then, f(x) = sx and f(y) = sy. By using coordinates, we can write this as f([1; 0]) = [s; 0] and f([0; 1]) = [0; s]. The matrix representation of f then becomes:

Note that if s = 1, the function f doesn't do anything. Representing f(v) = v as a matrix, we get the very special matrix called the identity matrix, written as I, 𝟙 or 𝕀:

The identity matrix has the property that for any matrix M, M𝟙 = 𝟙M = M, much like the number 1 acts.

Of course, there's no requirement that we stretch x and y by the same amount. The matrix [a 0; 0 b], for instance, stretches x by a and y by b. If one or both of a and b is negative, then we flip the direction of x or y, respectively, since -v is the vector of the same length as v but pointing in the opposite direction.

A more complicated example shows how matrices can "mix up" the different parts of a vector by rotating one into the other. Consider, for instance, a rotation of the 2D plane by some angle θ (counterclockwise, of course). This is more difficult to write down as a function, and so a picture may be useful:

By referencing this picture, we see that f(x) = cos θ x + sin θ y, while f(y) = - sin θ x + cos θ y. Thus, we can obtain the famous rotation matrix:

As a sanity check, note that if θ = 0, then R_θ = 𝟙, as we would expect for a matrix that "does nothing."
One very important note that needs to be made about matrices is that multiplication of matrices is not always (or even often) commutative. To see this we let the matrix S swap the roles of x and y; that is, S = [0 1; 1 0]. Then, consider A = SR_θ and B = S. Since applying S twice does nothing (that is, S² = 𝟙), we have that BA = R_θ. On the other hand, if we calculate AB = SR_θS, we find that AB = R_-θ:

(Sorry for the formatting problems with that equation.)We conclude that AB ≠ BA unless sin θ = 0, neatly demonstrating that not all the typical rules of multiplication carry over to matrices.

I'll leave it here for now, but hopefully seeing a few useful matrices makes them seem less mysterious. Until next time!

What is a matrix? (Part 1)

2010-08-21T19:47:00.000-07:00

Functions are an important tool in mathematics, and are used to represent many different kinds of processes in nature. Like so many mathematical objects, however, functions can be difficult to use without making some simplifying assumptions. One particularly nice assumption that we will often make is that a function is linear in its arguments:

One can think of a linear function as one that leaves addition and scalar multiplication alone. To see where the name comes from, let's look at a few properties of a linear function f:

This implies that f(0) = 0 for any linear function. Next, suppose that f(x) = 1 for some x. Then:

This means that if f represents a line passing through 0 having slope m = 1 / x.

So what does all this have to do with matrices? Suppose we have a linear function which takes vectors as inputs. (To avoid formatting problems, I'll write vectors as lowercase letters that are italicized and underlined when they appear in text, such as v.) In particular, let's consider a vector v in ℝ². If we use the {x, y} basis discussed last time, then we can write v = ax + by. Now, suppose we have a linear function f : ℝ² → ℝ² (that means that takes ℝ² vectors as inputs and produces ℝ² vectors as output). We can use the linear property to specify how f acts on any arbitrary vector by just specifying a few values:

This makes it plain that f(x) and f(y) contain all of the necessary information to describe f. Since each of these may itself be written in the {x, y} basis, we may as well just keep the coefficients of f(x) and f(y) in that basis:

We call the object F made up of the coefficients of f(x) and f(y) a matrix, and say that it has four elements. The element in the ith row and jth column is often written F_ij. Application of the function f to a vector v can now be written as the matrix F multiplied by the column vector representation of v:

We can take this as defining how a matrix gets multiplied by a vector, in fact. This approach gives us a lot of power. For instance, if we have a second linear function g : ℝ² → ℝ², then we can write out the composition (g ∘ f)(v) = g(f(v)) in the same way:

That means that we can find a matrix for g ∘ f from the matrices for g and f. The process for doing so is what we call matrix multiplication. Concretely, if we want to find (AB)_ij, the element in the ith row and jth column of the product AB, we take the dot product of the ith row of A and the jth column of B, where the dot product of two lists of numbers is the sum of their products:

To find the dot product of any two vectors, we write them each out in the same basis and use this formula. It can be shown that which basis you use doesn't change the answer.

If this all seems arcane, then try reading through it a few times, but rest assured, it makes a lot of sense with some more practice. Next time, we'll look at some particular matrices that have some very useful applications.

Rebuttal: The Difference Between Religion and Woo

2010-08-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

I have tried to resist writing about science and religion for awhile; at least, dial back the frequency a bit. My ideas are not hidden, but they're also not terribly unique. Much of the time, I suspect my voice only marginally adds to the conversation, if at all.

All this aside, there are times when I find it extremely difficult to resist. It is particularly hard for me to let something lay when someone else makes an issue of it. This is precisely the case of Rob Knop's latest post, in which he attempts to insert a wedge between religion and woo while still maintaining the validity and importance of science. His post is such a quintessential example of that protected status for religion that I find so harmful to our society that I find myself drawn into yet another Web-delivered argument. I don't write this post with the hopes that my argument with Knop will go any better than last time, but rather because it is important to me that I try.

Without further ado, then, let us look at what Knop has to say. It's a long post, so by necessity I will pick out the bits I feel most deserving of response-- go read it for the full context of his remarks.

Why do I mention this? Because I see a lot of those who call themselves skeptics making exactly the same mistake— judging another field of intellectual inquiry on what they believe to be the one true way of reason. They dismiss things as trivial or childish based on criteria that fail to be relevant to the field of human intellectual activity they’re trivializing. Specifically, there are a lot of people out there who will imply, or state, that the only form of knowledge that really can be called knowledge is scientific knowledge; that if it is not knowledge gained through the scientific method, it’s ultimately all crap.

At this point, Knop has made it clear that he intends on revisiting his false equivocation between religious fundamentalists and "fundamentalist atheists" (full disclosure: Knop apparently considers me to be a member of this group). By using phrases like "one true way of reason," Knop conveniently ignores that skepticism, atheism and rationality have no central dogma beyond a sort of pragmatic honesty: if you are going to claim that your methodology (or way of reason, in Knop's vernacular) works, then it had damn well better work. As a part of that, yes, you must be able to verify that your "way of knowing" produces useful results, or else you cannot legitimately say that your methodology is a valid one.

The scientific method, then, which Knop elevates to the level of dogmatism in order to build his straw man, is not a dogma at all but a formalization of those ways of learning that have been shown to work. Far from being immutable or the "one true" way, science is adaptive and self-correcting. Already, then, Knop's equivocation fails on the basis that he's not describing skepticism as is espoused by the atheists he is so reviled by, but rather his own funhouse mirror version. We've got a lot of post left to cover, though, so let's press on:

What makes Robert Frost so much more important to human culture than the stories I wrote when I was 7? It’s not a scientific question, but it is a question that is trivially obvious to those who study literature, culture, and history. And, yet, using my 7-year-old story to dismiss all of literature as crap makes as much sense as using the notion of believing in a teapot between Earth and Mars as a means of dismissing all of religion.

If there is one sure way of pissing me off, it's to tell me that something "isn't a scientific question." Given that science is the methodology of pragmatism, such claims are no more than a way of giving up reasoned analysis. As someone who has made a career out of cultivating and exploring his own curiosity, few things are more offensive to me than someone putting such ultimate limits along my path. I don't expect that Knop refrain from doing things that offend me, however, as that would make the world a much more boring place--- rather, I would hope that as a fellow scientist, Knop would feel the same curiosity and lust for knowledge that renders such a claim so offensive to me.

The burden, however, of demonstrating that analyzing Frost versus the 7-year-old writings of Knop lies within the realm of science is one that I shall have to take on to truly make my point. In that vein, then, note that in addition to the "hard" sciences such as physics and chemistry, we have a full array of social sciences that are dedicated to applying scientific (that is, useful) methods to social questions. Such questions inevitably deal with the behaviors of entities each composed of many more than 10²³ particles, so that the "hard" sciences are completely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the questions. Thus, we have found it useful to develop alternate methodologies that sacrifice some degree of exactness and objectivity in exchange for an enhanced ability to cope with such overwhelming questions as that proposed by Knop.

Ultimately, though, we must expect that the methods of analyzing Frost must lie within science for one simple reason: Frost existed within this reality, was a physical being and produced tangible objects that are amenable to study. Frost was, just like you or I, a citizen of the physical universe. Even if one posits the existence of a soul to try and escape this fact, the soul then influences the physical world by some mechanism that is not completely random, and thus can be examined. Knop's question is as scientific a question as any that could be asked, in that it is a question that concerns physical objects and that can be answered using useful and robust methodologies.

Of course, this is all a distraction from Knop's apparent point to mentioning Frost and his younger self. Rather, Knop accuses those who make reference to Russell's teapot of being akin to those strawmen that would discard Frost as useless due to the apparent uselessness of stories written by seven-year-old children. Indeed, Knop makes this accusation quite clear:

If you cannot see the difference between Russell’s teapot and the great world religions, then you’re no more qualified to talk about religion than the fellow who thinks that cultural bias is the only reason any of us believe in the Big Bang is qualified to talk about cosmology.

Pray tell, then, what is the difference between Russell's teapot and, just to make the discussion concrete, Christianity? Besides, of course, that the teapot is a gendanken intended to provide an easy example of the kinds of arguments that can and should be made against religion. All of Knop's strawmen aside, I have never heard of anyone claiming that Russell's teapot invalidates all of the world's religions, but rather that the gendanken explains why we should insist upon claims being testable. Religion is, in actuality, a complex and multi-faceted thing which many atheists and skeptics take a great deal of effort to understand. That along the way we find such examples as Russell's teapot useful is far from using the teapot as "a means of dismissing all of religion."

If Knop is interested in dragging atheists through the mud for overly reductionist arguments, then perhaps he should start by not reducing us to such a caricature of our actual arguments. That would include, for instance, not saying things like this:

There are quite a number of skeptics who openly say that they cannot see the difference between religion and belief in UFOs, Homeopathy, or any of the rest of the laundry list of woo that exists in modern culture.

There is of course a difference between religion and homeopathy: there's a hell of a lot more religious people in the world. Mind you, that's not the only difference, but the most immediately important one. As a consequence, religion alone has earned itself a special status in our society as immune to rational analysis and criticism. The point that I and others that agree with me tend to make isn't that religion and woo are the same, but rather that they draw from there is an important commonality to be found in their mutual rejection of rationality. This hypothetical reductionist that is blind to anything but that commonality, important as it is, is no more representative of actual atheists than any other strawman presented thus far.

On the other hand, Knop pretty much nails it with his next claim:

The assertion is that being religious is a sign of a deep intellectual flaw, that these people are not thinking rationally, not applying reason.

Yes, that is precisely what I have said here and in many other venues, though presented in much more judgmental terms than I find are appropriate to the assertion being made. Rather, I would put it differently by asserting that religion is not philosophically compatible or logically consistent with rationality.

Of course, the part of this assertion that people repeat far less often is that religion is not unique in that regard. There are many other intellectual "flaws," a great many of which I will admit that I am afflicted by. Why I focus on religion, then, is that it is relatively unique in being celebrated and enshrined despite that it is defunct as a means of learning-- of accumulating accurate knowledge.

I could go into much more detail on this point, but for now let me leave it for now, as I would like to get onto Knop's next point:

It’s fine to believe [that religion is a sign of a deep intellectual flaw], just as it’s fine to believe that the Big Bang theory is a self-delusional social construction of a Judeo-Christian culture. But it’s also wrong.

Read that again, please. Knop is saying that it is fine to believe something that is wrong, and is it is with that assertion that I most passionately disagree with him. In my life, I strive to ensure that I believe only things which are true, and so I will admit that I have very little basis for understanding Knop's assertion here. Even moreso, when Knop continues thusly:

Yes, there is absolutely no scientific reason to believe in a God or in anything spiritual beyond the real world that we can see and measure with science.

This is a statement which is not new to me, but which I have made no recent progress towards understanding. I doubt that Knop intends to say that his god is impotent in that it is incapable of affecting the material world, and so I presume that Knop is asserting the existence of an untestable and yet still physical phenomenon. As I said before, however, this is where I must take earnest and profound offense: learning does not stop where it is convenient for the religious, and so we should not impose a priori limits on understanding the world just because of someone's god. Either Knop's god is impotent or it is material in the sense that it affects the material world; if we insist upon the latter, than the methods of science (sometimes called "methodological naturalism" in this context) must be able to study the patterns by which his god affects the world.

It is in the context of this assertion that I find Knop's closing comments so difficult to agree with:

But that does not mean that those who do believe in some of those things can’t be every bit as much a skeptic who wants people to understand solid scientific reasoning as a card-carrying atheist.

Knop has admitted in his post that there are a priori and impregnable limits to the limits of rationality, something which I do not admit or agree with. In doing so, there is at least one "bit" with which I am more willing to be a skeptic than is Knop. While overall, Knop may be more or less skeptical than I am (I really don't know which is the case), I cannot agree with the claim that his endorsing of religion is compatible with the skepticism he practices elsewhere in his life.

It is truly unfortunate, however, that Knop's approach to arguing for this controversial claim is to build such silly and distorted strawmen of atheists who might otherwise be more inclined to ally themselves with him in fighting the woo that he so rightfully expresses a passion to fight.

Note: Rob Knop said a great many things in his post I did not address, in the interests of brevity (believe it or not). Please don't take this posting as being a fair summary of the entirety of his argument, as it is intended only as a response to those points I found most objectionable.

Role for initiative.

2010-08-19T20:59:00.000-07:00

Since I can't resist doing more cultural and philosophical blogging, I figure I should chime in on one more of the recent topics to set the Internet abuzz. In particular, Greta Christina wrote a pair of excellent articles on ten unfair and sexist things expected of men (part 1, part 2). As is her custom, Greta Christina nails beautifully the points that she attempted to hit in her columns. For my part, then, I'd like to expound just a bit, and to be presumptuous enough to add a stupid thing of my own to the list of stupid things society expects of men.

Preemptive Apology: The rest of this post will be unintentionally heteronormative, as that is the set of experience from which I can best draw. As such, I apologize to those outside the narrow range of sexual identities discussed here for neglecting their experiences.

To put it bluntly, modern society still seems (anecdotally, anyway) to maintain the antiquated expectation that men take the initiative in forming relationships. It is common that we put the pressure on men to initiate relationships ("have you asked her out yet?"), and that we encourage women to wait. While this standard is manifestly unfair to women, as it strips them of yet mode of personal decision making, I posit that it is just as manifestly unfair to men. Taking the first step is bloody hard, after all. You must be willing to put your feelings on the line, to be honest in the face of intimidating awkwardness, and perhaps most frighteningly, to be wrong about your feelings.

All these is leaving aside, of course, the mire of ambiguities and potential misinterpretations built up from cultural expectations of a male privileged society. In any action, one must take into account the cultural context of that action in order to respect the humanity of those around them. It is no different in the case of romantic initiative, save for that the context is that much more overwhelming.

Thankfully, we see the signs of this unfair standard starting to break down, as both men and women alike are encouraged to seek the pleasure of another person's company. In time, then, and with the introspection granted by such discussions as that started by Greta Christina, perhaps we can decouple the role from the initiative.

Looking back at what is.

2010-08-19T19:56:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks, I've tried to tunnel through the potential barriers to actual science blogging, with mixed success. One of my bigger oversights thus far has been to omit any sort of a "big picture" from my posts, leaving them as little islands in a vast sea of scientific ideas. Today, I'd like to correct that.

My most immediate goal in science blogging has been to explain how physical states function in the beautiful formalism of quantum mechanics. The language of quantum mechanics, however, is one of probabilities, of complex numbers and of linear algebra. Arguably the most fundamental part of the language of quantum mechanics, linear algebra may be roughly thought of as the study of vectors, and how they transform. As I shall discuss in a future post, by using the idea of a basis, we can represent a special kind of vector transformation by an object called a matrix (more generally, an operator). Thus, what we have discussed thus far is not a set of disparate islands so much as a set of stepping stones. If you prefer a more concrete metaphor, we have poured a foundation for future discussions, including a discussion of the quantum state itself.

Once we have the idea of a quantum state, the horizon opens wide for exploration. The quantum state gives us a language in which we can understand seemingly arcane consequences of a world described by quantum mechanics, such as entanglement or superposition. With the formal tools of mathematics at our disposal, we can overcome the limitations of our intuition, so that we can understand even such tricky concepts as these.

One downside to my stepping-stone approach, however, is to seemingly put the concept of a quantum state on a pedestal, inaccessible without a high degree of mathematical maturity. Little could be further from the case. Indeed, the mathematics with which we understand quantum states are not so difficult as they are esoteric. It is my own opinion that these areas of math need not be esoteric, save for that it has been arbitrarily decided upon (at least in my home, the United States) that Math Is Hard, and that concepts such as those discussed here Should Be Left To the Professionals. Bollocks. We live in a probabilistic world, and one in which statistics guide nearly every aspect of society, so why should understanding probability be so inaccessible? While complex numbers are not so manifestly real, even to the point that i is called the imaginary unit, it takes but a small amount of study to see that the complex numbers form an integral part of how we describe reality. Similarly, the concept of a vector may seem too far removed from reality for the layman to pursue, but in many ways, vectors formalize and encode much of our intuition about geometry, and are just as accessible as the sort of geometry that is taught in many grade schools.

No, quantum states are there for those who want them. My goal is to bring the concepts just a little bit closer, and to let the mathematical beauty underlying them shine through just a little bit brighter. In doing so, I won't always go from point to point in most straightforward way, but I ask your patience, for I am going somewhere. With a bit of looking back at what is, I hope you'll agree that we're going somewhere interesting.

What is a basis?

2010-08-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Consider a vector. Just to make things concrete, consider a vector on the 2-D plane. In fact, let's consider this one (call it v⃑):

It's a vector, to be sure, but it's hardly clear how one is supposed to work with it. It doesn't make sense to pull out a ruler and pencil every time we want to add our vector to something; mathematics is supposed to be a model of the world, and thus we should be able to understand things about that model without recourse to physical measurements. To solve this problem for vectors on the plane, we can introduce two new vectors, x̂ and ŷ, then use vector addition to write v⃑ as a sum:

Now we can write v⃑ = ax̂ + bŷ̂, which doesn't at first seem to buy us much. Note, however, that we can write any vector on the 2D plane as a sum of these two new vectors in various linear combinations. Mathematically, we write this as ℝ² = span {x̂, ŷ}. Whenever a space can be written this way for some set of vectors B, we say that B is a basis for the space.

Once we have a basis picked out, we can work with the coefficients (a and b in our example) instead of the vector itself, as they completely characterize the vector. For example, adding vectors becomes a matter of adding their respective coefficients.

In spaces other than the 2-D plane, we can also apply the same idea to find bases for representing vectors. Consider, for instance, the space of column vectors such as [a; b] (pretend they're stacked in a column, OK?). Then, a perfectly fine basis would be the set:

It's easy to see that we can write any other 2-dimensional column vector as a sum of the form a[1; 0] + b[0; 1] = [a; 0] + [b; 0] = [a; b].

A point that can get lost in this kind of discussion, however, is that there's absolutely nothing special about the bases I've given here as examples. We could just as well used [1; 1] and [1; -1] as a basis for column vectors, or just as well used a different pair of vectors in the plane:

Put differently, a basis is a largely arbitrary choice that you make when working with vectors. The relevant operations work regardless of what basis you use, since each of the vectors in a basis can itself be expanded. For example, [1; 0] = ½([1;1] + [1; -1]) and [0; 1] = ½([1; 1] - [1; -1]), so that we have a way of converting from a representation in the {[1; 0], [0; 1]} basis to the {[1; 1], [1; -1]} basis.

While there is much, much more to be said on the topic of bases for vectorspaces, I'm happy to say a few words about bases. As we shall see when we get into discussing linear operations, the existence of bases for vectorspaces is a large part of what gives us so much power in linear algebra. We shall need this power in the quantum realm, as linear algebra may well be said to be the language of quantum mechanics. Hopefully I'll get a few more words in on the subject before my vacation!

What are vectors?

2010-08-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

As I've said before, science is social-- oops. Wrong mantra. What I meant to say is that vectors are an abstract way of describing a pattern. Specifically, the vectorspace axioms formally describe a kind of mathematical object, the vector, that encapsulates the geometric and algebraic properties of a large class of seemingly disparate objects. By using the vectorspace axioms, we will be able see that lists of numbers such as are vectors, as are arrows on the 2D plane.

Rather than describe how to do so myself, though, I will try something different. Vectors are important in much of physics, and so lots of people have already written much about them. Thus, for the bulk of the work in describing vectors, I will defer to these other writings. A very physics-oriented approach can be found over at Dot Physics, starting with a trig-based introduction to vectors, followed by a discussion of how to represent vectors. An alternate physics-motivated discussion of vectors can be found at HyperPhysics.

For the more mathematically motivated amongst us, Wikipedia has a good page describing a very special family of vector spaces called ℝⁿ that is used to describe points in Euclidean space. MathWorld has a few good articles on vectors, including a technical definition and listing of properties and a more concise listing of the vectorspace axioms. Finally, the Unapologetic Mathematician derives vectorspaces from a more general construction called a module (warning: not for the feint of math).

To understand why we care about vectors in quantum information and computation, however, takes one more observation. A quantum state can be written as a linear combination of some set of basis states. For example, an arbitrary qubit state can be written as . This important property means that quantum states are a kind of vector in what we call a Hilbert space. This has some profound implications for how we think of and manipulate quantum states, as we shall explore in forthcoming posts.

Joining the fray, despite better judgment.

2010-08-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

After reading Jerry Coyne's take on the NYC mosque project known as Cordoba House, I feel compelled to contribute my own unsolicited views. Let me be perfectly (and perhaps painfully) clear on this: I do not support the building of this mosque any more than I support the building of any other mosque, church, temple or other monument to that source of perpetual irrationality that is religion. Of course, what's brilliant about living in a country that respects human rights is that they do not need my support to build their mosque any more than, say, a Catholic group needs my support to continue expanding that particular institution.

There is an inherent and celebrated right to express viewpoints, including those that I find deplorable and unconscionable, and I am not about to stop celebrating this right simply because of some contrived notion of "ground zero" as being somehow sacred, as is currently being pushed by the right-wingers in my home country. My personal revulsion at a religious institution that offers no better than a compromise with the hateful and inhumane extremes of the worst and most fundamentalist strains of religious practice do not figure in to the equation at all. I cannot, by the same reasoning, let the hatred expressed as an article of faith by the Mormon church in the recent California Proposition 8 debacle lead me to reject the inherent rights of Mormons to practice their faith.

Rather, as I have said before and will continue to say, such institutions are made irrelevant through eroding the cultural support for irrationality. The law has no place in deciding questions of this kind of cultural imperative-- not even zoning laws. To throw away the recognition of fundamental human rights in a case like this is nothing other than embracing the very irrationality that I argue is so damaging.

Note: Thank you to the person who helped me perfect the writing on this one. Left anonymous for search engine reasons.

Intuition, mathematics and the conspicuous absence of "vs."

2010-08-13T20:33:00.000-07:00

I am now at the point in my academic career where some people see fit to ask me for advice. As shocking as this change is to me, I have found that when people ask me for advice, they mean it sincerely and take my advice seriously. It is thus incumbent upon me to be just as serious and sincere in what advice I give. Tonight, I'd like to ponder one particular kind of advice I have found myself giving in recent weeks.

In physics, we use mathematics. A lot. Math is the language of physics and the method by which our science is performed. How, then, can physics ever advance in directions unanticipated by math? Perhaps more to the point, since mathematical thinking is not inherent but a skill, how can we check ourselves against mistakes in our mathematics? In physics, we often find that intuition is the answer to these problems. A good physicist will have developed a keen intuition that guides them to new and novel discoveries, checks them against mistakes and that helps with the interpretation of very abstract concepts.

This answer, as correct as it may be, is nonetheless incomplete, however. Our intuitions are ill-equipped to deal with phenomena outside the "middle world" in which nothing is too big, too small or too fast. Thus, when we first encounter quantum mechanics, for instance, our intuitions often betray us, leading us to reject such beautiful facets of the theory as entanglement. As we learn, we must fight our intuitions as much as we utilize them.

It is common to paint this quandary as being about intuition versus mathematical truth, but herein lies my perhaps not-so-humble advice: trust your intuition, but trust the mathematics more. Our intuitions are wonderful tools for doing science, but at the end of the day, it is mathematics upon which our theories must be founded. When we encounter something unintuitive, it does indeed behoove us to exercise extra caution and skepticism, but these must ultimately give way to experiment and to theory.

As we learn to put our trust (not faith) in the explanatory power of mathematics and the veracity of our experiments, then we can build up a new intuition that serves us more faithfully. In short, by trusting in mathematics, we turn that most admirable of human qualities to our intuitions: the capacity for self-improvement. Rather than thinking of intuition and mathematical truth as being at odds, we can see conflicts between these as opportunities to learn and to improve. The two tools, when used to their fullest, work together in a virtuous cycle that results in the expansion of knowledge.

All our relations laid bare.

2010-08-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

Update: Thank you to Diandra for the kind words about this post!

The Internet is abuzz recently with a depressing bit of news about the state of math education in the United States: the vast majority of adults in the US do not understand what the equals sign means. For a particularly good take on this, please see the excellent article on Cocktail Party Physics. As for my part, I'd like to take this as an opportunity to expand on a point that the author, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, made in the Cocktail Party post. Specifically, I want to elaborate on the use of the equals sign to indicate a relation.

Fundamental to mathematics is the idea of a relation, which is a formal way of stating that two objects are related in some specific way. For instance, the object "2 + 3" is related to the object "5" by the equality. This notion, however, can hide that something very important has occurred. We have taken a conceptual process, addition, and restated it in terms of a statement about static relations. No matter what I do, I cannot break the relation "2 + 3 = 5." By contrast, if I constrain myself to thinking about the addition process, then it is harder to separate that statement about Platonic ideals from the perhaps imperfect implementation of the addition process. The equality relation, then, tells us about what is.

To take a tangent for a moment, mathematics can be thought of as the process of identifying and abstracting patterns. The concept of addition, for instance, is an abstract way of discussing and modeling a very common pattern in the natural world. We need not specify whether we are adding apples or planets; the pattern is the same. Thus, taking the relational view is a natural step in this methodology of abstraction, as relations tell us about the patterns that we can identify in other patterns. We recognize that the pattern "three objects" is indistinguishable from the pattern "one object and two objects added together," and so we say that these two patterns are equal to each other. In doing so, we make no statement about which pattern precedes which in a process, meaning that we can represent the "three objects" pattern as the "1 + 2 objects" pattern should we find the latter more convenient.

Of course, processes exist, and so mathematics would be much less useful were it not able to describe them. One may well point out, for instance, that the concept of a function has a very clean intuitive description as a mathematical formalization of a process. That is, the expression "f(x)" means "take x and do f to it." Notice, however, that we ultimately rely on the idea of a relation to make sense of functions. We say things like "y = f(x)," meaning that the result of f acting upon x is related to y such that the two objects are indistinguishable. We can thus remove any notion of dynamics from our description, focusing on the pattern that our process introduces. One can even go as far as to think of a function f as a kind of relation between other objects, so that "x f y" means that the objects x and y are related by the action of f.

This shift to relational thinking is very powerful, and underlies not only much of mathematics, but also much of our language. When I say "I am Chris," there is no naming process implied, but only the statement that the concepts "I" and "Chris" are related by the verb "to be." That is, in announcing my name, I am relating the concepts of self and name. Recognizing this has been a boon to the Semantic Web, and is used to express concepts in terms of abstract relations, such as is done in Notation3. The entire concept of the World Wide Web comes back to the concept of a very special relation known as the hyperlink.

Understanding the notion of a relation can be seen to be critical to understanding the means by which we understand and model the world around us. A key part of being human is our capacity to identity patterns and relationships between objects around us, and it is precisely this capacity that we bring to bear in mathematics.

PS: This is why ":=" is often preferred over "=" for indicating "set equal to" by mathematicians.

The Power of Conversation

2010-08-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

Today, I had a conversation with a friend of mine. One of those wonderful, roaming conversations that managed to touch both on the merits of various tabletop roleplaying game systems and on the utility of deriving quantum mechanics from quantum field theory. You know, the kinds of conversations that you can have with awesome people. Along the way, we spent a while discussing a topic near and dear to my blogging interests: science and rationality in society.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we agreed on most of what we talked about with respect to this important topic. Looking back has gotten me thinking about the pragmatic value of keeping the rationality conversation alive, even with like-minded people. There are many reasons that often come up in such meta-discussions, of course. Conversing with others can help you to realize that you aren't alone in everything, just as Darwin fish can serve to raise consciousness about the existence of freethinkers. Such conversations can help one to hone their arguments and develop confidence in their conclusions. Through conversation, we can also expose ourselves to novel motivations and arguments, even for positions we may already take. For the emotional reasons alone, it's worthwhile to keep talking about rationality and science, to say nothing of these kinds of pragmatic benefits.

That said, there's one purpose that conversation can serve that I feel deserves special emphasis. Through conversing with other people, whether like-minded or diverse, we can learn quite a bit about when we are wrong. We are all human (I presume, anyway), and are fallible in our applications of logic. As such, it is a wonderful opportunity for self-improvement to be able to hash through our views with those honestly seeking truth. Indeed, just as science is inherently a self-correcting enterprise that must deal with the limitations of human minds, so too must rationality in general co-exist with a self-awareness of our capacity for mistakes. In conversations with others, we are often called upon to defend, explain or otherwise make explicit those private ideas which shape how we understand the world. When we are in the wrong on an issue, this process can be a tremendously helpful mechanism for self-improvement. Even with like-minded people, one's justifications can be flawed in ways discoverable through open and honest debate.

Conversation, then, is an essential tool in the rationalist's toolbox. Without healthy conversation, we are each isolated and limited to the power of our own brains. This is a large part of why I appreciate having a healthy and vibrant discussion take place on articles that I post here, such as that attached to Context Isn't Everything. By the time that you, dear readers, invest in this nascent community, I am given a precious opportunity to discover the depths of my own wrongness, as well as to find points of agreement with my intelligent, rational and compassionate peers. The rationality conversation is everywhere, and I'm glad for what parts of it find their way here, conveyed by vibrant minds.

P ≠ NP?

2010-08-08T20:42:00.000-07:00

I don't have much to say on this one yet, but it's too important to stay silent on. Someone is claiming to have proved that P ≠ NP, which wouldn't be new but for the fact that the claimant is actually a credible computer scientist, such that Stephen Cook is saying it may be a correct proof. Since not everyone here is a complexity-head, let me spell out the significance of that: Cook was one of the people behind the Cook-Levin Theorem, which established the existence of NP-complete problems. Without Cook, then, the P vs. NP problem would be much less relevant, so his opinion on the matter should carry no small amount of weight. Of course, this is a science, so that can't be the last word-- hence the question mark in the title. It'll be interesting to see what light the morning brings to this one.

Many others have written on the issue, including: R. J. Lipton, Dave Bacon and Joe Fitzsimmons.

Deciding What Science Is

2010-08-08T19:45:00.000-07:00

Recently, someone at a major newspaper wrote an article about science blogging that is perhaps best described as trolling. This article, penned by Virginia Heffernan, has already led to many pixels being spilt over its careless dismissal of the state of science blogging. See, for instance, PZ Myers' post on the matter wherein he dispatches her arguments quite handily. I don't wish to add to this issue, as too much has already been said about her article.

Rather, I want to address one of the more poisonous and wrong attitudes upon which her article seems to have been predicated. This attitude is far from limited to Heffernan's flamebaiting, and has been reflected in much of the writing that has followed. For instance, one blogger writing on "Christian faith, society, science and culture" had this to say:

One of my chief complaints about many science blogs is that there really isn’t much science to be found there. Many of the most popular consist primarily of diatribes about various political issues (gay marriage, immigration, the tea party, etc) and the personal religious beliefs of the blogger (who is more often than not an evangelistic New Atheist). What one will find very little discussion of science, as in information about current research, particular papers, or the state of various scientific fields. [emphasis in original]

The author, Jack Hudson, has implicitly made the same kind of error that so many face when discussion science: he has decided a priori what is and is not within the realms of what can be discussed as science. Let's take gay marriage, for instance, since Hudson seems to think that this issue has no place on a blog about science. It also serves as a very timely example to pick at, seeing as how the fate of the anti-gay marriage amendment Proposition 8 was just found to be unconstitutional in the decision Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Much of the decision came down to deciding if the law had any rational basis, and thus involved a substantive discussion of material claims made by anti-gay advocates. These claims were found to be wanting, as they were not grounded in scientific fact. Thus, we see that the final decision in the case came down to a scientific question: is gay marriage at all quantitatively different from heterosexual marriage?

Gay marriage, then, is a perfect example of something within the purview of science, as in deciding, we must apply the ideals of rationality upon which science ultimately rests. Advocating against gay marriage is simply not rational from any standpoint with which we should find acceptable in society, and so any blogger advocating for the public role of science has not only the right, but the responsibility to speak out against anti-gay actions like Prop 8. If science bloggers stick had by and large stayed out of the issue, then they would have been complicit in the further separation of science and society.

The trouble that Heffernan, Hudson and other writers run into, then, is that they don't get to set aside some issues as being outside of science. Deciding what science is and is not is not so trivial as to be settled by consulting with one's political positions. We cannot appease the Hudsons of the world by shying away from "whining about creationists," but will only further weaken how science is seen and accepted in society at large.

P. S.: I have to point out that Hudson filed his article under the "Atheist Contradictions" category, begging the question of what exactly is so contradictory here.

Test: a new way to math.

2010-08-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

Note: If this test does not work for you in Firefox 3.5 or later, please follow use "about:config" to change "html5.enable" to true. (details)

Trying something out here, so please humor me...

x = \frac{- b \pm \sqrt{b^{2} - 4 a c}}{2 a}

Two Book Recommendations for QI/QC

2010-08-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

Uncharacteristically, this shall be a short entry. Instead of talking about my thoughts on politics or science or anything at all, I'd like to point my readers at a wonderful book that serves as a good introduction to quantum information and computation. I don't claim to be such an expert in these fields as to be able to write a complete book's worth of introductory materials, and so my own writings will be, by comparison, incomplete. If you have an interest in these subjects, then, you will almost certainly want to find a better introduction than that which I have been working on here.

The seminal textbook of the QI/QC research community is undoubtedly Nielsen and Chuang (az, goog), due to it's incredible completeness, depth of content and clear writing. As such, I cannot help but recommend it, as it truly deserves its place as the bible of quantum computation. That said, it can be daunting to read through as a first book on the subject, and so I would also recommend Kaye, Laflamme and Mosca's excellent introductory volume (az, goog). While KLM do not delve nearly so deeply into each topic, their text does a wonderful job of making QI/QC not only concrete, but accessible.

Starting out in a field can be hard, as it is difficult to even know what a first step towards self-education might be. Thus it is that I hope that these recommendations help lower that potential barrier, even if only slightly.

Notes: There are other excellent books, I'm sure. I chose two with which I am sufficiently familiar to make a personal recommendation, but that is not to say that these two books are the only books worth considering. Also, I get a kickback on books purchased via the links to Amazon.com.

Open Source and Science: A match made in pragmatism.

2010-08-05T18:11:00.000-07:00

Note: This is an issue I care a lot about, and so I've written about it before. This is kind of a "take two," where I hope to expand on previous writings.

I am an idealist of a peculiar kind, in that one of my highest ideals is that of pragmatism. For instance, I posit that society should not spend immense amounts of resources in efforts that evidence has shown to be futile. As I wrote about in my post on science and faith, this is one of the quintessential features of science. So much so, in fact, that one may define science as the set of those means of learning which expand human knowledge.

This pragmatic ideal is what determines much of the way that we do science. We have found that, as the sphere of human knowledge grows, it has quickly transcended the capacities of any one human brain. Thus, in order to continue to do science, we have recognized that science must be a social enterprise. This then requires that we have some means for accepting that what another scientist tells us accurately reflects reality.

It is this point at which many will claim that science must base itself on faith; specifically, faith in the goodwill and honesty not simply of our peers, but of all who came before us. Through pragmatism, however, we see that this is not the case. Rather, necessity has driven a complicated system of social protocols for communicating science by which everything is reproduced and verified such that errors due to misplaced trust are minimized. A key aspect of this social system is that science is done in the open. While truly taking seriously the ramifications of such a principle is an effort still in its earliest stages, we have long recognized that science cannot go beyond that which is communicated (put differently, science cannot exist in a vacuum). Thus, secrecy has no place in the development of scientific knowledge. In order to truly succeed in the sciences, we must wholly embrace the social and open nature of science.

Of course, science in the abstract is not the only place that we find such concerns. Consider, for instance, a computer. It was not too terribly long ago that a single person could in principle understand every aspect-- perhaps even every circuit component-- of a computer. Despite their immense physical size, computers of this age were small in the sense that they fit into the human mind. Now, however, there has been so much technological progress that it is ludicrous to think that a single person could design a modern computer from first principles. Rather, the development and manufacture of computers is a social enterprise, and not just to the extent that it overlaps with science as we have discussed it so far.

To make the discussion still more concrete, we can consider the enormity a modern operating system. The Linux kernel alone has grown from 10,000 lines of code to about 13,000,000 lines, representing far more work than any one individual can master. Such a task is undertaken with open collaboration and communication, whereby each contributor can focus on some subset of the immense whole that is the Linux kernel. This is to say nothing of all of the other parts required to make up an operating system, such as a desktop environment and low-level userspace utilities. The modern operating system must be a true community effort, if only due to the proportion of the task.

In order, then, to develop software commercially, one must create within their company a microcosm of this sort of community. Undoubtedly, this can be done, as the evidence exists in the form of closed and proprietary software. Science, however, serves in this instance to show us the value of an open flow of ideas. We spend an immense amount of effort in the sciences on facilitating communication, utilizing everything from conferences to telecommunications as tools to do so. It is, in essence, an openness born primarily of a pragmatic ideal which can be readily seen to apply in society more generally.

The story of openness, however, is far from being a constant push from academia to the rest of society. Indeed, much of the current open science movement relies on the open source movement for its inspiration. There is, in fact, a healthy community on the boundary of the open science and open source movements. This community is a wonderful example of the more general realization that pragmatism can and should drive forward the open exchange of ideas.

Resources
I would be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to share at least a few good links on the subject. In particular, I have provided below links to the work of a small sampling of the people who comprise much of my view of the open science movement.

Michael Nielsen (blog, twitter)
Cameron Neylon (blog, twitter)
DJ Strouse (blog, twitter)

Context Isn't Everything, But It's Quite A Lot

2010-08-03T19:57:00.000-07:00

Context. We can think of it as what separates us from the current generation of machine intelligences, floundering around with no memory. Context is the difference between a definition and a connotation, between an innocuous statement and a sly innuendo.

Part of being human is that we have a shared culture, which serves as a context for all that we do. Thus, a statement which is delivered with only good intentions can, in the context of culture, communicate bigotry instead. Recently, in the particular blogging circles in which I run, this effect has reared it's ugly head quite a disturbing number of times.

This most recent run seems to have been set of by a list of "sexy scientists" published with good intentions. Following this list, I saw some threads on the subject that quickly filled with controversy. One particular thread reached almost 700 comments, a good indication of the original list having struck a nerve.

Before going any further, I'd like to stop for a moment and point out something: despite not ever having named the gender of the scientists on the "sexy" list, you probably know the answer. Indeed, women were the subject of that post. In our cultural context, it is predominantly women who get the label of sexy, and so context lets you fill in that missing information. This is precisely where I think that Luke went wrong in posting the list.

Even though there is nothing inherently wrong with noticing the physical attractiveness of those around us, or even commenting on it, in the context of a society where women are unfairly disadvantaged as a consequence of their gender, Luke's list takes on a different meaning. Were women not already judged more on their physical attractiveness, then the intended celebration of beauty may not have been perverted into just another aspect of life in a patriarchal society.

Similar problems have been occurring in discussions all over the Internet, though, and so I don't want to hone in on what is, in many ways, a done deal. Just look at what happened in the comments following another of PZ Myers' posts on feminism. Here, commenters that I can only assume were well-meaning tried to point out ways in which men are hurt by sexism, but in doing so neglected the context of a discussion of male privilege. In turning a thread on male privilege into a discussion of how men suffer, these commenters perpetuated, however inadvertently, the cultural norm that men's problems are somehow more pressing then those of women. Thus, the context turns a well-meaning discussion of sexism into yet another mechanism to perpetuate sexism.

Cultural context can be a powerful thing, twisting our words and actions. By necessity, this introduces a double-standard, where the same kinds of jokes and statements that are acceptable to make about men turn poisonous when placed against a backdrop colored by sexism of the most vile kinds. Without the cultural context of religious oppression, a veil would be just another cloth. Without the context of a society in which many women live in constant fear of sexual assault, a flirtatious compliment could be seen as innocuous. Without a context of a society that fetishizes youth, a pole-dancing class for children would be just another dance class divorced from its sexual origins (after all, it's not as if ballet or tango have "innocent" origins).

If we want this to change, then we must all-- men and women alike-- be more inviting and inclusive. We must learn to not play into the problems of our culture. We must recognize that there are limits to how much we can make note of a woman's attractiveness before our message becomes one of objectification. For instance, we can't use phrases like "cry into your underwear with nerdlust" when referring to our colleagues and our peers if we want to change this poisonous cultural context.

Likewise, the men among us must be involved in the conversation in ordder for change to really set in. Here, I'll admit that the story gets much more personal for me than I'd like, so please forgive me if I spend a bit longer on this point than is really appropriate. I'm not always perfect at how I express myself, or always the best at communicating about feminism. It's hard for me, as a man, to truly understand what women go through sometime. Despite this, I do try, not out of expectation of reward, but because I feel downright compelled. It makes it hard to try, however, when speaking out means that vile accusations like this get leveled:

As I read more of your posts about this girl, I begin to see what your motivation is. You're the overprotective geek friend/wannabe lover who thinks by defending her honor on some random geek message board, you will curry favor with her and this will somehow lead to her fucking you. I'm sad to inform you this will never happen.

As long as it is so inconceivable that a man may speak up to try and improve their own community, rather than in a single-minded pursuit of sex, sexism will persist. We must all, men and women alike, understand the context in which we exist if we seek to change it so as to respect each other.

What are the complex numbers?

2010-08-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

Now that we have ideas about states and probabilities under our belt, we're ready to build up yet another step towards understanding what a quantum state is: the complex numbers.

First, as is typical for me, I'd like to go off on a tangent. In mathematics, we often consider sets of some kind of object, such as the integers (which we write as ℤ) or the real numbers, written as ℝ. We can then add operations on these sets, such as addition and multiplication. A very useful property for a set to have with respect to an operation is that of closure, by which we mean that an operation doesn't take you outside of a set. For example, if you add any two integers, you get another integer, and so ℤ is said to be closed under addition. Similarly, ℤ is closed under multiplication and subtraction. Where it breaks down, however, is when we consider division; the specific counter-example of ⅔ shows that not all integers can be divided to produce another integer. For that, we must take a step back to the rational numbers, written ℚ. The rational numbers can be taken as the set of numbers produced by dividing integers with each other (except zero, for which we must always make an exception). One can then show by direct calculation that if you divide two rational numbers (that is, two fractions), you get another rational number, and so ℚ is closed under division.

Where, then, do numbers like come into the picture? One can prove that (that is, that there is no way of writing as a fraction), and yet the number comes up in a very natural way from looking at polynomial functions of integers, which we write as ℤ[x]. When we study such functions, we are very often interested in the roots of polynomials, since they tell us quite a lot about how such functions behave. For instance, consider f(x) = x² - 1. We can obviously factor this as f(x) = (x - 1)(x + 1), which gives us by the zero factor theorem that f(x) = 0 has two solutions at x = ±1. Notice that if we have n factors of the form (x - a), we obtain a term like xⁿ from multiplying all of the xs together, and so we should expect that a polynomial of degree n (that is, whose largest power of x is xⁿ) will have n roots. This fails if we restrict ourselves, however, to ℤ, since the function g(x) = x² - 2 has roots , which are not integers or even rationals. The solution, then, is to broaden our perspective to all real numbers, written ℝ.

This idea of including roots of polynomials is related to, but not precisely the same as, the concept of closure. It is often useful to consider sets of numbers such that all polynomials must have roots from within that set. We still, however, cannot say that ℝ has this property. Consider the polynomial x² + 1 as a counter example. Obviously, , but what does mean? As is customary in mathematics, we can generalize our notion of a square root by defining a new number i such that . We shall call this number the imaginary unit, as it has some surprising properties that we may not expect out of real numbers. The set of all complex numbers, that is, numbers that are a sum of a real and an imaginary part, such as z = a + ib, is written as ℂ. It turns out that this set does in fact include all of its polynomial roots, while still remaining closed under all the typical operations, indicating that in some sense, ℂ is large enough to encapsulate all of our typical arithmetic. Any set smaller than ℂ will not be expressive enough to capture all of the arithmetic operations we might wish to perform in our study of quantum states.

While a post on all the wondrous properties of ℂ would be far beyond my modest goal for the afternoon, one property in particular is too wonderful to go unmentioned. When we define the imaginary unit i, we also define how our typical arithmetic carries over, so that (a + ib) + (c + id) = (a + c) + i(b + d) doesn't surprise us. This does not, however, let us immediately make sense of expressions like for some real number θ. For that, we must use a mathematical tool such as power series to extend our typical definition of to include complex exponents. When we do so, we obtain a beautiful formula which serves to define what means:

Notice that this allows us to relate complex numbers to angles in a simple and straightforward way. One immediate consequence of this definition is that complex numbers tell us about rotations, whereas real numbers tell us about scales. Since , the "size" of (which we can define formally as |a + ib|² = a² + b²) is always one. This property shall be very useful to us in considering quantum mechanics and information, where we shall interpret complex rotations as a phase between two wavefunctions.

For now, though, I shall leave off this brief introduction to complex numbers, having (hopefully) demonstrated both a bit of their utility and of their beauty. Until next time!

What is a Probability?

2010-08-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

Now that we have somewhat discussed the idea of a state, we can proceed to discuss the next building block for understanding the idea of a quantum state. As quantum states are rather intrinsically tied to the notion of a probability distribution, it is worth talking about classical probability for a few minutes. I won't try to teach all of statistics, or even necessarily the most interesting parts, so much as I will try to communicate a bit about the subset of probability theory that gets used in quantum information.

Imagine that you have a coin. If we plan on using this coin to decide something of value to us, such as the order of play in some game, then we are naturally going to be interested in whether this coin is fair. To do so, we need to understand what we mean by the word "fair" here. One way of defining fair may be to say that no one can predict the outcome of a flip of the coin in any way that is more reliable than just guessing. That is, that there is no information that an observer could have which would give them a leg up on coin prediction. This is a notion which we will return to later.

Another way to capture our intuition about fairness, which turns out to be easier to discuss at first, is to imagine that the coin is flipped a very large number of times. We would then demand that a fair coin give approximately as many "heads" as "tails," so that neither player in a coin flipping game is advantaged over the other.

We can formalize this second notion by defining the fraction p of the coin flips which come up heads and then demanding that p = 0.5. We then say that p is the probability of obtaining a heads from our coin flip experiment. If the coin is unfair, then we can imagine p taking on any value from 0 to 1 (there can't very well be less than zero heads, nor more heads than flips of the coin). In either case, however, our notion of probability as being a proportion of experiments having a specific outcome depends on considering very large numbers of trials, such that we can mostly ignore unlikely coincidences such as five heads in a row.

Of course, we needn't restrict ourselves to coins. More generally, we can think of a source as being some device or system that produces a series of events drawn from a list of all possible events. Under this view, the fair coin was a source that produced events from the list {heads, tails}, but we can have any number (well, any number in ℕ, anyway) of possible events in such a list. Then, we will have a probability distribution function, written p(x), that tells us the fraction of experiments in which a source X produces the event x. For example, in the coin example, p = p(heads). Of course, summing this function over all possible events must give probability 1, since in all experiments, something happens. Written in symbols:

Once we have this probability distribution function, we can do some very nifty things. The primary one that I wish to talk about here is how to connect the idea of a probability distribution to the earlier intuition about uncertainty. To do this, we exploit the Shannon entropy-- I won't derive it here, but it turns out that the number of bits required to describe (on average) the outcome of an experiment with a particular source, written H(p), is given by a nice and compact formula:

Here, by lg x, we mean the base-2 logarithm of x, which can be obtained by the change of base formula lg x = log x / log 2.

A quick check with a calculator tells us that in the fair coin example, H(p) = 1, which we would expect: no observer can do better at recording coin flips than to simply write down each coin flip as it occurs, using a 0 for heads and a 1 for tails (or vice versa). Another quick check tells us that if we have an unfair coin with p(heads) = 0.9, we get H ≈ 0.46 bits/flip, meaning that someone who knows that the coin is unfair is much less uncertain of the outcome of a coin flip than someone who doesn't. This example shows a close relation between the concepts of probability, uncertainty and entropy, as we shall see more of in the future.

For now, however, I hope you enjoyed a bit of introduction to and philosophizing about probabilities!

The Curious Case of a Linguistic Degeneracy: An Accidental Manifesto

2010-08-01T08:48:00.000-07:00

I am an odd fellow-- you may have noticed. To start with, I am a physicist, and thus count myself amongst a group not widely known for excessive bouts of conformity. Add to this that I am a gamer, an occasional programmer, a sci-fi fan, a mild movie buff, etc., and you get a recipe for an overall odd fellow, about on par for the course of one that is in the process of spending upwards of a decade in college to get a PhD.

As a part of being an odd fellow, I have a few linguistic quirks. Some, such as my overreliance on words like "orthogonal," "asymptotic," "potential," or those starting with "eigen," can be well-characterized by my being a physicist. Others, such as my apparent inability to differentiate between the words "rationalist," "skeptic" and "scientist" seem significantly harder to explain. Thus, I would like to take a moment to explain why it is that I often conflate these three words, especially where religion and politics are concerned.

To do so, it's instructive to take a step back and note that I am a hopeless idealist. I have a (perhaps overdeveloped) sense of how the World Should Be. Of course, I am not so naive as to think that my ideals reflect how the world currently is, or that my ideals are anywhere near universally agreed upon. Rather, my idealism often takes the form of considering issues in the context of an asymptotic approach to my ideals. Thus, my apparent degeneracy in vocabulary, in which I may appear to be unable to distinguish between rationalists, skeptics and scientists stems from the fact that in my ideal world, these concepts are degenerate.

In the real world, of course there are profound differences between these three groups-- important differences. As an idealist, though, I am often much less interested in discussing these differences than I am in discussing a world in which the primacy of evidence is universally accepted, and in which all actions and conclusions are susceptible to analysis. Humans are, by nature, flawed and error-prone-- therein lies our creative power, as suggested by a viewpoint informed by formal logic. As such, in order to minimize the frequency and damage done by our errors, we need to recognize the efficacy of rational thinking in arriving at conclusions, of skepticism with respect to our conclusions and of the scientific method in establishing conclusions.

I will often refer to one or the other of these three facets of evidenced-based thinking when discussion politics or religion, as issues that arise there can provide useful examples for the importance of evidence-based thinking. Really, though, I have very little interest in atheism itself (for example). To me, it is an inevitable consequence of what I am: a scientist that attempts, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to apply the standards of criticality and evidence to all aspects of my life-- especially those that have impacts on the lives of others, such as my political decisions.

On the other hand, I recognize that we do not live in my ideal world. I recognize that there are, for instance, religious scientists that are damn good at what they do. It is perhaps inescapable, then, that I sound somewhat judgmental in declaring religiosity as a deviation from my notion of the ideal scientist, but this is not my intention at all. I do not expect others to share my ideals, though I do try to perpetuate and propagate them. Nor do I expect that there is any person-- scientist or not-- that lives up to the relevant ideals in all ways. For me, ideals are not quite a goal, so much as the asymptotic limit that our goals reach as we push forward, so that there is always more room for improvement.

That I can find ways in which I think that society can be improved is not unique; ask anyone on the street and they'll give you a litany of ways to improve society, most of which will be contradictory with what you would hear from any other such random interview. What makes my situation unique, then, is that I am saying that a deviation from the ideal is something that many people treasure and defend vigorously.

But I digress. To get back to my central point, my ideal of a scientist is one that recognizes that all of human experience is, in principle if not in practicality, amenable to the methods of science. As the methods of science are rationality, skepticism and the primacy of evidence, I feel justified in my curious degeneracy, insofar as I am justified in considering the asymptotic approach to idealism.

What is a State?

2010-07-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

OK. Enough politics. I am a scientist, after all. Part of why I spend so long on politics, however, is that it makes for an accessible topic insofar as that I can contribute with little special expertise. As my science career progresses, however, I am more confident of my ability to contribute usefully to the world of science blogging.

Since I am in quantum information research, much of my science blogging will necessarily be talking about quantum states. As such, it's worth starting out by discussing the notion of a state more generally. I apologize to the quantum foundations people in the room, as I will likely butcher this horribly, but I've got to start somewhere, eh?

1 a : mode or condition of being b (1) : condition of mind or temperament (2) : a condition of abnormal tension or excitement
2 a : a condition or stage in the physical being of something b : any of various conditions characterized by definite quantities (as of energy, angular momentum, or magnetic moment) in which an atomic system may exist

[source]

Rather than start with a physical definition, I'll start with the computer science notion of a state-- at least, one notion. In computer science, we often think of the state of a machine as being that set of information which is required to predict (that is, to simulate) the future states of that machine. This is by necessity somewhat recursive, but we can disentangle it somewhat. If you're lucky enough to have a laptop where hibernation works properly, then you're already somewhat familiar with a state, as it is the state of the computer which gets written to and read from the disk during the hibernation and resuming processes. The contents of the computer's memory completely describe what it means for the computer to resume its execution, so that we may discover the contents of the computer's memory in the future.

In a very real sense, this is exactly what physicists mean when they use the word "state." If one knows the full state of a physical system, then they can predict as much of the future of that system as is allowed by the laws of nature. If, as Newton and others thought, those laws are deterministic, then that means that one can predict all future states of the system. The state of the system, then, is a description of the system so complete that it is for all intents and purposes the identity of that system. To take a materialistic view of myself for a moment, I am then equivalent to a full and complete state of my physical body. In fact, we can be recursive again and define my physical body as that whose state is necessary to describe me. (If you find this kind of recursive definition of self as satisfying as I do, you may also like reading Scott Aaronson's notes on a complexity theoretic approach to free will.)

For a specific example, consider a pool ball on a table-- we will presume for now that it cannot go up or down, despite whatever trick shots one tries. Then, if we wish to simulate the trajectory of this pool ball, we must know for at least one given moment exactly where it is, how quickly it is moving, in which direction it is moving, and the axis and magnitude of its spin. That is, we must know x, v and ω. If we know all this, then we may as well dispense with the table and simply run a computer simulation, as the state given by these three vectors completely describes the entire dynamics of that system. If one of those three vectors changes, then the pool ball is no longer in that same state. To put it yet another way, if we have two tables with one ball each, and if their states are identical, then the balls themselves are indistinguishable (not in the sense of indistinguishable particles, mind you, but in the sense of state discrimination).

The astute reader will note here that I have pulled a bit of a fast one on them. This notion of state is not the only kind of state that gets bandied about in physics. Rather, it is a special kind of state called an ontic state-- that is, one corresponding to reality. Statistics allows us to also speak of an epistemic state, which describes not reality itself, but our knowledge of it. Thus, an epistemic state is not in general sufficient to describe or simulate a system, but is a complete characterization of a given agent's interactions with that system. Unlike ontic states, which we assume to be objective in order to have a reality consistent with multiple observers, epistemic states are subjective. Two observers may validly have different epistemic states for a system in some fixed ontic state.

One may, in fact, go as far as to say that all states actually discussed in physics are epistemic, since we cannot even in principle have complete knowledge of a system. I do not subscribe to this view myself, but I find it helps to remind me that ontic states such as those discussed in the pool example are often states not of real systems, but of toy models we make to approximate real systems. A physical pool ball is much more complicated than a list of three vectors, and a true physical ontic state would reflect this.

Understanding these somewhat orthogonal views of a state helps clarify many counterintuitive aspects of physics, such as quantum teleportation. If, as is true in quantum mechanics, a state cannot be copied, then there is no physical difference between transmitting a state and transmitting an object with that state-- both lead to exactly the same state of reality after the fact. Thus, quantum teleportation can be seen not just as some sci-fi-esque "beaming" of an object, but something much more interesting: a clever way of communicating. Of course, fully exploring this is a subject for a future post.

To close out this discussion of a state, I wish to be so bold as to assign a bit of homework until my next post. As you go about your day, think of what the states of objects around you might be like-- what information would you need to reproduce or to simulate those objects perfectly?

What We're Up Against

2010-07-28T21:12:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that progressives, secular humanists, rationalists, skeptics and all other manner of forward-thinking individuals face a myriad of different uphill battles, not the least of which is to prevent our own internal disputes from causing us to lose sight of what we're working for. That's why I find it helpful to sometimes take a step back and simply look at what sorts of challenges we face.

In particular, I find that in my own life, I tend to surround myself with people that, while far from exactly like-minded, share enough of my concerns that it's easy to forget that I hold many views that are very far from what is considered normal, even to the point of being taken for granted, in modern society. Advocating for atheism (and more generally, for skepticism), for instance, is not yet seen as acceptable in much of the United States. This makes it even more paramount to look at what those on the other side believe, think, do and say. Were I more into the militaristic metaphors with which so much of the English-speaking world seems to be so infatuated, I would say that we must know our enemies to defeat them. Instead, I'm going to be a physicist about it and say that we must know the potential energy function in which we move about.

Without further ado, then, let me start by noting that ours is a society in which people are fine with saying shallow and narrow-minded things like this:

While I was living there it was voted one of the top 10 cities for singles. What were they smoking? I want some! In Seattle I met the geeky Microsoft guy who used a discount card on our second date at a horrible restaurant. I met the engineer that ensured me he was not “a typical engineer”. Yes, yes you are. Socially awkward. Inappropriate conversation. Typical engineer. Wait, inappropriate conversation? You want more details on that? Okay…well the words “penis” and “vagina” were used, complete with gestures. Yes, that really did happen. On a date. In public. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

This kind of casual prudishness and enforcing of gender norms in dating formalisms (such as how to pay for a meal) should be seen as a large barrier towards creating a tolerant and sex-positive society in which people are free and encouraged to find and make their own happiness.

On a closely related note, the sex-negative and anti-porn group Porn Harms celebrates Facebook's shameful act of censorship:

Thank you Facebook! They just removed a very inappropriate pro-porn page with links to pornography that our children had easy access to.

Keep in mind, this is the same group of people that proudly repeats Gail Dines in saying that "pornography is a 'cultural support system for violence against women,'" at once trivializing violence against women and insulting all those who work hard to make the adult entertainment industry a responsible one.

Of course, this kind of sex-negativity ties into and is fed by religious sentiments, such as those espoused in this Islamic tract that predates on the emotionally vulnerable, or this poster which uses Islam is used to justify the locking of women into narrow and repressive gender roles:

Muslim women dress in a way that is modest and dignified. The purpose of clothing is not only to protect oneself from physical elements, but also to protect oneself from immorality and pride. Some traditions of dress, and more generally, the treatment of women in some Muslim countries and societies, are often a reflection of culture. This is very often inconsistent and even contrary to Islam teachings. Prophet Muhammad said: "The most perfect in faith among you believers is he who is best in manner and kindest to his wife." [emphasis mine]

For all the poster's empty platitudes about the equality of women, there is no reasonable way to interpret the phrase "protect oneself from immorality and pride" here but to mean that women should feel shamed (that is, not proud) of their bodies in ways that men should not.

Not, mind you, that Islam is anywhere near alone in using religion to justify sex-negativity or misogyny. For example, the Christian fundamentalist Reformers Unanimous group advertises support for a questionable list of addictions, including "pornography addiction":

Help for: Addiction - Drug Intervention - Codependence - Rehab - Alcoholism - Meth Addiction - Gambling Addiction - Cocaine Addiction - Marijuana Addiction - Opiate Addiction - Codependence [sic] - Enabling - Nicotine Addiction - Pornography Addiction - Love Addiction

Amongst RU's approaches to what they see as problems is the gem that all we need to do is remember that "Christ is enough." If this reminds you of "Jesus Plus Nothing," pat yourself on the back. This kind of worldview, where religious sentiment is allowed to replace all other forms of thought, is a major driving force behind many of the political problems that we face in the world today.

Sadly, one of the other major driving forces being political problems, at least in the United States, is racism. Take, for instance, the vile screed written by Mark Williams of Tea Party infamy, which includes this choice bit:

We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

This is the same Mark Williams, mind you, that objects so vehemently to the construction of a mosque near 9/11 Ground Zero, and encourages the bombing of Mecca in response. This kind of abject racism lies at the heart of much of the Tea Party. Just ask Shirley Sherrod.

Since my attempt in this is not to depress you, I'll not go on in this vein. Rather, I will point out that for every one of the examples I've shown, there is someone who cares enough to work against that kind of hate, bigotry or just plain ignorance. Even if we disagree with these caring people on some fronts-- maybe even many fronts-- we must at least recognize that they are there, working for a just cause.

One of the key strengths of the spectrum of thoughts and ideals that includes such seemingly disparate causes as progressivism, rationalism, sex-positivity and feminism is that open-mindedness is (in general) celebrated. We can disagree with each other and still recognize what commonality we have in our goals. We do not strive, as our adversaries do, for perfect uniformity in thought and deed, but only for mutual respect of our fellow human beings and a dedication to truth. In short, we are not alone. That's good, I think, given what we're up against.

I Am Sick: A flimsy excuse to use the phrase "evidence-based."

2010-07-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

As the title says, I'm sick. Not deathly sick, but merely the massively inconvenient sinus problems one can get with the changing weather. As a part of trying to treat myself, I went down to the local drug store and bought a 50-dose bottle of pseudoephedrine (totaling 3 g of the active ingredient).

Had this been in the United States, the comically self-righteously named Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 would have meant that I was dangerously close to the 3.6 g/day purchase limit. Exceeding CMEA05 limits is criminally punishable, as some people have had the misfortune to find out by accident. Even if one does not exceed the given limits, CMEA05 requires that retailers maintain an archive of purchaser IDs for at least two years, establishing a worrying paper trail about one's OTC purchases.

The ostensible purpose of the law is right there on the tin: to combat what is seen as an "epidemic" of methamphetamine usage and production. The questions for any supporter of evidenced-based public policy, then, are whether this epidemic exists, and whether draconian measures against allergy and cold medication purchases help. I will leave the first question for now, as there are significant arguments to be made about what constitutes an "epidemic" of addictions.

Rather, I would like to focus on the question of whether or not such draconian measures are effective. Were they effective, we would expect that the rates of meth abuse in Canada, with its comparatively more lax laws regarding pseudoephedrine and other means of meth production, would be significantly higher. To truly argue this point, one would need to control for as many other potentially confounding factors as possible (different economic and cultural conditions, availability of other drugs, degree of enforcement of existing laws, population density, etc.), but we can at least take a first look at the data. Thanks to the help of Saver Queen, I was able to find statistics on 2009 meth abuse rates amongst middle- and high-school students in the US and Canada, respectively.

Only the Canadian source comes with error margins, so a formal hypothesis test is impossible, but we see that to the 95% confidence level on the Canadian statistics, between 0.8% and 1.7% of students in grades 7, 9 and 11 reported past-year usage of meth, while data from the estimated US rates lie within the 1.0% to 1.6% range (again, no error bounds on the US data). Since all of the US data linked to from here is consistent with Canadian statistics, we have no basis to even suspect that US rates are in fact lower than Canadian rates, in lieu of hypothesizing significant confounding factors.

My point with this is not, of course, to do a full analysis of the comparative rates of meth abuse, as that would require significantly more research than my stuffed-up head can handle right now. Rather, I simply wanted to give an example of how an evidence-based conversation about public policy might look. In particular, it has to start by deferring to reality and not simply to rhetoric.

The Spock Fallacy

2010-07-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

I love Star Trek. I love it quite a lot. (Just ask @masstreble over on Twitter if you don't believe me.) Buried within the Star Trek mythos are quite a lot of different wonderful, positive and utterly human ideals, and so it enjoys a special place in my heart.

It's not all good, though. For as much as Star Trek elevates science and rationality to being the centerpieces of its Utopia, it often cares very little for the actual practice of science. It is also, unfortunately, where we get one of the most quintessential embodiments of the fallacy that rationality must entail emotional detachment. Indeed, many people seem to believe that scientists and others who value rationality are somehow "cold" emotionally (of course, this would make sense if one considers the analogy between irrationality in game theory and the statistical distributions associated with temperature, but I digress). While it is true that many of us embrace our analytical natures and try to deconstruct, analyze and reduce our experiences, that doesn't mean that emotions aren't an important and vital part of that process, to say nothing of our lives on the whole.

We can reason about our emotions, and choose rationally to engage in some action do bring about desired emotional states. For example, I spent money to buy the equipment needed to play video games because I enjoy them, not because it makes sense when emotions are removed from consideration. Practically everyone does this to some degree, but part of being rational, analytical and self-aware is to exercise introspection about this process.

Ironically, I think that much of Star Trek has actually gotten this right, but what sticks in people's minds is the image-- the idea-- of Spock as being both the nearly platonic ideal of a rationalist and of being incredibly unemotional. This image, intended or not, seems to resonate within our culture, leading to that stereotype of the unemotional rationalist being reinforced.

People are, and in my opinion, should be emotional agents in addition to rational agents. The effect, then, of the Spock fallacy, is to create a false dichotomy between these two views of the human condition. Rationality may then be rejected on the basis of not being compatible with intuition or emotion. This is particularly and appallingly clear as applied to religious issues; atheism is often dismissed as lacking in emotional appeal (see Rebecca Watson's recent video on the subject for a good refutation of this argument).

Part of the problem is that in setting up a false dichotomy between rationality and emotion, it is all too easy to forget that rationality is, amongst other things, a strategy for finding the truth. Sometimes the goals of finding truth and being happy appear to be in conflict, and at these times, it is rationality that must win. This is not to say that emotions cannot play a part of such decisions, or that the importance of happiness is somehow overlooked by a rational analysis.

Since I am a physicist by training, I like to argue from limiting cases, and what could be a greater example of the importance of emotion than that of romance? Is it not possible to rationally argue, for instance, that in the interests of long-term happiness, a troubled romance should be ended? This may appear to be in conflict with the importance of emotions, and may even seem to play into the stereotype of rational analysis being "cold." On the other hand, is this not an example of how emotions and rationality can be happily wed?

Rationality and emotion need not be seen as orthogonal to each other, as indeed they are both important parts of being a full and complete human being. Instead of Spock, then, maybe we should think about what Julian Bashir has to teach us.

A case study of the less pleasant side of the Internet, examined.

2010-07-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

Update: I forgot to credit @ebertchicago and @stevensantos on Twitter for pointing me to this article. Thanks!

The Internet is filled with wonderful people sharing their thoughts. You can find lots of deep insights on all manners of topics, serious arguments and debates from just about any position imaginable, and you can find intelligence analysis of complicated social issues.
On the other hand, you can also find things like this. Just the title gives away how seriously the author, Rich Deem, takes his arguments. When your article is titled "Why Sex With Robots is Always Wrong: The Impending Demise of the Human Species," (emphasis mine) you are sending a clear message that you are more interested in getting attention than in making reasoned arguments. It is absurdly hyperbolic to say that there is a threat to the survival of humanity itself posed by the specter of cyberdildonics.

Don't get me wrong, however. It is fully and entirely possible to have a mature, adult discussion of the moral, ethical and social issues raised by sexbots. It is even possible to do so via the use of fiction and parable. In TV and movies alone, we see examples like Chobits, Battlestar Galactica and Ghost in the Shell taking sexuality with robots seriously. Even series like Buffy and Star Trek deal with these issues to some degree. What doesn't do this, however, is the parable-like story penned by Deem.

Rather, we get breathless statements like:

This page is going to seem rather far out and unrealistic, given today's moral standards. However, the standards are rapidly changing, and within a few years the human race will be in a position in which sexual immorality could exist on a widespread scale.

Setting aside for a moment the tiresome and troublesome phrase "sexual immorality," it is hardly the case that we are on the cusp of some global sexual crisis. Humanity is on quite a few cusps, but "increasing sexual perversion and increasingly pervasive virtual sex happening through the expanding acceptance of online pornography" is not one of them. Pornography has been an integral part of human sexuality for no short length of time, and though it is easier to access and disseminate via the Internet, that is by no stretch of imagination any more of a threat to human survival than the widespread availability of pictures of cats doing silly things.

Certainly, there are changes that we must be aware of and that we must learn to deal with, but Deem's use of the word "perversion" indicates right away that he has no interest in real social issues. Rather, he is content to stick to the fiction that there is a limited set of morally acceptable ways to enjoy consensual sex-- that somehow, there is a universal standard for the Right Way to Get It On that was set in stone billions of years before sex itself was produced by evolution. In some sense, this must be a comforting fiction, as it would seem to release one from the duty to challenge and improve their ethics and to actually confront real problems rather than producing absurd and comical windmills for tilting at.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Surely there is comedy to be found in how Deem communicates fevered nightmares to us? We're in luck:

Instead of magnesium frames covered with thick plastic, the robots were eventually designed using lightweight carbon-fiber composite designed to mimic the structure of human bones moved by pulley systems to generate the full range of human motion. The hard plastic was soon replaced with fabrics that felt like real skin. Thus, the transformation from machine to android was nearly complete. [emphasis mine]

This is the sort of statement I should expect from a creationist screed ("Why are there still machines if androids have been invented?"), and so I shouldn't be surprised to find that Deem takes pride in being a creationist. Rather than positing the existence of a wide range of robotic systems for various purposes, Deem's story has robotics doggedly pursuing some ultimate goal, which happens to be the same goal as his creation myth: humanity. The "transformation" described is but one more comical example of the bizarre and devout anthrocentrism to which creationists and such seem to hold. Indeed, in his hypothetical world, why is it a linear progression from ASIMO to android? Is there no room in this imagined future for a market that sells intentionally un-lifelike sexbots, or limited-functionality sexbots that appeal to the working class stiffs? No, of course there isn't. In Deem's world, the pornography and cyberdildonics industries don't at all resemble those in our world:

The first of these sex robots were crude, non-animated versions introduced in the early 2010's [sic]. However, soon top programmers and engineers were hired away from the automakers and computer companies with offers of up to ten times their average salaries, similar to what had been done with their movie businesses in the late 2010's [sic], when they had hired away Hollywood's best CG programmers to turn out realistic-looking virtual pornography movies. [emphasis mine]

In the real world, adult entertainment makes a lot of money, to be sure, but not so much as to be able to poach off talent en masse from three of the largest industries that our society has ever seen. In general, while pornographers have often been early adopters of technologies, they do not have the resources nor the social standing to revolutionize entire branches of science, such as Deem hypothesizes his future pornographers to have done with robotics:

Money from the adult entertainment industry, in their push for realistic motion and conversation, had accelerated the technology in what would have taken decades to only a few years.

Of course, Deem is not content to run roughshod over facts concerning economics. Indeed, we see that he is perfectly willing to perpetuate some of the most trite and easily debunked of gender-based stereotypes:

Although the newly designed FACA [ed: female anatomically correct android-- read, sexbot] looked good, they were still somewhat clumsy and had trouble with all but the most common colloquialisms. For the average male college student, this was not a major problem, since conversation was not his major intent. However, when companies tried to market MACA, the male counterpart, to the female college crowd, the acceptance was less than stellar... [emphasis mine]

Never mind that in the real world, people have complex and varied approaches to their own sexual lives. In Deem's world, it's simple: men like to have sex and women like to talk. Not that the stereotypes end there, mind you:

Acceptance among the male population evolved rapidly as men realized they could get an ideal "woman" whose only goal was to serve him. Entertainment companies became more bold as FACA were advertised as being "better than sex." In addition, FACA were adept at gourmet cooking, cleaning, and household chores, so that one could always use utility as an excuse to get one. [emphasis mine]

As a male, I am deeply offended by Deem's sick insinuation that my ideal of a companion, spouse, sexual partner or anything else is a being that wants only to serve me. This flippant remark, I suspect, betrays some of Deem's own attitudes towards his fellow humans. Certainly, I don't think that a healthy mind could project such a warped view of gender and of humanity itself onto the whole of his fictional society. Moreover, the implication that since his sexbots are replacing women as sex partners, they must also replace women at housework betrays some very regressive and oppressive notions of gender roles that are better left in our past than our future. Deem's future seems to be one in which women are no better than appliances with genitals, and in which as soon as appliances are endowed with artificial genitalia, women are left with no place at all in society. Not my idea of a positive future, or even of a realistic dystopia.

Doubling down on his commitment to narrow and harmful gender roles, Deem continues on to inform us that in his future:

Sperm banks sprang up all over as women who wanted to have children were forced to pay exorbitant prices, since very few men were interested in donating [...].

Men in this funhouse mirror view of sexuality have no interest in reproduction or family-building, so that all it takes is an overgrown sex toy to demolish his one, true Nuclear Family. So consumed with libido are his future's men that as long as they have a warm body (never mind that it's one devoid of a mind) to have sex with, they have no other desires or motives that may at all involve flesh and blood women. As much as this is patently misogynistic, condemning women to a status just slightly elevated from that of a washing machine, it is also a patently misandric view. Just as much as women should find Deem's futuresex revolting for what of himself he projects onto it, men should be outraged at his reduction of the complex whole of humanity to some cartoonish interplay between sex-crazed men and meek women. The climax in Deem's twisted fantasy seems to be when he declares that:

Men who owned a FACA disdained the company of real women, with all their incessant demands and mood swings. The sexual revolution was complete and we were all the victims.

In spite of all this, I must give Deem credit for the sheer multitude of ways that he manages to prove himself foolish. For instance, consider the near glee with which he sets up strawman versions of those with whom he disagrees:

Population control groups and environmentalists were thrilled that the human birth rate was now rapidly declining well below replacement levels. Several women's groups formed an alliance in an attempt to outlaw the sale of FACA. Virtually all attempts to legislate against FACA were either blocked by male legislators or in the courts as restricting freedom of speech.

All in the space of three sentences, Deem presents his reader with conveniently packaged and easy-to-hate caricatures of population control, environmentalism in general, feminism and the freedom of speech. He doesn't even try to understand or explore the reasons why environmentalists may want to keep the human population at sustainable reasons, but instead describes that they are thrilled to see the decline of humanity itself. Feminist groups he brushes aside as relatively powerless and reactionary groups easily defeated by "male legislators." Freedom of speech is seen in Deem's bizzaro world as some thin shield for "sexual immorality," whatever in the hell that is. He even sees fit to revisit his disdain for the protection of speech later, declaring that:

The Supreme Court has ruled that nearly all forms of pornography are first amendment "protected speech." There is no reason to believe that a machine would not fall into that category.

What we see from this serial strawmanning is that, just as rich and nuanced explorations of human sexuality have no place in Deem's reckoning, nor do subtle and qualified arguments. In fact, look at what Deem holds up as an example of courtroom drama:

In the middle of the examination, the defense attorney suddenly grabbed the FACA and slammed it to the ground, scattering pieces of the machine all over the floor. Suddenly, the facade of humanity was gone, as the lawyer asked if anyone was going to charge him with a crime. The last challenge against the widespread use of FACA had been crushed.

Though I think that the attorney in question is supposed to be a villain of Deem's narrative, it is still amazing that Deem leaves no room for his villain to actually argue. Rather, he must make his point through sheer brute force, eschewing any subtlety and any finesse that may help the readers identify what exactly the attorney believes in that is so reprehensible to Deem.

Having declared us all victims of the sexual revolution, Deem ends his story and progresses into a realm where he is even less able to hold his own: facts. I am not the best person to debunk and deconstruct his claims, such as that the viewing of pornography leads to a "trivialization of rape as a criminal offense." Luckily, however, there are those bold and wonderful few, such as sex educator Violet Blue, that tirelessly fight against the anti-porn movement by debunking lies, exposing poor studies, presenting studies that contradict anti-porn narratives and by educating people about sexuality in general. For more, I direct interested readers to her site dedicated to the pro-feminism sex-positive and pro-porn movements, Our Porn, Ourselves.

As for myself, I shall be content to leave this story here, and to instead concern myself with those parts of the Internet in which intelligent and mature discussion is to be found.

Science and Faith

2010-07-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

I've been silent for far too long, but recently, I've felt the need to return to putting my views on display. Perhaps it's egotistical, but there it is. Blogging is one of the primary means of participating in global conversations that is available today, and there are too many conversations worth having to sit idly on the sidelines.

One of those important conversations is on the nature of science and faith. It is often claimed that science requires faith, or that science is its own religion, or that science is somehow built on a house of cards. This post, then, is a manifesto to the effect of demonstrating that none of these is true. Science is, at its most basic, the formalization of those ways and means of learning that work. No one definition captures all of science, as the methodology itself of science changes as we learn what methods work and don't work. When we learned of the placebo effect, for instance, evidence collected without the aid double-blind randomization was no longer seen as good enough. That is, we identified a weakness in the very way that knowledge was collected by the medical sciences, and we fixed it.

To learn about the world, we don't need faith in anything other than the existence of something that can be learned. To then say that this simple and universal axiom is somehow a manifestation of faith in any religious sense strains the word beyond all usefulness and turns it into nothing more than a vehicle for ad hominems. Taking as a given the existence of patterns is what keeps us from thinking that we shall find ourselves to be bananas in some near-future moment, to pick one of the less strange possibilities. A world where anything can happen is a world without patterns, rules or causality. I have yet to meet any system of religious thought that rejects the idea of causality itself; indeed, we rightfully label as "insane" those people who reject causality. One can always go down the rabbit hole of hypothesizing an adversarial universe that merely seems causal by some cosmic coincidence, but down this path lies nothing but the most dismal form of navel-gazing. In order to function, we must take as axiomatic the existence of patterns.

In this way, science is the ultimate expression of pragmatism. If something contributes usefully to the realm of human knowledge, then science can and will adapt itself to incorporate this new knowledge. If you'll pardon a rhetorical bit of oversimplification, science has moved from armchair philosophizing to stamp collecting to a mathematical endeavor to the huge range of approaches we see today. Throughout human history, however, one thing serves as a strong indicator of what works and what doesn't. Without evidence-- objective and reproducible evidence-- we know nothing. Human memory is fallible, as is human reasoning. We are all too easily convinced of what is patently false, and thus must expand knowledge outside of the fragility of our minds. Thus, evidence is paramount. There is no faith to this, but only empiricism and pragmatism.

Of course, to fully refuse the "science is faith" claim, I would have to first understand the claim. I must admit that I find myself unable to do this. Despite my attempts at understanding the views of those around me, this is one point which fiercely resists my analysis. I admit that I am at a complete loss for any arguments as to the faith-based nature of science. If you have some, I'd love to hear them, as I hate leaving my arguments incomplete. It's rather unsatisfying, to say the least.

There are those who will, no doubt, interpret what I am saying here as some strong claim of science as omniscient or infalliable. Nothing could be further from my views. Science is, after all, a human affair, and we make mistakes. This is why our whole methodology is designed to minimize the room for the flaws inevitably introduced by our own human limitations. Moreover, science does not know everything-- simply more than any other systematization of knowledge available to humans. The nature of science is to expand knowledge, and as such, the realms of human experience off-limits to science are continually shrinking-- never growing. Neuroscience, for instance, demonstrates that human emotions are at least in principle subject to objective and evidence-based analysis. Anyone who takes SSRIs for clinical depression indirectly benefits from this shrinking of the unknowable. Why should we mistake the limits of our current methods as being intrinsic properties of the world itself? That seems like the ultimate leap of faith. To hold some phenomenon to be permanently beyond the realm of understanding, regardless of how much humanity grows (or how much our post-human descendants grow), is to take an unpalatable amount on faith.

Don't Be a Dick

2010-03-22T06:50:00.001-07:00

I have a few words for all my fellow Americans who today find themselves hating the new healthcare reform package: don't be a dick.

You had eight years at the helm to fix healthcare, and you did nothing. You had eight years to tackle a problem that, aside from letting people die for lack of medical care, is keeping the US from being competitive in the jobs market. You failed to stand up for the rights of middle- and lower-class workers and their families.

Even more damning, though, you were given every opportunity over the past year to make your arguments for keeping the old "if you get sick, you die" healthcare policies. Instead of offering substantive critiques, such as how including a mandate but not a public option is a giveaway to the very insurance agencies that made the problem to start with, you took those opportunities to be heard and spat on them. You invented preposterous lies about "death panels," abortion funding, illegal immigrants and whatever else you could get away with. You threw around meaningless but emotionally resonant labels like "socialism" and "communism," without even a shred of pretense that those labels were in any way relevant or accurate. Worse still, when that kind of fearmongering didn't change the fact that the majority of Americans wanted some sort of guarantee that getting sick wouldn't be a death sentence, you resorted to racial slurs and threats of violence. Your shameful behavior has made a mockery of political debate, as well as shocked the rest of the world. Living abroad, I often get asked just what in the hell is wrong with America that would make us think that an idea that is uncontroversial everywhere else in the developed world would somehow undo society.

You had your chance to be taken seriously, and you blew it big time. You demonstrated with horrifying clarity the lengths to which you will go to deny your political opponents any kind of a legislative victory. Your callous opposition to something precisely because it was supported by a majority of the American public was and is sickening (literally-- people really could have benefited from not having you delay healthcare reform over your nonsense). Now, while today the saner half of America celebrates a small, incremental step towards recognizing universal human rights, as you threaten to leave the country or take violent actions, I ask that you instead try calming down and not being a dick to your fellow Americans.

For the childrenz

2008-07-12T10:11:00.001-07:00

Disclaimer: I am not a parent, and have no plans of becoming one. Take all this with a grain of salt. I do, however, have first-hand experience at being a child.

For the sake of the children, we do quite a lot. Never mind exactly what it even means for something to be for the sake of the children, such as whose children and who gets to decide what's best, we are as a society willing to do a lot for our children. Frankly, that is a wonderful thing in many ways, but when that otherwise noble drive crosses the line into hysteria, then unsavory people will seek to exploit it for their own nefarious ends.

This seems to be the case with child pornography: a real problem is exaggerated to the point that those who at some level control us can exploit the problem, tagging whatever their political enemy might be with the emotional baggage of "kiddie porn." Someone doesn't like Usenet, so it's kiddie porn. It is such a common pattern that many Slashdot users have adopted the use of the "thinkofthechildren" tag to mark stories about such excesses, along with tragic stories of incidental victims.

Of course, the real irony to my mind is how little we are actually willing to do for children. We provide basic healthcare only after a mockery of a national debate. We fail to provide decent education, and even pass acts to further the problem. We subject our children to dangerous diseases over a long-debunked anti-vaccine hysteria (yes, I know that many of those link to the same blog-- it's a good blog, but far from the only one to deal with anti-vaccine hysteria). We leave our children a world plauged by global warming. Most of all, we do our children a great disservice by tarring their names with all of our petty battles whilst ignoring their most pressing needs.

On bias and hypocrisy: Conservapedia as a case study.

2007-02-23T12:09:00.001-08:00

Bias as a human element.

There is a reason why our language is littered with trite phrases such as "only human" and "the human element." At some level, as a society, we recognize that the human condition is marked by an extreme level of imperfection. We cannot but introduce elements of ourselves in what we do, and we cannot perfectly abstract ourselves away from a task. In particular, in any non-trivial writing, then, we make obvious to the world our thoughts as we introduce bias into that which we pen. Of course, I am no exception. What I write here is quite obviously biased, and I wouldn't expect anyone to think otherwise.

Bias as a conservative anti-virtue.

This discussion, though, presumes an understanding of what "bias" even is. We most often hear the word in association with "the media," or other elements of mass communication, when neoconservatives accuse decidedly conservative reporting outlets of being liberal in bias. This modern use of the word is very misleading in several ways, the majority of which are outside of the scope of this essay. What I do want to deal with, however, is the idea that unbiasedness is a virtue that trumps accuracy, fairness, completeness or relevance.

That particular idea of bias, along with the modern usage of the word "balance," leads us to farces like that of including an oil industry representative to "balance" a scientist's reporting on global warming. Some statements are, within the scope of our current knowledge, "true," and this by their very nature gives them a special status apart from any other statements. For instance, if I say that all the research conducted to date confirms that global warming is true, then this is not "biased" in a liberal-versus-conservative sort of fashion. Rather, it is biased towards verifiability and accuracy.

What does one do, then, when their political positions are based largely on statements that are in contrast with what we know about reality? Construct a system of thought where evolution must be "balanced" by creationism under the guise of intelligent design, where global warming must be "balanced" by climate "skepticism," and where an introspective examination of history must be "balanced" by blatant and unjustified religiosity in the guise of historical interpretation.

This is precisely the sense of the words "bias" and "balance" which those like Fox News use in order to justify spewing what any sane and rational person would call biased trash. As per the discussion of bias before, I don't mind the biased part. I listen to Democracy Now, read Crooks and Liars, and watch Olbermann. No, I mind the implication that everyone else's bias is bad, but that one group (always the conservatives or neocons) can be biased with impunity.

A recent case study.

Seldom has this effect been more stunningly obvious than in the recent launching of the Wikipedia-inspired Conservapedia. With the lofty mission of eliminating bias, this "virtuous" project demonstrates the incredible extent to which they avoid bias by putting their political leanings in their name. How could any project with the name "Conservapedia" ever be accused of being liberal in nature?

Of course Conservapedia is biased. It exists. That pretty well guarantees its bias. The problem comes, however, in how it is biased. Whereas Wikipedia is biased towards things that we understand to be true (global warming, evolution, the existence of religions other than Christianity), Conservapedia is biased towards things which support the neoconservative and Christian fundamentalist platforms. While this may be useful to them, it most certainly cannot provide the same utility as a repository for information generally regarded as being accurate. Moreover, the inherent effect of this kind of a "resource" is to be display marked hypocrisy, as one cannot simultaneously demonize "bias" and publish articles based only on a book about "Creation" published by "Apologia Press."

Thus, I denounce Conservapedia not as being horribly biased, but rather as being vapid and hypocritical. In the same way that I don't decry the fact that the Cato Institute is biased towards the classic-conservative position, I do decry the horrible dishonesty with which the authors of Conservapedia handle the issue of bias.

Commencing the Metashell Project

2006-12-03T22:36:00.000-08:00

This entry was cross-posted to cgranade::social.

Well, folks. It's time. The open-source Metashell project (hosted at Google Code, read the blog) is underway. Sure, it started as a class project, but it is time to try and make something wonderful out of it. I strongly encourage anyone who's interested to go and read about it, and to give it a try. There isn't a snapshot up yet, but the Linux users among you can download MonoDevelop and use it to compile a copy. It can't do too much yet, but it does have enough there to be interesting and to be fun to mess with.

That said, to say that Metashell is rough around the edges is a significant understatement, and it serves to drive the point home that I'm not good at everything. Thus, I do want help. I want someone to write a nice installer and to get it to compile under Windows, for starters. More than anything, though, I want this project to get attention. I think that, even if the project itself isn't that well written, that the ideas behind it are sound, and I hope that developers writing all kinds of software can glean some inspiration from it. If it sounds conceded to write that, it is. I'll admit that much. I can't justify why I feel conceded about it, but I hope that at least my conceit isn't too offensive to anyone, and that you give my work a fair chance.
In short, if you want, it's there to download and play with. The Metashell project has commenced. Spread the word.

Technorati Tags: metashell, opensource, projects, dotnet, mono

The most basic premise.

2006-11-13T00:54:00.000-08:00

Underlying all of science is one basic axiom that has been implicitly invoked time and time again throughout the ages. So basic is this premise, and so drastic the consequences of its falsehood that it routinely evades comment. It is the reason that we can even write down the laws of physics, why we can establish principles, and why we are able to make predictions about the natural world. Those who attack science often do so without full cognizance of this foundation, and thus are apt to issue only the most topically applicable of arguments.
What is this assertion, then? What one statement could all of science be built upon, and yet be seen as too trivial to deserve mention?

The Scientific Axiom: The world is logically consistent, and is describable by a set of logical constructions.

If this is not at all true, then all of science is meaningless, as all events are merely coincidences, with no correlation or structure. It is even worse when we consider that the statement that all things happen randomly is a perfectly logical description, and thus would not violate the Axiom in any concrete way. Rather, a world which violates the Axiom is even more perverse and more impenetrable to understanding than even a completely chaotic world. We could not distinguish an unscientific world from a scientific world based only on historical observations, thus rendering all reflection and introspection useless and meaningless.
Why do we assume this strong of an axiom, then? Simply stated, we would very much like that it is actually true, as there is no humanity, no experience to an unscientific world. Art, philosophy, culture and even thought itself depend on the Axiom for their existence. We assume the Axiom because, if we did not, there would be no point to science itself. Perhaps the Axiom is false. If so, then whatever we do is utterly devoid of meaning anyway, so why not spend life on such a useless pursuit as describing that which is by definition undefinable?
From this, we see that despite the protestations otherwise, science is the foundation for a great many other things, and that a world in which science carries no weight cannot also support any other human pursuit. So many aspects of human experience are intertwined thusly; we cannot practice science in an artless world (a basic result of complexity theory), and we cannot practice art in an unscientific world. Any attempt to completely isolate and detangle these aspects of human existence is futile, and endangers humanity itself. At the same time, we must separate the spheres of our lives to at least some degree, as they are in fact different, and must be treated in different manners.
It is patently absurd to approach art with the same axiomatic rigor as is applied to science, just as it is to apply the subjectivity and flexibility of art to scientific pursuits.
Rather, the Scientific Axiom tells us that no matter in what open field we find ourselves, we can make some ground beneath our feet for us to stand upon. We needn't fall into an abyss of despair, for we may always trust logic to at least some degree. At least, in the cases in which we can't, we aren't really "wrong," as correctness is a logical construct anyways.

A small footnote.

The astute among you will note that my statement of the Scientific Axiom is, in fact, not accurate, as it does not take into account Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, nor any other aspect of complexity theory. I must obviously hold some faith in the validity of complexity theory, though, as I so flippantly invoke it elsewhere in my diatribe. No, I realize my omission, and made it intentionally to simplify the statement of the Axiom and to render it accessible to a wider audience. Technically, I should have defined that the world can be described as the asymptotic tendency of increasingly accurate logical constructions. There will, of course, always be lapses and differences, but these are minimized by refining our constructions.

Technorati Tags: science, philosophy, axioms

What is important?

2006-11-10T10:54:00.000-08:00

With the liquid ban still mostly in effect, months after any pretend or real threat has passed, the time comes for any intelligent citizen to ask one resounding question to the TSA: what is important? The boarding pass flaw still unchecked, the question becomes even more pressing.

Let us, in asking this question, take the view of a passenger going through the "security checkpoint." A passenger, most often also a citizen of the United States of America, is made to remove shoes, watches, coats, purses, backpacks, belts, rings, wallets, key chains, cell phones, and any number of other arbitrarily chosen objects. Meanwhile, the line behind them grows. If we accept the premise upon which the TSA supposedly operates, that the world before the checkpoint is dangerous, and that the world after the checkpoint is safe, then we realize that the TSA is placing American citizens into danger.

Indeed, I claim that with every arbitrary inconvenience, with every invasion of privacy, with every bureaucratic hiccup, with every police-state-style intimidation, the TSA has every reason to believe that they are putting American citizens into mortal danger. Citizens are being thrust into a situation where they are crammed in a tight space, with no substantive security measures protecting them. If a rouge suicide bomber ever wanted a nice target, the TSA has saved him the walk all the way to their gate.

What, pray tell, is being protected by the TSA? What does the organization feel is important enough to protect at the direct cost of the safety of the American populace? For what is our safety spent with not even a receipt to show for it? Is it the planes, the private property of already heavily subsidized corporations? Is it the Commander-In-Chief's approval ratings? Is it the jobs of the agents? Their place in the federal government at all? What is important to the TSA?

At What Cost: A rational approach to security.

2006-08-15T14:01:00.000-07:00

"No such thing as a free lunch."

Security always comes at the comes at the cost of something else. We must ask ourselves what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of security; what we are willing to accept in return. There are certainly those who show no such introspection, as is evidenced by the article titled News Hounds: Fox News Airs Call for 'Muslim-Only' Line. People like those described seem to think that there is no trade off- that those target by such profiling are unworthy of consideration. This can hardly be further from the case.

Making a sacrifice.

Despite warnings from those such as Benjamin Franklin, there are those among us who are willing to make an exchange of liberty for security. This exchange, however, is rarely thought through to its logical extremities. If one is to make this choice, then a firm line must be made, or else we end up with an entire state of matter being forbidden. Worse, we could have just as easily been in a state like the British find themselves now: forbidden from even carrying their own personal effects. Are we too far from the old rag about flying naked?

If sacrifices are to be made, they must be made in the context of a strong system of legal oversight to ensure that limits imposed on the extent of the sacrifice are held. Of course, by definition, sacrificing liberty means sacrificing one's ability to redress grievances if this accountability is not observed.

Fair exchange.

It would be ridiculous to make these kinds of sacrifices without even having any security to show for it, but that is exactly where we find ourselves. Air travel is no more secure for our having made these sacrifices, and so we might consider that, as a populous, we have been cheated. To support this claim, consider the massive problems with the revised security procedures advanced by the TSA:

Banning liquids only helps against yesterday's attacks, and is no more than security theater.
The liquid ban is based on a poor threat model.
The modified security procedures are poorly implemented, resulting in more security problems.

Sadly, these problems are only part of a larger progression of ever worse security, being brought to us in exchange for our liberties. Indeed, non-solutions such as racial profiling distract us from the real problems, as do such statistical nightmares as our generation's polygraph. Our fear is being co-opted, and we are being swindled by power-hungry fiends.

Remember, a public system cannot be perfectly secure. Especially not one as trafficked as the airline system. There will always be ways around security, whether it be through body cavities or through sneaking in modified fast food ingredient shipments. Besides, security goes beyond the airports, and as we tighten the airline system, we lose sight of the general problem.

A solution.

We don't have to make these choices. We don't have to choose between liberty and security. As we have seen, blindly ignoring the costs of security makes us both less secure and less free. Instead, let us pursue diplomatic and humanitarian means of resolving the underlying problems of which terrorism is a symptom. It is hard work, and comes at the cost of many years of diplomatic endeavors, but leaves us free, secure and respected in the world. Not that security should be eschewed altogether, but such procedures as are in place today should not be relied upon, but should be secondary to fixing underlying causes of violence.

Surely, our liberty is worth a bit of patience, and a fair spot of work? At the very least, a diplomatic nation is a secure nation.

technorati tags:security, politics, tsa, liberty

Celebrating a Failure of Civic Duty

2006-08-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

As written in a post entitled Hoystory » What they knew and when they knew it, Matthew Hoy berates the New York Times for not revealing the illegal NSA wiretapping program (which Hoy describes as a "terrorist surveilence program," despite that it targets law-abiding American citizens) as soon as they knew about it. The reason he gives, however, is as fine an absurdity as you'll likely find on the Internet:

Frankly, the second-best choice (the best choice being not revealing the program at all) would have been for the Times to reveal the it when it first discovered it. Democrats would’ve beenforced to take a responsible position — not the politically convenientone — and endorse the program and trash the Times. The year-plus delay served to give the paper, and Democrats, some cover.

So, basically, Hoy seems to wish that both the Democrats and the Times would abandon the American people to be victims of this administration's war on the Constitution. Not revealing an illegal program that you have knowledge of can hardly but be considered a deriliction of duty, and makes one an accessory to that crime. This unethical and illegal program stripped American citizens of their Fourth Ammendment rights, as well as any right or privledge to privacy. Furthermore, the program could not be considered to be effective, as before it was commenced, we already knew that the methods by which many terrorists choose to communicate are invisible to this program, such as the shipping of prepaid cell phones to other countries.

Whenever a program strips citizens of their rights and lets terrorists go unchecked, while at the same time violating the law, I would hope that all citizens would at the very least feel transgressed, and not celebrate any derilictions of duty which occur.

While I may respect that others have different viewpoints on how to combat terrorism, broad and untargeted wiretapping is unethical, ineffective and illegal. Targeted wiretapping, with warrents obtained through open or secret courts, against those strongly suspected of terrorism does work. In fact, this is what Britian used to foil the most recent airplane-related terror plot. Remind me again how it would have been a good thing for the Times to fall through on their duty as a journalistic enterprise? You know, the watchdogs of democracy?

technorati tags:politics, wiretapping, nsa, illegal, republicans, nyt, duty

Pacifism Meets Godwin's Law: Debunking a strawman argument.

2006-08-14T23:53:00.000-07:00

Whenever I hear about some kind of "do no harm" attitude I always want to ask "does it pass the WW2 test?" What I mean is, would you really have preferred to have sat by and watched the Holocaust happen rather than fight? If so, then I consider the concept morally bankrupt.

-- theStorminMormon (883615)

It is truly unfortunate to see pacifism treated in such a disrespectful manner. This argument, if one could call it that, is a straw man. It discounts entirely that the point for pacifism and diplomacy had passed: by the time the Holocaust had begun, the choice to engage in violence had been made through inaction. Were pacifism applied to the events of WW2, more efforts would have been made to preserve peace before Hitler took power. To say that WW2 is an argument against pacifism is to substitute blatant emotional appeal for rational discourse, and is, in effect, distorting the claims made by pacifists to paint them with the same brush as the Nazis.

technorati tags:politics, idiots, wars, pacifism, ww2, godwin, slashdot

A Rare Moment of Unadultered Hatred: Shut the hell up.

2006-04-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

I get frustrated just like any other person. Anyone who knows me in person can vouch that this is indeed the case. I try to keep it in check, but right now, I have but a few words to say to a great many persons:

Shut the hell up. If you can't think of anything intelligent to say, or at least something that doesn't jepordize the future of everything you might reasonably care about, then just go into your little corner of reality and don't say anything at all. You are now, and always will be, a nuisence, a distraction and a danger. While in general, I don't advocate "censorship," I must at this point admit that I need some isolation from the overwhelming idiocy that pervades what passes for political discussion in this country, and the only way to do that is for the debate to become intelligent, or for me to leave my political awareness behind. Of the two, I prefer that the dangerous idiots leave.

Having said this, I suppose I probably should make clear who I am aiming at, since we as a society have been damn near brainwashed into thinking that we actually have meaningful discourse on political, social, moral and scientific issues. I am refering to the overwhelming and completely unfounded attack on science that seems to have manifested itself this week in the form of "articles" denying the existance of global warming. By the way, don't even dare accuse me of failing to make an argument. I shouldn't have to. Many others have done so, and I don't intend to waste any effort in convincing people so utterly disconnected from reality. At this point, I wish only to encourage anti-global-warming dittoheads to simply lay off the issue until they learn what it means to have a brain and apply this learning in practice.

Let me describe some examples of the sort of thing that prompts this Unadultered Hatred. Attempting to read the opening comments of this recent Slashdot article on a related issue simply sickens me to the point of physical nausea. Reading pseudo-arguments like the following examples make me despair for humanity.

We already have droughts, floods, powerful storms, varying jet streams, famines, and lots of other weather. Why should we expect next century's droughts to be drier than last century's? When was the time when the weather was perfect for everyone? What makes you think that you can have the weather you want?

-- Kohath, comment #15145483.

Marked as 3, Insightful. I guess noting that storms exist without making any sort of actual argument passes as Insightful these days.

Face it. Most people in the US are bored. They on average spend 4 hours a day in front of the tv, 8 hours working, 8 hours sleeping, and 4 hours unexplained.

From what I hear, New Orleans is a blessing since the hurricane. Crime is almost non-existant, and people are focused on rebuilding the city, working, and being nice to each other.

Maybe a shifting environment and real estate changes will be good for us.

-- hackstraw, comment #15145816.

Marked as 4, Interesting. I suppose that I can't deny that it's interesting. Then again, isn't Hitler interesting, too, or did I just lose the debate via Godwin's Law?

Does it bother you that hurricane researchers have said repeatedly that global warming had little or nothing to do with it, and that there was an expected upswell of activity due starting last year, give or take? Or that the US coastline had been dodging the averages for the better part of 20 years, with a far smaller fraction of hurricane strikes than the historic record would otherwise suggest? What will you be saying if the next hurricane season shows lower activity than the last?

-- Martin Blank, comment #15145268.

Marked as 5, Informative. So that means if I make a bunch of baseless and uncited claims that have nothing to do with the argument at hand, it's not only perfectly on topic, but an informative contribution to an intelligent debate?

Let's make a deal:

Global warming caused last year's record number of hurricanes. So this year, when the number of hurricanes is fewer, we'll know it's because global warming has peaked and is no longer a problem. Do we have a deal?

-- Kohath (again), comment #15145883.

Marked as 4, Insightful. I give up on Slashdot moderation for now. I suppose I have to find a new target, like maybe... Digg? At least on Slashdot, the article itself is fine. The comments are what are so scary. Even then, there are some good commenters mixed in, but they spend all their time responding to idiocy like what I just referenced. On Digg, however... well, let's look at the very headlines of some recent front page articles:

"Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence."

"Global Warming Reportedly Stopped in 1998."

"Remember Global Cooling?"

Sick. To be fair, some of these have been marked as inaccurate, but again, they never should have made it to the front page. There is no substance to such articles; no arguments, no compelling presentation of new perspectives, no attempt at intelligent thought. To repeat myself, then, please, for the love of whatever you hold dear, shut any orfice from which words may emit, cease to utilize any appendage capable of recording written words, and go take a middle-school science class.

technorati tags: hate, rant, vent, science, idiots, digg, slashdot

Semantics and Software: What the hell is a beta?

2006-04-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

If this blog has any recurring theme, it is that language doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. Often times, this subjectivity can lead to great amounts of confusion and general miscommunication. Should we not expect, then, that there exist those willing to exploit such difficulties? Of course we should. This effect is seen everywhere, and we are not surprised to see it again in issues relating to software quality.

Chances are, if you haven't been asleep for the past fifteen years, you've heard the word "beta" used in a sense other than radioactivity or Greek literature. Particularly, you've probably heard it in reference to the development status of software. Historically, the progress of software progress has been described in terms of a progression from planning, feature-incomplete implementation, feature-complete implementation, tested implementation and maintained implementation. Though the precise terms used to describe these phases depends heavily upon whom you ask, there is little disagreement on the five-phase system. Some may split or divide, but these five seem to be common across categorization systems. One of the more common codification schemes involves referring to the second and third phases (call them Phase 1 and Phase 2 for now) as "alpha" and "beta," respectively. Thus, "beta" is quite often intended to refer explicity software which does everything it should, but is likely to be buggy, and in need of through testing.

At this point, many readers would do well to stop and think of what they've seen the term "beta" applied to. Gmail, which has gained no small amount of features, has been in "beta" since its inception. Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is quite obviously not feature-complete, nor is the documentation even close to adaquate. Thus, we see that in both cases, the term "beta" has been shifted from meaning "feature-complete but buggy" to "people won't use it if its called alpha" in the first case, and to "we don't care enough about quality to have a bugfixing phase" in the second. Of course, the idea of distinct phases gets a bit blurry with a feature-incomplete production application. Google can't afford to have major security flaws in a production application, whether they call it beta or not. Thus, I would propose that Google fix the problem by simply choosing another word to use other than "beta." For Microsoft's part, calling Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is nothing short of a boldfaced attempt at deception. The documentation and visual styles are far from complete, and most dialogs are completely different than most others, leading to the realization that Microsoft is not really even trying at making the beta phase a quality control phase.

In summary, please be aware of what the word "beta" means, and don't let it sucker you into ignoring large and important faults of a product.

technorati tags: software, language, beta

More Trust Models: To Trust Telecos and Governments.

2006-04-07T17:17:00.000-07:00

As discussed in the article "AT&T Forwarding All Internet Traffic to NSA?," the EFF alleges that AT&T has been forwarding that traffic which passes over their lines to the NSA. In keeping with my recent obsession with trust models, I shall raise an important question: to what degree should one's telecommunications provider and one's government be trusted? The most obvious answer seems to be to not trust either at all.

Dealing with each in turn, let us consider the role of a teleco in a trust model. A teleco sells a very specific service: to connect you to the Internet. Nowhere in this is the guarantee that they have the human decency to keep the data which you trust to their networks reasonably secure or private. Though some telecos may give you this decency, there is no compelling reason to assume that they will prevent unauthorized access to your data. Rather, the very people you least desire to have access to your data will seek to integrate themselves with a teleco, just as a pedophile might find access to their victims through a position in a police organization (as seen in the recent Department of Homeland Security child sex scandal). Thus, in one of those many ironies which permeate throughout information security, a teleco should be distrusted by default. How do you deal, then, with securing your data over what is, fundamentally, an untrusted network? For that, cryptography again comes to the rescue. A trust model which assumes a base distrust of the network itself will promote the use of end-to-end encryption. Oh, would that this were the case in practice.

Moving on to trusting a government, let us reflect upon words of wisdom from the Federalist Papers, No. 51, written by Alexander Hamilton:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

A careful examinations of these words reminds us that at its most fundamental, a government is a response to imperfections in the human condition. Unfortunately, however, that response is in itself forged from the same flawed humanity. At a practical level, we are again reminded of a very basic axiom of trust:

The positions most requiring of trustworthiness are sought out by those most apt to abuse that trust.

Put differently, the positions that we create to deal with issues of trust and crime are the most desirable to those intent on violating that trust. As I have already mentioned, a position in a police organization is highly desirable for a criminal, so is not a position in lawmaking most desirable for a lawbreaker? How, then, can we ever trust our own government to be responsible with our data? We cannot if we wish to have any expectation of security. Government can secure us from each other, but it can never secure us from itself.

It is thus seen that the recent allegations by the EFF represent yet another failure to apply sane trust models to every aspect of our lives. Instead of harboring a base distrust of our communications providers and our governments, we explicitly place large amounts of trust in them. Though this by no more excuses the alleged crimes than leaving an expensive car unlocked excuses its subsequent theft, we should likewise not be at all surprised that, when we are so naive as to trust our governments and telecos, our trust will be violated in the most profound sense.

technorati tags: security, trust, encryption, government

The Fatal Flaw With Credit Cards.

2006-03-19T13:55:00.000-08:00

Why is it that credit and debit cards are so continually under attack? Is it that those in charge of securing the credit card system are so incompetent, or is there a fundamental flaw with the model that they are charged with making secure? If the latter case holds, then no matter how intelligent the security teams are, the system will remain insecure due to a these fundamental assumptions. In this essay, then, I attempt to make the case that the model underlying modern credit cards is fundamentally insecure, and must be replaced if we are to expect any sort of security from the system. Let us consider how this might be the case by examining a typical transaction.

John Q. Public buys a few groceries at the local supermarket. He decides to use a credit card, since it is much more convienent than cash. He then proceeds to swipe the card through the card reader. The card has now been comprimised, for he made the decision to trust equipment fundamentally outside of his control with the entirety of his card's data. His web of trust has not even had the chance to start building, as it was so throughly violated at the first step. The problem that is immediately seen is that in this kind of a transaction, the validation data is the key! Every time that card is swiped, the exact same data is exchanged, and one need only capture that data once to invalidate the implicit trust in every other instance. How else might this transaction have been completed, then? By the magic of private/public key encryption, also known as keypair encryption.

Before delving into how this would work, we must first develop an understanding of keypair encryption. If you already have such a grip, please skip this paragraph. Under a keypair encryption model, each user has a private key which they keep secret at all times, and a public key which they distribute as widely as possible. There are four basic operations that can be performed using a keypair system: encryption, decryption, signing and verification. Encryption takes a set of data and encrypts it against a public key so that only the matching private key can decrypt it. Decryption, then, is the act of taking such encrypted data and recovering the original data by applying the private key. Signing is the act of attaching an extra block of data, called a signature, to a message, and requires a private key. Verification takes a public key, a signature and a message and checks to see if the signature was generated from the matching message and private key. For instance, I can sign an e-mail message and attach the signature. If someone malicious intercepts my e-mail and changes it, then the signature will no longer verify and the message should not be trusted. These operations can be combined, too. If I have your public key, I can encrypt a message so that only you can decrypt it, and then sign the encrypted message with my private key. Upon recieving the message, you can verify that it is from me, and be assured that only you will ever see the message.

Let's revisit the credit card purchase scenario again, and use keypair encryption this time. Before arriving at the grocery store, let's say that John Q. Public created a GPG keypair (which can be done using free software available for most any OS) and sent the public key to his bank. He then goes to the bank's branch office and reads to a teller the fingerprint on the key (a string of data that is unique to each public key) and verifies that the public key they recieved was the same as the one he intended to transmit. Having done that, the bank now trusts that key. John now goes to the store, selects his purchases and goes to the counter to pay. Instead of swiping a card, he takes out his PDA.

The register now generates a message to send to John's PDA. It doesn't know who John is, and so it can't encrypt it to his PDA. There would be some serious privacy concerns if the register were to send a message with his purchase details over the air, and so it first attepts to confirm his identity by generating a block of random data (called "salt" for reasons beyond my understanding) and sending it to John's PDA. The PDA then responds by signing it with the private key stored on board. The register now knows which key to use for the transaction, and verifies the signature with the public key from the bank.

Next, the register needs to confirm the transaction details. The register now writes a message consisting of the current time, the name of the company recieving payment, and the transaction amount. The message is then encrypted against the public key it recieved from the bank, as well as the store's public key and the bank's public key. (That means that any of John, the store and the bank can decrypt the message.) John's PDA recieves and decrypts the message and shows a dialog on the screen asking if the transaction should be completed. If he clicks yes, then the PDA signs the encrypted message and sends it back to the register. The signed and encrypted message can serve as legal verification of the transaction in case of dispute.

Note that nowhere in this process is John's private key sent to anything but his PDA. Thus, in order for this transaction to work, John needs to trust the following three things:

The bank's public key actually belongs to the bank.
The store's public key actually belongs to the store.
The PDA has not been comprimised, and will only sign the messages that John explicitly agrees to, and will protect his private key.

The first two can be solved rather easily; if the bank's public key is trusted by a large number of other people, then they can sign a message containing the bank's public key's fingerprint and a statement that the key referred to actually belongs to the bank. Software exists to collect such messages and assemble a web of trust. If John knows any of these people personally, then the trust link will be stronger. The same process can be used to verify that the store's public key really belongs to that store. As for the PDA, that is a trust issue that John has explicit control over. If he does not trust the code on the machine, it can be replaced with code that he does trust. Of course, such trust has its limits, as it may be that the hardware itself was comprimised, but such issues remain in any system, regardless of the model. Rather, a system of trust such as the one described here minimizes the risk by decentralizing points of attack. In order to comprimise John's transactions, one must either comprimise his personal property, or form a conspiracy of the bank, store and many customers of each to poison the first two bullet points above. To form such a large consipiracy without John's knowledge is difficult at best and counter to human nature at worst.

The system can be further protected by creating John's private key such that it only works if a special password is entered at any use of the key. This, however, still requires that the PDA's hardware be trusted, and simply protects against physical theft of the PDA. These arguments are not to indicate, however, that such a system is secure against all attack, but rather that it is improved from the direct key exchange method of modern credit systems.

technorati tags: security, cards, encryption

Related or not? A case for more metadata.

2006-03-14T05:06:00.000-08:00

Recently, I tried to search for a PSP port of the PC game Cave Story using Google, using the search string "cave story psp," and was completely frustrated by the preponderance of articles about the game on sites with PSP sections. A human can quickly see that these articles have nothing to do with the PSP, and that the links are part of the site's chrome. Google and other search engines, however, have no means of discerning this separation. Thus, I propose that in order to give search engines the help they need, site designers should label navigation links as rel="nav".

A more complete, but robust, solution would be to include an attribute for the div element from another XML namespace (say "uri:seo-metadata") that would allow you to specify information like the rel attribute of the a element. For example, a div element could take the following form:

The contents of the div element would then be marked as being part of the site's chrome and not directly related to the content, and would also be marked as being part of the navigation structure. Such an approach would also be extensible so as to include a mechanism to describe other aspects of a resource for the benefit of search engines. Of course, such metadata would be useful to applications outside of SEO and so it would be more appropriate just to refer to it as a generic metadata stucture that allows you to attach metadata to any arbitrary element. That, however, is a topic for another day.

technorati tags: seo, metadata

Language, Cause, Evolution and Effect.

2006-02-28T03:31:00.000-08:00

Recently, I found myself greatly amused by a particular Doonesbury strip illustrating the problems with the creationist assertions. Deciding to share my amusements with those who cohabit the dormitory in which I spend my sleeping hours, I printed a copy and posted it on my door. A few days later, I found that my posting had been modified to include a strange response:

"Evolution is a complete change of species: fish to bird. [The adaptation of pathogens to drugs] is called natural selection. Get the facts straight, stud."

This statement is simply false. Evolution can include complete changes of species, but not in any sort of sudden sense. In order, then, for a complete change of species to occur by evolution, there must be intermediate steps that are incremental in nature. Thus, these too should be considered part of evolution as any theory of evolution predicts their existence.

Interestingly, this response did not actually "debate" anything, but seems to have sought to distract other readers of my door with a semantic sleight of hand. I have posted to other forums on this tactic, but I feel strongly enough as to do so again on this forum. Here, our friendly neighborhood linguistic charlatan, whether consciously or not, has acted to confuse the method with the effect. Evolution can happen by many different methods, of which natural selection is but one. We can exact a change in a species through other methods, such as artificial selection practiced in the breeding of domesticated animals, resulting in an evolution of that species. At its most basic, to say that evolution exists is to say no more than that the world's zoology is not constant with respect to time and space. This notion can be experimentally shown by an examination of any number of datasets, including fossil records showing a set of species not found on modern-day Earth.

The more controversial notion is that of natural selection, the proposed method by which species evolve. (It should be noted that this is technically not correct -- species do not evolve as a direct result of natural selection, but rather, genetic patterns evolve with species as hosts. For our purposes here, however, the two models are in close enough agreement that we need not belabor the point further than to point an interested reader to Richard Dawkins.)This can be observed directly on a microscopic scale, but the allegation by the creationist apologists is that the lack of direct observation for macroscopic natural selection precludes the proposal that macroscopic natural selection is responsible for evolution from being useful or worthy of consideration. Of course, by similar criteria we are left with no viable explanation of the observations alluded to above. Creationism is no more able to produce evidence from the depths of time long past, and in fact lacks any analogous data to that of microscopic natural selection, which serves to suggest that the principles are sound and should hold at other scales. Thus, the whole trickery of trying to recast the debate into terms of an emotionally charged term and then seeking to redefine the term in a straw man argument is seen to be a callous attempt to change the universe by changing popular opinion.

What would be the effect if our delightful correspondent had succeeded in convincing all of his readers that evolution is a sham? Would the universe suddenly stop evolving? Would TB drugs of yesteryear suddenly become effective again? No. The universe would not even slow down in its continual process of change, despite our kicking and screaming, and our denial of overwhelming evidence. Such intellectual dishonesty gets us no where, as it ultimately divorces us from the world around us and impairs our ability to make rational judgments.

technorati tags: language, debate, creationism, evolution

Not Safe For Work: A case for new metadata.

2006-02-21T16:40:00.000-08:00

You've no doubt seen it before: those wonderful four letters that alert us that a certain link should be treated differently than all others around it. Depending on the person, one may either anticipate with glee akin to that of eating from a forbidden tree, or avoid it with the same anxiety as one might avoid a rabid animal. Yes, NSFW is one of the more useful acronyms to have been developed by the collective patrons of the Internet.

All the same, however, one does occasionally fail to notice these instructive glyphs, resulting in shock, amusement and pain. If only there was a way to flag these links at the metadata level so that the browser wouldn't allow you to follow them inadvertently. Luckily for us, the rel attribute of the a element in (X)HTML is designed for such things. If we simply mark links as being NSFW by adding the attribute rel="nsfw" to the anchor tags, then it would become possible to create a Greasemonkey User Script to prevent such links from being followed. This measure would be easily deactivated, thus making it a conscious decision to follow NSFW links. In fact, I am working on just such a script right now. Hopefully I'll finish it soon. If so, I'll post it to this space when I do. In any case, please consider marking your NSFW links with this attribute, and perhaps it will catch on.

Update: Jeremy Dunck on the Greasemonkey mailing list was kind enough to write up a script for me to do exactly what I wanted.

technorati tags: metadata, design, web

Griffin AirClick USB + Linux?

2005-11-17T13:16:00.000-08:00

I just purchased a Griffin AirClick USB. The application that powers it is a .NET application, so it should run under Mono, right? Well, not quite. Let's look at what I found.

The application itself doesn't do much- it delegates from a USB driver (I'll come back to this) to one of a set of plugins (these are .NET DLLs renamed with the extension "acp". They can be manipulated just like DLLs). The plugins then do something based on the button pushes. The Windows version comes with Interop.PowerPoint.dll and Interop.iTunesLib.dll, which the PowerPoint and iTunes plugins use to delegate to the applications. Thus, the flow of information seems to be: USB to delegate application to plugin to target application. The problem in porting this to Linux is the USB part. The application includes, compiled into the AirClick.exe assembly, the USBSharp class found here, which in turn makes explicit reference to kernel32.dll. Specifically, the file handle and HID device APIs seem to be used. I'm not too good at .NET hacking, so I can't go too much further on this front.

Assuming I can find some way of getting AirClick.exe to recognize the Linux USB stack, what next? Well, in order to be useful, you have to control something. If, for instance, you use it for controlling music, could you control a Mono music player like Banshee? If you want presentation control, use the CLI-UNO bindings to control OpenOffice.org. I now just have to find the API for the plugins...

Too Idiotic to Ignore

2005-10-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

There are those articles that I run across that are simply too idiotic to ignore. Before responding to the article, however, I must summarize it for those with too weak a stomach to read it. The basic contention of the article, itself an extract from Dick Morris' book in which he advocates for a 2008 presidental run by Condoleeza Rice, is that an electoral showdown between Rice and Clinton is inevitable because Rice is a sort of "anti-Clinton." The article states in no uncertian terms that the two are somehow "destined" to fight each other:

Hillary Clinton does not want any other woman to take what she regards as her just place in history. Yet, ironically, it is Hillary's candidacy that makes Condi's necessary and, therefore, likely. The first woman nominated by the Democrats can only be defeated by the first woman nominated by the Republicans. Were Condi and Hillary to face one another, it would be the next great American presidential race and one of the classic bouts in history: Hector vs Achilles; Wellington vs Bonaparte; Lee vs Grant; Mary, Queen of Scots vs Elizabeth; Ali vs Frasier. And now, Condi vs Hillary.

These potential combatants are as different as, well, black and white. In many ways, they are mirror images of each other: not only white/black but north/south; Democrat/Republican; married/single; suburban/urban; and, in policy interests, domestic/foreign.

Saying that Condoleezza Rice is black, though, is similar to saying that Colin Powell is black, that Jennifer Lopez is Hispanic, or that Ann Coulter is a woman. In each case, the statement is in fact true, but it doesn't help to explain the person in question. All of them have disregarded their racial, sexual or ethnic identies in favor of the pursuit of money and political power. Thus, portraying this as a "white/black" battle is deceptive in many ways: Clinton would be much more likely to support racial and ethnic equality and civil rights. Rice is far too busy being beholden to the oil corporations that love her so much as to name an oil tanker after her to ever care about such human issues as civil rights. Make no mistake: Rice is a neoconservative, and as such has not ideological basis for upholding the Constitution. To her, and to the rest of the Bush cronies, the "law of the land" is merly an obstacle to greater levels of power. The Bill of Rights is thus made into a pesky thorn in the side of neoconservative campaigns.

That there is even one person who has even a passing familiarity with politics and yet can still hold on to the idea that Rice has any qualifications or capacity for President is a disturbing thing indeed. Her qualifications are no greater than the only President in history to ascend to office without winning any kind of a national vote whatsoever. For her to ally herself with one who blatently steals elections, who commissions and condones the murder of nearly 30,000 Iraqi civilians, who has led the most concerted assult on the Bill of Rights in US history, and who has made a complete mockery of the nation's diplomatic relations, what does that indicate about her? What sort of person willingly and knowingly supports a war criminal, serial electioneer, and a neofascist? The portrayal of this supposed struggle between Clinton and Rice as being "preordained," just or otherwise anything other than a battle of Rice's propaganda machines against the power of the independant media to expose her for what she is would be laughable were it not for the fact that there are those among us who seem to think that she could serve this nation well in any sense of the phrase.

Stop praying, start doing.

2005-09-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

God did not ordain that Katrina kill so many. This was- and is- a human drama. It falls to humanity to save its own that it so willingly left in harm's way. The drama of Lake George is an outrage. The poor are left to die, as racism and rape run rampant. Look well, America! This is the face of Bush's America; his America is one in ruins as he vacations. Praying didn't stop this from happening, and prayer will not reverse it. The final chapter of this human tragedy must be written, and the climax must be the removal of George W. Bush from the seat of U. S. President. Our very survival may even be at stake, as the direct loss of life in NOLA is likely to be the least of our worries. Rather, this may be indicitive of the consequences of ignoring global warming, wetland devestation, etc., as well as the more immediate issue of providing strong leadership during times of crisis. What would happen if another hurricane hit? With the stunning lack of effort that Bush has displayed, how can we expect any better? Bush sees fit to link 9/11 and Katrina, using the same tactic that he has used for every crisis before. What he doesn't say, though, is that there is actually some merit to this comparison, as Bush was warned of both in 2001. As Paul Krugman documents:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans.

Looks like FEMA was two for three, whilst Bush was batting a straight .000. The time for prayer is long past, and now we have a simple mission ahead of us: defeat Bush.

Update: This is really too much.

Websites that should exist, but don't.

2005-08-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

I have ideas. Lots of ideas. Time? Not so much. Perhaps more if I wasn't so bloody lazy. That, however, is for another time. For now, let me document two of these ideas.

HateTagger

People hate people, companies and things... wouldn't it be nice to document these various hatreds? In light of the recent fad of social tagging sites, I propose the following: allow users to create "objects," tag them, and associate them with "reasons," and tag those.

SiteGrant

Ever see a bug on a site that you want fixed, but don't have any control over it? Well, offer the site money for it! Problem is, that'd be expensive if you are the only one offering a bounty. Thus, allow users to log bugs and attach PayPal payments to them. When the site fixes the problem, or if the bounties expire, the money is either given to the site's owner, or back to the grantee. Let the taking back of the web begin!

Things I Hate: Part 1

2005-08-18T22:42:00.000-07:00

I listen to George Carlin. A lot. He spends a lot of time speaking about things he hates, and this inspires me. Carlin isn't like O'Reilly, Coulter or Malkin in that he is doing it for the humor value, and backs up his statements with logic. Not being a comedian myself, however, I shall be content to write a list that is at least logical if not at all humorous. With that, here are some things that I hate. Expect this list to get longer.

Anti-Intellectualism

Why is it that we, the American populus, seem to shun those willing to develop their intellect? Why is it that Dubya's apparant lack of brains serves as a benefit to him on the campaign trail? What sort of a society disgraces those most willing and able to tackle its problems? As a nation, it makes no sense to elect someone to office because he is stupid. This should, if anything at all, be a great deterrant to his or her being elected. Thus, this irrational distain for all things mental is something I hate.

Cars Made by Ford

Henry Ford was, let's face it, an asshole. "My customers can have any color car they want as long as its black," he said. His contribution to American capitalism and to the automobile industry? The dehumanizing assembly line process. Upon a legacy of deep seated disrespect for the human condition, and in particular, for his customers, Ford built an auto company that would eventually work to prevent the seatbelt from seeing the light of day. The company's reaction to quality control issues? Use public relations to cover up the issue and let the buyers die.
To be perfectly fair, GM does many of these same things, but for some irrational reason, Ford pisses me off much more.

Wanted

What a stupid waste of electromagnetic waves. Police departments are in an ongoing struggle against fugitives- they don't all of a sudden decide that 100 of them are going down, then relax when they're done. The advertisements for this insipid waste of bandwidth represent the level of intellectual stimulation that the show itself is expected to provide, in that the same couple of lines are repeated ad nauseum. I swear, if I hear that "the next loud noise you hear is me" again, someone will be hurt.

Knee-Jerk Counter-Protesters

Recently, MoveOn helped to organize vigils around the nation to show support for Cindy Sheehan. One of these vigils was hosted by my parents, and was held here in Fort Worth, TX. Towards the end, two counter-protesters arrived with badly scrawled signs reading "God Bless President Bush." Before arriving, however, they saw fit to file a noise complaint with the police. When the police arrived to find only a silent candlelight vigil, it became clear that the counter-protesters were being vindictive and underhanded. If they expect such crass behavior to reflect well upon their Fearless Leader, they are dreadfully mistaken. Of course, to hold it against Shrub would be a gross error of Guilt By Association. We have enough reasons to hate Bush without having to resort to logical fallacy.

Pro-Life - Anti-War

2005-08-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

Pro-Life - Anti-War
Originally uploaded by GammaBlaBlog.

Wow. Good to see that someone stands up for what they believe in. Finally, pro-life does mean anti-war.

2005-08-08T18:33:00.000-07:00

2005-07-11T00:05:00.000-07:00

2005-07-10T11:56:00.000-07:00

2005-07-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

America supports you by mispending money.

2005-06-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

I'll make this one short. I'm just saddened enough by this that I don't know what to say, really. To make a long story short, the Department of Defense has created a website where you can get a free dogtag that says "America Supports You." The fact that they're spending the money on the servers, shipping and tag itself rather than on buying even a small amount of armor is insane. I know, the site isn't likely that expensive, but if even one more soldier was properly equipped, wouldn't that be worth it?

Note: to avoid increasing the Google PageRank of this sick site, I have used the rel="nofollow" attribute. I encourage anyone else linking there to do so as well.

Supreme (In)Justice

2005-06-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court has been busy. In the past several days, there have been no less than five actions taken that fly in the face of liberty, law and human dignity.

MGM v. Grokster: Putting profits above people, the SCOTUS has decided that only the movie and music industries should be free to innovate. Companies like Grokster, who don't actively try to restrict the features available to their users, should be punished if one listens to the SCOTUS. At least the Betamax decision wasn't overturned.
Kelo et al v. City of New London: Also known as "taking land from individuals to give to private corporations who pay off the right people." Not much more to be said here, except for that I hope that construction on the Lost Liberty Hotel starts soon.
National Cable & Telecommunications Association et al. v. Brand X Internet Services et al.: God, do I hate it when I wind up agreeing with Microsoft. Well, this decision basically says that since broadband carriers are not "common carriers," they are not responsible for encouraging competition. Disney and Microsoft have joined the ACLU in saying that this descision is bad for consumers.
Van Orden v. Perry: Revisiting the 10 Commandments for the first time in a quarter-century, the SCOTUS managed to screw it up on their grand revisiting, by ensuring that a religious monument can be proudly and boldly displayed on state property in Texas.
McCreary County, Kentucky, et al. v. ACLU et al.: As long as the Commandments aren't in the courthouse itself, that is. The SCOTUS is nothing if not consistant, eh? Oh, and let's not forget to invoke 9/11 when things don't go our way, right, Scalia?

What can I say? The Courts are busy these days. So many liberties to revoke, so many people to step on, so many pockets to line at our expense. It's a wonder that they have time to breathe anymore.