Tue, 24 Apr 2012

Climate Change Alarmists: Get Off The Soapbox

In my last post I mentioned that global warming would get its own post sometime soon; it appears that now is the time. I ran across a quick update from Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit (linked to from Watts Up With That) that mentions Michael Mann's new book:

I had also spent some time considering a response to Mann's book. It amazes me that a reputable scientific community would take this sort of diatribe seriously. Mann's world is populated by demons and bogey-men. People like Anthony Watts, Jeff Id, Lucia, Andrew Montford and myself are believed to be instruments of a massive fossil fuel disinformation campaign and our readers are said to be "ground troops" of disinformation. The book is an extended ad hominem attack, culminating in salivation in the trumped up plagiarism campaign against Wegman, arising out of copying of trivial "boilerplate" by students (not Wegman himself). Wegman's name nearly 200 times in the book (more, I think, than anyone else's).

Virtually nothing in its discussion of our criticism can be taken at face value. Mann begins his account by re-cycling his original outright lie that we had asked him for an "excel spreadsheet". Mann's lies on this point had been a controversy back in November 2003. The incident was revived by the Penn State Investigation Committee, which had (anomalously on this point) asked Mann about an actual incident. Instead of "forgetting", as any prudent person would have done, Mann brazenly repeated his earlier lie to the Penn State Investigation Committee. Needless to say, the "Investigation" Committee didn't actually investigate the lie by crosschecking evidence, but accepted Mann's testimony as ending the matter. In the book, instead of leaving well enough alone, Mann once again re-iterated the lie.

Or to pick another example, Mann noted the controversy about the contaminated Korttajarvi sediments (Tiljander), but conceded nothing. Mann said that there was no "upside down" in their "objective" methods and asserted that his results were "insensitive to whether or not these records were used", a statement contradicted in the SI to Mann et al 2009. In any sane world, Mann would have issued a retraction of the many claims of Mann et al 2008 that depended on the contaminated Korttajarvi sediments. But instead, more attacks on critics.

Pretty strong language, which should not be a surprise to anyone who has been following the ongoing contretemps between McIntyre and Mann. But McIntyre is not the only one commenting on Mann's book; Harold Ambler wonders how he can actually get his hands on all that funding that Mann claims is being doled out by Big Oil to climate skeptics:

This is all a bit hard to take. I myself am a skeptical blogger and author, yet I am in no way funded by Big Oil. In fact, my three-and-a-half years of toiling on the subject of climate change has yielded approximately $4,000 worth of income. I'm not proud of this fact as a father, husband or man, but it does undercut the constant conspiracy theories about funding behind global-warming skepticism. Meanwhile, as I've noted elsewhere, mainstream climate scientists themselves have received grants totalling more than $1 billion from Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and other large energy companies.

And, of course, there's the continual stonewalling that's been going on for years now at the RealClimate site, as noted by Anthony Watts:

Email 2743, Sept 2009, Michael "Robust Debate" Mann: "So far, we've simply deleted all of the attempts by McIntyre and his minions to draw attention to this at RealClimate."

And Mann himself, apart from his book, has blogged defending his position, with plenty of strong language on his own account:

As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked, politicians have demanded I be fired from my job, and I've been subject to congressional and criminal investigations. I've even had death threats made against me. And why? Because I study climate science and some people don't like what my colleagues and I have discovered. Their attacks on scientists are part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged in a cynical effort to discredit climate science.

My first inclination after collecting the above quotes was to put this post in the "rants" section. After all, the battle lines are pretty well drawn by this time, aren't they? But no. This wouldn't really be worth a post just to rant, and anyway I'd be rather late to the party. And there is, actually, an issue worth teasing out from the diatribes and discussing on its own merits.

First, take a look at what seems to me to be the core of Mann's blog post:

By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing much of the carbon that had been buried in the earth over the eons into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and other gases. Those gases are acting like a heat-trapping blanket around the planet.

If we continue down this path, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet - one with more widespread drought and flooding, greater competition for diminishing water and food resources, and national-security challenges arising from that competition.

As a father of a six-year-old daughter, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to make sure that she doesn't look back and ask why we left her generation a fundamentally degraded planet relative to the one we started with.

There's a tendency for people to be so overwhelmed by the challenge and the threat of climate change that they go from concern to despair. They shouldn't. While some warming is already locked in, there's still time to turn the ship around. We can still limit our emissions in the decades to come in a way that prevents some of the most serious impacts of climate change from occurring.

Forget all the criticisms and diatribes for a moment. Forget the fact that the things Mann states as simple facts in the above are nothing of the sort; they are beliefs that he holds, which may or may not be justified. The question I want to start with is: does he really hold these beliefs? Is he sincere? I think he is, and so are the other climate scientists and politicians who preach alarmism about global warming; and that is what we should really be worried about.

Without getting into the whole history of the "hockey stick" and other debates that Mann has been involved in, let's just look at Mann's simple statements above and apply some basic critical thinking. First: it is true that the carbon in fossil fuels was stored there over a very long period of time (millions of years during the Carboniferous period, some 300 to 360 million years ago, if our current understanding is correct), and we are now releasing it over a much shorter period of time. However: there have been plenty of periods in between the Carboniferous period and now when humans were not burning fossil fuels--so all that carbon that's supposedly warming the planet now was not released, but stayed buried--and yet the climate was warmer than it is now, sometimes quite a bit warmer. What made it warm then, since it obviously wasn't all that carbon that was buried?

Of course, I'm quite sure Mann would have an answer to this if we asked him--though he might need some help from the other folks at RealClimate to work it into a really good blog post. But the point remains: the basic assumption underlying all of this hysteria about global warming is that CO2 released by human burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver of the climate. But it clearly wasn't in the past, so what's changed now? Do the laws of atmospheric physics somehow adjust themselves because they know that humans are now burning fossil fuels? Or could it be that there are other things that drive the climate? After all, if Mann is correct, we are releasing millions of years' worth of carbon over a few hundred years, so if all that carbon really made so much of a difference, Earth's climate should already be somewhere around where it was at the start of the Carboniferous period, right? But it isn't.

But let's put that aside and go on to the next point. Suppose the Earth does warm by another degree Celsius or so by 2100--so what? Mann asserts that this will degrade the planet--but hold on a second. The planet warmed by 0.6 degrees Celsius from 1900 to 2000, according to the IPCC. Do you feel any impulse to look back and ask why those profligates in the early 1900's left us such a degraded planet? True, things have changed since then: but we have adapted to the changes. Not only that: we have innovated. We have found new ways of doing things, and new things to do, that the people in 1900 could not have imagined. And as a result, the planet is much, much richer today. Yet somehow, all that is supposed to stop, and we are just stuck? People won't find any more new ways of adapting? That is just silly. I expect that Earth in 2100 will be a lot richer than Earth today, and to the people of the future, climate change will be a non-problem, not because it won't be happening, but because adapting to it will be cheap, the same way that adapting to changes in the weather is cheap in developed countries today.

(An aside: it could well turn out that not just adapting to climate change, but controlling it, will be cheap by 2100. That would be even nicer, just as being able to control the weather would be nicer than having to adapt to it. I can wear a raincoat and carry an umbrella, but if things could be arranged so the rain fell while I was sleeping and it was always sunny out when I had to go somewhere, I certainly wouldn't complain. But the main obstacle in the way of controlling the climate is--climate science. As long as Mann and his ilk are running this field, we will never really understand how the climate works, because they are not trying to understand it; they are trying to force it to conform to their predetermined conclusions. But that's another post.)

Mann talks about people being overwhelmed by the challenge; but it seems to me that he and his crew of alarmists are the ones who are overwhelmed, and are simply projecting their own feelings onto the rest of us. They have a sense of planetary emergency because they can't think of any ways to adapt--the only response they can come up with is alarm: stop emitting CO2 RIGHT NOW! Well, let me reassure you, Mr. Mann: the rest of us have plenty of ways to adapt. It may well turn out that we burn a lot less fossil fuel in the future than we do today--but for reasons that have little or nothing to do with climate change. Gasoline is well over $4 a gallon in the US as I write, and hybrid vehicles are selling like hotcakes. Some of those people are probably buying hybrids because they're concerned about the climate, but I expect a lot more are buying them simply because they want to save money. Or because they're concerned about their dollars going to oil-rich countries in the Middle East. But regardless of the reason, people do respond to reasonable incentives to change their behavior. What they don't respond well to is being told that their only choices are to emasculate the economy or destroy the planet.

So I'm not responding to Mann's book by writing the long, long post I could write about all the details of what is wrong with Mann's so-called research, why the hockey stick is bunk, why the climate models are worthless, and so on. (I may write that post anyway sometime, just for fun--or perhaps to go more deeply into the underlying issue of how we should be doing science--but this isn't it.) None of that really matters to the bottom line, which actually ties in nicely with my last post:

Humanity has always faced problems, and we always will. The only choice we have is whether we face them with hope or with fear. But there is not only an individual choice, for each of us to make for ourselves; there is also a social choice, whether or not to let the fears of the fearful constrain the hopes of the hopeful.

When it comes right down to it, Michael Mann isn't being investigated because he did bad science. Scientists are human, and can make mistakes; we all realize that. He's being investigated because he did bad science and then used it to justify declaring a planetary emergency. When you do that, people take notice, and if it later turns out--after you have tried your best to obstruct the investigation--that you didn't do the science right, people get annoyed. Particularly if, even supposing the problem you are worried about is real, there are other ways of dealing with it besides pushing the emergency button. The real problem with climate change alarmism is that the alarmists just can't get this; they just can't get that the whole alarmism thing is their personal thing, and most other people just don't share it. It's not that we don't want to "save the planet"; of course, everybody wants to save the planet. It's just that we don't agree that your declaration of a planetary emergency is the way to save the planet. It may even be counterproductive, since it involves committing a lot of resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

So here's my advice to climate change alarmists: get off the soapbox. Yes, we know you're concerned, and we appreciate your concern. By all means, buy a hybrid car, support alternative energy research (and by the way, it would be nice if you would include nuclear power under "alternative energy", but that's another post), look for other ways to help reduce our use of fossil fuels. There are other good reasons to do that anyway. But we are not going to stop everything else and cripple the world's economy. You've had your say, and there are plenty of other pressing issues to attend to. Deal with it.

Posted at 23:19 | Category: opinions | Tags: politics, science | Permalink

Thu, 19 Apr 2012

Discovery Retires

Along with a lot of other people, I watched Discovery fly over Washington, DC on its way to Dulles Airport. A good sequence of pictures is here. I lamented a while back that today's NASA seems to have fallen far from the NASA of the Apollo missions, but obviously there's not much to be done about that except to move on (see below for more on that), and anyway, that's not Discovery's fault. The Shuttle deserves a good retirement, and will get one; I plan to go see it in its new home.

Then I saw news of a new venture called Planetary Resources, backed by James Cameron and the founders of Google, which, if speculations are correct, plans to mine asteroids. So as I said in that post a while back, we don't need NASA to go into space now; private ventures, at least in the US, will do it on their own dime. It will be interesting to see if NASA's current plans get there before a private venture does.

Many people are probably wondering why a private venture would even get into this business. I am sad to note that the magazine closely associated with my alma mater, Technology Review, appears to be in this category; their response to the press release announcing the venture can only be described as snarky:

According to the company's press release (below):

"[...] the company will overlay two critical sectors - space exploration and natural resources - to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources'."

That sounds like asteroid mining. Because what else is there in space that we need here on earth? Certainly not a livable climate or a replacement for our dwindling supplies of oil.

Regular readers of TR (which I still am, but may not be for much longer if they keep going the way they're going) will recognize the "livable climate" bit as a reference to global warming; I won't comment on that here since it deserves a whole separate post (and will probably get one sometime soon). The "dwindling supplies of oil" bit is just as bad; we don't need to go into space to find substitutes for oil. (And that's not even considering other alternatives like nuclear power--TR does know that MIT has a whole Nuclear Engineering department working on that, right?) And even if the venture is intended to be nothing more than asteroid mining, at least to start with, there are a lot of resources to be mined from asteroids; that "trillions of dollars" part is not hyperbole (in fact it is probably an underestimate of the total value that will eventually be realized). Does that not count enough in TR's calculus of value to merit more than a passing comment before the snark begins?

But the real problem with this attitude is the narrowness of vision, the underlying belief that the best way to face our problems is to withdraw inside our shell, to scramble as best we can for our share of a limited pie, rather than looking for new ways to make more pie. Isaac Asimov wrote a story called The Martian Way which showed this kind of contrast. Human settlers on Mars have a problem: Earth is reducing shipments of water to Mars, which are crucial for the settlement because it needs much more water than it can tap from Mars' polar cap. The temptation is there to withdraw, to accept the limitation and reduce the settlers' quality of life by restricting their water usage; ultimately, it is quite possible that this would mean the settlement would have to be abandoned altogether, and its people would have to return to Earth to an impoverished existence. But the Martian people choose another option: go and get water from the rings of Saturn, which turn out to be composed of huge mile-wide chunks of mostly pure water ice (this was the actual scientific belief then and still is today). They bring back enough to be able to not only meet their own needs but to sell water back to Earth in order to help with the water shortage there that forced the shipments to be reduced.

Humanity has always faced problems, and we always will. The only choice we have is whether we face them with hope or with fear. But there is not only an individual choice, for each of us to make for ourselves; there is also a social choice, whether or not to let the fears of the fearful constrain the hopes of the hopeful. When we sent astronauts to the Moon, we chose not to let that happen; there were plenty of naysayers who said it could not be done, and plenty more who said that maybe it could be done, but that it was too risky to try. We made the same choice, to a lesser extent, when Discovery and the other Shuttles flew. But neither of those ventures was supposed to be the end; both were just first steps and were meant to be followed by others. And it looks like they will be. I'm glad to see that happen. It appears that TR is not, which is fine; but at least they should have the decency to keep it to themselves.

So happy retirement, Discovery, and I hope you'll have some company in time, when the museum exhibit opens showing the first retired spacecraft that made the run to the asteroids and back.

Posted at 23:07 | Category: opinions | Tags: economics, politics, science | Permalink

Thu, 08 Mar 2012

Delimiters Suck

A while back I explained why I use Python, not Lisp. However, after reading this review of Go, I realized that I left out something important, something that sets Python apart from pretty much every other language out there, and certainly from every "C-oid" language, which is all that the author of the review seems able to find himself wishing for.

Here it is, in a nutshell: delimiters suck.

Back in the old days, when CPU cycles were scarce and parsers had to be streamlined, it made a kind of sense to make the programmer do the lion's share of the work of defining the structure of the source code. Curly braces, parentheses, semicolons, and so forth helped simplify the process of parsing and compiling code, and if that made the difference between a short wait for your code to compile and run so you could test it, and having to go out and grab coffee (or even lunch) while your code compiled, that was a tradeoff worth making.

But this is 2012, for goodness' sake. Compilation is cheap. Code gets compiled on the fly all the time now; after all, web pages are code that needs to be compiled every time the page loads. And that means that any programming language that makes more work for the programmer in the name of making less work for the compiler is simply braindead in today's world. And yet that's exactly what programming languages with delimiters do. Why should I have to tell the parser that, oh, here's a new block; oh, here's the condition for an if statement; oh, here's the end of a statement? Why can't it figure all that out for itself?

The answer, of course, is that it can; but our lazy programming languages don't require it to. Except one. And that's why Python is my favorite language: no delimiters. No curly braces, no parentheses, no semicolons. None. (Yes, strictly speaking, there is one delimiter: the colon that opens a new indent block. But typing that feels natural, since the whole point is that I'm starting a new block, and typing the colon feels like I'm just starting the new block, especially since I don't need to type any corresponding closing delimiter at the end of the block. Still, if Python were to upgrade its parser to eliminate the need for the colon, I wouldn't complain.) Python indicates code structure the sane way, with indentation. In other words, it uses something that every coder does anyway, simply because it's necessary to make the code readable. Indentation requires no extra typing; I do what I'm best at, writing actual code instead of delimiters, and the computer does what it's best at, applying complex but precisely specified formal rules much faster and more accurately than a human can.

And truth be told, even those who claim to prefer other languages know in their hearts that I'm right. For example, the reviewer applauds the fact that Go doesn't require semicolons--but then says:

Well, actually there are semicolons, but they are discouraged. It works like JavaScript, there is a simple rule that makes the parser insert a semicolon at certain line ends.

In other words, the Go designers know that the parser is perfectly capable of spotting the end of a logical statement without requiring a delimiter. Then why isn't the delimiter eliminated, instead of just being "discouraged"?

But wait; it gets better. The next comment we get is this:

Next in category "pure heresy": Go defines a canonical indentation and the One True Bracing Style.

In other words, the Go designers also know that indentation is important; yet they still cling to the delusion that somehow the indentation needs help from curly braces. But if you're going to define a One True Bracing Style, why can't the parser simply deduce where the braces would go, the same way it can deduce where semicolons would go? Well, the reviewer says this about the canonical indentation style:

Like Python, only I think python has a tad too little visual cues. Indentation alone isn't always sufficiently clear, so we get to keep our beloved braces.

Oh, so the braces are to help the programmer know where the ends of blocks are? Strange how so many people are able to program in Python perfectly well without this crutch. Of course, if you don't have a canonical indentation style, you can't depend on it as a cue, so you may have problems with indentation being "sufficiently clear". But the reviewer just told us that Go does have a canonical indentation style! I think he hasn't fully grasped the implications.

(An aside here: the Go designers are making a huge mistake with the canonical indentation, by using tabs instead of spaces. Of course, all Pythonistas know that indenting with tabs is just a straight road to perdition. See here and here for the details.)

There's another funny bit in the next item in the review. We read this...

Speaking of braces, there are no brace-free forms of if and loops.

...followed almost immediately by this:

One important technical reason for the previous point is the fact that those control statements no longer have parens.

In other words, take away parentheses around conditionals (good), but then use that as an excuse to keep curly braces (braindead). Give with one hand and take away with the other. But wait; there's a reason:

Only Perl6 tries to parse paren-less if without curlies, and we all know how complicated Perl parsers used to be (and obviously, still are).

I guess the reviewer forgot that Python has no trouble parsing paren-less if without curlies. And without forcing you to use Perl and its parser, either.

Static Typing Sucks Too

Since we're on the subject of Python vs. "C-oid" languages, I'll go ahead and rant about variable typing as well. The reviewer notes that Go is smart enough to use duck typing, as Python does, instead of requiring explicit interface declarations:

Go uses interfaces exclusively. Unlike Java, however, you don't declare that a given type conforms to some interface. If it does, it automatically is usable as that interface.

Great! Go objects are duck-typable. But that raises the obvious next question: what about references to objects, i.e., variables? Well, that's better than C, in that variable declarations don't require explicit type specifiers:

If you leave out the type, the type is instead taken from the assignment. You may even leave out the declaration altogether by using the new declare-and-initialize operator.

Okay, good. But once you've done that once, you're stuck; the new variable declaration syntax

does not introduce dynamic typing, it does not allow changing a declared variable's type, it does not remove the need to declare variables, it does not allow you to declare variables twice. It's really the same as before, semantically, but much lighter on syntax. Feels like an ad-hoc scripting language but still gives you the benefits of static typing.

Um, what benefits of static typing? Objects are already typed; once you create an object, its type is fixed forever. That's true in every language, including Python; I'm not sure I can see how you could implement an object system at all without it. That, plus duck typing, ensures that if you try to do anything with an object that it doesn't support, the language will tell you. If you want anything more draconian than that, you don't want a language like Go, or Python, or C for that matter. You want something like Visual Basic, because you're going to let people use it who can't be trusted with fully capable tools.

But given that you're cool with duck typing, whyinhell would you want to restrict variable bindings? When you reassign a variable, you aren't changing the type of its object; you are binding it to a new object, which has been freshly created, and of course when you write the code that creates it, you have already decided what type you want it to be, just like when you bound the variable to its original value. Sure, the vast majority of the time, the new object will have the same type as the old; but what about those cases where you don't want it to? What if, for example, you want to assign a new object that is duck-type compatible with the old one, but has no common base type with the old one, so the type system can't tell they're compatible? Again, if you want your type system to prevent you from doing this, you don't want a fully capable language in the first place.

I could go on about other stuff, but I think I've said enough to make it clear, once again, why Python is my favorite language. Frankly, the only advantage I can see with Go over Python (and not just based on this review; I've been following Go's progress for several years now) is speed; but Moore's Law and projects like PyPy are making that less and less of an issue every day. It's great that people keep on trying new things with programming languages, but at least this time, I'm sticking with Python.

Posted at 23:28 | Category: rants | Tags: computers | Permalink

Sat, 03 Mar 2012

One Rant Deserves Another

Cary Sherman, the CEO of the RIAA, is upset. He says those mean and nasty Internet companies shut down SOPA and PIPA by spreading misinformation and claiming it was fact. Well, after reading his recent op-ed in the New York Times, I will certainly concede that Mr. Sherman ought to know about that sort of thing, since he is evidently an expert at it. Just for fun, I thought I would post some examples.

Since when is it censorship to shut down an operation that an American court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined to be illegal?

Oh, is that all Mr. Sherman wants to do? He can do that now, under existing law, and his organization certainly hasn't been shy about it. In fact, he hasn't even been shy about shutting down operations without going through all the hassle of taking them to court or getting a review of the evidence, but simply on his say-so. One wonders why he needs SOPA and PIPA in the first place. Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?

As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn't take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That's partly because "old media" draws a line between "news" and "editorial." Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don't recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact.

What? Google has editorials plastered all over its search page? I must have missed it. Wikipedia has "SOPA is bad" banners at the top of every article? I guess I need to get my eyes checked because I didn't see them. Or maybe Google and Wikipedia said negative things about SOPA/PIPA on their blogs or their editorial pages--you know, the places which are clearly marked as expressing their opinions, not facts.

Of course, Mr. Sherman would certainly like to have his opinion accepted as fact. In fact, it's hard to tell whether or not he even knows the difference. He writes an "opinion" piece and gets it published on the op-ed page, where you are supposed to give your opinions, and then states his opinions as facts and hopes nobody notices. Hmm.

Perhaps the problem is that Mr. Sherman has some vocabulary issues. For example:

Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative to protect American property from theft, to shield consumers from counterfeit products and fraud, and to combat foreign criminals who exploit technology to steal American ingenuity and jobs.

By "American property" he means "the money RIAA companies make by exploiting the work of artists", not "the actual work done by the artists, which is what people actually want to listen to".

They knew that music sales in the United States are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged,

By "music sales" he means "sales of CDs", not "sales of music". In other words, he means "sales of stuff I want to sell because I'm too lazy to actually give customers what they want".

and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half since then, to less than 10,000.

By "the industry" he means "companies which are members of the RIAA". He does not mean "anybody who actually makes music".

They studied the problem in all its dimensions, through multiple hearings.

None of which included the people who actually make the Internet work. In fact, as I noted in a previous post, several technical experts were supposed to testify before Congress, the first opportunity any such experts had had to do so, on January 18th; but there's no indication that the hearing ever actually happened.

But perhaps the real problem is something else. Mr. Sherman lets slip an interesting comment towards the end of his article:

The conventional wisdom is that the defeat of these bills shows the power of the digital commons. Sure, anybody could click on a link or tweet in outrage - but how many knew what they were supporting or opposing?

Good question. How many legislators who initially said they supported SOPA/PIPA knew what they were supporting? How many who switched to opposing it did so because they actually read the bills, so they did know what they were opposing?

The root of the problem is that Mr. Sherman and the rest of the "old media" simply don't understand what's happened. They don't understand that the reason they're having all these problems is that the Internet has killed their business model. They think it must be some evil plot by "hackers" and "pirates", because surely people wouldn't just stop buying CDs because, say, they wanted more convenience and knew there were ways to get it? Naw, that couldn't be it.

No doubt, some genuinely wanted to protect Americans against theft but were sincerely concerned about how the language in the bill might be interpreted. But others may simply believe that online music, books and movies should be free.

Or we may believe that if we are going to pay money for music, books, and movies, we should get something worth paying that money for, not something that's been emasculated and micromanaged to the point where it's more trouble than it's worth. And that our money should go to the people that actually create, not the people that exploit them. And that we should not be treated like potential thieves when all we want to do is listen to music, read books, or watch movies.

Posted at 20:50 | Category: rants | Tags: computers, politics | Permalink

Sat, 25 Feb 2012

Postscript

I said I wouldn't make this post into a rant, but the latest from Hollywood is just too good to pass up. Apparently the "medial moguls" are not pleased that (in what they see as a drastic turnaround from the previous Administration statement that I referred to above) President Obama has taken a stand against SOPA:

The moguls are reminding Obama et al that, in the words of one studio chief, "God knows how much money we've given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they're not supporting our interests. There's been no greater supporters of him than we've been from the first day and the first fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And, at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we need the administration to support us."

In other words, as a number of commenters have noted, Hollywood is accusing President Obama of failing the classic test of an honest politician: he's been bought, but he won't stay bought.

But there actually is a more serious nugget here:

"The issue at hand -- piracy -- is a legitimate concern. But Google and those Internet guys have been swiftboating the entertainment industry by saying we're trying to shut down the Internet just because we don't want them to advertise pirated movies."

I'll be charitable and grant that the "studio chief" quoted here sincerely believes that he is not trying to shut down the Internet by trying to get SOPA and similar legislation passed. He's not a technical expert. But his sincere beliefs don't count; what counts is the actual effect that such legislation would have if passed. He appears to think that "Google and those Internet guys" could quite easily stop advertising pirated movies if they wanted to. Perhaps he thinks that Larry Page and Sergey Brin sit in a big room and supervise a bunch of people who assiduously review every ad by hand. Chris Dodd displays similar ignorance here:

"When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn't do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites."

No, they agreed to shut down the pathway that had allowed people in China to access Google without going through the Chinese government's firewall, since they knew the Chinese government was going to shut it down anyway. They most certainly did not put in place any kind of system that could block individual sites.

Actually, of course, it would be impossible for Google, or any other Internet site of any size that allows users to post content, to police everything that they are hosting and still provide the immensely valuable services they provide. There is simply too much content and not enough time for humans to review even a tiny fraction of it; the processes have to be automated if they are going to work at all. And how can we expect computers to reliably tell "pirated" content from the rest, when humans often have to go through many levels of the judicial system to get a decision on the question?

Not to mention that, once you give people a way to shut down websites by claiming they are "rogue" sites, this ability will be abused, and the collateral damage from such abuse will be far worse than any possible damage from "piracy". I've mentioned this once before, but there are plenty of other examples, such as this and this. The first article talks about Universal Music's claims that popular "hip hop" sites and online magazines covering that music genre are "rogue" sites; so much for the "media moguls" being concerned about the actual "content creators", who, of course, want their music to be heard and talked about on these sites. The second talks about Monster Cable's claims that Costco and Sears, among others, are "rogue" sites.

So this really is a binary choice. Either we have valuable Internet services like the ones we have, or we have a locked-down system where everything else is sacrificed to the goal of stopping "piracy". And even then the goal won't be achieved. Mr. Dodd and the MPAA would like the US to be more like China in the way it controls the internet. But the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which counts among its members--wait for it--the MPAA and RIAA, is continually agitating about how much piracy there is in China. Of course, this may be as much a matter of the Chinese government not caring all that much about piracy as anything else. But that only underscores the point: Americans do care. As I noted in my last post, we don't want to steal. But we also don't want to pay for outmoded products, and we don't want to put up with inconvenience and being treated like potential pirates when we just want to watch a movie or listen to a song. Does that justify stealing? No. But the alternative is not for us to start buying what the MPAA and RIAA would like to sell us; the alternative is for us to spend our money somewhere else entirely. Trying to buy legislation is going to make that more likely, if anything, not less. Maybe the "media moguls" should stop trying to emasculate the Internet, and start working on giving their customers what they actually want.

Post-Postscript

The phenomenon of corporations seeking to buy legislation to prop up dead business models is not limited to the arts. A number of companies, notably Elsevier, have for years had a sweetheart deal with the US government allowing them strict publishing rights for scientific journals. Now the Internet has killed that business model too, but the companies don't want it to die, as PZ Myers reports:

Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of information: RWA, the Research Works Act. This is a bill to, it says, "ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector", where the important phrase is "private sector" -- its purpose is to guarantee that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of scientific information...

This is a blatant attempt to invalidate the NIH's requirement that taxpayer-funded research be made publicly available. The internet was initially developed to allow researchers to easily share information...and that's precisely the function this bill is intended to cripple.

PZ is a biologist, which is why he refers specifically to the NIH, but the same problem exists in other scientific fields. However, the physics and math communities got tired of this years ago and started arXiv, a site where preprints of scientific papers are made freely available. As you can see from the site's home page, other scientific fields have joined this effort as well. Papers on the arXiv can still be (and often are) published in journals, but until they are actually submitted, the scientists who write them have the publication rights, and they routinely publish preprints; in fact, they have to in order to enable the very "peer review" process that the journals claim to be facilitating. In the days before the Internet, preprints were circulated by mail, but of course the Internet makes it all much, much easier, just as it was intended to do (as PZ notes).

In other words, the very justification for the US government giving the sweetheart deals to journals in the first place, to "ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works", is no longer valid. Scientists no longer need these companies to help them share information, because of the Internet. The companies' response: try to buy legislation. Of course the journals' business model is in even worse shape than those of the film and record companies, because the latter can at least offer some additional value to customers in the form of particular actors or brands. The journals are pure middlemen; the only value they added to the process was distribution. (They claim that they also added value to the peer review process, by organizing and vetting editors and reviewers, but even before the arXiv site was stood up, the process had long been shifting in the direction of more and more review of preprints and less and less review of actual journal submissions. Now of course, the first question anyone, even a journal reviewer, asks about a paper is "is a copy on arxiv?" There is even a proposal to formalize this process by allowing signed reviews of papers to be linked to the papers themselves.)

All of this just reinforces the fact that any attempt on the part of government to interfere with things is fraught with risk. The interventions are usually reasonable at the time: in their day, the journals really did facilitate a lot of sharing of scientific information. But the interventions always end up long outliving their usefulness, and in the process they may do harm that more than outweighs the good they did originally. It's up to us, the people, to try to keep that from happening. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Posted at 19:56 | Category: opinions | Tags: computers, politics | Permalink

Mon, 09 Jan 2012

The Latest From The SOPA Front

This is just a quick update to my previous posts on SOPA to collect a few more links of interest.

First, a "mainstream" media channel (CNN) is now at least covering the issue. No surprises in the article, but at least it means the issue is getting some attention.

Next, The Register has posted about a study that finds that, first, the vast majority of people prefer to obtain content legally (no surprise for anyone who has heard of Netflix or iTunes, but it seems like media companies still haven't gotten the memo), and second:

When it comes to the penalties for piracy the American public is a lot more forgiving than the courts. Three quarters of those surveyed felt that fines of less than $100 per song were acceptable and only 16 per cent felt that cutting off internet access was justified to stop piracy. Only a quarter who approved of disconnection felt that more than a one month ban was warranted.

Just in case anyone was still wondering whether SOPA and similar legislation actually represents what the people want, here's your sign: it doesn't.

Finally, it appears that one of the founders of Reddit, the CEO of Rackspace, and Dan Kaminsky, a world-class expert on Internet security and DNS, will testify before Congress on January 18th. One of the main thrusts of their testimony will be that SOPA and the Protect IP Act will in fact be harmful to US national security. (The fact that SOPA will break DNSSEC is one aspect of this, but not the only one.) Hopefully that will help to keep these bills from passing.

Posted at 22:58 | Category: rants | Tags: computers, politics | Permalink

Thu, 15 Dec 2011

Another Brief Nerd Interlude

Years ago, Doug McIlroy, the inventor of the Unix pipe, published a paper on techniques for computing the terms of power series. The paper talks about a number of key concepts in programming, such as "lazy" evaluation, that were not well supported by most programming languages at the time, which is why McIlroy spent a good portion of the paper describing an implementation of his techniques in a new language designed by Rob Pike.

I came across this paper recently and realized that Python's generators would be a perfect fit for representing power series. They support all the key techniques McIlroy described, particularly "lazy" evaluation (a generator doesn't compute any specific term of its series until it is asked for it in sequence). You can see the Python implementation I came up with on github here. A particularly neat feature is that you can recursively include a Python generator in itself; this allows the recursive nature of many power series to be directly represented in the code. For example, here's the exponential series:

def _exp():
    for term in integral(EXP, Fraction(1, 1)):
        yield term
EXP = PowerSeries(_exp)

No monkey business with factorials; just a generator that recursively integrates itself. This same trick also works for implementing operations on power series; for example, any series can be exponentiated by a method similar to the above. The reciprocal and inverse operations on series use similar tricks, which basically make the code look just like the mathematical descriptions of those operations in McIlroy's paper.

Once I got the Python implementation working smoothly, I began checking online to see what other recent implementations of these techniques existed, and found that McIlroy posted an implementation in Haskell on the web in 2007. All of the key operations are one-liners. This is possible because Haskell has built-in support for expressing these operations declaratively, instead of having to define functions and use for loops and so on. So in a sense, my Python implementation is a case of Greenspun's Tenth Rule. But it's still fun.

Posted at 23:55 | Category: general | Tags: computers | Permalink

Tue, 29 Nov 2011

Don't Tread On Our Internet: The Sequel

I thought I was done with this topic for now, but I can't help adding one more quick post, because it now appears that it isn't just media companies who want to put a stranglehold on the Internet. Chanel is getting in on the act. Yes, the perfume maker. Based on what appears to be extremely meager evidence, a Nevada federal judge has ordered that "hundreds" of domain names can be seized by Chanel and transferred to a US registrar (GoDaddy). The judge also ordered that "all Internet search engines" and "all social media websites" must "de-index" the seized domains.

In case you're wondering what "meager" evidence means, it appears that, of the most recent batch of 228 domains that were seized, three were actually verified to be shipping counterfeit merchandise, by placing an order and seeing what was delivered. (Even this "verification" is somewhat dubious, since it was done by Chanel itself and not by a neutral third party. Also, if you're wondering about that "batch", Chanel has been bringing these claims to court in groups, and there does not seem to be any endpoint to this process; they'll just keep on doing it as long as they feel like it.) The rest were seized based on "a Chanel anti-counterfeiting specialist browsing the Web", according to the article linked to above.

For extra fun, the court order that authorizes seizure of the latest 228 domains calls itself a "Temporary Restraining Order". Anyone who has ever tried to switch even an ordinary, non-seized domain from one registrar to another knows how Byzantine the process is. I can only imagine what the companies whose sites were seized, should they be found to not actually be selling counterfeit merchandise, will have to go through to get control of their domains back. So the order might as well say "Permanent" since that's what it will effectively end up being. Eventually, Chanel might even sell the domains it has seized; who says the domain seizure business isn't lucrative?

One should also note that the court order, and the complaint that gave rise to it, are ex parte, which is legalese for "the defendants didn't get a chance to rebut anything". Also, the order is dated November 14, 2011, and it sets a hearing date of November 29, 2011, with any responses to the complaint required to be filed with the court by November 23, 2011. Is it just me, or is that a really short response time? (Particularly as many of the seized domains probably were not even based in the US, which makes a Federal court's jurisdiction rather problematic. Indeed, some non-US registrars apparently have not complied with the court's order to transfer domain registrations to GoDaddy.)

I should make one thing clear: if Chanel wants to defend its trademarks (that's what "counterfeit" amounts to in this case, infringement of trademarks), it is entitled to use legal means to do so. I personally think that anyone who is buying the counterfeit stuff is not going to be a potential customer for the real stuff anyway (for one thing, the real stuff's price is not for the squeamish, and people who are willing to spend that much on perfume don't want the counterfeit stuff), so I strongly doubt any of these "counterfeit" websites are losing Chanel any sales. But that's their call; if they want to spend time and money on what to me is a fruitless pursuit, they're welcome to.

But the appropriate legal means for that fruitless pursuit are not seeking a "temporary" restraining order with an extremely short fuse as a first action. Even the US Congress' previous attempt to emasculate the Internet (and other things), the DMCA, doesn't allow that. (Yes, I know the DMCA refers to copyright, not trademark; but the principle is the same.) In fact, one wonders why the judge's first question to Chanel was not "Have you contacted any of these websites and demanded that they cease and desist?" As the article I linked to above notes, if the US government and US courts are going to behave like this, the Protect IP Act/SOPA battle may end up being rather superfluous. I understand that companies try these shortcuts all the time, but that doesn't mean the government and courts have to cooperate.

Posted at 22:14 | Category: rants | Tags: computers, politics | Permalink

Wed, 23 Nov 2011

Yet Another Reason NOT To Tread On Our Internet

This is just a quick update to yesterday's post. According to Ars Technica,

Last Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution ahead of a forthcoming summit between Europe and the United States. It included a section on "the need to protect the integrity of the global Internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names."

That provision was added at the urging of the civil liberties organization European Digital Rights (EDRi). In a presentation to the Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee, EDRi's Joe McNamee noted that "the United States has, up until recently, never sought to exploit its theoretical jurisdiction over the companies and infrastructure that are at the core of the Internet."

The Internet was created in the US, and as the article goes on to note, key pieces of the Internet's infrastructure are based in the US, such as ICANN, the company that coordinates domain name assignments, many key DNS root servers, and the registries for .com, .org, and other popular TLDs. Up to now, nobody has really had a problem with this, because the US has been careful not to abuse its privileged position. If our lawmakers want to change that, and squander our position by abusing it, they're going the right way about it. It's ironic that we now have the European Union, whose Constitution weighs in at more than 350 pages (more than double that if the "Protocols and Annexes" and "Declarations" are included) and has to be delivered as PDFs, trying to tell the United States, whose Constitution can fit in a single reasonably sized HTML page (or two such if the Amendments are included--what extravagance!), how something as simple as protecting freedom of communication and civil liberties is supposed to work. But so it is.

I suppose one could argue that, in the long run, it would be better for the Internet's infrastructure to come under the control of an international body that was not controlled by any single country's government. In theory that would be a good argument. The problem with it is that all our evidence about such bodies shows that they do not work. The United Nations was supposed to end war and ensure human rights for everyone. As Dr. Phil would say, how's that workin' out for ya? As much as I complain about the US government, I still think that, up to now, its stewardship of the Internet has served the Internet better than any possible alternative, and that ending that stewardship would be a turn for the worse. I really hope it doesn't come to that.

Posted at 20:56 | Category: rants | Tags: computers, politics | Permalink

Tue, 22 Nov 2011

No, Really, DON'T Tread On Our Internet

I've posted twice now about the Protect IP Act, or SOPA (the former is the Senate version, the latter is the House version), which is the latest attempt on the part of big media companies to put a stranglehold on the Internet. As you can see, since this is the third time around on this topic, I'm not going to mince words. I've mentioned some of the damage this bill will cause in previous posts, but it's worth taking a look at the Wikipedia article on SOPA linked to above and seeing all the different issues raised under "Ramifications". (The Wiki article also has lots of good reference links.) If you haven't already done so, and you are a US citizen, I strongly urge you to contact your elected representatives and demand that they make sure this bill doesn't pass. Two good sites to help you do that are the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Demand Progress. You can also go to the Stop Censorship site to register your opposition to the bill and to put your name on a list of citizens that Senator Ron Wyden intends to read from the Senate floor if he is forced to filibuster the Senate bill.

Having got that out of the way, I can now vent in a more leisurely fashion. (This post is filed under "rants", but the previous paragraph is not just venting, as my rants usually are. The issue is a serious one, so I wanted to get the serious part out of the way first; but that's only a paragraph and the rest of this post is, well, longer, so into the "rants" category it goes.) Today I came across a blog post comparing SOPA to China's "Great Firewall", which is the Chinese government's massive infrastructure dedicated to controlling what the Chinese people can and can't see on the Internet. The post is worth a read, if for no other reason than that it uses the same word I did above, "stranglehold", to describe the aim of this bill. :-) (It also has a number of good reference links.)

What gets me, though, is that as you'll see if you read the post, some US lawmakers actually think that the fact that legislation like this would make the US more like China in its control of the Internet is a feature, not a bug. If you're a person of Heinlein's class two, like me, this sort of thinking just seems so far out in left field that it's hard to understand how it can survive and even thrive. Don't these people understand that the Internet is not something you can control? Don't they realize that the Internet is individual empowerment, individual freedom, individual choice, in just about the purest form that those things have ever existed? The United Nations realizes it; as the blog post I linked to above notes, the UN has declared free and uncensored Internet access to be a basic human right. Shouldn't that be enough to stop this kind of legislation from even being considered? Hey, folks, um, trying to put into law something that the UN considers a violation of human rights is probably a bad idea, okay? It's not as though there aren't plenty of other pressing matters to attend to, like, say, trying not to let the country's credit rating slip again.

But of course the proponents of this legislation do realize all the above. That's why they're trying to get it passed. The analogy with the Chinese government is far closer than it might seem. China is the classic example of a country run by people of Heinlein's class one; the government wants to control everything. The United States of America was supposed to be the exact opposite: the government was supposed to control as little as possible. But it's really, really tough to sustain that vision in the face of harsh reality. The US government in 1790 didn't have much of a choice, because the country was so large and the technology of the time so limited. The pattern ever since has been for the amount of control the Federal government exerts to increase, to the point where today we have laws and regulations covering all manner of things that would have been unimaginable as subjects of Federal interest to an American of 1790 (or even one of 1890, for that matter). But at least, for most of that time, each individual law or regulation appeared to be a good idea in itself; what caused trouble was the cumulative effect of all of them, combined, of course, with the law of unintended consequences.

Now, though, we have something different: we have a law that, I would venture to say, looks like a bad idea to most Americans, and yet it won't go away. It's not the first such law; take a look at many of the laws and regulations that cover the financial industry, and you will see the same pattern (and, not coincidentally, a lot of reasons for the economic meltdown we have been experiencing). It's certainly not a new thing to have a bunch of large corporations with outdated business models trying to buy legislation that will prop up those business models, regardless of the damage it might cause elsewhere, using the cover story that it will "protect society" from something or other. We heard the same story from the financial industry all the way up to the big crash, and now we're hearing from them that we need more regulations to "protect" us from another one. (Remember the classic definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?) And we're hearing the same story in the fight over the US budget and whether or not the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire; we're told that keeping the tax cuts will "protect" small businesses and help innovation, when in fact a number of commentaries, for example these articles in USA Today and Business Week, have argued that letting the tax cuts expire would not hurt small businesses at all, and might even help them, since the current rules actually define "small business" in a way that excludes a lot of the businesses that are actually (a) small, and (b) innovating, while including a lot of entities that are really more tax shelters for the wealthy than anything else.

So why am I picking this particular issue, a free and uncensored Internet, as the one we really, really need to take a stand on? Because with a free and uncensored Internet, it's a lot easier to fight all those other battles. Information is power, and the big media companies who are trying to put a stranglehold on the Internet know it. So do lawmakers who would love to give the US government the power to shut down sites like Wikileaks. But we in the USA are supposed to understand that we, the people, have the power. We get to decide how information flows. The Internet is our medium for making those decisions. If we want to say something, we post it. If we like something someone else says, we link to it. If we don't like what someone else says, we refute it. We don't censor it. We fight bad information with better information, not with a Great Firewall. Ultimately, if we don't like what's on a given website, we exercise our own freedom of choice by surfing somewhere else. But we need a free and uncensored Internet to do all this. Don't let it be taken away.

Posted at 23:59 | Category: rants | Tags: computers, politics | Permalink

Fri, 14 Oct 2011

Dennis Ritchie, RIP

Amidst all the news about Steve Jobs' passing, you may not have heard that Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and one of the original designers of Unix, also passed away this past weekend. The news first broke on the Internet through this post from Rob Pike on Google Plus. Pike later followed up with another Google Plus post giving a longer tribute to Ritchie and his work. Tributes to Ritchie have also appeared in the New York Times, on Wired, by way of CNN Tech (including the classic photo of Ritchie and Ken Thompson, the founders of Unix, working on a PDP-11), on BoingBoing, in The Register, on Tim Bray's blog, and on Herb Sutter's blog. Finally, this follow-up Google Plus post by Rob Pike is worth a quick read, since it quotes from an email Pike received from Ritchie encouraging him to pursue a programming project that turned out to be important in the history of Unix.

I don't have much to add to what you'll read at the above links, but I do want to comment on the headline of the Wired/CNN story: "Dennis Ritchie: The shoulders Steve Jobs stood on." Jobs, and pretty much everybody else who uses a computer. Ritchie created the C language, as the story notes, "because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to build UNIX." But it turned out that the feature of C that enabled that, the fact that it was "portable" between different types of computer hardware, turned out to be a better way to write almost all programs, not just Unix. C is now the foundation of pretty much every piece of software in existence; if the software is not written in C directly, it's built on top of something that is. (My personal favorite language, Python, for example, is implemented in C.) The story quotes Brian Kernighan, another key figure in the development of C, as saying, "There's that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants...We're all standing on Dennis' shoulders." I'm glad Wired and CNN recognized this and gave Ritchie his due.

Postscript

I shouldn't end without mentioning Ritchie's page at Bell Labs, which has links to many of his writings. If you're a programmer, or even if you're not, they're worth reading.

Posted at 21:50 | Category: opinions | Tags: computers | Permalink

Sat, 08 Oct 2011

Some Items About Steve Jobs

Unusually for me, this post will be almost entirely links to and quotes from articles by others. But I should explain briefly why I'm linking to them and quoting them. It's not to set the stage for my own comments about Mac OS X, or about iPods and iPads and so forth. I made comments about OS X in an earlier post, and there's no need to rehash them here. Nor do I have any personal anecdotes to share. My reason for linking to these articles, and quoting briefly from them, is, quite simply, to draw attention to what they say.

First, Eric Raymond's post On Steve Jobs's Passing, in which, towards the end, he says:

Commerce is powerful, but culture is even more persistent. The lure of high profits from secrecy rent can slow down the long-term trend towards open source and user-controlled computing, but not really stop it. Jobs's success at hypnotizing millions of people into a perverse love for the walled garden is more dangerous to freedom in the long term than Bill Gates's efficient but brutal and unattractive corporatism. People feared and respected Microsoft, but they love and worship Apple - and that is precisely the problem, precisely the reason Jobs may in the end have done more harm than good.

Next, quotes from two articles that Raymond links to. One is an op-ed in the New York Times entitled Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia, by Mike Daisey:

I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he'd never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, "It's a kind of magic."

Mr. Jobs's magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple's immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to "think different," in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.

The other quote is from SkepticBlog:

Most pancreatic cancers are aggressive and always terminal, but Steve was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with excellent survival rates - if caught soon enough. The median survival is about a decade, but it depends on how soon it's removed surgically. Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a diet instead of early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet cell carcinoma. As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate.

Finally, to put that last quote in perspective, here's one from another article, on Science Blogs, about Steve Jobs, neuroendocrine tumors, and alternative medicine:

Did Jobs significantly decrease his chance of surviving his cancer by waiting nine months to undergo surgery? It seems like a no-brainer, but it turns out that that's actually a very tough question to answer. Certainly, it's nowhere near as certain as Dunning [the author of the SkepticBlog article] tries to make it seem when he writes things like:

"Eventually it became clear to all involved that his alternative therapy wasn't working, and from then on, by all accounts, Steve aggressively threw money at the best that medical science could offer. But it was too late. He had a Whipple procedure. He had a liver transplant. And then he died, all too young."

After over seven years of science-based treatments that prolonged his life.

One has to be very, very careful about making this sort of argument. For one thing, it could not have been apparent that it was "too late" back in 2004, when it became clear that Jobs' dietary manipulations weren't working. For another thing, we don't know how large the tumor was, whether it progressed or simply failed to shrink over those nine months, and by how much it increased in size, if increase in size it did...

In retrospect, we can now tell that Jobs clearly had a tumor that was unusually aggressive for an insulinoma. Such tumors are usually pretty indolent and progress only slowly. Indeed, I've seen patients and known a friend of a friend who survived many years with metastatic neuroendocrine tumors with reasonable quality of life. Jobs was unfortunate in that he appears to have had an unusually aggressive form of the disease that probably would have killed him no matter what. That's not to say that we shouldn't take into account his delay in treatment and wonder if it contributed to his ultimate demise. It very well might have, the key word being "might." We don't know that it did, which is one reason why we have to be very, very careful not to overstate the case and attribute his death as being definitely due to the delay in therapy due to his wanting to "go alternative." It's also important to remember that, as much of a brilliant visionary Jobs was, even brilliant visionaries can make bad decisions when it comes to health.

All of the articles are worth reading in full; none of them are very long. All of them recognize what everyone knows, that Steve Jobs was indeed a brilliant visionary; as President Obama said in his statement eulogizing Jobs,

there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.

The quotes I've given above focus on other aspects of Jobs's life and work, not because they're more important, necessarily, but because it's always worth trying to put things in perspective. And that's all for now.

Posted at 22:39 | Category: opinions | Tags: computers | Permalink

Mon, 26 Sep 2011

Why I'm Not Crazy About The Cloud

I've seen a number of online articles and blog posts recently with the common theme of being uncomfortable with Facebook. For instance, this at Slate, or this from a programmer, or this from a Facebook developer.

Of course the privacy implications of putting your data in the cloud, with Facebook or anywhere else, are (or should be) obvious; as this article by Rick Moen says,

Experience suggests that "Possession is nine points of the law", and the best way to prevent abuse of your personal data by strangers is not to give it to them.

I personally do not do Facebook, and keep only minimal data in the online accounts I do have, for exactly this reason. But apparently most people are not like me, and are quite willing to post lots of personal information where it is visible, if not to the entire Internet, at least to anyone who uses the same social media services they do (which is a lot of the entire Internet). That's a decision everyone is entitled to make.

However, the common theme of the above articles goes beyond that, and it was brought into focus for me by this article on The Atlantic's website (which I got to via Hacker News ).

The key observation is this:

We've always been dependent on software providers to create the digital spaces we inhabit, but when your email and documents and music are in the cloud, you're giving up the lock on the door and allowing changes to be made on the schedule of the parent. He or she may clean up or buy you a new desk. He or she may take away the car or decide you can't do something you think you should be able to.

This is not a new problem. The question of whether to own or rent (or more precisely to live rent-free on someone's property, which is what the "cloud" amounts to, as the Atlantic article notes later on) is a very old one, and the tradeoff has always been the same: ownership can be a burden, yes, but without it you lose control. Facebook and Google and all these other wonderful "digital spaces" do not belong to you. And complaining that the changes are affecting your "user experience" is kind of missing the point; your user experience makes a difference to them only to the extent that it affects their ability to collect data that they can sell. It's not as though you are a paying customer.

But I seem to be an outlier; most people don't seem to see things in the stark way I just put them. Perhaps what makes me (and Rick Moen, and other programmers who have posted about this kind of thing) different is that I don't need or want "software providers" to create any "digital spaces" for me. Sure, there are some services (like Google) that I can't reasonably create for myself, so I use them (but I try to give Google as little information as I can when doing so). And I do participate in online forums in areas I'm interested in, and where I think I have something to contribute. But those are limited uses for limited purposes. As far as my email and documents and music go, I can see paying a hosting provider to maintain one's own personal "cloud" online, both as a backup and for convenience. (I don't even do this for a lot of my data, but as I said, I'm an outlier; not everybody has a RAID array on a file server, not to mention multiple other machines to store copies of data, in their house. Although these days, external USB hard drives are cheap enough that anyone can have their own personal backup storage.) But the idea of putting all my data on the servers of someone, even Google, to whom I am not a paying customer--that is where I draw the line. No amount of convenience is worth that.

And it is basically about convenience, as the Atlantic article makes clear:

This isn't a bug in the way that cloud services work. It is a feature. What we lose in freedom we gain in convenience. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. Or maybe it's something that just happened to us, which we'll regret when we realize the privacy, security, and autonomy we've given up to sync our documents and correspondence across computers.

In case the reader is still in any doubt, I'm betting on the second option. I could be wrong; it could be that "cloud" services will evolve in the direction of less centralization and more privacy. But I think that will only happen if their business model is changed. And that will only happen if we, as users, start to be willing to pay for some things that we are used to getting for free, in order to ensure that they are set up in our interests. We'll see.

Update: Not long after posting the above I came across this post taking an even bleaker position than mine:

The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you'll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies.

However, it's clear from the rest of the post that this kind of thing is much more of an issue for businesses and organizations than for individual people. I am certainly not opposed to as many people as possible reading this blog, but I don't need people to read it the way a lot of businesses need people to visit their sites. And for a business, the tradeoff between keeping control of data and making information visible is very different. I don't use Facebook in my personal life, but as a business owner (see the PDApps link under Wizard Projects on this page), we certainly have a social media presence; we want people to see what we're up to as a business. No small business has ever been able to control the rules by which that game is played; companies that a decade or two ago were trying to get press "hits" (see Paul Graham's essay on PR firms for a good account of how this worked in the mid-1990's for a web startup) are now doing search engine optimization and trying to build Facebook and Twitter followings. I simply don't see this sort of thing as a harbinger of doom for the web, or anything else; it's just business as usual.

But the post I quoted from just now also has links to projects that are aimed at making it easier to have the convenience of data in the "cloud", without having to sacrifice privacy and control. For example, Unhosted is building software to allow you to have your own "cloud", which you can host anywhere but which only you (or those you give user accounts to) can access, because everything stored in the "cloud" is encrypted. Diaspora is taking a somewhat different approach, building tools to let people set up their own social media networks where they control their own data and how it is shared. Thimbl is making a micro-blogging platform that is free and open source. And even the W3C, the web standards body, is working on specs for a Federated Social Web. So even on the personal side, the picture is not all bleak. There will always be ways to opt out of the Big Web companies' offerings if you want to. Maybe most people won't want to; that's their choice. But it's important that there is a choice.

Posted at 18:02 | Category: opinions | Tags: computers | Permalink

Wed, 14 Sep 2011

George Smiley is Back

This is a culture interlude, not a nerd interlude, although of course the kind of culture I'm about to focus on might well be called nerdish. A new production of Le Carre's classic spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is out. A short video of the cast at the premiere in Britain is here.

Very interesting casting: Gary Oldman as George Smiley; it will be interesting to see how his take on the role differs from the book and Alec Guiness' classic portrayal, since this role is kind of against type for him. Not that I'm against that; good actors deserve chances to do different roles. John Hurt is "Control", Smiley's former boss who died too soon to finish the hunt for the Russian mole in The Circus (Le Carre's name for British Intelligence), leaving Smiley to complete the job. That should be interesting; the role has possibilities that weren't really explored in the 1970's BBC adaptation.

I won't say any more since I want to avoid the temptation to speculate without having seen the film, or to include spoilers based on my knowledge of the story from the books. (Yes, I've read every one that I mention below, and have re-read most of them a number of times. I warned you about what kind of interlude this was.) I have just one final comment. At the end of the video clip, Le Carre was asked about possible sequels, and he took what I thought was just the right line: yes, it would be great, but it has to be done with "fear, not confidence." I would love to see this crew do Smiley's People, assuming this film does well (which I think and hope it will). Having them do every Le Carre novel in which Smiley appears (there are five in which he plays the leading role, one, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, in which he is a major character but not the lead, and at least two others I can think of in which he appears) is probably too much to ask, but one can hope. :-)

Posted at 21:29 | Category: general | Tags: info, movies | Permalink

Sat, 10 Sep 2011

Why I Run Linux

Having spent enough time using all three of the major OS's to have a decent understanding of their flaws, it's easy to explain why I use Linux whenever I have a choice: its flaws are much easier to manage. Part of that is the Unix tradition: everything is visible, and you can always take full manual control of something if you really need to. On Windows, there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that you can't really see, and can't really control. On my Linux box, I know exactly what every single running process is there for, what data it is able to clobber, and what functionality will go away if I kill it. On Windows there are all these "system services" lying around that I can't make go away and can't know what they could potentially mess up. And then there's the Windows Registry...

But Mac OS X also has Unix under the hood, so the Unix tradition isn't all there is to it. The problem I have with Mac OS X is that there are too many layers of spackle over the Unix core, and those layers are not transparent the way Unix is supposed to be. And although OS X lets you do things in the traditional Unix way, without going through all the layers of spackle, it strongly discourages you from doing it very much. And yet, some basic GUI tools simply aren't there, such as a task scheduler (even Windows has a GUI task scheduler) to automate things like backups. Yes, I know OS X has Time Machine, but that's another example of the same problem. If I want to use some other mechanism for backups, such as rsync, or pushing to a version control repository, I can't use Time Machine and the other GUI tools; I have to drop back to the Unix command line, and OS X doesn't even like you to use crontab the way it was designed. Basically, OS X wants you to do everything in the One True Apple Way, which is fine if that works for you, but when it doesn't, things get very difficult.

Linux has flaws too, of course, but as I said above, they are much easier to manage. For example, KDE 4 sucks, but I don't have to use KDE 4; I can use KDE 3, or any of a number of other desktops. Or I can be more minimalist and just pick a good window manager, of which there are quite a few, and build my own GUI desktop tailored to my needs. Or I could be even more hard-core minimalist and run bare-bones X Windows. (I'm pretty sure that there are very few, if any, nerds left who are so hard-core that they refuse to run a GUI at all; even if you're just running emacs, a terminal, and a text-only browser, it's still nice to have multiple windows on screen at the same time.) As another example, Ubuntu's standard GUI for network configuration is braindead enough not to have a way to specify DNS servers when you're using DHCP, even though the DHCP config files have an option designed precisely for this purpose. I need this option because, for reasons explained by Rick Moen in this article, I run my own recursive DNS server on my home network instead of just defaulting to the ones run by my ISP (who shall remain nameless here because, at least in this particular case, they're no worse than any of the others). If Windows lacked this option in its GUI, I'd be helpless (ok, maybe not totally helpless, since I suppose there's some registry key somewhere that might help with this, but it might take a lot of pointless work to find it). If OS X did, I'd be, if not exactly helpless, certainly wearied after what I would have to do to make sure the config change persisted across reboots. On Linux, I make a quick change to /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and I'm done.

Another thing the various Linux distributions have done very well is providing a cryptographically verified distribution chain for software, both binary and source. On Windows, yes, you can get software updates from the Windows Update site, but that only covers software that Microsoft distributes, and many of the so-called "updates" aren't really for your benefit anyway; they are to enable Microsoft to control more of what you do with your computer. On OS X, again, you can get updates for Apple's software from Apple, but not for third party software. For third party software on both Windows and Mac, you are pretty much stuck with surfing to some website, downloading an .msi or .dmg file that may or may not have any means of verifying that it's actually what you think it is, and installing the thing by hand in the hope that it isn't a virus or spyware. And, of course, in neither case is the source code open to you. With Linux, you use the package management tool that comes with your distribution, which can verify that every piece of software it downloads and installs for you is digitally signed and comes from a trustworthy source.

I realize that this doesn't sound much like making flaws easier to manage, but bear with me for a moment. When people find out I run Linux, they often ask how I keep my system free from viruses. The definitive answer to this question is by Rick Moen, here, and basically boils down to this: viruses and malware are not problems in themselves; they are symptoms of deeper problems with either the OS or the user or both. No OS is perfect; there are always flaws in any software system that can in principle be exploited. But one can still design an OS to not only make it as free of flaws as possible, but also to minimize the impact of flaws when they are found. And included in "flaws" from this point of view are ways that a user can make mistakes and do damage to the system. Linux, and Unix variants generally, are designed explicitly to contain such damage, and so the kinds of anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-whatever tools that are ubiquitious on Windows are simply not necessary. Mac OS X, being built on Unix, gains this advantage to an extent, but the key thing it lacks, compared to Linux, is precisely the cryptographically secure distribution chain, which removes an obvious way for users to make mistakes and do damage. (Windows, by contrast, has had what security features it has bolted on as afterthoughts, and it shows.)

Of course, as computer users go, I am a statistical outlier. I am a programmer, which means that I have to have a degree of control over my computer that most users do not, because I have to be able to configure it to build and test software, not just use it. It also means that I actually like doing things like editing /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf by hand to make sure DNS is set up just the way I want it. Users with different requirements for their computers will make different tradeoffs between control and convenience, and that's fine. This post is about why I run Linux, not why everyone should.

But to close, I do want to say one thing about Linux that should be important to everyone. Control over your own computer is not just for programmers. I'm not saying that every user should have to edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf; but every user should own their computer, and the software that runs on it. If you run Windows, you may not realize it, but you don't own your software; you are "licensed" to use it by Microsoft, and if you read the fine print in all those license agreements that you probably clicked through without thinking, you will find that you have signed up to allow Microsoft some pretty draconian control over not just the specific software they gave you, but your whole computer. And if the RIAA and MPAA get their way, it could be law in the US that you have to allow such external control over your computer, in the name of preventing "piracy". Apple is somewhat better, since you can run the core of Mac OS X without signing up for their DRM, but as soon as you use iTunes, you're in about the same position as a Windows user. Only Linux has remained a fully open OS where you own your computer, and you don't have to "license" anything from anyone, or cede any of your rights to anyone, to use it.

Posted at 23:59 | Category: rants | Tags: computers | Permalink

Thu, 01 Sep 2011

Linux Kernel Site (Not) Cracked

Unless you're a Linux nerd like me, you probably didn't hear that the kernel.org site, the "home" of the Linux kernel and the "official" place to get a copy of its source code, was recently cracked. As far as I can tell from the Internet oracle, this hasn't made the news outside of the Linux developer and distribution community. If you're a conspiracy theorist, you might be thinking that this not making the news is some kind of nefarious scheme to hide flaws in the security of Linux. When a bank's server gets cracked, everybody finds out in a New York minute. Why should Linux's kernel source be any different?

The answer is in this article on linux.com. Basically, the cracking of the kernel.org server was a non-event, in security terms, because even though the cracker gained root access to the server, he couldn't change any of the kernel source code stored there without immediately raising alarms, because that code is cryptographically signed in a way that cannot be forged. So the damage was limited to having to take the servers offline once the cracking was detected, to reinstall their operating systems and restore the stored code repositories from backups (which were themselves checked against the cryptographic signatures to make sure they were correct).

As a matter of fact, I wish this event would get wide news coverage, but not because it shows any problem with Linux. Quite the opposite: it is a perfect example of how professional software development and distribution, particularly of something as critical as an operating system, is supposed to be done. First, extremely strong security precautions were taken against the possibility of a server being cracked, even though such events are very rare on well-managed servers. Nobody sat back and said, well, we do such a good job of securing our servers against intrusion, we don't have to worry about what would be compromised if somebody did get in. Second, when the compromise did happen, the kernel development community was completely open about it. Even though their server was cracked, they quite literally had nothing to hide; everything was out in plain sight anyway, and the security features that protected the source code have been public knowledge for years. All the site maintainers had to do was point to them.

Oh, by the way: the Linux kernel, and the version control system that protects its source code, git, are both free. And yet their developers set a standard of professionalism that I strongly suspect is unmatched by proprietary systems that users pay good money for. Of course, we don't know if the source code for those has ever been compromised, because it isn't out in the open where anyone can check it. Perhaps that secrecy makes it safe. We don't know. With Linux, we know. Which is one reason for what I showed in my brief nerd interlude on Linux's 20th birthday.

Posted at 23:03 | Category: opinions | Tags: computers | Permalink

Wed, 31 Aug 2011

Another Look At Marbury v. Madison

I just came across an article that shows I'm not the only one who thinks that US Constitutional law has gone a little overboard in its interpretation of the Marbury v. Madison Supreme Court decision. The article's position is summarized in this paragraph, towards the end of the introduction:

It is the fundamental betrayal of Marbury's premises and Marbury's logic that accounts for nearly all of what is wrong with "constitutional law" today. The twin peaks of constitutional law today are judicial supremacy and interpretive license. Marbury refutes both propositions. Correctly read, Marbury stands for constitutional supremacy rather than judicial supremacy. And constitutional supremacy implies strict textualism as a controlling method of constitutional interpretation, not free-wheeling judicial discretion.

The bit about "strict textualism" is explained further later on in the article:

Marbury's conception of written constitutionalism implies a particular methodology of constitutional interpretation: originalist textualism - that is, the binding authority of the written constitutional text, considered as a whole and taken in context, as its words and phrases would have been understood by reasonably well-informed speakers or readers of the English language at the time.

As I noted in my previous post, this does raise questions when considering issues that weren't even contemplated by the Framers, such as whether wiretapping constitutes a "search and seizure" under the Fourth Amendment, as in Olmstead v. United States. But such questions always end up being questions of classification, not principle: whether wiretapping counts as a search and seizure, rather than whether evidence obtained by a search and seizure without a warrant is admissible (no one disputed that it was not). As I noted in my previous post, many of the Court's classifications (such as what they think counts as interstate commerce) are highly questionable, and the logic suggested by the above quote can be used to see why. Would an average American in 1790 have agreed that growing food on one's own property for one's own use counts as "interstate commerce"? I'm guessing not. So on the whole I think the methodology advocated in the article is sound.

The full article is worth a read, and I won't belabor the details of its arguments here (though I will note that the article focuses, as I did, on Chief Justice's Marshall's statement that the Supreme Court's job is to "say what the law is", and how that statement has been taken way out of context). However, I can't resist one more quote:

Marbury truly fits Mark Twain's definition of a "classic": a work that everybody praises but nobody actually reads. Marbury is invoked today for the myth it has become, not for its actual reasoning and logic.

Which is a good brief summation of what I was getting at in my previous post. (Please note that this is not a blanket endorsement of everything on the Free Republic website, which is where the article is posted. The article itself is from the Northwestern University School of Law.)

Posted at 17:59 | Category: opinions | Tags: history, politics | Permalink

Sun, 28 Aug 2011

Don't Tread On Our Internet, Part II

In a previous post I mentioned the Protect IP Act as an example of government making things worse instead of better when it tries to censor the Internet. Today I came across an article talking about another very bad effect that the Protect IP Act would have if it were passed: it would break DNSSEC, which is a key security mechanism that lets your computer validate DNS records, so that, for example, when you type your bank's URL into your browser, you know that you're talking to your bank's server, instead of some rogue site that has been set up to impersonate it. Of course, as the article also notes, this will not actually reduce online copyright infringement, since people who really want to infringe can simply bypass any blocking technology that is put in place (for example, if the US were to mandate DNS filtering, people could just use DNS servers that are outside the US). So once again, the law would impose substantial burdens on legitimate uses of the Internet, without making a dent in illegitimate ones. As I noted when I posted about my favorite Heinlein quote (I warned you I'd be referring to it again), whenever you try to fix things by fiat, by controlling people, it always ends up being a net loss.

(By the way, I haven't even gone into the fact that two key organizations that are trying to get the government to pass the Protect IP Act, the RIAA and MPAA, are doing it to prop up their outdated business models, not out of any genuine concern for the people that actually create "intellectual property". If they were really concerned about the actual artists that create the IP they are selling, they wouldn't go to such great lengths to rip them off. But that's a whole other post.)

Posted at 12:55 | Category: opinions | Tags: computers, politics | Permalink

Fri, 26 Aug 2011

Happy Birthday, Linux!

Twenty years ago (yesterday, to be exact, but cut me some slack here), Linus Torvalds posted a message to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix, announcing that he was working on a free operating system and wanted to know what features people were interested in. The original message is on Google Groups here. So it's time for another brief nerd interlude:

peter@localhost:~$ uname
Linux

At some point I'll do a longer post on why the above is true, but for now I think I'll just let it stand by itself. Thanks, Linus, for starting it all 20 years ago, and thanks to all the developers and distributions who have kept it going.

Posted at 12:37 | Category: opinions | Tags: computers | Permalink

Sun, 14 Aug 2011

My Favorite Heinlein Quote

I've already referred to my favorite Heinlein quote once, and I'm sure I'll be doing it again, so I figured I might as well lay it out in full and unpack in detail why it's my favorite quote. Here it is, from Time Enough For Love, as noted on wikiquote:

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

I'll start the unpacking with the following hypothesis: human progress, which I will define in a moment, only comes from people of the second class.

Heinlein himself, of course, was of the second class. All that business about the people of the first class being "idealists" and those of the second being surly curmudgeons was irony, particularly sharp irony since it describes well how people of both classes see themselves, but while people of the first class do tend to see those of the second as surly curmudgeons, people of the second, like Heinlein and like me, do not see those of the first as actually doing good. We see them (or more precisely those of them who want to actually do the controlling of others, as opposed to just wanting others to be controlled; I'll expand on that later in this post) as infernal busybodies, whose general effect on human history is best summed up by this quote from Rick Moen:

Experience suggests that, if we were able to kill off the well-intentioned at birth, as a preventative measure, the leftover evil-doers would be small potatoes, in comparison.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

How do I define "human progress"? Simple: it is anything that expands the choices people have for how to live their lives, without infringing on other people's choices. The reason I like this definition is that if you propose it to people of the first class, you will have them nodding their heads in agreement; yes, indeed, that's what progress means. And yet, when we take this definition of progress to its logical conclusion, we'll find that it confirms my hypothesis above: actual human progress always comes from people of the second class. And so, if you are of the first class, and you are in favor of human progress, the best thing you can do to help is to switch to the second class.

Consider this simple question: do you, yourself, want to be controlled? No, of course not. Nobody does. Everyone wants complete freedom for himself. Most of us (grudgingly) accept that we can't have complete freedom, because we have to share the planet with others. But we want as much as we can get. We want it because we want, as the definition of true human progress above says, to have as many choices as possible for how to live our lives. We don't want to be restricted by someone else's idea of what is "good" for us, or what is "proper", or what is "right". We want, as responsible adults, the freedom to decide those things for ourselves.

If you are of Heinlein's second class of people, this is no problem. You don't want to be controlled, and you don't want to control others. The situation is symmetric. You also, as Heinlein noted, will be a more comfortable neighbor, because you aren't always sticking your nose into other people's business.

But if you are of the first class, you have a cognitive dissonance problem. You don't want to be controlled, but you do want others to be controlled, even though the others themselves don't want to be controlled. This situation is not symmetric, but our evolved ape brains are very adept at inventing rationalizations for the asymmetry. We say that people need to be controlled in the name of "security", for example. Or we say that they need to be controlled because otherwise they will corrupt our children. And so on.

But, you might think, wouldn't people's natural desire not to be controlled stop these rationalizations from working? Well, that's where somebody of class one, somewhere way back in human history, invented a neat trick. A person of class one wants other people to be controlled, but this does not mean every person of class one wants to do the controlling. Like everything else, it's easier to get someone or something else to do the hard work if at all possible. So when a person of class one comes along who does want to do the controlling, they can simply attach a little rider to all those rationalizations I mentioned above: yes, people need to be controlled to protect our security, or to protect the children, or whatever, and I will take care of all that if you just give me the power to do the controlling. And it works! People of class one, it turns out, will happily submit to being controlled if they think that they are thereby obtaining security from the crazy antics of all those other loons who don't want to be controlled.

And note that if you are the lucky person of class one who gets to do the controlling, you get the best of both worlds: you get to claim to be a person of class one, so you don't set off the alarms that people of class two set off in the minds of all the other people of class one, but you also get all the freedom that people of class two want, plus power. Nice work if you can get it. We'll come back to this in a little bit.

I have stated the above in roundabout terms, but of course what we have here, in plain English, is a dominance-submission hierarchy. It is far older than the human species. It has been one of evolution's handy solutions to organizing social animals since its invention. Cognitive scientists are finding that we have "modules" for this behavior pattern pretty much hard-wired into our brains. From that standpoint, it is not a mystery why the trick works. What is a mystery, at least from this viewpoint, is why it doesn't work on everyone: why there are any people at all of the second class.

Of course old-fashioned liberal philosophy has the answer to this one: human beings are not just animals. Somehow, we managed to cross a line and become persons. And once you're a full-fledged person, the whole system of dominance and submission looks the way socialism looked to E. O. Wilson: great idea, wrong species. Human beings are not insects. You don't have to believe that humans were made in the image of God to believe this; indeed, you don't even have to believe that there is a God. But you do have to believe that human beings are persons, and that persons, while they are evolved animals, are not just animals. We have some extra quality that makes us unique, different from other animals. This extra quality doesn't have to be anything mystical or mysterious; the simple fact that we are capable of even thinking about and discussing the question of "human progress" at all will do. Insects don't have elaborate debates on how best to run the hive.

In other words, as soon as you have the ability to even think about a concept like the "good" life, as soon as you can even consider one potential future vs. another in the abstract and label one as "better", over a whole lived life instead of just limited to the next meal, you have crossed a line, and you have only two choices. One is to exit the whole scheme that evolution evolved for organizing social animals; it quite simply no longer applies to you, because it evolved in animals that didn't have the conceptual ability that you have. This makes you a person of the second class: you don't want to be controlled, and you don't want to control anyone else either. As I noted above, this situation is symmetric, and it makes for a minimum of hassle.

The other choice is to yield to the temptation of the Ring, as Tolkien would have put it. You find yourself in possession of a great secret: you now know that it is possible to not be controlled, that you can have a "good" life completely free of the dominance-submission hierarchy that evolution saddles social animals with. But why should you share this secret with anyone else? Why not use it instead, to put yourself at the top of the hierarchy?

Of course, to do that consciously, with full malice aforethought, as it were, you would have to be evil, wouldn't you? But there's a handy dodge for this too. Taking power, putting yourself at the top of the hierarchy, just for yourself would be evil, but if you do it for a good cause, that is quite another matter. After all, there is so much that is wrong with the world, and yet nobody seems to be fixing all these wrong things; they just seem to go on and on. But you, of course, have a great idea for really fixing something, really making a difference. All you need is the power to do so. And we've already seen how you can get that: just work the trick we saw above on all the other people of class one, and get them to help you impose your system of control on the people of class two.

But doesn't this count as human progress? Okay, so it was done using the Ring; but even so, didn't something get fixed that needed fixing? Maybe, for a time anyway. But the fixes, even if they are fixes at first, don't last. What does last is the system of power that the well-intentioned people of class one construct to implement their fixes. And the first thing such a system does is to make sure that nobody else has a chance at the top. And so, as Richard Feynman said in his eloquent essay, The Value Of Science,

we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, "This is it, boys, man is saved!" and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination.

In other words, as soon as you use power to "fix" something by fiat, by controlling people, you always end up taking away more choices than you open up. It always turns out to be a net loss, not a net gain. And so no real human progress ever comes from people of class one.

It's often difficult to see this because the perceived gains from controlling people are visible and immediate, while the losses from restricting other choices are often invisible and take time to be felt. For example, in the previous post where I referred to my favorite Heinlein quote, I talked about efforts to censor the Internet in the name of some "good cause", such as preventing computer viruses or child porn. Advocates of such schemes always talk about the obvious, visible benefits, but they never talk about the hidden costs: all the good things that could be done on the Internet that haven't been thought of yet, but which would be harder, or even impossible, on a censored Internet. We can't know today how valuable those things might be, any more than someone in, say, 1995 could know how valuable Google would be today. But that's exactly why we can't afford to, as Feynman said, confine future innovators to the limits of our present imagination.

Of course the conflict I am describing is an age-old one in philosophy: which is more important, virtue or liberty? W. H. Auden described it as the difference between the European and the American viewpoints; an article in Life magazine in November 1947, which is readable online via the wonder of Google Books, quotes him thus:

Europe's faith, as a recent essay by W. H. Auden puts it, involves the proposition that virtue is prior to liberty: you must do and think right, by free choice if possible, but in any case you must do and think right. The American proposition is that liberty is prior to virtue: it is better to choose wrong than to have right chosen for you, since freedom of choice "is the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning."

(I believe the Auden essay in question is in The Dyer's Hand, but I have not found it online.)

It should be obvious that Heinlein and I and everybody of class two are on the American side in this. "Freedom of choice" is simply another unique quality of humans that makes us persons, unlike other animals. (I could argue that it's actually the same quality that I was talking about above, but that will have to wait for another post.) The only thing I would add is that the European proposition assumes, without proof, that it is even possible to ensure virtue by making it prior to liberty; and if history teaches anything, it teaches that that is a pipe dream. Even the most draconian systems of control in history, such as the medieval Christian Church, came nowhere near ensuring that people would "do and think right". If anything, people have probably been more virtuous, on average, in societies that have given them the liberty to decide for themselves what "virtue" is. Which is, of course, precisely the American point.

Does any of this guarantee that real progress will come from people of class two? Of course not; there are no guarantees. But at least we of class two recognize the plain fact that human beings cannot be controlled. We are simply too complex. Still less can reality itself be controlled. That may seem strange to say in this scientific age, but any real scientist will be the first to tell you how vast is our ignorance. The supposed "security" that the people of class one at the top of the hierarchy are promising to the other people of class one underneath them is an illusion; it can't actually be had at any price. The best we can do is to let everyone use their own judgment about how to make the choices they have. This certainly isn't perfect, but at least it makes progress possible, which is more than can be said of the alternative.

Posted at 18:17 | Category: opinions | Tags: politics | Permalink

Mon, 08 Aug 2011

Two Cultures Redux: But Wait, There's More

The New York Times, which is certainly a bastion of the liberal arts types if anywhere is, has been running a debate about law school that is similar to the one about college in general that I discussed in my post a couple of weeks ago on the two cultures. The question under debate is: "Should the standard three years of law school, followed by the bar exam, be the only path to a legal career?"

I won't bother canvassing most of the responses, which are predictable. What got my attention were a couple of responses that got into that same "two cultures" territory that prompted my last rant.

First up is a law professor who wants us to know that law school is not a trade school:

At the risk of sounding "liberal artsy," law school should emphasize educated citizenship. It prepares people to become leaders in our society, which makes it imperative that they be rigorously trained as thinkers. They will become stewards of policies that affect our everyday lives: in our schools, our jobs and our families. All of this responsibility, in diverse fields, comes from legal education.

I hardly know where to start, but perhaps that phrase "liberal artsy" will do. So a degree in, say, physics, or chemistry, or engineering doesn't qualify one to be a "steward" of important policies? Not even a degree in one of those other liberal arts, like literature? "All of this responsibility" can only be had if you first get a law degree? Wow.

The standard liberal artsy argument, of course, is that one doesn't have to actually understand the details of a technical field, like physics or chemistry, in order to be a "steward of policies" that are dependent on such a field. One can always learn enough to know which experts in the field to trust. I would hope that my last rant, and the observations of C. P. Snow that I quoted there, would be sufficient refutation of that, but in case you don't think it is, consider this from Paul Graham:

Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?

We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?

My experience leads me to a similar conclusion. I would much rather have a scientifically educated person making policy and having to learn the political stuff as they go, then have a liberal arts educated person making policy and having to learn the science as they go.

But even that conclusion assumes that those are the only choices. Why do they have to be? And no, I'm not talking about those "interdisciplinary" degrees. I'm talking about the misconception that there should be any rule for choosing "leaders in our society", other than doing stuff that works. No one group, no one academic discipline, has a lock on "educated citizenship". This is America; we are all supposed to be educated citizens. And there are no degrees in that discipline; we all learn it on the job.

Even focusing on "degrees" in the first place ignores all the other areas of experience that are highly relevant to citizenship, such as serving in the military, or even something simple like being a good neighbor. If we look at the track records of "stewards of policies", it certainly doesn't look to me like law degrees, or indeed any degrees, stack up very well against those other types of experiences. (The hard sciences know this; people outside the standard "academic" circles can get work published if it's good. Einstein, of course, was a Patent Office clerk when he published his five classic scientific papers, in 1905, in the most prestigious physics journal in the world at that time, Annalen der Physik.) Have our Presidents, or Senators, or Representatives, with law degrees been better, on balance, than those with other backgrounds? Congress is certainly chock full of lawyers now, and look at it.

But wait, there's more. Another law professor says that a law degree is priceless because of the experience it gives you:

My own decision to attend law school was based in part upon my perception, still shared by those who rush our doors, that a legal education provides an unparalleled opportunity to understand the intersection of private and public power, to explore the rationale for the organization of human society and to participate more knowledgeably and effectively in every aspect of human endeavor.

I guess I can't quarrel with the "intersection of private and public power" part; lawyers certainly get to see that first-hand. But unlike the law professor, I regard that as a bug, not a feature. As Chesterton said:

[T]he horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policeman, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.

It seems to me that the best way to "participate more knowledgeably and effectively" in society is to actually participate in it, not to sit above it and tinker with the rules. And I'm all for exploring the "rationale for the organization of human society", but again, that's part of educated citizenship, and no one group or discipline has a special private line to the right answers. We can only judge by the actual track record.

In fact, the law professor says so himself:

When the history of legal education is written, the important question...will be, "Did our legal education system deliver equal justice under law?"

The answer in our society today, I submit, is quite often "no". Too bad the professor thought the question was just rhetorical.

Posted at 22:40 | Category: rants | Tags: politics | Permalink

Fri, 05 Aug 2011

A Brief Nerd Interlude

For non-nerd readers, I promise I won't do this very often, but once in a while I just have to get these sorts of things out of my system. Does anyone else find the following (from a transcript of a short Unix shell session) a little weird?

peter@localhost:~$ true
peter@localhost:~$ echo $?
0
peter@localhost:~$ false
peter@localhost:~$ echo $?
1

The test of whether you're a nerd reader or not, of course, is first, whether the above makes sense to you, and second, if it does, do you immediately see why I find it weird?

(And for the really nerdy nerds who are brimming full of explanations of why it's not really weird at all, it makes perfect sense for things to be that way, yes, I know why it's that way. I write Unix shell programs too. I just said it was a little weird, not that it was bad engineering. It isn't, all things considered.)

Posted at 22:19 | Category: general | Tags: computers | Permalink

Fri, 29 Jul 2011

Wow, Sometimes Things Actually Work

In the interest of keeping the record honest following my last post, it's only fair to report that I have now been pleasantly surprised. Not relishing the prospect of a phone call (including most probably a lengthy time spent on hold), I decided to try email first. Believe it or not, my email was actually acted on within a day, and I have now received confirmation that the claim is being handled properly. Whoever read my email and did the right thing, I doubt you're reading this, but thanks. You've saved my wife and me (and your company as well) a significant amount of hassle. It's nice to be reminded that things can actually work.

Posted at 17:44 | Category: rants | Tags: info | Permalink

Wed, 27 Jul 2011

Beam Me Up Scotty, There's No Intelligent Life Here

Today I had one of those experiences that make you wonder how anything ever gets accomplished in our society. A couple of days ago I faxed in a claim form to our health care spending account for some prescription copays. After I faxed the form, I realized that I hadn't signed it, so I signed it and faxed it again.

Today I got an email from the agency that processes the forms. It referenced two claim forms received. The first claim form was marked as "pending" with the following note:

PLEASE SIGN THE CLAIM FORM AND RESUBMIT FOR CONSIDERATION.

The second claim form was marked as "denied", with the following note:

THIS CLAIM IS A DUPLICATE OF A PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED CLAIM.

The real fun will be when I call the 800 number and speak to a human and see if they can actually fix this without my having to fax the form a third time. Bets, anyone?

Update (29 July 2011): The issue has been fixed. It still makes a good story, though. ;)

Posted at 23:10 | Category: rants | Tags: info | Permalink

Sun, 24 Jul 2011

Two Articles and Two Cultures

I recently came across two articles talking about whether a traditional college education is really worth it any more, and they awakened a pet peeve of mine. The first article, which is titled College is a waste of time, is by a 19-year-old recipient of a Thiel Fellowship, which he is using to organize "UnCollege" as an alternative to the traditional college education, which he says

...rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

All of these are commonplace (and often valid) criticisms, and the writer goes on to talk about a different way, in what by now are familiar (and again often valid) terms:

The success of people who never completed or attended college makes us question whether what we need to learn is taught in school. Learning by doing -- in life, not classrooms -- is the best way to turn constant iteration into true innovation. We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions. We are the disruptive generation creating the "free agent economy" built by entrepreneurs, creatives, consultants and small businesses...

But then, right after the end of the paragraph from which I just quoted, I found a link to an article by the president of Wesleyan University on Why liberal arts matter, in which I read:

A well-rounded education gave graduates more tools with which to solve problems, broader perspectives through which to see opportunities and a deeper capacity to build a more humane society.

This sounded all right (if a bit vague), but already I was wondering about the contrast with the article I just clicked from. So college is supposed to be part of a well-rounded education after all? I read on:

Already at liberal arts schools across the country there is increasing interest in the sciences from students who are also studying history, political science, literature and the arts. At Wesleyan, neuroscience and behavior is one of our fastest growing majors, and programs linking the sciences, arts and humanities have been areas of intense creative work.

This is still vague and general (and the only specific major given, neuroscience and behavior, looks like straightforward science to me). How about some specific examples? Well, the article does give a few; these two in particular struck me:

...a philosophy and chemistry major at Wesleyan...founded [a] biotech chemistry company...to "transform the way serious diseases are treated."

...an interdisciplinary social science major at Wesleyan...helped restructure the U.S. auto industry as a deputy director of the National Economic Council.

You will note that neither of these examples illustrate any kind of synergy between the liberal arts and the sciences. The first person's hard science major (chemistry) has an obvious relationship to his achievement, but did his philosophy major really play any role? (Later on, the article says that "cultural understanding, economic planning and ethical reasoning" are needed to effectively deliver vaccines, but it would be nice to see some evidence that a philosophy major, for example, actually has any special expertise in any of these areas, beyond what any well-informed citizen, or chemistry major for that matter, would have.) Reading the second example, one wonders whether economics is included in "interdisciplinary social science", as otherwise there seems to be no connection at all between the education and the achievement, not to mention that the achievement itself is hardly "interdisciplinary"; were any technical people, such as engineers, at the big three automakers consulted about what they thought might help? Based on what I've read about the "restructuring", I'm guessing not.

I can only surmise that the CNN site put the link to the second article in the middle of the first one to provide some kind of "balance" in viewpoints. If so, the second article seems to me to come up short in the comparison. The message I get from the two articles combined is not that college is, after all, worthwhile for some people, if not for all; instead, what emerges from the comparison is that, while a degree in science (preferably hard science) might be useful, one in liberal arts might well be, as the first article suggests, a waste of time.

You are probably wondering, having read the title of this post, how I've managed to come this far without mentioning C. P. Snow. Fear not; I was simply saving him for the coda. Of course the comparison between the two articles above brings to mind his famous speech about the "two cultures"; but I wonder how many liberal arts majors realize that he was not talking about scientists being ignorant of the humanities, but the opposite:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question - such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? - not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

And this type of ignorance is worse than ignorance about the arts and literature, because it's about things that can be objectively tested. We can argue forever about whether a given novel is "good" or not, or whether "absolute truth" is possible, or whether we can truly "know" anything, and liberal arts types often do. But we know to a moral certainty that the Earth is round, not flat; that it goes around the Sun; that energy is conserved and "perpetual motion" is impossible; that human beings evolved from apes, and in fact all living things on Earth evolved from a single common ancestor; and a host of other scientific facts. And yet non-scientists can still get away with being ignorant of, or even denying, these facts, or saying things like "the jury is still out" on evolution, without being hooted down in derision. (As the comedian Lewis Black said about George W. Bush when he made that remark about evolution, "What jury, where? The Scopes trial is over.")

But at least everyone agrees on the ultimate goal, don't they? Both articles appear to:

It's not a question of authorities; it's a question of priorities. We who take our education outside and beyond the classroom understand how actions build a better world. We will change the world regardless of the letters after our names.

We should have confidence, as my parents did, that a broadly based, liberal education will help our young people lead lives of creative productivity, lives in which they can make meaning from and contribute to the world around them.

So we all agree that we want to make the world a better place. But in that case, it seems to me that we don't need Shakespeare or a philosophy major or an interdisciplinary degree to tell us the right thing to do. We already know that. What we need is practical knowledge of how to solve the practical problems that stand in the way of a better world for all. In other words, science and technology.

Of course the liberal arts types have an obvious retort: if science and technology are so great, how come we still have all these problems? And how come we now have new problems, like environmental pollution, that we didn't have (or at least it's claimed we didn't have them) before science and technology entered the picture? Doesn't that show that we need input from the humanities in order to use science and technology for good ends?

The problem is that, if we look at the barriers that are keeping people from taking advantage of known solutions to their problems, we find that they are mostly economic and political, not technological. (The same goes for the reasons why cultures of the past, for example, often weren't such good stewards of the environment as they are portrayed in the liberal arts version of history.) And those economic and political barriers have not changed much through all of human history. Science and technology, on the other hand, keep discovering ways to not so much remove the barriers as make them irrelevant. (The medium by which you are reading this is one outstanding example.)

Daniel Dennett (a philosopher, no less!) gave a similar answer to a similar point, in the essay "When Philosophers Encounter Artificial Intelligence", which appears in his book Brainchildren. He was talking about other philosophers' responses to AI in particular (Hilary Putnam's in this case, but he makes similar comments about other philosophers elsewhere), but what he says applies just as well to the general case we've been discussing:

But still one may well inquire, echoing Putnam's challenge, whether AI has taught philosophers anything of importance about the mind yet. Putnam thinks it has not, and supports his view with a rhetorically curious indictment: AI has utterly failed, over a quarter century, to solve problems that philosophy has utterly failed to solve over two millennia. He is right, I guess, but I am not impressed. It is as if a philosopher were to conclude a dismissal of contemporary biology by saying that the biologists have not so much as asked the question: What is Life? Indeed they have not; they have asked better questions that ought to dissolve or redirect the philosopher's curiosity.

Yes, science has utterly failed, in a few hundred years, to solve problems that the "liberal arts" have utterly failed to solve over the entire length of human history. Science recognizes when something isn't working, and tries something different. Liberal arts types keep on saying that if we just try one more time (using their pet solution, of course), maybe it will work. Isn't the classic definition of insanity repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different results?

All of which further underscores the comparison between the two articles I started with. The first article recognizes that a standard college education isn't working for many people, and proposes trying something different. The second, purporting to address the same issues as the first, proposes...more standard college education. You do the math.

Posted at 21:34 | Category: rants | Tags: education | Permalink

Wed, 20 Jul 2011

The Greatest Tragedy of American History

After posting last week about how the Supreme Court's role has evolved since the US Constitution was adopted, I did some more poking around on the Charters of Freedom site, and found a page on the US Civil War that includes the following interesting paragraph:

At stake in the Civil War was the survival of the United States of America as a single nation. Eleven Southern states, invoking the spirit of 1776, seceded from the Union in 1861 to form a nation they named the Confederate States of America. The Federal Government refused to allow it. Massive armies representing the Union and the Confederacy squared off in a conflict that tested the experiment in self-government as never before. At the end of the Civil War's carnage, the primacy of the Federal Government over the states was indisputably upheld.

Those who attended similar history classes to the ones I had may well wonder: what about slavery? It isn't mentioned at all in the (admittedly short) Charters of Freedom page. But Lincoln himself would not have been surprised, since he said often that his primary concern was the Union, not slavery. In a letter to Horace Greeley in 1862, he wrote:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

What's more, the leaders of the Confederacy would also not have been surprised to read that the Union went to war to assert Federal supremacy over the states. This post by Mencius Moldbug includes an interesting quote from R. L. Dabney, who was a chaplain in the Confederate Army and chief of staff to Stonewall Jackson:

History will some day place the position of these Confederate States, in this high argument, in the clearest light of her glory. The cause they undertook to defend was that of regulated constitutional liberty, and of fidelity to law and covenants, against the licentious violence of physical power. The assumptions they resisted were precisely those of that radical democracy, which deluged Europe with blood at the close of the eighteenth century, and which shook its thrones again in the convulsions of 1848; the agrarianism which, under the name of equality, would subject all the rights of individuals to the will of the many, and acknowledge no law nor ethics, save the lust of that mob which happens to be the larger.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in American history, in my opinion, is that the South was able to base its economy on slavery. The Framers of the US Constitution basically punted on the slavery issue, and I suppose we can't really blame them, since they were having a tough enough time getting a Constitution in place at all. They did at least manage to put in the clause that ended the slave trade after 1808. After that, according to what students in US schools are taught in history class, the South kept its slavery-based economy while the North realized that slavery was wrong and worked to abolish it, eventually leading to the US Civil War, when the issue was decided once and for all.

But what isn't often talked about is that the South had a valid point too. The Union was supposed to be a balance between Federal power and States' rights, and yet Federal power kept expanding. Had the South taken a stand in defense of what the Constitution was supposed to stand for, on any issue other than slavery, they would at least have had a chance of being heard. All during the antebellum period, the South kept trying to keep the Federal government from getting too large and taking on too much power. The South tried to make sure the Federal government respected the Constitution, and tried to keep Federal power from being used to favor some parts of the country over others. But the South was mostly disregarded, because they were defending slavery. That one fact was enough to outweigh everything else. (To be fair, while the South defended states' rights when a state was supporting slavery, they were quite ready to insist on using Federal power over states' rights when a state was against slavery, as in the case of Wisconsin's attempted nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.)

The North's hands were not exactly clean, either. Northern merchants, particularly those of New England, profited from the slave trade until it ended. And as noted above, the North did not hesitate to use its growing industrial superiority to its advantage in national politics (though to be fair, President Andrew Jackson, who was in office during the Nullification Crisis, was a southerner from Tennessee). Meanwhile, the cotton gin gave the South a staple crop that sustained its economy just long enough for the slavery issue to boil over, and for the South's leaders to have solidified their position on states' rights and the necessity of secession if they could not get what they considered to be fair treatment at the North's hands.

So from the South's point of view, they were, as Dabney says, simply asserting their right to opt out of a country and a Constitution that had morphed into something they could no longer sign up to. But the slavery issue was enough to close off even that option. Lincoln could say that the war was about the Union, not slavery; but the very fact that he felt he had to say this, and say it often, shows that in the minds of most people in the North, the primary issue was slavery, not the Union. They were fighting to free the slaves, and it was only to achieve that objective that they were willing to change the Union from a completely voluntary agreement between "Free and Independent States", as the Declaration of Independence has it, to something that, in this respect, was more like the Mafia or the IRA: once you're in, you're never out. As Confederate general John B. Gordon wrote:

The South maintained with the depth of religious conviction that the Union formed under the Constitution was a Union of consent and not of force; that the original States were not the creatures but the creators of the Union; that these States had gained their independence, their freedom, and their sovereignty from the mother country, and had not surrendered these on entering the Union; that by the express terms of the Constitution all rights and powers not delegated were reserved to the States; and the South challenged the North to find one trace of authority in that Constitution for invading and coercing a sovereign State.

The North, on the other hand, maintained with the utmost confidence in the correctness of her position that the Union formed under the Constitution was intended to be perpetual; that sovereignty was a unit and could not be divided; that whether or not there was any express power granted in the Constitution for invading a State, the right of self-preservation was inherent in all governments; that the life of the Union was essential to the life of liberty; or, in the words of Webster, "liberty and union are one and inseparable."

When I called this a tragedy, I was not just talking about the South, as if I were rehashing Gone With The Wind. I was talking about all of the United States of America. Our entire nation changed as a result of these events, and it wasn't entirely for the better. But given the strongly held convictions on both sides, with some genuine merit on both sides, how could it have been avoided? Both sides were trapped, not just by their flaws, but by their principles, into a situation where there was no longer any compromise possible, and so more than half a million Americans had to die. That is a tragedy.

Postscript: Not Entirely A Tragedy?

Another thing that isn't often talked about is that Europe really, really wanted the South to win the US Civil War. As the article just linked to notes, this was one reason why Lincoln changed his tune and issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, explicitly making it a goal of the war to free the slaves. Europe, up until then, had played dumb and said that, well, since the US Government had said that it was not fighting to free the slaves, but only to preserve the Union, there was no moral issue involved, and so it was quite okay for them to help the South. Lincoln realized that he had to take away that smokescreen.

But why did Europe want the South to win? The article linked to above says it was because they wanted the American experiment with "democracy" to fail, but I think it's more than that. I think they knew, even then, that the United States, if left to itself, was going to become a superpower, and they wanted to nip that in the bud. Many people these days might well say a non-superpower USA would have been a better outcome. But consider some alternative paths that history could have taken.

First, suppose the South had won the Civil War, and ever since, there had been two countries between Canada and Mexico, instead of one. In that case, I strongly suspect that Germany and France, for example, would still be fighting each other, just as they did for centuries before the US came along. Western Europe (and Japan) would not have had more than half a century of peace following World War II, courtesy of the United States of America. A divided USA and CSA, I believe, would simply not have had either the strength or the will to get involved in Europe's affairs to such an extent.

In the light of this alternative, the Union was more important than slavery, just as Lincoln believed. But now consider a second alternative: suppose slavery had not been an issue. Suppose that the South had had to transform its economy as the North did, so that the question of slavery was simply taken off the table. Would the South still have stood up for those ideals that Dabney enumerated, while the North pushed for more Federal power? Would the Union still have been fractured, but without the issue of slavery to make it worthwhile, in the eyes of the people of the North, to fight to preserve it? We might have ended up in much the same situation as the first alternative, with two countries instead of one, but split not just over slavery, but over an entire spectrum of political ideas.

And there's even a third alternative: suppose the Union had not been fractured. Suppose that, not just slavery, but all of the Constitutional questions that are raised in the quotes above, had been peacefully solved by the middle of the nineteenth century, by finding a reasonable equilibrium between Federal power and States' rights. Would even a unified United States of America, having gone through that process, have been willing to get involved in European wars? Would we have remained isolated on our side of the oceans, wanting to avoid what George Washington in his farewell address called "entangling alliances"? Could we, even, have been forced to get involved by an attack on American soil worse than 9/11, worse than Pearl Harbor?

Of course playing the what-if game is entertaining, but you can't let it get out of hand. We have the history we have, and we can't go back and change it; we can only try to learn from it. I am not really trying to argue that the way things turned out was, all things considered, the best of all possible worlds. It might have been, but if so, that just shows that even the best of all possible worlds can suck pretty bad. And not just because six hundred thousand Americans died in the US Civil War. If we are going to be fair about the record since, we have to consider, not just the fact that the US kept Western Europe at peace after World War II, but the fact that it arguably contributed to making the situation so dire that World War II happened in the first place. Not to mention that the Union has continued on the path of more and more centralized power, a trend which not everyone agrees is a good thing.

Perhaps the deepest lesson we can learn from the US Civil War is that people can honestly disagree even about fundamental principles. On the last day of deliberation of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Ben Franklin was asked, "What have we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it." Both sides in the US Civil War sincerely believed they were fighting to keep it. And both sides were right, and wrong. But once the fight was over, those who had fought showed each other respect. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston died of pneumonia contracted when he took off his hat as a sign of respect at the funeral of his old adversary, Union general Sherman. Today the USA gets scant thanks from Europe for keeping that continent at peace since 1945, and Republicans and Democrats in the US seem unable to credit each other with any good intentions at all. I doubt if any leaders of the various political factions, in the US or in the world as a whole, could write the kind of fair summary of their opponent's views that General Gordon wrote of his. That's something we need to fix if their sacrifice is to be, if not less tragic, at least not futile.

Posted at 22:11 | Category: opinions | Tags: history, politics | Permalink

Tue, 19 Jul 2011

A Bit Of Shameless Vanity

My alma mater, MIT, has always been in the forefront of Internet presence (since the Internet was, after all, largely developed there). Quite a few years ago now, the Open Courseware site was launched, which contains free online lecture notes, readings, past problem sets, and past exams for just about all of MIT's courses. To anyone who believes in the free sharing of knowledge, this is a great thing. But I found out today that MIT has gone one better; it also has DSpace, a site that makes MIT research materials freely available online.

When I got to the site and read the description, I immediately wondered: do they have theses posted? And of course the answer is yes; so here, for your reading pleasure, are my MIT theses, now available to the world courtesy of DSpace!

Bachelor's

Master's

Posted at 21:10 | Category: general | Tags: info | Permalink

Mon, 11 Jul 2011

A Living Constitution?

After I posted my independence day post, I spent some time browsing around the Charters of Freedom site at the US national archives, which is where the transcript of the original Declaration of Independence is hosted. I noticed that, along with the pages on the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, they have a page there on the Marbury v Madison Supreme Court case. That reminded me of an article on courts and majorities that I read years ago on Jonathan Tweet's website, and a discussion I had online with Tweet as a result, where we reached a conclusion that is probably not quite what the writers of the Charters of Freedom page were thinking when they wrote that "the U.S. Supreme Court has...resolved some of the most dramatic confrontations in U.S. history."

Jonathan Tweet was one of the designers of D&D 3rd Edition, which is how I first found his website, but he likes to range all over the map in his web posts, and since I do too, I've had several interesting exchanges online with him. His main thesis in the article I have just mentioned was that the US courts provide a much-needed counterweight to the tyranny of the majority in a democratic system:

Elected officials violate our ideals because the people who vote for them want them to, and because they want to themselves. What the courts do, on the other hand, is hold us accountable for our own ideals. That's why so many people hate the courts. Courts favor the high-minded principles that people can put down on paper when they think in terms of liberty, equality, and personal sovereignty. They don't favor the hatreds and prejudices that people express when they try to put their neighbors in their places.

This sounded good to me when I first read it, but as it happened, soon after that I read a book, The Living U. S. Constitution, by Saul K. Padover, which talked about major Supreme Court decisions and showed how the viewpoint of the Court has evolved over time. And, as I pointed out in a discussion thread on Tweet's message forums (unfortunately the exchange appears to have vanished from the web, which is one reason why I'm writing this post now), what I saw in the book was quite different from what Tweet's article portrayed. There are certainly cases in which the Supreme Court has upheld our ideals against popular prejudice (Brown v. Board of Education is probably the canonical example). The problem is that the Court does a lot more than that, and not all of it is in harmony with those same ideals.

In the aforementioned discussion thread, I gave a number of examples culled from the book (and I'll discuss some of them below), but at the time it never occurred to me to wonder just how far back I could go and still see signs of the pattern I was describing. Later on, thinking over the question again, I realized that I could make a case that the pattern goes all the way back to the very Marbury v. Madison decision that the Charters of Freedom page talks about.

You're probably familiar with the facts of the case, but let me recap them briefly. John Adams lost the presidential election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson. In what remains a firm tradition of the American presidency, Adams spent his last days in office getting a bunch of people from his party appointed to Federal positions and confirmed by the Senate, hoping to hamstring his successor. (It always amazes me how people complain, as if it were some huge new issue that needs to be fixed right now, when current Presidents do things that just about every President has done since the country was established.) Once confirmed, each appointee was supposed to receive a commission, which had to be delivered in person. However, some were not delivered prior to the expiration of Adams' term at noon on March 4, 1801, and they ended up in the hands of the new Secretary of State, James Madison.

One of the appointees who didn't get his commission, William Marbury, sued Madison. However, he did so in a rather unusual way; at least, it seems unusual to me, particularly in the light of the outcome. He filed a petition directly with the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus, which is legalese for asking the Court to order Madison to deliver his commission. What seems unusual to me about this is that: (a) he did not petition for the United States, itself, to deliver his commission, but for Madison, as an individual, to do so; and (b) he nevertheless brought the petition directly to the Supreme Court, instead of to a lower Federal court. And, of course, the whole case turned on whether the Supreme Court actually had original jurisdiction (an issue which would not have arisen had the petition been brought in a lower court, and then possibly come to the Supreme Court on appeal). I wonder if Marbury's lawyer was either not very competent, or perhaps had some ulterior motive for adopting a strategy that was open to such a simple objection. (As we'll see below, there was legal support for this strategy in the Judiciary Act of 1789, but that support proved to be illusory.)

Of course we all know what happened. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote and delivered the opinion of the Court, which said three things. First, Marbury did have a legal right to his commission; Madison was in the wrong by not delivering it to him. Second, Marbury did have the right to seek a legal remedy against Madison (and a petition for a writ of mandamus was a perfectly acceptable remedy to seek). But third, filing the petition directly in the Supreme Court was not the correct legal remedy, because the Supreme Court did not have original jurisdiction in the case. (I'm hard pressed to think of a better example of giving with one hand, then taking away with the other. I would love to have seen Marbury's face, and that of his lawyer, while the opinion was being read.) Marbury never did get his commission.

This case is so important in the history of Constitutional law because of the argument Marshall made in support of the third item above. Marbury had used the Judiciary Act of 1789 as justification for submitting his petition directly to the Supreme Court, since that Act stated that the Supreme Court had original jurisdiction over writs of mandamus. However, the Court found that that provision of the Judiciary Act was unconstitutional. The Constitution simply does not give Congress the authority to add to the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction; it only gives Congress the authority to make "exceptions" and "regulations" to the Court's appellate jurisdiction. (Technically, there is a small matter of interpretation involved, since the section in question in Article III could, by a very tortured interpretation, be construed such that the "exceptions and regulations" clause applies to the whole section, rather than just to the part concerning appellate jurisdiction, as a normal reading of the language would indicate. As far as I know, nobody since Marbury's lawyer has seriously tried to defend such a tortured interpretation.) And, Marshall argued, since the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, if there is any conflict between the Constitution and a law passed by Congress, the higher law, the Constitution, must govern. Otherwise there would be no point to having a Constitution at all.

(Another legal point about the case is also worth noting. Some critics argued that the Court had original jurisdiction over the case even without the Judiciary Act of 1789, since Article III grants original jurisdiction over "all cases affecting...public ministers and consuls", and Madison, as Secretary of State, was such a public minister or consul. However, that raises the question of why Marbury's suit named Madison individually, not in his capacity as a public minister or consul. Again, I wonder what Marbury and his lawyer could have been thinking, not to avail themselves of these obvious strategic moves.)

When I first learned about this decision (in government class in high school, if you must know), a particular quotation was given as a sort of "tag line" to Marshall's opinion:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.

Taken in context, it is clear what Marshall means by "say what the law is". Indeed, he goes on to amplify that very point:

So, if a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law, the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty.

And, of course, the latter option is the only acceptable one, since the Constitution is supposed to be the supreme law of the land, superior to laws passed by Congress.

But there is another, quite different meaning that could be placed on the phrase "say what the law is." Consider another case that is often cited as an example of the Court upholding our ideals against popular prejudice: Roe v. Wade. The Court ruled that a woman's right to choose was included in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. (There is an interesting point about this, though: the lower court decision had been based on the Ninth Amendment, but the Supreme Court preferred to base its decision on the Fourteenth Amendment.) There were strong dissenting opinions by Justices White and Rehnquist (though the latter was later the Chief Justice when the Court upheld Roe v. Wade in several decisions in the 1980's and 1990's), arguing that, as White's dissent put it, there was "nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment." But the majority ruled in favor of Roe, and that ruling still stands today (though the interpretation of it has evolved, as we'll see below).

So far, what the Court did was well in line with what Marshall's opinion in Marbury v. Madison described. But the Court did not stop there. Rather than just say that the law under review (a Texas state law) was unconstitutional, the Court erected a whole framework of what was, in effect, new law, setting down rules for how states could regulate abortion. This is not just "saying what the law is" in the form of determining what law shall govern when existing laws conflict. This is "saying what the law is" in the form of making new laws. Yes, they're written as "opinions", and states can try to write laws that differ from what the "opinions" say is allowable. And when they do, and it comes to court, those laws get struck down, just as though the words in the Court's "opinion" were part of the Constitution. (To be fair, as I noted above, the Court's interpretation of its own words has evolved over time, so that, for example, the trimester framework laid out in the Roe opinion is no longer really applicable. But the primary criterion, viability, is still in force, and even Justice Blackmun, who wrote the Court's opinion, admitted that that criterion was "arbitrary".)

Of course I know that, in terms of the long-running debate over how to interpret the Constitution, I have just labeled myself as a "strict constructionist". But I'm not saying, as the dissenters in Roe v. Wade did, that if the Constitution doesn't explicitly say that it covers, for example, abortion, then it simply doesn't cover it at all. I know the Court has to interpret; no body of written law can possibly cover all cases, or even anticipate all possible types of cases that might have to be covered. There is nothing explicitly about abortion, or even about marriage or parenting, in the Constitution, but that doesn't mean those things somehow aren't covered by the Constitution, as Justice Scalia, for example, likes to claim. My objection is simpler: interpretation of existing laws is not the same thing as writing new ones. The latter is supposed to be the job of the legislative branch, not the judicial. And yet we allow the Supreme Court to "say what the law is" in both senses, not just the first. (One could argue, in connection with my mention of Justice Scalia just now, that his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which is worth reading if for no other reason than as an example of judicial humor, was making the same point I just made. But even there, where I think he was justified in saying that the Court is not supposed to just make up rules like the trimester system or viability out of whole cloth, he tried to make his argument prove too much: he tried to show that the Court simply can't regulate abortion at all.)

This sort of thing casts a very different light on this statement from the Charters of Freedom page:

The word of the Supreme Court is final. Overturning its decisions often requires an amendment to the Constitution or a revision of Federal law.

This seems all right if the Court is only going to "say what the law is" in the narrow sense that Marshall described. But that's not what the Court has evolved into. For example, take the long history of the Court's rulings on the Commerce Clause, the clause in Article I, Section 8 that gives Congress the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." An early case that turned on this clause was Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824. The Court ruled that the State of New York could not prevent Gibbons from operating a steamboat service on the Hudson River, even though the State had, by act of the legislature, granted exclusive rights to navigation on all waters within the State to Livingston and Fulton (who licensed that right to Ogden), because the Constitution gave Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, and Gibbons' service ran between New Jersey and New York. In itself, this seems reasonable enough, but it opened the door to an evolution of jurisprudence that had the Court ruling, in Wickard v. Filburn in 1942, that the growing of food on one's own property for one's own personal consumption came under the heading of "interstate commerce" in terms of Congress' power to regulate it. In fact, it seems at this point that practically anything comes under the heading of "interstate commerce", apparently on the theory that just about anything might somehow, by some process, possibly, by some amount even if it's small, in at least one case even if it's rare, affect interstate commerce. Perhaps this isn't "saying what the law is" by writing completely new law, but it certainly goes beyond what I, at least, would call a reasonable interpretation of the law that was actually written.

As another example with a different twist, consider Missouri v. Jenkins in 1995. The question at issue was a desegregation program that a district court ordered the school district in Kansas City to undertake. The Supreme Court in this case actually overturned the district court's ruling ordering various measures, such as salary increases and remedial education programs. This in itself seems reasonable enough; the district court had for almost two decades been micromanaging the school district's desegregation program, and the Supreme Court simply said that the district court had been exceeding its authority, as indeed it was. So it looks here like a lower court was trying to "say what the law is" in too broad a sense, and the Supreme Court called them on it.

But two things complicate the picture. First, in striking down a desegregation program, the Court was not, apparently, upholding our ideals against popular prejudice. Why wasn't the Court as willing to "say what the law is" in the broad sense here, when it obviously has been in so many other cases? Second, when you dig into some of the nuances of the Court's opinion, you find that the rationale for striking down the district court's ruling may not be quite what you expect. With reference to the district court's imposition of a tax, for example, the Court ruled that, as the Wikipedia page on the decision puts it, "while direct imposition of taxes is indeed beyond judicial authority, it would be permissible for the district court to order the school district to levy the same tax". The Court went on to say (and I have to quote this directly from the opinion because it's so revealing) that:

Authorizing and directing local government institutions to devise and implement remedies not only protects the function of these institutions but, to the extent possible, also places the responsibility for solutions to the problems of segregation upon those themselves who have created the problem.

In other words, the problem wasn't that the district court was micromanaging the school district, but that it wasn't doing so properly.

So the Court can't even be depended on "say what the law is" in the broad sense when it would uphold our ideals. Not only that, but they can't even be depended on not to go against our ideals. (One could say that regulating everything in sight under the Commerce Clause isn't really upholding our ideals, but that's not nearly as clearcut as the example I'm about to give.) Take the Kelo v. New London decision in 2005. Here the Court ruled that taking private property from individuals and handing it over to a private corporation as part of a "redevelopment" project qualified as "public use", so it was a constitutional use of the eminent domain power. It's worth noting that the expected "community benefits" the Court relied on in its argument never materialized: the land that was taken is an empty lot today. But the Court should not have had to prophesize that outcome (although it wouldn't have been hard to prophesize; the track record of such "redevelopment" projects is spotty at best) in order to see the problem with the City of New London's argument. Would any reasonable citizen really think that this was a justified interpretation of the phrase "public use"?

As I confessed at the end of the discussion thread I referred to at the start of this post, I'm actually hard pressed to find any kind of a reliable pattern to the Court's rulings. They look to me like a hodgepodge of ideologies, personal preferences, and yes, sometimes upholding our ideals. The only common thread I can find is that, once Marshall said that the Court could "say what the law is," sure enough, it's done so. The fact that the Court has evolved into doing so in a way that Marshall and the Framers never envisioned is apparently not a significant issue; after all, if something needs fixing, someone has to fix it, and if legislators aren't doing it, doesn't the Court have to step in?

But this viewpoint ignores the fact that the Constitution has separation of powers, and checks and balances, for a reason. They are not just inconveniences to be worked around; they are there so that when we are ready to charge ahead and fix something, but we find that to do so we would have to compromise a founding principle, we don't just ride roughshod over the principle; instead, we're supposed to stop and think. If "fixing" the issue requires bending (or breaking) the Constitution, maybe we ought to step back and examine whether our fix, at this time and place, is really a good idea. Maybe it would be better in the long run to play by the rules, even though it means that particular issue takes longer to resolve. The rules are bigger than any individual issue, and they're not supposed to be ignored. If they really need to be changed, well, the Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times. It can be done, if you do the work of convincing enough people that it's worth doing.

Postscript: It's Not Just the Court

It's worth noting that the pattern I describe here is not limited to the Supreme Court, or even to the US courts in general. (Did anyone really think it was? I hope not.) To take just one relatively minor example, consider the kerfluffle a few years back over getting official voting representation in Congress for the District of Columbia. I should make clear that I am in complete sympathy with that objective; the original theory that justified not giving representation to D.C. is clearly no longer operative. (The idea was that the people living in D.C. would all be involved with government in some way, either as elected representatives or civil servants, and so their lack of direct voting representation would be compensated by having other avenues for getting their views heard. Clearly this does not apply to almost all of D.C.'s current inhabitants.) So given that we have a desirable objective in view, there are, broadly speaking, two ways to get there:

(1) A Constitutional Amendment: the obvious route. D.C. already has non-voting representatives in the House, so the mechanics should be fairly easy. The main question would be whether D.C. should get no, one, or two Senators; I would lean towards one, which would have the advantage of eliminating ties, but any of the three could work. But of course getting an Amendment drafted, passed, and ratified is a lengthy process.

(2) Retrocession: simply return most of the land currently within the boundaries of D.C. to the State of Maryland. (It's worth noting that the original boundary of D.C. included Arlington and Alexandria in Virginia, but they were long ago returned to Virginia, so this has been done before.) We would probably want to keep the main government buildings within D.C. itself, but it should be possible to draw a line (though it might not be a very straight one) that did a pretty good job of separating the core government buildings (and monuments, etc.) from the residential areas, in order to make sure that basically no one except the President actually resides in D.C. (The President already gets to vote in his home state, as does his family, so they aren't even affected by the lack of representation; though if the original justification for the lack of representation applies to anyone more than the President, I don't know who it would be.) This could in principle happen much more quickly than an Amendment, since it would only require an act of Congress, though the mechanics would be more difficult to work out; for example, imagine switching half a million license plates from D.C. to Maryland, rewriting a bunch of real estate deeds, working out property taxes, and so on.

So, of course, when a solution was actually proposed in Congress, it was...neither of the above. Instead, a bill was introduced that would simply make the current D.C. representatives into voting representatives, even though the Constitution specifically uses the word "States" when it says who gets to elect voting representatives, and specifically calls D.C. a "District" formed "by Cession of particular States", i.e., not a State. (Note also that an Amendment was required, the 23rd, to allow residents of D.C. to appoint Electors to vote for President.) Someone actually asked Nancy Pelosi if this was really constitutional and whether it might require an Amendment, and if I remember correctly, her answer was "Are you kidding me?" So the courts are certainly not the only ones taking a rather cavalier view of the role the Constitution is supposed to play.

Posted at 23:55 | Category: opinions | Tags: history, politics | Permalink

Mon, 04 Jul 2011

Independence Day

Two hundred and thirty-five years ago today, these words were approved by the Continental Congress of the United States of America:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

When I first read this as a child, I wondered about that word "unalienable". At the time, it was explained as simply meaning a "natural" right, one that, as this Wikipedia page says, is "not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular culture or government." That seemed straightforward enough, but then why didn't the Declaration just say "natural" or "innate" or something like that?

Then there was another wrinkle; some versions of the Declaration that I saw in school used the word "inalienable" instead of "unalienable". As a matter of fact, this picture shows the inscription of the opening of the Declaration in the Jefferson Memorial, which clearly uses the word "inalienable", not "unalienable", even though the official transcript in the US government archives clearly says "unalienable".

Is there a difference? The same definition was given to me for both words in school, but this webpage quotes several law dictionaries that assign different meanings to the two words. According to these definitions, an "inalienable" right is one that cannot be given up or transferred except with the consent of the holder of the right; an "unalienable" right is one that cannot be given up or transferred period, even if the holder of the right wants to.

This is a significant difference. Either way, of course, there is something more to our rights than just being "natural", as opposed to being granted by law or custom; they can't be taken away from us without our consent. But the original Declaration, by using the word "unalienable", meant, I believe, to say that we can't give up these rights even if we want to. In other words, they are not just rights that we should expect others to respect; they are rights that we owe to ourselves, because they are part of our nature as human beings, and thinking that we can choose to give them up, or trade part of them for something else (such as security), is like thinking that we can choose to have the laws of gravity not apply to us.

Posted at 23:15 | Category: opinions | Tags: history, politics | Permalink

Wed, 29 Jun 2011

Why I Use Python, Not Lisp

The answer can be summed up in one sentence:

Not every data structure is a list.

Don't get me wrong: Lisp is a powerful engine for manipulating data structures. In fact, in one sense Python (like every other programming language) is just "syntactic sugar" for Lisp expressions; as Paul Graham put it, in Lisp "you express programs directly in the parse trees that get built behind the scenes when other languages are parsed." That ability gives you extra control and flexibility, but it comes at a price: since you're explicitly writing parse trees, you have to express all your data structures explicitly in terms of parse trees. Python may be just a layer of syntactic sugar over that, but syntactic sugar has uses.

In fact, ironic as it may seem, my reason for using Python instead of Lisp is really the same as one of the reasons for using Python instead of C: namely, that you don't have to build your data structures "by hand"! This will seem daft to those who believe that Lisp is a more powerful language, but consider the following code snippets in Lisp and Python:

Lisp:

(setf mydict (init-hash-table ("a" 1) ("b" 2)))

Python:

mydict = {"a": 1, "b": 2}

Obviously the Python version is shorter and easier to read (in fact, in the Lisps I'm somewhat familiar with, Common Lisp and GNU Scheme, there isn't even a way to initialize a hash table in one statement, so I'm actually assuming that someone has written an init-hash-table function to enable the above code to work, otherwise the Lisp version would be even longer and more complex). But the Python version also provides a valuable layer of abstraction that the Lisp version does not: it makes a dictionary, a mapping of keys to values, a built-in data structure, rather than one that I have to build "by hand". That may not seem like much for a single mapping with just two entries, but my Python code uses dicts all over the place, simply because it's such an easy and useful data structure. If I had to write init-hash-table and all those parentheses every time, I might not use them quite so much.

I know, I know: you just have to "get used" to reading Lisp and then it will seem easier, and writing all those parentheses and init-hash-table every time won't seem so bad once I've gotten enough practice. But why should I have to reprogram my brain to fit the language? The fact is that the abstraction I want is a dict, not a list that's been gerrymandered into something that can act like a dict. Programming languages are supposed to adjust to fit programmers, not the other way around.

Posted at 22:20 | Category: rants | Tags: computers | Permalink

Sat, 25 Jun 2011

What's Up With That? No. 1

This is the first of what will no doubt be many dispatches from the "what's up with that?" department.

There was much rejoicing by many at the news yesterday that New York has passed a law permitting same sex marriage. This post is not about that issue, though I will say that I support such laws; "equal protection" is supposed to mean what it says, and if the state is going to provide special benefits to people who make life commitments to each other, it has no business saying that some couples can get them and some can't. But that's for another post someday.

While watching coverage of the event on CNN, one item struck me: it will be 30 days before any same-sex couple can actually apply for a marriage license under the new law. Nobody who mentioned this seemed to find it worthy of any further remark, nor have any of the print (or online) articles I have seen. But think about this for a moment: what, exactly, is required in the way of implementation of this law? All it says is that the state no longer needs to check your gender when you apply for a marriage license. Do they have to change the form to eliminate that block or something? What, exactly, is preventing the state government from simply issuing a memo to all state officials Monday morning that says they can now issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples? Why does it take 30 days? It's not like the vote was unexpected; they've been working on this for months, and they certainly had all the press releases ready to go the moment the governor signed the law.

Perhaps I'm making too much of this, but it seems to me that our standards for what a large organization with a lot of resources ought to be able to accomplish have lowered over the years. President Kennedy famously promised a man on the Moon in ten years, and the Apollo program made the deadline with room to spare. Now the US government has decided not to even try to go back. Fortunately NASA is not the only player in this game, but it makes one wonder why no one even seems to care any more that they're not the top player, as they used to be. Mind you, I'm all for free enterprise, and I'm proud to live in the only country in the world where people do manned spaceflight for fun, on their own dime. But there's still something sad about NASA today compared with the NASA that landed six missions on the Moon in the space of three years. Whatever happened to "failure is not an option"?

We also seem to have forgotten what legislative power is supposed to mean. I don't have a time machine to check, of course, but I strongly suspect that if you told an average US citizen in 1790 (or even more an average US legislator in 1790) that, in an age of instant global communication, it would take 30 days for a law that does nothing but change one simple rule to take effect, they would look at you like you'd grown a second head or something. Back then a law took effect when it was passed, and that was that. If you didn't like it, well, sometimes you lose. Or you start a revolution. But that is an extreme measure, only to be used when all other avenues have been exhausted. Certainly that's not the case here; this law is not the Stamp Act. It imposes no burden whatsoever on people who do not want to participate in a same-sex marriage. But there are plenty of people who will want to comply with this law as soon as they possibly can. And yet it's like we have to give people who don't like the law time to adjust, simply because the law makes them feel bad and they need time to get over it before we actually make it a law. I don't know, of course, that that is the primary reason for the 30-day delay; as I noted above, no one has even remarked on this at all, so no rationale for it has been discussed. But I wonder if something like a "get over it" period is not part of the reason, at least subconsciously.

It's true that, in the grand scheme of things, 30 days is insignificant. People have been waiting for years for this, and there are plenty still waiting in other states. I sincerely hope that people who get their New York marriage licenses in 30 days will look back 30 years from now and laugh at this last little quirk of the system before it gave them the same opportunity to marry as heterosexual couples. At the same time, I can't help but wonder what Americans of the past would think of the fact that it will take longer for a simple new law to take effect in New York than it took to change the course of the Revolutionary War in the Battles of Saratoga. How times have changed.

Posted at 14:51 | Category: rants | Tags: politics | Permalink

Thu, 23 Jun 2011

The Great Birth Certificate Controversy (Not)

CNN announced some time back that the White House had released President Obama's birth certificate. Donald Trump claims that he was the one who pushed Obama over the edge, but that's neither here nor there. I mention the story because just yesterday, while browsing around the "Unqualified Reservations" blog, I came across this post from last summer by Mencius Moldbug, in which he proposes two new terms, "sealer" and "opener", to replace the traditional "birther" and "anti-birther". A "sealer", according to Moldbug, is someone who thinks Obama's birth documents should remain sealed. Moldbug writes:

As a sealer, you can reasonably be expected to answer three questions. First: why do you think B.H. Obama is withholding his birth documents and other vital records? Second: why do you feel these records should remain sealed? Third: if B.H. Obama's records should remain sealed now, at what point should they become accessible to historians? The end of his term? The end of his political career? The end of his life, plus 100 years? The end of the Solar System?

It's always fun when someone like Mencius, whose writing I enjoy reading, takes a position that makes me want to argue. In this case, I think the proper response to Mencius' questions at the time (of course now they don't really need a response, but this is my blog and I can pretend I saw his post when it was written) would have been to clarify the proper usage of two particular words in his vocabulary:

(1) To say that Obama's records are "sealed" implies that nobody has seen them except those few who are mentioned in Mencius' post (Obama himself and the governor of Hawaii), or at least very, very few others. Does anyone really believe this? Obama has a U. S. passport, so the State Department has seen his birth certificate, and apparently considered it sufficient evidence of citizenship to issue a passport. Also, do you think the Democratic National Committee would nominate a candidate without making sure their proof of natural-born citizenship was in order?

(2) To say that Obama is "withholding" the documents implies that Obama is somehow shirking an obligation to show his birth documents to any yahoo who posts on the Internet or works as a talking head on TV. No such obligation exists. As Steve Dutch noted back when the controversy was thick:

The people whose opinion counts, the Democratic Party and the voters, accept Obama's citizenship as genuine. He doesn't owe hard-core denialists the time of day.

And Dutch even goes on to anticipate the obvious rejoinder from birthers (as you can see, I decline to adopt Mencius' revised terminology):

B-b-but he's the President. He's answerable to the people. Yes. He's answerable to their representatives in Congress, and ultimately to the voters. But he's not answerable to every crackpot on the far fringes. He's not answerable to 9-11 conspiracy theorists, or people who believe we have frozen aliens at Area 51 (next to the ~~Ron~~ Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks). And he's under no obligation to produce an original birth certificate to placate people angry because they couldn't win the election the right way.

As for why Obama didn't just release his birth certificate anyway a long time ago, even if he wasn't obligated to do so, at least one commenter on Mencius' post gave the obvious answer to that one: because it was a great opportunity for Obama to make his opponents look crazy and waste their energy on silliness instead of actually doing something productive. Then why did he release it now? Probably because, as a shrewd politician, he judged that he'd gotten about as much mileage out of that strategy as he could, and it was time to put the issue to bed.

Posted at 18:43 | Category: opinions | Tags: politics | Permalink

Wed, 22 Jun 2011

Don't Tread On Our Internet

In a recent post, Eric Raymond describes an alternate history in which the Internet and the World Wide Web never happened. In this alternate timeline, the DARPA research that led to the Internet never got out of the "research curiosity" stage, and instead of having one Internet, we have multiple "walled gardens" like Compuserve and AOL. It's not a pretty picture: imagine not being able to email, text message, or Facebook a friend just because you and they have different ISPs. Imagine also that there is no Linux, no open source software, no way for anyone except a dedicated hobbyist to have a computer that doesn't run proprietary programs that you can't see the insides of. Not to mention that censorship would be a lot easier on networks that did not have infrastructure specifically designed to make that as difficult as possible.

Apropos of that last point, soon after finishing Raymond's post, I came across this post describing the French government's plan to, as the author puts it,

...censor and block web sites to such a degree that commentators have described it as "industrial scale". The ministries of Defence, Justice, Interior, Finance, Health and Digital Economy will have sweeping powers which will not have to be sanctioned by any judge. In fact, it is difficult to see what part of public life is not covered by these organs of the state.

The post goes on to note that, in what seems to be the typical modus operandi for such things, "it would seem that the French government was intent on burying such complex measures" in the minutiae of an amendment to an existing law. French President Sarkozy says this is an attempt to create a "civilised Internet". I know the French are experts on what is "civilized", but this is a bit much.

This French scheme is but one of a number of reminders we have had lately that something like Raymond's alternate future could still come to pass if we don't take continuing steps to protect the open Internet we currently have. Raymond himself posted recently about the Apple patent for a phone camera "kill switch", which could potentially allow third parties to control what you could take pictures or video of with your iPhone. And of course there is the Protect IP Act, the latest in a long line of attempts in the US Congress to restrict what you can do online in the name of preventing "piracy"; as I argued in this article on DRM on my old site (and I'm sure I'll be posting more about such things here as well), such attempts will not actually prevent "piracy", but they will certainly impose undue burdens on people's honest use of the Internet.

In the right-hand column of this site you'll see an image with a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's campaign to say no to online censorship. As I noted on my old site when I first posted the image there, Robert Heinlein once wrote that "the human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire", and the fact that the Internet makes it much, much harder for the first type to control the second type is a feature, not a bug. Whether it's the government wanting a way to control online traffic to censor a site like Wikileaks, or the RIAA and MPAA wanting draconian DRM to avoid having to come up with a better business model, there is never any lack of people of the first class. But in an online world, the liberty to decide for ourselves what we will read, and just as important, what we will post, is more important than ever.

And it's not just me saying this. Of course there's the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but since the Internet is global, I'll quote instead from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

I think even the French President would have to admit that the Internet qualifies under "any media and regardless of frontiers". So it looks to me like what the French government is trying to do is against human rights, pure and simple. But don't just take my word for it. Follow the link and make up your own mind. Isn't it nice that we have an open Internet where I can post that link, and you can read it, no matter what any other person or government says? Of course I'm not posting defense secrets or a torrent of the latest movie DVD or child porn. And as Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in his famous Supreme Court opinion, the right to free speech does not include the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater. But we already have a legal system for dealing with cases where someone has a legitimate reason to seek redress for what someone else posts. I didn't see any qualifications in the human rights article above that said it's OK to go beyond that and restrict freedom for everyone just because some people don't exercise their freedom responsibly. However loudly and often governments ask for that kind of power, we should not give it to them.

Posted at 19:29 | Category: opinions | Tags: computers, politics | Permalink

Tue, 21 Jun 2011

The Mismeasure of Stephen Jay Gould?

Quite a number of years ago now, I first read Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. This post is not about the central topic of that book, which is evolution (I'm sure I'll get into posting about that on this blog in time, but for now you'll have to read this article on my old site if you want to see where I'm coming from). Instead, I want to talk about one particular claim Dennett makes in his book: that Stephen Jay Gould did not believe in Darwin's dangerous idea, the central premise of evolutionary theory.

Just to recap briefy, Darwin's dangerous idea is that every feature of any living organism that looks like "design", i.e., like it is adapted to a particular purpose, was produced through evolution by natural selection. Actually, a better phrase to describe the process is the one Richard Dawkins first used in The Selfish Gene: "the differential survival of replicating entities." (Dennett calls it a "dangerous" idea because, as he argues persuasively in the book, it works in any domain, not just the evolution of living organisms. For example, cognitive science is converging on a model of the mind in which the same process is at work on several levels.)

Dennett's claim about Gould, then, is simply that Gould does not believe that Darwin's dangerous idea actually explains why living organisms are adapted to their environments. When I first read this claim, I thought: "That's crazy! Gould doesn't believe in evolution?" I will confess here that I liked, and still like, reading Gould's essays; I like his writing style and his way of weaving in baseball and other cultural references with his scientific discussions. So I was, to put it mildly, surprised to find Dennett, whose writing I also like and whose thinking I respect, making such a claim about Gould. Then I read the actual critique, and followed Dennett's argument, and realized why he said what he said, and thought: "He's right! Gould really doesn't believe in evolution. Holy --!"

More recently, I came across a post by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the "Less Wrong" site entitled Beware of Stephen J. Gould. It was only on reading this article that I fully realized just where Stephen Jay Gould really stood in the minds of much of the academic community, or at least the community of evolutionary biology. The post begins thus:

If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate misrepresentation of science.

As scathing as Dennett's critique of Gould was in his book, he didn't go this far. But on reading through Yudkowsky's post, and reading the further material he links to, I realized that something was certainly afoot. In particular, this letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books, by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (in response to previous letters of Gould's) got my attention, with its catalogue of ways in which Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory", in the words of John Maynard Smith. If these criticisms were accurate, and they certainly seemed to hold water, Stephen Jay Gould was not what I thought he was. But it seemed preposterous, all the same, to think that Stephen Jay Gould, the poster boy for evolution in the eyes of the lay public, was somehow a traitor to the cause.

Not that I thought Gould was always right, or that I always agreed with what he said about evolution. As I noted above, I like reading Gould, and I also am in his debt for introducing me to the world of evolutionary theory. But I did start disagreeing fairly early on with a lot of what I read him saying about it. For example, I never bought his and Lewontin's case for "punctuated equilibrium" as any kind of "alternative" to "standard" Darwinism; as Dennett argues in his book (not that he is the only one to make this argument by any means) "punctuated equilibrium" is just standard Darwinism looked at on the appropriate scale. So even though I liked reading Gould, I felt a vague uneasiness whose root cause I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Dennett's critique in the book goes further than simply discrediting "punctuated equilibrium", though. He attacks and refutes Gould's position on "adaptationism" in general. Part of the attack is to simply be clear about what "adaptationism" is. It is not the claim (which no reputable evolutionary biologist has ever made, as far as I know), that all evolutionary change is the result of natural selection. Now that we can look directly at DNA and other evidence at the molecular level, it is clear that much evolutionary change has no impact on adaptive fitness and is therefore "invisible" to natural selection. In so far as Gould tried to argue that "adaptationism" was committed to the view that all evolutionary change must be explicable as an adaptation, he was simply setting up a straw man.

But Dennett also makes the point that, even if we restrict attention to evolutionary change that is adaptive, we have to be careful not to misunderstand what an "adaptation" is. An adaptation is any feature that provides a selective edge, regardless of how it came about. In particular, an adaptation does not have to be a step in a continuous process of selection for the same function. A feature that has one function in an ancestor can be "exapted" for a very different function in a descendant, and that still counts as an adaptation.

I was surprised to read this part of Dennett's critique, because I was sure I remembered Gould talking in his essays about precisely this point, and being on the same side as Dennett is in the book. For example, in one of his essays (I don't have his books handy to check which one), he says something along the lines of, "Critics of evolution often ask things like, What good is five percent of an eye? We argue that a feature being five percent of an eye is irrelevant because the ancestor who had the feature at that stage did not use it for sight." In other words, exaptation is adaptation, exactly as Dennett says.

But as the examples Dennett tirelessly catalogues in his book make clear, Gould was much more consistently on the other side of the question, arguing for an extremely narrow view of what "counts" as an adaptation, and inventing the term "spandrel" to apply whenever he saw an "adaptationist" being too free with his labeling. Reading this part of the book brought at least one part of my previous vague unease about Gould into focus: Gould was not consistent in his arguments, and often seemed to be more concerned with not agreeing with whoever he was arguing with than getting at the truth.

The bit about "spandrels" also brings up another quality I had often seen in Gould's writing, namely, that while he seemed to feel very strongly that he was "against" something, it wasn't always clear what that something was, or why he was against it, or what positive position he held that drove him to refute whatever he was refuting. You will look in vain in Gould's writing for any precise definition of what a "spandrel" is, and the same goes for other terms that he apparently thought were very important. Indeed, he never really gave a precise definition even of "punctuated equilibrium". And on those occasions when he did spell out reasonably precisely what he was talking about, his argument was obviously bogus, as with his claim that religion and science are "non-overlapping magisteria". (To see why this idea of his is bogus, ask yourself how far you would get with a sincere Christian by telling him that all that business about Jesus being the Son of God is just metaphor and isn't supposed to be actual historical fact, because historical facts are in a different "magisterium" from religion.)

Still, inconsistency and imprecision are not the same as deliberate misrepresentation. Is that more serious charge really justified? Dennett's book, as I noted above, does not make that charge, and does not really discuss the key omission from Gould's writing that justifies it. That's why reading Yudkowsky's article was such an eye-opener for me: because it was only then that I looked back at everything I had read of Gould's, and realized that not once had he made clear to me that evolution, at bottom, is about genes. Gould talked about evolution in terms of individual organisms; he also (in his vague way) talked about "group selection", the (supposed) evolution of groups as separate "units of selection" from individuals. But he never once got across to me the fundamental fact that genes are the primary units of selection.

It is this omission that Yudkowsky discusses in detail in his article. Gould essentially wrote as if the "gene's-eye view" of evolution had never been invented, let alone won over the entire field by its acknowledged superiority in making sense of the data. In hindsight, this should have been a huge red flag to me; after all, you can't read Dawkins, for example, for more than a minute or so without some mention of genes, if not the actual phrase "selfish genes". And I first read Dawkins not long after I started reading Gould; not the entire book The Selfish Gene, but at least the shorter article condensing its material, "Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes", that appeared in the book The Mind's I. So it wasn't as though I didn't know about genes and the role they played in evolution.

Why did it take me so long to catch on to this? One possible reason is hinted at in the closing of Tooby and Cosmides' letter:

Yet in the final analysis, there are genuine grounds for hope in the immense and enduring popularity of Gould. Gould is popular, we think, because readers see in "Gould" the embodiment of humane reason, the best aspirations of the scientific impulse. It is this "Gould" that we will continue to honor, and, who, indeed, would fight to bring the illumination that modern evolutionary science can offer into wider use.

I have already said that I found myself not really buying a lot of what Gould said. Why, then, did I keep on reading him? I think it was because I saw Gould the way Tooby and Cosmides describe readers as seeing him; he was a symbol of science as a force for good in the world, and he managed, among all the vagueness, to include some eloquent statements of that ideal. For example, in The Mismeasure of Man, even though he got a lot wrong when discussing the field of IQ testing (for one thing, he described the field as it was decades before he wrote, and critiqued IQ tests used during World War I as though they were representative of current ones), he still managed, in one sentence, to sum up why people get so concerned about standardized tests, however "scientific" they seem. The sentence was: "You can't judge an individual by a group mean." And however wrong he may have been about the actual scientific status of IQ tests (see for example this review, with Gould's response so that you can see his side of the story, or this article discussing Gould's treatment of "factor analysis", the statistical technique that underlies IQ tests), he was right that, in the eyes of too many non-scientists, IQ tests have been nothing more than a handy excuse to write off whole groups of people.

But if Gould did serve as a symbol of science fighting for good, that only makes it more disappointing that he felt he had to misrepresent his own field to do so. Tooby and Cosmides may have been more kind than they wanted to be in their closing; as Yudkowsky notes at the end of his post, "Many academic writers on Gould could not speak as sharply as Gould deserved." For myself, I keep coming back to the startling claim that I read in Dennett's book, that Gould did not believe in evolution. Gould was also an atheist and a Marxist, so apparently he also did not believe in the faith of his ancestors, Judaism, or the political foundation of his country. Was he just angry because others did not seem to share his particular brand of unbelief? Or was he just another aspiring revolutionary, trying to stir up the masses against the establishment? We'll never know. Perhaps the best lesson we can learn from Gould is that science does not need a "symbol"; it stands on its own, and the best thing we can do to "fight for" it is to understand and use it properly. The "Gould" that the lay public thought it was reading would have agreed with that, whatever the real Stephen Jay Gould might have said.

Posted at 23:47 | Category: opinions | Tags: science | Permalink

Fri, 17 Jun 2011

KDE 4 Sucks

It's a well-known custom for Linux users to rant about some aspect of their OS. Unlike the Mac community, which gushes about how wonderful their OS is, or the Windows community, whose writings about their OS often read like soldiers' letters home from a war zone, we Linux types view ranting as a force for change. Or at least, as an explanation of why we personally no longer use the festering pile of dung we are ranting about.

The particular festering pile under the microscope in this post is KDE 4. A few months ago I gave in to long-standing temptation and got a new computer. Another thing about the Linux world is the meaning of that phrase, "get a new computer". It does not mean, as it does in the Mac world, "go to the store and buy the One True Machine To Rule Them All"; nor does it mean, as it does in the Windows world, "go to the store and exercise your power of choice by picking one brand of pre-packaged Windows machine that has the same bugs and misfeatures as all the other brands of pre-packaged Windows machines". In my case, it meant going to a computer show and buying a motherboard, a CPU (AMD, not Intel), memory, and a power supply; going to Micro Center and buying a hard drive (the show was all sold out, and Micro Center's sale prices on hard drives are pretty low anyway); assembling the computer, hooking up the keyboard, mouse, and monitor from my old computer, turning it on, and installing Linux.

It was at the "installing Linux" phase that the fun started, the issue being, of course, which Linux distribution to install. This is another concept that is foreign to the Mac and Windows worlds, where people simply can't grok that "Linux" is not a marketing label for a corporation, it's just an operating system that can be packaged in different ways for different purposes and preferences. I had run OpenSuSE for years on my old computer, so that got the first try. However, I ran into some issues with video drivers, and when I got tired of digging around the OpenSuSE site looking for a fix, I decided to try Ubuntu instead.

I already expected some friction because when I upgraded my old machine from OpenSuSE 10.something to 11.something a while back, I found that KDE 4 was now the default desktop, and I was astounded at how slow and bloated it was compared to KDE 3 on that machine. I couldn't get KDE 3 up and running fast enough. If I wanted to be forced to upgrade my hardware every few years just to keep up with software bloat, I'd run Windows, thank you very much. (Apple is heading this way too, but not to the same extent, at least not yet.)

But with the new machine, I figured the hardware ought to be fast enough to handle it, so I decided to at least give KDE 4 an honest try. The first thing I realized was that I have no use at all for all the "Plasma Desktop" features that are supposedly so great that you won't be able to resist them. Maybe at some point I'll find out that there is some killer feature in there that makes it worth it, but I'm not holding my breath. At least I can close all the "Plasma" windows on my desktop and just ignore that whole subsystem. (But it was still cruft sitting there taking up hard drive space, and processes taking up memory that I couldn't just kill because I didn't know what else in KDE 4 depends on them.)

The next thing I realized was that I can't stand Dolphin as a file manager. (I already kind of knew that from my previous brief bout with KDE 4 on the old machine, but now I have definite proof.) Konqueror was fine, thank you very much. But of course the geniuses of KDE 4 had removed Konqueror as a file manager from the standard menus, so I had to remove all the Dolphin references and replace them with Konqueror references by hand. Thanks a lot, I don't think.

However, even Konqueror turned out to be less likable than in KDE 3. For one thing, there are irritating little bugs that weren't there in KDE 3, and which relate to functionality that's been there forever, so you wouldn't expect bugs to just appear out of nowhere. One example: delete a directory in Konqueror when you have the directory tree displayed in the left pane and the current directory in the right pane (which is my normal way of operating). The right pane updates correctly to show that the deleted directory is no longer there. The left pane does not; you can hit "refresh" all day and it will continue to show the deleted folder. Even after you have clicked on the deleted folder in the left pane, and had Konqueror tell you that it's not there, it still displays in the left pane. The only way to fix this is to exit and then restart Konqueror. How could this basic piece of interface have gotten broken? Don't they test these things? I ended up running the KDE 3 version of Konqueror under KDE 4 as my file manager, which meant yet another round of adjusting menu items and settings by hand.

Then I discovered that, not only did the genuises at KDE 4 break previously working functionality, they also flat-out removed functionality that had been there in KDE 3. I discovered quite a while ago that Kontact (at least, the KDE 3 version) lets you store your calendar, contact list, to-do list, etc. in "groupware" folders in your IMAP email. This is great; I can share all that stuff among multiple machines (at a minimum, I need my primary desktop and my laptop to both see the same data) without having to worry about setting up separate network infrastucture for each one. I really don't want to have to set up, say, an LDAP server just to share my contacts; IMAP email is everywhere anyway, so why not use it for this simple, obvious added functionality?

Well, guess what KDE 4 removed from Kontact? All of that IMAP groupware functionality is gone. Well, perhaps that's a bit strong. Technically, it's not quite gone, because digging around on Ubuntu's forums turned up some ways to edit config files by hand to (supposedly) enable the sort of thing that was easily set up through the standard settings GUI in KDE 3. Now to me, if they went so far as to remove all those settings from the standard GUI and make you edit config files by hand, they might as well have removed it altogether. I run a GUI desktop like KDE so I won't have to edit all those configs by hand. But even so, I tried all that, and it still didn't work. Apparently, from the forum traffic, I'm not the only one who has observed this. Maybe there's some magic words I haven't put into the configs, and if I can find out what they are, I could get this to work. But I don't have the time or the inclination to go to all that trouble for something that should never have been broken in the first place. Instead, I started running the KDE 3 version of Kontact under KDE 4. (Are you beginning to see a pattern here?)

I'm actually surprised, looking back, that I didn't switch back to a full KDE 3 desktop session at this point. By that time, I did have a fair number of settings established in KDE 4 that I didn't want to have to re-establish in KDE 3, so I hoped that I could get away with running a KDE 4 desktop but using KDE 3 versions of applications almost exclusively. (Oh, yes, the pattern I just referred to kept on with a vengeance. In fairly short order, I had to dump KDE 4 versions for KDE 3 versions of pretty much all the applications I use, because the KDE 4 versions kept throwing weird curve balls at me. I won't bother listing them all here; you'd get bored. It's worth noting, though, that for one application in particular I had to use the KDE 3 version from the start, because there is no KDE 4 version at all: KEdit, the basic "notepad-equivalent" text editor. This one just baffles me: wouldn't that be the easiest application to port to a new version, not to mention one of the simple, basic ones that you would never want to be without?) But I should have known it was a vain hope.

What finally pushed me over the edge was when I found that, even though I was running the KDE 3 version of Kontact, the "groupware" stuff I talked about above ceased to work, simply because I was running it under a KDE 4 desktop. I confirmed this diagnosis, of course, by starting a KDE 3 desktop session (by this time I had one installed, something in my subconscious having convinced me that the switch was inevitable) and seeing that all the neat groupware stuff worked just fine. Let me be clear: the groupware stuff had been working under a KDE 4 session, and then it stopped, when I hadn't changed anything that should have had any effect on that functionality. I had rebooted the machine because of a kernel upgrade, but that shouldn't have affected Kontact, should it? I was peeved enough that I actually spent some more time burrowing through the various config files that deal with this functionality; all of them looked the same as they had when it had been working under KDE 4, and Googling and searching forums turned up nothing helpful. Once again, if I wanted stuff that had been working to suddenly break for no apparent reason, and to be unable to diagnose the problem and fix it even by digging into config files by hand, I'd run Windows, thank you very much.

So here I am, writing and publishing this post in a nicely working KDE 3 desktop session, running nicely working KDE 3 applications. Are they perfect? No, of course not. But they work well enough to meet my needs, and after this experience with KDE 4, I don't think I'll see any reason to change again any time soon.

Oh, to answer an obvious question that someone is sure to ask: no, I'm not interested in switching to Gnome. I do have a Gnome desktop session installed on my machine, but I only use it when I'm curious about how some particular GUI I'm working on will appear in a Gnome desktop. I have nothing in particular against Gnome; it just doesn't fit the way I work. And once more, if I wanted to be forced to switch around the way I work every time somebody came out with a shiny new desktop that I just have to try, I'd run...well, this one could be Mac just as well as Windows, but you get the idea.

(One other note: towards the end of the Odyssey recounted above, I set up a Linux computer for a friend, and started him out with KDE 4, after a brief period with Gnome, only because it's the default desktop on Ubuntu and I didn't have a Kubuntu DVD handy, made it clear that it didn't fit the way he was working with the computer either. He went through the Odyssey much faster than I did; within a couple of weeks I had installed and switched him to a KDE 3 desktop. That was another factor that helped to finally push me over the edge for my own machine; when your friend, a Linux newbie, has a machine running smoother than yours does, something's gotta give.)

Postscript: 64-bit Linux Sucks Too

One thing I forgot to mention above is that, since I had a brand spanking new multi-core 64-bit processor, I figured that I should install a 64-bit version of Linux to take full advantage of it. In fact, I did this twice, with both OpenSuSE and Ubuntu. What a mistake. Even though 64-bit has been around for a number of years now, there were still a lot of packages without 64-bit versions, which takes away a lot of the benefit of running 64-bit in the first place. But what finally pushed me over the edge and made me wipe the hard drive and start again with 32-bit versions was that the graphics in the 64-bit versions of both OpenSuSE and Ubuntu simply sucked. The desktop themes were limited (and didn't include the ones I preferred), the configuration options were limited (and didn't include a number of options that I had spent considerable time tuning on my old machine), and worst of all since I do a lot of writing and programming, the font rendering was atrocious, even when I had tried all possible combinations of settings for smoothing and anti-aliasing and so forth.

I should make clear that none of what I'm ranting about caused me any really serious problems, in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I spent extra time getting my new computer set up, but I was expecting to do that anyway. And I still had my old computer up and running (in fact, it still is, though now it mainly just provides a filesystem for storing backups), so I could still get things done while I was messing around with the new one. Mainly it was just a big disappointment; all the work that has gone into KDE 4 and 64-bit Linux, and they're still not ready for prime time.

Posted at 19:38 | Category: rants | Tags: computers | Permalink

Tue, 14 Jun 2011

Tolkien's World

A post at "Stephensplatz" describes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as "A Notable Work of Children's Fiction" (that's the title of the post). As someone who first read LOTR in seventh grade, and who has re-read it many times since, this naturally got my attention. And since reading Tolkien's writing was, in large part, what made me first think of writing myself, it's fitting that a discussion of his work gets the first "real" post on this blog.

Perhaps surprisingly, I could find almost nothing to disagree with in the post linked to above. However, I was a bit confused by the post's opening question:

Why do Tolkien fans get so touchy when people refer to Lord of the Rings as a children's book?

That statement certainly does not make me "touchy", nor did anything in the post. The author gives reasons for characterizing LOTR this way, and from his point of view, the characterization is reasonable. I have not read a great deal of literary criticism of Tolkien's work, or much of what his "fans" write (for the most part I prefer to read what Tolkien himself wrote, not what others write about him), so perhaps I simply have not seen the sort of touchiness that the post's author has. (I have read a fair number of critics who get touchy when their particular pet interpretations of LOTR are criticized by others, but that's not quite the same thing; I'll come back to this point.)

Some of the post's comments are purely subjective: for example, that "the early parts of LOTR are almost unreadable." They aren't for me, but of course every reader's experience is different. And "the Revised Standard (Catholic) Version" is not an unjustified moniker for the work, though Tolkien does take pains to make the Christianity in it subtle and not overt (for which I, personally, thank him, since it allows me to read the book as an agnostic without continually gritting my teeth, as I did when I tried to read, for example, C. S. Lewis). When, for example, you look in the Appendices and see that the dates of the Fellowship setting out from Rivendell and of the destruction of the Ring are, respectively, December 25 and March 25 (and Tolkien says explicitly in a later Appendix that those particular dates were intentionally chosen by him), of course you understand the reference.

Other comments in the post are not subjective, exactly, but they are perhaps not as important to me as they appear to be to the author. For example, consider this comparison of LOTR to Wagner's Ring cycle, and specifically Siegfried seeing a woman (Brunhilde) for the first time:

...entering the world of love and adult sexuality--that's real white-hot terror, that's what separates the men from the boys. It's a ring of fire Tolkien's fiction is too timid to cross.

Siegfried was a courageous hero, yes, but he was also an idiot (Anna Russell, in her hilarious "condensed" Ring cycle, calls him "a regular Li'l Abner type"), and Wagner himself was not a model I would recommend following in his relations with women. It is true that LOTR has no sex in it, and almost no man-woman relationships of any sort (Aragorn and Eowyn being the obvious "exception that proves the rule"), and that did reflect, at least in part, Tolkien's own combination of innocence and Victorian training in these matters. But it also reflects, I think, a judgment that the kind of sexuality portrayed in, say, the Ring cycle is ultimately rather superficial. (I am reminded of a story about John Randolph, who was in the early US House of Representatives, and was well known to be impotent. When another member made an indirect reference to this disability, his reply was "Sir, you pride yourself on an ability in which any ignorant barbarian is your equal and any jackass immeasurably your superior.") Tolkien simply preferred to concentrate on other aspects of human relations that, to him, offered deeper possibilities. This is probably also a matter of taste, at least to some extent.

The most interesting point in the post about the worldview of LOTR, that it "projects a simplistic Sunday-school good vs. evil worldview", is also not unjustified; and it may account for the touchiness the author has observed, because a good deal of Tolkien criticism that I have read is centered around the morality portrayed in LOTR and how, if at all, it relates to the real world. Critics who defend the position that the morality of LOTR does apply to real life do tend to get touchy when that position is questioned. Years ago I came across a book of critical articles called A Tolkien Compass, and I was struck by the fact that the editor, Jared Lobdell, went so far as to use the word "wrongheaded" to describe the view that "the morality of LOTR cannot be applied volens nolens to real life." (To Lobdell's credit, he did have the integrity to include articles on both sides of the question; the word "wrongheaded" was used to describe his opinion of an article in the same book.)

It is probably not a coincidence that critics who take the position that LOTR's morality can be applied to real life tend to do so from a Christian perspective. That was the case in A Tolkien Compass, and it is also the case in a book a friend lent me recently, Following Gandalf, by Matthew Dickerson. Most of the book is devoted to studying in detail the morality portrayed in LOTR: that good and evil are objective things in the world, and "it is a man's part to discern them" and make the right moral choices. Also, the right choices should be made even if they may lead to defeat; the Wise of Middle-Earth all refuse to use the Ring, and instead seek to destroy it, even though that risks total defeat if the Ring-bearer's quest fails. But of course even that would not really be "total" defeat, because ultimately the One is there to judge all choices, good and evil, so this morality is ultimately founded on the belief that what appear to be bad consequences of "right" choices will be made right in the end.

Near the end of his book, Dickerson makes explicit the real-world Christian implications:

But if Tolkien is right--if the Christian story is true, as he (and so many skeptical men) have come to believe is the case--then the victory of salvation is possible.

In other words, human beings can achieve moral victory not just in Middle-Earth, but in the real world, by applying the morality that Tolkien's heroes apply in LOTR. Of course this belief, as it is described here (and by Tolkien himself, whose writings Dickerson quotes aptly throughout the book), depends crucially on the belief that "the Christian story is true," and the author of the post I linked to at the start might simply be flatly denying that belief. But that post also describes differences between Middle-Earth and our world that are independent of where one stands on that question. For example, in LOTR, "there's never any doubt who the good and bad guys are" as there is in the real world. (A more accurate way to state this objection would be that in LOTR, there's never any doubt what the good or bad actions are. Dickerson in his book takes pains to draw this key distinction, so that persons in LOTR can be morally ambiguous, not completely good or bad. But each individual action in LOTR has a clear moral status, whereas in the real world, we don't even have that much certainty.)

Is this simply an impasse, then? Both the Christian critics and the author of the post above seem to think so, but I'm not sure. The post hints at a deeper issue when it describes LOTR as

...a little-England fantasy...where benevolent lords held sway and servants contentedly knew their place--an ideal which Tolkien must have known was a lie.

This gets at another key difference between Middle-Earth and the real world, ethically/morally speaking: in Middle-Earth there is such a thing as an objective "right" to power, an objectively "rightful" King or lord, as Aragorn is. In the real world, there is no such thing. But it would be wrong to draw from that, as the post's author does, the conclusion that Middle-Earth has nothing to teach us about power and politics. The error here is the flip side of the error made by a number of critics (one example is another article in A Tolkien Compass) who claim that the central theme or message of LOTR is that power corrupts. The "message" of LOTR about power is nowhere near that simple; but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Dickerson, to his credit, avoids both errors in his book, and instead correctly observes that LOTR distinguishes between power wielded justly, rightly, and power wielded unjustly, wrongly, and only the latter kind of power is viewed as corrupting. This is, of course, the whole point of the Ring itself, as a symbol of the temptation to take shortcuts when using power, to just make people do what you think is right, instead of using one's power to enable them to freely choose for themselves.

And that concept is applicable to the real world, regardless of where one stands on religion and theology. After all, having no objective test for who "rightfully" has power in the real world does not mean nobody has it; and enforcing responsibility when using power is all the more important when you can't dictate any objective rules for who "rightfully" has it. Every politician who wants to shortcut the Constitution to "fix" some pressing social problem, every do-gooder who wants to shortcut the lengthy (and often unsuccessful) process of actually convincing people that taking care of the environment, say, is a good idea, and just pass draconian legislation instead, every Wall Street trader who sees nothing wrong with playing risky zero-sum games with other people's retirement savings simply because they can, is an urgent testimony to the need for some kind of countervailing force. Perhaps Aragorn and Gandalf are not the absolutely best models to look to for people who find themselves in such positions; but those people certainly could do a lot worse, and mostly do. And that is anything but "kid stuff."

Postscript: The Peter Jackson Films

The same author also has a post about the Peter Jackson films of LOTR. Here I have even less to disagree with than in the post about the books proper, above. In fact, in one way I was even less enthused by the movies than this author was, since he admits "to being moved by The Fellowship of the Ring on my first viewing, but that's because I was watching the book, not the movie." I couldn't even get that far; by about 30 minutes into FOTR, I was already telling myself that I just had to accept that this was not the book I knew, that it was a different work, a different story which happened to draw on the material of the book, but which had to be taken on its own merits. So I didn't even get much of a feeling of nostalgia. (I get that by re-reading the books themselves, which I probably do, on average, once every other year or so.)

I could also add other absurdities that aren't mentioned in the review: for example, the fact that so much screen time is spent on cheap stuff (e.g., in FOTR with Saruman creating the orcs, scenes which never appear in the book at all), while many of the actual suspenseful events in the book are omitted or glossed over. Or the fact that the elves, in particular, just seem way too immature compared to Tolkien's originals. All the characters suffer from this to some extent, as the post's author notes, but it was particularly grating, for example, to see Elrond, who is something like 6500 years old at the time of LOTR, acting like an overwhelmed middle-aged father in a TV movie. (I had to wonder if Peter Jackson even bothered to read The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, since his portrayal of that whole subplot bears little if any resemblance to the book.) Only Galadriel in the film gets across any sense of how much history Tolkien's elves had already lived through by the time of LOTR, and how much was riding on the outcome of the War. When she delivers the great line "All shall love me and despair!" you actually do get a sense that something really world-shaking is at stake.

One change from the book that I did not object to was putting Arwen in Glorfindel's role. I understand why Tolkien wouldn't ever have considered doing that, but even in the context of the book, it seems extreme. And we don't even have to look at the obvious contrast with Eowyn to see this. Galadriel clearly wields power and is not just a female appendage of Celeborn, and by simple analogy one would not expect her granddaughter to be just a female appendage either. So I didn't mind that she wasn't in the movie; if nothing else, it makes Aragorn's love for her more believable.

All that said, however, I should make clear that, once I had made the perceptual shift I referred to above, accepting that the movies I was watching were not of the same story as the one in the books, I actually found that, in places, they do capture something of the feeling of the books. One such place I have already referred to above, at the Mirror of Galadriel. Another is the view we get of the charge of the Rohirrim as they arrive at the Pelennor Fields, the great aerial shot of a wave of riders breaking upon the besieging armies. Watching that scene was every bit as moving as reading it was when I first read the trilogy. And Aragorn's speech to his soldiers before the last battle at the Black Gate seemed to me to have some echoes of Henry V's speech before the Battle of Agincourt.

In the end, though, I think the movies are missing a lot of the richness of the books. Some of that is probably unavoidable; Tolkien's books are very, well, bookish, and much that is in them does not translate well into other media. (Tolkien himself knew this quite well, as is made clear in other writings of his, such as his essay "On Fairy-Stories".) But that still leaves a lot that could have been truer to the books, and wasn't. In particular, the movies do not capture at all the key lesson about power, and the right and wrong ways to use it, that I discussed above with reference to the books. The post goes so far as to say that "Jackson, perhaps unwittingly, has produced a work that plays into the hands of the neoconservative paranoiacs in the White House" (it was written in 2007), which seems to me to be laying it on a bit strong. But Tolkien's books, even if you don't agree with the viewpoint they take, at least encounter the issue. The movies don't.

Posted at 18:36 | Category: opinions | Tags: fantasy | Permalink

Mon, 13 Jun 2011

Welcome!

I've started this blog as an easier way to get my thoughts actually posted to the web, instead of languishing in the "pending" area on my home machine waiting to be put into the form of an actual "article" that could be added to my old site. I will still post full-blown articles from time to time, but I intend for this to be a place where I can just post quick thoughts as they strike me, without having to worry so much about how they're organized. We'll see how it goes.

NOTE: Right now there are no comments here, because that takes more work to set up, and the whole point of this is to minimize work for me. If you have comments, questions, suggestions, etc., please feel free to email me. I can't promise that I'll answer, but I try to be open to interesting discussions.

Posted at 23:07 | Category: general | Tags: info | Permalink