No, It's Religion

The verdict is in for the Kitzmiller case. The judge had a good hard look at Intelligent Design, and he did not like what he saw.
The Panda's Thumb goes into full celebration mode. And why not?

Guys, if you want it taught in science class, it has to be science. Show people that actually work in these areas that they can get real results with it, and you won't be able to read all of the resulting papers - biotech is an enormous research area.

But right now, people doing the research are using evolutionary ideas and histories, because they work.

I was going to blog about what a crock Intelligent Design is, but the judge beat me to it.

There is no war in Eastasia

It's official: Donald Rumsfeld has ended the insurgency in Iraq.

Last weekend, while other Americans were watching football and eating leftover turkey, the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ended the Iraqi insurgency.
It was easy, really. He said that the insurgents would, henceforth, no longer be called insurgents.
"Over the weekend, I thought to myself, 'You know, that gives them a greater legitimacy than they seem to merit'," Mr Rumsfeld said of his ban on the I-word at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday.

If the Onion had printed that, it would be satire.

Shafting your customers as a business model

Dear Sony,

You have finally taken that one step too far.

I like to listen to music while I work. Practically the first thing I bought when I got a part-time job was a decent CD player, an amplifier, and the first CD for my collection. I did a lot of studying listening to that system.

When I started working, I listened to a lot less music. I didn't feel like lugging my entire music collection to work and back every day, so I was less likely to have the CD I felt like listening to with me. I bought a lot less music.

Then came bigger hard drives, and CD rippers, and Winamp. Suddenly I could have my entire CD collection with me at work. Whatever I wanted to listen to would be there for me. I started buying music again.

Music companies, such as yourselves, started complaining about piracy, and talking about CDs that couldn't be ripped. People laughed as "copy protection" methods came out that were trivial to work around, and talked about how a single analog-digital conversion would get around it anyway.

I kept buying CDs, even though some of them weren't allowed to have the Compact Disc logo on them any more. My CD ripper was having no trouble with any of them, and I figured if one ever did, I'd just take it back.

But now you publish CDs with a root-kit on them, that silently installs itself and creates a backdoor for who-knows-what. That phones home to tell you what I'm doing. That damages the OS if I try to remove it. That includes other people's code in violation of copyright! And when you're busted, you say "who cares?" And don't get me started on your EULA. Your CDs are not safe to take to work any more; not even just to play them on the built-in DVD drive. Yes, yes, turn off auto-run. I hadn't; it's convenient, and the only things that go in there are company purchased software and music CDs. What could go wrong?

What you're telling me is that it's not safe to rip or listen to your CDs; I should go sign up for Kazaa, or whatever the big file-sharing app is these days. Buy the CDs and get the safely ripped version from someone else. Or maybe get lazy and not bother to buy the CDs. Do you people think about the messages you're sending?

Well, signing up for Kazaa would send the wrong message to you. It would say "keep on with your stupid war on fair use, and I might run out of options and be forced to buy your stuff". The right message to send is "Quit treating me like a criminal, and quit trying to take over my computer. You're not worth the trouble.".

So I'm not buying any more of your stuff. Not the CDs - nothing from Sony/BMG. Not the audio equipment, or the TVs; when I get the surround system and the wide-screen digital TV I've been dreaming about, Sony is out of the running. When I buy my next games machine, Playstation is off the list. And there's no way I'd buy a media center from you. Who knows what you people would hide in there?

From now on, I'm buying Compact Disc labelled CDs, or nothing. Other music distributors can take note: if it's got some copy-control rubbish on it - even ineffective rubbish - I'm not buying it. And a big thank-you to Philips for enforcing the format labelling on CDs so I know what I'm buying. You might pick up a big sound-system purchase instead of Sony.

That drop in music sales? It's not pirates, it's a boycott. I'm not the only one. Of course, independent music sales might pick up a bit. I've got an unmet need for good music in a convenient format, and people tell me there's some out there.

Sony, you used to be on our side. You of all companies would know that making it easy to watch and listen when and how you want expands markets. Video recorders created a huge market that has allowed me to watch (and pay for) movies I would have never otherwise seen.
You can still get out of my bad books. Apologize for trying to take over people's PC. Drop all that copy protection rubbish; the CDs will be rendered useless before the copy protection becomes effective, and in the meantime you're just driving people to file-sharers. Go back to real Compact Discs, and I'll start buying your stuff again.

Customers. Remember us? We are the people who buy your stuff and pay your salaries.

Or not.

Mass Insanity

When I was a kid, and the Soviet Union was a going concern, you generally had to read between the lines to spot the crap in their news services. Yes, it's possible that the workers all heroically volunteered to work on their rest days for the greater good of the worker's paradise; anyone might do that if they were suitably convinced that the country was under threat. But it's much more likely that they were told that working hours had been extended starting this week, and they grumbled and did what they were told.

What you didn't generally see was an open announcement that the place was a nut-hatch, such as we had from the North Koreans a few months back. The Guardian has the story: after a huge explosion, a number of people were killed rescuing portraits of Kim Jong Il. The North Korean news agency reported that two workers on lunch break "were buried under the collapsing building to die a heroic death when they were trying to come out with portraits of President Kim Il-sung and leader Kim Jong-il".

Now, these portraits are everywhere in North Korea. So take a minute and try to imagine what would make you risk your life for a widely available portrait of, well, anyone. At a stretch, I can imagine someone racing in to retrieve irreplacable pictures of a dead relative. It would be sad, but people do funny things in the heat of the moment. But a portrait of George Bush? Tony Blair? Hu Jintao? Not likely.

KCNA also had reports of people rescuing the portraits before their own children, which would be diagnostic of clear-cut mental illness anywhere else on the planet.

North Korea, though, has a cult of personality around their leaders. Portraits of them hang everywhere, or else. People have reportedly done prison time for accidentally defacing the portraits. Those portraits really are as valuable as human lives, when you consider the possible consequences of letting one be destroyed or damaged.

In a sane country, such deaths would be considered a sad thing. There might be an enquiry, to make sure it didn't happen again. Perhaps an education program on what is and is not worth saving in a fire. Some soul-searching on what made people so fearful of letting a portrait burn.

North Korea reports them as "heroic deaths".

A really admirable leader would be extremely saddened by that. But then, a really admirable leader would not have presided over the climate of fear that led to this.

North Korea is a nut-hatch. They even tell you they're a nut-hatch. But at the moment, they're an extremely heavily armed nut-hatch.

You're soaking in it!

This planet runs on recycling. Everything that's built gets torn down and reused - whether by rot, or erosion, or even by subduction. That's why the life-forms we see are the ones that are best at making copies of themselves, and why we can find traces of only a tiny fraction of all the creatures that have walked here. As well as being largely made of pieces of exploded stars, we are made of our predecessors. And because everything mixes so much, and the individual pieces are so very small, we carry parts of almost all of our predecessors.

Consider the air we breathe. According to Wiki Encyclopedia, our atmosphere weighs 5x10^18 kg, which means at sea level conditions it would be about 4x10^21 L. One litre contains about 2.7 x10^22 molecules. So there are about seven times as many as many molecules in a litre as there are litres in the atmosphere.

Just under 1% of it is Argon, a noble gas that is produced largely by the decay of the radioactive form of Potassium. Because it's a noble gas, it has a pretty simple cycle; it doesn't get made into trees, or react with minerals, or become part of water molecules and spend a few millenia in the ocean. It just stays there. And because our atmosphere is a dynamic place, it mixes pretty well. Argon makes the maths pretty simple; oxygen and nitrogen and all the rest do the same thing, in larger quantities and at much more variable rates.

If you take a litre of air, then, and mix it into the atmosphere, then everywhere you go on the planet, there's an Argon atom from your original litre - on average every 1.7 cubic metres (roughly speaking, your personal space). Or, for half litre (one standard breath), on average every 3.4 cubic meters (a medium-sized wardrobe).

What does that mean? Pick a famous saying - "I have a dream...", "Ein volk. Ein Reich. Ein fuhrer", "I am the way, the truth, and the life", "Veni. Vedi. Vici", "Watson, come here. I need you". Some of the air that was used to first say that is in the room with you. Some of the air that person breathed is in your lungs right now.

Heroes and villians, the inspirational and the pathetic. You're breathing the exact same air when you blow out the candles on your birthday cake.

Water, water, everywhere

The city I live in is currently in the process of constructing a desalination plant to ensure future water supplies. The government have decided not to build a water recycling plant (which is much more energy efficient) because... the public won't accept drinking recycled sewage (or more to the point, enough marginal voters won't). I have only two problems with this. Firstly, the public are apparently idiots; and secondly, the government are apparently idiots.

Where do people think their water comes from now? There's a limited amount of it on the planet, and it gets recycled over and over again. Everywhere it's liquid (and sometimes when it's not), things live in it, crap in it, reproduce in it and die in it. We collect it by having rain fall on dirt and run off, and we store it in a big open-air reservoir. The water company has standards on what's allowed in it, and they have to treat the water supply to get it to meet those standards. It all comes from the same place eventually; only the treatment paths differ.

The government's job in these circumstances is to realize that recycling is the correct choice. It costs less energy and emits less pollution; so it costs less money. It is just as good as current water supplies; it can be made better if necessary, and still be cheaper than desalination. Instead of throwing up its hands, the government should be educating people on why it's a good idea, and getting on with it. People can learn. Civilizations that don't learn, make way for those that do.