Lose Your Illusion

Over at The Distant Ocean, John Caruso discusses the belief that America is inherently good. And, sadly, when he lost that belief. It is interesting to me that he lost his about the same time that I lost mine, but for different reasons. Go read his, I'll wait. Caruso is an interesting read; I often find that he introduces no new facts into a discussion (by which I mean, nothing I didn't already know), but puts a quite different interpretation on them that makes much more sense than my original theories. I worry that I am turning into a Nader-voting lefty like him.


To understand my change of mind, you need to go back another decade to the Iranian revolution. I was just a kid then, and all I knew was snatches of foreign affairs news in the local paper and radio news. The old Shah (a repressive and unpopular dictator) got booted out by a popular uprising headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Some of the locals promptly occupied the US embassy; why they would do that is something I didn't understand until many years later. Very quickly the new Iranian government became a bunch of America-hating howling fanatics, which of course made them bad people.


Not too long after that, Iraq and Iran went to war, for reasons I wasn't clear on. Iraq was presented to me as a modern, western-oriented state; and so of course they got a lot of aid in their fight with Iran. This went on for a long time, and there were a lot of casualties on both sides.

And then Iraq invaded Kuwait. Suddenly, Iraq was run by an oppressive dictatorship, and needed to be booted out. And I realized that I had no idea how worthy any of the various US-supported regimes around the world were. I guess that was an opinion I had been coming to for a while - South Korea had terrible governments for many years, but they were up against North Korea. Iraq crystallized it. In the second gulf war the joke went that the US knew Iraq had chemical weapons - they still had copies of the receipts.

Not long ago I read Christopher Hitchens book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. I have no idea how accurate it is; but what struck me about it was that even if it was all true, it wasn't really a trial of Henry Kissinger. There were some things he had allegedly done that could reasonably earn him a treason conviction (like his interference in the Vietnam peace talks, and the kickbacks from the Greek Junta), but mostly he was simply accused of being up to his neck in US foreign policy. That is, anyone who was involved in US foreign policy in those years could (per Hitchens' arguments) be charged with war crimes.

As I have grown up I have continually run into claims (or clear facts) that the US has supported violent and unsavory governments around the world. In my youth I figured that they were up against a serious opponent in the USSR and sometimes Bad Things Had To Be Done. But the USSR has gone; the modern equivalent is al Quaeda, and if ever there was an opponent to be fought by being the Good Guys, they are it.

I still think the US is a lot better than it could be. It is a country to be improved, not fought. But I no longer assume, when I hear of conflict between it and someone else, that the US is in the right until shown otherwise. At least until Nehemiah Scudder is elected in 2012.

Information security

If you're anything like me, you get a lot of personally addressed ads from the various companies you do business with (and those you don't). They include them in bills and updates; they send out offers regularly; they try to get you to join up. American Express is a particular offender here.

When I throw them out (as I do with the vast majority of them), I like to strip off the personal identification. I don't think it's a good idea to have pieces of paper with my name, address, and account number blowing around garbage dumps or recycling facilities. Some of them can be used directly as ID, and applications can be filled in and accepted on your behalf, even with obvious modifications to contact details. Many provide enough information for identity theft, like birthdays.

Once upon a time, picking out the personal info was easy. Printing individualized messages was expensive and tricky; so there would be a one page form with extra info filled in here and there, and it would be in a different font, a different ink, a different size, and possibly even offset to the rest of the printing. Tear up that page, and you're done.

As the years go by, it gets cheaper and cheaper to do quality printing. So at the very least, they'll get paper with colored logos on it and print the entire form out on that - same font, ink, size, and alignment. Worse, when they send irrelevant fillers, they'll print them the same way. And when they send you a form to accept their wondrous offer, they'll pre-fill it with your info, and stick bar codes all over it for quicker processing.

Instead of one page with an easily spotted name, address and account number (and the other four pages safely anonymous), I'll get five with my account details at the top of every page (including the one giving me account security tips), and various other bits of info scattered everywhere. My paper bin looks like it's been visited by a World War II censor. No doubt in a few years I'll discover that they've been using infra-red ink all this time, and my strategic tearing up has been in vain. I am tempted to get an industrial shredder just to be sure.

One of the firms I deal with has the right idea. The first page of my bill is double sided, with everything itemized on that one page. - they've taken some trouble to squash everything in there. There's a space for me to fill in with all the details when I pay it. That page gets filed. The rest is completely anonymous, and can be safely junked. They are making my life easier, and I feel kindlier towards them as a result - you can't buy advertising like that. (I am not naming them, because telling the entire internet details about your life would be rather ironic in this post).

Of course, many other companies are moving to internet-only bills. This solves the throwing-out problem (except for old hard drives, which would require care anyway), but means I have to remember to download the record every month. They may keep excellent historical data, but why take the chance?

Look for another rant in a few years/months/days/hours/minutes, on the topic of backups and how not to do them.

Jobs!

One of the regular complaints I hear about any kind of action on climate change is that it will cost jobs. Conversely, the merits of projects are often expounded in terms of how many jobs it will create. Such comments rather miss the point of what a "job" is.

There are two things that a job represents. One is some amount of work that must be done by somebody to maintain some desired standard of living (usually our current standard, or some improvement on it). The other is some defined task that a person can do in order to get their cut of society's goods and services.

Technological improvements have over many centuries taken away a great many jobs of the first kind, by making tasks easier, or eliminating them entirely. We live much better than our ancestors did, and we work a great deal less. Compare the percentage of the population currently engaged in agriculture with historical levels, and you will see a massive loss of jobs. This is an excellent thing.

Other technological improvements have created jobs of the first kind. The number of jobs in telecommunications has vastly increased over the past couple of centuries. This is also a good thing, because it has increased our standard of living; we like to be able to talk to people even when they are in other places. Judging by the number of mobile phones I see in public use, we like it a lot.

Basically, a job of the first kind is something people can do to increase society's wealth. If something bad happens, and people can fix it, this creates jobs of the first kind. If someone finds a new way of creating useful stuff, this also creates jobs of the first kind. Disasters create jobs, but only by costing money in the first place (the broken window theory). Inventions create jobs, and are much better for society.

Creating jobs of the first kind almost always creates jobs of the second kind. Creating jobs of the second kind can be done by reducing the amount of work everyone else does (which can be a good thing, and we have done a lot of that over the last couple of centuries), or by doing stuff that isn't really necessary (i.e., no-one would ordinarily pay for it). Governments sometimes do this in recessions, just to spread out the wealth and make sure everyone gets enough to live on. This hopefully kick-starts the economy, because modern economies are complicated beasts that appear to function more smoothly with a bit of external management.

Now I've said all that, I can discuss the claims I opened this post with.

Yes, your nice new project will create jobs of the second kind. This will be a great thing if it's because the work those people do is actually worth it (i.e., it creates jobs of the first kind), but if the best that can be said of something is that it will create jobs, there's probably something better we could do with the money. In the worst case, it will just be the equivalent of an artificial disaster. Unless there's a recession on, that's bad; even if there is, think harder.

Climate change action is very unlikely to cost jobs. It will almost certainly create jobs of the first kind - that is, instead of taking the easy route of burning fossil fuels to get something done, we will have to instead commit elbow grease, or farm biofuels, or build and run solar collectors, or whatever. It will therefore increase the numbers of the second kind of job as well.

Climate change is almost certainly an actual disaster, which we can fix by doing work. That creates jobs of the first kind. If we're extraordinarily lucky, we will develop technologies that take away those jobs almost immediately. Don't hold your breath.

And even climate change skeptics agree that these jobs will appear (because fossil fuels are limited). Only the timing is up for debate. Those who think we are warming the planet are hoping to avoid creating disaster jobs as well (relocating cities and farms, reorganizing food production, adjusting to extinctions, etc, etc). If that's considered to be costing jobs, bring it on.

Live Recordings

A few years ago I was walking home listening to the radio - channel surfing as is my habit - and came in half-way through somebody singing Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road". A great song, but this guy was absolutely murdering it. He was singing like a caricature of a country singer, all whine and yell. I thought to myself "Who does this guy think he is? Get off, and play the real version." At the end, the back announcement said it was... Steve Earle.

I've never been much for live recordings. I do own a few, although some of them have been the ones that taught me to avoid them. I have an album of Huey Lewis singing most of his catalogue; you can pretty easily ignore the occasional whoops and yells from the crowd, and the intros between the songs. And Huey Lewis sings them the same as they are on the radio.

The best of the ones that I do have are almost as good as the real thing, and the worst are nowhere near it. The only exception is Flanders and Swann, who are better live, and that's because half the charm is Flanders' patter between the songs, which he seems to do much better with an audience to laugh at his jokes. In the studio, his delivery is a little wooden, but the songs are just the same.

It's a surprise to me I've never found a singer who did a better job with an audience. With all the extroverts out there, you would think there would be some. Perhaps I just don't appreciate those performers (although I seem to have relatively eclectic tastes, so it would be a surprise to me). It's perhaps more likely that part of the appeal of music to me is its familiarity; when there are two popular versions of a song I like, I almost without exception prefer the one I heard first. That's usually the studio version, which gets all the play on radio.

Since I dislike crowds, and idiots, I probably don't get a lot out of hearing the audience in the background, either - although laughter goes well as a backdrop for comedy.

The stimulus for this post, though, probably contains the real explanation. I have always liked Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is", and "Every Little Kiss", and "The End of the Innocence". So when I saw them all on an album called Greatest Radio Hits on special at the local music shop, I bought it. Despite the warning that "The End of the Innocence" was a "previously unreleased live version".

The other two are studio versions that sound as good as I'd hoped, but "The End of the Innocence" is rubbish. Really bad - it sounds like he was given the words and music as he was going on stage, and told to add this new song to the act, and he had no time to rehearse. The tempo is all over the place, lyrics are rushed to fit into the music, the tune is followed only loosely. And he wrote the music and co-wrote the lyrics!

I think this is the real problem. In the studio, singers do the real version, the one intended in the written music and lyrics - the canonical one. And if they don't get it right, they can try again. On stage, they're singing to an audience that has already heard that one - so they joke around, and try odd effects, and make mistakes, and get the audience to sing. And they only get one go. No doubt if you were there that night you'd appreciate it. For me, it's not what the music is about. I want the real version.

I have no idea why Bruce Hornsby thought that version was good enough to stick on a record, never mind one with a title like "Greatest Radio Hits". I bet no-one ever plays it on a radio station more than once. Surely he can sing it better than that? Why not release that version?

Coincidentally, the album also contains a "previously unreleased live version" of "Jacob's Ladder", which is on that Huey Lewis album. It is further evidence that Huey Lewis can sing in front of an audience, and Bruce Hornsby can't (I don't know if that's true, but it's consistent with the evidence available to me). The rest of the album at least shows that Bruce Hornsby can sing in a studio.

There are probably two sorts of people (as in so many things) - those who like the live versions, and those who don't.

I don't.

Misspent Book

Warning: this review contains spoilers. On the other hand, it will allow you to save several hours of your life by not reading the book. You have been warned.

Misspent Youth, by Peter Hamilton, follows the story of Jeff Baker, who has just become the very first person in the world to undergo rejuvenation therapy intended to make him (roughly) early twenties again. This much is on the dust jacket.

Since he is now young, and extremely famous, and was already well-off, he apparently becomes extremely attractive to women, and spends the book sleeping with anything in a skirt. This annoys everyone else, but apparently not the women he sleeps with, and everyone else forgives him anyway. At the very end, there's a minor plot twist (which I won't reveal) which adds nothing to the story.

And that's it. There's a little bit of speculation mixed in about the short term future of European politics and technology, but none of it is especially relevant to the plot, with the possible exception of a kind of crowd-sourced media born of the enormous amounts of bandwidth and data storage available to everyone.

You could pull this book apart into a mildly interesting (and fairly short) speculative technology/political piece, and a fairly boring R-rated soap opera. The soap opera would be tossed out by any studio as unwatchable.

Apparently it is in the same universe as Pandora's Star; and it's what it immediately made me think of. In Pandora's Star, a minor plot point is that this rejuvenation therapy leaves pretty much everyone hopelessly randy for a while, and there are now social conventions that accommodate that. I wondered if Hamilton had run out of ideas and decided to write a prequel, but it turns out that Misspent Youth came first. I'm pleased to hear it; there's a decent chance the Void series will be worth reading.

The characters in Pandora's Star are also not shy of getting into the sack, to the point that I felt it was getting in the way of the plot a bit, but at least there was a plot to get in the way of. Indeed, for anyone who is tempted to read Misspent Youth, I recommend getting hold of Pandora's Star instead. If you've already read it, get one of the Mindstar series. The Mindstar series was my introduction to Peter Hamilton, and it got him onto my short list of authors to look out for. If I'd read Misspent Youth first, I'd never have read anything else of his again. If you've read everything else he wrote, pick one of them at random and read it again. Or read something else - Richard Morgan writes some really good stuff.

Wikipedia quotes Hamilton as saying "I could see why it didn't appeal to a lot of people. It was an unpleasant story about unpleasant people. With hindsight, it was never going to be as popular as my other works." No, it's a boring story about unpleasant people. The only thing I got out of it was a good rant, which is now done.

Blasphemy Day

Wednesday was Blasphemy Day, and the Center for Enquiry is having a contest.

I will not be entering. Well, actually it's too late now. But still. Why? Nothing to say.

Don't get me wrong. I'm quite prepared to blaspheme. Although I maintain a discipline on this blog of not swearing, I do that as one way of requiring articulation and substantive thought. If you can't say it without swearing (given time and space to reflect on the point you wish to make), you probably have nothing useful to say. In person, I lazily revert to various forms of profanity more than I consider optimal.

Nor do I regard religious opinions as beyond mockery; I can perfectly understand the urge to cross the lines of religious condemnation, if only to demonstrate that no thunderbolt is forthcoming. I ask only that such mockery display some wit - ideally enough to stick in the heads of believers and make them uneasy - and hopefully as little hostility as possible.

More importantly, I hold opinions that a great many people would consider blasphemous and for which I could no doubt have been tortured to death in times past. The Pope is not God's representative on earth; there are no witches; there is no transubstantiation; the Old Testament is a disgraceful book; the Koran was written by an ordinary man; the book of Mormon was deliberately invented by a scoundrel.

But in all these things I want there to be a point. Let us not offend for no good reason; let us cross these lines because we would have done it even without a complaint of blasphemy, or to show how silly the complaint is, or to stick up for people who's only crime is to disagree on something that affects no-one else.

So, lacking some really good jape, or a point that has not been made a thousand times before, I won't be entering. But I do hope to see some well thought out entries, rather than mere invective and mindless cursing. And whether it's enlightening or not, I'm 100% behind their right to hold such a contest. The right to say what you think is incredibly important.

Climate Change

I have a confession to make. I do not know if our climate really is warming because of excessive carbon emissions from our civilization. I don't even know if it's warming at all. I have heard a lot of very suggestive evidence, but I don't really understand enough climate science to make an informed decision. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide is well documented, but are we putting enough into the atmosphere to make a difference? What else is going on? Is solar output variable enough? How consistent a trend do we expect? Etc.

As a general rule, people to whom I have previously attached credibility because of other things they have said, are arguing that climate change is real. And many of the people who argue that it's not, are people who I have other reasons not to trust. But these two statements are neither comprehensive, nor 100% reliable.

If I had to bet, I would have no hesitation betting that it's real. I'm almost at the point of hoping the Greenland icecap collapses sometime soon; that would probably settle the argument (or at least substantially reduce the number of skeptics). But to be perfectly honest, I don't actually care.

I don't care, because the things we need to do to mitigate climate change are mostly things that we will have to do anyway. And when I say "have to", I mean "be required by the the laws of physics to". The simple fix to climate change is to stop using fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are limited, and will run out eventually. We will then stop using them, whether we want to or not.

Climate change is like having the council come around and tell you that you have to stop dumping rubbish on your lawn, because it will attract termites. You might think that the rubbish won't really attract termites, or that termites will come around anyway. But the fact is, your lawn has a finite size, and eventually there will be no more room to dump rubbish. You need a more elegant solution.

In the long run (...we are all dead, but our descendants are not...) we will need to adjust to a planetary energy budget that is basically solar; or else we will need a new energy source like fusion. The time to develop these technologies is when we have the luxury of cheap energy and large agricultural surpluses, so that we can spare a lot of people to research it (directly as engineers and scientists, and indirectly building all the necessary tools and equipment). When we are almost out of oil and food and everyone is fighting for enough to live on, no-one will have time to develop a really high-efficiency solar cell, or a gadget that turns matter into energy. These things are high-tech, and expensive.

Climate change is just another reason to sort out our energy needs sooner, rather than later. Yeah, call me a tree-hugging hippy, but I want to have a comfortable retirement, not get booted out into the waterless wastes because I can't work the plough any more.

It's a conspiracy

There are a lot of people out there who think the Apollo missions never made it to the moon. The story goes that the US government had promised a landing by the end of the decade; realized they couldn't do it; and decided to fake it instead of facing the embarassment. Ask them for evidence, and they will point to all sorts of signs that the footage of astronauts on the moon was faked on a sound stage. This may or may not be true (I've never heard anything to make me think it is), but at least it makes sense.

Then there are "truthers". They think the US government wanted a large-scale, scary terrorist attack so they could justify all sorts of repressive security measures and military action. So they faked an attack on the Twin Towers. So far, so good. Ask them for evidence, though, and many (not all, but many) will point to anomalies in the way the towers collapsed.

Here's a tip: the simplest way to make it look like somebody flew a plane into a skyscraper is... to fly a plane into a skyscraper. If you've got the money and the resources of the US government behind you, getting a plane full of jetfuel and piloting it into a building will be easy. After all, they went to the trouble of making a few hundred passengers vanish, didn't they? Or else they faked their existence, who cares.

Once you've done that, and you've got two large buildings on fire, the rest is easy. There will be plenty of casualties, and the public will be good and scared. Think - would 9/11 have been different if the buildings had burned for hours and ended up hollow shells? If you want to demolish them with explosives, you just announce that they're unsafe, and send in your team of military demolition specialists to publically plant the charges.

If "truthers" had stories about missing planes, and faked victims, or perhaps that the government knew the attack was coming and deliberately ignored it (as for Pearl Harbor, no doubt), that would at least make sense. It'd take a lot to convince me, but it wouldn't be ridiculous on its face.

And that brings me to "birthers". Obama's not eligible for President, they say. He was born in Kenya, and he's not a "natural born citizen". The birth certificates are faked. Again, this makes sense initially. Obama realizes in the 90's that he wants to be president, has an eligibility problem, and cooks up some scheme to fix the records. They're electronic now, apparently, and they could say anything.

But then we go looking at old newspapers, and find that his birth was announced in Honolulu newspapers way back in 1961, as having happened in Honolulu. So the birthers have to say that this was faked, too. But suddenly, it's not an ambitious man running for President who's faking records; it's a teenaged mother, and the only reason she could possibly have for doing it is so that her new-born son (who has a black parent) can one day run for president. This, too, does not pass the laugh test.

And yet a considerable percentage of Americans swallow this rubbish. When your ideas make the moon-landing hoaxers look sane and reasonable, it's time to quit drinking.

Brainwashed!

A local chain of churches in my area (and maybe a lot more widespread, who knows) share the effort of creating the obligatory thought-provoking roadside billboard message. These are usually at least interesting, although they sometimes make me feel like scribbling a response.

The current one asks "Are you too brainwashed to read the bible?" over a picture of somebody with three things being stuffed into his head - a television, a newspaper, and a couple of books. The rear book is a penguin edition of something; but the front one is "The God Delusion". I'm sure Richard Dawkins would be chuffed.

It's amusing to me, because reading the Bible was an absolutely pivotal point in my religious attitudes. Read it, in its entirety, and you will see why many people regard it as a repulsive book. I would cheerfully recommend it to anybody in the hopes that they would be more inclined to agree with me; possibly even more than any of the New Atheist books. After all, no-one can complain that the author of the Bible is biased against religion.

If I were advising the church on PR campaigns, "Read the Bible" is probably the last thing I would go for, unless I could figure out a way to make sure no-one actually did it. Making them all feel guilty about not doing it, but not guilty enough to actually do it, is probably optimal.

Maybe that's what they're trying to do.

Managing Your Reputation

Simon Singh is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association. Go see all the gory details here.

I can't be accused of being anti-chiropractor. I visit one regularly for joint problems. They are literally palpable (you can feel that the joint is misaligned). The chiropractor re-aligns them. The pain goes away. This all makes a great deal of sense.

Using chiropractery to fix an infection is a considerably less obvious idea, and deserves a lot more evidence. I am not aware that there is any good evidence for this, but for the purposes of this post let us say that the jury is still out.

The BCA could have responded to Singh's article in a number of ways. They could have published the results of well-designed clinical trials that showed he was wrong. This would have taken time, but it is the best option. They could also have taken up the Guardian's offer of a response in the same column, which would have been entirely fair. It's what I would expect a BCA-style organization to do.

Instead they chose to sue, in the British legal system that puts the burden off proof on the defendant in such a case. This is not how science works; and it should not be how evaluations of medical treatment work. It is, in my opinion, an attempt to shut Simon Singh up. This lowers my opinion of the BCA considerably. But they were not finished yet.

The BCA chose to argue that Singh had implied that they knew chiropractery didn't work, but promoted it anyway - an opinion that he himself explicitly disclaims. If this were simply about reputation, this is all that needed to be said.

What that says to me is that, even with the burden of proof on Singh, the BCA is not confident that it can argue that chiropractery cures infections, colic etc. Imagine how that would look if I substituted "aspirin alleviates headaches" or "antibiotics treat infections" in that sentence. If they are so distrustful of the legal system, why are they inflicting it Singh?

Before hearing about this case, I would have assumed that whatever the truth really was, the BCA was strongly convinced that they could treat these things; and that maybe the studies just weren't being done properly, or the evidence was being ignored, or whatever. Ironically, by their tactics in court, the BCA have made me more inclined to think that they really don't believe it works. I'm sure there are chiropractors that do, but I'm no longer sure the BCA does.

The more I hear of this, the less I can think of a reasonable motivation for the BCA's actions other than shutting up a critic while they rake in the money for treatments they don't believe in.

Of course, all of this is only my opinion. All I know of it is what I read on the net.

Dembski jumps the shark

When William Dembski first came to my attention with his "No Free Lunch" work, I was interested by it. I though it was wrong, but I could see how a creationist would find it at least plausible. And at least it wasn't some quote-mined rubbish that could be debunked just by reading the original; it was right or wrong on its own terms.
Since then, I've slowly become less and less impressed by him - any regular reader of the Panda's Thumb would have no difficulty understanding why. But I still thought he was at least serious, even if he wasn't actually contributing to anything... although even that impression has been ebbing away.
With this piece of work, Dembski has officially crossed the line. He's seriously talking about the very important issue of whether Richard Dawkins' Weasel program had a locking mechanism in it (so that there could never be regression in the sequence of genomes, even if there was no progress). And he talks about a TV program where Dawkins showed it off... 22 years ago.
Now, there's no question that Dawkins Weasel program doesn't address, say, the No Free Lunch argument. It's got its target sequence built right in, up the front. What it does show is that if there is a fitness gradient, then evolution can use it to converge on a solution extremely fast compared to blind search. It forces those who try to do probability calculations based on sequence length to justify their (often implicit) claim that there's no other way to get a given result than by producing it all at once.
It also makes no real attempt to consider exactly how long it takes for convergence to occur - something that depends on generation sizes, mutation rates, sequence lengths, population size, mating types, dominance, selection intensity, etc, etc. What it shows is that convergence time can be linear in the size of the sequence, instead of exponential.
Locking makes a difference to the precise convergence speed, especially for small populations; and if you make your population small enough, and you make your mutation rate high enough, that individuals are almost certain to have multiple mutations, you might get the convergence time up to something like blind search. But the very output that Dembski prints shows that this is not the case.
In fact, for any vaguely sensible mutation rate, there will be a small population size (on the order of the number of characters in the search string) for which locking simply happens naturally because by chance there is always an individual with no mutations.
If Dembski has any skill as a mathematician, he already knows this. He should have known it before writing his blog entry, if he's had time to watch a YouTube video and think about it. It's been over a month since that was written, and that's plenty of time to catch up. If his "chief programmer" has any skill beyond a high-school hacker, he should already have the results of the modelling. For an exercise, I wrote a Weasel program; it took me 90 minutes, including testing it, commenting the code, and getting results. Nor am I the fastest coder in the world.
In fact, any mathematician worth his salt ought to be capable of using some programming language well enough for this.
It's my opinion that Dembski does actually know better, but thinks he can create the illusion of controversy with this; and that tells me a lot about what kind of person he is, and what kind of person he thinks his audience is. If I'm right, he's just another Internet troll, and worth no more attention than any other troll. If I'm wrong, and he's serious, then he's just sad.

Either way, he's one less creationist to take seriously.

For reading out loud

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Authors Guild says that it's a breach of copyright to make the Kindle 2 read books out loud. The EFF goes into the legal argument on why this is rubbish, but I'd like to take a simpler, more man-in-the-street approach.

Copyright is a right to prevent other people from redistributing your work. The idea is that people put a lot of effort into creative works, and they should be paid for distributing copies of them. This is good and right.

But once you've sold me a copy of your book, in whatever form, I'm entitled to do whatever I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute copies. I can scribble on the pages; I can picture the characters in my head; I can drink a shot of whiskey whenever the author uses a rude word; I can light my barbecue with it, if I bought a paper copy; and I can use the zip file as a source of randomness for my mathematical experiments, if I bought an electronic copy.

And I can read it aloud to my family. There are restrictions on public performances, because this is easy to enforce and fair - but what I do in my house is not included because that would be a nightmare to enforce and unfair.

Having my Kindle read it to me instead of reading it myself is just another way of accessing the contents. It might make me less inclined to buy an audio book read by some famous movie star, but that's just bad luck. I can have a friend read it to me instead if I want. A Kindle that can read books aloud to me is a handy technological device that makes me more likely to buy more books and support more authors.

A book's author might like everyone to buy their own copies, instead of sharing them around, but that's bad luck. The purpose of copyright is for society's benefit, and society thinks that preventing people from sharing books is a bad thing, and too hard to do anyway. We've been experimenting with technological ways of doing this, and nobody likes them , and they have bad long term consequences for the preservation of works (and people's enjoyment of them) - another societal benefit that has to be traded off against high incomes for authors and voice performers.

Similarly they might like us to buy the audio version as well as the text, but since I have a device that turns the text into audio I don't need to (assuming I'm happy with the quality). Stopping me will involve stopping innovations that make books more useful to people; and encouraging innovations and creativity is a big reason why we invented copyrights and patents.

Bottom line: the Kindle gives me more ways to read books and enjoy them. It makes me more likely to buy them, particularly since I have very limited space to store actual books, but hard drive space is under $1/Gb and dropping. It will increase sales.
And contrariwise, if I see that any authors have invoked their new power to disable the audio reading function on the Kindle, I will certainly make sure I don't buy anything from that author. That's one thing the Authors Guild has no legal power over.

Give me more

This week a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald complains about those pointing out problems with the "growth mentality":

The end of growth means the end of civilisation

Those arguing for an end to economic growth seem not to understand the dangers of stagnation and decline (Letters, February 25). Unless economies grow, they stagnate. If they stagnate, the rate of profitability falls. If profitability falls, investment falls. If investment falls, there are very few new businesses, new technologies or new products.

No neat little iPods, mobile phones or the internet, or even blood pressure pills. If there are no new products, there are no new jobs. If people are already losing jobs, this will simply continue. Fewer jobs means less wealth for families, and lower standards of living now and in the future. No growth now means no pensions. And so on.

If this happens, it will make the current downturn look like a walk in the park.

Its author seems not to understand the laws of physics. Unending exponential growth is not physically possible, and the likely consequences of trying to continue it are a complete collapse of the entire system. That is the real risk to civilization.

Instead, we have a period of prosperity and leisure to think about how to run a society that does not depend on unending growth; that does not require an unsustainable supply of fossil fuels and easily mined minerals; and that has a stable population. If we figure those things out there are other challenges - the universe can be a hostile place at times - but they are plenty to be going on with.

If we throw up our hands and decide that growth is essential, we will hit the wall very hard and there will be conflicts over the remaining resources that will make World War 2 look like a walk in the park. Imagine how it would go if we suddenly needed to cut our population in half over the course of ten or twenty years?

I would happily give up my iPod in exchange for the other half of my family, but in fact neither option may be needed if we can just pay attention to reality.

Insulting My Intelligence

My credit card provider has offered me an increase in my card limit, something it does regularly because they want to make more money off me and I persist in paying the full balance every month. They describe it thus:

Imagine what you could do if your credit limit was increased. You could take the holiday you've been thinking about, buy those clothes you've had your eye on or treat you and your family to something special.

If it were just the limit on my card that was the problem, I could deposit some extra cash onto it, taking me into surplus; and then buy whatever it was I wanted. Can't be that. So it must be that I don't have that cash, and they would like me to buy stuff anyway. What they do not mention anywhere on this form (even in the fine print) is the exhorbitant interest rate that I would be paying for "that holiday" that I've been thinking about.

In other words, they are hoping I don't really understand how credit cards work; they don't think I'm very smart. Well thanks, Mr Credit Card Provider. In return, I suggest that you understand exactly how credit cards work - but you are amoral and indifferent to anything beyond accumulating more money.

This is of course how corporations work. But it doesn't really match the cuddly image they like to project in the media. I have an amorphous rant in my head about this which I hope to polish sometime soon. And I prefer not to have my intelligence insulted in personally addressed form; it's bad enough seeing ads for Reality TV shows.

In the meantime, I sometimes wonder if it should be compulsory to take a simple maths exam (calculators permitted) before getting credit of any kind.