Some Minor Web Pages of Mine
- I have a web page with a few small utility programs I have written, mainly for the benefit of my collaborators.
- I have described my experience purchasing a Sony Vaio VGN-TX770P with Ubuntu preinstalled from EmperorLinux.
Features of the Heriot-Watt Riccarton Campus
Most of the Heriot-Watt Riccarton Campus is quite picturesque. There are many exotic trees, and a wide range of wildlife. One of our staff members, Adrian Hurt, has taken a number of pictures of the wildlife on the campus. I like his pictures of a goose, a number of young cygnets, and a family of swans.
One kind of wildlife is particularly common. The Riccarton campus is overrun by rabbits. In the winter, the Riccarton rabbits seem to have an unusual mode of hibernation. Periodically, the swarms of rabbits seem to suddenly disappear. There is some speculation that at these times the rabbits are beset by armed opponents. Photographic evidence obtained by Adrian shows that the rabbits may be preparing their response.
Adrian has also obtained photographs indicating that our school's new Colin Maclaurin building may be concealing some hidden purpose. It is possible that this has something to do with strange transformations that the Riccarton rabbits have undergone near the Colin Maclaurin building. There are also unholy buses in the vicinity, although it is unclear if this is related.
Recommended Reading and Viewing
Serious Stuff
- The best source in the world of news on free and open source software and Linux is LWN. It is so good that I even pay for a subscription just to be able to read its main weekly report when it comes out instead of waiting a week to read it as a non-subscriber. My subscription to LWN is the only paid subscription I have had for the last 20 years (whether delivered by Internet or by physical post). Really, it's that good. Go read it, and subscribe if you like it.
- One of the most interesting works of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is Letters from the Earth. Permission to publish this work was withheld by his daughter until more than half a century after his death, for good reason, because Mark Twain is certainly observant and logical and we all know what trouble observation and logic can cause.
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In 1929, John Desmond Bernal wrote a brilliant prophetic essay about the long-term future of humanity: our living environment, our physical nature, and our psychological nature. The breadth of this essay can only be hinted at by the following quotes:
We shall have very sane reactionaries at all periods warning us to remain in the natural and primitive state of humanity, which is usually the last stage but one in their cultural history. But the secondary consequences of what men have already done — the reactionaries as much as any — will carry them away then as now.
…
…; the dangers to the whole structure of humanity and its successors will not decrease as their wisdom increases, because, knowing more and wanting more they will dare more, and in daring will risk their own destruction. But this daring, this experimentation, is really the essential quality of life.
- Isaac Asimov's excellent article on The Relativity of Wrong explains how scientific theories improve over previous ones without necessarily ever being “right”.
- Darius Rejali gives a brief overview of the history of modern methods of torture, i.e., those which cause maximum agony and suffering while leaving no visible marks. These methods include forced standing, low-amperage high-voltage electric shock, and waterboarding. Many such torture methods have been developed entirely inside democracies like the USA, the UK, and France and only later exported by agents of those democracies to totalitarian governments.
- A recent Gallup World Poll (conducted by The Gallup Organization) included surveys of 90% of the Muslim population worldwide about beliefs related to ongoing conflict between Muslims and the USA and the UK. The results indicate that religion is actually a minor factor in the conflict and that instead the “root cause” of conflict is concerns about “occupation and U.S. domination” and “perceptions of being under siege” by the USA. (Of course, religion does influence the perceptions of who is “us” and who is “them”.)
- Steven Pinker explains that statistics on violence (war, murder, torture, cruelty, etc.) indicate how from millennium to millennium, century to century, decade to decade, and year to year, things are getting better. If we think things are bad now, this is mostly because (1) worldwide social standards for acceptable behavior are rising faster than behavior is improving, and (2) we are often unaware of enough history to see things in perspective.
- John Taylor Gatto is a retired school teacher who was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. His short essay The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher explains how compulsory government schooling has little to do with education, and how it often damages students more than it helps. When you have more time, I recommend reading his book The Underground History of American Education, a detailed historical analysis of how the “education” system developed. You can read also read a review and discussion of this book.
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Alan Sokal's marvelously fun hoax article Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity published in 1996 in the “journal” Social Text begins with the following wry (and technically completely accurate) commentary about the relationship between science and culture:
There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.
For publishing this paper, the editors of Social Text won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for Literature (and winning the Ig Nobel is usually not an honor). The award presentation honored the editors “for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality did not exist”. The publication of this paper triggered an enormous and wide-ranging debate (with hundreds (probably thousands) of articles) about the deleterious effects of postmodernism (and other movements influenced by postmodernism).
- Douglas Hofstadter has written an excellent article on why we don't need race-neutral ways of referring to people and their roles. (Satire warning!)
- Patrick Forterre gives a possible explanation of how the three domains of life (Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya) could have been formed from RNA-only cell ancestors by three distinct infection events where DNA viruses merged with their targets instead of killing them. (It is not entirely clear whether Bacteria and Archaea should be considered distinct domains, but Forterre's theory could also help explain two domains.) Forterre's proposal can explain the homologies between the RNA machineries of the three domains, the distinct differences in the domains' DNA machineries, the distinct lipid chirality of the Archaea, etc. This supports the hypothesis that the last common ancestor of cellular life forms on Earth was an RNA-only cell, and extends it with the hypothesis that there was a separate viral last common ancestor for the DNA portion of life.
- The report of this 1968 NATO conference appears to be where the phrases “software engineering” and “software crisis” were invented.
- Richard Dawkins analyzes how human minds are vulnerable to being infected by false beliefs.
- This analysis by Maia Szalavitz illustrates how the media abuses statistics in coverage of touchy subjects.
Lighter Stuff
- In 1957, Richard Dimbleby presented a lovely segment of BBC's Panorama show on the cultivation of spaghetti in Switzerland.
- I highly recommend Lucas Kovar's excellent research paper Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass (published in Annals of Impr. Res.), which contains an explanation of one of the best ways to achieve reliable research results.
- The über-geeks at Google Labs reveal the secret non-extinct-dinosaur technology behind Google's high quality search results.
- Sreeram Ramagopalan et al. investigate the mechanisms in inheritance of magical ability.
- Steven Pinker explains why many of the so-called “rules” of English grammar are simply nonsense.
- P. Z. Myers has written a marvelous parable about irrational thinking on the Planet of the Hats.
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Linus Torvalds has a marvelous rant about how horrible C++ is, where he has this to say:
C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
- Alonzo Church's 1958 Harvard lecture on The Ontological Status of Women and Abstract Entities is an amusing criticism of Quine/Goodman finitistic nominalism.
- What may be the earliest science-fiction/fantasy story is A True Story by Lucian, written at least 1800 years ago. Intelligent talking plants, inhabitants of the moon, a space battle for control of Venus, hermaphrodites, gigantic cetaceans. What more could you want? Another early science fiction story is Micromégas by Voltaire, which features intra-solar-system travel (with fairly accurate distances and dimensions). Like most good science fiction, Micromégas is actually clever satire about the stupidity of human beliefs.
- Everyone can benefit from reading the informative tract of The International Square Earth Society which reveals the truth about the shape of the world. (To avoid complaints from the unimaginative, I probably must warn the reader that there is a high level of irony somewhere nearby, perhaps in the previous sentence.)
- We are considering adopting here the marking approach recommended in A Guide to Grading Exams by Daniel J. Solove. Your opinion on whether we should adopt this excellent approach is solicited.
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You might enjoy reading P. Z. Myers's review of a recent book by classic crackpot Stuart Pivar. (But please don't even think of buying the book! For your amusement, search the web for the phrase “classic crackpot” to learn more about Pivar.) The best part of the review:
The doodles in this book bear absolutely no relationship to anything that goes on in real organisms, but after staring at them for a while, I realized what this book is actually about.
This book is a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals.
It's that bad. This is a book suitable only for use at clown colleges, and even there, I suspect the clowns would tell us that it is impractical, nonsensical, and has no utility in their craft.
- Southeast Missouri State University's Department of Philosophy in 1986 posted on the Internet what might be the most honest faculty job advertisement ever.
- Think Cthulhu is scary? That's nothing compared to John Aegard's The Great Old Pumpkin. For comics aficionados only. (As a bonus, also try Jon Hansen's Tales of the Plush Cthulhu, Charlie Stross's tale of the horror of an evil old one named Perl, and Feòrag NicBhrìde's photographic documentation of many famous victims of the plush Cthulhu.)
- And, of course, everyone should carefully consider Randall Munroe's advice about how to cope with velociraptors.
Alter Egos
“Joe Wells” is also:
- the former wrestling coach at Oregon State University,
- the president of the Homer Laughlin China Company, the makers of the famous Fiesta® line of china dishes,
- the president and CEO of WildList Organization International, and
- a leader in research and development for the use of metal matrix composites (MMCs) in Army vehicles and munitions.
Some Thoughts
I did not write this, but it seemed worth sharing:
I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.I accept human mortality.
We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.
Web Page Validation
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