The death of blogging

From technolope:

Why does it seem like the comments on some blog posts are just quotes from, and links to, other blogs posts that reference the first one? While the comments section has always been something of a collective cry for attention, it is occasionally funny and interesting. But when it's all just other bloggers looking for any traffic they can grab, it becomes pathetic.

What do you think?

Kickin it old school

Early this week I found myself writing a CGI script. An old-style CGI script.

Ok, I'm not talking like Matt's Script Archive full of security-holes &format(*INFO); old-style; I at least use-d CGI.pm. But it was still chock-full of print "<tr><td>"; and the like. Did we really build the early web on this crap? (although I bet a lot of java servlets are still written this way...)

Nowadays I mostly use HTML::Mason for anything interesting, it's just so much more natural to type the needed HTML code as ... well, HTML. And, to complete the circle, yesterday when I needed to extend the functionality of my hack, I rewrote it in Mason. I feel better now.

The end of trivia?

I'm getting to really hate wikipedia and google.

It used to be that a person with a good memory for random facts could occasionally impress people by whipping out something like "The hundred years war actually lasted 116 years," or "Light takes 8.3 minutes to get from the sun to the earth," or reciting entire passages from "The Princess Bride." I used to fill my brain up with facts like these from the kind of books that you can open to any page and start reading (bathroom readers, Guinness Book of World Records, etc.) or by watching the movie over and over again.

But now, anyone can find this kind of info faster and more accurately (or at least with citations) with a quick google search, which usually lands you on wikipedia. And with the prevalence of iPhones and the like that can access google from anywhere, we're not even safe in bars anymore.

Tell me, is there a place for an old-fashioned trivia buff anymore?

I guess I'm not the only one

Intelligent Design, Evolved Stupidity

Why do 'intelligent design' proponents attack the evolution of life? It seems much easier to attack things that just "are" perfectly so. Like, e^πi+1=0 ... There seems to be a suspicious amount of design in this system of mathematics to make such a random equation turn out so neatly. Or cosmology - why are the various physical constants "just so"?

There are two core principles of ID, "irreducible complexity" which is also known as demonstrable ignorance, and I forget the other, but I think it is also demonstrable ignorance. The real answer is that Genesis doesn't mention the cosmological constant, but it really undermines any shallow credibility the ID folks might have. Wheras not asking "how did this complex system arise" but instead "where did the framework to create this complex system come from" strikes me as alot more profound.

For example, look at genetic algorithms. The final solution can be ridiculously complex, in such a way that no one understands how they work, only that they do (for example, the GA-created cube-root function curcuit. From a certain level of ignorance that could probably be proved to be irreducibly complex.) The final product was not created by any intelligence. BUT, the *framework* to evolve the complex design WAS created by intelligence.

But no, it's always "What good is half an eye?" or "Look at the motorboat flagellum, that couldn't possibly have evolved by random chance!"

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Ok, I appear to be showing my own ignorance here - the wikipedia article on intelligent design (all hail wikipedia) does make reference to this concept, calling it the "fine-tuned universe". However, I had to go looking for that. All the press reports on ID only ever mention the biology angle.

There is of course a simple explanation for this: Genesis doesn't mention the cosmological constant, relativity, complex math, or even gravity. It only explains in irrefutable form that God created all life as we know it. "But ID isn't about religion, it's real science!" they say. And it is mere coincidence that every single ID proponent is a fundamentalist
Christian, and that they all had their religious awakening before accepting ID and not the other way around.

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The use of 'ID' to abbreviate 'Intelligent Design' is not in any way Freudian. Honest.

-EO

Swatting flies

Old cliches don't die, they just get older. An old cliche mentions the futility of "swatting flies with an elephant gun". There are worse ways to swat flies.

A commentator on a radio show I was listening to this morning about the war in Iraq and military recruiters defended the rights of anti-recruitment and anti-war groups to spread their message, but also called them out for not suggesting alternative other than "sticking their heads in the sand." The implication is that doing something is always better than doing nothing, and the the current war is at least doing something about terrorism (the dubious connection between the war in Iraq and terror groups notwithstanding).

I disagree. We should be opposing it, because the way we are going about it is worse than doing nothing, in that while it may make things a little better in the short term, is it almost certainly making things worse overall, and in time we will see and feel these effects. And more broadly, there is no military solution to terrorism - it is like swatting flies with .. well, you know the rest.

To draw a more complete analogy, consider acts of terrorism to be malaria, and those who commit such acts to be mosquitos. Mosquitos breed in pools of standing water. So we have some military folk come in and determine that we must eliminate the places for mosquitos to breed: we must destroy these pools of standing water. So naturally, we call in artillery strikes. They blast the pools with pinpoint accuracy, kill millions of mosquitos, and declare the problem solved. Excapt that the very tactic used to clear up the problem makes it worse. The artillery shells destroy alot that they weren't intended to. And they dig more holes in the ground, create more places for the water to pool, and next season the mosquitos will be worse than ever.

Of course, terrorists aren't mosquitos and they don't breed in pools of water. Instead, they breed in pools of despair. However, the military tactics we use against them have a very similar effect - short-term gains with much collateral damage, and I don't even want to think about what next season will be like.