Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Why work for a game any company like this?

This link is making the rounds of a couple of different mailing lists I’m on.

Activision games to bypass consoles – News at GameSpot

When he wasn’t promoting the company’s games or technology, Kotick was celebrating its laserlike focus on the bottom line. He pointed to changes he implemented in the past as being particularly beneficial, such as designing the employee incentive program so it “really rewards profit and nothing else.”

“You have studio heads who five years ago didn’t know the difference between a balance sheet and a bed sheet who are now arguing allocations in our CFO’s office pretty regularly,” Kotick said.

He later added, “We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”

Oh, goody. And…

The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture “skepticism, pessimism, and fear” of the global economic downturn, adding, “We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.”

In a way, I do understand. We are all in business to pay for our housing, our food and our health insurance. If we are lucky, we get to put some away for retirement, and even get to enjoy some of life’s little pleasures (many of which, despite the claim that the best things are free, often seem to require money). We have to look at things like costs in our planning, and we have to be aware of global changes in the market for our products to ensure that we remain employed. That kind of planning isn’t always the funnest thing to do, nor does cheerful optimism keep companies afloat.

But seriously, it needn’t be a death march. Fear can be a strong motivator, but it’s not sustainable, and it’s no great muse when it comes to creativity and innovation. Kotick’s entire strategy is to acquire and market sequels to existing products, and to milk them on every platform in every way possible. I can understand why bean counters like this: it’s essentially a low risk way to maximize profits. And, in fact, he’s been pretty darned successful doing precisely that. And, he’s not alone: a great deal of the film industry works precisely this way.

I’ve recently gained a slightly more charitable view toward sequels. They are successful, and it’s not entirely because people are sheep. It is because they saw something in the original work which they liked, and they want more of it. Their desire to slap down money on sequels is a compliment to the original work, and to their trust in you to continue to deliver that kind of positive experience that they originally remembered. But here is the tricky thing: it doesn’t last. We see this time and time again in the film industry. A great movie becomes a good franchise, then an okay franchise, and ultimately peters out into a dreadful mess. Occasionally, these franchises can be resurrected, but it usually takes a completely new approach by a completely new director/producer who isn’t afraid to bring something new to the table and take risks. Witness Abrams’ revival of the moribund Star Trek franchise if you need a recent example.

Great movies (and great games) are the result of great direction and great technical staff doing the work they love. People who are that good at their job aren’t going to be content with just doing the same thing over again: they are going to be looking for ew challenges and new opportunities. Hence, you generally end up with paler and paler imitations of the original painting, until it’s just something to wrap your fish and chips.

Bleh.

“Everyone is edited by circumstance.”

Pardon me for this diversion from usual topics.

While commuting in with my wife this morning, I was listening to a talk show discussing a reality TV show (specifically, the truly horrendous Real Housewives of New York, a show which obviously stretches the meaning of the words “real” and “housewives”). In it, one of the radio hosts expressed the idea that so-called “reality television” didn’t really give you a fair view of the people on the show, because they could be edited in anyway they like, and made to look like either a sinner or a saint at the whim of the editor.

Here’s the thing that struck me: in the real “real world”, we don’t even need to have an editor do that. If someone sees you just in one meeting a year, they are seeing a very edited version of who you are. If they see you only at work, they see a very edited version of who you are. If people only know you through the Internet, they are seeing a very edited version of who you are. Even if they only see you in public with friends, you might be very different in your own home with your family.

Everyone is edited by circumstance. (That’s my new phrase, and I’m applying for trademark protection.)

What does this mean? It means that perhaps we shouldn’t be quick to judge other people. What we are seeing of them is probably only the slimmest version of what they are really like, and we should exercise a little restraint we either condemn or praise them.

Windows Vista Faces Crisis

It was announced today that Microsoft was facing a software crisis: their short sighted engineers only allocated space for a two digit total for the number of months late that Windows Vista will slip, and it is now feared that when they finally do ship Vista 119 months late, it will cause…

Okay, okay, it’s not quite that bad yet, but it’s just about that bad. Today Microsoft announced that they won’t begin retail shipments of Windows Vista until January 2007. Microsoft began talking about Longhorn, Vista’s predecessor back in 2001, even before Windows XP was out, and they were predicting a shipment for it late in 2003. In August 2004, Microsoft had to admit that they were basically screwed, and had to start over again, dropping many important features that they had touted like their new WinFS. And it keeps slipping, and slipping, and slipping…

According to the WSJ, Steve Sinofsky, senior VP of Office at Microsoft will be taking over for Jim Allchin, who currently is the copresident of the Platfrom Products and Services devision. Nothing like seeing a change in leadership right at a critical juncture in product development.

Microsoft has deep pockets, and will likely weather this storm fairly well. The guys who are going to take it on the chin are guys like Dell and HP who will have a lean Christmas as people delay their PC purchases until after the holidays.

Robert Scoble had this to say:

I’ve learned that dates in the software industry are likely to slip and I’m glad that our management is still paying more attention to product quality and customer and partner feedback than trying to meet some date. Yes, it’s painful. Yes, it’s embarrassing. But we have been through product slips before (before I was a Microsoft employee I was a beta tester on Windows 2000 which slipped years after the first test CDs arrived) and I’d rather have a slipped date than a cruddy product.

It is true: delays in shipping software are rampant in the industry, but that’s really just an excuse. Good companies ship software on time. Good companies get software into the hands of customers who want to pay for it as often as they possibly can. Apple doesn’t talk up their new releases of their software: they just release them. Adobe doesn’t chat up their releases: they just release them. When Vista finally does ship, it will be years late, without many of the innovations that were originally planned.

And the closing sentence of Scoble’s post implies that either we’d get a cruddy product, or we’d get it late. I suspect we are going to get both. As I have mentioned before, Vista seems to be more about placating various current and potential Microsoft partners than delivering compelling, enabling technology to the consumer. My years in software have taught me one thing: if it isn’t stable as it goes along, it isn’t going to be stable when it ships. You simply can’t add quality at the end of the production cycle.
But there are some bright sides:

  • You are probably smiling a bit if you are holding Apple stock.
  • The resulting catastrophe will likely give us this generation’s version of The Mythical Man Month, documenting the failure of large software for the new millenia, and educating a new generation of software people about hhow everything always goes wrong in software.
  • Microsoft will be given the chance to sell even more Xbox 360s this Christmas, losing money on every one.
  • Since you won’t be upgrading your PC, you’ll have more money for a PS3 for Christmas, or a PSP, or a Nintendo Revolution.

[tags]Microsoft,Windows Vista,Software Engineering,Rants and Raves[/tags]

Addendum: Check out Daniel Lyon’s Forbes article. A couple of telling quotes:

Meanwhile, 500 tech buyers sat there in the dark, their eyes glazing over from the sheer mind-numbing pointlessness of most of this stuff. The audience laughed out loud when the Microsoft guy showed off a kludgey system that lets you fetch Outlook e-mail messages using voice commands from a cell phone.

For God’s sake, can you imagine how absolutely soul crushing it must be for the poor software engineer tasked to create such a useless, pointless demonstration?

If you are in charge of PR, should you continue to have a job after Lyons’ writes this summary of their event?

Worse yet was the grumbling afterward in the press room. Why the hell did they drag us here? we wondered. We’d been promised big news and some earth-shattering announcements by Microsoft flacks who insisted this was something we shouldn’t miss. Instead, we got a demo that was about as compelling as a root canal followed by a 15-minute press conference with Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive who seems incapable of speaking at any level softer than a bellow. Ballmer took a few potshots at IBM, claiming the computer giant doesn’t innovate anymore.

Read the rest. It’s quite good.

Payment and Apology

A couple of days ago I pointed out the hypocrisy of Isaac Hayes in accepting payment for episodes of Southpark that ridiculed religion but adopting a different standard when it applied to him. Christian Pundits agreed with me. The problem is, I don’t agree with much that Christian Pundits have to say about anything. For instance, they promote all sorts of discrimination against gay people, including opposing any kind of extension of legal rights to same sex couples, like being able extend powers of attorney, medical decision making, and the ability to draw up will and dispense of your property. Or opposes a movie simply because one of the actors is “a self-professed homosexual”. Just in case someone thought that I might agree with such attitudes, I do not, and find such ideas “worthy of ridicule”, as I do the notion that Christians are some kind of victimized minority in the United States, as implied by Christian Pundit’s charter.

Still, today they got upset with me because I called them hypocrites. Were they right? Did I make a mistake? Go ahead and check it out. The author claims that she referred me to this post, (I don’t know how she could have done that, since she didn’t actually link that article in the article to which I was responding, but…) (ah, in my comments, didn’t catch that) which points out that she indeed did think that it was disrespectful to publish such cartoons, but “as a staunch supporter of free speech I have to say that the newspaper had every right to publish the cartoons”. Well, that’s nice: I’m a supporter of free speech as well, and don’t think that Muslims have any right that protects them from offense anymore than anyone else does. Perhaps I do owe Christian Pundits an apology after all…

But let’s shift back over to the article which spawned this debate. Did Christian Pundits say “we support freedom of speech, and while whe disagree with the depiction of Christianity in this cartoon and find it offensive, we continue to support free speech”? No. Instead, Christian Pundits lauded the fire that the University newspaper came under, and the ultimate resignation of their editor, calling it “much too late”. Does anyone else think that this is a reaction which differs in quality from tacit acceptance of cartoons which depict Islam negatively?

Christian Pundits also complained that the story of this offensive cartoon “got NO attention from American main-stream media”. Perhaps that’s because it was published in a school newspaper in Saskatoon for pity’s sake. Do you really have to go that far out of your way to find something to offend you, something that some pimply faced editor did for a school newspaper that has a circulation of 10,000 in another country? If this is the greatest injustice you can find against Christianity, perhaps you really don’t have much to complain about.

Perhaps I have gotten the wrong impression about Christian Pundits on this issue, but I think it’s understandable, and in all fairness, they probably think its fair too, otherwise they wouldn’t have felt the need to clarify their position again. To make sure that I have been clear, here’s my position:

People will say whatever they want to, and people should be allowed to say what ever they want to. That’s freedom of speech, and it’s important. Nothing anyone says should be cause for violence against them. Sticks and stones may break bones (and call for physical conflict as a result), but names will never hurt you. If someone offends you, take responsibility and don’t talk to them anymore. Talk positively about what you believe.

Christian Pundits concludes their article with this:

I don’t expect an apology from brainwagon, nor am I asking for one. What will be interesting to see is if he admits his ‘mistake’ to his readers.

Well, I don’t feel I’ve made a mistake, nor will I feel I have to “repay” the link with an apology. I do feel there are two distinct levelsof outrage displayed in your postings, an inconsistency in how you reacted to these two situations. I’ll let my readers (I think there is still more than one) decide for themselves whether I have over reacted or not, and they can choose to read me or, as I mentioned above, take their valuable time elsewhere. I’m quite happy holding opinions that are truly in the minority, and nobody has to stay and listen to me out of politeness.

Lastly, I will apologize to all my readers who read this blog (as I suspect most do) simply to find out about geeky computer stuff, baseball and the like. I usually limit my comments on politics and religion: that isn’t what this blog is about, because quite frankly that’s not what I find fun to blog about. My rants are usually a bit more esoteric (and therefore less inflammatory), and I’m not going to make a habit out of this momentary weakness.

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a break, check out this highly inoffensive website.

[tags]Religion,Politics,Hypocrisy[/tags]

From metamerist: Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies

Metamerist was musing abut Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies this morning, a subject that I’m kind of interested in as well.   We’ve all used these systems which try to evaluate our choices in music or books, and then make suggestions based upon what we say.   They are sometimes useful, but most often useless in trying to find new material that’s of interest.

The reason is actually pretty easy to understand.  Let’s take books as our example domain.  Amazon knows that recently I’ve bought books on baseball, on the chinese language, on filmmaking, and on computer graphics.   So what does it do?  It gives me more of the same.   It’s not a bad idea really: there are undoubtedly lots of books in these subjects I don’t have.   But they are unlikely to actually suggest books in other, even related subjects that might be of interest.  Does an interest in filmmaking suggest an interest photography?  If I’m interested in Chinese language, might I not be interested in Chinese food or Chinese history?

It seems most of these systems work to dramatically reduce the number of possibilities that they present to you rather than expand them.  In that sense, they just reinforce your narrow tastes, rather than help you expand and educate them.  That’s too bad.

What’s the answer?  What algorithm will help?  Frankly, I don’t know.   The way that I deal with it is to read a wide variety of sources, keep a wide variety of interests, and actively work to break out of the ruts in your thinking.  Don’t be afraid to explore deeply, but also work to explore broadly.   Make it your responsibility, not just the responsibility of software.  Invest time in making yourself more interesting.

[tags]Rants and Raves[/tags]

Intelligent Design the Future: Make Mine Ham and Pineapple

The perversion of intelligent design can be seen in Cornelius’s Hunter’s title and opening paragraph on ID The Future:

The main problem with our red state-blue state culture today is that good pizza is only available in the blue zones. As Harold Hubis, moderator of last night’s evolution vs. ID debate had warned me, last night we were not merely in a blue zone, but a Navy Blue zone. And it showed–the pizza was great.

Dear lord, is there a more perverse collection of pizza toppings than ham and pineapple?

His treatment of his debate seemed no better than his choice of pizza toppings.

Ten reasons Microsoft thinks I should buy Vista…

Michael Desmond, writing for PCWorld, wrote this article called Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista. Me? I’m completely unconvinced. Let’s walk through what he thinks are the strengths of Windows Vista:

  1. Security. The funny thing is, I expected all the previous versions of Windows to provide security, and for the most part, I’ve been cruelly let down. There is no bigger indication that Microsoft has fumbled the security ball than to look at the entire industry (with players like Symantec, McAffee, Network Associates, and literally dozens of others) that have sprung up solely to shore up the inadequate defenses of Windows against the attack of hackers.
  2. Internet Explorer. Yawn, you mean the browser that doesn’t even implement the box model properly, making it virtually impossible to design portable css layouts for webpages? I’ll stick with Firefox, thank you very much.
  3. Eye candy. Honestly, who cares? Especially since Microsoft thinks its reasonable to force you to upgrade your video hardware to provide this extra ocular saccharine.
  4. Desktop search. Sorry, tried it, but never really use it.
  5. Better updates. I’d like it if they didn’t make me reboot everytime I change a network setting. Updates never really bothered me the way they are.
  6. More media. Too bad they are adding more DRM to keep you from using more media. It kind of balances out.
  7. Parental controls. More features that only serve to keep me from using the computer. Yawn.
  8. Better backups. Might be nice. Worth $180 for the upgrade?
  9. Peer-to-peer collaboration. With other Vista users. Yawn.
  10. Quick setup. Here’s an idea: how about an operating system that doesn’t force you to reinstall often enough for the hour install to matter?

To be fair, Desmond lists five things that should give us pause:

  1. Cost. $100. Again.
  2. No antivirus software, likely to be made available as a paid subscription. If Vista is so secure, why continue to tax us for security updates?
  3. The upgrade carousel. You might be able to run Vista on your old hardware, but you won’t want to.
  4. The learning curve. That doesn’t particularly concern me.
  5. Lots of stuff is just warmed over. Well, yeah.

But the real problem is that Windows just doesn’t deliver very much. With Fedora, I can turn my PC into a document preparation system, a VOIP pbx, a webserver, a database server, a rich program development environment running literally dozens of languages, and dozens of other things. It’s just a better buy for the buck, allowing me to make better use of my available computing hardware.

So, why should I pay for Vista?

[tags]Microsoft, Rants, Raves[/tags]

How you can be popular!

It’s been some time since I mocked Robert Scoble, mostly because I’ve mostly stopped reading him. I guess i just don’t find seesawing between promotion of the A-List bloggers and apologetics for the sins of Microsoft all that compelling. But today I must have had more free time than usual, so I found myself reading his Tips for joining the A list. Surf on over there and read it, and then come back for the question I think you should be asking…

Ready?

Why don’t his tips on how to become an A-List blogger include any hints on making compelling content?

His tips are basically:

  1. Use lots of graphics and screenshots.
  2. Use lots of tags.
  3. Link to other bloggers, even other Z-listers.

It’s not that these are particularly bad ideas: I use these techniques as much as the next guy. I just think they just should not be the meat and potatoes of your strategy in trying to attract readers.

Here’s my idea: let the A-List do whatever the A-List is doing, which is apparently standing around, patting one another on the back. Write about what you want, and let the popularity contest do what it will.

[tags]Blog, A List,Scoble,Rants and Raves[/tags]

Addendum:  Jeremy Wright gets it.  Quoting:

Blogging is just like high school. And, just like high school, who is cool right now doesn’t really matter. What matters is who is still cool in 10 years, and you are much more likely to get there if you don’t listen to Scoble’s advice than if you do.

Amen, Z-list brother.

Score: Virus 2, Mark’s Windows PCs: 2

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call from my son who informed me that the virus scanner on his Windows box was disabled, and that it would no longer run. When I got home to check it out, I found that my laptop, which used the identical virus scanner (Computer Associates EZ Antivirus) had been similarly afflicted. I ended up uninstalling EZ Antivirus (why would you use antivirus software that got disabled by a virus) and installed Norton’s on my laptop and F-Secure on my son’s machine, scanned them, and all seems better.

My wife system which runs McAffee seemed to be unaffected. I have another machine which wasn’t powered on and was running Nortons, which similarly seems to be unaffected.

Thanks Microsoft. Thanks Computer Associates. Nice system you’ve got there.

Google Virus News

[tags]Microsoft,Computer Associates,Virus,Nyxem,Blackworm[/tags]

Blogzilla: DRM-a-go-go

What’s wrong with Microsoft’s DRM strategy:

“We don’t want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number. We charge a license fee to keep the number of people we have to deal with down to a level we can handle.”

Really, why would this hobbyist give even another $.10 to this company?

[tags]Microsoft,Digital Rights Management[/tags]

No comment from Dembski on E. O. Wilson…

I know, I know, I’m on an Intelligent Design kick.  I’ll move on sometime soon, but I couldn’t help noticing that luminary of the Intelligent Design community, William Dembski apparently could find no point to criticize in E. O. Wilson’s editorial for USA today.  His only addition is the title of his own article, which seems to imply that Wilson claimed that “strict Darwinism” (whatever that means) is a fact, and a law of nature, when of course, Wilson didn’t do anything of the sort.

Uncommon Descent » E. O. Wilson: Strict Darwinism is “an undeniable fact” and “ranks as a virtual law of nature”

Addendum: Dembski and Behe are widely listed as the intellectual leaders of Intelligent Design, and these are the kinds of arguments they forward.

[tags]Dembski,Intelligent Design,Evolution[/tags]

Typical Objections to Intelligent Design by Bob Murphy

As part of my usual scuffling around, reading about intelligent design, I ran across this article:

Typical Objections to Intelligent Design by Bob Murphy

which appears to be a sincere attempt by someone who doesn’t follow the issue of intelligent design very closely to make some sense out of the recent hullabaloo regarding it. He begins by stating:

However, I do think I’m pretty good at analyzing arguments, and – as I’ve said before on this site – the more I look into this stuff, folks, the more I think that the ID people are on to something, while the proponents of Darwinian evolution are missing the point. In the present article, I want to quickly discuss several typical objections to ID.

The first primary objection is that scientists have accused Behe of being ignorant and/or deceitful. Murphy cites Behe’s own statement of his curriculum vitae in order to show that he shouldn’t be labelled as ignorant. On the face of it, I think that Murphy is right: Behe should not be assumed to be ignorant solely because of his stand on Intelligent Design. We should look at what his qualifications are in the field in which he is engaged and his publications and statements to decide whether he is qualified or not. Certainly, he has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in biochemistry. He certainly has published, he was tenured, he gets research money. All good signs that he’s qualified.

But if you look closer to the statements that Behe is responding to, people are making very specific accusations: that Behe made a claim that he knew of no papers which tried to illustrate evolutionary pathways for irreducibly complex systems, and in this, Behe showed that he really didn’t do his homework (despite his protestations to the contrary). For example, Behe made the claim that there were only two papers that “even attempt to suggest a model for the evolution of the cillium”. But David Ussery did a quick search on PubMed (a standard database of relevent publications) and located 107 at the time he did the search (188 showed up just now when I did it). From:

http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/Behe.html

A quick PubMed search (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/, (all the PubMed searches were done in July, 1998 – here I just typed in “cilia” and “evolution”), revealed 107 articles, many of which discuss exactly the types of mechanisms Behe claims are missing from the literature. The interested reader with web access is certainly encouraged to try this little experiment for themselves – how many articles can you find about the evolution of flagella? According to Darwin’s Black Box, “Even though we are told that all biology must be seen through the lens of evolution, no scientist has ever published a model to account for the gradual evolution of this extraordinary molecular machine.” (page 72, emphasis his) I found 125 articles, several of which DO discuss and give models for gradual evolution of flagella, with titles such as “The flagella apparatus of spermatozoa in fish. Ultrastructure and evolution”. So my point in all of this is that Behe hasn’t done his homework.

It’s usually in this kind of context that strong criticism of Behe’s competency and honesty are put into question.   He does respond usually that such papers aren’t significantly detailed, but that amounts to hair splitting, and is different than saying that such papers don’t exist at all, which was his argument in the first place.   When someone tries to shift the aim of an argument, that amounts to deceit.

Murphy goes on to Behe’s admission that ID that under his definition of science, astrology would also be classified as a science, as if that admission where somehow proof that Behe was honest.   I would merely suggest that when one is part of a court proceeding and sworn in as a witness, there are very serious legal consequences to lying to the court.  It was not laudible for Behe to tell the court the truth in this case: it was required by law.

Regarding peer reviewed publications, Murphy again leaps to Behe’s defense.   It’s simply a fact that intelligent design papers aren’t published in scientific journals.   There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that this is in part because ID theorists don’t actually submit articles to scientific journals for review and publication.   Science journals are (by and large) not particularly scared of publishing scientific work which may not pan out, which might be speculative, which could be wrong.  This is because science publication is a conversation amongst the world’s scientists, and the ability to think and speak freely are good.   But it’s also true that such publications have review processes, and they are unlikely to publish things which are of dubious value or are by their very nature unscientific.   In other words, scientific publications do have a bias: it’s a bias against crap.  ID loses on two fronts here: scientists like Behe are for the most part not submitting such papers for publication, and when they are submitted, they are recognized for being incredibly unscientific in their methodology and conclusion.

Murphy goes on to address the issue of Intelligent Design being unscientific.   It is.   As a counterargument, he quotes William Dembski as saying that Intelligent Design might be useful in determining if a disease outbreak was the result of bioterrorism or a naturally occuring mutation.  Of course, Dembski doesn’t actually have any idea how to do that: he’s just riding the bandwagon of anti-terrorism hysteria in some attempt to make his work appear relevent.   I’d also add that forensics, which nominally tries to reconstruct what actions were performed by intelligent agents, gets all its leverage from actual observations of the intelligent designers.   When we see a bullet-ridden corpse lying in an alley, we don’t consider that Wesson, the American God of Bullets suddenly appeared and shot him full of holes, we consider the motives, means and opportunity that known intelligent beings had.  Since ID works so consistently to avoid determining any properties of their ID, they really can’t pretend they are very good at this forensics game.

Murphy then addresses the issue that critics call Intelligent Design an Argument from Ignorance.  Well, it is.   Behe says that since he can’t imagine a probable pathway that leads to the blood clotting cascade or the bacterial flagellum, that the most reasonable conclusion is that some unnamed designer, about which he can tell you nothing, is the most likely alternative.   Does that seem sensible to anyone?

The last argument he addresses is that Intelligent Design is simply Christianity in disguise.  Well, it is.  The testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover was pretty conclusive, and witness the response.   The outrage of Christian group after Christian group. Where are the scientists arguing that it was a bad decision?  Where are the atheists?

In the end, Murphy misses the real point.   The real point is that there is no scientific controversy: ID began and remains a political and social issue.  ID theorists want to adopt the mantle of science without doing the work.  They want the respectability that science has in the modern world, but they aren’t going to earn it.   Scientists and people of good conscience simply aren’t going to stand by and let that happen.

Addendum: One last thing regarding Behe.   His own department at the University of Lehigh has this to say:

http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm

The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.” While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

This comes from the people that sign his checks.

[tags]Behe,Intelligent Design, Bob Murphy,Evolution[/tags]

Intelligent Design Isn’t the Future

As some of you might know, I’m fascinated by psuedoscience. When I was a young child, I had a deep interest in all sorts of strange stuff. I remember reading Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and musing about ancient astronauts. I read books about UFOs. I read books about pyramid power. ESP.

But, by the time I was fourteen, I got over it. I realized that it was entirely rubbish, that the people who promoted such ideas were perhaps sincere, but were not the clever, free thinkers they imagined themselves to be. Furthermore, I realized that some weren’t even sincere: they were trying to exploit the gullibility of ignorance of their fellow man.

Which, of course, brings me to Intelligent Design.

As the recent court case Kitzmiller v. Dover, amply illustrated, Intelligent Design is nothing more that a ruse designed to allow the promotion of certain religious ideas as science. I monitor a number of related blogs and websites just to see what’s going on, and what’s going on is largely drivel like the stuff spewed by Jonathan Witt below:
Intelligent Design the Future: Why Trust a Monkey Mind?

Witt quotes Darwin as saying:

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has always been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

This quotation was produced by Joe Carter and is meant to imply that it is illogical to believe that human brains could be undesigned and yet reliable: that to trust our monkey brains is illogical unless they are designed.

Can anyone spot the problem with this argument?

The problem is that it’s actually not illogical or even impractical for us to trust our monkey brains. Why? Because the evidence is simply that they work (or at least can work) rather well in practice. It’s easy for ID theorists to lose sight of this, because ID actually has no practical implications whatsoever. Whether our minds are the results of natural, unguided physical processes or intelligent design, they do appear to work.

And, of course, there is the other practical reason. Why trust our monkey brains? Because those are the only brains we’ve got, silly.

Addendum: The quote by Darwin above is seldom provided with a proper citation, it appears in one of his letters to William Graham, author of the book The Creed of Science, which Darwin was apparently reading. If you click through the link, you’ll see the complete text. It’s interesting how often creationists cite this particular sentence, but ignore the surrounding text. Here’s a taste:

You would not probably expect any one fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects; and there are some points in your book which I cannot digest. The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this. Not to mention that many expect that the several great laws will some day be found to follow inevitably from some one single law, yet taking the laws as we now know them, and look at the moon, where the law of gravitation-and no doubt of the conservation of energy-of the atomic theory, etc. etc., hold good, and I cannot see that there is then necessarily any purpose. Would there be purpose if the lowest organisms alone, destitute of consciousness existed in the moon? But I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray.

Typical of Darwin’s self-deprecating nature. He continues….

Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.* But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

I find it interesting that Charles Darwin makes the same argument as Witt and Clark, but with the opposite conclusion. Darwin here is not questioning his own science, he is questioning the conviction that Graham has: that the natural laws imply some greater purpose or intelligence. It is that conclusion, unsupported by scientific evidence or metholody that Darwin mistrusts, not his own attempts to reveal the workings of the universe through science.

I don’t think that’s what Witt wanted you to know.

Addendum: I’m curious about another thing. The blog above doesn’t allow comments. What’s up with that?

[tags]Intelligent Design,Darwin,Creationism,Quote Mining[/tags]

On the difficulty of Technical Evangelism

It was time for my daily dose of Robert Scoble, and once again he providing some thought provoking fodder for me to go on about. Last week I mentioned just how boring I thought Gates’ keynote was at CES: full of empty hyperbole, long on announcing partnerships, short on announcing actual products that one could go out and buy. This is in more or less direct contrast with Apple, who chooses not to announce new products months in advance, and rather just announce products that you could order that very day from the online Apple Store.

But today Scoble was mentioning his job title: technical evangelist, and how he was a teeny bit uncomfortable with it because of its religious connotations. He had also just read this post by legendary Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and found that he didn’t much agree with Guy.

In some ways, I’m not surprised. If we look at the upcoming list of products coming from Apple Microsoft, there isn’t much for the average-Joe consumer to be excited about. What’s most visible about Vista is they are apparently working very hard to make Vista as pretty as possible, and to match it Apple’s OS X feature for feature, so that they won’t look bad by comparison. But while Apple is hard at work creating useful applications like iMovie, iDVD and iWeb and selling them to consumers for ridiculously low prices (and indeed, giving them away when you buy a new Apple), Microsoft seems to be playing catchup. I can’t say that I’ve read of a single feature of Microsoft Vista that would compel me to spend my money to upgrade. That simply isn’t true of Apple products: just the new Podcast Studio features of GarageBand would make me cough up $79 for the iLife upgrade.

Kawaski in many ways had a much easier job than Scoble: the Macintosh was designed as a cause. It was radical. It required people to begin to “think different”. It made promises which resonated with people (and even managed to keep a few of them). And, perhaps most notably: they were the underdogs. When you are the underdog, you have to look for your opportunities wherever you may find them, and exploit them for all they are worth.

Scoble works for a vast corporate empire. You can’t even think of it as a single company. When Roz Ho gets up and says that Microsoft is 100% behind supporting the new Intel based Macs, you know that there are several groups at Microsoft who are sweating the very real possibility that the Mac Business group may be hastening the downfall of their own operating system division. (Incidently Microsoft, could you find a spokesperson with any less charisma or panache than Roz Ho? Dear Lord, I actually walked out of our screening room to get coffee to avoid her whiney, weasely, MBA speak.)

Like most big entities, Microsoft has lost sight of one thing: the consumer. When you buy a PC equipped with Windows XP, you can use it to browse, and maybe listen to some CDs, or maybe watch some DVDs. And that’s really pretty much it. When you buy a Macintosh, you get OS X and iLife, and can do a lot more. It’s easy to evangelize that, because it’s a great product.

Consider a product that I own: an HP Media Center PC. It will nicely record my shows and play them back. It’s not quite as nice as a TiVo, but I must admit, it’s pretty close. Recently I got both a Video iPod and a Sony PSP. I’d like to be able to convert my ripped shows to formats that I can store on these devices. But Microsoft stores these files in some kind of bizarre .dvr-ms wrapper file that nobody else seems to know about. Microsoft seems unwilling or unable to add the functionality themselves, and because they chose to use unstandard formats, I have to wait for some third party company to figure this stuff out and make third party add-ons, none of which are as convenient as if the functionality was simply built in from the start. Meanwhile, Apple just as an afterthought tossed the functionality to convert videos from Quicktime to proper Video iPod formats just as a small bullet item on their dot release of iTunes. Microsoft probably is still having hoards of corporate lawyers figuring out which of their media partners they are going to offend.
Scoble says that he’d rather let his customers figure out if Microsoft products are right for them. I think the question he should be asking himself is: why are so many people interested in products which aren’t made by Microsoft? Can we draw any lessons from what we see happening in the market? Why should a consumer prefer Vista to OS X or Linux?

In addition, from the developer’s standpoint, things aren’t that much better. I tell you what, surf on over to the Microsoft Developer Network and try to see what Microsoft thinks are the top ten things you need to do to make a good Vista application. You’ll find impossibly vague suggestions like “Run securely” (wow, why didn’t I think of that) or “Establish a customer feedback loop” (wow, innovative). To support these ideas, they list literally dozens of libraries and new controls, new APIs, zillions of tech notes. No modern windowing system seems simple, but sometimes I think that Microsoft must have a logging and paper company as one of their subsidiaries. Despite Scoble’s intent, Microsoft is not at all nice to their developers: otherwise their wouldn’t be this constant barrage of new complexity with every release. They simply wouldn’t have to: they’d have some consistent vision and direction on how to help their developers, rather than just being blown by whatever group delivers another 100K lines of code. When we read on memeorandum or the like about productive programming environments, the hot topics are Ruby on Rails and Python, not .NET.

Scoble has a tough job: evangelizing technology which really isn’t all that exciting to consumers who really don’t care, and a software environment that’s just plain hostile to developers. It’s not the religious connotations of evangelism that should worry him, it’s that Microsoft doesn’t have a cause he can get behind.

[tags]Scoble,Kawasaki,Apple,Microsoft,Linux,Rants[/tags]