Archives 2007

How to Prevent Lines from Wrapping in Emacs

By default, Emacs’s buffer list truncates lines at the right edge of the screen: if you’re editing a file with a long name, it doesn’t wrap around; you have to use C-x < and C-x > to scroll the viewport left and right.

I’d always wondered how to do that, since it can be useful when editing files like ~/.ssh/known_hosts, where the useful information is at the beginning of the line, and the wrapped keys get in the way.

Now I know:

(setq truncate-lines t)
And This Is Why the First Amendment Is a Good Thing ™

One more thing to be grateful for
if you live in a country with freedom of speech:

CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) — An Alexandria court convicted an Egyptian blogger on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced him to four years in jail over his writings on the Internet.
…

One of Suleiman’s articles said that al-Azhar in Cairo, one of the most prominent seats of Sunni Muslim learning, was promoting extreme ideas. Another article, headlined “The Naked Truth of Islam as I Saw it”, accused Muslims of savagery during clashes between Muslims and Christians in Alexandria in 2005.

He has also described some of the companions of the Muslim prophet Mohammad as “terrorists”, and has likened Mubarak to dictatorial pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt.

“I was hoping that he would get a harsher sentence because he presented to the world a bad image of Egypt. There are things that one should not talk about, like religion and politics. He should have got a 10-year sentence,” said lawyer Nizar Habib, who attended the trial as a member of the public.

Point duh-one: freedom of speech is not there to protect popular speech. It’s for unpopular speech.

Point duh-two: an idea that needs legislative protection from criticism is one that can’t stand on its own. I’m sorry Mr. Habib doesn’t like the fact that Suleiman aired Egypt’s dirty laundry in public (any more than I like it when an American makes the US look bad in the eyes of the world), but frankly, the way to deal with this is to fix the problem, not shoot the messenger.

And if there needs to be a law against criticism of Islam, doesn’t that pretty much mean that there’s no rational reason to believe in Islam? What kind of god needs to be protected, like an endangered species?

Flock of Dodos Meme

I went to see Flock of Dodos for its Darwin Day showing on Thursday.

At one point, Randy Olson, the filmmaker, points out that the Intelligent Design movement has lots of points that fit on a bumper sticker, such as “no transitionals” (or “not enough transitional fossils”), “teach the controversy”, and so forth, while proponents of evolution, especially scientists, can’t seem to express any point in less than a paragraph. And while this may indicate that scientists are careful to make well-thought-out, nuanced statements and avoid oversimplification, it makes for bad PR.

Later on, perhaps unintentionally, Olson does present an anti-ID slogan of his own: ID never rises above the level of intuition. For instance, as IDists like to point out, it’s obvious that Mt. Rushmore wasn’t carved by erosion and tectonic forces. Okay, fair enough. But that’s just the first step. Now they need to quantify this intuitive feeling, and come up with an objective metric of “designedness” or something, so that two people in different parts of the world, with different backgrounds can look at the same phenomenon and independently arrive at the same “designedness” number.

Likewise, creationists of all stripes are fond of saying that certain structures are too complex to have arisen by chance. Setting aside the obvious fact that natural selection is the very opposite of chance, one can still easily imagine a person to whom it’s intuitively obvious that human eyes are too complex to have arisen through the action of natural laws, without an intelligent guiding hand.

But again, that’s just a first step. How do you turn this intuition into something objective and quantifiable? I would expect someone to write a paper showing that natural laws can produce X amount of complexity in such-and-such amount of time, but that human eyes have X+100 complexity. X+100 > X, ergo human eyes are too complex to have arisen naturally.

The first step toward this would be to come up with a definition of complexity in biological systems, and a way of measuring it (and people like Bill Dembski do refer to the work of Shannon, Kolmogorov, and Chaitin in this area). The next would be to estimate the upper limit of complexity that natural processes can generate (which creationists have never done competently and honestly) and measure the amount of complexity in a biological structure (which, again, they’ve never done. Dembski has been asked several times to produce such a calculation, but has never done so, to my knowledge).

So when the Discovery Institute, trying to avoid getting sucked into the Dover trial, said that ID wasn’t ready to be taught in classrooms, they were right. ID has yet to rise above the level of intuition and gut feeling. And until it does, it has no right to be taken seriously as science.

Addendum: Another bumper-sticker-sized slogan for evolution I’ve run across is that we are risen apes, not fallen angels.

The Cruelest Line

While working on the Dover trial podcast, I think we’ve found one of the most cruel lines one can inflict on an actor:

Their names here, just for a couple of
examples, Moythomasia and Howqualepis. The names are really
unimportant. And on the other side, Psarolepis and Achoania.
Again, the names are unimportant.

By the way, if anyone knows how to pronounce these words, please let me know.

PZ Steals My Thunder

Looking through my httpd logs, I ran across this post over at Teleological Blog:

Our friends at The Panda’s Thumb are planning a re-enactment podcast of the

Dover trial and are looking for voice talent. Imagine my surprise when I
received this e-mail today from someone named Lee Bowman:

Are you a voice talent? Andrew Arensburger is looking for volunteers!
http://www.ooblick.com/pandas/

Casting director is PZ Myers (self appointed).

PZ is the “self-appointed” director. You gotta give PZ points for Chuzpah!!

I suspect that’s this Lee Bowman, simply because a person by that name is listed as a contributor to Bill Dembski’s little circle jerk.

So let’s see. I asked PZ to advertise this little project, since he has a large audience and I don’t. Bowman sees it at either Pharyngula or the Panda’s Thumb. He follows the links and looks around and finds my name, but manages to miss the fact that PZ isn’t mentioned anywhere and has nothing to do with this project. But hey, he first read about it in a post by PZ, so PZ is clearly in charge!

And then DonaldM at Teleological Blog gets mail “from someone named Lee Bowman”, doesn’t check a goddamn thing in it for himself, and proceeds to chide PZ for his chutzpah. So maybe this should really be entitled “Creationists Steal My Thunder, Drop It On PZ’s Porch”. Or maybe “ID researchers announce absence of word `gullible’ in dictionary, according to sources.” Psst! Donald! Wanna buy a bridge in Manhattan? How ’bout some Iraqi WMDs?

Anyway, just to bring this back on topic for the Pandas podcast: if you’re playing a creationist, please don’t try to play them as idiots. The script does quite a good job of that on its own.

Secondly, just to make things clear for the copro- and lithocephalics: PZ Myers has nothing to do with this project. It’d be cool if he did, but he doesn’t.

Thirdly, Lee Bowman and DonaldM are clearly asshats (drink!) who need to learn some critical thinking (not to mention reading for comprehension) skills. Seriously, guys. If you want to be taken seriously, why don’t you act like it? I hate to think ill of anyone, but you leave me no choice.

Picking Up Steam

I love the Internet.

After PZ
mentioned
this project on Pharyngula, I got replies from several people, from places as far away as Texas and California, and several demos.

I’ve also installed Audacity 1.3. This is, unfortunately, a beta version, but it has an important new feature: the ability to have multiple “clips” per audio track, and slide them around. This makes it much easier to take two voice tracks and splice them together into a coherent dialog.

I still need more voices, though. Lawyers in particular (odd, during the trial I thought Eric Rothschild was a hero), and no one seems to want to be judge Jones (maybe nobody wants to play a liberal activist). There are plenty of short parts, too, if anyone wants them.

Pandas Podcast: Casting Call!

I’m putting together an audio dramatization of the Dover Panda trial, to be podcasted, and I need actors. If you’re interested in helping, go to the
project page and sign up!

Here’s how it works: pick some parts you’d like to play (preferably more than one in case your first choice isn’t available) and send me the list, along with a demo (because I’d like to know that you know how to record stuff on your computer). Once roles are handed out, you’ll record yourself reading your part in the
Dover
transcript
and send it to me. I’ll collect all of the recordings and splice them together into something like a radio drama or dramatic reading, and put them on the net.

Porn in Afghanistan

According to
the Scotsman,
people in Afghanistan have developed quite a taste for teh pr0n:

The heaviest fighting in five years has slowed reconstruction to a crawl in the deserts and oases of Kandahar, where the strict Taleban movement began in 1994, but pornography, opium and illegal alcohol are flourishing, officials say.
…

“Pornography is a problem,” admits new provincial police chief General Asmatullah Alizai. “According to our Islamic rules and beliefs, people cannot accept this kind of thing. I don’t want people to see this kind of film.”

Can you say “forbidden fruit, boys and girls? I knew you could.

Also, from the comments:

If they are going to be issued with a bevy of virgins
in their next life, I see nothing wrong with them veiwing a few training manuals. You wouldn’t want to look stupid on the big night if it was you.

(HT Plan 8 from Doubter Space.)

Removing Accents in Strings

I’ve been ripping and encoding a bunch of music. Since I’m a hacker, naturally I have scripts that take a file with artist, album title, and track titles, and finds the corresponding .wav or .aiff source files, encodes them as MP3 and tags them.

A lot of the music I have is in French or German (and some Spanish and Russian), so there are accented letters in names and titles. My input files are in UTF-8 format, so that’s cool. But one problem is that of generating a filename for the MP3 files: if I want to play the song “Diogène série 87” by H.F. Thiéfaine on his album “Météo für nada”, I don’t want to have to figure out how to type those accents in the file and directory names. I want the script to pick filenames that use only ASCII characters.

Read More

Stock Scams and Pascal’s Triangle

There’s a stock market scam that goes something like this: make a
list of 1024 people, and send them an “investment newsletter”. The
copy sent to the first 512 people says that a particular stock will go
up; the other 512 get a copy that says that that stock will go down.
Let’s say it goes down. You throw away the list of people whom you
told the stock would go up, divide the remaining 512 in two, and send
them another “investment newsletter”. You tell the first 256 that some
other stock will go up, and tell the other 256 that that stock will go
down. Eliminate those to whom you gave a false prediction, divide the
remaining ones in two, and send them another tip, as before. Do this
ten times, and you’ll wind up with one person to whom, by sheer
numbers, you’ve given ten good predictions in a row. You then tell
that person that he’ll have to pay you to receive further stock
tips.

One problem with this scam (from the scammer’s point of view) is
that there’s a lot of waste: you have to start with over a thousand
names and whittle them down to just one sucker. But what if you
lowered your standards a bit? After all, if someone gets nine good
predictions and one bad one, you can still say you have a 90% success
rate, and that should help sell your nonexistent Wall Street wisdom.
What about 80%? Or 70%? If you start with 1024 names, how many
potential suckers will you have if you consider the ones to whom you
sent seven or more correct predictions, and not just the one where you
got all ten right?

Read More