All posts by Andrew Arensburger

If You Could Never Leave the Milky Way, Would You Call it Imprisonment?

Frank Pastore has a rather moronic column over at Clownhall. If you’ve got your anti-stupid goggles on, you can read the whole thing, but one paragraph isn’t addressed in the comments. Here, he is ostensibly reading from the atheist playbook:

Avoid the pesky problem of freewill. If atheism is true, if all that exists is mere matter and energy, then I don’t have a brain, I am my brain. But if the brain is exhaustively physical, then it is just as incapable of acting freely as a computer or any other machine. Which is why the idea of Artificial Intelligence makes for such fun science fiction – the more peo-ple believe that a computer can become a person, the less likely they will have need to believe they were created in God’s image. Thus, more AI, less theism – that’s the game plan. Same with the search for ET. Find life elsewhere so we can dismiss Genesis.

(emphasis added)

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Drawing the Wrong Conclusion from Giant Bacteria

DaveScot has an article over at Casa Dembski about Epulopiscium fishelsoni. Judging by the article that he links to (from the Journal of Bacteriology, 1998), this bacterium looks like a pretty interesting beastie: it changes size by up to 20 times. That’s individual cells, not variation in a population: a single E. fishelsoni can grow to become 10-20 times larger than it was some hours ago. Not only that, but at its largest, it’s over half a millimeter long, making it visible to the naked eye.

But what interests DaveScot is the size of its genome: about 1 trillion base pairs, more than 300 times as much as in humans, which he evidently takes to be evidence for intelligent design. Unfortunately, to do so he must ignore the conclusions of the very paper he cites.

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Truncated Songs on iPod

Every so often, I’ll update the MP3 file for a given song. For instance, if I record an LP to MP3, then buy and rip the CD, I’ll just update the MP3 file on the back end and tell iTunes to reread it (with open -a itunes /path/to/file.mp3, for those who care).

Unfortunately, when I do this, I’ve noticed that iTunes plays the new file properly, while the iPod tends to hang a few seconds befor the end of the song, or, in more extreme cases, reset itself.

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“But It’s Still Just an X!”

I realize that “DaveScot says something incredibly boneheaded” is about as newsworthy as “dog bites man”, “Pope is Catholic”, and “Hollywood remake not as good as original”, but this time I couldn’t resist.

Every time someone tries to demonstrate evolution by pointing to one of the numerous instances when new species have arisen through evolution, e.g., fruit flies speciating into two distinct species in the lab, you can bet that the creationists will say, “but they’re still fruit flies!” This raises the question of just how much change creationists will accept as microevolution.

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Civil Unions in New Hampshire

The Washington Post is reporting
that New Hampshire is about to institute civil unions for gay couples.
No word on how these civil unions differ from marriage, but there were
some interesting bits in the article:

Advocates of gay rights say the latest milestone is especially significant because it comes in comparatively conservative New Hampshire, where polls have shown locals becoming more tolerant of same-sex unions after watching neighboring states pass similar laws without major social fallout.

“I just don’t think it’s a major issue anymore,” said Jim Lupien, 40, a lifelong Republican and owner of the Cool Moose Creamery & Candy Store on Concord’s old-style Main Street. “Vermont did it, and then Massachusetts, and people around here just started thinking, ‘Okay, what’s the big deal?’ I’m not pro-gay, but that’s no reason to deny them their rights.”

which is pretty much what I’ve been saying all along.

Also interesting are the comments by those who still think the number
of tuxes should equal the number of bridal gowns:

Nevertheless, opponents of same-sex marriage look at what is going on in New England and express growing concern. “The more states that do this, the less radical and more plausible the idea may appear in others,” said Peter Sprigg, vice president for policy at the Family Research Council.

Damn right, the idea may appear less radical. And this would be a bad thing because…?

The Catholic Church and other religious groups have come out against the legislation, arguing that it effectively sanctions homosexuality, to which they are opposed.

The article doesn’t say why the Catholic church is opposed to
teh gay (officially, at least). But of course, this is the same group
that thinks that a cookie turns into God when you eat it, and feels
that it is vitally important that a woman had a child without ever
having sex, so how seriously can you take their opinions?

A more interesting objection is this one:

But much of the political opposition has instead focused on what some feel is a “gay exclusive” law that should be expanded to include other types of same-sex couples.</p

“We haven’t really gotten into the morality of the argument,” said Republican state Rep. Maureen C. Mooney, an outspoken critic of the bill. “What I’m opposed to is carving out a chapter in our laws for a special interest group. Why can’t two sisters enjoy these rights, or a boyfriend and girlfriend who don’t want to get married?”

Those are good questions. Why can’t they? Why shouldn’t they?

Getting Information from Creationists Is Like Pulling Teeth

Some of you may remember threads on time.com and Pharyngula where Egnor challenged “Darwinists” to say “how much new information can Darwinian mechanisms generate?”

For completeness, you should read those threads, but the summary is that when people tried to answer his question, e.g., by showing that point mutations increase the Shannon information of the genome, or pointing at the literature for gene duplication, Egnor said that wasn’t what he meant by “biologically meaningful information” and refused to provide a definition.

On the Mar. 26, 2007 episode of the ID the Future podcast, Casey Luskin interviewed Michael Egnor. They talked about these discussions. Egnor accused Darwinists of being angry and implied that they were unsure of the soundness of their own theory (start listening at 12:42, if you care).

Then (around 14:16), Egnor said

I, for example, if a Darwinist approaches me, and asks me politely about Intelligent design, I’m delighted to talk about it!

I took this as an invitation to ask him to clarify his remarks.
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Friday Stochastic Fifteen

You know the “Friday Random Ten” game: put your MP3 player on random
shuffle, and list the first ten songs that come up. Good, wholesome
fun.

Unfortunately, I have an awful lot of crap in my collection. Well,
maybe not crap per se, but stuff that I only feel like listening to
once in a blue moon. So here’s an adapted version, in which I only
list songs that I wouldn’t have skipped over when they came up:

  1. Bigod,
    Like a Prayer
  2. Art of Noise,
    Close (to the Edit),
    Daft
  3. Assemblage 23,
    Anthem,
    Contempt
  4. (Maybe: Michael Z. Land,
    Meeting Lemonhead,
    )
  5. Dead Kennedys,
    Chickenfarm,
    Frankenchrist
  6. VNV Nation,
    DSM02,
    Advance and Follow
  7. Cocteau Twins,
    The Thinner the Air,
    Victorialand
    At one record store, on the divider that marked the Cocteau Twins CDs, someone had written, “Buy every one of their albums and live forever!” With a few exceptions, I agree.
  8. Pink Floyd,
    Nobody Home,
    The Wall
    Proof that not all music from the 70s sucked.
  9. Conflict,
    The Serenade is Dead,
    Turning Rebellion Into Money
    The only hardcore brit-punk charity album I know of.
  10. The Crystal Method,
    Blowout,
    Tweekend
  11. The Cure,
    If Only Tonight We Could Sleep,
    Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
    Those lips on the cover are a hell of a lot more impressive on the LP than on the CD.
  12. Yazoo,
    Only You (1999 Version),
    The Best of
    This is what you get when you pair up a guy from Depeche Mode with a blues singer.
  13. The Psychedelic Furs,
    Only a Game,
    Mirror Moves
  14. (Maybe: Gilbert & Sullivan,
    When the foeman bears his steel,
    The Pirates of Penzance)
  15. Klutæ,
    God Spoke Through a Burning Bush,
    Hit ‘N’ Run
  16. Jack Wall,
    MA_THEME_mldy_1,
  17. Wire,
    Strange,
    Pink Flag
Hovind on Hold

The Pensacola News Journal reports:

An appeal by Pensacola creationist Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo Hovind, seeking acquittal on tax-fraud charges was denied.

U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers upheld the Hovinds’ November 2006 conviction on 44 counts of bank-structuring — the withdrawal of bank funds under the $10,000 threshold that triggers bank reports to the Internal Revenue Service.

During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence that showed the couple routinely withdrew $9,500 and $9,600, from their bank.

In November, a jury found Kent Hovind guilty on 58 federal counts, including failure to pay $845,000 in employee-related taxes. In January, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Jo Hovind was convicted of 44 counts of evading bank-reporting requirements. Her sentencing was delayed pending the appeal and should soon be set.

Is anyone surprised by this? If so, I have some lovely oceanfront property in Oklahoma to sell you. As I recall, Hovind started by screwing with the judge, by pleading “Subornation of false muster”, whatever that means; then hired a lawyer with a long history of involvement with tax evasion; then didn’t even mount a defense.

And now, like a kid who has finally realized that there’s only so much he can get away with before mommy gets mad and really punishes him, he wants a mulligan.

Criswell predicts!
Allow me to predict that he’ll continue claiming that he hasn’t done anything wrong (unless he thinks that repentance will play well with the parole board); he’ll rationalize his problems by saying that God wants him in prison, spreading the Word™ through his prison ministry; and his followers will continue to defend him.

(Thanks to for the headline. Better than what I could come up with: “God to Hovind: HA-ha!”)

Making Emacs Do Stuff at Startup

Like many users, I start an emacs session in .xinitrc and use it throughout the day. Since I’ve recently started using Emacs Planner, I wanted it to start up automatically in that first Emacs session (but not subsequent ones, if I just want to edit a file).

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Soft Coding

Over at Worse Than Failure, Alex Papadimoulis has an article on soft coding. Hardcoding is when something is written in the code when it ought to be in a header constant or an external config file. Soft coding is the opposite, when something is put in a config file that really ought to be in the source. For instance, the number of days in a week isn’t likely to change any time soon, so you may as well just use “7” in your code. You might

#define DAYS_PER_WEEK 7
#define WEEKS_PER_YEAR 52
#define LOAN_DURATION DAYS_PER_WEEK * WEEKS_PER_YEAR

to make it clear what you’re calculating, but putting it in an external, user-configurable file is just absurd.

I’m guilty of softcoding, myself. In my experience, it comes from trying to be too generic. Code that’s too specific, too hardcoded, is hard to maintain and extend, so a good programmer will ask himself, “What requirements might change in the future? How should I write this so that when it changes, I can do it without too much pain?” This leads to things like declaring configuration constants at the top of a script, in a Makefile, or in a header file; or having the code read messages from an external file, rather than hardcoding them as strings.

But it’s also easy to overcompensate, and start making everything customizable, or overly generic. So it’s important to remember that at some point you have to actually make the code do something.