Category Miscellaneous

Thanks to No One

At this time of year, it’s traditional to say what you’re thankful for. And I’m thankful for a lot of things: that I know where my next meal is coming from, that I don’t have any debilitating diseases, that I have good friends and family… Heck, I’m thankful that the job I had to do after hours at work today didn’t turn into one of those nightmare jobs that wind up having you working all night.

But gratitude requires an object. To whom am I grateful? In some cases, it’s obvious: I’m grateful to my friends for putting up with me, and for doing all the things friends do. I’m grateful to my parents for raising me. I’m grateful to the nameless people who raised the food I’m going to enjoy tomorrow, the ones who hauled it here, and to the millions more who set up or aided the free market system that ensures that I have whatever food I want, whenever I want it.

What about the job tonight that went more or less according to plan? To a great extent, it went smoothly because I planned it carefully in advance. Should I feel grateful to myself, for having the foresight to solve a lot of problems before they came up, the experience to know what those problems are likely to be, and the knowledge to quickly diagnose and solve the snags that did come up?

Maybe. I’ve been known to do favors for my future self. But it still feels narcissistic.

And to whom should I feel grateful that I don’t have any debilitating genetic disorders? I suppose the obvious candidates are my parents. But they didn’t pick their genes, and didn’t decide how they would mix. They got lucky, as did I.

Shoud I thank the innumerable rocks flying around the solar system that none of them has decided to intersect Earth’s orbit and conk me on the noggin?

There’s an asymmetry here: on one hand, I can easily imagine an alternate universe in which I was born to parents who didn’t care about my upbringing and education, or one in which a stray C14 atom decayed at the wrong moment and gave me cancer at age five. And I’m glad for both. But in one case, there’s someone to thank, while in the other… the universe has failed to kill me, so far. It just worked out that way.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I have the same hyperactive agency detector as everyone else. Feeling grateful to some nebulous other for the random circumstances that went the way I like comes as naturally as seeing faces in clouds, and so I understand why people naturally believe in benevolent gods and spirits. And so I suppose there’s no harm in addressing thanks to someone or something for those things, as a way of satisfying an urge, long as it’s understood that that’s all it is. The universe. The flying spaghetti monster. Or, as George Carlin did, Joe Pesci, since he looks like a guy who can get things done.

So have a happy Thanksgiving, y’all. Don’t forget to thank the people — actual, living people — who have done something good for you, who matter to you. In fact, don’t wait until Thanksgiving, any more than you should wait until Valentine’s Day to tell your sweetheart you love him/her.

And if I hear you thanking Joe Pesci for the fact that the biscuits came out all right after all, I’ll understand.

(Update, Oct. 11, 2010: s/one/none/.)

A Well-Timed Ad

Yesterday, at work, I got an ad from IBM that said

Today’s business requires actionable insights.

Today, Slashdot is reporting that IBM and Intel executives have been arrested for insider trading.

I guess the actionable insight they had was “if we use information about the company that the public doesn’t have, we can make a killing on the stock market!”

May I also suggest “If someone orders something from you, and you take their money but don’t ship the product, you can reduce your operating costs” and “You can make a ton of money just by pointing a gun at people and taking their wallets.” No, don’t thank me. The thought of you enjoying some quality time with your cellmate Bubba is all the thanks I need.

Skeptics Easier to Control than Republicans?

On Thursday, Max Pappas boasted on Hardball how his organization, FreedomWorks, mobilizes right-wingers to go to town hall meetings. These are the loudmouthed WATBs whose only aim is to disrupt these meetings to shut down any discussion of health care reform.

Then on Friday, on C-SPAN, he said that there was nothing he could do about how his members were behaving.

The passions are so deep about this issue that we can’t send out an email that says “calm down.”

In contrast, the Student Secular Alliance recently organized a trip down to Ken Ham’s Hebrew Mythology “Museum”. The group included PZ Myers and over 300 atheists, freethinkers, and skeptics — people notoriously hard to organize.

Before the trip, PZ posted this:

Here’s what I expect: EVERYONE in our group will be firm, rational, and will not shy away from asking hard questions. You will feel free to wear some distinguishing clothing — a scarlet A, a Darwin fish, a t-shirt, something so that we can tell we are members of the same group. You will discuss the material on display with your peers, but with other visitors to the “museum” if and only if they invite it.

There are a number of things you will not do, however.

Do not show up wearing obscenities or particularly abusive articles of clothing. Dress casual, but look good — you are setting an example. Pro-science t-shirts are excellent, t-shirts with naked lesbians masturbating with bibles will give them an excuse to throw you out, so don’t do it. The SSA won’t even give you a ticket if you show up looking like you want to brawl.

You will not be disruptive. This is an information gathering mission that will make you a better informed individual to criticize bad ideas. Do not interfere with other visitors’ ability to examine the place. Ask questions only where appropriate. Collect questions that you can ask of any of the real scientists who will be in our group. Do not get into loud arguments. If a discussion starts getting angry on either side I want you to be the ones to back off.

Remember, if you are calm, civil, and well-behaved, and you tour the “museum”, we win. If you are calm, civil, and well-behaved, and the security guards throw you out because they don’t like the fact that you’re an atheist, we win. If you are angry, rude, and cause trouble that gives them a reasonable excuse to throw you out, we lose, and I will be very pissed off at you.

(bold added.)

The result? The Inside Science News Service published a story with the telling headline “Tour of Creation Museum Quieter Than Expected“.

In the most noticeable moment of noticeable conflict, Derek Rogers, a computer science major at Dalhouise University in Nova Scotia, Canada, was detained by guards for wearing a shirt with a slogan recently plastered on buses by activist groups that read “there’s probably no God, so get over it.” He was escorted to the bathroom and ordered to flip the shirt inside-out.

“One family of religious people told me that I had ruined their trip, and they drove all the way from Virginia,” said Rogers.

As far as I can tell, that was the one and only “disruptive” event. And if it really did go down as described (and it probably did, since it’s mostly confirmed by Answers in Genesis), 300 skeptics and freethinkers can make it through a palace of lies without causing a scene. (Hell, even I managed to sit through one of Kent Hovind’s performances without bursting into laughter.)

But Max Pappas can’t send a message to his mailing list explaining the whole “moral high ground” thing.

Way to go, wingnuts. Way to show the country that you’re a bunch of whiny crybabies with no ideas. The sooner you run off into the woods to await the Rapture, the happier we’ll all be.

Rites of Passage

Presumably your education, like mine, included a discussion of rites
of passage. That your teacher discussed various cultures’ rituals,
along with a discussion of how our western culture also has rites of
passage: graduation, driver’s license, and so forth.

Now, maybe I’m slow, but it only recently occurred to me what function
these rites play in the life of a person, and society at large: they
mark transitions between one chapter and the next: switching from
child to adult, from bachelor to husband, from prince to king.

These are the points where the rules change. In most societies,
children are allowed to spend the day playing; adults are expected to
plow the fields or mend fishing nets. Children are allowed to run and
hide when raiders attack the village; adults are expected to help
defend it. Single people can quit their job and wander the world for a
year; family heads are expected to stay home and provide for their
families.

From a society’s point of view, this makes sense: someone has to plow
the fields, someone has to defend the children, someone has to make
policy decisions, and so forth. If there’s a role for everyone and
everyone does their part, society works.

This also means that ceremonies like first communion or bar mitzvahs
aren’t really rites of passage in today’s society: a thirteen-year-old
Jew may say that he is a man as part of the ceremony, but in practice,
he’ll go back to the same school the next day as he did the day
before, and stay there for several more years, until he goes off to
college.

Modern western society has similar chapter transitions: going off to
college, when you learn to live on your own without daily support from
your parents; marriage, when your plans become inextricably linked
with another person’s; learning to drive, when you are expected to
wield half a ton of steel without killing anyone. And so forth.

Chapter transitions also make sense for the individual, since they get
rid of a lot of possible ambiguity. You don’t have to figure out when
and how to transition from your child role to your adult role, or from
your carefree bachelor role to your breadwinner role. The change is
abrupt, and marked by a memorable ceremony. It often comes at a
predetermined time (like puberty) or is planned long in advance (like
marriage), so you have time to get ready for the transition.

Of course, in today’s American society (and in other countries as
well, I’m sure, but I’m most familiar with the US), a lot of
traditional rule changes have been blurred: people live with their SOs
for years — including having sex, raising children, and buying a
house — without getting married. Many offices allow you to wear
the same jeans and T-shirts as you wore throughout college (although
you’re encouraged to launder them more than once a semester).
Thirtysomethings play the same online games as teenagers do. A lot of
the hard rules of earlier societies have become optional.

By no means am I suggesting that we should return to a more rigid
society. I happen to like playing video games. And if you don’t live
with someone for a while, how can you tell whether you’ll be happy
married to that person, or whether your sexual tastes are aligned? And
some of the most impressive Lego structures are built by people far
older than the age on the box.

But I think it’s worth looking forward to upcoming life changes and
figuring out who you can and want to be before and after. Do you want
to gallivant around India for a year? It’s probably best to do that
before you settle into a steady job. Do you want to join a startup or
start your own business? Consider that it’ll probably mean long hours
for a few years, and you may go broke. So you probably don’t want to
bet the kids’ college fund on it. And speaking of kids, if you’re
raising any, you may want to consider what sorts of chapter
transitions they’ll be going through as well, and plan for those as
well.

Consider, too, how to commemorate the event. Ideally this should be
something unique, memorable, and pleasant. By the time you retire,
you’ve probably seen enough office parties that they all start to blur
together. So go to Acapulco or Greece for a week to mark the occasion.
If you’re lucky, you’ll only be married once, so don’t just run down
to the registrar’s office and sign a marriage license; go all out and
have a bash to remember. And assuming that circumstances permit and
all parties are cool with it, you may even want to lose your virginity
the day you get your driver’s license, commemorating a new phase in
responsibility with an eminently memorable experience.

The Exploration Will Be Televised

While we’re all celebrating the 40th anniversary of humanity’s first
trip to another world, I’ve been listening to the “real-time”
broadcast of the Apollo 11 mission at
We Choose the Moon.
Think of it as a multi-day radio broadcast.

Yes, we all know how it turns out, so the brief moments of drama when
something goes wrong, or when Houston talks about possible burn
failures while the spacecraft is behind the moon, aren’t really as
suspenseful as they were forty years ago.

And then, for some reason, this
comment
by Michael Collins caught my ear:

04 03 28 12 CMP
Roger. There will be no television of the undocking. I have all
available windows either full of heads or cameras, and I’m busy with
other things.

Somehow this brought into focus the enormity of what was going on: not
only had a bunch of upright apes shot a tin can further than any tin
can had gone before; not only were people able to traverse a span of
cold emptiness to another world; but they sent back radio and
television transmissions, so that the entire world could watch what
was going on.

This is in marked contrast to earlier explorers like Columbus,
Magellan, Amundsen, and others, who basically disappeared from view
for months or years, then brought all of their stories back in one
package.

And here’s Collins saying, in effect, “Step back from the window,
kids. Daddy’s got work to do.”

Of course, this link to the earth wasn’t just for PR. Listening to the
conversations between the astronauts and Earth, it becomes clear that
the astronauts and spacecraft were simply the apex of a vast support
system that made the trip possible: people figuring out when and how
to burn; what might go wrong, and how to fix it; keeping an eye on the
myriad things that the craft could run out of; and on, and on.

Humans are often defined as the tool-making animals, or the animals
with language. But one thing that’s really worked out for us is
cooperation. And as the festivities this week remind us, it got us off
of this rock, and made an ancient dream into reality.

Running Like the Wind

Throughout history, the wind has been used as a standard for speed, as
in “run like the wind”. But it occurred to me recently to wonder about
that.

According to the
Beaufort scale,
hurricane-force winds start at 118 km/h (73 mph). Mere strong gales,
which break branches off of trees, are in the 75-88 km/h (47-54 mph)
range.

That doesn’t seem particularly fast these days. Heck, I’ve often passed
people on the highway who were driving “like the wind”
for going too slowly. And we’re not even talking about Formula One
racing or airplanes or Saturn V rockets.

I think it’s rather cool that we as a species have gotten to a point where everyday reality has outstripped the hyperbolic imagery of ages past.

Open Thread

Particularly for anyone who wants to contact me after the The Case for Christ talk at UMD, but go ahead and say what you like. Unless you’re a spammer, in which case FOAD.

Legal Markup Language

Today at work, I had to sign some legal papers. They were pretty standard “I have read the attached policy and agree to be bound by it” stuff that all of us Full-Time Employment Units have to sign once a year.

But I’m the sort of person who believes that if I sign an agreement, I ought to at least know what it says. But I have better things to do than to read legalese all day.

The same problem applies to a lot of commercial applications: every time you upgrade, you have to agree to a EULA for the new version. For a variety of reasons, most people just click through and get on with their lives. But it would be nice to be able to know that the vendor hasn’t just asked you to sign over your firstborn.

One possible solution would be a markup and revision system for legal documents. For starters, if your job requires you to sign an Acceptable Behavior Policy once a year, you could read it carefully once when you sign on, and save a copy. Then, the next year, you can compare the version you’re given with the one you signed a year ago. If there are no changes, you can just sign it without reading, on the grounds that if you didn’t have a problem with it last year, you don’t have a problem with it now.

Of course, a lot of documents include other documents by reference. These need to be archived as well.

It would also be nice to add comments: for instance, if the policy requires you to keep your cell phone number on file with your manager so that you can be contacted outsiide of business hours, you could add “Has my cell phone changed since last year?” in the comment area.

Since big chunks of legal documents are just boilerplate text, and since many legal documents (such as software EULAs, credit card applications, car rental agreements, etc.) apply to many people, it would be nice to look them up on the net. That is, the tool on your desktop could take the MD5 hash of a clause, send that off to the legal opinion servers of your choice, and see what they have to say. For instance, the EFF could have a repository that says that certain clauses aren’t as scary as they sound; the FSF could point out which clauses will forfeit your Free Software-loving soul.

This could be a commercial service: you could pay a legal firm for online legal advice. Yes, a lawyer would have to read and research the various documents, and that’s expensive; but if they can spread the cost around several hundred or thousand clients, it could become affordable.

You should be able to specify certain details about your situation. For example, a clause that affects US Government employees might be either important or irrelevant, depending on whether you’re a fed or not. You should be able to check or uncheck “I work for the US government” in the preferences menu, so that the software will look up the appropriate response. Ditto if you don’t work at a nuclear reactor, don’t deal in foreign trade, and so forth.

One interesting aspect of this is the coding theory aspect of it: there’s a level of distrust that has to be dealt with. If you sign the yearly policy without reading it because it hasn’t changed since last year, then you probably don’t want to leave your copy of last year’s document with your employer, in case they try to change it. And if you leave a copy on your employer’s computer, they might not be above rooting around in your files to change your backup to make it match this year’s version. So you’ll want to be able to cryptographically sign each document. And of course any sensitive information that goes out on the net needs to be encrypted.

Then there’s the question of giving away information by the sorts of questions you ask. For instance, you may not want the people running Joe Random Legal Server to know that you work for the military or at a nuclear power plant, but there are common clauses that affect people who do. So while the program on your desktop needs to know this in order to give you good advice, that’s not necessarily something you need to send out on the net. So when it sends out a query about a particular clause, the protocol should allow to specify as much or as little detail as you want: if you say that you don’t deal in trade with foreign nationals, the remote server can save itself the trouble of looking up what a given clause means for those who do; but if you don’t say whether you’re in the military, it’ll send both responses back and let your desktop software decide which version to show you.

Of course, you probably don’t mind letting your attorneys know whether you’re in the military, so the software should be smart enough to send this information only to some servers and not others.

I imagine that some of this already exists: contracts are already negotiated between parties that don’t trust each other. Presumably the law firms on each side already have software that’ll tell them that section 3, paragraph 10 hasn’t changed since the last round of negotiations, so they don’t need to check it again.

And of course laws go through many iterations from original inception to bill to committee to floor vote, and are often amended by people of other parties, who’d love to make life miserable for you. The staffs of legislators must have some system for keeping track of it all. Hopefully some of it is automated.

For software, there are already software-installation tools that include presenting a EULA to the user as a standard step. It shouldn’t be too hard to put in a hook that calls the user’s preferred legal document management system.

The
Subversion version control system has a “blame” subcommand that shows you when certain lines in a file were last changed, and by whom. Legalese is so structured and formal that it seems that a similar approach should be able to help there as well.

Google Maps and Metro: So Close, and Yet, so Far

Google Maps
now has a feature that allows you to specify whether you want driving
directions, or for public transportation.

This sounds great, but if you ask for
directions
from the College Park Metro station to the Metro Center Metro station,
it says to walk a mile and a half to the Riverdale MARC station (what?
Not the College Park MARC station?), take that train down to Union
Station, and walk another mile to Metro Station.

So all in all, just a wee bit pointless.

Am I A Humanist? Definition vs. Allegiance

I don’t know whether I’m a Humanist.

I haven’t read any of the
Humanist manifestos,
but a while back, a podcast that I listen to had a show about
humanism, and discussed the main points of Humanist Manifesto III, the
most recent one. I agreed with points that were discussed, such as
that knowledge of the world comes from observing the world, and that
moral values are something that we humans have to work out for
ourselves.

But I don’t know whether I’m a humanist because I don’t know whether
it’s a matter of definition or of allegiance.

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