Caffeine

I have a high tolerance to pain. I don't even notice it. When noticed, i look for some cause and solution. Observation. Almost five years ago, the pain in my right shoulder was bad enough that I could not extend the arm higher than horizontal. I still reach for things on high shelves with my left hand. I didn't complain, but did notice that it was somewhat better on Sundays, and best on Monday mornings. What could that mean? Well, i'd experienced caffeine withdrawal on Sundays. I didn't just get headaches because i was at church. And when my Mt. Dew consumption was reduced, they went away. So, i went cold turkey, and 10 months later, was restored to full movement and the pain was gone. Arthritis in the hands and feet which i'd barely noticed, back pain, shoulder pain, all of it.

And i won't go back. Why would i grab a Dew if it will cause such misery? The reason is that caffeine is rather addictive after all, and by comparison, i have no will power to speak of. But i'm back on the wagon again, and though my hands are better, i know my right foot won't recover until August.

The current additional experiment is to see if non-impact exercise will accelerate the healing process.

Weapons of Math Instruction

~(AP Newswire)

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, the attorney general said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," a Justice Department spokesman said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, 'there are 3 sides to every triangle'."

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes"

The GNU patch disk

Feh. A database import process at work has been failing on a record that some upstream user has found a way to corrupt. They've managed to pick the delimiter that the file format uses to separate fields in a data record. The delimiter in question is the seldom used ASCII character '~' (tilde). It has been used to indicate the German language double 's' character. At least this is my guess, and even this guess strains the limits of my knowledge of the German language. I confess to being one of those Americans who only really knows one language, and, by the way, thinks that the word American refers only to citizens of the United States. If i meant Western Hemispherian then that's what i'd have said. Thank you very much.

Back to the problem. It is a large multinational corporation that i work for. So finding who can fix this in the upstream feed is going to take some time. In the mean time, i need a fix for my users. Fortunately, there is a very unique string in the broken field, and the data does not change from day to day. A quick substitution filter might provide a temporary fix.

So, i copied the data file to my development box, wrote and tested a quick Unix sed script - and it worked like a champ. I had the foresight to test this script on the production machine, but not installed in the production area. It failed. The new file differed from the original file by more than just the one record. Many, many records were changed. Further, it wasn't immediately clear what exactly was different about the records. A quick check of the file sizes showed that the converted file was much smaller than the original.

Feh. The original file contains null characters (the ASCII code is zero), and the Unix command, sed, was silently stripping them. No one asked it to do this.

So, why did it work on my development system? Simple. The production machine is a big expensive Sun box running Solaris. The development machine is a PC that is so old that it doesn't run modern Windows very well, and so no one wanted it. I installed Linux on it. The Linux version of sed has no bug dealing with nulls. It has no line length limitations. The version of grep on Linux was easily capable of finding the offending record. It would be the one with 43 tilde characters in it, scattered here and there. The Solaris version doesn't even get started.

As an aside, i've been asked, by managers, etc., why i have two PCs. Well, i need Linux to get any actual work done. Multiple times per day i perform tasks under Linux that would take days under Windows, at best. Look at my bill rate and figure out how many such days pays for a PC. I'd like to get rid of Windows, really. But, last i checked, the version of Lotus Notes for Linux doesn't have all the functionality that the Windows version has (is IBM listening?). And, the corporation has a few other tools that are only supported on Windows. In particular, many of the internal web sites are optimized for Internet Explorer, the only single platform browser (now that the Mac version has been orphaned). Why the corporation has an explicit policy of locking itself into using the buggiest and least secure operating system in common use anywhere on Earth is beyond me. Was there a golden handshake somewhere in the past? Is Microsoft marketing that good?

Production is on Solaris 8. Yes, i know, version 10 of Solaris is out, and the corporation has started using it for new projects. This system could be upgraded, but such upgrades are expensive in time and effort, and this production system is being rewritten from scratch piece by piece. In another year, the plug will be pulled on this system. We called it a Sundown.

One of the things that i really like about Solaris is the backward compatibility delivered. Utilities like grep and sed seem to have undergone zero changes since the early eighties. In an industry where six months is also an eternity, this is software from the previous millenia. So scripts that worked back then still work. This is a good thing. But, the bugs haven't been fixed. This behavior with nulls is a bug. I know, Rich Kulawiec said that Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. This feature has many legs. The grep bug where it never finishes compiling the regular expression is also a bug. The easy fix would be to use the versions of these utilities that come with Linux. They are open source, and freely usable. Sun could easily simply use them. Why don't they? For one, they have been rewritten, from scratch, and may not have the exact behavior of the old versions. For example, the new regular expressions have been expanded in power. Can it be proven that all old valid regular expressions will perform as the old versions performed? A dozen years or so of experience with the GNU utilities shows that these fears are largely unfounded. The new utilities have many new features, and people will come to depend on them. This could make moving scripts from newer to older systems more difficult. A minor point, and progress can't be made allowing this point.

When one does not have backward compatibility, for example when using a language that keeps changing, like Visual Basic, or the early days of Java, one eventually finds that one is spending so much time upgrading, that no new code can be written. This is unacceptable. In contrast to MicroSoft, Sun does not require a forced march of frequent upgrades on their customers. If it were my decision, the first time such an upgrade was forced, i'd upgrade off of Windows. That would have been before 1995. Yet companies follow this logic all the time. They'll even lease systems rather than buy them, forcing multiple data and code migrations for production systems that do not require the expanded performance and capacity of the newer systems. What a waste of time and money.

Sun does offer installation packages that have the Linux utilities. They work. My company hasn't installed them. I don't have permission to install them.

The last version of Solaris that i used that i really liked was version 7 Solaris running on a Pentium II (Solaris x86). It wasn't better than version 8. It is just that i had administrative rights to the box (root), and over the course of a year, i installed almost all the open source utilities that i had come to expect from Unix (from Linux use). Sun provided handy packages for painless installation (and still does - thanks, Sun). The Solaris x86 system had the feature that when i compiled something and got it to run, it would compile and run on a Sparc based Solaris system without modification, every time. However, the time it took to get all this stuff installed was aggravating, and i often wished i'd just installed Linux from the start.

Without upgrades of some kind, any product stagnates. Frequent upgrades are expensive in support. So, infrequent upgrades is the current goal. Backward compatibility is important. However, the bugs really need to be addressed. And, no, it isn't good enough to load Solaris, then apply the GNU patches GNU versions of these utilities, perhaps having path order dependent behavior. Solaris needs to make a clean break from the hoards of bugs and limitations of the old utilities, in the name of reduced customer headaches. These bugs include arbitrary line length limits, troubles handling characters with the high bit set, troubles handling null characters, problems coping with complicated, or just long, regular expressions, and on, and on, and on.

The solution, by the way, was to use Perl. But Perl is one of those new fangled open source products. Though it is non-standard for this company, it is required for the application, and so was available. It may not be there next time.

COSMOS

I'm currently watching the 2000 DVD version of Sagan's (1980) COSMOS. As an educated layman defending science and debunking stupidity, i have to say that Sagan was really good at this stuff, and having a pro do it is a good thing. Further, it is in the scientist's own interest to make sure science is understood by the masses. Much of the funding for science comes from the public.

Of late, i've come to be of the opinion that i've been quite ineffectual in debunking the stupid. Coming down like a ton of bricks has the same effect that Bible thumpers had on me while i was growing up - which is none. I have to admit that all i've done is look like i'm trying to sound smart, when the smartest i've ever been was when i was asking stupid questions. What does seem to work is teaching using the audience's vocabulary, and using compassion. What you really need to avoid doing is saying, "i'm really smart, and these are the fact." You need to say, "This is the process that scientists find works the best." So, when an ID'er says that Carbon 14 dating isn't any good for talking meaningfully about T-Rex, i agree, and state that there are several lines of evidence that, though they include radio dating techniques that aren't Carbon dating, they also include stratification and other techniques, which, when combined, yield answers that are consistent with each other, and lend confidence to the results. Then i use an example i really know about: that the 1998 result in which the team states that the Universe we live in is accelerating apart at an increasing rate was delayed while they rechecked their process in several ways to avoid saying something that was wrong. It was an extraordinary claim, and such things demand extraordinary evidence. And it was extraordinary. It wasn't one of the three Freedman models that the Universe must be. And, yes, this result could be wrong. And yes, there is continuing study.

Easy ways for scientists to promote their causes are to write blogs, and when they complete some task, do a phone interview with a podcaster. Many of the science podcasts are made by educated laymen who have the time to figure out how to assemble podcasts and distribute them. They need content. The scientist has content that needs to get out.

Growing up

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to become so old that i can plan my own surprise birthday party.

Shadows

Orson Scott Card's books Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant continue the Enderverse's Bean fork. Card continues to have good ideas at a reasonable rate. Have i mentioned that what seems to draw me to a story is the ideas? Dense is good. The story changes as the characters age. Bean had already saved the Earth in Ender's Shadow, and now helps the Hegemon unite the world under a peaceful democratic government. Don't expect a surprise ending - that is repeatedly telegraphed. The surprises happen during the stories, early and often. Though Shadow of the Giant has huge ties to some future story, which Card seems to have designed, i'm not aware of any such story. OK, so Shadow of the Giant came out in 2005, which wasn't that long ago. All I have yet to read of the series are Children of the Mind, First Meetings, and perhaps the short story version of Ender's Shadow. This last, since it is available in clear text, is something that my computer can read to me in the car. It has already been rendered as audio, and awaits a slot between podcasts.

Back Pain

My experience with real quacks had its crescendo when my wife was looking for relief from chronic back pain. She bought books, a very bright light, various medicines, etc. I wasn't too critical, since my HMO was paying for most of it. Finally, she got a membership in a health club and tried every exercise they offered. This, unfortunately, was NOT paid for by the HMO. After six months, it turned out that twenty minutes on a treadmill gave her 'good back days'. All other days were 'bad back days'.

When the membership was about to expire, she complained that it was expensive, and it consumed the whole morning. Drive to the club. Wait for one of the treadmills to free up, run, shower, drive home. Feh. It made me tired to just hear it. I asked how much the membership was, and decided to check treadmill prices at Sears. Sears was the low bid. A new treadmill cost less than a six month membership. It has been over ten years, we wore out the belt (it was replaceable). Amazingly, I recently picked up a completely working exercise unit that a neighbor left in the trash.

We never had a doctor of any kind suggest exercise.

Shopgirl

Steve Martin's Shopgirl is available at the local library on audio CD. The cover says something about a movie. Perhaps they seeded libraries with the audio to promote the movie. You know, generate excitement, and word of mouth advertising. Word of mouth is very powerful. Did you know that Star Wars was released as an audio book before the first movie? I'm not sure that I know this still, but there is evidence that it played out that way.

The book is short. It comes on only four CDs, and of a possible total run length of over five hours, it comes to three hours, thirty seven minutes and nineteen seconds, give or take. By comparison, most of the Tarzan books are eight hours, and the Dune prequels total eighty hours. So this book will only yield a couple days entertainment. However, the book is mercifully short. Not because it is dull, quite the opposite. The humor comes at machine gun speed, every few seconds. The humor is all irony and biting sarcasm. The sarcasm bites all the harder because it seems impossible for the listener to avoid identifying with the worst aspects of each character in turn. Though, if asked if I identify with anyone, I'll deny it. And I've never told a lie in my entire life. If pushed, there's always plausible deniability - how would I know if I identified with it?

The story itself is mostly about character and relationship and sex. Despite graphic descriptions of intimate encounters, it manages to avoid being racy. That might be the sarcasm, or the constant pounding on the theme that these people are all nearly unbelievably pathetic. Only nearly unbelievable because, well after all, one must identify with just these traits.

Mr. Martin reads the book in an entirely competent way. Not a surprise, he wrote it, and he has demonstrated time and again that he is a competent actor. Though humor is everywhere, there are no belly laughs. While listening, I wear a vague smirk which could just as easily be interpreted as a smile or a wince. The whole thing would be preaching, but the humor just manages to prevent it from taking itself too seriously. The narration isn't full of life. The subject is pathetic, which prevents that sort of delivery.

So who would sit there and take it? I would. Show me cartoons lampooning the most sacred bits of my religion, and rather than riot, I'll likely respond, thank you. And who knows if Mr. Martin would take that as the compliment it is intended as, or if he'd be deeply insulted as if wounded in kind. It doesn't matter. I can't hear your response either, and I'm not bothered that I get so few comments on the blog. I don't care if it is because no one reads it, or if it is because no one thinks it is a conversation opener. If you think this is a review, know that I don't care if you like it, just that you know if it is for you. The surprise ending isn't here, so you are still free to read it yourself. In fact, i haven't yet heard the surprise ending, so i haven't accidentally given anything away.

Even I couldn't just sit there and listen to the whole thing at one go. At breaks, I imagine where the story will go, and some of my guesses are reasonably accurate, even when they completely miss the mark. It should be predictable, but fails. In this case, failure is a good thing.

I'm not offended. I take the book personally, but am not offended. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult to cause me offense. It is hard to imagine how that might be done. The amazing thing is that it has been done, once or twice.

Education

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post wrote this essay. I won't debate Richard here. He knows the problems with his arguments. He conveys sympathy.

In response, Gary Stix, at Scientific American wrote this less sympathetic one.

For me, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be - not half full or half empty.

One can blame the student for not working hard enough or being smart enough all one wants. One can blame the teachers too. One can blame the system, the President, the school board. It doesn't change anything. However, it turns out that there are superior teaching techniques. My math skills happen to be excellent, and as an engineer, I depend on them. But when I was a kid I took piano lessons for three years before dropping it. I had no idea why I was making so little progress. I didn't even know that was happening, I was just frustrated, and quit.

In my forties, it became partly my job to help my son with his education. When his arithmetic was falling behind, I taught him the Soroban (Japanese abacus) and a variant of finger math where one can add and subtract two digit numbers on one's fingers. His math came up to snuff in a couple months, and permanently. This is a technique that, when I was in high school, allowed me to perform twenty digit mental arithmetic - for example, it took about a minute to multiply two ten digit numbers and get a twenty digit answer. And, without the technique, I couldn't remember twenty digits.

My wife got my son into Suzuki Violin, and more recently Suzuki Piano. As a parent teacher for both, it has become clear that the general teaching methods and techniques are clearly superior to what I struggled through as a kid. There's nothing wrong with my dexterity or aptitude, and if I'd had the opportunity to learn music this way, I have no doubt I'd be considered a music savant now. Even now, it's clear that just a few years of study will improve my performance to much more enjoyable levels. It isn't too late, and I expect thirty or more years of enjoyment to come.

There are two keys to these teaching and performance techniques. And they are the same as each other. The first is that the material is broken down into very short consumable parts. That allows steady progress with minimal frustration. The barrier to entry is lower. More students will be able to get it. Everyone will get it faster, and learn it better. The second is that the techniques themselves are made up of these simple ideas, put together. They really work.

For example, in the Soroban, there are ten lessons to learn addition. Each takes about five minutes and can be explained in one or two sentences. There is then about a week's worth of practice, maybe twenty minutes a day. In the resulting addition, there is a simple set of steps. When there is a carry to handle, it is handled right away, and the procedure mechanically takes care of it. At any moment, there is only one thing to remember, and one next thing to do, and it is obvious. The result is addition that is quick and reliable. It isn't that important that it be quick. What is important is that it is reliable. If the answer is off by one, it is still wrong. The student knows if their answer is wrong, and it is frustrating, which leads to failure, which leads to more failure. So, this technique is simple, produces the right result every time that the procedure is followed, at least in contrast to doing arithmetic on paper as taught in school. So, it is easier to learn and less frustrating to use. So, fear of math vanishes.

Algebra is built on arithmetic. If the arithmetic is easy, algebra becomes that much easier.

These techniques have been available for more than fifty years. They are already in wide spread, but not universal, practice. They invariably show their superiority. By comparison, the teaching techniques used today for nearly all education looks like the teachers are doing whatever the first things that come into their heads. It's stupid. As great as these techniques are for subjects such as music and math, the general concepts are applicable to a wide variety of fields of study. If this has been done, I'm not aware of it. We need to be smart about teaching, and not just for math.

It is my opinion that algebra should be a high school diploma requirement. The diploma should mean something.

Ipod Shuffle

Just recently, I've started listening to podcasts with an IPod Shuffle. This is a very low end device. I picked mine up for $80. I considered getting an iRiver for $150, that also has a microphone and FM tuner, but funds have been low. The device is tiny. It looks like a pack of gum. It comes with a cord attached to a USB cap, so you can hang it around your neck, but there is also a cap without a chord, making the chord optional.

The Shuffle has no display. Well, there is an led that glows green, yellow or red, showing the current battery state. Green for full charge, red for nearly dead, and yellow for in between. The non-replaceable lithium ion battery is supposed to last 18 hours on a charge. The battery is charged by plugging it into a computer USB port. The Shuffle goes from empty to full charge in three or four hours. The 512 MB should give you about ten hours of high quality mp3 music. I get more audio, because the books I listen to are in mono, and spoken text compresses better than music, probably because silence compresses so well. I've had 28 hours of podcasts on it.

The end of the shuffle comes off, revealing a USB port. Plug the shuffle into your computer, and use the computer to copy data onto it, and delete stuff from it. The shuffle mounts as a disk drive, and arbitrary files can be placed there for data movement. I still carry a USB drive for moving data, but have used the Shuffle for this once or twice. The upshot is that you need a computer for the user interface for putting stuff onto the drive and removing it. There isn't space enough on it to put your entire CD collection, so you'll need to do this fairly frequently. For me, there is something to do every day, as I'm not listening to a daily podcast.

There are some buttons on the Shuffle. There is the off/sequential/shuffle switch. The device is either off, plays tracks sequentially, or plays them in random order. There is a play/pause button. That is, if it is currently playing, this button causes it to pause, and if it is paused, it will play. Of course, you can't tell if it is playing or not if the sound file has silence. Many of the podcasts and audio book tracks start with a few seconds of silence, and therefore, it isn't clear if it is playing or not. You just have to listen longer. It helps if the volume is high enough to hear it.

There is a four switch circular button. Press left to go to the previous track. Press left and hold it for a second or so to rewind in chunks. The Shuffle plays little snippets, each chunk further back in time. Press right to get to the next track. If you are in shuffle mode, it goes to a new random track. Press right and hold for a few seconds, and the Shuffle fast forwards, playing little snippets. Press up and the sound volume increases. Press down and the sound volume decreases.

And that would be it for the pack of gum. But this totally trivial user interface has some hidden unexpected behavior. For example, you can not play audio on the Shuffle while it is connected to a computer. This isn't much of an issue. My Linux computer OS has a utility that can play the mp3 tunes from the Shuffle while it is mounted. So, while the Shuffle can't play, the host computer can play those tunes right where they are.

One typically pauses the audio, then turns the Shuffle off. Since I often listen to books sequentially, it is important that I get back to where I was when I turn it back on. Sometimes, it forgets where I ended up, and it starts at the same place it started the last time. This can be many tracks ago, and I have no idea how many tracks. In particular, if the tracks have no silence at the start or end, there is no break between tracks in playback. There can be no indication at all that you are now on a new track. Also, when it forgets where you were, it also forgets what the volume setting you had was. So, if you had it on loud for the car, it can blast you at your desk. The guess is that one should wait a few seconds between pausing the audio and turning the unit off. That seems to reduce the frequency of this odd behavior to acceptable levels.

Since there is such a limited user interface, it is not a good device if you have more than one thing to listen to. For example, if you have 100 tracks of a book, and three podcasts to listen to, it can be maddening to listen to a podcast, and then try to navigate to track 56. I periodically delete tracks from my current book so that this isn't a problem. I also arrange the tracks so that the book is all the first tracks, and the podcasts are at the end. There are usually only a few.

The fast rewind feature stops at the beginning of the track. It will not proceed to the previous track. This is good if you want to find the beginning of the current track. Finding the beginning of the track can be done by skipping to the previous track, then skipping forward to the beginning of the current track. So this isn't as handy as it sounds. Still, it isn't entirely redundant, especially, if you've never heard the tracks in question. It isn't so hot if what you want to do is get toward the end of the previous track. In fact, you must go to the beginning of the previous track and fast forward to near the end. But there is no way to know that you are near the end if you've never heard it before.

The Shuffle is an odd sort of duck. The user interface is minimalistic, and a computer is required. There is no A/C charger, a computer is required to charge it. It is incredibly small. Even ear bud headphones are bigger. What makes it awesome is that what it does, it does very well. The sound quality is great. You may take this for granted, but for example, typical PC sound cards vary from useless to pretty good, and even sound cards on name brand computers can have erratic quality. From Apple, however, the sound is good or it doesn't go out the door. I suspect that they perform some sort of quality control test. What a concept.

I plug it into my stereo and listen to it over breakfast. Then I plug it into my car stereo's aux port, and continue where i left off. Then I plug headphones into it and walk across parking lots to work. So why didn't I do all this with my Walkman? Well, mainly because it takes a few seconds to fill it with hours of audio, where it takes an hour to record an hour of audio on a tape. Yet, I never spent an hour writing about the Walkman. I did use the Walkman in the car, through the aux port in the car stereo. That let me listen to something other than CDs. And, it was more convenient than ripping the tapes to CD by playing the tapes into my computer's sound card.

The upshot is that I no longer want a CD or tape player in my car. A simple AM/FM radio with an Aux port for my shuffle will do fine. But, you say, what about the round trip from Michigan to Florida? That's 19 hours each way. Well. I guess I'll just have to hook up to a computer when I get there.

Diesel PT Cruiser

On the 9th of February, 2006, I had an opportunity to test drive a diesel PT Cruiser. This vehicle option is not currently offered for sale in the United States. The car is has the Route 66 bundle of options, which probably means that it is loaded with features I personally wouldn't order on a new car. These might include the Moon roof, electric windows, the five disc mp3 CD changing stereo, tilt steering wheel, and brilliant yellow paint. I'd go with a stripped car with A/C and cruise control. At this point, I'd go with an AM/FM radio with Aux in - so I could plug in my iPod. Then I'd stick a Velcro patch on the dash to hold the iPod. Still, 5 mp3 encoded CDs can give you a total of about 70 hours of high quality music without fiddling with it. Great for those road trips to Argentina. The glove compartment is very roomy, and could easily hold the audio cable when not in use.

This car has a 5 speed manual transmission that is very forgiving and easy to operate. The 2.2 liter turbocharged diesel generates 150 hp, which is more than enough to make this sized vehicle very responsive. The steering and suspension make it agile. Most of my real driving is highway, and the 42 MPG highway rating would be very welcome to my 35,000 mile per year commute. The long range of the car would allow me to fill the tank less often, which would be a real time saver.

The car started instantly. Though it was a cold winter day, the car had just been driven. It would be interesting to see how it behaves on a cold winter morning after sitting out in the cold all night. This is an historic problem for diesel engines, but it isn't clear that it is a problem for this one. In any case, my house has an attached garage, so even if this is a problem for this vehicle, it likely would not be much of an issue for me.

I left the moon roof open. The windshield glare which such systems often generate did not materialize. I have no idea why not.

The clutch engagement travel is slightly shorter than my own car, but the feedback was clear, and after that first engagement, I didn't have to think about it again. The brakes are slightly more sensitive than my own car, but again, driving was very natural after the first minute. We'll see how my own car behaves when I go home. In particular, my own car does not have power steering...

The route I used put me onto the highway almost at once. For a moment, I was startled to be doing 100 on the ramp! However, the big numbers are in Kilometers Per Hour, not Miles Per Hour, so all it meant was that it could get up to 60 MPH to match highway speed with a significant margin. Once I realized where the MPH numbers were, it was easy enough to read without further thought. This car is clearly built for Europe, so, of course, the big numbers are KPH. The car drives smooth enough that it isn't that clear if you are doing 100 MPH or 100 KPH. Acceleration at highway speed is smooth, and there isn't any doubt that the rated top speed of 114 MPH is achievable. One of the reasons I haven't gotten a traffic ticket in years is that I obey the law.

I coasted to an exit, and followed around to get back on the highway for the return trip. This gave an opportunity to check out steering, turn signals, visibility, brakes, shifting and suspension in turns. The car gets high marks everywhere.

Back on the highway, I checked out the cruise control. A dash light tells you it is engaged, and it was able to smoothly accelerate and coast. I reset the Average Fuel Economy (which, despite the European target, read in Miles Per Gallon), and the numbers quickly climbed. The trip was too short to show EPA estimates, however.

The route then included some stop and go, and turns you might find in city driving. Since I'd just reset the Average Fuel Economy gauge, I watched the numbers go lower while idling at a stop light. That's to be expected. My house gets really bad gas mileage too.

My biggest complaint would probably be that though the steering wheel is on the left, the fuel door is on the right. Clearly, the fuel door should be on the driver's side of the car, as God intended. That way people don't end up facing each other at busy gas stations. Speaking of which, several gas stations near my house sell diesel, so there would be no fear of not being able to find it. Also, the generous range is also a welcome feature. Since diesel is safer than gasoline, I might consider carrying a small spare amount in a sealed container in the hatch. This is not something I do with gasoline cars.

My youngest vehicle has 150,000 miles. With luck, it will hold out until the diesel PT Cruiser, or maybe the diesel Caliber are sold in the States. If not, the there's always the diesel Jeep Liberty.

Astronomical Gas Mileage

My new (well it is new to me) 2000 Saturn SL is proving to be more efficient than expected. The EPA mileage is 32 MPG highway, much less than the 37 MPG my 1988 Mazda 626 was getting before it started seriously needing a ring job. In the first few trips, this Saturn was getting about 31 MPG, and until the Mazda is repaired, it was expected that gas bills would be higher, and that would be that. Part of the reason that the vehicles perform better than the EPA estimates is that the vehicle isn't driven at 70 MPH, even if the speed limit sign says so. The speedometer seldom goes above 65 MPH. Tests on the Mazda shows that this can save 10% to 15% in fuel while costing 10% in time. That is, an hour commute might take an extra six minutes. However, given congestion, it is probably much less time than that.

Computers can do more than just allow one to write a blog and edit email. They can also assist in computing. So, it is somewhat of a surprise to find that this Saturn is clearly achieving 40 MPG, on average.

My commute is long, and mostly highway. Apparently, it simply required a small number of tanks of gas to learn how to drive it efficiently. Perhaps this young stallion is learning how it is being driven as well. It is gratifying to learn that not only was the acquisition of this vehicle cheap, but running it is cheap as well. That it will save the burning of 200 gallons of fuel a year is a bonus. A 10% savings is a significant amount of fuel and money.

It also solves the problem of why this Saturn, which is younger and smaller than the Mazda, with the same kind of 5 speed manual transmission, would not achieve better fuel economy. The answer is simple. It does.

The US president has declared that we have an addiction to oil. He called on technology to save us. Presumably he meant hybrid vehicles, solar and wind power, etc. He also seems determined to drill for oil in Alaska. Frankly, we don't need it. Drilling in Alaska will take more than five years, and could possibly contribute 6% of the US energy needs. Hybrids and light diesels are just starting to come on the market, and will take years to make much difference. On the other hand, driving a little slower has an immediate effect. Sizing your next vehicle a little smaller takes effect as soon as it is purchased.

So far, this Saturn has held up quite well. If it makes it to 250,000 miles (another 100,000 miles), it will have clearly been worthwhile. If the engine holds up that long without emitting blue clouds out of the tailpipe, then it will clearly have lived up to its name: The Lord of the Rings.

Comment Spam

Father Roderick doesn't like TypeKey because visually impared people can't post. His solution is to make his forum wide open to spammers. He has a big fan following, and a small army of volunteers from around the world check his forum for spam, approximately hourly.

On my own Yahoo Groups, I have moderated registration. In the registration, the prospective new member must pass the Turing test. They have to answer the question, "What is this group about, and why do you want to join it?". If they answer 'I love this group', then they don't get to join. Not all humans are able to act as if they are indistiguishable from a human at a teletype, and they don't get to join. Oh well. So I'm more restrictive than I'd like to be. And yet, I try to have more than one moderator on my groups so that if I get hit by a bus (or something) the group goes on. It's not an army, it's just another active group member or three.

My blogspot and LiveJournal blogs both have open comments. I've not had any spam, which suggests that no one knows these blogs exist. If you're reading this, you've found one of them.

My favorite spammer story is that when a spammer was taken to court and convicted, his home address became part of the public record. Someone (anonymously) wrote a little script to sign him up for 100,000 snail mail catalogs... poetic justice.

The end of Xenocide

I finished reading Xenocide, on dead trees, just in time to return it to the Library. It was touch and go there for a bit. But the morning of the due date, there were only twenty pages to go, and it was a Saturday.

The more i think about Orson Scott Card's books, the more i think he must have gotten cash to write more or less favorably on the subject of ID. There is plenty of hard science and smart thinking in these books. It just seems unlikely that Card has actually bought into that kind of nonsense.

Oh well. It was a nonsense article, i can ignore it. i've started his book entitled Shadow Puppets, and have checked out the audio version of Shadow of the Giant, both are in the Enderverse, following the character Bean. So far, there is no evidence of dementia, so i'll continue down this line of entertainment.

People change. There is a newspaper article where Ann Rice, author of many entertaining vampire books, says that she's become a Christian, and will be writing Christian books from now on. Well, that doesn't retroactively change the old books. As a Christian, you might think i'd be into it... but it just doesn't sound very entertaining.

It happens to musicians too. Billy Joel has dropped out of pop, and has composed some classical music. And its hot, too, if you're into it. I wish more musicians would show off their talent.

ID Card

Orson Scott Card, whose Ender series books were reviewed in this blog (positively, the only negative review so far has been a dictionary, and it was reviewed as a dictionary), wrote a column on Intelligent Design.

He wanders around alot in this article, so much so that it is difficult to come away with the feeling that he has said anything in a definitive way. And yet, there is this air that he thinks that there should be a competitive theory to the Theory of Evolution, and the Intelligent Design is such an idea. Yet no evidence is presented that Intelligent Design presents any evidence for itself. The only arguments appear to be against Evolution, or against the way that science has defended Evolution. In fact, he seems to argue that Evolution should not defend itself. However, Card knows that all ideas in science must be defended. That much comes from his fiction.

He presents seven points. They're numbered. Here are some rebuttals.

1. Intelligent Design is just Creation Science in a new suit (name-calling).

A mathematician will say that if you know how to get from point A to point B, and you know how to get from point B to point C, then it follows that you know how to get from point A to point C. The easiest way for scientists to attack Intelligent Design is to show that it is in fact exactly Creation Science, with some minor differences. That way, one can refer to how Creation Science is not science, and then the new details can be refuted on their own. This isn't name calling, just efficient.

2. Don't listen to these guys, they're not real scientists (credentialism).

No one says that Michael Behe doesn't have a doctorate. What they say is that his ideas aren't new, and have been successfully refuted in the literature. Further, they don't, in general, say that ID'ers aren't scientists, it is more that what ID'ers are saying isn't science, for one reason or another which is also generally stated. When there has been a debate, it has been generally the scientists who ignore name calling and stick to the most real issues.

3. If you actually understood science as we do, you'd realize that these guys are wrong and we're right; but you don't, so you have to trust us (expertism).

There is a problem with modern science. Though the evidence is collected and analyzed, it takes some real effort to get through it. That's one reason that scientists like to have independent confirmation, that more than one person or group takes data and performs analysis, despite the obvious counter incentive of allowing competition. It's also one of the reasons that peer review is encouraged. That way, when all is said and done, that when desktop fusion is announced to the public, there is some reason to believe in it without having to perform the experiments yourself. But it is hardly a single expert or group of experts that is to be trusted. How many Intelligent Design groups are there performing experiments, collecting data, performing analysis?

4. They got some details of those complex systems wrong, so they must be wrong about everything (sniping).

When scientists evaluate Intelligent Design, they have come up with evidence or analysis flaws fatal to the concept every time. The arguments are generally comprehensive. By comparison, the ID arguments about Evolution often concern themselves with details. Much of the time, these details are discovered from the literature where scientists talk about what is not yet known. Most of this is knowable, and often is soon known.

5. The first amendment requires the separation of church and state (politics).

Card asserts that ID isn't Creationism, and is therefore not religion. That's not what came out at the Dover trial. But if ID isn't religion (and I agree with this much), it also isn't science, as there is no evidence and analysis that stands up to scrutiny. As it isn't science, it shouldn't be taught in science class. As it isn't religion, it shouldn't be taught in philosophy or comparative religions. Moreover, as it seems to be bereft of anything interesting, it can only be taught as a set of bad examples in thinking. The clear conclusion is that it shouldn't be taught.

6. We can't possibly find a fossil record of every step along the way in evolution, but evolution has already been so well-demonstrated it is absurd to challenge it in the details (prestidigitation).

There is representative fossil evidence of every step along the way in Evolution. Further, there are independent, complimentary lines of evidence, such as the genetic record. The results are compelling. Scientists don't say that it is absurd to challenge, they say that challenging it will require serious evidence and analysis. Evolution has been ordinary for hundreds of years. A successful challenge will require extraordinary evidence. It was five years before Einstein's Relativity was taken seriously as a replacement to the Newtonian system. The evidence and analysis were extraordinary.

7. Even if there are problems with the Darwinian model, there's no justification for postulating an "intelligent designer" (true).

But Card doesn't seem to believe this:

So when the answer to the question "why does this natural phenomenon occur?" is "because God wants it that way," then science simply has nothing to add to the conversation.

Since scientists don't insert God into the question or answer, they have always been free to add to the conversation. Just because some IDer talks about God doesn't mean that science has nothing to say.

Like Card, I feel free to teach my children whatever i want. And, like Card, I will expect them learn how to look things up, and question those things. Just because someone wrote it, doesn't make it true. The Internet is the prime example here. It is very easy to look up the mass of Pluto on the Internet, and if one walks away with the first answer found, it is very likely wrong. It isn't because someone has an agenda about the mass of Pluto, it is just that modern measurements are so much better than those of only thirty years ago that this older data can be safely ignored. Any value for the mass of Pluto that predates the discovery of the moon Charon will be based on inferior evidence. The new evidence is extraordinary. There can be many reasons for something being erroneous.

If my son grows up believing that Santa Clause doesn't exist, there is room for him to believe that Christmas is a magical time of the year.

I don't believe in Evolution. The evidence strongly suggests that it is correct. I'd bet my life on it. In fact, I have. Modern medicine is based partly on Evolution. So when my gall bladder died and was removed, I trusted the hospital staff to treat the infection properly. This treatment can fail if Evolution is not taken into account, since the infecting microbes can evolve immunity to an antibiotic in about the time frame of the infection.

Evolution of the SUV

I was just at the Auto Show in Detroit yesterday. Many of the new species appear to be related to each other and to previous forms, including 'retro' throwbacks to earlier forms. The evidence suggests that SUVs are evolved from less advanced forms. Indeed the brakes preceded engines. Shortly after four wheeled soap box derby creatures split from the two wheeled species of scooters and hobby horses that were extant at the time, breaks evolved due to survival pressures inherent at the bottoms of some environments, namely huge hills with short runoff areas. One may argue that simply adding more wheels involves no new functionality, just an aberration in design details. So too can early brake designs be considered aberrant wheels that happened to extend survival probability. Steam engines provided considerable survival advantage, as evident at the Henry Ford Museum, and made possible the expansion of environments that could be inhabited to include farms. That gasoline engines evolved from steam engines has been documented in a variety of areas, popularly the BBC show The Day The Universe Changed. These kinds of evidence and much, much more has pretty much refuted the theory that SUVs and their engines were created by God Last Thursday. If God also created the rest of the Universe at that time, including all the evidence of past automotive evolution, including the written, film, and fossil (museum) records of prior forms, then the theory that God created the Universe Last Thursday is non-falsifiable when God is defined as Omnipotent, Infallible and Devious. My claim is that such a God is unworthy of praise. Thus, the theory is also refutable on theological grounds.

Xenocide

I was reading the Ender's Game series by listening to audio books on CD from the Library. Excellent performances, and great listening on the way to work. However, the tapes for Xenocide have half been eaten by some prior tape player, and could not be deciphered. Now, i'm reading it on dead trees.

Chapter 12 starts with a conversation between members of two intelligent non-human species, talking about humans.

They never know anything. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. Individually, human beings are all dolts.

Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.

So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals - and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.

Exactly.

I like this book alot. Orson Scott Card has just described the scientific method, in a brief, clear, and hysterically funny way. The series so far is full of insights with descriptions that delicately and elegantly run roughshod all over everything.

Last Thursday

In Hawking's A Brief History of Time, he spends much of the time talking about the origin of the Universe, and the history of the thinking that has brought science to current theories. Along the way, he talks about Last Thursdayism. In Last Thursdayism, one believes that God created the Universe the way it looks now, in particular, it looks as if it were billions of years old, and you remember your childhood that you never had (unless you are a child currently). You never had a childhood, because, since you were created last Thursday, all of those memories were created by God.

Now, it can be argued that an Omnipotent God could certainly have created the Universe in this manner. And, this theory can never be disproven. In particular, since God is omnipotent and flawless, there will never be any evidence that God made some mistake, for example, in creating the fictitious past. One might question the motives of God, for example that she was impatient to enjoy the Universe of this moment, rather than wait the eons. One might speculate that God was too lazy to create the complete Universe, that creating a Universe that is just a light week in radius is easier, since the Universe will be recreated next Thursday, or something. These speculations could never be proven or disproven either.

Some would suggest that this theory implies a God that is devious. God created the Universe last Thursday, but with fossils and astronomical phenomenon that appear to be millions or billions of years old. Why would God invent a Universe that appears to evolve when it actually doesn't? Frankly, it strikes me as evil. Some would say that it isn't my place to judge God. But this isn't the kind of God I care to believe in. Its not the kind of God that I would find worthy of praise.

While Last Thursdayism is absurd, it isn't really different from Creationism, where some, at least, consider the Universe to be less than 10,000 years old. The same arguments apply. All of them.

Galileo told the Vatican that where the Bible contradicts common sense, it is generally understood that it should be interpreted as allegorical. It took the Catholic Church a long time to officially see this point, but it has happened. I find it very odd that it is factions of Protestantism, invented theologically because the Catholic Church was so slow in seeing reason, is the last bastion of stick in the mud theology. Martin Luther would not be pleased.

Briefly

I have this long commute, and often use the time to listen to audio books. Many come from the library. One of the recent audio books in a series, Xenocide, was only available on tape. So, I developed a way to play the tapes into my computer's sound card, and convert to mp3. However, the tapes were of very poor quality, and I ended up checking out the dead trees version.

Just to make sure that it was the tapes, not my system, I ripped my historic copy of Stephen W. Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Nothing wrong with my old tapes.

It is only 5 1/2 hours, so i listened to it twice. It is a long commute.

The reader, Michael Jackson, who does not sing for a living, is a capable reader, but not a scientist. There are a few names, like Chandrasekhar, which would give anyone pause. And, he chuckles at the absurdities, like the quark names: up, down, strange and charm, or the Einstein quote, God does not play dice.

The book is, in my opinion, not so much about time, but about gravity. Even then, it isn't so much about what gravity is, but about what it isn't. And, it isn't currently viewable with the other forces in a consistent way. Oh, and gravity primarily governs the past and future history of the Universe, which is all of space-time, hence the time references.

It isn't a new book, but seems to have avoided obsolescence reasonably well, at least for what he says. The age of the Universe was known only to within a factor of two. He says ten to twenty thousand million years. That's 10 to 20 gigayears, or for an American, 10 to 20 billion years. His handling of big (and small) numbers is annoying. He'll say 5 million, million, million, million, million years or a five with thirty zeroes after it. I wish he'd have just explained scientific notation up front.

Additionally, he mixes metric and English measurement units for length. I'd have preferred he just used metric, possibly by introducing conversions. That, and I'm an American.

Further, there are now reasonably well accepted models of the Universe earlier than when it was one second old. Plenty of stuff goes on in that first second that matters later on. Still, this isn't An Exhaustive History of Time, so it is quite OK if a few details are skimmed.

Something I'd forgotten is that it has a preface written by Carl Sagan. Sagan doesn't say billions even once. And, he says things that I had attributed to Hawking. I've never read the dead trees version, and feel that I'd never have not noticed that the preface was by someone else in that format. Sagan always had interesting things to say, and an eloquent way of saying them. I haven't read all of Sagan's books, but I've always been pleasantly impressed when I see another of his works.

Son of a Witch

Son of a Witch

I thought i was finished with the Wizard of Oz saga. The Judy Garland movie is shown at Halloween and Easter every year. I read two or three of the fourteen books at Project Gutenberg. I had this idea i'd read them all. I figured that Frank Baum wouldn't write any more books. I had no idea that so many others had written about Oz.

My local library had a copy of the audio book Son of a Witch on CD, read by the author in a capable way. More entertainment for my long commute. I haven't experienced Gregory Maguire's first book, Wicked, but it seems clear that it isn't required for comprehension. Now it appears worth seeking.

While Dorothy and the Wizard play parts in this story, they aren't big parts. While the world is similar to Oz, there is much that is new. Also, the point of view is so different, that its nearly unrecognizable. It really could have been a new place. However, the new point of view seems to have been part of the point, without having to write the other view.

The story seems to meander for about three quarters of the volume. I had the impression that were i reading it on dead trees that i might not have had enough momentum to finish it. The main character doesn't seem to accomplish anything, and sometimes beats himself up over it. Then, when everything is all set, the most meaningless bits are gathered together and used to accomplish goals on a grand scale, much to the hero's own surprise. Well, it was my surprise too. And, the story was worth waiting for.

The theme that no one is evil in their own eyes is not explicitly stated, but central to the structure. The Wicked Witch of the West is dead, so she can't tell her own story. Rather, she had a son, who tries to discover things about her after her death. In this way, it is like Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series, where the story is told from Dracula's point of view. Dracula is a vampire, yes, but also a devout Catholic. He's not afraid of crosses as evil incarnate fearing ultimate good, rather he respects them and will not desecrate them.

Another feature of the work is that the author raises difficult questions and answers them. These questions often have multiple answers, and over the course these answers are enumerated. They aren't forced, but seem to organically come up when the hero has some decision to make. Some of the questions are normally recognized as rhetorical, and they are answered anyway, and the answers are worthwhile after all as they sound like wisdom. And why not?

In an afterword interview with the author, he makes a reference to the Harry Potter series. In particular, as Rowling broke the various rules of books for children and teens willy nilly, Gregory feels the confinement of these rules relaxed. Rowling has real depth in her stories, book five has extraordinary length. Obviously, kids of all ages are instantly addicted to them. Publishers recognize that the numbers show that the rules can be irrelevant. Other authors have been more critical of the new giant.

And yet, it should be pointed out that Son of a Witch is not a kid's book. It was written for adults, with adult language, and adult themes. While going through it, it seemed for a bit that it could be salvaged for younger readers without damaging it too much, as Card says he did with his Enderverse. You know, fix the foul lanuage, trim here and there. Maybe. And maybe not.