Looking Out To Sea

This story is just too funny not to pass on: PZ Myers gets barred from entering a screening of Expelled, a film whose message is basically “the Darwinists (sic) are intellectual frauds who have kept real science out of biology”.

Read his account in full, I urge you — there is a most fantastic twist to the tale.

Watching how the ID supporters attempt to spin this story will be amusing. The producers delved too deep in the Mines of Irony and who knows what they awoke in the darkness?

A while ago — I’m pretty sure it was before the Christmas holidays, so on the order of months anyway — I sent a query to Boots’ Customers Services email address, asking about their Meal Deals.

I wanted to know where they got their meat and eggs, were they free range, ethically-treated or other appropriate category, and could they please think about adding this information to their website if not on the packaging itself.

The reply arrived today, after I’d long since given up.

All of our meat is sourced from approved suppliers, which are audited for quality and safety on a regular basis. Sources are always subject to change depending on season and availability. It is a not a requirement to be specific this is why the details are not on the pack.

I hope this information is of assistance to you.

In fact, no, this information is of almost no assistance to me. It tells me virtually nothing, or than the fact that Boots are keeping very tight wraps on the provenance of their food, so it can’t be all that great. Otherwise they would be shouting their hippy bona fides from the highest treetops.

“approved suppliers”

Approved by whom, for what purpose? This could mean nothing more than it’s legal for sale to humans in the UK.

“audited for quality and safety”

Again, no indication whether this auditing process returns good results or whether these suppliers are consistently threatened with losing their licence. It could be either.

“always subject to change”

This probably means they go with the cheapest supplier at the time.

Most disappointed. Though fearing the worst I have given up eating their meat-based sandwiches. And on good days, like today, I take in home made curry. ;-)

Been trying — and mostly failing — to engage with Haskell’s foreign function interface (FFI). I have just managed to get something together although bits of it are closer to cargo cult programming at the moment. Write these keywords, intone these phrases, bam it works.

Lost at C

For this exercise I wanted to write a ‘library’ in C then call it from within the Haskell code. My magic C library has two parts, foo.c and foo.h. The first part squares the supplied integer! Amazing!

#include "foo.h"
 
int square(int n)
{
    return n * n;
}

The other part is the header file for this:

int square(int n);

I bet you would all have struggled to come up with something so hardcore…

Deep Voodoo

The Haskell to link to this great library is:

module Main where
 
import System.Environment
 
main = do [n] <- getArgs
          print $ sqr $ read n
 
foreign import ccall "foo.h square" sqr :: Int -> Int

And I have to admit that the last line doesn’t really mean much to me. I know what all the bits do, but I wouldn’t know how to adapt that to more interesting or varied callouts.

But one step at a time is the way to go.

Compilation and Linking

The first step is to create the library we want to call out to, then build the Haskell around it.

$ ghc -c foo.c
$ ghc --make -fffi Foo.hs foo.o -o foo

So you need to create foo.o and then pass it and the Haskell source to the compiler with the -fffi argument. Then we try it out:

$ ./foo 3
9

Not bad. (Though not actually what one might call “good” either. Merely satisfactory.) At some later point I will attempt side-effectful functions and maybe even some data structures.

Last week the kettle died at work, but on Monday a shiny new one arrived that even has a little button you can hit with your thumb to open the spring-loaded lid. Brilliant! Our current kettle at home is a real hassle to get the lid off.

But we’ll be leaving it behind soon. So should we go for the kettle that changes colour as it boils or the one we can send text messages to?

This is the most baffling turn of events from a man I have often considered to harbour quite a deal of common sense.

Dr Rowan Williams, said “Neo Darwinism and Creationist science deserve each other. Creationism is a version of slightly questionable science pretending to be theology, and Neo Darwinism is a questionable theology pretending to be science.”

If evolution is bad religion — and not a science at all — where exactly does that leave his views on the history of life. If we weren’t created and we didn’t evolve, we…?

Dr Williams admitted that Neo Darwinism, a theory supported by Atheist Professor Richard Dawkins, is “most problematic” to theology, but he called it “a pseudo science” and “deeply vulnerable to intellectual challenge because it is trying to be a theology.”

I’m extremely curious why Rowan Williams thinks “trying to be a theology” makes one open to intellectual challenge. Even the ridiculous Answers in Genesis creationists admit there are arguments that creationists should not use, but that doesn’t stop them being used all the goddamn time. Clearly intellectual challenges have no effect on theology.

Despite all these apparent absurdities I’m not willing to write Williams off yet. He does not have a good track record on being understood by the press, so I’m willing to wait for an official transcript to appear. But it doesn’t look good for him.

Success!

Our bid was successful and we got the flat! Awesome stuff. So if anyone wants to see our current flat you’ll have to be prompt at inviting yourselves…

Anyway. Assuming all goes well with valuations and the lenders are happy to burden us with substantial debt, we will become fat property magnates. How’d you like them apples?

I’m currently sitting in the corner of the room, typing on my computer. I’m listening to The Reindeer Section’s brilliantly morose second album, but the speakers are behind me and pointing away from me. I’d much rather be sitting over there, on the sofa.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about laptops. And I honestly have to say I’m being quite tempted by the Asus eee-by-gum-lad. It’s cheap (+1), it runs Linux (+1), it has a small screen (-1), it has a Flash hard disk (+1), it has WiFi and Ethernet (+2, I’m looking at you Apple).

My only reticence is with the keyboard. I’d like a chance to play with one for a while but I can’t find any stockists that are likely to have them on display. (Apparently Toys R Us sell them, but probably locked in boxes if they have any in stock north of the Watford Gap.) If I can happily type on it then it looks like a winner.

A thought just occurs — does it have a hash key?

Edit: Naw, I’ve completely changed my mind. This is what the Dixons website says: “916 kg This is the weight of the appliance in KG”. I’ll never fit that in my bag! ;-)

Last week we tried and failed to become terrifying property barons¹ that would grind the faces of the poor. We didn’t get the place we were looking at — in fact, we were £5000 short. The bid that was accepted was 36% over the asking price, for those if you interested. We are disappointed but not too much.

Another place closes on Tuesday, so I’ll be phoning with our bid tomorrow. We’re a lot more excited about this, for some unquantifiable reason, but there’s nothing we can do to make it easier. This one has a lower asking price (it’s a smaller flat, after all) but in some respects it’s nicer — a more central location, bright airy views and so on.

We went to see the place again (the owners must be getting thoroughly sick of the sight of us by now…) and took some photos, some measurements, walked around and around, imagined where we would store everything. Tried to work out everything that we would need and see if this place would fit the bill. Nothing was insurmountable… except the fact of not knowing what to offer for it.

We’re currently looking at elegant graphs of figures to evaluate what do we bid? and what do we save? and what’s a silly percentage over the offer price? but not getting anywhere. It is heartening that we were so close last time (we were second place) but with only one data point we don’t know whether we lost out because the higher bid was unusually high, or predictably high or something else.

Maybe — just maybe — I’ll be able to post on Tuesday evening with the good news that we have a flat. I honestly hope so.

PZ Myers recently touched on this question in his response to John Gray:

The critics of atheism seem, without exception, to be lacking in imagination. Over and over again, what we hear from them is desperate attempts to pigeonhole atheism as just another religion; they squat uncomprehendingly in their hovels built of faith and peer quizzically at the godless, seeking correspondence with their familiar theological nonsense, and crow in triumph when they find something that they can sort of line up with their experiences. “They want more people to think rationally — why, that’s evangelism!” Never mind that you could, with the same legitimacy, argue that when one person mentions to another that it is raining, they are attempting to evangelize their precipitational worldview.

Denotation, denotation, denotation…

In the broadest sense, practically every statement or opinion we make is evangelist in that sense. “Don’t you oppress me with your belief that this pasta tastes great! I’ll make up my own mind, dammit!”

At the opposite end of the spectrum — and this is according to the relevant Wikipedia page — evangelism is not even the same as proselytism in Christianity. It’s not enough to just attempt to convince someone of the truth of your statements; there’s something more to it, though the particular differences are rather obscure and I don’t feel confident teasing them apart. Evangelical religion seems to prefer “personal experience” over other means of proselytism, but this may not be completely accurate. (Maybe Rob can shed some light on this?)

In technology, some companies have advocates and some have evangelists. I’m not sure what the difference is here, but intuitively I would say that evangelists attempt to push a lifestyle whereas advocates push a technology. In the end they are both intended to sell more products.

Connotation, connotation, connotation

I think most uses of ‘evangelism’ are not meant in the strict religious sense, but with the understanding that evangelising is inherently bad. If you disagree with what someone says you can say that they are evangelising rather than advocating — or the more plain-speaking arguing.

If you’re from an evangelical religious community then obviously evangelism isn’t a dirty word. So it probably doesn’t get used as an attack in such cases. But everyone else — who would think of Billy Graham or Pat Robertson on hearing the word — feels a bit uneasy with that kind of religion. And yet by itself it shouldn’t have these connotations when applied generally — it’s only because people like Pat Robertson have such an odious reputation that the word means more than just “bringing good news”.

I’m shuffling around in my dressing gown today. Went to Glasgow this morning to see some friends for brunch. The plan was to then go to one of those friend’s new house for tea, but I feel too full of the cold so we came home just after lunch time.

I slept until it got dark and my throat demanded more painkillers. They’re not really doing much to help though. I think I’d rather just sleep for the next 36 hours and wake up feeling normal. But instead I have to see flats and people tomorrow (and do some studying too).

There is no good time to have a cold, but the worst time is when you’ve got loads of stuff planned.