Looking Out To Sea

If you say pudding often enough it becomes a verb. We were pudding yesterday evening and will be doing so again today. Serial pudders? That’s us.

Of course if you say it too much it becomes a horrible non word.

I’m willing to bet you’ve never seen stupidity like this before:

Scientists at the Roslin-based firm Global Bioenergetics think disturbance to bees from mobile phones, radio signals, wi-fi and microwaves is disrupting them with devastating results.

Oh no! It’s electrosmog!

This little report in The Scotsman is such awful, transparent, witless advertising for some useless snake oil that I’m honestly gobsmacked it could ever have been published.

The scientists are trying out a new device, called a Bioemitter, that transmits electromagnetic waves to provide a stable environment and reduce stress for the bees in their hives, boosting their immune system.

By strange coincidence the scientists¹ have just the thing to solve all your bee-related problems! (It can even work pigs and chickens!) They use electromagnetic waves at particular frequencies² to boost the bees’ immune systems and kill off parasites. It’s almost like magic: it must be very advanced technology.

But what’s this down here, right at the bottom of the article, after all these winning statements about how much good this Bioemitter can do?

Now [the company] is trying to secure funding to carry out trials on bees using the device.

Yes! That’s it! All these claims are nonsense! They have no idea if this thing works at all. (And given the absurd nature of the claims, I think it’s easy to guess the outcome of any rigorous trial.)

To round things off, why not mention a scientist? Any scientist will do!

Ms Murray said: “Bees are so representative of the whole ecosystem. Einstein said we have only got five years to live without the bees. I believe this is evidence that everything we have done to our environment is coming to a head.”

Ah, where would an article on good beekeeping be without mention of that famed theoretical physicist beekeeper Albert Einstein.

Last week in The Herald:

Pupils show a lack of interest in computer studies

University students are being used to help rekindle interest in computing science courses in Scottish schools amid concerns for the future of the subject.

… The difficulty for teachers and local authorities stems from the difference between computing studies and ICT, the latter being more common in schools. Computing studies deals with technical aspects of computers and technology, while ICT teaches pupils the user side of technology.

This was certainly the case when I was at school — computing was taught by people who had no apparent understanding of the subject beyond the use of application software. So that was what we learned. Certainly nothing of the mathematics, programming or rich history of the field. (I started Standard Grade computing but dropped it after a couple of weeks when I read through the past papers and realised I stood a good chance of passing the two-year course without study.)

A day or so after that article in The Herald, two responses appeared on the letters page. The first, from the University of Edinburgh’s school liaison in the Informatics department:

Policy-makers at all levels need to understand that being able to “use” Microsoft Word or Google doesn’t make you a computer expert — it merely makes you just another consumer. If we want our children to be prepared for a better future than as readily replaceable call-centre fodder, then we need to understand that the wielders of tools are always under the control of the creators of tools, and that ICT is not computer science.

I don’t recall seeing the situation summarised with such clarity and conciseness before. This is exactly the problem (and what’s more, the problem isn’t even limited to computing or to Scotland).

What really iced the cake for me was the second letter on the subject that day, from a teacher at my old school. Mark Tennant wasn’t around when I studied there but he obviously knows what he’s talking about, and highlights some alarming turns:

Faced with falling numbers in a department that requires costly equipment and resources to run, it is hardly surprising that head teachers are choosing to close computing departments. I would, however, implore them not to take the easiest option, but rather work with the departments to re-invigorate their computing courses for pupils, right from the start of secondary school.

Even contemplating closing down computing departments seems horrifying from my view — but then, if the subject they teach is as dull as Mr Tennant makes out, what merit is there in keeping them open? It seems clear that the people in charge (of the curriculum and of the individual schools) don’t realise what computing should be about.

I wrote to Mr Tennant (tracked him down via his blog) to thank him for his letter and to ask him how I might help. He says (I hope he doesn’t mind being quoted):

If you are wanting to help out with the campaign then the best thing you can do is make some noise — make sure that you respond to any articles in the press, write to your MSP etc. Broadly, there are three messages we are trying to get across.

1. There is a difference between computing and ICT skills, and both are important to have in schools,

2. The computing curriculum is outdated and contains irrelevant content, but we aim to address this through “Curriculum For Excellence”

3. Head Teachers are limiting pupil’s options if they remove computing from their schools, and parents should be very concerned.

I will be writing to my MSP about this. If you feel as strongly I recommend you do the same. You can find out exactly who that is by inserting your postcode or address on the Scottish Parliament website.

Things you can do no problem at all:

• Stand at the cooker, laptop in one hand for reading email, idly stirring soup with the other hand.
• Playing Tux Racer on the sofa.

Things that will take some setting up:

• Connecting up to router console port because there does not seem to be any terminal software in the default repositories.

What’s the latest on Thud?, I’m sure I heard you say. Well, bits and pieces. I’m still at the point where I don’t really have a good strategy for the AI, I’m just playing. But whenever I have an idea it takes a while to link it in to the current system. So I’d like to get some strategy combinators working. That might help to add a bit more structure to my code, which is looking quite messy now.

Also, I made some enquiries about other board game implementations and received some good replies from the Haskell Café list. A couple of notable ideas:

• Don’t bother holding an array for the board, just carry around separate lists for each piece. Makes it easy to locate friends and foes on an otherwise-quite-large board.
• Use Prompt to abstract ideas of user/computer interaction. I’ll have to look into this again but from what I remember it was quite an elegant way of containing a two-sided conversation (between user and computer, for example).

I also wrote a bit of simple network code to see how to write a server. I can connect to a known port with telnet and send the server messages; it sends back the number of characters in each line in return. It then hangs up on receiving “quit!” — not complex, but pretty close to what I need.

I have a conundrum to lay out. Or at least, a question which seems to require some nuance in answering.

One the one hand, it’s poor form to rebut an argument without some familiarity with it. Recently Mark Ravenhill wrote a terrible piece about how “Richard Dawkins’ secular army must be stopped or future generations will be denied a source of inspiration” (that’s a direct quote, believe it or not) at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. It’s painfully obvious that the guy hasn’t read anything of what Dawkins has written on religion — he erects and burns straw men with gay abandon. Most of those projected opinions are the opposite of what Dawkins states in his book. And it’s not the first time people have attacked his work at length without bothering to read or understand it. (Mary Midgley’s review of The Selfish Gene is a classic in this genre; you can read Dawkins’ extended rebuttal to it here.)

On the other hand, it’s a common argument from pedlars of pseudoscience and the like to claim they will reveal all the proper scientific details in their book. And refuse to be drawn on the matter unless you read their book. Which is to say, buy their book.

So the question is, what kind of argument is “read this book!” and should it be used with sincerity? When is it valid? In the first case, it’s obvious that if you’re criticising someone’s views you should have at least a reasonable understanding of those views. And yet many people will hide behind that, using the cost and effort as a shield for their weak arguments. I’m not spending twenty quid on Amazon every time I run across a crank with “revolutionary” ideas on physics, medicine or what-have-you. I feel that this doesn’t let them off the hook.

The middle ground exists, when the arguments are large and complex enough to fill a book but the proponent tries to condense them. If someone writes, say, a blog post to describe their ideas, is it reasonable to attack the contents of this post only — is it valid to argue against just the presented arguments? It seems disingenuous to think otherwise — there is no visible difference between someone who presents all of a poor argument and someone who presents the weakest part of a good argument. Both can claim their ideas get better explanation in their book. Buy my book!

I feel a certain degree of unease when I see people use this gambit, whichever side I agree with. It doesn’t help anyone’s understanding to say “you don’t know anything, away and read This Book”. I don’t like to see it used even when I agree with the people who use it. This may be an inherent dislike of unfree information, which is probably related. It’s okay to make a claim if you’re willing to reveal all the information that supports that claim. That seems as good a guiding principle as any.

Yesterday I got home from work and set to making some stock. I was unsure if there was a good way or bad way to do this, so I pulled out The River Cottage Meat Book from the shelf.

Fifteen minutes later I had almost completely lost track of what I had intended to do, as I was so engrossed in this great book. But I eventually got the stuff together and (after straining it all today) I confess it smells amazing. I’m now quite upset that we’re planning to spend this weekend away and I won’t get to use it immediately.

We’ve been concentrating on Nigella Express so much that I completely forgot that there were other recipes. The Meat book is so captivating, though, that I really must start to pay it closer attention. But Nigella’s making us eat a lot of meat anyway, so there’s not really room in our diet for more. Occasionally — in a period of meat overdose — we throw together a massive vat of lentil curry as some kind of penance, or maybe as a concession to economical cooking.

I’m sitting on my comfy sofa right now, typing this post in a Firefox browser window, on a cute blue Eee PC 4G Surf. It’s very small — about the width and length of a hardback book, and a couple of centimetres tall — and incredibly light too. I haven’t had to travel anywhere with it yet, but I don’t think it would be a hindrance. (It comes with a little black pouch that feels a bit like a wetsuit.)

The typing is still a wee bit awkward, but I don’t do a great deal of high-speed typing as it is. By far the biggest bottleneck is in my head.

I set up the Skype stuff last night, so I might get to chat with my brother in China before long. I’ll have to remember to keep it on though! It even has a webcam built in, so I might even be able to use that (maybe video conferencing from here to China would not be very effective; I don’t know).

Er, not sure what else to say. Haven’t really done much with it yet. I’ve changed the hostname from the default of eeepc-owner (where owner is the username you first put in on setup). It’s called barnacle to keep in with the sea theme of all my computers. (I’ve mentioned this in previous posts though I can’t remember where. Even our wireless network is named after a sea…)

More information when I can think of something to say! Or if you’ve got any questions that would be good.

On Monday night Alan Penny came down from St Andrews University to talk about SETI. In particular, he wanted to convince us that spending money on searching for intelligent aliens is a good thing.

He didn’t really achieve this aim. Over the course of his talk he diminished his expectations and ended up stating that searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence would happen anyway, so that was that. He certainly didn’t convince me, and I don’t think anyone I was with changed their mind after hearing him speak either.

He spoke about the general arguments for and against the existence of intelligent life — such as the anthropic argument — which mostly served to highlight the futility of the search. Then he tried to convince us that it was worthwhile anyway. His arguments boiled down to two things, which I will render in a deliberately mocking and provocative fashion just because I can:

Where’s Your Logic Now, Science Boy?

People aren’t going to stop looking for aliens so it doesn’t matter what we do. This isn’t actually an argument for anything, more a statement of the romantic outlook of many people with cash to burn.

But Think Of The Children!!!

SETI is an easy concept to grasp and (because of the aforementioned romanticism) people are always interested in it. But it also requires science, so — in the absence of a real space programme — we can get kids interested in science by hunting for aliens.

He changed his mind during the talk from emphasising government-sponsored science (“should we spend money on SETI?”) to private foundations, so his first point is doubly irrelevant. No one is actually going round to billionaires’ houses and telling them how not to spend their money.

The children argument is interesting. It makes me uneasy, since it seems to beg the question that SETI is science¹ in the first place. The primary means by which SETI does its work is by examining signals picked up by radio telescopes to find “artificial signals”. Unfortunately I don’t know what an “artificial signal” looks like, since the only definition we have of one is a signal created by an intelligent being.

The speaker didn’t bother going into the detail of what they actually look for, which is a shame. The Discovery Institute have spent years telling people that they have means by which they can identify “design” (see “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity”), all of which have been bunk. By what means do SETI discriminate natural from artificial? What, exactly, does the SETI@home program do when it churns through radio data?

So the way I see it, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is as scientific as the hunt for Big Foot or Nessie — involving lots of fancy James Bond toys but requiring us to ignore the fact that there is no evidence to suggest these things exist to be detected. In that respect, getting people interested in science with SETI is a bit perverted. There’s no lack of exciting work which both starts with some reasonable evidence and produces results all while using fun kit.

Meanwhile, in that other world which claims to know artifice when it sees it, Scientific American got a look at the creationist propaganda film Expelled in a private screening put on by the film’s associate producer, Mark Mathis. They then recorded a conversation/interview with Mark Mathis.

You can listen to the guy (part one, part two) repeatedly digging himself into rhetorical holes and then weaseling his way out. It’s remarkable how many times he used the argument “ah, well I wasn’t actually responsible for that bit” whenever a good point is raised. I began to wonder (and I’m sure the SciAm folks did too) what he actually did do.

Check out the fun time I had cooking burger and fries from Nigella Express. You should try the chips recipe, it’s great fun. You get a freezer bag and put a bunch of new potatoes inside. Then you get a rolling pin and beat the crap out of the little blighters. And then when they’re little chunks — or when you’re tired, whichever comes first — you fry ‘em up. She suggests shallow fry but I think a deep fry would be give a crisper, more golden finish.

Getting nice new potatoes is probably quite important too. The only ones I could get in Somerfield were a bit tired.

I had a deep philosophical conversation with Martin earlier and came to the conclusion that the green Eee was the way to go. (Thanks for the encouragement Calum; you’re still invited for Nigella-food some time!) So I ordered it, and hope to get it within a week. (Finding somewhere that stocked it was harder than I expected.)

Meanwhile, I have to think up, practise, and then record, a ~3 minute presentation for my next BSL assessment. I hate these things where you have talk about your hobby or whatever because I never know what to say. I had this paralysis in school with French essays and it hasn’t really got any easier. Must get thinking…