Vitanuova for 2001
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"In the book of my memory, after the first pages, which are almost blank, there is a section headed Incipit vita nova."

On Wednesday and Thursday, I read Dante's La Vita Nuova, which I'd long been curious about. It's very interesting that Dante feels compelled to explain his own poetry, even in a very formulaic way. ("There are four parts in this sonnet. In the first, I...")

There are definitely some interesting parts in the Vita Nuova. It's good to get the inside story on Dante's love for Beatrice -- something commentators on the Divina Commedia always write footnotes about, something my father has often mentioned, but never something I read a primary source about.

After the vision which I had described, when I had composed the rhymes which Love had commanded me, a number of conflicting thoughts began to contend and strive one with the other, all of them, it seemed, unanswerably. Among them were four which seemed most to disturb my peace of mind. One was this: "The domination of Love is a good thing because he guides the mind of his faithful follower away from all unworthiness." Another thought was this: "The domination of Love is not good because the more faithfully a follower serves him, the more burdensome and grievous are the moments he must endure"; yet another thought was as follows: "The name of Love is so sweet to hear that it seems impossible that it can be anything but sweet in its effect upon most things, for it is known that names are a consequence of the things which are named, as it is written, Nomina sunt consequentia rerum"; the fourth thought was this: "The Lady for whom Love holds you so enthralled is not like other women whose hearts are easily moved." Every one of these thoughts so contended within me that I became like a person who does not know which road to take on his journey, who wants to set out but does not know where to start.

(Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, XIII (trans. Barbara Reynolds))

Dante's self-condemnation on account of his love for the "compassionate lady" who appears after the death of Beatrice is remarkable. Dante was a very serious man and really felt things deeply; I think this is something that leads people to compare him with Vergil, whom he put into his own poetry later on as a character or as an inspiration.

People are remarkably divided in their views of Dante's love for Beatrice. La Vita Nuova records that (as has become legendary) he saw her when they were both nine years old -- we could presume before puberty, when they were both children -- and he fell in love and remained deeply in love with her for the rest of his life, although they barely spoke. (Dante remembers being greeted once by Beatrice some years later, and wishes at length that she would greet him again. So they did actually say hello to each other, at least once.) But Dante had a series of visions which convinced him of the validity of his inclination that Beatrice was unique and special and that he ought to love her for his whole life. ("And some in dreams assured were...") And when he did waver from this commitment (after Beatrice was dead!), he couldn't live with himself:

Your levity I contemplate with dread [...]
While life endures you should not ever be
Inconstant to your lady who is dead.

(id., XXXVII)

and again: "often I grew angry in my heart and reviled myself greatly [a]nd often too I cursed the vanity of my eyes [...] 'for never, this side of death, ought your tears to have ceased!'". Finally "my heart began to repent sorrowfully of the desire by which it had so basefully allowed itself to be possessed for some days against the constancy of reason; and when this evil desire had been expelled all my thoughts returned once more to their most gracious Beatrice".

So you can see how Dante's view really polarizes people; few people reading this are neutral in their assessment of Dante's behavior. (It's interesting that I say "behavior", because Dante barely did anything observable in the entire book, except visit another city, get sick, cry, and write poems. He's very concerned with his inner life, which continues in parallel to and separate from what people can see about him. It's of consequence to him whether his feelings are noble or base, whether his thoughts are reasonable or unreasonable -- whether inside himself he is virtuous or vicious. Certainly Dante, as a Christian, kept in mind the admonition of the Gospels about looking at women the wrong way, as opposed to the Jewish emphasis on good deeds, what Christians ended up calling "works". In La Vita Nuova, Dante's only works are his poems, and he never does anything that most people today could call "real". This is a source of continuing controversy. Dante's concerns make lots of sense to me; I can relate.)

By the way, there is a company called Vita Nuova which sells support for the Bell Labs Inferno operating system.

I always associated the title of La Vita Nuova with Christian apocalyptics -- "Ecce nova facio omnia", which I remember acutely from a love story of my own, and the New Jerusalem and the New Heaven and New Earth, and then of course in the Symbolum Nicenum where it says "et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi, amen". So the phrase has this really strong eschatological significance for me, which really affects how I would read a book called La Vita Nuova -- but the notes in my edition say, to my surprise, that "[t]he literal English translation, 'The New Life', has religious overtones which are probably not in the original". Hmmmmm.

On a very different note, on Tuesday I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with Zack and two ladies whom I presume are gracious. It's definitely a beautiful movie, and I agree with the praise for the fighting scenes, especially in the forest.

Crouching Tiger is interesting for addressing ancient mythical Chinese sexism: Jade Fox becomes evil because the founder of the Wudan school rejects her as a student and sees her only as a sexual partner (we could probably even say "sexual object"). And Jade Fox's student in turn rejects Wudan for its continuing sexism and begins to turn toward evil. There is the sense that Wudan is to blame for all this: if Wudan's founder had been willing to teach Jade Fox as an equal with his male students, the policeman's daughter would not have ended up as an orphan.

A lot of artistic works have been addressing sexism in somewhat cliched ways. The classic example for me is actually a Dar Williams song, "The Babysitter's Here":

And will they get married with kids of their own? He says
"Not if she's going to college we won't,"
And he kisses her, oh... some day I'll have a boyfriend just like that...

(Emphasis in original.) The young girl's misunderstanding of her babysitter's life

She says, "Do me a favor, don't go with a guy who would make you choose,"
And I don't understand, and she tries to explain
And all that mascara runs down in her pain
Cause she's leaving me...

(emphasis added) is tragic, but I think the presentation is a bit heavy-handed. Every single time I hear that song, I find it really jarring: it's the core and key to the song, but the little girl narrator has no idea of that. This is a traditional literary device, which Dar Williams wields powerfully, but what's being revealed this way is somehow too much for me.

Another sexism plot showed up at the beginning of Carl Sagan's Contact, which I read recently. The daughter wants to be a scientist. Her father encourages her and then dies tragically. Her (wicked) stepfather thinks women shouldn't be scientists. She keeps on studying science and nature against his wishes. So she becomes endearing, appealing, interesting; her stepfather rapidly becomes the bad guy, ignorant, even cruel. This is all laid out in just a few pages, but we can so quickly identify with the young woman in her enthusiasm and independence (we know that this is a character who will not care about convention, who will find her own path).

When I read the beginning of Contact, though, I felt manipulated, as though Sagan had picked out an unreasonably extreme situation just to polarize the beginning of the story and draw us in. But the problem is that I actually know of a young woman in real life who wants to be a scientist and whose parents are actively discouraging her because they believe women shouldn't be scientists. So "this is real, this is something that happens", and Sagan isn't just making it up.

I had lunch with Art Tyde, one of the founders of Linuxcare, on Wednesday at an Indian restaurant on Folsom (it's actually under the same management as the Tandoori Mahal on Kearny, where I always used to go for lunch buffet -- and they have exactly the same menu, including the lunch buffet) by 8th or 9th.

One of the things we talked about was the effect of business involvement in the Linux community. I reminded Art that this had been a subject of really active controversy in 1998 -- "is business good for Linux?" -- and that there had been all sorts of different views. The most prescient, I think, was the view that "business involvement won't hurt the Linux community as a whole, but personal relationships will suffer". I don't remember whose idea that was, but I'm sad to say that it seems to have been true. I've lost no friends, as far as I know, through business and the "Linux industry", but many of my friends have lost friends that way, sometimes very close friends.

I really do miss the casual and enthusiastic local Linux community from 1998, but I'm glad that I'm still in touch with so many people despite all the turbulent events since then.

I did work for Linuxcare at home. In very classical teacher style, I actually graded a bunch of written multiple choice tests.

I also got my beard cut.

Doesn't it make sense to use the <H1> and <H2> tags here instead of <BIG> and <STRONG>? I got into the habit of using <STRONG> for section headings on Advogato.

My arms really hurt, from moving a filing cabinet last weekend and then typing during the week.

I noticed that RyanMuldoon on Advogato was a co-founder of the ARHS network, with Gabe Ricard, whom I met and corresponded with a bit when I visited ARHS in 1999. It's quite likely that I actually met Ryan, too. Their advisor in this undertaking was Peggy Westcott, who was my computer teacher in elementary school at the Smith College Campus School. (She taught Logo to 4th through 6th graders, including the really exciting LegoLogo unit in 6th grade, to which I looked forward for years and about which I once had a very dramatic dream. It was a dark and stormy night and a few of us, students all, took shelter at Peggy's house, where she let us do experiments with LegoLogo. I think I had that dream in 5th grade, and I wish I could remember who the other students in the dream were, because I have a guess.)

Peggy was a computer teacher at ARHS (one of the best public high schools in Massachusetts) after that, and she had a group of really motivated students who set up a network with a Linux box and did technology projects. I am very much reminded of GEECS, and it seems to me that every high school should have a project somehow along these lines, if students are interested.

After work, in Jamba Juice, I heard the song "Closer to Fine" by the Indigo Girls on the radio, but I think it was more like "closer to crying" for me, because it made me want to cry.

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountain
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine

I guess I've done all of those things lately except for drinking from the fountain. The Indigo Girls continue:

I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee

so when I walked out of Jamba Juice, closer to crying, I thought "Everybody's looking for salvation" but also that I was unlikely to ever have a Ph.D or a beard to my knee -- where other times I seemed to be on track for both of those things.

Well, I remembered the bit from Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey:

Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

I liked this because I always associated ignorance with cruelty and knowledge or certainty with kindness. But the Indigo Girls associate ignorance and uncertainty with health, which would certainly have been anathema to me once. (I suppose there are other ways of reading that Wilder quotation, like associating polytheism with cruelty and monotheism with kindness.)

If we take the straightforward interpretation of the list of activities in "Closer to Fine" as metaphorical for all the things that people attempt or look to in order to find meaning, health, happiness, or wisdom, then I think it's easy for anyone to sympathize with the story in that song. Sure, the list there is pretty "New Agey", for the most part. (It does mention the Bible later on, and a "revival", presumably mixing some Christianity together with mountains and fountains in the catalogue of salvationist technique.) But the message of the song is "I did x, y, and z, and nothing worked" (but now the person to whom the song is addressed has allowed the singer to feel more comfortable with ignorance and thereby "closer to fine"). Well!

Isn't it just a little strange for a bottle of isopropyl alcohol to have a safety seal on it, saying "Sealed for your protection"? Isopropyl alcohol doesn't exactly go bad, and you're not supposed to drink it, as it's already a poison. Yes, there are ways of tampering with it that could make it dangerous to people, but it's not exactly a bottle of pills or something.

mike dillon (I'm conflicted about whether to capitalize the names of people who don't capitalize their own, like bell hooks and e. e. cummings; it involves a judgment about whether or not capitalization is part of orthography so that somebody can say "You are misspelling my name!" if you use a capital in a standard place where that person doesn't) is preparing an edition of Ferrer's The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School.

I had dinner with Zack and worked a bit on getting this diary set up. zork is still down, but this is hosted on homer, so this is available even though my home page is not.

My arms felt marginally better in the morning, but that didn't last too long. zork has come back up.

I had a dream last night that I lost a tooth; I definitely hope that doesn't happen in real life. At a few points in my life, I haven't taken good care of my teeth. There are consequences to that.

I'm thinking about various possibilities for interface for this diary. One is to have month pages (2001-03.html) with concatenated day pages together, separated by horizontal rules. Another is to take the output of cal, like 

     March 2001
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 
             1  2  3
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

and generate links to entries for days where entries exist. Another is to have "next" and "previous" links. I'm just not sure what to do.

I've been hearing a lot (from five different sources!) lately about solar activity and likely storms on Earth. I'm told I might even be able to see the aurora down here in San Francisco this evening, and then that the power grid may be even more unstable. And my cell phone may not work. Good thing I don't have a cell phone!

With my right arm in lots of pain in the afternoon, I read E. L. Doctorow's City of God.

This is one of the best books I've read in years, but also one of the most painful, maybe more so than The Last of the Just -- solid competition, anyway.

Reading a book was good for my arms. So, in many ways, was talking on the phone. I had a great conversation with my father and managed to catch up with some friends.

I made it back into Daylight Saving Time all in one piece.

I did look out on my porch to try to catch sight of the aurora. No aurora, just lots of wind and fog and the moon.

I listened to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, which I hadn't listened to for a year or two. I first encountered this work in a music class at Berkeley, and I went out and bought a copy, and I even transcribed the words once and put them up on the net on a machine which has since crashed twice over.

(Not the free software kind.) The streets between here and the 24th Street BART station are fairly covered with evangelical Christian literature, some in Spanish, some in English, including Jack Chick cartoons. I saw a notice about how there was going to be a "campaign" in honor of Holy Week, so probably I'm just seeing some of the advance publicity work.

The Mission and the South of Market are really different in visible ways, like what kinds of things typically happen in public. In the South of Market, I've never seen anyone engaged in any kind of religious proselytizing or debate (or a house of worship, except the church across from the Metreon). In the Mission, religion and religious evangelism are relatively large, active forces. (Biella, approximately: "There's a reason it's called the Mission District...")

The Chronicle or the Examiner (am I the only person who still can't tell them apart readily?) had a strange juxtaposition pretty recently. At the bottom of one page was an article which proclaimed that, "for the first time", whites were not a majority in the state of California. At the top of the same page was an article about a research result that the San Francisco Bay is the saltiest that it's been "in 400 years".

This is a little bizarre, I thought. Clearly, the top article is admitting that California history does extend at least 400 years (OK, it wasn't a state then...), because there was this San Francisco Bay here then and it had a certain salinity and that salinity 400 years ago is a part of California history. And it's interesting! All this time all of these other things were happening, and you know, San Francisco Bay kept on having a salinity! The Bay continued having various amounts of salt in it all that while, and there's this amazing sense of continuity over four centuries of San Francisco Bay saline history. But the bottom article is saying that California history is much shorter, really, because this year is "the first time" that whites haven't been a majority of the people in California. But 400 years ago, whites weren't a majority in California.

I'm sure that the Associated Press would say that they just meant "since California has been a U.S. state" and that of course whites haven't always been a majority in California, the place. This still raises a question, though: why are racial demographics only interesting since California became part of the U.S., but environmental factors, geophysical factors, are interesting before that too?

... was April Fool's Day.

There are a pretty good assortment of hoaxes on-line, although I don't think I've been fooled by anything yet.

In other news, Zack and I went to CompUSA and I got a new sound card, which I set up (after compiling Linux 2.2.19, which was remarkably easy). It's a SoundBlaster 16 PCI -- the cheapest common 16-bit PCI sound card with line in and line out. It uses the es1371 module; Creative Labs bought Ensoniq...

Oh, I got to try Mac OS X in CompUSA. It's very pretty, and I managed to find the shell (the default shell is tcsh!) without too much difficulty, and run ls, ps, df, and all -- on a Mac, running MacOS. So I can see how a lot of people will like this and will want to switch. And I do have a Mac that I'd be running MacOS 8.5 on if the hard drive hadn't crashed... but I do want to stay focused on free operating systems, not just Unix in its manifold glory.

I bought the sound card because I wanted 16-bit line in so that I could record a CD of myself singing. No, you can't have a copy (unless perhaps you are Wolfgang), but I'll probably publish the recording of "If I Were in Rescomp". It's turning out that there's a Jewish theme because the two other things my original plan calls for me to sing are "Eli, Eli" and "Shir Hamaalot". I really think that's just a co-incidence, though.

A side effect of having the sound card is that I can play WAVs from my little collection of ripped CDs. (I ripped some of my own CDs so that I could have them in digital form. I don't habitually trade illegal copies of music, even though I agree that the impulse to do that is very natural, but I think having access to music in an unencrypted digital form is very important. People reading my diary will probably already be aware that I think that.) So I can actually give a simple command like

cd /mnt/bigger
echo So/*.wav | xargs -n1 play

and I immediately get a CD-quality rendition of Peter Gabriel's So. But of course I can script things so that tracks play in a particular order or in response to a particular event.

If we give up control over digital media, we will be limited to the applications the people who control it can think of, minus those they think it's not in their business interest to permit, minus again those they think they can extract extra payments for.

I had a great time with Biella, who came by for dinner. We had a wide-ranging conversation, although supposedly we were talking about "Patent Scope and Innovation in the Software Industry" by Cohen and Lemley.

Patents are an absolutely vast risk for the free software community. Aux armes! Fortunately, there are some more encouraging things going on in the world than just software patents.

I'm sorry that I still have secrets from my diary readers, that I can't remark on every single interesting or amusing thing that happens. I remember at dinner how something happened that I thought was funny, but it was already secret there; quo magis here. So if you read this, imagine some funny and interesting things happening that I don't mention. Thanks.

Actually, not only do I not generally trade illegal copies of music, but I even accidentally buy multiple copies of the same CD! For example, I have two store-bought legal copies of The End of the Summer by Dar Williams, two of The Green World (eadem), and two of a particular recording of Bach's Mass in B minor. So I'm even sometimes buying CDs where legally I wouldn't even be obliged to.

That said, if you want my duplicate copy of any of those, let me know!

Just over four years ago, Alan Hale said:

How many more of these types of reports are we going to have to listen to before we finally decide that we are going to use the candle of science, and the reasoning skills that we have, to take back the darkness from the ignorance and superstition that is enveloping us?

I hate to sound like I'm saying "I told you so," but I'd like to read the last paragraph of the explanation I posted to the Web after this business of the Saturn-like object broke out last fall. I remind you that this is dated November 16, 1996. After explaining that the "object" was nothing more than a bright star, I wrote: "There are many `fringe' people who are trying to attach apocalyptic significance to Comet Hale-Bopp, and incidents like this one . . . are sure to increase as we get closer to the comet's perihelion. I ask readers to treat all these irresponsible reports with the disdain they deserve, and instead enjoy the beauty of the comet for its own sake."

I really meant that last sentence. What I want everyone to do -- and I mean everyone who is here today, and everyone who is seeing my image and listening to my voice -- is, tonight, to drop what you're doing, forget about the world for a minute, go outside, look up in the northwest, and take a look at this comet. It's a beautiful object. It's lovely. It's one of the most magnificent celestial objects you will ever see. But for all its beauty, its magnificence, its splendor, all it is is a dirty snowball that's orbiting the sun. Nothing more. It has no influence on Earthly events. It has no power to affect anything that happens here on Earth. It has no power, but we do. We have the power to build a world for the 3rd Millennium that is free of the ignorance and superstition that is so rampant in our society today. We have that power. What I'd like you to do when you're looking at the comet tonight is to think of some ways to make that happen. I'd like to hear what you come up with.

I'm sure Dr. Hale would still appreciate your comments.

My machine pie was broken into by the Ramen worm, which is the first time an automated computer program has ever compromised my system. Alas, I hadn't applied the BIND update I was supposed to, because the Debian dist-upgrade didn't work for me and I got lazy about patching it by hand. So no human had the patience to discover my negligence, but a computer program did.

I think in the future some worms will be much nastier and more virulent. I think we'll see viruses and worms as the pre-eminent source of security threats. I mean, if a machine can beat the world chess champion, surely machines will be better than people ultimately at breaking into other machines. (There will be cases where judgment and background knowledge is important, but many attacks can be automated.)

By the way, I was literally months behind in applying the security patches in question. I saw them the day they came out, and I didn't do anything. So mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

I'm moving everything over to this machine homer, which Trey runs in Berkeley. I'm just waiting for some things to go through with Network Solutions. They tend to do an incredibly bad job with a lot of things they used to do well, so that it's become boring to complain about them.

I'm contributing a list of "non-kitten items" to the robotfindskitten project.

The sound quality on my new sound card was fine for playback but awful for recording. But now I've got a program called rawrec which lets me make raw samples at any sample quality. So I can explicitly record at 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo; with the input gain turned down a bit, it finally sounds very good.

If Zack gets sound working on his machine, we could have a little intercom over the local LAN.

Surprising things caught on MiniDisc: myself crying in January. I recorded myself singing a couple of songs and then I recorded myself bursting into tears after one of them. I think I'm going to erase those tracks, not burn them to CD-R.

I wrote a long piece in response to ishamael's complaint on Advogato about police enforcing laws against victimless crimes. But I haven't finished it or posted it anywhere.

Zack wonders (along with a political science professor I met about two years ago) whether there aren't duties to the self (in the sense of whether people have moral obligations to themselves or can be acting immorally in their treatment of themselves). The political science professor suggested that submitting to coercion might be wrong even if the coercion itself is wrong -- because we should not permit ourselves to be so abused if we can find an alternative. (The song says, by way of example, "You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith, you better keep the faith and run away. It's time to break free, oh oh oh oh, run away...") In libertarian thought, this would be a very foreign concept, although not as foreign as the idea that somebody else could legitimately help enforce these duties (maybe by forcing someone not to use drugs or something).

I remembered the good old days of arguing with Kevin Sabet on the opinion page of the Daily Cal. I would write a piece to the effect of

Let's first get out of the way the myth that drugs are not harmful. They are, at least potentially. They are very dangerous and using them is typically a poor choice and a great risk. Now, everyone has a fundamental liberty interest in doing whatever he or she wants with his or her own body. Governments and the societies they claim to represent have no right to legislate over what people do to themselves; when they try to create restrictions like this, they are overstepping what legitimate authority they might have. If you try to force someone not to use drugs just because they are risky, you are infringing on that person's rights.

I would really take pains to emphasize that I thought that drugs were really bad and recreational drug use was a really big problem. (In that sense I think I came close to suggesting that I thought that there were duties to the self -- because most of my published criticisms of drugs were based on what they do to their users. But I argued at length that there is no right on the part of anyone else to enforce those duties, if they exist.)

So Kevin Sabet would always write in and respond to my letter, except what he would say was always along the lines of "But drugs are really dangerous, and really harmful". And it was really bizzare, because I took such pains to agree to that and to support his contention that drug abuse was a real problem and was really upsetting. But his responses always seemed to be limited to citing statistics about health risks from various drugs or correlations between drug use and poor academic performance or the likelihood that people would become addicted to something.

And (as often, as very often, alas) we were really talking at cross purposes, because we weren't contradicting each other (although I did think that Sabet overstepped in his categorical denials that marijuana had legitimate medical uses; however much medical marijuana in California may be used as a cover for recreational drug use, it seems that there is no reason to dismiss the potential benefits of a drug when that drug is surrounded by a recreational-use tradition). But Sabet would conclude that because drugs were so dangerous, it was vitally important that society act forcefully to suppress the depredations... and I would conclude that there is no right to compel individuals against their will and the government should get its laws off of everyone's bodies, as the emotionally tinged slogan runs.

It was frustrating to argue with Kevin Sabet. Our perspectives were apparently so different that we couldn't even disagree with each other effectively.

(That happened with affirmative action too, although not with Kevin Sabet in particular. It took me a long time to notice that the most fundamental disagreements were not even about affirmative action, but about what a university is for. Some people thoughts of public universities as instruments of public policy or social welfare. So therefore if a government had a socially useful policy, it could implement it through a university. Other people were just horrified that politics could get involved in a university at all and thought that universities should have a remarkable detachment and independence and promote knowledge in general rather than specific social goals. And then it just so happened that governments sponsored universities, because universities are good and it's difficult to get people to found enough of them, but the governments should not expect anything back from the universities, but should leave them alone to be universities. I mean, if people are intermittently horrified that religious universities compromise their independence by trying to promote religious beliefs, why should they not be horrified when government universities compromise their independence by trying to promote government economic policies? Do I overstate the point? I've barely gotten started here exploring the depths of the disagreement on this issue! People who argue about affirmative action in public universities have virtually no common ground and they completely misunderstand each other or talk, again, at cross purposes because of their different starting point.)

What is a university for? In precisely the same vein, what is a romantic relationship for? When we've solved those, we can take on Wendell Berry's question, because founding universities and creating romantic relationships are prototypical human activities.

(I remember talking to Biella about Don Marti's complaint that universities were becoming fancy tax shelters for startups and for proprietary corporate research. Too simple, she said. Universities are more complicated and multifarious than that. So there would be an element of this sort of thing, but we would have to look at the whole picture and see what all different kinds of people were up to in the context of a university. But if we believe, as some people do, that things have a particular essential purpose -- which is one of the oldest academic traditions in the world! -- then it's worth asking what universities are really supposed to be about. And you'll find that people have absolutely no consensus about that. The people who are there don't agree on what they're there for and the people who pay for it don't agree on why they pay for it and the people who examine and criticize the universities don't agree on what the universities were supposed to be doing in the first place.)

My arms feel messed up and I feel very tired -- I think the latter is either due to not getting enough sleep or to not eating regularly enough. All of these things are somewhat longstanding problems -- should I say "chronic"? -- but it doesn't mean that I always do anything about them.

I'm trying to do or locate some paperwork to re-open a claim and go to see a chiropractor downtown. I saw her last year but didn't go back; she's been very helpful to many of my friends who had various degrees of repetitive strain injuries. I don't think any of their cases were as bad as mine, but still this chiropractor is well-regarded and maybe she can help me.

I'm going to CalLUG tonight.

I'm working with Andrew in person at Linuxcare today to produce a new BBC, which Mike will give out at the upcoming SCLUG LUG Fest event. Then we will burn some more BBCs to send to LUGs that request them, and we'll do a new revision to give out at LWCE in San Francisco in August.

Andrew is typing for this BBC revision -- I'm not.

At work, I happened to hear the song "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which my friend Eric used to play in high school and which I hadn't heard in some years. I think I'd better get a recording of it.

Here are my submissions to the robotfindskitten project: 

"A book with \"Don't Panic\" in large friendly letters across the cover.",
"A compendium of haiku about metals.",
"A discredited cosmology, relic of a bygone era.",
"A hollow voice says \"Plugh\".",
"A knight who says \"Either I am an insane knave, or you will find kitten.\"",
"A neural net -- maybe it's trying to recognize kitten.",
"A screwdriver.",
"A statue of a girl holding a goose like the one in Gottingen, Germany.",
"A tetradrachm dated \"42 B.C.\"",
"A voice booms out \"Onward, kitten soldiers...\"",
"An eminently forgettable zahir.",
"Apparently, it's Edmund Burke.",
"For a moment, you feel something in your hands, but it disappears!",
"Here is a book about Robert Kennedy.",
"Hey, robot, leave those lists alone.",
"Ho hum.  Another synthetic a posteriori.",
"It's Asimov's Laws of Robotics.  You feel a strange affinity for them.",
"It's Bach's Mass in B-minor!",
"It's a bug.",
"It's a synthetic a priori truth!  Immanuel would be so pleased!",
"It's the Tiki Room.",
"Just some old play by a Czech playwright, and you can't read Czech.",
"Kitten is the letter 'Q'.  Oh, wait, maybe not.",
"Quidquid Latine dictum sit, kitten non est.",
"Sutro Tower is visible at some distance through the fog.",
"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.",
"The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.",
"The non-kitten item like this but with \"false\" and \"true\" switched is true.",
"The non-kitten item like this but with \"true\" and \"false\" switched is false.",
"This is the chapter called \"A Map of the Cat?\" from Feynman's autobiography.",
"This is the forest primeval.",
"Werner's \"Pocket Field Guide to Things That Are Not Kitten\".",
"You found nettik, but that's backwards.",
"You have found some zinc, but you must not stop here, for you must find kitten.",
"\"50 Years Among the Non-Kitten Items\", by Ann Droyd.",
"\"A robot may not injure a kitten, or, through inaction, ...\"",
"\"Address Allocation for Private Internets\" by Yakov Rekhter et al.",
"\"Mail Routing and the Domain System\" by Craig Partridge.",
"\"The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism\" by Emmanuel Goldstein.",
"\"201 Kitten Verbs, Fully Conjugated\".  You look for \"find\".",

I saw various people in Berkeley, including Sumana and Ben. It's nice over there. ASUC election season is in full swing.

The Cheese Board collective and their pizza shop are really good (on Shattuck by Vine).

I have an ear ache.

I read To an Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, by Garrett Epps. It's the story of Employment Division v. Smith, the case about whether Native Americans had a legal right under the First Amendment to use peyote in religious ceremonies. The Supreme Court's answer was "no"; I think the issue is remarkably subtle and important, and it brings into focus or digs up a lot of other interesting topics.

Epps doesn't talk in much detail about the history of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was passed (and overturned) after Smith was decided. He gives it a few pages but barely mentions why the Supreme Court decided to throw it out in City of Boerne v. Flores (the famous "art gallery owned by an atheist" argument).

I think somebody should open an art gallery called Art Gallery Owned By An Atheist, but I don't think many people would get the joke.

I was particularly interested in RFRA because it was used as a basis for the only recent successful court challenge to the California loyalty oath, in Bessard v. California Community Colleges. But Bessard was almost immediately overruled by City of Boerne. As I've written elsewhere, I had mixed feelings about this, because I thought that Smith and Boerne were correctly decided, but I thought that the laws to which religious objections were asserted in Smith (drug prohibition), Bessard (loyalty oath for public employees), and Boerne (zoning ordinance) were all unjust!

Bessard actually came close to eliminating the loyalty oath entirely, because under other precedents, someone who claimed a religious objection would likely not have been required to provide much more detail. On the other hand, we have United States v. Seeger (where the Supreme Court said that atheists could be conscientious objectors to the draft) -- so the logic of Bessard together with Seeger could almost have created a plausible argument that nobody could be forced to sign the oath!

Except...

Except that that's a complete end-run around the purpose of the RFRA, which was to create special privileges or exemptions based on religious beliefs and not simply based on sincere beliefs. And because the RFRA (under which Bessard was decided) really did set out to create that special status for religious beliefs, it was invalided by the Supreme Court.

(I think I'm overstating what Seeger held too -- it's a long time since I read that opinion, and when I glance at it, it looks much narrower than I'm making it out to be.)

I wrote a lot on patents to Biella. I really disagreed with Professor Lemley's piece on "rational ignorance" and his critiques of patent reform proposals.

I bookmarked this when I read that book a few days ago, meaning to quote it here:

Yet science teaches us something about song: Scientific formulas describe the laws by which the universe operates and suggest in equations that a balance is possible even if things are in apparent imbalance. So do songs. Songs are compensatory. When a singer asks, Why did you do this to me, why did you break my heart . . . the inhering formula is that the degree of betrayal is equivalent to the eloquence of the cry of pain. [...] And when a song is good, a standard, we recognize it as expressing a truth. Like a formula, it can apply to everyone, not just the singer.

This passage actually has relatively little to do with the rest of the book, although it does suggest a connection between a couple of themes which do show up repeatedly.

The mozilla not party (kind of like the mozilla dot party except, you know, not) was at Zeitgeist today. I had a great time! I saw a bunch of people I know and got to talk to Jack Moffit about Vorbis for a while.

My right arm got a bit sore again, but I got documentation about being discharged from treatment last fall, and we're sending that off to the insurance company.

I'm trying without any success to break a encrypted message which is a very short message in English in some kind of cipher like a substitution cipher which can be worked by hand. But no luck. I think I have some evidence that it's not a simple substitution cipher: there is a word which has a pattern of letters like AABCCDE. It doesn't seem to me that there is any English word which has that pattern, so I think the cipher is more complicated than simple substitution.

How do people go about breaking ciphers given only the ciphertext? Bruce Schneier is always telling us that we should assume that the cryptosystem is known and only the key is unknown; here I don't actually happen to know the cryptosystem, but I still want to break it.

I suspect this might be a Vignere cipher -- I do know that it's a cipher that has a short English "password" or key. The Vignere cipher is one of the most obvious possibilities beyond simple substitution in that case. I know that the Vignere cipher is supposed to be readily broken, but I don't have a whole lot of ciphertext and I don't even member the standard technique for breaking it.

I did generate Vignere encryptions and decryptions of the ciphertext, plus slight variations, for every word in /usr/dict/words. So now I have this file of about 300,000 possible decryptions, and I don't know a good way to search for a possibly valid decryption.

Somewhere or other there is a research project with a good statistical test for the presence of English text. One approach is to figure out (somehow) the probability that a certain text could have been generated by a Markov chain model for English text. If the probability that the text could have been generated by the model is high, then perhaps the probability is also high that the text is English.

How did John Gilmore's DES cracker recognize that it had decrypted its text when it did?

It's incredibly windy here. (And cold.)

And I felt you slippin' away
And I felt myself slippin' from you
And I wanted more than anything else
For it to rain for one whole day like it used to

(Dan Bern, "Wasteland")

"and that last bit is where the passion comes in."

... were it not that I have bad dreams.

(Hamlet, II, 2)

I saw Mr. Bad for the second time in two days and again had lots of fun. This time it was BayFF, where Chuck D (the musician) spoke about on-line music. Mr. Bad, Biella, Mike and I sat together, heard Chuck D say various extremely funny and in some cases extremely provocative things, and then went off to the BAD meeting (no relation to Mr. Bad except that he is a Bay Area Debian developer) where I saw Joey, Justin, and Ian Jackson (special guest) as well as some people I didn't know. Then we went to dinner.

I got Ian Jackson's business card, so I could conceivably sign his PGP key now.

One interesting thing at the BayFF meeting was that somebody mistook me for Seth Finkelstein and congratulated me on winning an EFF Pioneer Award. So I said I wasn't sethf but that I would accept the congratulations and forward them along, which I will.

There was actually an e-mail thread about how people at BayFF thought I was Seth Finkelstein. I guess the confusion was for real.

The rain didn't seem to damage my filing cabinet, which is still outside.

Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, That all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion.

(Francis Bacon, "Of Vicissitude of Things"; quoted by Borges)

I walked up to Sutro Tower and back in the afternoon. It's really big! I remembered writing a poem in college about an antenna; it was a sad poem and I wish I still had a copy. (It might be on that hard drive over there, if I could recover it.)

Sutro Tower is always bigger than you think, or always further away than it looks. It's the tallest structure in San Francisco, and visible from more places than any other -- for example, you can see it at any time of day from my bedroom window, and probably from tens of thousands of other bedroom windows in the City.

I brought back a stick, like a walking stick, from a dead branch of a tree that grows right by Sutro Tower, perhaps in its shadow. The branch is unusually lightweight, like bamboo or balsa wood -- closer in appearance to bamboo.

The composition of this diary entry was interrupted by a blackout on my block which lasted for at least several hours (the power came back on after I went to bed). I was told that a transformer exploded somewhere nearby. Our UPSes lasted for an hour or so, but after that, no more Internet access, no more computer use, no more electric lights. "It was like another century", but not really.

I tried writing a letter by candlelight, which was an unusual experience, but I guess the only real benefit was that I got to write truthfully that I was writing that letter by candlelight. I suppose I could do that any time I want, since I have candles (I no longer live in the Berkeley dorms). But I wouldn't usually think of it; if it happens, it probably happens by accident.

The Moon is Full

and today is Palm Sunday. I wonder if Berkeley SANE deliberately invited Richard Dawkins to speak during Holy Week (and Passover).

Zack and I did laundry and went to CostCo. On the way back, we stopped by the new EFF office, which is still under construction down the street on Shotwell.

I fixed a DNS outage; if you couldn't resolve vitanuova.loyalty.org recently, it was due to my error. I'm still trying to get DNS over to homer properly. It's really a pain to deal with Network Solutions.

I had a dream that I was involved in a huge project to build an Inform model of the South of Market and the Mission, to be used in a very sophisticated adventure game. One thing that made the dream more exciting was that I was inside the model the whole time, although it was clear that what I was seeing was somehow generated by Inform, and I could converse with other people about the progress of the model ("This is so-and-so's apartment -- in the next version we're going to add a door over here and a daemon that shows changes in the apartment over time"), which was actually kind of like David Gelernter's Mirror Worlds, although I didn't think of that at the time.

My virtual South of Market is a very exciting and dramatic place!

It's great that there are people who critique pop songs by reference to ancient philosophers.

I'm going to the Richard Dawkins lecture at Berkeley tonight (VLSB, 8:30p). I may try to get my copy of The Selfish Gene autographed.

Some years ago, I made a t-shirt that says "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. -- Richard Dawkins"; if it still fit me and if it looked decent, I'd wear it to the talk. But I can't even find it, which is yet another problem. (That was what Richard Dawkins said was the "t-shirt slogan" version of his work.)

On Crackmonkey, I wrote that the intricacy of ancient Greek verb structure

led to many British prep school students learning things like the present subjunctive first-person middle dual of "luo", no doubt so that, if two of them were ever captured by extremely ancient Greeks, they could sing a duet in which they discuss with their captors the possibility that they might ransom themselves.

This led indirectly to the relevation that Mr. Bad (who else?) is the holder of eleutheria.org.

The lecture by Richard Dawkins was very amusing; Dawkins got in any number of cheap shots against organized religion, but several of his points were really compelling. He actually re-iterated with a picture his old point about religion running in families and the assumption that children of four know their religious beliefs (or can be assumed to share their parents' religious beliefs).

The use of fundamentalist tracts in his slides produced a lot of comedy (he was even the target of one cartoon he reproduced), but I don't think he was arguing against his strongest opponents. If all you knew of religion was what appeared in that presentation, you would certainly think it was absolutely ludicrous, but there are some more intelligent presentations of religious ideas out there.

In some places, Dawkins was quite moving, especially when he quoted from the late Carl Sagan.

The audience was mostly non-religious; the best question by someone who seemed to disagree with Dawkins seemed to me to be based on an argument due to Phillip Johnson (who conceivably could have been somewhere in the audience) -- whether scientists view naturalism as a prescientific commitment (or as part of science) or whether they find naturalism to be an empirical conclusion from their research.

Dawkins didn't quite understand the question; I did, I think, only because I read Johnson's books which advised people to ask pro-evolution scientists a question just like that. For example, Johnson's Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds invites audiences to ask

one simple question:

What should we do if empirical evidence and materialist philosophy are going in different directions?

I think that's what this audience member was asking -- did you come to naturalism empirically, or do you believe that the world has to be like that? And this is a seriously valid question and the answer Dawkins gave was very capable even though he didn't quite understand it. Dawkins said that there are likely things other than matter and energy as we understand them but that our understanding will improve in time and there's no particular reason that we shouldn't understand the nature of the other things we discover in the future which we don't understand now. (Perhaps he had dark matter in mind, for instance.)

And this is certainly what I generally thought in the past: if there were a "supernatural" realm, it wouldn't even be supernatural because it would have laws by which it operated and those laws could be investigated and learned and then, what do you know, the supernatural realm is actually just a particular corner of the natural realm which hadn't been discovered or studied before!

(One argument in support of this idea is the discovery of things like radio, which would have been considered supernatural if they had been observed or demonstrated a long time ago. Near-instantaneous communication around the world through the air? That's like divination, or telepathy! But with Maxwell's equations we understood radio pretty well for a while, up until Einstein.)

On the other hand, proponents of the supernatural may argue that we are unfairly defining the supernatural out of existence by asserting that everything that exists operates through, well, natural laws. So one claim would be that there are things which aren't subject to any laws (some theology would say the will of God, and some people say that supernatural magic works for supernatural reasons not described by any intelligible natural law), and another claim would be that supernatural laws exist but are of a totally different character than natural laws (for example, that they can't be defined through or reduced to mathematical formulae showing definite relations of entities).

Dawkins complains that actual theistic proponents of supernatural explanations aren't really giving an explanation (a slightly subtler formulation of the "God of the gaps" argument). For example, he says, the Christian God is much more complex than a human, so saying that God created humans fails to "explain" how something as complex as a human exists, because it raises the new and even more difficult question of how something as complex as God exists. Ignotum per ignotiora. (Dawkins seems to be suggesting that it is more plausible that humans have always existed than that God has always existed, because humans are much simpler. I should read Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being.)

And I think that Dawkins has an extremely strong point there, and it was a new one to me. Still, if a true supernatural is not logically contradictory, it could exist, right? And that could be the way things really are. But Dawkins would probably exist that there is no credible evidence for it and no reason to believe it -- and "science can't explain X" is not one. (He mentioned "directed panspermia", the theory where life on Earth was seeded by intelligent aliens, as more likely than creation by God, in that the aliens are more likely to exist or require less explanation or less departure from things we already know about.)

On Monday, I saw the car with the California license plate FNORD parked by the 4th and King Caltrain station. That was amusing.

Andrew and I worked on the BBC for a long time Tuesday, and finished up the 1.6.0 release version. It's a good feeling to get a BBC done!

We fixed a lot of things. But I know of at least one bug left.

Hail, brave Knight! You completed your divine Task[...]! Yet it seems you left a great Riddle behind.

(Leonard Richardson, Degeneracy)

Like a work of fiction, the value of a sophisticated work of software is not in the simple plot idea, but in the complex telling of the tale. It is only those unfamiliar with the strong feelings, beliefs and preferences which exist among writers of software regarding alternative expressions of the same software ideas who could believe that differences in expression of the "same" idea are unimportant to those who write software, or to those who use software written by others.

Imagine if, for 17 years, only one author was allowed to write about the plot line "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl". Or that once some consortium of artists has invented rock and roll or string quartets (and produced an initial "reduction to practice"), no one else could write music in those styles for 17 years without their permission. Or that once the first mathematician has invented a technique for dividing numbers, all other mathematicians must for 17 years request permission before inventing their own techniques, for fear of accidentally reinventing or coming too close to reinventing what another mathematician has also thought about. In each of these cases, imagine the arrogance of someone claiming a right to bring before a court of law and convict of a civil crime all others who choose to think for themselves and write independently.

(Phil Salin, "Freedom of Speech in Software", 1991)

Everybody please go read Salin's letter and John Gilmore's speech with the same title.

Jim Bell was convicted of interstate stalking and the European Copyright Directive was adopted (this is the "European DMCA" which could lead to DeCSS being banned in EU countries, among other things).

Legislation needs a better reason than that lawyers like it, and that America does it.

I had a very encouraging dream about nanotechnology. It was basically about being in a space colony which looked like Smith College on the outside and like Trader Joe's on the inside. There were various buildings, each run by a benevolent Emperor who had a certain color associated with him (like ancient China?) -- the building I was in was the domain of the Purple Emperor, who gave people all kinds of food and technology and explained various technical things to me. Because nanotechnology had been so far developed, everyone's physical needs were met, but there were still very interesting challenges remaining (which I don't remember).

The people who lived in the building run by the Purple Emperor slept in the aisles of what looked like a supermarket (Trader Joe's, as I said), and then the Purple Emperor periodically used nanotechnology to provide them with things they needed.

The Emperor told me that most people there didn't understand the technology involved, which was a disappointment to me.

My high school teacher's son has died while a college freshman. A healthy 19-year-old, he suffered heart failure as he slept. He died as I was leaving the Dawkins lecture on Monday. I can't make it to the memorial service because it's Easter weekend and almost all airline flights are already booked.

I wrote a Latin free verse poem called "In obitum filii magistri mei, apice iuventutis". It is very depressing; maybe it's good that it's in Latin so that few people will ever be depressed by it.

I tested the BBC extensively on my home machine and was pretty impressed, although I found three serious bugs. I think we've made a lot of progress. I'm still playing with it.

I think that free software in general is losing momentum and reaching a momentary peak in market share or mind share. I associate this with the lack of business success of most large and prominent Linux and free software. It's upsetting to me; I remember that a few years ago, we may have had a touch of the "historical inevitability" disease which is one of my least favorite characteristics in an ideological movement. Like "Linux will definitely take over the computing world because it's better in every way, and people just have to see this...".

But a large portion of the people who are also a part of the computing world don't share our values. I'm really torn between the point of view that says "So let them suffer" (or perhaps "Shall I at least set my lands in order?" or "As for me and my house, we will worship the Lord") and the point of view that says "I will not enter nirvana before all sentient beings do so" (or perhaps "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations"). Interestingly, the more conventional views "Find out what those people want and figure out how to give it to them" and "Different strokes for different folks" don't even seem to enter the picture for me.

I'm reminded of the relativist view that different peoples (a euphemism for "countries") should have different political systems. And that kind of diversity, I always thought, we don't need.

It's interesting to talk with people who have a less moralistic outlook on things.

Anyway, I noted about a year ago that finally lots of people are trying Linux and not deciding to keep using it, whereas back when I got started in the Linux world in 1995, almost everyone who tried Linux immediately switched over or at least kept on using it regularly. So the people who tried it back then, I've realized, were people who were really disposed to like it, people who were on the lookout for something more or less just like Linux, in search of a better way and a movement to which they could hitch themselves. ("That far within our faith we were all waiting"! Dar Williams.)

So when we saw Linux, it was "Yes I said Yes I will Yes".

And we thought that if other people would just try Linux, they would also immediately recognize what they had been missing. (That was actually what I personally thought about a lot of issues until I was in college; I thought that truth and beauty were much more obvious and more accessible than they are.) But the problem is that there's been so much hype about Linux, for various reasons, that people got spurious expectations that had no connection with the technical reality. So a lot more people with different ideas and backgrounds were moved to try Linux, and many of them actually said they didn't like it! Quite the shock for Linux advocates, that someone might have tried Linux and disapproved.

But these people had (for the most part) different values and expectations in the experience of computing. Many of them were content or at least numb in the proprietary Windows world, and weren't hoping for any of the particular technical virtues which pertain to the free software world.

But it's tragic, because there was a big miscommunication about Linux, where Linux geeks said that Linux was the be-all and end-all of the operating system world at the moment (I recognize that Linux can benefit from new technology, but we could say, as they say in Hemingway, that it was "less bad"; remember what Michael Elkins says about mutt). And we said this because that was actually our experience.

But if people have totally different ideas about what they're up to or about what's virtuous and vicious, it's not completely shocking that they would not see why we said that Linux was so great; certainly Linux is very different, which wasn't emphasized enough in its full generality.

Sometimes I've thought that I didn't want to convince people to like Linux: I wanted to make them be people who would like Linux. From that point of view, when Linux and the general public's values in computing don't get along, then typically or more often the public's values -- not Linux -- need to be amended. (And here I'm speaking only of things that were deliberate decisions, not of things that happen not to have been implemented...) I guess that qualifies as an elitist point of view, but it's not so far from what people say on dvd-discuss: "We have to get the public to see the importance of the public domain", "We have to get the public to see the problems with copyright extensions and anticircumvention legislation". Not "the public doesn't care"; not "the public won't care"; not "the public will believe that the public domain is not important". But "the public domain is important, and we will explain that to the public, and they will see it". Or "Linux is good, and the public will see that".

A rather wise comment in opposition to several of the ideas above:

I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salemen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

(Alan J. Perlis, quoted in Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)

Someone I mentioned in my Advogato diary last year found my diary and wrote me a paper letter to thank me for endorsing his product.

A very exciting thing happened which I can't discuss here. But I think I got two more points on the Hacker Test.

I bought a copy of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which I mentioned here recently, on CD.

I wish I were a better poet. I'm a decent prose essayist and a decent programmer, but it seems to me that poetry is what really changes people's lives; I wish I could write a poem that had a real effect.

I had a good time trying out Vorbis on Thursday. I recommend it all the time, so I thought I should actually find out how well it works.

I thought it worked well. I don't have a lot of experience with MP3s to compare it, but it sounds pretty good. I tried to compress a few CD tracks (remember: when CDs are all encrypted "to prevent piracy", you can't even try these experiments for yourself!) and I could hear the loss of quality, but they still sounded acceptible to me.

The compression I saw at default bitrates is better than 10:1, which is pretty cool.

The proximate cause of my trying out Vorbis was writing to Dave Farber about how it's good, in response to an instantly-infamous Wall Street Journal piece recently in which he was quoted. The piece reports that Microsoft is trying to get rid of MP3. Why? You guessed it: because MP3 doesn't include copy protection! ("You" who guessed it are anyone who reads dvd-discuss or goes to BayFF or knows Don Marti.)

The article was actually incredibly depressing, because all of these companies blatantly stated that they were going to put their own business interests ahead of consumers' interests and try to seize control of the market and such. I think more people should read the Wall Street Journal (and that's not the only reason). Dave Farber was quoted to the effect that consumers would mostly not know better and would use the software that they were given (although he wasn't happy about that).

So all of these representatives of various companies said that the whole problem with MP3 was that the format was too open!

My view, of course, is that MP3 is not open enough, and we need to get rid of MP3 as quickly as possible -- but we need to replace it with something like Vorbis, not with something like WMA! Replacing MP3 with WMA wouldn't be a step backwards, it would be a 100-yard dash backwards, tripping over one's own feet in the process.

Mr. Bad writes:

That's the funniest thing I've read all day! (But I thought it was a Linuksamantaro.) For "Maldesktrulaj", read "Maldekstrulaj".

If Leonard Richardson is going to link to my diary saying that I've provided a "summary of the Richard Dawkins speech", I guess I actually ought to provide one.

But I think it's a bit late for that. I've forgotten a lot already.

Dawkins said that there were five ways of knowing things: Evidence, Tradition, Authority, [personal] Revelation, and Faith. He said that science only uses Evidence, while organized religions use the other four and don't care much for Evidence.

Dawkins has dealt elsewhere with some religions' claim that Faith is good, but he didn't address it directly in this talk (except along the lines of "why do you have faith in X instead of Y?", kind of like the old standby Invisible Pink Unicorn argument). (It is interesting to note that some atheists purport to believe in invisible pink unicorns and some in invisible purple unicorns. I wonder whether this schism will have tragic consequences for the atheist worldview.) Some argument in support of religious faith is given by arch-rationalist and skeptic Martin Gardner (a self-proclaimed philosophical theist!) in some of his books; I guess The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener and The Night is Large would cover it, but you'd probably also want to read The Flight of Peter Fromm.

There are some traditionally religious people who believe that Evidence does support their religious beliefs. This is actually an abiding division in Christianity, where a huge proportion of believers suspect that they can't prove their religion empirically (although I've heard some people say that this is because the proof isn't there, and some that this is because the proof is there but evil prevents unbelievers from accepting it). Judaism and Islam have strong rationalist apologetics traditions which I think are mainstream, but I'm not sure. (One source of apologetic evidence is the "unparalleled" item or event -- in Judaism, the unparalled character of the national revelation at Sinai, and, for some, the unparalled accuracy of the Torah. In recent times a few groups have added unparalled statistical anomalies in the text of the Torah. In Islam, the unparalled literary character of the Koran. In Christianity, the unparalled nature of the reported statements of Jesus -- the "trilemma" argument -- and of the broad public consensus on the truth of the miracles attributed to him.)

Phillip Johnson is one of the leading advocates in the American Protestant world of the view that Evidence does support his religious beliefs. But that view is common to a number of authors who share his publisher, InterVarsity Press. The word "Evidence" even shows up in the title of one of the best-selling apologetic works being given out in vast quantities to American college students -- Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell. (Postscript: I mistakenly thought that IVP also published Evidence; it was actually published by Here's Life Press.)

Nobody seems to endorse Tradition and Authority, although Dawkins associated them strongly with religions, and quoted some statements like an ex cathedra papal teaching on the Assumption of Mary.

There are definitely people who endorse Revelation, in the sense of belief informed by personal religious experience which is not shared as Evidence with others. Dawkins suggested (I think) that Revelations might be unreliable (as they seem to contradict one another) and that in any case they didn't count as Evidence.

The audience repeatedly burst out laughing at some of the parodies Dawkins put together showing scientists behaving in some of the ways he attributed to religions -- for example, a mock journal issue on extinctions where scientists reported that they had faith in or had experienced revelations in support of or had been raised to believe the theory that a comet killed the dinosaurs. He showed a scientist issuing a fatwa condemning to death a rival; he showed a world map and reported on the scientific wars that had broken out between countries where scientists believed contrasting doctrines. He showed a preacher telling an audience that "The Origin of Species is the inspired Word of the Prophet Darwin (peace be upon him); every word of it is true!".

Dawkins thought that American scientists who disagreed with religious belief were generally afraid to speak out and were under social pressure to say that science and religion were not incompatible. He criticized Gould's Rocks of Ages, with its "non-overlapping magisteria", on two grounds: first, he said that religions do routinely make factual claims which scientists should consider false on the basis of evidence. He said that it is definitely the place of scientists to dispute these claims, just as they could dispute any other claims about events in the natural world. (He quoted various lists of miracles which the Roman Catholic Church teaches as fact and argued that scientists could definitely disagree.) Second, he doesn't think that science can give any insight into the "magisterium" of morality and values, but he doesn't think that revealed religion can either -- so while he accepts that science can't teach us about right and wrong, he would dispute that Christianity can.

Dawkins also took issue with the claim that religious doctrines about historical events are "symbolic" (and so immune from criticism as historically false). First, he said that these doctrines used to be believed as fact and that only scientific progress has made that belief less tenable. Next, he suggested that the idea that something formerly considered real and then disproved should live on as "symbolic" was silly. He gave the example of a scientist in the future responding to hypothetical news that the theory of the double helix structure of DNA was mistaken: "Well, it's true that DNA isn't really a double helix, but look at the wonderful symbolism in this picture, what it shows us about human Love!"

Additionally, Dawkins said that many religious leaders would claim that their doctrines were symbolic "in front of sophisticated audiences like this one" and then tell their (unsophisticated?) religious communities that the doctrines were actually literally true after all. So he accused these leaders of being disingenuous and wanting to have it both ways -- shielding their beliefs from hostile criticism, yet maintaining them firmly among friends.

I've already mentioned the "religion runs in families" argument, so I won't repeat it. But Dawkins showed a slide arguing that, once a particular religious belief is started, it continues to be passed down by tradition and is generally not questioned or examined. By contrast, he said, scientific beliefs are held in conflict and fight against each other on the basis of evidence, so that mistakes are detected and science makes progress.

This isn't true for everyone, though! There are lots of religious converts. Jack Chick converted to his Protestant views from Catholicism and retains great animosity toward Catholic belief and practice. But I think Dawkins is saying that religious conversion doesn't happen as often as it would if people really routinely seriously questioned the religious beliefs they acquired as children. Also, religious belief doesn't appear to make the same kind of progress that scientific belief does (in the sense of detecting and refuting errors and finding a consensus based on public evidence). But maybe that is a matter of perspective; maybe religious belief is making progress and it's just the people with mistaken beliefs who don't see this. Still, the process seems very chaotic; it's at least the case that the mills of God grind slow.

I did say there were some "cheap shots", and I think that's the case; in particular, some parodies directed at one religious group raised laughter directed at all religious belief -- unfair stereotyping. There is greater diversity of religious belief in the world than Dawkins seems to admit; not all of it is subject to all of his criticisms.

And the "sophisticated audience" thing was a bit much -- Dawkins kept on saying that the Bay Area atheists and geeks who turned out to hear him were a "sophisticated audience", unlike religious believers. What an appeal to vanity! "Ah, but ye, the Elect..."

Yes, that audience was s