<D
Y> M> D>

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 sophisticated, and there are lots of unsophisticated audiences in the world, but it's not as though all religious believers are uneducated and backward congregations driven to a frenzy by preachers of (R.) Hofstadter's "religion of the heart". Some of the smartest and best-educated people in the world and some scientists (including some working evolutionary biologists) are believers in traditional organized religions. Dawkins should not appeal to vanity and stereotypes by suggesting that we all who came to hear him are sophisticated and that everyone else is unsophisticated.

There is a negative correlation between education and some forms of religious belief. And this is important. But remember that Francis Bacon (an unbelievably powerful advocate of science whose works may have undermined religious belief on more than one occasion) said "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion". Can anyone doubt that this is a serious charge, coming from Francis Bacon? (Oops, is that an appeal to authority?)

I filed a new Worker's Comp claim. The bureaucratic elements of this are confusing to me, but they provided for me to put off going back to the chiropractor. I guess I'll be going back next week.

Sumana, breakfast.com is registered, it's just that there's no machine called www.breakfast.com. It's entirely possible to register a domain and not run a web server there called www. The registree of that domain is 

[whois.domaindiscover.com]

This WHOIS database is provided for information purposes only. We do
not guarantee the accuracy of this data. The following uses of this 
system are expressly prohibited: (1) use of this system for unlawful 
purposes; (2) use of this system to collect information used in the 
mass transmission of unsolicited commercial messages in any medium; 
(3) use of high volume, automated, electronic processes against this 
database. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this 
policy.

Registrant:
   The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International
   1560 Sherman Ave
   Evanston, IL 60201
   US

   Domain Name: BREAKFAST.COM

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
      Rotary International
      The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International
      1560 Sherman Ave
      Evanston, IL 60201
      US
      847-866-3000
      klimess@ROTARYINTL.ORG

   Domain created on 30-Jul-1997
   Domain expires on 28-Jul-2001
   Last updated on 28-Dec-2000

   Domain servers in listed order:

   T.NS.VERIO.NET               192.67.14.16
   B.NS.VERIO.NET               129.250.35.32

If you want to see whether a domain is registered, use whois, not a web browser. (Or you can use a DNS query tool like dig or nslookup.)

I try not to let people answer that they don't have access to these tools; if they say that, I'll generally give them Unix accounts.

Also, although there are definitely vegetarians who are bad people, the idea that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian is largely a mistake. Hitler went on a mostly vegetarian diet for part of his life for medical reasons, but he was very fond of certain animal foods for his whole life and continued to eat some of them even while he was on his health food diet.

You can find some references on this from a Google search for "Hitler vegetarian".

I have so many complaints with some of the ways I've seen the "Hitler was a vegetarian" story abused, it's not even funny. So I would like to point out to people that there's a grain of truth in it, but it's a rather small grain.

I guess people use that as some strange sort of antidote to the lists of celebrity vegetarians which includes a fair number of people who are considered moral heroes. I've seen lists of celebrity vegetarians and lists of celebrity atheists, and I think the message conveyed by these lists is supposed to be along the lines that being such-and-such is normal or socially acceptible. In some cases it may go beyond this and try to associate the behavior or belief with positive characteristics of the celebrities -- for example, Gandhi being vegetarian (I have his pamphlet The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism somewhere) and Gandhi being a good person and these having some connection.

I guess one goal could be to show that being good tends to make you a vegetarian, or that being a vegetarian tends to make you a good person. These two conclusions are not at all the same thing ("'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!' 'You might just as well say,' added the March Hare, 'that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!'") unless vegetarianism is identical with goodness.

A bad person being a vegetarian would count toward disproving that vegetarianism makes you good, but not toward disproving that goodness makes you vegetarian. Other possibilities from the set of things that someone might be trying to establish with celebrity vegetarian lists include that vegetarianism does not make you bad.

I don't know how many times I've seen the puzzle about the four cards, and "How many cards do you have to turn over in order to know for sure whether..." -- a famous puzzle to show how bad most people are at formal logic. I've seen it attributed to many different people, and I'd like to know something more about its history. I'm sure it's in several Gardner books.

Here's one version. You see four cards on a table and you already know that they are standard playing cards and have either red backs or blue backs. The cards -- as you see them -- are

Now the question is, how many cards (and which) do you have to turn over in order to be sure of knowing whether it's true that "All of the spades on the table have red backs"?

The analogy in this particular case is if you had

then how many, and which, would you have to "turn over" in order to resolve (prove or disprove) various claims about "All X are Y" (all good people are vegetarians, all vegetarians are good people, all bad people are non-vegetarians, all non-vegetarians are bad people)? Or "No X are Y" (no bad people are vegetarians, no vegetarians are bad people, no good people are non-vegetarians, no non-vegetarians are good people)? (Some of those statements are equivalent to others.) There's a general rule involved here.

Of course, in informal propaganda argument, you don't generally try to explicitly prove a universal -- you just try to produce a statistical, empirical inference. But some philosophers of science think that the rules of what lends support to an empirical inference are related to what proves the corresponding universal claim or what disproves its negation. (E.g. evidence akin to what would prove that "All Berkeley students are blue" or what would disprove that "Not all Berkeley students are blue" would tend to support the weaker claim that "Berkeley students are generally blue" or "Berkeley students tend to be blue" or various other versions that aren't categorical.)

It's fun to discover the basics of quantifier logic if you've never been exposed to them.

Today is Good Friday and Friday the 13th. Someone at work said that those should cancel out to make this just a plain old Friday.

Yesterday I bought a very old copy of The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Or, Christianity Before Christ (which you can read on-line). It seems that Kersey Graves is doing one of these "extremely excitable 19th century authors getting carried away" things, but the book is interesting. It pretty much accuses Christianity of plagiarizing a number of other earlier religions, and seems to argue on this basis against what Thomas Paine called "fabulous theology" and against Christian religious tradition. (Did I mention that I was reading Paine's The Age of Reason the other day?)

I think that Graves ends up at a non-religious position, very much unlike Paine, who famously said that "I believe in one God, and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life" (but that revealed religions were all "fabulous", which is to say false). But I haven't finished Sixteen Crucified Saviors to know for sure.

The trouble is that Graves can't back up some of his strong claims -- so the Internet Infidels edition I linked to above says that "readers should be extremely cautious in trusting anything in this book".

I threw together a proof-of-concept version of a downloadable packages script for the BBC, and burned a BBC and put up two packages -- aumix and ogg123 -- on the net. Then I booted the BBC and asked it to download those packages and install them in a ramdisk. After about twenty minutes of fixing bugs related to library paths, I got the BBC-booted system to load the SoundBlaster module and to play the Ogg of Total Eclipse of the Heart (well, I had it sitting around) over an SSH connection, and then to play one of the Oggs from Vorbis.com over an HTTP connection. Streaming media using protocols that weren't designed for streaming media is really cool. It's very easy --

ssh foo cat Total_Eclipse_of_the_Heart.ogg | ogg123 -d oss -

Sorry if that doesn't look easy to non-Unix geeks. It's really straightforward.

When I visited Ben, I saw a demonstration of a streaming media server that used HTTP and MP3s -- it was really neat, and it worked over an 802.11b wireless network, so you could take a laptop anywhere in the building, not plugged into anything at all, and then at any time choose a song or album from extensive menus on a web site -- and the song would be "broadcast" (it's actually just an HTTP GET) to you through the air and your laptop would start to play it. Very cool.

So now I just have to get Ben to convert all that over to Oggs instead of MP3s, and it will be even better.

I thought I saw a way to use netpipes to make what would look like a circular (bidirectional) pipe -- really a socket, you know -- in the shell. But no such luck yet. I'll have to figure it out, because I promised it to some people on the SVLUG mailing list.

[Main]
Support Bloggers' Rights!
Support Bloggers' Rights!


Contact: Seth David Schoen