Today I have had a rather mysterious problem pop up with my Tecra M7 – when I try to log on to my “david” account (the one I normally use every day) at the welcome screen, it will start loading, then freeze inexplicably – even the mouse won’t move. For whatever reason, doing a crash > restart > try logging in again works. I’m not sure why.
My guess is that this is caused by something that I did to the machine recently. I experiment with a lot of software, and I also just installed some for my new Creative MV100 1GB Muvo MP3 player (review to follow at some point). I think this is also in part due to the Tablet OS – I’ve found that it is rather clunky, slow, and inefficient compared to regular ol’ Windows XP. I think most tablet users would agree with me here – even if you get kick-ass hardware, this OS extension really bogs down the practical use of the hardware.
In any case, I still have a week of vacation left, so I still have some down-time available where it won’t matter if I have my tablet working. I think I will try re-installing a tweaked OS using nLite. This requires doing a full back-up first (of course), which means clearing some space on my external HDD. I have a 40GB partition for Ubuntu Linux which I don’t really use, so I am trying to find some way to get rid of this partition and enlarge the NTFS partition again. Unfortunately, for some reason the M7 will not boot from the partition, and I can’t seem to find any good partition software that runs in the Windows environment (I prefer not to mess with DOS programs). Man, this little login problem sure sparked a chain of things to do!
So, for the moment I will be searching for some partition software… updates will probably follow at some point…
I find I am increasingly consumed with the ‘creation v. evolution’ debate, and I thought I’d put a few thoughts down here tonight that I’ve been mulling over. I have to say outright that they are not favorable to the creationist side, but that I am not closed to the idea. As Carl Sagan is famous for saying, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I simply don’t see any of this type on the creationist side.
An Argument for Biblical Literalism
Before I get into the issue of creationism itself, I will first proffer an argument for its scriptural validity for christians. This entire debate, after all, is central to the problem of religions making claims about the physical world that it is theoretically possible to verify by empirical investigation. If the creation account is only to be taken as a myth, then the entire debate is really a moot point.
Young-earth creationism is the claim that the earth is approximately 6,000 years old, and that God created the earth and all it contains in 6 days (He purportedly rested on the 7th day.. so I wouldn’t count it as part of creation week). Fundamentalists pick this age for the earth for a good reason. In the first few books of the Old Testament, lineages following from Adam can be traced to Noah (Genesis 5), from Noah to several lines of descent (Genesis 10), and on down the line to the birth of Christ, which was around 0 BC. All of these descent lines generally provide an idea of how old each generational father was when he had a kid, and when he died. A good example of this is Genesis 5:3-8…
3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth: 4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters: 5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. 6 And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos: 7 And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters: 8 And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.
If you take Adam as the initial father of all humanity, and trace the overlap of all these timelines, then the recorded generations in the Bible imply that Adam was created 4,000 years before the birth of Christ.
This, I think, creates a problem for those that would take the Bible seriously in determining church and/or personal doctrine, but would treat the creation story as a myth. It begs the question, why would these lineages be written down in such a manner of fact way? Why preserve fictional family trees? If it is only a myth that is to be treated as, say, a metaphor for man’s gaining consciousness through the evolutionary process, then the creation story alone would suffice to serve this purpose. However, given that the authors of these books did write in lineages as well, I would posit that they meant the creation story to be taken seriously, given a concurrent belief that the scriptures themselves are the Word of God.
If you have some alternative explanation that can somehow make it tenable to treat the creation story as metaphor for the physical evolutionary process, then I have open ears. I can’t think of one myself. In the meantime, I think it is safe to go with the proposition that if you take the Bible seriously at all, then young earth creationism is the most tenable position.
[update 2007-01-10]
I did a bit more research into the genealogy of Christ out of pure curiosity. I made the weak assumption that someone in the SDA church of which I was raised in had done their homework. There appears to be some gross discrepancies in the generational counts from the Matthew/Mark/Luke versions of Christian genealogy. This raises the interesting question of whether someone has figured out a tenable resolution for why these discrepancies exist. If not, the SDA church definitely has some soul-searching to do since a core tenet is the faultlessness of the Bible.
While I did not get to completely go through checking all the details of these genealogies / counting up the years etc., I made some notes that will be a good starting point when I have time again to go through it. In the mean time, I would have to say that this argument for biblical literalism is shaky at best.
[update 2007-03-04]
I happened to run across an article about the Ussher Chronology on Wikipedia today while investigating some things related to the Scopes Trial. According to the article, this is the most commonly accepted (though not the only) scholarly look at the chronologies of the Bible that attempts to infer the age of the earth. This study was conducted in the 17th century. It appears to be the primary source for the idea that the earth was created on October 23, 4004 BCE (a common citation of young-earth creationists).
Personally, I would not take this date to be accurate, considering some of the methods required to infer it. Most notably, there are several places where chronologies have gaps, or different versions of the Bible that have differing genealogies that can vary the timeline by as much as 1500 years. There is a definite upper limit to the age of the earth, as can be inferred from these accounts, which is perhaps why I’ve heard creationists use the figure of roughly 10,000 years instead of 6,000 – just to be on the safe side, assuming that all longer accounts of a particular section of history are considered true.
In any case, it is fairly clear to me that the Bible cannot be used as an accurate historical reference for dating events, considering the wide variations in translations / versions produced over time, and the internal inconsistencies within each of those versions. I’d say that this argument can be fairly put to rest as nothing more than young-earth creationist propaganda. The Bible is not inerrant in this respect, and should not be considered a good reference point.
[/update]
So How Do Creationists Explain This..?
Rather than trying to disprove the myriad arguments for creationism, I would rather start with some interesting genetic experiments done recently. There are interesting implications for the beliefs of creationists.
This is a clip taken from a lecture given by Ken Miller at Brown University that is 4.5 minutes. I would highly recommend seeing the whole lecture, but if you don’t have the time, then at least watch the 4 minute clip. The whole lecture (117 minutes) is here:
A short rundown of this clip:
Humans have 46 chromosomes in each cell, 23 from each parent
All other modern hominid species (apes) have 48 chromosomes, or 24 from each parent
If apes and humans are descended from a common ancestor (as evolutionary theory claims), then there must be an explanation for why this is. There are only a few plausible ways this could have happened, since if an entire chromosome disappeared, then we likely would have died off fairly early
One hypothesis: the human genetic line at some point had a 2 unique chromosomes (of the set of 24) fuse into one. This leaves us with 23 chromosomes total.
It is common knowledge in genetics that the ends of chromosomes have sequences of DNA called “telomeres”, which are essentially just location markers – they indicate the beginning/end of that chromosome’s DNA.
If the previously mentioned hypothesis is true, then if we sequence all the chromosomes from a human, we should find one with a patch of telomeres in the middle, where two chromosomes fused.
This is exactly what we found when we sequenced the human genome.
I think this is an absolutely gorgeous example of the predictive power of scientific theories, and of evolutionary theory in particular.
Implications, Motivations…
But what does this result of the human genome project mean to creationists? After all, God can make us any way he wants.. even if it ends up looking like evolution is a plausible alternative. Fundamentally though, why would He do this? It is clearly unnecessary to have those chromosomes fused, as it is simply a matter of the tail ends being stuck together – there is no significant coding information in telomeres by themselves that would change our biology. We can only be left to guess as to why a creator God would do this.
At the same time, this example gives good reason for why evolutionary theory is used as an explanatory/predictive model of biology in the modern day – because it works. This does not necessarily imply that evolution, and the corresponding storyline of all life descending from a few initial pieces of primitive life, is in fact the way that we came to be. On the contrary, and as I mentioned before, God can create in any fashion he wants. I just have to say that it is rather curious that he would leave such tell-tale marks of evolution.
What motivations could he have for doing this? An obvious one to an atheist is, spite and/or whimsy. Christians, however, do not take kindly to this characterization. I would ask christian readers to respond: why do you think God would create in this manner?
[update 2007-01-10]
I would like to, at this point add another beguiling feature of our universe as created by an intelligent being:
A Young Universe That Looks Old
Given the biblical literalism / creation story is accepted as assumed before, the creation week was a literal 6-day period. This implies that if all stars were created in place, we would not be able to see anything beyond the ~6,000 lightyear distance boundary. This leaves us with three options:
1. The universe was created in a manner similar to the cosmic expansion/big bang model, but much, much faster than we thought. I’m sure there’s plenty of cosmologists that cringe at the thought of this since, it probably violates a lot of the math underlying the formation of the universe – things that result from a formation that takes billions of years rather than a few minutes. The pace of formation no doubt would change many things, and I would venture a guess that the cosmic background radiation would be a bit different.
2. The universe was created in the manner as described by our best scientific understanding, with an age on the order of a few billion years. This is completely discordant with the idea of creationist theory, and is therefore a direct conflict with the creationist ideology if it is in fact how things happened.
3. The universe was created in six days, but God placed the photons emitted from stars in pathways so as to make it look like the universe was created in a manner as described by our best scientific understanding (billions of years old). This bypasses the problem of transmission time, but creates the question of why God would create the universe in such a manner as to be completely physically decieving as to how it was formed.
Again, this raises questions as to the motivations behind why the universe or the structure of life itself on this planet appears to be of ancient origin, yet was supposed to have been created in a comparatively miniscule time period. Why would god go to such lengths to “cover up” the physical consequences of a young universe? Option #1 allows for things to stay quasi-plausible and still within a scientific framework, but it still undoubtedly violates a lot of principles of physics, which again comes to the problem of why god would invoke exceptions of physics in order to make a young universe look old.
Matthew LaClair, 16, taped his 11th-grade Advanced History class teacher David Paszkiewicz in Kearny, New Jersey. Why? Because the first week, the teacher started proselytizing to the class and advocating a christian fundamentalist position as the only way to get to heaven. LaClair didn’t think administrators would believe him if he said his teacher was saying these things, so for the next 8 weeks he taped the class.
So far, I have only been able to find a few of these recordings on the internet:
“Talk in Class Turns to God, Setting Off Public Debate on Rights“, New York Times – see the Multimedia section. It uses streaming flash audio, so I can’t link directly to the audio. These are only choice bits of audio of when the teacher proselytizes to the class.
“Classroom Recordings“, The Observor Editor’s Blog. Has links to two clips of audio, both of the same day of class (early September), unedited. I will be posting copies of these clips on Ourmedia so they are sure to be archived for posterity. Links to these files to follow. Right now I am having difficulty with uploading to Ourmedia – it is giving me a mysterious error that I can’t deal with right now.
I’ve listened to these recordings, and there doesn’t appear to be any direct advocacy of his specific religion (he’s even diplomatic enough to make the distinction between an islamo-fascist and people who follow Islam that are nonviolent)
Clip 2 – 5:45 – Paszkiewicz makes a comment about how America has a superior worldview to China’s. The teacher cites the fundamental differences as freedom of speech vs. political prisoners, voluntary vs. forced abortion, no communism vs. communism, etc.. I would say that while the teacher is right in that our freedoms should be valued, I’m not sure I would frame that as a “superior worldview”, as if there is some moral framework that can judge how good various governments are. Perhaps he meant it more in the sense of the general level of satisfaction of the people governed?
Clip 2 – 9:00 – Paszkiewicz says something about a guaranteed war of some type happening in this region according to the Biblical timeline. It’s difficult to understand this comment if you don’t hear the surrounding context of the discussion. Nonetheless, I’m not sure what he means by the Biblical timeline.
David Paszkiewicz (left), Matthew Laclair (right).
According to the New York Times article, Paszkiewicz has had some chats with the school administration, after which there have presumably been no problems (no more complaints from LaClair, at least).
The surprising thing about this entire story, though, is that the majority of the other students and parents of students are on the ’side’ of the teacher. I think this is unfortunate, but it is at least evident that due to the vigilance of one student who spoke out, that corrective action was taken. I only worry about further classes of students who may not have the courage to do so.
Sort’ve paired with my “Summer 2005 – Welcome to Intercourse, PA” picture. Along the trip that summer, we stopped across the street from one of these stores – a Kum & Go – and I could’ve sworn I took a picture. I can’t find it right now though. They apparently have a website though! http://www.kumandgo.com/index.html
Maybe that picture’s on film somewhere. In any case, when I saw the sign for this store I just thought to myself – who came up with this name?!? Seriously…
This was taken during a road trip (summer of 2005). Intercourse, PA was given the name when the word didn’t have sexual connotations, but is now a popular tourist location b/c of the more recent connotations of the word. Wikipedia even has a snapshot of this sign in the article about the town!
Probably the only reason they don’t change the name today is b/c of all the business it generates! But seriously, if you had to tell someone “Oh, I live over in Intercourse…” would you really wanna live there?
I had all my finals (3) on Monday. So I woke up today with literally nothing to do as far as classes go. My first instinct? Go to the library! I picked up a couple of volumes from the “New Books” section:
“Why People Die By Suicide” by Thomas Joiner
“behind the SILENCE: Chinese Voices on Abortion” by Nie Jing-Bao
I have read 21 pages into the second book, and am simply fascinated with this author’s candor and efforts to provide a text that is to represent the wide variety of opinions and feelings regarding abortion in China. The introduction gives a few excerpts of interviews with woman who have had abortions, and doctors who perform them, and also patently discloses that the book is not intended to be a “scientific report” on this issue, but rather a text to represent the human context – views, emotions, actions – that the Chinese take in regards to this issue.
The most surprising thing that I have found in the first 20 pages of this book is that there is apparently a Western (American) meme that stereotypes the Chinese as completely heartless in regards to this issue. This meme purports that for the Chinese, abortion is not considered a moral/ethical issue, and that they consider it simply a medical procedure; that abortion is not in any way considered the extermination of a human life. The author, who is a Chinese medical student who has studied in the US as well, flatly contradicts this with the reality of her research – interviews with 60 people, and survey data collected from a wide range of people (700 participants in the study overall) – that highlights the Chinese’ paradoxical silence that Westerners perceive as apathy, and the individually diverse views on the subject.
It looks like it will be a good, enlightening read. I have already encountered many interesting ideas, and a foreshadowing of an interesting interplay between the cultural context that people live in and how they consider moral, ethical, and social/political issues. The Chinese’ view of abortion is almost completely alien to that of Americans’, and is perhaps the reason for the misunderstanding. The majority of the language we use to describe this issue does not adequately address the differences in cultural thought between East and West – it seems that there is an almost completely different emphasis on how individual rights and social welfare are prioritized.
This post contains a customer call to Verizon (youtube clip) disputing his bill of $71.79 for 35,895 KB of data transfer while he was in Canada. The main problem is that while he was quoted 0.002 cents per kilobyte, he was actually charged 0.002 dollars (or 0.2 cents) per kilobyte on his bill.
Here’s the Youtube clip:
Apparently, Verizon CSRs are completely incapable of understanding how you use algebra with conversion factors to make units cancel. The correct math for his bill would be:
Instead of reading the calcuation in Step 1 as cents, however, the CSR assumes that the calculator *automagically* knows that the CSR wants this quantity in dollars, and that it will convert it to this format for the CSR – thus reading the bill as $71.79, instead of $0.7179 once the correct conversion from cents to dollars is calculated.
In any case, I find it completely inexcusable that these people have no understanding of how to use basic Algebra 1 math techniques for finding out how much he should be billed on the quoted rate of 0.002 cents (just replace cents with x, dollars with y, and kilobytes with z.. it’s all the same). Perhaps a 10 year old could get away with not knowing this, but 5+ CSRs that are 18+ years old?
“…I understand that Hollywood needs to dress things up to make them more entertaining, but in the case of programmers, code, and hackers they’ve done more than dress things up – they’ve morphed a little stuffed teddy bear into a cybernetic polar bear covered in christmas lights and phosphorescent hieroglyphics with a fog machine pumping rainbow smoke out of his ass.”
My personal favorite (the last one):
“10. Most code is not inherently cross platform
Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit!
If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.”
Matt sure knows how to write smart sarcasm! I love it!
Since last post, I was unable to access saved drafts that I hadn’t published due to some embedded HTML in a draft of the previous post. I went to BlogDesk’s website to check out the FAQ, which recommended checking the built-in help system (what a thought!). It turns out BlogDesk actually does have fairly thorough documentation. I found out where the drafts were saved – and fortunately, each post draft is an individual file – so I removed the offending post, and my ability to access drafts is restored. Yay! I don’t have have to re-install or lose data now!
I’ve been reviewing quite a bit of Calc I stuff for the final on Monday, and decided I’d do a quick screencast of how to derive the equation used in Newton’s Method for approximating the root of an equation. This post is mostly an experiment in embedding a flash-export of what I recorded (in a more web-friendly 800×600 size) into a blog post. I’ve already uploaded the *.swf file to Ourmedia at this link.
Blogdesk Doesn’t Like Embedded Objects
I tried writing & uploading this post in Blogdesk, however it seemed to not like the ‘embed object’ HTML that inserted. When exporting something from the Flashback Recorder (FBR) into flash, it automagically generates an HTML file that sources the flash file it generates. Theoretically, all it would take to make this web-enabled is to change the path in EMBED src:”<path>”.
Blogdesk’s “Save post” feature isn’t working now that I have saved that post with HTML in it. I can’t open up any drafts that I haven’t posted. This seriously sucks, considering that I have no idea where it saves these, and thus would have to re-install the program in order to get rid of the corrupted/unliked saved file.
I’ve now tried embedding flash using WordPress’s online editor, however every time I save the post and look at the preview, the code disappears. A quick check of the forums/FAQ reveals that WordPress doesn’t allow <embed></embed> type html for security reasons. The only thing allowed is stuff from goo/youtube and odeo (audio), for which there is a shortened non-HTML syntax for embedding a player for audio/video of a particular file in a post.
External HTML Link w/ Embedded Object: Thank You Ourmedia!
So, now I’ll try something else: uploading an HTML file to Ourmedia that links to the uploaded file, and link to that from here. A less than ideal solution (it doesn’t directly appear in the post then), but if it works, then at least people can view my screencasts in a browser / in a streaming style player rather than downloading a file and opening it.
The HTML file appears to work fine, so it looks like I’ll have to go through some rather cumbersome measures to put up any custom *.swf embedded files, and link to an external page. Now I know!
