Detectable Design

The hot debate between Darwinists and Intelligent Design advocates is whether “design” is a detectable property of a system.  The ID hypothesis votes yes, its opponents vote no.

So the other day I was random-link-cruising and happened upon some articles and discussions about Yucca Mountain, and particularly about the “warning label” problem: how do we mark the Yucca Mountain facility in such a way that all comers will recognize it as “dangerous” even if those comers are not English-speakers (10’s of years), familiar with Post-enlightenment Western culture (100’s of years), users of “language” as we understand it (1,000’s of years), or even recognizably “human” (10,000’s or 100,000’s of years).

It struck me that this is simply another face of the “design” question: the DOE wants to make it unambiguously clear to an observer with whom they have nothing (practically speaking) in common and to whom they will communicate nothing except a single physical artifice that (1) the artifice was deliberately designed by an intelligent agent, and (2) the intent of the designer was to warn the curious away from the site.  So success rests upon the existence of some empirical means of detecting not only design, but intent.  If the site can be misunderstood as a potentially natural phenomenon (e.g., genetically-modified blue cacti) or its purpose is misunderstood by a civilization with a different cultural lexicon (as, e.g., a “place of honor”), the project will have failed.

Then I had an almost comical daydream about Richard Dawkins’ great⁶⁰ grandson (60-some-odd generations from now) standing before an apparently sealed-up wall, Geraldo Rivera style, lambasting his critics’ quaint but preposterous notions that the triple-triangular megaliths surrounding him are anything except aethetically fortuitous freaks of geology which our psychological evolution happens to have predisposed us to be both fascinated and horrified by, and that he intends to prove first-hand that there is nothing interesting about the site.  Bring in the robot-piloted hyper-backhoes and start digging!

Bumper Sticker Philosophy

As I walked my dog this evening, I passed a car with a curious bumper sticker.

EVOLUTION MEANS… No God… No Master

More true than most people realize. Evolution does not mean “truth” or “history” or even “science”. It is a model of biological history that is tautological if you assume there is no Creator, hence its appeal — the hedonistic scientist is spared the hard work of furnishing extraordinary evidence for his extraordinary claims, and the scientific hedonist is spared the bother having to reckon with accountability for his immorality.

Not that I expect any Darwinist to be convinced by this little rant. But it is curious that even Darwinism’s proponents recognize its philosophical ramifications; my only real disagreement with them would, I suppose, be whether those are the cause or the effect of their worldview.

Blogspotting

Taking “going green” to absurd measures…

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/black_google_wo.php

http://ecoiron.blogspot.com/2007/01/emergy-c-low-wattage-palette.html

By the way, it’s my understanding that LCDs actually consume more power displaying black than white (although the marginal cost is MUCH smaller).  So maybe the econ geeks can tell us what ratio of LCDs to CRTs it would take for a white Google homepage to be more eco-friendly than a black one?

In the meantime, I’m going to start restyling all of my web pages with alternate eco-palette CSS.  Yeah, that sounds like a very productive use of my time.

PS and apropos nothing above — Loving John Mayer’s new album, “Continuum”.

Why I Loathe Poetry On Buses

The poem dances over my head
Evoking the smell of cumin and cornmeal
But the dude next to me
Smells of his own urine,
His skin leathered,
Perhaps from sleeping in it.

It sings the beauty of an unknown tongue;
His words, too, are incomprehensible,
To myself and to him, but rhythmic,
And regular with the pulse of cursing.

My pastor doesn’t collect fares at the door
And doesn’t romanticize public transit.

Based on a true story of a ride on the northbound 36 last week.  I was reading “poetry on buses” (the poem quoted below) when “the dude” sat down next to me, reeking of his own excrement and muttering a steady stream of syllables that probably used to be curses when he thought anyone would bother to listen.

I don’t think public transit is a bad idea, but I’m under no illusions of it being able to usher in the blissful multicultural utopia some seem to ascribe to it.  Being exposed to “all types” requires taking the good and the bad, the pleasant and the rank, the enticing and the repulsive.

This piece was inspired by:

MY EDUCATION
By Erin Bogarte

She brushes past my knees
eyes on the distant horizon
looking for an empty seat. The air that follows her is
cumin and cornmeal.

Across the aisle a woman
scarf low on her forehead
smiles at me and speaks to her friend
with beautiful words I do not understand.

Oh, pastor bus driver
I wouldn’t trade this sermon for any.

On a Lighter Note

As I begin to take my first baby steps down the road to guitar demigod status, it occurs to me that the popular music of 2007 leaves me completely without any usable role models. Verily the rockopalypse is nigh upon us, but The Onion (America’s Finest News Source) brings tidings of redemption - Unreleased Jimmy Page Guitar Riff To Be Retrieved From Secret Vault To Save Rock And Roll.

Clothes vs. Whoopie

According to a recent Unilever survey, women prefer clothes to sex (see also Reuters article).

Nearly half of the women, or 48 percent, taking part in the survey by consumer products giant Unilever said their favorite article of clothing was more reliable than their man in giving them confidence and making them feel sexy.

Encouraging news, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Maybe I’m just too jaded after last year’s spate of article saying married women have no incentive (in a supply-demand sense) to provide sex.

Spiritual Sandy

C3 Manhattan worship leader Kathleen Monteleone is one of the finalists on NBC’s “The One That I Want“. Rock on Kathleen!

(Updated 2/4–)

More bloggy goodness, coverage, and promotion:

• http://www.realityblogs.com/2007/01/30/spiritual-sandy-offers-sage-advice/
• http://www.oregonlive.com/tv/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/1169601931123070.xml&coll=7
• http://www.kathleenmonteleone.com/
• http://blogher.org/node/15008

The Driscoll Furor

Um, yeah.

So, there’s a lot being said about Mark Driscoll right now, and it’s not hard to find. Sifting the signal out of the noise, however, is a bit of a challenge.

Two things I think are worth remembering long after this firestorm has passed:

The only way to stay away from sin is to stay close to Jesus.

I know that the words “I can’t believe in a God who…” have to be removed from the vocabulary of anyone who wishes to take up His cross.

The Cartoon that Ended the World (part deux)

Nothing new here, just the same weird sensitivity fascism we were seeing a year ago. When one country’s foreign minister summons another country’s ambassador to protest because some kids did something offensive at summer camp, it becomes clear that someone has lost the plot. And if the imams of the world would like for us to believe that Islam is a grown-up religion and not just another excuse for tribal war-mongering, they need to tell their people not to threaten, harm, fire-bomb, intimidate, or otherwise act childish toward the people of Denmark.

Techie Wannabes

So, for my day job I work on a web site.

There’s another web site where some of the more, uh, “avid” users of our site congregate and comment on us and how we’re doing.  One of these “fans” made a snide remark just yesterday about us needing to do some “basic testing” on our web site before we put it out there.

Dude, you have no idea.  We have three - count them, three - separate automated test suites, each with hundreds of individual test cases, all of which get run against our software before a new version of our site launches.  We spend several weeks bug bashing, load testing, and vetting release candidates before we launch them to the public.  We take the release process - including testing - VERY seriously, because we also wear the pagers that go off when someone doesn’t like something they see on the site.

Our web site isn’t just a bunch of perl scripts and a MySQL database.  It’s composed of more than twenty interlocking components, databases, and service, each of which runs on a fleet of machines, some of which are owned by other teams.  Those systems can fail with no notice to us (as hardware tends to do), or change in sometimes subtle ways with little or no notice to us (as software owned by other teams tends to do).  Anticipating all of the corner cases — especially the ones where every conceivable combination of services can die, brown out, studder, or generally go flaky — is hard.  Anticipating and hardening ourselves against the errors that those other teams will make is even harder (read: “impossible”).

So chill.  We’re not a bunch of amateurs, and it will get fixed, but it takes time.  And snarky comments on forums that say “this is broken” but don’t tell us who you are, when it happened, what you were doing, and what happened are worse than useless, because they cause managers to assign us to dead-end rabbit hole investigations instead of actually working to improve the stability of the site and the quality of the codebase.