Textbook Disclaimers from the Catholic Church, the Soviet Union, and the Intelligent Design Movement

In the 16th century, Copernicus published his paper On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, in which he described the motions of the moon and planets in terms of early algebraic equations. To his surprise and everyone else's consternation, his results indicated that the very best equations, the ones that provided the best prediction for where Mercury, or Mars, or the Moon, would be in six month, or six centuries, were ones that assumed the Sun at the center of the solar system and the Earth as one of many objects in orbit around the Sun, moving in circular motion.

This was in contradiction to the Church's teaching at the time, in which the Prophet Isaiah made the sun stop in the Heavens. If the sun stopped, then it could not be the lynchpin of the solar system. It could not be the thing which moved.

Copernicus was forced to write a preface in his book in which he said that while his equations were interesting and useful tools for predicting the apparent motion of the planets and stars, it would be a mistake to assume they were the Truth, because only the Church had authority over the Truth.

Between 1930 and 1960, physicists working in the Communist Soviet Union always put a preface to their books and monographs, explaining that while their use of the equations of Bohr and Einstein and Schroedinger were very interesting and apparently useful, they should not be taken as the Truth. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics was in contradiction to Marx's scientific materialism, which was a deterministic system. Nature was not allowed to have a maybe in Marx's universe, and so Lenin and Stalin jailed any scientist who said otherwise.

At the same time, biologists working in the Soviet Union had a similar (and more egregious) problem. The official state policy was Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism proposes that acquired characteristics of an organism could be be inherited by future generations; this was a brand of Lamarckism, and was absolutely essential to the Marxist-Leninist program. Lysenkoists believed that each generation of Soviet men would be smarter, better and more Soviet than the previous, because each generation had been taught to be so and the next generation would aquire those as residual characteristics on top of which more work could be done.

Genetics was a "bourgeois psuedoscience" because it did not promise a progressive program. It did not have a ratchet, and it did not follow Marx's scientific materialism with its arrow of history. Darwinian biology does not imply progress: it says only that organisms change, and not always toward what we value. In a world of changing environments, it may well be the smaller, weaker creatures that survive better after all. Unlike physicsists (whom Stalin needed), geneticists were not allowed to get away with mere disclaimers; many were jailed, others executed.

The Texas and Florida school boards are currently convulsing with ideological fervor. The State of Texas' Superintendent of Instruction recently fired her science advisor for having a position that implies that the Texas Education Administration is "not neutral on the issue of evolution and intelligent design." The Florida State Board of Education Member, Donna Calloway, has said she'll vote against the biology requirement because it explains evolutionary theory to the exclusion of "other theories."

I have this nightmare that, should a Republican win the presidential election in 2008 and get the power to nominate Supreme Court Justices, we'll end up disclaimers in our college biology textbooks in which the authors write, "The apparent nested heirarchal relationships between species suggested by morphology, the apparent nested heirarchal relatioships between species suggested by genetics, and the precise correspondence between these two heirarchies, are strictly the work of our designer. Nothing in this book is meant to imply that this striking coincidence indicates common descent with modification. Assuming such a relationship might be interesting, and might even prove fruitful in the pursuit of specific research outcomes, but it is only an assumption and is not supported by the evidence."

Blog linking.

Back when Hillary Clinton described Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, a number of people pointed out that this was an unfair comparison. For example, Darth Vader once served in the military. [Paul Krugman, NYT]

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Compare Rudy Giuliani: "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenues." Contrast: ""Virtually every economics Ph.D. who has worked in the Bush Administration acknowledges that the tax cuts of the past six years haven't paid for themselves." [Justin Fox, Time Magazine]

Sounds like a character issue to me.

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Another Willand Mitt Romney quote: "There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution."

No, Mr. Romney. That's not what it says. What the constitution says (Article 6) is that no oaths of office shall ever be required of the government for elected officials. It says nothing about the press or the people requesting an explanation from those seeking high office, and in fact allowing people to request that is a matter of free speech and principle.

Kouryou-chan's dance

Saturday, Kouryou-chan had another of her mid-class dance performances for her ballet group. It was held at a local high school, and it had much of the feel of a high-school level performance. Given that she's in second grade (well, the Montessori equivalent), that's not a bad thing.

But oy, the amount of running around that we had to do: 1:15pm rehearsal, 3:30 let out, 4:15 performance; that gave us 45 minutes to feed Kouryou-chan. I think I spent way too much time in the car.

The show was only about an hour long, and it all looked very rough, but it was only three months since the resumption of classes. Kouryou-chan looked great and was at least as within her marks as any of the kids in her class. She has a very distinctive face compared to the pudgy, round looks of her fellow students.

Ebay Nuisances

What's the point of paying the extra $20 for "second day delivery" when the freakin' Ebay retailer doesn't put the package in the UPS chain for four days?

I'm tired of working on a computer where I have to shut down the word processor to pull up the mail browser, and have to shut down both to pull up the web browser, and so on and so forth.

Didn't Bill Gates once say that 128MB was more than any consumer would ever need? 128MB isn't enough for this consumer right now.

The Golden Compass

Omaha and I took the girls and met lisakit at the cinema this afternoon to go see The Golden Compass, the new movie based on Phillip Pullman's book The Northern Lights.

I was disappointed with the film. It's a beautiful movie with a ton of special effects thrown into it, but ultimately the outcome is less than perfect. Much of what's in the book is missing from the film not because the writers cut it out but because intrinsic aspects of the book do not transport well to other media. The relationship between a person and their daemon is easy to write, but very hard to relate in a film. The very basis of the book, the ideas that knowledge of good and evil and the worthiness of rebellion, are hard to get across in a film without getting talky, and you can't have a talky kids film. It doesn't work.

If you're a steampunk afficiando there's more than enough imagery in the film to keep you happy for days: magic zepplins, horseless carriages, steam and sail, gleaming cities of marble and chrome, the whole 1930s look and feel of the university, the laboratory, the docks. (Indeed, the laboratory is striking because everything in it looks like it comes out of a Doc Savage video except the intercissor, which instead looks like popped out of some postmodern cyberpunk.) The armored bears are very cool indeed, as is the relationship between Lyra and Pan.

Omaha believes that the point of the film is that it's told in Lyra's eyes. But for people watching the film, it's a mishmash of coincidences, deterministic segues from one crisis to another without any real threat to Lyra's will being, and overall a real lack of narrative struggle: Lyra is just carried along from one set piece to the next and you just know, with more surety than a film should allow, that she's going to come through unscathed. I was never in any doubt about this film, and that's a sign of poor filmmaking; I never felt that the main characters were in any real danger. Someone will show up who's just willing to help Lyra-- no reason given, mostly-- and in scene after scene that's exactly what happens.

It's very pretty. If you like Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, they make lovely set pieces in an accelerating collection of gorgeous steampunk settings and post-Victoriana costumes. Derek Jacoby and Christopher Lee are effective villains. Dakota Richards is quite effective as Lyra. Even Sam Elliot looks great. But still, to cut the heart out of the book and make The Magisterium into an organizing body without invoking the authority of God, hurt the story, and it ultimately didn't move me.

.NET and the Cult of Microsoft

I've been looking for a decent book on doing ActionScript development without the Flash environment, since I have Swfmill and MTASC. But I've also been looking for pointers to the C# development environment for Unix, so while I was at Half-Price Books I picked up a used copy of ASP.NET in a Nutshell, since I tend to trust O'Reilly (although that trust is sometimes not warranted; it took O'Reilly forever to get their heads out of the butts with respect to Python because they were too Perl oriented once; and their XML and UML books have just been awful).

There are some moments in this book that reinforce for me the whole Cult of Microsoft meme. Seriously. There's a chapter in the opening where the author absolutely crows about how ASP.NET is "completely object oriented." In 1996, NeXT, Inc. released the very first web application server, WebObjects, and it was written in Objective-C, a C-based language with Smalltalk-based object orientation that was arguably more "object oriented" than C++ has ever been. Almost every web-based framework since then has been OO; For MS to act as if in 1992 it brought manna to the masses by "introducing an objected oriented framework for web development" is simply ridiculous in the extreme.

The whole section on authentication and authorization pooh-poohs the basics of HTTP authentication and seeks to "route around" it by providing extra, Microsoft-only solutions such as Passport. There's no mention of other, more popular authentication schemes. It's as if, once you drank the Koolaid, nothing else in the world exists or had ever existed: not Apple's WebObjects, not Zope, not PHP, not Rails.

It is stuff like this that bothers me most about Microsoft: the whole "it wasn't invented by us therefore it's not worthy of your attention" attitude that is so all-encompassing as to be a distortion of reality. It's no wonder that C-Sharp, despite its obvious superiority to Java, makes developers itch.

Is it okay to dislike a grocery chain for its design decisions?

Most of you have probably already seen the automated checkout lines in many grocery stores. The one down the block from my house has one, and I used to like it. I used to because it was actually very simple and once you got to know it, easy to get through. They updated it a couple of months ago and, while I still use it, I have developed a deep, abiding loathing for the damn machines.

Because they chose that font you see above.

Chainlink (that's not actually chainlink there, but a free knockoff that's pretty close) is one of those "decorative" fonts that implies butchness, connectivity, technocracy. It has all of those design elements, and many designers I know fall for its trick at first. But the infatuation quickly wears off: chainlink is so graceless at being a decorative semiserif font with masculine lines that you quickly go from being infatuated with it to being sick of it. It's not even like Comic Sans; it's not a matter of overexposure. Chainlink is just one of those fonts that is so clearly and obviously bad eyecandy that you get an ache the second or third time you see it.

The auto-checkouts at the QFC down the street have chosen to use three different typefaces: A decorative font I couldn't name for the display page (including the store's logo), Helvetica for almost everything (the price and quantity display, most of the touchscreen buttons, and the close-captioning on the left for those who can't hear the bright chirpy voice), and Chainlink for... well, it's hard to say what for. Some buttons (including the red (why the frack red?) [PAY NOW] button), the "Thank you for shopping with us" notice (which always makes me want to say "Fuck you very much too," mostly because of the font), and a few other seemingly random places.

The new design is awful all around. The new "Do you have any coupons?" page has yes/no buttons that are opposite the "pay now" and the "pay with a card" buttons, so for 90% of their customers that hand has to seek back and forth on the screen, slowing them down. The "No barcode" sequence has added a new page between the button and the touchpad for entry so you can choose to search the database by category: putting the search button on the touchpad screen, which has plenty of real estate, would have been much nicer.

But mostly it's that font. That godawful, testosterony, "I'm young and stupid and a programmer not a designer and I think this font looks manly and great and I'll sneak it in where I can" font.