If you're going to replace an industry standard, do it PROPERLY

Those who know me will probably appreciate that I have no time for That's What Everyone Else Uses thinking. I chose my first mobile phone on the basis of not getting a Nokia because everyone else had one. I use Linux, and at my last job I actually preferred using the free PrimoPDF PDF creator to Adobe Acrobat which I also had installed.

But I am also a big fan of using technology that works the way it's supposed to (which is, indeed, a major factor in my using Linux over Windows). I am aiming at a Nokia for my next mobile because they're looking very much like the only people who can competently make a mobile phone. I use Adobe Acrobat Reader even on my Linux machine because it is (now, finally) smoother, faster and more powerful than xpdf, evince, kpdf, etc.

And speaking of PDFs...

I can not, for the life of me, understand why anybody would choose to buy PDF software from anybody except Adobe, when you can create PDFs from any Windows program using small, efficient utilities like PrimoPDF which plug themselves into the Windows printer queue, and Acrobat Reader is a free (if annoying) download. And yet my new employer has chosen to do exactly that, going with PDF Complete, a suite that falls short of providing even Reader functionality, let along full Acrobat creation functionality. And it just plain doesn't work well enough.

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that there is no text selection functionality, a pretty useful tool when doing research, I have just tried to access a document from the Disability Services Queensland website and found that, due to layers being used to display graphics for page backgrounds, PDF Complete was unable to correctly display the text in front of the graphics. Or print it. Which made it, quite simply, useless.

If DSQ hadn't also made a Word version of the file available (which answers the baffling question of why the hell they bother doing that anyway), I would have been unable to do my job properly.

As much as I dislike large, market-dominating corporations in general and Adobe in particular (among many others), sometimes you just have to go with "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And if the fix broke, unfix it!

There's a reason that Christians need their own bookstores to sell anything

There is a second hand books-and-everything-else shop across the road from my new work, and I finally wandered in today to have a look.

It's fantastic. it's one of these shops run by a couple of little old ladies, where there are incredibly tacky antiques, the occasional good find and stacks, I mean literally, of old books. I wandered in, lingered over the Fantasy/SF section (no Bester, no Leiber, too much Larry Niven, one ratty old copy of Lord Of The Rings), and kept on drifting. I came to the self-help etc. section (oh look, there's a copy of Dianetics! That should be in Fantasy, just let me fix that...) and found a book that claimed to present a unique theory of blended personalities and how to understand this and maximise your life.

Nothing wrong with this so far: There are numerous theories of personality or temperament, and why not another one?

So I picked it up, and flicked vaguely through it, not really intending to read anything, when I found the steaming pile of dog turd in the middle; A diagram which claimed that "there are only three basic types of personality". The three could be loosely described as Wrong 1, Wrong 2 and Good. Wrong 1 was something like "Natural Man" and was angsty and nervous. Wrong 2 was something like "Aggressive Self-Promoter" and was all pushy and unable to appreciate life. Good was...

Wait for it...

Drum-roll please...

"Christ-Controlled Christian."

Fuck off and die, you superstitious, sanctimonious hack.

Your daily Windows YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME

This is so ludicrous that I'm having serious trouble believing it.

The position I am currently occupying at work is brand new, and limited-term funding. As a result of which, there wasn't already a desk set up to take me. I was on an old grey desk, slightly too small, nicked from somewhere else and with a brand new computer that used a USB wireless adapter because there weren't enough network sockets in the wall.

Today, my new desk finally arrived. Which meant unplugging everything, packing up, transferring, plugging everything back in...

Being a modern new computer, the keyboard and mouse plugged in through USB, and the back of the very trim little business-type computer chassis had six USB ports available. Okay, one for the wireless adapter, one for the mouse, one for the keyboard, hit the power button...

Neither the mouse nor the keyboard worked. Non-functioning USB ports? No, there were lights on both peripherals. I waited, I tried jiggling everything, I tried swearing, I tried rebooting and then, not seriously expecting a response, I tried unplugging both devices, while the computer was still running, and swapping them. Not moving them to different ports, just swapping them.

Whereupon they both merrily decided to work.

Please, please don't tell me that either Windows XP or the BIOS has been set up to save time by assuming that devices plugged into the Universal Serial Bus, the one truly agnostic computer connector into which anything can be plugged including mug warmers, microscopes and frigging laser guided missile launchers, are always plugged into the same port? Because that would be, like, really stupid and insanely annoying.

There appears to be difference between "education" and "schooling"

To quote myself:

"I have commented here before that I am not particularly impressed with the quality of the science education that I received at school. I had some great teachers, but they were hamstrung by the curriculum".

I have just been alerted (thank you, Mark) that one possible explanation of this comes from Richard Feynman, and although he was talking about a particular situation in America, I wouldn't be too surprised if something similar was not the case here in Australia, when it comes to schools buying textbooks:

"They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous -- they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child."

It goes on in that vein for some time, with impressive (and quite scary) amounts of detail.

We're all doomed.

Your daily Windows WTF?

It's been a while since I've done one of these. I haven't needed to push my desktop at my new job hard enough to really find the problems, but:

According to my desktop, I have four icons visible - Trash, a shortcut to My Computer, a wizard for the wireless adapter (I'm not actually plugged into the wall, there weren't enough sockets spare) and a shortcut to my folder on the server. According to My Computer, however, the Desktop should have eight icons, with the addition of the original My computer, My Documents, My network Places and Internet Explorer.

Excuse me, but where the fuck are the missing four?

Science 101: How we know that what we know is worth knowing.

I have commented here before that I am not particularly impressed with the quality of the science education that I received at school. I had some great teachers, but they were hamstrung by the curriculum, and we spent all our time doing little experiments, some of which were based on debunked ideas anyway (I never could detect different tastes on different regions of my tongue, and I wonder if the people who laughed at me then ever heard that the whole idea of taste regions is bullshit?) instead of talking about what the difference between science and things like religion is (hint - proof).

Thought: I really should do a post on the definition of Philosophy, as well...

But, in recent years, driven by the professional need to evaluate fringe medicine and alternative medical practices, I have gone on a determined period of self-education, and there are various basic principles that have served me well in understanding where scientific knowledge currently stands, and in separating the crap from the canonical (to use a particularly inappropriate word). And then I run straight into someone who has basic misunderstandings of science and scientific processes, and an attempt at a discussion becomes an argument which becomes a series of statements which get nobody anywhere.

As a part of relieving my frustration at these confrontations, and in the hope that somebody, somewhere, will benefit from my experience, here are those principles, in roughly descending order of importance:

• Reality is complicated. This means that one quibble does not a theory destroy, one factual error in data used to construct a conclusion will probably be lost in the noise, one error by NASA in constructing climate records doesn't mean jack shit when it comes to analysing the long-term trends, pointing out exceptions disproves no rule and when you complain about a majority consensus on anything you had better be prepared to respond to fifteen different lines of evidence, not one. The result of which is:
• The language of science is probability, not certainty. Science deals in balance of probability. Any "fact" we think we know can potentially be disproved, even if subtly, and usually is. Newtonian physics was found to be incomplete when Einstein gave us relativity. Matter was once thought to be composed of three fundamental particles, but now we know that not only are protons, neutrons and electrons composed of even smaller particles, but that those particles may themselves be just manifestations of fluctuations in space-time. Darwin didn't know about DNA, but understanding DNA is a key part of modern understanding of evolution. Physics thought it was complete at the end of the nineteenth century, and then quantum physics was needed to solve the black body problem. None of which means that Newton and Darwin and everyone else was wrong the first time. They just weren't as right. Absolute knowledge is for all practical purposes impossible, and a very important consequence of this is:
• There are degrees of truth. Isaac Asimov: "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Darwin wasn't wrong about evolution because he didn't know about the underlying chemical processes. He was just a bit wrong, and still produced a brilliantly working explanation of genetic diversity. Newton wasn't wrong about the laws of motion because he didn't realise that he was just working on a particular macro scale in a particular gravitational environment. His work was just a bit more situation-specific than he realised. All of which means that, in terms of language:
• "Theory" does not mean "guess". This is one of the most tired and pointless arguments trotted out by global warming deniers, evolution deniers and all other shades of deniers. "They're not even certain!" They trumpet, "It's just a theory!" Here is the truth: Something which scientists guess at, hope for or wildly surmise is a hypothesis.
  Something which has been demonstrated, at least once, to be true is a theory. See point one above: Science in general (if not scientists in particular) has enough humility to realise that we are, at the moment, only a little bit further along the road to truth than we were yesterday, and not quite as far as we will be tomorrow. Even a theory which can explain the vast diversity of life on earth, lead to vast improvements in medicine and make accurate predictions of change in entire species is still only a theory, because our understanding is still not yet perfect and we keep fine-tuning the details. Yes, there are "laws", but that's got more to do with the confidence of the person who named them than anything else. Compare the laws of thermodynamics with Moore's law. And speaking of individual people:
• Individuals can be wrong, which is why we have consensus. You can find, if you look hard enough, or even for five seconds on the Internet, a "scientist" who disagrees with anything: Neurologists who don't believe in evolution, climatologists who don't believe that C02 is a climate forcer, you name it. But do you really think that one mind out of all those who have won recognition in their field is the only one to get it right? Very rarely in science do you find a genuine prophet who is without honour in his own country - Einstein won the Nobel Prize while he was still alive. Max Planck demonstrated (see black body radiation) that physics had been entertaining a fundamental untruth, but was not pilloried until the day he died. Scientists who are correct tend to be on the inner. Scientists who remain on the outer - well, there's probably a a very good reason for that. People who use the religious persecution of Galileo to try and defend the flimsy possibility that somebody who is discredited by "the establishment" might be right would do well to remember the words of Carl Sagan: "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

And finally, as an excellent addition to your bullshit-filter:

• Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. Also known as the "Wow!" factor, or "Anything which sounds too good to be true, usually is" or "What's the catch?" or "Hey, why hasn't he won the Nobel Prize?" This is where people tend to get very defensive and start saying that "The Establishment" is trying to suppress the truth, or that drug companies or energy companies are beating up on threats to their monopolies, or that other scientists are either too scared to accept the truth or too desperately clinging to their own theories. The simple response to which is: Put up, or shut up, and we mean in front of your peers, not the under-educated mass media. Most rejected theories or claims are rejected not because of inertia or low self-esteem in the scientific community, or aggressive and underhand tactics by stakeholders, but because those new theories or claims are, quite simply, crap. Drug companies pour millions into development and are desperately looking for the next monopoly. Scientists will accept any new theory that works and is useful (there's a whole other argument around "So? Your point being?") - in fact, Max Planck even expected wave mechanics to supplant his own quantum mechanics, but he was wrong about that - and the "Establishment" is simply the collection of individual scientists. Truth really does tend to out.

I'll wrap up here with a piece of advice which more self-proclaimed skeptics should really take to heart: Professional scientists have usually done a research higher degree and operate in an environment of cut-throat competition for university positions and grants funding, and truly vicious attacking of any new theory or position. This tends to mean that they're intelligent, sharp-witted and devote their entire lives to pursuit of further knowledge in their chosen field. If you, personally, think that you have spotted a flaw in their work, how likely are you to be right? If they really are wrong, other people will rip them to shreds soon enough. If they keep standing, your world view is probably wrong. Deal with it.

P.S.: If you wish to argue about climate change, please leave it until you read through this: How To Talk To A Climate Skeptic. If you wish to argue about evolution, shut the fuck up until you read through this: Talk Origins: Introduction to Evolutionary Biology.

How to save yourself from conmen and alternative medicine

Beware simple answers to complex problems, or easy methods for accomplishing difficult goals. If you combine this maxim with the advice to be skeptical of any claims that are being made in order to sell you something - then ironically you have a simple method (perhaps I should call it an “elegant” method) for protecting yourself from most scams and cons. Actually the application of this combination of maxims can be complex, but what it does do is trigger doubt and skeptical analysis. (And to be clear I am not saying that all simple solutions must be wrong - you should just beware them, meaning your skeptical senses should be tingling.)

Thankyou NeuroLogica Blog.

Put this right up there with "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof".