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“Deponent” is a Spurious Category

February 11th, 2010 Gordon 10 comments

I’ve seen a few posts lately regarding the “problem” of deponency and/or the middle voice in ancient Greek. One blogger even suggests that we use a different word than “middle”, which is a dumb idea, because “middle voice” is a term of art, with a specific meaning that has only a tenuous relationship to the ordinary use of the word.

To a linguist, this is all very bemusing. Trying to build elaborate models and explanations to help English speakers wrap their minds around the idea that ancient Greek speakers used middle or passive constructions in contexts where English would use the active is just pandering to Anglo-centrism — all the models are attempting to explain Greek in terms of the writers’ English-language categories.

Look, folks, news-flash: ancient Greek is NOT English! The categories of ancient Greek are not those of English, and the ancient Greeks’ reasons for using a particular voice in a particular situation may simply be quite different from those of modern-day English-speakers.

And they may indeed have not had reasons! Far more of language is made up of arbitrary convention than most scholars of language would like to admit. A search for “reasons” (or “deep structure”, cough cough) is often at best an exercise in historical linguistics.

It might have been better had Greek been further grammatically from English — it’s hard to shoehorn an ergative-absolutive system, for example, into English-speakers’ conceptual framework — they just have to learn it on its own terms.

So in teaching ancient Greek it’s not a cop-out to say “that’s just how they did it”. The idea of “deponency” is actually a barrier to thinking in ancient Greek, because it tries to keep the learner using English concepts, instead of forming Greek concepts! I think sometimes language pedagogy goes overboard in trying to teach systems of rules. Languages are in general messy, and the most useful and interesting parts of language are often exceptions to the rules.

I’m brushing up on my Attic Greek right now by going through Reading Greek, which I cannot recommend highly enough, but for my own amusement, I’m not bothering with making sure I’ve got all the paradigms, or even memorizing new vocabulary. Of course, I did have the advantage of memorizing lots of paradigms back in school days, but I’m surprised at how much structure and vocab I’ve been picking up simply inductively. It helps that the texts are interesting, colourful and thus memorable.

Categories: Linguistics, Rants Tags: , ,

There is No Soul

December 9th, 2009 Gordon Comments off

Came across some fascinating stuff today in the area of cognitive science.

The first bit is a mention of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, in which he puts forward a trenchant argument against dualism: if the soul is to affect the body (i.e. when “I” want to move a part of my body), then it must apply energy to the neurons to change their state. Where does the energy come from? We could put a person in a calorimeter and verify that the energy of heat that they put out is no greater than the energy of the food they consume. A corollary I immediately thought of is: why does thinking (or praying, for that matter) consume a measurable amount of glucose from the blood? Why should a “soulish” activity consume matter?

I have long maintained that whatever is meant by the Biblical terms (e.g. psyche) translated “soul”, it cannot consist of matter or energy, but must consist of information. Dennett’s thought experiment is further support for this view.

The second fascinating item is an Edge talk by Stanislas Dehaene. His research on cognition and consciousness has progressed to the point where it is possible to determine from a real-time brain scan if and at which moment a person becomes consciously aware of a stimulus.

I’ve recently been reading Sydney Lamb’s work in neurocognitive linguistics; Dehaene’s work seems to tie in nicely.

I shall be interested to read his papers on the cognition of number and compare with Dan Everett’s work with the Pirahã, whom he claims do not use numbers.

Categories: Linguistics, Rants, Space & Science Tags:

Smoking Gun

November 25th, 2009 Gordon 1 comment

People with more time on their hands than me have been poring over the source code in the leaked CRU files. Here is a snippet of IDL code that produces a graph showing temperature data for the twentieth century (osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro):

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8, 1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

That long string of numbers with some negative values in the middle and positive values at the end? Those numbers are multiplied by the real temperatures to hide a warm period in the 1940s, and exaggerate the temperatures at the end of the century.

This is scientific fraud, pure and simple.

Categories: History, Rants, Space & Science, World Tags: , ,

Groupthink and the Fate of the World

November 23rd, 2009 Gordon 3 comments

You may have noticed some strange news articles over the weekend, saying things like, “All that these emails prove is that climate researchers are in fact honest and diligent scientists, if a bit testy in private.”

Honest, the Emperor does too have clothes!

Now that it’s been more than 48 hours, I think I can make some substantive comments. Here’s the story:

Last week the following comment appeared on a blog post at the Air Vent:

FOIA said
November 17, 2009 at 9:57 pm e

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

The comment was accompanied by a link to a zip file on an obscure server in Russia. The zip file contained 157 megabytes of emails and documents that appeared to have been taken from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which just happens to be the major repository for climate research data for studying global warming. The emails span a period of almost 15 years, from 1995 or so to the fall of 2009.

After several days it is apparent that the emails and files are genuine. The CRU has admitted that someone stole their files, and has not denied their authenticity. The story is ongoing at Climate Audit (and its alternative mirror site), Bishop Hill, Watts Up with That, The Blackboard, and the aforementioned Air Vent, among many others.

What the documents contain is telling. They do not provide a perfect “smoking gun” — they don’t say “we made it all up” — but they do cast serious light on the science and politics behind the global warming movement.

Defenders at such bastions of academic freedom as Real Climate and Discover magazine are pooh-pooing the idea that lowly proles such as yourselves could ever interpret the subtle and exalted thoughts of real scientists, who are all shown to be as pure as the driven snow.

Questions of technical scientific interpretation aside, there are some demonstrably shady things going on:

  • At the very least, they clearly reveal criminal conspiracy to destroy or deny data subject to Freedom of Information requests:
    If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does!

    Also see 1212063122.txt, 1106338806.txt, 1228330629.txt and 1219239172.txt. This is criminal activity, plain and simple.

  • The emails also clearly reveal collusion to control the scientific peer review process, by rejecting articles critical of the global warming “team”, and then detracting from their critics by saying “they’re not peer-reviewed“:
    This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

    1051190249.txt:

    One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about.

    1089318616.txt:

    I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

    This is nothing less than a subversion of science. The whole point of science is that members of one particular school of thought should not be able to prohibit the publication of dissenting views. Debate is the essence of science.

    The emails are a classic example of what Thomas Kuhn calls “groupthink” in science: a tight-knight group who polices their members for political reliability:

    Be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy and what emails you copy him in on. He’s not as predictable as we’d like.

  • The “science” of global warming relies on complex computer models where the final output and predictions are the result of multiple layers of mathematical processing. This processing relies on many variables that must be tuned to make the models reflect reality. Except…
    I want to make one thing really clear. We ARE NOT supposed to be working with the assumption that these scenarios are realistic. They are scenarios-internally consistent (or so we thought) what-if storylines. You are in fact out of line to assume that these are in some sense realistic-this is in direct contradiction to the guidance on scenarios provided by the synthesis team.

    The dominant theme throughout the discussions of data processing (and the actual source code used), is of manipulating the data to fit a pre-conceived idea:

    I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

    This telling phrase has been explained as a mere slip of the tongue, but it is part of a bigger pattern:

    I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that … I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have.

    1254108338.txt:

    So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip.

    I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.

  • These would be enough. But the very worst thing about these emails, as far as I’m concerned, even more than the criminal activity and the perversion of science, is that “the team” is NOT EVEN SURE THEY ARE RIGHT. They are pressuring global leaders to do irreperable harm to the economies of the world — which will devastate the developed world, and condemn the developing world to a century of abject poverty, all for something they are not certain about! They are well aware of problems with the data and the process at the IPCC:
    The fact is that in doing so the rules of IPCC have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal) but production of results. … Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent which might mine the IPCC credibility, and I am a bit unconfortable that now nearly everybody seems to think that it is just ok to do this.

    1255352257.txt

    The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

    1257546975.txt:

    We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

    1255523796.txt:

    How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!

    The kicker from Phil Jones:

    I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.

    He would rather see the death and destruction he’s been predicting come true than for him to have made a mistake.

So if the core group of climate change scientists:

  • Is unsure about the actual data.
  • Is controlling the literature to make sure only the right voices are heard.
  • Is committing criminal acts in not releasing their data.

Are they really justified in demanding multi-trillion-dollar economic programs that could otherwise go to feeding the poor (hopelessly naive, I know)?

Even worse: as Christopher Monckton says, Copenhagen is nothing more than a power grab:

These climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

I hope that the world leaders in Copenhagen will be able to smell the rat. But if ultimate power is involved, I fear not.

UPDATE: an excellent article at the Wall Street Journal:

We do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.

Categories: Rants, Space & Science Tags: , , ,

Learning in a Vacuum

November 3rd, 2009 Gordon Comments off

Turns out that actually teaching kids things in school makes them better at reading, writing, and participating in modern society. Who knew?

Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could.

Hirsch’s theories, long merely persuasive, now have solid empirical backing in Massachusetts’s miraculous educational reforms. Before the state passed its reform legislation, school districts employed a hodgepodge of instructional approaches, had no standard curriculum, and neglected academic content. But one element of the 1993 Education Reform Act was Hirschean knowledge-based curricula for each grade. The history and social-science curriculum, for instance, makes clear that students should be taught explicitly about their rich heritage, rather than taught how to learn about that heritage.

The idea of teaching “critical thinking” in a vacuum is absurd. You need to know about the qualities of things you are thinking about in order to think critically about them!

Categories: Rants Tags:

Step Away from the Category

November 2nd, 2009 Gordon 1 comment

I recently stumbled across an interesting blog dedicated to the union of the Christian Church, an admirable goal. But being always on the lookout for sloppy logic, I noticed one article in which the author attempts to show that:

Within Protestantism there is not some one additional entity to which the term “visible catholic Church” refers, consisting of these denominations, congregations, believers and their children.

As opposed to the one entity which is the Roman Catholic Church, of course.

Unfortunately, the only thing the author shows is that philosophy students should be forced, at gunpoint if necessary, to take a formal course in logic before they graduate.

His argument is as follows:

This was the error of assuming that unity of type is sufficient for unity of composition. In actuality, things of the same type do not by that very fact compose a unified whole.

At first glance this might suffice for a Platonist, but consider this: who gets to decide which collections of things of the same type get their own unified whole, and which don’t?

If the Westminster Confession defines the “visible catholic Church” as the unity of Protestant Christians, then who is the author to claim that that entity does not exist, whilst the entity known as the Roman Catholic Church does?

I assume that the author would assert that the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church hold more authority than the Westminster Confession. But this is not an argument, it is an axiom: he has not “shown” anything, but simply restated his underlying assumption.

I can, in fact, refute his argument by construction.

Consider the set C, defined as the set of persons adhering to a Christian tradition descended from those developed in the Protestant Reformation.

If mathematics has any access at all to the world of Platonic ideals, then I have just shown that there exists, both in our world and in the ideal world, an entity, C, which is identical to the “visible catholic Church” as defined in the Westminster Confession.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Categories: Rants Tags: , ,

Why We Vaccinate Redux

October 28th, 2009 Gordon 4 comments

The latest Wired has a great article on vaccination (emphasis mine).

There is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this [vaccines harm America’s children] is true. None. Twelve epidemiological studies have found no data that links the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine to autism; six studies have found no trace of an association between thimerosal (a preservative containing ethylmercury that has largely been removed from vaccines since 20011) and autism, and three other studies have found no indication that thimerosal causes even subtle neurological problems. The so-called epidemic, researchers assert, is the result of improved diagnosis, which has identified as autistic many kids who once might have been labeled mentally retarded or just plain slow. In fact, the growing body of science indicates that the autistic spectrum — which may well turn out to encompass several discrete conditions — may largely be genetic in origin. In April, the journal Nature published two studies that analyzed the genes of almost 10,000 people and identified a common genetic variant present in approximately 65 percent of autistic children.

I am proud to say that Emily had another round of vaccinations the other day. Her risk of dying from a host of fatal childhood diseases has gone down significantly.1 Her risk of developing autism has increased by an amount so small it would take a scanning electron microsocope to detect.

We evaluate risks every day. There is a small but non-zero chance that I will be run over by a truck while biking to work. Should I then refuse to get out of bed?

My extremely fetching orange and yellow reflective vest is made of plastic, which is flammable, and might melt itself into my skin if it catches on fire. Is the risk of my vest catching on fire (perhaps from static electricity generated by rubbing against my jacket) greater than the risk of a truck driver not seeing me on a dark rainy evening if I don’t wear it?

Sounds crazy, but that’s how anti-vaxxers sound to me. Is the infinitesimal (and in fact made up out of whole cloth) risk of autism greater than the risk of brain damage or death from rubella or measles, or pertussis?

  1. However, if enough people in her community refuse to vaccinate their children, her risk of dying from an infectious disease actually goes up. The more people in a community who are vaccinated against an infectious disease, the less chance the infection has to spread. Not rocket science, people. ↩
Categories: Rants, Space & Science Tags: , ,

Progressivism as a fundamentalist religion redux

September 30th, 2009 Gordon Comments off

Plans to build a large solar electricity plant in the California desert have been cancelled because of opposition.

By environmentalists.

Evidently they are not actually interested in renewable electricity. They just want us to freeze in the dark.

Categories: Rants, Space & Science Tags: ,

Religious Double Standard

September 30th, 2009 Gordon Comments off

Turns out there’s still at least one religion whose priests can sodomize children and be excused and even applauded.

The religion I speak of is, of course, Progressivism, whose self-appointed high priests are the glitterati of Hollywood. Roman Polanski, a genius at film directing, admitted to drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl, and then fled the country. Now his extradition to the US is being protested by a large number of hollywood celebrities. (Thankfully there are some, both celebrities and non, who are rightly appalled by this.)

It’s a little ironic, don’t you think, that in this day and age a high-status male can sexually assault a child and be excused and applauded. How very . . . patriarchal.

Categories: Rants, World Tags: ,

Progressivism as fundamentalist religion

September 16th, 2009 Gordon Comments off

Some new evidence of progressivism as a puritanical religious movement:

When study participants were allowed to buy green products, they were more likely to cheat and lie in a subsequent task than those who chose among conventional products. (Apparently, it seems that they either consciously or unconsciously used the good deed to excuse for subsequent unethical behavior.)

Just as avoiding drinking, swearing and playing cards lets you ignore bigger sins like racism or sexism.

Categories: Rants Tags:

Why Men Should Not Be Ordained

September 11th, 2009 Gordon 1 comment

Via Christian Feminism (HT: Inhabitatio Dei) comes this excellent list of reasons:

10. A man’s place is in the army.

9. For men who have children, their duties might distract them from the responsibilities of being a parent.

8. Their physical build indicates that men are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be “unnatural” for them to do other forms of work.

7. Man was created before woman. It is therefore obvious that man was a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment, rather than the crowning achievement of creation.

6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. This is easily demonstrated by their conduct at football games and watching basketball tournaments.

5. Some men are handsome; they will distract women worshipers.

4. To be ordained pastor is to nurture the congregation. But this is not a traditional male role. Rather, throughout history, women have been considered to be not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more frequently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.

3. Men are overly prone to violence. No really manly man wants to settle disputes by any means other than by fighting about it. Thus, they would be poor role models, as well as being dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.

2. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, change the oil in the church vans, and maybe even lead the singing on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the Church.

1. In the New Testament account, the person who betrayed Jesus was a man. Thus, his lack of faith and ensuing punishment stands as a symbol of the subordinated position that all men should take.

Categories: Rants Tags:

Good News for Freedom of Speech in Canada

September 2nd, 2009 Gordon Comments off

The federal Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (the body that decides the cases that the “Human Rights” Commission persues) has declared that Section 13 of the Human Rights code (the “pre-crime” section — it allows extra-legal persecution of speech that is “likely to expose someone to ridicule”) violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This is great news in the fight against the wholly corrupt Canadian “Human Rights” commissions.

Categories: Canada, Rants Tags:

The Family

August 27th, 2009 Gordon 1 comment

I’ve recently been reading about the secretive fundagelical political organization described in Jeff Sharlet’s disturbing book, The Family. Some further links are via Amicus Dei and Slacktivist.

While I have some minor quibbles with certain aspects of Sharlet’s interpretation, the evidence and conclusion are as compelling as they are depressing: the US government — of both parties — and financial elite are pervaded by a clandestine organization whose express goal is global theocracy, and whose members, lacking any moderation via the wider context of scripture or theology or the main stream of orthodoxy in the church, are, as C.S. Lewis warned, capable of blithely colluding in the worst kind of oppression and violence in the name of “the will of God”.

Read more…

Categories: History, Rants, World Tags: , , , , ,

John Piper is an Idiot

August 21st, 2009 Gordon Comments off

Suzanne McCarthy ably documents some recent failures of common sense, Christian charity and just plain logic on Piper’s part.

However, I have known this for a long time.

I wrote a review over ten years ago of his Desiring God, a book which attempts to encourage what Piper calls “Christian hedonism”. The concept is as bemusing as I write this as it was then, but bear with me, because the book begins with a plainly fallacious argument.

In the first chapter, he attempts to found his entire enterprise on the notion that the proper end of humankind is happiness. A bit dubious, to my mind, but certainly a valid opinion. Why should happiness be the ultimate goal? Because God is happy, of course.

The idea that God partakes of a mental state influenced by waves of ions and streams of neurotransmitters in a neural network is a bit wierd to me, but let’s accept that as a given, because Piper is setting up a formal argument. He says that he can show that God is happy by the following argument:

    If God were not sovereign, She would not be happy.

This axiom seems even more dubious to me, but let’s give Piper the benefit of the doubt one more time.

    We assume that God is sovereign, therefore God must be happy.

This is a completely invalid argument. Even if its axioms were individually true, the form of the argument itself guarantees that we can have absolutely no knowledge of whether the conclusion is true or not.

In formal logic, it’s called denying the antecedent, and is one of the classic blunders.

Let us try a different argument with the same form:

    If I were not human, I would not be Japanese.
    I am human.
    Therefore, I am Japanese.

It is obvious from this example that the argument proves nothing at all about whether or not I am Japanese or whether God is happy.

From this incoherent starting point, the book proceeds to pile shoddy reasoning upon linguistic ignorance to eventually completely re-define the word “hedonism” to mean a sort of grim Sisyphean death-march towards the kind of lifeless legalism to which Piper is evidently dedicated.

Nothing has changed, it seems.

Categories: Rants Tags: , ,

A Fairly Silly Biblioblog

June 23rd, 2009 Gordon 2 comments

Why are we taught in Sunday school that Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead?

It has always seemed completely obvious to me that she was in a coma — because Jesus said so! You would think that being endowed with divine knowledge he would know better than the townspeople…

In an extremely unscientific search of the internets, I keep coming across sermons that say as an aside “well, she may just have been in a coma, but that doesn’t detract from the miracle, because she was as good as dead”.

Why the defensiveness? It’s not as if the NT is lacking in resurrections. Why do we in effect call Christ a liar in order to boost his supernatural powers? Why isn’t coma-girl the default interpretation?

Categories: Rants Tags:

Ooh, Biblioblogging!

June 23rd, 2009 Gordon Comments off

What with all this biblioblogging going around maybe I’ll do a few posts in an exegetical vein.

First off, I’ve been meaning to get into the Church Fathers, an aspect of my theological education that has been sorely neglected in favour of Arabic and statistical machine translation. So I found a more or less readable translation of I Clement — my Greek is far too rusty for a lunchtime read.

My impression: “be nice.” I like the bit about the Phoenix, though.

Categories: Rants Tags: , ,

Two Birds with One Stone

June 22nd, 2009 Gordon Comments off

I just stumbled across the blog of Peter Kirk, who knows his stuff when it comes to Biblical languages. There’s been a bit of an uptick in the Evangelical blogosphere discussion of gendered language in Scripture and liturgy, and Mr. Kirk offers a wonderful suggestion, sure to make explode the heads of both patriarchists and prescriptivists alike:

Perhaps, if I put my tongue in my cheek a little, the best solution is to call the Holy Spirit “they”. For some this will be understood as a singular “they”. But, to those who might object to the singular “they” or insist that it carries nuances of plurality, I point out the ancient Christian tradition of the sevenfold Spirit, based on Isaiah 11:2 and repeated references in Revelation (1:4, 3:1, 4:5, 5:6) to the seven Spirits of God. So there should be no objection to using an apparently plural pronoun to refer to them.

Categories: Linguistics, Rants Tags: , , ,

The Shunning

June 22nd, 2009 Gordon 2 comments

Not that anyone will care, but I have removed Better Bibles Blog from my list of links. It has become over the last couple of years a bastion of white male conservatism, promoting a fundagelical agenda and driving out any form of real discussion.

Now that the administrators have invited a blatantly dishonest white spremacist to contribute, it’s time to say good riddance.

Update: it appears I misinterpreted the phrase “moderated status”; Peter Kirk informs me that Hobbins has not been invited to contribute.

Doesn’t materially change my opinion of BBB, which is (my opinion, that is) mostly motivated by one individual whose folksy style masks a wilful ignorance of critical thought and a rock-hard intolerance of anything outside a carefully circumscribed conservative belief system.

My opinion is overly harsh perhaps because I grew up in the same heretical sect as he, and suffered for it.

Categories: Rants Tags: ,

Sic Transit Gloria Galactica

March 23rd, 2009 Gordon Comments off

Spoilers Ho!

Hurried home to catch the BSG finale last Friday. The first hour was vintage BSG: the old girl goes in guns blazing, with Adama squinting, Tigh scowling, and Lee and Starbuck leading infantry assaults like the good pilots they are; Boomer changes her mind one last time; Torey gets her comeuppance.

My disappointment began when the reality behind the opera house vision (I have sung on the stage of that opera house, by the way :-) turned out to be utterly irrelevant to the plot. We’re chasing Hera through the ship; Baltar and Caprica steal her, and then . . . everyone walks onto the bridge as if nothing has happened. Whoop-de-do.

But the thing that started me booing and throwing spoiled vegetables at the television was when the dead hand of the Raptor pilot brushed up against the nukular trigger. A heavy sense of doom descended, as I foresaw that the rest of the plot, such as it was, would be driven by coincidence, rabbits pulled out of hats, and ultimately as quintessential an example of the deus ex machina as you could hope for.

I was not proven wrong.

At least they didn’t go through the black hole… But it’s like the writers were sitting around in their last meeting going “I am soo tired of thinking up ideas for this stupid show… Um, let’s just say God did it and go home, mkay?”

If post-crash Starbuck was just a head Starbuck, how come everyone could see her, and she could fly real planes, and shoot real bullets and everything? If she’s an angel, and so are Head Six and Head Baltar, then how do they differ from the other Cylons’ “projections”, and if they do, what plot purpose is served by having both angels and projections in the same show? Complete cop-out, especially as it’s obvious all through the show, right from the original miniseries, that Head Six is the same thing as what they started calling “projection” later on, because she doesn’t just appear to Baltar in the space he’s in, she creates virtual spaces for them both, viz. the nice house on Howe Sound. It’s only been in the last half-season that Baltar’s suddenly been ranting on about angels, which is just the writers being completely and utterly lazy.

I like the suggestion by someone on the Tor website that we just all agree that a lion ran by and ate Starbuck while she was out of frame.

Oh, and the producers leaked a rumour months and months ago that the last shot of the show would feature Six in New York City. So obviously the only possible way to accomplish this is for the hapless body count to land on Earth and then suddenly, utterly, and completely inexplicably give up all technology! The only demonstrably bad thing about the cities on Caprica (and New Caprica, for that matter) was that the Cylons came and nuked them. So what in the world is Lee suddenly on about?

But in utter defiance of any prior foreshadowing, theme, or semblance of logic whatsoever, forty thousand people who have bled and died and struggled to survive and hang together as a civilization for four long years are to abandon the ships that have been their cradles of life for all that time, and scatter around the surface of a planet to die alone of exposure, starvation, minor infections, dental abcesses, trivial sprains, and childbirth, not to mention being eaten by the aforesaid lions? I mean it’s not like the history of the human race was one of idyllic peacefulness and happy happy joy until somebody invented evil robots that all of a sudden screwed everything up. The primary cause of death for adult male hunter-gatherers is other adult male hunter-gatherers.

And poor Anders, having just discovered the perfection of unity with the machine, somehow coerced to suicide along with the other crazies? Why couldn’t he have, you know, taken an unbroken ship off to explore the galaxy? Or if he had to stay with Galactica, why not hide out on the far side of the moon, or Mars?

The ultimate lesson we’re supposed to learn from all this? ROBOTS are EEEEVUL!

Feh.

The first hour tantalized with the promise of a bang, but the second delivered a craven and terminally lazy whimper.

Categories: Journal, Rants Tags: ,

Why Linux (oh, and Open Source too!) is a Big Fat Pile of Steaming Excrement

March 11th, 2009 Gordon Comments off

So at work I get a new computer and have to install Linux on it. I am quickly reminded why I gave up on Linux in disgust lo these many years ago. I’m installing a distro with a cutesy African name (that English-speakers universally mispronounce, making me cringe every time) that is universally received as the ultimate in desktop-friendliness (as much as that means anything in Linux-land).

Now one of the criticisms leveled at, say, Windows, is that there’s often no way to diagnose a problem, and trouble-shooting simply consists of reinstalling pieces until things sort of work again.

So I install from the very latest ISO on the website, and things seem to work OK. However, there’s some update program yammering for my attention, so I check it, and there’s evidently 280 pieces that need updating. That’s quality control for ya. So I run the update, which automagically chooses the slowest possible mirror to use — 30 kilobytes per second, for crying out loud.

Now that the updates are done, the window manager crashes and burns. Luckily, since Linux is so much better than Windows, I can tell exactly what’s causing it to crash. Well, it can’t seem to find a function ISNGBdiugjnooruwojhdwIgHDUWHGUdh in a shared library. Now I actually happen to know what this means. I also happen to know that I can do exactly squat about it, because the vaunted package manager that is supposed to keep all those picky dependencies straight can’t actually be arsed to do its job.

A quick Google finds that lots of other people have encountered this problem, and that the recommended solution starts like this:

apt-get --reinstall ...

Remind me how much better than Windows this is?

And to top it off, when I do run this recommended command, the computer has conveniently forgotten that it ever had a network card, so my download speed is now, let’s see, nothing times nothing, carry the nothing…

This is why I’d far rather run an operating system whose development includes at least some pretense to a QA process, and which I can use to get something resembling work done in less than a week of setup, rather than Linux, which is “Open Source”, meaning a random pile of poorly-coordinated contributions by people working on little bits of things that they happened to feel interested in during their off hours, and thus resembles nothing less than a terrain feature you’ll often find behind a farmer’s barn.

I weep for the thousands of hours I wasted on Linux in my youth before I discovered OpenBSD.

Categories: Computing, Rants Tags: , ,