June 30, 2008
End of yet another month. A very light month on this journal... I've been generally under the weather and getting a tad worried about it. And what weather - thunder and lightning last night - spectacular double and tipple strikes lighting up the sky and leaving wierd after images.
I have a new book: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I just could not walk past that title.
It is a truism that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.
This is great! Basically we are looking at an unholy trinity of bad kung-fu, Romeroesque zombies, and Jane Austin. Rendered cheesy by the author's minimal period research and American anacronisms - as if it were shot in Southern California.
The English wildlife includes chipmonks and skunks, there are established churches made from whitewashed boards, chinese-style swordplay uses japanese katanas... even the wealthiest gentlelady would carry a Brown Bess (a cheapo military musket), or a boot dagger (less conspicuous). Some of the Austin subtlty is lost, no worse than the BBC miniseries, but the Austin irony is thrown into sharp relief.
All in all, Austin's story is made much more accessible - rumours of a film on the way.
People who have sent email submissions on the software patent issue need to resend them as hardcopy. This is due to the general misinformation on the govt website. The commission does not accept email submissions. The address is:
Commerce Committee
Room 10.04
Bowen House
Parliament
Wellington ... so print out that email and stuff it in an envelope.
For those near Auckland with an interest in Copyright Legislation (Section
92A, anyone?) I draw your attention to a forum being held by the Labour
Party in Auckland on 8 July.
I have end of month stats - the blog activity has been real slow, which is my fault, except for the Oolite pages. There have been massive downloads of the neolite, neolite-companion and neolite-behemoth oxps. There is more in the pipeline there folks.
I have updated the ubuntu pages - but they have not seen the activity of previous months.
Good news is that firefox has easily 2/3 of the market, IE is next at about a sixth with a slew of others filling out the other sixth. Apart from that, Windows and linux are still 50:50.
Regular readers will note that the User Freindly cartoons are all repeats. This is because Illiad is on bereivement leave, so we'll forgive him. Anyway, the South Pole sequence is one of the better runs.
The long preachy posts this month did not generate the emails I expected. Perhaps everyone just figured it for a troll post. That's OK, if I really wanted loads of feedback I'd have this thing hosted at blogspot or something. This way it is the motivated who write me.
I did get feedback about the acer pages though, which were updated to account for this.
Things are happening around me, so I should have more to talk about next month. Stay tuned.
June 24, 2008
Update on the software activist front:
On the subject of Software Patents:
I urge you all to consider sending a submission about the insufficient
consideration of software patents in the Patents Act review. It will
only take a few minutes:
"Oral submissions are probably the most impactful. Paper submissions
are probably more impactful than emails. Emailed submissions will be
considered. Parliament.nz has useful information about making
submissions of all types. Email submissions should be addressed to
select.committees@parliament.govt.nz. Here is a submission template
to get you started:"
As well as sending in a submission please take a moment to encourage
your colleagues and other parties to do the same. Feel free to
forward this email as you see fit. A large number of short
submissions are probably more impactful than one large submission.
I blogged about the Patent Act review's screw up.
Cheers,
Bevan/
And Vic Oliver has managed to be more clear about that Auckland NZOSS meeting that Don Christie has been banging on about:
The NZ Open Source Society is having a meet-up on this coming Wednesday
(24th). Anyone interested in the wider aspects of Open Source, getting
it into schools, government and so forth and who happens to be in the
area might want to come along.
Venue is hopefully Red vs Blue (RvB) at 155 K Road, starting at 6:15 pm
with initial mingling expected at 6:00. Should this fall through we have
a backup meeting place. [see below]
Vague comments about dinner last night went over not at all well - wifey issued instructions: we shall have pizza and banana cake thank you very much! She was using the Voice. But at least it meant that my last lot of baking was a success.
This time I put chocolate chips in the cake, but I was short pizza topping and settled for onion and potato with the tomato + oregano + sauce. Another home-made base - this is cool.
June 22, 2008
NZOSS head honcho, Don Christie, is giving a talk in Auckland on the G2009 effect and what can be done about it. He says this will be
next wednesday
which I make out to be the 31st of June.
NZOSS members and free software advocates are all invited - clear your diaries. Arrangements are in progress, but we are looking at the RVB at 155 K'rd (to be confirmed) or, failing that, Open Systems Specialists will host us at their offices
. Expect to gather at six for a six-fifteen start.
Also on the software freedom front there is a move to include software patents in NZ patent law. Currently a patent must be connected to a machine or invention. This makes existing attempts to patent software somewhat torturous in their wording.
We want to oppose this - as Bill Gates has observed, If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry
would be at a complete standstill today
-- this move can only be harmful.
In a recession we need to be removing barriers to innovation, not constructing them.
The anti-smacking law comes under fire in a totally botched referendum. Should smacking as part of good parential discipline be a criminal offense in NZ?
is the question and saying "no" will force a rewrite of the existing law. Thing is, what the law says right now is that smacking as part of bad parental discipline may be criminal. Which is how it should be.
What the law actually says is quite subtle - it removes I was just giving a smack
from being an acceptable defense in child-abuse cases. In the past this has been used to justify broken bones and brain damage.
The thing to realise about this law is that, if you or I do something to a kid which so alarms someone else that they are moved to inform the police, testify against us in court, and all that, then we probably have some explaining to do. We do the explaining in front of a jury - they are also parents so they understand. For most of us, this is not a really a threatening situation.
The trouble, of course, is that many parents feel guilty about the way they have disciplined their children in the past. We feel bad about it, of course we do. No decent parent likes punishing their child.
I think parents need to feel less like their every move is under scrutiny here. You don't want to be worried that your actions will be misunderstood - but you also need some other way to discipline your kids.
If you are worried that the way you smack your kids could be confused for child abuse, then you probably need to change what you do.
It can be done - school teachers are not allowed to hit kids at all and they seem to manage. The trouble with smacking is that, though considered a last resort, it quickly turns into the only resort. And what happens when it is not effective? You smack them harder?
That's not right: if it does not work, you have to do something different. But anything other than the smack they got before is just a lesser punishment. Anything, that is, other than a harder smack. And so it escalates.
The secret is to plan your discipline strategy out before trouble arises. Work out your first resorts and how the punishments escalate. Make sure you have ten to a dozen steps before smacking even enters the equation and when you are angry, and you will be, delay the punishment. Kids are smart, they know they are in trouble... making them wait can actually be more effective anyway.
And that's the rant for this week.
Movies turned out to be Land of the Lost
at the Berkeley, whose seats are getting better with wear, and Steven King's, Desperation
on free-to-air. Both were terrible.
If you think LotL is a family movie, and there were two families there, think again; most jokes were sexual and/or scatalogical. All were heavily laboured. While we expect this from Will Ferrell, this was scraping the barrel even for him.
In the session I attended, the kids had more sense than the grown-ups and just generally messed about rather than insult themselves with this dross. The movie is only watchable if your IQ is smaller than your shoe size or you are high. Nuff said.
I actually liked the TV series.
Despiration was expected to be bad because, lets face it, when was the last time SK did a good movie? What was it: IT? Misery? This one was bad enough that the producers felt they needed to spell out who the author was to get it to sell.
The central theme of the film was the problem of evil - you know: If God is so good and almighty, then how come bad stuff happens at all? Perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds? Perhaps evil is the work of human free will? As the film develops, with all the gruesome horror of a ghost-train ride, we discover that bad stuff happens as Gods way of getting our attention. Almighty? Nope, God needs to wark through humans. All good? Nope, God is cruel. It was observed that God did not seem all that different from the body-changing demonic entity thingy they were opposing.
In the closing scenes, the kid whose faith was sorely tested through the movie managed to still conclude that "God is Love", against the prevailing evidence.
It has won an award for production excellence (which is good) and was nominated for things like soundtrack and art-direction - which kinda gives you an idea about the plot, storytelling, acting, etc. The early scenes are actually decently tence, Ron Perlman is great as Collie Entraigan, but the whole thing goes downhill after the writer (Tom Skerrit) enters. It's not the actor's fault - it's the writing.
Out shopping at the local New World, they must have seen me coming, I ran into the sample stands. One, by the pick and mix, was hawking dried goods and chocolate coated strawberries. I swear that woman will be the next Suzanne Paul she was that good. Nobody she approached, she was pro-active, and I do mean nobody walked away without buying anything. She got me for the strawberries. Thus softened up, a more subdued staffer managed to sell me a bottle of wine, a dry pinot that I don't normally get.
Thus - my special dinner this week was a lamb-shank, marinated in a mix of the wine, ginger, and tamarind chutney - mmmmm yum. Since Wifey is vegetarian, I also made a pizza (broccoli and mushroom) for which I made my own pizza bread for the first time (turns out to be easy). I've had a firm request for banana cake for tomorrow.
June 14, 2008
Since this post is so late, I thought I'd start with a proper essay, one which I expect will get angry letters ;) Before you get stuck in, take a look at the music for this month - a faster-paced electronic/jazz/swing than I usually use, by
Beat Under Control. Hit play for the theme music.
The Education Curriculum, Science and Creationism
I keep seeing, especially in the United States, people trying to get some variation on the theme of Creationism into High School curriculae... curriculums... curriculie-curriculai... courses. In this essay I examine some of the main attempts and the arguments and misconceptions which give rise to them. Hopefully this will lead to a better understanding as to why, exactly, creationism in any form cannot have a valid place in any honest science curriculum.
Teach Us the Truth
A very common misconception, especially amongst students, is that Science Education is about teaching the truth.
While the truth is important to all education, the whole point of Science Education is to teach about Science.
Science is what scientists do.
Scientists look for natural solutions to problems. They look for natural causes for phenomina under investigation. Even theistic scientists approach phenomina from the point of view that God did not have a hand in this (God intervened, or set up the Universe, in such a way as to make the phenomina understandable in terms of natural causes.)
This could be thought of as the "Atheistic Principle" in science.
I defy anyone to point out any (scientific) research where the assumption of the existance of God has contributed usefully to an experiment. (Preferably backed up by reference to a peer-reviewed publication.)
Thus, the idea that a supreme being had a hand in the appearance of life (or even the universe) is not science. And so it should not be part of a science curriculum.
Q.E.D.
Let Us Decide for Ourselves
At any time, in Science, there are a range of competing ideas and paradigms. Perhaps High School Science courses should teach this range, allowing students to make up their own minds about which ones to believe?
To a certain extent we do.
The course is divided into the major disciplines (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) with subdivisions being clearly indicated (electronic, astro, quantum in physics for eg.) Variations of thought exist, and are taught, between these major divisions.
However, science courses for high School students are usually far too basic to admit a great deal of variation. At such a basic level, all the ideas have been tested for generations. There has been plenty of time for major variations to be checked and the clearly false ones to be eliminated. The basic science of today consists of ideas which have survived this, somewhat brutal, process.
It is a valid critisism that students frequently come away from a Science course with the impression that Science procedes from one idea to the next through a linear-esque progression ... Thomson gives way to Rutherford, Newton to Einstein, Lamark to Darwin, and so on. So when students discover the competition of ideas and the general uncertainties in the way Science is conducted, they can become "disillusioned": cynical and distrustful of anything carrying the label "science".
Part of this is due to the belief that one should "find the Truth then believe it to the end". Partly to the impression of science being about the truth. Many adolescents are seeking some stability and certainty in lives that have suddenly become chaotic and insecure. While science can provide tools in this search, it is not the end of the search. For many people, this search continues well into adulthood.
Are students, therefore, in a good position to "decide for themselves"?
That students keep coming up with this suggestion, suggests that they (at least the ones making the suggestion) may not be. Science is not about looking at the evidence and deciding what to believe. Presented with a genuine variation in ideas, a scientist is trained to suspend judgement on all of them until some definitive experimentation is concluded. In the meantime, the ideas are considered "interesting". (Of course, being human as well, scientists have their favorites.)
Scientists do not make up their minds which to believe - they let the universe make up their minds for them.
So, just asking they be allowed to decide for themselves which to believe, the students are showing that they do not understand the fundamental processes in science.
Perhaps students should ask to be taught the variations so as to better understand the feild they study?
This would be a great argument. Generally, it runs into the more practical problems in education: resources, funds, time. Is there enough time to cover the range of topics needed to understand the techno-scientific aspects of the world we live in, provide tools to help graduates puzzle through things not explicitly covered in the course, and provide a useful profile of the variations in scientific ideas where those exist?
Imagine studying science in a course like that? How would you fair in a pop-quiz where there are three or four ideas about the question? From the other end: how would you deliver such a course?
All school courses represent a compromise of one kind or another. While it would be possible to produce a course as described, it would involve giving up something else. As it stands, science courses are pared almost to the bone. They include only major ideas which are frequently used and found useful by scientists. Already, much that is taught of the scientific body of knowledge (the facts et al) cuts into the teaching of the toolkit (scientific method and philosophy) which is probably more useful in the long run but more difficult to set exams for.
In the end, it is hardly suprising that graduates end up confused. Schools are set difficult goals against overwhelming odds, and are underresourced to boot. Teachers are increasingly asked to cope with higher and higher beaurocratic workloads (detracting from teaching) and have to bow under PC pressure. That the education systems work as well as they do (which is to say, "at all") is a remarkable acheivement.
A place for creationism?
Creationism, as a school of thought, makes a reasonable study.
Darwinism, as a school of thought also makes a reasonable study.
There are different ways of thinking about the world which affect our lives; it seems reasonable to acknowledge this.
The study of the alternative ways of thinking about things is the study of philosophy. So, it would seem that Creationism is appropriate to a course in philosophy.
Intelligent Design?
ID is not used by scientists. So the argument, above, also applies to ID. This applies regardless of whether we think that ID is a form of creationism or not.
Truth and High School Education
A footnote on truth in science education: practically everything taught to high-school science classes is known to be wrong in some important way. It is known to be untrue.
Newton's Law of Gravitation, for eg, fails to account for the orbit of Mercury (amongst other things). It has been supplanted by General Relativity.
We teach Newtonian Physics in High School because;
(a) High School students stand some chance of understanding it,
(b) it accounts for all the phenomina most will directly experience in their lifetime,
(c) it'll help students understand Einstein's work,
(d) it is actually still used by scientists every day.
Since it is what scientists use, it is a valid part of a science course. Einstein is also valid - and more true. But we spend less time on Einstein because it is less useful, harder to understand, and school-time is limited.
From this example, you can see that merely being true is not high on the list of priorities.
