A Mother's Guilt

In the meantime, I will comment on my excitement for tomorrow. We get to go pick up Bryana from her first overnight-away-from-mom-and-dad-camp and I can't wait. I've been worrying about her since we dropped her off. I almost changed my mind that she could go. It was my "What was I thinking? She's just a baby. I'm a terrible mother, sending her off alone in the woods to be eaten by bears!" moment.I recovered, sort of, but I will be very glad to go pick her up tomorrow and find out that her unbearable homesickness was all in my imagination, that she didn't miss us at all and is ready to go to college, thank you very much!

On the other hand, we think that we have found the cure for Allison's temper fits. Only-childhood. Yup. It has been two days since we dropped Bryana off at camp and we haven't had a single melt down or temper fit since. Allison has become the epitome of a reasonable, sweet, temper-free child. We figure this is either related to not having to compete for attention or fear of us dropping HER off alone in the woods to be eaten by bears. Either way, we figure we only have 18 hours or so left before a relapse - as soon as we pick Bryana up tomorrow. :)

So I have one daughter who away at camp, homesick, crying for her parents in between being snacked on by a bear and the other perfectly happy now that she has experienced the life of an only-child. A mother's guilt never ends....

Percy Jackson annoyances

Note: there are some spoilers here (only sort of), but the movie has been out for awhile, so I don't feel bad.

Overall, I really like the movie. Obviously, when you have a story that takes place in modern times, but has all the greek mythological characters in it, it is quite likely that you'll have to change small bits of the story line. There were two that annoyed me to some degree, however.

The first was Medusa. She was killed in the myths, which means that it seems somewhat unlikely that she would be alive in modern times to be killed again. Not a big deal, I suppose, since she's a well known monster that they could put in there. However, I think they could have simply made the character another of her species. I guess that would lose the Hollywood name dropping of the villain. While it's fun to complain, I won't dwell on it.

The one that annoyed me more was the depiction of Hades. In most of the mythology I've read, Hades is described as the underworld, sure, but it is *not* Hell. Hell is specifically a modern, monotheistic notion. The idea of fire and brimstone, torture and pain is modern and doesn't show up in the old myths. (To be clear, there are some that are tortured, but only a handful of - mostly demigods - who have annoyed the gods.)

Hades is simply an afterworld. It is Heaven and Hell put together. It is where you go when you die, but not necessarily a bad place to be. In many depictions, it isn't played up to be a particularly fun place, either, but the movie implies it sucks for everyone.

This seems unnecessary to me. Most of the rest of the references weren't too far off, why was this one? Were the producers so steeped in Western mythology that they couldn't let go of the "underworld-as-hell" idea? Did they have a low expectation of viewers? Either was, I felt it was kind of a downer.

Origins of Life - Double Standard

Origins of Life - Double Standard

When looking at the creation/evolution debate (well, intelligent design these days is what they like to call it instead of creationism) one of the arguments that frequently comes up is what the origin of life was. To summarize: the anti-evolutionist argues that either evolution can't explain the origin of life or that even the most basic forms of life are so complex that they could not have arisen purely by chance.

At this point there are a couple of directions I could take this essay. I could mention that any time someone starts talking about "chance" they probably don't know what they are talking about with respect to evolution. That alone is a subject ripe for discussion, of course, since it amazes me how someone could be so far off base that they can't even summarize the opposing position reliably. Instead i want to talk about hippocracy... But first, the other side of the coin.

A common argument from the scientist about why an intelligent design explanation of the origin of life isn't workable is that it only explains the first step... There is always the question of who designed the designer. Of course, there is a lot more to this argument if you flesh it out. One of the major assumptions is that science won't tolerate a supernatural explanation. (I won't go into that assumption much here, but suffice to say that if something out there is allowed to break the rues, then it makes researching what the rules are somewhat difficult... Well, impossible, really.) The only reason this comes up is that many of the people in the ID movement insist that it isn't about religion and that the designer doesn't have to be god. (Ironically, in the Expelled movie, Richard Dawkins was trying to concede this exact point, which Ben Stein mocked.)

However, we're told by the ID crew that we're not allowed to ask who designed the designer. They say that this is outside the scope of intelligent design. We're told that the techniques of "design detection" can only tell us if design was employed, but cannot reveal anything of the designer. Convenient, when yiu need to hide a religious motive in a secular argument.

The hippocracy, then (and the simple complaint at the end of this lengthy steep) is: Why can't they understand that Origin of Life research is outside the scope of evolution? Attacking evolution because we're not sure how the first genes came about is tantamount to asking an ID supporter questions about the designer. Of course, in e grand scheme of human learning, we went to know how life originated... But it wasn't related to evolution, it was the precursor to it.

I think it would be fair that scientists ignore the question until all the ID suppoeters fess up to their religious motivation.

Eric

PowerShell isn't perfect

Linux: du -s *

PowerShell: dir | foreach { $item = $_; dir $item -Recurse | Measure-Object length -sum | select -Property @{n="Item";e={$item}}, count, sum }

Would you like to have more readable output (ie: in MBs)?

Linux: du -sh *

PowerShell: dir | foreach { $item = $_; dir $item -Recurse | Measure-Object length -sum | select -Property @{n="Item";e={$item}}, count, @{n="MB";e="{0:N2}" -f ($_.sum/1MB)} }

Visual Studio regions in XCode

One of the few features that I've liked in Visual Studio that XCode doesn't have is the ability to define regions for code folding. It's nice to have regions of code that are logically grouped that you can collapse when you're working on other parts of the same method. (Of course, regions also work across methods, but this hint won't address that.)

Fortunately, XCode allows for block folding (which the versions of Visual Studio I've used don't have), which allows you do to something like this:

//region I want to fold

{

...code...

}

This defines a statement block that you can fold. When folded it ends up looking like this:

//region I want to fold

{...}

One caveat here... don't define any variables in that block that you'll need elsewhere. The statement block defines a local scope for any variables declared. This might be want you want, but it may also cause scoping issues. The compiler will probably warn you about this, however.

PowerShell Training

I've finished a training that I did at work around PowerShell... a great shell language from Microsoft.

Yes, I said it in public, I like something Microsoft did. :-)

Really, the designers of PowerShell did something revolutionary with the traditional command line, they made it object-oriented. The biggest leap forward was allowing objects to be pipelined throughout the shell. This makes the language feel very similar to ruby in the way that I use it.

Anyway, with little other comment, here's a link to my presentation, if you're curious:

PowerShell - Shell Environment

Vampires and the Anthropic Principle - a response

I read a number of Intelligent Design blogs, just to see what they have to say. I find it interesting to read what "the other side" thinks and how their arguments are structured. Over the years, the biggest frustration of mine is that they often use straw man arguments as they fail to grasp what evolutionary biologists are trying to say. Furthermore, they seem to misunderstand science in general and how it progresses. Anyway, this post isn't about that complain specifically, but I wanted to write about a post at a new blog I've been introduced to that brings Vampires into the Anthropic Principle to strengthen the argument... he says.

Go ahead and read what he has to say...

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/02/10/vampires-and-the-anthropic-principle/#more-12597

This is going to be somewhat random, so here goes...

1) Claim: If Vampires existed, then their feeding patterns would overrun the human race within a few years.

The base of this claim is that a vampire converts a human into a new vampire each time it feeds, which means that there will be an exponential increase in the number of vampires and a corresponding decrease in the humber of humans. While I don't have any issues with the mathematics of this (even though he leaves out the possibility that some humans are killed without being turned and some vampires are going to be killed as well), the main problem is that - being a legend - there are great variations in the stores around vampires. In fact, in literature such as Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the base assumption isn't valid. It's annoying when I disagree with the base assumptions, but what can you do.

At any rate, for the sake of making things sound formal, he continues with calling Vampires "V-class objects" in recognition that there could be other destructive agents in the universe.

Moving along, he states the Anthropic Principal in a negative way (so he says).

2) Claim: In order for humans to exist, there must be no V-class objects in existence.

To restate this, he's simply saying that in order for humans to exist, there must be nothing in existence that would kill off all the humans. When you state it this way, it almost sounds silly. It is, in fact, a tautology when stated like this. In my opinion, this shows that he lends no additional argument to what the anthropic principle already says, which is that the universe must be amicable to our existence simply because we exist.

He is trying to argue that the probabilities that the universe would be able to support life is calculated separately from the probability that the universe does not contain things that would kill off all life. Since these are logical inverses of each other, separating their meaning into two probability calculations seems unjustified.

Besides, the anthropic principle's purpose in life is to show that the probabilities are next to meaningless. To state it in my own way, it says that the fact we exist means that the necessary elements must have been in place. Anecdotally, to the person who won, the chances of winning the lottery are irrelevant... because they already won. Once an even occurs, we now have a given and no longer a chance calculation. It might be interesting to tell a millionaire that there was only a 0.0001% chance of him winning, but that won't change the fact that he won after only playing 14 times.

3) Claim: the likelihood of existence of a V-class object exists as an independent probability.

This claim is not directly in the post, but rather a base assumption that I see in the text. In order for any probability calculation like this to make sense we basically have to have independent events. As soon as there is causation between elements of the calculation, using a raw probability does not make sense.

As an aside, this seems to be the major issue with the tornado in the junkyard producing the 747 argument. Yes, the probability of that happening is low... so low as to assume it can't happen by chance. But biologists do not claim that random chance is responsible for the development of life on this planet. So, to use an analogy of a tornado is not a valid comparison. Period.

In the case of V-class objects, there is the implicit assumption that the development of such objects is independent of the development of humans. This isn't the case, however. Humans have, along with all other life on this planet, become successful while competing for the resources of the environment in which we life. This competition implies a couple of things.

First, there have been things that otherwise might have been V-class objects that died off due to some other reason. Maybe there was a superbug that would kill off humans, but it was isolated in a small town. Maybe there was a species of saber tooth cat that might have wiped out humans, but it failed in other ways. (Remember, just because something can kill us doesn't mean that it isn't vulnerable to other organisms. Maybe our V-class objects have been killed off by W-class objects.)

Secondly, and a bit of a continuation of the last point, maybe we are the V-class object. In the course of our evolution we have killed off numerous other species. Some incidentally, some directly... but the recurring theme is that we are still here and those aren't. Of course, it would be arrogant to assume that we are somehow more successful than other animals. The sharks and alligators seem to have done far better than us when it comes to staying power. Maybe we can play piano, but if success is measured by years in existence, we're just getting started. Maybe we just haven't met any V-class objects yet.