Phoenix lander sees snow on Mars

More details here. Win. I’m off to get my skiis…

EDIT: the pic below isn’t supposed to contain snow, it’s just a nice photo…but you can keep staring at the screen from an inch away looking for snow if you want.

Yudkowsky on elites

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s posts on Overcoming Bias range from strange and shallow ideas about reality wrapped in crypto-mystical blather, to incredible, truly novel insights which stay on my mind for months, to simple and elegant observations which take unverbalisable stray thoughts that have floated around my mind for years and press them into a neatly expressed passage. His recent post on Competent Elites falls into the latter class.

One of the major surprises I received when I moved out of childhood into the real world, was the degree to which the world is stratified by genuine competence.

[...]

What is it that makes an executive?  I don’t know, because I’m not a professional in this area.  If I had to take a guess, I would call it “functioning without recourse” – living without any level above you to take over if you falter, or even to tell you if you’re getting it wrong.  To just get it done, even if the problem requires you to do something unusual, without anyone being there to look over your work and pencil in a few corrections.

[...]

Hedge-fund people sparkle with extra life force.  At least the ones I’ve talked to.  Large amounts of money seem to attract smart people.  No, really.

I have a feeling that this is a post I’ll periodically return to for the same reason that I reread Ayn Rand every now and then: to be reminded that people more competent and brilliant and alive than me really do exist, and that it’s a lot of fun to work towards their level.

Yudkowsky’s post is ostensibly about the way we lie to ourselves about elites, finding sadistic comfort in the idea that their surface success must be balanced by unseen misery. One of the annoying things about growing up in a memetic soup is how the most ridiculous notions – “Space aliens must be morally good, because they would be so much smarter than us” – “Nobody could really be as smart and alive as those elites seem” – come to feel like deep truths woven into the fabric of the universe. There is no universal arbiter of happiness who makes sure everybody, by hook or crook, gets a roughly equal share. If somebody looks happier than you, they probably are.

What the post is really about, for me at least, is the kind of people that constitute the “executive” level. The aura of competence Yudkowsky describes is real, and rarely leaves room for doubt once you get close to it. I’ve had the privilege of meeting a handful of people on the level Yudkowsky describes. A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a professor in my school about a presentation I was working on. He asked me to describe one of my key points, then gently but ruthlessly demolished it in a few pithy sentences. I remember being unable to suppress a grin as he neatly disassembled my carefully constructed argument: “this guy gets it“, I thought, “he thinks like me, but better“.

There are so many moments of disillusionment as we grow up. We realise, usually quite early, that our parents are not omniscient gods but fallible humans. We move from awkwardly and jealously trying to imitate the impenetrable social game we see our teenaged siblings playing to inhabiting it ourselves. As we are educated in our chosen fields, the mystical skills of experienced practitioners resolve into simple tasks we perform without thinking twice. After a while, we get comfortable with assuming that the high-level skills deployed by the true elite are just linear extensions of our own: “I could do that, if I wanted”.

It’s so much more comfortable in so many ways to pretend that nobody out there really experiences exceeding competence and aliveness, that everybody with money and success is just flawed like us, or at least gained their station through black-hat conniving rather than work and talent. Once you’ve encountered the aura of competence, though, this pretense seems petty and miserable. There really are people whose minds work on a higher level, and if we try to drag them down with just-so stories about their failings we are just wrestling with straw men; the elite don’t care what we think. Better to acknowledge them, appreciate them and struggle to emulate them.

Ubuntu Dust theme: an update

Commenter aescnt replied to my extended review of Dust, a proposed new look for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex or future releases, to point out that updates to the theme have been released that address some of my past criticisms. I reinstalled Murrine, which I had embarrassingly neglected to do before my extended review, and slapped on the new Dust release. This was around ten days ago, and I’ve been so busy for the last fortnight that I failed realise I have been using, and enjoying Dust for all that time. If nothing else, this proves that Dust has gone from being a patchwork prototype to a coherent, functional look.

The verdict? Vastly improved. I really, really like this theme now.

Let’s look at the major changes. The min/max/close window controls were my major bugbear with the old look:

Small, fiddly and ugly. Yuck. Now, they’re larger, better integrated with the theme and produce a cool ‘glow’ effect when you hover over them:

The second major flaw with the old Dust was contrast. No matter how I tweaked things like transparency, my LCD monitor’s brightness and contrast settings, the system fonts and even the wallpaper, everything was still impossibly dark and I found myself squinting just to open Gnome menus. No more. Maybe it’s because of Murrine, or because of tweaks to the theme itself, but my eyes are much more comfortable with the new Dust and I can pick out text on window titlebars and Gnome panels with ease.

The ‘new’ Dust includes some extra bonuses. The long-promised Firefox theme has been released, tweaking the browser’s look and feel into line with the rest of the system without the previous text/background colour clashes. Although it’s not perfect – the tabs particularly look a little too Star Trek – it’s a major improvement that helps Dust to integrate into the GUI rather than stand awkwardly against it:

Nautilus, too, has been brought into line. The changes are subtle but the clashes between different elements (such as the grey statusbar with near-black resizing handle) have been smoothed out into a pleasing, unified look:

Dust comes packaged with a neat little script which adds some Compiz-powered drop shadows and other effects I would never have thought of using but which look really great, especially under tooltips and the Gnome panels:

I’ve had a little problem installing the Dust theme a few times now: when I try to install it through System > Preferences > Appearence, I get an error message “Can’t move directory over directory”. The only solution I’ve found for this so far is to remove all Dust-related folders from my ~/.themes directory, then installing the them normally. Apart from that, Dust delivers a near flawless experience.

One other theme-related item: check out these comments from Adam and marianomd for some advice on snazzing up the system fonts.

Credit again to sandman for the excellent wallpaper photo.

Drug offenders are political prisoners

From Wikipedia:

A political prisoner is someone held in prison or otherwise detained, perhaps under house arrest, for his or her involvement in political activity.

In other words, a political prisoner is somebody who hasn’t hurt anyone but whose actions threaten the reigning political view – even if the ‘offender’ is not trying to make a political statement, but simply go about their life. Drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy and LSD are less physically harmful and probably less addictive than alcohol and tobacco. Even if they were not, what drug users do with their own bodies is none of anyone else’s business, least of all the government. However, through a grotesque quirk of history, all nations still find it acceptable on at least some level for politicians to summon false moral outrage against drug users and lock them up. This only feels normal because we’re so used to it.

Dr. Chris McKay’s seminar on the Phoenix lander and life on Mars

Scraps from a seminar today starring Dr. Chris McKay, a NASA planetary scientist and one of the biological investigators for the Mars Phoenix lander mission:

• If this guy is typical of NASA, it must the smartest, nerdiest group of people on the planet.
• It’s incredible how much simpler abiotic factors become in the absence of life. McKay kept insisting that we can’t draw general conclusions from single sample sites on Mars, yet by his description the planet is remarkably uniform, at least in ways relevant to life. The obvious exception to this is permafrost and ice, which vary with longitude.
• ‘Dry’ permafrost – the kind that never, ever melts, apparently found on Earth only in the high, dry valleys of Antarctica – actually supports microbial life on the ice-dirt interface, a few centimeters below the surface. This is not particularly surprising; microbes will live pretty much anywhere. What is strange is that, as far as McKay and his colleagues could tell, the Antarctica permafrost only supports heterotrophic microorganisms, mostly proteobacteria. This means that the bacteria are not producing their own energy from sunlight, which is the way almost all food webs are supported, but slowly eating their way through organic carbon in the soil. Apparently they still have several million years’ supply worth, given their very slow growth.
• Astrobiology is much more about chemistry than biology. I’ve always known this intellectually but you only really get it on a gut level when somebody competent in the field picks through all the lines of evidence for alien life in front of you.
• The Phoenix mission was originally intended to be a “dirt mission”, using the scoop to dig through a couple of meters of dirt and gather information on the layering. When the planners realised that they would probably hit ice below that, which would be worth examining chemically, they decided to add a rasping instrument to the scoop. However, the lander would not be able to get enough torque on a rasp with its robotic arm stuck a couple of metres down a hole. So, the landing site was moved to the north polar region, where the dirt layer was only a few centimeters thick. This left the scientists who thought they had been working on a “dirt layers” mission rather confused.
• If you trust McKay’s judgement, ignore the results from ground-penetrating radar investigations of Mars. The technology is simply not suited to the environment and incredibly subjective to interperate. This means that deep aquifers, including liquid ones, are still very plausible.
• Planetary landers are no longer sterilised.
• Mars is really, really cool.

There’s a great interview with Dr McKay here on terraforming Mars, space industry and more. Like a lot of scientists, his personality seems to combine an unwillingness to make claims that go beyond the evidence or his expertise with a nerdy enthusiasm for and interest in pretty much everything.

Twelve easy steps to writing an excellent literature review

1. Perform an exhaustive search through the literature to find all papers, books, unpublished results, letters etc. that are even tangentially related to your topic.
2. Spend days reading the collected literature, carefully noting important findings and listing references.
3. Begin writing a detailed review of the collected literature with multiple references to support each point.
4. Notice that the paper you just spent a page meticulously deconstructing is in fact a poorly performed replicate of an experiment done many times before, much more rigorously, with completely different findings. Rewrite that entire section. Cry.
5. Realise that the paper you were relying on for your central conclusion was retracted by the authors a year after publication for hideous flaws and inaccuracies. Attempt to make it look like you noticed those flaws and inaccuracies yourself by using longer words than the original authors.
6. Decide that you have been too uncritical. Write a paragraph critising a vaguely relevant study for not taking into account the effects of Jupiter’s magnetic field on their electrophoresis results. Cite fourteen astronomy papers to support your attack\pad out your bibliography.
7. Repeatedly cite your own past work with glowing praise for the superlative experimental design and deeply insightful analysis. Attempt to disguise this by referring to “Old Supervisor et al.”.
8. Lose your bibliography. Freak. Find it again. Repeat 15-20 times.
9. Realise that you really should have started reading about past work in the field before you started your experiments. Try to think of a way to reframe “pointless rehashing” as “rigorous confirmation” when your supervisor asks you to discuss this. Plan to steal others’ entire experimental designs anyway.
10. Become so familiar with your university’s online literature access tool that you start clicking the right place on the screen before the page even appears. Be unsure if this is a good thing.
11. Laugh uproariously at a terrible pun in the title of a paper. Then look out the window at some actual people and feel instantly depressed. Retreat away from the searing natural light.
12. Congratulations! You have finished your review. Now spend twice as much time as you did writing it on formatting, proofreading, and fixing your printer. Bask in the look of vague recognition in your supervisor’s eyes when you submit the finished product.

How-to: fix pulseaudio bugs in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

Audio was one of the weakest points of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, with the PulseAudio ‘upgrade’ seeming to cause more problems then it fixed. One of the constant bugbears on my system was that when more then one application producing an audio stream – say, Firefox open to a YouTube video and VLC – were open simultaneously, audio would often cut out altogether and require a reboot to restore it. I tried out psyke83’s how-to which adds tweaked PulseAudio, ALSA and Flash packages backported from the upcoming Intrepid Ibex 8.10 release. It worked great and I havn’t had a single audio (or Flash for that matter) glitch since! Props to psyke83.

Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” announced

Jaunty Jackalope? It may sound like furry porno but Mark Shuttleworth’s slightly eccentric announcement promises some interesting new directions for Ubuntu 9.04. First up is boot time, which has long been a pet peeve of mine in Gutsy and Hardy. There’s nothing that takes the shine off your favorite distro like watching it place a poor second against Windows in the startup event.

The Jackalope is known for being so fast that it’s extremely hard to catch, and breeds only when lightning flashes.

I’m a little confused about the significance of the second part, but the sentiment is good. Shuttleworth also mentions tailoring 9.04 for speed on specific devices. I’ll probably never see my dream of Ubuntu-based firmware for my old iPod touch; this more likely refers to subnotebooks shipped with customised versions of 9.04 as well as embedded devices.

Jaunty will also emphasise increased web integration into the desktop. Since “Jackalope” is apparently not sufficient to meet the awkward portmanteau quota, we are at this point introduced to the ugly “weblication”. This is a logical extension of the “pervasive internet access” slated for Intrepid Ibex. It’s going to be interesting to see what the developers come up with here, since this is the first application-centric major goal we’ve seen in a few releases. Google’s new Chrome browser has been stirring up a lot of talk about web based applications for no reason I can clearly discern: it’s certainly a great browser with a lot of potential, but beyond the improved Javascript handling and Gears integration it doesn’t offer anything particularly unique. I would be very surprised to see it become a part of Ubuntu any time soon, especially as there is still no linux port of the beta, although Google’s close ties with and support for Canonical could lead to some surprises.

More likely for Jaunty is a range of synchronisation services, some of which will be tethered to Google’s cloud. Given the increasing staleness of OpenOffice, we might even see Google Docs become the default office suite in 9.04. A revamp of web-integrated Gnome screenlets to be enabled by default is also a possibility, although this would be a fairly minor improvement. What excites me more is the possibility that entirely new weblication (ugh) systems will be dreamed up and implemented by the developers. This would be a boon in so many ways: it would lend some substance to the vaporous “web OS” paradigm; it would establish a hallmark feature to set Ubuntu clearly apart within the linux world and attract new users from without, something that has been sorely missing from the distro so far; and it would force web developers to take notice of the linux user base and push the spread of web standards. All good things.

My fellow atheists: please stop calling every atheistic ideology you disagree with a religion

My fellow heathens,

We all know them. We hear them from friends of friends, read them in web forums, laugh at them in YouTube videos of earnest evangelicals. They’re the killer arguments against atheism that, like Randi’s unsinkable rubber ducky, will bob right back up no matter how many times you push them down. Wouldn’t we all be murderers and rapists without a god telling us what to do? Do you really think a world without religion would produce wonders like the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel? Religion gives my life so much meaning, it just must be true!

The most offensive and ridiculous of these canards is unfortunately also the most common: “Stalin and the Nazis were atheists! See what that atheistic amorality leads to?” Like so many other religious claims, this one lacks consistency with both logic and reality. Frustratingly, it’s very difficult to point this out in a pithy and straightforward way. You could take the historical evidence route, and get bogged down in a futile argument over some boring quote that may or may not be attributable to Hitler’s butler’s frau’s sister’s nephew. Alternatively, you could try and point out that guilt by association is generally considered a logical fallacy. Aside from the implied acceptance of Hitler’s atheism, the downside of the second approach is that theists are almost by definition blind to their own logical inconsistencies.

This leaves the rhetorical approach. Given limited time or interest in the argument, we will so often succumb to the temptation of making a verbal stab which seems on the surface to address the question sufficiently that the conversation will move on to less muddy terrain. For the Nazi-Stalin question, the rhetorical response goes something like this: “Well, if you think about it, Nazism and Marxism were really a kind of religion. Hitler’s ideology was based on unscientific ideas like Social Darwinism, and Stalin used Russians’ deep cultural religiosity as the substrate for a cult of personality. So really, they were not atheistic regimes.” I don’t have the time to search through YouTube clips for evidence of this, but I have heard both Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris give versions of this rebuttal on many occasions, and would not be surprised if Christopher Hitchens has too.

As much as I sympathise with their frustration at having to face Nazi-Stalin over and over again, I just can’t agree with the response. There are a lot of ideologies in the world, and a lot of them are wrong. In fact, because so many of them are mutually exclusive, every one of us is forced to disagree with the vast majority of them. When we reject an ideology, we are doing so because the ideology contains objectively false premises, embodies values that we do not share, or most often a combination of the two. Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens reject religious ideologies because they hold the existence of a god to be objectively extremely unlikely, and the three men hold a variety of values which clash with those embodied by many religions.

There are also ideologies which are wrong but are not religions. I reject Marxism because I believe its core economic premises to be objectively false, and because Marxist values clash with my high regard for freedom. Hitchens has famously rejected Trotskyism for no doubt more scholarly and sophisticated reasons. I’m sure that Dawkins and Harris too have rejected non-religious ideologies; neither seems a likely Lysenkoist, for example. Clearly, they accept that it is possible for an ideology to be wrong without it being necessarily a religion. It’s just so much easier, when faced with the desire to move quickly past the worn Nazi-Stalin issue, to denounce fascism and Stalinism as religions and move on.

I think this approach is wrong. I think it is wrong because it is historically awkward. Certainly, there were strong devotional threads in the relationships between Hitler or Stalin and their respective peoples – but this can be said of many other ideologies with a single group or person at their core. Certainly, demonetization of an outgroup were features of both evil regimes – but again, few ideologies past or present are willing to grant more than grudging tolerance of non-members. The parallels between fascism/Stalinism and religion are both strained and unnecessary. We have a reasonable working definition of religion, and a common sense idea of which ideologies fall into that category. Trying to force the stigma of ‘religion’ onto Hitler or Stalin, whatever their personal beliefs actually were, is futile when they are both condemned a millionfold already by genocide and war and human suffering.

I think this approach is wrong for a pragmatic reason, too. Communist regimes like their yoked masses to see the world as a war between themselves and the oppressive West. Similarly, the religious would like us to think that our personal beliefs about invisible friends in the sky are the sides we take in the globally important struggle. It simply ain’t so. As I have already pointed out, religions are but a minor nook in the vast cathedral of wrongheaded ideas. Religions have and have had an enormous influence on all human societies. This does not mean that we, as atheists, should define ourselves by them any more then we define ourselves as non-Lysenkoists. We needlessly dignify religion when we pretend that Stalin can only be condemned if we first disclaim his atheism.

When we try and distance ourselves from evil in this way we are automatically adopting a defensive position against what is really just an appeal to the absurd. “Hitler was an atheist? Who cares! Do I look genocidal to you?” Let your opponent take the debate from there to the relationship between religion and morality, if they want. Put the onus on them to show that not having a telepathic connection with the creator of the universe makes you an immoral person. Don’t fret about the religious audience who really will accept this as sensible; you were never going to change their minds anyway. Just don’t elevate religion to the position of universal moral discriminant. The religious are your uncle who still tries to frame every world event in cold war terms: the planet has moved on, but he hasn’t. The religious are the twenty-one year old woman who still sees the people around her through the lens of high school cliques and alliances: she is only capturing a small part of the wider social picture. The next time a theist tries to link atheism to Hitler, or Stalin, or whatever, give them the reply they deserve: gentle ridicule and an prod towards more substantive issues.

I would appreciate it.

IMAGE CREDIT: “Godly Sunrise in Reykjavik” by Stuck In Customs under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence

Dramatis personae: what the US election looks like from the other side of the world

A lot of Australians get their news through American and international media. This is still a minority, however; most of us don’t go further than the government run ABC or one of the local free to air television networks. Without further ado: the key characters in the US election, as presented by our local media.

• Barack Obama. He’s good looking, and has a very nice speaking voice. His policy is getting troops out of Iraq; if he has other policies they are unimportant but probably all quite nice. Obama most definitely grew up in Indonesia and has a very nice speaking voice. He is black, and we pretend to understand the significance of this to Americans although we really don’t get it. He seems to be genuinely friendly towards Hillary who he defeated in a baroque contest called ‘The Primaries’ which none of us bothers to even pretend to understand. Did I mention he has a very nice speaking voice? My grandmother says he looks like Nelson Mandela, but she says that about anyone of African descent. He is not George Bush.
• Joe Biden. That dude standing next to Obama. They mentioned who he was a few days ago but only because they had to. He seems cool. He is not George Bush.
• Hillary Clinton. She’s a women. Bill, who is also cool, is her husband but it doesn’t seem to have rubbed off. We have no idea what she thinks about Iraq, but assume she’s opposed to it, whatever that means. She is being a good sport about the whole losing to Obama thing but everybody knows she really wishes she’d won. Hillary looks old. She is not George Bush.
• John McCain. McCain is a Republican. Those are the ones who like guns, invading places, and George Bush. He is old and white and looks like every other evil American politician we have seen in the movies. We don’t know what his police are but undoubtedly they involve guns, Iraq and bashing up gays. McCain has no chance of winning and is probably only running to fulfill some legal technicality. Every now and then, somebody will mention that he is actually doing well in the polls. The purpose of these results is to emphasise how crazy Americans are; they have no relation to the actual election. He is probably George Bush.
• Sarah Palin. Hey, who’s that hot librarian? What a weird accent! Is she that lady from Fargo? Her teenaged daughter is pregnant. Meh. She’s not George Bush. Hey, is she a politician or something?
• Joe Lieberman, Rush Limbaugh, Freddie Mac, Nancy Pelosi: These are probably all old white southern senators or something. They are frequently mentioned and seem to be important in some way. George Bush status unknown.