The literature of dictators

Courtesy of The Browser, a light Foreign Policy piece surveying the writings of some of the twentieth century's better-known absolute rulers.

As you might expect of men whose egos drove them to the pinnacle of power in their countries, their writing, by and large, lacks finesse. After all, not only were they convinced of their prowess in all things, but they were unburdened by editors, too.

On the other hand, consider this bit of (translated) verse:

Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night,
For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.
I have torn off the garb of asceticism and hypocrisy,
Putting on the cloak of the tavern-hunting shaykh and becoming aware.
The city preacher has so tormented me with his advice
That I have sought aid from the breath of the wine-drenched profligate.
Leave me alone to remember the idol-temple,
I who have been awakened by the hand of the tavern's idol.

Granted, on its face it might not be the greatest poetry you've ever read. But doesn't it become more interesting, and revealing, when you learn it was written by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini?

A Somali pirate in a German court

Courtesy The Browser, an English-language version of a great article in Der Spiegel about a Somali pirate's experiences in a German court, where he is on trial for piracy against a German-flagged vessel. He's utterly bewildered by the norms of a society under the rule of law.

Caveat: you have to believe the young man in question is telling the truth. I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

I wasn't inclined to feel sorry for a Somali pirate, but this one's youth and background made me question whether the world's energies would not be more productively directed toward fixing Somalia (for some definition of "fixing") rather than pursuing and prosecuting desperate young men like this one. The effort seems akin to treating a gunshot victim by mopping blood off the floor rather than taking her to a hospital.

Last year's model

I stumbled across an intriguing-looking badge on a blog and clicked through to Last Year's Model, whose motto is, "Saving the planet through sheer laziness." The point is to encourage people not to buy new gadgets if they have perfectly functional ones that are slightly older.

It's an idea with which I was already on board a long time ago. My only quibble is, "last year" is such a short horizon. I think shooting for five years is reasonable. (I know, I know: just contemplating being behind the technology curve for that long would make some trendinistas' heads explode.)

Life's short, yes, but just because you can buy something doesn't mean you must.

Giants generous to Loewenstein

It's nice to read a story of classiness.

A full World Series share came to $317,631.29, a life-changing windfall for a gravely ill career clubhouse attendant. The Giants’ players had sole determination over how the cash was doled out among employees – partial shares and cash awards were awarded in addition to full shares – and they’d voted [David] Loewenstein the maximum.

Open source vs. closed source

In response to Jon Stokes' opinion piece on Facebook's open-sourcing of its datacenter design, I found a strikingly insightful comment from user "brentbordelon" on what really distinguishes an open-source project from a closed-source project.

"Open Source" is really little more than a PR stunt. There's very little difference between open source systems and their outcome vs. closed source systems.

In successful examples of both you have a few brilliant people doing the huge majority of the things that makes the venture successful. The difference is really only concerned with the "tagalongs":

In the closed-source world, a tagalong is a yes man or some middle management person who wants everyone above them to think they play a significant role in the success of the venture. In reality, they usually do more to hinder progress than help. Eventually, they end up losing their jobs as it becomes increasingly evident that they are not adding any real value.

In open-source scenarios, the approach to tagalongs is very different. Anyone and everyone can say, "...and I helped!", even if all they did was git some code and look at it. Instead of one or two people getting in the way, you have a multitude. Many of which submit actual code. Unfortunately the majority of code is either novice crap or is so laden with someone else's totally different vision as to be useless. Fortunately, with a few key players being able to decide what ACTUALLY gets accepted and what doesn't, an open source project can progress.

More of the tagalongs are helpful than "brentbordelon" admits, but his main point holds true in my experience: it takes a core of dedicated, motivated, creative, and effective people to make a successful project.

Comodo and bogus SSL certificates

Oh boy. The Comodo Group, a certificate authority, was tricked into issuing SSL certificates for well-known domains to a bogus client. As Bruce Schneier wrote, "This isn't good."

I gave some background on this technology in December and August 2010. My blog entries aren't perfect but they give you the flavor of what's going on and why the Comodo story is important.

There are ways to mitigate the vulnerabilities introduced by corrupt or sloppy CAs (the Comodo Group appears to fall into the latter category), but some if not all of them require far-reaching changes in even more fundamental Internet technologies, like the Domain Name System (DNS).

In short, there's no easy fix.

"Does the Universe Need God?", Sean Carroll

Courtesy of The Browser, an absolutely fascinating excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity (due out in July 2012 according to one source).

Carroll's question is provocative, but his answer is compellingly well-reasoned and thoughtful. It helps that he sensibly circumscribes the problem space:

Some questions science has more or less answered: "What happens when something catches on fire?" But "Where did the universe come from?" is not one of these questions. So we are not faced with a matter of judging the merits of a mature and compelling scientific theory. Rather, we are trying to predict the future: will there ever be a time when a conventional scientific model provides a complete understanding of the origin of the universe? Or, alternatively, do we already know enough to conclude that God definitely helps us explain the universe we see, in ways that a non-theistic approach can never hope to match?

A brief and quite comprehensible explanation of the state of our cosmological knowledge follows. Along the way, Carroll clears up misconceptions that have arisen around concepts and terms of art that have seeped into the wider public consciousness, like "the Big Bang."

Then he surveys the various theories purporting to explain how the universe came to be. It is in these theories that science and religion contend with one another, and what becomes clear in Carroll's survey is that which theory -- or which type of theory -- one believes is very much a philosophical rather than scientific question.

First, Carroll notes the attractiveness for the theologically inclined of the scientific observation that the universe's physical characteristics are exceptionally well-suited for our form of life. Certain physical parameters could have taken many different values, resulting in many different types of universe; even small differences from what we have measured could have resulted in a universe in which life on Earth could not have existed (at least, not in its current form). Since we seem to exist by virtue of a long shot, probabilistically speaking, the idea that there must have been an entity "setting" these particular values is attractive at first blush. However, Carroll points out possible alternative explanations:

• Other values for those parameters might have led to other forms of life emerging, forms whose characteristics we can't imagine.
• We got extremely lucky that the universe came into being in this way.
• Different parts of the universe have different values for the physical parameters, and we happen to live in one of the parts where life is possible.

Carroll observes that not nearly enough credence is given to the first possibility.

Life may be very fragile, but for all we know it may be ubiquitous (in parameter space); we have a great deal of trouble even defining "life" or for that matter "complexity," not to mention "intelligence." At the least, the tentative nature of our current understanding of these issues should make us reluctant to draw grand conclusions about the nature of reality from the fact that our universe allows for the existence of life.

(That's one problem I've always had with the anthropic principle: it always has struck me as unjustifiably specific to humans.)

The "we got lucky" explanation is certainly possible, but from the standpoint of a cosmologist it doesn't lend itself to the imaginative flights of fancy that the alternative explanations do. (That's my opinion. Carroll dismisses "we got lucky" on the basis that it is highly improbable, which is consistent with his assignment of probabilities to each of these alternative explanations.)

The third alternative explanation requires introducing the concept of the "multiverse." A universe is a region with a single set of values for fundamental physical parameters, and therefore a particular set of physical laws. If universes with different values for the same physical parameters exist, the whole collection of universes is called the multiverse.

There are different theories for how a multiverse could have arisen, but the bottom-line question for Carroll is the likelihood of a multiverse coming into existence versus the likelihood that a (or rather, the) universe was created by a deity.

One popular objection to the multiverse is that it is highly non-parsimonious; is it really worth invoking an enormous number of universes just to account for a few physical parameters? As Swinburne says:

To postulate a trillion trillion other universes, rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality.

It's here that we arrive at the question of what is philosophically preferable in a theory. Simpler theories are better, but what is the measure of simplicity? Carroll's answer is, the theory that can be expressed most compactly (for a technical definition of "compact") is the one scientists prefer.

... The physics of a universe containing 10^88 particles that all belong to just a handful of types, each particle behaving precisely according to the characteristics of its type, is much simpler than that of a universe containing only a thousand particles, each behaving completely differently.

Likewise, a multiverse that arises due to the natural dynamical consequences of a relatively simple set of physical laws should not be discounted because there are a lot of universes out there. Multiverse theories certainly pose formidable problems, especially when it comes to making predictions and comparing them with data; for that reason, most scientists would doubtless prefer a theory that directly predicted the parameters we observe in nature over a multiverse ensemble in which our local environment was explained anthropically. But most scientists (for similar reasons) would prefer a theory that was completely free of appeals to supernatural agents.

There are legitimate objections to the notion of a multiverse. However, whatever challenges arise from positing a multiverse to explain our physical reality, those same challenges, and worse, confront "the God hypothesis." For instance, one fundamental question facing an explanation of the universe as God's handiwork is, why is the universe so much more complex than it needs to be for the purpose of creating man?

In my experience, the typical rejoinder to this kind of objection is, "God's reasoning is beyond our comprehension." This assertion is a showstopper: there is no way to convince a nonbeliever that it's true, and no way to convince a believer that it isn't.

What is often overlooked is that there is a corresponding showstopper argument if you come at things from the opposite direction. "God hypothesis" advocates cite various roles God could have played or could be playing in the unfolding of the universe, but they all have the purpose of explaining why things happen. And as Carroll writes:

... the ultimate answer to "We need to understand why the universe exists/continues to exist/exhibits regularities/came to be" is essentially "No we don't."

Carroll thinks that some people need to find causes for all things, while others are able to see the universe as a thing beyond the need for causation. It's this fundamental difference in mindset that explains why some people need a "God hypothesis" and others don't.

There is no reason, within anything we currently understand about the ultimate structure of reality, to think of the existence and persistence and regularity of the universe as things that require external explanation. Indeed, for most scientists, adding on another layer of metaphysical structure in order to purportedly explain these nomological facts is an unnecessary complication.

It's a terrific read.