Tuesday, 28th of February, 2006

Well, I don’t know a huge amount about Anthony Albanese, but he does tend to speak up more than your average Australian Labor Party member, and about the right things too. What with most of the top bods in that party being basically dead in the water, while Howard’s mob get away with absolutely anything, Albanese is at least standing up for some things…
Today the SMH reports the wonderful Tony Abbott showing his racist colours in Question Time:

“I’m reading in The Australian last Friday, he’s (Mr Crean) still got the Greek branches but he’s lost the Spanish branches and he’s lost the Vietnamese branches as well as the Cambodian branches.

“And I couldn’t help but think - are there any Australians left in the so-called Australian Labor Party today?”

Why do the Libs keep coming out with this shit? Because they can.

Opposition frontbencher Anthony Albanese, whose inner-Sydney electorate of Grayndler has a large non-English speaking population, immediately objected.

“My point of order, Mr Speaker, is for the minister to withdraw that extraordinarily outrageous slur on every Australian who doesn’t have an Anglo-Celtic name in this country,” Mr Albanese said.

“We’ve heard the dog whistle from this mob one after the other, but this minister as usual has gone too far and I ask him to withdraw it.”

Speaker David Hawker said he did not find the comment offensive.

“Well Mr Speaker, I did and 46 per cent of my electorate will find that offensive as well,” Mr Albanese said.

Says a lot about the speaker too. Abbott, of course, thought he was being funny, but it doesn’t take a linguistics or psychology degree to realise that when he says “Australians” he’s betraying, if not his true feelings, then at least some deep-seated assumptions about who “real Australians” are. And they’re not pretty. But then the contents of Tony Abbott’s head could never be pretty.

So thanks, Anthony Albanese, for showing him up, and while we’re at it, let’s all enjoy again his wonderful tirade against John Howard from April 2001, linked from this old post of mine.

Wednesday, 22nd of February, 2006

You may not realise it, but not only are the Chaser kids doing a 27-week stint on ABC on Friday nights now, but the satirical newspaper continues online.
And not only are there frequent humourous and satirical stories (plus Weldon and Katauskas), but there is also some great news commentary courtesy of NewsJunkie, and some actual investigative stories from Tim Brunero.
And you can subscribe to the RSS feed, which covers most (not quite all) the content (they also hide it in the headers, so give that link a go).

Anyway, today NewsJunkie’s article is too good to let it rest, so have a read of “And among the swastikas, a little Aussie flag was flying…”

Monday, 20th of February, 2006

No real comments from me yet, but Leon Wieseltier (Literary editor of the New Republic, mind — not a philosopher) has committed a rather iggorant review in the NY Times of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, previously mentioned on this blog. I’m hoping to pick up the book soon, and have little doubt I’ll love it (although I need no convincing in its central thesis), but I can’t comment in-depth, having not read the book yet.

I’d like to point out an excellent rebuttal though, by Brian Leiter, entitled Why review a book of philosophy when you can sneer at it?. I strongly recommend reading the Leiter; there’s no doubt there will be many more responses like Wieseltier’s to the Dennett, and Leiter provides a useful tonic against them, expressing much better than I could why indignant cries to the effect that you just can’t do that are philosophically unworthy. Wieseltier brings out that old saw about science (or here, “scientism”) being just another superstition, which Leiter swiftly puts paid to; but the main tack of Wieseltier’s review is that Dennett’s philosophy is lacking, and that’s where Leiter is particularly illuminating.

Amazon is of course the home of ignorant reviews, so here’s one (see link from the book title above):

This book is based on the premise that God doesn’t exist or else is completely disinterested in human affairs. If you accept this premise, the author is right: why be ruled by religion? If you believe in God and you understand what God demands from us, this book is ridiculous.

Of course, Dennett is not starting from the premise that God exists because, as this reviewer correctly notes, there would be no point to the book if it were so. But for most people, belief isn’t primary, although Dennett has spent considerable energy pointing out pervading Mind-first trends in philosophical thought, and questioning their validity. To take a Mind-first stance is to stop asking questions, to stop being curious, and the point at which this happens is entirely arbitrary. I’ve read enough of Dennett on this and related subjects to know that what he’s doing is demonstrating that if you keep asking questions, you’ll dissolve more and more of the mysterious fog that surrounds and nurtures superstitious beliefs.
And by revealing the historical basis of religious beliefs, Dennett is throwing doubt upon those very beliefs. It’s a tricky point, and Leiter puts it thus:

He [Wieseltier] does not seem to realize that an account of the historical genesis of a belief can have bearing on the epistemic status of that belief, that beliefs with the wrong kind of etiology are epistemically suspect (…) It is true that you cannot show a belief to be false by explaining its origin, but it is clear you can show that holding the belief is not warranted by explaining its origin.

Saturday, 18th of February, 2006

If you read the science blogs at all you may have come across this by now. A couple of days ago Richard Cohen wrote a somewhat disingenuous article at the Washington Post called “What Is The Value of Algebra?”, in which he addressed high-school dropout Gabriela Ocampo, who gave up after apparently failing algebra six times — quite an achievement.
Choice quote:

Here’s the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it.

Actually, choicer quote, the really bad shit:

Gabriela, sooner or later someone’s going to tell you that algebra teaches reasoning. This is a lie propagated by, among others, algebra teachers. Writing is the highest form of reasoning. This is a fact. Algebra is not. The proof of this, Gabriela, is all the people in my high school who were whizzes at math but did not know a thing about history and could not write a readable English sentence.

PZ Myers over at Pharyngula is furious and writes a beautiful piece tearing Cohen to shreds, and rightly so. Well… I was going to suggest that maybe he was overreacting a tad (despite the egregious second quote above, which I’ll get to in a minute) — after all, some people in some positions don’t need alegbra, and sure, you can get through life without having a clue about it (although more on this below). But here’s the pretty scary coda, added a day later from the LA Times:

“I don’t want to be there no more,” she said, her eyes watering from raw onions, shortly before she quit to enroll in a training program to become a medical assistant.

I’m sorry? Gabriela, not only can’t you pass algebra, but you don’t know English grammar, and without basic maths you want to be a fucking medical assistant?!!@!! I don’t know what to say.

More infuriating, though, are Cohen’s other two assertions, the second quote above. Firstly, his proof: ALL the maths whizzes had no idea about history, geography and writing English? Come off it! It’s not hard to point out a few maths whizzes who are perfectly rounded people and write beautiful English to boot — take Ian Stewart, for a start. Then, given that anyone who’s done any architecture, science (including medicine, nursing, pharmacy), computer science, web coding, and the list goes on, would have to have done reasonably well in high school algebra, suddenly we’re open to a huge list of individuals. Let’s just jot a few down: Doug Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds, Cory Doctorow, PZ Myers, Chris Mooney… I mean you don’t have to agree or even like with what these people write to realise that they’re quite capable of writing, and — ooh — reasoning. Looks like I’ve refuted your argument, Mr Cohen — but you’d have to have a rudimentary grasp of logic to realise that, and logic, of course, is just a branch of algebra.

So. “Writing is the highest form of reasoning”? Huh? Should these people’s writing be counted as prior to their algebra skills in some way? — that’s a generous interpretation of Cohen’s argument. And it’s a good question; good writing skills are by no means equivalent to good algebra skills. But all that being able to grasp the basics of algebra means is being able to reason abstractly. High school algebra tends to involve on the one hand translating real world situations into abstract formulations, and on the other hand manipulating abstract formulations in order to derive new information. And that’s a skill that’s applicable all over the place — as suggested above, a paramedic is going to have to be able to think on the fly about, for instance, how much dosage of a drug to give to someone, based on various factors (patient’s weight, age & gender; length of time since trauma; etc). Anyone involved in public policy will have to be able to reason about abstracted qualities and quantities in order to make decisions that matter to all of us — and any member of the public who wants to understand matters of policy in order to make judgements about policies to vote for is going to need a bit of that ability too.

I’d hate to seem like a killjoy here (or, as thesaurus.com suggests, a fussbudget - cute!), so let me remind you here that I’m a musician, as well as a comics devotee and an avid reader. By no means do I think that numbers and formulas are all that life’s about. But abstract reasoning runs too deep to be dismissed as unnecessary for practically anyone wanting to engage in the world, and I think Richard Cohen is seriously deluding himself if he thinks he’s never used those skills in his adult life.

Abstract reasoning is integral to music-making and fine art too — I’m by no means the only person I know even from my single university year who was deeply involved in music at the same time as majoring (well, co-majoring) in maths. My other major? Philosophy. Look — I can string a sentence together in English! Pretty good for a maths geek, hey?

That said, should algebra be compulsory (and this is the issue, from Cohen’s article: “the L.A. school district now requires all students to pass a year of algebra and a year of geometry in order to graduate”)? I’m not sure. In Australia (at least in New South Wales), the year after I did my HSC the Board of Studies decided to make it compulsory not only to do (and pass) English but to include the mark in your aggregate total. [Explanation for the puzzled: you can take more units than the 10 that count towards your final mark; for the last 14 years two of the 10 that count have had to be English.] On the face of it, this sounds fair enough — we want our university students to be able to string words together in the official language of this country. The trouble is, English for the HSC has nothing to do with learning to reason, or learning anything about language (Linguistics? Grammar? What’s that? Phonetics? As if! How about History of English? Unlikely!) It’s just literature studies — learning lots of quotes from texts, and worse, these days, regurgitating some half-understood bits of po-mo literary theory. How schoolkids are meant to grasp post-colonial theory or Marxist interpretations of Shakespeare without any historical context is beyond me (and beyond them, and beyond their teachers…)
In that context, I’m strongly against English being compulsory; I did badly in it because I hated learning quotes from texts, and didn’t like most of the texts we studied, and frankly had philosophical positions that ran counter to the conclusions my teachers wanted me to draw from them. First year in Uni, I was getting distinctions and higher in my philosophy essays, so it’s not like my English skills were lacking.

That’s just me, but it does make one pause to think, briefly, about whether a kid who’s just no good at algebra is still smart enough to be allowed to pass their matriculation. But I’m not really sure it’s a valid one. In my case, had English been compulsory, I would’ve made sure I did well enough, one way or other. And I’m sorry, Gabriela, but if you really tried, and tried, to pass that algebra subject, six times in six semesters, and you still failed, then maybe your place is behind the counter at that Subway branch, and you might just have to give up the dreams of becoming a medical assistant. Or you’re just going to have to try a whole lot harder.

Notes: i) “Try a lot harder”: Lest I seem too unfair here, a) I know, Gabriela can still achieve much more than being a fast-food salesperson; but b) I’m serious about trying a lot harder. Most people who can’t pass high school maths are just deathly afraid of it. Getting over one’s fear (and therefore one’s hatred) of maths goes a long way towards managing to at least scrape through. And finding a sympathetic someone to tutor one, face to face, is going to help a lot too.

ii) Oh that’s right! I knew I wanted to comment on something else. Lest we think Cohen’s just got an axe to grind and isn’t himself particularly ignorant, consider this:

You will never need to know — never mind want to know — how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later — or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note — or reason even a little bit.

This is an incredibly foolish statement. You don’t even have to generalise the problem in the first sentence to deny it — the sort of logistics required here come up in all sorts of jobs; if you want to avoid having to think about such problems, then throw away your ambitions of responsible employment.
How about computers and calculators, then? Here, especially, Cohen is leading his audience up the garden path. Anyone who wants to write a computer program, or understand a script they want to put in a webpage, will have to have a solid understanding of algebra, but you don’t need to go for such a (relatively) esoteric example: anyone who wants to put together an Excel (or substitute your favourite program) spreadsheet needs to have a basic understanding of algebra in order to work out the formulas to relate sets of cells to other cells.
You don’t need algebra because computers can do it all now? Talk about topsy-turvy! Computers are no better at solving high school algebra problems than they are at writing opinion pieces for the Washington Post — the problem’s the same; computers can’t (yet) comprehend the abstract concepts because so much social context is required. But a smart person can use them to do wonderful things, as long as they’ve mastered abstract reasoning themselves. The sort of reasoning that Cohen wants isn’t an indivisible thing that’s based entirely in writing skills; it’s a hybrid, requiring vast general knowledge from experience, plus the skills of abstract reasoning — logic/algebra — and communication — “writing”, I guess, however exactly we define that. However we define it, we’re not going to be able to separate logic from it if we want it to be the “highest form of reasoning” (or, hey, any form of reasoning).

iii) Addendum: Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science puts the blame fairly and squarely on the teachers, and it’s hard to disagree.

Xeni at Boing Boing passed on the news a couple of days ago that Dan Clowes is working on the screenplay of the Michael Gondry-directed adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s Master of Space and Time, set to star Jack Black - hugely exciting news!
A Boing Boing reader wrote in to point out a similarity with a movie from 1989 by Mike Jittlov called The Wizard of Space and Time, and wondered whether Rucker had intended the similarity in naming the novel, so I couldn’t help but point out myself (after looking it up, mind you) that the Rucker novel in fact dates from 1985 (actually 1984 according to Wikipedia).
And Xeni put up my comment, so I have officially been Boing Boinged for the first time.

Friday, 17th of February, 2006

It’s the best thing Warren Ellis has done in ages!

Joss Whedon turns up in the comments on Warren Ellis’s blog. Much entertainment is (briefly) had, and Joe Quesada makes an appearance.
I emailed this to a friend a couple of hours ago but decided it’s worth blogging.

Speaking of said friend, please welcome www.poisontothemind.org to the mighty Frogworth hosting empire!

Thursday, 9th of February, 2006

Hint: no. Blasphemy is meaningless to an atheist, and it’s offensive to pull us up for blaspheming when we don’t believe in the gods you hold so sacred.
Now, of course I’m not going to go about offending the strongly-held beliefs of people for no reason. But hey, if there is a reason, or if I’m not addressing those people and don’t feel that what I’m saying or doing is going to directly affect those people, why the hell not?

Among the feeds I’ve subscribed to in my recent feed explosion (I’ve installed a highly customised version of feed on feeds on my server) is Ophelia Benson’s Notes and Comments on the Butterflies and Wheels site. She’s a fairly extreme atheist - like me, only somewhat more strident in her expression thereof, much like the wonderful PZ Myers of Pharyngula. And she’s had some really great posts regarding that whole Muslims-and-cartoons thing.
(By no means do I agree with everything Benson says - but I’ve been rediscovering the joy of actually reading people you don’t completely agree with. It’s challenging, and I find it hard on a large scale, but that’s why blog posts are so great!)

I personally feel that the cartoons in question were rather offensive and racist, without really addressing any of the issues between the West and the extremist Muslim (”Islamist”) world. I don’t think they should have been published, and those who published them really couldn’t have expected anything other than a horrendous overreaction from said extremists.
But that’s not to say that we should just bow down to those poor offended believers-in-things. Hence the blasphemy reference above. After all, the reductio ad absurdum of the Flying Spaghetti Monster works just as well here: Shall we have to take care in our art, fiction, articles, cartoons and so on that we don’t step on any believers’ toes? Surely not - where would we stop? And if not, then why should some people’s beliefs require more care than others’?

So here’s OB on “understandism”; and here’s a rather inspiring post of hers: Ask the Women. In case you’ve been conned into thinking that “the Muslim world” just means those violent unthinking young men, go and ask the women. She links to an amazing article by German feminist Alice Schwarzer which is highly worth reading.

Wednesday, 8th of February, 2006

Gawd almighty. From the latest Weekly Book Newsletter, Hachette Livre has wholly acquired the Time Warner Book Group. This makes them the third-largest trade publisher in the world - Pearson (who own Penguin) and Bertelsmann (who own Random House) are still bigger. But here’s a list of what Hachette now own:

The Hachette family
Imprints owned by Hachette Livre now include:

• Hodder & Stoughton
• Headline
• Hachette Children’s Books
• John Murray
• Octopus
• Time Warner UK
• Time Warner US
• Orion
• Little,Brown
• Virago
• Abacus
• Orbit
• Lothian
• Hodder Moa Beckett (NZ).

Think about it: Hodder Headline, Orion (who own Gollancz) and Orbit are all owned by the same publisher now. Sure, Hodder Headline and Orion are independent and compete with each other in the UK… but it’s still a bit scary.
Any idea what the implications are for SF publishing?

Monday, 6th of February, 2006

Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram is offended.
It’s a beautiful piece of perfectly balanced prose that demonstrates how both sides of the Mohammed-cartoons fiasco are full of it. It’s easily applicable to, well, anything else you like, too.
So far, half the commenters don’t seem to have noticed the satire…

Sunday, 5th of February, 2006

I’m really crap at updating the reviews section of this blog these days, and thus I haven’t reviewed Al’s wonderful latest novel, Pushing Ice. It’s the second Alastair Reynolds book I’m in the acknowledgements for now, as I read and commented on 2/3 of it before print, but suffice to say that it’s an excellent piece of hard sf that goes from near(ish)-future to far future, shares a lot of the concerns of his earlier work, but is even better-written and, by the way, has some brilliantly rendered and very alien aliens.

This, however, is something else again. As the author says in the “latest” section of his homepage, “And now for something completely different”. It’s currently only available as a chapbook (ie just one novella bound as a little booklet) published for the Novacon 35 SF convention. I got it from Cold Tonnage Books and they probably still have some copies.
I’ll explain why “something completely different” is such a great way of introducing it, but a quick warning: This is a beautiful story, and if you wish to read it by getting it from Cold Tonnage or are hoping that it’s in one of Al’s two story collections coming out later this year, then you may want to skip the rest of this review due to some slight spoilerage. Not too much, though.

First off, “completely different” might be misleading: despite the cover featuring a Bösendorfer piano floating above the surface of Mars, fantasy this ain’t. And it does share with both the jazz-soaked Paris of Century Rain and the elegiac (and highly recommended) exploration of art, meaning and identity in “Zima Blue” (another recent short story, from Issue 4 of Postscripts) a lovely mix of musical/artistic concerns with hard science fiction.

Something very strange appeared in the outer recreation bubble on the day that Katrina Solovyova died.

John Renfrew is a geologist in humanity’s colony on Mars, and when we meet him he’s just seen a piano appear in the recreation room. Solovyova seems a classic Reynolds female - Slavic name, strong but dark personality… But far from being the driving force of this narrative, she dies within two pages. Not long afterwards, we discover the significance of her death: The two of them were the last remaining survivors on the Mars colony, unable to go home or properly repair their station because of a catastrophe on earth - a runaway weaponised virus that has killed the entire population of the planet. So Renfrew is now literally the last human - and we later learn that the virus destroyed the entire biological population of the Earth.

The rest of the novella gradually turns into something like those Stephen Baxter stories that follow some strand of humanity into Deep Time; as Renfrew keeps himself sane by giving himself a purpose - nothing less than “understanding space and time”. Initially he is encouraged in this by the Piano Man, an avatar who appears at the floating piano and plays classic songs to Renfrew, and eventually interacts with him (possibly as a hallucination). Renfrew can’t remember who he is, but in case you’re wondering he’s not the “Piano Man” but rather a chap who wears weird glasses… I had to look up Rocket Man and re-remember the lyrics before I worked out why Al chose this particular guy…

But, first time round, Renfrew fails in his attempt at stoicism - he gives in to hope when a capsule lands on the surface of Mars, and upon discovering it’s just a lost probe and not more survivors, he dies on the return journey. Woken up a seeming short while later, he discovers he’s been resurrected by aliens, and here’s the “completely different”: in a delicious twist on the wolf-like Inhibitors from Reynolds’ most big space opera sequence, these aliens (”The Kind”) are machine intelligences bent on helping life-forms wherever they can find them. Too late to save humanity (and unable to reinstate life on Earth, because the virus itself is now on the brink of forming a completely new biosphere itself), they help Renfrew in any way they can. And so we follow him in a series of wondrous transformations as he continues in his quest to understand space and time.

Arthur C Clarke and Olaf Stapledon combine with some cutting-edge physics and just enough of the tropes of contemporary space opera/hard sf, and of course the musical thread that entwines itself through the plot, to make for a highly satisfying read. Unlike some widescreen short works, this piece is perfect for its length, and the musical references are mostly well-pitched (except for an egregious (but sadly commonplace) misuse of the word crescendo - hey authors, it means “a gradual increase in dynamic”, not “a climax”, ok?)
The limited edition is mostly nicely done - a very readable font, and nice grade of paper. There are a few typos - it looks like it was only given a minor edit - and a number of misplaced line breaks. I also would’ve liked perhaps a little more accompanying material (there isn’t even a bio of the author) but presumably if you seek it out you know what you’re getting. As there’s no guarantee it’ll be collected anywhere in the near future, I recommend picking it up if you’re any kind of Alastair Reynolds fan. And while you’re at it, pick up issue 4 of Postscripts for “Zima Blue” and maybe even subscribe to this very very worthy British genre periodical!