Improving Wetware

Because technology is never the issue

Celebrating the day of fools...

Posted by Pete McBreen 31 Mar 2011 at 22:31

Why skepticism is just another cult

Some History Of Programming

Posted by Pete McBreen 12 Mar 2011 at 12:05

A fascinating one hour videos of a talk by Douglas Crockford on Open source Heresy. The talk includes some humor around the JDON license

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Interesting to hear the idea that open source dates back to the very early days of Univac …

Celebrating 15 years of the Sokal expose...

Posted by Pete McBreen 04 Mar 2011 at 09:58

In the Spring of 1996 the Alan Sokal had his article Transgressing the Boundaries published in the Social Text journal. To coincide with the article’s publication, Sokal arranged for another article to be published A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies.

The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is – second only to American political campaigns – the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time. – Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (1990)

For some years I’ve been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities. But I’m a mere physicist: if I find myself unable to make head or tail of jouissance and différance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.

So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?

The overall result of the experiment was that the parody article was published as if it were a valid work of scholarship in the field.

Hoax or Expose?

Sometimes it is not enough to just question something, sometimes you have to go further. Yes, Sokal’s experiment is often labelled a hoax, but my take is that it was an expose of many things that are wrong with out current social and political discourse.

TL;DR Soundbites Are Going To Kill Us

Posted by Pete McBreen 02 Mar 2011 at 22:14

TL;DR If you let other people tell you what you should think, don’t be surprised if you end up doing things that are not in your own long term interest.

Niel Postman was right, we are Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Soundbites cannot communicate nuances of ideas

For whatever reason, few people take the time to really find out what is going on in the world, being happy to be few a soundbite by a politicain or demagogue. Since I have the CO2 level shown in the sidebar, a good soundbite to use as an example is “CO2 is Plant Food”. Yes, CO2 is required by photosynthesis in plants, but the role of CO2 is much much more complicated than that.

Television and Radio news rely on soundbites, and as such are destroying public discourse about important matters that as a society we need to deal with. And yes, I know that TV and Radio news have some value, but that value needs to be considered in the light of what it also does to our understanding of science, technology, economics and the political choices facing us in the 21st Century.