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December 12th, 2011
09:20 pm - Remember Bobby Tables
You would think the guardians of Scottish culture (inexplicably unavailable at this precise moment) would be more careful. I had trouble logging in because of an apostrophe in a password, and the error message was very obviously a sanitation problem ("Error in SQL at string..." obviously because the quote ended too early). An apostrophe in an input field should not cause a server error. (I really hope I've not made that mistake in anything I've coded. I think I've watched for it all the time, but maybe I missed once, or didn't sanitize enough..?)
I sent them email telling them about the problem, and suggested they show http://xkcd.com/327/ to their DB techs. They have fixed the problem (or I wouldn't be telling you who it was in a blog right now). You can't be too careful.
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December 6th, 2011
08:59 pm - Biblical issues
Just something that came up and was on my mind lately, may be worthy of sharing. In my rôle as Samaritan Pentateuch Guy, I am on a mailing list for students of the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible (if only they would fix the misspelling on the group page...) In fact, hardly anyone actually posts there except this one person (I doubt she reads this, but if so, hi Misty!)... and me, answering her (though I probably shouldn't).
She often posts questions involving "seeming" contradictions or difficulties in the Bible, usually asking if the Hebrew text offers some resolution or something, if the translation is bad or whatever. Usually it doesn't, and you have to find reassurance in some other source to support your faith in the Bible (if that's what you're trying to support). More on that below.
This time around, she was looking at some quotes in the Bible that "seem to imply" that the Bible speaks of a flat earth (which would be a problem, I guess, since we know that the Earth is not flat). So, specifically things like Isaiah 40:22, the word חוג is translated in various ways... does it mean a circle, a sphere, a vault, etc... (there are actually more explicit places, like Psalms 33:13, "God looks from the heavens and sees all people": you can't see all the people on a sphere while looking from the sky. Or the classic Isaiah 11:12, telling us that the earth has four corners). And I went through some possibilities, found other places where the root might be used, found where the modern word for "sphere" (כדור) occurs in the Bible, etc.
Anyway, when I realized that the exercise was intended to "answer" the "question" of the Bible saying that the Earth is flat, I realized that the whole question is ridiculous and ill-posed. Even assuming that the Bible really was written by some Supreme Being or with his inspiration, there's no reason to expect it to be right about incidentals like this. Biblical inerrancy is absolutely not implied or required for believing in Biblical divinity.
Look, assume that Isaiah, or David, or whoever was writing the Bible down, did know that the Earth was spherical, due to Divine revelation or something. Well, that's a world-changing(!) piece of knowledge for someone of that age, why wouldn't he tell other people, be more explicit in his words? I know it's a silly question, there's an obvious answer (and one that doesn't require the question in the first place, once you know it). You could very rightly answer me that it wasn't what the prophet was talking about. He had a mission, a message to deliver, and chatting about the shape of the earth would be at best distracting. Maybe the prophets knew all kinds of scientific facts we are only just discovering, but perhaps were forbidden from revealing them before their time (that is actually a common way of thinking.)
In that case, what difference does it make what he wrote? We already know that he won't be telling the secrets that he knows, that he has to conform his words to the beliefs of the time. So why should we be surprised that his words conform to the beliefs of the time? The Bible wasn't trying to be right here, why should we be surprised that it isn't? I say "We already know," based on an assumption I made in the preceding paragraph, and maybe you don't believe it, but even so, consider it on your own. Obviously the Biblical phrases were consonant with contemporary (and later) beliefs, or we would have had ancient commentators asking questions ("Gee, the Bible seems to say that the world is spherical here, and we believe it's flat.") So when it was said, did it "mean" that the world was flat? Was that how people who heard it, if they thought about it, understood it? Yes! Is that what the composer of the words meant? Probably, though of course there's no proving it. Can we find that the wording is also consonant with our knowledge of a spherical earth? Yes, without straining too terribly hard. Language tends to be fairly imprecise about things we're not actually talking about; there is enough vagueness in wording, especially after several millennia and language change and so forth. Does that mean that it was "really saying" the earth was spherical all along? Not at all.
Getting back to the bigger question, though, of bothering to try to reconcile issues in the Bible, I think there isn't much new to be found there. We have been picking at this book for three thousand years, do you really think that you're going to find a question/contradiction that someone else never noticed? And that commentators and apologists haven't spilled gallons of ink answering? How much you accept their attempts to reconcile it is another matter; sometimes it seems that they are capable of explaining anything; it's hard to imagine what the Bible could say that would actually not be answerable by some of the reasoning I've seen proposed. But probably all the real "problems" have been analyzed to within an inch of their lives (and more) in the course of the centuries.
I guess there are new things to be found in answering perceived contradictions with new discoveries that have not been known for very long (we've known the Earth to be round at least for some centuries). Germ theory would be a good one, but I don't recall anything in the Bible that really reqires spontaneous generation (there are problems with that and statements in the Talmud, but that's another issue). Most of the really new discoveries are about things sufficiently invisible to everyday senses that I'm not seeing many of these problems surfacing.
(Sigh. Though I wonder why I bother with things like this anyway.)
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October 7th, 2011
10:51 am - Cultural Changes and Risks
I seem to have a much greater capacity for being bored lately, and find myself trying to do all kinds of hard thinking to keep busy during boring tasks. And I sometimes come up with possibly interesting stuff. Unfortunately, I usually forget them when I get a chance to write them down. But I'm trying to buck that trend, and managed to scribble down some notes on some things I thought about yesterday (still just a small part of it, alas) and I hope I have been able to flesh it out into some sort of article. If I'm lucky, maybe I can do this more often.
( This is kind of long. )
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September 7th, 2010
02:40 pm - The U.S. Army Did Something Wrong!
Maybe I should use a title that's a little more surprising, in order to grab the eye. It's hardly news that the Army gets things wrong. But I have a feeling this one hasn't been noticed before.
I was in the local public high school's guidance office this morning, as my son was starting there and there were apparently some things that needed taking care of. We wound up waiting there a very long time, and it's amazing how bored you can get sitting around the office. On the table with various recruitment brochures was one from the Army, in the form of a Periodic Table of the Elements and various useful science-y formulæ and data (on the other side), with “join the Army” information in the margins, etc. Presumably this is the usual advertising strategy of putting your name on something people will see and look at, to get them thinking about you. It's like companies giving out calendars. And perhaps while they're at it, trying to combat any lingering stereotype of the Army as being anti-intellectual or whatever. OK, fair enough, and like I said, you can get very bored there, so I started looking over the table.
Take a look at this scan of the periodic-table side.
And I found a mistake. One so subtle and bizarre my wife has classified this as a “Mark, you are so weird” incident. I'll give you a hint: it's in the square for Berkelium (element #97). Here's a scan of that. Don't read ahead if you want to try to work it out on your own!
Berkelium is element #97. That means it has 97 protons in its nucleus and 97 electrons in its electron shells. But the list of electron shells in the upper right corner of the square adds up to only 96 electrons. Or, if you don't feel like doing the arithmetic, just notice that they are all even numbers, and we are expected to believe that they add up to an odd sum.
There may well be other mistakes, this is just the one that I noticed (I'm not such a chemistry geek that I know the electron shell filling of all the elements by heart, but I can at least add up numbers and check for parity). Just imagine what other horrible mistakes the Army may have committed!
(Whom do I write to about this, anyway? “Dear Army, I found a mistake on your recruitment flier...”?)
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July 19th, 2010
05:22 pm - Counting and Geometry
Just a quick note about something I saw in the drugstore last week:
Note that the device is being advertised as a “Hexagon Gazebo.” Note also that just to make the point clear, we have a little image of the “hexagon,” clearly labeled as a “6-sided Structure.” Now take a close look and see if you can figure out why I felt it necessary to post this.
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May 31st, 2010
10:16 am - The Coraniaid
This actually isn't a current obsession of mine, but I guess I felt like writing it down because I remember I didn't find it discussed in this way when I looked on the net.
There is a mediæval Welsh story, The Story of Lludd and Llefelys, written down in 12th or 13th century, usually published alongside the Mabinogion. The story describes the counsel taken by Lludd, ruler of Britain, with his brother Llefelys, ruler of France, regarding three terrible plagues that afflict the former's kingdom.
The first of the plagues (and the only one I'm going to talk about) is described very briefly. This plague consists of a people called the Coraniaid who have moved into Britain, and they apparently can hear anything that the wind hears, so it is impossible to plot against them (that's all we are told about how horrible they are).
It takes a little work for the brothers to discuss things; they have to use a brass horn to talk through so the wind (and thus the Coraniaid) won't hear them, and they need to wash a demon out of it with wine. Anyway, Llefelys gives Lludd some insects in order to deal with the Coraniaid. He's to set some of them aside for breeding (in case the Coraniaid ever come back), and mash up the rest in water. Then call a big meeting of the Britons and the Coroniaid together, with the pretense of making peace between them, and sprinkle the water over the whole crowd. The insect-water will utterly destroy the Coraniaid, but won't harm the Britons at all.
OK, am I the only one who finds this to be xenophobic almost to the point of offensiveness? Nobody else seems to have noticed this. These Coraniaid are described as a plague, and what horrible suffering do they inflict? Apparently just being there and being impossible to be mean to. And for this, our heroes are determined to lie to them, and trick them under false pretenses of peace, in order to exterminate them. I guess it's sort of okay, since the fact that they're susceptible to these insects while decent, red-blooded Britons aren't shows that they're not completely human, right?
This sounds a lot like the basest of accusations leveled against various (immigrant) ethnic groups through the ages (especially against Jews, actually). “Gee, something has to be done about these horrible people. Well, no, they're not actually doing anything wrong, but they're too clever/hardworking/cunning/sharp-eared to compete with. And they're taking up space/land/services/jobs that should be going to real Britons/Americans/locals.”
It just sort of struck me how blatant the bigotry was in this case. I guess it makes a certain amount of sense in the small, local world back then. People are bad simply by virtue of not being locals, and when they move in they're invaders, and any means are valid to repel them.
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May 11th, 2010
09:38 pm - Rhombic Hexecontahedron
I've been sitting on this one for a while; too lazy to take the pictures. But it's pretty cool. Once again straying slightly from just following instructions. This is a rhombic hexecontahedron, a stellation of the rhombic triacontahedron (a d30 if you play RPGs). It's a really cool shape; it also happens to be the logo of Wolfram Alpha, which is nice too. I used a golden rhombus module from Moseley's book, and worked out what modifications needed to happen and also how to put it together. Very cool.
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April 15th, 2010
05:54 pm - Praying to God
So the editorial in the March Scientific American quoted a tweet from Sarah Palin:
Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature's ways.MUST b
good stewards of God's earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers
nature
Leaving aside the various media enjoyment over possible contradictions with her other statements, etc... Let's take a look at this.
I think I interpreted this maybe not exactly the way it was intended, but let's pursue it anyway. So the implication here is that we mustn't think that humanity is responsible for any climate change, since it's all out of our hands. Or perhaps (and this may be where I'm going off on a tangent), we mustn't panic and go nuts changing our habits to try to fend off climate change since it's all out of our hands. Either way, it obviously leads to some pretty dangerous fatalism, of course. If it's all out of our hands, then what does it matter if we do good or bad, are careful or careless? Nothing more or less than what God wants will happen. And of course that is a simplistic way of looking at it, and I doubt anyone seriously would take that view this far.
Still, let's take God's guiding hand as a given, rather than trying to fight the basic premise. There are those that take comfort in that, contending that God would never let his world be damaged in the way global warming threatens. But wouldn't he? Maybe God does promise never to destroy the whole world again (just after the Flood), but he never said anything about massive drought, heat waves, rising oceans that don't flood everything but do take out most major coastlines, etc. After all, things like plagues wiping out a large fraction of humanity have happened in the past (Black Plague, Smallpox, etc). So there's little comfort to be gained from that. What God wants to happen could very well be quite nasty.
So, again staying with God's guiding hand, we are often told that we can help influence God's decision by praying. But there are other things God seems to care about much more. When doctors started washing their hands between autopsies and deliveries, God very conspicuously started sentencing a lot fewer mothers to death in childbirth, and a lot fewer babies to death in infancy. It seems that certain practices, like health and safety protocols and such, have a profound effect on God's decision-making process.
I wonder why it might not be looked at this way. Rather than the somewhat uncomfortable, almost adversarial view of "the scientists/doctors do what they can on earth, but we will pray to God" (with the implication that prayers are what really matter), why not think of earthly procedures simply as some really ultra-effective forms of prayer. Rituals, if you like. If you perform the handwashing ritual, God will protect you from infection. If you have the appendectomy ritual performed, God will cure you of your stomachache.
This is actually pretty cool. Might be especially inspiring to deeply religious doctors. If prayer is a way of communing our needs to God with the intent/hope that this will influence God's decision about them, and if the ultimate decisions are made by God, then there isn't much room to escape the conclusion that for whatever reason, God likes it when your prayers for health are accompanied by hygiene, medicine, etc. God likes it when prayers for healthy children and lives are accompanied by vaccines, seat belts, building codes, and other safety protocols.
This sort of opens up a whole new avenue of empirical theology. Study what God likes by what he has (very clearly) demonstrated to us that he likes. There are some obvious conclusions to be drawn, like those above. God seems, on the whole, to like science: when we use it, he makes decisions that favor what we want. So why does religion feel so threatened by science?
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April 13th, 2010
08:49 pm - Tetrakis Hexahedron
So I found myself revisiting some geometry obsessions lately (background: at my brother's house for Passover his children and mine began to be interested on playing Dungeons & Dragons, which led to talk about polyhedral dice, and so forth), including modular origami construction of interesting polyhedra. I dragged out my old copy of Paperfolding Stellated Polyhedra by Jeannine Mosely to look up how to make a rhombic dodecahedron etc. (Jeanine, if you are out there and by some bizarre chance ever read this, a friend gave me a copy of some paper or another you wrote with that title back when I was in high school; I don't know if you ever meant for it to be seen). I thought about making other die-like polyhedra, some of the other Catalan Solids, like, say, a tetrakis hexahedron, sometimes used as a 24-sided die. I've never designed one of these modular shapes before, only followed other peoples' directions for them. But I read and i reckoned and I pondered and actually designed the thing—and it worked! See picture...
(the smaller one is the first one I made; I worked out a simpler way to approximate the ratios needed and made the larger one.)
I record this accomplishment here for posterity so at least I don't forget I did it. I wrote down the instructions and everything too so maybe it could be repeated. I suppose for some people working this out would be simple, but what I think is cool is how little I started with. I had done none of the calculations to find shortcuts and formulas for all this, and besides, it isn't like my 3D geometry is even all that good. I remember a few simple formulæ from plane geometry and trigonometry and that's about all I have to go on; I re-derive everything when I need it. I couldn't even find good data on the shapes of the triangles etc (actually, MathWorld did tell me the edge lengths, but I didn't even look at them so I didn't realize how easy it was to derive their very simple 4:3 ratio); I derived everything from only the description of the shape as a cube with each face replaced with a pyramid of height ¼s. Hey, I thought it was cool.
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April 9th, 2010
05:29 pm - Oh the Horror!
Saw this today in Best Buy, on a display advertising the Blu-Ray edition of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Oh, this hurts.
Let's read that text: “Best Buy Exclusive Includes: Andruil™ Sword Letter Opener (a $30 Value)”
Andruil™[sic]? Really? As John Cowan asked, "The Flame of the Wset"? On the one hand, this is so geeky it is perhaps embarrassing to have noticed it. On the other hand... dude!
(If you really are lost: the sword's name is Andúril, dammit!)
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