Talking in Circles

I’m working on other stuff. BBL.

I’ve started a new section of this site, called Talking in Circles Games. I’ve already released one game (interactive fiction), and I plan to release more in the future.

Honestly, I’m surprised it took me so long to do this. I’ve been making games on-and-off for a long time now. In elementary school I messed around with QBasic. In middle school I messed around with Visual Basic and Game Maker. In high school, Flash, Multimedia Fusion, then Python and C++. That whole time, however, I never actually finished a game. I came close a few times, but ultimately got tired of the project and moved on.

Currently I have a few projects I’m working on, including more (longer) IF works, and a graphical point-and-click adventure game I’ve been toying with for months. I plan to release them all as freeware, or even GPL where applicable and useful.

• Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
• I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: “The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.” In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
• To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
• Most people would die sooner than think — in fact they do so.
• There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
• I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.
• No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.
• The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.
• We shall be wise to build our philosophy upon science, because the risk of error in philosophy is pretty sure to be greater than in science.
• The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
• Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
• The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
• Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power.
• It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
• This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising a mass massacre of mankind.
• “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” (Russell’s reply when asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him)
• Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

No, that isn’t a contradiction. Evolution is both fact and theory.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a paper called “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” and it sums up the issue quite nicely:

In the American vernacular, “theory” often means “imperfect fact”–part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is “only” a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can’t even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): “Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science–that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was.”

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Moreover, “fact” doesn’t mean “absolute certainty”; there ain’t no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory–natural selection–to explain the mechanism of evolution.

Most anti-evolutionists oppose it on both grounds, ie: they reject both the fact of it occurring, and the theory as to how exactly it works. Some anti-evolutionists have come to understand the difference, however, and changed their arguments. They now claim to accept “microevolution” (as it can now be easily and overwhelmingly proven over observable periods of time) but not “macroevolution.”

There is still some controversy over the exact mechanisms of how evolution works. Intelligent design and creationism are not, however, valid explanations. Supporters of both generally misunderstand evolution (often drastically misunderstand it), sometimes bringing up absurd arguments that have nothing to do with evolution (”how does evolution explain the origin of life?”) or that have been answered a million times (”where are the transitional fossils?”). The truth is, neither ID nor creationism are real science. Neither is falsifiable, and both are just religion trying to masquerade as science.

Anyway, that isn’t my point. Those people are generally too far gone to save. The people I’m more concerned about are the people who still bring up the argument that evolution is “only a theory” and hasn’t been proven, and the people who don’t understand why evolution can be a fact and a theory at the same time.

The most obvious and most common misunderstanding to confront here is a misunderstanding of the word “theory.” We are talking about a scientific theory, not a theory in the colloquial sense. To quote the National Academy of Sciences:

Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena.

It constantly surprises me how many people don’t understand this. I think it is a sort of willful ignorance on their part. They can be shown all of this information and more, mountains of evidence and lengthy, in-depth explanations and definitions, yet they manage to ignore it and go put an “evolution is just a theory” bumper sticker on their SUV.

Yup, a Genius “MousePen 8×6.” I played with it for an hour or so in Photoshop. My first thought was that I wasted my money — the pen and tablet didn’t change the fact that I’m a crappy artist — but after I got the hang of it I began to like it. Sure, I bought the cheapest one I could find, and it skips around a bit, but it was well worth the 50$ I paid for it on Amazon. I can trace things fairly well now, I can draw some nice looking stick figures, and maybe one day I’ll get around to learning how to draw.

I caught a bit of this live on C-Span yesterday, and I think it’s about damn time. Of course this isn’t going anywhere, but it’s nice to see my favorite congressmen up there saying what myself and millions of other people think.

As readers of this blog may remember, I supported Kucinich in the Democratic primary (though I didn’t get to vote for him, since he’d dropped out by the time of the California primary vote). While this — as well as his earlier attempts to impeach Cheney — ensure that he stays a bit of an “extremist,” I wish we had more politicians like him.

You can watch the video of his speech in three parts (below the fold):
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I just installed TinyXP on a system I’m building for a friend, and I was amazed. I chose the “BARE” install without IE/OE/WMP, and it worked like a charm. It booted very quickly, and the ram usage was just above 70mb total!

The idea behind TinyXP is that most of the useless junk that comes with XP is stripped out, leaving only the bare essentials. This leaves you with a functional OS that’s much smaller and faster than the original bulky XP.

Sure, it’s piracy (since you’re downloading a hacked XP ISO that bypasses registration), but I actually own a legal copy of XP. That doesn’t make using TinyXP legal, but in my mind it makes it morally okay.

If you need a really light and fast OS with a tiny memory footprint that won’t get in your way, I highly recommend TinyXP.