Off By One

Well, thank you, Stewart Brand, for doing a fine job of saying something that I’ve held to be true for a good long time: Good old stuff sucks.

This is part of the EDGE questions for 2008; “What did you change your mind about in 2007?” This is a web thing, I suppose, but some fine thinkers are involved, and their responses run the gamut from predictable (Sam Harris) to interesting (Richard Dawkins).

I recommend checking the rest of them out from the provided links. I’m on my way to work, but I think that this evening I’ll try to add my own “What did I change my mind about in 2007?” to it; if I can find one

Aaron mentioned TED to me some time ago as an interesting place to go for talks about the world; technology, science, economics, politics.

I finally got around to checking it out, and I have to admit, there’s a lot there.

It’s a time-consumer, no question, with the video talks running to 20 minutes each, so you might not get to see all of it at a shot, but I’m convinced it’s worthwhile. Right now I’m watching a talk on the application of economics to explaining AIDS in Africa, and there’s more like that.

Check it out.

This is a two-pronged posting:

Domain name change

First, as you probably failed to notice when you clicked into the comments on the pages, there’s a new name for this site, in terms of ways to get to it: www.offby1.net. The old offlineblog.com address won’t stop working, so worry not, but offby1.net is now the preferred URL, and all links on the site will point to it, as soon as I figure out how to walk my MySQL database and convert all of the old URLs.

Anti-scientific idiocy

Second is a pointer to some more ludditism: The New Internationalist, a newsmagazine recommended to me by Char is a mostly-interesting alternative view on the world; not one with which I agree on most points, but nonetheless a refreshing perspective, but subject to some of the common flaws of its kind, including this example of total technological paranoia, calling for a small, but scary, symbol for nanotechnology, and demonstrating a complete inability to distinguish means from ends. This mini article is analogous to calling for a warning label on all products made with screwdrivers.

Why can’t people pull their heads from their asses and ensure that they know what they’re protesting? I want to ask if it’s too much to ask for people to inform themselves, but the ‘protest movement’ is an adequate demonstration that I needn’t bother; it is too much to ask.

A choice quote:

Yet invisible nanomaterials are already being used in our food, cosmetics, pesticides and clothing, even though they are not labelled and we do not know what their health and environmental impacts might be.

Uhm…

You do know that your “invisible nanomaterials” are completely indistinguishable from atoms, right? It’s almost like (gasp!) matter is entirely made up of some “invisible nanomaterials” whose characteristics are not completely understood.

In the spirit of the silly, here’s a set of 100 things we didn’t know last year, courtesy of the BBC.

Amongst these facts is this: 200 million blogs are no longer updated. Go figure!

Stumbled upon this interview with a woman that wrote a biography of Kurt Gödel entitled Incompleteness. She makes some interesting statements regarding the widespread misinterpretation of Gödel’s results, primarily amongst postmodernists and such.

Nothing that I didn’t already feel myself, but it’s interesting that a biographer would have found that Gödel felt the same. I can only imagine what it must have felt like for him to see, even during his own lifetime, his greatest work twisted by people who knew nothing of it, until they had interpreted it to mean the exact opposite of what Gödel had proved.

Ours is but to question why.

A list of things that aren’t really well-explained, at least by reputable, peer-reviewed science. I’ll leave aside the issue of crackpot theorists whose entire contribution to the scientific method is to serve as an example to others.

Good read, here. Especially interesting (to me) since the announcement of the artificial creation of a black hole. If you’re more interested in this than I am, you may want to check out the actual results (Simon?) and draw some of your own conclusions.