I don’t know why, but the tech gremlins have been working overtime on me this month. I think I have everything sorted out, though. I hope.
Tell me why, exactly, self-driving cars are supposed to be a good idea?
Photo © 2009 Justin Marty. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
I have another book to put on my Christmas list. I’m not sure how I missed the publication of James Hannam’s book God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, or why it’s taken me this long to discover it, but from the review I just read, it looks like a fascinating work. Usually, you hope a book is as interesting as the review says it is; in this case, I hope it’s as interesting as the review, and for that matter the reviewer. The reviewer in question is an Australian medievalist named Tim O’Neill who appears to specialize in the history of medieval science and technology. He’s also an atheist who gets as irritated as I do at the ways atheists abuse and misuse history to smear Christianity. (Rest assured, I get just as irritated at the ways Christians abuse and misuse history. In this area, my first allegiance is to the discipline.)
One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who hangs around on discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person’s grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.
Perhaps it’s because I can’t think of any parallel consolation, but I’ve had to accept that the average person’s grasp of history and how history is studied is indeed so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing. I’d like to believe that atheists and secular humanists are worse than Christians in this respect—but, no. Indeed, as O’Neill notes in passing, the myth of the Dark Ages is as much the creation of Protestants attacking the Roman church as it is of atheists attacking Christianity in general.
It’s an excellent review essay because O’Neill has a fine eye for nonsense, a firm command of his subject, and apparently no use for people who value scoring cheap rhetorical points over getting their facts right.
In the academic sphere, at least, the “Conflict Thesis” of a historical war between science and theology has been long since overturned. It is very odd that so many of my fellow atheists cling so desperately to a long-dead position that was only ever upheld by amateur Nineteenth Century polemicists and not the careful research of recent, objective, peer-reviewed historians. This is strange behavior for people who like to label themselves “rationalists”.
Speaking of rationalism, the critical factor that the myths obscure is precisely how rational intellectual inquiry in the Middle Ages was. While writers like Charles Freeman continue to lumber along, claiming that Christianity killed the use of reason, the fact is that thanks to Clement of Alexandria and Augustine’s encouragement of the use of pagan philosophy, and Boethius’ translations of works of logic by Aristotle and others, rational inquiry was one intellectual jewel that survived the catastrophic collapse of the Western Roman Empire and was preserved through the so-called Dark Ages. . . .
Hannam . . . gives an excellent precis of the Twelfth Century Renaissance which, contrary to popular perception and to “the Myth”, was the real period in which ancient learning flooded back into western Europe. Far from being resisted by the Church, it was churchmen who sought this knowledge out among the Muslims and Jews of Spain and Sicily. And far from being resisted or banned by the Church, it was embraced and formed the basis of the syllabus in that other great Medieval contribution to the world: the universities that were starting to appear across Christendom.
Read the whole thing—it’s well worth your time.
I haven’t gone anywhere, I’m not dead, and I’m not feeling overwhelmed by life; but I think my wireless card is going, as my connection has been sketchy, and I have been ill (though doing better today, it seems). We’ll see how the day goes, but I have at least a couple things I’d like to finish up.
Large Hadron Collider broken by bread dropped by passing bird.
Seriously.
Of course, when the same newspaper website also features the headline “New Bra Transforms into a Golf Putting Mat,” you just have to figure it’s a weird news day.
You probably noticed that Yahoo rather ignominiously killed off GeoCities this week. That probably didn’t matter a whit to your life, though, which illustrates why they did it as well as anything could. GeoCities has long since been rendered irrelevant by Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, and the whole world of what’s commonly called Web 2.0. If you’re like me, your primary mental picture of GeoCities is of acres and acres of ugly websites (which, unfortunately, spawned imitators such as SiteRightNow that are still around, helping people build bad GeoCities knockoffs).
As Slate points out, though, that undersells GeoCities. For all the disaster it became (especially for Yahoo), GeoCities had the right idea. In fact, it was ahead of its time. (That may have been the problem—it was too far ahead of its time for its founders to see the right way to implement its core idea. They did the right thing, but in the wrong way to produce long-term success.)
GeoCities deserves much more credit than we give it, because it was the first big venture built on what is now hailed as the defining feature of the Web 2.0 boom—”user-generated content.”
The company’s founding goal—to give everyone with Internet access a free place on the Web—sounds pretty mundane now. But GeoCities launched in 1995 (it was originally called Beverly Hills Internet), when there were just a few million people online. Back then, the idea that anyone would want to carve out his own space on this strange new medium—and that you could make money by letting people do so—bordered on crazy. (Two other free hosting companies—Tripod and Angelfire—started up at around the same time, but they proved far less popular than GeoCities.) In an early press release, David Bohnett, one of GeoCities’ co-founders, hailed the idea this way: “This is the next wave of the net—not just information but habitation.” Look past the tech-biz jargon, and his prediction is startlingly prescient. Today, few of us think of the Web as a simple source for information; it’s also a place for dissemination, the place where we share life’s most intimate details. In other words, it’s for “habitation”—and GeoCities helped start that trend.
This is why one insider commented,
Had they done things right with GeoCities, there would be no Facebook, YouTube or MySpace.
Unfortunately for them, though, they didn’t, because they only got half the picture; they missed what seems, in retrospect, to be the obvious corollary of their big idea.
The site came upon one of the chief ingredients of Web success—letting people put up their own stuff—but was missing what we’ve since learned is another key feature: a way to help people find an audience for their daily ramblings. The main difference between GeoCities and MySpace is the social network: Both sites let you indulge your creativity, but MySpace gave people a way to show off their pages to friends. On MySpace, your site was no longer shunted off to some little-traveled corner of the Web. Instead it was at the center of your friends’ lives—and so there was some small reward to keep hacking away at it. At least, that was true when MySpace was hot, which is no longer the case—just like GeoCities, it lost cultural cachet to newer, better sites that came along after. In this way, too, GeoCities was a trailblazer, the first example of another reality of user-generated sites: They’re extremely susceptible to faddism. You want a page on GeoCities or MySpace or whatever else only if other people are there too. As soon as the place becomes uncool . . . everyone leaves in droves.
The result is best summed up by T. S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
LiTraCon, short for light transmitting concrete, is an innovative new combination of optical fibers and light concrete. The resulting concrete is just as strong as conventional concrete, but it transmits light like glass. The optical fibers are small enough that they aren’t visible in the finished product; the surface of the concrete is homogenous while the structure remains sturdy.
Wow.
There are scientists who like to insist that “absence of evidence is evidence of absence.” At least, there are those who like to do so when the subject is the existence of God; I don’t know if they chant the same mantra with regard to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). Certainly, though, there are many outside the scientific community who consider SETI a waste of time and money, and who make essentially that argument against it—and not without scientific support (see for instance the Fermi paradox).
Against that, though, xkcd’s Randall Munroe raises an important question: are we looking for the right sort of evidence? Can we really say that the evidence for which we’re looking is sufficient to draw any conclusions about the existence of extraterrestrial life? Put another way, do we know so much about extraterrestrial life that we can be certain that any such beings would necessarily produce evidence of their existence that meets our pre-determined criteria? Or are we, like these ants, looking for the wrong sort of thing?
This is a cluster of questions deserving serious consideration—and not only when it comes to the existence of extraterrestrial life, but also with regard to the existence of God. As the philosopher Edward Tingley has pointed out, much of the argument offered for atheism rests on the dogmatic insistence that if God exists, he must necessarily be subject to scientific proof based on evidence deemed acceptable by people who are philosophically and emotionally committed to atheism. The insistence is, essentially, “Prove yourself on our terms”; which is, essentially, a justification for the fixed intention to disbelieve. God didn’t take that from the Pharisees, and there’s no reason to think he has any interest in taking it from the scientific community, either. One suspects he probably has that in common with the aliens, if there are any.
This will be of interest to those of you who tweet (I don’t, at least right now). Logos Research Systems, maker of Logos Bible Software, posted this announcement today on their Facebook page:
While I try to keep God’s Word in my heart and mind on a regular basis, I must say that among email, work projects, family, Facebook, Twitter . . . my heart and mind tend to stray a little. That’s why I’m excited about the new project we’re launching today.
Today we are announcing the launch of 7 new Twitter accounts that are designed to help you take a moment in your day and meditate on God’s word.
We set the accounts up about a couple week ago to run them through some testing, and I’ve been following them in my personal twitter account. It has been really encouraging to glance over at my feed throughout the day and see a simple reminder of who God is and who I am in Christ.
We hope that these accounts will be a blessing to all you Twitter users and that, amongst the endless chatter of Twitter, you will stop for a moment focus your heart and mind on God’s Word.
Here are the accounts you can follow:
Follow @BibleHope
Every three hours we’ll send out a tweet with an encouraging verse from Scripture.
RT @BibleHope: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom… http://ref.ly/Ps27.1
Follow @BibleHour
We’ll tweet a different verse from Scripture every hour.
RT @BibleHour: When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.http://ref.ly/Ac2.1
Follow @OToftheDay
Once a day we’ll tweet a verse from the Old Testament.
RT @OToftheDay: Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do… http://ref.ly/Jos1.8
Follow @PRoftheDay
Receive wisdom from Proverbs with this once daily tweet.
RT @PRoftheDay: There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death. http://ref.ly/Pr14.1
Follow @PSoftheDay
This once daily tweet will give you Psalms to meditate on.
RT @PSoftheDay: Praise the LORD, my soul, and forget not all his benefits – http://ref.ly/Ps103.2
Follow @NToftheDay
Once a day we’ll tweet a verse from the New Testament.
RT @NToftheDay: Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very… http://ref.ly/Tt2.14
Follow @BiblePlan
Read the Bible in a year. Every day includes a reading from the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs.
RT @BiblePlan: Today’s Reading: http://ref.ly/Ge27.1-28.9 http://ref.ly/Ps9.10-16http://ref.ly/Pr2.3-5 http://ref.ly/Mt10.1-15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_RW-oT9ZSbE
This is fun. My thanks to Chris Forbes for posting it.
According to Paul Mah on TechRepublic, they don’t mix. If I understand him correctly, the problem is that sites like Facebook leak personal information through their ad networks, and also through third-party apps (the games and quizzes that proliferate). Combined with the use of tracking cookies, the results of this could be quite far-reaching:
The implications are sobering and call for a reexamination of how we interact with the Web. Since tracking cookies have been in use for years, it is entirely possible that aggregator sites with historical records could theoretically link our social networking profiles with all our past accesses in its database.
Which, again assuming I’m tracking him correctly, would result in the sort of thing we saw in the movie Minority Report, with full profiles of our activities, associations, interests, and (of course) purchases available online to anyone who cared to pay for them. Something to think about.