fact, opinion and poetry (not airy-fairy)


Thursday 26 January 2012

System Administration in the Twilight Zone

This is a bit of a commentary on how things have been going in my new job. It's somewhat exaggerated, but not vastly. Trixbox is a software telephone exchange (PBX) which runs on a PC and gives you Internet telephony (VoIP). A worm is similar to a virus; some PC's have been infected by one from 2009, which they should have been immune to due to operating system patches.

In the twilight zone
The users groan
They haven't got a working phone.
Trixbox the name
And it's a pain,
The clunker's gone tits up again.

The boss has sunk into despair,
He's started to tear out his hair;
The firewall's down,
The techheads frown,
Fix soon or they won't be aroun'.

Weird things come fast
From out the past;
Old worms resume
The system's doom.
Hard drives and fans
Give up the ghost,
The ancient servers are just toast.

The staff are fighting with the boss,
Or saying they don't give a toss;
The techheads are quite at a loss.

The systems creak,
The gremlins leer,
The techies curse and quake with fear.
Whatever next?
God alone knows,
It seems our trouble only grows.

Saturday 7 January 2012

The Dawkins Delusion

Straw Men Locked in Combat, Richard Dawkins Pulling the Strings

I took a longish look at his book 'The God Delusion' in a second-hand bookshop, and found it without merit. I did not waste money on it. It was full of special-pleading and poor logic. He sets up a straw man, God as the old-man-in-the-sky-with-a-beard, and snipes away relentlessly, ignoring the fact that no serious religious thinkers have thought of God in that way in the last few centuries, and it is not clear that they ever did. Nor are he and his followers willing to publicly debate a serious religious thinker. I suspect that they know that they would get slaughtered.
       I find it hard to believe that Richard Dawkins is an eminent scientist. I have seen him interviewed on TV and he came across as a man of average intelligence at most. His arguments are usually naive. His book is full of bullshit. As an example, he tries to make it seem that a higher proportion of scientists are atheists than is actually the case, using inaccurate methods. He quotes a survey at a scientific conference that showed that a high proportion of attendees did not believe in a personal God, and goes on to assume that means that they are atheists. How does he know that they aren't engaged in Buddhist meditation, or attending shamanic drumming workshops? Or even agnostic? Rigorous logic is missing from his writing.
       He tries to pretend that great scientists of the past who were self-proclaimed believers were insincere, using the slimiest trickery imaginable. Freeman Dyson and Gregor Mendel suffer particularly from his innuendos. He clearly knows nothing of their life-stories, yet is happy to traduce their integrity in a kind of sniggering way. Of course they are not around to defend themselves, which, I suspect, is the point.
       Many people are angry with those who seek to make a profession of religion. Some of these religious professionals have behaved in a quite obnoxious way, infuriating many. Dawkins exploits this rage. Those who want to see someone biffing the mullahs and priests read his book uncritically, and hence are blind to its flaws.
       The type of 'scientific' world-view that he puts forward belongs more in the 19th century than the 21st. His mechanistic world would have been familiar to Lord Kelvin, but is alien to modern science, which sees the scientific process quite differently, and has a more modest agenda. Sadly, not all working scientists seem to grasp this, even though they must have heard it explained many times.
       The modern scientific process consists of the construction of models, often of a mathematical nature, but not necessarily so, and the testing of the degree of agreement of the model with the results of observation. Models do not need to be perfectly accurate to be useful, and some sort of quest for absolute truth is alien to this way of thinking. Ever since the discovery of quantum theory, physicists have accepted that the world may be quite mysterious on a deep level. Richard Feynman went so far as to declare that any effort to understand the quantum theory non-mathematically was a hopeless endeavour. I am not sure I agree with him about that, but it gives some idea of how things have changed since Kelvin's (and Dawkins') day. Modern savants understand that it is impossible to prove a negative.
       Dawkins absurdly claims that the idea of God is a testable scientific proposition like any other, which suggests that he doesn't understand the ideas in the previous paragraph, or even the idea of God, in a general sense. He has an unsubtle mind, and much escapes him.
       It is perfectly obvious that if a sentient being created the cosmos, He isn't necessarily comprehensible by us, and He doesn't need to be accessible to measurement by instruments. It is obvious that an external agency creating the cosmos might remain external throughout time, and the only direct evidence for the existence of that agency accessible to us, bound as we are in space and time, would be the existence of the cosmos itself.
       Equally, if a Creator is active within the cosmos, it isn't necessarily through the manipulation of material objects, but He might only act through the base level of consciousness, as the Yogis have long thought, based on their many years of meditation.
       Dawkins points out that if God wanted to prove his existence to us he could do so very easily, by manifesting miracles etc. He doesn't discuss the desperately anthropomorphic assumptions about the creator of the cosmos which he is making, or explain why God would wish to disrupt his own natural laws in such a way, merely to impress a bunch of baldy part-smart apes. Perhaps he is thinking that since he is such a grandstanding type of person, God, if he existed, would have to be too. A kind of larger Dawkins. I find this idea unnecessary, and distasteful.
       For centuries, since the time of Galileo Galilei, wise people have tried to separate the realms of science and religion, pointing out that they occupy separate spheres of human awareness. Dawkins wants to reverse this progress, and pit them against each other in a conflict as impassioned as it is meaningless. Sadly, he has managed to lure many people into following him down this destructive path. His success is humanity's failure. All he can accomplish is to impoverish the experience of anyone who falls within his influence.

Sunday 1 January 2012

Leicester's Zone of Alienation

Today I undertook an eerie journey into the Zone. It was quite unplanned: I was swept along by circumstances. I spent the morning reading, and suddenly realised that I was late posting my brother's birthday card. Because Ne'erday came on a Sunday, I had one day less than I had thought. I went to the local post office, to find I had missed the last collection there. It claimed there was a later collection at Campbell St collection office, an old haunt of mine. I walked to Campbell St, to find that there wasn't after all a later collection there. The sign on the wall there said there was a 7.30 pm collection at the Post Office building on the Meridian Business Park, which is a desolate place out on the edge of town, next to the motorway junction, where I would never willingly go. This was especially true since the place is vast, and the sign gave no clue as to where the PO had its shed on Meridian.
I set off later in the afternoon, in the company car I have recently been provided with, after years of not driving. It was a trip down memory lane. There is a peculiar sense of deja-vu involved in driving again after several years, following routes that used to be familiar, but now aren't quite. Down to the great 'square roundabout' I went, which I used to traverse daily ten years ago, but now I struggled to select the correct lane in the darkness, though it seemed hauntingly familiar.
I drove across in the direction of the Meridian Park, which of course is not a park at all, but a vast collection of sheds. I was unsure of which turn-off to take, knowing only that if I went past, I might overshoot by miles up the dual carriageway. So I took the first turning, and found myself in the Grove Business Park, which isn't a park either. It is a set of large square buildings set far back behind car parks, virtually identical to Meridian. It was quite deserted in the evening dark. These places are quite eerie after office hours, with their miles and miles of abandoned buildings. Oddly reminiscent of Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation, the Zone abandoned by people due to the radioactivity. Occasionally another car whizzes past, some other fool behind the wheel. I chugged round the site at low speed trying to read the dim signs. Though there are tall lampposts everywhere, wasting vast energy reserves, they create only a dim light, as the place is so widely spread out. Few of the companies have thought to illuminate their signboards. Why should they, when all legitimate visitors will have been provided with an electronic map?
Eventually I concluded there was no way through to the Meridian Park, and left the way I came. Navigating unfamiliar high-speed roads is much more difficult after dark, and I wished I had come earlier. I found myself accidentally heading down towards the motorway junction, and felt a spasm of fear. Was I ineluctably on my way to Loughborough or Lutterworth? I quelled the panic by remembering that the main motorway junction had its own roundabout. I did a U round it and eventually found my way back
I entered Meridian by its South entrance. It was virtually identical to Grove, except much larger. There was absolutely no clue to the location of the Post Office. I drove round endlessly, seeing no soul, and few parked vehicles except for juggernauts. After driving for miles, I eventually found the collection point. A completely dark building with a few red vans parked outside. It had the gloomiest car park of all the ones I had seen. The place to post letters was far from obvious. I walked round the building and eventually found a letterbox, and thrust the card through it with a sigh of relief. Over an hour in hand!
In the darkness, I could vaguely see some writing on the wall under the letterbox. It was white on grey, and quite small. I was just able to read it by shoving my nose against it, one of the advantages of being very short-sighted. It told me that the slot I had just used was not for the public to post letters, it was for delivering mail to the building. I should have used a pillar box outside their other building half a mile further up the road. It didn't finish by saying 'tough luck, pal'. But it should have done. Groan!
I stood around feeling stupid for a while, then decided that for future reference I might as well find the pillar box. I got back in the car and drove on. I found three large pillar boxes at the very northernmost extremity of the park, standing outside a large office building whose ownership and purpose was far from obvious. For some reason I got out and looked at the pillars. They had a sign saying the last collection was 7.30 pm only on weekdays, on Saturday it was 1.30 pm, and these were the last collections anywhere in the area. So the whole trip had been doomed to futility from the start.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Daytime

I was driving up the A50 toward Coalville, passing through Groby. At this point the road is a dual carriageway with a 50 mph speed limit. A large dog walked out into the road, and began sniffing at the ground. It was a type of dog I have never seen before, like a large bulldog with longer legs, bright copper in colour. It completely ignored several cars hurtling toward it, forcing us to do an emergency stop. The nearest car came to rest only a yard away from it. It looked up casually, saw the car and strolled back to the pavement. As I drove away, I watched it in the rear-view mirror, and saw it had returned to the road and resumed its sniffing, with its back toward the direction that traffic would approach from. I have never seen a dog behave like this before.