Popular Science

I am quite a big fan of popular science and have been watching prof Brian Cox's Horizon series with interest. I think it's an awesome show and I like the way information is presented to the viewer. However, I have been wondering for a while about scientific "leaps of faith". I don't see anyway around them and as part of my own view on the universe, I am quite happy to make them, simply because I understand that is what I am doing. My concern is that recently I have seen people accepting things as fact because "science says it is so".

"Can you get the project finished by Friday, yes or no?". Despite being the question being couched to provoke a boolean response, the question may well have more than 2 correct answers. The most correct is likely to be "Well, it depends". Despite being the most correct it is likely to be one of the least satisfactory possible answers to the asker. People don't like uncertainty and this often clouds the answers we give or alters the way we talk.

Leaps of faith

If I am making a point the validity of my argument will rest on some key ideas. If my argument rests on the value of x in the following: x - 2 = 7 and I state that x is 5, almost everyone will be in a position to know if I am correct or not immediately. However, if I state that for the inequality 3x - 7 > 5x + 11, x < -9, well, I'm guessing that the number of people who would go to the effort of solving the problem decreases significantly. If I then argue that E = mc², well I think you see where I am going.

Of course, the validity of my claim can also be tested in practical application. For example, if I am talking about the pressure of a gas increasing with temperature and quote pV = NkT (the ideal gas law) you can rely on the fact that this is principle through which steam engines work. Thus gaining a degree of confidence in my point without resorting to first principles.

There are circumstances where the evidence isn't completely in yet and statements are made based on a consensus of opinion using the data that is currently available. One statement like this would be "the universe is 13.7 billion years old and will go on for ever...". The current evidence does seem to point in that direction, however, it's not the only possibility. It is possible that at some point in the future a new source of dark matter will be discovered, giving the universe sufficient mass to be closed. It doesn't seem likely, but it's far from impossible.

Reasons for post

I worry about the blind belief in "science" without the necessary tools for reasonable scepticism. Being wrong about the ultimate fate of the universe is one thing, but being wrong about the right type of medicine for you is entirely another. Whilst I applaud the current wave of scepticism over religion and homoeopathy, it unfortunately seems to go hand in hand with a blind acceptance of "scientific" western medicine. Pharmaceuticals are not produced by people working in the pursuit of pure knowledge, they are created by large corporations built to produce profit.

The current scientific thoughts on a subject are not dogma. Science is not a religion with absolute truths being handed down from on high. The scientific method is merely the best way we know of to solve problems and find answers. It is based on trying to find fault with the current theories of the day. It requires you to be sceptical of everything, not just those ideas which are not currently in fashion.

More Books...

Shardik

It is as the sleeve blurbs says "an epic allegory" and a "human saga". However, I have to say that it is a little heavy on the epic and a touch light on allegory for my taste. Perhaps I came at this book from the wrong angle, but I read Stephen King's "gun slinger" series in which Shardik has a small cameo and thought "you know, I really should read that". The book is well written and I really liked and agreed with the points about humanity it was making, but I spent way too long thinking, "yea, I get it" only to find that we were going to stick with the same theme for the next 100 pages just to ram the point right home. For me, the book could have been an awesome 300 pager and still had room to make more use of the fact that it has a massive kick-ass bear as the title character :).

Slaughterhouse 5

I read this book and instantly became a Vonnegut fan, writing these notes has reminded me I still have a few novels lined up to be read. A very personal book, which also, at times, trips the bizarre-o-meter, it really is a proper classic. Sometimes you enjoy a book because the story is interesting and the writing isn't bad enough to jolt you out of the world your imagination has created. Other times you get to read a book where the story has been crafted, by a real author, and you are transported into someone else's world with its own set of rules and laws. To describe the story itself in any way that had real meaning, I'd probably have to re-print the book, but it's kind of about the Dresden fire-bombing from an antiwar point of view.

Faust

Yea, one of those "I really should read it" things that I decided to cross off my list. It's an epic poem about Faust's deal with the devil, their beguilement of the lovely Margaret and Faust's desire to repent of his treatment of her.

I felt the reward to reading this was more in the destination than the journey. It was hard work at the time, but I am really glad I read it and can now enjoy certain passages on re-reading. I also feel a bit smarter when Stephen Fry quotes it on QI :)

The Wind-up Bird Chronicles

This is one of those books you read with no pre-knowledge of the plot. I am loathe to describe the plot as I really am not going to make much sense without describing a fair bit of detail. I liked the style of writing quite a lot here and I think this originally lead me to expect more from the story than I eventually feel I got. This is actually a minor criticism as there are some outstanding set pieces and a few memorable moments. It's well written and gripping to the end - I think I just expected spectacular as opposed to good.

The Grand Design

A very readable popular science book, fascinating content and well presented. I read it in two plane journeys, simply because it's absorbing and maths light. In someways I was prepped for a little bit of the science by reading "The Omega Point" a much older work (also popular science) so some of the concepts were familiar. I immediately fell for the idea of M Theory because it complements the theory of psychological reality I have been thinking about for a fair while. The very basic idea being that there are a collection of overlapping mathematical theories that define the universe rather than one unified theory to rule them all.

A Farewell to Arms

I like Hemingway, a lot, but the start of the book confused me a little, the constant overuse of "and" to link descriptive sections made me wonder what to make of the narrator. Eventually I think it just made me trust his naivety, it's something I remember about the book though. I felt connected to all the characters, not always immediately, but eventually and strongly. There is a section of the book where you know for a long time that something bad is in the post, this gave me a tremendous sense of foreboding. The arrival of said "bad post" was delayed by the plot making me became more and more emotionally involved as I tried to guess which way the story would go. Highly recommended from a personal point of view, but I can imagine people with whom the emotional attachment to the characters doesn't take disliking the seemingly unnecessary elongation of the plot.

The Master and Margarita

I really like the Russian authors and so when this book was recommended to me, I moved it to the top of my list. It contains a retelling of the tale of Pontius Pilate with a nice twist on the Faust legend (It's synchronous that I read Faust then this in succession without knowing the plot of this book). A well written and evocative novel which left me thinking about the story for quite a while afterwards. I found the novel held my interest from the start, but the ending is worth getting to even if you don't.

Training - current state of play

I've been running quite a lot recently. One long run per week along a track that takes me an hour and a half to run. I've no idea the actual distance and I will admit to finding excuses not to measure it, in case it's not as long as I hope. I also do a shorter run at about 5k - the idea being that I really need to work on my pace. I can manage all of this fine so long as I don't try and train my legs, which is difficult as I've been enjoying some dead lifting recently.

I am also managing to get between 1 and 2 yoga sessions a week. I really feel they've worked well on my legendary lack of flexibility. I am now merely in the "very poor for his age range section" as opposed to my previous "freakishly inflexible and to be mocked on sight", which is nice.

On the weights front things are going quite well, I've dropped my body weight down to 103kg, but have worked my bench back up to 5 sets of 5 at 120kg. As a consequence of my weight loss, my pull-ups are pretty sweet at the moment with my first set at 15 and tapering off after that.

Ollie Williams explains black holes

• And now over to Ollie Williams to find out why black holes are black, Ollie?
• Light can't escape!
• So light can enter a black hole, but not return?
• Yes!
• Isn't that a clear violation of the second law of thermodynamics, Ollie?
• No!
• Why, Ollie?
• Has entropy!
• How, Ollie?
• Hawking radiation!
• Thanks Ollie

Parsing JSON

For reasons I won't go into, I had need to write a JSON parser recently - yea, I genuinely couldn't just use Doug Crockford's json2.js. It was my first attempt at writing a parser and was an awesome learning experience. I was lucky that I had some pretty smart people on hand to help with the methodology for doing this. The process is relatively simple once you know how, but I will admit it took me a while to get my head round how to approach the problem.

The task was to write something that would take a JSON string and parse it back into a JSON object. The string might contain n depth of nested types (for example an array of objects with each object containing other objects or arrays). I initially expected to have to work out what the first tier primitive types were, then recursively pass in their contents to the parsing functions. So, I was somewhat surprised to find that the method suggested to me was simply to run through the string character by character, from left to right, keeping track of my position within the string, recursively calling the parse function each time I found a symbol which denoted a new primitive.

Functions

I wrote a few helper functions:

• ignoreTrash - which moved past trash characters in the space between primitives, such as spaces, commas and semi-colons
• MoveToNextCharacter - which moved the string position counter
• amEscaping - which checked for backslashed quotes

Ok, so that list was shorter than I recalled. The parse function itself was really just a glorified if statement, looking for the first character in the string - if it is quotation marks, call parseString; if square bracket, call parseArray and so on.

The parse primitive functions would create a new object of their type, then they contained while loops to move through the string until they found their corresponding terminator symbol (usually a regular expression). If during the parsing they found another starter character, they simply called the main parse function again.

It all sounds pretty simple and the nice thing is that the code is really readable, but at the time, it took me about a day of thinking hard, to get my head round the concept. Still it was time well spent, as I think I learned quite a lot during the process. Unfortunately, one of the things I learned here is that the browser implementation of the javascript regular expression engine is a real let down on most browsers. The language seems to support groupings using parantheses, allowing lookahead and lookbehind, but I certainly couldn't get them to work.

XULRunner - an odyssey

When I first discovered that we were using XULRunner as part of our app. I have to admit to being quite excited. I thus jumped at the chance to work on that part of the project when the opportunity arose, a chance to play with some cool technology and learn a thing or too. The project sounded pretty interesting, create a small interface in XUL and add some functionality to it. Then implement some of browsers accessibility features and open them to the web page through an API.

XUL

XUL itself is fairly nice and the MDN documentation is readable enough to make initial progress rapid enough to be fun. However, I was a bit disappointed that CSS support is not complete, in particular z-index is not supported, which immediately removes you from your confort zone when trying to make your interface cool. There are two entirely reasonable solutions to these problems, the easiest is simply to abandon ideas of web 2.0 interfaces and go with what XUL provides natively, such as overlays. The other is to add html elements into the mix. Clearly, these must be namespaced to differentiate them from XUL elements, as outlined in MDN

So far so good, XUL is pretty simple and the documentation is helpful, lets move on to adding the functionality... This is where, unless you are doing something pretty trivial, problems can occur. It's not that the way XULRunner works is difficult, or indeed illogical, it's that the documentation is sparse, confusing, confused or a heady mixture of all 3. I ended up coding initially by trial and error, which is a big problem because de-bugging straight out of the box in XULRunner is painful. After a bit of searching, I found a great resource for setting up a reasonable debugging environment.

The type attribute

It turns out that when opening an API from the chrome to the browser, the type attribute is very important. It seems a little odd to me that the default setting for type is "chrome" which carries a security warning. It also seemed odd to me that when trying to access the API with this incorrect type, there is no error, the functionality simply appears buggy, for example, when accessing the full zoom property the page zooms, but only partially requiring a screen redraw to display correctly. This lead me to try and fix the apparent buggy behaviour, rather than realise there was a security issue.

However, once I did realise there was a security issue, things fell into place and the methodology for creating an API seems sane, logical and more importantly bug free. However, I will freely admit that there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth prior to this from myself and the others I dragged in to help figure out what was going wrong. To give an idea of how hard won this knowledge was, we got most of our information from downloading plugins such as Venkman and Firebug and just trawling through the source code to see how they work. I even have a copy of the Firefox source code checked out... N.B. I was impatient to get the download, but I still feel Mercurial was pretty slow.

Progress Listeners

Once the type was set, we wanted to attach an object to the browser window which would allow us to call functions in the Chrome javascript. This turned out to be a bit more complex than I had hoped, as there are timing issues; what chrome event corresponds to when the window of the browser will exist and can have objects attached. For this, I pretty much used the code from the Progress Listeners MDN page. OnStateChange was the only event needed and when aFlag and STATE_START were both true we knew the browser window existed for the first time. As stated in that documentation, aWebProgress.DOMWindow gave me access to the browser window object and we were but one hurdle away from glory :)

Wrapped JS Object

I had missed another security hurdle and somehow skipped this section in the documentation. To make my object available to the browser, I needed to use wrappedJSObject, fortunately, an astute colleague remembered reading about this somewhere during the early days of development.

The API was now available to the browser! Using aWebProgress.DOMWindow.wrappedJSObject.myAPI = { ... } within the chrome and simply accessing myAPI within the browser, the work was complete and not a moment too soon!

Looking back

It all seems pretty straightforward looking back and the documentation all seems in place. However, what I think is missing is the continuity between the two. It's pretty difficult to find a page that talks about all of the pieces of the puzzle mentioned here in one place. Still, it was good practice solving problems by reading the source code of other plugins.

Kindle and reading

As I had a 3 month contract in Cambridge, I had little time to post, but lots of time to read. I got a kindle for Christmas, which I will admit to absolutely adoring. I've read quite a lot of the free kindle books and revisited many old favourites. I spent a lovely amount of time reading and re-reading The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe, I also read Machiavelli's The Prince, which was an interesting read. Travelling always makes for lots of reading and over the past 3 months, I have been averaging a book a week and have been really lucky in reading quite a few belters, so I though a post might be in order.

Rodger Penrose - Shadow's of the mind

A very hard read, I found this book exceptionally challenging, but a revelation once I grasped the concepts. The book discusses how we think and the actual process of conciousness and the concept of understanding. It challenges the assumption that the human brain processes information solely in a computational manner - which has an enormous impact on the future of A.I.. I admit to already being sympathetic to the view that true A.I. is a much more complex task than people seem to think and that in fact we are a very long way away from machines that can understand the problems they solve, rather than simply perform pre defined instructions at increasing rapid rates.

This is one of those books that I would love to recommend unreservedly, but there is an awful lot (to my mind...) of maths and logic, that make it a challenging book, whose reward is only worth it if you have a definite interest in the field. If you do, this is the guy to be reading.

Philip K. Dick

I have been a big fan of Philip K. Dick for a long time. His books are often challenging, but never without a definite point to make on either the human condition or the nature of reality. I have never read a book of his that I wouldn't recommend, so I am slowly working my way through his entire works. During the last 3 months I have read Ubik, Do androids dream of electric sheep, The man in the high castle, Flow my tears, said the police man. Do androids dream of electric sheep (the book from which Blade Runner was made) stands out among the books... It differs from the film greatly, the book is a discussion about empathy, in which the androids are simply held up as humans without empathy. I found it fascinating and inspiring of many discussions with friends.

Turgenev - Short Stories

I have always had a very soft spot for Russian literature and music. Crime and Punishment being my favourite book as a teenager. War and Peace also features high on my list of favourite reads. The settings of the stories (particularly His first love) remind me of Dostoevsky's The Fool and the romantic nature and depictions of passion are just what you would expect. Well written and very touching, I was especially moved by Mumu as it involves a dog! A highly recommended read.

H. Ryder Haggard - King Solomon's Mines

These stories come from a time when the British "stiff upper lip" was a thing to be feared. They are proper "Boy's own" type stories of manly men, with adventuring to do and no time for lady folk. Well written and utterly engaging, they reveal both the good and bad sides of a time gone past. It's hard to get behind a hero who is an ivory hunter, but it's written with such an innocent view and such good intentions, that it gradually wears down your reserves.

Robert A. Heinlein - The Man From Mars

Heinlein was a fine author and a great mind. This book is a truly thought provoking look at how alien, aliens would actually be. He overcomes this issue in the story by having a human raised by aliens and then returned to earth. He depicts with a thought provoking ease, how an this alien human might pick up our language with great ease and yet still utter lack the contexts which would give words meaning.

It's quite a long book and for me, the payoff was almost all in the first half, when the alien struggles to understand (or grokk) humanity. In the second half of the book, the alien tries to shine a light on some of the issues of society from this new and innocent perspective. I didn't dislike the second half of the book, it's just that reading a book like this, some 30 years after publication, can make ideas which were shocking and new then, seem tired and overused now. Well worth the read though, especially for the first half.

John Christopher - The Death of Grass

Now here is a book I can safely recommend to all and state that people "should" read this book. It's an "end of society" book, which, even after 70 odd years is still the most elegant expression of how quickly and easily our society could fall. With it's utterly realistic plot line and character, it depicts the change in morality of a group of people travelling across the UK during the collapse of society. I can't recommend this book highly enough - I've already purchased additional copies for friends.

Thomas Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Another of the free kindle books and one I'd been meaning to read for a while now. This was a strange read, I immediately admired the quality of the prose and how well written the characters were. I was impressed by the ending and yet, I couldn't wait to finish the book. I think with so many other books to read I was a little impatient with a story that didn't have something to teach me. Perhaps, had I read this book on holiday with nothing else in the wings to read I may have been able to enjoy it more. I genuinely believe this was more my fault than the books.

Hunter S. Thomson - The Rum Diaries

As always with Hunter Thomson, you know that whatever the topic, it will be related with an absolute fairness to all characters. The work will be subject to his astounding attention to detail and an uncanny ability to get directly to the heart of the matter. I absolutely love his style of writing and his descriptions of scenes, such details in the minutia that you could be sat in the bar with him and yet not a single word is wasted. This is a little like the Fear and loathing in las vegas for Rum addicts.