Ones and Zeros

Last February, on the event of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, Gallup polled Americans and found that believe in the theory of evolution. About the same amount had no opinion (in other words the Gallup people called at dinner time). That leaves about 25% do not believe Darwin’s theory.

I’m suspicious of polling. They abstract many people’s potentially nuanced points-of-view into a very few categories. I’ve been on the receiving end of poll questions and found the experience frustrating. But however we quibble about poll numbers it remains true that many people don’t believe the humans evolved from other animals and we weren’t just created by divine intervention somehow.

In earlier periods it was held that humans were special and since animals didn’t have language, make societies, use tools, or think abstractly then there was a massive difference. Humans had to have a divine spark in them that animals didn’t have. This allow us to exploit and damage the ecosystem with God at least implicitly on our side.

Then we found insect societies and other animal communities that indicate some type of society - a wolf pack or pod of dolphins for two examples.

Biologists noted that any society required communication. And they found examples of that in numerous species. Then, they managed to teach gorillas and chimps to communicate with us too.

And, of course, tool use is common in other apes (non-human ones that is), and some birds as well. Otters use rocks to crack shells, they have favorites they keep.

Now, there’s examples of higher-level cognition in animals too.

So if you’re the type of person that requires humans to be special in some critical way, a believer in humanity’s descent from God and not from apes, then you’re feeling pretty crowded by now. All the special human characteristics also have examples in other species too. Either you a) just ignore those pesky scientists, or b) start reacting against “godless liberals”.

Politically, the rise of Reganism in the US and Thatcherism in the UK and the more recent reign of Bush, which was philosophically an extension of Reganism, is part of that reaction.

Note, however, that evolution and the connection of humans and animals is clear. I’ve read that over 98% of our DNA is the same with chimps. We use the same or very similar proteins as all the other animals on the Earth. Those proteins are made from the same amino acids by same or very similar DNA. We can see the evolutionary changes over time in different and related species. It’s quite clear that we not only grew up here on Earth but that we share a common ancestry with all the other animals and plants here. No one seriously disputes that.

The key difference in humans from other species is the combination of design features we have and the level to which we have them. Tool use, opposable thumbs, language, social structures, and more are all special in combination. We are specialized to being generalists. Humans seem to be the only animal that is highly effective at adapting and learning, and passes that knowledge on to future generations. We seem like we might have a part of our brain that specializes in tool use, we think about tools as an extension of our bodies. We use tools and all our other generalist capabilities to be very adaptable.

Faced with this information we have several choices. A first might be to ignore science and scientists. Refuse to adapt, become a button pusher and have no knowledge of what is behind the buttons or technology we’re using. This also means we’re subject to those who actually do know that technology.

Second, we could embrace science and reality. Live up to our fully adaptable humanity and be reality-based. We will never know the world and the universe completely. But science is a way of making a working approximation of what we do know and being able to test that approximation and to improve it. We gain some degree of mastery over our fate this way.

Third, as the T-shirt says, we can reject reality and substitute our own. This can be a problem as we live in the real world. If we ignore reality too much, we will suffer. In a simple case, jumping off a five story building and expecting to walk away is ignoring reality. But there are less obvious ways of ignoring reality that may involve voting against your own interests, making bad decisions, or not anticipating consequences.

For many things it’s quite obvious when we’re being reality-based (#2) and when we’re just making things up (#3). But sometimes it can be hard to judge this, we can’t all be scientists in all areas and know all of human knowledge, we have to trust others sometimes, many times.

I’ve been pursuing my IFR rating and am hovering at the brink of a checkride. I have a letter of discontinuance since the plane’s directional gyro (gyroscopic compass) failed on the checkride. We had it removed and sent back for repair. It’s on it’s way back to me now, but I’m not overly delighted with Kelly Manufacturing’s service (they make R.C. Allen gyros).

The fix is covered under warrantee, and that repair work is covered as well, but there are some issues.

1. Although their form that is sent in with the gyro includes my phone number and email, I’ve not received any information from them either way. Mom and Pop online vendors do better.
2. I had to send it for repair at my shipping cost. This isn’t true for various electronics repairs I’ve dealt with in the computer field, I usually get an RMA number for returns.
3. When I called them the first time I found that it took as long to get the gyro from their receiving department to repair as it did to ship the device halfway across the country. I was admonished to “give them time”.
4. They repair the gyro, they don’t replace it with repaired stock, then repair mine and stock it for a future warranty repair. This restocking process is routine in electronics repair.
5. They didn’t give me a tracking number for the return shipment, again, most small online vendors do better.

For a gyro that costs over $900, I’d expect better service. The next time I buy a instrument for the plane, I’ll factor the customer service I got into my purchase selection. Aviation businesses complain about the lack of repeat customers and the difficulty of keeping customers, customer service might be part of the answer.

Wired is reporting that an intelligence analyst is facing federal hacking charges for using his security clearance to see data (about military intelligence operations against demonstrators in the US) that:

1. he wasn’t supposed to see because of a short text warning in an email
2. he had been given both the password and access rights to see

Hm.  If the account in Wired is true then it seems that he’s being made a scapegoat for someone else’s violation of security in giving him access.  Not to mention there’s some real legal and ethical problems with military intelligence operating inside the US investigating people who are exercising their constitutional right to free speech!

Hacking is word that is routinely misused.  It started out as a word of praise for someone’s high level of abilities, at least in the technical world.  Since people breaking into computers and networks had a higher level of skill, this word was used to describe them back in the countercultural ’60s and ’70s eras when the word came into being.  Today of course, “script kiddies” use hacking tools they can’t write and perhaps don’t understand and are called hackers when they break into systems.  This is a misuse of the word.

Hacking is still used as praise in some circles of technically-minded people.  “Crackers” is what we call the black hats that abuse and break systems.  (Which is also another overloaded term if you’re an old Florida resident.)

But, calling a person a hacker for using a password to access a system he had authorization to use, well, that’s just abuse of English.  Which is also called distorting the truth, or more simply lying.  It’s hard to communicate if we just make a word mean whatever we want it to.  No one else knows what we’re talking about then.

I’ve recently installed Snow Leopard on all three of our Mac OS computers. (We’ve simplified and are down to just three now. And I don’t run a mini server farm anymore either.)

The install went well on the MacBook Pro and the Desktop machines The MacBook Air wouldn’t establish a connection over the WiFi to do the install. I bought a USB-Ethernet converter dongle from Apple and used that instead. I used an old D-Link WiFi router as an ethernet router and just turned off the router’s WiFi features. (I had to hard-reset the router since I no longer remembered its password.)

When I talked to an Apple Genius she mentioned that it would be pretty slow for the MacBook Air over WiFi and didn’t recommend it. But, she hadn’t heard of any other problems with it not connecting. However, James Fallows and I are in the same boat on this. The dongle was only $30, and I should have one on hand anyhow.

I did the “optional install” after the regular OS install. This installs and updates some apps. The timing estimation algorithm for that install seems to be borrowed from Windows as it says “4 minutes” remaining for 2o minutes or so on the Pro and Desktop, and closer to 40 minutes or so on the Air. So, stay calm when it happens to you.

Snow Leopard is worth the update, I’d do it again. The smaller OS size (in memory as well as on disk), and the snappier speed is worth it alone, especially with the low cost ($30, or $50 for the family pack). There are cool some new features, but robustness, “future-proofing”, and stability and reliability improvements are important. Much of these changes are technical and not visible unless you’re a software developer.

There are some the changes to make the Mac immune, or at least resistant, to a number of common virus and hacking attacks. I consider this well worth the cost. While the Mac OS is not a big target for this sort of thing I applaud Apple for focusing on substance instead of simply feature glitz that, while flashy, don’t really help anyone. And, these sorts of changes help keep Mac OS from becoming a big target for malware.

Update: In light of a Shashdot post today about Windows 7 upgrade taking a day to install, I thought I should mention that hte whole Snow Leopard process took about three hours, and that includes the optional install after the actual OS installation.