makeshiftmind

Ben Stein’s pseudo-documentary Expelled, a film about the alleged prejudice against intelligent design advocates in scientific establishments, has been receiving a lot of negative attention in the scientific community because it borrows heavily from Michael Moore’s playbook, i.e., it’s a dishonest film that does not present facts accurately.

Scientific American, a very popular scientific magazine, has written an interesting article called “Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…” that details six of the film’s most disturbing flaws. Atheist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins, who was interviewed for the film, claims that, among other things, he and his colleagues were told that they were being interviewed for a totally different film, and that their quotes were taken out of context and twisted. He has posted an article called “Lying for Jesus” that heavily criticizes the film. The film’s Wikipedia article catalogs the controversy surrounding the film with quite a bit of detail.

Whether you are a creationist, an evolutionist, and ID advocate or just undecided, twisting facts, distorting quotes, and citing material out of context is a very low way to solicit your position. Don’t accept less than the truth.

Today is the official launch of Ubuntu 8.04. Ubuntu is a Linux operating system that is developed by a strong open source community, and is freely available to download, use, and distribute. An operating system is the software on your computer that allows you to run programs. Windows is an operating system, and so is Mac OSX. Ubuntu is, arguably, the most popular Linux operating system for desktop PCs, and is steadily encroaching on the server market as well.

Some reasons to download and use Ubuntu:

1. You can’t afford (or refuse to pay for) Windows Vista or Mac OSX Leopard
2. You want to learn how computers work (Linux hides nothing from you — you can literally find out how everything works)
3. You’re a mad h@X0r and want to show off your sKI11z
4. You like to try new things, and aren’t afraid to reinstall your operating system a few times just to get the hang of it
5. You want to be part of a helpful community of computer geeks who enjoy tinkering as much as you do
6. You like the word “Ubuntocalypse”
7. You feel peer pressure from this blog post
8. You loathe M$ and wish IE would die a slow, painful digital death
9. You like pretty graphics, but really get excited when you see white text on a black background and a blinking cursor
10. You want to court the favor of the gods

This is like, every night at my house.

There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century — the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential — or: one pertains to man’s consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say “freedom,” I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as “freedom from want” or “freedom from fear” or “freedom from the necessity of earning a living.” I mean “freedom from compulsion — freedom from rule by physical force.” Which means: political freedom.

These two — reason and freedom — are corollaries, and their relationship is reciprocal: when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.

Their antagonists are: faith and force. These, also, are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny. Look at the Middle Ages — and look at the political systems of today.

– “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”, Ayn Rand

EVE Online is an MMORPG that has the most most robust and intricate market systems of any game I’ve ever played. This article from the developers’ blog explains one of the changes introduced recently to make the market more “free” because of the economic impact to the game. What is interesting is that they basically show how price regulations in a market system are bad for that system, and what the side effects of removing market price caps will be.

In a nutshell, EVE developer’s had placed price caps on certain small ships in the game called shuttles. A player could buy a shuttle for the fixed price of 9,000 ISK (EVE currency) from any NPC (non-player character). There were two side-effects to the price control: 1) cheap transportation was available to all, and 2) the price of tritanium (a mineral used to manufacture ships and items) would never sell above a certain threshold because one could simply buy shuttles and “recycle” them for their minerals cheaper than mining the minerals themselves.

The developers decided to remove the shuttle price cap and offered this explanation:

“The benefit from removing this price cap is that the price of tritanium will be more in line with the underlying demand for tritanium at any given time. This makes the mining industry more profitable in the long run and will balance the benefits between mining and other professions in EVE.”

“I also have full faith in that EVE industrialists and traders will supply shuttles where there is a demand, but of course at a reasonable price for convenience. There is no reason why NPCs should be subsidizing cheap travel in EVE at the cost of the mining profession. Another benefit is a new opportunity for industrialists to produce and sell shuttles of course.”

“This change is also along the lines of our general philosophy of the design of markets in EVE, that all items should be player produced and based on the incentive to make a profit from providing the item to other players.”

“Speculators will try to cash in on the short term shortage of shuttles by buying up the current stock and reselling it at a very high price (this happened within hours of patch deployment), that will in turn make it more profitable to industrialists to start producing shuttles and selling them at a good profit. At the same time competition among industrialists will drive prices down, the market should therefore stabilize within a relatively short period of time.”

“Tritanium is the building block of everything in EVE and hence we expect that in the short run this will create some turmoil on all markets, especially the mineral market and the market for Tech I items. Again, speculators will affect the market for tritanium, most likely by hording trit in the hope that now that the price cap has been lifted the price of tritanium will increase (note: just lifted, not completely removed). This has already happened, prices for tritanium started to increase almost immediately, but have since declined a little from the highs last night… But again, the beautiful workings of the invisible hand will help us (thank you Adam Smith) due to the greed we have for ISK. With higher tritanium prices, mining of veldspar will become very profitable, and since it is readily available in safe areas, needing only low cost equipment to mine, we should see the veldspar flowing very soon and tritanium prices stabilize, but at what level? At this point your guess is just as good as mine.”

I find the short- and long-term economic analysis fascinating. In the short-term, people will horde shuttles and sell them for ridiculous prices, because shuttles are no longer freebies. This will no doubt upset people with little ISK who count on low shuttle prices. However, in the long-term, industrialists will begin manufacturing more shuttles because of the economic incentive, which will not only reduce the price of each shuttle, but will also equalize the price of tritanium as well.

So basically, these game developers understand more about free markets than our politicians. Go figure.

“…the public has two hopes, and Government makes two promises – many benefits and no taxes. Hopes and promises, which, being contradictory, can never be realized.”

“Now, is not this the cause of all our revolutions? For, between the Government, which lavishes promises which it is impossible to perform, and the public, which has conceived hopes which can never be realized, two classes of men interpose – the ambitious and the Utopians. It is circumstances which give these their cue. It is enough if these vassals of popularity cry out to the people: ‘The authorities are deceiving you; if we were in their place, we would load you with benefits and exempt you from taxes.’”

“And the people believe, and the people hope, and the people make a revolution!”

“No sooner are their friends at the head of affairs, than they are called upon to redeem their pledge. ‘Give us work, bread, assistance, credit, instruction, more money,’ say the people; ‘and withal deliver us, as you promised, from the demands of the tax- gatherers.’”

“The new Government is no less embarrassed than the former one, for it soon finds that it is much more easy to promise than to perform. It tries to gain time, for this is necessary for maturing its vast projects. At first, it makes a few timid attempts. On one hand it institutes a little elementary instruction; on the other, it makes a little reduction in some taxes. But the contradiction is forever starting up before it; if it would be philanthropic, it must attend to its exchequer; if it neglects its exchequer, it must abstain from being philanthropic.”

“These two promises are for ever clashing with each other; it cannot be otherwise. To live upon credit, which is the same as exhausting the future, is certainly a present means of reconciling them: an attempt is made to do a little good now, at the expense of a great deal of harm in future. But such proceedings call forth the spectre of bankruptcy, which puts an end to credit. What is to be done then? Why, then, the new Government takes a bold step; it unites all its forces in order to maintain itself; it smothers opinion, has recourse to arbitrary measures, ridicules its former maxims, declares that it is impossible to conduct the administration except at the risk of being unpopular; in short, it proclaims itself governmental. And it is here that other candidates for popularity are waiting for it. They exhibit the same illusion, pass by the same way, obtain the same success, and are soon swallowed up in the same gulf.”

– “Government“, by Frederic Bastiat

I found a great technical article the other day on UTF-8 character encoding.  In case you didn’t know, when computers first started to become mainstream they only worked with the English alphabet and a small subset of numbers and symbols (this is called ASCII text).  Computer resources were quite limited back in The Day, and since only English-speaking countries had computers, it made sense to condense the character pool.  Now, computers are much more powerful, and span countries, cultures, and languages.  The creation of the Internet has opened communication channels between different people groups at an astounding rate.  It only made sense, then, to expand the set of printable characters that a computer can display.   This is why UTF-8 is so important — it supports a very large number of printable characters (including numbers and symbols) from many different languages.  This article explains the history of UTF-8, and how to use it in your own projects (web development, database work, etc.).

I found an interesting website today called Iraq Veterans Against the War.  It’s interesting to hear the thoughts of people in the armed forces who believe the military has no business in Iraq.

My wife sent me out yesterday to mail some tax forms to our masters in Jefferson City. She explicitly told me to get a receipt. I decided to go to FedEx instead of the post office because, frankly, the people at FedEx are friendlier by orders of magnitude, and I will pay a premium for that. Plus I also needed to make copies of each form. Anyway, I had four envelopes to mail so I asked the nice lady behind the counter for the appropriate address labels to fill out. I managed to mess up two of them and had to re-write them, which took more time than I would have liked, but since I can’t seem to figure out the TO/FROM fields, that’s probably my own fault. Anyway, when I was finished with the forms, I took them back to the desk and handed them to the nice lady, who proceeded to punch in the information to the computer. The first one was fine, but when she got to the second one, she said “uh oh!” “Uh oh what?” I replied. She looked through the remaining envelopes and informed me that they would not be able to send them. When I inquired as to the reason, she stated that they were addressed to P.O. boxes.

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Sir the post office owns P.O. boxes and they won’t let us deliver to them.”

And that, my friends, is why the post office is NOT your friend. Because unlike naturally occurring monopolies, the post office can never be challenged, and if you try, they have all the force of the government behind them to say “screw you”.