Shannon Love

The Makers vs the Talkers

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[Note :I wrote this as a comment to this Victor Davids Hanson post but it ran long enough that I think I will make it an actual post.]

Way back in the ’80s the columnist William Raspberry wrote about a conversation he had at a Washington party.

Looking around at the collection of lawyers, bureaucrats, journalists, academics, etc., he turned to a friend and asked:

“Do you know anybody who makes anything?”

It had suddenly occurred to Raspberry that his entire professional and social circle was comprised of people who more or less did nothing but talk for a living. He had no personal contact with anyone who participated in the creation of any material good. After asking around, he found that he didn’t know anyone who even made things as a hobby. He said, “I couldn’t even find anyone who had made so much as a bookcase.”

That little newspaper column opened my eyes up to the most profound division in modern society. It is not rich vs. poor or ethnic-group/race A vs. ethnic-group/race B or male vs. female etc. It is the division between those who create the real physical wealth of our civilization and those who merely manipulate others by persuasive communication.

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There’s a Grand Metaphor for Leftism in This

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This is taken from Failbooking.com which is a site that collects humorous Facebook posts.

Funny Facebook Fails
see more funny facebook stuff!

Just substitute “Socially/Economically/Environmentally Conscientious Voting” for “texting Haiti to 90999” and “my taxes” for “my phone bill”.

This line really sums up the leftist point of view:

It’s not my money, Hah!

But in the end, you’ve got to pay your bills, even when you’re being ostentatiously compassionate while you think you’re spending other people’s money.

More on Crappy Scientific Software

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Via Slashdot comes this article in the Guardian that reinforces the points I made in my previous post: No One Peer-Reviews Scientific Software, Scientists are Not Software Engineers and Scientific Peer-Review is a Lightweight Process.

The article makes that same points that (1) there is little to no professional quality-control in the creation and maintenance of scientific software and (2) scientific software should be as open and scrutinized as scientific hardware.

This observation is especially important:

Computer code is also at the heart of a scientific issue. One of the key features of science is deniability: if you erect a theory and someone produces evidence that it is wrong, then it falls. This is how science works: by openness, by publishing minute details of an experiment, some mathematical equations or a simulation; by doing this you embrace deniability. This does not seem to have happened in climate research. Many researchers have refused to release their computer programs — even though they are still in existence and not subject to commercial agreements.

(Note: In this context, “deniability” means that the hypothesis or theory must be constructed so it can be proven wrong, i.e., that you can deny the truth of it.)

Scientific hypotheses differ from hypotheses in other fields specifically because scientific hypotheses can be conclusively proven wrong by experiment.

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Peer Review as Talisman

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Mark Steyn says:

Like all the poodles of the environmental beat, Margot O’Neill repeats those magic words “peer review” every couple of paragraphs like a talisman to ward off evil deniers.

From my “Scientific Peer-Review is a Lightweight Process” :

By the way that proponents of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) wave it about as a talisman to ward off criticism, a lay person could be excused for thinking that peer review is a rigorous process that is central to the functioning of science and that verifies the conclusions of a scientist’s research.
 
Peer review is nothing like that.
 
Peer review isn’t even central to science. Science functioned fine for centuries without peer review and scientists who work in secret or proprietary environments do not use it. Instead, peer review serves economic and social functions related to scientific publishing and does nothing else. Peer review somewhat protects the integrity of scientific media, not the quality of science itself.

I would just like to point out that Mark Styen steals from the best. ;-)

Would Someone Please Just Release a Mac OS X Virus Already?

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Because, people, the suspense is killing me.

If you went back in time to 2002, at the time of the initial release of Mac OS X, and told everyone that over the next eight years not a single Mac OS X virus or worm would be found in the wild, everyone, including me, would have called you barking mad.

Ever since Apple began the transition to Mac OS X in 1999, computer security experts have every week of every month of every year confidently told us that Mac OS X is just as vulnerable on a technological level as Windows or any other operating system. By that they mean that it is just as technically easy for a malicious programmer to write a program to hijack the operating system of Mac as it is to write a program to hijack a Windows machine.

Several times a year, they demonstrate flaws in Mac OS X that they claim could be used to spread viruses. They complain about Apple’s insular, arrogant and cavalier attitude toward finding and patching these security flaws. They tell us that all these factors make Mac OS X a ticking bomb and that “any day now” Mac users will face a sudden tsunami of self-propagating viruses and worms just like Windows users do.

They tell us the exact same thing every week, month and year.

They told us that in 1999 with the release of Mac OS X server.
They told us that in 2000.
They told us that in 2001.
They really told us that in 2002 when Mac OS X shipped widely for desktops.
They told us that in 2002.
They told us that in 2003.
They told us that in 2004.
They told us that in 2005.
They told us that in 2006.
They told us that in 2007.
They told us that in 2008.
They told us that in 2009
And they continue to tell us that in 2010.

Yet, der Tag never comes and waiting for it is giving me ulcers.

So, I have to ask: How many more years have to elapse before we begin to suspect the security experts (and everyone else, myself included) have misunderstood something critical about how the Mac OS X security model works out in the real world?

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