Inward Bound

I’m reading a book at the moment recommended by Mr Sammut (awesome Physics teacher for those who don’t know him) – it’s Inward Bound, ‘of matter and forces in the physical world’ written by Abraham Pais, and although written in the style of a set of memoirs or a history of Science, it is designed to contain many mathematical and scientific assertions rather than to descend to the style of populist ‘appreciation of science’.

As its title suggests, the book is largely about Physics on the micro scale, tracing the path from the discovery of the electron all the way to that of the W and Z particles, the gauge bosons of the weak nuclear force. In brief, it steps through X-rays and radioactivity (including beta radiation, linking with electrons), spectroscopy, nuclear Physics, quantum mechanics, QED, while constantly describing the path of scientific progress from the beginnings of civilised science as we know it today to the recent discoveries of the book’s publishing date of 1986.

Flipping to a random page near the beginning of the book I already see familiar relativistic equations involving the Lorentz constant beginning to appear around p90 (of about 600) and Schroedinger’s awesome equation involving the best Greek letter ever, Psi, at around p256. Scanning pages in its vicinity, I notice asterisks appearing in the equations – any book that discusses complex conjugates of wavefunctions must be good!

While looking forward to a meaty meal from a Physics book, I can’t help but point out the superfluously copious quantities of popular science books. While genuinely interesting to read about how xyz always picked his/her nose while conducting experiments and how abc always wrote figures to a certain number of sig figs except on Sundays, such details really do not interest me. Granted, these are invented examples, but fundamentally what I look for in a book about Science is, unsurprisingly, the Science, and the history and anecdotal asides around the topic should be used at most as structure and supporting material (respectively) rather than form the backbone of any truly scientific work of literature. Often have I found myself opening up a book titled something promising that might give me a real insight into why and how the world works expressed in the natural language of physics – maths, and instead been confronted with pages and pages of black text, entirely absent of equations, numbers, diagrams etc. While it may be possible to draw endless parallels between branes and slices of toast, nothing at all like that can be proven truly elegantly without using maths.

This is what I find fundamentally annoying about popular books. They aren’t, I assert, bad books – in fact I really enjoyed reading Simon Singh’s writings – but they are simply inadequate to satisfy my curiosity: they are about science appreciation rather than science understanding, the latter of which is what I and in fact many of my peers are really after. They say ’scientists have done this with GPS because of relativity’ or ‘the equations blow up in your face when you try to combine the two theories’ without actually explaining any of the maths behind relativistic calculations or relativity v quantum mechanics, and I find this profoundly infuriating – I intensely dislike taking someone’s word for something without finding out about the maths and logic and science behind it. Thank God (or should I say Xenu?) for the internet, whence all information flows. This is the fault I find with many popular science books – they underestimate their audience. In apparent desperation to make what they perceive an uneducated audience ‘understand’ a concept, especially a complicated one best expressed in equations, the very concept is reduced to an analogy, stripping from the arguments all that I find exciting about Physics – the maths and the rigour with which concepts are exposed, proven and developed, and the ‘understanding’ reduced to an appreciation of how similar the enthalpy of a system is to a bouncing ball.

Perhaps I’m being a little unfair. Perhaps the problem doesn’t lie in the way popular scientific literature is written – there must be a reason it’s popular. But after reading about five such ‘popular bestsellers’ I feel I’m starting to get saturated. I know enough funny (or otherwise) anecdotes about how certain discoveries were very nearly not made. I know enough about Einstein’s quirks and his pain and anguish as he refused to believe a wholly probabilistic model of the universe. I now want to read in-depth information about Physics, not the surrounding paraphernalia (sp?). I simply think there are too many intelligent scientists who end up writing material for the ‘general public’ which for some reason is assumed to be not very intelligent just in order to make some money, and, as I might have said when still doing Spanish GCSE, es una lástima.

Fruits of my Labour

PHP has been an annoyance to work with, although I somehow managed to write something vaguely (useful?) with it – a ‘predictions league’ thing commissioned by a friend (whose site I somehow got roped into hosting). I actually managed to write this in a few hours as a first PHP/MySQL project which in my opinion is pretty fast considering I had to learn my way round PHPMyAdmin for a good half hour setting up the DB then start learning PHP starting from the MySQL end, learning the hard way that die(…) literally means the script, well, dies.

The requirements for the program was that people would log in / register and be able to predict scores on upcoming matches. Their predictions end up in a database, and when a match finishes, admin enters the results into another table in the database, at which point a script runs to compare each person’s predictions against the real result. A formula works out the number of points they get based on similarity to the actual score, and their points accumulate over the whole season.

Apart from some teething problems it seems to run OK. I only managed to work out cookies after it was launched, and a logout link was created a day after that. But overall, I’d consider it a fairly successful first project in PHP. The URL to follow if you’d like to make a prediction is http://gedanken.we.bs/wordpress/predictions/

Being not very (or even remotely) interested in Football probably didn’t help, but the writing of this did alert me to some nice things about web programming: a lot of different languages are at your disposal all at once. Javascript if commonly used in conjunction with PHP to optimise user interfaces (UIs) and java applets with parameters, generated using PHP, passed are the best way I am cognisant of to display anything dynamic – no I haven’t yet delved into Flash. Apart from these, it is possible to write some scripts in Perl, although it has to be admitted that it sucks at life. Odd that that page is a CGI script… Another nice thing is the fact that server-side scripting can be audaciously typed straight into a page, making security so much less of a headache. Theoretically one can write passwords in plaintext in the script and have it still fairly secure – *theoretically* – Although getting cavalier about security tends not to be a good idea.

By far the worst part of my experience coding this was the discovery that PSPad, a program I’ve had on my machine all this time but haven’t realised its potential PHP-wise, is an awesome editor for PHP. Oh well, bye then Notepad.

La Femme D’Argent

I’m now learning an amazingly cool bit of music by AIR called La Femme D’Argent from their album Moon Safari; for the uninitiated, AIR is a French music duo, consisting of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel. The name AIR is a backronym for ‘Amour, Imagination, Rêve’ (Wiki). I think they make quite unique music and really know how to write to affect mood and set atmosphere.

The entire piece revolves around a single chord sequence and a catchy rhythm: that’s it; simplicity is typical of all AIR pieces, including a song in which almost the only lyrics are ’surfing on a rocket’! As always, there’s also quite a bit of ad lib, which if you listen to recordings of them performing is truly masterful and always perfectly in keeping with the atmosphere of the piece.

The chord sequence is not starkly unusual in its own right, going B, Bm7, F#m, E, but is repeated every two (4/4) bars, setting a harmonic structure which underlies the entirety of the piece, with an accompanying base (base guitar in recording) drumming out the catchy rhythm. The top line (there are in total 3 lines), played by some electronic instrument which I don’t recognise (‘Electric Piano’ in my piano part) is where all the ad-libbing happens in between some awesomely complicated rhythmical patterns.

Apparently, unbeknownst to many, AIR pieces are used as background music to a large number of TV programmes and films, including The Virgin Suicides – so they’re surprisingly important despite their apparent lack of prominence!

Failbook

Since Facebook had a … facelift, it has become the talk of the town among my Facebook-oriented social groups, and it appears to have received quite a lot of angry fire from furious users who have become disoriented by the changes. I personally think in terms of usability Facebook has improved, however there are still several huge problems which are beginning to turn me away from Facebook.

1. Facebook attempts to do everything. It is an amalgam of all sorts of different social networking services which at first sounds fantastic but actually ends up really quite a mess. My philosophy on social networking is that each site serves a single purpose and serves it very well; an example of such a site is Twitter – it’s for status updates and it works pretty damn well, even from text and other non-web interfaces. Facebook on the other hand attempts to incorporate status updates with notes (a sort of excuse-for-blogging concept), links (sort of mimicking Pownce), photos (imitating Flikr), groups and networks, events and private messaging all rolled into one enormous bundle, and even more ‘applications’ can be added. This used to be a huge problem as to get to someone’s wall one had to scroll past ‘Hatching Eggs’, ‘Top Friends’, ‘Compare People’, ‘Superlatives’, miscellaneous flash games and all sorts of other rubbish. Fortunately the new layout circumvents this annoyance, although nonsense with invitations like ‘xyz thinks you are gay – add Facebook Gay Application Version 2.4 to return the favour’ (??) still goes on in bulk.

2. Ajax/javascript etc. I presume the auto-complete when searching and Facebook chat are based on Ajax or something similar, and it simply doesn’t work half the time. The number of times I’ve started searching for a person and ended up having to refresh the page just to get that drop down menu exceeds my tolerance thresholds and I just end up giving up and doing something else. I can’t stand working with a site that doesn’t work. Plus the site loads unnecessarily slowly.

3. Facebook Chat. Socially awkward. Incompatible with Pidgin (last time). Breaks a lot. Distracting when in the middle of doing something on Facebook. Pure evil.

4. Facebook messaging. Bulk messaging is a complete mess and there’s no way to opt out of a spam thread which contains many people all spamming you – you just have to sit there and watch your emails pile up. Even unfriending and blocking them lets them spam you for 30 days.

5. Privacy. Facebook, with its reputation for refusing to delete users from their database and vulnerabilities to maliciously coded applications, is possibly the most anti-privacy website around; it is the antidote to anonymity. The fact that they refuse to delete information on anyone is just incredibly unnerving, and the possibility that Mark Zuckerberg will in the distant future have access to my entire online social history is disturbing to say the least.

Facebook is definitely useful, but I’m beginning to drift away from it. If I want to share links I’d much rather use Digg or StumbleUpon or Pownce than a system in which the link will be quickly buried under a sea of spam application invites, fan page joins and other people’s wall posts.

<?php Mein Kampf ?>

Don’t worry, I haven’t turned into Hitler. But I’ve been struggling for some time now to learn new programming languages and my most recent struggle is PHP. I’ve finally taken it upon myself to learn it, one of the most important languages to know since the internet practically runs off it, and I had to be persuaded by, of all people (as always with these matters) someone who has no idea about programming but has an idea for a program he wants written; for some reason I’ve ended up as the techie authority in my year even though I’m relatively unskilled so I was the first, and only, unfortunate soul to be roped into it. I’m pretty pleased though in the end that I learnt PHP – it’s probably going to end up a valuable life skill; meanwhile here’s what I think of it…

The Bad

1. Variables are disgusting – the concept of variable types is transparently non-existent which should send shivers up the spine of any programmer.

2. $. The entirely of PHP variables revolves around the Dollar Sign, which is actually rather nice (easy to see what’s going on) but it does mean that I’m constantly hitting shift+$ every time I want a variable, and I invariably end up hitting shift+% or some other key nearby.

The Good

1. String concatenation looks very neat, like Perl: “string1″ . “string2″ – it just makes code look so much less messy (and no need to press shift)

2. The script is run server-side so security is good and nobody can steal your code (among loads of other useful things about server-side scripting)

3. Even with server-side scripting, PHP can be inserted straight into web pages – just go

4. It’s a curly bracketed language, like C#, Java and C++, rather than Python (yuck) – personal pet preference / hate respectively

5. It’s a Recursive Initialism (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)!

Overall I find it a fiddly language to work in, and the two ‘bads’ listed here are almost enough to turn me off forever, and no doubt I will find more problems as I continue my quest to master PHP. Don’t laugh, I will do it … some day.

Cover your ass from anti-P2Ps

When record labels are being taken down for sharing their own music you know it’s time to hide. Like it or not, the RIAA and MPAA are going to have to face up to the fact that they simply cannot contain piracy. So long as the media exists in an electronic form, it is easily possible to replicate and distribute it, and with internet speeds commonly measured in Mbits/s, levels of music and film piracy are completely out of the control of the law. So this means that the few unfortunate souls who do get caught sharing files illegally are in for one heck of a punishment and end up used as examples to the rest of the torrenting community.

I’d like to think that most of those who stumble upon my blog can be considered friends, and so in this friendly spirit I offer some advice for those who simply can’t help but fire up uTorrent whenever they miss that one must-see episode of Dr Who. Of course, in no way do I encourage breaking the law, but I reckon if you do, as a friend, you deserve some protection from the huge-capital goliaths of the music and film industries.

Torrenting

Lifehacker had a wonderful feature on BitTorrent privacy which I’m going to replicate partially here rather shamelessly.

Basically the way you get caught on BitTorrent is when an anti-P2P organisation pretends to seed a file and grabs your IP as you download from them (or vice versa), and once they have your IP, you’re pretty screwed.

Solution 1: use IP blacklist blocking programs (PeerGuardian)

Begin Lifehacker copy-paste-summarise:

IP-blocking application PeerGuardian2 (PG2) uses a constantly updated blacklist of IP addresses known to track your activity. By default, PG2 already blocks Anti-P2P organizations but it’s capable of blocking more IPs if you have other privacy concerns beyond P2P that you want to address. PG2 is not and cannot be 100% effective, but it will provide a good deal more protection than downloading without. With PG2 running, you’ll never connect to the IP addresses on the Anti-P2P blacklist, meaning that those organization can’t log your IP and your participation in a copyrighted download.

Solution 2: use a proxy

[Lifehacker]If we’re talking about file sharing, a proxy protects you by routing all of your traffic through another server when it leaves your computer and before it comes back to you. That means that when you’re downloading data using a peer-to-peer protocol like BitTorrent, your peers can only see the proxy IP address, not your home IP address—so even if they are tracking your activity, they’re not actually tracking your address at all.[/Lifehacker]

Apparently a good proxy service is BTGuard ($7/mo), but if you don’t like paying, you might consider using Tor, the Onion Router.

Taken from the Tor website:

Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Your (encrypted) traffic is routed through other peoples’ computers, giving you fantastic privacy for free. The downside is that the network is under enormous strain as many people have exactly the same idea, so download speeds tend to be fairly limited and the damage done to the network’s capability to re-route data is detrimental to the Tor community. Which is why, as a Tor user and relay host myself, I’d encourage you, if you do decide to download through Tor, to run a relay and give something back to the Tor network, traffic-wise.

Solution 3: Encrypt torrented traffic

I suppose if you can’t be bothered to install PG or Tor, the least you can do is make some attempt to hide the data through the encryption service provided by most Torrent clients. There’s a fantastic set of instructions here. Many ISPs understandably hate BitTorrent as it’s apparently responsible for 80% of total internet traffic (Ouch) so throttle BitTorrent speeds. This encryption is designed to get round that, but at the same time affords a limited level of privacy. Without PeerGuardian though, there’s absolutely no guarantee you aren’t downloading from a sting-operation server owned by the RIAA itself.

HTTP Downloading

There are numerous other ways of obtaining pirated material though, including Rapidshare, which are generally less susceptible to spying. There’s an entire forum dedicated to Rapidshare download links of pirated music, films and software, and since your ISP is probably too busy spying on Torrent traffic it’s unlikely to be watching HTTP traffic streams for un-paid-for material, especially since many HTTP downloads are actually legitimate, e.g. from online stores, and regulating it all would be too much of a nightmare. Many Rapidshare download links are also password-protected rar files (forum posts contain the passwords) so even if your traffic gets spied on, ISPs won’t be bothered enough to attempt to brute-force your archive. Even better, if it’s software, the forum format provides some protection as users submitting feedback for download links normally complain loudly if their AV detects malware. HTTP downloads are also easily routed through proxies and require only a browser to initiate so are almost ideal for most people.

Steganography

And of course, rather than making it blatant that you’re downloading pirated stuff but frustrating authorities by encrypting it, you can always try hiding the fact that you’re downloading a song, including concealing an mp3 file inside a suitably large image file:

copy /b image.png + piratedsong.mp3 innocentlookingfile.png

To extract, rename the innocent looking file to have an mp3 extension.

I hope this has been useful to someone, as all these methods have been tried and tested extensively vicariously by myself at some point and been found to work very well indeed.

China and Censorship

China’s reputation for oppression and censorship is truly notorious, in both past and present. There’s a reason why traders call the divider between research and the trading floor a ‘Chinese Wall’: it supposedly prevents any information whatsoever from leaking through. China is surrounded by metaphors and connotations linked to walls and censorship; the Great Firewall of China for example prevents law-abiding and innocent Chinese citizens from educating themselves about the world around them: they have no way of learning about China’s history other than to absorb the government propaganda administered on a daily basis; they genuinely believe America consists of nothing but greedy corporations bullying China and taking advantage of Asia; according to their version of Google, baidu.com, nothing ever happened in Tiananmen Square. Killings, what killings? Nothing happened here. Oceania was never at war with Eastasia… For those without access to the real world, what the government tells them is the real world. Those who control the present control the past, and if an entire population is being indoctrinated with clearly false information about historical events, it’s probably safest to hide underground for a while when that population is freed and told otherwise.

China’s methods of protecting her citizens from the ’scary truth’ are multifarious, immoral and, in my opinion, largely disgusting. Already the immoral nature of the Great Firewall of China, a huge blocking mechanism which denies access to any online information on the tragic parts of China’s history to citizens, is clear and reflects badly on the government responsible, but to make things worse, Google was bribed into censoring search results for terms like ‘Tiananmen Square’ and anything pertaining to the worst parts of China’s history. Even users of Skype, vaunting about end-to-end security and enhanced privacy, were shocked when the creators of the supposedly secure service succumbed to the temptation of China’s monetary offer and surrendered users’ privacy to the Chinese government. And now, as if to confirm suspicions, even internet cafes, used by many for anonymity, are under attack: China has decided to take photographs of all internet cafe customers.

The whole Chinese system of hierarchy is actually rather worrying. In the modern age, certainly in the West, the entire nature of hierarchy has undergone a revolution, most markedly in education. In the past, the teacher-student relationship tended to take the guru-apprentice approach, in which the teacher is infinitely wise and the student never questions and just absorbs. Today, with the explosion of information, the student often knows more than the teacher in specific areas of interest, and the role of the teacher has changed to a guide, someone who teaches the student to teach himself – more a mentor than a guru; indeed, the student is invited and encouraged to challenge established theories with new evidence and question what is often taken to be true. Even the law is often questioned, and the presence of sceptics (in the true sense of the word) in the West has blossomed, and a substantial fraction of a generation has been bred of people who do not just follow rules blindly and instead think intelligently about politics, policy and law before making decisions. China on the other hand has been left behind in both areas, both in terms of information and a culture of questioning. Information on the real world, and on real word politics and history, is simply unavailable to the majority of the population, and the people are forced to obey rules blindly lest they end up imprisoned or, more likely, shot. China has a culture of no questioning, of blind obedience to some higher authority. For the government this is wonderful and it’s a success for internal politics – many Chinese simply believe whatever they are told by their government no matter how blatantly false or one-sided it may be, accept the indoctrination and are blindly patriotic, supportive of a a political structure built on lies, censorship and corruption, and this is actually very dangerous. As China slowly develops into a Capitalist country, and as information becomes increasingly free, the government is going to have to change at some point. Germany was bad enough at the end of the first world war when their citizens believed it was a defensive war, so when – and I think it is a case of when rather than if – China’s government collapses, her citizens will be confused and angry, and 1.3 Bn angry and confused people is really not very funny: political stability will become something of yesterday, the economy may well collapse, and international relations will certainly suffer.

I was actually full of hope that the Olympics would change things. The huge campaign on human rights was given so much exposure that I genuinely believed China would be forced by the rest of the world to accept that it could not continue to oppress information. They even opened access to the BBC website, something I hoped would set a precedent for further steps towards sanity. Sadly China’s human rights and censorship situation, as far as I’m aware, is still very much the same as before.

My PC Collection: in pictures

I begin to wonder whether I have too many computers at home. At the last count, my family uses four computers on a regular basis, which of course begs the question of exactly what the other 6.5 are doing… I’ve decided to make an attempt to justify to myself my possession of the 10.5 computers living (in some cases not) alongside me, a technophilic teenager.

First of all, the family computer – 5-6 years old, Windows XP. It’s used on a daily basis by my parents, and occasionally by myself. It seems to have become the central computer since all our DAS is connected to it, and it’s the one physically closest to the router (interestingly it’s also the only computer which is linked to the main router via a single cable – just about everything else is connected through an ethernet switch).

My own desktop is probably about 4 years old now and still serving me pretty well – when we bought it, a config with 1.5GB RAM and an Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz processor was pretty impressive. I use it for just about all my Windows software and it’s rigorously maintained, using the likes of TuneUp Utilities and CCleaner. It’s also running XP, arguably the most compatible and programmed-for OS around. I’ve optimised it quite heavily for performance – relatively minimal yet pleasing visual effects and faster, more efficient free software alternatives to default crapware such as foobar, Pidgin, the Mozilla suite and AVG Free.

The antithesis of my desktop, so to speak, is my Laptop: if my desktop is D, my laptop is D’. Optimisation goes straight out the window immediately as it was shipped with Vista and I was too lazy to install something decent, and besides it’s a Toshiba Satellite A300 with 3GB RAM and a speedy Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor so it can theoretically cope with pretty much anything I might care to throw at it – including Vista, excluding games. I use it, obviously, for all mobile computing needs, and also as a ‘programming computer’ – it’s the only machine at home with C#.NET installed.

The last of the regularly used computers is my Debian server – the white Compaq. An ancient machine, it boasts about 500MB RAM and a processor whose clock speed is probably best measured in tens of MHz, but it does the job of hosting a WordPress blog with the help of the wonderful stress-reliever XAMPP.

Next to it is the Dell Optiplex workstation (WinXP), which is used for road testing software and port scanning other computers on my network using Nessus in search of security holes.

Compaq: This one runs Windows 2K and is the same model as the Debian server. I tend to use it occasionally to test software in a Win2K environment and experiment with LiveCDs.

Huge server: A wonderful piece of history, definitely worth the ~0.25 square metre of floorspace it occupies. It unfortunately has no HDD and seems to use nothing but SCSI and tape drives (oh the days of tape drives…), neither of which I possess, so only boots off liveCDs – Sabayon Mini and Knoppix are therefore its OSs of choice.

Our old computer was a Time, and was built for Windows 95. That pretty much says it all – the wires protruding from its rear end are testimony to its current function: its PSU provides DC for my electronics projects.

Toshiba Tecras used to look like this…

…and HPs used to look like this. The HP is the only computer downstairs so is used as an excuse for a home entertainment system – it just about managed to install XP so can’t be all *that* bad.

And finally, the half computer: the picture really says it all. I think it was made by Time.

You may now be wondering how rich I must be to own so many computers. Allow me to surprise you – we only spent money on four of the above: my desktop, the family computer, my laptop and the old Time computer (the PSU one). Both Compaqs (including my server) and the old Dell were given to me by the school as old machines when they replaced the computers, my dad’s company also threw out some machines: the huge server and the HP, and my friend also contributed 1.5 computers to my collection – the Tecra and the, erm, box of components.

In Defence of Music Piracy

I recently read this article from Slashdot and here’s my response.

In the American climate of vicious litigation I almost feel sorry for the RIAA. Big companies and trade groups such as the RIAA and the MPAA are bound to sue, regardless of the country they happen to be in and the situation in which their victim allegedly offended, to inspire fear and strike terror into the hearts of those who even dare hover their mouse over a torrent link; so to be based in a country in which their victims actually fight back is really rather unfortunate. Take for example possibly the most famous case of RIAA litigation: that of Jammy Thomas who was fined $222K for sharing 24 files on Kazaa; the big trade group lost. Much of the time victims, unable to afford litigation against the giants, settle for a few thousands dollars of payment outside court, but once the case goes to court, the Goliaths are hit by a wave of bad publicity and occasionally an unsavoury verdict.

On the other hand, the RIAA still has much to gain from such cases. In the case of Jammy Thomas, a ruling in favour of the RIAA would have been disastrous for the filesharing community and a huge success for greedy bastards *ahem* the leaders of the recording industry. The fine was based on a rule invented conveniently by the antagonists in which evidence for a file actually having been shared would have been deemed unnecessary for prosecution, and proof of transaction of information would no longer have been required for file sharers to be crushed by enormous disproportionate fines. A guilty verdict on the scale of $222K would therefore have set a dangerous precedent and left the already stinking rich at even greater an advantage over the innocent music-lover who merely wants to share a fantastic song with a couple of friends. Fortunately the judge had second thoughts about this insanity before realising the illegal nature of the RIAA’s claim and changed the verdict.

My personal opinion has probably already been made quite clear, but I’d like, at risk of utilising tautology (in more than one sense), to expound further. The recording industry has always been over-enthusiastic and hyper-zealous in its war against music piracy. Many cases can be cited, including the ridiculous one brought to my attention by Slashdot in which a clip on Youtube was removed owing to a barely audible Prince soundtrack in the background. What about Dragostea din Tei or ‘Karaoke for the Blind’ to Natalie Imbruglia? Even the makers of South Park, the masters of satire and blunt political humour, picked up on this extremism when the FBI stormed Kyle’s house (or was it Stan’s?) after the kids downloaded about two songs.

A big reason why I feel the RIAA and MPAA’s efforts are ultimately in vain is the domain of such extreme punishment. The people affected by such public examples tend to be those who aren’t extremely tech-savvy and those who almost as a consequence are not as damaging to the recording industry. These are the people who have never heard of SUPER and to whom ‘DivX’ tends to mean ‘that thing that asked me 2 update 2day’ [sic]. These people use Napster and torrents using unencrypted connections and sign up to file sharing services using their real email addresses. These people don’t share files – they just download the occasional TV episode they missed because they don’t know how to stream from BBC iPlayer. And of all people in the world the RIAA and MPAA target them. The real ‘crooks’ are the ones who download and upload through proxies. These people just sit there in Germany or Japan, spitting binaries out into the sea of bits and bytes that is ‘the interweb’ at rates of 100’s of kilobytes per second through anonymising proxies. These are the hackers who use Mailinator to sign up to services, encrypt their hard drives with AES and Twofish and run Tor clients, and have computers dedicated to ripping high-quality video and audio from Blu-Ray and DVDs alike. These people are not afraid of the RIAA; they know they are anonymous and covered. And these are the very ones, if anyone, the RIAA should target.

I also feel that it’s unfair to accuse pirates of damaging the industry as much as is claimed. Mike Henley, a former member of CompSoc, pointed out something that I think makes a lot of sense. If music downloaders suddenly no longer could download it for free, I suspect many of them would just stop downloading full stop. The reason they download is more because it’s convenient than any reason concerning the price: there are simply so many good deals out there that good music is already available for decent prices. Therefore it can be deduced that they are actually not harming the industry – they aren’t reducing demand and removing themselves from the market by downloading for free since the market wouldn’t contain them in the first place.

My final reason is a technical one. The Armchair Economist points out that economc efficiency is completely unaffected by payments from one individual to another since one person’s benefit is another’s loss. Therefore downloading without paying should be identical, efficiency-wise, as buying it from the iTunes store; the difference however is that the buyer has to go through the hassle and spend time paying. This may involve typing in credit card details or typing in a password for PayPal, but whatever the case, it is undeniably true that paying is time-consuming and inconvenient, if only slightly so. This time could be otherwise used to expand the productivity of the economy – by providing a service for example. However miniscule an effect this may have, having to pay reduces the efficiency of an economy. Therefore I’d argue that downloading music for free is more economically efficient than buying it. I like the idea of basing decisions on economic efficiency, and my (probably incorrect but appealingly conclusionary) economic reasoning compels me to take the side of the pirates. This point can also be argued from a utilitarian point of view – the £10 I spend on an album is of more relative utility to me than to an already stinking rich manager. Just to clarify, I am in no way now endorsing stealing which is something entirely different: what I am talking about here is replicating electronic data and distributing it, not taking away any good from anyone else; the record company still owns the music.

Summing up, I’d just like to leave you with this last thought: if sharing 24 songs leaves a $222K sized hole in your pocket, is it really worth cutting down on the file sharing? If you’re completely screwed anyway, what’s the point of sharing 50 instead of 500 songs, or even 5000? In no way am I going to endorse illegal activities publicly, but if you are going to break the law, I’d say go for it in a really big way. Through Tor of course. (And go you)

Science and Religion Debate (St Paul’s Cathedral)

I attended the debate titled ‘The Battle for Truth? The Science-Religion Debate’ at St Paul’s Cathedral on 7 Oct 2008 and rather enjoyed my evening. The panel consisted of four high-profile guests who discussed for 90 minutes the relationship between science and religion. The speakers were (straight from the site):
- Nancy Cartwright FBA is Professor of Philosophy at the London School Economics and the University of California, San Diego. Her books include How the Laws of Physics Lie and The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science.
- Nicholas Lash was for twenty years Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. His publications include The Beginning and End of ‘Religion’ and ‘Where Does The God Delusion Come From?’
- John Milbank is Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics and Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at Nottingham University. A leading figure in the Radical Orthodoxy movement and author of the highly influential and controversial Theology and Social Theory.
- Roger Trigg is Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University. Among his many publications are Rationality and Science: Can Science Explain Everything?

I heard it mumbled near the beginning that the debate was funded by the Templeton Foundation hence I approached the entire event with a certain degree of scepticism; nevertheless, here are my thoughts on the debate. I can’t remember which panellist said what, so forgive my vagueness. I’m also fairly sleep deprived as I write this so please forgive excessively blunt and/or blatantly wrong points that my fingers might have unwisely typed.

They began with a discussion on the definition of Science, a sensible starting point I thought. Unfortunately most of the propositions for a definition didn’t work in my opinion. Someone suggested the definition of a science as a discipline in which predictions are made very precisely and empirically, to a high degree of precision. However one might consider the Quantum side of things in which according to Werner Heisenberg, it is actually a law of nature that velocity and position of a particle cannot both be measured exactly; all you get is a probability distribution, or the wave function. This means the prediction of where a photon will be in t seconds’ time ends up as a probability distribution rather than a coordinate, and while one can argue that this model does make very precise predictions – things like the shapes of interference patterns can be calculated exactly, the whole idea of discoveries in Physics actually proving it impossible to give precise predictions is unsatisfactory given the very criterion of precise predictions. Another idea put forward was that of falsifyability – the definition of a science is one which yields falsifyable results. This definition was less usable – my view on this is that theories in experimental sciences are only as good as the data. Newton had a good theory which was blown out of the window by the arrival of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The famous constant (whose name I have forgotten) whose value has changed continually over the years through changes in calculations using Feynman’s Sum over Histories approach is key to what I think is a closer definition of an experimental science: a discipline which yields predictions based on models which are improved over time as more and better data is collected. It sounds terrible and it probably is, but it’s my best attempt at midnight.

The next thing they moved on to talking about really upset me. The panel members took it upon themselves to contemplate the limitations of the utility of science to make predictions in context of a ‘real life’ situation. One even had the cheek to argue that since experiments are often conducted in situations very different from real life (at 3 Kelvin or 500 atm for example) the results is useless. Experiments are always performed under strictly controlled conditions which are recorded along with the results of the experiment. It’s true a single one of such experiments alone are useless: the result may be spurious, and context is different from real life. So that’s why scientists take repeats, and conduct the same experiment, changing only one condition at a time, to get results which can be extrapolated, effectively a model, which can be applied to real life situations. Experiments conducted in unrealistic conditions are far from useless. And I haven’t even mentioned ‘thought experiments’ and other more exotic practicals. A panellist later questioned the logic of science, and pointed out that it is based on experiment therefore isn’t logical. As I have already argued, science is about building better and better models of reality based on data, and doing so in a highly rigorous fashion; there is nothing illogical about taking data and formulating a theory from it.

The focus then shifted to God. Dawkins argues in his book, The God Delusion, that there is no evidence for God. One of the panellists rejected this argument on the grounds that if this is taken to be true there would be no conceivable evidence which would prove the existence of God. Clearly the panellist never finished Dawkin’s book as this is covered in exquisite detail which I refuse to reproduce here owing to time pressure, sleep deprivation and copyright issues.

A panellist then quoted (I think it was a quotation at least), ‘everything is not like things’ and made a point about it which I can’t remember. The audience then posed a question about ‘militant rationalists’ and the unconditional rejection of creationism. I’d actually say there is good enough reason for anyone to believe in creationism of some form or other, particularly the computer simulation version (covered in the New Scientist in enormous detail about five years ago when I was in prep school), so I agree with the panel on this one, that the education system should remain open-minded about ‘unconventional’ ideas.

A question was then raised about the place of uncertainty in religion and science. A panellist made a case (without much explanation come to think of it) for religion bringing people more into contact with reality than avoidance thereof and quickly changed the subject to science treating all objects as ‘things’ without reverence for significance, another thing I had issues with.

The question was raised about the separation of science and religion and the effect of that on each. According to a panellist, religion and blind faith is engrained in human nature therefore should not be ignored or marginalised. Agreed: it should be incorporated into social models of irrationality.

There was then some discussion about the famous ’spooky action at a distance’ quirk with quantum entanglement being incompatible with the panellists ideas of first principles of science and the possibility that Quantum Physics has raised more mystery than solution. I’d argue that it’s experimentally well demonstrated that photons and electrons and indeed other tiny particles can act as both waves and particles, and that the theoretical Schrodinger’s cats (WordPress is not on talking terms with umlauts) would both decide their ‘death status’ at the exact same time. However uncomfortable one might be with these results, they are unfortunately reality, and Physics cannot be blamed for discovering such inconvenient truths. The same panellist also rejected relativity for its warping of time. The prediction of time warping is not intuitive, but from all the evidence we have gathered, is true (to a greater extent). String theory was also heavily criticised, and I suspect the panellist would have liked to call it ‘fantasy’ but instead opted for a more long-winded description of his grievances. This was fortunately rebutted by Nancy Cartwright who argued that the logic and maths behind string theory satisfy criteria for ‘good theology’ (yes, the panellist who had grievances is a theologian), and hinted at the presence of some hypocrisy. The response to that rebuttal was something vague about the definition of ‘truth’ and a clearly desperate argument that the uncertainty in quantum mechanics leaves space for God.

Overall, Cartwright was the panellist I thought made the most sense. Her ideas were clearly put forward and were the most ’scientific’ in my opinion. Milbank can also be accredited with the most nonsensical arguments of the day, with his accusations of Science being illogical owing to its data coming from reality and rant about science being useless because experiments are often taken out of context. I’m sure he had great points made up in his mind, but linking lack of logic to basing theories on reality confirmed my scepticism of theologians’ logical abilities.