Omega Point

Has Russia, in any of her historic guises, ever invaded a neighbouring state, won, and then withdrawn?

I see.

Just recently, I was lamenting the fact that there are likely orders of magnitude more people who understand the “turn it off and then on again” method of troubleshooting than the scientific method.

To back up my theory, this month’s Wired Magazine sees editor Chris Anderson confidently stroll into Crazyland with his essay The End of Theory, asserting that the age of the scientific method is over, replacing hypothesis and testing with statistical number-crunching of massive databases.

Needless to say, there exist a variety of reactions to this idea, most of which can be summarized by “Wait, what now?”

The Daily Galaxy’s critique of Anderson’s article was particularly effective, pointing out that recognition of correlation is not the goal of science; rather, it provides a starting point for science to begin from:

Noticing a correlation between factors is the START of science, not the end.  When you see that two things affect each other and ask “Why?”, you’re a scientist.  When you just record a million trials you’re an accountant.  When you say “It happens because that’s the way things are” you’re either a mother answering a five-year-old’s fortieth question in a row, or uninterested, or possibly religious.

The “you are not qualified to make this assertion” style of criticism tends to bug me, but in this case, it seems particularly accurate:

This combines with his second error: Belief that the Internet is the entire world.  This is an easy mistake for somebody like a Wired editor to make, but the fact remains that if you walked down a street shouting “LOLCAT” most people wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about.  This is important.  In fact, a species where everybody knows about LOLCATS is one whose viability needs severe re-evaluation.

After a couple months of fighting to retrieve data from my ISP, arguing about whether or not I had the right to transfer the LSLwiki.com domain name — and finally buying a new one — followed by a couple days’ worth of messing about with MySQL, I’m pleased to say the LSL Wiki has returned, in editable, “current” form. Your old logins and passwords work.

Everything is the way it was at the moment the wiki went down. Nothing’s changed, we just wanted to get an editable wiki back up, but we have some fixes and addons to be rolled out over the next couple of weeks.

One catch though: this time, it’s at LSLwiki.net. I’ve put up redirects at the old site at LSLwiki.com, but it remains to be seen whether or not I’ll ever be able to recover that domain and put it to more useful… use.

This announcement comes right on the heels of Milo Linden’s “ohhh yeahhhh…” forum post:

Currently on the aditi beta grid.

llSetLinkTexture(integer link_pos, string texture, integer face)
Sets the texture of face for link_pos

llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(integer linknumber, list rules)
Set primitive parameters for linknumber based on rules.

Yes! It’s about time! (By which I mean, “thank you for the continued steady fulfillment of the userbase’s most desired wishes, Linden Lab.”) These are two of the biggest “missing functions” in LSL. With their addition, scripters can update all prims in an object with one script instead of a hundred or more.

Now, let’s get to work updating this thing!

I thought this was kind of interesting: “RCMP Spied on Tommy Douglas“. I don’t just mean the culture of J. Edgar Hoover-esque agency creepiness that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the RCMP Security Service and the subsequent creation of CSIS, Canada’s modern intelligence agency. (For those of you outside Canada, CSIS is known for such classy operations as helping to form the white nationalist Heritage Front and participating in the USAUK ECHELON program. Nicely done, guys.)

No, what I actually found interesting was that I’d never made the connection that Donald Sutherland was Tommy Douglas‘ son-in-law. I knew who they both were individually, and I knew Donald was father of Kiefer, but I never actually associated the two.

When I mentioned this bit of trivia to a friend, he didn’t seem to understand why I was telling him this. Why was this fact important? At first, I couldn’t tell whether he meant its importance in the article or in our conversation, but that got me thinking — did it actually matter which he actually meant? Why would someone consider that sort of trivia important? Moreover, if it’s not, why did the CBC see fit to include it?

Upon a little consideration, this is easy. To be fair, nobody knows who Tommy Douglas was. However, several million people watch 24. By associating “Tommy Douglas”, a relatively unpopular brand, however important a figure he may have been, with a highly popular, well-known brand like “Kiefer Sutherland”, the article’s details are reframed for a broader audience.

The audience, seeing the man’s grandson hacksaw off terrorists’ heads every week, have formed an emotional familiarity with him. Seeing the vast number of people: A) who try to kill him, B) who he kills, and C) who he chooses not to kill — in a single day — causes us to become interested in his day. For those of us who choose let him into our homes, he’s very much a part of our lives.

So, when we see this story — police pursue popular populist — placed in pop-cultural context for us, what do we come away with? “Hey, the Mounties spied on Jack Bauer’s grandpa! What the hell?“

Predictably, Ze Frank already spent time thinking about this stuff… presumably so I didn’t have to.

(Original link via Rob Cottingham)

This may be the least effective use of an interactive map infographic ever. It attempts to present information on an important subject, but it’s very difficult to take in due to poor UI and ineffective use of the map itself.

Why on earth does this tool use the same icon for identifying a target country as the button you click on to determine information about the top 10 countries with female political leadership and so on?

If I click on a country name, shouldn’t I be able to see it highlighted? Doesn’t it make sense to see how regions are ranked? I realize this isn’t a university mapping textbook, but honestly now.

When comparing regions, static maps can be far, far more compelling and contain much more relevant information. Cases in point. Bad CBC!