Sociology Memo: Intelligent Design vs. Evolution in Schools

This is a memo I wrote for class a few months back, going to be posting a bunch now. The question here was "Should Intelligent Design be taught in public schools?"

----

There are three main arguments against the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools that I will consider: the first is one of purpose, the second is one of practicality, the third is one of merit. On purpose, the purpose of a public education in science is, as the nay-author says, "to expose students to the best possible scholarship in each field of science." Chemistry does not teach Alchemy alongside the standard model, Astronomy does not teach palm reading or divination alongside the standard model, Mechanical Physics, while technically wrong (as superior models exist), does teach the math that got us to the moon, not simply "intuitions" about distance or the idea that the sun revolves around the Earth. Thus it should not be the purpose of a biology class to teach vitalism, a long-dead theory, nor the idea of Intelligent Design, which while not yet quite dead in the eyes of the public is certainly dead to most of science. I am open to the possibility of teaching Intelligent Design in an alternate course, but I disapprove of labeling it science and once you have a class allowing it the door opens to the practicality argument.

See Full Post and Comments

Tao Te Ching Reflections, 26 through 46

26

The heavy is the root of the light.
The unmoved is the source of all movement.

Thus the Master travels all day
without leaving home.
However splendid the views,
she stays serenely in herself.

See Full Post and Comments

Getters (Accessors) and Setters (Mutators) Are Evil

They are a plague upon Object Oriented Programming everywhere! They are concepts from a less civilized age.

Before I continue, let's make sure we're talking about the same things. This is a getter:

class Foo:

  ...

  def getX(self):

    return self.x

See Full Post and Comments

Humanity's Progress, Niceness

Humans are social creatures, and being social creatures it makes sense that we have innate altruistic desires. (See The Moral Animal for an awesome introduction to Evolutionary Psychology.) It further makes sense that in order to have significant progress as a species, most of the members also need to progress.

Suppose that a hermit, thousands of years ago, mysteriously discovered the secret of flight and hid it from the world, being a selfish prick. And then he died. And no one cares about or remembers him. Now we uncover his remains, see what he did. What's the first thought? "Wow, what a prick." In the end, keeping his knowledge of flight did not deter humanity from progressing, but it sure would have been nice to have had that so early in our history.

I think one of the reasons people advocate altruism is to at the same time advocate against assholes. Pointing out that thinking someone an asshole is subjective doesn't change the matter of a person being an asshole, and if a huge number of people are in agreement over someone's status as an asshole, then that person probably is an asshole.

See Full Post and Comments

A brief foray into determinism

A deterministic system is one where some piece of information determines another. This is most commonly the case in Math and input-less programming:

def f(x):

  return x * x

or
[math]y = f(x) = x^2[/math]

In this example, the result of the function, y, is determined by x. If you know the value of x, you immediately know the value of y. Is the reverse true, however? If you know y, you only know the absolute value of x. x itself could be positive or negative. However, x is still determined from y: x can't be anything. y is determined by x: if you stick in the same x, over and over again, the same y will still pop out. Two possible values of x are determined by y: if you stick in the same y, over and over again, the same two possibilities will pop out.

See Full Post and Comments

Dumb Hack: cycle desktop background in gnome

Cool little feature I wanted but didn't immediately find a solution to (it took a little googling), my Linux desktop background wallpaper now changes and cycles over random images in a specified directory. I also made a few-lines Python script to replicate the functionality of the show desktop button in Gnome's gnome-panel.

It's not very feature-complete, but it does what I wanted. For the code and further instructions, check out my repo for it.

And why all the boldness? Stupid SEO that might help someone find this.

See Full Post and Comments

Some problems with C and C++

First off, let me list the two things I love about both C and C++.

1. They're freaking fast
2. You can muck with logical memory directly

If it weren't for these two features, I'm certain the languages would have died long ago.

To get my bias out of the way, I'm a Pythonista at heart, though I have experienced Lisp in all its glory and love it (closures for the win), as well as seen the Perl side and mostly enjoyed it.

Anyway, I think most of my problems in C and C++ can be generalized to their obsession with imperative style programming and static types (and can be generalized further with their lack of abstraction). If you're a die-hard C/C++ fan, you're probably already hating me for spitting on your language, and a typical reply I've heard when I say language X can do something C can't, is that "Wrong, C can do anything."

See Full Post and Comments

Older Posts Newer Posts