Gosh darnit, I keep finding out things about the upcoming season of Buffy that I don't want to know.
Wooo hoo! $font-size: 15pt$*Beer!!*$ $font-size: 15pt$*Canada!!*$.
PHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!! <-- blow horn
From Annette: ICANN Announcement: Steps to Improve Whois Data Accuracy:
Marina del Rey, California USA (3 September 2002) - ICANN today announced additional steps to improve the accuracy of the "Whois" data that ICANN-accredited registrars have agreed, in their contracts with ICANN, to publish about the domain names they register. The additional steps consist of (a) improved facilities for receiving and handling reports from the public about incomplete or inaccurate Whois data and (b) commencement of formal contract-enforcement steps against one large registrar (Network Solutions/VeriSign) based on a broad, longstanding pattern it has exhibited of failing to abide by its agreement to provide complete Whois data, and to take steps to correct reported inaccuracies in that data.
Under its registrar accreditation agreement, VeriSign Registrar has fifteen working days to cure the breaches described in the formal notice. ICANN hopes that the inaccuracies will be cured in that period and that VeriSign Registrar will become more responsive to future reports of inaccuracies. If the breaches are not cured in that period, then ICANN may give notice of termination of the accreditation agreement, after which VeriSign Registrar may initiate arbitration to determine the appropriateness of termination.
Wow.
lemonodor:
Unfortunately, the referer header seems to be becoming less useful by the day. There is a trend for RSS readers and aggregator applications to use the application's homepage as the referer url. ... The user-agent header is right there for the very purpose of expressing information about the program fetching the url.
Exactly, which is why I simply use the user-agent field to identify my aggregator, and have resisted the temptation to fake the referer field.
Kuro5hin: Quantum physics and free will.
Philosophers, ever in the habit of asking difficult questions, have come up with a number of possible scenarios describing humans, our relationship to time, and how this affects the concept of free will. The most difficult of these situations to address logically, without resorting to metaphysical premises, is that of determinism.
This author is very confused. I couldn't believe what I was reading as I read it.
First, this guy is clearly not a philosopher, yet he's discussing philosophy, and it's embarrassing. He wants to discuss free will "without resorting to metaphysical premises". Sorry, the assumptions that the universe displays determinism, that our senses can come in contact with it, and that we're rational beings and can understand what we observe are all metaphysical premises. Furthermore, the rationality he assumes in his readers while making his argument itself presupposes that his readers have free will. It's like he's debating whether air exists all the while he's talking.
His argument is basically this:
- The universe is deterministic. If we knew everything about the universe we could predict the location of every particle at any point in the future.
- Thus, since man (including our brains) is made up of matter (particles), man is also subject to this determinism, therefore free will seems to be an illusion.
- However, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that we can't know both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time with arbitrary precision. Furthermore, Schrodinger's Equation tells us that we can describe a particle as a wave-function, and "the wavefunction is the set of probabilities of the particle occupying any particular point in space, with any particular momentum".
- This means that "the position and momentum values of a particle are indeterminate", and therefore "particle interactions must necessarily be statistical in nature--not deterministic".
- But on a large scale these things add up to be deterministic, so our brains and thoughts are still deterministic.
Then he states that the probability of our existence, and that of the Milky Way, etc. was about nil after the big bang. So this means that while "determinism holds some truth, it is essentially a vast exaggeration of the actual situation", and it may be possible to formulate an argument for free will based on chaos theory.
Wow. This is so awful, I'm not totally sure where to start.
First, Heisenberg's principle doesn't mean that things in the universe are "indeterminate" using the word to mean "random" somehow. All it says is that we can't measure both the position and momentum of a small particle accurately simply because our measurements themselves affect the momentum and position of a particle. And just because it's a useful abstraction to deal with a particle as a wave function, that doesn't mean that somehow the particle exists at all points in the wave function at once. This is just an abstraction. A particle doesn't somehow "decay" into a particular position once we measure it, whereas somehow before we measured it it was "everywhere at once".
Next, chaos theory is the same type of thing. Chaos theory states that in some cases, given certain inputs, it is hard to predict the outcome of some series of events. Not that the events are somehow random - but that the underlying system is such that a small change in inputs can potentially cause a large change in outputs. That's why it's hard to actually make predictions about a chaotic system, but chaotic systems are deterministic, not random.
He also never defines how "statistical" is different than "deterministic" and why that's important to his argument.
The author wants to bring in some more randomness with "the spontaneous and random generation of virtual particle pairings". "This alone," he writes, "as a random occurrence, automatically refutes the possibility of the universe as deterministic; but it's merely one symptom of a larger system where randomness and indeterminacy are fundamental principles." So which is it, is the universe random or deterministic? I love how people think that somehow bringing in randomness to their universe saves free will. Both randomness and determinism destroy the possibility of free will. Furthermore, I get annoyed at the scientific arrogance of people who say things like "the particle exists in two places at once", and that particles are "spontaneously created and destroyed". They make claims about the causal nature of particles that they can't substantiate unless they know everything. How do they know that it's not moving so fast that it just appears to be in two places at once? It shows a lot more humility to say things like "it looks like" rather than "it is", especially when you're making such outlandish claims about the nature of reality such as that something can exist at two places at once.
I don't know why people continue to think that somehow the principles of quantum mechanics make room for free will. Many people confuse our own abstractions as if they say actual things about reality, and I've shown how the author did that with Heisenberg's principle, chaos theory, and for quantum mechanics in general.
Finally, it's funny when people think they're talking about science (without making metaphysical claims) when in fact most of what they do is make metaphysical claims about reality.
Tuesday, September 3, 2002
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