Cause and effect?
I’ve been doing some reading lately and a topic that has come up more than once is that of false causalities. It seems to be human nature to construct causalities that fit our worldview when in fact the only thing that can be objectively demonstrated is co-variation. We can see this when it comes to non-heterosexuality and the relative occurrence of mental health problems. Some people seems to have their interpretation of the fact that some surveys find depression to be more common among non-heterosexuals than in the general population as a direct cause and effect relation. You’re depressed because being gay makes you so! Well, I’m not sure about that, in fact I’m sort of convinced that is not the case. But how do you illustrate that interpreting co-variance as cause and effect is often problematic? With colorful diagrams of course!
Alexander sent me a link to this wonderful piece of graphics, from climate sceptic:
In the comments I found the only relevant question to ask: should we struggle to produce more oil, so the quality of the music will increase, or should we attempt to draft better composers and musicians into rock ‘n’ roll, so we can have more oil? I’m so confused! At least it made me smile.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (2)Falling through the sky
The reason that I haven’t written here in a while is that I have been busy having my 30th birthday, with associated celebrations. It has been great fun. Thanks to my amazingly thoughtful fiance Alexander I got a gift certificate for a tandem skydive that I had the great pleasure to redeem today. What a rush! Thanks to a whole bunch of friends I got a photograph joining me in the jump as well. Skydiving makes even a geek like me feel like a rock star. Amazing. I got a whole album of pictures.
I predict McCain
I’ve been following the US presidential election closely for more than half a year now, and when I got the message that Obama chooses Joe Biden as his vice president I changed my mind about who I think is going to win this election. My adjusted prediction is that John McCain is going to win.
I think that he can snatch a close victory in november because now Obama has basically invalidated his own best arguments. The Obama campaign likes to paint the picture of McCain as problematically old and part of the washington establishment, but now they have proven that being old and part of the establishment is not a problem when choosing a vice president candidate.
Also, I don’t think that you should underestimate Obama’s consistent opposition against the war in Iraq as giving him the edge that he needed to defeat Hillary in the primaries. Now that he has chosen a running mate that voted yes to the war, that argument is weakened as well.
Part of me thinks that this is kind of sad. I really liked the idea of an american president that was a brilliant public speaker. I also think that Obama is the smarter guy and being intelligent is one of the most important assets a president can have. On the other hand, with McCain we get a president that is pro free trade, which is a really good thing, especially for those of us living in Europe.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Programming for fun and profit
I work as a programmer. Most days it is great, because I get to spend my days writing software and even get payed to do it. However, when writing commercial software unfortunately the most elegant solution to a particular problem is rarely the one that is reasonable to spend time on. Almost all the time, “good enough” is the goal.
As an example, a new functionality that we have just added to voxbiblia.com, the website i spend most of my days working on is the ability to create albums out of the audio Bibles available from our site. An album is a collection of Bible verses read by one of our voices. From a more technical perspective a collection is a group of MP3 audio files. We want those MP3 files to be easy to download and once downloaded we want them to have metadata that makes them show up in your MP3 player. Do achieve this we want to be able to generate metadata information on the fly and we also want to put a whole lot of MP3 files with metadata into a zipfile so that i can be available as one download. We have code to to all this (The ID3 metadata generator will be released as Free Software some day, I promise) and it works as expected but one aspect of the zipfile generation code is not elegant as I would want it to be.
The current solution needs to read each MP3 file into memory to be able to calculate it’s CRC-32 checksum before it can write it to the zip datastream served to the user. Since our server is quite powerful it is not a problem to read a few MP3 files into memory at the same time, but the thought that it must be a more elegant and efficient way of doing it was spinning around in my head. Since there is absolutely no justification for finding this solution, the one we had was good enough, I had to put this problem on the shelf for some time.
However, vacation came and when I thought about what to do that would be really fun and recreational I thought about this problem and I decided to try to solve it. So I did, and it was great fun. I will blog about the specifics of this little project in a short while, but for now I’m just so glad that I solved the problem.
Free advice to big media
I bet that one or two executives in the film industry is wondering what they can do to have people buy their product instead of just downloading the content from elsewhere. I have a humble suggestion: produce and sell something that is better or at least equal in quality to what can be downloaded almost for free.
One of the more absurd examples of this is the current high definition movie offering to people using Macs. I have a MacBook Pro which is fast and has a large screen and no trouble displaying HD content, as can be shown for example when watching movie trailers. Yet there is no way that I can get my hands on full length movies in HD format in any way blessed by the movie industry. There are no Blu-Ray players for Macs, and iTunes movie store has not yet opened here in Sweden. A quick visit to the bay however, shows quite a large supply of High definition movies, delivered without any limitations and easily playable on my mac with VLC.
In short, the choice consumers have is to play by the media companies’ rules, and get mediocre quality DVD movies or download via BitTorrent and get movies in the best quality that their computer can support. With a choice like that, it is no wonder the movie produces get in trouble.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Different types of recreation
There are lots of different types of recreation that crops up when the tempo slows down in vacation times. I try to blog, write a bit of software, and my dear partner Alex has taken up crocheting. Yesterday I had a bit of trouble finding my laptop, buried in a pile of breathtakingly beautiful naturally dyed yarn. You could have worse problems.
Can you spot the laptop?
ps. If you are interested in yarn, knitting and such stuff you should definitely check out my friend Linster’s blog Yarnlove
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments (2)The definition of irony
It turns out that the very definition of irony is placed just outside my office window. It has been there for quite some time, including when we had our most intense rain storm this year.
The text reads “NOTE: The goods must be stored on a level surface in a dry place protected from rain”.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)A day with the kids
Today Alex went with some friends to an auction on the country side, so I had a quiet day with the kids at home. When Alex is away I sometimes take the opportunity to cook food that he doesn’t like. So I made liver stew. It went a fair bit better than last time, when the stew was more like soup.
I also used the day to dive deep into a geeky computer project while the kids were playing. More about the specifics of that in a separate post, but the end is that you now can access this web server via an encrypted connection via https://noa.resare.com as well as the usual way.
I also managed to watch two pilot episodes of new TV shows. I really liked the first one, The Mentalist and the second one – Flashpoint – was kind of ok, but something I think I will follow.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Ah, the joys of new gadgetry
So today was iPhone 3G day. Telia, network operator with an exclusive deal with Apple here in Sweden, has worked hard to hype the release day. There were three stores in sweden that held special midnight events, however there is about 1000km to the closest one in Stockholm, so I had to wait until the morning to get a chance to buy.
This was my first time in a release day line, and I didn’t really know what to expect. I went in line about 2 hours before the store was to open, and there were about 25 people before in line before me. It was cold, somewhat rainy and a bit slow but with some really interesting podcasts from This American Life in my iPod it was nice anyway. I had my alpaca sweater on and my timing couldn’t have been better, when I finally got into the store I got the second last black 16gig iPod in the store.
So, now I’m a proud owner of a really neat phone.
Is web standards compliance finally catching on?
I was surprised today to see a W3C Valid XHTML icon today at the bottom of www.svd.se, the webpage of one of the largest daily newspapers here in Sweden. I have always thought that being compliant with the various HTML and related standards was something that only geeks paid attention to, and that major mainstream web pages would always use as ugly HTML code as they got away with with decent rendering on a few tested browsers. It’s always nice to be positively surprised.
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