John Lindal’s Blog

The Arrow of Time

I just read an article about the Arrow of Time. The foundation of the author’s discussion was entropy and the observation that it always increases. From a macroscopic perspective, this is reasonable, but it seems to me that there is an even deeper argument. If I understand the Free Will Theorem correctly (always iffy for deep stuff like that), then, assuming humans have free will, the result of measuring properties at the quantum level cannot be known ahead of time. I believe Conway stated that the result doesn’t exist until the experiment is performed. I can’t conceive of anything more unidirectional than that. There is just no going backwards.

Note that the Free Will Theorem directly contradicts the article’s claim that knowing the exact state of the universe allows you to compute the future.

The Matrix

Why is it that people so dislike the sequels to The Matrix? Is it just because they contained so much more dialogue? Or is it that the battle against the system, so passionate in the first movie, was tempered by the realization that even resistance is just another cog in the system?

New MacBook Pro

This is my first blog post from my brand new, shiny unibody MacBook Pro. I like the no-hook lid. I love the trackpad without any buttons. When I was born, the mouse had barely been invented, and now my daughter isn’t yet five years old, and she’s already growing up in a world where the mouse is obsolete.

Update (2/21/10): Trackpads with separate buttons now feel really strange. And I love how far back the display tilts — much further than any other laptop I’ve ever used, and so much more comfortable!

The Future of UI is not boring

Scott Berkun’s tangent off John Gruber’s wistful piece about the Apple Newton is flat out wrong. The future of UI is here already, and it is anything but boring. 10/GUI was announced several months ago, and SixthSense has been under development for a while. Both have the potential to revolutionize how we use computing power. The former replaces the ubiquitous desktop mouse, while the latter makes the iPhone seem antiquated and clunky. While neither will be available by Christmas 2010, gestures are invading our computing experience. Apple continues to execute on its long-term plan by introducing more and more gesture recognition in every new model of laptop and mouse. Designers who are not already thinking about how to effectively use the expressive power of systems like 10/GUI and SixthSense will probably find themselves out of work by 2020.

Humility

I recently read The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief because it was recommended to me by a retired pastor who is a friend of my wife. Now I recommend it, too. The science is clearly presented, and the arguments for the existence of God are worth considering.

When I went to find the book on Amazon, I discovered that there is a whole cottage industry based on writing books like this. I was a bit surprised, but I really shouldn’t be. People on both sides of the debate never cease to propound their opposing views. Why shouldn’t there be a group who tries to bridge the chasm?

The sad part is that all three groups mostly get it wrong. Regardless of the point of view — be it bible only, bible+science, or science only — they almost always fall into the trap of thinking that they actually know how the universe really works.

The fact is, we don’t.

We cannot prove that God exists. If He does not exist, we are left wondering how the universe came to exist and what our purpose is, if any. If He does exist, we are left wondering how He came to exist and, if you accept the Bible, why He behaves the way He does.

It is quite humbling to admit that we just don’t know what is really going on. It is also scary, however, which is probably why most people cling desperately to one viewpoint or another. (This applies to all religions, not just Christianity.)

However, if people would accept this dose of humility, then I think we would all find it much easier to get along.

Faith

I’ve been struggling with my belief in God for the last several weeks, ever since finding Douglas Adams’ speech at Digital Biota 2. Basically, he claimed that God is a fiction that makes it easier for us to get on with our lives. If you have ever witnessed the dramatic personality changes caused by psychoactive drugs, e.g., antidepressants like Prozac, you will know how much of what a person considers to be me is actually governed by brain chemistry, not something supernatural like a soul.

Adams also brought up the issue that after we evolved to survive on this planet, we fell into the trap of thinking that the environment was designed to fit us, instead of the other way around. This was reinforced when I discovered this blog post about the purposelessness of evolution. This isn’t news to me. Intelligent Design is nonsense. Nature is neither efficient nor kind — though I can’t call it cruel either, since that would anthropomorphize it by implying that it had a concept of morality. It’s safest to say that Nature is blindly hostile. Life is an endless struggle against entropy.

If the existence of carnivores isn’t sufficient, consider the arms race in a species of beetles recently reported in Science News: a male essentially uses a spiked club to fertilize females and tear them up so they cannot mate again. This gives his genes a higher probability of continuing to the next generation. Under these conditions, females with extra tough armor have a survival advantage: they are less likely to die from coitus. When females get tougher, then only extra spiky males have an advantage. This never-ending escalation is clearly horribly painful and very inefficient!

This is tough for me, because as a scientist, I can’t simply accept the Bible on faith. Anybody can write a book and build a religion around it — just look at Scientology. So can I believe in God when there is such overwhelming evidence for the Big Bang and blind evolution? (Claiming that God is the creator of everything just pushes the question back a step. Where did He come from?) Can I believe in a loving God when nature is hostile? Can I believe in the existence of God when brain chemistry is the simplest explanation for religious experiences?

While driving home from work a couple of days ago, it struck me that even if God doesn’t exist, the fundamental advice in the New Testament is still valid. (Our pastor’s sermon on Sunday solidified this.) The human experience clearly indicates that we face a paradox: what we instinctively want is not what is really good for us.

• Self-reliance isn’t psychologically healthy. We need deep, stable relationships.
• Money, power, fame are hollow. They are just as addictive and destructive as heroin. Instead of fulfilling you, they leave you hungry for more. We need food, shelter, and recognition in moderation.
• Sex for gratification is just as hollow as money, power, and fame, and it spreads diseases. Faithfulness within a healthy marriage deepens the bond by building trust.
• Revenge may succeed, but it is guaranteed to destroy us. We need to forgive others, for our own sanity. We also need to be forgiven, or at least forgive ourselves, since guilt is crippling, too.

The Bible’s shortest summary of this is two rules (Luke 10:27):

1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.
   Translation: Don’t worship money, power, fame, sex, self-reliance, revenge, or any of your other instincts. They are all traps. Instead, focus on love, mercy, justice, etc.
2. Love your neighbor as yourself.
   Translation: Treat others as you wish to be treated. Don’t murder, steal, lie, abuse, insult, etc. You don’t like it, and neither does anybody else. Instead, help others when they are in trouble, just as you would like to be helped when you have problems.

The longer summary is the Ten Commandments. Using the Talmudic method of counting, the first four are consequences of #1 above, and the rest are consequences of #2.

This, of course, doesn’t prove that God exists. It could be that some really smart psychologists wrote the Bible to tell us what we ought to do — essentially what Adams claimed — and that the Good News about forgiveness of sin was invented because (1) it’s obvious how bad we are at doing what we ought to do and (2) as noted above, we need forgiveness to avoid being crippled by guilt. But if He does exist, then it’s clear that He’s for us, not against us.

So I can’t prove that God exists. But neither can I prove that God does not exist. Thus, if I spend all my time wondering whether or not He exists, I’m wasting my life grappling with an axiom. This is analogous to parallel lines in geometry. If you decide they never cross, you get Euclidean geometry. If you prefer that they can cross, you get some variant of non-Euclidean geometry.

If I choose to believe in a loving God, how does this fit with blind evolution and hostile nature? Evidence suggesting the existence of free will is mounting. Conway and Koshen recently proved the Free Will Theorem, which states that if people are free to make choices, then elementary particles also make choices that do not depend on anything in the past. Again, it is impossible to prove, but Conway strongly believes that we do have free will, which would imply that the universe is fundamentally unconstrained. In this situation, a loving God couldn’t do better than help us go in the right direction. Otherwise, we would end up as enslaved puppets.

Of course, free will might not exist, in which case we are puppets. Though it may sound paradoxical, I choose not to believe this.

Moreover, I choose to believe that God does exist. Why? As discussed above, the advice attributed to Him in the New Testament is sound, and He offers to forgive and lift the burden of guilt for those who honestly want to change. I want Him to exist. The alternative is terrifying.

Erlang Message Passing

I’ve only just started learning Erlang, so I certainly don’t know all the tricks, but when I found a blog post claiming that message passing between actors made deadlock less likely, it got me thinking. A classic deadlock occurs when A and B both want to aquire locks X and Y, and A gets X while B gets Y. In Erlang, it seems that the equivalent can happen if A is waiting for a message from B while B is simultaneously waiting for a message from A. Message passing is neat, but concurrency is still just plain hard

On the subject of message passing, I’ve noticed several libraries for implementing message passing in Java, but they all seem overly complex. A simple base class which manages a message queue for each actor should be sufficient. The only public API is the function to send a message and functions for telling actors about one another. All derived class functions should be private, protected, or at worst package-public.

Of course, you also need some discipline. The messages must be send-and-forget. Once a message has been sent, the sender should discard all references to it and everything inside it. Otherwise, you are back to standard shared objects which require locking.

This produces a system where all state is stored in messages. State can only be modified by the single actor which has a reference to it. I doubt if everything can be implemented this way, but it is a good exercise to try!

I’ve posted the code on github

Sleeping Beauty

Our daughter loved the Princess Fantasy Faire at Disneyland. The show included a knight who spoke of the Shield of Virtue and the Sword of Truth, references to the shield and sword in Sleeping Beauty. It sounded rather corny the way it was presented, but it got me thinking. Pop culture has long since discarded them, but Virtue really is a shield against many forms of Evil, and Truth really is a sword that cuts through an awful lot of nonsense, including pop culture!

Disney Magic

I enjoyed Disneyland as a kid. But I never truly understood Disney Magic until yesterday, when we took our 3½ year old daughter on her first trip to Disneyland. Her reactions to meeting Mickey Mouse (her primary goal, and clearly a transcendent experience), riding It’s a Small World, watching the parade and seeing Goofy (her secondary goal), riding the train and riverboat, etc. were priceless. And so not only did my wife and I not grumble at all about the ticket price, but we are also going to use Disney’s custom photobook system for this trip instead of Shutterfly. That’s the real Disney Magic: making parents happy to spend money!

Update (1/9/2008): The Disney photobook site does not appear to work.

Rhyming

I found myself thinking about Disney’s clip show House of Mouse this morning. We saw the same show in Norway, dubbed with the title Muse Hus, which when pronounced correctly (moo-se hoos), still rhymes. At first, I thought it was simply clever that Disney managed to make the translation rhyme. But this morning, I realized that it could also rhyme in German: Maus Haus. And in Danish. And in Swedish. I don’t know the underlying cause, but it seems too far fetched to claim that it is pure coincidence that all these languages, which have been diverging for hundreds of years, would maintain such a strong connection between the two words!