Brian Goetz on Java

This is a really fascinating presentation by Brian Goetz about why Java is as it is, and what is planned for the future. Interesting points include that Java is much more dynamic than usually thought, and the years of effort put into getting the introduction of functional code and lambdas just right.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/java-history-present-future?utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=videos_homepage&utm_campaign=videos_row2

How the Higgs field gives particles mass - it's simple!!

There are many common explanations of how the Higgs effect gives particles mass, and virtually all of them are either misleading or wrong.

One well-known explanation likens the Higgs effect to having space like a room full of people in a party, and when a massive particle enters that space it's like a famous person - everyone clusters around that person making it hard for that famous person to cross the room, so that fame gives people a form of inertia.  This is wrong.

Other explanations imply that the Higgs effect somehow slows particles down like a marble falling through honey as against falling through air.  This is also wrong.

How the Higgs effect gives particles mass is very easy to understand, and it doesn't involve any stickiness or clustering or slowing down.

To understand we have to use Einstein's equation  e = mc² - mass is related to energy: the more energy, the more mass.

Now, imagine you have a bar magnet, one end North, the other end South.  If you allow it to move freely, it will end up aligned with the Earth's magnetic field, the stable lowest-energy state.  The bar magnet will have a mass, which will include the energy of the interaction with the Earth's magnetic field.  Now, turn the magnet 180 degrees and hold it there.  The magnet is now in a higher energy state, with its field opposite to that of the Earth's.  This higher energy means that the bar magnet will have more mass: it will weigh more and it will have more inertia and a higher (but very, very tiny) gravitation field.  Changing the energy of interaction of the bar magnet with the Earth's magnetic field changes the mass of the bar magnet.

Magnetic fields, like many other fields, are directional.  They are described by vectors.  At each point in space there is a direction to the field and a strength of the field.  But not all fields are directional.  For example, it's possible to plot out a field of temperature in any system of matter, such as the atmosphere or the oceans.  Temperature only has an intensity, not a direction (although temperature can change with direction, that change is not a property of each point; it's only meaningful over a distance).  Temperature is an example of a 'scalar' field, one which only has intensity.

The Higgs effect arises because space is filled with another scalar field - the Higgs field.  The Higgs field is like an electric or magnetic charge, but it has no direction - particles can't turn in any way like the bar magnet in the magnetic field, to reduce the interaction.  Certain particles - electrons, quarks, neutrinos - have an energy of interaction with the universal Higgs field and it's that energy that gives them mass.  It's that mass that means they have a resistance to change in velocity - inertia.

The "Higgs Boson" itself doesn't give particles mass.  It's a particle what was predicted to appear if the universal Higgs field was given a certain kind of kick.  The Large Hadron Collider succeeded in giving enough kicks of the right kind to the universal Higgs field to allow the existence of the Higgs Boson to be convincingly shown.

GamerGate 1 - Down with SJWs and that sort of thing

My twitter feed is packed with GamerGate tweets.  I'm not what some would call a 'hard core' gamer, but I have played PC games for decades and I can understand some of the issues, and being a wishy-washy liberal I can see arguments on both sides, but what I almost never see are good, evidence-based and rational arguments on both sides.  The GamerGate situation is very similar to that of Atheism+ over the past few years, and 'Social Justice Warriors' have been central to both.  GamerGate seems less one-sided than the Atheism+ situation, where (in my view) the Atheist+ers were on the wrong side, and I have criticisms of both pro- and anti-GamerGate supporters.  The next post will deal with the pro-GamerGate arguments of Christina Hoff Sommers.  This post is about the style of argument of anti-GamerGaters, particularly Anita Sarkeesian.

This tweet inspired this blog post:

Whatever side of the GamerGate you are on, I hope you agree that this kind of assertion is seriously flawed, and it illustrates one of the main problems with feminists like @femfreq (Sarkeesian) - this is a hugely question-begging claim with no supporting data supplied. There are 'if's missing here - 'if' depictions are sexist, and 'if' those depictions are harmful. Personally, I have no problem accepting that depiction of women in some games are sexist. But there is a considerable amount of evidence showing that games don't have significant influence on adult behaviour; for example the link between games and violence just isn't there. If this is the case, why should sexism in games be assumed to lead to sexist behaviour? 

So many games are set in fantasy worlds where things are bad, to give a sense of danger and excitement, not reality. Some games show women with big breasts; others show a plumber leaping tens of feet into the air.  You can't just assert that games which show a different reality can be harmful, even if that reality shows sexism, because minds are just too complex for such question-begging assertions.  Some people play games of inequality in their sexual lives, and there is no evidence that such shared fantasies do any harm at all.

I'd love to see better, evidence and thought-based campaigning for equality, not evidence-free assertions,

Sarkeesian and statistics

I have had a lot of training in statistics as part of my degrees. A tedious amount. It helped me to understand about when it is or is not valid to draw conclusions. This brings me to the subject of people like Anna Sarkeesian receiving threats of violence and death. Such threats are disgusting and must be terrifying, but what do they actually mean? What is the problem that these threats highlight? Unless some data is provided, it's just not possible to come to any general conclusions, bad though the situation is. It's not possible to say "women are hated on the internet", or "gamers are misogynistic bullies". These statements might be true, but you can't get to their truth from the receiving of threats unless some hard statistics are provided.

What the threats do show is that the Internet often allows instant access to anyone. There's no security barrier - cranks, nutjobs and bullies can walk right up to you on social media and email. But what does this mean? It means that visible people on-line get crazy and vicious people sending them crazy things. There is no doubt that this situation can make the on-line experience bad for some people, but the problem can't be said to be the nature of people on-line.

Unless you expect all of any group of a million people to be utterly sane and reasonable, then the nature of the Internet is that if you are visible you are going to come across frightening nutters. This may have no more meaning than the fact that nutters exist.

Ideas and Mother-Lodes: Should we care about holy books and doctrines?

I'm sure just about everyone knows about the Affleck vs Maher and Harris battle recently.  A particular phrase Sam Harris used stirred things up: "Islam is the mother-lode of bad ideas".  I'm not going to agree or disagree with that phrase, instead I'm putting forward the suggestion that it might be an interesting and perhaps useful strategy to sometimes leave religion out of discussions of the consequences of religion, paradoxical though this may seem.

What do we really want most of all in the world?  Peace, equality, fairness, freedom.  That's a reasonable list, I think.  Does removing religion appear in that list?  Should it?  (A believer might ask the same about removing atheism!)  If you believe that some aspects of religion get in the way of those ideals, it might seem like a good idea to attack religion, and yet religion has considerable privileges and protection within our cultures.  Religion is precious to many people, and so there is understandable defensiveness when religious beliefs are challenged.

So, how about not challenging certain religious beliefs - not by ignoring those beliefs, but by putting aside the fact that those beliefs are religious in origin?

Suppose someone says that a woman's opinion is legally worth half that of a man's opinion, and they say that it is because of religious law.   How about responding that you aren't going to talk about religious law, you are going to talk about principles of equality?  Nothing strident, simply a statement like this: "Sorry, but I'm not going to discuss supernatural beliefs".  

You see, if you allow religion to come into things, you are allowing a barrier to be put up, a source of immediate conversation-stoppers.  So:

Don't talk about Christianity, talk about science and evolution.

Don't talk about Islam, talk about the equality of women.

Don't talk about Islam, talk about the importance of legal equality for same-sex couples.

Don't talk about Christianity, talk about the importance of stem cell research.

And, controversially, don't talk about Islam being full of bad ideas, just talk about the bad ideas.  If someone wants to mention Islam.... "Sorry, but..." etc. This is absolutely not a criticism of Sam Harris - it's only a suggestion for a parallel strategy for dealing with bad ideas.  

Who knows?  By not allowing the defensiveness that can appear when religion is mentioned, we might change more minds, and if someone believes in evolution and yet thinks they are still a Biblical literalist, do we care?

Evidence for belief

I'm sure you have come across the insistence that religious people don't have evidence for their beliefs; that their beliefs are faith-based.

I don't think that is generally correct, or at least it's useful to consider that it might not be.  Speaking from personal experience and from what others have said, it seems to me that quite a lot of believers think that they are rather good evidence for what they believe.  Here are some examples:

1. The Bible.  The Bible is a book that has been carefully handed down through the millennia, and considered an highly important (to say the least) source of facts about reality and moral guidelines.  That this book remains highly regarded by many is evidence for something, and for believers it can be evidence of it being a source of truth, at least in parts.

2. The universe is here.  When I was a believer the existence of creation seemed to be good evidence for some creative force, which I considered to be "God", although in a mostly deistic sense.

3. Our moral feelings.  Where does our desire for goodness come from?  Clearly, from the goodness of some creator.  The existence of these feelings must mean something, and that something could well be "God".

4. Reports of miracles.  There are plenty of these reports.  How do we explain them?  It makes sense to invoke a deity.

Now, I hope I don't need to make it clear that I don't agree with any of the above examples.  But, what I disagree with is the reliability of this evidence as indicators of religious truths.   But, I can't deny that these are evidence - just not for the beliefs of believers.

As for faith, I had none and I didn't know anyone who considered their beliefs as faith.  Our beliefs were based on what we saw of the universe around us and what it felt like to be a human.  We didn't struggle to believe, there wasn't a daily battle with the dark forces of reason.

On-line threats and harassment are terrible, but are they representative?

On-line bullying and harassment are are serious problem.  It can make being on-line a difficult experience for some people, and this has been the case recently for women involved in gaming.  The same goes for threats via e-mail:  shocking and totally unacceptable.

I'm not questioning at all how awful these attacks are, but what I am questioning is what these attacks mean.

Let's consider someone who has made what turns out to be a controversial statement, a statement which, in a better world, would not be controversial.  They then get some frightening threats by e-mail.  Do these threats mean that this person is being attacked by some community?  That depends.  It depends if these threats are a significant proportion of that community.

Let's say there are ten threats.  They are terrible threats, perhaps even threats that require that the police get involved.  If those ten threats come from members of a group of a few hundred members, then it's safe to say that those threats are a significant part of that group, and it's certainly something that group needs to deal with.

But what if the group consists of a thousand members?  Ten thousand?  A hundred thousand?

There has to be a number at which the responsibility of the whole group for the actions of ten of its members is insignificant.  At that number it makes no sense to describe the actions of those ten as being truly representative of that group.

Let's give a name to the group - how about 'flamers?'

Someone makes a statement, and gets disgusting and frightening attacks from 10 flamers.  Surveys shown that there are 200,000 flamers.  

How should we respond to that someone saying "I am being attacked by the flamer community?", or "the flamer community needs to deal with their hateful members?", "there is a serious problem with on-line flamers?"

Let me be clear.  I am certainly not saying we should in any way dismiss the frightening experience of being attacked on-line, and I am not in any way excusing the attackers. What I am saying is that it's simply a mistake to use the existence of those attackers to come to conclusions about a whole community.  It's factually incorrect.

Just because someone has been the victim of harassment, we should not accept incorrect conclusions from them about tens or hundreds of thousands of people.  For one thing, we could end up dealing with problems that don't really exist as against dealing with real and serious problems of abuse and bullying.

The Internet is a Superconductor of Stupidity.  The mad and the bad get instant and easy access to those they want to attack on-line.  That access can make their voices seem loud, but we should also listen to the peaceful silence of the majority, and that means we need to realise how big that silence is, how many are peaceful.