The quote¹ actually says

science != consensus politics == consensus science == ∃ X such that ((X == investigator) && (X == “correct”); where (”correct” == “results are verifiable in reference to the real world”))

The problem is that skepticism does not reign throughout much of science. Rather, dogmatism reigns. Anyone who dissents is silenced. If the environment we have today existed, Einstein would not have been able to publish, he upset too many careers. But back then the science journals were not as tightly controlled as they are now, and it was more possible then for a radical idea to get published.

It is then asked, “what does it mean to say in reference to the real world.”² A valid question. What is meant here is that results have to bear out, taking relativity for an example again, we can see that the data fits better than Newtonian physics. However, Global Warming doesn’t account for a great deal of the data out there. Relativity fits the real world. Global warming is questionable at best.

“The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” - Michael Crichton¹

On a nearly random side note, metacity’s default keystrokes are woefully substandard to my (admittedly customized) fvwm2 keystrokes. I have yet to randomly hit upon the right keystroke to change virtual desktops.

In other news, I have spent a little bit of time modifying the css for ikiwiki to attempt to match the css I use elsewhere. It is a fustrating process. I ended up changing the theme I use for everything else in an attempt to be more ikiwiki friendly, but while I have ended up with a collection of style.css files that mostly work, I cannot be entirely happy, there is a decided lack of cohesion here.

I suspect I will need to dive into the template files for ikiwiki to make more progress.

As a correction to my previous post, libfuse2 is not in fact at fault here. I am able to mount an sshfs with the suid option. The problem is that gluster does not implement the -o option, and so I cannot pass the suid option to the mount, and thus the default of nosuid takes effect.

I am still quite disappointed.

Discovered tonight that libfuse2 forces fuse file systems, such as gluster, to mount with nodev,nosuid. This means that I cannot host an ikiwiki with CGI support on a gluster file system. This does not please me.

I would really like to see this, and read/write shared mmaps (for spamprobe and similar) to be supported in fuse file systems (and naturally gluster in particular).

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.” - Alexander Tyler (A Scottish professor)¹

No endorsement of any single issue qualifies a person to hold public office. Being pro-life does not make a person a good governor, mayor, or president. But there are numerous single issues that disqualify a person from public office. For example, any candidate who endorsed bribery as a form of government efficiency would be disqualified, no matter what his party or platform was. Or a person who endorsed corporate fraud (say under $50 million) would be disqualified no matter what else he endorsed. Or a person who said that no black people could hold office—on that single issue alone he would be unfit for office. Or a person who said that rape is only a misdemeanor—that single issue would end his political career. These examples could go on and on. Everybody knows a single issue that for them would disqualify a candidate for office.¹

As I understand things, even if it takes 10 million years to create the pattern that allows me to identify an error, it is still an error. Perhaps we are off by 100 years, perhaps by 100 million years, but when the article says that what was thought to be constant for the globe now has localized variations, and further more might not be at all correlated as the previous theory suggested, I think I am perfectly justified in saying that we do not know how old things are.

“I do not know” is a whole lot better than “I am going to believe something I know to be untrue just because you cannot offer a better theory” in my book.

I see looking back that I never said anything other than the fact that there have been a lot of good movies out this summer, and that I enjoyed the Indiana Jones movie.

We went to see the Incredible Hulk back when it was still in normal theaters. I very much enjoyed it, even more so than I have the previous Hulk movie. I look forward to sequels. ☺

The newest Batman movie was certainly very different. I do not at all regret going. It was a little more disturbing than I like to see in a Batman movie though, and I hope they brighten things up for the next one. True to the comic books though it no doubt is, I also dislike seeing Rachel die. ☹