Mike Huckabee on Bees

"It is aeronautically impossible for the bumblebee to fly. However, the bumblebee, being unaware of these scientific facts, goes ahead and flies anyway."

- Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas and republican presidential candidate for 2008

Things Psychologists or Students of Psychology Hear All the Time

"Oh, you do psychology! So you can read my mind!"

"Oh, you do psychology! I better watch what I say..."

"Oh, you do psychology! You should meet my friend/father/mother/sister/brother/uncle/aunty. He/she is nuts."

"Oh, you do psychiatry!"

The Joy of Auto-Deletion

One of the best things I ever did was setting my computer up to delete my files by default. Now, that might sound crazy to you, anathema to the very notion of good computing. But, let me tell you brothers and sisters, it saved my digital soul!

You see, fundamentally, I'm a messy and impatient person when it comes to my digital lifestyle. I can't be bothered labeling all of my files carefully. I can't be bothered maintaining a taxonomically perfect filing system. I download or create hundreds of files every day, and the 10seconds it would take to file each of them would add up to too much.

So, inevitably, the clutter on my hard drive would mount. My desktop was drowning in a million icons (far worse than the picture above, actually), and the state of my other folders wasn't much better. I just couldn't bring myself to knuckle down and tidy it all up and DELETE ALL OF THE CRAP, because I knew that once I started it would take days to achieve complete cleanliness. Yes, I was lost. Dark days, dark days.

But then it hit me! The whole system was back to front. Generally, computers keep every file by default, and the user has to actively choose what to delete. Now, that would be efficient if the things worth keeping outnumbered the junk. But that's not how it is any more. Not for me at least. 90% of the files that I create on my hard drive are useless within a few days. Precious files are quite rare. Thus it would be more efficient for my files to be deleted by default, and persist only if I went out of my way to designate them worthy. Clearly, I needed to set up auto-deletion.

So that's just what I did. I found a piece of Mac software called Hazel that seemed perfect for this job. Hazel is an application that runs in the background, watching any folder or folders that you ask it to. You can then assign actions for Hazel to perform on that folder. For example, Hazel can automatically move mp3 files to a 'music' folder, set the label on any new files to green, or delete files that have not been touched in the past month. You define the rules.

Using Hazel, I implemented a very simple auto-deletion system. I created a folder on my desktop called "temp", and I set Hazel to delete any "temp" file that has "not been added in the past 30 days". I then made "temp" my default save location for everything. Every download, every text file, every screenshot now goes to "temp" by default. And if I haven't filed it elsewhere in 30 days...poof...it's gone. In other words, my Mac presumes files to be junk (which they usually are) unless I specify otherwise.



This system seems much more human friendly to me. In someways, it resembles the way our brain does file storage. By default, information that we are exposed to is forgotten half a minute after exposure (mostly). If we need to remember something in any detail we have to put in effort and think about that information, or even right it down. And thank goodness for that. If we remembered every detail about our day (every word of every conversation, every license plate number, every frozen orange), we'd go crazy pretty quickly. And for the brain, that system works brilliantly. Because we don't expect our memory to store absolutely everything in detail, we know we have to put in effort when there's important information that needs to be remembered.

I find that my auto-deletion system has a similar effect. If I start an important document, I know that I have to put in the effort to file it away in a permanent folder. If I don't, it will be gone in a month. It's very motivating. And I haven't lost one important file yet. Most importantly, however, my hard drive is cleaner than it's ever been, without me hardly ever having to clean it up. I'm saved!

(Ethan over at Kinkless.com has detailed instructions for setting up a more complex Hazel based filing system, complete with some really cool demo videos)

Online Christmas Card Printing and Mail Out

Help me out. I'm looking for a website that will let me create and customise Christmas cards, then will print them out for me and send them off. Has anyone heard of such a thing?

I'm not a big Christmas card person, but I might be if I could use something nerdy like that.

Is it a good idea to 'sponsor' children in the third world?

Ja'mie (from the ABC comedy series We Can Be Hereos) and her 'Global Vision' promotional poster.

A conversation with some people from my French class had me recently contemplating signing up to one of those sponsor-a-child-in-a-developing-country programs. Quite a few of the people in my class said have sponsored a child and said they found it very rewarding.

However, in doing some research, I stumbled on a very interesting article that has made me think twice.

ONE MILLION 'foster parents' in the West are now sponsoring children in the Third World - each giving around $20 a month - in what has become an extraordinary international exchange.

This is a very 'personal' form of giving - and from the outset the needs of the individual donor are taken into account. Advertisements for Save the Children in the US offer the prospective parent a long series of multiple choices. You check one box to choose the sex of your child and then another for their location or race. After this, as with most of the organisations, you get a child 'on approval' - with a photograph and a case history. If you accept, the process starts; you send your monthly aid and get letters from the child of your choice.

The appeal of all this is almost irresistible, and it is hardly surprising that this is one of the fastest-growing sources of money for voluntary agencies. The organisations concerned - like Foster Parents Plan and World Vision - are expanding rapidly. And even the relatively new British agency, Action Aid, now has 60,000 children on its books.

There can be no doubt about the good intentions of most of the donors. They wish to help identifiable individuals and hope to learn more about the places where their money is being used. It is a more attractive proposition than working through a conventional aid agency, which might fund a thousand projects from a central fund and appears much more impersonal.

Offering sponsorship is certainly an easier way to raise money. But is it a good way to spend it? (Continued...)

The article goes on to argue that, compared to other modes of charitable donation, child sponsorship has several hidden disadvantages for those you're trying to help:

- It's an inefficient use of your money (much of your donation is spent on taking photos of the child, monitoring the family's progress, translating the child's letters, etc).

- It causes divisions, setting the child apart from other children in the family, village, and school that don't also have a sponsor.

- Makes the child and his/her family acutely aware of their poverty relative to the sponsor's lavish first world life style.

- Maintains the child and his/her family's consciousness of aid and dependence.

Hmmmm. I had never considered these things before. It's not the kind of thing that is readily apparent to prospective donors. Of course, the article is from 1982, so maybe things have changed since then. But I haven't been able to find much info to the contrary.

Anyway, I feel obligated now to find something else to donate the equivalent amount to. Something that gets me 'bang for my buck'. But how do you calculate 'bang'? How do you work out which charity squeezes the most goodness out of each of your charity dollars?

The logical fallacy in Paul Davies' article 'Taking Science on Faith'

The blogosphere is abuzz over the recent article in the NY Times by physicist Paul Davies. In the article Davies has a go at repackaging the old fallacy that science requires blind faith in the orderliness of nature.

Taking Science on Faith
By PAUL DAVIES

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified. (continued here...)

But hang on, science doesn't presume orderliness, it just looks for it. Scientists examine various phenomena looking for reliable relationships between things -- rules that reality seems to hold to most of the time -- and sometimes they find them and sometimes they don't.

"Ah, but you wouldn't look for these reliable relationships and orderliness unless you believed (i.e., had faith) it was there" Davies might say.

Um, no! One looks for something because one entertains the possibility that it might be there.

For instance, let's say that I was playing a game of hide and seek with the readers of this blog. You all hide, and I begin to search for you. And the first place I choose to look is in a cupboard.

"Why are you looking in the cupboard?" Davies might ask.

"To see if anyone is in there," I reply.

"So you expect someone might be in there. You believe they might be in there. You have faith that they might be in there? You must, otherwise you wouldn't look."

"Well, I think someone might be in there, and I'm putting that hypothesis to the test. I certainly think it is possible that no one will be in there, Paul."

Scientists don't need to believe in an orderly lawful universe, they just look for it and very often find it. But scientists are quite open to the possibility that they won't. That's completely different from religious faith.

More analysis of the Davies article can be found over at Edge.

Longevity with a hard 'g'

The new leader of the Australian Liberal Party, Brendon Nelson, pronounces the word 'longevity' with a hard 'G'; 'G' as in 'gap' rather than 'G' as in 'gee wiz'.

What's with that?!