Multithreaded

Not sure it’s actually a meme, but in this post Scott Eric Kaufman sets out to see how far and fast he can propagate his idea.

I’m in, if only to see how fast we can bring down his blog with all the trackbacks that come in :-)

In a recent blog posting Scott Adams, the creator of the rather wonderful Dilbert cartoons, makes the argument that free will does not exist. His argument is rooted in the idea that since the laws of physics are deterministic at best or random at worst (if you bring the uncertainty principle into play) that free will cannot exist since, essentially, the universe will simply roll on of its own accord and take our brains with it and there’s nothing we can do to change that process. Now Scott is a comic so, free will or not, he can’t help but take a somewhat humorous approach to subjects even as deep as the issue of free will. However, since his post was made on his self-named ’serious Sunday’ we should assume that this is a fairly accurate representation of his views so it is worth a second look.

There are a few different ways I would like to challenge his assertion. Not that I am arguing that free will does (or does not exist) but I want to look at the logic he has used and perhaps demonstrate some flaws in his thinking.

Firstly, taking the argument at face value, there are two axioms has used to construct it. The first is explicit. That is, that the laws of physics are deterministic, or at least random, meaning that they do not provide a basis on which to postulate free will. I have to question this assumption. I would quite confidently assert that at this time our understanding of the laws of physics is far from complete. Such issues as the uncertainty principle and quantum wave functions very well defined mathematics which accurately describes what we know about the physics of the very small, and has been used to make predictions that have been borne out by experiment. However, these well-defined concepts lead to multiple interpretations of ‘reality’ that physicists and philosophers are still arguing over with little sign of any definite answer anytime soon.

Furthermore, the current leading approach to trying to resolve the unanswered questions of the universe is superstring theory which postulates nine or ten additional spatial dimensions that we cannot perceive and, at present, no-one can even conceive of an experiment that might confirm or deny their existence. Along with a lot of other exotic theoretical concepts it seems to me that the laws of physics, far from being so nailed down as to provide a sound basis for denying free will, still leave plenty of wiggle room for the discovery of some aspect of reality that we have not previously even conceived of that could support free will as an intrinsic property of the universe. I would highly recommend reading Brian Greene’s book “The Fabric of the Cosmos” for a very clear, approachable discussion of these issues.

This brings us to the second, implicit, assumption that Scott has used in his argument. That ‘free will’ needs to be an intrinsic property of the universe in order to be meaningful. I contend that, on the contrary, any meaningful definition of free will is as an emergent property of the same complexity that leads to our own consciousness and that free will is most meaningfully defined as the “quality” which we experience moment to moment. In other words, free will exists precisely because we feel that it exists. What Scott calls the “persistent illusion of making choices” is precisely what free will is.

This might sound like a cop-out, but let me take a more familiar example. Few people would doubt that the colour red exists. Unless you are blind or colour-blind you most-likely experience ‘red’ every day of your life. However, a physical description of ‘red’ light is that it is an wave made up of an electric field and a magnetic field oscillating out of phase at a frequency of 448 terahertz. In the view of physics it differs little from ‘blue’ light except in the frequency at which the oscillations occur. It reflects off of and is absorbed by pretty much the same things, travels at the same speed in a vacuum, etc. However, few would deny that the experience of ‘redness’ is qualitatively different from the experience of ‘blueness’. Should we, just by looking at the law of physics, deny that ‘red’ exists?

Take another example, possibly closer to Scott’s heart. Using his argument we could conclude that Dilbert cartoons are not funny. After all, if you look at the physics and even the chemistry of ink and paper, there is nothing to suggest that humour should, or indeed can exist. Sure, I might look at a Dilbert cartoon and think that it is funny (as I often do), but physics tells us that it isn’t really.

Similarly, free will cannot be defined in terms of the raw physics of the universe (no matter how precisely we might understand it). In the same way as ‘red’ or ‘humour’, ‘free will’ is the quality of an experience and an emergent property of our minds, not an intrinsic property of the universe. For a really good development of this idea, and other ones, I suggest reading “Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind” by Ian Stewart and Jack S. Cohen. They do far better justice to it than I’ve been able to in this short post.

I’ve updated the theme on my blog to introduce that quintessential web 2.0 feature, rounded corners and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this.

For guidance I referred to chapter 3 of Andy Budd’s excellent book, CSS Mastery. I first tried the “flexible rounded-corner box” approach. This wraps three layers of div around the content and uses four images to provide the corners by placing them appropriately as background images. The basic technique is to create images with the correct background colour and use a “sliding window” technique so that as the content size grows or shrinks (say by changing the font size), more or less of the left top and left bottom images are exposed. Since these are of a constant colour the user sees it as the corners moving.

The concept is straightforward so I fired up Photoshop and dived in. My first realisation was how annoying it is to generate the right images with photoshop/image ready (remember, I’m a programmer not a designer). After figuring out that I needed to use Image Ready instead of Photoshop to get the rounded rectangle marquee tool, and searching for several minutes before finding the option to change the radius of the corners, I finally created a nice rounded-corner rectangle. Then I had to chop it up into gifs for each of the four corners, a tedious process.

My assumption had been that I would just need the corners and I could rely on the background colour of the content to fill in the rectangle but after installing the images and CSS I realised this isn’t the case. The top left and bottom left images need to be large enough to fill out the content no matter how tall or wide it gets. I don’t like this as it puts a maximum size on the content box unless I use very large images. I don’t like that kind of constraint. Also, this approach requires that I make different corner image sets for each colour box I might have so I moved on to the next section of the book.

This is entitled “Mountaintop Corners” and takes the “opposite” approach. Instead of filling in the corner, this technique uses gifs to mask off the corner. Basically, I created four images where the outside of the corner is white and the inside is transparent so that the content colour can show through. This is much more flexible in that it can be used on any box on the site regardless of the content colour. The limitation is that I would need to create a different set of corners for each background colour I might be using. In my case, the background is always white so I can get away with one set of corners.

Here’s the result:

Okay, not the most amazing of boxes I’ve seen (hey, no gradients, drop shadows or even anti-aliasing) but somewhat nicer than the rectangular look I had before, I think. Plus, it only took the most minor of tweaking to get it all looking good in FF 1.5, IE 6, Opera 9 and Safari, which is a bonus. All in all it took about an hour to do.

But all this raises the question in my mind as to when CSS will start to include things like rounded corners as native features. It seems bizarre to always be having to jump through these kinds of hoops to get visual tricks like this up and running.

One of the great things about Web 2.0, compared to the dot-com boom, is how much of it is happening in Europe. Living in England in the late nineties it often felt as if dot-com was something that was happening elsewhere. This time around, much more innovation and development seems to be going on in Europe, for example sites like NetVibes, Plazes and others. In addition, Europe is hosting quite a number of Web2.0-related conferences such as dConstruct, Flash on the Beach and, Le Web 3. We also have the Future of Web Apps coming up in London in February and Ajax World Europe in Amsterdam in May.

It seems to me that at least part of the reason for the level of activity in Europe is the difference in financial model for Web 2.0. The dot-com boom was all about investing a lot of money, developing fast and then going for IPO. Burn rates for dot-coms were legendary and the capital was available on the basis that the investors would reap huge rewards on flotation. This, of course, meant that access to the much more flexible and willing US stock markets was very important.

Web 2.0 seems to be going about things differently. Companies are starting up on shoestring budgets and the exit strategy seems to be to be bought by Google, or some other cash-rich survivor of the last boom. The hardware and software necessary to get an idea off the ground is now trivially cheap in comparison to six years ago so the major cost is people. That means that two or three people who are willing to invest their own time in developing an idea can come up with something innovative and viable in a few months so access to a lot of liquid capital is not as necessary.

This is reflected in the changes in capital funding. I am reading that traditional VCs are having a hard time finding places for their moneys. Business angels are much more dominant. These are people who will put up much smaller amounts of money than VCs but not demand nearly so much equity in return. It seems a startup is more likely to go for a couple of hundred thousand pounds rather than a couple of hundred million.

What it boils down to is that it is good news for those of us in Europe (or at least on the edge of it in England) who want to participate in this wave of innovation.

Technorati Tags: dconstruct06, Web2.0

I was reading Jeremy Keith’s journal entry about his upcoming presentation at Flash on the Beach in which he mentions that Neville Brody is speaking at the conference. I hadn’t heard of Neville (I’m a programmer, not a designer after all) but reading his profile entry led me to Research Studios, which is his design company.

I spotted the Guardian on the project list and, having worked on the Guardian Unlimited sites in 1998, I clicked through. What do you know. Research Studios developed the block-layout design that I helped architect and implement using Vignette StoryServer. At the time I was much more of a heads-down programmer and never realized what illustrious company I had kept.

I’ve just spotted this article on The Register which describes a critical security flaw on all versions of Windows apart from Windows 2003. Secunia list this as an Extremely Critical vulnerability and note that it is being actively exploited by hackers. Microsoft have posted this advisory notice about it and one of the recommend workarounds is to disable the affected ActiveX control.

That control, it seems, is in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX control. Sound familiar? It’s the control which provides XMLHTTPRequest in IE. Unless I’m missing something, disabling it would mean disabling Ajax behavior.

Normally, a serious flaw like this in IE, common as they are, would have the ‘other browser users’ making the usual noises about how insecure IE is and everyone should switch to <insert your favourite browser here>, few people would actually change and life would go on as usual.

The impact of this on Ajax applications, however, could be quite disastrous if the result is that a very large percentage of IE users turn off the XMLHTTP control in response to this alert. All of a sudden, Ajax has become dangerous and that is a big setback for all of us, IE users or not, since the benefit of Ajax really comes from widespread adoption and acceptance.

Technorati Tags: ajax, Web2.0

Martin Fowler gives a well-considered summary of pair programming and dispels some of the misconceptions which are sometimes propagated.

Technorati Tags: agile, programming