Rondam Ramblings View RSS

Preaching the gospel of evidence, experiment and reason since 2003.
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No, Science is Not Just Another Religion 10 May 2:41 AM (4 days ago)

I want to debunk once and for all this idea that "science is just another religion".  It isn't, for one simple reason: all religions are based on some kind of metaphysical assumptions.  Those assumptions are generally something like the authority of some source of revealed knowledge, typically a holy text.  But it doesn't have to be that.  It can be as simple as assuming that

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What did you expect? Of course the Trump administration will defy court orders! 10 Feb 10:25 PM (3 months ago)

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry over this:Federal judges have issued President Donald Trump stinging legal rebukes in the early clashes over his blitz of executive orders, and two of his top aides have responded by suggesting that his administration defy the courts and move forward with its agenda.There’s no indication that Trump has adopted such a strategy, although a U.S. judge in Rhode

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An Open Letter to Democratic Candidates and Organizations 19 Jan 11:12 PM (3 months ago)

The ink is barely dry on the (drama-free) certification of the election results and I'm already getting calls from organizations and candidates seeking donations.  (Apparently my name is on a lot of lists.)  In order to save everyone a lot of time, I thought I'd write up my current thinking so I don't have to have the same conversation dozens of times.First and foremost: I really do

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I am (not) a Failure: Lessons Learned From Six (and a half) Failed Startup Attempts 12 Jan 7:49 PM (4 months ago)

A while back I wrote:I've had many, many failures in my life.  (Hm, maybe I should write a blog post about that.)This is that post.  I'm writing it not as a lament, but rather because I've ended up in a good place in life despite my extraordinary track record of failing at just about everything I've ever tried.  If my younger self had heard these stories he might have had a less

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A Reply to Don Geddis 26 Dec 2024 8:12 AM (4 months ago)

Don Geddis left a comment on my last post.  My reply grew far longer than would reasonably fit into a comment reply so I decided to post it as an article.  Don wrote:I wonder if you've considered that perhaps you have more in common with the people who frustrate you, than your current self-image suggests.My reply:I've not just considered it, I will happily concede that I am not as

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I have failed. Now what? 24 Dec 2024 6:40 PM (4 months ago)

Nearly two months ago now I wrote:It's getting harder and harder to find a reason to keep doing this.  My opportunity costs are high, and writing a blog entry takes a non-trivial amount of time.  I wrote this because I needed to blow off some steam, and I wanted to get my position on the election results on the record while they were still fresh in my mind.  Whether I keep

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The Bright Side of the Election Results 6 Nov 2024 5:59 PM (6 months ago)

I'm writing this at 9AM Pacific standard time on November 6, the morning after the election.  Not all the dust has quite settled yet, but two things are clear: Donald Trump has won, and the Republicans have taken control of the Senate.  The House is still a toss-up, and it's still unclear whether Trump will win the popular vote, but the last time I looked at the numbers he had a pretty

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What scares me about a second Trump administration 2 Nov 2024 10:26 PM (6 months ago)

As long as I'm getting things on the record (while I still can without too much fear of reprisal) I want to endorse a video by Legal Eagle that lays out the case against voting for Donald Trump in 18 minutes of some of the best video commentary I've ever seen.  It's well worth watching, and encouraging others to watch, but just in case you don't want to invest the time and would rather read,

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Ron Prognosticates: Trump is Going to Win 29 Oct 2024 10:54 PM (6 months ago)

 I'm too depressed to elaborate much on this, but I just wanted to go on the record with this prediction before the election.  Why do I think Trump is going to win?  Because DJT stock is up and has been rising steadily since it hit an all-time low in late September.  It didn't even go down today after yesterday's disastrous MSG rally.  The polls have been static since

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Have Republicans Ever Actually Listened to the Lyrics of YMCA? 16 Oct 2024 9:32 PM (6 months ago)

Yesterday we were treated to the sight of a major party nominee at what was supposed to be a town hall meeting suddenly stop taking questions and just dancing (badly) for the better part of an hour.   A mere 20 years ago, well within living memory, less than five seconds of screaming were enough to end Howard Dean's political career.  My, how times change.But the truly astonishing thing

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Yes, you can have exactly-once delivery 20 Sep 2024 1:32 AM (7 months ago)

IntroductionThis post is ostensibly about an obscure technical issue in distributed systems, but it's really about human communications, and how disagreements that on the surface appear to be about technical issues can sometimes turn out to actually be disagreements about the meanings of words.  I'm taking the time to write a fairly extensive post about this for two reasons.  First, I'm

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Information, Data, and Knowledge 12 Sep 2024 5:13 AM (8 months ago)

(This is part 10 in a series on the scientific method.)In 1966, well within living memory as I write this in 2024, Digital Equipment Corporation released the PDP-10, later rebranded as the DECsystem-10 or, more colloquially, the DEC-10.  The base model cost over $100,000 in 1966 dollars, well over a million dollars today.  For that price you got 8,192 words of memory, each being 36 bits

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The Trouble With Big Numbers 15 Aug 2024 6:06 PM (9 months ago)

This is part of my series on the scientific method, but it's a bit of a tangent, an interlude if you will, so I'm not giving it a number.  As you will see, that will turn out to be metaphorically significant.  I'm writing this because my muse Publius raised the problem of infinity in comments on earlier installments in this series, and so I thought it would be worth discussing why these

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Computation: Math and the Church-Turing Thesis 29 Jul 2024 10:46 PM (9 months ago)

(Part 9 in a series on the scientific method)In the last installment of this series I addressed a philosophical question: what does it mean for a mathematical statement to be true?  I tackled this in the context of a general definition of scientific truth, namely, that a statement is true if it corresponds on some way to the actual state of affairs in objective reality.(Note that this

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Sorry about the radio silence 20 Jul 2024 11:37 PM (9 months ago)

It has been nearly two months since I last posted anything here.  This is far from my longest period of radio silence, but in this case it was right in the middle of a series I had been writing on the scientific method, and I really didn't intend to stop and lose momentum.  But two things happened.  First, I decided to write a chapter about mathematics and that turned out to be a

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My (not) Twitter Account Got Hacked 31 May 2024 7:04 PM (11 months ago)

My (not) Twitter (I refuse to refer to it by a single letter) account got hacked and so I got to see first-hand how utterly inadequate (not) Twitter's security measures are.  The hacker immediately changed both my password and email address so I can no longer access the account and I can't do a password reset.  Which is such an incredibly stupid design because of course anyone who

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Donald Trump is a Convicted Felon 31 May 2024 1:02 AM (11 months ago)

The question of whether or not Republicans will nominate a convicted felon to be their candidate for President of the United States is no longer a hypothetical.  Unless they can somehow persuade him to withdraw from the race (and good luck with that) they will have no choice.  The primaries are over.  The convention will just be a rubber stamp.  And Trump's conviction will not

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Truth, Math, and Models 27 May 2024 10:27 PM (11 months ago)

(Part 8 in a series on the scientific method)In the last installment I advanced a hypothesis about what truth is, which is to say, I suggested a way to explain the broad consensus that appears to exist about truth.  That explanation was: there is an objective reality "out there", and true statements are those that in some sense correspond to the actual state of affairs in that objective

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A Scientific Theory of Truth 18 May 2024 5:52 PM (12 months ago)

(This is part 7 of a series about the scientific method.)The over-arching theme of this series is that science can serve as a complete worldview, that it can answer deep philosophical and existential questions normally associated with philosophy or religion.  I gave a small example of that in the last installment where I showed how the scientific method can be deployed to answer a fun

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Languages are theories: debunking the new riddle of induction and flat-eartherism 5 May 2024 8:08 PM (last year)

This is the sixth installment in a series about the scientific method.  My central thesis is that science is not just for scientists, it can be used by anyone in just about any situation.In part 2 of this series I gave a few examples of how the scientific method can be applied in everyday situations.  In this chapter I want to show how it can be used to tackle what is considered to be a

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The Scientific Method part 5: Illusions, Delusions, and Dreams 29 Apr 2024 10:41 PM (last year)

(This is the fifth in a series on the scientific method. )Daniel Dennett died last week.  He was a shining light of rationality and clarity in a world that is often a dark and murky place.  He was also the author of, among many other works, Consciousness Explained, which I think is one of the most important books ever written because it gives a plausible answer to what seems like an

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The Scientific Method, part 4: Eating elephants and The Big News Principle 24 Apr 2024 11:43 PM (last year)

This is the fourth in a series about the scientific method and how it can be applied to everyday life.  In this installment I'm going to suggest a way to approach all the science-y stuff without getting overwhelmed.There is an old joke that goes, "How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time."  That answer might be good for a laugh, but it wouldn't actually work, either for a

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Three Myths About the Scientific Method 21 Apr 2024 11:54 PM (last year)

This is the third in a series on the scientific method.  This installment is a little bit of a tangent, but I wanted to publish it now because I've gotten tired of having to correct people about these things all the time.  I figured if I just wrote this out once and for all I could just point people here rather than having to repeat myself all the time.There are a lot of myths and

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Feynman, bullies, and invisible pink unicorns 1 Apr 2024 9:37 PM (last year)

This is the second installment in what I hope will turn out to be a long series about the scientific method.  In this segment I want to give three examples of how the scientific method, which I described in the first installment, can be applied to situations that are not usually considered "science-y".  By doing this I hope to show you how the scientific method can be used without any

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A Clean-Sheet Introduction to the Scientific Method 17 Mar 2024 3:56 AM (last year)

 About twenty years ago I inaugurated this blog by writing the following:"I guess I'll start with the basics: I am a scientist. That is intended to be not so much a description of my profession (though it is that too) as it is a statement about my religious beliefs."I want to re-visit that inaugural statement in light of what I've learned in the twenty years since I first wrote it.  In

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