Futurama back from the dead

Good news everybody! Futurama is officially back from the dead.

The New York Post is reporting that Comedy Central will be making at least 13 more episodes.

How much would you spend to catch a criminal?

How much is too much to spend catching lawbreakers?

There are people who might say "Nothing is too much to spend to uphold the law!" -- but they change their tune when they get their tax bill. Somebody has to pay to catch lawbreakers and criminals, and that somebody is wage and salary earners (especially in the current political climate where the rich and wealthy pay proportionally less tax than those who have to work for a living).

Bruce Schneier discusses US-VISIT, the program to fingerprint and keep tabs on foriegn visitors to the U.S.A. (Reminds me of the bad old days in Soviet Russia, where tourists and foreign visitors were constantly treated with great suspicion by the government.)

[...] the last paragraph is the most interesting:

Since January 2004, US-VISIT has processed more than 44 million visitors. It has spotted and apprehended nearly 1,000 people with criminal or immigration violations, according to a DHS press release.

I wrote about US-VISIT in 2004, and back then I said that it was too expensive and a bad trade-off. The price tag for "the next phase" was $15B; I'm sure the total cost is much higher.

But take that $15B number. One thousand bad guys, most of them not very bad, caught through US-VISIT. That's $15M per bad guy caught.

Surely there's a more cost-effective way to catch bad guys?

Or, alternatively, recognise that many of these bad guys aren't bad guys at all, but merely people who have done no harm what-so-ever but fallen foul of some unnecessary bureaucratic legislation.

The Tale of the Lost Phone

The New York Times (warning: registration and DNA sample required) tells the tale of a lost mobile phone, and how it was found:

Three weeks ago, Mr. Guttman went on a quest to retrieve a friend's lost cellphone, a quest that has now ended with the arrest of a 16-year-old on charges of possessing the missing gadget, a Sidekick model with a built-in camera that sells for as much as $350. But before the teenager was arrested, she was humiliated by Mr. Guttman in front of untold thousands of people on the Web, an updated version of the elaborate public shamings common in centuries past.

The tale began when Mr. Guttman's best friend Ivanna left her cellphone in a taxicab, like thousands of others before her. After Ivanna got a new Sidekick, she logged on to her account - and was confronted by pictures of an unfamiliar young woman and her family, along with the young woman's America Online screen name.

The 16-year-old, Sasha Gomez, of Corona, Queens, had been using the Sidekick to take pictures and send instant messages. She apparently did not know that the company that provided the phone's service, T-Mobile, automatically backs up such information on its remote servers. So when Ivanna got back on, there was Sasha.

Using instant messages, Mr. Guttman tracked down Sasha and asked her to return it. "Basically, she told me to get lost," Mr. Guttman recalled. "That was it."

Big mistake. Guttman set up a web page detailing everything that happened, and word rapidly spread. Before long, Guttman was receiving thousands of emails from people whose phones had been lost or stolen -- and more importantly, messages from lawyers, police officers and others volunteering to help retrieve the phone.

Sasha Gomez, meanwhile, was receiving a lot of unwelcome attention:

Some readers also began visiting Sasha's MySpace page and bombarding her and her friends with e-mail messages. Others found her street address in Corona and drove by her family's apartment building, taking videos or shouting out "thief" in front of her neighbors.

It didn't take long for the threats to begin:

Mr. Guttman also kept exchanging e-mail messages with Sasha and, eventually, her family. Then he heard from her older brother, Luis Pena, who said he was a military policeman and warned Mr. Guttman to let his sister alone.

Mr. Guttman posted the exchange.

Within days, he was contacted by dozens of active and retired soldiers. One said he had gone through basic training with Mr. Pena; several others told Mr. Guttman that making such a threat was a violation of military policy and promised to report Mr. Pena to his superior officers.

Mr. Guttman posted it all.

"I don't want people to be punished," he said last week. "I just want them to give the Sidekick back."

Eventually, the police became involved:

The police arrested Sasha and charged her with possession of stolen property in the fifth degree, a misdemeanor. (The police have possession of the Sidekick and plan to return it to Ivanna.) Sasha was released, but was not available to comment. Her mother offered a parting remark.

"I never in my life thought a phone was going to cause me so many problems," Ms. Gomez said.

It's not the phone which caused the problem. It was the refusal to return it to its rightful owner.

Office finds a place in the Creative Commons

C|Net News is reporting that Microsoft has teamed up with the non-profit Creative Commons organisation to provide a free tool that will let people attach a Creative Commons copyright license to their Office documents.

Report.
Image only.

There are many reasons why reliance on closed, proprietary, secret file formats like Microsoft's .doc is a bad idea (e.g. vendor lock-in, sudden obsolesence at Microsoft's whim, etc.), but the reality is that .doc is a de facto "standard". (It isn't really a standard as such -- have you ever tried opening your old Word version 1.0 documents?) At least for the short term future, people are going to continue using Office, and this has the potential to introduce, and give Microsoft's Seal of Approval to, the Creative Commons to millions of people who otherwise would think that anything less that All Rights Reserved is an open invitation for the communists to take over and start eating babies.

How much does free fertility treatment cost?

The British government pays for free fertility treatment to infertile couples. How much does it cost the nation?

Suprisingly, the answer is that in the long run, not only does it not cost the country a penny, but it actually makes money, despite the initial price tag. (On the other hand, in the very long run, it isn't certain that having an ever increasing population is a good idea. For starters, I don't like soylent green -- I prefer my long pork au naturel.)

Yahoo quotes from a Reuters report:

Professor William Ledger, a fertility expert at the University of Sheffield in England, looked at the average cost of producing a baby through in-vitro fertilization and the benefit to the government over the person's lifetime.

He and a group of mathematicians and economists used a modeling exercise and calculated that for the average 13,000 pounds ($23,960) it costs to produce a child through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) the government would recoup 143,000 pounds in taxes alone.
[...]
"The average person over a lifetime will contribute 143,000 pounds to the state in benefits if they are an IVF child born to a mother of age 35," he explained.

Link to a Yahoo news article which will probably disappear before long.

This just goes to show that when it comes to economics, not everything is what it seems. Giving services away from nothing can be a money spinner, and compassion to the infertile comes with an average profit margin of one thousand percent!

A century-worth of fear mongering

The EFF discusses the music and movie industries, and their history of fear mongering:

This week, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) is running a great ad [PDF] in the Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, reminding Congress that the entertainment oligopolies have cried wolf about new technologies many times before.

The ad collects a century-worth of fear mongering by an industry focused on legislating to protect out-dated business models[...]

The movie and music business, ironically enough given their own origins in piracy and copyright infringement, have objected to:

• The player-piano


• The wireless radio


• The cassette tape recorder


• The VCR, famously described as being like Jack The Ripper


• The DAT tape, successfully killed by RIAA-sponsored legislation


• Digital VCRs like Tivo


• The digital radio

and now the industry is crying wolf about devices capable of recording digital radio, claiming that they will destroy the music industry.

Just like the player-piano did, and the radio, and the cassette tape, and ...

Dartboards are competitive with money managers

An interesting discussion about why picking stocks at random is likely to perform just as well as the best professional money managers, and why the Wall Street Journal's competitions are (inadvertently? yeah, sure) biased in favour of the professionals.

The Journal set out to create an entertaining contest to test Malkiel's theory and give its readers some new investment ideas in the process. Wall Street Journal staff members typically play the role of the monkeys (the Journal listed liability insurance as one reason for not going all the way and actually using live monkeys).
[...]
Liang concluded that the pros neither outperformed the market nor the darts. According to Liang, the pros supposed superior performance could be explained by the small sample size, the announcement effect, and the missing dividend yields. One of the strongest criticisms of the contest is the fact that the Journal measures performance by price appreciation only, despite the fact that total return is measured by both price appreciation and dividends.

Royal Society to try open access science

This is good news: after the Royal Society complained about other scientific journals publishing scientific results under open access because it hurt the Society's ability to charge outrageous high subscription fees, an open letter from the Society's grass-roots has convinced the Society that their mission is the furtherance of science, not the collection of subscription fees.

God, a Career Retrospective

An amusing sequence of seven cartoons showing a retrospective on the career of the god known only as God.

Censorship, here and there

Two reports on Internet censorship from Boing Boing:

The first discusses censorship in China. Ben Lehman, who lives in Shanghai, discusses the widely variable, inconsistent censorship of the Internet within China:

The insidious thing about this is not the censorship [...] but the fact that most Chinese people don't even know its there. Almost no one I've talked to even understands that government censorship happens at all -- it just looks to them like the internet has a lot more "dead links" and, if that's all you're used to, there's no reason to expect otherwise.

Techies and geeks often suggest that Internet censorship doesn't matter, because it is easy to get around. Easy for some, perhaps, not so easy for others -- but as Lehman suggests, the biggest problem is that people don't even know they are being censored. If web pages came up with great big CENSORED it wouldn't matter -- people would know when they were having things hidden from them, and make their decisions accordingly. What hurts us is not so much the lies we know about, as those we don't know about.

(Censorship is a lie -- it tells us that something doesn't exist when it does.)

Meanwhile, back in Australia... our government has stepped back from the threatened compulsory Internet filters, and is offering free Internet filters to anyone stupid enough to ask for one.

Why stupid? Because censorware filters are unreliable, biased, and capricious. (The full report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU is here.)

David Cake from Electronic Frontiers Australia writes:

With the conservative government being heavily lobbied by conservative Christian groups and others calling for opt-out ISP level filtering, and a misguided opposition supporting them, a proposal that takes ISP level filtering off the table and replaces it with opt-in PC filtering has actually improved the political outlook here quite a bit.

With the current state of politics, the rise of conservative Fundamentalism, and the selling of government to the all-mighty corporate dollar, it is a good day when my tax dollars are merely going to be wasted on doing harm to a minority of volunteers who opt-in to censorware. Good news indeed.

A warning about Internet storage

Over the last few years, services such as Gmail and Flickr have been exploding in popularity. Thousands, possibly even millions of people, have begun storing their precious memories -- photos, email conversations, or other electronic files -- using these services. There are certainly many advantages to these services.

But all is not sweetness and light. There are serious risks that need to be considered before doing so.

Imagine that you place all your photo albums in storage, so that they will be safe. Then, one day without warning, you go to the storage warehouse and discover you've been locked out and your photos and diaries have been incinerated. Or worse: the storage company has taken your property, including the screenplay you've been writing, and sold it.

If this happened with physical property, actual paper diaries and film photos, there would be little doubt that everyone would recognise it as outragous theft of private property. But unfortunately, things are not so clear-cut with electronic files.

Take TextAmerica.com for example. (I'm not linking to them deliberately -- if you want to visit their site, copy and paste the URL into your web browser address field. No free advertising from me, thank you very much.) According to reports, they've tried all the major sneaky, disreputable and downright dirty tricks in the book:

• Apparently deliberately deleted at least one user's photos without warning -- equivalent to incinerating your photo albums in storage


• Tried to claim ownership of all copyright and other intellectual property rights to photos stored on their site -- equivalent of claiming ownership to your property you put in storage in their warehouse


• And now are about to hold users' photos for ransom by suspending their accounts, then deleting them, unless they upgrade to a paid service.

Of course, TextAmerica.com doesn't supply an easy tool to download your photos off their site should you wish to retrieve them. Can you say the words "locked in"?

The sad thing is that all of these things, which would be recognised as outright theft if they involved physical photos, are probably legal, thanks to the Terms of Service that users agree to. You remember the Terms of Service? You know, the 85 pages of tiny writing that you clicked "I Agree" to when you opened your account? Yes, that Terms of Service.

Yes, I am aware of the irony of placing this work on Blogspot instead of my own website. There is no need to mention it, thank you.

Spam spam spam spam

As well as blocking known spam at the mail server, I run the open source Spam Assassin on my desktop. It is set to throw away everything it is certain is spam, and I never see those emails. However, there are other emails it isn't quite sure are spam, and they get dumped in a mail folder for me to periodically check. Today, I finally got around to doing this for the first time in about six months. After an entertaining half hour skimming the subject lines of almost 12,000 spams emails, I found four false positives.

That's a damn good error rate: less than 0.04%.

However, the false negative rate is much higher, probably around 5% -- despite the spam filtering, I still get about fifty spams a day. I could reduce that by having Spam Assassin be stricter with its filtering, but I'd rather err on letting spams through than tossing away real mail.

Battling the Copyright Monster

Wired is running an interview with law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, who co-wrote and produced the comic book Bound By Law? Tales From the Public Domain.

Professors Aoki, Boyle and Jenkins see themselves as defenders of copyright, and hope to show how the system is supposed to work, finding balance between protection and freedom for artists. Aimed at documentary film-makers, Bound By Law? describes the trials and tribulations of a film-maker as she tries to make a documentary, only to fall victim of many copyright pitfalls.

Jenkins says:

First of all, documentaries are incredibly important records of our history and culture. They're visual histories, and they're increasingly based on copyrighted culture. Our book describes several instances in which the telling of that history has been thwarted by permissions issues. An example is Jon Else having to pay $10,000 for a four-and-a-half-second clip of The Simpsons playing in the background of his film (Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle). The makers of Mad Hot Ballroom had to pay that same amount to EMI because a cell phone rings in the background of one of the scenes, and the ringtone is the theme from Rocky. These examples really resonate with people. They understand that these are instances where copyright is not working the way it's supposed to.

Boyle says:

One of the questions we're going to be asking is, "Would we have genres like jazz, blues or soul if those musicians had to work in the current climate of copyright protection?" Imagine if, in the history of jazz, anyone who played a sample of any bar of someone else's music had to clear each and every sample and pay permissions, or else just go underground and play at backstreet bars and never make a record. Would we have a better culture? Would this lead to advancement in the arts? I don't think so.

See also the gallery.

Is cleanliness bad for you?

Intriguing research that suggests that living in an environment which is too clean and hygienic may be a cause of allergies and auto-immune diseases.

CBC reports:

A comparison of rats living in the wild and the lab lends support to the idea that an overly hygienic environment can lead to allergies and autoimmune diseases.

According to the "hygiene hypothesis," exposure early in life to infections from household dust, germy siblings or surfaces may reduce the risk of developing disease in adulthood.
[...]
Industrialized societies that emphasize hygiene have higher rates of allergy, asthma and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis compared to the developing world.

I think it is time to stop wiping everything down with disinfectant.

Blocking digital cameras

BoingBoing writes about new technology that can detect and blind digital cameras:

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers developed a system that scans an area for the CCDs in digital still and video cameras. Once it locates one, the system would shine a laser into the CCD to "neutralize" its imaging capabilities.

The list of suggested applications is ... interesting:

• Preventing movie piracy


• Stopping industrial espionage


• Blocking people from taking photos of their kids with Santa at a shopping mall

One the inventors missed is stopping people from taking photos of public areas. Heaven forbid if people could just take a photo of the landscape without money changing hands.

See also this news release.

How book publishers make or lose money

TOR employee Anna Louise gives a vivid portrait of the inside workings of a fiction publisher and how they make or lose money on individual books.

In part I, she writes about a complete mass-market failure:

The publisher tells you to get some in house reads, because she isn't sure this is a wise use of resources -- without blurbs, you're going to have a hard time. Plus, you're on your second cover -- the art department just can't get it right. You spent $4,500 hiring an artist. Now the art director is working on the cover himself, using stock art. You still have to pay for stock art -- it costs $1,400.
[...]
On the initial profitability and liability statement, the excited, committed editor theorized it would print at least 50,000 and sell at least 30,000, and paid the author an advance of $12,500. She didn't want to go all the way up to $16,000, just in case she was slightly off the mark -- and normally a first time author would get something like $5,000 (just in case! and also leaving room to grow!), but this was out with four other houses, and the agent had a $10,000 offer from NAL, and, damn it all, the editor really wanted it, so her publisher let her pay an exorbitant amount.

Oops.

In part II, she writes about a successful hardcover book and its move to the mass-market:

10,000 copies. Everyone gets a 50% discount off the cover price of $24.95, which means we're starting out with $12.48 per copy.

The author gets the standard 10% through 5,000 copies sold, and 12.5% for the 5,000 after that, and 15% thereafter. This means the author makes $2.50 per copy through the first 5,000 copies sold, and then $3.12 per copy on the next 5,000 copies sold. This particular project sells 8,000 copies, which means Rygel makes a total of $21,860 on the hardcover sales alone.

Part III still to come.

The fascinating thing is that book failures are completely normal for publishers, and not a black mark at all. (If you're a first-time author, on the other hand, failure to sell will turn your name into mud.) Publishing seems to be like professional gambling: what matters is the long-term success, not any individual wins or losses. Of course, a big enough win or loss will make a big difference to whether you get promoted or fired, but in general, it expected that editors will promote their share of turkeys. There are so many things are completely out of the publisher's control that nobody cares when a book fails to sell -- except the author.

That's not to say that publishing is completely random. Like a gambler, the skill is in doing your sums correctly so you know how much risk you can afford to take for the expected payoff. Unlike gambling, where the payoffs are usually known in advance, publisher's sometimes stumble accross a book or two that the public falls in love with, and then there is no limit to the payoff they can get.

Flickr gives full access to competitors

BoingBoing is reporting that Flickr's co-founder, Steward Butterfield, has promised that Flickr will allow any of their commercial competitors full access to their programming interfaces to help customers switch away from Flickr -- but only if the competitor has to offer the same deal.

This is fantastic news for openess and competition. Flickr promises that copyright to all photos placed on their website by users remains with the user (assuming the user owned the copyright in the first place). That promise that Flickr won't claim ownership of your digital content is meaningless if there is no easy way to move your content to another service.

(Imagine that you put your property in storage, but then discovered that you couldn't get it back out of storage. There is a word for that -- theft.)

Flickr's move will increase the pressure on other commercial content-hosting services to make good their promise to customers that the host won't snatch possession of their content from them. And because it will be a reciprical relationship, open competition will be encouraged, allowing the marketplace to choose the best services.

DRM harms innovation and discriminates against buyers

Computerworld is reporting that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is likely to stifle innovation, increase the cost from litigation to legitimate businesses, and fail to put a dint in piracy rates.

Sydney lawyer Brendan Scott is quoted as saying:

"It is one in which small business is thriving [and] we didn't get there by asking for handouts from the government," Scott said. "We're there because we took our soundings and adapted to the new conditions."

True capitalism at its best.

The article goes on to say:

Scott said the [Open Source software] community encourages older industries to embrace the opportunities the future holds, rather than running to the government to help keep them "and the rest of us" in the past.
[...]
Scott believes the DRM provisions have already created an environment of risk and that Australians are reluctant to engage in digital publishing because of it. For example, most Linux distributors are "so scared of being sued" they don't include DVD playing software.

"Digital publishing is in a parlous state in Australia because of overregulation and DRM is a large part of it," he said. "Australian publishing is destined to languish until these risks of publication are dramatically reduced - not dramatically increased."

Sadly, the provisions of the so-called Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.A. have forced upon Australia laws which will go a long way to ensuring we'll always be a consumer, not a producer, of software and digital content.

Scott goes on to discuss the Australian Kazaa file-sharing software case, which gave the litigants a resounding win -- at enormous legal cost to all those involved -- but has done absolutely nothing reduce illegal Internet downloads:

"There is no evidence that these provisions do anything other than increase risks for legitimate businesses and waste time and money on litigation," he said. "There has been a deluge of copyright litigation over the past decade, but the litigants keep asking for more ways to sue people, this time by way of DRM."
[...]
"The OSIA [Open Source Industry Australia] wants strong and sensible copyright laws, not laws which encourage even more wasteful and quixotic litigation," he said.

Scott also points out the elephant in the room which so many interested parties wish to avoid mentioning. The primary use of DRM is to segment the market, to discriminate against buyers in one market compared to another. Under the guise of "Free Trade", the U.S.A. has gone in to bat for their corporate interests, forcing Australia to accept legislation that allows those American corporations to discrimate against Australian buyers. What other possible use does technology like "Region Encoding" for DVDs have?

Evil cat hailed as a hero

The BBC is reporting the story of a cat from Sheffield, England which has been hailed as a hero for reportedly being able to predict that his owner[1] is about to have an epileptic fit:

Tee Cee's owner Michael Edmonds, of Sheffield, has complex epilepsy and can suffer seizures without warning.

But now he is warned of an impending fit when Tee Cee sits close to him and stares at his face.

"When he first did it I thought it was a one-off," Mr Edmonds said. "But ever since then he just seems to know."

Hero cat? Nonsense -- this is an evil cat.

El Reg has worked out the truth. The cat isn't predicting the epileptic fits, he is causing them, using evil cat powers:

Indeed, the cat stares at Edmonds, and subsequently Edmonds suffers a fit.

Indeed indeed. What more needs to be said?




[1] Of course cats don't have owners. They have staff. Back

Bad maths about Irreducable Complexity

Mark C. Chu-Carroll over at Good Math Bad Math takes a philosophical position and attempts to use Godel's Theorem to prove that irreducible complexity is a meaningless concept:

No matter what you do - no matter what kind of formal system you've developed for showing that something is minimal, you're screwed. Godel just came in and threw a wrench into the works. There is absolutely no way that you can show that any system is minimal - the idea of doing it is intrinsically contradictory.

In summary: Mark thinks that Creationists need a guaranteed, perfect, 100% accurate irreducible complexity detector in order to do good science, and tries to demonstrate that there is no such beast. But Creationists don't need one. All they need is a detector that works at least once.

The Creationist concept of irreducible complexity (IC) as proof against evolution is irredeemably flawed. There is no shortage of websites that demonstrate the feebleness of IC as an anti-evolution argument, so I'll limit myself to a single point:

The IC argument is an argument from ignorance.

Mark sets his sights very high: he wants a knock-out blow, proof that not only can there be no examples of IC, but that the very concept is meaningless. Shorn of its mathematics, it can be summed up thusly:

1. Proving that a biological system is irreducibly complex is mathematically equivalent to proving that it is minimal in the number-theoretic sense;


2. Godel's Theorem holds for that biological system;


3. Therefore proving that some biological system is minimal is impossible;


4. Therefore we can't ever prove that a system is irreducibly complex;


5. And therefore the concept of IC is scientifically meaningless.

Unfortunately, Mark gives no evidence for his very first premise. The concept of minimality in the number-theoretic sense has a specific meaning, and it isn't clear at all that irreducible complexity is equivalent to that specific meaning (mostly because it isn't clear what IC actually is). But, for the sake of the argument, let's assume point (1) is correct.

Point (2) is even more problematic. Mark has fallen for the error of greedy reductionism. Reductionism is a powerful tool, in biology no less than any science. But like all tools, it can be misused, and greedy reductionism is such an error: Mark ignores developmental biology, and consequently imagines that there must be a 1:1 correspondence between the genotype of an organism (the DNA) and its phenotype (the actual organs and molecular protein machines). Because DNA is Turing Complete, he imagines that Godel's Theorems must also apply to higher-order biological features -- the sorts of molecular machinery, the lipids and proteins and enzymes, that we must look at when trying to find irreducible complexity.

In a reply to a comment, he writes:

But per Godel, no axiomatic system is complete and consistent. If you have an incomplete axiomatic system, then the axiomatic system isn't powerful enough to do minimality proofs. If the axiomatic system is powerful enough to do minimality proofs (i.e., it's complete), then it's by definition inconsistent.

But this is just not so. Mark skips over a requirement for Godel's Theorems to hold. The most important is that the axiomatic system be computably enumerable, that is, there must be a way to enumerate all the statements ("true or false theories") of that system.

Are biological systems computably enumerate? Genes are comfortably digital, and thus any finite number of genes will be computably enumerate. A gene is a gene is a gene, regardless of the organism. But a gene's phenotype, it's effect, is not necessarily digital, it is often analog, and that means continuous rather than discrete.

If we look for irreducible complexity, we won't be looking for it in the genotype of the organism's DNA, we'll be looking in the phenotype: in the proteins, lipids and enzymes in 3D space, and the interactions between them. It is not at all clear that phenotypes are computably enumerate, even at the molecular level. At the very least, since molecules exist in a three dimensional continuum space, there is an uncountably infinite number of statements we could make about the relative positions of any two atoms. Adding the axioms of chemistry -- or physics -- will not help him, since we are rapidly getting into areas where we don't know enough to enumerate those axioms, let alone all the possible true and false statements that follow from them. (Given the laws of quantum mechanics, derive the solubility in water of all possible molecules containing 100 carbon atoms. Quickly now, we don't have all day.)

Mark's argument falls down badly at point (3). He writes:

This is a result of some work done by Greg Chaitin in Algorithmic Complexity Theory. A fairly nifty version of this can be found on Greg's page.

The fundamental result is: given a system S, you cannot in general show that there is no smaller/simpler system that performs the same task as S.

But Mark has missed an important part of what Chaitin says, and that makes a vast difference to his conclusion. Chaitin writes:

The first of these theorems states that an N-bit formal axiomatic system cannot enable one to exhibit any specific object with program-size complexity greater than N + c.

and furthermore, writes here:

Show that a formal system of lisp complexity H_lisp (FAS) = N cannot enable us to exhibit an elegant S-expression of size greater than N + 410. An elegant lisp expression is one with the property that no smaller S-expression has the same value. Setting: formal axiomatic system is never-ending lisp expression that displays elegant S-expressions.

What Chaitin has demonstrated is this:

Given a formal axiomatic system of some given amount of complexity, there exists sufficiently more complex systems within our formal system which we cannot prove if they are minimal or not.

For the programming language Lisp, Chaitin claims to have proven that "sufficiently more complex" means a mere 410 bytes over and above the complexity of Lisp itself. For DNA, we have no idea what sufficiently more complex may be; for the phenotype of even a simple organism, we can't even begin to guess. Hypothetically, it could be billions upon billions of gigabytes. Mark merely assumes that, since there are sufficiently large systems which can't be proven minimal, no systems can be proven minimal.

Since there are animals, like elephants, which are too big for me to lift, all animals must be too big for me to lift.

Or, to put it another way, Mark's argument is this:

There are hypothetical biological systems so complex that we can't prove, in the mathematical sense, that they are irreducibly complex; therefore the entire concept of irreducible complexity is meaningless.

When you strip out all the mathematics and formal language, the error is obvious. What about simpler biological systems? Can we not prove they are minimal? Maybe not -- but Mark hasn't ruled them out, and so his entire argument against IC is shot down in flames.

Interestingly, Mark himself recognises the existence of this hole in his argument, but just waves his hands and hopes it will go away. In this reply to a comment, he says:

If you look at the proof, there is a critical threshold, based on the size of the formal axiomatic system (FAS) that proves minimality. The problem with minimality kicks in as soon as the complexity of the system becomes such that the length of the meta-program plus the size of the FAS is smaller than the information-theoretic complexity of the system.

Tiny systems - like a single-instruction program - are probably smaller than that threshold. (I'll explain the probably bit in a moment.) But we can't know where that threshold is: because finding the threshold requires finding the minimum size of a FAS that can be used to show mimimality. And that's the minimality problem biting itself.

(Emphasis in original.)

Talk about Bad Math! Mark's argument, then, is effectively:

1. For all X < N, where N is some unknown but positive non-zero number, IC is undecidable.


2. Therefore IC is undecidable for all X.

Hmmm.

But it gets worse for Mark. He states that we can't know where that threshold is, and even emphasises it -- but if you read Chaitin's page that Mark linked to, you will see Chaitin has written:

As is shown in this course, the algorithms considered in the proofs of these two theorems are now easy to program and run, and by looking at the size in bits of these programs one can actually, for the first time, determine exact values for the constants c and c'.

Chaitin says he can calculate the threshold, and does. This wasn't hidden deep within a 300 page tome; it was the fifth paragraph, and Mark apparently missed -- or ignored -- it.

So far Mark's argument is not looking healthy: the first four points out of his five are either unproven, unjustified or wrong. The fifth point, his final conclusion, is even more flawed. He's confused undecidability for meaninglessness. Chaitin tells us that, given a sufficiently large system, we can't prove whether it is minimal or not; from this, Mark argues that therefore the very concept of being minimal is nonsense. He writes, replying to a comment:

The fact remains that no test can ever demonstrate that a real system is IC. A scientist can't test to see if a hypothesis of IC holds up. It's a non-testable hypothesis, because the underlying concept is invalid.

(Italics in original -- bold added.)

Mark hasn't demonstrated that IC is invalid. All he has shown is that some examples of IC are unprovable, not that there are no provable examples at all.

Mark falls for the fallacy of assuming that just because a statement of a formal system is unprovable, it must be invalid. But that's nonsense: unprovable (or undecidable) doesn't mean false, or meaningless. To take an non-mathematical example, it is undecidable whether Alexander the Great's maternal grand-mother ate a bowl of fried potato chips on her 10th birthday; but it is certainly either true or false that she did. That logical undecidability doesn't prevent us making a probabilistic decision that, beyond all reasonable doubt, she did not: potatoes weren't introduced into Europe (as far as we know) until over a thousand years later.

A more mathematical example of an undecidable statement is Goodstein's Theorem.

Despite all the holes in Mark's reasoning, let's grant him his conclusion: IC is logically undecidable. What does this mean for the science of biology?

Very little. All it means is that IC is unprovable in the mathematical sense, not unprovable in the scientific sense.

Science has much lower standards than mathematics: proof beyond all reasonable doubt, not beyond all doubt. All truths are provisional in science. In mathematics, we can be absolutely 100% certain that (e.g.) 11 is a prime number -- but in science, the best we can say about any fact is that it is true to the best of our knowledge, subject to revision in the light of new facts.

That "best" might be very good indeed. You can bet your life on many things in science, but it is never 100% certain. Scientists sometimes produce formal proofs based on simplified models of whatever feature they are interested in, but the model is not reality. Mathematical models are always simpler than reality. Consequently, science is ultimately based on empirical evidence. And what empirical evidence can prove, better empirical evidence can disprove.

(The classic example is Newtonian and Relativistic Mechanics; astronomical observations of the planets were Newtonian physics' greatest triumph -- until more accurate observations discovered discrepancies which couldn't be successfully explained by Newtonian physics.)

It is unfair to hold Creationists to greater standards than we hold real scientists doing science. Let's accept, for the sake of the argument, that Mark is correct: we can't find absolute certain mathematical proof that a specific biological system is minimal and therefore IC. Fine; but that's irrelevant to the question of whether we can be provisionally sure that it is minimal. On the basis of empirical research, Fermat's Last Theorem was proven beyond all reasonable doubt many years before certain mathematical proof was discovered. Mathematicians don't care for empirical evidence, but that's the fundamental core of science.

Let's pretend, for the sake of the argument, that Creationists like Behe who work with IC are doing real science. (Try not to laugh too hard.) They are working in a research program aimed at collecting enough evidence to disprove the fact of evolution (except our hypothetical Creationist scientists will disagree that it is a fact). To do so, they aim to prove that some sufficiently large number of biological features are irreducibly complex. For them, one such IC system is sufficiently large; for Richard Dawkins, it may require hundreds of examples before he'll admit that evolution can not explain all the facts of the biological world.

If the Creationists are lucky, they will find some examples of IC that are simple enough that they can formally prove they are minimal, and we are done. Mark's argument is shot down in flames, and biologists start looking for a new paradigm to explain the features of the biological world.

If the Creationists aren't so lucky, they will find biological features that they think are IC, but can't formally prove that they are absolutely minimal. Will that matter? No, of course not, any more than biologists let the fact that they don't have a formal axiomatic system for the mechanics of predation prevent them from accepting as true the empirical rule that, in general, predators will catch more slow, weak prey and fewer fast, strong prey. Biologists will try to falsify the IC hypothesis. If there are enough failures (whatever "enough" means), biologists will become convinced that, on the balance of the evidence, that these are actual IC systems. The lack of formal proof will disturb them no more than the lack of formal proof that the sun is mostly made of hydrogen disturbs physicists. Empirical evidence is enough.

In conclusion, Mark has:

• Assumed that Godel's Theorem's apply to biological phenotypes, an unjustified assumption;


• Tried, but failed, to demonstrate that Godel's Theorems forbid us from proving the existence of irreducibly complex features; and


• Failed to demonstrate that it would matter even if proof of IC was impossible.

There are many reasons to consider irreducible complexity to be a degenerate research program, but Godel's Theorems are not one of them.