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1. A word is not the same as the thing it describes.

There is an old dictum in mysticism: Ipsum Nomen Res Ipsa -- "the name itself [is] the thing itself." This is a rule for hypnotizing oneself or others to change our perceptions of the universe to fit our ideas. This rule is the opposite of the rule of science, which is to change our ideas (theories) to fit our perceptions of the universe (observations).

Corollary 1a -- Lincoln's Law: Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

The practical conclusion of the above rule is that we cannot alter reality simply by changing the names by which we refer to things. There are good reasons for changing names sometimes, specifically when we find that the old names do not accurately reflect observations. However, when we change names out of wishful thinking (calling a dog's tail a leg) we set ourselves up for delusion and disappointment.

Worse, when we assent to others' redefinition of the words that describe the world, we are effectively under their spell. Who is doing Black Magick upon you? (What does the word "waffle" make you think of?) Reality is ultimately reality-based, not faith-based, and the credibility gap is a tension between the two. When it snaps, people do get killed.

2. There's always the chance the guy is lying to you.

This insight is famously ascribed to David Hume, but outside of credulous Christendom it may simply never have been needed: Whenever someone tells you that a miracle (or other unlikely event) has occurred, consider the following. There is a probability M that a miracle actually has occurred. There is also a probability L that the person who is telling the tale is lying or simply mistaken. As long as L > M, we have no reason to believe in miracles, wild advertising claims, or other unlikely stories.

3. Popularity and correctness are not strongly correlated.

Corollary 3a: Ten million people could be wrong.

Sometimes ideas are useful, but unpopular -- either because few people have heard of them or been convinced of them yet, or because they have gone out of fashion.

Corollary 3b: They laughed at Gandhi, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Being original is not, in itself, any guarantee of being right. Likewise, the fact of being rejected is no assurance that you're on the right track. Sometimes, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then you figure out you're being a dork and quit it.

4. People who sound totally sure might just be trying to convince themselves.

If a person is absolutely insistent on some point, it may well be that he (or she) is working under the rule of mysticism rather than that of science: rather than trying to come up with statements that accurately describe the world, he is trying to convince himself that the world is how he wants it to be.

It's not always the case, though. Sometimes we find that in order to prevent harm, we need to do some magic or politics -- same thing -- even for ideas that we have discovered by science. Otherwise we end up with creationism in the public schools and pi being declared equal to 3 by legislative fiat. Sometimes we do have to insist that we're right and the other guy is wrong. But we have to offer evidence, not just assertion -- and we have to be careful (not certain, but careful) that we aren't letting our ideas run away with us.

I don't think apologies to Billy Ray Cyrus are really necessary, but ...

Achy Breaky DOCs

You can send me spam
Or just fill up my RAM
With ancient cheesy forwards in my box
But if you give a screw
'Bout what I read from you
You'd damn well never send me DOCs!

Just don't send me DOCs
Those Microsoft .DOCs
I just don't want 'em in my mail
And if you send me DOCs
Those goddamn Word file DOCs
I'll have to send my answer back in Braille.

Just send me text/plain
It really is a pain
To see eight megs of binary to say:
"Good morning, how are you?
I'm doing lovely too,
I really must be going now -- good day!"

Or send HTML
I think it's really swell
And I can read it up in Firefox
But, sir or madam, please
I'm beggin' on my knees
Just lay off the Microsoft .DOCs!

Yeah, don't send me DOCs
Pro-pri-e-tar-y DOCs
Not everyone sucks Billy Gates's wang
And if you send me DOCs
Those freakin' Word file DOCs
Ya better know I'll just delete the thang.

Look, send me EXEs
Sure, give me Sobig -- please!
It won't even faze my Unix box
But if what you need
Is to send me stuff I'll read
Then don't bother sending it with DOCs.

I live with a philosophy graduate student. It's contagious. Note, none of these are particularly meant to be offensive, except possibly the Peter Singer one. Sorry, Pete, I just couldn't resist a zoophilia joke.

The moral realist doesn't sleep with other people's wives because it would be wrong.

The Kantian doesn't do it because if everyone did that, someone would be sleeping with his wife.

The natural law theorist doesn't do it because it would be a violation of the marriage contract.

The emotivist doesn't because -- ew, yuck, sleeping with other people's wives!

The consequentialist doesn't because he doesn't want to sleep with a woman who would cheat on her husband.

The cultural relativist doesn't do it because the culture he lives in rather arbitrarily happens to value sanctity of matrimony.

The utilitarian doesn't because he figures that extramarital affairs cause more bad than good.

The moral skeptic doesn't for no particular reason.

The hedonist doesn't because he doesn't feel like it.

Peter Singer doesn't do it because there's nothing that makes other people's wives ethically preferable over, say, goats.

The virtue ethicist doesn't do it because what kind of a person would he be if he did?

The feminist doesn't because other people's wives are usually straight.

You might be a closed-source twerp if ...

• You've chosen a piece of software not for its features or benefits but because it is not open source.
• Despite the numerous copyright- and patent-violation lawsuits that have been filed, adjudicated, and settled against Microsoft, you think it's more likely that Linux contains "stolen intellectual property" than that Windows does.
• When someone in your organization proposes use of an open-source product, you've retorted, "Not everything has to be open source!"
• You refer to a reasoned preference for open source software as a "bias" or "religion".
• Despite the existence of Red Hat, Digium, MySQL AB, Zope Inc., and other open-source companies, you believe that open source software is "non-commercial" or "anti-corporate".
• You have referred to open source software as "communist".
• You have referred to Eric S. Raymond as a "socialist".
• You have conflated open-source licenses with "the public domain", or claimed that open-source software is "not copyrighted".
• You take Laura DiDio or Rob Enderle seriously.
• You crack BSD/LSD jokes to imply that Unix or open-source programmers are insane or unreliable.
• You believe that Linux or Unix cannot be used "on the desktop", but you have never tried it or asked anyone who does it about their experience.
• When someone points out that Mac OS X is a desktop Unix system, you retort that it isn't "really" Unix -- despite the C shell, POSIX compliance, BSD kernel, X11 ....
• You think that software users should bear liability for copyright infringement committed by software publishers, thus necessitating "indemnification" -- even though you would never claim that readers of the New York Times would be liable for a plagiarism committed by a Times reporter.
• You think that Linux, in its present form, was cooked up by some college student in a basement.
• You think that Linux, since it is based on the design of Unix, is "30-year-old technology" and therefore inferior -- as if software designs were to be judged on their novelty rather than their reliability.
• Despite the number of Linux systems that Dell, HP, IBM, and other major vendors ship to large corporations and other institutions, you believe that "Linux is not ready for the enterprise".
• You note that only a small fraction of the computers in the world run Linux or BSD, and conclude that open-source software is of little consequence -- selectively ignoring the fact that 60+% of all Web servers in the world run the open-source Apache software.
• You think that open-source software is likely to contain Trojan horses, because anyone can modify it.
• Although you know that The SCO Group's legal arguments are unfounded and that they have presented no evidence of their claims, you hope that they will win anyhow, to show those irritating open-source upstarts that business should be about power rather than mutual benefit.
• You think that Sun Java Desktop is a Java-based product, not a Linux distribution.
• You think that the GNU General Public License (GPL) is an end-user license agreement, or that using GPLed software involves giving up rights you would otherwise have.
• You think that open-source projects are each the work of an individual volunteer programmer, so that when the one programmer responsible for Linux or PostgreSQL or Apache gets bored with it, there will be no more support available.
• A security vulnerability in mySQL is a "Linux security hole", but a security vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server is not a "Windows security hole". That is, the fact that Linux distributors ship more third-party software should be considered a problem, not a virtue.

From time to time in our nation, religion and religious faith have become contentious political issues. While we may prefer (as I certainly do) that religion remain a private matter and outside of politics, this is not always possible. Important political movements such as Abolitionism, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Civil Rights movement, and more recently the Religious Right have all sprung from the nexus of religion and politics. We cannot, therefore, ignore or set aside candidates' religious views and practices when considering them for the Presidency.

My question is this: What religious view were you and President Bush expressing -- what religion were you practicing -- when, as undergraduates at Yale University you both bowed down to an idol of the Prince of Darkness? As members of the Brotherhood of Death, or Order of Skull and Bones, you both participated in rituals explicitly Satanic in tenor and content. Does this fact leave you prepared to govern a nation whose populace is majority Christian, most of whom believe that the Devil is quite real and active in the world?

We can all see from every day's headlines the result of electing one member of the Brotherhood of Death to the presidency. Why in the world -- or in the underworld, perchance? -- should we suffer another to ascend to that seat?