If you develop for the web, there is a new extension for Firefox that you simply must get:
Firebug combines the functionality of the DOM inspector with the Error console and command-line JavaScript interpretor and then packs it with some great additional features.
I apologize for the recent lack of posts. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. In addition to working to meet some pretty important deadlines at work, working on a contract programming job after work, providing some support for the recent release of my open source project, xajax, and fulfilling family responsibilities, I started school again last week.
Microsoft has apparently shut down the blog of a Chinese journalist named Zhao Jing (aka Michael Anti) that was hosted on its MSN Spaces blog service because of subject matter critical of the authoritarian Chinese government. Former TV reporter Rebecca MacKinnon has posted the details on her blog. Included with her analysis is this fascinating insight:
Can we say, snakepit? It’s actually not uncommon in China for people in one company to actively “tattle” on their rivals and get them into political trouble in order to gain a competitive business advantage. I saw it happen several times in the media and entertainment worlds when I was living and working in Beijing. This is one reason the communist party will stick around longer than many outsiders think. Businesses get greedy and try to manipulate the authoritarian system to their advantage, rather than working together to make the whole thing more fair, accountable, and transparent. Microsoft clearly isn’t taking the high road either.
Liberals are correct when they attack big business and corporations for their corruption. Businesses that will do anything they think they can get away with to win are often the rule rather than the exception.
As a solution, liberals often work to establish more government regulation of business. However, they often don’t take into account the dynamic demonstrated by Ms. MacKinnon’s observations of business in authoritarian China: When you give the government far-reaching power to control business, the corrupt corporations will soon turn their efforts toward manipulating those in government to create laws that can be manipulated to the benefit of their company. In other words, they use the government as a club with which to bludgeon their competition.
So in an effort to curb corporate corruption through government regulation we often move the corporate battlefield into government; We may change the dynamics of how corrupt businesses compete, but we do not remove the corruption, we just change how they operate and the arena in which they battle.
I believe that this dynamic was also operational in the breaking Jack Abramoff scandal. Glenn Reynolds of instapundit provides this insightful thought :
The real source of corruption is government power. When the government can make or break businesses, businesses will try to influence it. If you want cleaner government, you need to limit what, and how, government affects people’s lives.
Though I don’t have any specific examples, I am aware of rumors of companies basically writing bills to be presented in congress to their own specifications and then having them submitted by corrupt politicians, verbatim.
I am also aware of stories of large corporations who have lobbied to have their own products made illegal because their patents are about to expire and they don’t want any competition once the product is no longer under patent. They spend the period during which the patent is active developing an alternative, then they patent the new alternative so that no one else can produce it. Then they work to make their former product illegal.
These are just stories, but they seem plausible to me.
This is one of the reasons why I tend to oppose treaties like the Kyoto Protocol . While I am in favor of protecting the environment, I worry that the regulations only provide another tool with which big businesses can attack each other and invite people like Jack Abramoff to focus their considerable talents toward manipulating and corrupting the system to their own benefit. For all I know the Kyoto Protocol is just another manipulation by some big corporations to keep their competition down.
At the same time, I oppose the kind of libertarianism that would remove all government power to regulate. The same corporations who will twist government regulation to their own use, would wreak equal havoc if left completely unregulated.
It is a difficult problem for which I don’t have a good solution.
I’m pleased to announce the release of xajax version 0.2.
The xajax PHP library allows PHP developers to easily add Ajax functionality to their PHP driven websites. A big thank you to Jared White for his excellent work on the project and to our wonderful forum participants who have helped debug, submitted code improvements, and suggested feature enhancements.
Also a special thanks to those who donated money to the project. The donations will help us pay for hosting for the new xajax webite, wiki, and forum .
Recently, Intelligent Design versus Evolution has been a hot topic in both the legacy media and the blogs. It is a subject in which I have been interested for some time. I am especially intrigued by the relationship between Information Theory, Complexity Theory, and the origin of the biological information contained in genes.
In this post, however, I want to discuss the problem of scientific modesty—or the problem of the lack thereof.
I have previously posted on the neglected literary merits of the marvelous book Flatland, by Edwin Abbot. In its dedication, the book’s fictional, two-dimensional narrator says that the book was published in the hope that it would contribute ”…To the Enlargement of THE IMAGINATION And the possible Development Of that most rare and excellent Gift of MODESTY Among the Superior Races Of SOLID HUMANITY.”
Modesty, in this sense, refers humility resulting from circumspection regarding our own limitations. It is this kind of modesty that science so often seems to lack.
During the 19th Century, many scientists felt that they finally understood basically everything there was to know about our universe. Over the previous few centuries they had developed a consistent model of the universe that appeared to apply universally. It was taken for granted that theoretical concepts like the universal luminiferous aether were simply fact. Even though its existence had not yet been demonstrated, it was certain to exist by reasonable induction from the known facts of the universe.
In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley formulated an experiment that would demonstrate the fact of the aether. The experiment backfired and ended up throwing the entire theory of the Ether into turmoil. Neither Michelson or Morley accepted the implications of the results of their experiment and Edward Morley spent the next twenty years or so trying to produce an experiment that would vindicate the theory. Meanwhile, others rejected the theory and it was eventually replaced with Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
In 1895, Rontgen discovered X-rays. Henri Becquerel discovered Radioactivity in 1896. And Joseph Thomson discovered the electron in 1897. Within a few short years the beautiful models that had been built up over centuries and were accepted as fact became, suddenly, insufficient.
It is interesting that Flatland was published in 1884—its allegorical exhortation to modesty strikingly apt for the impending shift in science.
