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<\/a><\/p>\nYesterday I ran a post on science fiction and philosophy<\/a> and the next one coming up is going to be on the distinction between science fiction and fantasy. \u00a0So let\u2019s make this a science-themed edition of quick-takes (as if I needed an excuse).<\/p>\n But before we move off sci-fi entirely, I want to link to a post on this topic by John C. Wright, an atheist-to-Catholic convert and Nebula nominee for his scifi writing. \u00a0When it first ran, the essay was titled \u201cAliens Need Christ\u2019s Redemption, Too<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n From the ever-excellent blog Schneider on Security<\/a>, a link to the following academic paper: \u201cScience Fiction Prototyping and Security Education: Cultivating Contextual and Societal Thinking in Computer Security Education and Beyond<\/a>.\u201d \u00a0The researchers recommend using science fiction as a way to raise awareness of computer security issues and keeping them urgent and relevant. \u00a0It\u2019s certainly a step up from the password security theatre<\/a> embraced by plenty of companies and websites.\n<\/p> I really enjoy Google\u2019s\u00a0tendency\u00a0to release why-the-heck-not? projects, and Draw from Google Correlate<\/a> is the latest to delight me. \u00a0You try to freehand draw a trend line with your cursor, and Google supplies a search term that roughly matches that plot.<\/p>\n Apparently we\u2019re a lot more worried about \u201csharp pain\u201d than we were in 2004. \u00a0Have fun futzing around.<\/p>\n And, if you\u2019re interested in trying to extract meaning from arbitrary-seeming jumbles of data, maybe you\u2019ll like the research I found via Ezra Klein: an interesting hypothesis about the density of concepts in different languages<\/a>.<\/p>\n The more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second \u2014 and the slower the speech thus was. English, with a high information density of .91, is spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, rips along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edges past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A friend of mine calls shennanigans, on the grounds that foreign languages always sound fast, since the unfamiliar phonemes mean you can\u2019t tell when anything begins or ends. \u00a0I imagine that could be true, but linguists could still observe some languages to be more densely packed than others. \u00a0I don\u2019t know much about linguistics, though, so I\u2019d appreciate a clarification.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n If you\u2019re not already\u00a0familiar\u00a0with the Stanford Prison Experiment<\/a>, check out the wikipedia page and then head over, with everyone else, to Stanford Alumni Magazine, where they\u2019ve published interviews<\/a> with several of the participants.<\/p>\n The experiment, which took place 1971, randomly divided up a group of volunteers to serve as either guards or convicts in a simulated prison. \u00a0The experiment swiftly spiraled out of control, as the \u2018guards\u2019 began abusing the \u2018prisoners\u2019 under their care. \u00a0It\u2019s become a cautionary example of the corrupting and warping influence of power over people in a dehumanizing situation.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been catching up with Common Sense Atheism\u2019s read-all-of-Yudkowsky project<\/a> and one post I read this week (\u201cUnbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, & Futurism<\/a>\u201c) touches on an interesting aspect of social science and cognitive bias. \u00a0Here\u2019s a preview:<\/p>\n Kahneman et. al., 1998 and 1999, presented 867 jury-eligible subjects with descriptions of legal cases (e.g., a child whose clothes caught on fire) and asked them to either<\/p>\n And, lo and behold, while subjects correlated very well with each other in their outrage ratings and their punishment ratings, their punitive damages were all over the map. Yet subjects\u2019 rank-ordering of the punitive damages \u2013 their ordering from lowest award to highest award \u2013 correlated well across subjects\u2026.<\/p>\n Which is to say: if you knew the scenario presented \u2013 the aforementioned child whose clothes caught on fire \u2013 you could take a good guess at the punishment rating, and a good guess at the rank-ordering of the dollar award relative to other cases, but the dollar award itself would be completely unpredictable\u2026 Taking the median of twelve randomly selected responses didn\u2019t help much either.<\/p>\n So a jury award for punitive damages isn\u2019t so much an economic valuation as an attitude expression \u2013 a psychophysical measure of outrage, expressed on an unbounded scale with no standard modulus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read the whole thing, and then see what you could do to compensate for this effect.<\/p>\n And, to close closer to where we began, check out two English glosses on a Jesuit\u2019s take on the Christian perspective on computer hacking<\/a> and open source software<\/a>. \u00a0(As you may\u00a0remember\u00a0from my posts during senior essay season, I\u2019m very invested<\/a> in these topics). \u00a0Here\u2019s a quote to think on:<\/p>\n Mr Spadaro says he became interested in the subject when he noticed that hackers and students of hacker culture used \u201cthe language of theological value\u201d when writing about creativity and coding, so he decided to examine the idea more deeply. The hacker ethic forged on America\u2019s west coast in the 1970s and 1980s was playful, open to sharing, and ready to challenge models of proprietary control, competition and even private property. Hackers were the origin of the \u201copen source\u201d movement which creates and distributes software that is free in two senses: it costs nothing and its underlying code can be modified by anyone to fit their needs. \u201cIn a world devoted to the logic of profit,\u201d wrote Mr Spadaro, hackers and Christians have \u201cmuch to give each other\u201d as they promote a more positive vision of work, sharing and creativity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He is not the only person to see an affinity between the open-source hacker ethos and Christianity. Catholic open-source advocates have founded a group called El\u00e8utheros to encourage the church to endorse such software. Its manifesto refers to \u201cstrong ideal affinities between Christianity, the philosophy of free software, and the adoption of open formats and protocols\u201d. Marco Fioretti, co-founder of the group, says open-source software teaches the \u201cpractical dimension of community and service to others that is already in the church message\u201d. There are also legal motivations. Commercial software such as Microsoft Word is widely pirated in many parts of the world, by Catholics as well as others. Mr Fioretti advocates the use of open-source software instead, because he doesn\u2019t want people \u201cto violate a law without any real reason, just to open a church document.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-Ct4XYSBmm3Q\/TmmDH4BU07I\/AAAAAAAABlM\/_AAPKYlxqCE\/s400\/google+draw.jpg\")
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