Interesting Links for 04-06-2012

• Nook version of War and Peace turns the word “kindled” into “Nookd”
  (tags: publishing ebooks EpicFail )
• Sometimes Darwin should be allowed to prevail - Top Gear edition
  (tags: EpicFail funny TopGear guns )
• Various SF writers discuss economics.
  (tags: charlesstross society economics writing scifi )
• The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol' Dial-Up Modem Sound
  (tags: history technology modem )
• 46% of Americans Are Creationists, 32% believe in God-guided evolution, 15% are actually right.
  (tags: IfYouTolerateThisYourChildrenWillBeNext usa religion evolution )
• Who were the top selling singles acts of the last 60 years?
  (tags: history uk music )
• Exaggerating changes over time in video allows you to see a person's pulse. I want this in glasses!
  (tags: thefuture amplification video )

Why we have different cables for monitors and TVs

Over in a flocked post I was trying to explain why we have different cables, and how we got to this state. Apologies for any mistakes I've made:

Once upon a time there were analogue connections, where signals varied continuously, and were basically used to directly control the wavy bits of metal inside TVs and monitors that beamed electrodes at the phosphor at the front of the screen. And this was fine.

Then there was the move to LCD screens. Which came first to PCs, because monitors are much smaller than TVs, and people were happy to spend a fortune on getting nice thin ones on their desks. And it seemed silly to change a digital signal inside the computer into an analogue one, sending it to the monitor, and having it convert that signal back into a digital one that turned different pixels on and off. And so DVI was born - the Digital Video Interface. And that allowed the digital signal to go direct from the computer to the monitor, and all was good.

And then the TV people decided they'd also like to get in on the digital action, now that LCD TVs were selling. But they didn't like the idea that people could pull the awesome digital signal direct from the cable and use it to produce pirate copies, so they wanted a connector that included encryption*. They also wanted sound included, which the PC people hadn't cared about, because monitors don't tend to have speakers in them. And rather than building on DVI, they decided to produce HDMI instead, which did these two extra things.

And so we have two competing cable types in the digital world: DVI for PCs and HDMI for TVs. Except that a lot of more recent monitors will also take an HDMI connection and a fair number of decent TVs will take a DVI connection.

I suspect that in the long run HDMI will win, as they're constantly upgrading the spec to allow for higher resolutions**, but it's probably going to take a while.

*This was, of course, completely successful. As you can tell by there being no pirated videos anywhere on the internet. At all.
**Up to 3840x2400 now. Which is twice as high and twice as wide as Blu-Ray currently does, and about the same number of pixels as they use for cinemas. Unless your TV is ridiculously big, you don't need to go that high.

Some brief thoughts on knowing things

Over on Twitter WidgetFox replied to my link about Americans and Evolution (and that only "15% are right") by pointing out that the existence of God isn't testable, and (presumably) therefore saying that the people who were claiming God's involvement were wrong isn't reasonable.

After a teeny bit of conversation I offered to bring the conversation over here, because Twitter is awful for actually laying out thoughts. So I'll try to lay out what I think about Truth, Testability, Belief, etc. Those of you who have already studied epistomology can hit page-down now, and spare yourself my garbled explanations.

People make statements about the universe all of the time. These statements are usually made in absolute terms: "It is hot today.", "Arsenal are rubbish.", "2+2=4", "Evolution is true.", and are then reacted to as if the person who stated them believes 100% that they are absolutely true, with no doubt whatsoever.^[0]

So the first thing to mention is that very few people have 100% absolute belief in anything they state. Most people, if you speak to them reasonably, and they don't feel that they're backed into a corner, or that acknowledging doubt will cause them harm (physically, socially or otherwise) will admit the possibility that their belief is not true^[1].

There are multiple classes of beliefs about the external world that can have their fact levels debated:

• There is belief that is based on logical systems that are self-contained (like mathematics) - "Given the rules of mathematics, adding two and two produces the answer four."
• There is belief that is based on experience of the world - "I saw the car, it was red." This can be further subdivided into things that other people can verify "I took a photo of the car, and as you can see, it is clearly red."^[2] and things which they cannot such as "I feel happy"^[3].
• There is belief that is based on extrapolations from our experiences of the world. "I only told Dave about Jane's surprise birthday party, and now Jane knows, therefore Dave told her."
• There is belief that is based on other people's extrapolations and experiences of the world "My physics book says that the formula for gravity is Gm₁m₂/r².", "My physics teacher told me that Newton was hit on the head by an apple, and that's how he came up with Gravity.", "Pythagoras says that irrational numbers are impossible." And, again, these can be divided into ones that can be verified ("Julie's PhD shows how she achieved her conclusions, includes all of her data, and her methods chapter tells you how to repeat her experiments."), and ones that can't ("Joseph Smith says he translated The Book Of Mormon from a golden book given to him by an angel. But then he gave it back, so you can't see it for yourself.")

There are also beliefs that don't need any justification to the outside world at all - beliefs about internal states, like "I don't like cheese.", "I feel good when I go to Church.", "I am aroused by tentacle porn" , "I'd rather people didn't strangle puppies." and "I enjoy listening to Nirvana more than One Direction." - all of these are purely descriptions of how a person feels, and as such need absolutely no reasoning behind them. It's only if people try and claim that these internal states are actually statements about the outside world, and that other people should be bound by them that they need any kind of discussion. Personally, I prefer a world in which nobody strangled puppies (and am more likely to vote for people who are pro-puppy), and also one without the government forcing (or denying) cheese consumption. It's very much up to individuals to decide how much their morals affect their actions, and how far they are willing to go to make the world into what they see as better. I do find that phrasing these beliefs as personal feelings, rather than statements about the outside world helps a lot ("I don't like cheese" is much easier to deal with than "Cheese is bad and wrong".)

Going back to beliefs about the outside world:
If someone is merely passing comment on their belief system "I believe that the primeval cow licked the first god out of a salt stone.", then one can happily take that as a statement about their beliefs and exchange views with them by telling them that "I believe that Earth gave birth to Sky, who then fertilised Earth and gave birth to some deities who overthrew their father, and then gave birth to different deities who overthrew them in turn.", and then further explanations can be fascinating as you delve into the wildly disparate beliefs you both happen to hold.

There are four levels of evidence for beliefs:
1) There is clear, replicable, evidence for your belief. Photos of Titans overthrowing Chronos, Zeus hosting a Tuesday-night chat-show while maintaining the form of a swan, etc. This should make persuading other people a lot easier.
2) There is personal evidence for your belief. While the chariot of Helios isn't seen drawing the sun across the sky each day, Zeus _did_ once turn up in your home dressed as a shower of golden rain. Possibly you hallucinated the whole thing, but possibly you didn't - and having experienced a god first-hand seems like a pretty good reason to believe in them^[4]. Can be upgraded to (1) by having a camera with you next time Zeus pops round for a shag.
3) Other people tell you that Apollo is real, and will help you out if you pray to him. They don't have any proof, and Apollo seems to work more through coincidence than anything else, but surely that many people can't be wrong? The problem here being that there are lots of other religious believers who believe completely contradictory things to your lot. Sure, they have a bunch of books, but so do the Latter Day Saints, the Scientologists, and John Doe from Se7en.
4) You really, _really_ want to. This one doesn't usually happen by itself. There's usually either (2) or (3) to act as a trigger, followed by (4) to hold the belief in place. Sometimes, though, people start off because of a group of people/books, and then they abandon one part of the book, and some of the people, and change their belief to be something that makes them happier. But now they don't even have "A bunch of people claim that their distant ancestors saw Zeus, back when he used to meddle all the time." as an explanation for their belief, because the Zeus they believe in doesn't match the one that the Strict Zeusists claim to have seen.

Now, these four different options aren't just applicable to religion, of course. They can equally apply to other beliefs about the world.
1) A scientist has done a high quality study, that is entirely openly published, and has been replicated by numerous other scientists all over the world. Other people are free to build on this, or try to refute it, but currently it has not been contradicted.
2) You've discovered that eating beef makes you sick. Possibly there's something going on at a biological level where you have an unusual physiology, or maybe you once ate some bad beef and now you feel nauseous when you even think of eating it. (Alternative example: You find social situations difficult and once did an internet quiz that told you you had Aspergers.) Upgradeable to (1) by getting an expert to test you, but may be useful on a personal level even without that.
3) Many people have told you that they diluted something poisonous with so much water that there was none left, and that taking it helped them with their problem^[5], despite there being a complete lack of any evidence that homeopathy works.
4) You've now defended homeopathy/the perils of beef-eating so many times that it has become part of you self-identity, and is thus hard to let go of.

In any case, my reactions to people's claims vary dramatically, depending on how well I know them, how their claims fit in with existing beliefs, what kind of mood I'm in at the time. The majority of the time that people claim that things are true without proof I just move on. I can happily talk to a Christian about how awesome Avatar:The Legend of Korra is^[6] without having to worry about whether we share a belief in how the universe began^[7]. Also, I don't see any point in jumping up and down on other people's beliefs, unless they're using them as an excuse for behaving badly towards people. I'm fascinated by why people believe - and even then I try to avoid drilling too deep, because I don't want to offend people. However, when people say they believe things that they admit are untestable, then my reaction is to wonder what it was that caused them to believe in something without any proof. Personally, I'm much happier saying "I don't know" about the gaps in my knowledge than I am making assumptions to fit into the gaps that happen to make me happy. It seems a far more honest a way to deal with the world.

[0]I'm going to avoid using the word "Knowledge", because it gets twisted around by people. I'm using "Belief" here to mean the ideas people have about how the world (and other systems) work.
[1]Personally, I'm not willing to discount the idea that I'm living in a computer simulation. Which would make all my other beliefs about the world immediately suspect. I don't think it's very likely, but I can't see any way to disprove it.
[2]Leaving aside here differences in perception, colour-blindness, etc. When struck by daylight, the car reflects light of a specific wavelength, generally named "Red" by those who see it.
[3]Well, until we can analyse the brain at a sufficiently high level.
[4]I know a couple of people who fall into this category. And much though _I_ interpret their experiences as being brain-spasms, I can at least firmly understand why they believe. Partially because I don't know what I would do if I thought I saw an angel/demon/vampire/alien one day, but nobody else did.
[5]Thanks to the wonders of regression to the mean. Basically, if you're really ill, chances are that you're about to get better, whether you take the sugar-water or not.
[6]Not as awesome as Avatar: The Last Airbender, but still pretty damned awesome.
[7]My current working assumption is "with a big bang", but I'm by no means certain. As to what happened before that, I just don't know, and I don't see any point in making guesses, except for entertainment value.