Identity Theft

On the 10th of October, 2010, Natasha Mitchell interviewed Thomas Metzinger on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National network program All in the Mind. The show was titled You are not a self! Bodies, brains and the nature of consciousness. The ABC is the Government-financed public broadcaster in Australia. Radio National (RN) is an AM radio network dedicated to cultural and scientific topics that do not get much airplay on commercial radio. Metzinger was introduced on the programme like so:

Professor Metzinger is based at the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz in Germany, and has long collaborated with neuroscientists and artificial intelligence researchers and others. And in his new book The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self he makes the case that there is no such thing as a self.

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Ant: process elements in a list

I was looking for a way to process a list of items in an ant build file, similar to what you would do in Java with a construct like:

for ( Element element : elements ) {
    // do stuff with element
}

The approach of XSLT, using recursive calls with local variables, looked promising. In the ant-user mailing list, I found a posting on the topic Implementing a loop in ANT with something like what I was looking for. Ben Stringer’s example gave me the critical information—that I could make indirecly recursive calls to antcall. He also used an external file, updated with the buildnumber task, to maintain state through the recursive calls. Bingo!

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Ant: edit property values

One of the frustrations of using ant was the difficulty of deriving one property value performing some sort of editing operation on an existing property value. The mapper task does a lot of grunt work for file names, but not for property values as such.

A common requirement is to map a Java package name to a corresponding directory structure. I have a property containing the package name, and I want to create another property with the directories. Here’s one way to do that. Continue reading “Ant: edit property values”

Using environment.plist with Mountain Lion

UPDATE
This post is now obsolete. For the preferred method in both Mountain Lion and Mavericks, see  Setting environment variables in OS X Mountain Lion and Mavericks. With Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), the environment settings from ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist are not taken into account when the background system environment is set up by launchd, the OS X initialisation process. Consequently, if you want settings like $JAVA_HOME to be available to Java applications you start from Finder, you must find an alternative for setting them.

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Setting Environment Variables in OS X Lion

If you want to set environment variables in OS X in such a way as to be recognised in applications run from Finder, it is not enough to set the env var in .profile.  You must also ensure that the variables are set in the file ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. Setting values in that file is most conveniently done using the executable PlistBuddy.

On my system, the command
$ which PlistBuddy
yields
/usr/sbin/PlistBuddy

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Does Intelligent Design subvert faith?

Spengler (David Goldman) posted an article in the Asia Times Online, titled Why ‘Intelligent Design’ subverts faith. What follows is my reply. Quotes from Goldman’s article are in italics, for the most part. Spengler quotes from an article by David Bentley Hart, hence the reference.
The workings of nature are so complex and perfect…that they bespeak a design, and a design must have a designer. The trouble is that the same clock seems to set off a bomb at random intervals. 
There is a false premise in Voltaire’s argument, namely that humankind is always and inevitably subject to the ravages of cruel and capricious nature. We now build cities able to withstand earthquakes; the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 killed 16,000 people in much more densely populated regions, a terrible toll, to be sure, but a fraction of the Lisbon dead. No human being need die from hunger, or cold, or bacterial disease; if some die, it is the fault of human action, not an Act of God.

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‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’

Daniel Dennett published an article titled ‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence in The Atlantic on 22nd June, 2012. What follows is the text of a post of mine on the Polanyi Discussion List, polanyi_list.

Daniel Dennett is performing conjuring tricks for his Atlantic audience.

To this day many people cannot get their heads around the unsettling idea that a purposeless, mindless process can crank away through the eons, generating ever more subtle, efficient, and complex organisms without having the slightest whiff of understanding of what it is doing.

How true. Drop the last couple of clauses, and he’s describing Polanyi.

In order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is.

This in bold, no less. I’ll come back to this. Continue reading “‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’”