Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink

Three points of intersection:

1. I went to see Batman this weekend with my lady friend. It was very good. I find I go to see a movie every two or three weeks. I love going to movies. Problem is, most of them just aren't that good. But you know this. You aren't going to movies as much either. You use netflix, too, don't you? Movies are expensive, refreshments are expensive, you have to drive there, and gas is expensive. And again: most of the movies just aren't much good. The movie industry is in crisis mode because people aren't going to the theaters anymore.

2. I went to the book store yesterday, as I had finished reading the excellent Seabiscuit: An American Legend. I really wanted some fiction to read, but found nothing appealing. I'm pretty picky, but I was not lacking in choices. Quite the opposite: I was overwhelmed. A rifled through the endless wrack. So many books in this fine world of ours, but no one seems to have received the memo about writing interesting openings. Nor have many received the memo about not using crappy titles. Titles should be phrases, or at worst, dependent clauses, not full-on sentences. Nor should a title be a snippet of something somebody says. Editors who allow such filth should be dragged into the street and beaten. Anyway, I gave up and got some more nonfiction. So much to read, and nothing perked my interest.

3. CDs. The old familiar. Suffice to say, I shop at iTunes now. $15 for one hit+fluff? No samples? Are you kidding me? And the RIAA blames file sharing.

None of this comes as a surprise to you, I know. We all know. Our media sources are letting us down. They're flooding the market with dreck. That's why we made napster, etc. That's why we made blogs. Newspapers blow, by and large. Local news blows. GOD does it blow. We know this. The big guys appear not to.

I think the music situation is sorting itself out. And books? What can you do? Since movies seem to be the crisis du jour today, here's a movie tip:

Show old movies. I would be all over that. Especially with action movies, there's no substitute for a giant screen with surround sound. Instead of crunching in Legally Blond 5: Blond out your ass, why not show star wars, pre-Jar Jar. Or something like Lawrence of Arabia. I'd pay to see that. Because as nice as home theaters are, they're no theater. Then, hen someone comes out with something new that's worth seeing, we can see that.

Guys: I want to give you money. Please, give me a reason.

A guy can dream

Rumors of Apple being in talks with Sirius satellite radio are floating again. As with most rumors, grab your salt, but here's an apple-ish thing that would make such a deal make sense for Apple. (Sirius-on-iPod, I think, would mostly benefit Sirius, riding the iPod's coattails.)

The main challenge when selling media like music and books is to take customers, and segue one thing they like into another thing they like. There are many reasons iTunes is successful, but I think two are absolutely key: The previews and iMix, etc.

I love the preview feature. Sometimes, I'll be at a store, looking at a CD, so I'll grab it, and sit down. I will then search for the album, and sample the music on iTunes. If I like what I hear, the CD is mine. Of course, usually I like a few of the songs, but hey, I'm already at a store. Why don't I just buy what I want and be done with it? Sometimes, I opt for the physical disc, especially if I like the whole thing, and I suspect my darling girlfriend might like it, too. Either way, I have happy Apple-directed thoughts.

iMix and its retinue are the bane of my existence. By which I mean they are the sucking machine hovering over my wallet. I walk in looking for one song, and I walk out with 40. This happens often. Why? Because iMixes are real playlists that people actually listen to. The free-association magic is astoundingly effective at finding me what I like. Which gets back to our original question: How else to segue from one sale to the next?

If done properly, a Sirius iPod could do that. Radio stations (assuming they don't suck, a stretch, I know) are a good way to get new music out there, in a way that isn't easy (one assumes) to copy or "steal". And better than a preview, you can hear the whole damn song. The only point of disconnect is the time between hearing a song you like, and buying it. But what if there was a button on your radio to add the song just played to your iTunes shopping cart. Perhaps the song could be sent to your iPod if you set it up properly, but it would be enough just to queue it up so that, the next time I go to check out, there be the music. This seems eminently doable, and if there's any credence (doubtful) to the rumors of Apple-Sirius talks, I hope this is what they have in mind. I'd buy it.

Episode III

And the award for most ironic line uttered in a Star Wars movie (and perhaps, indeed, in any movie) goes to this line, uttered by Obi-wan Kenobi:

"Only a sith would speak in absolutes."

Is it possible to die of irony?

Much ado about I.D.

You may have heard about a little scuffle they're having out in Kansas. Some school governing body is holding 'hearings' to decide whether a "theory" called Intelligent Design should be taught along with Evolution in Kansas schools.

Your first question, if you aren't familiar with the issue, is: What's Intelligent Design? It's a mercifully simple idea. I.D. people note that there are certain flaws in the evolution theory, or more accurately, things we haven't explained yet. I.D. people say that these issues are, in fact, insoluble, and cannot be explained without some sort of designer. Even in millions of years, they say, random mutation cannot account for the development of life.

I should note that the ideas of Intelligent Design are not far off from my own. I believe there is a divine being running the show, and I believe that being designed, created, and is testing that design around us as we speak. I think some amount of evolution is just about undeniable, but I also can see the holes in our current theories. There are questions to be answered.

Having said that, I can say with absolute certainty that I.D. does not belong in our science classrooms, and I'll tell you why: It's not science. At best, it's very very bad science, and very bad science is the last thing we need in classrooms.

Arguments like the one about I.D. are able to happen, I think, because most people, having spent at least a few years in high school studying it, don't have a clear idea of what science is. High school doesn't touch this topic too much. The main issue is to learn facts and formulas. Philosophy of Science must seem a bit of a waste to most teachers. And with the horizons of science expanding so rapidly every day, it must seem like a hopeless battle. But understanding philosophy of science, I would argue, is the most important thing in science education. The particulars can be learned at leisure. But to do so, an understanding of what science is and how it works is critical. We're going to consider two questions: What is science, and what is good science? And why is I.D. neither?

Put simply, science is the acquisition of knowledge through the testing of ideas that can be proven wrong. There is a great myth, encouraged, I'd say, by the media, that science "proves things". Nothing could be further from the truth. Many a bleary eyed dieter has suffered this effect trying to decide if a particular food is "good for you" or "bad for you". So you turn on the news, and some sound-bite pedlar tells you "Scientists today say bran is good for you." Anyone who's read a real piece of scientific writing or research knows this is simply not so. When a scientist wants to demonstrate something, they go through a simple, rigorous process. We look at things in the world, and we have ideas as to how they work. So far, we have no science. To cross that threshold, we must construct a test. For instance, gravity. We all know that when we jump up, we come back down, but why? The greeks thought there were two forces, one called levity that helped birds fly, and gravity, which kept is down. But why is levity not working so well on us? Newton had a better idea. Matter (i.e. Stuff) has gravity. Every bit of matter has a certain amount. The more matter, the more matter. It's a force of the universe between atoms. Einstein had an even better idea: Gravity is the result of stuff actually bending space and time. Lots of matter bend space and time a lot.

Now, why did people like Newton's explanation better than its predecessor? Well, Newton made up a formula for gravity describing how much gravity a given amount of matter should have. So many years later, scientists were looking at the planets. They looked at Uranus and Saturn and Jupiter, and something was wrong. Given the known planet's size, speed, and calculated gravity, they weren't moving right. Scientists figured out that for those planets to move as they did, there would have to be another planet of a certain mass at a certain position moving at a certain speed. So they figured out where such a planet ought to be, they pointed their telescopes thither, and lo and behold, there lay Neptune!

This is an example of good science. What makes it good? Well, when Newton wrote up his theory of gravitation, he didn't know about Neptune. He was just writing about what he saw. But he predicted how things would work elsewhere. Years later, those tests were tried out in a novel situation, and worked like gangbusters. This is how we decide that a theory is a good one. If it predicts things for which it has no knowledge, and proves right, it's good.

I.D. does not predict anything. It simply notes flaws in the current theories regarding the development of life, throws up its hands, and says "Can't explaining it! It must be a designer!"

It's at least possible that this is so. But no method is provided to prove the idea wrong. If we had pointed our telescopes at where Newton's laws predicted a planet would be, and found nothing there, we would have had reason to believe that Newton was wrong. As it turns out, we do find little cracks in Newtonian gravity, and have built better explanations to account for them. But the important thing is: There was a test. I.D. provides no such thing. In fact, I.D. is symptomatic of a deeper issue in the sciences that cuts both ways.

To illustrate this issue, lot's consider a piece of cheese. (Bare with me.) Imagine we cut it in half, then again, and again. How small could we cut the cheese (snicker) before we could no longer cut it. What, in other words, is the smallest particle? Well, eventually, we'd reach cells. and then we'd reach molecules, and atoms, and protons. Then we'd find things like quarks, muons, bosons, and even more strangely named particalia.

Are these the smallest? Who knows. Indeed, how would you know when you'd reached the bottom? It's certainly plausible that you could reach the bottom, smallest piece, but there's no way you could know for certain that you had done so.

Our ability to have as good an idea of the situation as we do is thanks largely to superior tools of observation. Powerful telescopes, microscopes, and gauging devices give us an ever sharper picture of what is out there. But the tools could certainly be sharper, and one hopes, they one day will be. It's possible, indeed probable, that one day our future tools will shake up all our current ideas. And in the goodness of time, those tools and ideas will be shaken as well. It's a game that probably never ends, because much though the media, and even scientists themselves might like you to believe, science has no real end game we know of. Science is very bad at fingering ultimate truth. Instead, science chops off bad ideas, and makes an educated guess with what is left. As an ecology teacher told me in college "Science never proves, it disproves."

Most people find such a notion supremely disappointing. It is in this utterly human attitude that religion and philosophy find their stock and trade. Religion and philosophy grow ideas like a majestic vine, as science follows along, chopping off the bad branches. Without imaginative ideas, there could be no science. Without care and grooming, the vine would become a sick and tangled mess, which might not be so bad, but often tends to be.

Which brings us back to I.D. As I said in the beginning, the ideas of I.D. are closely aligned with my own. It's a fine idea. But it makes no testable claims, and that is why it is science. As we have seen, to say that because an idea doesn't have all the answers, it is therefore invalid is simply wrong. Science isn't designed to bring the answers. It's designed to narrow the pool of possibilities. Ideas that do so should be taught in a science classroom. For anything else, there are many, many venues. Hand throwing theories that say anything "must be true" belong elsewhere. Here's hoping the board in Kansas comes to understand this.

At last, better cover art

Sex and the City - The Complete Series

My brother and sister-in-law got me hooked on Sex and the City via Netflix (alas, I have no HBO of my own). It's a great series. So good I've considered acquiring DVD's for my permanent collection.

So I head on over to Amazon to see what the prices are like. Upon landing at the above page, I'm chided not to buy it, because, you see, HBO is going to release a premium edition. What makes the premium edition so shagadelic? Quoth a reviewer:

According to the New York Daily News:

Rhea said HBO is planning a "super-premium" set of "Sex and the City" to hit stores before Christmas.

"I think there is absolutely a super-premium collector's market," she said about "Sex and the City."

Though all seasons have been released in separate installments, Rhea said the complete collection, including additional content and DVD extras not available on the originals, is being developed with "an eye for the collector," including new disc art and lavish packaging.

"It'll be kind of showpiece that you might want to own and preserve, and not use as your everyday set," Rhea said. "I guess it would be kind of like the good china. Or the good shoes."

So you can have your DVD set that you use and the special one for show. The difference, friends, is that the packaging is nicer. I'm sure the superior DVD art makes the jokes much funnier.