Oct 9, via the BBC, buried down at the bottom of the toothless UN sanctions imposed on North Korea:

I hear scuttlebutt that the dictator with the bad hair has a wife with a well-developed fashion sense.

Today, I see N Korea ‘not planning more tests’

Hmmm.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, but Dawkins’ pronouncements are just plain stupid.

Using religion and God as an excuse to kill people is evil. If he’d said that, I’d agree 100%. Some of the things people do in the name of God really are evil.

But to say that religion is at fault because people make a pig’s breakfast of it is like saying that love is evil because people can use it to hurt each other.

The other thing is, where does he get off, making sweeping statements about God? He’s just finished saying he doesn’t think God exists. If God doesn’t exist for him, he couldn’t know anything about it. I would have thought he was smart enough to see the paradox. (Yes, I do have issues with not separating science and religion. Read more about it here, if you’d like.)

Maybe he should stick to genetics, something he does have a clue about.

Technorati tags: Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, religion, God, evil

Many commenters on the Lancet study (pdf) boggle at the numbers, point at the uncertainty, express disbelief, and note that they’re not statisticians. Well, I’m here to help.

Although perhaps not very much. I’m not a statistician either. I scraped the bottom of the barrel as a student taking my one required stat class. It was only because Dick Lewontin was a brilliant teacher and exceedingly merciful that I passed at all. But in some ways that may make it easier for me to explain. I know what we all go through when statistics get thrown at us.

I won’t be discussing specifics of the methodology or how they collected data. (For what my opinion is worth, their methodology is excellent.) Billmon, Zeyad, and the Lancet article itself go into that in exhaustive detail. (Update, Oct 19. Another English- rather than statistics-based discussion by Greg Mitchell. Yet one more: Riverbend gives her usual excellent personal take on the numbers.) Iraq Body Count has a much lower number (about 43,000 at the low end of the estimate) because that is a tally purely of deaths reported in various media. Anyone who thinks that the media are cataloguing every single death in Iraq is living in a dreamworld. Of course IBC’s estimate is vastly lower.

I’d like to (try to) explain in a nutshell what the overall numbers in the Lancet article mean.

The main thing that seems to have people’s knickers in a twist is the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimates of the true number of excess deaths. (It’s worth pointing out that the uncertainty would be much lower if the US had lived up to its obligations as an occupier and kept as good a count as it could of deaths in the country.)

There are two different kinds of uncertainty: the uncertainty of not knowing whether your numbers are right because of the difficulty of collecting the data, and the statistical measure of uncertainty. The broad range of estimates, 392979 – 942636, in the Lancet article is due to the difficulty of collecting data. Since getting the data is difficult, the distribution of estimates of the real number of deaths will look like the blue line below. Note that the line does NOT represent numbers of deaths. It represents estimates of what the actual real number is.

(Graphs modified from Wikipedia, showing generic normal distributions to illustrate the concepts discussed. These are not from the Lancet.)

The important thing to remember is that the statistics tell you how much chance you have of guessing wrong. The true number has a 68% likelhood of being somewhere in the blue zone in the lower graph above. It has a 95% likelihood of being somewhere within the blue plus beige zones. In the top graph, the 95% zone lies between the dashed lines: as discussed below, that’s a narrow range for the red line, broad for the blue one.

With good data, the chance that your estimate will be far from the true number (i.e. “0”) is low, so the curve is steep and pointy. If, for instance, the true number of excess deaths were 655,000, and the necessary records to count the number of deaths were easily available, the likelihood that the real number of deaths was, say, 600,000 would be vanishingly small. Ninety five percent of the estimates might fall between, for instance, plus or minus 10,000 deaths, as depicted by the dashed lines in the top graph.

With hard-to-collect data, the chance of estimating wrong is much higher. The likelihood that the real number was 600,000 is not vanishingly small. It’s quite large, and 600,000 may, in fact, be the real number. So may 700,000. Both are equally likely. If one wants to stress that the number of excess deaths could be as low as 393,000 according to this study, one has to also stress that it could be as high as 943,000. The uncertainty of the estimate means higher numbers are as likely as lower ones.

What the range of numbers means is that there is high statistical certainty (at least 95% to be precise) that the real number of deaths falls within that range. The range encompasses the blue and the beige areas under the graph (and is represented by the hard-to-see dashed lines at the extreme right and left of the blue line in the top graph). That means there is a 95% probability that the true number of deaths falls somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636. There is a less than one in twenty chance that “only” 350,000 people have died due to the occupation, or that a million people have died. In other words, there is a great deal of statistical certainty that the range is correct. The midpoint of the range is the likeliest true number, but that is less certain.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died. That is not in dispute any more than any other scientific conclusion that rests on a 95% confidence level (i.e. all biological and medical science).

So, now that I’ve cleared that up, can we stop pooh-poohing the numbers and start being appropriately horrified that hundreds of thousands of people have died?

Technorati tags: Iraq, body count, Lancet, war, human cost

Windows Vista, the new version of Windows due out Real Soon Now, will have an anti-piracy *cough* feature *cough* that people need to be aware of.

This is like Windows “Genuine Advantage,” only more so. WGA has made a name for itself by interfering with people’s legitimate copies of Windows, forcing them to call Microsoft, and prove their legitimacy by climbing through the usual time-wasting voicemail jungle jim after digging up their software serial numbers. I think Microsoft is assuming that the new, improved Vista version of the kill switch will never, ever, ever make any mistakes. Personally, I would not want to bet my ability to meet a deadline on Microsoft’s idea of a mistake.

So maybe it’s time to take another look at Linux. I’ve used Linux for years (Red Hat 6, 7, 9; Fedora Core 3; and Ubuntu). Linux is an open source operating system, free as in free speech, which is famous for being suitable only for geeks. That is not entirely true anymore. It’s also important to remember that there’s no need to choose either/or. If you have the hard disk space, you can set up a dual boot Linux system and keep your Windows system exactly as is. That way you can use Linux and learn your way around, but if you need to use some of your old software, it’s right there. You can also try Linux out by booting and running off a CD, without installing at all. More on that below.

[Standard disclaimer: I’ve tried to make these pointers as clear and correct as possible. However, I can’t vouch for their suitability or fitness for any purpose whatsoever. Nor can I promise that they won’t turn your computer into a brick. Or whatever the correct terminology is. I throw away all the EULAs without reading them, just like everybody else.]

Let’s get to it. What’s involved?

First of all, there are many different kinds of Linux. Ubuntu is one of the easiest and best-supported types, or “flavors,” or “distributions” or “distros,” of Linux. It takes a couple of hours to get everything installed. It’s not any different from installing any other new software, but since there’s more of it–we’re talking about the whole operating system and office software, after all–it takes longer.

Step 1a. Check for compatibility. The simplest way to do this is by booting Ubuntu from CD, without installing. If something critical, like your display or keyboard doesn’t work, it’ll soon be obvious. However, if you’d rather do it by the book, or if you want to buy new hardware and need to know whether it’ll work with Linux, then you can look through the compatibility lists. If you have common hardware that’s two or more years old, you can be pretty sure Ubuntu will install and run. Three compatibility lists: Ubuntu lists with a link to tldp.org which is as complete as it gets, and a huge list where you have to scroll down to find the search bar,

1b. Check whether you have enough system memory and hard disk space. The current version of Ubuntu (6.06, Dapper Drake…) requires 256 MB RAM (also known as “system memory” as distinct from hard disk space) at the very least. 512 MB of system memory is the lower limit in practice. One gigabyte is better.

Space needed on the hard drive: The operating system itself plus basic programs take about 1.5 GB. Linux, like Windows, reserves space on the hard disk to swap files in and out while you use them. The Linux swap file takes 1.5 to 2 times your system memory. So if you have 1 GB RAM, you want around 2 GB space for a swap file; 512 MB RAM, you want about 1GB swap; and so on. You might want space for other programs you install later. As far as your data is concerned, Linux can read Windows-based files, so you can either use your existing Windows space, or reserve extra space on the Linux part of your hard disk. In the latter case, your Windows programs will NOT be able to read those data files.

Step 2 Download the latest version of Ubuntu to your computer. This is a large (approx 600MB) file that can be written straight to a CD. Alternatively, there’s an address to request a CD to be sent to you, which they do free of charge. (Thank Mark Shuttleworth)
2b) Boot from that CD.

Step 3. Try out Ubuntu. A screen with several choices appears. One is “Start or Install” (the default). Let it boot using that. It won’t install unless you tell it to after it boots up. You can run Ubuntu from the CD, so you can see what it looks like and how you feel about it without installing it on your computer. Since it’s on a CD that you can’t write to, you can’t change settings permanently, but it can give you an idea of what the operating system (OS) is like. Start by clicking on the icon in the top left of the screen, which acts like a Windows Start Menu. (Ubuntu has a somewhat unfortunate brown color scheme. This can be changed in preferences.)

Step 4. Install If you decide to install, you’ll eventually click the “Install” icon after the CD boots up. Not yet. Have your ethernet cable plugged in, if you have one. The installer sets up your network connections in that case, which is much nicer than doing it yourself. It also goes out on the web and looks for software it thinks you need while it’s installing. This is actually very useful, and not nearly as sinister as it seems beforehand.

Adam Pash of Lifehacker has written a number of helpful posts on Ubuntu (check under their linux section. There’s even a post on how to set up a triple boot system, which works just as well for dual boot if you ignore the first step about adding Windows Vista on top of your existing WinXP, and go straight to Step Two, installing Ubuntu.

The scariest part of installing is setting up an Ubuntu “partition.” Partition is Linux-speak for “drive.” If you were in Windows, this would be like formatting a new drive so that you could put a totally separate set of files on it. The installer can set up partitions as part of the install process, but it is actually easier to do it using a program that is on the Ubuntu CD. [correction Oct. 8th: The installer can set up partitions, but not the ones you want if you want to keep your Windows intact. So, it would be more correct for the purpose here to say that it cannot set up the necessary partitions. You have to do it ahead of time.]

Erase entire disk is the default selection. DO NOT HIT RETURN OR CLICK THE FORWARD BUTTON. Do change the selection to “manually edit.” Then hit the forward button.

The next screen is still Step 5). It shows the partitions you saw before in GParted. Make sure the list includes an “ext3” partition and a “swap” partition that you made earlier, and that they’re the size you expect them to be. Since you don’t actually want to change anything, accept the partitions as they are, and hit “Forward.”

You reach the third screen of Step 5) (The Ubuntu folks obviously cheated a bit here.) It shows all the partitions on the disk, and has boxes next to each one at the right showing which ones will be reformatted to hold your new Ubuntu operating system. By default, it leaves Windows partitions alone, and only the “ext3” and “swap” should have their reformat boxes checked. Make sure this is the case. One of the partitions has to be “ext3” and have a “/” (which equals “root”) “mount point.” Translated into English that means that one of the partitions has to be in native Linux format and has to tell Linux “boot from here.” Once everything is right, hit “Forward.”

Step 6) lists what will be done during the install. Double check that to make sure that only the partitions you intend to reformat will be reformatted. If everything is as expected, hit “Install” and either watch curious things scroll by on the screen, or do something else. I don’t remember how long it takes, but it’s at least half an hour, I think. Check back periodically in case there’s a problem. Do not worry about bizarre computer gobbledygook that goes scrolling by too fast to see. All of that is going into a file an expert could use, but has nothing to do with an ordinary user, even if it says stuff like “error.” If the install process stays stuck at one point with no sign of any progress for more than, say, five minutes, it’s a likely bet that some hardware in your computer is hopelessly incompatible, and the thing to do is give up.

If, because of an install problem or just because, you decide to go back entirely to Windows, see below about how to get all your hard disk space back into Windows.

Note that if you’re installing both Windows & Ubuntu (if, for instance, you bought a used corporate laptop off ebay that had its disk wiped clean), Windows has to be installed first. It doesn’t play well with other OSes, and needs to think it’s the only thing on the drive.

By default, if the installer detects Windows (or any other operating system) on your computer, it assumes you want a dual boot system, and gives a choice of operating systems when you start back up. You’ll get an ugly text screen showing the choices, one of which is regular Ubuntu (don’t choose rescue, or safe or any of that stuff), and the other is Windows. The default will probably be Ubuntu, but that can be changed to Windows later, if you prefer. You have 30 seconds, by default, to make your choice.

Things the installer does for you
Ubuntu includes OpenOffice, which is a full Office Suite donated by Sun Microsystems and hundreds of programmers. It can write and read Microsoft Office files without issues, unless you have complicated Powerpoints with animations. Those haven’t always worked for me. Ubuntu includes Gimp, a PhotoShop analog with about 90% of PhotoShop’s abilities. (No easy way to do high dynamic range, for instance.) CD burners, mp3 players, Firefox to browse the web, EvolutionMail, will all be there once the OS is done installing.

5) Getting help. As with any new software, you do have to learn your way around. The “OK” button is not in the same place, and that kind of thing. If there’s something you need outside assistance on, unfortunately the help files that come with the system tend to be obscure. The way to get help in Linux is via forums on the web. Users helping users seems like an iffy way to do things, but it has worked 100% better for me, with far less aggro, than “real” technical support. Ubuntu, has some of the best help forums around. (Support page with links to documentation, FAQs, mailing lists, and the forums. The Ubuntu wikis are also a useful resource, best used by using the search feature at the top right. Linuxquestions.org is one of the biggest general linux forums. Another neat trick if you get a specific, incomprehensible error message, is to search Google for that exact phrase (enter it into the Google search bar with double quotes around it.) More often than not, the answer is in the first few search results.

I have a post about some of my favorite Linux programs here. There’s an open source animation program (Blender), photo gallery software (JAlbum), (one example using photos from Fiji) and other links.

Likeliest Problem Areas

In order to do anything system-wide in Linux, you have to be the Administrator, known in Linux as “root.” However, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can cause huge security holes or crash your system as root. Ubuntu has therefore made root inaccessible. If you need Admin/root access, there are instructions at Ubuntu Community Help: Root-sudo

The weakest links in the Linux world are wireless, home networking, and font files.

Fonts. Adobe and Microsoft don’t want other people using their cool fonts. Obviously, a page formatted in some new, unplanned font can look very weird. The workaround is to find where the fonts are stored on your Windows system (search for *.ttf, and note the folder. E.g. C:\Windows\fonts.) You probably don’t use all of them, and if you want to save space you can just copy your favorites. With a bit of imagination, you can usually guess what’s what from the file name. These are then copied to /usr/share/fonts/truetype. (Note that this isn’t illegal, even in the alternate universe where the megacorps live. You have paid for the right to use those fonts when you bought your computer.)

Jeremy at linuxquestions.org has a brief rundown on exactly how to do this, after you open a command line (=terminal) window:

Home networking. Ubuntu has something called Zeroconf, which should find your home network for you the same way Windows does. I haven’t used it yet, so I don’t know if it’s effortless or not. In Ye Olde Days, networking was dealt with by Samba, which I, personally, hate. After a labor of what feels like decades expended on it, you have a house full of machines eyeing each other suspiciously and refusing to talk.

I use a command line program called ssh (stands for secure shell, which means “secure way of giving the computer commands”). There’s a good intro by Gina Trapani of Lifehacker here. Ssh allows you to use the computer accounts already set up on various machines to log into those computers and get files from them or write to them, as needed. It’s not pretty, unless you get a GUI frontend.

Wireless As a relatively new technology, wireless is one of the iffiest parts of running Linux. It’s getting better, but if you’re having problems, it’s probably not you. It’s the operating system.

Where Linux Gets Really Difficult

If you have any sort of specialized software or very new hardware that does not have Linux drivers, then you shoot straight into the geek stratosphere, and should avoid Linux for now (unless you’re a geek, of course, but then you probably stopped reading this after the first sentence).

Recovering the space given to Linux requires the following steps:
–boot from the Ubuntu CD
–when the opening screen is there, go to “System” on the menu bar at the top, choose “Administration” from the drop down menu, and Gnome Partition Editor from the submenu.
–in the table, under “filesystems,” find any called “ext3” or “swap”. Start by selecting ext3 with one click because it won’t let you touch the swap file until ext3 is gone. You have a couple of choices:
—-if you want to keep them as separate, but windows-readable, drives, go to Partition on the top bar, choose Format As, and choose any one of the windows-readable formats, ntfs (WinXp native), fat32 (all Windows), fat16 (old Windows). Do the same with the “swap” filesystem.
—-if you want to return them to one big Windows drive, select “ext3” and “Delete.” (Sounds scary, but that frees it up.) Do the same with “swap.” The WinXP partition (labeled either ntfs or fat32 in the table) can then be “Resized” to include all that free space.)

Update a few hours later: It seems today is the day for posting about installing Linux. Lifehacker has a link to a site giving simple instructions on how to use Linux. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek in spots, but that’s better than a sea of acronyms. The instructions are for the Debian flavor of Linux, which is the most closely related to Ubuntu. Well worth a visit.

Also, in comments on the Lifehacker post, Tephlon also has a good howto on installing a single-boot Ubuntu system, –>with pictures!partition where you put it. In a dual boot system you install Ubuntu in a separate partition, so it does NOT wipe out your entire hard drive.

Technorati tags: Linux, dual boot, Windows, Vista, computers, PC, Ubuntu, installing Linux, installing Ubuntu

I give up. I have to comment on the Foley business because so many people seem to be totally confused about sex.

On the left and the right, every scandal that involved private parts has been enumerated, going back for decades right to Gary Hart and his Monkey Business. The implication is that they’re all more or less the same. They are not.

This really isn’t difficult. Sex is enjoyment, preferably between people, but not unknown as a solitary activity. That’s it. That’s all anyone needs to know. If anyone involved isn’t enjoying the situation, then it’s not sex.

If anyone involved is creeped out, then it’s harassment. If anyone involved doesn’t have the power or the knowledge to say no, then it’s exploitation in the same sense that slavery is exploitation. If anyone involved is saying no, then it’s rape. These are crimes. CRIMES. They are not sex, even if there is an erection going on somewhere.

There’s one reason why it’s essential to keep the difference between sex and crime clear. Sex is nobody else’s business. Crimes are everybody’s business and have to be stopped immediately.

Some examples, just to make the distinction clear. Barney Frank and Mark Foley were elected to Congress and are both gay. So far, so good. Their gayness is nobody’s business but their own and their partners’. Barney Frank does not proposition pages. That is also good. Foley propositions people young enough to be his grandchildren, AND OVER WHOM HE HAS POWER. That is a crime. It would have been bad enough if he’d been streetwalking in DC looking for nineteen year-olds. But he had to go harass lowly clerical staff who are hoping to make a career in his business. That makes his crime that much worse.

Or, take another pair of examples. Clinton having sex in the Oval Office. This was a poor choice of venue and one taxpayers can justly complain about. Dignity of the office and all that. But the sex itself is nobody’s business (except Hillary’s). Alternatively, there’s the current Gubernator of California, who apparently has a decades-long history of groping women. He said he was “just playing.” The narrative when this first became public (2003) was, really, what did anyone expect, we’re surrounded by sex scandals, and anyway, look at Clinton. Boys will be boys.

Which is nonsense. Hundreds of millions of boys with plenty of testosterone manage to get through life without harassing women. It’s got nothing to do with boys or sex or hormones. It has to do with the sense of power that twisted people get from humiliating another person. Doing that by assaulting a person and grabbing her breasts is not sex. It is a crime. (And one which the Gropinator has kept out of the news by using the power of the Governor’s office to investigate the victims.)

There are vital implications from the fact that sex is private, but crimes are public.

One is that the media and the politicians need to get out of everyone else’s underwear. Leave people’s sex lives alone. Enough already. Publicly messing about in people’s private affairs always ends in disaster. In the case of sex, the end result is something like Saudi Arabia, with morality police roaming the streets and masses of the men with erectile dysfunction (Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors, 2005; no direct link, unfortunately. Also, U. Chicago study (pdf) based on the GSSAB.). In the case of religion, the result is endless war. (I don’t really need to give references for that, do I?) Sex and state need to be separated at least as much as church and state. And although a politician’s attitudes to sex, race, or religion may need to be discussed if they are likely to affect voters, there is never any need to gossip about his or her Catholicism, hairstyle, or bed partners. Gossip may whip up the voters, but it’s a drug which is killing our ability to have an intelligent public conversation, and since democracy is founded on informed voters, this is not trivial.

On the other hand, crimes must be discussed, made public, and prevented, or, failing that, punished. The media and the poltiicians, and all the rest of us, need to stop confusing crimes and sex, need to stop lumping sex in with crimes, and need to stop pretending crimes are caused by wanting sex. Human beings are unique in having opposable thumbs, which gives us ways of dealing with irrepressible sex all by ourselves. Humans are also unique in having a mass of brain, which gives us ways of understanding how other people feel. So if we’re hurting someone, we bloody well know it, which is the very definition of a crime.

We have to keep the distinction between sex and crime straight because when we don’t sex can be called a crime, which makes the whole thing ridiculous, and crimes can be called sex, which, among other things, lets congressmen harass pages for years while everyone looks the other way.

Update, Oct. 14th, 2006
Holy crap. I knew that Those People were confused, but even I had no idea it was this bad: “Shays: Abu Ghraib abuses were sex ring” (Chris Shays, for those who’d like footnotes, is a Republican representative from Connecticut.)

Technorati tags: Foley, Mark Foley, politics, harassment, Congress