Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting over, with everything I know now, what I would consider to be my ideal High School Curriculum. This isn’t a curriculum designed to be practical or even teachable, but it integrates some things I feel would have been a vital part of my high school experience:

• Rhetoric & Language: Focusing on the interface between reason and language and the use of language as a tool for persuasion. How should we effectively engage with the modern world and how do we make sense of the world around us. Examination of the purpose and power of language in Science, Politics, Marketing & Literature.
• Global Development: A broad sweep view of history from 100,000BC to the present day, designed to give a gestalt view of human history. Rather than take a strict chronological view, this course will instead explore thematic similarities between different eras and focus on how historical insight can be applied to better understand the modern world.
• Perspectives on Human Understanding: This course will be a blend of psychology, economics, anthropology/sociology, history & literature that focuses on each fields’ differing perspectives on human understanding. This course explores the fundamental underpinnings that each approach takes and how such approaches can support but also come in conflict with each other and demonstrate the ability to move between different thematic paradigms as a lens onto different facets of human behavior.
• Science & The Scientific Method: A combination of physics, chemistry and biology, this course will first begin with the scientific method and the foundational elements of science before demonstrating how science can work at multiple levels of abstraction. This course will move fluidly between the scientific disciplines and show how each has a differing but fundamentally compatible view of reality.
• Mathematical Exploration: Focusing on the beauty of mathematics and the joy of exploration, this course is heavily proof based and designed to foster exploration and discovery rather than rote memorization.
• Exploratory Programming: This course aims to expose both the power and beauty of programming through the use of more obscure but elegant languages such as Lisp, Forth, Haskell, Erlang and Ruby. This course will focus on the principles of computation and an understanding how how to rapidly build elegant and powerful programs.
• Foreign Language & Culture: This course aims to expose how different cultures have radically different foundational assumptions and outlooks. It aims to show that there are underlying assumptions each of us have within our own culture which are so embedded we do not notice them until we experience a culture in which they are not present.
• 2 * Professional Development: While all the other courses are compulsorily and designed to provide a generalized, gestalt view on various subjects, these two courses are of the student’s own choice and are designed to provide the necessary content for further professional studies in these fields.

So there it is, ridiculously impractical, highly individualised and probably something I wouldn’t have even appreciated if it had been offered to me. But it’s a wishlist of all the stuff I wish someone had taught me so I didn’t have to figure it all out on my own.

From How to prototype a game in under 7 days:

Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate

We tried hard – boy we really wanted brainstorming to work! We scheduled “brainstorm meetings”, and “powwows”, we tried different color markers on whiteboards and oversized post-it notes, we even used motivational phrases like “blue sky” to help with our “out of the box thinking.” But in the end, out of all the games we created, not a single one was the result of sitting down as a group for a brainstorm session.

Why not? This was all very shocking to us, but after much investigation, it appears that you just cannot schedule creativity. You cannot say, “Hey everybody let’s meet for a brainstormer at 4:15, and by 5:00 we’ll have 4 kick-ass game ideas ready to hit the ground running!”

This seems like a deeply shocking result but one I’ve had a sneaking suspicion of all along. Certain things are great for brainstorming sessions but it’s not the magic tool for everything and a lot of useless wheel spinning can occur.

I’ve been developing a few ideas for iPhone applications and the app verification process is taking so long that it was just easier to jailbreak my phone than wait for Apple to finish “verifying” me. The applications for jailbreaking the iPhone all seem very well designed and easy to use but the documentation surrounding them is lacking. Here’s some tips that could save you a great deal of stress in case you decide to jailbreak your iPhone:

1. If you care at all about how your apps are arranged, write down the order your apps appear on a piece of paper or something. The reason for this will be apparent later on.
2. There’s no way of irrevocably damaging your iPhone via this procedure. No matter what happens to it, there’s always a way to get back to a virgin state so take a deep breath and chill if something unexpected happens.
3. Backup your iPhone via iTunes immediately before jailbreaking it. To do this, right click on the phone and select backup
4. Run through either Pwnage Tool or QuickPWN and follow all the steps. Hopefully, you should have a fully jailbroken iPhone at this step.
5. If your phone comes out of the jailbreak at the apple boot logo screen and continually restarts, see this post for a fix
6. If anything goes wrong with the jailbreak, you can always restore your phone to it’s original settings but the only thing that mysteriously seems to not get remembered is the order your apps are in, hence the handy cheat sheet.

If, after a jailbreak, you’re experiencing your iPhone continually being stuck on the Apple boot screen and restarting every 10 – 15 minutes. The problem comes from one of the apps on your phone being incompatible with the jailbreak.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Press the power and home button simultaneously for 10 seconds to shut off the phone.
• Hold down the home key and plug your iPhone while keeping the home key pressed
• Go into iTunes and choose to restore your phone
• In the Application tab of your phone in iTunes, deselect “Sync Applications” and choose apply. This will uninstall all apps from your phone
• Run the jailbreak software again

This fix worked for me but I can’t guarentee that it will work in your case. Please post a comment if you’re still experiencing this problem.

Several of the reactions to my most recent post that “No one is born atheist” contain some variant of the argument:

Since atheism is defined as the lack of belief in a god or gods, and babies are born without any supernatural beliefs or opinions whatsoever, children are clearly atheist until they engage in this ‘animistic behavior’ – 180andback

and

Atheism is simply the lack of belief in a deity, nothing more. – Zaki

Sure, if you literally break the word down into a-theism then you can interpret it to mean the lack of a belief in a God but I don’t think this is a useful way to talk about atheism.

If I made the claim that “I don’t think dinosaurs exist” then your natural first reaction might be “Well, what about all those fossils?”.

If I went on about how Satan buried those fossils as a test of my faith, you could safely label me a-dinosaur as I’ve made an active assertion about how the world could be without dinosaurs.

On the other hand, if I simply choose to ignore your question about the existence of fossils, it would be more accurate to label me as a dinosaur denier. Someone who doesn’t want to confront the issue of dinosaur existence.

Furthermore, if I had simply never even heard of dinosaurs before and had no reason to suppose their existence, then it might be accurate to label me as a dinosaur agnostic.

In each of these three cases, I don’t hold a belief that dinosaurs exist but these three lack of beliefs are of a very different nature and calling them all a-dinosaurism confuses the issue.

It is not enough to claim that gods do not exist to become atheist, you must also provide a explanation that explains the evidence for the existence of gods. Any justifiable atheism must be at least about to adequately answer the following phenomena:

• Every single day, hundreds of faith healers across the globe cause countless miracles of healing
• I had a dream about my Aunt Marge dying and when I woke up, I got a phone call that she got into a horrific car accident
• Every time I go to the 5th floor of my office,  I feel incredibly sad and lost. I later found out that someone had committed suicide on that floor. I had no idea it happened but I still felt the presence of his ghost.
• My friend had a terminal cancer and the doctors told her that it was incurable but when she prayed to God, it miraculously went into remission. The doctors all said they had never seen anything like it.
• When I rub my lucky coin 3 times in a clockwise fashion, I win much more at roulette
• I can feel God guide me in my life and feel his presence in my soul. It’s impossible for such a feeling to be faked

What’s amazing about atheism is that it can adequately answer these seemingly amazing phenomena in a purely naturalistic manner. However, the answers to these questions are neither simple nor obvious. Any answer requires a great deal of sophisticated understanding of both philosophical and empirical matters and it’s the ability to answer these questions that separates genuine atheism from a simple denial of gods.

Such a confusion does atheists and atheism no favors. Because this distinction is not made clear, most of the Christians I talk to believe that atheists are God deniers. Atheists are atheists because the implications of a God existing is so morally threatening that atheists must construct a psychological shield that justifies their immorality and secularism. The idea that atheists are actually capable of answering the preceeding questions is so astounding that it’s never even considered.

Atheists need to become much more clear about what atheism is and isn’t if they want atheism to be given the respect it deserves as an intellectual position. Atheism is not simply a denial of gods. Instead, it’s an active assertion that the universe can be explained better in the absence of gods.

One argument I’ve been hearing about with increasing frequency from the atheist community is that “everyone is born atheist” with the implication that religion is some unwitting indoctrination forced upon children too young to object. To me, such an argument represents a shockingly naive tabula rasa view of human development and, what’s more, invalidates the significant intellectual achievements of atheism as an intellectual stance.

A far more accurate view of human development would reveal that “everyone is born animist”, that is, ascribing human like traits to naturalistic phenomena. Our propensity to find and explain patterns of behavior is a product of our deep evolutionary background and even in modern, technological society, we curse our computers as malicious and believe that we can influence the timing of traffic lights. All religion does is impose an organizational framework upon our original animist intuitions. It provides a ready explanation for what we were already pre-programmed to believe.

Only atheism seeks to directly challenge the validity of our animist intuition and promote a wholly naturalistic view of the world. As a result, atheism is a deeply counter intuitive claim and one which can only be justified by deep intellectual inquiry into rationalism, skepticism and the scientific method. The argument that “everyone is born atheist” wholly discredits the significant intellectual effort that atheists must take to reach an intellectually defensible point of view.

So let’s retire this tired old canard that “everyone is born atheist”. It’s intellectually embarrassing and gives a grossly inaccurate viewpoint to outsiders on what atheism actually is.

While cooking dinner last night, I accidentally broke the handle off of my pan and so I thought I would get myself a new one as an early Christmas present. Looking online, I was confronted full force with the sheer retardedness of the current state of Australian online ecommerce.

Let us currently review the state of the online offerings of the 4 largest department stores in Australia:

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One interesting, unnoticed property of security is that it often contains provably unsolvable problems. Generally, we tend to split problems into those that have been solved and those which we don’t know if they can be solved. Nobody knows right now how to build a 100 mpg+ Internal Combustion Engine but that’s because building a 100+ mpg engine is hard. We imagine that if we throw enough smart people and technology at a problem, it will inevitably be beaten down and solved or we’ll reach a point where it’s not worth the effort to solve. Nobody imagines that building fuel efficient engines is impossible.

Translating that same thinking to security, we imagine security problems are a matter of effort. If only we were willing to expend enough resources, security problems could get solved. The TSA takes this approach to airline security. Airline security breaches occur because there is a lack of political will and if we only had enough regulations, screeners, X-Ray backscatter machines and cameras, airport security would become a solved problem.

However, the fundamental flaw with airport security is that what makes a good “dangerous” is how you use it and not what its made out of and so it’s impossible to develop an effective screening process that is not in the context of use. A laptop battery is pretty much just an explosive which is designed not to explode (sometimes unsuccessfully). That planes aren’t being brought down every day from laptop explosions is not because they can’t explode but because nobody wants them to explode. Imagine all the technology you want, it’s impossible to look at a laptop battery sitting in a scanning machine and decide whether it will be wanted to explode.

Convincing people that security can be provably unsolvable is the hardest step because often, the actual proofs of unsolvability are fairly simple. Normally, we assume that an explanation of why something can’t be done is something only comprehensible to experts because it’s more accurately a proof of why it can’t be done yet which requires you to understand what can be done now. As a result, we take explanations of infeasibility on a certain degree of faith and deferral to expert opinion, we use zero knowledge rather than first order proofs.

Security flips this around. Proving something secure is hard because it requires you to know all the ways it can be attacked whereas proving something can never be secure is easy because it requires a simple application from first principles. This is an important consideration in policy debates because one common tactic of bamboozling your opponent is to force them into using first order proofs where zero knowledge proofs would have been more appropriate (the Intelligent Design movement uses this to great effect with their “teach the controversy” and “let the children decide” messages). This means that unless your opponent is aware of the curious inversion on the structure of a security debate, arguments about security can often seem seedy and underhanded because they resemble so much debates in other, less reputable areas.

The result of all this is that security is one of those areas where there is a disproportionate amount of astoundingly bad, poorly thought out policies and a large part of this can be explained through the communication mismatch between security experts and managers where “it can’t be done” means “It’s impossible to do” but is interpreted as “I don’t know how to do it and I’m too lazy to find out”.