Useful Tool for Clojure: JVisualVM

One of the main reasons for my wanting to learn Clojure was to take advantage of the ease of using threads in it. But sometimes threads make things worse, so it helps to have a nice tool to profile the performance like JVisualVM. Here's a short intro and tutorial on it: JVisualVM and Clojure.

Book Review: "Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning"

Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning is a fantastic book about the development of science and its advancement in Western culture. It contains a lot of deep and thought provoking discussions on the position science holds in current Western culture, and its metaphysical and epistemological nature.

In particular, it looks at the notion of science as a societal, cultural, and even spiritual force, a notion that is sometimes thrust onto science and perpetuated by certain science writers. To some, the building of this notion tends towards using science as part of a myth constructed by people to shape and understand how to live in an age of an over abundance of information; perhaps it even seems to be displacing the role of religion.

Neither entirely anti-science nor pro-science, Midgley presents a nuanced view of the interaction of science, religion, and society. Midgley encourages a rethinking of the role and importance of science, and its relationship to how we live and how we ought to decide to live.

On the whole, this is a book I recommend on the philosophy of science and society. I also recommend reading this in conjunction with Barbour's Religion and Science (Gifford Lectures Series), which I will be reviewing as well.

Getting Clojure

I find programming languages interesting because they're designed to solve problems the designer thought are important, and understanding a little bit about a different language gives me a little bit more understanding of what the designer was thinking.

The latest programming language I'm dabbling in is Clojure, a LISP on the Java VM.

I'd like to collect what I found useful in learning Clojure later on. For today, I found this exceedingly interesting: Reddit Clone in 10 minutes and 91 lines of Clojure. Interesting because it brought together so many concepts in a short and useful package (rather than, say,  yet another calculator example).

Learning a new language is always hard, I find, because there's always a big step up in the beginning before I know enough to do anything even remotely interesting. Tutorials like that helps a lot in learning a new programming language.

Credibility of Science and Open Source Methodology

Having discussed the issue of the need for the freedom of data in Credibility of Science and the Freedom of Data given the slightly tarnished credibility of the sciences, in this post, I'll speak briefly on the issue of the methodology in science and why open sourcing it would help.

Here's what I mean for the methodology of an experiment to be open source: that is all the steps and instruments must be open to careful examination and testing. All the steps from the test tube to the data analysis must be open for examination to ensure validity. Traditionally, this hasn't been a problem at all. Beakers, test tubes, thermometers, etc, are physical objects inherently open to inspection, in case the instruments themselves added something into the materials, ingredients, or skew the data of the experiment. More and more, however, the modern instruments are becoming opaque to the scientists, especially as its insides are often controlled with computer and software technologies. Unfortunately, software is notoriously closed off and difficult to inspect.

Book Review: "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking"

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking presents some interesting ideas and anecdotes to help better understand how good decisions and snap judgements are made when people are faced with overwhelming data.

Plenty of skepticism ought to accompany you as you read this book. The stories are well written and may seduce you into believing his theories all too easily. Pack along some salt for a better taste. (If you are thinking of reading Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye, you might want to read my review of that one first.)

Especially important is to look into his explanation of how, why, and when the snap judgements worked in the cases he presents. He doesn't make the absurd claim that all snap judgements in all cases under all circumstances are better than thought out judgements. If you've carefully read Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success (which I've reviewed previously), you may notice that Gladwell's point in the narratives he shares are often subtle and sometimes easy to misinterpret. Maybe that's why it makes for such an enjoyable and engaging read!