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Evo­lu­tion

A quick primer to send to any cre­ation­ists you may know.

Edit: Appar­ently the Youtube Word­Press auto-post thing neglects to set the title.

Yes­ter­day Pat Robert­son made another one of his trade­mark idi­otic state­ments. In response to Maine pro­vid­ing homo­sex­ual cou­ples the right to marry, Mr. Robert­son went on CBN and opened his mouth to let this shit drib­ble out:

Here is a tran­script, snagged from Think Progress:

HOST: Mean­while, the New Hamp­shire leg­is­la­ture has also voted in favor of gay mar­riage, but Pat, the gov­er­nor there still isn’t sure if he will approve that bill.

ROBERTSON: Lee, we haven’t taken this to its ulti­mate con­clu­sion. You got polygamy out there. How can we rule that polygamy is ille­gal when you say that homo­sex­ual mar­riage is legal. What is it about polygamy that’s dif­fer­ent? Well, polygamy was out­lawed because it was con­sid­ered immoral accord­ing to bib­li­cal stan­dards. But if we take bib­li­cal stan­dards away in homo­sex­u­al­ity, what about the other? And what about bes­tial­ity and ulti­mately what about child molesta­tion and pedophilia? How can we crim­i­nal­ize these things and at the same time have con­sti­tu­tional amend­ments allow­ing same-sex mar­riage among homo­sex­u­als. You mark my words, this is just the begin­ning in a long down­ward slide in rela­tion to all the things that we con­sider to be abhorrent.

He starts off with what is actu­ally a very good point. If polygamy was made ille­gal for reli­gious rea­sons, then it most cer­tainly should not be ille­gal. Of course my posi­tion is the reverse of his, so I see it as “so why is polygamy still ille­gal?” He then steps off the logic bus and boards the crazy train by claim­ing the next steps would then be bes­tial­ity and pedophilia. There’s this lit­tle detail he’s ignor­ing of course, and that is informed adult con­sent. Homo­sex­ual mar­riages are between two con­sent­ing adults. Polygamy would also be a num­ber of mar­riages between con­sent­ing adults. Bes­tial­ity, pedophilia, and all the other things the Chris­t­ian cra­zies claim nec­es­sar­ily fol­low gay mar­riage clearly don’t.

Can some­one please tell me why peo­ple keep lis­ten­ing to this igno­rant idiot?

Video cour­tesy Media Mat­ters.
Tran­script and inspi­ra­tion to write cour­tesy Think Progress.

This morn­ing I rebooted my test box run­ning VMware ESXi 3.5 to com­plete the upgrade from Update 3 to Update 4. The hyper­vi­sor came back up, but no guests were run­ning and when I popped open the VI Client it indi­cated that there were no data­s­tores con­fig­ured and it could not find any of the vir­tual machines I had in inven­tory. It saw the inter­nal disks and that they were for­mat­ted VMFS, but would not allow me to do any­thing other than for­mat them over again.

Nor­mally this would have sim­ply annoyed me since I would have lost my test VMs, but they don’t take long to build so I’d have just for­mat­ted them and gone on with my day. Unfor­tu­nately within the last week we had tem­porar­ily moved a crit­i­cal application’s VM to this box and we had not prop­erly recon­fig­ured backup. I could restore from the week old backup, but there would be hell to pay.

Since the VMFS par­ti­tions were clearly vis­i­ble I felt I had a chance, but I’m still new to ESX/ESXi so my first step was to flip over to my always run­ning irssi ses­sion (if you use IRC and do not use screened irssi, go Google it now and enjoy) and ask for help in #shsc and #vmware. #shsc always has a few guys who work on large VMware installs idling, and of course #vmware is obvi­ous. While wait­ing for any input from IRC, I went to Google for my next step. I knew ESXi has the capa­bil­ity to be accessed via SSH, but it’s dis­abled by default, so I looked up how to turn it on. A few min­utes later after bring­ing a mon­i­tor over to the machine and reboot­ing it I had SSH access and could go through sys­tem logs from the com­fort of my laptop.

In /var/log/messages I found two entries ref­er­enc­ing my SATA con­troller which looked inter­est­ing:
May 5 14:34:35 vmkernel: 0:00:06:39.406 cpu0:3616)ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba000:0:0:3 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide.
May 5 14:34:35 vmkernel: 0:00:06:39.408 cpu0:3616)ALERT: LVM: 4482: vmhba0:0:0:1 may be snapshot: disabling access. See resignaturing section in SAN config guide.

This infor­ma­tion, after a quick trip to Google, led to VMware’s SAN con­fig­u­ra­tion guide which ref­er­ences sim­i­lar issues occur­ring on SANs, so I tried enabling the res­ig­na­tur­ing option and mag­i­cally my data­s­tores reap­peared. After renam­ing them back to their orig­i­nal names and turn­ing the res­ig­na­tur­ing option back off I had all my data and was able to down­load the disk images and VMX files so I was safe in the event of a major problem.

At this point, I could see my VMs but the VI inven­tory was still con­vinced that they were on the “old dri­ves”, so after a bit more time on Google I dis­cov­ered the Import fea­ture within the data­s­tore browser and I was able to bring the VMs back in and get them boot­ing up.

Screen­shot show­ing my data­s­tores and two VMs running

After con­firm­ing that the VMs I really needed were boot­ing and oper­a­tional, I shut every­thing down to move the server back to its spot in my rack. For­tu­nately every­thing came right back up so the pres­sure was now off.

Now my con­cerns shifted. If this hap­pened once, what’s to stop it from hap­pen­ing again? I needed to fig­ure out why it hap­pened. For­tu­nately at nearly the exact moment I started think­ing about this IRC came through for me. “jidar” in #shsc linked to this thread on VMware’s forum with lit­er­ally the exact same symp­toms. A few posts down was a link to this page which again matched my expe­ri­ence exactly and says that U4 updated a num­ber of SATA dri­vers includ­ing the one for the ICH9 con­troller in my Pow­erEdge and changed the way they appear to the hyper­vi­sor, which led to it not rec­og­niz­ing the dri­ves for what they are.

Right now I’m mod­er­ately annoyed at an update that’s not even enough to earn it a minor ver­sion num­ber bump on a piece of soft­ware intended for enter­prise use hav­ing a change with the poten­tial to cause this, but on the other hand I don’t expect any­one who really cares about reli­a­bil­ity to be using SATA local stor­age. Ah well, I learned a bit about nav­i­gat­ing around ESXi’s internals.

Over the com­ing weeks I will be spend­ing one week each with a num­ber of PC-based router/firewall prod­ucts installed as the pri­mary NAT gate­way at my apart­ment. I will be review­ing them based on over­all per­for­mance, inter­op­er­abil­ity with my SIP-based VoIP ser­vice, QoS capa­bil­i­ties, VPN capa­bil­i­ties, and any extra fea­tures that make them stand out from the crowd.

The test plat­form will be a Dell Pow­erEdge SC430 with a 1.6 GHz Intel Xeon dual core proces­sor and 4GB of RAM. The cur­rent list of soft­ware to test is as follows:

• pfSense 1.2 (Stable)
• pfSense 2.0 (Alpha)
• Untan­gle Open Source 6.1
• Vyatta Com­mu­nity 5

I will also be test­ing “appli­ance” type routers based on what is avail­able to me, which cur­rently is as follows:

• Linksys WRT54GL (Linksys firmware 4.30.12)
• Linksys WRT54GL (Tomato 1.23)
• Linksys WRT54GL (DD-WRT v24 SP1 Mega)
• Linksys WRT54GL (Open­WRT Kamikaze 8.09)
• Cisco 1841 (IOS 12.4(23))
• Watch­guard Fire­box X Edge
• Edge­wa­ter Edge­marc 4500 (VOS 9.1.2)

The Watch­guard is cur­rently unknown due to not hav­ing the pass­word for it and I may cut down the list of Linksys firmwares, but all of the rest will be tested.

Hard­ware or soft­ware sug­ges­tions for fur­ther test­ing are appreciated.

With the Obama admin­is­tra­tion look­ing like they will be rolling back Bush era poli­cies allow­ing doc­tors to refuse to per­form cer­tain pro­ce­dures and/or refuse to pre­scribe or sell cer­tain med­ica­tions (let’s say RU-486 for exam­ple) the Internet’s polit­i­cal debate hotspots have erupted as expected. Over at the Some­thing Awful forums I saw a great post that com­pletely explains my posi­tion on this issue:

It’s a sad reflec­tion on the influ­ence of the reli­gious right that this is even a note­wor­thy issue. If you work at Burger King, and one day you decide that you don’t like the Dou­ble Whop­per and won’t serve it to peo­ple any­more (say, for rea­sons of their health), you get fired. If you’re an net­work admin­is­tra­tor and one day decide that TCP/IP is the devil’s pro­to­col and you won’t use it, you get fired. The list goes on. Giv­ing peo­ple the legal med­ica­tion they need is the job of the phar­ma­cist and doc­tor. Their job is not “Make value judg­ments about my patients and then pre­scribe what med­ica­tions I per­son­ally believe are good”. We have a cen­tral reg­u­la­tory body that deter­mines what med­i­cines and pro­ce­dures are legal to give out and per­form. Doc­tors and phar­ma­cists are expected to adhere to these. A phar­ma­cist who decided that he would no longer give can­cer patients their drugs or a doc­tor who decided he will sub­sti­tute phrenol­ogy for a gen­eral exam would find them­selves out of jobs in short order. The only rea­son this is an issue is because for some rea­son “It’s my reli­gion!” is taken as a valid excuse for not doing your job.

If you are a phar­ma­cist, it is your job to dis­pense med­ica­tions as pre­scribed. Your per­sonal morals have absolutely no legit­i­mate influ­ence on this. If you do not like this fact, find another job. What the right wing wants here would be equiv­a­lent to a paci­fist join­ing the Marines and then com­plain­ing that they were being sent to war.

If you’re still con­vinced that this “reli­gious free­dom” is the right option, pre­tend you live in a small town with one local doc­tor. Now pre­tend that doc­tor is a Jehova’s Wit­ness. Now think about what hap­pens if you or a loved one needs a trans­fu­sion. Your local doc­tor would then be fully able to refuse to give you/your loved one a trans­fu­sion because it goes against their religion.

If you don’t like the job require­ments, find another job. Don’t whine that you chose a job that con­flicts with your beliefs. Put up or shut up, either way your morals don’t have any effect on me.

Sjur Usken and San­dro Gauci have dis­cov­ered a major flaw in the SIP imple­men­ta­tions on a wide range of IP phones. The short expla­na­tion is that the phones do not ver­ify where a proxy authen­ti­ca­tion request is com­ing from and hap­pily return the SIP authen­ti­ca­tion infor­ma­tion. It is hashed and salted, but the salt is cho­sen by the attacker, so a set of rain­bow tables would make crack­ing it triv­ial. For full details, check out Sjur’s blog post (which spread fairly rapidly around the VoIP world) and his lat­est post show­ing the trace as he attacked a Cisco 7940 I set up for this purpose.

Until the phone ven­dors release fixed firmware (if they do) the only way to defend your­self from this is to not have phones exposed on pub­lic IP addresses. If they have to be for some rea­son (we all know SIP and NAT really don’t get along, and proper SIP aware NAT devices cost a fair bit) set fire­wall rules that pre­vent the phones from speak­ing SIP to any IPs that aren’t part of your VoIP sys­tem. Alter­na­tively, in the event that every sin­gle phone on your sys­tem is sta­t­i­cally addressed, the reverse could be done at the reg­is­trar side. It wouldn’t stop the attack­ers from find­ing the pass­word, but it would pre­vent them from using it in any way.

The impli­ca­tions of an attacker gain­ing the SIP authen­ti­ca­tion infor­ma­tion are of course severe, once they have that they can imi­tate the attacked phone and make calls to any num­ber of regions poten­tially cost­ing thou­sands of dol­lars in the course of a sin­gle night.

Accord­ing to CNET, Billy Cor­gan (of Smash­ing Pump­kins fame) went in front of Con­gress to argue against the exemp­tion that allows ter­res­trial radio broad­cast­ers to only pay song­writ­ers and pub­lish­ers, but not artists, for the right to play their music. Satel­lite and inter­net broad­cast­ers by com­par­i­son must pay all three.

I’m 100% in favor of mak­ing things even between the three radio medi­ums, as it’s absurd that ter­res­trial broad­cast radio is treated as some­thing spe­cial, but I think it should go in the other direc­tion. Rather than rais­ing the rates paid by ter­res­trial broad­cast­ers to equal those paid by satel­lite and inter­net broad­cast, I believe the lat­ter two should have their rates low­ered to match ter­res­trial. Some sta­tions are simul­cast on all three (Clear Chan­nel has a part­ner­ship with XM satel­lite radio and is also push­ing their inter­net stream­ing heav­ily now with their “iheartra­dio” iPhone app) with three dif­fer­ent rates apply­ing. Wouldn’t it make more sense over­all to just have one sim­ple charge based on num­ber of lis­ten­ers? This charge should be much less than it is now, as the radio is sec­ond only to word of mouth for how peo­ple find new bands.

Radio is a dying medium as it is thanks to satel­lite (which isn’t doing too hot right now either), stream­ing, and MP3 play­ers. We don’t need to make it worse.

Just a few sec­onds ago I finally cleared the check­box in Adium for my ICQ account. It was my longest-lasting instant mes­sage ser­vice account, hav­ing been active since 1998 or so, and I started using multi-service IM clients like Miranda, Tril­lian, and Adium entirely because I wanted to keep using ICQ even though most of my friends were on AIM instead.

Times have changed of course, as far as I’m aware I have one con­tact on ICQ and I haven’t used it to talk to him since AIM started to sup­port offline mes­sages. Look­ing at my Adium chat logs, since Decem­ber of 2006 I have not sent a sin­gle mes­sage on ICQ and the only mes­sages I’ve received are spam. With that in mind, it’s time for it to go.

PZ over at Pharyn­gula linked to this Face­book group, so I had to share. Blas­phemy Day Inter­na­tional 2009.

Yes­ter­day while dri­ving back home from help­ing my now-ex-roommate move out, I was lis­ten­ing to a recent episode of Athe­ists Talk radio (pro­duced by Min­nesota Athe­ists) in which the guest was Dan Barker, for­mer Chris­t­ian min­is­ter and now co-president of the Free­dom From Reli­gion Foun­da­tion. A few very good ques­tions were raised which have rarely come up when I’ve dis­cussed reli­gion in the past.

The first ques­tion I’d like to ask is why believe in any god or gods?

With reli­gion as with any other claim, the stan­dard pro­ce­dure of sci­ence is to start with the null hypoth­e­sis. A claim about the exis­tence of a god is treated the same as a claim about the effec­tive­ness of a med­ical treat­ment and the bur­den of proof is placed on those mak­ing the claim. In the case of reli­gion, this means that any claim based solely on so called “holy texts” is imme­di­ately dis­carded as their “truth” is entirely depen­dent on some­one already sub­scrib­ing to that belief. The claims must be inde­pen­dently ver­i­fi­able by any­one, not just believ­ers. Attempts to claim truth based on some­thing that requires one to already be a believer will invoke the wrath of the Fly­ing Spaghetti Mon­ster.

The sec­ond ques­tion is why YOUR god(s)?

I con­sider this to be the best counter when a believer tries the Pascal’s Wager argu­ment. The three most well known and pop­u­lar reli­gions in the United States are Chris­tian­ity, Judaism, and Islam, col­lec­tively referred to along with a hand­ful of other smaller reli­gions as Abra­hamic reli­gions after an impor­tant char­ac­ter in the texts of the group. Within all three of these major reli­gions, there are a num­ber of denom­i­na­tions which then branch fur­ther in to a vari­ety of sects. Now with­out even look­ing beyond the top three major monotheisms we’re look­ing at lit­er­ally hun­dreds of pos­si­ble groups, all of which will tell you that the oth­ers are doing some­thing wrong and deserv­ing of some kind of divine ret­ri­bu­tion. Beyond this we have the var­i­ous poly­the­is­tic beliefs, the Indian reli­gions, the Far East­ern reli­gions, an uncount­able num­ber of tribal reli­gions, and mod­ern reli­gions such as Sci­en­tol­ogy, as well as the ever-popular and vague “spir­i­tu­al­ity”. I’d be will­ing to wager that very few of those read­ing this have ever seri­ously looked in to any reli­gions beyond the major denom­i­na­tion they were born in to and fur­ther than that I’d bet that absolutely zero have made a major change in their reli­gious belief other than leav­ing reli­gion alto­gether. It would be a num­ber of life­times to even under­stand the Abra­hamic reli­gions to the level where one could make an informed deci­sion. With that in mind I believe the answer to the ques­tion posed by Mr. Pas­cal cen­turies ago would be non­be­lief, as if it were to turn out that there was a god and it was one of the many jeal­ous gods of the world’s reli­gions (in the words of the Chris­t­ian god from both the Exo­dus and Deuteron­omy vari­ants of the Ten Com­mand­ments, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me…Thou shalt not bow down unto them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jeal­ous God,”) one would log­i­cally be bet­ter off hav­ing not believed in any god rather than the wrong one.

Now at this point some will cer­tainly be ready to pull the faith card, and I can’t refute that one. Pure faith is by def­i­n­i­tion with­out evi­dence, so attempt­ing to mount a log­i­cal oppo­si­tion to faith is silly and a waste of time.

My third ques­tion in response to that would sim­ply be what good does it do?

There are a num­ber of exam­ples read­ily avail­able for evil in the world which is caused by reli­gion. The vast major­ity of wars through­out his­tory were fought over reli­gion. The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in the Mid­dle East is because of reli­gion. The 9÷11÷2001 ter­ror­ist attacks and in fact almost every ter­ror­ist attack ever to occur in all of time were at least par­tially reli­giously moti­vated. Assaults and killings of homo­sex­u­als, Fred Phelps and the West­boro Bap­tist Church, etc. It is much much harder to get some­one to seri­ously injure or kill another per­son and almost impos­si­ble to con­vince them to die in the process with­out the belief that they’re sat­is­fy­ing the desires of a higher power. I’ll gladly con­cede that the same abil­ity to orga­nize around beliefs does allow reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions to bring in vol­un­teers and dona­tions for char­ity work more read­ily than a sec­u­lar orga­ni­za­tion, but until you show me some­one blow­ing him or her­self up in a crowded mar­ket for sci­ence I per­son­ally see it as a worth­while trade-off to have to work harder for char­i­ta­ble goals.

The last ques­tion I have for the believ­ers out there is what would it take for you to change your beliefs?

Often in debates the reli­gious side will accuse non­be­liev­ers of being closed-minded and/or biased against the super­nat­ural, when from our posi­tion it is the believer who is closed-minded and biased. Going back to the ear­lier point about faith, to be truly faith­ful one is arguably required to be closed minded. The num­ber of con­tra­dic­tions within entire reli­gious texts and occa­sion­ally even within the same chap­ter or even para­graph of said texts requires a level of closed-minded men­tal acro­bat­ics to accept the whole as still being a reli­able source of “truth”. As for bias, the believer who runs in to a gap in their knowl­edge or in the knowl­edge of soci­ety as a whole (for exam­ple the ori­gin of life) will often just say “God did it” where the non­be­liever would hit that same point and say “I don’t know”, then start look­ing for answers if the ques­tion is suf­fi­ciently interesting.

I’m sure I speak for many non­be­liev­ers when I say we’d love to see con­vinc­ing evi­dence for any set of reli­gious beliefs. I wouldn’t be par­tic­u­larly happy in some cases depend­ing on which one turned out to be true in that sce­nario, as many belief sys­tems would label me as very high on the sin scale (I’ve vio­lated as many of the Ten Com­mand­ments as is pos­si­ble for a non­be­liever to do aside from the one about killing, and com­mit­ted every sin­gle one of the Seven Deadly Sins a num­ber of times, often simul­ta­ne­ously. I’m less famil­iar with the equiv­a­lents in other reli­gions, but I’m sure many are sim­i­lar), but I’d still find it inter­est­ing to know and would be more than will­ing to start liv­ing by the ideals of whichever reli­gion it was if there was rea­son to believe it would mean any­thing. In that way I believe I and most other non­be­liev­ers are very open-minded about reli­gion, again we sim­ply do not see the evi­dence offered as being convincing.

Can any of you believ­ers hon­estly say that if evi­dence was pre­sented to you tomor­row of your reli­gious text being noth­ing but a work of fic­tion that you would accept it? Of course this is prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble with most of the older reli­gions as the sim­ple lack of a large quan­tity of his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion makes if very hard for specifics to be ver­i­fied about any­thing, much less to the level one would need to make claims about dis­prov­ing one of the world’s large reli­gions, but it cer­tainly could hap­pen with more mod­ern reli­gions such as Mor­monism or Sci­en­tol­ogy. Both of those were founded in the United States (by trea­sure hunter Joseph Smith and science-fiction author L. Ron Hub­bard, respec­tively) within the last two hun­dred years and their pub­lic his­tory is very well doc­u­mented. It would be very pos­si­ble for doc­u­men­ta­tion to arise show­ing either of these to have been entirely bogus. Note that I am not mak­ing that accu­sa­tion specif­i­cally at those tar­gets, obvi­ously I believe all reli­gions to be equally fab­ri­cated, but the younger a reli­gion is the more reli­able of a his­tory we have of its found­ing and thus more ques­tions can be answered rather than being left open.

I may come up with more ques­tions, but I’ll save those for a follow-up post later. For now, I await any responses and would like to take the oppor­tu­nity to remind any who read this that as long as you’re not a Phelps clan mem­ber or Sci­en­tol­o­gist I’m not here to flame you, I’m just ask­ing legit­i­mate ques­tions and would like rea­son­able responses. Cra­zies quot­ing scrip­ture and the like will be laughed at, flamed, and torn apart in the spirit of PZ’s won­der­ful “I get email” blog posts.