Einstein's God

There's been a lot of commentary in the blogosphere about a January 3, 1954 letter from Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric Gutkind which contains the following statements:

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

and

For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

Einstein expressed similar sentiments in a pair of letters he wrote on July 2, 1945 and September 28, 1949 to Ensign Guy H. Raner of the U.S.S. Bougainville which were first published in Skeptic magazine in 1997:

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. Your counter-arguments seem to me very correct and could hardly be better formulated. It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere--childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of the world--as far was we can grasp it, and that is all. [July 2, 1945]

and

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. [September 28, 1949]

Einstein didn't consider himself an atheist in the common usage of the term (his 1945 letter restricts the term to "from the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest"), though he was clearly comfortable being called an agnostic. He rejected the idea of a personal god, but was apparently willing to accept the possibility of Spinoza's pantheistic god.

UPDATE (May 14, 2008): ERV quotes this description of a statement by Oxford historian and theologian John Hedley Brooke, and describes it in a comment as "a 'respected' theologian lying to try to 'keep him'" (emphasis hers):

"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

ERV also writes, after giving this quote, "Evangelical Atheism!!!! During the MCCARTHY ERA!!!! AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA! w00t!"

But she's clearly wrong and Brooke is clearly right, if you read the quotation I gave from the 1949 letter. Einstein said "professional atheist" rather than "evangelical atheist," but the point Brooke describes is exactly the point Einstein made.

Some have argued that the newer 1954 letter is clearly more atheistic than the older letters I've quoted from above, in that it removes the qualifier "personal" from its expression of distaste about the use of the word "god." But if Einstein continued to use the word "god" himself after the 1954 letter, then it's not clear to me that he's not simply continuing to make the same point about the word "god" as it's normally used, to refer to the gods of the major world religions. Other than the lack of the qualifier "personal" in one sentence, the quotes from the new letter strike me as consistent with his position in the previous letters.

UPDATE (October 27, 2009): Images of the Gutkind letter, its translation into English, and a transcription of the original German may be found here.

Bad military botnet proposal

An article by Col. Charles W. Williamson III titled "Carpet bombing in cyberspace: Why America needs a military botnet" has been published by the Armed Forces Journal.

Col. Williamson, seeing that miscreants are using compromised machines all over the Internet to create botnets used for malicious purposes, has decided that the military needs to create its own, legitimate botnet. He proposes that this would be used in order to respond to online attacks from foreign countries by attacking the attackers, including both government and civilian attacking machines as necessary. He specifically proposes not using compromised machines (which would be illegal), but using machines on the af.mil (U.S. Air Force) network, including all hosts on the NIPRNet (Nonsecret IP Network).

The proposal doesn't really make any sense to me.

First of all, attacks from hostile compromised machines on the Internet occur on a daily basis and are already handled by network service providers. These attacks are never likely to be initiated specifically from an individual attacking country's systems, but rather from compromised systems all over the world--sometimes including compromised systems belonging to the U.S. military. Second, the best way to respond to attacking systems is not by launching hostile traffic back at them, but by filtering them or nullrouting them. Again, network service providers already do this today, and cooperate with each other in addressing major attacks. Thirdly, if the U.S. military sets up a botnet and uses it to launch denial of service attacks, it will be in violation of its own contracts with its network service providers--I don't know of any network service provider that offers a military exception to its terms of service regarding denial of service attacks. Fourth, if all of the U.S. military bots are on its own network, their aggregate bandwidth still can't exceed the bandwidth of its connections to other networks. Fifth, if there are attacks coming from another country that the U.S. is at war with, the recent subsea cable outages in the Middle East suggest that there are other effective mechanisms for disabling their ability to engage in Internet attacks.

Finally, it's not clear to me what benefit would be obtained from the military setting up its own botnet on its own network using its own IPs. Botnets offer two main benefits--(1) offering a distributed platform for computing and traffic generation and (2) creating a buffer of separation between the agent performing an action and the action itself. The second benefit occurs because the miscreant doesn't own the machines that make up the botnet, lots of other people do. A botnet composed entirely of hosts on the military's network is relatively easy to identify, filter, and block--the second benefit doesn't exist. The first benefit is also mostly lost if you use your own network and hosts. The point of a distributed denial of service attack is to use up the other guy's bandwidth, but not your own. That's very easy to do if you're not using your own resources, which is why distributed denial of service attacks use compromised systems and, sometimes, methods to amplify attacks using other people's servers that send out responses that are larger than the requests that prompt them. But if you're using your own resources on your own networks, you're limited to the bandwidth you have at your network interconnection points, and multiplying hosts inside that perimeter gains you nothing except a guarantee that you can saturate your own internetwork connectivity and cut yourself off from the outside unless your target has less bandwidth than you do. It's ironic that Williamson complains about a "fortress mentality," while making a proposal to create a gigantic bot army inside the military's own perimeter. A million-man army doesn't help you if they're inside a fortress with exits that restrict its ability to be deployed, except when you can win the battle with the number of men who can leave the exits at any one time.

I've also posted a comment on the Armed Forces Journal article at the AFJ's forum where I make a few additional points. I also agree with many of the other critical remarks that have been made in the thread there. "Crass Spektakel"'s point that "Whoever controls BGP and the backbone routers controls the internet" and that most of the control of BGP routing and the routing registries resides in the U.S. is a good one. A similar point could be made about DNS.

Other posts on this subject:

Kevin Poulsen at the Wired blog
Jon Stokes at Ars Technica

UPDATE (May 14, 2008): I may take some heat for even suggesting this, but an idea which actually takes advantage of both of the characteristic benefits of botnets I listed above and would be far, far more effective than Williamson's proposal would be if the military produced bot software along the lines of SETI@Home and Folding@Home, which anyone could volunteer to download and run on their home or corporate machines (or better still, made available to run on XBoxes and Play Station 3s), for use by the military when needed. Some of the abuse worries could be defeated if the activation and deactivation of the software was fully under the control of the end user, and the military obtained appropriate permission from upstream ISPs for activities which would otherwise constitute AUP violations by end users.

I hasten to add that this is still a terrible idea--putting such software out in public makes it a certainty that it would be reverse-engineered, and the probability of it being compromised by third parties for their own abuses would correspondingly increase.

UPDATE: Looks like Paul Raven beat me to the "Milnet@Home" idea, as he dubs it. A commenter at Bruce Schneier's blog also came up with the same idea.

F-Secure's blog also offers some good criticisms of Williamson's proposal.

Same-sex marriage ban amendment may go to voters again

The Arizona House has passed SB 10242 and sent it on to the Senate. This would put a measure to the voters to amend the Arizona Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. A similar proposal was voted down in 2006, but that measure included a provision that would have prohibited state benefits to domestic partners--this one doesn't.

Unfortunately, I think this has a good chance of passing.

Arizona already bans same-sex marriage by statute, but not in its Constitution.

Bill McCauley, RIP

I was saddened to learn this morning of the death of Bill McCauley, who was my boss when he was Vice President of Operations for GlobalCenter for a year or so around 1999-2000. I last saw him in 2001 at NANOG 21, when he was working for a company called iAsiaWorks, and we chatted briefly. I never knew him well, but when I worked for him he would occasionally chat with me about network security.

Bill had left the technology field to run a food distributorship, Red Rock Foods, and recently opened a coffee shop in Queen Creek called Daily Buzz. Unfortunately, he was having financial troubles, and chose a gruesome and horrible way to end his own life, by backing his car into a storage area at his food distribution business, pouring gasoline behind his car, and setting it on fire. The fire burned him and his dachshund, Millikin, killing his dog and leading to his death in a hospital several hours after firefighters pulled him from his car, mortally injured but still alive.

His death has been reported at the Arizona-Coffee blog where he frequently posted. He apparently left no suicide note. It's very sad that he chose to end his life this way, as well as that of his dog.

Another creationist goes to prison

Turkish creationist "Harun Yahya" (pseudonym for Adnan Oktar) has been sentenced to three years in prison for "creating an illegal organization for personal gain," according to Reuters:

Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999.

In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case.

Oktar planned to appeal the sentence, a BAV [Turkish acronym for Oktar's Science Research Foundation] spokeswoman said. No further details were immediately available.

Oktar, born in 1956, is the driving force behind a richly funded movement based in Turkey that champions creationism, the belief that God literally created the world in six days as told in the Bible and the Koran.

Istanbul-based Oktar, who writes under the pen name Harun Yahya, has created waves in the past few years by sending out thousands of unsolicited texts advocating Islamic creationism to schools in several European countries.

I've heard that many of "Harun Yahya"'s works are contain plagiarized bits of translations of books and articles from the Institute for Creation Research, minus the arguments for a young earth.

Another creationist currently in prison is young-earth creationist Kent Hovind, convicted for tax evasion.

According to Adnan Oktar's Wikipedia page, he was a former student of Edip Yuksel, a promoter of the works of Muslim imam Rashad Khalifa, who was murdered in Tucson, Arizona in 1990 by Islamic radicals. (One Islamic radical allegedly involved was Wadih el-Hage, a former Tucson resident who was Osama bin Laden's secretary in Sudan.) I met Yuksel at the University of Arizona, when he attended some of the same philosophy classes I did, and he gave me some pamphlets which touted Khalifa's claim that the Koran is demonstrably the word of God on the basis of numeric codes (similar to the Bible Codes), specifically involving multiples of 19.

The websites of Edip Yuksel criticizing Oktar are the reason why Wordpress.com is blocked in Turkey, as the result of a legal action by Oktar in that country. Yuksel describes his relationship with Oktar here.

Senior McCain advisor helped arrange Rev. Moon coronation

Charlie Black, a senior advisor to the McCain campaign, lent his name to and helped arrange the bizarre March 23, 2004 event on Capitol Hill in which Rev. Sun Myung Moon was crowned King of America and declared himself to be the Messiah.

Rev. Moon is a very powerful, wealthy man who has been regularly supported at public events by people such as former President George H. W. Bush and evangelical Christians like Tim and Beverly LaHaye (he helped found the Institute for Creation Research through his Christian Heritage College, co-author of Left Behind; she is the head of Concerned Women for America) and Jerry Falwell. Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute is a member of Moon's Unification Church, which makes DI another organization where evangelical Christians join hands with members of Moon's cult. Most of these people probably don't agree with Moon's nonsense, but they like his money and aren't above prostituting themselves in order to receive some of it.

UPDATE (May 13, 2008): More on Charlie Black, from FiretheLobbyists.com:

Charlie Black, McCain’s senior counsel and spokesman, began his lobbying career by representing numerous dictators and repressive regimes

• Black’s firm represented the governor of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. According to a 1985 report, the firm Black, Manafort & Stone earned $950,000 plus expenses for its work to provide “advice and assistance on matters relating to the media, public relations and public affairs interests.”1

• Black’s firm lobbied on behalf of Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, earning $1 million a year for his efforts.2

• Black’s firm lobbied on behalf of Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.3

• Black’s firm represented Nigerian dictator Ibrahim Babangida, earning at least $1 million for his efforts.4

• Black’s firm has represented Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich state “best known for the outlandish brutality of its rulers.”5

• Black represented Angolan rebel and “classical terrorist” Jonas Savimbi, a job that earned him $600,000.6 “We have to call him Africa’s classical terrorist,” Makau Mutua, a professor of law and Africa specialist told the New York Times. “In the history of the continent, I think he’s unique because of the degree of suffering he caused without showing any remorse.”7

• In recent years his client list has also included the Iraqi National Congress8, Friends of Blackwater9, and the China National Off-Shore Oil Corp.10

• Since 2005, BKSH has received more than $700,000 in fees from foreign entities.11

And Black is only one of several lobbyists for scumbags working on McCain's campaign.

McCain questionable land swap deal

Friday's Washington Post describes an Arizona land swap deal--the largest in Arizona history--pushed through Congress by John McCain which had the effect of transferring valuable federal land to Fred Ruskin's Yavapai Ranch Limited Partnership, that ended up being developed by SunCor Development, owned by McCain supporter Steven A. Betts.

The Post article describes past land swap deals that McCain has also pushed through, which have benefited McCain donors Donald R. Diamond and Carl H. Lindner, Jr.

Probably all just politics as usual.

UPDATE (May 15, 2008): The Arizona Republic finally gets around to covering the story--by reprinting a story from USA Today.

McCain dishonesty

Arianna Huffington has given a list of occasions on which Arizona Sen. John McCain has "issued heartfelt denials of things that were actually true":

* That he had talked with John Kerry about possibly leaving the Republican Party to become his vice presidential running mate in 2004.
* That he had claimed he didn't know much about economics.
* That he had ever asked for a budget earmark for Arizona.
* That he'd ever had a meeting with lobbyist Vicky Iseman.

Back from Seattle

We're back from a week of vacation in Seattle--this was my third time in the city, but my first time with free time to do touristy things. We saw the usual sights--the Space Needle, Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square and the Underground Tour, and we took a Snoqualmie Falls/winery tour and paid a visit to Bainbridge Island. We also saw the Klondike Gold Rush Museum, the Olympic Sculpture Garden, the UPS Waterfall Garden, the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, and the oddities at Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, including the feejee-mermaid-like objects pictured and a collection of tsantsas (shrunken heads). We also managed to see some local crazies--a 9/11 conspiracy theorist outside Pike Place Market, Lyndon LaRouchies at Westlake Center, a Church of Scientology "free stress test" center, and building housing the Discovery Institute.

And we had plenty of great meals, including a few with friends we haven't seen in a while (or hadn't met before in person). Lots of Thai and Indian food.

We didn't get around to visiting the Seattle Aquarium, the Museum of Flight, the fish ladder at the Ballard Locks, the Roman exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, or trying a doughnut at Top Pot Doughnuts. Maybe next time for most of those.

Seattle is a fun city, we had great weather almost the entire time, and we were happy to see how dog-friendly it is. I'm sure we'll return.

Ken Miller op-ed on "Expelled"

Brown University biology professor, textbook author, and Catholic Ken Miller has written an op-ed about "Expelled."