The Austringer

Yesterday, we got busy with the fixing-up of the fixer-upper in Palmetto. While Sam worked on the electrical panel, I made a photographic record of the state of the house. We plan to ask Manatee County for a re-appraisal as the house is currently not ready for occupancy. So I have about 3.5 GB of photos showing everything from the exterior views below to the various fixtures without cover plates.

There was soaking rain when we left Clearwater. By the time we got to Palmetto, that had slowed to the drizzle. About an hour after we arrived, the clouds cleared and we had some sunshine. We took advantage of that to have a bit of a picnic lunch in and just outside the garage. I had called Manatee County during the week about a couple of abandoned vehicles parked on our seven acres, and the towing service sent out two tow trucks to handle those while we were there on Saturday.

The house itself was built in 1955. We’ve been told that it was neglected for some time before its purchase in 1998 by the previous owners. They replaced much of the roof structure and were working on renovating the interior room by room. The floors are all done in tile, with the exception of the hall bathroom and a couple of closets in the hall that are unfinished. The hall bathroom is completely stripped out, with exposed drywall and the previous set of tile taken off. There are no fixtures in there, so part of our work will be to get the hall bathroom finished again. The interior paint job was not complete, so we have that to look forward to as well. There is a bedroom suite at the east end of the house, with two adjoining rooms and a master bathroom. We are contemplating redoing the doorways there to make the rooms separate, rather than simply having a shared door to the hallway.

Because the place was foreclosed, there is essentially nothing more complex than ceiling fans still there, except for the central air conditioning and heating system. We will need to get ourselves an oven/range combo unit, refrigerator, and, eventually, a dishwasher. There’s nothing in the utility room, so we can add getting a washer and dryer as well. It looks like the water heater in the garage is actually relatively recent (the tag references efficiency figures from 2004).

So on with the pictures. The exterior shots don’t hint at the work to be done on the inside.

Wider view from southeast.

Closer view of south side (front).

View from driveway.

View of west side with garage.

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We looked at a property last September that stood out as a candidate for a home purchase. It had a house on 7 acres of land, and we could afford the asking price… barely. Now that might be ringing all sorts of bells, and to be sure there is a laundry list of issues to go with the house and the property. But there was nothing else close to it in terms of something that we could afford within commuting distance of downtown St. Petersburg that actually had a livable, or not-too-much-repair-needed-to-make-it-livable, house plus some land so that we had a place to train the dogs in agility or flyball.

The property is in Palmetto, Florida, and runs alongside a railroad line easement. It used to be a strawberry farm, but more recently the former owners had used it as a place to dump lumber from a tree surgeon’s patients and to fix up stock cars. It was foreclosed on last year, so we bought it from the bank. That turned out to be a saga, and took about as long as the usual short sale, despite the fact that we were dealing only with the bank’s selling agent.

You see, we got under contract for the place early in November. But it turned out that the bank’s title was incorrect, something that our lawyer pointed out to us. They had failed to get the easement for ingress and egress recorded when they foreclosed. So their task was to go back to the court and get the title corrected. We thought that our closing could be done late in November, but we got word that the seller’s agent wanted to extend to December 18th. Our real estate agent discouraged us from having any contact with the seller or people working for the seller, so time simply passed by until mid-December, when the seller’s agent again proposed an extension, this time to December 28th.

That got us worried about the process. I went online and found that Manatee County had an excellent online site for their courts. I found out that there was no scheduled motion putting the issue before the court. We gave up on the notion of being passive buyers at that point. Diane got the lead for which law practice was involved in the case and contacted them. It turned out that the first request for a change to the title was incorrectly formed, and the clerk had kicked it back with instructions for correction. In the meantime, the lawyer at the firm handling the case had moved on to other employment, and had not passed on the file to anybody else there. So as far as anybody at the firm could tell, the file needed no action. It took Diane’s pushing to locate someone there who agreed to pick it up and finish the job. But at that point, the holidays were in full swing, and it became apparent that nothing further would be done before the end of the year. With that also ended our anticipation that we could at least camp out in the house as ours in order to claim homestead exemption for 2010. The next extension took us into January, and more interaction with the lawyer handling the title correction effort. But it became apparent that things would not move fast enough to close in January. The next extension put the closing date at February 15th.

The court did act before the end of January, but getting the change recorded took us into early February. At that point, the seller’s agent finally woke up to the fact that the property could be sold, and started pushing for a close as fast as possible. We, though, needed to have the corrected title before ordering a survey, and getting the survey scheduled was an adventure itself. With assistance from the title company, we settled on a closing date of February 24th and worked toward that. The survey team actually got out to the property on the 19th, and the title company got the completed survey yesterday. Today, we got our funding sent to the title company in two wire transfers and went to their office in Tampa to get our papers signed and notarized. About an hour after that, the title company told us that the sellers had signed off on the settlement statement.

We still have oodles of work to accomplish before we can actually move in. But we’ve managed to clear a huge hurdle. The place is ours to restore and make our own.

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I went over to Wikipedia earlier this evening, hoping to find out what major University of Florida football quarterback Tim Tebow was graduating in. I didn’t find that out, but I did run across this sentence there:

One of the reasons he chose Florida was because of Meyer’s spread option offense, an offense for which Tebow was deemed a prototypical quarterback.

Given that the spread option offense has existed since the 1920s, it seems unlikely that Tebow was around then to serve as the prototype of a quarterback to run it. So I changed that to read:

One of the reasons he chose Florida was because of Meyer’s spread option offense, an offense for which Tebow was deemed an archetypal quarterback.

and left this explanation for others editing the page:

prototype=first of kind or preliminary; archetype=instance most indicative of the type

Before committing that change, I did look to see if I could get the Gainesville Sun article that was referenced for that sentence. I had no joy on that, but Google indicates that sports writers seem to have this as a common confusion over the difference in the terms.

Results 1 – 10 of about 156,000 for tebow prototypical

and

Results 1 – 10 of about 746,000 for football prototypical

I’m sure some of those are legitimate uses of “prototypical”, but my sense from looking over a small sample is that most are not.

Update: I found Tebow’s major; it is “Family, Youth and Community Sciences” in the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The web page says that the program is an applied social science.

Further update: I’ve found at least one source that defines “prototype” as “a standard or typical example”. That would make sense of a lot more of the usage I see in sports writing, but would still leave out those that are trying to communicate a sense of someone being exceptional in performance. It is certainly out of place in trying to use it in description of Tebow.

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There are things that get put on the to-do list and just seem to stay there. I’m dealing with some of that because there really hasn’t been much spare time for me to apply to clearing some of those off the list. For example, I just tonight got around to dealing with about three administrative items related to the TalkOrigins Archive, and I know there are at least a couple more TOA-related things left on the list yet.

Despite the length of the to-do list, the weekend is pretty well fully scheduled with family activities. We’ve lived out of state for 23 years, so it is no surprise that we’re looking to do more with family now that we are living closer. I’ll be headed up to Gainesville Saturday with my dad to see the season-opener against “Charleston Southern”. OK, I admit it, I’d never heard of them. Apparently, CSU is a Southern Baptist-affiliated university in South Carolina. They’ve never played against UF before. It is a night game, so I’ll stay overnight in Lakeland and return to Clearwater sometime on Sunday. There’s a pool party on Monday that we’ve been invited to, which sounds like a fine way to spend Labor Day. I don’t know whether I will chip away any more off the to-do list, but I do expect to enjoy the weekend.

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I’m commuting about half an hour each way to work. We’ve been rearranging belongings and vehicles, using our travel trailer as a storage space for the moment, and that’s taken up extra time. This weekend we’ll work on the hawk mews for Rusty. And I can look forward to my first substantial paycheck to hit the bank account on Sept. 11th. We need to get moving on house-hunting if we are to manage to get the $8K stimulus credit for home-buying.

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This is a short note written from the Florida welcome center just south of Georgia off I-75. They have free WiFi. Later I may go into the new half-inch soon-to-be scar on my pate and the great trailer tire fiasco, but for now this is an update on progress. I should be in Clearwater by early evening.

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Life is change.

I’m at a change point in my life. My time here at Michigan State University is up. Fortunately, there is a next job in the offing. I am currently in the midst of packing to head south to Florida. I will be taking up a job at the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) in St. Petersburg, Florida. It has been quite a while since I last worked for the State of Florida.

I will be working on various projects there to collect, collate, store, retrieve, and analyze wildlife research data. FWRI handles most of the research data that the state’s biologists collect on species like the critically endangered Florida panther, manatees, and many others.

Florida also happens to be where I was born, and where my family and Diane’s family reside. That part is a plus. My sister, Emily Kay, will be coming up here in about a week to help us with the end of the packing and loading up two trailers for the move south. Moving is always a chore, and we’ve moved our stuff from place to place about 11 times in the past 23 years. That part doesn’t really seem to get any better with time. Unfortunately, there is no moving allowance for the particular job at FWRI. If you feel like helping out, drop some change in the tip jar: look in the right sidebar for “Money Stuff” and the “Make a Donation” button there.

Update: My thanks to those who have contributed to the moving fund. That will be such a help over the next few weeks.

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There’s a site called “Complaints Board” where I found a complaint that reminded me of a personal experience. He had a problem with a hold being placed on a deposit.

I went to deposit my paycheck on friday @ noon. They said I could only have access to $100 until tomorrow. This irritated me but I let it go. The next the day the money wasn’t there so I called them. They said that due to my lack of deposits with them, they were going to hold my paycheck for 5 days. I am a new customer with them. I told them I needed the money because I had 3 young children and need to buy food. They didn’t care. I could see their point if it was a personal check, but it was my paycheck, from a local business. What I support my family on. I told them that I would be canceling my acct as soon as I can get my direct deposit that I had just set up change over to a different bank. I also told them I would tell everyone I know and tell the public in every way possible not to use their bank and if they were, to cancel. The associate I spoke to refused to let me speak to a supervisor. They said in their huge booklet they sent me with it states in their they could hold anyone’s money at their discretion. Don’t ever use this bank. They are heartless, money grubbing, useless people that waste the oxygen that God gave them.

Here’s my response to that:

They cannot hold anyone’s money at their discretion. Federal banking law provides that funds that have cleared *must* be made available to the account holder.

That does mean, though, that they can refuse you the courtesy of providing the funds drawn on any third party’s account *until* they have cleared. But they cannot impose an arbitrary hold time, such as “two weeks” or “ten business days”. Once you confirm that the issuing bank has released the funds, the law says you must have access to them.

It does seem that banks do often use the ignorance of their customers regarding this aspect of banking law. This obviously favors the bank, since they earn interest on the money that they do not let you use for the period of their arbitrary “hold” on a deposit.

I once was refused access to funds one day, the money primarily being in the form of a recent deposit. The next morning, I checked with the issuing bank and confirmed that they had released the funds. I went back to my bank and requested the same value cashier’s check as I had the day before.

“It is bank policy that deposits be held for ten days,” the clerk told me dismissively.

“It is federal law that you must release the funds on a draft that has cleared, and the draft in question has cleared. So which are we going to follow, bank policy or federal law?”

I got my check.

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I've gotten used to using as my usual document preparation tool. However, many of the people I collaborate with are not into and would prefer that we use MicroSoft Word instead for drafts of manuscripts.

I had tried applying the latex2rtf package before to get a version of an existing manuscript into a form that Word would recognize. I failed completely; the translation simply didn't work well.

Given a task of preparing a new manuscript, though, I decided to have another look at latex2rtf. I installed it on the MacBook Pro. That was simple, just a "make; make install" process at the command line. Then I started building my manuscript in TeXShop. I'd typeset the source, then apply latex2rtf to it.

What I can say is that the help available for latex2rtf is sparse. What there is indicates that one should stick to general and common features of . That is good advice.

Some advice for latex2rtf, though, is misleading. It claims to pick up parameters from the statement for the "geometry" package. I tried changing my margins there, and while my document reflected those, the RTF I got did not. Also, I could include graphics, but they appeared without scaling in the RTF. After a while of Googling without result, I finally dug into the latex2rtf source code. That produced results.

To expand the width of text on the page, I ended up using the following:

\oddsidemargin 0.0in
\textwidth 6.5in

That worked for both the and RTF versions of the manuscript.

Instead of using an absolute size for included graphics, I found that if I used "[scale=0.45]" in my "includegraphics" call, that worked well enough for both document systems.

So far, I haven't encountered a difficulty in having the equations carry over to RTF. This looks like it may actually work. I'll have to figure out how to highlight differences in edited Word documents so that I can efficiently carry over edits to the source, but I'm hopeful that won't be too difficult.

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All I want for Christmas... well, any date coming up, would be this 180 acre parcel of land. Of course, I don't have the $5.4 million or more that the auction on Sept. 10th is likely to bring, but I can daydream. Maybe somebody I know will end up with it, and we could do some fishing in the lake near Reynolds Road.

Cloudscape at Lakeland, FL parcel

Lake near Reynolds Road

Picnic site near Reynolds Road

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Reed Cartwright can hardly contain himself for an upcoming tale on Panda's Thumb of the continuing adventures of Prof. Steve Steve. PSS got to meet a famous fellow...

Reed will have the complete picture, the details, and the identity of Prof. Steve Steve's latest acquaintance soon.

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I took a trip early in the year to attend my aunt's funeral. While on the trip, I got a call from American Express, asking if I had just made an $800 purchase on my credit card. After confirming that the charge was made where and when neither Diane or I had been, I told them no. They said that the best course of action would be to de-activate my cards and that they would send out new cards with a different number. I thought that was pretty spiffy at the time, that American Express seemed to be really on top of things.

I was reminded of this because I was going through the mail that had come in in the past few days, and ran across something from American Express: my new set of cards to replace the de-activated ones.

OK, if there has to be a disparity in alacrity of departments at a credit card company, I surely prefer the model American Express has gone for, with consumer fraud being right on its toes and card replacement in "whenever" mode. But it seems to me that it wouldn't hurt to get the card replacement people nearer to prompt scheduling.

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I retired my banner that I put together in my hospital bed in 2004 and have set up a set of new banners that get picked randomly with page requests. The original aspect ratio was just too long at 8.84:1, so I shifted it to 8.84:2.

GIMP provides a selection tool for a fixed aspect ratio, which was just what I needed. Rotate, crop, scale, apply levels, unsharp mask, and I can save off another banner image. I'll try to add more to the mix as time goes by.

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George Tiller, a physician who provided late-term abortions to women with high health risks, was fatally shot in his church. Obviously, the shooter has no acquaintance with the concept of sanctuary.

The famous Kevin Bacon site demonstrated that there are less than six degrees of separation between most people. That is, if you know someone who knows someone, etc., in six or fewer such links you can put any two people on the ends of such a chain. I didn't know it before, but I turn out to be just two degrees of separation from George Tiller; I have a friend who knew Tiller and counted him as a friend.

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Jerry Coyne lets NCSE know he doesn't like what they said. Meanwhile, NCSE's April 2009 fundraising letter includes the following:

At the $100 donation level, we are pleased to offer Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, a lively and lucid review of the evidence for evolution.

NCSE's choice of books to use in fundraising promotions and in sales doesn't seem to have any relation to viewpoint of author except that they fall on the pro-science side of the fence. Nor do I expect that there will be any hard feelings over Coyne's criticism.

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Over at "wattupwiththat", a commenter opined some time ago:

I remember when I was a kid playing with a bicycle pump that compressing a gas heats it up. Is it possible that some of the high surface temps on Venus are because of that pressure?

Why not have a cold beer to help think that one through?

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Philosopher Russell Blackford takes issue with various science advocacy organizations pointing out that many people of faith also manage to accept the findings of science when it comes to evolutionary science. Blackford thinks this is wrong, essentially because the science organizations are infringing on philosophical turf:

This leaves aside the arrogance of science organisations appearing to favour particular religious viewpoints. Of course, it's true that some religious viewpoints are just irrational, in that they plainly contradict well-established scientific findings. Others, even on my account, are incompatible with science only in relatively subtle ways, and reasonable people with those viewpoints could put some kind of case against my position (even though I might not consider that case to be at all plausible). While this is all true, it's not up the scientific organisations to be saying it. That's outside their remit.

Blackford expands a bit on what he sees as acceptable science advocacy organization behavior:

Science organisations should stick to the point that certain findings are the result of systematic, rational investigation of the world, supported overwhelmingly by several lines of converging evidence. In putting that case, they can be "religion blind"; they should present the evidence for the scientific picture, but that's as far as they should go. They should not comment on what specific theological positions are or are not compatible with science. Leave that to the squabblings of philosophers and theologians, and, indeed, of individual scientists or other citizens. We can think and argue about it for ourselves.

This goes further than just what science advocacy organizations say about the religion and science issue (which I think Blackford mischaracterizes in any case). This makes clear that so far as Blackford is concerned, science advocacy organizations have no business with any aspect of public policy. Blackford at least has provided no qualifying statements that would indicate that talking about science and religion is a special case, and his entire argument is structured in such a way that it does not admit of having special cases: Organizations don't get to have opinions when those cross over into the intellectual turf handled by people outside the science organization's particular field of interest.

I think that Blackford misses the point pretty completely. The religious antievolution movement is not something that is primarily about the state of the evidence and the scientific theories about that evidence. Instead, it is a social and political phenomenon. Telling science advocacy organizations to only talk about the evidence and theories is not just shortsighted; it is wrong. Science advocacy organizations need to address both the state of the science (to undercut that false claim to intellectual legitimacy that religious antievolutionists make) and also actively engage in the public policy debate. And that means that there will be discussion of the factors that underlie religious antievolution, whether it offends Blackford's territorial impulses or not.

Blackford could have a point if science advocacy organizations were also advocating religion, and in fact Blackford implies just that:

This leaves aside the arrogance of science organisations appearing to favour particular religious viewpoints.

It could be a real concern, just as Blackford points out that various counterfactuals asserted by certain denominations could have been true, but are ruled out by the evidence. I don't see any evidence that science advocacy organizations are favoring particular religious viewpoints. What I have seen done is noting the existence and extent of particular religious viewpoints, which is a rather different issue.

All in all, it is pretty ironic that Blackford has chosen this approach, given how various and sundry evangelical atheists have long complained that they have felt pressured not to emphasize their viewpoint of null compatibility between science and religion in the interest of pursuing the public policy goal of obtaining good science education. Is turnabout supposed to be a good thing now?

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Back around 2001, Jeff Shallit of the University of Waterloo asked me about collaborating on a critique of various claims made by William Dembski. Late in 2002, we had a completed manuscript. However, Dembski is not considered a hot topic most places, given that his claims have almost entirely appeared in popular rather than academic venues. In 2006, though, Glenn Branch became a co-editor for a topical issue of Synthese, which was to take up the subject of religious antievolution, and our submission there went through the revision process and finally page proofs quite recently. The paper is now published and available for about $35. Don't believe the submission date listed there; our submission was complete as of early October, 2006.

Of course, the original, longer version is still available for free.

Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski’s “complex specified information”

Journal	Synthese
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
ISSN	0039-7857 (Print) 1573-0964 (Online)
DOI	10.1007/s11229-009-9542-8
Subject Collection	Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
SpringerLink Date	Thursday, April 16, 2009

Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski’s “complex specified information”

Wesley Elsberry1, 2 Contact Information and Jeffrey Shallit3 Contact Information

(1) Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48825, USA

(2) National Center for Science Education, 420 40th Street, Suite 2, Oakland, CA 94609-2509, USA

(3) School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

Received: 23 March 2009 Accepted: 25 March 2009 Published online: 16 April 2009

Abstract Intelligent design advocate William Dembski has introduced a measure of information called “complex specified information”, or CSI. He claims that CSI is a reliable marker of design by intelligent agents. He puts forth a “Law of Conservation of Information” which states that chance and natural laws are incapable of generating CSI. In particular, CSI cannot be generated by evolutionary computation. Dembski asserts that CSI is present in intelligent causes and in the flagellum of Escherichia coli, and concludes that neither have natural explanations. In this paper, we examine Dembski’s claims, point out significant errors in his reasoning, and conclude that there is no reason to accept his assertions.

Keywords Information theory - Evolutionary computation - Artificial life - Pseudomathematics - Complex specified information

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Picked up from Facebook... If I've counted correctly, I've seen 84 out of the following 232 movie titles. (Counts via use of "cat | grep pattern | wc" to get watched and unwatched numbers. The original on Facebook said it had 239 titles, which I think is wrong. I even added a couple where a series list was obviously incomplete.)

Continue Reading »

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Today is the 200th anniversary of the births of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. I'll be adding things to this post through the day.

Google has taken note of the day. If you go to their website, they have a Darwin's finches-themed logo:

There are lots of Darwin Day activities going on around the country. And Evolution Weekend is coming up.

Check out the SSE video birthday card:

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