My free ride on a Heathrow Terminal 5 ULTRa Pod

I've been following PRT and the ULTRA project at Heathrow in particular since 2005, so I've been getting rather excited by the prospect of trying it out.

Eventually I got tired of waiting for an opportunity to use the Terminal 5 business car park where the first loop seems to be in a Google-like extended beta, so I just took a bus from work to Heathrow, followed signs to the business car park via level two of the short term car park, and there it was.

(If the image above is at right-angles to reality, use my Google+ version instead)

(Sorry the video is totally un-edited - I'll update it to something shorter and snappier once I've got on top of the necessary file conversion and editing tool stack)

There's a lot to like about this form of transport:

• The pods wait for you, not vice-versa
• They're comfortable - there's no need to stand because you were the last aboard
• They take you straight to your stop without stopping at anyone else's stops
• They take you closer to your destination than a tram or rail line, and aren't scared of a little gradient either
• They're more wheelchair friendly than the bus (though wheelchair users - and suitcase stackers - might benefit from a warning of any gradients)
• Reduced greenhouse effects and zero local air pollution

Were there any negatives?

• The ride was a little bumpier and noisier than I expected, but totally tolerable
• The Door Open and Door Close buttons are familiar from lifts (elevators) and commuter trains, but in neither context is there a separate Start button - I don't mind it, but I really can't see its purpose
• I'm pleased to see that you can go from any one of the three stops to any other one, but I'm really looking forward to seeing the scalability I mentioned in my 2005 post, and we won't see that until you have multiple linked circuits

So overall, the experience was everything I'd hoped for. Sadly we won't see it at the London Olympics, but I look forward to seeing it rolled out to airports, campuses and town centres all over the world.

Deeply shallow - why Intelligent Design fails the test of Abraham (and Evolution passes)

I was listening to a discussion on the train last week, involving someone talking to his friends about some kind of alternatives to evolution event he'd been to. The people talking obviously had some feel, some care, for truth; and they were clearly inclining towards a view that while Creationism wasn't very convincing, Intelligent Design was at least interesting and maybe it should be given more equal status with Darwinian evolution.

While I kept my mouth shut all the way until they got off at Wimbledon (I am English, after all), I would really like to talk to people like them - reasonable people of faith, who might be considering the pros and cons of Intelligent Design, and offer them a line of argument which may in some ways make more sense to them than to the average evolutionist.

Some years back I was reading a Danish writer who was talking about God's test of Abraham, when he asks him to sacrifice his first-born son Isaac. Now, even as an occasionally resentful second son, I've never liked this episode - in fact I suspect it contributed to my departure from religion. But some - probably misunderstood - memory of his interpretation of the story as a challenge to choice or commitment stuck in my mind, to resurface from time to time.

Another idea that had stuck in my mind was a quotation that had also taken up long term residence there:

"If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection."

(Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species, 1859, Chapter 6 - Difficulties On Theory, page 201)

Think about how western culture saw nature up to the moment when Origin was published. The general approach was to seek - and find - examples of Divine Providence in the ingeniously helpful disposition of nature. As Darwin continues in the next sentence, "Although many statements may be found in works on natural history to this effect, I cannot find even one which seems to me of any weight."

A few pages earlier, he does something similar:

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down"

(ibid, page 189)

This is just as challenging - an entire strand of Natural Theology had been built on the basis that this was simply not true, including William Paley's well known Watchmaker Analogy.

So Darwin is going out of his way to give opponents a chance to "annihilate" or "absolutely break down" his theory - if they cannot, the world must be very different from what they think. And this is not any old "theory", this is his life's work (it is 28 years since his voyage on the Beagle started him on this road) which, he must have realised, could more or less immortalise his family name. This theory is, almost literally, his baby.

Eventually I made a illuminating connection between these two ideas. Darwin's invitation to his readers to "annihilate" his theory takes similar courage to that of Abraham offering to sacrifice his son - each is offering the destruction of their life's greatest achievement, and of their nearest hope to immortality in this world. And each is driven by a greater love - Abraham's, of God, and Darwin's, of truth.

Now, let's look at Intelligent Design. Whereas Darwin said, in effect, that the natural world we live in is totally different from how we thought it was, proponents of Intelligent Design say that it is almost identical but somewhere, somehow, there is something that will demonstrate Irreducible Complexity or Specified Complexity - but it appears that they do not even seek proposals for actual research.

Frankly, this reminds me an ancient TV sketch where Rowan Atkinson parodies a famous science fiction theme by explaining, over a cup of tea, that he comes from a parallel Earth on precisely the other side of the sun, where everything is just like this earth - except that the gearknob of their Mini Metro has little dimples in it.

Prove me wrong - show me one sentence anywhere in Intelligent Design which shows such courageous love of truth as Darwin's clear and self-imposed tests, and I will revise my views.

But until then, I firmly believe that ID has as much relationship to a brave and beautiful scientific theory as Caligula's horse Incitatus had to democratically elected leadership.

What was that?

I've been taking an interest in Erlang and wondering how suitable it would be for anyone launching a non-telecoms web project, so I was quite impressed by this strong endorsement yesterday from the co-founder of a start-up called MochiAds.

Naturally the next question you ask ourself is "how real is this company?" - so I did a double-take when I spotted this techcrunch post today, which seems to show them getting real traction even in private beta.

Nice to think that my technology hunches haven't gone totally rusty...

In praise of Babytype

My favourite new utility is Babytype, which makes your computer into a wonderful baby-proof activity centre - every key pressed pops up an image and makes an entertaining noise, rather than sending emails to employers and old flames or reformatting the hard disk.

The only flaw was that I kept having to dive across the sitting room to start Babytype whenever Johnny approached the keyboard, which he can now just reach. So I asked Raize software if it could be turned into a screensaver, and got the following helpful answer:

First, you need to go to the directory where you installed BabyType. The default location is "C:\Program Files\Raize\BabyType." In this directory, you will find several files. One of the files is named "BabyType.exe".

Select the BabyType.exe and then select the Edit|Copy menu item. The select the Edit|Paste menu item. This will create a copy of the file which will be named: "Copy of BabyType.exe".

Next, select the File|Rename menu item and change the name to: BabyType.scr

Then finally, select the File|Install menu item and Windows will install the program as a screen saver.

I would like to say that this works perfectly, that the sitting room PC is now goes into Babytype after 5 minutes without use, and that the reply was sent on Saturday night, which is pretty damn impressive for a product that currently costs a mere $19.

Great product, great attitude. Thanks!

The semantic web - no longer a pipe-dream?

Let me be rash - I've just had my first look at Yahoo pipes and I think this will prove a major milestone in the evolution of the web. I believe that the semantic web is appearing under our noses, not as the result of the ontologies and predicate reasoning that I used to imagine would be involved, but through a rapid evolution of bottom-up folksonomies and strength-off-association relationships, which in fact are a better fit to the loose-fit metaphorical reasoning we actually use in practice.

I'm too tired and coffee-wired and busy right now to write my own pipe - but I'll be doing it as soon as work and domestic circumstances permit.