Tom Morris

Via PZ, Karen Heller at the Philadelphia Inquirer has an excellent article up about The Franklin, Philadelphia's science museum, pointing out the high costs of entry (admission is $23.25 per person for the over elevens) and exhibits filled with vacuous exhibitions that aren't high in scientific quality.

I have to say, one of the things I absolutely adore is the fact that London museums and galleries in the last few years have been encouraged by the government to reduce their entrance cost to that most wonderful price: free. The British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and many more are now free, as are plenty of art galleries. You can now visit London, see an Archaeopteryx, ten Pablo Picasso works, an eighteenth century orrery, original Magna Cartas and Gutenberg Bibles without paying anything beyond the cost of a few Underground tickets. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

That said, if libraries are any measure, we need to be on guard against the kids-need-dumb-shit brigade. That may be so, but they don't need it in the museums. All those clever interactive doohickeys have a place: it's called the Web. I don't see the point of travelling some distance to go to a museum to find oneself interacting with a screen when you can do that at home. Me? I blame all these targets. The measure of a museum is simple: does it house objects of intellectual, historical, scientific, artistic and pedagogical importance and interest? That is what makes a good museum. Not how many people go through the door. Not how many press launches and junkets they have. Not media coverage. We should have art galleries because art itself is important, not because - as one government minister stated - consumption of art by ill people can often make them better. We should have museums about science and technology because those subjects are important, not so we can sell crap in the museum shop or increase the Sats results.

Measure museums as museums, not as subdivisions of hospitals, social services departments and job centres. There's no point getting a thousand more people through the door if there's nothing of substance to see.

Glad to see that Microsoft is embracing Ruby, and the open source community attached to Ruby. Yesterday, I downloaded Mono and managed to get IronRuby working on my Mac.

I got a bug report for Rena in the other day (ticket #2 in the bug tracker). It was a really simple bug that basically said XML was being serialized differently in JRuby than in the standard C Ruby implementation (MRI). I don't know why. It could be my code is being interpreted differently by JRuby or it could be that JRuby takes my calls to REXML and handles them differently - using native Java XML libraries, maybe. I didn't investigate. I'm not bothered what the difference is, so long as it works. I changed the test code so that the test passes and marked the bug as resolved. The next thing I did was added a new Rake task called 'jspec', which is the same as the 'spec' task, except it runs the tests through JRuby.

The tests take a lot longer in JRuby. On the standard interpreter (1.8.6 on Mac OS X, universal-darwin9.0), Rake says the test suite takes 0.516497 seconds, while on JRuby Rake says the tests take around 3.711 seconds to run. Time gives a different result to - on the standard interpreter, the tests take 4.968s (real), 2.365s (user) and 0.422 (sys) while the the JRuby tests take 13.718s (real), 8.789s (user) and 0.724s (sys). This seems to parralel what Wikipedia says about JRuby performance, namely that the interpreter is slow but it's much better on the server because of JIT compilation. If you are interested in performance, do read The Great Ruby Shootout. It goes into more detail than one could ever want about interpreter performance.

As for IronRuby? I managed to get it to work, and I could pull up an IRB shell without too much fuss, and I can run simple scripts, but as for being able to load gems and run tests (etc.), it isn't ready for that as far as I can tell. Still, it's looking pretty cool. I had to do quite a lot of dark magic to get it to work (grab old versions from the repository, apply weird patches and so on), and am somewhat astounded that it works. I'm tempted to not bother trying to run IronRuby on my Mac and just give in and do testing on my Windows machine which has actually got an official .NET implementation. Certainly, when it's possible, I'll be adding an "ironspec" task to the Rakefile so we can make sure those on the Microsoft side of the aisle can run the library.

Then, of course, we've got Rubinius, which is the next implementation I'm planning to test. They also seem to be operating in a nice, open way. I'm hoping that if library authors make a point of running their tests on these different interpreters, we can both make our code more portable, and help those developing the implementations.

I'm really excited that I can write a piece of software in a really high-level 'scripting' language that can now run in an ever-growing number of different implementations. (I reject the whole programming/scripting language divide as irrational - it's now just an arbitrary line with little use - especially now we have more and more abstractions, virtual machines and interpreters that run on virtual machines).

From Norm Geras, I see that a man called Jonathan Hoffman has published a report entitled Antisemitism on Guardian 'Comment is Free'. It's basically a report containing a bunch of posts containing a variety of idiotic and anti-semitic statements, and some poor moderation decisions that accompany them. And before we continue, there are plenty of very idiotic statements in the comments, the sort that you can imagine finding on many political blogs.

But some of the presuppositions that are stated in the opening pages of the report I strongly disagree with. It is this from the third page: Note that the advocacy of 'one [secular] State' is antisemitic. Says who? I think that secularism is a universal principle and should be applied in every country. According to Hoffman's standards, that makes me an anti-Semite. I think Israel should be a secular country - as I think the United States, the United Kingdom, India, China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Germany and every other country you name. I wish that Britain would finally hurry up and disestablish the Church of England, and I wish Iran would become a secular, liberal democracy. Does that make me anti-Anglican and anti-Islamic to an offensive extent? Not at all. I'm opposed to all forms of non-secular government, because I think that it necessarily involves the coercion of those people who do not subscribe to the established religion - whether that means forcing people to fund schools or churches which teach religious dogma, or forcing them not to practice their religion or to not criticise religious beliefs which they disagree with.

I disagree with the conclusions of the report too. I do not think that newspapers need to have comments - it makes little difference whether comments are pre-moderated or post-moderated (ignoring the impracticality of pre-moderating comments). I think that Comment is Free is mostly a steaming pile of shite and should probably be turned off.

I'm not a big fan of comments on blogs, and think that the Comment is Free comments are really the bottom of the barrel. If the Guardian wants to participate in the blogosphere, there's an easy way: tell the journalists to stop reading the comments and start using Technorati and Google Blog Search, as well as referrer logs, to hunt for reactions on blogs. Then if you get particularly interesting threads appearing in the blogosphere, link to them.