Faith and Honor

Jonathan Delacour takes on a subtle and important topic. It's one that I'm reluctant to take on because I'm not at all certain I could do it any more justice than Mr. Delacour has done. Of course, it's entirely possible that I have thoroughly misunderstood him, and everything from here on out is simply missing the point. With that in mind, I'm going to give this a shot anyway.

First, I suppose I might try to restate the issue Mr. Delacour seeks to address: In a terrible time, where is honor to be found? Can it be found only in the actions of those who history ultimately judges as right? Or can it be found on each of the opposing sides?

The short answer to this question, if I understand Mr. Delacour, is that honor is to be found wherever anyone acts in good faith, or, as I might add, in harmony with their circumstances, as they reveal themselves to be.

To me, this is the essence of the notion of "right action," although I'm reasonably certain I am not using that term in its customary sense, but please indulge me for now. As I understand it, "right action" for two different people in entirely identical circumstances can be entirely different things. This is frustrating for some people, because we'd like to believe that there is some single standard by which we may judge all others' behavior and choices. To kind of draw on an example from Mr. Delacour's piece, for two people facing the possibility of being called upon to go to war, for one person "right action" may be to refuse and go to jail, or even to flee. For the other person "right action" may be to accept the call, even if they harbor doubt or uncertainty about the cause.

What makes two different acts equally right is what Mr. Delacour refers to as "authenticity." Although I'm not sure he'd agree with me on this point, I will attempt to elaborate a little bit on what "authenticity" is, at least to me. Each of us has a role to play in the world, and the events around us unfold to lead us in the general fulfillment of that role; to our destiny, if you will. Authenticity stems from embracing life on its terms, not seeking to reject it, or to attempt to impose our terms on life. Both choices are honorable, if each choice is embraced affirmatively, in good faith with the grand scheme of life. If one chooses to run away to avoid the war, but one does so with one's heart full of fear and anger and excuses, then that is not an authentic choice. That is rejecting what life has put before you and your role in it. "Why me?" It's okay to have those kinds of thoughts now and then, but ultimately you must embrace your choice and accept the consequences, if you are to live an authentic life.

I think this is at least part of the message in the first verses of the Gita, as Arjuna struggles with the role he is about to play in the impending battle.

The person who is acting authentically, has asserted their authority over their own life. Many people who act inauthentically have ceded their power to other authorities, unconsciously perhaps. I believe most of the social organisms, or corporate entities that we are a part of, wish to have us in this state all of the time, so that our actions may be more easily directed in the service of the larger entity. But that's a topic for another essay.

Some of the comments on Mr. Delacour's piece reflected the reservation that this notion could be used to attribute the virtue of honor to the most heinous of acts. I'm not sure I've got this completely right, but I don't believe that is possible.

The essential quality of honor is faith. Evil, at least as I know it, has its origin in fear, though sometimes it may never be clear what the origin of a particular evil can be said to be. Sometimes, evil just is. No act which has its origins exclusively or even principally in fear will ever be said to be honorable, because it lacks sufficient faith to make it honorable. This is not to say that honorable people do not know fear, are never afraid - they certainly do and they often are. But what is at their base, their foundation, the aspect they choose to present to life, is faith. We all get to choose between faith and fear. Usually, it's never exclusively one or the other, but some combination of influences. But, over time, we'll establish more and more what the basis for our own life is, either faith, or fear.

Persons of great faith can find themselves involved in conflicts initiated by leaders out of fear. That does not affect the quality of their faith, or the honor of their actions. A soldier who does his duty, who keeps faith with his comrades, is an honorable man even if he is killing other soldiers of the opposing side, who are later judged as being right.

Mr. Delacour quotes Irvin Yalom: "freedom extends beyond being responsible for the world (that is, for imbuing the world with significance): one is also entirely responsible for one's life, not only for one's actions but for one's failure to act."

What I take away from that is that "one's failure to act," is to reject life's demands, to face life with the aspect of fear, to try to deny one's role. To live an honorable life, an authentic life, means to embrace what life presents to you, to "say yes to it all."

Anyway, that's what I think.

What We Wish For

If we contemplate going to war against Iraq, do you think we'll not contemplate going to war against other countries?

Think again.

Self-Medicating

My right arm hurts. It hurts worse than it did on the Sunday following the injury. Now, this is a little bit interesting to me.

Before this seminar or class, I took two aspirin, and vitamins C and E. I did this because I knew that aspirin reduces inflammation, and I'd read that antioxidatives also help reduce inflammation. I've also been given to understand that it is the inflammation associated with an injury that is the actual source of pain and swelling, with swelling being the source of the reduced mobility.

Well, sure enough, I got hurt. But there wasn't a great deal of pain. I could tell I was hurt, I could feel some tenderness at the wrist and the elbow, but it looked worse than it felt. I had good mobility and no pain associated with normal activity.

I continued taking aspirin Saturday night and Sunday morning along with the vitamins. Sunday evening and Monday morning I just went with the vitamins.

Tuesday morning, out of absent-mindedness, I neglected to take the vitamins, and I failed to do so for the rest of the day. I skipped Taekwondo, not wanting to aggravate the injury, but figured I'd probably be okay for Thursday.

Yesterday morning I woke up to a good deal of discomfort in the arm, particularly in the wrist area. Again I failed to take any vitamins, and the arm was more painful all day, with some additional pain appearing in my shoulder.

This morning the arm is somewhat more painful, with pain in the wrist, the elbow and the shoulder.

Now I'm wondering what this is due to. (Well, of course it's due to having it bent in ways it's not designed to bend, I know that.) Is it because inflammation has set in? There is no swelling, and mobility remains good. Or did I somehow aggravate the injury in my sleep by sleeping on my arm, or stretching it? Or does it have something to do with the amount of keyboard and mouse activity I've been engaged in at home and at work? It's hard to say, but I'm going to definitely take some aspirin, C and E today and see if there's any improvement. All the bruises have pretty much faded. One appeared on my wrist that hadn't been there immediately coincident with appearance of the others, and while it was somewhat large, it was fairly diffuse.

Of course, I'm still wondering what my partner looked like.

Between Three Oceans

One of water, one of air, one of sand. Go read Golby.

The West Wing -1, Shark - 0

No shark-jumping tonight. We now know how Sam Seaborne will be written out of the series. Hal Holbrook was a pleasure.

Thanks...

To Hal (I changed the pointer in the List o'Links to link to your ETP site again), and Cecil, and Loren and AKMA and Pascale and garret and Al for all the linkage in recent days. I do enjoy the attention, as long as I don't get too much...

And, let me say, that if there is one weblogger who, I think, is doing more than any other weblogger in ways that might actually have a positive effect, it's Mira. I visit her site every day, and I always come away with something to think about that is worthwhile and I can plumb for days. Thanks, Mira, you're a treasure.

Gotta get back to work!

The What and the How

Home for lunch and I just wanted to pound again on this spurious notion that the internet or weblogs or whatever new whizzy technology you care to name, "changes everything."

Technology changes the "how" of things, not the "what." Although how humans do things can often get us into trouble, it is usually the what that causes the most problems. Even in the face of the most rapid period of technological advancement in the history of our species, human beings still do nearly all the same things we used to do back when we roamed the savannah. If you think we're much more sophisticated in our politics today, then you haven't read Thucydides. Technology changes the how, not the what. Most often, technology compresses processes in time, and expands them in space. Yes, we can fly now and we couldn't do that in Thucydides' time, but that's just transportation.

To the extent that it may be said that we have made any progress in changing the behavior of human beings ("what" people do), and there is damn little evidence we've enjoyed a great deal of success, it has come on the heels of moral or spiritual leadership - although even that is often corrupted to afford new "hows" to old "whats."

What is perhaps a little different now, is that we have some greater understanding of why we behave the way we do, and perhaps this affords us an opportunity to find a means to effect real changes. But it's very little to go on, and it has to work against hundreds of thousands of years of evolved behaviors encoded in our genes, and very sophisticated social organisms which are also learning organisms, that have learned to adapt and assimilate even morally-induced changes in human behavior. If you want to use technology, use it to focus attention on the means for making a change, focus on the fact that it is going to take millions of individuals taking inventory of their own hearts and deciding what they wish to believe. (This probably annoys some of you. How can one "decide" what to believe? You believe what is true and you disbelieve what is false, but you decide between those two every day.)

Unfortunately, my own experience suggests that the impetus to undertake such a wrenching endeavor is a personal crisis of some kind. Absent that, we're all far too comfortable in our certainty, our carefully-constructed and elaborate explanations we've fashioned for ourselves, or too frightened to entertain any doubt. We know we're right, and we're all too eager to suppress any suggestion that we should perhaps reconsider our cherished beliefs. At least, that's the way I was, and I didn't believe anything terribly out of the ordinary.

Is America a nation that declares war on other nations, absent a hostile act of war? It appears as though we are about to become one. That wasn't a part of my belief system about America. Is America a nation that embraces the torture of other human beings to extract information? It is startling and unsettling to me that we'd even be having the debate.

I believed that America was a great nation - flawed, but still great - that would endure great suffering and sacrifice to remain true to the principles that have made it such a great nation. Apparently that is not the case. We are only too willing to sacrifice those principles on the alter of "security," rather than endure the suffering and sacrifice that often seem to accompany great principles.

I still believe that's true, but it seems the only people getting any attention are the ones who believe principles are something to be discarded in times of crisis. I would have believed those were the times when we should adhere to them more closely.

The Long and Winding Road

I've told this story before, so for those of you who've been reading me for a while, it may be repetitious. It's prompted by something Anil Dash wrote.

People get the flu. They catch colds. They get athlete's foot and crotch rot. They break limbs, they cut their fingers. They get infections, acne and in-grown toenails. They get cancer and heart disease, appendicitis and bursitis and lower back pain. Lots and lots of things happen to people's physical health, notable usually only because they aren't good things.

My wrist hurts this morning, I think I aggravated it yesterday even though I skipped TKD. It'll get better.

There's little stigma attached to physical illness with the exception perhaps of sexually transmitted diseases, or illnesses that are highly contagious and of a high mortality rate. If my wrist hurts badly enough, long enough, I'll go see a doctor and find out what's wrong and the worst thing I'll worry about is navigating through the insurance nightmare I now have to confront.

But when it comes to mental health, most people would like you to believe that they never get sick. They eat all their vegetables, exercise regularly, had great genes, get eight hours of sleep each night and are as mentally fit as the proverbial fiddle. "There's nothing wrong with me! (All you other people, though, are a different story.)"

Of course, I suspect we all know there's often something not quite right with respect to our mental health, it certainly seems to fuel a thriving self-help industry. But I suspect, many of the "alpha-bloggers" or "high attention-earners", if they note Anil's request at all, will only do so to draw negative attention to it, so as to reinforce amongst the "mob" they appeal to, their own distorted self-image of robust mental health and clear-headedness.

There is a kind of negative side to this sort of disclosure, and it deals with the matter of attention as well. For some people, seeking therapy isn't exclusively an effort to discover an insight into themselves, or to lead a happier life, it's a way of receiving attention, and then telling people about it is yet another way of receiving attention and marking themselves as being among an élite in the sense that Georg Frank wrote about in the piece I mentioned yesterday. I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm just saying it's a distraction, I think, from what Anil intends, and certainly what I intend.

I can't claim - at least I don't think so, I've never asked for a diagnosis or to look at my record - that I have or had anything more serious than depression. I'm not sure how you would characterize the condition that finally motivated me to look for help. I can describe it. It's like getting to the end of your rope and then tying a knot in it and hanging on, and hanging on long enough to begin to wonder if the rest of your life is just going to be hanging onto this knot? It was not understanding how anything worked anymore, because nothing worked. I have an IQ that'll clear the Mensa hurdle with points to spare, but I couldn't figure out why things seemed to be getting worse instead of better, even though I thought I was doing all of the "right" things. It was a feeling of intense frustration and unhappiness, punctuated by moments of inappropriate anger and sometimes rage. There was a certain amount of "victimhood" creeping into my self-image, and I hated that. I'm not sure I'm conveying the despair here, but that's okay.

I was a really unhappy guy, who didn't like how his options were shaping up.

So, I got help.

It occurs to me that I need to add a caveat here. Just as there are a variety of different maladies with respect to physical health, there are a variety that affect mental health. Some of those require treatment with medication under the care of a trained physician. That wasn't the nature of my illness. Mine was more in the thought process.

I didn't get help at the first couple of places I went looking for it. I now believe you should expect this, if you choose to look. But eventually, I did find help. "When the student is willing, the teacher appears." This is true, and was one of only many, many things that Robert Scoble would tell you was only seeing patterns in random noise and concluding some false signal was there; but I will tell you they became the evidence, to me, that there is more here than meets the eye.

I got help from a rather conventional source, a service the Navy provides called the Community Counseling Center. My counselor is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, she's not a New Age guru, but she is a talented and gifted woman and probably the best teacher I've ever known.

In our first session, I recall she mentioned something about "know thyself," I later learned this was from one of the first Greek philosophers, Thales. And as time went on, I discovered that there were problems I didn't know I had, but that Sandy knew I had from the first session, probably the most serious of which was anger. And she walked with me through my life, basically just asking me questions. Leading questions, to be sure, but seldom telling me things, usually just helping me discover them for myself. Showing me where to look.

You know, that's the key: Showing you where to look.

For all our giddy enthusiasm about the internet and weblogging and wireless connectivity and this patently ludicrous notion of "smart mobs," there are no answers here. The answers are precisely where they have always been. Not in this CRT or LCD you're peering into. Look the other way.

But I digress.

It was during our sessions that I began to examine all the things I believed, which were fairly conventional notions. And we looked at them closely. One of the questions I stuggled with was, "I'd take a bullet for my kids, why won't I live with their mother?" This was a hard question and there were others. And I began to understand something about belief systems, expectations, power, and responsibility. And I began to understand how much of whatever power I possessed I had ceded to others, and how many beliefs I had that served others more than myself. Now, that's going to set off "selfish" alarms in many of you, but you need to just ignore those for the time being. That's another belief that's been instantiated in many, usually for noble purposes, but that normally winds up subverting the happiness and health of the individual. There's plenty of opportunity to be unselfish once you know who you are and what you can do.

Who wrote, "The unexamined life is not worth living," or words to that effect? I'm guessing Socrates. As unhappy as I was, and as much turmoil and trauma as it has brought to myself and others in my family, I am grateful for what happened to me. I could not have imagined, three years ago, being in the place that I am now. I also understand I still have far to go. But I know now where I'm going, and though we all have to walk this path on our own, others have been this way before.

If we really want to believe that we're going to change in some fundamental ways as a species, to make life better for each other and this planet we share, we need to begin where we are. We need to change the only thing we have the power to change, and that is each our own individual selves. I can't change you, I certainly can't change you if you don't want to change yourself. I will tell you how to begin, and it's not going to fit in well with weblogging and the "intertwingly," wired, wireless, "smart-mob" fantasies we're erecting for ourselves here. I will tell you how I was told to begin, what sometimes Sandy pleaded with me to do, and how I begin again each time.

Be still.

It Matters What You Believe

I do not like this process that seems to happen in the wee hours of the morning inside my head. Lots of different things I've read and been thinking about go swirling around and begin coming together and I get these insights that seem crystal clear, and then I have to get up and try to capture them. Because, while they're crystal clear, they also seem to be very fragile and as soon as the duties of day to day existence intrude on them, or even if my attention drifts to the duties of the day, they vanish and I'm left thinking I knew something a few minutes ago, but I'm not entirely sure what it was. So having wasted valuable time writing that, forgive me if what I write next seems disjointed, I'm in a hurry to try and get this down before cats, dog and kids, and the demands of my mundane existence sweep these thoughts away.

Social organisms compete with one another by seizing the attention of constituent members, or potential constituent members and manipulating their belief systems. This is why the attention economy is so highly-developed. The phenomenon of weblogging is an effort at expanding the attention economy to a new medium.

People, as individuals, can be said to have principles. They usually don't, even when they believe they do, but some really do. A principle is a special class of beliefs in an overall belief system. Social organisms do not have principles, although they may affect their possession through such means as stating "core values," "mission, vision and guiding principles," and "manifestos." All such mechanisms are really efforts to shape the belief systems of constituent members.

I read an article yesterday criticizing Alan Dershowitz for advocating torture in some circumstances, and the author of the criticism mentioned something like "when a society loses its moorings," and I think referred to Nazi Germany, citing the integration of the Jewish community into that society that so quickly disintegrated through the manipulation of beliefs by Hitler and his followers.

We know through scientific experiments, people will do things they are uncomfortable with, things they wouldn't ordinarily do, when confronted with an "authority" telling them it is all right, or their duty to do them. To be sure, some people will say, "No!" but they are the exception. People will also adopt certain behaviors which would otherwise not be in character for them, when placed in certain situations in which they perceive themselves as fulfilling a role about which they have certain, probably unexamined, beliefs or expectations. I would cite the Prisoner experiment. I've cited it so often, you'd think I'd have it memorized along with URL, but I think it's entitled the Stanford Prisoner Experiment.

In that experiment, all of the subjects are also members of an attention economy. Each group is receiving the attention of the investigators. My guess is, this is a good thing, a good feeling, so they want to please their investigators, so they adopt behaviors they, unconsciously perhaps, believe will be most appealing to their investigators.

I wonder how many of the so-called "war-bloggers" are people who wanted to be "high-earners" in the attention economy, and how many of them, who are "high-earners" have adopted positions they would never have personally advocated two years ago, were they not the recipients of such attention?

Some people believe the phenomenon of weblogging is the extension competition in the "marketplace of ideas," I believe that is another convenient fiction used to manipulate belief systems. I believe what's going on here is really more about thousands of years of evolved psychology and adaptation to and reliance upon emergent behaviors.

Social organisms have no principles, they rely on manipulation of belief systems, elements of which we call, "marketing, propaganda, public relations, debate," or "rationalization."

The other day I mentioned the movie Gladiator, though to be truthful, I didn't really know why I wanted to attention to that movie, other than to the conclusion in which Maximus tries to restore the "dream that was Rome," and I fear the erosion of the dream that was America.

Well, maybe my subconscious knows more than my conscious mind. Quickly, here's how the movie serves this whole notion of mine. Marcus Aurelius is a man of principle, you can argue about how true that was, but I'm talking about the movie, not real history. He wants to restore Rome to a more democratic republic, but he knows the current people in "authority" would oppose that after his death, which he knows is near. Aurelius needs someone who can seize the people's attention, who has the requisite authority, who can bring about the change Aurelius wants in spite of the opposition of the established powers. Maximus is that man. Fresh from his victories in Germania, he would have little trouble seizing people's attention. Commander of Phoenix Legion (or whatever it was) he'd have the means to cow the others who would oppose him.

Alas, but fortunately for our entertainment purposes, Aurelius' son, denied the opportunity to ascend to Emperor by his father, kills him, seizes power and orders Maximus killed. Maximus escapes, is captured by slave traders, and becomes a gladiator, hence the title of the movie. But what happens? Maximus is so successful in the ring, he seizes people's attention even before it is known that he is Maximus, "General of the Armies of the North, Commander of the Phoenix Legion, husband to a murdered wife, father to a murdered son, and loyal subject of the one true emperor, Marcus Aurelius," who is shortly to have his vengeance "in this life, or the next." Once it is known who he is, Aurelius' whole plan comes back to life.

The whole scene in the coliseum is a metaphor, albeit not a terribly sophisticated one, for what is going on in our country today. Two opposing visions of America are competing for the belief systems of its citizens.

Well, that's probably enough about all of that. I think I've lost pieces of it, but maybe it will come back to me later if I revisit this. I suspect it will to some extent. This is all part of an essay I guess I'm supposed to write one day called "The Persistence of Vision," and it's slowly beginning to come together for me.

It does matter what you believe. Social organisms don't have principles. Countries, corporations, even churches, don't have principles. People can, and usually believe they do; but often they don't understand what that means, so effectively, they don't. We're all too willing to modify or ignore our principles for the sake of attention, under social pressure (which is a negative, coercive form of attention), or in the face of fear.

We're all parts of various social organisms, from our families all the way up to our nation, and, in some context, even as a species. Social organisms don't have principles. They have beliefs that they interchange and revise as necessary in order to compete with other social organism, and the way they do that is through attention.

If you don't think something like Nazi Germany can happen in America, I think you're wrong. It can happen anywhere.

I think if we begin to understand how these things work, if we can begin to see where we fit in as individuals in the larger entities we are a part of, we may be able to begin to re-shape that process. Maybe we can keep from losing our moorings.

I don't know.

I know I don't like a lot of what I see going on. But I don't think the "same old, same old" is going to change it. I think we've seen that social organisms have learned how to adapt to things like mass demonstrations. And I don't think passive resistance can do it anymore either. I think we need to get inside the genetic code of social organisms and re-code them. I think if more people, what I call the "constituent members" of social organisms understood what the processes were that were at work, they might be able to alter their behavior in such a way that the social organism would be less effective. That's a danger as well. Too little social cohesion, too little conformity, and there's probably chaos and anarchy.

Anyway, this probably sucks. I wrote it fast, haven't proofed it, and I've got to get on with the day. You'll note that I'm interested in attention too, I put the Site Meter thing on the page yesterday. Though, in some ways, I don't want very much attention. Too much attention and you become an authority, and I'm an authority on nothing. And I make all this shit up.

Think for yourselves.

More Attention Matters

Amazon has an excerpt of the book The Attention Economy, and it's kind of interesting. Here's a quotation (of a quotation) from this page:

Prominence as Wealth. "It is becoming popular in our affluent society to rank income in attention above money income. When rising numbers of people are able to afford the insignia of material wealth, then the desire for distinction will create a demand for attributes which are more selective than a large money income. In accordance with the law of the socialisation of luxuries, such attributes will be found among privileges which are still élitist. The undisputed common denominator of present-day élites is prominence - and prominence is nothing but the status of being a major earner of attention."

I think the source says Georg Frank, "The Economy of Attention," a little help from Google and here's the original reference!

Now I'm going to spend a little time reading this and thinking about what it means with respect to power, authority, social organisms and weblogs.

Another Culinary Experiment

Okay, we'll see how this goes. I stuck a shoulder roast in a roasting pan, threw in some string beans and red potatoes (with an "e"), and an onion. I poured Worcestershire sauce over the roast, then covered it with more onion, then poured cream of mushroom soup on top of that. Covered the whole thing with aluminum foil and stuck it in the oven at 250. Rumor has it, it'll take four to five hours to cook. The potential downside is I put the potatoes and beans in too early, but I'm lazy and don't want to screw around with it an hour or so before it's supposed to be done. So they'll be a little mushy. Or very dry. We're not sure which.

Now I'm going back to work. When I get home, dinner should be almost done.

I hope.

Update: Cooked it too long, a little dry. And I think the onion was a bad idea, or maybe I shouldn't have used a sweet one. The beans were good. The potatoes were a little too soft.

Oh well, live and learn. Or not, as the case may be.

Attention Matters

Here's an interesting link I need to explore a bit more. It's a promotional site for a book called The Attention Economy. There's a kind of an assessment test you can take on the site, I'm not really sure what it's designed to indicate. When I have a little more time, I'll see if my results are saved, and I'll try to post them here. I found the link via Halley's Comment.

This will get filed under Social Organisms. Social organisms, or what Howard Bloom called Super Organisms, rely on manipulating belief systems in order to compete with one another and to grow. Bloom bought deeply into the concept of a meme as a kind of information, or metaphysical virus that infected people and organisms. There's a lot about Bloom's book that is good, but there's probably an equal amount that is off the mark, I think. That's a topic for another day. The point is, in order to gain access to where you store your beliefs, social organisms must seize your attention, and they've grown quite adept at that.

If Howard Rheingold wants to create "smarter" mobs, if people think weblogs are going to change the way human beings gather information and interact with one another, then we'd better begin to pay attention to attention.

Fork-Tailed Devils

Another old P-38 Lightning takes to the skies. The P-38 was my favorite fighter of WW II. I got a copy of Martin Caidin's Fork-Tailed Devil: The P-38 when I was a kid, I guess about thirteen or fourteen at the time. It was a great book.

The P-38 was one of the first, if not the first, to encounter compressibility effects on the control surfaces at high-mach numbers. The effect was to make the controls act opposite from the way you would expect them to, so a few were lost in high-speed dives until they figured out what was happening.

Some people love the P-51, others think the Spitfire was the best fighter of WW II, and a case can certainly be made for the various models of the FW-190, but the Lightning had a great combination of speed, range, payload and maneuverability (counter-rotating props!), and a devastating sting of four .50 calibre machine guns and a 20mm cannon in the nose, that made it one of the best performers of the war.

It's good to see another one flying again.

Mozilla Malfunction

I've been noticing some peculiar behavior in Mozilla lately. I suppose I should just download the latest version, I've been running 1.0 release candidate 2 for quite some time now.

This morning, it stopped displaying the second of the two flower pictures I uploaded yesterday. I thought for a moment that I'd had the problem I'd seen before where sometimes a picture file would disappear between uploads. So I exported my Tinderbox file to a local folder to check the names of the pictures, and then I had to use Goliath to look at my iDisk, Finder was giving me Error -47 and wouldn't mount the darn thing.

Comparing the two folders, I saw all the picture files were right where they were supposed to be. So I launched IE just to see how it saw the page, and both pictures were there. On a hunch, I quit Mozilla and re-launched it. When I went back to the site, all the pictures were there again.

Another time I've learned to quit and re-launch Mo is when I can't get javascript links to work. Some folks use javascript links to get to their comments, and sometimes clicking on them does nothing. Quit and re-launch and everything is fine.

Of course, I love OS X. I have thirteen applications running right now and everything is working great. With 512MB of RAM, and using virtual memory in OS 9.1, I suppose I could be doing the same thing, but I'm not confident. My habit had been to run no more than four or five applications at one time, because things tended to become rather dicey as the number of running applications increased. Of course, that also meant I had to kind of keep track of which order I launched them in, in order to avoid leaving big, useless holes in RAM. If I had had this problem with Mozilla in OS 9, I'd have to back out of every program I'd launched after Mozilla, in reverse chronological order, quit Mozilla, then re-launch, then launch the other applications. If I couldn't remember, I'd just restart the whole computer.

I just have trouble fathoming how people can claim they were so much more productive under Mac OS 9, unless they ran only two or three applications all the time, and didn't mind re-booting a lot.

Fresh Air

Here's a breath of fresh air.

New Version of Launchbar

Version 3.2.5 is out and available from Objective Development. Spend some time with this one, you'll never regret it.

Another Day in the Life

The groceries have been procured, the larder stocked, the bags thrown away.

The lawn is mowed, the edges edged, and the leaves blown.

Turning my attention to my ongoing project in the backyard, I finished picking up all my trash from Saturday's efforts. Re-arranged all the plants and the little bit of plastic patio furniture I have, blew down the patio to get rid of the leaves and, more importantly, the acorns. I plugged in my fountain, and life was good.

Except I was missing something.

The chimes!

So, into the Montero I hop, and off to Ace Hardware I go. $127.00 later, I have some very cool wind-chimes. I hung them up and ... no wind.

Sigh.

Oh well.

Tonight's dinner is tacos, one of my least-favorite meals. I enjoy eating them, but there's a pretty fair amount of prep, and a lot of clean-up afterward. Since I do everything around here, it makes for a long evening. I think I need to hold another family meeting.

A Few More Pictures

I was out mowing the lawn, and I happened to notice this spider. I wanted to get a picture of him, and while I had the camera out, I figured I'd take a couple of the Morning Glories that are scheming to take over the entire yard.

First, the spider. This guy is over two inches long from the tip of his fore leg to the top of his hind leg. You'll note, he appears to be missing one on the left side (His right. Hers?).

The flowers:

Post-processing probably sucks, but again, I don't know what I'm doing. The colors are about right, the flash was off, but they're also probably over-sharpened. This was the only shot of the spider that came out. I need to learn how to quickly shift from three-zone focusing to spot focusing. One of these days...

I'm not a Masochist

But how to explain the condition I'm in this morning?

I'm what we used to call an HFC ("hurtin' fuckin' cowboy", as in "He's one HFC today!" Usually accompanied by a snicker or a sneer.)

I don't know what possessed me to go ahead and take a two-hour seminar in grappling or ground-fighting. Back in high school, it was called wrestling, but I suppose the WWF has given that a bad name. I, along with everyone else, took six weeks of it twenty-five years ago at USNA, when I was, (surprise!) twenty five years younger. It seemed like it might be a fun or interesting thing to do. And it got me out of the house and away from house work and yard work for a while.

I partnered with one of the school's Taekwondo black belts and a state or national sparring champion, I forget which. He's probably ten or more years younger than me (I? Whatever.), but I've probably got fifty pounds on him. Which usually isn't a good thing, but in this case it was helpful.

Well, things went pretty well for most of the seminar. We all understood how to tap out before bad things started to happen wrists and elbows and shoulders and knees and necks. Then we went into these 30-second mini-bouts toward the end, and I think my competitive partner, perhaps a little tired of me tossing him around, wished to demonstrate some of his own competence. I don't recall the sequence of events, but I do recall getting my right arm bent the wrong way much more quickly than I could "tap out." It hurt like a son of a bitch for a bit. Fortunately, it seemed like it still worked, so I hurt him back on the next bout. And the one after that too. It's amazing what you can do with your chin.

After I got home, I got a look at my right arm, and it is a mass of purple blotches all around the elbow and forearm. I'm guessing this is what it looks like when it's been somewhat hyper-extended. It still works, but it's sore and I have to be careful when I bend it or it seems to lock up and hurts a lot. I seem to have bruised my right knee too.

And I'm pretty much sore all over. I took aspirin before the seminar, which may have contributed to all the colorful blotches as it's an anti-coagulant. I expected I was going to get a little bit hurt, and I wanted to minimize the inflamation so I could retain mobility afterward. I also took a lot of vitamin C and E for the same reason. I took a couple of more aspirin and C and E before I went to bed, so I think I'm in about the best condition I could expect under the circumstances.

It was the most exhausting two hours I've spent in a long time. Right at the end of the session, my legs started cramping up on me, and I'd been staying well-hydrated. My clothes were soaked through and through. I went home, showered off and spent the remainder of the afternoon on the couch. Later on I mustered up the energy to clean the kitchen, then it was back to the couch. Of course it didn't help that I moved 1400 lbs of crushed stone earlier in the morning, trying to get the backyard under control.

Friday night I was presented with my Green Belt in Taekwondo. I'm not sure I'll be attending class on Tuesday. I think punches are right out for a few days. But maybe not. We'll see.

I've still got to mow the lawn today, and do the grocery shopping. And the kitchen needs to be cleaned again. Yep, I'm one HFC today. I think I'm going to pass on any more grappling seminars.

Not a great picture, but I'm not a great photographer. It's over-sharpened, but I was in a hurry. Sue me. It looks worse than it feels.

I think.

Escapable Logic

I've added a new link to the list o'links (Sometimes referred to as a "blogroll." Ugh.) there on the right, it's down at the bottom for my convenience in making the entry, but that's no reflection of its value or interest. It's Escapable Logic, by Britt Blaser, and I followed a link from Doc Searls' to get there.

There's some very good stuff there, and there's a lot of accounting too, so I guess nothing's perfect, right? ;-) But I loved the specific entry Doc linked to, you'll find it here. Go read it.

Firefly

I caught the last half of tonight's episode of Firefly. I'm not sure how good the first half was, but what I saw tonight was, I think, Nebula or Hugo award-winning calibre. I think the series is still trying to find its voice, but what I saw tonight was excellent.

Paul Wellstone

There are people in both parties with whom I often disagree. There are fewer who I also respect.

I respected Paul Wellstone.

Technical Difficulties

I seem to be having problems with either .Mac or Tinderbox, but I've lost some posts and I'm re-constructing them. So if things seem a little more disheveled than usual, that's the reason.

Cinéma Verité

Cinéma Verité

Don't gig me on the spelling, I make all this stuff up.

I almost bought Saving Private Ryan last weekend. I didn't, because I didn't know if I could watch it again. I'll probably buy it this weekend. I think I can watch it again.

I started watching Gladiator tonight. I stopped. I may start again soon. Same problem.

I think I'd like everyone who embraces the wisdom of waging war with Iraq to watch those two movies, back to back if possible; but I'm not sure, because I think they might see only what they wanted to see. We do this because that's the way we've evolved to perceive things. To see only what makes us feel good about what we believe. There are things to feel good about in both movies, but there's a context that can easily be overlooked, and usually is.

I went to a change of command today. Two of my old shipmates were the principals. I didn't stick around after the ceremony. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself struggling with my feelings about my own career. Placing my attention in the past, something that is gone and out of reach, they weren't happy thoughts. But all the talk was of war, and I know we are at war. And I wish I were in another place, in some other capacity. But I am where I am. And I know we're contemplating fighting the wrong enemy at the wrong time.

"There was a dream that was Rome."

Well, there was a dream that was America too.

Once.

Adapting to Change

There is some relatively good news in the world. This report on international climate change talks indicates the focus has shifted to adaptation instead of emission reductions. I think, in the short term anyway, adaptation is the way to go.

Entropy Always Wins

Well, I've scratched the Iraqi itch all I care to for the time being. I'm quite convinced folks have no idea what they're advocating or what they're likely to find themselves in for, but I certainly can't change their minds.

In addition, I find that when I'm thinking about Iraq, I'm not getting other things done that need doing much closer to home. This is a problem, since there are probably more things that need doing than I can reasonably be expected to accomplish. Certainly, that was the way my week was shaping up. I've had to scale back my plans for this week. The stone arrived yesterday, but I've been staying up too late reading idiots' arguments for going to war and waking up too tired and foul-tempered to be a good parent, much less work in the yard.

This means I'm going to have to curtail some of my online reading. It's hard, because there's something habit-forming about reading the rantings of seemingly intelligent people making arguments for lunacy. I think I've become addicted to the feelings of stimulation I get when reading them. But, what's odd is, I don't really like those feelings. So it takes a much more conscious effort not to read them than my dislike for them would seem to suggest.

What makes it somewhat harder is I'm encountering arguments for lunacy at places I formerly hadn't expected to encounter it. I guess this means idiocy is contagious? Maybe it's a meme thing. In any case, I can no longer visit some sites with the belief that I won't encounter something outrageous advocating destruction and bloodshed for uncertain aims. So I think I'm just going to spend less time online and more time trying to hold back entropy in the local universe.

I think we've gone over this issue before, in the fallout from 9-11 and the run-up to Afghanistan, but weblogs are not going to change very much in the way human beings conduct their lives or make their decisions. We'll still be stupid and stubborn in all the ways we've been stupid and stubborn in the past. Only now we have the shiny new patina of a novel technology to suggest to ourselves we've discovered something that will somehow make things "better;" when the only way we can really make things better is to discover those things within ourselves that tend to make them worse.

But don't try telling that to a chicken-hawk.

Maybe I'm wrong and everything will work out just fine. We'll liberate Iraq, the Turks will make fine "peacekeepers," democracy will flourish, oil prices will decline, we'll find we really don't miss our civil liberties, we'll erect a few more monuments to our honored dead, we'll find a way not to attack Iran or North Korea and still be comfortable living in our hypocracy, and life will go on in a Golden Age of Pax Americana, complete with graphics on Fox and CNN. Believe me, I won't lose any sleep over being wrong. It won't hurt my feelings if all the chicken-hawks go "neener-neener-neener," and crow about their manly virtues of courage and prescience. I guess that's the best I can hope for at this point.

Anyway, I've gone on too long as it is. But you already knew that, didn't you?

Here's Someone Confronting Evil

I would say this is an example of someone confronting evil.

Confronting Evil

I think if one wants to make the case that evil must be confronted, then one must then examine where that confrontation must take place.

I submit that one does not have to look very far to begin to confront evil. Indeed, I would say the only meaningful confrontation can take place somewhere one need not travel very far at all.

The only place where evil can truly be confronted is within one's own heart.

Saving the World

Al Hawkins links to this editorial in the Washington Post, which makes a liberal case for war with Iraq. The concluding paragraph: In the end, it comes to this: The anti-warriors of the left would rather see Iraq continue as a slave state under Saddam Hussein than concede any legitimacy to the idea of an American (or at least a Republican) use of force. It's a price they are willing to pay. Because, you see, America is "a menace." Well, it is a point of view. But you might have a hard time convincing the average Iraqi torture victim that it is a liberal one, or moral one.

This is just plain horseshit. Moral arguments like this have to be made in the context of an overarching strategy, a statement that says what America's objectives are, and what it is prepared to do to achieve those objectives. Mr. Kelly's liberal, moral arguments can be applied to any number of nations who fail to observe human rights.

If one is to assume that Mr. Kelly's arguments are to be the basis for a national strategy, then it must therefore follow that wherever America encounters a nation that fails to observe our standard of human rights, America is prepared to use force to overturn the government of that nation and install another government which is, presumably, more respectful of human rights. That strategy puts us into armed conflict with, at least, North Korea, Iran, Uzbekistan, Mexico, Russia, Egypt, Vietnam, and Algeria, to name but a few.

There is evil in the world. Even if we had the will and the capacity to wage war all over the world and install regimes that were "better" than the ones they have now, there would still be evil in the world. And all the blood that would be shed wouldn't change one bit of that. There would still be evil in the world.

Get a better argument.

What's the Program?

Perhaps, more precisely, what is our strategy?

I know some of the small number of people who come by here are in favor of war with Iraq, perhaps you could point me to the site where the grand strategy is laid out for us to examine.

I'd like to see how our ongoing effort against al Qaeda fits in with our anticipated efforts against Iraq. I'd like to know how we plan to secure Iraq once we've defeated it militarily. I'd like to know what is contemplated for Iran, Korea and Pakistan, one of which is known to have nuclear weapons, one has fairly sophisticated ballistic missile technology and one is working hard to acquire both.

I don't think we can make a rational decision with regard to commencement of hostilities against Iraq without knowing what our intentions are with regard to those other three nations.

Of course, someone will point out that giving away the grand strategy would only aid our enemies. I don't happen to think that's true. I suspect no one can point out any kind of overall strategic plan because there isn't one.

I suspect this effort against Iraq is just some unfinished business on the part of some members of the administration who were able to gain some traction following September 11th, perhaps to their own surprise. The justification for the invastion of Iraq smacks of reasoning backwards from the conclusion. Iraq has been a thorn in our side since the cessation of hostilities and some people have been itching to revisit that issue ever since. Finding a sympathetic ear, they then make their case by pointing out the obvious, that Saddam is a bad man, that he has weapons of mass destruction, that he may or may not have had links to al Qaeda, ergo, we invade!

Looks good on the surface to a group of people who are particularly bloodthirsty and have nothing at risk, so they all start pounding the drums of war.

Okay, if you really want to convince me that this is a good idea, show me where Iraq fits into an overarching strategy. I submit that you can't, because we don't have one. We've reasoned backward from the conclusion we wanted, and now we're making this up as we go along. If we're not very careful, we're going to find we'll have bitten off far more than we planned to chew.

Frankly, I'm surprised and dismayed that our legislators failed to demand this of the administration before signing off on their indulgence of the president's prerogatives as commander in chief. I suspect that, even though they haven't articulated this publicly, the lack of a sound, well-reasoned, grand strategy is at least part of the explanation of the reluctance of some senior military leaders.

This is what we get when we elect a frat-boy president and his coterie of ex-CEO advisors and sycophants. Limited thinking, no long-range vision, "make the numbers look good for this quarter, we'll worry about next quarter...next quarter." "That vision thing" must be a genetic defect in the Bush line.

No, Cecil, we're not hosed. We're fucked.

Selective Service

I wonder how many of the chicken-hawks have children approaching draft-age? My guess is, not very many. Having kids, especially ones approaching their late teens, tends to dampen one's enthusiasm for foreign military adventures.

Those whose kids are still pre-teens shouldn't be feeling too comfortable, either. I'm guessing this could go on for a very long time.

I think we're going to find we'll need the draft. I have a feeling we'll find our client states' troops (Turkey) a little unreliable, and we'll have to have large numbers of occupation forces. Those are likely to be conscripts, so we can free up the career combat forces to take on the next contender in the Axis of Evil series. Could be Korea, but Iran is getting a bit of attention now. Iran has the geographic advantage of being right next to Iraq, so, as long as we're there...

I hope that when we re-activate the draft, we don't allow deferments for all the priveleged and the connected.

And I wonder how it'll effect the Social Security actuarial situation? On the one hand, with so many young men and women out of the workforce and in uniform, older people will be more in demand as workers, so, in effect, they will be paying more for their own Social Security. That might be a good thing.

Then there's the question of whether we can afford all-volunteer force wages for a conscripted force? My guess is it would be pretty expensive, so there'll probably have to be some adjustments for status as either a volunteer or a conscript. And I wonder if this will be for a fixed period of service, or for "the duration?"

All those benefits packages may have to be looked at as well. And maybe this explains Bush's opposition to Concurrent Receipt, the bill that would allow veterans with VA - assigned disability ratings to collect their full retirement pay as well as their disability pay. Under current law, your retirement pay is offset by the amount of your disability payment. So if you're disabled in the service, you don't really get any disability pay, you just get a tax break since your "disability pay" is non-taxable. Both the House and the Senate have passed bills changing the law to allow concurrent receipt. The House would only offer it for veterans with greater than 60% disability, while the Senate version would apply to any veteran with a disability rating. President Bush has stated he would veto the measure. Perhaps because he knows he's going to have a hell of a lot more career military people with service-connected disabilities in the years to come.

But I sure hope the children of all those chicken-hawks get their opportunity to serve.

Routine

Nothing like getting up in the morning and discovering there is no water pressure. What is this? A ship? Italy? It's back now. A quick call to the water plant, to be greeted by a busy signal, told me it wasn't because I haven't paid the water bill yet.

Chris and I dragged the last remnants of the old fence down by the road last night. Hopefully the refuse fairy will come by and make it go away. (Yes, I know it doesn't just "go away.")

I've finished cleaning out the corner enclosed by the new fenceline, and I've discovered it's going to take at least another 1200 lbs of marble chips to cover it all. Hopefully Lowes delivers, because that's at least three trips in the Montero and I don't fancy doing all that driving. I'd like to get this done by Friday so I can enjoy the weekend for once. There's a huge wind chime at Ace Hardware for $120.00 I'm thinking about. Maria's got a number of them about, but they're the little ones with the little "tinkle-tinkle" sound. I want something with a little more resonance.

Mandy has suddenly taken to digging holes in the yard again. Perhaps she senses I'm trying to make the backyard look nice after having been neglected for a decade or so. She just likes to be a pain in the ass, which she does quite well. All that digging tracks in prodigious amounts of dirt into the house. Time to look into more dog psychology. The vet told me we don't want to make her stop digging, we just need to find her a good place to dig. Well, it's a yard, not a doggie playground. I'm not sure I can find a place, and I'm not sure how I'd go about persuading her to dig only there.

Anyway, I'm beat. I get up in the last couple of mornings and everything creacks, crackles and snaps, sometimes so loud it sort of scares you.

Housework, yard work, work work. Not much time for this sort of thing.

Time to go to work.

Be Careful What You Wish For...

Al Hawkins linked to this editorial in the Washington Post, which is more about bashing "the left," than it is any cogent defense of the invasion of Iraq. If it were just bashing "the left" it wouldn't be very interesting, except this is from a self-identified liberal. The chicken-hawks are going to love this latest addition to the rookery. Which I suppose only goes to show how useless labels are. I'm opposed to war with Iraq, I suppose this makes me a member of "the left," but I really don't know because I eschew embracing membership of any group, although I cannot avoid being a member of a number of groups.

So much of this piece is irritating, it's hard to know where to begin. I guess it's irritating because this is what we get instead of meaningful debate of the merits of the issue, just some more feckless casting of aspersions.

Mr. Hitchens seems to be arguing that we need to depose Saddam essentially because it's the "right thing to do," and doesn't bother to consider or count the cost. He makes reference to some criticism the President has received, presumably from "the left," for dumbing the issue down to a matter of "good versus evil;" and makes a passing snide comment about moral relativism making accomodations with evil.

Mr. Hitchens must live in a different world than I do. From my perspective, it is often the folks on "the right" who argue that moral relativism is an offense against humanity. Yet it seems to me that they are embracing moral relativism themselves when they assert that killing innocent Iraqi citizens and U.S. servicemembers in pursuit of the goal of a "regime change" is morally right; because, presumably, something more evil might or will occur.

To me, the issue of whether or not going to war against Iraq is morally right hinges on the matter of "might or will." Those advocating war on this basis must either stake a claim of prescience which none of the rest of us share, or else they are making a morally relative choice by deciding that a few thousand, maybe several thousand, innocent certain deaths are justified by the potential deaths of many times more that number. To embrace this course of action, we will be responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, just as responsible as Osama bin Laden was for the deaths on September 11th, each sharing the certainty that what we were doing was morally "right."

Someone is going to pipe up and explain that it's really Saddam Hussein's fault, that he is the one who is responsible. Well, perhaps the case can be made that he shares responsibility; but it will be a conscious, deliberate act on our part that will initiate a state of war between our two nations. We can't hold up a fig leaf with Saddam Hussein's picture on it and pretend we've got our virtue covered.

The world of human affairs is an ugly, treacherous place, and there is no one whose virtue is intact. We do make accomodations with evil, in small ways and large, and this administration has done so as all administrations have. I'm sure Mr. Hitchens knows that. Some of those accomodations are undoubtedly more repugnant than others, but what is the alternative? This administration tries to take up the banner of moral leadership by defining the Iraqi issue in narrow "good versus evil" terms that will only raise further issues in the future. And I'm not sure we've had that debate yet. Who's next on the hit list? North Korea? Iran? Pakistan? Wherever there is "evil" in the world, that's where we're going to ride to the rescue? Anyone planning on bringing the draft back? Because you're going to need it.

I want the people who are in favor of this adventure to explain why we're not going to invade Iran, or Pakistan, or North Korea. How is the situation in those nations significantly different, and therefore not requiring forcible entry and violent overthrow? North Korea is an exceptionally good candidate. It's already a member of the "axis of evil." It has brought suffering and ruination on its people, so we could claim we were "liberators." They have ballisitic missile technology, and they're likely much further along in their nuclear weapons program than Iraq is. It seems to me, they're a much greater potential threat than Saddam is. So explain to me where North Korea fits on the timetable? Or maybe this isn't about morality at all, is it?

If so, then what is it about?

I am a moral relativist. I don't believe any issue is strictly black and white. But I understand that one has to make choices. In my opinion, it is morally better to live with the risk that Saddam Hussein poses a threat, and to take all appropriate action to minimize that risk short of the invasion and occupation of the country of Iraq. If we could kill Saddam Hussein without taking the lives of thousands of other Iraqis and some number of American service members, I'd be in favor of that.

This is a bad business. The only thing wrong with killing sons of bitches who deserve it, is it's so hard to know when to stop.

Temptation Resisted

This probably isn't the kind of news Apple, Inc. likes to hear about, but I didn't buy a new iMac today.

CompUSA was offering a two-day promo that included no payments, no interest for 18 months on computer purchases made with the CompUSA card.

I went up there with the intention of doing it. I even picked up the application. But I managed to talk myself out of. Of course, now I'm kicking myself but it really doesn't matter, I would have been kicking myself if I'd have bought one too.

I was going to settle for the 17" iMac, instead of the 867MHz Dual-Processor G4, I thought I wanted. I figured the new 970-based Macs would be out in about 18 months, and so spending a little less money now for an interim machine might be a good way to go. I really wanted the larger display, 1024x768 just drives me nuts. The 867 would have been paired with the 17" LCD display, but that adds another $1K to the price, plus tax, although an Apple rebate would have lowered that somewhat.

But I decided I could get buy a little longer on the iMac DV/400. I figure by March I should be able to pay cash for a new machine. We'll see.

I did go and buy 400 lbs of marble chips. That was fun.

Kind of.

The new fence encloses some additional new area in the back yard that had formerly been allowed to grow wild. I've been trying to clean it out the past few days, it's a real mess. I decided I really wanted something low maintenance, that would still look nice. So I bought some of that weed-barrier material and I'm going to put that down and then cover the whole thing with marble ships. At some point I may put a plant or two in there, but it's really not essential at the moment.

I'm not sure I bought enough marble, but I should know for sure tomorrow, if I don't get too exhausted. Fortunately, the weather has cooled considerably. I also looked at a very nice set of wind chimes, the BIG kind. $120.00, but I think I'm going to get them.

It's going to be nice when I'm done.

Obligatory Weblog Cat Photo

That's Karma on the right and her, now grown, kitten Squeaky on the left. They're still not quite at home here, though you'd never know by this picture.

Technology Versus Evolution

I was flipping around through Emergence yesterday, inspired perhaps by the mention of adhocracy and Rheingold's "smart mobs." Emergence is about complex adaptive behaviors arising out of networked agents. The author of that book also suggests that new forms of human behavior will emerge as a result of the influence of technology on human beings.

I'm not so sure that's true. It is typical of us, though, to become enamored with a new idea and new technologies, and then read entirely too much into their potential while overlooking some of the real effects that are likely to accrue. I think the automobile is an example of that.

But perhaps I'm being unfair. I just happen to believe that human behavior is governed more by tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of evolutionary adaptation, than by our technology. We have evolved to affiliate into groups, and we have evolved mechanisms for sorting out the means by which we make those groups effective, which usually involves a network of individuals who make decisions and provide leadership for the remainder of the group. To be sure, these individuals are, in turn, affected and influenced by their connections with the individuals who are not members of the leadership network, and we do see emergence-type phenomena in human activities all the time; but there is still a relatively small, indentifiable group that performs the function of influencing or leading the rest. We've also evolved to be really good followers, whether it suits your personal view of your character or not. And I think that much of this evolutionary adaptation was, itself, the product of emergence-type phenomena.

What I think communications technology offers is a way to compress these processes in time, and expand them in space, but I don't think it fundamentally alters these processes leading, somehow, to more egalitarian groups of people doing wonderful things without leaders or leadership hierarchies. And no one has pointed to an example of these sorts of organizations doing anything more complex than creating a disturbance, which is something mobs have always done quite well.

I think, if we're looking for a fundamental change in the ways human beings interact with one another to identify and solve problems, we need to make a greater effort to understand the neurological and psychological bases for these behaviors, and their practical effects. We then need to educate everyone about why they behave the way they do, and why it is in their interest to know and understand this. Then they will be better equipped to monitor their own behavior, and perhaps be less suseptible to the mechanisms we have evolved over time to influence behavior.

This would be bad news for groups like advertisers and political parties, but I think it's far more likely to lead to improvements in human interactions than ubiquitous cell phones and colorful riots with lots of street theater and vandalism. All the answers we seek are within us, not within our machines.

Birthday Greetings

My preoccupation with fences and things I have no control over distracted me from remembering my brothers' birthdays a couple of days ago. Happy birthday, John and Eric. They're not twins, because they're separated by some number of years. I shouldn't have forgotten, it was also Maria's birthday.

Another Book to Add to the List

I hated reading math books in school. It's funny that I should enjoy reading them now. Here's another one I think I'll enjoy reading.

Star Wars Whining

The movie industry loves tracking, and perhaps today's most relevant question is why young people aren't going to the same movie five or six times a la "Titanic."

Um, dare I say it? It's because the movies suck, that's why. Especially the latest Star Wars epics. The first three were great because they were kind of campy, but they were playing it straight. We saw things we'd never seen before in movies, and we liked the characters.

The latest series gives us Jar-Jar Binks in place of Chewie, a much too uptight Aniken instead of Han Solo, and a prissy Obi Wan Kenobi instead of Luke. They just suck. We go see them once because they're Star Wars, after all, and you want to see what Lucas has done this time to screw up the franchise. But don't be surprised when folks don't go back a second or third time. Because they suck.

Hasn't anyone told these guys this?

Joni Mitchell

When I was a freshman midshipman we weren't allowed to have stereos. At some point, I don't recall anymore, we were allowed to have small, portable devices, or maybe that was all I could afford, I'm not sure. In any event, I had some Panasonic 8-track player. It was a square box with a plunger on the top like you see in all the Road Runner cartoons when Coyote is trying to blow up a tunnel or something.

Anyway, one of the very few tapes I had was Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. I think I wore that tape out. Car on a Hill and Twisted were two of my favorites, but every song on that album made a rather unpleasant existence a little more tolerable.

In later years we were permitted to have a stereo system, but as I recall, I always relied on my roommates' systems since I didn't buy my own until after graduation. In any event, once I could play vinyl I quickly added Blue and Miles of Aisles and wore those records out.

I haven't been able to keep up with Joni's work as the years have gone by. I still love her voice just as much as ever, but the words and music don't reach me the same way they did back then. I've got Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, but I couldn't name a song on it.

All of this is prompted by this piece at CNN on Ms. Mitchell being ashamed to be in the music business.

Repeating Myself (Like That Never Happens)

Restating the issue is based on something I read recently, though I can't recall where I read it. I use three computers, so going through the history files of each is a little tedious and cumbersome.

It was a piece on asking people moral questions, or at least, that's what I took away from it.

It posed a scenario in a couple of different ways and noted the different responses people gave depending on how the scenario was presented. It had to do with a disease and perhaps a vaccine or a drug treatment, but I've forgotten which. Anyway, I didn't think very much about it after I read it.

Then, the night before last, when I was in that sort of half-asleep, half-awake phase I seem to spend too much time in, I put together the argument that killing a few thousand innocent Iraqis was "okay" if it prevented the deaths of thousands of Americans. The uncertainties from the article kicked in, and all of a sudden I was looking at the same subject as the article.

I remembered it yesterday afternoon when I read someone else saying it was okay to be responsible for the certain death of some number of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans, to choose the best case, in order to prevent the deaths of many more thousands of Americans.

Everyone seems to believe the two alternatives are of equal probability, but they aren't. To be sure, I can't know in advance how many Iraqis we would kill in our effort to oust Hussein, and I can't know how many American servicemembers would give their lives in that effort. But it is far, far less certain that any Iraqi-developed weapon of mass destruction would ever be used against Americans. I'm not saying it's a zero-probability event, just that the probability is not 100% and likely less than 50-50, I think.

So it's like we're willing to conduct thousands of ritual sacrifices of innocent people, including hundreds of our own, to appease the probability gods. That sounds pretty enlightened, doesn't it?

And then, after we've killed all these folks, how do we do the math to determine what the probability is that terrorists will be able to get a weapon of mass destruction from some other source? How do we calculate the probability that they won't find some other new and innovative means of killing large numbers of Americans without relying on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons? How do we assess by what amount the deaths of all those people has made us "safer?"

Kenneth Adelman wrote in the October 14th issue of Time magazine that "terrorist networks can barely exist without terrorist states." That's an interesting assertion. So, I suppose Ireland is a terrorist state? The IRA seems to have little trouble existing. Maybe Britain should invade Ireland. ETA hasn't been very active lately, but what terrorist state supported them? Dethe Elza's "adhocracies" kind of demonstrates that loose networks of individuals can work together to at least achieve destructive ends. I'm just not sure that there is any way to measure how much getting rid of Saddam Hussein is going to reduce the threat from terrorism. And I'm not in favor of killing a bunch of people on purpose to achieve these uncertain goals.

What are we going to do now that Korea has announced a nuclear weapons program. Demand an inspection regime a la Iraq? And failing that, are we going to invade Korea next? How does one assess the probability of a Korean-developed nuclear weapon making its way into the hands of terrorists? What are the calculations there? How many people do we have to kill to satisify those probability gods?

Some people are advocating invading Iraq kind of on the "it's for their own good" theory. We'd be liberating them from the evil clutches of Saddam Hussein. Well, maybe we would. Who's next? Korea? How's everything looking down in Africa? Everybody got a strong, stable representative democracy? Whose door do we kick in next?

Anyway, I can't save the world. It's all I can do to save myself. Maybe if more people worked on that premise it'd be a safer world for all concerned.

Adhocracy

Dave McCusker (who is now available for new programming gigs), points to this mention of the term "adhocracy," at Living Code. It's a riff on the "smart mobs" thing Howard Rheingold's written about.

Dethe Elza believes these are good things because they are an alternative to the current networks of people who serve as the "brains" of social organisms.

I have two comments: First, while technology affords some new and faster ways of forming networks, it does not stand to reason that the only people who will form the new networks will be people who agree with your political convictions. I would point to the rise of the so-called "warbloggers" following 9/11 as an example of this.

Second: It isn't clear to me that an "adhocracy" or "small pieces, loosely joined," are going to be an effective mechanism for mobilizing the energy and efforts of large numbers of people for anything constructive. Pointing to demonstrations like the ones in Seattle or the Philippines is not a good example. A mob is still a mob. Crafting legislation, building a network of interstate highways, developing a better healthcare system require more focused effort than simply getting everyone together to have a good time and be disruptive.

Dethe Elza points to technology as a solution to a human problem. It has never worked that way and it never will. The solution to human problems lies in the hearts of human beings. As long as our attention can be focused on externalities that either frighten us (weapons of mass destruction, or evil cabals in Washington) or enthrall us (invading Iraq or concepts like "smart mobs"), we will be forever missing the opportunity to discover those answers.

It's like a smart lady told me not very long ago, "David, just be still."

Irritable, Aren't I?

Well that was certainly a cranky post, wasn't it? I usually try to avoid that particular issue, but it's been bugging me for a couple of days since I read one rather prolific blogger's entry about how terrible war is, but, you know, it's better than the alternative, I guess.

On top of that, it's only semi-literate, or even less literate than usual, because I wrote it after coming in from removing the last of the fence. The fence-removal guy failed to show up to complete the job. I'm thinking I was probably too hasty in giving him that $50.00. Maybe not. But the last few panels left were the ones covered with ivy. Boy, were they hard to remove. So I was already in a pretty unhappy mood.

One surprising thing was I found the shovel that had been missing for I don't know how long. That was offset by the loss of the hedge shears. Must be the law of conservation of lost gardening implements or something. I had to whack down some palmettos in the corner where a new gate is going. I just cut them back, hopefully the fence installers will move the fronds out of their way. I'll drag them down by the street this weekend, I didn't have the energy to do it tonight.

Hopefully, by this time tomorrow I'll have a new fence surrounding the back yard. I won't have to worry about Mandy getting out and frightening little old ladies. This weekend I'll finish cleaning up the yard, getting rid of weeds, unwanted trees (little ones, they grow everywhere from the acorns and the magnolia pods), filling in the holes Mandy's dug and trying to make the place look presentable.

The West Wing was pretty good tonight. I'd say a B+ episode.

And that's probably enough out of me.

Well, we reached that point long ago...

Restating the Issue

I guess evil is a numbers game, isn't it?

Here's a question for those who believe it is right to invade Iraq because a few thousand deaths now are better than many more deaths later. I've read many bloggers write, "I'm not willing to take that risk."

So let's restate the issue (If those aren't the appropriate words of art, please forgive me, I am but a simple engineer.):

There is a possibility, a probability of uncertain value, that 200,000 Americans will die a violent death at some uncertain time in the future. If 200,000 isn't a big enough number, insert your own here.

There is another possibility, another unknown probability, that by killing 4,000, let's say Canadians, and, oh, 500 American service members, we can prevent the violent death of those 200,000 Americans.

Why Canadians? Oh, I don't know. Let's say Cubans, if that makes you feel better. It really doesn't matter does it? Death is death. It's not like the thousands of Iraqis we're contemplating killing are any more responsible for a terrorist attack than Canada or Cuba. One innocent is as good as another for our purposes. If we kill 4,000 people - hell, select them at random, I don't care - just make sure there are some women, some elderly and some children in there, or the spell won't work, oh, and I almost forgot, 500 of America's sons and daughters too, (we'll call them heroes, it'll be okay) and there's a chance that 200,000 Americans won't die a violent death.

Is there a problem with the numbers? Somebody want to clarify that for me? How many potential deaths require the certain death of 4,500 people in order for it not to be evil? In order for you to "not be willing to accept that risk."

All these pious chicken-hawks, with their ever-so-somber pronouncements of how they know and understand that no sane person wants war, but they're "not willing to accept that risk," just make me want to puke. Okay, so I think all the chicken-hawks should pick the folks they want to die in order to preclude the possibility that some untold number of Americans will die in a terrorist attack. I'll even volunteer. I'll relieve them of the responsibility of my death. But they should accept the responsibility for the death of everyone else who's going to die in this thing because "they're not willing to accept that risk."

It doesn't matter how willing I am to accept the risk that I'll get hit by a car. It doesn't matter how willing I am to accept the risk that I'll get hit by lightning. It doesn't matter how willing I am to accept the risk that I'll contract a fatal illness. It doesn't matter how willing I am to accept the risk that some day, sooner or later, I'm going to die. It goes with the territory. Life is not a zero-risk enterprise.

If somebody is standing in front of me, threatening to take my life and I find that threat credible, I'll defend myself. But I'm not inclined to go around pre-emptively killing the people who I consider are possible threats because, "I'm not willing to accept that risk."

I'm no pacificist. I think we did just about what we needed to do in Afghanistan. Was it perfect? By no means. Nor would it ever be. But it was nowhere near as bad as it could have been. If somebody is foolish enough to want a standup fight, I'm happy to oblige if there's something worth fighting about. If somebody's skulking around trying to kill people and run and hide, fine, I'm in favor of hunting them down and killing them.

But I'm not willing to warrant the deaths of innocent people on the chance that it might prevent a potential attack at some uncertain time in the future. I am willing to accept that risk and use all means short of warranting the deaths of thousands of people, short of an unprovoked declaration of war, to prevent that possibility. Because evil isn't a numbers game.

I spent twenty two years in uniform. I'm no pacifist. But I'm no chicken-hawk either.

Unproductive

As I feared, following dinner and the dishes and a little other routine housework, I lacked the energy to sit here and do whatever it is I do.

I tried a bit. Didn't care for the result, and settled for reading some other things for a little while. But sitting here just reminded me of what I wasn't getting accomplished, so I ended up on the couch watching some show on ESPN covering some of Larry Holmes' old fights. I was surprised to see that Jerry Cooney was a much better boxer than I thought, apart from his problem with low blows. But Holmes was better.

Anyway, it's off to work I go. Fall is here, temperature is only supposed to reach the mid-seventies today. That will be nice. Perhaps it won't rain either.

iChat Glitch

Nothing like getting a surprise IM from eastgatesystems (I suspect it was Mark Bernstein) then having iChat fail on you in mid-reply.

I suspect it's because my son Chris is online playing Counterstrike or chatting. iChat has worked pretty well for me when I wasn't competing with him for bandwidth.

I think I'll go download a huge Quicktime trailer or something. Then I'll hear, "Dad! What are you doing with the computer?!"

Heh-heh.

Adjustments

I've moved the piece on attention into the "not-ready-for-publication" topic. It's too hard to think around the house with the kids home. Caitlin has the phone ringing every five minutes. I'm going to try to work on it in the latter part of the evening when they're in bed. The downside to that is, I'm usually too tired to concentrate at that point.

Update: Well, I did move it, and then I learned about another thing I overlooked in my Agent query for creating the main page. I fixed that little problem, but in the mean time, it can stay where it is. I'll revisit it soon. I hope.

May I Have Your Attention Please

Here are a few statistics for your consideration:

In 1999, 2,391,630 people died in the United States. To cite only a few of the causes:

724,915 from heart disease

549,787 from cancer

97,298 from accidents

29,041 were suicides

16,831 were murdered

All of the rationalizations I've read regarding going to war against Iraq ultimately rely on the supposition that Iraq poses the potential to cause large numbers of deaths due to weapons of mass destruction.

I think most of the "world's" problems are problems of attention. Death is a natural part of life. Life is, after all, a terminal condition. Yet we use death as some kind of yardstick by which we measure "evil." Everybody dies, we know that, so we focus our attention on the means.

Now, I haven't thought all of this through yet, and I suppose it's possible I never will, but I think it's interesting that we're so focused on Iraq as a source of potential deaths that we're willing to endure immediate, assured deaths of some number of Americans and Iraqis, to supposedly preclude the possibility of some, presumably larger, number of deaths in the future. So, the evilness of death is related, at least in part, to the number of deaths. It seems also related to the intention of the supposed enemy.

This is an attention problem. At least, it is for us as individuals. It isn't a problem from the point of view of the social organisms we are a part of. (I know, I can hear you groaning from here. Tough. This has to be examined.)

If al Qaeda wants American deaths, it has to do exactly nothing. Almost 46,000 of us will kill ourselves or each other, more than 20 times the number of Americans that were killed in the WTC attacks. Nearly 100,000 will die accidentally. And who knows how many of the cancer and heart disease deaths are due to the "decadent" American lifestyle Islamicists are always decrying. (I happen to enjoy that lifestyle, so don't read more into this than is necessary.) So, if the goal is to simply enjoy the deaths of Americans, we're only too ready to fulfill that wish ourselves. Obviously, that isn't enough.

al Qaeda has to take credit for killing Americans. It doesn't matter that the number of Americans it kills is only a tiny fraction of the number we kill on our own, though I think it is clear they would prefer to kill as many as possible.

It is the act of taking credit that gives al Qaeda the value of those deaths; because by taking credit, they capture the attention of both their enemies, and, most importantly, those they purport to represent. Social organisms must "consume" constituent members to survive. They do this by exploiting and manipulating the belief systems of those whom they would consume (you could say "assimilate" and imagine the Borg and you wouldn't be too far off). In order to exploit or manipulate a belief system, you must first seize the attention of the individual, something that is not terribly difficult to do with human beings who have evolved to be constituent members of social organisms, and who are disinclined by nature from paying attention to where their attention lies.

Social organisms compete with one another. al Qeada is competing with the social organisms of the west, which threaten the belief systems of Islamic fundamentalists, and thereby the social organisms which rely on those constituent members. Unsurprisingly, acts which will seize the attention of large numbers of their prospective constituent members are very likely to seize the attention of their competitors, especially when one of those competitors is the object of the act.

The WTC attacks seized the attention of the west, especially Americans, and naturally so. Now, social organisms have "brains" - networks of constituent members who act as a kind of "nervous system" for the overall organism. Interestingly enough, the "brains" don't all think alike, they sort of compete with one another to try to ensure the organism, as a whole, makes the most advantageous choices. I'm not sure this always works reliably, in fact, I'm pretty sure it can go seriously awry at times. I happen to think this may be one of those times.

Once our attention has been seized, the networks of individuals that serve as the "brains" of our social organism goes to work on the belief systems of the rest of, the constituent members. The networks of individuals include people on all different sides of the issue. In the case of the response to the WTC attacks, there were people who were opposed to any kind of violent response, and there were people who were in favor of very violent responses. As it turned out, I think how we responded in Afghanistan was just about right. It wasn't perfect, and there were some errors; but, in this case, I think the social organism acted just about the best we can expect.

While our attention was seized by al Qaeda and events in Afghanistan, other parts of the "brains" network took advantage of the opportunity to begin to focus attention on Iraq. America was mobilized, ready to take action, indeed had been persuaded it was in a state of war with terrorists, or "evil-doers." I think this created a favorable environment for some members of the leadership to begin to manipulate people's attention and belief systems regarding Iraq.

Why this is, I'm not sure. I suspect it has genuinely been a source of concern for some responsible people. I suspect there are some others who have harbored lingering resentment toward Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein. I'm sure it's been quite expensive to maintain the combat air patrols over the nothern and souther no-fly zones, and some people would like to see that requirement go away. In all likelihood, it was some a combination of all these and probably many others that I know nothing about, that motivated these people to turn our attention toward Iraq.

Whatever the motivation, the effort has clearly worked. Up until now, it has never been a part of the American belief system that we would declare war on anyone who hadn't attacked us first. Now, we can argue about Korea and Vietnam and Latin America, and even the Gulf War, but my point is that our belief system included the notion that we don't "start" wars. That has changed, and it's changed because our beliefs have been manipulated by out leadership to make that notion acceptable to us. It has chiefly been done through the fear of death.

The argument is that Sadam Hussein possesses some weapons of mass destruction, and he is actively working to acquire more. Weapons of mass destruction are something special in our belief system. These are weapons that are so bad, so indiscriminate in their effects, so powerful, that they should never be used. We believe this because we have used them, and we've been repelled by their effects.

This, in itself, is kind of an interesting belief. Dead is dead, and suffering is suffering. There's nothing "special" about weapons of mass destruction in terms of their effects on people. I think it is, in part, either their silent, invisible nature, in the case of biological and chemical weapons; or their connection to fundamental forces of nature released through arcane science and high technology in the case of nuclear weapons, that makes these weapons especially frightening to people.

I think it has been conclusively demonstrated that a commercial airliner has the potential to be a weapon of mass destruction, we don't seem to be especially affected by a fear of them.

In any event, the rationale for going to war against Iraq is that it either has, or will develop, weapons of mass destruction and that it will use them, causing lots of deaths. Or it will give terrorists weapons of mass destruction that will cause lots of deaths. No one, to my knowledge, has put forward any scenarios of how many deaths are likely to result from a terrorist attack using a weapon of mass destruction. I'm not sure anyone needs to, it's probably best left to our imaginations, we're quite good at frightening ourselves if were given the correct cues.

So the social organism that is America has pretty much prepared itself to make war on Iraq. Some number of deaths will result from that effort, most of them Iraqi, and only one of them will be Sadam Hussein. This this is all okay, because it will "prevent" a lot more deaths at some point in the future. A few thousand Iraqi and American deaths to prevent a potential attack with several thousand, maybe tens of thousands of deaths at some unknown time in the future.

Perhaps this would be at least internally consistent if Iraq were the only potential source of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Our ally, Pakistan, has nuclear weapons and has a terrorism problem of its own. Why isn't our attention focused on Pakistan in the same way it's focused on Iraq? And what about the former republics of the Soviet Union?

I think September 11th demonstrated that terrorists don't need weapons of mass destruction. I'm quite sure they'd like to have them, but they pose so many problems in handling and delivery that, in many ways, we'd be safer if they were focusing exclusively on those kinds of weapons.

But anyway, we've been manipulated into believing a war against Iraq is in our best interests. What will we be asked to believe when it's over? I'm not sure anyone's thought that far yet, but I'm sure they'll let us know when they have.

A war on Iraq will seize the attention of the world, what will the world believe? How will we manipulate the belief systems of the entire world? The effort to secure the approval of the United Nations is directed toward that goal. That may work for most of the western world, I'm not sure how it will play in the middle east. There was a line in one of the episodes of The West Wing that went something like, "They'll like us when we win." And, to some extent, part of that is true. We may even enjoy some favor from the Iraqi people if we don't go out of our way to make their lives miserable. The ones we don't kill, that is. But I'm not sure how young Islamic fundamentalists will view The Great Satan defeating an arab nation. Will they feel humiliated? Will they resent the power of America that allowed it to so easily defeat an arab nation? Will those who have already started down the path to becoming martyrs feel deterred, or inspired?

I don't think we can manipulate the belief systems of the middle east quickly enough to avoid serious risk here. I think we're going to inspire a lot more hatred toward the U.S. than we are love. Some people think that's okay, but we're trying to win a war against terrorism and the only way you do that is by drying up the sources of new terrorists, and that's an attention problem and a belief system problem.

I think terrorists are a problem, and I think we ought to be focusing all of our resources on that problem. It's a belief system problem, because we have to stop the formation of new terrorists, and to manipulate their belief systems, you first have to seize their attention. War with Iraq will do that, but the commucations channels opened will be tuned to their own leaders, their own "brains" network. A significant portion of that network is made up of fundamentalist religious leaders, do you suppose they'll be sending out messages about how this is a good thing for Islam?

We need to seize their attention in some other way, and I'm not sure what that is, but I'm sure there are plenty of smart people who can.

Computability

This is an interesting story involving two of my favorite headache-inducing subjects: quantum physics and mathematical reasoning. It seems that quantum computing gets around Turing's computability theory.

I'm not sure how this new work will relate to the foundations of mathematical reasoning. Classical mathematical reasoning is accessible to the human mind. While there are an infinite number of problems human brains would be too slow to solve, they are, fundamentally, solvable; and we have computers which are fast enough to do so. Nevertheless, we can't know in advance if a problem is "solvable," i.e. will a program eventually produce a final result?

Here's a related article, it's the text of a talk given by Gregory Chaitin back in 1999. It gives a little background on Turing's computability problem, and Hilbert, as well as Godel.

And here is the text of a talk given by J.R. Lucas on The Implications of Godel's Theorem. There's a lot of interesting stuff on his home page as well, the link's at the bottom.

Lots of good headache-inducing material there. Enjoy.

Thinking About Thinking

It seems we've made a little more progress in mapping some of the functions of the brain. In this case, the faculty is attention. But I think it is terribly incomplete. The research seems to focus on attention to external stimuli. I wonder what regions of the brain govern attention of internal stimuli?

Dave Winer of Scripting News is thinking about thinking too. Which prompted Pascale Soleil to offer a reaction to Dave's thoughts.

Actually, I don't think people tend to think hierarchically, so much as they may tend to store information that way. And the fact that it seems like a hierarchy may be simply because of the very metaphor Dave cites: we tend to store information in somewhat concrete terms. This whole thing can get wrapped up in AKMA's unhappiness with the web as a kind of "place" if we're not too careful; but there is a line of reasoning that suggests all abstract thought is grounded in physical, experiential metaphors.

But thinking about thinking has to, I think, consider the faculty of attention at some point. What are you thinking about? How did you come to be thinking about that subject? In part, it is in response to a physical stimulus, and that may be a perceptual physical stimulus (I see a pretty girl), a concrete physical stimulus (I stub my toe), or an internal physical stimulus (I'm hungry). Granted, all of these are, at root, perceptual, but I think the distinctions have merit.

So presumably, attention attends to some stimulus. But it can also attend to itself, which isn't quite the same thing.

Good Morning! (Even if it is raining.)

It feels so good to be able to post things again and have them work the way I think I intended them too. It was a good weekend, and it still is since today is a federal holiday and I'm nominally a federal employee.

I got a lot done this weekend, even if I am paying for it a bit, physically (and fiscally). The city came by this morning and removed this weekend's pile of tree limbs and weeds, which always kind of amazes me. The fence is mostly down, hopefully the guy will finish it off this afternoon and that will be a further sign of progress. It's raining and the roof isn't leaking, which is just a wonderful feeling. I learned a lot about Tinderbox which was frustrating and rewarding, as learning all new things usually is. No, this weekend was not the usual "one step up, two steps back" routine my life so often seems to resemble.

I'm sure the glow will fade a bit when I delve into the spreadsheet to assess the financial damage. The guy who took down the fence works for the guy who fixed my roof. He came by in an old Ford pickup with four people in the front seat, one of them was a woman who is his wife or significant other. She pitched in and worked as hard as he did. If you ever saw the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and if you recall the scene where Steve Martin and John Candy get a ride from the motel with the guy in the pickup truck with the dog, well, that's kind of the impression I got with these folks. Actually, I grew up with people just like this in upstate New York.

The roofer said I didn't need to pay the guy anything, he was going to use the fence panels to fence in his property. Those panels are in pretty bad shape, I'm not sure how much he'll be able to use. And they live in Starke, which a pretty rural area and probably a good hour and half from here, at least in that truck with that load of fence on the back and four people in the front seat. All of which is a long story to explain why I ended up giving the guy fifty bucks. He didn't ask for it, but I figured it was a hell of a lot of work and gas money for some old fence.

What a weekend...

I am so sore.

It started on Friday. My Taekwondo instructor, Mr. Alfaro was out, so we had his assistant, Ms. Busca, filling in for him. Ms. Busca is into aerobic fitness. There was only one other person in the class besides yours truly, and we had our work cut out for us. It was fun though, but my legs were sorer on Saturday than at any other time in recent memory.

Saturday was a yard work day. I needed to update my arsenal of field implements, since I am now doing my own yard work. I hate 2-cycle engines. They're noisy, the smell and I really, really hate having to mix gas and oil. But I needed a new weed trimmer, and one that could be used for edging. I went electric, even though extension cords pose their own challenges. Black & Decker had a nice one that allowed you to rotate the cutting head 180 degrees to make it easier to use as an edger. It's not ideal, but it's much cheaper than a dedicated machine. I also bought a new (electric) leaf blower. My current one (ha-ha, there's almost a pun there) works, but it's older than Chris. Bought a new Black and Decker, with the flexible tube and a shoulder sling. Wanted to go for the laser sight, but I thought that was just a little too much. And, finally, the blisters on my thumbs told me I wanted an electric hedge trimmer. I went large on that one. Got the 26" Black and Decker, rated for 3/4 inch branches. Argh-argh-arrrrrgh! Take your arm off at the shoulder, it will. Electric, naturally.

Of course, browsing around Home Depot is fraught with peril. Fraught, I say. With peril.

The dog has been digging in the yard again recently, burying her new toys, of all things. Apart from the unsightly holes and potential trip hazards, it's the dirt she tracks in that bugs me. So I happened to spot these huge, heavy-duty cocoa mats. Figured if I put two of them together at the door she goes in and out of, they'd have better luck at getting some of the dirt off her paws than the other mats have had (although they've been much better than the purely decorative ones Maria favored). So I had to have two of those.

The back yard is littered with stuff. Garden implements, dog shampoo, citronella candles, flower pots, you name it. That large plastic stand-up cabinet would probably go a long way toward keeping that stuff easily at hand and out of sight. Um, I need another basket.

Speaking of keeping the back yard neat and orderly, I'm tired of tripping over the hose all the time. One of those hose reels would probably be nice. Say, that one with the automatic feed guide (I used to know what those things are called, we use them on the AN/SQR-19 towed array - there's advancing age for you) would be nice. We have one out front and the hose just piles up on the spool, not good when you go to pay it out. Into the basket it went.

Then there was the purely "impulse" buy. I've been wanting a water fountain in the worst way. I've got some small ones, and mostly they just sound like I've got a leak somewhere I need to fix. I wanted something with a little more substantial sound to it. Unfortunately, those usually run more than $300.00, which is more than I can afford, even in my state of perpetual near-insolvency. But here was one that was bigger than a desktop model, if only barely, with a fairly robust sound, and it was only $180.00.

I needed a third basket.

They love people like me at Home Depot.

Anyway, I got home and I had to play with all my new toys. Actually, all I managed to get to was assembling the storage cabinet, hooking up the hose reel, and using the blower to clean off the back patio. Oh yeah, and I put the fountain together too.

Once things were looking rather spiffy on the patio, I decided I needed to cut down some limbs that were growing hither, thither and yon. So out came my trusty limb-pruning pole and I proceeded to attempt to kill myself by having large branches fall on my head. There's a reason why they warn you to wear safety goggles while doing this sort of thing. Fortunately, God looks after fools and Sailors and I happen to belong to both clubs, and I retain the use of both of my eyeballs.

As the sun set, I was hot, tired, sweaty, dirty and broke. I blew down the last of the sawdust with my new blower and re-arranged all the patio furniture so I could enjoy a nice morning reading the paper on the patio the next day. If it didn't rain.

When I woke up this morning, I wasn't sure I could move. Well, let me take that back. I knew I could move, but it hurt so much, I wasn't sure it was worth it. I must be getting old.

I managed to drag myself out of bed, attend to the animals, (parenthetically, Mandy misbehaves more on weekends when Maria is in town. Maria sleeps on the couch, so Mandy figures she's entitled to sleep on the other couch. Caught her twice on Saturday and Sunday morning), and get myself something to eat. By that time, my joints had stopped complaining and the sun was coming up, so I went down to the driveway to collect the paper.

I went out back, withdrew a clean rag from my newly-installed cabinet, wiped down my inexpensive, but wet, patio furniture, plugged in my fountain and sat down to enjoy my Sunday paper in the quiet bliss of a Sunday morning in my own backyard.

It was wonderful.

Today was more limb-trimming. I'll probably be paying for it tomorrow.

The old fence came down today. Mostly. The rest supposedly comes down tomorrow. The new one goes in on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to that. Then I've just got to move some earth to fill in holes, plant some grass seed in the bare spots (I'm not sure about what I'm going to do about the spot right off the back porch were Mandy pees every morning. What grows there?) and the back yard is about under control. I'm going to call an electrician and see about running some 110 service out to the far side of the patio. Power for the fountain, maybe some lighting, the occasional stereo, stuff like that. But I'll have to see how badly the budget has been hammered by yesterday's spending spree.

Tomorrow is a holiday for me. I'll be focusing on the indoor chores, with perhaps some time here. That's if I can manage to drag myself out of bed.

Woo-hoo! One more little thing to look into...

We are now nearly 100% back. I just have to turn on the RSS feed, but I need to tweak that template first, and we're back.

I am beginning to understand Tinderbox in a much deeper way. Doug, thanks for the help, but I got it working the way I intended to do it, I just made some errors with regard to where the Action were placed (or failed to be placed). Part of the problem was trying to modify a template that I didn't create, so I had very little intimate knowledge of how it was put together.

I'm much better informed now, but I need to take some time soon and kind of document some of this for myself so I don't "forget" the next time I decide to "improve" things.

Which is going to be real soon now.

I Think We're Fixed

Thanks to Mark Bernstein and Doug Miller, I think I have things almost in hand. Let's see what this looks like.

Cheops' Law

Nothing ever gets built on time, or on budget.

Still working on the Tinderbox file that creates this site. Archives should be working, and I have have a kludge-y fix for permalinks that doesn't involve creating a new template for page exports. Hopefully, I'll be able to use Actions in a note to enter a new attribute in each of the existing notes so I don't have to do it by hand. That would get rather tedious.

Shifting gears, I watched The West Wing last night. Decent episode, not too preachy, at least not in the fingernails-across-the-blackboard kind of way it sometimes (often) gets. I guess Ainsly (or however her name was spelled) is out of the series, since I spotted her on CSI:Miami the other day. Bummer.

Since the roof has been repaired, it hasn't rained. That's supposed to change though. Not that I'm complaining. I've had enough rain to last me a while.

Mowed the lawn myself the night before last. First time in I don't remember how many years. Nothing like inhaling untreated exhaust to improve your outlook on life! I need to find those ear-muffs (aural-protectors) I have in the garage. I hope to alternate weeks with Chris. I wanted to take the first week to get an idea of how difficult it is. It's a little difficult, which means his enthusiasm will wane halfway through his first effort. Just a data-point.

Got the extra memory for the 6500 yesterday, too. Installed that and played around with that machine for a bit. The new DIMMs use fewer chips than the old ones, and that seems to have reduced the heat load inside the box, since Metronome is reporting lower temperatures. In addition, the old DIMMs had chips on both sides of the package, and they weren't exactly surface-mount, so one DIMM's chips were about a millimeter away from the L2 G3's heat sink. Now there's a greater gap and the chips face away from the heat sink. Good news all the way around.

The downside is I managed to lose the ethernet connection to the router. I'm not sure how that happened, except I dragged a few items from the 9.2.1 CD into the 6500's System folder since 9.2.1 won't install on the 6500. I brought in Carbon Lib, some Unicode stuff (which the 6500 complained was missing and would refuse to launch the Finder if I made any changes in the Appearance Manager.), and the latest Applescript, none of which should have affected the ethernet port. So more trouble-shooting is required there.

At some point, I may have time to actually write about some things that have been on my mind. But maybe not. That's the way life goes.

Meanwhile, I'm happy that I seem to be earning (the hard way) a much better understanding of Tinderbox.

What Day Is It?

I'm slowly making progress in rebuilding Time's Shadow from the inside out. Permalinks are still down, but I think I have a fix that doesn't require me to create a new html template every month. What I have so far works locally (I think) I just want to see what it's looking like "live."

RSS Is (Hopefully) Offline

Since permalinks are broken, because I modfied the archives, that means the RSS feed links are likely broken as well, so I turned off exporting in the html view of the RSS Agent. I'm pretty sure that means RSS is turned off as well. I'll have to manually delete the RSS files at the site so they aren't "out there," confusing anyone.

This is what happens when you try to futz with something you know nothing about. Too many things are connected, change one thing, break everything. Sometimes, it seems as if a note is just something to hang attributes, a prototype, and an html view window on. That is to say, you spend more of your time in the ancilliary windows than you do in the note itself, since all the important stuff for getting your note into the web page resides elsewhere than the note window itself.

Then you have to make sure your template reflects all the changes.

It's a curse of some kind.

I was thinking of posting some stuff on Zen, hope, desire, practice and meditation based on some of Pascale's and Loren's recent posts, but I think I ought to just put my head down and get this thing working right.

Then again, I may just go to bed.

It's a tough call.

And So It Goes

Okay, Archives are broken. I think I can eventually figure out how to fix that. I suspect I'm going to require a separate html template for each month, which is kind of an unsatisfactory solution, but what do I know? The present situation was unsatisfactory, uploading every single entry I've made every single time I exported is unsat. Why this is offered as a template is beyond me. If a blogger made only occasional entries, one every few days or so, then this might be acceptable.

But if you're hoping to post six or seven entries a day, then this Archives file grows without limit and that's just ridiculous.

Permalinks are broken too. I'll have to figure out something on them as well.

In the mean time, we're online, so here we go...on a wing and a prayer.

This may not work...

I've been mucking about in Tinderbox, which is harder than it sounds, and I'm pretty damn sure permalinks are broken. Archives may be as well. Hell, this whole thing may be kaput.

Too many moving pieces. Change one, you've got a whole daisy chain of changes to make.

Let's see what happens...

Soy Formula Linked to ADHD?

This will have to be examined further, but a report in today's Science News Daily suggests there may be a connection.

Some Assembly Required

mentions this post from John Robb, expressing appreciation to Userland's customers. I suppose that's a nice touch. Certainly it's nicer than Dave Winer's lament that folks complaining about the first of the month bug were unkind. Robb's post seems almost in direct response to some of the legitimate criticism offered in reply to his CEO's petty complaining.

I used to be a Userland customer. I suppose I still am, but I don't use their product. I got started blogging using Manila, which was offered, for free, at editthispage.com. Unfortunately, when you're getting something for free, you're not in much of a position to ask for better service. ETP was a fantastic deal for nearly all of my run there. But, like many free services, it became a victim of its own success. At times, usually early in the morning when I'm most likely to be trying to post, it was virtually impossible to reach the server to post new material. There were a few sites with phenomenal numbers of users and they were clearly taking a little too much advantage of a good deal, at the expense of everyone else trying to enjoy the same opportunity.

Userland took some action to alleviate that situation. They had the folks with the highest traffic relocate to more appropriate services, and they offered Radio as an alternative.

Radio appealed to me because it promised to give me more control over the process, and whatever I wrote, even if it was written "in the browser" remained on my hard drive; so if Userland's servers ever crashed, I'd have a local backup. The greatest appeal was that I was paying for the service, so I felt entitled to offer feedback and request assistance when I needed it. I had the transition to Radio well underway, and had even moved the software to my iBook so I could take advantage of 802.11b to blog from anywhere in my house.

Then one day, Radio stopped transmitting.

This was a big deal to me. I couldn't post new material. Although I could write it, posting it required "upstreaming" the new material to Userland's servers in "the cloud." For whatever reason, I was unable to upstream new material. Having done this for over two and a half years, nearly every day, this is pretty much what most reasonable people would call a habit, and when I can't do it, I get frustrated. Testy. Irritable.

The challenge any software vendor faces, from Microsoft to Eastgate, is the complexity of the application environment. Back in the days of the Apple II, your program ran under one or two versions of a very simple operating system. It was the only program running, and usually the most complicated thing you had to worry about was what printer card your user had installed.

Today applications reside on machines with varying processors, installed memory, network connections, operating systems, and an unknown number of co-resident software applications and services that can interact and interfere with the vendor's application. Support in this environment is a nightmare.

I know a few things, and I tried those. I reinstalled my copy of Radio, which is a non-trivial task, although not terribly hard once you've done it a couple of times, and I still couldn't upstream, or post new material. So, I asked for help at Radio's discussion group site.

My initial request met with defining silence. (Late editorial observation: Obviously, I meant to write "deafening," but that's what happens when you're trying to carry on a conversation while typing away in a blog. I'm leaving it though, because it works the way I wrote it the first time as well, fortunately for me.) A day later, I posted another request, mentioning that I'd asked for help the day before and had nothing in the way of assistance. If you follow the thread, Lawrence Lee made some effort to try to help me, but to this day, I'm at a loss to discern anything in any one of his posts that might have been of some assistance to me in trying to resolve the problem. It was just a series of questions that I tried to answer to the best of my knowledge, with no follow-up, no feedback, and no suggestion of what avenues to pursue.

Not even an expression of sympathy. Not that that would have been useful.

That's okay. It's a $40.00 product. What do I expect? For $40.00, I can abandon it without too much thought. Radio may be great, but when it doesn't work - it's useless.

That's the difficulty, or the challenge, vendors face with selling products like Radio for relatively low prices. On the one hand, hopefully you sell lots of product, because people like me wouldn't buy Radio if it cost $395.00. On the other hand, when it doesn't work, the amount of technical support the vendor has to provide will often exceed whatever profit margin the product offered.

To some extent, vendors can rely on a "community" of users to provide technical assistance. For many problems, they will be the resource of first resort. Some problems will exceed the ability of the user community to address, and some greater level of technical expertise will be required. That's when you hear from Lawrence or Jake. At some point, however, it becomes clear that the vendor will be expending greater resources on a particular customer in support, than the customer provided in revenue, even if there is the potential for further revenue in software "subscription" renewals and hosting services. If you're Ed Cone, that's not a problem. Ed's a high-profile blogger, and keeping him happy is good for business. If you're Dave Rogers, it's no big deal. It makes more business sense to abandon customers like me, than to invest the resources into solving their problems.

No hard feelings, it's just business and it's just software. I'm not sure it's good business or good software, but it's not a big deal.

Having no other recourse, and a wish to continue blogging, I had to find another platform.

I'm presently using Tinderbox to create Time's Shadow. I didn't pay for a Tinderbox license with the intent of writing Time's Shadow with it. I originally purchased with the intention of replicating much of my experience with WebArranger, a Classic Mac application that has long since been abandoned by CE Software. In many ways, it remains superior even to Tinderbox, but there simply is nothing else on the market that approaches its range of features and unique combination of utility and ease-of-use.

Tinderbox has been a mixed blessing to this point. While it is likely not as powerful as Radio, with its Usertalk scripting engine, what considerable power Tinderbox does possess is much more accessible for the non-programmer. My exploration has been somewhat complicated by my experience with WebArranger, trying to apply metaphors that worked in that application in something that is, while similar in many ways, very much a different application.

Something both Tinderbox and Radio share in common is a lack of good documentation. Again, in today's software market, this has become the rule. Good documentation is expensive to produce, and developers are forced to survive on limited revenues which precludes both solid support and good documentation. Complicating this situation somewhat further, is the product development cycle. Good documentation probably takes at least as long to develop as the product itself; but it has to occur after the product is in a stable release. So while the documentation is being created for the finished product, the finished product is being revised to incoporate bug fixes and added features, so by the time the documentation is done, the product may be totally different.

Tinderbox ships with documentation that was inadequate when it was version 1.0, and it is now up to version 1.2. The learning curve is steep, and the user has to be motivated to master the application.

Mitigating this, at least at this point, is the level of the developer's motivation. Mark Bernstein is Chief Scientist at Eastgate Systems. Mark will often respond personally to questions and offer helpful suggestions for solving problems. One wonders, though, if Tinderbox is as successful as it probably deserves to be, will Mark have the time to give personal attention to each user with a problem and still be able to work on further developing the application?

Up On the Roof

It's a beautiful day.

I was up on the roof trying to trim back some of the branches from the oak trees surrounding the house. It doesn't seem right to call these trees oaks, but that's what they are. They're demented oaks. They grow in twisted, convoluted patterns that can kill them. I suppose if one were to monitor their growth, the worst of the convolutions could be avoided with prudent pruning and trimming. Alas, these are much older than the house, so they've grown almost naturally.

Unfortunately, they also grow onto the roof. This creates a convenient path for carpenter ants, squirrels, raccoons and can, over time, lead to roof damage. So I was up on the roof today, trimming back the limbs that I could reach easily. Even though it's getting cooler, the roof was hot. Very hot.

Now I'm indoors enjoying a cold beer and deciding that I've done about as much household maintenance and housekeeping as I care to do this weekend. I'm going to stay inside and do a few things on my other to-do list, the computer one. I may make some changes here at Time's Shadow, if I don't find myself neck-deep in stuff I don't understand.

Test

This is a test. Hello, , just want to see where the link goes.

Mark Bernstein, the developer of Tinderbox, wrote to me and explained what the "circular include" glitch was with my previous attempt to replicate a shorcuts feature.

The Roof! The Roof! The Roof is...

The roof is going to get fixed today. Supposedly. My contractor has backed away from the siding job, and the construction of a small hip-roof over the garage-addition entryway to divert the torrent of water that lands there in a downpour. Apparently, his lead carpenter/foreman had to head to North Carolina for some family matters and he doesn't want to sub-out the job to just anyone (probably couldn't make any money if he did - it's really a small job). He's going to turn the fence contract over to me, presumably the sub that was going to do that will honor it.

He tells me that with many roof repairs, it's never better than an 80% probability the fix will work the first time. I guess that means out of every 10 roofs he repairs, he has to revisit 2 of them. Who knows? Anyway, if it doen't fix it the first time, he'll come back and make sure he gets whatever is still leaking.

I guess I'll do the siding myself. I've done a little of this before, it's not rocket science, but I do have the ability to screw things up royally if I'm not careful. So I guess I'll do a little more research, the contractor gave me a couple of good tips, and when it looks like I'll be able to devote the time to it, probably at the end of this month (when it's cooler, too), I'll do my Tim Taylor imitation.

Batteries Not Included

A potential advance in the composition of lithium-ion batteries may make them safer and cheaper. This is good news for all of us gadget freaks.

Hurricanes and Other Tempests

Mindfulness is paying attention to where your attention is. For all the little nit-noid irritations I'm coping with today, I'm reminding myself that there are several hundred thousand folks on the gulf coast with a lot more on their minds than slow contractor performance. I'm grateful that, thus far in the season, I haven't had to contend with that issue.

My little effort to replicate shortcuts appears to have failed for some reason. It mostly fails now, whereas before it mostly worked. I'm not sure why it seems to work some of the time, but not all of the time. Well, to be accurate, at this point I'm not sure why it doesn't fail all of the time. But it's an opportunity to learn something.

Lee Smolin said some things about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that I found a little confusing. He wrote that he basically doesn't believe it, but he uses it because it seems to work for the problems he's trying to solve. So I went back in a few books I have on quantum physics and got a little better description of the Uncertainty Principle. A nice one is found in The Tao of Physics, by Fritoj Capra, it has a little tiny bit of math if you like that sort of thing. Brian Greene's explanation in The Elegant Universe is nice, and he uses the term precision instead of accuracy, in the way that I expected; while Smolin used accuracy when I expected precision, which is a funny error for a physicist to make - so I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding something. Michio Kaku doesn't give much attention to the Uncertainty Principle in Hyperspace, while the late Richard P. Feynman's Six Easy Pieces has it as the very last topic in the book with a little bit of math was well. John Gribbin's otherwise excellent Q is for Quantum, gives a terse, somewhat less accessible explanation in a rather brief entry.

Those are two things that vex me but I enjoy playing with them anyway, quantum physics and software. Someone suggested the other day that perhaps I was indulging myself a little too much in mental masturbation. (That's probably going to offend someone.) I suppose there may be something to that. It's not like I'm actually going to ever understand quantum physics, or contribute to it in any meaningful way. And it's certainly not essential for living a life of grace and gratitude. Maybe they're both just distractions from the kinds of things I really should (there's "that" word again) pay attention to. Who knows? Something to think about anyway.

Time to wake up the kids.

Temporary Fix

I'm going to fix the images problem by manually transferring the files to the iDisk Sites folder. I've written to Eastgate to see if they might have some insight into why they won't export properly.

Of course, it may not stay fixed, every time I export - the folder with the images gets exported as well, and sometimes not all the images make it through. It seems to work fine on a local folder, so it appears to be something unique to WebDAV.

Or maybe I just have bad karma. Anyway, the pictures aren't essential, but I feel a little silly with notes pointing to them and they're not there. Of course, some people probably think I should feel pretty silly about this whole endeavor anyway. This ain't literature, after all.

Update: I must have bad karma. It doesn't seem to be a problem with Tinderbox, I don't think. I just tried to manually copy the file from the local export to the iDisk via the Finder - I get an error message listing Error Code -8065. I can't find anything about that particular code at Apple's support pages. On a hunch, I launched Goliath, a WebDAV client, and dragged the files from the Finder window onto the folder listed in Goliath and they transferred properly.

So I'm baffled. If my connection with my iDisk was stale, you'd think nothing would get exported and the text of new notes wouldn't appear. Why some things go through and others don't is a little beyond me.

Well, it's late and I'm tired. It'll have to wait for another day.

Testing again...alfa...bravo...charlie...

Just a test.

November 2002

Graphical Weirdness Returns

This is something I'm going to have to pursue. In the Try Again note from 9/30, there's supposed to be a little cartoon caricature that I'd created from some website (the URL is in the graphic I think) a while ago. When I was having difficulties with graphics not uploading earlier in the week, it was one of the ones that had disappeared.

It was gone again after this morning's post. I added some text to the note just now, hoping that Tinderbox would notice the change and that would force the re-upload. It looks like Tinderbox re-uploads the entire Archives page with each export, and uploads the pictures to a separate Archives folder, assigning a name to each graphic based on the name of the post. All the graphics in that folder have modification dates of today's date. Only that one is missing. Earlier in the week, three of the graphics files failed to upload.

Now, what's interesting is that apparently when the file is exported to the WebDAV server, the existing files are erased? Removed? I don't know. If I was merely exporting to a local folder, I'd usually get a warning that there were files with those names already present, asking me to either replace the exting files with the new ones, or giving me the option to cancel and re-name the new ones. I'm not sure what's happening here, but apparently, the whole folder of images is replacing the whole folder of images on the server, because if it was just uploading the images into the folder, then the missing graphic would already still be there.

Something to look into anyway.

Lunchtime Note

One nice thing about working so close to home is I can come home for lunch and try to redeem myself if I've said anything stupid in the morning. I hadn't checked the news sites this morning, because the first thing I check is e-mail and I had one that I wanted to answer before I got the kids up. That took a while, then it was time to launch the offspring, and I wanted to post a brief note because I thought it was cool Caitie was going to get to see the Shuttle go up. So I didn't know the launch had been cancelled.

When I got Caitie to school, one of the other kids was getting out of her mother's 2002 Porsche Targa (I think they're still called 911's but I'm not sure given the change in the front headlight design, and the unfortunate connotations of that particular sequence of digits, but I digress) and noticed Caitie had all her field trip equipment. She told her the launch had been cancelled and they wouldn't be going. Well, little Caitie was crestfallen, but Porsche mom told her daughter that she didn't know if the field trip had been cancelled, just the launch.

Caitie gets it into her head that I am to park the car before she can go in and ask her teacher if they're still going. I'm sitting there idling behind the Porsche and trying to tell Caitie to go ask because if it is cancelled then we need to return to base for different equipment. Caitie is insisting I park the car and the Porsche is still sitting there, presumably interested now in learning if the field trip is on or not. I point out to Caitlin, rather gruffly I'm afraid, that I can't park the car because I can't move, trapped between the Porsche and the other luxo-mobile that pulled up behind me, so just go ask!

About this time, the Porsche decides she probably doesn't really need to know if the trip is on or not, since her daughter wasn't going anyway, and she pulls away. So I'm able to park the car, thereby freeing the mental vapor-lock Caitie's little mind was in regarding where the car was to be while she goes to inquire about the day's schedule. In less time than it took to type all of this, she came back out and happily announced, "We're still going!" so Dad gets to un-park the car and head off to work, secure in the knowledge that his little girl is happy and has the "right stuff" to get through the day.

All's well that ends well, but I suspect that had I bothered to check the news, I would have told Caitlin we'd have to bring everything and that she would need to run in and ask before deciding what to take out of the car. It was just an interesting, if somewhat frustrating, few minutes there when everyone was trying to decide what to do next and everyone had a different idea - each of which conflicted with the others.

Porsche mom is really nice, they own a car wash at the beach here. I'd have written her name, except I've forgotten it. I've only met her a couple of times. There is a fairly high percentage of parents driving luxury cars or luxury sport-utility vehicles at this school. For a while there last year, when I was driving my 92 Ford Explorer, which would often spew coolant in the school driveway, I could swear I sensed some sort of hostility from the other parents. Now that I have a new sport utility vehicle, even if it did cost less than $30K, I'm much more accepted. Or maybe that's all in my head too.

Field Trip

With a little luck today, Caitie's class will get to see the Space Shuttle lift off from Kennedy Space Center. I wish I could go with them, but I don't have the vacation time saved up, and I can't really afford a day without pay. I suppose I could have made the hours up working longer hours but that poses its own challenges in terms of child care. Anyway, she's headed down with her class and I gave her the Kodak DC 215 to take some pictures of the launch and the space center. We'll have to see what she brings home.

I just hope the launch isn't scrubbed or delayed past their return time. We're pretty cloudy up here, so I'm not sure I'll get a chance to see it.

Grinding Axes

I'm reading Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, and I keep getting distracted by the sound of an axe being ground. I'm not sure if he's writing about resolving the discrepancies between quantum physics and relativity, or if he's pontificating about pseudo-science, mysticism and religion. It's grating.

At the end of the prologue, he's at pains to distance himself from any accusations that his references to his own work are from any sort of ego, but rather simply because he's most familiar with his own work. I happen to think that sort of thing is always doomed to failure. It's going to sound like ego anyway, and protesting just seems to confirm it. Scientists are entitled to egos, false modesty is worse, in my opinion.

In the first paragraph of Chapter 1, we're treated to the first principle of cosmology, "There is nothing outside the universe." Okay, I can deal with that, it's a principle of cosmology, I think I get it. But in the very next sentence he offers, "This is not to exclude religion or mysticism, for there is always room for those sources of inspiration for those who seek them. But if it is knowledge we desire, if we wish to understand what the universe is and how it came to be that way, we need to seek answers to questions about the things we see when we look around us. And the answers can only involve things that exist in the universe."

Well, I'm not sure what I'm to make of that. Weren't we discussing cosmology and isn't this book about quantum gravity? Okay, so I guess he felt he had to make a display of magnanimity to those of a less rigorous intellect, "those who seek them." Okay, you're a hard-headed materialist, I got it, let's move on, shall we?

On the next page, he writes, "It is absurd to talk of a sentence with no words in it." That made me laugh. For all the parallels people have drawn between eastern religions and modern physics in the recent past, I think Prof. Smolin would have some difficulty with Zen. But I don't think this was an overt comment on metaphysical matters.

He is trying to describe how space and time only have meaning in relation to other objects in the universe. We're doing fine, I'm with him, no real heartburn from me, and then we get this:

"It may be that science has one main thing to teach humanity, to help us shape our story of who we are and what we are doing here." Again, I'm jarred out of following the train of thought regarding how physicists viewed the universe after Einstein and into some kind of editorial comment on the mission of science, as if it were some kind of disembodied entity and not the product of human endeavors. This is starting to grate now.

The next paragraph begins, "Charles Darwin's theory tells us that our existence was not inevitable, that there is no eternal order to the universe that necessarily brought us into being." What is this? A Carl Sagan book? Can we get on with the cosmology already? Plus, I'm not exactly persuaded that Darwin's theory of evolution says all that; although I'm onboard with evolution as the theory that explains the development of life on this planet, I think Prof. Smolin has burdened it with some philosophical duty the theory itself is silent on. Anyway, this is beginning to get tedious.

He manages to make it through the rest of Chapter 1 without having to comment on things extraneous to cosmology or relativity in a form of backhanded, passively-aggressive criticism. But here we go again, right at the beginning of Chapter 2, paragraph 2: "That we can do this in physics and astronomy is one of the reasons why those sciences are said to be 'harder'. They are held to be more objective and more reliable than the social sciences because in physics and astronomy there seems to be no difficulty with removing the observer from the system. In the 'softer' social sciences there is no way around the fact that the scientists themselves are participants in the societies they study. Of course, it is possible to try to minimize the effects of this and, for better or worse, much of the methodology of the social sciences is based on the belief that the more one can remove the observer from the system, the more scientific one is being."

Oh, for crying out loud! I'm not sure that all social scientists would agree with his assessment. I don't see what it has to do with explaining quantum gravity, and what the hell is he talking about, "seems to be no difficulty with removing the observer from the system?" Quantum physics seems, to me, to have been the discipline that most clearly showed the influence of the observer on the system.

Then he goes on to describe a type of logic I had never heard of before, but it sounds interesting, called "topos theory." But this then leads him into a brief excursion into why ethics doesn't require "having to believe in a being who sees everything." I can tell I'm going to have to wade through a lot of this sort of thing if I'm going to have a chance at discovering what Prof Smolin thinks he knows about quantum gravity, which, so far, he seems to only be interested in as a vehicle to express all of his other views and prejudices.

I wish he'd had an editor with a better ear for the science, or that he had a different premise for writing the book. I don't mind reading books about why science is "better" than mysticism or religion, I'd just like to know that's what I was getting going in. This is really two books, and trying to read them both at the same time is not an enjoyable experience.

Laugh Track

The phone company sent me a small refund check to close out my account with them. I promptly deposited it in my checking account, and then spent twice its amount on two new additions to my DVD collection.

Two comedies, Trading Places and Spies Like Us, I'm in a Dan Aykroyd state of mind. Every now and then someone tells me I look just like Dan Aykroyd. Last week, I was walking out of Subway and two guys who had been in there ahead of me were pulling away in their car, when they stopped and rolled down the window and yelled to me, "You look just like Dan Aykroyd!"

Could be worse, I guess.

Spurious Emissions

I had one of those days today. I wrote about them before at the Radio site in a little post called I Still Go to Extremes. That still exists on my iBook, I may or may not resurrect it for this iteration of the Shadow. Anyway, I'm feeling much better, but it was an unpleasant several hours or so. This one came complete with the knot in the chest that drives me nuts from beating myself up over beating myself up.

I should be grateful it was only several hours, they used to go on for days until I was simply exhausted by them. I had a chat with Sandy today, and that helped a lot; then I had a TKD lesson, the first in over a week, and that helped a lot too. Mrs. D was the only other student, but she kicks high, and I took one on the nose. Oddly enough, it didn't make me mad like that sort of thing usually does, it just made me laugh. Not in a maniacal way, but in a good way. I can take a punch, and a kick too, every now and then.

It's an attention thing. And mine got stuck in the leaking roof, car needs alignment, lawn mower needs repair, house needs painting, market-keeps-falling-just-when-I-want-to-liquidate-my-mutual-fund, I need some distraction of the distaff variety (the good kind anyway), I've gained back three pounds, why-is-it-frigging-raining-when-they-predicted-three-days-of-sunshine, doesn't it just suck to be me, sort of mental do-loop that mine has a tendency to get stuck in.

But, I'm out of that now.

I can take a punch, and a kick too, every now and then.