“One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” —May Sarton, poet and novelist (1912–1995)

Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, has popularized the idea (the meme?) that “a human being is a gene’s way of making copies of itself.” Cute, maybe, but inherently illogical and, if taken seriously, harmful.

So once we realize that we can’t permanently eliminate poverty, of whatever type, what then? Abandon all hope? Certainly not. Rather than fatalism, I meant to encourage vigilance.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So now you’ve read Inside the Monkeysphere as I asked you to, and are still grappling with its basic message: the fact that our brains only have the inherent capacity to recognize 150 or fewer other people as people. The rest, according to Wong, are “sort of one-dimensional bit characters” to us. What does this mean, besides the slowing dawning realization that you are just a one-dimensional bit character to most of the people you encounter out in the world?

What do the New Testament and the free software movement have in common? (Besides both ending in “ment”.) The most interesting answer, I believe, is that both of them are alternative social systems designed to subvert and surpass the burdensome ones in place. I studied the New Testament for most of the years of my life, and have worked within the free software movement over the past few. Over-familiarity with an idea can leave you blind to its essential meaning. The Christian concept of grace was so well-worn in my mind, so confined to the text of the Bible, that I almost didn’t recognize it when it showed up elsewhere. Seeing it through another prism helped me, in turn, to understand grace better.

This post is about a software debugging experience and an old favorite TV show of mine.

Caveat emptor—“buyer beware”. If only.

Back in May 1987, a bit more than 20 years ago, Jared Diamond wrote something (or maybe gave a talk, I can’t tell) called “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”. Just to take care of the quick answers that I’m sure are leaping to your mind, this mistake is not (1) nuclear weapons, (2) pollutants that mimic estrogens, or (3) the Internet. No, he’s talking about agriculture, which arguably made the other three possible. 20 years ago I’m sure that this was a pretty startling thesis, but thanks in part to the popularity of Diamond’s Pulitzer-prizewinning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (in which this idea is developed more completely), it’s an argument I seem to hear more often. Or if not an argument per se, a sort of angst, a feeling that we screwed up everything when we started farming.

Why does the God of the Old Testament seem so barbaric and capricious compared with the God of the New, especially if He is supposed to be the same today and forever? I have one idea.

A psalm of lamentation. When Derek learned that Apple is moving to Intel x86 microprocessors.

Joel Spolsky, in an otherwise good article on the risks of rewriting legacy software, scoffs at the idea that software rusts, or rots. It seems absurd, to him, that people would imagine that the entropy that acts on physical things would act on pure information. But in my many years as a software engineer, I have seen software rot, for the very same reasons that things in the physical world rot and decay.

What is a demon, anyway, to a modern 21st century, university-educated, Internet-connected Christian? Is it a malevolent, conscious entity that schemes to possess our minds and bodies? Or is it an antiquated folk psychology metaphor for the breakdown of the internal processes of our brains?