Friday 29 April 2005 at 2:59 pm
We have a candidate here today. Busy, busy. All is well, so far. I was able to get my AIREML jobs debugged and running (woohoo!) and one of our programmers is setting-up the database tables for some of the climate data we hope to receive. More later.
Links within.
(more)
Wednesday 20 April 2005 at 9:00 pm
I should bring my laptop on the bus with me more often. That is a good time to blog in that I have time to sit and think about something and write. It is not a good time to blog in that I do not have Intarweb access during my commute, but I could write it up and post it at work or home. Anyway. The central idea in "Small Gods" is that gods only exist and have power so long as people believe in them. The god at the heart of the story used to be very powerfl but is reduced to a turtle, sustained only by the one true believer in the great church devotedto him. While Pratchett is using this idea to talk about modern churches, I think that the same sort of approach can be used to understand ideas. Dawkins introduced the idea of
memes, and writers such as Stephenson have broadened the definition and popularized the concept. An important concept here is that memes are pieces of information that can be transferred from one mind to another, much like a virus or bacterium can be passed from one host to another. This means that memes are actors in an ecological sense, and evolutionary pressure can be applied to them. Good (in the sense of successful) ideas are retained in the mental environment and poor (unsuccessful) ideas are lost or reduced to a very low frequency.
For example, there is always going to be some inbred redneck cracker who believes that things were pretty damned good back in 1805, and that they should be that way again. There is always going to be some nutjob who believes that it is [g]od's will that he strap ten pounds of plastique and ball bearings to himself and blow up a cafe full of people who just wanted a mocha. In a rich memetic ecology, though, those memes will infect relatively few people because better ideas will be endemic. The problem, as always, lies in the definition of good. Harris is baffled that humans cling to religious faith in the face of evidence to the contrary that many feel is overwhelming. Unfortunately for Harris, and the rest of us, the religious meme is very successful. Perhaps that is because the meme provides a lot of pleasant feedback for comparatively little input (note that I am referring the average -- in my experience -- .American who professes to be a person of faith.) What is even stranger is that the faith meme seems to be able to live alongside a science meme without much cognitive dissonance. That is probably because the benefits of accepting that the products of the scientific method far outweigh any clash with the faith meme.
But back to small gods for a minute. Ideas really can die. I would be very surprised if you could find anyone alive today who sincerely believes in Odin or Zeus. Those gods have faded out of existence because no one believes in them anymore. If I knew why the Christian god was so successful after two thousand years I would write a book about it and retire to do something like travel Europe indulging in sinful pastries. One idea is that Christianity (not uniquely, but most importantly for the Wet) provides the underclasses -- that's most of us, folks, despite our laptops and Starbuck's and college degrees and smug thoughts to the contrary -- with hope. Without hope that things are eventually going to get better, that in fact we will be rewarded for being on the bottom in this life by being onn top in the next, the world would be an even uglier place than it is today. A Republican-majority Senate recently voted to make it much more difficult for people to declare bankruptcy and get out from under their debts; this wasn't done for your welafare and mine. It was done for the upper classes. We are bogged-down in an ill-defined and open-ended "war on terror" that smacks of equal parts "1984" and "Saturady Night Live"; peole don't really run a country this way do they? What about the people I ride thebus with every day? Very few of them are going to upper middle class professional jobs. The point is that without hope, people would realize that they have nothing to lose. And people with nothing to lose are dangerous. Marx (IIR) said that religion is the opiate of the masses; he may be more right than he knew. Religion is something that is inside our minds, the result of a brilliant advertising campaign. Let's face it, a lot more people know who the Pope is than know who the CEO of IBM is. And if that does not underscore the power of ideas, I dont know what does.
Sadly, I am not like James Burke. On "Connections" he can jump from idea to person to event and back to idea at very quickly, but he always keeps things tied together. I am not sure that I ever manage that feat. But Misty is gone to yoga and the baby is asleep and I have a stomach full of food. And I know, I should probably proofread. But I have better things to do, like think about, well, thinking.
Monday 18 April 2005 at 11:37 am
This weekend we worked in the yard. Yes, I,
Brother Joyous Cruise Missle of Reason, performed manual labor. Misty, Ellery, and I pulled up the patio (it is just bricks), put down new sand, and relaid a much-smaller patio. It took 750-freakin'-pounds of sand, and that is exclusive of fill-sand. I spent 13 years in college so that I would not have to do this kind of thing, but hairdressers make more money than I do, so there I was, pushing 500 pounds of sand on a cart through Lowe's. What the hell do people think, anyway? I know that when I see a guy pushing a cart with a washer and a dryer on it MY first thought is not, "Let me jump out in front ot him to get from aisle 10 to aisle 9." A couple of people are lucky I was not going faster than I was, I tell you what.
Anyway. Gotta run. We have to go up to a hotel by BWI to meet with the Dairy Sire Evaluation Committee. Exciting, eh? All I know is that it is going to really screw the pooch on my evening commute. I think that they want us there this afternoon rather than this morning is because they don't want to pay for our lunch.
(more)
Thursday 14 April 2005 at 8:22 pm
Words by Christopher Raible
Coffee, Coffee, Coffee,
Praise the strength of coffee.
Early in the morn we rise with thoughts of only thee.
Served fresh or reheated,
Dark by thee defeated,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.
Though all else we scoff, we
Come to church for coffee.
If we're late to congregate, we come in time for thee. Coffee our one ritual,
Drinking it habitual,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.
Coffee the communion
Of our Uni-Union,
Symbol of our sacred ground, our one necessity.
Feel the holy power
At our coffee hour,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.
Thursday 14 April 2005 at 3:34 pm
Oh, man, I am glad that I was not drinking anything when I read
this communique from a group calling itself Unitarian Jihad; it would have ended badly. The formidable erudition of the authors shows in this powerful statement: "Just because you believe it's true doesn't make it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn't mean you are not doing harm." The
Unitarian Jihad Name Generator I shall henceforth be known as
Brother Sword of Enlightened Compassion. Which is somewhat confusing, as the
First Reformed Unitarian Jihad Name Generator has given me the name
Brother Joyous Cruise Missile of Reason.
Thursday 14 April 2005 at 3:14 pm
Hello, Dear Readers. I know, I know, you've missed me. What can I say? Sometimes I have to work for my $5.15/hour. I have accomplished a lot, though, including scheduling interviews for my support scientist position, selecting lists of climate data stations, reviewing a paper for the Journal of Dairy Science, writing some new tools for work (in Python, of course), and hacking on
my pedigree analysis software (props to my German FreeBSD user).
We watched
"Closer" last night. It was pretty good. If you needed further proof that George Lucas is an untalented hack, look no further than Natalie Portman's performance in this film. I was quite surprised to see that she can really act. I quite liked the up-from-working-class-roots doctor, Larry, played by Clive Owen. The writing, while not perfect, is much better than average for a mainstream Hollywood picture. Don't watch around young children or the easily offended -- the language is pretty foul in places. There is an Intarweb chat room scene that sums up all that is wrong with chat rooms.
(more)
Tuesday 12 April 2005 at 1:14 pm
One of the things that I am reading right now is
Sam Harris's "The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.". One of my Dear Readers lent me the book, and I am sure would like to hear what I think about it. You will have to wait a bit yet. One of Harris's central arguments is that we should no longer give people a free pass when they make outlandish claims without supporting evidence, such as when religion is discussed. We as a society should be intolerant of those ideas. In
an interview on Amazon.com he makes the point that he is not suggesting the kind of intolerance that led to gulags, but that we purge ourselves of harmful ideas that are, kindly put, myths. He discusses a Baptist minister who used this book to suggest that moderate religion is dead, and the only choices left are fundamentalism or secularism. I am also intrigued by the idea of discoverability, that is, if [just suppose] what is written in the Bible is true then those truths should be discoverable, as are natural phenomena. All of the world's religions completely fail a test of discoverability. Let's face it, there is absolutely no reason to believe that morality or ethics must be grounded in some set of rules passed down from God to Man some conveniently long time ago. If religion does not provide us with a unique framework for determining how we should live our lives and [arguably] poses a great danger to society, than what good is it? (I guess I'll throw the Catholic Church a bone and say that some scholars argue that the Church "saved" Western intellectual culture during the Middle Ages; I am not an historian, and I think that the Irish claim a lot of the credit for saving civilization. Somehow.) Thanks to thirty-some years being raised in this culture I feel very uncomfortable admitting that I am, without doubts, an atheist, and panning religion even as the Conclave to select the next Pope is about to start. That is reason enough to be angry -- that I would hesitate, even just in my own mind, to say what I think for fear of offending believers in superstition.
(more)
Monday 11 April 2005 at 3:10 pm
Saturday we decided to go see
the famed Washington, D.C., cherry blossoms. What a mistake that was. It was almost as bad as Bourbon Street at Mardi Gras, seriously. Misty and I were amazed to see that the line of peoole waiting to get on the Metro at the Smithsonian station stretched all the way up the escalators and down the sidewalk a block or so. By the time the parents at the end of the elevator line got to use the lift their infants were graduating from high school. We made it as far as the base of the Washington Monument where we could see the tops of the trees. They looked nice. But after two blocks of fighting horrible crowds -- Yankee crowds, the kind of crowds that felt no qualms about forshing a guy pushing a stroller into the street, streets on which (inexplicably) people were attempting to drive -- we turned around and retreated to the [relative] calm of the sculpture garden at the Hirshorn. Oh, I know, some of you are thinking, "
I would have perservered; youre getting soft with age, Cole!" Well, maybe so. Or maybe it was better for me to turn back before I ended up on a late-breaking news bulletin. You know, the kind that features grainy helicopter footage. We did stop by the [President who fired all of the air traffic controllers] Building to see a bunch of Mickey Mouse sculptures. I know, I know, Disney (tm , etc. don't sue me) is Evil and everything, but Ellery loved them.
Sunday we most emphatically did not do laundry.
(more)
Thursday 07 April 2005 at 10:26 am
My Loyal Readers know of my love of all things Simpsonic, particularly the brilliant
Guide to Springfield USA. You linguistic-types out there may find
"Beyond embiggens and cromulent" to be an invaluable guide to "theoretically-interesting examples of Simpsons language humor". That blog entry, in turn, led me to the long-needed analysis of
"Homeric objects of desire", a detailed analysis of the
canonical "Mmm..." list. "Mmm...beer" and "Mmm...chocolate" are tied at four utterances each, while "Mmm...donuts" trails at three references. The eternally-beloved "Mmm...sacrelicious" was said twice. Some of the best references, "Mmm...64 slices of American cheese", "Mmm...unprocessed fish sticks", and "Mmm...unexplained bacon" were only made once.
My FOSE's gettin' big, my FOSE's gettin' bigger
Yesterday I headed down to the Washington Convention Center to check out
FOSE 2005, "Where Government Meets Technology". Wow, how depressing. You cannot go down there expecting anything other than a big group of people who are desperately trying to sell stuff to another group of people; that is why these sorts of trade shows happen. But, still...I think that the only people I talked to who seemed genuinely excited about technology, and the promise of technology to make government (or anything) work better, were the guys at the Linux Users Groups booth. Most of the attendees I saw were either grabbing free pens as fast as they could jam them into their ludicrously-oversized goodie bags or talking on their cell phones the whole time. Here's a hint -- if you can't put the phone down, you don't have time to be there. The commercial aspect of the event does not bother me -- as I said, it is the reason everyone was there -- but I kept looking for people who were there because of a love, above all, for the technology. Even in the Apple booth, I did not see that. I saw a love for big government contracts and free ID badge lanyards, not a love for technology. Give me a crummy LUG meeting any day of the week. At least I got to go home early and play with Misty and Ellery.
(more)
Monday 04 April 2005 at 11:46 am
Well, I have the paclets on the candidates for my support scientist position. For obvious reasons I cannot say too much about them, but two of the four are very well qualified. Hopefully I can get the panel constituted and convened in a few days so that we can get interviews scheduled. THe sooner, the better, as far as I am concerned. This process has drug on for entirely too long. The extraordinarily long time it takes to hire someone around here (meaning the Federal government) is definitely a disincentive for many potential employees. It also means that we run the risk of losing applications who accept other offers while we spin our wheels. I am not dumping on the HR people here; they are just following the rules that we've been given. I guess that I am just grumbling about something I cannot change. Can I also say that the way that we now have to compose our hiring panels is a huge pain in the neck? Good. Thanks.
(more)
Friday 01 April 2005 at 3:24 pm
I gave blood today. On April Fool's Day. What was I thinking? They probably secretly replaced my blood with power steering fluid or Kool-Aid or something nefarious like that. They asked a bunch of new questions at the screening. Trainees were working on everyone. Boy, I bet they laughed a lot after we left. "Ha ha," they said, "I asked one guy if he had sex with a marsupial in exchange for drugs or many, even once, since 1923." The lack of blood must be getting to me. Maybe it is because I just sat through a two-hour meeting about website stuff; it feels like I have spent half of my life in rooms with people discussing web development to no good end. Some of the confusion might also come from the enlightening lesson I received this morning on the origins of the state codes in our database; I wanted to cross-reference them with FIPS state codes for mapping, only to learn that they do not even necessarily represent counties. I know, "WTF", but I am not sure there is anything to be done for it. That's enough typing.
(more)
