My teammates called me, Professor CrazySwing. It was a name my Coach gave me and it stuck throughout the season. I was 12, trying to play my last year of baseball in the minor league. The coach looked at me standing there, skinny, tall, mouthy and very very bright. I couldn't hit, I couldn't field, and I could irritate the heck out of anyone with long discussions of TV shows, girls, politics, girls, quantum theory, girls, music, girls, the meaning of life and girls and I could run. He knew I was there to run somewhere and that if he washed me out, I would never get my chance to be on the team.
So he didn't wash me out and for that season, I was the eternal benchwarmer. Next to me on the bench sat Jerry Mosley. The Moz was also a talkative guy and while he could hit the ball more often than me, it wasn't that often.
As the song goes, "the 142 fastest gun in the west and looking for number 143."
It was the last game in a series in which we had become the number 1 team in our league. The coach knew with his young talented tormented blonde pitcher, his big gangly 13 year old hitter, and pretty good guys in the outfield, he was winning the season. He had given me the rule book, told me to memorize it, and when he needed to know what the rule was, he would come ask me.
My coach was a lawyer. It explains much.
In the last game of the season, with no particular reason to think the worst team in the league could take us, knowing he had the season, the coach pointed to me and said, "Professor, you're up." So the benchwarmer who had the worst batting record in the league, mine own true self, would step up to face the worst pitcher.
As I walked past the coach he looked up at me and said with a big smile, "Swing for the fences." Just that. No pressure. No worries.
The first pitch went past me and noticed my big hazel eyes. It said, "Gotcha sucka." The second pitch came past me like his brother. I blinked. As the worst pitcher in the league unloaded his third pitch, I said, "I'm cooked." Then it hit me. What the hell? I'm the worst batter but I'm on the best team. Swing for the fences. I heard the crack of the bat and for one instant, I thought, "It's a homer!" I made it to first base. But I was on base. Wow! The Big Time.
Then I saw the coach motion to the Moz. Jerry picked up his bat and came to the plate. He looked scared. The second worst hitter on the best team was stepping up to meet the worst pitcher. I could see it in Moz's eyes. He knew he had a chance. When that first pitch spit past, he swung hard and missed. The Moz was bummed. Then he got mad. On that second pitch, he smacked it solid and I took off. I made it to third and turned. The Moz was standing proud on first base smiling.
The Coach smiled too. He was proud. His worst players made the bases.
He motioned to his best hitter. I smiled. The best hitter on the best team was stepping up to bat against the league's worst pitcher. I knew this man could bring me home.
He struck out. Game over. Season over. No homeplate for Professor and The Moz.
We walked in from the field heads down, when all of the team gathered round us and smiled. We had made the bases. That was the thing.
My father lay in the emergency room bed waiting for a doctor, knowing the mass against his prostate was going to kill him. We were watching "Some Like It Hot" on the TV hanging in the corner of the small portable room covered in white linen. He kept asking Momma for his pills. She snuck him one. He started to talk about the war. Daddy has once slapped me for asking about what he did in the Navy, but as he aged he told me more stories. Daddy liked to tell stories but until he was old, he didn't talk about the war. It haunted him. When he would see actions he was in on the History Channel, he'd just say, "I never saw any cameras."
My father served as a Seabee. He rode in small rubber boats smong the reefs between the landing crafts as the Japanese fired on them. His job was to restart the Hall-Scotts when some 18 year kid who had played baseball one year before in high school, now a scared Marine hoping the brother of the shell that had just gotten his guys wet wouldn't find him where he stood, hands choking the throttle on the twin-diesels, had killed the engines and left the LST to the mercy of the screaming demons of death falling around them. Get the kid's frozen hand off the throttle, hope the battery was still alive, pull like hell, start it, then jump back in the rubber boat and get to the next stalled boat drifting over the coral toward hell.
He had ridden a destroyer through Halsey's typhoons. He said it was the worst of it. On deck, he could fire a gun and he enjoyed that. In the water, he could dodge, but down in the ship listening to the engines howl and the screws cutting in and out of the water as the ship slid up, over and down the mountains of cold smothering rage around them, he could do nothing. He said it was the most scared he would ever be. When the kamikazes came, he got the one coming for him, but not the one coming for the carrier, so they tied up to it and fought the fires from their own decks.
On the island, he made friends with a pilot who flew patrol bombers. My Daddy loved anything that had an engine, and flying caught his fancy. He was younger than the pilot and the pilot liked that. He taught Daddy to fly. Daddy would go on patrol with him. In those days before pressure suits were common, it was not uncommon for older pilots to lose consciousness pulling out of a dive. The pilot preferred a younger man behind him who could take the Gs better. Wrapped in a towel because a dive makes blood run from his nose and ears ruining his prize jacket, the pilot would tell Daddy, "If I pass out, you gotta bring us home, Bullard."
Dad looked up at Marilyn on the screen in a clinch with Tony, and said, "Yeah, we were flying back that afternoon when we looked down and saw it laying there just off the coast. It was clear and we saw that sub waiting. After dark, he would surface and he would give us hell. I saw the pilot point down and I knew what he would do as he came round and started down. He was going all the way to the water before he dropped that bum. A bum has to hit hard and square on the water to get down to where that sub was at. So he flipped over and headed straight down, engine screaming, my guts all over me, and his face drawed up like a fish. I could see the top of that sub coming faster and faster until he let that bum go. As he was pulling up and the engine was groaning and the wings was cracking, I managed to look over. He hit 'er square on the tower and it blew up. We killed those barstards but they wuz gonna kill us that night. Made me glad. I looked around and I saw the red all over that towel, but as he was slumpin' down, he took the mike and said, "Bring us home, Bullard."
Then Daddy looked at me and Mom and said, "I can beat this." I knew it wasn't so, but I knew he would swing for the fences.
The back of the room of the Tralee museum was packed with a mob of people who had all come to see the Great Man. The man was Neil Armstrong who had flown every kind of plane there was to fly, who had first stepped on the Moon, and was now kneeling next to my seven year old son, Daniel. The Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland listened attentively next to the Great Man, as Daniel told him about the virtual reality epic before them on the screen.
Pushed into the crowd and the back of the room, Paul Hoffman and I and our wives watched as the cameras rolled and Daniel with complete poise told them about our work. An hour before that, Paul and I finished a 24 hour shift doing the final assembly of a work that had been made in 95 days out of beta technology by men all over the planet, none of whom except Paul and I ever laid eyes on one another. And Paul and I had only met a day and half ago.
It was reallllll close.
It was the finest moment of my life. For those men, all volunteers, only email buddies, mostly Dads for all the right reasons built that VR for the children of Ireland. Our team risked much but we were on base.
The next day, it was much quieter and we were back at the exhibit. Children playing around us, and Irish mother came up to me and asked, "Why did you do it?" I said, with pride, "For your children." but Paul, who sat making a few more tweaks, said, "For the fun." The redhaired girl from Kerry leaned into my shoulder and cried.
Around us the Gateway computers hummed. The children were laughing and living in the worlds of Hoffman, the genius who had pulled the project together, Kahuna who proved he was the master builder of ships, Dennis who created his magical worlds using only an Ascii editor and the beta browser, Niclas who would tell us of his days and his loves while he made the final mystery, Rev Bob who always replied with humor when Paul told him he needed to take just a few more triangles out of Bob's perfectly engineered and stunning International Space Station, all these good men who had heard the call to do the impossible, who had made the world's first virtual reality epic, had swung at the fences, and on the only pitch, knocked it all the way out of the park.
And my Daniel was there, his first time on a world stage showing our work to the Great Man who had been to the Moon first, and was there to see what we could make of the dream of space travel for the children of Ireland. Magic is attention focused by belief. We speak it into being and act. The whisper makes the word. The word is the act. Love is the reward. I couldn't have loved my son more than at that moment watching him swinging for the fences.
The night my father died my younger and my oldest brother sat in the room playing the music he had played with us so many Sundays for so many years. As he lay in the next room, we played with all the heart and all the love and all the mistakes we had learned while he had played with us. I sang his favorite, Gentle On My Mind, and we played all the blues and country and rock and folk and classical guitar songs we knew. When we stopped, he died. While now the grieving would begin, the deep sorrow of watching this Seabee join his mates was over. At Daddy's side was a very worn Bible with the signature of a man we did not know dated, 1943.
Two days later, at his funeral I read the elegy, and then I, my brothers, and my cousin played the song I had written ten years earlier knowing even then it was for this day, the song that got me into the Bluebird past Amy's pen years before. When I had told him that I was going to go take a swing at the audition in Nashville's home for songwriters, he told me, "Son, I know you like rock, and you write good songs, but for Nashville, you have to play a country song." So I went back to the studio to write a true song because as Harlan Howard said, "Country is three chords and the truth."
I sang about my Daddy making up after a fight with me when he had been drinking. He asked me what he could do. I was seven, but I said without hesitating, "Teach me to play the guitar." The song was true and it was enough to pass her test. Six months later, I sat on the stage of The Bluebird on a Sunday night and sang my song. I hit it over the fence. Daddy was proud. Hits didn't matter. It was about respect for a good song.
You only play the games you sign up for, and I had already decided that a life at home loving my wife, raising babies, and taking care of them was the best life. Music would always be my friend and like the Moz, if I could get to first base, it could get me further. I decided that home was far enough.
So now the time had come to play it for the family who always asked for that song, a song that would make Daddy cry. Without tears, I played the hardest song of my life, and the sweetest, and the truest. It was not written for the 'natch; it was for loving my Dad. In sadness and courage and practice and patience like the low tapping of a foot on a floor to start a song, we played as he had taught us: to bring it home.
A month ago I played for Kelly, my beautiful boo, the baby, the girl whom I've loved without reserve since her Mother first gave her to me. Before her grandparents and family friends and the assembly of her church, she sang her first solo. A month earlier, my best girlfriend when I was a teen-ager had given me her harp before she left for Israel to become a cantor. Knowing I loved the harp and would learn to play it, she told me to restring it and keep it until she could come back again. In a life time of music and love, this was an iridescent moment on stage with my little angel. As we both stepped up to the plate, her to sing for the first time in public, me to play a new and mysterious axe, we were there together swinging. With my Daddy's hands and my daughter's love, we hit it out of the park.
For all the times you think you cannot do it, for all the times you are scared and you can't see that ball coming, know that it is and when it gets there, you can swing for the fences. You can strike out when you're the best, you can hit when you're the worst, and you can bring someone home that made it to base. There is courage even in the most frightened heart, and there is will in the most frozen hand. I hope for you, that in this life, you will swing for the fences and know how wonderful the moment is when you hit it out of the park and bring it home.
Friday, August 27, 2004
Shreddin' The 'Natch
The title phrase comes from a Doonesbury cartoon in which Gary Trudeau's archetypal musician, Jimmy Thudpucker, returns to the studio after a long hiatus only to discover that his bandmates and the session musicians have all been replaced by midi-driven synthesizers. The producer tells him that employing real musicians is 'too many ways to shred the 'natch' which in mortalSpeak means, he would have to pay them union wages and that given the high costs of doing business, automation is cost-effective. Accepting that, Jimmy asks how the tracks will be 'sweetened' and the producer replies, "I got strings that'll give you diabetes."
Cost and quality have become the battleground in the wars between open source and proprietary systems. Insidiously, the one thing these competing systems shared in the technological ecosystem has been open standards. Now we see corporations beginning to walk away from the consortia who sponsor these efforts as the impact of policies regarding royalty-free contributions are measured against the price drops in software driven by open source systems, commoditization pressures from these very standards, and the intellectual property wars where the strategy to hold off predatory lawsuits using the tactics of pre-emptive patents is acceleration.
Ecosystems are about competing for energy. Tactics vary but the goals are always survival and growth. Species within these systems will apply tactics that will cause them to evolve towards symbiotic relationships or parasitic ones. In a technological ecosystem, a company or product can be one or both of these at the same time depending on the tactics applied in response to various conditions in an environment made up of themselves, their customers, and the ever present press all of whom can be contributors or predators.
Understanding the effect of one's tactics is essential to self-directed adaptation. The Hindus call this karma, but in this model, it is just the effect of feedback into a system that by virtue of its complex relationships strengthens or weakens the aggregate effects of acts selected by operations over those relationships. In other words, you aren't exactly what you eat, but the supply of what you eat is determined by how well you care for it. Basically, tend the garden or watch it go to weeds. Smart farmers know how to rotate crops, keep certain crops near or far away from each other relative to pollinization and predator control, how to select by markers for crops to cross-breed, which fertilizers cause rapid growth but burn the soil, and so on.
Farmers are the original ecologists, and not surprisingly, originally most were women because the men had manly pursuits such as whacking buffalo and deer for protein. Animal husbandry came later because mammals do the herd trick naturally and any male can follow a herd. So men eventually came to own most of the money, and like a herd, money follows fashion. Thus began the extinction of species. At the same time, the numbers of crops bred for food slimmed down to a very few. According to the August 2004 edition of Scientific American, no new cereals have been domesticated in more than 3000 years and today's population of mammals is fed by 24 plant species with corn, rice and wheat accounting for most of the calories consumed.
Meanwhile, further down in the system, the mammalian sex drives increased to replaced units damaged by war, famine, pestilence and bad beer. Sex is a means to repair damaged DNA and evolution, a friend of mine tells me, made it as much fun as possible to ensure we keep on having it. This increased the mammal supply, so increased the need to feed more mammals, and because no new cereals were being domesticated, we've cleverly learned to increase the yields of the few plants we use. In effect, the mammals bred the diversity out of the plants and increased the yield of the chosen few. From time to time, genetic breeding experts go into the wild and find a plant with markers indicating some desirable trait and introduce the gene responsible for that trait from the wild plant into what is known as an elite cultivar, essentially, the template plant for a new strain. The original population of plants from which all of today's corn crops are descended was likely less than 20 plants. Consider that next time you sit down to eat a bag of popcorn at a movie. There are more kernels in the bag and more people in the first two rows than all of corn's original ancestors. Grass fire anyone?
What does this have to do with music, standards, and source code? Glad you asked.
In the music world, open source is not the mp3 files people are busily swapping. That is the harvest of the crops grown by musicians. Midi is the open source. I am a musician. Musicians make and swap midi files with wild mammalian abandon. We often take old recordings and laboriously notate them in midi format so we can perform these with approximately the same sounds as the originals. Yes, like Jimmy Thudpucker, we'd rather use our fellow musicians but given that the pay for a gig has not increased in real or virtual dollars since 1972, we can't take the nine to fifteen people required to reproduce a 70s Motown hit to a gig that pays $300. It is simply too many ways to shred the 'natch. We'd like to make that up in CD sales but the real costs of producing a marketable CD even with all of the neat technology which includes midi has settled at the optima of about $10 a copy. Yes, a CD can cost less, but all megabytes are not equal so the geek math some use to criticize the industry doesn't reflect the reality of the costs of the harvest.
What midi really does is give us a chance to share open source music in the form of reproducible notes and orchestration. We pull these into cheap editors (thanks to the musical geeks) and study them to learn orchestral and composition techniques. We steal from each other, taking a drum part here, a lead lick there, and we compose new music. We've been doing this for centuries but midi made it cheap and fast. The quality of production actually can go up because we are as Paul Graham notes in his excellent article on Hackers and Painters, learning by example. It's a good thing. We found a way to make the bad effect of shreddin' the 'natch work for us. Now three guys can go play a decent sounding gig and still feed their kids. Where we resisted midi initially, we eventually embraced it and manage to live well in a shallower money pool.
Now we come to the issue for the geeks. If you want to keep open source open, you have to confront the dilemma of standards and code versus the reality that as you drive down the price of software, you force the system to get energy elsewhere. The powers of companies large and small found it in intellectual property cross-licensing. They also discovered that it could be used as a weapon against other competitors, so they are amassing it as fast as they can file it knowing full well that they are overwhelming the patent inspectors around the world and failing to meet the due diligence requirements. They use the tactics of the goombahs; as long as you can't resist them, the legal niceties don't matter because they have found a way to shred the 'natch in their favor.
The tactic coming into favor is pre-emptive patents. Pick a technology that you think is on the rise at some time in the future (to surf, you swim ahead of the wave), and get as many patents as you can. This works. Corporations today are defending themselves from IP suits with twenty and thirty year old users manuals dragged out of the garages of engineers who held on to them for keepsakes. Not being dumb, companies who see that trend are now building documentation repositories because they now know they need to keep all of the code they write, the documents they manage, and the contracts they sign just in case. Meanwhile, they are securing patents at a furious rate.
This won't stop because it is working.
Coming back to cereals, languages that we use on the web have been increasing steadily, but my bet is that at some tipping point, this will reach a steady state. It will winnow down to a handful of languages that we all use for the majority of our work. The bad part is that we haven't yet reached that state and some niches are being fought over furiously by old consortia and new faux consortia sponsored by BigCos who need to both justify their future products with a patina of cooperation while establishing their patent libraries as hegemonic over these faux standards. Meanwhile, champions of languages in the open source world are at war with each other over which languages shall be the elite cultivar of the future. This is bad because it means that very soon, two or more languages or systems that have to interoperate can't be bundled together because the licensing for each is incompatible with the other.
Yesterday, I responded to the request from a major figure in the development of open standards for 3D systems to introduce him to the editor of an up to now well thought of online magazine who's founder is a well-known champion of open source and open standards. The idea was to launch a series of technical articles about X3D, the only open source, open standard for 3D on the web. Here is the reply:
"Sorry, but from my perch, SVG is several orders of magnitude more used than X3D. *That's* what warrants series of articles, rather than inherent technical merit."
After swapping a few gratuitous insults, I realized this bird on his perch simply doesn't get it. SVG as an open standard and open source system isn't in as good a shape as he thinks in the market. X3D being a new language isn't either. What he also doesn't know is that patents and closed standards for 3D on the web are being pursued by invitation-only consortia with furious speed. In effect, the door for open systems based on 3D and 2D vector graphics is slamming shut while this guy is worried about the two formats competing. This isn't the first time I've heard this in the SVG camp, and it worries me. None of this stuff is new.
It is likely that one of the X3D vendors will implement 2D extensions to X3D for layers where 2D is a better and more efficient authoring and rendering technique. Think HUDs, data displays, 2D controls and the like. The work being done on shaders and a CAD Distillation Format will make this a powerful cross-bred set of capabilities. Some would like this layer to be SVG or at least a reasonable subset. That may well be the way this goes. Some in the SVG community want to
extend SVG into 3D and have done work in that direction. Graphics experts tell me that this is futile because the object model for SVG isn't designed to support real time 3D.
Why wouldn't these groups work together?
If the number of languages and elite cultivar are going to shrink, and if we as information farmers want to get more yield out of these virtual fields while protecting them from the predators on the near horizon, that would seem to be the best strategy. Yet in all my years of doing this kind of work, I am constantly amazed how the focus is on trying to get more yield from the field rather than improving the crops. This kind of bad planning dominates the thinking of some of the open source, free range designers and standards authors.
If we want to be able to feed ourselves in a time when the pay for the gig is falling, we need to learn from the musicians about creating formats that work together instead of fighting over who is paid to be in the studio. Our resources aren't that many and our products aren't that strong. Technical excellence still has a role to play on the World Wide Web, but for this to work, we should learn how to better shred the 'natch. X3D and SVG should be allies instead of competing alleles because extinction is just two releases away given increases in the parasitic qualities and a failure to breed symbiotes in the graphics ecosystems.
Why do it? Because Flash will give you diabetes.
Cost and quality have become the battleground in the wars between open source and proprietary systems. Insidiously, the one thing these competing systems shared in the technological ecosystem has been open standards. Now we see corporations beginning to walk away from the consortia who sponsor these efforts as the impact of policies regarding royalty-free contributions are measured against the price drops in software driven by open source systems, commoditization pressures from these very standards, and the intellectual property wars where the strategy to hold off predatory lawsuits using the tactics of pre-emptive patents is acceleration.
Ecosystems are about competing for energy. Tactics vary but the goals are always survival and growth. Species within these systems will apply tactics that will cause them to evolve towards symbiotic relationships or parasitic ones. In a technological ecosystem, a company or product can be one or both of these at the same time depending on the tactics applied in response to various conditions in an environment made up of themselves, their customers, and the ever present press all of whom can be contributors or predators.
Understanding the effect of one's tactics is essential to self-directed adaptation. The Hindus call this karma, but in this model, it is just the effect of feedback into a system that by virtue of its complex relationships strengthens or weakens the aggregate effects of acts selected by operations over those relationships. In other words, you aren't exactly what you eat, but the supply of what you eat is determined by how well you care for it. Basically, tend the garden or watch it go to weeds. Smart farmers know how to rotate crops, keep certain crops near or far away from each other relative to pollinization and predator control, how to select by markers for crops to cross-breed, which fertilizers cause rapid growth but burn the soil, and so on.
Farmers are the original ecologists, and not surprisingly, originally most were women because the men had manly pursuits such as whacking buffalo and deer for protein. Animal husbandry came later because mammals do the herd trick naturally and any male can follow a herd. So men eventually came to own most of the money, and like a herd, money follows fashion. Thus began the extinction of species. At the same time, the numbers of crops bred for food slimmed down to a very few. According to the August 2004 edition of Scientific American, no new cereals have been domesticated in more than 3000 years and today's population of mammals is fed by 24 plant species with corn, rice and wheat accounting for most of the calories consumed.
Meanwhile, further down in the system, the mammalian sex drives increased to replaced units damaged by war, famine, pestilence and bad beer. Sex is a means to repair damaged DNA and evolution, a friend of mine tells me, made it as much fun as possible to ensure we keep on having it. This increased the mammal supply, so increased the need to feed more mammals, and because no new cereals were being domesticated, we've cleverly learned to increase the yields of the few plants we use. In effect, the mammals bred the diversity out of the plants and increased the yield of the chosen few. From time to time, genetic breeding experts go into the wild and find a plant with markers indicating some desirable trait and introduce the gene responsible for that trait from the wild plant into what is known as an elite cultivar, essentially, the template plant for a new strain. The original population of plants from which all of today's corn crops are descended was likely less than 20 plants. Consider that next time you sit down to eat a bag of popcorn at a movie. There are more kernels in the bag and more people in the first two rows than all of corn's original ancestors. Grass fire anyone?
What does this have to do with music, standards, and source code? Glad you asked.
In the music world, open source is not the mp3 files people are busily swapping. That is the harvest of the crops grown by musicians. Midi is the open source. I am a musician. Musicians make and swap midi files with wild mammalian abandon. We often take old recordings and laboriously notate them in midi format so we can perform these with approximately the same sounds as the originals. Yes, like Jimmy Thudpucker, we'd rather use our fellow musicians but given that the pay for a gig has not increased in real or virtual dollars since 1972, we can't take the nine to fifteen people required to reproduce a 70s Motown hit to a gig that pays $300. It is simply too many ways to shred the 'natch. We'd like to make that up in CD sales but the real costs of producing a marketable CD even with all of the neat technology which includes midi has settled at the optima of about $10 a copy. Yes, a CD can cost less, but all megabytes are not equal so the geek math some use to criticize the industry doesn't reflect the reality of the costs of the harvest.
What midi really does is give us a chance to share open source music in the form of reproducible notes and orchestration. We pull these into cheap editors (thanks to the musical geeks) and study them to learn orchestral and composition techniques. We steal from each other, taking a drum part here, a lead lick there, and we compose new music. We've been doing this for centuries but midi made it cheap and fast. The quality of production actually can go up because we are as Paul Graham notes in his excellent article on Hackers and Painters, learning by example. It's a good thing. We found a way to make the bad effect of shreddin' the 'natch work for us. Now three guys can go play a decent sounding gig and still feed their kids. Where we resisted midi initially, we eventually embraced it and manage to live well in a shallower money pool.
Now we come to the issue for the geeks. If you want to keep open source open, you have to confront the dilemma of standards and code versus the reality that as you drive down the price of software, you force the system to get energy elsewhere. The powers of companies large and small found it in intellectual property cross-licensing. They also discovered that it could be used as a weapon against other competitors, so they are amassing it as fast as they can file it knowing full well that they are overwhelming the patent inspectors around the world and failing to meet the due diligence requirements. They use the tactics of the goombahs; as long as you can't resist them, the legal niceties don't matter because they have found a way to shred the 'natch in their favor.
The tactic coming into favor is pre-emptive patents. Pick a technology that you think is on the rise at some time in the future (to surf, you swim ahead of the wave), and get as many patents as you can. This works. Corporations today are defending themselves from IP suits with twenty and thirty year old users manuals dragged out of the garages of engineers who held on to them for keepsakes. Not being dumb, companies who see that trend are now building documentation repositories because they now know they need to keep all of the code they write, the documents they manage, and the contracts they sign just in case. Meanwhile, they are securing patents at a furious rate.
This won't stop because it is working.
Coming back to cereals, languages that we use on the web have been increasing steadily, but my bet is that at some tipping point, this will reach a steady state. It will winnow down to a handful of languages that we all use for the majority of our work. The bad part is that we haven't yet reached that state and some niches are being fought over furiously by old consortia and new faux consortia sponsored by BigCos who need to both justify their future products with a patina of cooperation while establishing their patent libraries as hegemonic over these faux standards. Meanwhile, champions of languages in the open source world are at war with each other over which languages shall be the elite cultivar of the future. This is bad because it means that very soon, two or more languages or systems that have to interoperate can't be bundled together because the licensing for each is incompatible with the other.
Yesterday, I responded to the request from a major figure in the development of open standards for 3D systems to introduce him to the editor of an up to now well thought of online magazine who's founder is a well-known champion of open source and open standards. The idea was to launch a series of technical articles about X3D, the only open source, open standard for 3D on the web. Here is the reply:
"Sorry, but from my perch, SVG is several orders of magnitude more used than X3D. *That's* what warrants series of articles, rather than inherent technical merit."
After swapping a few gratuitous insults, I realized this bird on his perch simply doesn't get it. SVG as an open standard and open source system isn't in as good a shape as he thinks in the market. X3D being a new language isn't either. What he also doesn't know is that patents and closed standards for 3D on the web are being pursued by invitation-only consortia with furious speed. In effect, the door for open systems based on 3D and 2D vector graphics is slamming shut while this guy is worried about the two formats competing. This isn't the first time I've heard this in the SVG camp, and it worries me. None of this stuff is new.
It is likely that one of the X3D vendors will implement 2D extensions to X3D for layers where 2D is a better and more efficient authoring and rendering technique. Think HUDs, data displays, 2D controls and the like. The work being done on shaders and a CAD Distillation Format will make this a powerful cross-bred set of capabilities. Some would like this layer to be SVG or at least a reasonable subset. That may well be the way this goes. Some in the SVG community want to
extend SVG into 3D and have done work in that direction. Graphics experts tell me that this is futile because the object model for SVG isn't designed to support real time 3D.
Why wouldn't these groups work together?
If the number of languages and elite cultivar are going to shrink, and if we as information farmers want to get more yield out of these virtual fields while protecting them from the predators on the near horizon, that would seem to be the best strategy. Yet in all my years of doing this kind of work, I am constantly amazed how the focus is on trying to get more yield from the field rather than improving the crops. This kind of bad planning dominates the thinking of some of the open source, free range designers and standards authors.
If we want to be able to feed ourselves in a time when the pay for the gig is falling, we need to learn from the musicians about creating formats that work together instead of fighting over who is paid to be in the studio. Our resources aren't that many and our products aren't that strong. Technical excellence still has a role to play on the World Wide Web, but for this to work, we should learn how to better shred the 'natch. X3D and SVG should be allies instead of competing alleles because extinction is just two releases away given increases in the parasitic qualities and a failure to breed symbiotes in the graphics ecosystems.
Why do it? Because Flash will give you diabetes.
Monday, August 23, 2004
The Hounds of Love
"When I was a child:
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be
Hiding in the dark,
Hiding in the street...
The Hounds of Love are hunting" [1]
Mammals are relentlessly innovative. That's a good survival trait. Given the capacity for the environment to go wonkers when some hidden force like a volcano erupts, a disease silently begins to whack the babies or a kid hits puberty, relentless innovation claims the prize for doing before done unto. Some mammals are herd mammals and others aren't. This is also a survival trait but it isn't ubiquitous among the furry warm bloods. Some float with the crowd that has the best looking Others as members, and some just float until other mammals invite them to a party. Then there are the loners. Some of them go on to become top corporate executives and others, psychopaths on the six o'clock news. Why one becomes or chooses one or the other is a tough call, but because mammals are relentlessly innovative, theories abound.
"Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake
And I'll be two steps on the water." [1]
Then came the Internet: a product born of the extraordinarily relentness innovation of North American mammals and their Cold War paranoia by which it was empirically demonstrated that successful executives and psychopaths could be the same people at the same party. The brilliance of it was that it was like water: reusable, simple, fundamental and recyclable. Once the PsychoMammalElite were done worrying about their Cold War, they offered the 'Net up for FREE at the Thrift Shop of Unclaimed Military Baggage. The genius of its design eeemmmmmeerrged.
The same features that made it theoretically possible to point a command and control droid to another droid after the first one was turned into unaddressable storage (say write only memory) that glowed regardless of whether the grid was up or down made it possible to get really good photos of mammalian pulchritudinousness without the postage or the brown paper bag. One click; some waiting, and there it was: nude mammals with all the parts. For FREE.
So begat the downloading that begat the desktop that begat the ISP that begat the two line home that begat the world wide wait that begat the DSP and the cableMowDem that begat the monthly bill that begat the taxless product that begat the urge to tax that begat the urge to mark that begat XML by which all things could be marked
"It's coming for me through the trees." [1]
That's a geek joke but I digress.
First, it was pictures and those were easy to find and get. Then came the music files, and those were easy to find and get too but the musicians who lived off royalties objected. Then came the movies but only to the mammals with broadband, a way of saying I can afford a big phone bill but won't take my kids to the cinema. All of this was justified by a fanciful notion called 'the frictionless economy'.
Among mammalian lifeforms, self-lubricating systems aren't all that innovative, but given one that takes, another one is making out, up, or do, or otherwise, negotiating.
This is called product for value. It isn't a terribly complicated idea: I make the original and a copy. You can get the copy if I tell you where it is. Now with a certain amount of excitement, some systems will self-lubricate, that is, if you can excite them enough, they are ready to receive or take. In others, if you want access, you grease the port. The problem comes of wanting without having the grease when using a system that isn't self-lubricating or excited.
"I found a fox caught by dogs.
He let me take him in my hands." [1]
Free has a way of conflicting with unavailableByDesign. While the Internet, really just a big set of data plumbing pipes, can enable exchanges of all kinds, those that want everything for free are not compatible with those that want to grease the 'natch. It is easy to dress up the 'should be free' with lofty words but these tend to obscure the negotiation. On the other hand, there are those who insist that the only proper exchange is one that is monitored and taxed to support the infrastructure. If mammals bred like that, fish would rule the world.
"Do you know what I really need?
Do you know what I really need?" [1]
The Internet, whose rise to public prominence was driven by that mammalian urge for pubic places is now caught smack in the middle of the herds of nerds that love it, the loners that build it, and the successful executives and psychopaths who want to control it. A rising tide floats all boats except the ones tied to the dock. If we ignore the need to grease the web, that sucking sound you hear could be your local commodity tax base collapsing only to be buttressed by your rising property taxes. If we don't stop the psychoExecs from using their authority to inspect and tax every item on it, that sound you hear and picture you see will start to look just like that reality series on cable that you just can't watch but TVLand is still running Andy and Barney and you already know the end of every sitcom on the Hitler Channel.
"Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I really mean?" [1]
They say the Internet routes around censorship. It's a good theory but like the theory that it could route around a nuclear fireball, it's never been tested so it remains yet another theory.
"The Hounds of Love are hunting, and I don't know what's good for me." [1]
Doc Searls says he does. Do give this a read.
To Barlow, I say, "J.P., I've been to a few of Uncle John's Band's
gigs. The tickets weren't FREE, the t-shirts weren't FREE, and even if I had a tape recorder, I couldn't get close enough to Captain Trips to get a worthy sound. But it was WELL worth the price of admission and still will be even without Jerry (Miss the Man? Yes I do.). Just be factual about the cost of the Marin Lifestyle, Dude. It ain't virtual."
To Doc, I say, "I don't want to restrict your choices or mine and we do need to fight those who do, but the truth is, it IS just another medium even if it has a Google number of channels and the TV talks back. Different parties have different party rules and those who don't want to stick to them will be visited by Master Jack and His Hammers who will pound their profits into plowshares to sell at the next county auction. I'm all for diversity, but I'm against the pedofile who wants to pick up a kid and the kid who wants to redistribute someone else's property like Robin Hood. I gave away recordings for free only to watch the dot.bomb that was to send me an occasional shekel keep changing the points and then selling them to the Frogs. So if someone is going to give it up for free, it will be me...excited by the prospect of a lady with five kids in Australia and a big farm to run driving her rig across her fields listening to my music. Let the lubing begin."
I suspect freedom of choice means we choose among options offered freely. So we better get busy figuring out what's good for us before those options are gone. The Hounds of Love are hunting. I can't tell if they're sniffing for a treat or a bite, but I'm still waiting for a new Kate Bush album, likely will until retirement, and as much as I love her music, I know it won't be free, but it will be worth the lube... with no problems.
"And I'm ashamed of running away
From nothing real.
I just can't deal with this,
But I'm still afraid to be there,
Among your Hounds of Love." [1]
[1] "The Hounds of Love" Kate Bush
Copyright 1985 - EMI America
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be
Hiding in the dark,
Hiding in the street...
The Hounds of Love are hunting" [1]
Mammals are relentlessly innovative. That's a good survival trait. Given the capacity for the environment to go wonkers when some hidden force like a volcano erupts, a disease silently begins to whack the babies or a kid hits puberty, relentless innovation claims the prize for doing before done unto. Some mammals are herd mammals and others aren't. This is also a survival trait but it isn't ubiquitous among the furry warm bloods. Some float with the crowd that has the best looking Others as members, and some just float until other mammals invite them to a party. Then there are the loners. Some of them go on to become top corporate executives and others, psychopaths on the six o'clock news. Why one becomes or chooses one or the other is a tough call, but because mammals are relentlessly innovative, theories abound.
"Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake
And I'll be two steps on the water." [1]
Then came the Internet: a product born of the extraordinarily relentness innovation of North American mammals and their Cold War paranoia by which it was empirically demonstrated that successful executives and psychopaths could be the same people at the same party. The brilliance of it was that it was like water: reusable, simple, fundamental and recyclable. Once the PsychoMammalElite were done worrying about their Cold War, they offered the 'Net up for FREE at the Thrift Shop of Unclaimed Military Baggage. The genius of its design eeemmmmmeerrged.
The same features that made it theoretically possible to point a command and control droid to another droid after the first one was turned into unaddressable storage (say write only memory) that glowed regardless of whether the grid was up or down made it possible to get really good photos of mammalian pulchritudinousness without the postage or the brown paper bag. One click; some waiting, and there it was: nude mammals with all the parts. For FREE.
So begat the downloading that begat the desktop that begat the ISP that begat the two line home that begat the world wide wait that begat the DSP and the cableMowDem that begat the monthly bill that begat the taxless product that begat the urge to tax that begat the urge to mark that begat XML by which all things could be marked
"It's coming for me through the trees." [1]
That's a geek joke but I digress.
First, it was pictures and those were easy to find and get. Then came the music files, and those were easy to find and get too but the musicians who lived off royalties objected. Then came the movies but only to the mammals with broadband, a way of saying I can afford a big phone bill but won't take my kids to the cinema. All of this was justified by a fanciful notion called 'the frictionless economy'.
Among mammalian lifeforms, self-lubricating systems aren't all that innovative, but given one that takes, another one is making out, up, or do, or otherwise, negotiating.
This is called product for value. It isn't a terribly complicated idea: I make the original and a copy. You can get the copy if I tell you where it is. Now with a certain amount of excitement, some systems will self-lubricate, that is, if you can excite them enough, they are ready to receive or take. In others, if you want access, you grease the port. The problem comes of wanting without having the grease when using a system that isn't self-lubricating or excited.
"I found a fox caught by dogs.
He let me take him in my hands." [1]
Free has a way of conflicting with unavailableByDesign. While the Internet, really just a big set of data plumbing pipes, can enable exchanges of all kinds, those that want everything for free are not compatible with those that want to grease the 'natch. It is easy to dress up the 'should be free' with lofty words but these tend to obscure the negotiation. On the other hand, there are those who insist that the only proper exchange is one that is monitored and taxed to support the infrastructure. If mammals bred like that, fish would rule the world.
"Do you know what I really need?
Do you know what I really need?" [1]
The Internet, whose rise to public prominence was driven by that mammalian urge for pubic places is now caught smack in the middle of the herds of nerds that love it, the loners that build it, and the successful executives and psychopaths who want to control it. A rising tide floats all boats except the ones tied to the dock. If we ignore the need to grease the web, that sucking sound you hear could be your local commodity tax base collapsing only to be buttressed by your rising property taxes. If we don't stop the psychoExecs from using their authority to inspect and tax every item on it, that sound you hear and picture you see will start to look just like that reality series on cable that you just can't watch but TVLand is still running Andy and Barney and you already know the end of every sitcom on the Hitler Channel.
"Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I really mean?" [1]
They say the Internet routes around censorship. It's a good theory but like the theory that it could route around a nuclear fireball, it's never been tested so it remains yet another theory.
"The Hounds of Love are hunting, and I don't know what's good for me." [1]
Doc Searls says he does. Do give this a read.
To Barlow, I say, "J.P., I've been to a few of Uncle John's Band's
gigs. The tickets weren't FREE, the t-shirts weren't FREE, and even if I had a tape recorder, I couldn't get close enough to Captain Trips to get a worthy sound. But it was WELL worth the price of admission and still will be even without Jerry (Miss the Man? Yes I do.). Just be factual about the cost of the Marin Lifestyle, Dude. It ain't virtual."
To Doc, I say, "I don't want to restrict your choices or mine and we do need to fight those who do, but the truth is, it IS just another medium even if it has a Google number of channels and the TV talks back. Different parties have different party rules and those who don't want to stick to them will be visited by Master Jack and His Hammers who will pound their profits into plowshares to sell at the next county auction. I'm all for diversity, but I'm against the pedofile who wants to pick up a kid and the kid who wants to redistribute someone else's property like Robin Hood. I gave away recordings for free only to watch the dot.bomb that was to send me an occasional shekel keep changing the points and then selling them to the Frogs. So if someone is going to give it up for free, it will be me...excited by the prospect of a lady with five kids in Australia and a big farm to run driving her rig across her fields listening to my music. Let the lubing begin."
I suspect freedom of choice means we choose among options offered freely. So we better get busy figuring out what's good for us before those options are gone. The Hounds of Love are hunting. I can't tell if they're sniffing for a treat or a bite, but I'm still waiting for a new Kate Bush album, likely will until retirement, and as much as I love her music, I know it won't be free, but it will be worth the lube... with no problems.
"And I'm ashamed of running away
From nothing real.
I just can't deal with this,
But I'm still afraid to be there,
Among your Hounds of Love." [1]
[1] "The Hounds of Love" Kate Bush
Copyright 1985 - EMI America
Thursday, August 19, 2004
The Anti-Mammals
Anti-Mammals. We see them everywhere these days. They look like us but they aren't us. They are there to deride the optimistic, to hold back the creative, to yawn at the comedic, to express disgust when acts of love are on public display or in private bedrooms, to kill off genuine compliments with accusations of harrassment, to in every petty way possible kill the mammalian drives.
They are power mad because they are insecure. Like vampires, they are only strong at the very darkest times, and just a bit of sunshine drives them to their cliquish coffin clubs of elitism and secret assuaging of their perverse thirsts. Ever since 1975, they've been replicating themselves by cloning their original members, and genetic fading is starting to make them as mad as inbred dogs.
One would think that they would have become the objects of much comedy but instead, we continue to elect them to high posts because we somehow have mistaken their stolen wealth and pale pasty faces for signs of economic wisdom and spiritual enlightenment.
Now they believe information is the ultimate power so they've set their beady red eyes on the Internet. Pretty soon they'll be in control of all the routers and selling us closed box desktops with "no serviceable parts inside", using their tactics of calling anything they can't do 'useless or geeky', and otherwise holding up any piece of information that suggests something different from their viewpoint and calling it, "liberal". They harvest joy to produce boredom.
Laugh at them and blog on. Mammals thrive because we are warm-blooded and sexy and love our children more than our jobs. You don't have to party with the anti-mammals, and they won't invite you anyway unless they need to feed.
Just Say No.
They are power mad because they are insecure. Like vampires, they are only strong at the very darkest times, and just a bit of sunshine drives them to their cliquish coffin clubs of elitism and secret assuaging of their perverse thirsts. Ever since 1975, they've been replicating themselves by cloning their original members, and genetic fading is starting to make them as mad as inbred dogs.
One would think that they would have become the objects of much comedy but instead, we continue to elect them to high posts because we somehow have mistaken their stolen wealth and pale pasty faces for signs of economic wisdom and spiritual enlightenment.
Now they believe information is the ultimate power so they've set their beady red eyes on the Internet. Pretty soon they'll be in control of all the routers and selling us closed box desktops with "no serviceable parts inside", using their tactics of calling anything they can't do 'useless or geeky', and otherwise holding up any piece of information that suggests something different from their viewpoint and calling it, "liberal". They harvest joy to produce boredom.
Laugh at them and blog on. Mammals thrive because we are warm-blooded and sexy and love our children more than our jobs. You don't have to party with the anti-mammals, and they won't invite you anyway unless they need to feed.
Just Say No.
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
The Value of Our Values
Following on this article and the discussion of effective means, it is important to discuss the value of our values. This can turn into a long philosophical discussion, but my focus is on what should be understood in terms of our values as effective means to achieve fundamental objectives. To do this, we must understand first the effect of our values on interpreting facts before we select means.
When analyzing a situation, we bring our values to the analysis, often without noticing it, and this can color our analysis in various ways. Let's look at some historical examples. Most reasonable people would agree that peace is preferred to warfare and that when examining the historical record of a society at peace, we tend to admire the accomplishments of that society. This exemplifies the confusion of our fundamental values and objectives with our relative values and means. For the AI literate, think goals and subgoals and inheritable properties.
There is the case of the Chaco Canyon pueblos and the builders of these large and impressive buildings, the Anasazi. While many archaeologists and sociologists study the collapse of this civilization in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico, others study the reason for its rise, particularly, how was it organized and what motivated the building of the large ceremonial centers. Interestingly, when these were abandoned, they were burned. Even if drought and famine were causes for abandoning these, why were they burned?
Christy Turner proposes a simple explanation: cannibalism. Even more interesting is that the signature of the bones and other artifacts found at the sites incline Turner to suggest that a group of Central Americans from the area of what is now Mexico invaded the area of the Chaco Canyon and used the brutality of their culture to subdue the diverse and warring natives to submit to their rule and their terrifying religion. While the perpetrators and causes are debated, the Bones Test is fairly conclusive. Cannibalism and brutality were practiced at a possibly large scale and in an organized and systematic fashion. If so, burning the ceremonial centers once the freedom to do so was achieved is an understandable reaction. They weren't defensible and this population had come to understand the need for defense from their neighbors.
The evidence for the invasion is considered scanty by other archaeologists but there is much evidence of unthinkable brutality followed by a mass exodus during which the Anasazi became cliff dwellers. This is not unlike the strategy of the inhabitants of the Aegean islands who also retreated to the inhospitable cliffs to build villages during a series of invasions by the so-called Sea Peoples during the Bronze Age.
Brutality can be a very effective means of social control. We have many modern examples of this. What looked to the original investigators of the Chaco Canyon excavation and the Mayan digs as examples of a noble period of peace turn out to be peace by terror. This isn't rare. Archaeologists project their own values on to the surface evidence and as a result, can come to exactly the wrong conclusions about means.
Objective evaluation means we deal with the facts and not the spin. The recent 9/11 Commission hearings following the publication of the report have shown abundant examples of authorities attempting to spin the interpretation of the reports in favor of their own political careers. Yet as one lady who is a member of the group of families of the victims of 9/11, and whose persistence forced the creation of the commission over the objections of political incumbents noted, "Anyone who reads even the first fifty pages is mad. The jig is up. You have to do something now."
I digress, but I want to note that at the root of value-focused thinking is the concept that hidden objectives and confusing means objectives for fundamental objectives are primary causes of value systems that drift over time. Given situations of global importance, we must acquire and deal with the facts before we do the Bones Test to determine means. History is only a good teacher when it is a true history.
Peace itself as an objective can be attained by different means and the most stunning observations come of asking oneself:
How many historical examples of peace emerging by consent of the governed are there, and if this is rare, why?
What are the effects of means once the objective is achieved?
I leave the reader to ponder the first questions, but the second question has relevance to the events of recent years. Peace created by brutal means typically results in the emergence of a criminal element following the removal of the agents of such means. We can look to the former Soviet Republics, to the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare these to our own American historical experiences for examples. If we are to do better in the future we have to pay attention to and draw insights from the results of improper means at odds with fundamental objectives.
In the practice of law enforcement, and really, any governance where the governed do not consent by self-motivated cause, the use of force applied without regard to consequence has very predictable results. Further, when force is applied, the perception of the values of the leadership of the dominating force plays a powerful role in shaping the behaviors of the dominated when that force is withdrawn.
Understanding this is crucial to how America uses its power in the world and within its own borders. Let's look at a recent examples in the USA.
During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference attempted to desegregate Albany, Georgia. Here, King found that the perception of non-violence could be played both ways. Dr. King had
".. a formidable opponent in Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett. Pritchett ostensibly practiced the nonviolence that King preached, ordering his officers to avoid brutality, at least when the TV cameras and news reporters were present. Prepared for the waves of marchers King encouraged, Pritchett had them arrested and sent off to jails in the surrounding counties, including Baker, Mitchell, and Lee.
In the end King ran out of willing marchers before Pritchett ran out of jail space. Once again King got himself arrested, and once again he was let go. By early August it was clear that King had proved ineffective in bringing about change in Albany, but he had learned the important lessons that he and the SCLC would carry to Birmingham."
Dr. King believed that he had failed, although "black voter registration efforts were so successful that, two months after King left Albany, African American businessman Thomas Chatmon secured enough votes in the election for a city commission seat to force a run-off election. The following spring the city commission removed all the segregation statutes from its books." It would be in Birmingham, Alabama that Dr. King would find the perfect foil for the strategy of using non-violent protest to incite unwarranted use of force in the person of "Birmingham's public safety commissioner Eugene T. "Bull" Connor" who "advocated violence against freedom riders and ordered fire hoses and police dogs turned on demonstrators." While Sheriff Pritchett was no shining example of a man of justice, he was not an idiot who did not understand the strategy being played out in Albany or the effects of such means when "the whole world is watching."
Cultures and attitudes can change but they don't change all at once and in all places. It has taken the continuous pressure of the U.S. Federal government over many years in many places to change the American attitudes toward race. As someone who was born and grew up in Alabama during the period of desegregation, I thank God for such changes as have come about. Yet racism and violence continue to this day and that brings us to the next example of the use of force as ineffective and effective means.
Some six and half months before the event that would dominate global news and preoccupy the American people and government to this day, an event of some importance occurred. In April 2001, the city of Cincinnati experienced race riots on a scale so shocking that participants labeled it a 'race war'. There are differing interpretations of the causes and effects but there are some clear patterns and facts.
The Kerner Commission in 1968 and the mayoral report of 1979 concluded that the police and city officials did not care about incidents of police misconduct, particularly, the use of force. The 1981 report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights accused the Cincinnati police of discriminatory hiring practices and again criticized the lack of standards for use of force. Although the city, under Federal pressure, did hire blacks to the police force, in a 1995 case of brutality against a black student, the police review panel concluded that racism persisted in the force because of 'a reluctance to institute necessary organizational and procedural reforms.' From 1995 to 2001, there were fifteen fatal police shootings of black men and none of whites. When the riots erupted, they were fierce and almost unstoppable. It was the weather turning cold and rainy that finally stopped the action, not the law enforcement agencies.
Some facts are worthy of notice:
1. Of the fifteen, 14 were justifiable.
2. Sustaining the action was in part due to outside agencies helping to organize the riots, of note, the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panthers.
3. While the press called this a race riot, the rioters called it a war.
Regardless of the actions leading up to the event, once in motion, the facts did not matter. Over time, the brutality of the local police agencies had built up an insurmountable tinder and once lit, it sustained an incredibly destructive use of force.
The Department of Justice under Ashcroft investigated the matter and came to the conclusion that the remedy was precisely to modify the behavior of the use of force. In an earlier effort to combat racial profiling in Montgomery County, Maryland, the Reno department monitored traffic citations to detect patterns of racial profiling. This was not as effective because while one can use police report management systems to detect such patterns, changing a belief system is a difficult thing to do.
Modifying a behavior is a well-understood science known as operant conditioning. A feedback loop based on an observable behavior resulting in a predictable reward over a predictable time is established and monitored. This will shape the behavior to the desired state. Then, it is a matter of sustaining that behavior once the controls are removed. If the clear policies for the use of force are reflected in the gathering and analysis of incident reports in the police records management system, the desired behavior will be sustained.
After the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit, the Department of Justice and the city of Cincinnati signed a Memorandum of Agreement that set out conditions for reporting on any incident that involved the use of force. Strict policies were put in place to analyze and report on these incidents. Under the MOA, once the City could demonstrate for a specified period of time that the behaviors of the officers conformed to the policies for use of force, the City would be released from the agreement. This is an effective use of minimum control to modify a behavior. As an example of the use of force, it is dramatically effective.
One can read the ongoing quarterly reports from the DOJ monitor online. Remarkably and to the City and the police department's credit, this is working. This is an effective means.
Before concluding, I want to draw the attention of the readers to one more lesson from history. When Cortez marched on the Aztec rulers, he defeated a force much larger than the meager group of Spanish Conquistadors he brought with him. Some have speculated that it was superior fire power and tactics by the Spaniards, and others the diseases to which the native Americans had no resistance that were responsible for his success. These are not the facts. The fact was that the Aztecs had brutalized the native population and used them in ceremonial rituals of sacrifice for some generations. As in Chaco Canyon, brutality had ruled a people. Cortez found it a simple matter to go to the neighboring peoples and recruit them to his cause. When he marched on Tenochititlan, it was an easy victory because he had found a force multiplier in the hatred these people felt for their rulers.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend. A statement of intent is the surest indicator that an attempt will be made." These are words to the wise for those with ears to hear them about the war on global terrorism.
To conclude:
1. As George H.W. Bush noted about the first Gulf War, the use of force must be governed by clear policies before it is applied.
2. As noted in operant conditioning texts, use of negative reinforcement typically results in subsequent negative behavior even once the behavior to which the force was applied is extinguished. We must use positive means, sustain them, and pay the price of monitoring subsequent behaviors. Examples such as the monitoring of elections by groups led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter have proven the power of this means.
3. If America is to be a respected leader in the free world, its acts and its values must be in accord. We must not confuse means as fundamental objectives and the actions of our leaders must clearly reflect our values.
The value of our values is that they shape our objectives. If we are not clear about these objectives, then it is clear that our values have become confused as well. Until we can clarify these and communicate them to each other, we will continue to confuse the means of achieving peace with the acts of a peaceful nation. Doing this, our enemies will grow because they will discover the means to use our greatest strength, our fundamental value of the individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to trap us into a generation of conflict by making us unreasonably fearful of losing them.
While the use of force can be justified and be a reasonable means, it can also be an unreasonable objective if it does not produce a just and lasting peace. Our policies and our acts must reflect this understanding because once the conflict is in motion, the facts may not matter, and there are no cliffs we can live on that are high enough to protect us.
When analyzing a situation, we bring our values to the analysis, often without noticing it, and this can color our analysis in various ways. Let's look at some historical examples. Most reasonable people would agree that peace is preferred to warfare and that when examining the historical record of a society at peace, we tend to admire the accomplishments of that society. This exemplifies the confusion of our fundamental values and objectives with our relative values and means. For the AI literate, think goals and subgoals and inheritable properties.
There is the case of the Chaco Canyon pueblos and the builders of these large and impressive buildings, the Anasazi. While many archaeologists and sociologists study the collapse of this civilization in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico, others study the reason for its rise, particularly, how was it organized and what motivated the building of the large ceremonial centers. Interestingly, when these were abandoned, they were burned. Even if drought and famine were causes for abandoning these, why were they burned?
Christy Turner proposes a simple explanation: cannibalism. Even more interesting is that the signature of the bones and other artifacts found at the sites incline Turner to suggest that a group of Central Americans from the area of what is now Mexico invaded the area of the Chaco Canyon and used the brutality of their culture to subdue the diverse and warring natives to submit to their rule and their terrifying religion. While the perpetrators and causes are debated, the Bones Test is fairly conclusive. Cannibalism and brutality were practiced at a possibly large scale and in an organized and systematic fashion. If so, burning the ceremonial centers once the freedom to do so was achieved is an understandable reaction. They weren't defensible and this population had come to understand the need for defense from their neighbors.
The evidence for the invasion is considered scanty by other archaeologists but there is much evidence of unthinkable brutality followed by a mass exodus during which the Anasazi became cliff dwellers. This is not unlike the strategy of the inhabitants of the Aegean islands who also retreated to the inhospitable cliffs to build villages during a series of invasions by the so-called Sea Peoples during the Bronze Age.
Brutality can be a very effective means of social control. We have many modern examples of this. What looked to the original investigators of the Chaco Canyon excavation and the Mayan digs as examples of a noble period of peace turn out to be peace by terror. This isn't rare. Archaeologists project their own values on to the surface evidence and as a result, can come to exactly the wrong conclusions about means.
Objective evaluation means we deal with the facts and not the spin. The recent 9/11 Commission hearings following the publication of the report have shown abundant examples of authorities attempting to spin the interpretation of the reports in favor of their own political careers. Yet as one lady who is a member of the group of families of the victims of 9/11, and whose persistence forced the creation of the commission over the objections of political incumbents noted, "Anyone who reads even the first fifty pages is mad. The jig is up. You have to do something now."
I digress, but I want to note that at the root of value-focused thinking is the concept that hidden objectives and confusing means objectives for fundamental objectives are primary causes of value systems that drift over time. Given situations of global importance, we must acquire and deal with the facts before we do the Bones Test to determine means. History is only a good teacher when it is a true history.
Peace itself as an objective can be attained by different means and the most stunning observations come of asking oneself:
I leave the reader to ponder the first questions, but the second question has relevance to the events of recent years. Peace created by brutal means typically results in the emergence of a criminal element following the removal of the agents of such means. We can look to the former Soviet Republics, to the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare these to our own American historical experiences for examples. If we are to do better in the future we have to pay attention to and draw insights from the results of improper means at odds with fundamental objectives.
In the practice of law enforcement, and really, any governance where the governed do not consent by self-motivated cause, the use of force applied without regard to consequence has very predictable results. Further, when force is applied, the perception of the values of the leadership of the dominating force plays a powerful role in shaping the behaviors of the dominated when that force is withdrawn.
Understanding this is crucial to how America uses its power in the world and within its own borders. Let's look at a recent examples in the USA.
During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference attempted to desegregate Albany, Georgia. Here, King found that the perception of non-violence could be played both ways. Dr. King had
".. a formidable opponent in Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett. Pritchett ostensibly practiced the nonviolence that King preached, ordering his officers to avoid brutality, at least when the TV cameras and news reporters were present. Prepared for the waves of marchers King encouraged, Pritchett had them arrested and sent off to jails in the surrounding counties, including Baker, Mitchell, and Lee.
In the end King ran out of willing marchers before Pritchett ran out of jail space. Once again King got himself arrested, and once again he was let go. By early August it was clear that King had proved ineffective in bringing about change in Albany, but he had learned the important lessons that he and the SCLC would carry to Birmingham."
Dr. King believed that he had failed, although "black voter registration efforts were so successful that, two months after King left Albany, African American businessman Thomas Chatmon secured enough votes in the election for a city commission seat to force a run-off election. The following spring the city commission removed all the segregation statutes from its books." It would be in Birmingham, Alabama that Dr. King would find the perfect foil for the strategy of using non-violent protest to incite unwarranted use of force in the person of "Birmingham's public safety commissioner Eugene T. "Bull" Connor" who "advocated violence against freedom riders and ordered fire hoses and police dogs turned on demonstrators." While Sheriff Pritchett was no shining example of a man of justice, he was not an idiot who did not understand the strategy being played out in Albany or the effects of such means when "the whole world is watching."
Cultures and attitudes can change but they don't change all at once and in all places. It has taken the continuous pressure of the U.S. Federal government over many years in many places to change the American attitudes toward race. As someone who was born and grew up in Alabama during the period of desegregation, I thank God for such changes as have come about. Yet racism and violence continue to this day and that brings us to the next example of the use of force as ineffective and effective means.
Some six and half months before the event that would dominate global news and preoccupy the American people and government to this day, an event of some importance occurred. In April 2001, the city of Cincinnati experienced race riots on a scale so shocking that participants labeled it a 'race war'. There are differing interpretations of the causes and effects but there are some clear patterns and facts.
The Kerner Commission in 1968 and the mayoral report of 1979 concluded that the police and city officials did not care about incidents of police misconduct, particularly, the use of force. The 1981 report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights accused the Cincinnati police of discriminatory hiring practices and again criticized the lack of standards for use of force. Although the city, under Federal pressure, did hire blacks to the police force, in a 1995 case of brutality against a black student, the police review panel concluded that racism persisted in the force because of 'a reluctance to institute necessary organizational and procedural reforms.' From 1995 to 2001, there were fifteen fatal police shootings of black men and none of whites. When the riots erupted, they were fierce and almost unstoppable. It was the weather turning cold and rainy that finally stopped the action, not the law enforcement agencies.
Some facts are worthy of notice:
1. Of the fifteen, 14 were justifiable.
2. Sustaining the action was in part due to outside agencies helping to organize the riots, of note, the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panthers.
3. While the press called this a race riot, the rioters called it a war.
Regardless of the actions leading up to the event, once in motion, the facts did not matter. Over time, the brutality of the local police agencies had built up an insurmountable tinder and once lit, it sustained an incredibly destructive use of force.
The Department of Justice under Ashcroft investigated the matter and came to the conclusion that the remedy was precisely to modify the behavior of the use of force. In an earlier effort to combat racial profiling in Montgomery County, Maryland, the Reno department monitored traffic citations to detect patterns of racial profiling. This was not as effective because while one can use police report management systems to detect such patterns, changing a belief system is a difficult thing to do.
Modifying a behavior is a well-understood science known as operant conditioning. A feedback loop based on an observable behavior resulting in a predictable reward over a predictable time is established and monitored. This will shape the behavior to the desired state. Then, it is a matter of sustaining that behavior once the controls are removed. If the clear policies for the use of force are reflected in the gathering and analysis of incident reports in the police records management system, the desired behavior will be sustained.
After the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit, the Department of Justice and the city of Cincinnati signed a Memorandum of Agreement that set out conditions for reporting on any incident that involved the use of force. Strict policies were put in place to analyze and report on these incidents. Under the MOA, once the City could demonstrate for a specified period of time that the behaviors of the officers conformed to the policies for use of force, the City would be released from the agreement. This is an effective use of minimum control to modify a behavior. As an example of the use of force, it is dramatically effective.
One can read the ongoing quarterly reports from the DOJ monitor online. Remarkably and to the City and the police department's credit, this is working. This is an effective means.
Before concluding, I want to draw the attention of the readers to one more lesson from history. When Cortez marched on the Aztec rulers, he defeated a force much larger than the meager group of Spanish Conquistadors he brought with him. Some have speculated that it was superior fire power and tactics by the Spaniards, and others the diseases to which the native Americans had no resistance that were responsible for his success. These are not the facts. The fact was that the Aztecs had brutalized the native population and used them in ceremonial rituals of sacrifice for some generations. As in Chaco Canyon, brutality had ruled a people. Cortez found it a simple matter to go to the neighboring peoples and recruit them to his cause. When he marched on Tenochititlan, it was an easy victory because he had found a force multiplier in the hatred these people felt for their rulers.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend. A statement of intent is the surest indicator that an attempt will be made." These are words to the wise for those with ears to hear them about the war on global terrorism.
To conclude:
1. As George H.W. Bush noted about the first Gulf War, the use of force must be governed by clear policies before it is applied.
2. As noted in operant conditioning texts, use of negative reinforcement typically results in subsequent negative behavior even once the behavior to which the force was applied is extinguished. We must use positive means, sustain them, and pay the price of monitoring subsequent behaviors. Examples such as the monitoring of elections by groups led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter have proven the power of this means.
3. If America is to be a respected leader in the free world, its acts and its values must be in accord. We must not confuse means as fundamental objectives and the actions of our leaders must clearly reflect our values.
The value of our values is that they shape our objectives. If we are not clear about these objectives, then it is clear that our values have become confused as well. Until we can clarify these and communicate them to each other, we will continue to confuse the means of achieving peace with the acts of a peaceful nation. Doing this, our enemies will grow because they will discover the means to use our greatest strength, our fundamental value of the individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to trap us into a generation of conflict by making us unreasonably fearful of losing them.
While the use of force can be justified and be a reasonable means, it can also be an unreasonable objective if it does not produce a just and lasting peace. Our policies and our acts must reflect this understanding because once the conflict is in motion, the facts may not matter, and there are no cliffs we can live on that are high enough to protect us.
Saturday, August 14, 2004
A Million Monkeys Typing
C-Span just wrapped up its political blogging segment. Experts who's names I don't know commented liberally on the blogging experience. They talked well about the power of link aggregation, the conversation, the difference between this media and others, and so on. As they closed one said jokingly, "A million monkeys typing" .
I only heard the Ad Sense ads mentioned once.
From an information ecosystem point of view, the Ad Sense ads are fascinating. Google algorithms are introducing my opinions to other people's products. My topics interact with the Google algorithms selecting ads to put there. Topics are pulling an economic selector across the intersection of links and aggregators. This is not a blithe unawareness but automation becoming choosy about the things it presents based on the topical environment in which it presents it.
The topics are in symbiosis with a sustaining artificial intelligence that will modify them. As We May Think becomes just the beginning of the evolution of thought because by selection, the blogosphere is modifying itself.
A Turing test it isn't. A difference that makes a difference it is. It isn't just monkeys typing. Blogging is typewriters typing monkeys.
I only heard the Ad Sense ads mentioned once.
From an information ecosystem point of view, the Ad Sense ads are fascinating. Google algorithms are introducing my opinions to other people's products. My topics interact with the Google algorithms selecting ads to put there. Topics are pulling an economic selector across the intersection of links and aggregators. This is not a blithe unawareness but automation becoming choosy about the things it presents based on the topical environment in which it presents it.
The topics are in symbiosis with a sustaining artificial intelligence that will modify them. As We May Think becomes just the beginning of the evolution of thought because by selection, the blogosphere is modifying itself.
A Turing test it isn't. A difference that makes a difference it is. It isn't just monkeys typing. Blogging is typewriters typing monkeys.
Friday, August 13, 2004
Bound
She said, 'What is mind'? I am/have been in
this path of spirituality for a very long time,
and i do not seem to be able to let it go.
It says "The soul may be defined
as the clear reflection
of Infinite Consciousness
and it reflects on the mind."
He told her,
"All things pass.
Some with pain.
Some with joy.
All with growth.
If the soul is the reflection of the Infinite
Then the light is not the reflection.
It is the light.
Do not mourn the mind or the soul.
The light is infinite."
len
this path of spirituality for a very long time,
and i do not seem to be able to let it go.
It says "The soul may be defined
as the clear reflection
of Infinite Consciousness
and it reflects on the mind."
He told her,
"All things pass.
Some with pain.
Some with joy.
All with growth.
If the soul is the reflection of the Infinite
Then the light is not the reflection.
It is the light.
Do not mourn the mind or the soul.
The light is infinite."
len
You Got To Fight The Blue Meanies
If its the time
Or the place
Or the style
Or the terrible confusion
You Got To Fight the Blue Meanies
You Got To Fight the Blue Meanies
When its the rock
And the sound
And the words
And the heart that beats between 'em
You Got To Fight the Blue Meanies
You Got to Fight The Blue Meanies
'cause its the thought
That holds you up
That takes you round
That makes you wince
That smooths the word
When its right
When its sparse
In the groove
It takes you down
It makes you small
It fills your dreams with
The One
Who holds you up
Who holds you up
Who frees your soul of the world.
How it owns you?
You Got To Fight the Blue Meanies
You Got to Fight the Blue Meanies
len
Or the place
Or the style
Or the terrible confusion
You Got To Fight the Blue Meanies
You Got To Fight the Blue Meanies
When its the rock
And the sound
And the words
And the heart that beats between 'em
You Got To Fight the Blue Meanies
You Got to Fight The Blue Meanies
'cause its the thought
That holds you up
That takes you round
That makes you wince
That smooths the word
When its right
When its sparse
In the groove
It takes you down
It makes you small
It fills your dreams with
The One
Who holds you up
Who holds you up
Who frees your soul of the world.
How it owns you?
You Got To Fight the Blue Meanies
You Got to Fight the Blue Meanies
len
Thursday, August 12, 2004
The Fair Witness
The day started today at 4AM, then to work at 6AM and into a meeting with the new president of the division at 8. It's 2PM now and I'm a bit bleary eyed because old guys like me just don't bounce back as far as we once did. Recording that here is a way of remembering it later. Why? I dunno, days when a career shifts gears should be remembered if for no other reason than tax purposes. On the other hand, anyone who googles themself and finds out just how much they said that is recorded and cached and commented on starts quickly to wish the Web could learn to forget as well as it remembers.
How much should we remember and how much should we forget? The age old cacheing problem will be with us forever, but situationally, when should we remember for others and how will we be sure what we remember is what we experienced? The mammal brain is notorious for its distortions due to the effect of neurons linking up in incredibly complex and overlapping ways, enscribing over each other like an Arabesque in which the pattern though beautiful, is exceedingly difficult and expensive to trace. This makes law enforcement tasks difficult, really, justice tasks where one goes to court or is hauled in and two adversaries, a prosecutor and a defender attempt to prove to a judge and/or jury, the facts of the case.
Facts are hard to come by if the mammalian brain is the storage medium. Both sides know this and elaborate tactics are used to discredit witnesses. We've all seen that movie. This is exactly why police cruisers have video cameras that are turned on during a traffic stop, and the video is then attached to the traffic stop record. It saves time in court.
Many years ago, I read a sci-fi story that included the concept of The Fair Witness. These were trained observers used in future litigations to state the facts of some situation they observed. Their training enabled them to overcome the dendrite dance and recall with perfect accuracy, the facts of a case. Given that humans share signs but can't be relied upon to share interpretants, this takes a lot of training. Actually, police do train for this, but what if we could engineer a way to increase the reliability of this, that is, more effective means?
Some folks are working on it. While one wonders about the indexing and retrieval, a URI with a space-time stamp isn't a bad approach and would work with geolocator systems for integrated analysis. This could fit in nicely with data fusion systems. I'm not too sure how much of my daily life I want to be digitized, in fact, I'm sure I don't want that, but if the police have similar systems in cruisers, why not put one on the t-shirt before going to any mob event, or just to confront the neighbor about the poop their dog is leaving on the lawn? Or just a walk on the beach?
Thanks to Steve Conklin for pointing this out. Once again, the mammals are relentlessly innovative and that is why AI has such a hard time keeping up.
How much should we remember and how much should we forget? The age old cacheing problem will be with us forever, but situationally, when should we remember for others and how will we be sure what we remember is what we experienced? The mammal brain is notorious for its distortions due to the effect of neurons linking up in incredibly complex and overlapping ways, enscribing over each other like an Arabesque in which the pattern though beautiful, is exceedingly difficult and expensive to trace. This makes law enforcement tasks difficult, really, justice tasks where one goes to court or is hauled in and two adversaries, a prosecutor and a defender attempt to prove to a judge and/or jury, the facts of the case.
Facts are hard to come by if the mammalian brain is the storage medium. Both sides know this and elaborate tactics are used to discredit witnesses. We've all seen that movie. This is exactly why police cruisers have video cameras that are turned on during a traffic stop, and the video is then attached to the traffic stop record. It saves time in court.
Many years ago, I read a sci-fi story that included the concept of The Fair Witness. These were trained observers used in future litigations to state the facts of some situation they observed. Their training enabled them to overcome the dendrite dance and recall with perfect accuracy, the facts of a case. Given that humans share signs but can't be relied upon to share interpretants, this takes a lot of training. Actually, police do train for this, but what if we could engineer a way to increase the reliability of this, that is, more effective means?
Some folks are working on it. While one wonders about the indexing and retrieval, a URI with a space-time stamp isn't a bad approach and would work with geolocator systems for integrated analysis. This could fit in nicely with data fusion systems. I'm not too sure how much of my daily life I want to be digitized, in fact, I'm sure I don't want that, but if the police have similar systems in cruisers, why not put one on the t-shirt before going to any mob event, or just to confront the neighbor about the poop their dog is leaving on the lawn? Or just a walk on the beach?
Thanks to Steve Conklin for pointing this out. Once again, the mammals are relentlessly innovative and that is why AI has such a hard time keeping up.
It's Just Sex
Anyone who has been divorced, watched a divorce, or divorced someone knows it is one of the most painful experiences this side of losing someone to death. It is a kind of death. People will do and say the most incredibly hurtful and stupid things to anyone and everyone particularly if they can't say it to the now insignificant other. The social problem is that while most of us have sympathy, it is a local problem and it tends to distract all about them onto the spilt milk of a relationship gone bad when it is possible that there are other more important things to be done.
American politics have looked like a divorce in process since 1992 when the Republicans were shocked to discover that the love affair with the Reagan aministration didn't translate to George Herbert Walker Bush. It wasn't that Bush wasn't a good guy or a decent President. He was the perfect Washington wonk, a credible authority, and fine war time President. This man had punched all the tickets from Yale to the CIA, had made a personal fortune doing it, and served his country with distinction. No, it was simply the Americans are also mammals and mammals have a wandering eye. They don't like boredom and when it is time for a change, the facts don't matter.
For the ultra-religious right, which is not to say the spriritual right, but the real power-obsessed-we-are-the-rightful-reagan-inheritors, the defeat of George H.W. Bush was an obscenity of the first order. With the same crusader mentality that lead them to declare an unwinnable war on drugs with a slogan that made even the drug dealers laugh, they went to work on the American psyche like a graphics card salesman at Siggraph. It wasn't enough to make their viewpoints known; they had to show that all other viewpoints were despicable.
So began the evisceration of the Clintons.
I won't dwell on that carnival of abuse of power, conceit, and outright treachery, aka, the politics of personal destruction, because, well, Bill Clinton is out of office. He has served his two terms and he's not coming back, at least, as holder of the Oval office. He's making money now, his wife has a solid day job, and his only child is off to the races of life. Bill's enjoying himself. So much for personal destruction.
The problem is in the Beltway and the pundit pulpits. Some in the current administration act and speak as if they were still running against him, and in that, they resemble a divorced spouse who just can't get over it and get on with it. The problem is that this behavior is distinctly painful for their friends and their causes. So be it. No one can save an incompetent politician. Who says that? Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich says that and he ought to know.
The problem we all have to face is there in the 9/11 Commission Report on page 105: "the oversight function of the Congress has diminished over time. In recent years, traditional review of the administration of programs and the implementation of laws has been replaced by a 'focus on personal investigations, possible scandals, and issues designed to generate media attention.' The unglamorous but essential work of oversight has been neglected..."
Newt is a sharp guy and despite his party or the left's loathing, his testimony before the government committees has value. He correctly assesses the job before them today as the most important work of their lifetimes, much less their careers, and the most difficult they will ever undertake. Right on, Newt.
It it time to turn off Fox Network, time to quit listening to Rush, to Hannity and Whosis, to the spin doctors of right wing politics. It is time to turn on C-Span and watch the hearings. Dull as they are, the most important decisions made since America became a Federation are being made. This isn't about the election although it plays a major role in it. This is about how we will govern ourselves, what our freedoms are or will be in the face of a stateless and determined foe, and at the bottom of it, whether we are a nation of mature and responsible adults or just kids squabbling over the end of our first marriage and who gets the Bruce Springsteen CDs.
We blew it. We watched a soap opera instead of the store and as a result, we took a brutal blow to the head from a street gang. Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky may have been sordid in some opinions, but at the end of the day, it was just sex and sex is what being a mammal is all about. Consensual sex isn't something to be made a topic of national debate, and certainly, it isn't the object of Congressional oversight. There is real work to be done.
American politics have looked like a divorce in process since 1992 when the Republicans were shocked to discover that the love affair with the Reagan aministration didn't translate to George Herbert Walker Bush. It wasn't that Bush wasn't a good guy or a decent President. He was the perfect Washington wonk, a credible authority, and fine war time President. This man had punched all the tickets from Yale to the CIA, had made a personal fortune doing it, and served his country with distinction. No, it was simply the Americans are also mammals and mammals have a wandering eye. They don't like boredom and when it is time for a change, the facts don't matter.
For the ultra-religious right, which is not to say the spriritual right, but the real power-obsessed-we-are-the-rightful-reagan-inheritors, the defeat of George H.W. Bush was an obscenity of the first order. With the same crusader mentality that lead them to declare an unwinnable war on drugs with a slogan that made even the drug dealers laugh, they went to work on the American psyche like a graphics card salesman at Siggraph. It wasn't enough to make their viewpoints known; they had to show that all other viewpoints were despicable.
So began the evisceration of the Clintons.
I won't dwell on that carnival of abuse of power, conceit, and outright treachery, aka, the politics of personal destruction, because, well, Bill Clinton is out of office. He has served his two terms and he's not coming back, at least, as holder of the Oval office. He's making money now, his wife has a solid day job, and his only child is off to the races of life. Bill's enjoying himself. So much for personal destruction.
The problem is in the Beltway and the pundit pulpits. Some in the current administration act and speak as if they were still running against him, and in that, they resemble a divorced spouse who just can't get over it and get on with it. The problem is that this behavior is distinctly painful for their friends and their causes. So be it. No one can save an incompetent politician. Who says that? Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich says that and he ought to know.
The problem we all have to face is there in the 9/11 Commission Report on page 105: "the oversight function of the Congress has diminished over time. In recent years, traditional review of the administration of programs and the implementation of laws has been replaced by a 'focus on personal investigations, possible scandals, and issues designed to generate media attention.' The unglamorous but essential work of oversight has been neglected..."
Newt is a sharp guy and despite his party or the left's loathing, his testimony before the government committees has value. He correctly assesses the job before them today as the most important work of their lifetimes, much less their careers, and the most difficult they will ever undertake. Right on, Newt.
It it time to turn off Fox Network, time to quit listening to Rush, to Hannity and Whosis, to the spin doctors of right wing politics. It is time to turn on C-Span and watch the hearings. Dull as they are, the most important decisions made since America became a Federation are being made. This isn't about the election although it plays a major role in it. This is about how we will govern ourselves, what our freedoms are or will be in the face of a stateless and determined foe, and at the bottom of it, whether we are a nation of mature and responsible adults or just kids squabbling over the end of our first marriage and who gets the Bruce Springsteen CDs.
We blew it. We watched a soap opera instead of the store and as a result, we took a brutal blow to the head from a street gang. Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky may have been sordid in some opinions, but at the end of the day, it was just sex and sex is what being a mammal is all about. Consensual sex isn't something to be made a topic of national debate, and certainly, it isn't the object of Congressional oversight. There is real work to be done.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Simple Systems: Effective Means
A topic sometimes debated on XML-Dev is that "worse is better", but the real topic is "simple is often better". Not always, but often. There are lots of examples from HTML (not so simple anymore), blogging formats, and further back, T-34 Soviet tanks, and not so far back, pagers. As one reads about 9/11 it quickly becomes apparent that the more sophisticated systems failed most frequently. The simpler systems like pagers were more effective but unfortunately, least distributed.
For those of us in the public safety industry, this is a lesson to be taken to heart. Command and control are worthless without communications and intelligence. While the dispatch center does thrive on sophisticated mapping and analysis technology, a command is most effective when it is presented in its simplest imperative form, such as, EVACUATE NOW!
For those of us in the public safety industry, this is a lesson to be taken to heart. Command and control are worthless without communications and intelligence. While the dispatch center does thrive on sophisticated mapping and analysis technology, a command is most effective when it is presented in its simplest imperative form, such as, EVACUATE NOW!
Monday, August 09, 2004
If I Only Had A Brain
Reflecting on Teresa Heinz Kerry's speech at the Democratic National convention, it occurs to me that people without opinions make me nervous. Regardless of where they formed them, why or with whatever facts or fictions, forming an opinion is part of being a mammal. Even the gorillas in the zoo form and express opinions. People who say they have no opinion are only saying they won't express one.
I can understand the need for timing but that means there is intent and often if someone is saying they have no opinion they are saying a) they have not considered the question or b) they have and they want to hide their intentions with regards to something that the expression might reveal.
Such as having a brain.
The time of political correctness and obsessive careerism seems to be a time of learning to be the Scarecrow. We wish our heads were not made of straw, and we certainly can express our heartfelt emotions, but we are too cowardly or too witchy to use our brains. Today the Emerald City within the Beltway has become a land where all horses change their colors with the time of day, serious debate too often looks like a choreographed dance number, and no one knows what is going on behind the big doors where Oz, the Great and Powerful, is ensconced pulling the levers of power without clear purpose.
We live with too much fear of our thoughts and too much fear of being thought too opinionated. I suppose that living in a bubble is ok for Glinda the Good but houses fall from the sky and the victims aren't always wicked witches. Sometimes they are Munchkins and forests, the air we breathe, and the roads we drive on. Ms. Heinz Kerry seems destined to be Dorothy, brave and fearless and able to slap a cowardly lion or a crass reporter on the nose when threatened.
Rail on, Teresa. If we are ever to make Oz a safer world, we need to hear what you and women like you have to say.
I can understand the need for timing but that means there is intent and often if someone is saying they have no opinion they are saying a) they have not considered the question or b) they have and they want to hide their intentions with regards to something that the expression might reveal.
Such as having a brain.
The time of political correctness and obsessive careerism seems to be a time of learning to be the Scarecrow. We wish our heads were not made of straw, and we certainly can express our heartfelt emotions, but we are too cowardly or too witchy to use our brains. Today the Emerald City within the Beltway has become a land where all horses change their colors with the time of day, serious debate too often looks like a choreographed dance number, and no one knows what is going on behind the big doors where Oz, the Great and Powerful, is ensconced pulling the levers of power without clear purpose.
We live with too much fear of our thoughts and too much fear of being thought too opinionated. I suppose that living in a bubble is ok for Glinda the Good but houses fall from the sky and the victims aren't always wicked witches. Sometimes they are Munchkins and forests, the air we breathe, and the roads we drive on. Ms. Heinz Kerry seems destined to be Dorothy, brave and fearless and able to slap a cowardly lion or a crass reporter on the nose when threatened.
Rail on, Teresa. If we are ever to make Oz a safer world, we need to hear what you and women like you have to say.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Intellectual Property: A Global Concern
Tim Bray writes
"But what I really worry about is the basic broken-ness of the US Patent system. It’s sucking money and time and resources out of the whole technology ecosystem; it’s a bleeding sore on our business and our culture and our people. It’s way past time to fix it."
I agree. The IP Wars are a cancer on our economies. I believe that unless we fix the global patent system, reforming the US patent system avoids the larger problems.
1. International recognition of kinds and types of property rights
2. International recognition of the states of property rights
3. International regulations for the collection and distribution of licensing fees.
We are both engineers who have worked for most of our careers to create, evoke, or otherwise recognize the power of international standards. Yet we both also recognize that technology is not governed wholly by standards. If we are to have international agreements to govern the kinds, types, states, and regulations, we need systems that implement these at least as well as we implement web browsers.
For while we both know that the development of the web technology must be followed by the standards and specifications that enable these to be developed by anyone with the skill and moxie, we recognize the need for simplicity, particularly in systems that must scale to be most effective. The challenge for nations, courts, and industries and the people that govern nations, rule in courts, and create product for all of these is to discover the simplest and most universally accepted laws for intellectual property in all forms.
It is time to recognize and administer intellectual property in a global system.
The goal of the means is to ensure fairness, accuracy, clarity, and transparency but above all, to lower costs. If this goal is met, the system will right itself.
"But what I really worry about is the basic broken-ness of the US Patent system. It’s sucking money and time and resources out of the whole technology ecosystem; it’s a bleeding sore on our business and our culture and our people. It’s way past time to fix it."
I agree. The IP Wars are a cancer on our economies. I believe that unless we fix the global patent system, reforming the US patent system avoids the larger problems.
1. International recognition of kinds and types of property rights
2. International recognition of the states of property rights
3. International regulations for the collection and distribution of licensing fees.
We are both engineers who have worked for most of our careers to create, evoke, or otherwise recognize the power of international standards. Yet we both also recognize that technology is not governed wholly by standards. If we are to have international agreements to govern the kinds, types, states, and regulations, we need systems that implement these at least as well as we implement web browsers.
For while we both know that the development of the web technology must be followed by the standards and specifications that enable these to be developed by anyone with the skill and moxie, we recognize the need for simplicity, particularly in systems that must scale to be most effective. The challenge for nations, courts, and industries and the people that govern nations, rule in courts, and create product for all of these is to discover the simplest and most universally accepted laws for intellectual property in all forms.
It is time to recognize and administer intellectual property in a global system.
- The URI is the key.
- Google and systems like it point the way.
- The Semantic Web is the means.
The goal of the means is to ensure fairness, accuracy, clarity, and transparency but above all, to lower costs. If this goal is met, the system will right itself.
Friday, August 06, 2004
Free Range Democrats
"One generation got old.
One generation got sold.
This generation's got no destination to hold.
Pick up your prize."
- The Jefferson Airplane
I live in Alabama. The only time I've voted for a Republican for President was in 1972 when I was eighteen and voting in my first presidential election. The candidate, of course, was old Tricky Dick himself. When asked by my friends why I would vote for someone thought even then to be a scurilous S.O.B., I said, "He is an S.O.B. but he's our S.O.B." The point was that at that time with VietNam still waiting for young Southern boys like me fresh out of high school ROTC, there was a six thousand mile long logistics train running thin into Southeast Asia. As a military student and having had two brothers go and return from in country, I knew exactly what this was about and while I would not sign up as a C.O. (conscientious objector), neither was I eager to get on that big silver bird and find myself snuffing through the Mekong or the Ho Chi Minh trail. Call it fear or common sense, but unbeknownst to me, my brothers were hatching a plot to grab my young behind and schlep it across the Canadian border. With a very very low draft number, it looked like my time was coming when my lucky vote cashed in and Nixon stopped the draft. We needed an S.O.B. to get us out of VietNam, and he was the Man.
All of that is a long winded way to say that I am a Free Range Democrat. Democrats are exceedingly rare in this state that distinguished itself in the last few years by passing laws against selling sex toys, attempting to ban the use of diminished fifths in music (there goes "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"), three times refusing to allow state lotteries to support education, banning the airing of the ABC special honoring the fallen soldiers in Iraq, and refusing 9 to 1 to watch the Democratic Convention. You just thought George Wallace was the worst we could do. No one out Bubba's the BamaBubbas.
If there is a place further to the right than Alabama, it could only be Texas and as they say, Texas is just Hell without the inconveniences.
You can spot Free Range Democrats easily at a distance. They resemble feral dogs that live in the desert with wisps of hair hanging loosely off their heads, and panting as if the next breath will be their last. Somehow they survive even though they are hunted for sport and pleasure. Twenty years ago, they were numberless and the most powerful domestic herd animals in the American South. Ronald Reagan was their downfall. After Jimmy Carter sinned in his heart, and then the Great Obsfuscator told them that their best behinds were before them and trickled down on their Ford pickups, the squarest dancers obediently aleman'd right and doe-si-doed all to the sound of their rowdy friends coming round with red ties, dark suits, and close-cropped haircuts. Now they are the New South, rich, successful, ultra-protestant and always willing to help a neighbor skin a deer or skim a profit. These dogs are now every bit the modern Republican.
Over time, the ranks of the Free Range Democrats dwindled to just the few bewildered dreamers you see before you. They seem to be the same people I saw in my youth at bong parties and working at the local waterbed store where I upholstered waterbeds. (No joke. Someone actually did have to figure how to wrap the vinyl around the pad and staple it to the frame without leaving a point that would puncture the mattress. It's a real craft.) They seldom gather in large numbers because the Republicans won't allow them to hold events that would attract large numbers, and because beer is too expensive to throw away. The mainstream Democratic Party has written them off and I don't expect the Calvacade of Rock Stars to come closer than 200 miles to the Great State of AlaBubba.
On the other hand, Free Range Democrats are the masters of dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Survival and dead dendrites do that to impounded animals. "Something's happenin' here.." the Buffalo Springfield sang to us long long ago, and you know what, something's happening again.
Last weekend I attended the second wedding of an old friend from my theatre freak days. The wedding was just an excuse to get a party beneath the Republican radar. Even the Blue Meanies had to sleep sometime. All the talk was of ways to take the Shrubs out of Washington. These lop-eared vermin were excited. Young kids listened as adults who have spent most of the last twelve years asleep on their couches plotted guerilla art tactics to get out the vote. They covered the windows in black plastic just as they did in their youth, but instead of pulling out bags, they put a DVD into their computer and used a full screen projector to view Frankenheimer's "Manchurian Candidate" in glorious black and white and surround sound on the living room wall. More sober and more studied than I've seen them, the Free Range Democrats have a cause.
And they live for a cause.
"America, where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
America, we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster."
- Steppenwolf
The Volunteers for America are back on the streets.
In an election that could come down to the dregs of the vote, the Dixie Dregs are oiling up their axes, putting up signs, wearing buttons, and writing their blogs. If it all goes as planned, we'll be able to achieve something really wonderful... we'll bring back the Dixie Chicks.
One generation got sold.
This generation's got no destination to hold.
Pick up your prize."
- The Jefferson Airplane
I live in Alabama. The only time I've voted for a Republican for President was in 1972 when I was eighteen and voting in my first presidential election. The candidate, of course, was old Tricky Dick himself. When asked by my friends why I would vote for someone thought even then to be a scurilous S.O.B., I said, "He is an S.O.B. but he's our S.O.B." The point was that at that time with VietNam still waiting for young Southern boys like me fresh out of high school ROTC, there was a six thousand mile long logistics train running thin into Southeast Asia. As a military student and having had two brothers go and return from in country, I knew exactly what this was about and while I would not sign up as a C.O. (conscientious objector), neither was I eager to get on that big silver bird and find myself snuffing through the Mekong or the Ho Chi Minh trail. Call it fear or common sense, but unbeknownst to me, my brothers were hatching a plot to grab my young behind and schlep it across the Canadian border. With a very very low draft number, it looked like my time was coming when my lucky vote cashed in and Nixon stopped the draft. We needed an S.O.B. to get us out of VietNam, and he was the Man.
All of that is a long winded way to say that I am a Free Range Democrat. Democrats are exceedingly rare in this state that distinguished itself in the last few years by passing laws against selling sex toys, attempting to ban the use of diminished fifths in music (there goes "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"), three times refusing to allow state lotteries to support education, banning the airing of the ABC special honoring the fallen soldiers in Iraq, and refusing 9 to 1 to watch the Democratic Convention. You just thought George Wallace was the worst we could do. No one out Bubba's the BamaBubbas.
If there is a place further to the right than Alabama, it could only be Texas and as they say, Texas is just Hell without the inconveniences.
You can spot Free Range Democrats easily at a distance. They resemble feral dogs that live in the desert with wisps of hair hanging loosely off their heads, and panting as if the next breath will be their last. Somehow they survive even though they are hunted for sport and pleasure. Twenty years ago, they were numberless and the most powerful domestic herd animals in the American South. Ronald Reagan was their downfall. After Jimmy Carter sinned in his heart, and then the Great Obsfuscator told them that their best behinds were before them and trickled down on their Ford pickups, the squarest dancers obediently aleman'd right and doe-si-doed all to the sound of their rowdy friends coming round with red ties, dark suits, and close-cropped haircuts. Now they are the New South, rich, successful, ultra-protestant and always willing to help a neighbor skin a deer or skim a profit. These dogs are now every bit the modern Republican.
Over time, the ranks of the Free Range Democrats dwindled to just the few bewildered dreamers you see before you. They seem to be the same people I saw in my youth at bong parties and working at the local waterbed store where I upholstered waterbeds. (No joke. Someone actually did have to figure how to wrap the vinyl around the pad and staple it to the frame without leaving a point that would puncture the mattress. It's a real craft.) They seldom gather in large numbers because the Republicans won't allow them to hold events that would attract large numbers, and because beer is too expensive to throw away. The mainstream Democratic Party has written them off and I don't expect the Calvacade of Rock Stars to come closer than 200 miles to the Great State of AlaBubba.
On the other hand, Free Range Democrats are the masters of dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Survival and dead dendrites do that to impounded animals. "Something's happenin' here.." the Buffalo Springfield sang to us long long ago, and you know what, something's happening again.
Last weekend I attended the second wedding of an old friend from my theatre freak days. The wedding was just an excuse to get a party beneath the Republican radar. Even the Blue Meanies had to sleep sometime. All the talk was of ways to take the Shrubs out of Washington. These lop-eared vermin were excited. Young kids listened as adults who have spent most of the last twelve years asleep on their couches plotted guerilla art tactics to get out the vote. They covered the windows in black plastic just as they did in their youth, but instead of pulling out bags, they put a DVD into their computer and used a full screen projector to view Frankenheimer's "Manchurian Candidate" in glorious black and white and surround sound on the living room wall. More sober and more studied than I've seen them, the Free Range Democrats have a cause.
And they live for a cause.
"America, where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
America, we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster."
- Steppenwolf
The Volunteers for America are back on the streets.
In an election that could come down to the dregs of the vote, the Dixie Dregs are oiling up their axes, putting up signs, wearing buttons, and writing their blogs. If it all goes as planned, we'll be able to achieve something really wonderful... we'll bring back the Dixie Chicks.
Thursday, August 05, 2004
The Gift of Tamas
"Religion followed by a witless will
To torture self, or come at power to hurt
Another - 'tis of Tamas, dark and ill."
The Book of Religion by the Threefold Kinds of Faith
I cannot accept a role or countenance an act that removes thought from the world. First, this is not legal in the American system of government. Note the court decision that allowed the American National Socialists to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1978. Even the speech of hate and the repulsive image of the Swastika are allowed. Second, it is not possible to erase thought. Even the best brainwashing techniques of the Cold War showed that given time and separation from the controlled environment in which this kind of programming is attempted, the individual returns eventually back to their normal habits of thought.
It isn't right and it won't work.
However, what can be changed is the unwarranted use of force. I hope that we are not fighting in the Middle East to change their culture or attempting to make them adopt ours. Yes, there are things about that culture that I find distasteful, particularly the treatment of women and children, just as there are aspects of the Western culture that some Islamists find revolting, but these are not going to change by the use of force. What we should look at critically is precisely the use of force to attempt to modify behavior, because this is precisely a behavior itself. This can be changed.
Should we kill to stop the killing? I am afraid we must. Will they kill us in return? They have.
And so it will go on, act after hateful act as it has gone on for as long as we have human memory to relate. Yet as Gandhi noted, Love always wins and the tyrants fall. So we must find and share reasons to love. This is not soft, but the hardest and the boldest action. We must find what we share. Golda Meir said, 'the violence will stop when we love our children more than we hate each other.' There are mothers today in Bagdhad, in New York and Lahore who love their children and wish only to see them do well in life. As said in the Middle East, God willing, another should live as well as I desire to live. As said in the Bible, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Islam is a religion of truth and mercy and beauty. It cannot perish because these are values it shares with all true religions and these are eternal values. No belief with these as core shall perish. That some believe they can make one religion master of all truth and all believers is deeply hurtful to these beliefs. A Christian who takes this path takes the sword in their own hand and plunges it into the side of the Christ. The Muslim who takes this path tars his own children in pig's blood. The Hindu who takes this path accepts the gift of Tamas that does not bless.
We must step back from the feast of rottenness, and we must accept our differences as the joyful expressions of God at play, and learn to hear the voice of Creation singing to us in our wakeful dream. I know it cannot be a perfect world, or a peaceful world, but it can be a world where our children play free of fear of one another based simply on the color of skin, dress, or how, when, and where we go to pray. This, I believe is the world the God of Abraham and Mohammed and Arjuna earnestly waits for us to create. God sees through our eyes but with infinite mercy, does not control every act of our hands or hearts. God watches and waits for the time when we ourselves undertake acts of mercy, compassion, and tolerance, and in these, knows joy.
There is much darkness in our hearts but there is infinite light in our souls. Pray in whatever tongue with whatever gifts you have, that this light overcomes that darkness soon, today, in this moment before another car bomb takes more lives, before more helicopters rain down death on the innocent, before we once again sully Creation in the eyes of God.
For the sake of our children, for the sake of our world, for the love of God, pray for this earnestly. God willing, let this be done; God providing, let us do this.
To torture self, or come at power to hurt
Another - 'tis of Tamas, dark and ill."
The Book of Religion by the Threefold Kinds of Faith
I cannot accept a role or countenance an act that removes thought from the world. First, this is not legal in the American system of government. Note the court decision that allowed the American National Socialists to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1978. Even the speech of hate and the repulsive image of the Swastika are allowed. Second, it is not possible to erase thought. Even the best brainwashing techniques of the Cold War showed that given time and separation from the controlled environment in which this kind of programming is attempted, the individual returns eventually back to their normal habits of thought.
It isn't right and it won't work.
However, what can be changed is the unwarranted use of force. I hope that we are not fighting in the Middle East to change their culture or attempting to make them adopt ours. Yes, there are things about that culture that I find distasteful, particularly the treatment of women and children, just as there are aspects of the Western culture that some Islamists find revolting, but these are not going to change by the use of force. What we should look at critically is precisely the use of force to attempt to modify behavior, because this is precisely a behavior itself. This can be changed.
Should we kill to stop the killing? I am afraid we must. Will they kill us in return? They have.
And so it will go on, act after hateful act as it has gone on for as long as we have human memory to relate. Yet as Gandhi noted, Love always wins and the tyrants fall. So we must find and share reasons to love. This is not soft, but the hardest and the boldest action. We must find what we share. Golda Meir said, 'the violence will stop when we love our children more than we hate each other.' There are mothers today in Bagdhad, in New York and Lahore who love their children and wish only to see them do well in life. As said in the Middle East, God willing, another should live as well as I desire to live. As said in the Bible, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Islam is a religion of truth and mercy and beauty. It cannot perish because these are values it shares with all true religions and these are eternal values. No belief with these as core shall perish. That some believe they can make one religion master of all truth and all believers is deeply hurtful to these beliefs. A Christian who takes this path takes the sword in their own hand and plunges it into the side of the Christ. The Muslim who takes this path tars his own children in pig's blood. The Hindu who takes this path accepts the gift of Tamas that does not bless.
We must step back from the feast of rottenness, and we must accept our differences as the joyful expressions of God at play, and learn to hear the voice of Creation singing to us in our wakeful dream. I know it cannot be a perfect world, or a peaceful world, but it can be a world where our children play free of fear of one another based simply on the color of skin, dress, or how, when, and where we go to pray. This, I believe is the world the God of Abraham and Mohammed and Arjuna earnestly waits for us to create. God sees through our eyes but with infinite mercy, does not control every act of our hands or hearts. God watches and waits for the time when we ourselves undertake acts of mercy, compassion, and tolerance, and in these, knows joy.
There is much darkness in our hearts but there is infinite light in our souls. Pray in whatever tongue with whatever gifts you have, that this light overcomes that darkness soon, today, in this moment before another car bomb takes more lives, before more helicopters rain down death on the innocent, before we once again sully Creation in the eyes of God.
For the sake of our children, for the sake of our world, for the love of God, pray for this earnestly. God willing, let this be done; God providing, let us do this.
True Magic
On finding the sign...
Apply your mind.
Thus you will not sleep.
Sustain this application.
Thus you will not doubt.
On understanding, feel rapture.
Thus you will not harm.
Experience happiness.
Thus you will not be restless.
Experience one-pointedness.
Thus you will not be seduced.
This is the way of jhana.
Jhana is true magic.
Apply your mind.
Thus you will not sleep.
Sustain this application.
Thus you will not doubt.
On understanding, feel rapture.
Thus you will not harm.
Experience happiness.
Thus you will not be restless.
Experience one-pointedness.
Thus you will not be seduced.
This is the way of jhana.
Jhana is true magic.
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Culture Versus Culture
Joshua Allen, a fellow I have much respect for, asks if the West will stop attempting to cram our concepts of liberty and culture down the throats of others. That is a tough question.
1. When two different cultures meet with an asymetric balance of power, the result is not usually improvement of both; the typical result in nature is the extinction of the weaker culture. If we think naturally, we should be quickly and efficiently committing genocide. Whatever our concepts of liberty and culture may be, they don't include genocide, so perhaps imitating nature is not in anyone's best interests.
2. A point in the 9/11 Commission report is that the history of the West and the Middle East has been one of economic entanglement with very large infusions of wealth into the Middle East for access and control of the oil resources. We've not been very overt about how that wealth was spent except where we could sell big ticket items; think water plants, refineries, and armaments. As the flow of this wealth decreased, the entitlement society it created became dissatisfied. The response by the controllers of that wealth, the monarchs and the military, has been to allow the religious culture that is native to these societies to take major responsibility for the education of the society. Thus the rise in wahabism and other forms of regressive thought. Otherwise, the emphasis on education of those who could afford to go to the West has been on technical and financial subjects.
What emerged from this laissez-faire interaction was a generation of technically sophisticated, tribally-affiliated, and historically impoverished terrorists who have been educated to believe that the Western culture is responsible for their current conditions and that a return to a medieval Caliphate based on the Koran is their salvation. If that is their goal, selah, but it is accompanied by the message that the will of God is only achieved when the West embraces their beliefs.
It ain't gonna happen. So we find ourselves in the position of creating a massive and possibly ineffective defense system that forces us to monitor every piece of information produced anywhere by anyone and to attempt possibly also ineffectively to fuse that into a coherent picture of 'what's happenin'. As a species, we share signs, but the difficulty is we don't share interpretations. Fast reaction is the essence of wacamole and we will exhaust a lot of resources trying to figure out which hole the mole will pop out of next. Further, by not distinguishing between civilians and military targets, but issuing fatwas that proclaim it is the religious duty of every Muslim to kill Americans, they've made us all players.
If we are being strictly empirical (observing results and backward chaining to causes), our own survival might depend on exporting more of our culture. The trouble here, and it is very evident in the current American election, is that we don't really share a common vision of just what that is. Until we have clear policies and quit beating each other down in a lust for power and domination, I don't think we have any chance of exporting anything but the image of our own indecencies, our own inhumanity to each other.
If I were to hope for anything, it would be that the holders of the pulpits of my country's heterogeneous religious institutions speak long and forcefully on the topic of examining our own motives for our own treatment of each other. The creepiest statement I heard this year came from a friend of a former Soviet emigre who told him, "I was amazed after the last election how quickly the Americans begin to look over their shoulders when discussing the topic to see who was listening." Having been told at my own company by one individual that who I voted for could be a "career decision", and constantly reminded by his friends that I should be more conservative in my opinions, and as Beldar Conehead said, "adopt low tones", I believe it is time to get louder, more up front, and not just a little aggressive in this election.
Is the refusal of a company to rent space to an anti-war group a violation of the first amendment?Likely not. It can be construed as a commercial business decision. The outcome here is in the details of the contract and lawyers settle that.
Is it a violation of the spirit of that amendment? Matters of spirit are for individuals to decide, but I say yes, it is. It is a disease where the symptoms are to seek power by any means and to lose sight of the necessity of balanced and fair leadership.
Our country is in a dangerous time in which thinkers and doers on both sides must look for reasons to unite instead of reasons to divide. The mean spirited acts of media and their customers alike that attempt to suppress dissenting opinions in these times have become not simply a political feint, but a global psychosis that is penetrating every communicative act. It leads a Republic to fascism and historically, this is a very hard disease to overcome. It takes generations and it leaves permanent scars. Look to the history of Italy for an example.
When the voice of dissent is heard, the warranty of freedom is realized. Let it be as loud as the bells and fireworks that announce our independence.
1. When two different cultures meet with an asymetric balance of power, the result is not usually improvement of both; the typical result in nature is the extinction of the weaker culture. If we think naturally, we should be quickly and efficiently committing genocide. Whatever our concepts of liberty and culture may be, they don't include genocide, so perhaps imitating nature is not in anyone's best interests.
2. A point in the 9/11 Commission report is that the history of the West and the Middle East has been one of economic entanglement with very large infusions of wealth into the Middle East for access and control of the oil resources. We've not been very overt about how that wealth was spent except where we could sell big ticket items; think water plants, refineries, and armaments. As the flow of this wealth decreased, the entitlement society it created became dissatisfied. The response by the controllers of that wealth, the monarchs and the military, has been to allow the religious culture that is native to these societies to take major responsibility for the education of the society. Thus the rise in wahabism and other forms of regressive thought. Otherwise, the emphasis on education of those who could afford to go to the West has been on technical and financial subjects.
What emerged from this laissez-faire interaction was a generation of technically sophisticated, tribally-affiliated, and historically impoverished terrorists who have been educated to believe that the Western culture is responsible for their current conditions and that a return to a medieval Caliphate based on the Koran is their salvation. If that is their goal, selah, but it is accompanied by the message that the will of God is only achieved when the West embraces their beliefs.
It ain't gonna happen. So we find ourselves in the position of creating a massive and possibly ineffective defense system that forces us to monitor every piece of information produced anywhere by anyone and to attempt possibly also ineffectively to fuse that into a coherent picture of 'what's happenin'. As a species, we share signs, but the difficulty is we don't share interpretations. Fast reaction is the essence of wacamole and we will exhaust a lot of resources trying to figure out which hole the mole will pop out of next. Further, by not distinguishing between civilians and military targets, but issuing fatwas that proclaim it is the religious duty of every Muslim to kill Americans, they've made us all players.
If we are being strictly empirical (observing results and backward chaining to causes), our own survival might depend on exporting more of our culture. The trouble here, and it is very evident in the current American election, is that we don't really share a common vision of just what that is. Until we have clear policies and quit beating each other down in a lust for power and domination, I don't think we have any chance of exporting anything but the image of our own indecencies, our own inhumanity to each other.
If I were to hope for anything, it would be that the holders of the pulpits of my country's heterogeneous religious institutions speak long and forcefully on the topic of examining our own motives for our own treatment of each other. The creepiest statement I heard this year came from a friend of a former Soviet emigre who told him, "I was amazed after the last election how quickly the Americans begin to look over their shoulders when discussing the topic to see who was listening." Having been told at my own company by one individual that who I voted for could be a "career decision", and constantly reminded by his friends that I should be more conservative in my opinions, and as Beldar Conehead said, "adopt low tones", I believe it is time to get louder, more up front, and not just a little aggressive in this election.
Is the refusal of a company to rent space to an anti-war group a violation of the first amendment?Likely not. It can be construed as a commercial business decision. The outcome here is in the details of the contract and lawyers settle that.
Is it a violation of the spirit of that amendment? Matters of spirit are for individuals to decide, but I say yes, it is. It is a disease where the symptoms are to seek power by any means and to lose sight of the necessity of balanced and fair leadership.
Our country is in a dangerous time in which thinkers and doers on both sides must look for reasons to unite instead of reasons to divide. The mean spirited acts of media and their customers alike that attempt to suppress dissenting opinions in these times have become not simply a political feint, but a global psychosis that is penetrating every communicative act. It leads a Republic to fascism and historically, this is a very hard disease to overcome. It takes generations and it leaves permanent scars. Look to the history of Italy for an example.
When the voice of dissent is heard, the warranty of freedom is realized. Let it be as loud as the bells and fireworks that announce our independence.
Think Like Engineers; Speak Like Lawyers
With the acceleration of not-selling-so-why-not releases of formerly proprietary products into the open source ecosystems, one begins to wonder where the manpower will come from to sustain the development of these entries at a rate that keeps them competitive? As John Cowan has told me in the past, unmaintained code is dead code.
Are the recipients of these gifts vetting them with respect to hidden IP encumbrances? I don't suggest that companies such as IBM with massive patent portfolios are signing away their new currency to the open source community, but given the concurrent stampede to acquire patents, I'm not so sure anyone knows what the IP status of these contributions are.
Meanwhile, the IP keiretsu I've been predicting are forming fast and furious in the forms of cross-licensing agreements and the revised IP policies of the standards, specifications and open source product consortia. As a current member of the board of one of these (the Web3D Consortium), I think they are the best refuge for the small and middle tier players in markets where the high costs of IP defense can't be sustained by individual players.
Clear participation agreements for members are the best way to proceed. This is important because anyone can create a consortium, proclaim its specifications to be standards, then use that wedge in combination with patents to hold weaker competitor's heads under water until they drown.
This topic should become a required course in universities that expect graduates to become innovators and entrepeneurs in their fields. The sad fact of the industry today is we have to think like engineers and speak like lawyers. The technical writers have understood this for years.
Are the recipients of these gifts vetting them with respect to hidden IP encumbrances? I don't suggest that companies such as IBM with massive patent portfolios are signing away their new currency to the open source community, but given the concurrent stampede to acquire patents, I'm not so sure anyone knows what the IP status of these contributions are.
Meanwhile, the IP keiretsu I've been predicting are forming fast and furious in the forms of cross-licensing agreements and the revised IP policies of the standards, specifications and open source product consortia. As a current member of the board of one of these (the Web3D Consortium), I think they are the best refuge for the small and middle tier players in markets where the high costs of IP defense can't be sustained by individual players.
Clear participation agreements for members are the best way to proceed. This is important because anyone can create a consortium, proclaim its specifications to be standards, then use that wedge in combination with patents to hold weaker competitor's heads under water until they drown.
This topic should become a required course in universities that expect graduates to become innovators and entrepeneurs in their fields. The sad fact of the industry today is we have to think like engineers and speak like lawyers. The technical writers have understood this for years.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
The 9/11 Commission Report: Effective Means
I've been reading "The 9/11 Commission Report". For $10 US, this is 567 pages of the scariest reading I've seen since Bram Stoker's "Dracula". I highly suggest you buy a copy and read it. The elections before us have made it a topical centerpiece, but without reading it, it is all too easy to drown in the punditry of the election and fail to grasp the long term implications beyond the November elections.
Although it may take some time to read, some things will be clear to Homer Simpson and his bespectacled neighbor.
1. The Federals blew it. From as far back as the Reagan years, they operated in an a fog of arrogance and back-biting competition with each other. When the ever so focused Islamic radicals decided to take on America as its number one target, America's agencies acted like a single skier on a slope unswervingly failing to miss the only other person on the slope.
2. We are still on the slope. The Bush administration cannot take the 'mote out of its own eye' and still continues to pursue policies that will keep us in this war for another two decades. Yet a new administration that fails to understand the history that created the opportunities for the Islamic fundamentalists will fail just as spectacularly.
3. Islamic fundamentalism is an old phenomenon. So is Christian fundamentalism. In different times in history, both have emerged as destructive forces. Their emergence simultaneously as movements that have seized power on opposite sides of a conflict are reinforcing elements that escalate tensions and ensure an ever escalating conflict. Yet even these are not the source of the conflict. If we are to reduce tension and conflict, we must reduce behaviors on our side that create the perceptions of conflict. It will take time to change these perceptions, but the sooner we start using effective means instead of Spy Vs Spy rhetoric which only makes the situtaion more incindiary, the sooner we will create a safer world.
4. Because we have fewer opportunities to modify the behaviors of other cultures, it is time to listen to what the fundamentalists are saying and begin to engineer systems to modify our own behaviors. In short, good forestry reduces tinder that accelerates fire. We must consider effective means.
In blogs that follow, I want to discuss means that have proven effective at modifying behaviors of large social systems without draconian or punitive measures. At the center of such means is the concept that it is not race or religion or profiling based on these characteristics that should dominate our selections, but the use of force in a world where feedback and agency can combine to amplify the effects of small forces over large communities.
Your comments are welcome.
Although it may take some time to read, some things will be clear to Homer Simpson and his bespectacled neighbor.
1. The Federals blew it. From as far back as the Reagan years, they operated in an a fog of arrogance and back-biting competition with each other. When the ever so focused Islamic radicals decided to take on America as its number one target, America's agencies acted like a single skier on a slope unswervingly failing to miss the only other person on the slope.
2. We are still on the slope. The Bush administration cannot take the 'mote out of its own eye' and still continues to pursue policies that will keep us in this war for another two decades. Yet a new administration that fails to understand the history that created the opportunities for the Islamic fundamentalists will fail just as spectacularly.
3. Islamic fundamentalism is an old phenomenon. So is Christian fundamentalism. In different times in history, both have emerged as destructive forces. Their emergence simultaneously as movements that have seized power on opposite sides of a conflict are reinforcing elements that escalate tensions and ensure an ever escalating conflict. Yet even these are not the source of the conflict. If we are to reduce tension and conflict, we must reduce behaviors on our side that create the perceptions of conflict. It will take time to change these perceptions, but the sooner we start using effective means instead of Spy Vs Spy rhetoric which only makes the situtaion more incindiary, the sooner we will create a safer world.
4. Because we have fewer opportunities to modify the behaviors of other cultures, it is time to listen to what the fundamentalists are saying and begin to engineer systems to modify our own behaviors. In short, good forestry reduces tinder that accelerates fire. We must consider effective means.
In blogs that follow, I want to discuss means that have proven effective at modifying behaviors of large social systems without draconian or punitive measures. At the center of such means is the concept that it is not race or religion or profiling based on these characteristics that should dominate our selections, but the use of force in a world where feedback and agency can combine to amplify the effects of small forces over large communities.
Your comments are welcome.
Monday, August 02, 2004
Whyizzit? Oil Money and the Elections
The news reports that a new and imminent terrorist threat has been uncovered. A recovered computer (Code 07 for those in the know) contained the details. The security forces go into action and the Attorney General tells us we must be Americans and continue about our normal duties, meaning, the Wall Street types can't take a day off. CNN posts a poll asking if people believe as Howard Dean suggests that the news is being manipulated for 'political purposes'. The usual pundits decry the conspiracy theories and my wife asks me, "Would they lie to us twice?" So as it was after Watergate, the mistrust by Americans of their government soars, and one wonders what the agenda of Al Qaeda could possibly be if it leads to more Americans voting for The Shrubs?
Almost as an afterthought, the press quotes sources as saying gas prices will rise as a result of fears of the 'imminent threat'. I don't know who is manipulating whom here, but the observable is that the same group is benefitting. After forty years one wonders why at the bottom of so many of America's great screw ups in the world, we keep finding Texas oil money cashing the checks.
I'm sure G.W. wants to win this election, but for those who pay his bills, I'm not sure it matters.
Almost as an afterthought, the press quotes sources as saying gas prices will rise as a result of fears of the 'imminent threat'. I don't know who is manipulating whom here, but the observable is that the same group is benefitting. After forty years one wonders why at the bottom of so many of America's great screw ups in the world, we keep finding Texas oil money cashing the checks.
I'm sure G.W. wants to win this election, but for those who pay his bills, I'm not sure it matters.
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