--"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator" -- President George W. Bush
In this article, David Greenberg discusses the tactics of the Republican Party since the 1992 defeat of George H.W. Bush. It resonates with what I am experiencing here in some private replies to these blogs, and in personal life where if I dare to wear the Kerry button to a local event, I am met with half-joking warnings and some that are not so joking. Even at work, people come up to me and say, "You sure are brave to wear that button here." In a neighboring county, a lady wearing a Kerry campaign button was greeted by her boss with, "You can work for him or me but not both" and that was the end of her job. Kerry heard about that, called her, and hired her.
At the very worst of the Wallace years in Alabama, I never heard of someone being fired for campaigning for a candidate unless they were actually not doing their job. This is outrageous.
I live in America, protected by a citizen government and a Constitution with a Bill of Rights. It seems these are a very thin veneer that can be undone by one administration using the tactics of the prep school bully. Fear and intimidation undo us too easily.
Having lived through the period of infamous Southern demogogues, I do recognize the steel behind G.W. Bush's sneer. It is the sneer of the little man become bully who can work his will with veiled threats to his opponents all the while acting as if he were a common man. He isn't. He isn't even Texan. The drawl, the denim jeans, and the boy howdy come lately personality are an act of a New England aristocrat, Ivy League educated, and wealthy. It's an act polished over many years but not many political successes. The act has kind even conciliatory words in it, but if you listen to the warm up acts, they are filled with vitriol, lies, and hate speech.
Note well: Bush rallies are closed events. Kerry rallies are open to the public. Kerry takes the heckling that Bush avoids facing, although his wife got a dose of it from a woman protesting the death of her son in Iraq. The woman was dragged from the meeting and charged with willful trespass. So, to tell the wife of the President of the United States the truth, one has to become a criminal?
This isn't like any election I've ever seen in America. The Republican behavior and tactics in every way betray a lack of faith in the people who give them their power and in the system they claim hegemony over. This is outrageous.
As Greenberg says, if we elect Bush this time, we have approved the politics of bullying. On the playground of American politics, no one is going to stop him in a second term from more eratic decision making and continuing his pursuit of policies that undo the gains of the middle class and the poor in the last century. The Republicans are well on their way to making this the century of American fascism at home and abroad. We get exactly one chance to stop them before this becomes a violent confrontation on the streets.
Last weekend, the "Dollar Man" as my Dad called him, drove through the neighborhood selling ice cream from his truck. As he handed me the goods (reward your kids for cleaning the house), he looked at the Kerry/Edwards sign in my front yard, and said excitedly and loudly in a Jamaican accent, "What about THIS?!? They are lieing about this man on TV. Is this the way you elect your president??? What can we do??? They ARE LIEING!!!" The Dollar Man typically says nothing but "Which one?" and "Here is your change." To hear him suddenly and without question launch into a tirade on the election was astounding. Immigrants "Get" American values long after the native born cave in to the politics of the bully.
I told him, "This isn't a normal election as I have experienced them and you are right. Turn off the television and get the facts, then whatever you believe, know, or support, come November, Vote. That's all we have to stop bullies."
Vote.
Friday, September 17, 2004
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
When Architecture Astronauts Earn Their Money
A few years ago, Joel Spolsky wrote an article on Architecture Astronauts. Essentially, it concerns the problem with abstraction: that at some point, the level of abstraction is so far removed from the actual work as to be meaningless. This article gets cited in blogs, posted on bulletin boards, hangs from walls, etc.
The article points out the foibles, but Joel's examples such as Java, XML, etc., have proven by 2004 to be good things. Architecture is a good thing. Needless abstraction isn't, but then, if XML and Java were too abstract and yet proved to be very good conceptually and in practice, even sharp guys can fail to recognize when an abstraction is needless versus when their own understanding is not yet matured to the point of appreciating the abstraction.
1. Without an architecture, development is ad hoc and duplicative.
2. Without an architecture, policies for procurement can't be created or enforced.
The reasons for abstraction should be more closely examined particularly if the implementation has to survive platforms. Abstraction if applicable often enables the designer to correctly predict where a system will need to be extensible. Abstraction enables concepts to be grouped dynamically and to share implementations. Abstraction reduces work and cost.
Knowing when an architecture is too abstract or too mundane, or in the sweet spot of reapplicable concepts is the trick. Where procurement and implementation meet, there must be specific knowledge of the task to be achieved. All true, but without the architecture, money is wasted and the project is seldom complete or mission-proficient. Without abstraction, one builds one-offs.
Code can come from anyone who learns coding. Architecture comes from those who learn to abstract. Invention comes of abstractions that scale and unify systems. Then it is time to code. Otherwise, it becomes 'cowboy coding' and in today's market, no one can afford it.
The article points out the foibles, but Joel's examples such as Java, XML, etc., have proven by 2004 to be good things. Architecture is a good thing. Needless abstraction isn't, but then, if XML and Java were too abstract and yet proved to be very good conceptually and in practice, even sharp guys can fail to recognize when an abstraction is needless versus when their own understanding is not yet matured to the point of appreciating the abstraction.
1. Without an architecture, development is ad hoc and duplicative.
2. Without an architecture, policies for procurement can't be created or enforced.
The reasons for abstraction should be more closely examined particularly if the implementation has to survive platforms. Abstraction if applicable often enables the designer to correctly predict where a system will need to be extensible. Abstraction enables concepts to be grouped dynamically and to share implementations. Abstraction reduces work and cost.
Knowing when an architecture is too abstract or too mundane, or in the sweet spot of reapplicable concepts is the trick. Where procurement and implementation meet, there must be specific knowledge of the task to be achieved. All true, but without the architecture, money is wasted and the project is seldom complete or mission-proficient. Without abstraction, one builds one-offs.
Code can come from anyone who learns coding. Architecture comes from those who learn to abstract. Invention comes of abstractions that scale and unify systems. Then it is time to code. Otherwise, it becomes 'cowboy coding' and in today's market, no one can afford it.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
The Chosen Few
The problem with the Republican strategies for winning the election is not that they might not win, but the long term effects of such strategies. Republicans behave as if the election were a football game between hateful rivals who play once a season, then go home to their respective schools and wait for the next scheduled game to try again.
The behaviors set in motion by the 2000 election results, and now the divisive tactics being used by the Republican incumbents are only just beginning to manifest. As I noted in my blog The Value of Our Values negative or brutal means to direct actions always result in a negative or brutal behavior from the victims afterwards. In this case, it means that after the election, one side or the other will resort to ever increasing amounts of brutal tactics.
As Richard Nixon found out to his chagrin after the 1972 election, the behaviors only grow in intensity and ferocity after the election. Hard cadres of disciplined, well-informed and well-connected protestors will emerge if the Republicans win this October. They will grow and they will become more powerful than the evangelical far-right Republican hard-core. The principal problem is the perception that somehow, the American system was hoodwinked, the election was hijacked, and that a minority group of well-off white men have succeeded in overthrowing the system from within. Given Thomas Jefferson's remedy for such an event, they will begin to see that action is not only within their rights, but is the duty of the American patriot.
The hate and bitterness that the Republican election tactics have created will fuel this grass fire of patriotic sentiment and call to arms as if one had tossed gasoline on the tinder. This is an explosive situation and all sides will do well to refocus their campaigns on substantive issues over personal vituperation. They are making a monster and it will not continue to obey them, nor will it produce results that either party will find productive or career-enhancing. The Republican's consider that right wing evangelical fervor a sign of American strength.
Nothing could be more wrong.
America is by design and practice, a polytheistic culture with many beliefs held in check by the separation of church and state. By attempting to unite these, the evangelicals have played directly into the grand design of Osama Bin Laden. He is a mechanical engineer by education and a religious extremist by choice. He recognizes that exploiting the religious divisions in the American culture by feeding fear into the evangelical right will split the country at a structural seam. He is using our fears of each other in combination with the powerful ambitions of those who have hijacked Christian beliefs and institutions for their own ends to feed that fear back into our system so that we will turn on each other.
He does not seek to overthrow us; he means to cause us to start a second American civil war.
The extreme religious right are his best allies and supreme instrument in his goal to break up our nation. We must come to understand how our actions are furthering his goals not only in alienating our allies and increasing the strength of our enemies abroad, but that they are causing us to crumble from within by invoking our darker nature created by our need to be among the chosen few.
The behaviors set in motion by the 2000 election results, and now the divisive tactics being used by the Republican incumbents are only just beginning to manifest. As I noted in my blog The Value of Our Values negative or brutal means to direct actions always result in a negative or brutal behavior from the victims afterwards. In this case, it means that after the election, one side or the other will resort to ever increasing amounts of brutal tactics.
As Richard Nixon found out to his chagrin after the 1972 election, the behaviors only grow in intensity and ferocity after the election. Hard cadres of disciplined, well-informed and well-connected protestors will emerge if the Republicans win this October. They will grow and they will become more powerful than the evangelical far-right Republican hard-core. The principal problem is the perception that somehow, the American system was hoodwinked, the election was hijacked, and that a minority group of well-off white men have succeeded in overthrowing the system from within. Given Thomas Jefferson's remedy for such an event, they will begin to see that action is not only within their rights, but is the duty of the American patriot.
The hate and bitterness that the Republican election tactics have created will fuel this grass fire of patriotic sentiment and call to arms as if one had tossed gasoline on the tinder. This is an explosive situation and all sides will do well to refocus their campaigns on substantive issues over personal vituperation. They are making a monster and it will not continue to obey them, nor will it produce results that either party will find productive or career-enhancing. The Republican's consider that right wing evangelical fervor a sign of American strength.
Nothing could be more wrong.
America is by design and practice, a polytheistic culture with many beliefs held in check by the separation of church and state. By attempting to unite these, the evangelicals have played directly into the grand design of Osama Bin Laden. He is a mechanical engineer by education and a religious extremist by choice. He recognizes that exploiting the religious divisions in the American culture by feeding fear into the evangelical right will split the country at a structural seam. He is using our fears of each other in combination with the powerful ambitions of those who have hijacked Christian beliefs and institutions for their own ends to feed that fear back into our system so that we will turn on each other.
He does not seek to overthrow us; he means to cause us to start a second American civil war.
The extreme religious right are his best allies and supreme instrument in his goal to break up our nation. We must come to understand how our actions are furthering his goals not only in alienating our allies and increasing the strength of our enemies abroad, but that they are causing us to crumble from within by invoking our darker nature created by our need to be among the chosen few.
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
When Spell Checkers Just Won't Save You
We love them because they make our writing better, and make us look smarter and more literate than we really are in today's email-driven society. But spell checkers aren't often grammar checkers. If you spell a word correctly yet use it incorrectly, a spell checker is like a life vest on the Titanic: it keeps your body afloat long after the chilling realization of just what it is that you have committed to the ocean of text actually means. In this article, I will list my favorites as they arrive at my inbox, beginning with:
"Please bare with me as I get on board with the duties as your chair. You have all contributed much to the work of the organization, and I will do my best to do my part."
One hopes her parts are doable. Better a bare chair than a chair bare.
"Please bare with me as I get on board with the duties as your chair. You have all contributed much to the work of the organization, and I will do my best to do my part."
One hopes her parts are doable. Better a bare chair than a chair bare.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
The Bonobo Blues
They say the web is responsible for higher divorce rates. We've heard this before. Everything from the corner bar to cars to smoking to television to golf to ham radio has contributed to the divorce rate over time. This time it is the ease of using a web service or Google to Yahoo with old lovers. The press can blame the web like it once blamed the telephone or notes left in hollow trees, but these are just means to ends. Why do we do it? We just do. We're mammals.
Monogamy is a hard row to hoe for the mammals. While the current popular media excorciate males for it (see Nip and Tuck) and celebrate it for women (see Sex in the City), it is the oldest non-story in the literature. Cultures regularly phase in and through causes and choices of victims and vary in the importance of fidelity to a spouse. Mammals, on the other hand, haven't changed in recorded history. It is likely we won't in the future.
Get over it.
It isn't that nature is cruel; nature is whimsical. When the male is at his most flighty, the female is at her most determined to build and hold a nest. Chaucer got it right, Dudes: it's about sovereignty.
You have your fling and the mama bird might ignore that, but the first time the other bird shows up with a gleam in her eye for your home or your children, get ready for trench warfare. There is a reason they call it "no man's land". If you don't understand that, you are among those poor helpless guys at the corner brew pub claiming that you don't understand women but you sure do like 'em. So with almighty ignorance as your motto, you pursue and persuade and beg on your knees to please. Hit it once, you can get away, but hit it twice and you're there to stay. Why? Because you like it.
Dudes, you are dogs, and a dog with a steak within reach is a stomach without a brain. It gulps it down and feels guilty but just as satisfied. Women count on that. As Nora Ephron, the finest director of chickFlix said, "God, I hope he doesn't want me for my mind". Only keep in mind that the married lady you are flirting with at work won't trade down and if you are a trade up, you're not a loaner. No one gets out alive.
Get ready for it.
If the kids are what you care most about, then just say no and do what you do when you're alone. As the child of a very large His Hers and Ours, I know first hand what the great ping-pong match of wife versus ex-wife does to children. I think that economics is the deal but men wonder about the economics of unlimited supply. On the other hand, the laws of economics have not been suspended, just your calculations.
What goes up must come down. True for trading markets, tents and elephant's trunks. Where the trade is legal tender, the tenderness goes out of the trade. If the equation only has an X and a Y, maybe you can juggle the numbers for better results. A street walker depends on X increasing while Y stays constant and in mathematical terms, that's a linear equation with no slope. A call-girl has a limited clientele but each one is selected for their conformance to ever higher standards of reward and that is a linear equation with a slope. Quality is a hill you must run up and you might not be the fastest runner in that herd. A married couple attempts to increase the value of X AND Y. That is a power law so maybe this all comes down to power. Whoever has the power also has the least number of Xs or at least knows Y.
Get down on it.
I'm not so sure we wouldn't be better off if we took a page from one of our close genetic cousins, the Bonobos and just got it on without too much ceremony. As they say in the song, "a little less talk and a lot more action". But by the time women get to this stage of the game, men are entering adulthood or at least their second marriage and don't care nearly as much about the score. That's another one of nature's whimsies. Science is extending the game time with all kinds of miracle drugs and the marketing seems to indicate that this is what men want but really it is what women want and once again, sovereignty outs. Nature is whimsical.
Get on with it.
Somewhere in all of this, you might think I have a point to make, but I don't. Life among the mammals has taught me that everything we do doesn't have a reason behind it. It might have a cause, it definitely has consequences, but if you believe that mammals are rational and all stories have a denouement followed by a happy ending and fade to the credits, well, you don't understand. Why do mammals want their old lovers? Because they haven't had them in a while.
That's it. That's all. It is as the hip say, a Jones, a hunger, a thirst, a need, a habit. Is it bad? No but it can make for a bad scene and unless one wants to go through life moving their stuff to new places, think twice. Stuff is just stuff but a relationship builds a craving and cravings last longer than stuff. It might be better if women treated men less like territory and men treated women less like applicances. Men would keep more stuff and women would have fewer cravings.
Get past it.
Sex is a never-ending story and like soap operas, the story arcs never quite conclude the action; they just cross fade or jump cut and new actors are on camera delivering the same old lines. Later, they might pick back up where they left off and the soap opera starts a new season, but the plot varies not at all. Is there a reason?
No. Nature is whimsical. Get used to it. That's life among the mammals.
Monogamy is a hard row to hoe for the mammals. While the current popular media excorciate males for it (see Nip and Tuck) and celebrate it for women (see Sex in the City), it is the oldest non-story in the literature. Cultures regularly phase in and through causes and choices of victims and vary in the importance of fidelity to a spouse. Mammals, on the other hand, haven't changed in recorded history. It is likely we won't in the future.
Get over it.
It isn't that nature is cruel; nature is whimsical. When the male is at his most flighty, the female is at her most determined to build and hold a nest. Chaucer got it right, Dudes: it's about sovereignty.
You have your fling and the mama bird might ignore that, but the first time the other bird shows up with a gleam in her eye for your home or your children, get ready for trench warfare. There is a reason they call it "no man's land". If you don't understand that, you are among those poor helpless guys at the corner brew pub claiming that you don't understand women but you sure do like 'em. So with almighty ignorance as your motto, you pursue and persuade and beg on your knees to please. Hit it once, you can get away, but hit it twice and you're there to stay. Why? Because you like it.
Dudes, you are dogs, and a dog with a steak within reach is a stomach without a brain. It gulps it down and feels guilty but just as satisfied. Women count on that. As Nora Ephron, the finest director of chickFlix said, "God, I hope he doesn't want me for my mind". Only keep in mind that the married lady you are flirting with at work won't trade down and if you are a trade up, you're not a loaner. No one gets out alive.
Get ready for it.
If the kids are what you care most about, then just say no and do what you do when you're alone. As the child of a very large His Hers and Ours, I know first hand what the great ping-pong match of wife versus ex-wife does to children. I think that economics is the deal but men wonder about the economics of unlimited supply. On the other hand, the laws of economics have not been suspended, just your calculations.
What goes up must come down. True for trading markets, tents and elephant's trunks. Where the trade is legal tender, the tenderness goes out of the trade. If the equation only has an X and a Y, maybe you can juggle the numbers for better results. A street walker depends on X increasing while Y stays constant and in mathematical terms, that's a linear equation with no slope. A call-girl has a limited clientele but each one is selected for their conformance to ever higher standards of reward and that is a linear equation with a slope. Quality is a hill you must run up and you might not be the fastest runner in that herd. A married couple attempts to increase the value of X AND Y. That is a power law so maybe this all comes down to power. Whoever has the power also has the least number of Xs or at least knows Y.
Get down on it.
I'm not so sure we wouldn't be better off if we took a page from one of our close genetic cousins, the Bonobos and just got it on without too much ceremony. As they say in the song, "a little less talk and a lot more action". But by the time women get to this stage of the game, men are entering adulthood or at least their second marriage and don't care nearly as much about the score. That's another one of nature's whimsies. Science is extending the game time with all kinds of miracle drugs and the marketing seems to indicate that this is what men want but really it is what women want and once again, sovereignty outs. Nature is whimsical.
Get on with it.
Somewhere in all of this, you might think I have a point to make, but I don't. Life among the mammals has taught me that everything we do doesn't have a reason behind it. It might have a cause, it definitely has consequences, but if you believe that mammals are rational and all stories have a denouement followed by a happy ending and fade to the credits, well, you don't understand. Why do mammals want their old lovers? Because they haven't had them in a while.
That's it. That's all. It is as the hip say, a Jones, a hunger, a thirst, a need, a habit. Is it bad? No but it can make for a bad scene and unless one wants to go through life moving their stuff to new places, think twice. Stuff is just stuff but a relationship builds a craving and cravings last longer than stuff. It might be better if women treated men less like territory and men treated women less like applicances. Men would keep more stuff and women would have fewer cravings.
Get past it.
Sex is a never-ending story and like soap operas, the story arcs never quite conclude the action; they just cross fade or jump cut and new actors are on camera delivering the same old lines. Later, they might pick back up where they left off and the soap opera starts a new season, but the plot varies not at all. Is there a reason?
No. Nature is whimsical. Get used to it. That's life among the mammals.
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Winning The Game
If you like to think like the thinkers who think command and control is hierarchical by nature, but intelligence is networked by design, here is a good article:
Winning the Game
Years ago, some of us feasted on chaos and complexity theory, information systems, and game theories such as tit-for-tat as discussed in Scientific American. For me, I wrote the Information Ecosystems paper you see referenced in the left column which is as Dave Winer said, tough reading. To write clearly, one has to really understand what one is going on about and when I wrote that, I barely did. I think some of the bloggers are in about that same place, but they do have values that match their objectives, so big points for that. When I wrote the blog on Surviving Outsourcing, I was after a similar theme: if you want to blow a system to pieces without too much risk, find the interfaces and slow them down. The evaporating energy budget does the rest.
The problem with the American elections is that there is far too much energy available for that strategy to work. Truth is the weapon of choice, but as my Dad used to tell me, they aren't interested in the truth; they want to hear about the deal you're making. If Kerry wants to win, he has to go straight for the jugular. The Republicans wrap themselves in the flag and promote fear.
1. Al Qaeda though dangerous is still a street gang. They have trouble with travel, transport, and financing. They can always replace members so just killing them isn't enough. Make it harder and harder to pay for goods and services.
2. If the Republicans want to keep us safe, why did they out covert agents names? They want power and don't care who or what they risk to get it. Make sure that is remembered. The real flip flop is the flipping of values for convenience.
3. Watch the History Channel presentation of "Nazi America: The Secret History". It provides the classic example of how propaganda with a minimum population can create a generational movement, even one that is abhorrent on the face of it. Note that Hitler actually understood that and did his best to put a pudgy bland face on it.
4. Democratic values aren't enough. Not enough people vote and in a system that elects electors, very small numbers can outweigh the power of the majority. Human values aren't enough. The German Bund sold 'decency' as the cornerstone of its values. Values that match objectives are. Until the Democrats are crystal clear about how their values are supported by their objectives, they will lose to the financial players and the rock hard discipline of the Republicans. Note that such discipline was the cornerstone of the German Bund and note the use of youth camps. If you don't find these today, it is because you are looking for swastikas and they aren't that dumb. Look at the hard right wing church camps.
Bush and the Republicans have achieved one thing I did not think possible: they have made me watch Christians with an eye toward an enemy. Not Christianity, because the teachings of the Christ are pure truth and beautiful, the word of God. No, I mean just as the Nazis hijacked the teachings of decency while preaching a mystical connection with higher powers, these guys have hijacked Jesus and put him on their dashboard. There is an old Arlo Guthrie song about that.
Where are you, Arlo? We need you.
Winning the Game
Years ago, some of us feasted on chaos and complexity theory, information systems, and game theories such as tit-for-tat as discussed in Scientific American. For me, I wrote the Information Ecosystems paper you see referenced in the left column which is as Dave Winer said, tough reading. To write clearly, one has to really understand what one is going on about and when I wrote that, I barely did. I think some of the bloggers are in about that same place, but they do have values that match their objectives, so big points for that. When I wrote the blog on Surviving Outsourcing, I was after a similar theme: if you want to blow a system to pieces without too much risk, find the interfaces and slow them down. The evaporating energy budget does the rest.
The problem with the American elections is that there is far too much energy available for that strategy to work. Truth is the weapon of choice, but as my Dad used to tell me, they aren't interested in the truth; they want to hear about the deal you're making. If Kerry wants to win, he has to go straight for the jugular. The Republicans wrap themselves in the flag and promote fear.
1. Al Qaeda though dangerous is still a street gang. They have trouble with travel, transport, and financing. They can always replace members so just killing them isn't enough. Make it harder and harder to pay for goods and services.
2. If the Republicans want to keep us safe, why did they out covert agents names? They want power and don't care who or what they risk to get it. Make sure that is remembered. The real flip flop is the flipping of values for convenience.
3. Watch the History Channel presentation of "Nazi America: The Secret History". It provides the classic example of how propaganda with a minimum population can create a generational movement, even one that is abhorrent on the face of it. Note that Hitler actually understood that and did his best to put a pudgy bland face on it.
4. Democratic values aren't enough. Not enough people vote and in a system that elects electors, very small numbers can outweigh the power of the majority. Human values aren't enough. The German Bund sold 'decency' as the cornerstone of its values. Values that match objectives are. Until the Democrats are crystal clear about how their values are supported by their objectives, they will lose to the financial players and the rock hard discipline of the Republicans. Note that such discipline was the cornerstone of the German Bund and note the use of youth camps. If you don't find these today, it is because you are looking for swastikas and they aren't that dumb. Look at the hard right wing church camps.
Bush and the Republicans have achieved one thing I did not think possible: they have made me watch Christians with an eye toward an enemy. Not Christianity, because the teachings of the Christ are pure truth and beautiful, the word of God. No, I mean just as the Nazis hijacked the teachings of decency while preaching a mystical connection with higher powers, these guys have hijacked Jesus and put him on their dashboard. There is an old Arlo Guthrie song about that.
Where are you, Arlo? We need you.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Arnold Speaks
That is quite possibly the scariest speech I've ever seen. Skipping over the obvious cheap shots, any politician who cites Richard Nixon are the fount of his political consciousness obviously is neither a smart politician or an action hero. I voted for Nixon because we needed an S.O.B. to dig us out of the biggest mistake of American politics, and one made by Democrats: Vietnam. I don't think I'm going to vote for another bum who got us into another Vietnam even at the urging of a guy who used steroids to bulk up and then married into Democratic royalty after years of groping his co-stars and calling anyone with intelligence, girly-men.
Even Cheney looked uncomfortable. I'm pretty sure a lot of people watching did. On the other hand, after watching the local TV station interview people in this most Republican of states, not too many people were. That's too bad. That raised arm at the end sure made me squirm.
Even Cheney looked uncomfortable. I'm pretty sure a lot of people watching did. On the other hand, after watching the local TV station interview people in this most Republican of states, not too many people were. That's too bad. That raised arm at the end sure made me squirm.
Friday, August 27, 2004
Swing for The Fences
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.
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.
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.
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