A psychologist told me many years ago that rather than getting out and doing things, I prefer to (as he put it) “sit in the catbird’s seat” and critique all the options.  He may have been right about that, but I’ve often wondered about his choice of metaphor.

Have you ever actually seen any bird… sit?  In a seat?  I don’t know about you, but to me the whole sitting concept seems completely out of the avian character.  Their hip bones just aren’t right for it.  They can blame the dinosaurs for that.  You never see an artist’s conception of a Tyrannosaurus kicked back in a La-Z-Boy, now do you?  No, it’s not working for him.  It might be relaxing for you and me, but for T-Rex it’s just not comfortable.  No place for the tail, arms too short to reach the lever – what was the idiot who designed this thing thinking?

And why a “catbird?”  What does that have to do with smugness?  The catbirds I grew up hearing were so named because they mewed like a cat — that doesn’t sound so smart to me.  What conversation could an intelligent bird possibly want to have with a cat?  Maybe something along the lines of “No birds in this tree, Snowball – I already checked.”  I can tell you, though, if you’re a bird trying to speak Feline, you’d better be sure you have the local dialect down.  You don’t want to accidentally invite Felix and friends over to dinner.

I suppose this post proves the psychologist’s point.  Naturally, Wikipedia has all the answers – if you can believe them.

I could only wag my head and chuckle sadly as I deleted the email notification of a new comment on one of Chad’s posts.  Looking ahead, I sa

That was 140 characters, so I need not continue.  The Twitteritis epidemic that is sweeping the web prevents many readers from extending their attention beyond that point, requiring them to either comment or move on without further ado.  But for those of us who are not yet infected, I’ll go on:

w that Chad had already responded, and I could guess the tenor of his reply.  I was expecting something along  the lines of “Did you even read my post?”  Instead, he surprised me with his gentle reiteration and quotation of the relevant passage.  Of all the times I’ve chided Chad for being harsh on commenters, this time it would have been deserved.

The article in question concerned Chad’s search for an implementation non-specific web framework for Scheme.  He specifically mentioned that the only web frameworks that he had encountered worked only with PLT Scheme, while Chad uses Ypsilon Scheme.  Yet the commenter (aaron) asked, “Is PLT Scheme’s web framework not fitting your requirements?”

I chalk it up to Twitteritis:  Chad’s post starts with a link to yours truly (thanks, Chad) and a discussion of the Lisp web framework to which I had linked.  Then Chad expresses a desire for something similar for Scheme.  He doesn’t get around to discussing the non-portability of the PLT Scheme web frameworks until around character 2228, well beyond the input buffer size of someone suffering from CUT (Communications Uptake Truncation, aka Twitteritis).  No doubt aaron stretched his powers to their limits just to get to the mention of Scheme at character 1619 before he felt compelled to reply.

This happens over and over again.  Netizens are too hurried, overloaded, or simply lacking in the ability to process details before they must act.  They flit about from site to site in the brave new web of constant novel stimulation, and they probably view those of us who spend more than ten seconds on the same page as the new Philistines.

Dr. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling in Scotland finds that short attention span activities like Twitter, texting, and watching YouTube fail to exercise working memory, a key component for success in life.  Games like Sudoku, on the other hand, require the participant to hold more information in working memory and coordinate that information to plan their next moves – thus building strength in that area over time.  She also found that keeping up with friends on Facebook has a beneficial effect on working memory.  To me, Facebook updates seem similar to Twitter – but I’ll admit I’ve had to work my brain pretty hard on several occasions trying to remember someone from my past whom I had taken great pains to forget.

If you read this post up to this point, congratulations – you don’t have Twitteritis.  Yet.

Today we take instant communications anywhere on the globe for granted.  I often chat in real time with Chad, who lives in Colorado.  Just 150 years ago or so, we’d be limited to sending an occasional letter that might take months to arrive — if we ever got the opportunity to know each other at all.  Even when I was a kid, you couldn’t dial a long-distance call yourself – you had to get an operator to connect you.  Depending on the distance, you might need several operators in between.  And those calls cost a lot of money back then.

Does anyone else remember party lines?  Our house was the eleventh on a ten-party line – the phone company treated our house as an extension of my great-grandparents’ house a half mile away.  When the phone rang, we’d both pick it up to see who it was for.  When we wanted to make a call, we might pick up the receiver to find one of our other neighbors talking on the phone.  We’d have to wait until they were done, and there was no visual indicator that the line was still in use – you just had to pick it up again and listen for a dial tone instead of some juicy bit of gossip fodder.

We didn’t have buttons on our phone, either — we had a dial.  That wasn’t too hard on the fingers, though, because phone numbers only had six digits.  There was no area code, never mind country code.  The only way into or out of our local phone company’s network was to dial 0 for the operator.

Just before direct-dial long distance became available in rural Virginia, my father was out of state and calling home frequently.  With his NSA training, he noticed something different about what the operators were telling each other as they made the connection home.  One operator was telling another to dial one and wait for a tone, then enter a series of numbers.  The call was connected immediately.   My Dad wrote down the numbers, the last six digits of which matched our local phone number.

The next time he wanted to call, he didn’t dial 0.  He entered a 1, and got another dial tone – then he entered the rest of the series, and got through!  The direct-dial system was already in place, though it had not yet been announced and was only being used by the operators.

There was a good reason for that – the billing for long distance in our area was not yet automated, so the call was free.  But my Dad managed to take advantage of this implementation gap only one time.

One of my stated blogging goals: self-discovery.  I found pretty early on that putting my thoughts into writing and soliciting feedback from the entire web leads to a much deeper understanding of my own assumptions and motivations.  The enlightenment of that experience, once embraced, engenders a euphoria of liberation.

But I’m not sure that it’s entirely healthy.

Seeking more of that euphoria, I’ve become even more iconoclastic than before – actively looking for weaknesses in each of my most cherished concepts so I can smash them to bits and see what’s left over.

What endures the hammer test?  In the end, nothing – as long as you use a big enough hammer.  All concepts are merely human, after all.  The more I examine them, the more I see that they’re occasioned by or sublimated from more basic motivations such as survival.  All well and good – we can just take them with a grain of saltpeter.

But I find it much more disturbing to discover cracks in beliefs about myself.  The little lies and exaggerations that I’ve told myself for years in order to prop up my sense of worth.  The vain notion that I still have some undiscovered purpose in life.  The pretension that I’m somehow better than the median case in the huge, aimless and stinky herd we call humanity.  The ridiculous idea that “better” counts for anything in the end.

That I’m less easily hoodwinked by popular misinformed memes than the average person may contribute to my smugness, but does it really help me cope in the twenty-first century?  On the contrary, I think many people find solace in their unsupportable views – a peaceful tuning out of the questioning siren voices in their heads that would lead them to abandon their ship of hope and embrace their own undoing.  They tie themselves to the mast and plug up the ears of their crew so they can safely sail on past.

I’m reminded of the dual meaning of the Greek word λύω (luo).  It’s related to the English word “loose”, and it can mean “to free” as in to release from bondage.  But it can also mean “to destroy”, as in to dissolve something ordered into chaos.  Achieving freedom from preconceptions may lead to the destruction of the framework that supports our ability to deal with the world.

Once we shatter the idol, though, we can no longer bring ourselves to worship it — even if we manage to superglue all the pieces back together again.  That it could be destroyed proves that it was never divine.  Moreover, it suggests that all such divinities are mere idols.

Thus, we can’t go back.  We can only move forward towards a new understanding of ourselves through additional questions, and learn to embrace the fact that we’re just organisms that live for maybe a century and suffer from this cancer of our survival instinct that we call intelligence.

But that “just” leads to yet another question.  How did I decide that that “just” belongs there?  After all, golf is “just” chasing a ball across the countryside trying to hit it into a hole in the ground.  A Chopin etude is “just” a series of noises at varying frequency and volume.  Michelangelo’s Pietà is “just” a rock that some Italian guy took a hammer and chisel to 510 years ago.

“Just” implies a value judgment – it presumes that we should value reductionism.  Why should we?  A reductionist view may be related to the iconoclastic quest to uncover the frauds that surround us (by unmasking pretenders), but perhaps it’s also capable of mutating into a fraud of its own:  that the lowest value you can assign to things is the “right” one.  I for one suspect anything that pretends to be “right”.

Perhaps the meaninglessness of life is a mental trap of our own making, rather than an essential quality of reality.  Both value and lack of value may have no place outside our own heads.  We assign them based on what works for us.  There’s no fraud necessary in being awestruck by a thing of beauty, even if that beauty is entirely subjective.  Perhaps the greatest injustice that religion has perpetrated on humanity is the idea that values are absolute and eternal — because when we discover that they aren’t, then we have to learn all over again how to appreciate our inscrutable, ephemeral lives.

Most people remember Snakes and Ladders (or the alternative version, Chutes and Ladders) as one of their earliest board games, usually right after Candyland.  I never played either as a child, but I’m unusual in more than that respect.  My son finds Snakes and Ladders comforting, primarily because of its use of numbers on each square.  He figured out early on that you can simply add the number you rolled to the space you’re on to get the number to which you go next, without having to count the spaces in between.

But the official rules for Snakes and Ladders lack any opportunity for applied skill, unless you can cultivate the ability to roll whatever number you want on the die.  So to make things more interesting, my son developed a few new rules (as he is often wont to do).

Our edition of the game came bundled in a set of board games.  One of those, Parcheesi, requires four pawns of each color.  So my son asked if we could play Snakes and Ladders using four pawns each – for each roll, the player decides which of his pawns to move.  That really changes things!  Obviously, you avoid moving to a space occupied by a snake, but you also try to set up each pawn to be within six spaces of a major ladder — then let them sit there until you roll the right number.

Another not so obvious feature of this rule is that as your pawns reach 100, your options are reduced.  Thus, it’s not in your best interest to always try to get the lead pawn home.  In fact, even once a pawn reaches the 90’s, your choices for that pawn are significantly limited.  When you have only one pawn left, you’re back to the old “victim of chance” rules of the original game.

But my son still found this version a bit too easy, so he invented another rule:  if at the end of your move, your pawn is diagonal to one of your opponent’s pawns and there is an open space diagonally beyond that, you can jump it as in Checkers and remove it from the board.  I thought that the captured piece should then have to start over, but he insisted that it should be gone for good.  If you can capture all of your opponent’s pieces, then you win – without having to get your pawns to 100.  However, there’s a catch – if you don’t take all four of your opponent’s pieces, he or she only has to get their remaining pawns to 100 in order to win.  So if your opponent already has pawns at 100 and you capture the last one on the board, they win right away.  Jumping your opponent may help you win quickly, or it may merely shorten your opponent’s distance from winning.  Unlike in Checkers, you can choose whether or not to jump.  Naturally, this rule increases the value of getting one pawn to 100 quickly.

But my son wasn’t finished yet.  He wanted to make the game even more interesting.  So, for whichever pawn you decide to move, after you compute the space on which it would land, swap the digits and go there instead – if you would land on 85, go to 58, for example.  Then follow the rule (if any) at that space (ladder, snake, or optional jump).  Naturally, multiples of eleven are unaffected by this rule.  But for other numbers, it has the effect of sending you back and forth all over the board.  If you’re at 89 and roll a 2, for example, you have to go all the way back to 19.  The ideal space to hit is number 8 – which when swapped becomes 80, where stands a ladder right up to 100.  But you can’t get to 8 on your first roll, and whatever space you do hit on your first roll will send you to a multiple of ten.  So you subsequently either have to hit a snake or land on a multiple of ten to get back into range of 8.  Naturally, if you end up exactly on 100 you don’t have to go anywhere else.

With all of these rules in play, determining your best move given the roll on the die can be quite challenging.  The probabilities become difficult to compute in your head, and the game can last for a long, long time – until it abruptly ends.

I know that Microsoft Paint is one of the least intelligent graphics programs available.  My children like to use it sometimes, precisely because it is simple.  But on Windows, anything simple can be rendered impossible if you know how.  Or even if you don’t.

Today I was torn away from my work by a user emergency:  the “tool box” in Paint was no longer visible.  Yet, selecting “View/Tool Box” from the menu (or Ctrl+T) had no effect.  I presumed that somehow my son had managed to drag the tool box out of view, so I brought up Spy++ to look for the window.  I found it easily enough as a child of the main “Paint” window.  To my surprise, the tool box window’s rectangle had a zero width — even though the tool box isn’t sizable by the user.

“How on earth…” I wondered.  But long ago I learned not to waste time trying to figure out how users get themselves into situations unless it helps to figure how to get them out.  In this case, Spy++ reported that the left side of the tool box was still docked to the left side of Paint, but there wasn’t anything visible of it that you could grab with a mouse.

Since Spy++ also gave me the window handle, I tried writing a C program to change the window’s width.  This worked after a fashion, creating a swath of gray, but there was still nothing to grab in order to resize it – and the tools were still not visible.  Restarting Paint went back to a zero-width tool box.

I googled and googled, and searched through the registry looking for where this kind of information might be saved — to no avail.  In the end, I logged on as another user — which restored defaults.  That shows me that the settings are saved per user — most likely in the registry somewhere under HKEY_CURRENT_USER — but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where.  Searching the built-in Help wasn’t helpful at all, either.

Has anyone else run into this?

Design lesson:  if you want to make a product simple, provide a simple way to completely start over with defaults.  Don’t assume that your product is too simple to get FUBAR.

Thirty years ago today, Jim Jones coerced more than 900 members of his Peoples Temple in Guyana to kill their children and commit suicide by drinking Flavor-Aid laced with cyanide in order to “die with dignity” rather than suffer retaliation for the killing of Congressman Leo Ryan and other members of his party.

About three months prior to that event, I began my freshman year at Oral Roberts University.  For those who don’t know, ORU was established by Oral Roberts — a preacher and faith healer whose charisma not only drove thousands of old ladies to empty their savings accounts into his ministry’s coffers, but also shaped many of the university’s policies.  Being at that time a believer with only modest reservations, learning about the events at Jonestown suggested some frightening analogies — especially when Oral would loudly declaim against those who were out to discredit him.  Let’s just say that I abstained from communion on campus for a while.

Of course, I had good reason to be even more mistrustful.  I should have recognized the cult-like quality of the Oral Roberts ministry from the start, having led a mini-cult of my own when I was a young teenager.  My religion at that time, which had seemed so profound, was pretty run-of-the-mill: a new and highly unlikely interpretation of the Bible combined with a heavy dose of pseudoscience to produce a new gospel, of which I was the Prophet and Messiah.  It gathered a small following among my peers before I disavowed it two years later and became a fundamentalist Christian instead.

You see, being a cult prophet is altogether too strenuous.  You have to keep your nose very clean, because after all you’re supposed to be perfect.  And then there’s all those nasty stories about how you weren’t so perfect when you were younger.  It’s a real advantage to a prophet to have died at least 20 years prior to attaining full Messiah status.  By then, all the old stories have been forgotten, suppressed, or transformed into new ones that are more consistent with Messianic claims.

Another thing that led me to abandon my cult was my inconvenient honesty.  Over the course of two years of studying the Bible, I began to realize that my new interpretations were certainly not related to the story being told in the text.  Of course, the New Testament acted as my pattern and justification for reinterpreting existing scripture — and for a long time I told myself that any real prophet has to break some textual eggs in the making of a Messianic omelette.  But it gave me spiritual heartburn.

So I decided to adopt a more traditional interpretation of the myths, a decision that was immediately followed by a “born again” religious experience.  I was not the type to settle for a drowsy, ritualized religion.  As a cult leader, I had experienced visions and even an out-of-body episode — and I expected just as rich a mystical life from Christianity.  I became involved with the Charismatic movement, and learned to pray fervently and speak in tongues.

This all seemed to me at the time to be the product of a faithful interpretation of the Bible, as did also the Oral Roberts ministry.  But I continued to study the Bible passionately, reading up to thirty chapters a day in various translations.  I took a major in Biblical Literature, Old Testament — and a minor in New Testament.  I learned Hebrew and Greek and read from the originals (as good as we have them).  It was from this intense study that I came to see that Oral was also twisting the Bible into his own image, just as I had done — only with much more subtlety. He may not have even been aware of it himself.

The study of Hebrew in particular made it clear to me just how far we are from the culture that produced the Bible.  If you think the King James version sounds foreign, the Hebrew version might as well be from another planet.  I don’t just say that because the language was unfamiliar.  In fact, it became very familiar to me.  I steeped myself in it to learn to think in it — so much so that I quit translating my Biblical Hebrew assignments ahead of class, and just translated on-the-fly from the original when my turn came.  No, what’s really different about the Hebrew Bible is its entire world view and system of thought — or rather, lack of system.  Attempting to apply logic to Biblical thought is like trying to fit shoes on a fish.  We can’t get around without it, but they didn’t even consider it.

Despite the mourning of mathematicians and scientists over the lack of rigorous thinking in our culture, we are nevertheless wholly reliant on logic — even though much of that logic is flawed.  We cannot escape our notions of causality, space, and time.  But it seems evident to me that the ancient Hebrew mind held quite different conceptions, which were, naturally, never even explicitly defined.  They relied much more heavily on analogy and metaphor.  As such, any attempt to systematize the theology of the Bible will perforce be unfaithful to the original — and the use of the Bible to support any modern-day cause constitutes abuse of the Bible.

Many of my fellow students at ORU consoled themselves with the knowledge that Jim Jones had departed from “Biblical” theology — and they ascribed his fall to that fatal flaw.  It also comforted them to know that Jones was a radical leftist, whereas conservative Christian ministries have a high incidence of leaning right politically.  But I saw much more commonality than difference between these religious personality cults.  Now I no longer have any need of religion, though I’ll allow that there may be a kernel of truth in some religious beliefs.  My cynical side suggests a different metaphor: a shred of truth covering a much larger lie.

The bigger question is: why do such cults find followers?  My provisional answer is that most people are too lazy or too insecure to take the larger questions of life onto their own shoulders.  They want certainty and solace, and they want someone else to give it to them.  As Jonestown demonstrated, the risks associated with abdicating that responsibility can far outweigh its relief.  Every person is ultimately responsible for what they will believe, even if they decide to let someone else decide for them.  In that respect, Jonestown should be a group winner of the Darwin Award — except that it wasn’t funny.

I like to try new things.  But for the majority of my daily activities, I’m an extreme creature of habit.  I go through my automatic motions while I think about other things.  You might call me absent-minded, but it frees up a lot of CPU time in my brain.

My wife is a wizard of organization.  She likes to move things around to improve the efficiency of our use of space.  She’s very good at it, but I find it problematic.  When I go to fetch something, I’ll automatically look first where it was stored in January of 2005.  Not finding it there, I semi-consciously remember that it was moved in April of 2006 and I mindlessly turn my attention thither.  The frustration of not finding it there either will lift the problem fully out of my cerebellum and I’ll finally locate it where it was moved several months ago.

You’d think that would only apply to items that I don’t retrieve every day.

But daily retrievals are even worse, because I’m not even aware of the fact that I’m trying to find the thing when I first seek it out.  It’s just part of my automatic flight plan.

Yesterday, my wife moved the pots and pans.  The new location is much more logical and accessible, which I greatly appreciate because I use a large frying pan every morning in which to cook my breakfast.  But I knew what would happen.  I knew it with a certainty that I do not grant to either science or religion.  Yet, I resolved to fight it.

This morning before making breakfast, I thought about it.  I thought hard about where that pan is now stored.  I thought about my absent-mindedness, and began to analyze how this problem affects me and why.  Then I began to word it all in my mind as this very blog post…

As I reached for the frying pan

Right where it used to be.

Here’s a quick and easy test to determine what programming language best suits your personality.

There’s a very tall palm tree, and four animals happen to pass by:

a chimpanzee,

a lion,

a giraffe, and

a squirrel.

They decide to have a competition to see who is the fastest one to get a banana off the tree.

Which one won?  Think of your answer before you read on…

————————————————————————————————————————–

Retrieving a banana symbolizes the successful completion of an application.

If you picked the chimpanzee, your language is Visual Basic.  They love bananas, and probably end up retrieving more of them than any other animal. However, although they’re ostensibly human-like, they spend a lot of their time screaming and flinging poo.

If you chose the lion, you’re Java.  The lion cannot climb the tree, but he thinks that by making a lot of self-important noise, an inheritance hierarchy will emerge that causes the banana to come to him.

If you picked the giraffe, you’re a PHP person.  Like the giraffe’s neck, it has a feature specially crafted for every purpose — provided you can remember its name and whether it returns an integer, a boolean, or both.

If you named the squirrel, you’re Ruby.  Agile and swift, he easily gets there first.  But a banana is too heavy to carry.

———————————————————————————————————————

Which one actually won?

None of them.

A palm tree doesn’t have any bananas!

Which goes to show that the language you take
Isn’t as important as the assumptions you make

(Adapted from an email from Joe Ector)

My youngest son asked me, “what does ’bush’ mean?”

Kind of surprised by his question, I responded “it’s like a small tree…”

“No, what does the bad word ‘bush’ mean?”

I guess he’s overheard some of our political discussions…