Gee, Robert, it looks like you got out just in time.

What a happy coincidence.

You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis. Postmodernist 88% Cultural Creative 88% Existentialist 56% Idealist 56% Fundamentalist 38% Materialist 38% Romanticist 31% Modernist 25% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

That pretty accurately describes my view. I see language as the greatest perverter of communication. Reducing things to words forces them into artificial categories based on metaphors. It’s also about your only choice.

Hey, I’m even more postmodern than Dr. D’Adamo.

As Randy mentioned yesterday, I’m helping edit his evolving e-book Ten Steps to Professional Blogging. I’m having a lot of fun with this new collaborative effort.

Thankfully, successful bloggers don’t have to be good at grammar and spelling. Randy has his own laconic style, which readers of his blogs find likable. In editing this work, I’m not trying to impose my style or change Randy’s direct, concise wording. Rather, I’m correcting grammar, spelling, and punctuation; reducing redundancy and use of the passive voice; and suggesting explanations where I feel they’re lacking. It’s nice of Randy to give me such high billing for performing these menial tasks.

In case you’re wondering, I didn’t major in English. I developed my eye for editorial detail from writing numerous papers in college for professors who accepted only typewritten, uncorrected submissions that never use the passive voice. That was in the days before affordable typewriter-quality computer printers were available. After typing the same page ten times only to rip it from the typewriter carriage once again, you learn to be careful. No, I still haven’t let go of the pain. But word processors and the Internet have made this sort of work a lot more fun.

If you have any input on this side of the process, feel free to leave a comment here or e-mail me.

Did anyone else notice the similarity between the picture I posted yesterday of David Hume and PDQ Bach?

David Hume	PDQ Bach

Drawing parallels between the philosophy of the one and the compositions of the other we shall leave as an exercise for the reader.

A stream of rambling thoughts began, as it often does, on my morning walk. Halley discovered yet another masterpiece of odoriferous expression, and as she inspected it thoroughly I found myself wondering about its, um, provenance. Too big for a raccoon’s, doesn’t look like a dog’s…bear? Hmm, I’ve never seen bear turds, so I wouldn’t know (aside: I can’t find any pictures on-line, either — what up with that, Flickr fans?).

This reminds me of the old sardonic question, “Does a bear shit in the woods?” “Of course he does, where else would he do it?” is the implied answer.

Just like “Is the Pope Italian?” — er, “Polish?” — I mean, “German?”. That one’s lost a lot of its tautological punch, hasn’t it?

Maybe someday the question of the bear’s defecatory destination will not seem so obvious, either, as we continue to eliminate forests around the globe. I don’t mean to get all Greenpeace on you, but bears’ habitats are shrinking all the time. I can imagine a de-Italicized version of the bear question fifty years hence: “Does a bear shit in the zoo?”

Sometimes when flying into a major city at night, I think that humanity looks like a huge, glowing, heat-producing organic singularity on our planet. Not unlike a slime mold, nor perhaps of any more consequence.

We’ve subjugated or eliminated other species with the ruthlessness of an invasive non-native plant when introduced into an environment less competitive than its original home. If it weren’t for the huge genetic similarities between humans and other primates, as well as the paleontological evidence of our forebears, I’d be tempted to think we came from another planet with a less survivable environment.

Bonobo chimps share 98.4% of our DNA. In my previous life, I want to come back as a Bonobo chimp. Just hang out in the trees, eat, and have group sex all day. Yes, I said “previous life”. In my next life, there won’t be any rain forests left for Bonobo chimps to live in, so I’ll have to come back in the past. What? If I have a spirit that is capable of transcending the spatial limits of my body, then why shouldn’t it also be able to transcend the passage of time, which is probably no more than a perception?

Spirit. That’s an interesting concept. We get this via the Hebrew word ruach, literally “breath”. We take “breath of life” metaphorically now, but perhaps originally it just meant breathing. If you’re breathing, you’re alive. When you breathe your last breath, you “give up the ghost(ruach)”. Greek perpetuates this association with pneuma.

Our idea of “spirit” these days has less to do with life and more to do with intelligence. We generally believe now that intelligence resides in the brain, and there’s a lot of good research to support that theory (making exception for certain cases). The ancient Sumerians believed that the liver, not the brain, was the seat of the intellect. Perhaps this was because they could observe the effects of alcohol equally on the mind and on the liver. They brewed some of the first beer, and it was a big hit. They even had a goddess of brewing: Ninkasi. Here’s a Sumerian beer-drinking song:

Let the heart of the fermenting vat be our heart!
What makes your heart feel wonderful,
Makes also our heart feel wonderful.
Our liver is happy, our heart is joyful.
You poured a libation over the brick of destiny,
You placed the foundations in peace and prosperity.
May Ninkasi live together with you!
Let her pour for you beer and wine,
Let the pouring of the sweet liquor resound pleasantly for you!
In the reed buckets there is sweet beer,
I will make cupbearers, boys, and brewers stand by,
While I turn around the abundance of beer,
While I feel wonderful, I feel wonderful,
Drinking beer, in a blissful mood,
Drinking liquor, feeling exhilarated,
With joy in the heart and a happy liver–
While my heart full of joy,
And my happy liver I covered with a garment fit for a queen!

The heart has often been identified as the site of emotion. “Harden not your hearts”, the Hebrew prophets said. Interestingly, as Nietzsche relates, the early Scandinavians also used the image of a hard heart, but as something desirable:

“Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast,” says an old Scandinavian Saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud Viking. Such a type of man is even proud of not being made for sympathy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: “He who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one.”

From the UNIX fortune utility: “Your heart is pure, and your mind clear, and your soul devout.” The older version of this utility had some good zingers like “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” It also produced the ominous observation: “There’s no life on the other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.”

Maybe we didn’t come from another planet, but what if we were influenced by extraterrestrials? Sci-fi flight of imagination: a dying, technologically advanced race finds our planet, chooses a suitable species, then re-engineers it to be able to host their intelligence. “God” making man in his own image, and returning from time to time to check on the farm. Now don’t be such a skeptic (except for you) — it could happen. You can’t completely rule it out. Just like Santa Claus.

Or not. Science has perfectly good explanations for why we evolved the way we did, as science always does — even though those explanations grow outdated and get replaced with new ones year by year. One trouble with science is that you can never gather enough data. The biggest problem, though, is that science relies on a very consistent model of cause and effect, which (as Hume suggested) can’t be proven. But it’s a convenient model, in that it allows us to explain and predict a lot of what happens, while (conveniently) ignoring the fringe cases. Most of us figure that the “unexplainable” really is explainable, if we only had enough data. But what if our whole system of explanation is marred — the concept of cause and effect merely a somewhat unfocused eyeball gazing on the world and providing its own interpretation? It could miss a lot. But trying to do without it would be like going completely blind. You’d have to rely on other senses.

My grandfather (Sterling W. Camden, Jr.) was a barnstormer, airport manager, pilot trainer, Eastern Airlines pilot, and Executive Vice President of the ALPA before his death in 1953.

Six years later, I was born. Looking back, it seems like he only just missed me. But when I was young, it seemed like his death was a whole lifetime before my birth. That “mirror year” perception thing again: now my mirror year reaches to his birth year: 1913.

My father (Sterling W. Camden, III) idolized his father, and told me many stories of his father’s life and times. Once he told me that his father had told him a story that he shouldn’t tell anyone else. Now that both of them have passed away, I think it’s safe to relate it.

My grandfather and his co-pilot were flying their signature Douglas DC-3, apparently without passengers. Suddenly a large cigar-shaped something appeared beside them, maintained their speed for a few seconds, then disappeared. The co-pilot looked at my grandfather. His gaze was reciprocated in silence. Then my grandfather said, “We didn’t see anything.” They never reported it, for fear of losing their careers.

I’m tempted to believe this story, because my grandfather never sought recognition for it, but instead kept it a secret. Unable to hold it in completely, he trusted it to his son, who told it to me. Whether he and his co-pilot saw an alien vessel, an illusion, some other phenomenon, or even a shared hallucination — I believe the report I received.

About this time in my thoughts, Halley and I returned to our home. Time to get to work.

Spent a little time today playing around with FantaMorph, from Abrosoft. It’s an image morphing product that produces an animated morph from one picture to another. The animation can be exported as a series of images, an AVI movie, an animated GIF, Flash movie, web page, screen saver, or standalone EXE.

I decided to morph myself from formal and younger to casual and older:

You import two images, then place dots on each of the images at points that correspond between the two. You can then modify the number of frames, how long to rest on each end frame, etc. and preview the animation before you export. Save your project to come back to it later and make further modifications.

One feature I really liked, though it’s a small thing, is that when I replaced the first image, it kept the dots I had placed on the original. I was just pulling in a different version that changes the background area color, so that worked great for me.

Here’s the result, as an animated GIF:

The credit overlay is removed when you buy the full version.  Windows only, apparently.  Single user license from $29.95 to $99.95, site license from $199.95 to $499.95, depending on what edition you purchase.  See the web site for details.
This is the first time I’ve used morphing software of any kind. How about you? Any better products out there?

I know I’m late to the party, but I’m enjoying Seth Godin’s blog more every day. Today he wonders about the seemingly inevitable decline of integrity in marketing in the digital world.

Seth’s musings add perspective to a conversation in the comments section of this post where Randy Charles Morin and I attempted to work out a definition of spamming. After Randy decided that any comments not initiated by a real person should qualify, apotheon capped off the discussion with:

I’d definitely have to agree that spammers are not real people.

Integrity, that’s what it’s about. Spammers of the world — get real!

Seth Godin offers Ten things programmers might want to know about marketers. I particularly like number 7, “There is no number seven.” The Zen of marketing.

Point number 3 also applies to programmers:

Most marketers have no clue whatsoever what to do. So we do unoriginal things, or stall, or make promises we can’t keep.

Interesting topic, because I was just thinking this morning that the blogosphere (at least the part I frequent) is mostly populated with geeks and marketing types, and the discussions often span the two realms. Why is that?

Blogging was invented by geeks, for the purpose of inter-geek communication. But it’s such a powerful communication mechanism (being designed by engineers, after all) that it has attracted the attention of that class of people who obsess night and day about how to get a message out: marketers.

All this fraternizing with the enemy might result in the emergence of a blended type. We’ve already seen that marketers who “get” blogging quickly lose their corporate sheen and become more human. Are blogging geeks also getting educated on communication and self-promotion — and thereby becoming more human, too?

This is brilliant. Just as blogging is really starting to take off as a corporate communications tool — WordPress, now established as the premium blogging platform, offers premium service contracts for a fee of $5000 annually. Which should appeal to companies that are just getting started on blogging and want to do it right.

As TechCrunch observes, that is how you monetize free software.

You tell ‘em, Cory (via Save the Internet). A thorough and thoughtful discussion of net neutrality. Cory Doctorow pulls the covers off the telcos’ infidelity:

The Bells and cable companies owe their existence to governmental largesse, and, while they’re profit-making private firms, they are, in effect, quasigovernmental organizations. A Bell that wants to get rid of regulation is about as practical as a cotton-candy cone that wants to get rid of sugar. Bells are nothing but a thin veneer of arrogance wrapped around a regulatory monopoly.

But besides being a freedom fighter in the face of the evil empire, Cory lays out some serious to-do’s that will be required in order to secure freedom of the network. These include defining what “network neutrality” means, revising the definition as technology advances, and enforcing it. None of these are easy, and screwing up any of them could result in a state of affairs worse than letting the telcos run wild: misdirected governmental control. We really need to get this right.

Cory also links to this humorous/sad future tale at Virtual Karma.