Ballroom Dance, Revisited

A long while ago, I mentioned that I take a ballroom dance class...and enjoy it.

It's true. Really. Damn lot of fun.

The class I take is social ballroom dance through the Ballroom Dance Club at the University. It's a great way to meet people, get to know people, have something in common with them, have an excuse to interact with them.

Taking these lessons has done several things for me. First, I've become remarkably more balanced and lighter on my feet[1]. I walk more on the balls of my feet, rather than on my heels. I feel like I move with a little bit more grace and ease, I feel more comfortable with my step, more sure of where that foot will land.

Friends of mine who have studied martial arts of various sorts say the same thing about their balance and surety of step. They speak of how the are more aware of their physical self. Martial arts also tend to add a grace and beauty of movement to the practitioner. The similarities end there, however. Where ballroom is an dance of graceful seduction (if apply to that end), martial arts is a dance of graceful violence.

The second things that I've really gotten out of the class is a bit more ease with the opposite sex. I've always been a bit awkward in my interactions, unless I become friends with a woman, which in itself is a whole other story.

The class is configured as such: the leads all stand in a line on one side of the gym, the follows on the other. The steps are taught to each side individually, and then the follows are told to find a partner. The pairs dance a for a bit, familiarizing themselves with the move. After a few moments, they are told to switch partners and the follows switch down one partner.

So what does this have to do with me becoming more comfortable with woman? Every semester I dance with forty different woman, some I know, most I don't. I have to make them comfortable with the idea of dance with me, even if it is only going to be for a moment. I doing so, I also have become more comfortable with asking my classmates to dance - there are occasionally open dance periods. It all stems from confidence gained from becoming slightly more skilled at this whole thing.

Granted, I've become a bit of the old man in the group. This is, after all, a University club. Many of the students are undergrads, and, more so, freshman undergrads. I'm older then most by about ten years. Not really an issue, since I'm neither creepy nor obsessive (nor ugly, if I do say so myself).

All in all, it has been a really good experience for me. It's a great skill, although, one that has is harder and harder to find the appropriate social situations in which to use it. It's a great social tool, enhancing interaction, and a remarkable amount of fun.[2]

[1] Now, I'm not using the phrase "light in my loafers," if that's what your thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

[2] As you can see, I'm still really lax on the art of the conclusion. It's as if I start these things with very little idea as to where I'm going. I know that I've had this discussion before, but I'd like to point out that I'm pretty much writing my essays in the same format as I learned in high school. You know the format: an introduction, two to three middling points, and a conclusion. This format is rather tried and true at getting one's point across.

Let's look at this essay a little more critically, through the lens of the high school essay format.

First off, the introduction makes not point at reference what it's going to talk about, other then ballroom dance. No mention of physical movement or opposite-sex interaction. So we're left wonder where the hell is he going?

Secondly, how are these points tied together? Did the art of physical movement affect the author's opposite-sex interactions? It was described as a dance of seduction, if applied correctly. Has the author applied it correctly? If not, the author should supply us with a story of it applied incorrectly, described with great flourish, humor, and self-deprecating commentary. If there is no story, the author certainly hasn't been doing this often enough.

As for that conclusion, holy crap, it's lame.

My advice to the author: don't quit your day job.[3]

[3] Hey, now, I appreciate your criticism, but let's remember, this is just an exercise. I'm just writing about what I know and feel about a particular subject. There isn't necessarily supposed to be too much connecting either part.[4]

[4] Well, look at it this way. Your now having a public dialog with your internal critic. You've just bumped up against the crazy ceiling. I was just telling you what I thought about your writing, but now I think you've slipped into something more along the lines of a crazy nutter.[5]

[5] I was merely responding to your criticism, and here you go responding with name calling. How's that for being the internal critic. Not very constructive, mind you. Not helpful at all.[6]

[6] Bloody crazy nutter, you are.

Force Feedback

So I posted a little note from my BlackBerry (which, I'm now of the opinion, are the spawn of Satan) the other night. It started me thinking on how easy it is these days to upload real-time information about the inner most thoughts of any human being.

Why does that seem like an incredible waste of technology?

There are some impressive possible uses for the instant access to the journalistic tools. The most obvious one being journalism. Having a journalist in the thick of things and sending in a story, written as it happens is wonderfully powerful. The reader can be connected instantly to the joy, unrest, terror or mundane of the world.

There are two issues with this. The first being the problem of aggregation. Mobile blogging or instant journalism has created an explosion of information and opinions on the events of the day. Collection, assessing and absorbing all of this information becomes an huge task for any one person. Data aggregation is becoming a big focus of development efforts (Google Reader is a good example). Even still, there's a wealth of information that comes in a daily basis.

Does this wealth of information allow us to live our lives in any better fashion? The answer is yes and no. Having access to those pieces of information that directly relate to you in a timely manner is valuable, of course. The problem is that the much of the information isn't directly applicable to one's current affairs. The reader may actually spend more time familiarizing themselves with the news of the day from Joe Blogger^[1], reading about Joe's life and spending less time going about their own lives.

Mundane was mentioned early. This is really the second problem with the instant upload of news and information. What is considered news by some is incredibly boring and useless information. When some one blogs about the fact that their friend is in trouble or they had a great time at a concert. All these things may be interesting to four or five people, but, on the whole, generally dull and uninteresting to the rest of mankind.

Which brings me back to my BlackBerry post. I posted that entry about the simple fact that I had a BlackBerry and wanted to write about it. Which really is the most boring, mundane and useless piece of knowledge that I can provide.

[1] Right. So I know that Joe Blogger hasn't actually updated his blog in quite some time. In fact, I just made a wild guess that someone out there actually had created a blog, originally called JoeBlogger for a real sense of anonymity or average Joe quality. It does fit the bill for my point. It's a bunch of small, useless tidbits about a the life some Joe somewhere, telling us all about how his life is going. Is it news? Probably not.

Then again, neither is this.

Mobility

I've been given a blackberry handset by my work. Interrestingly enough, I find myself already attempting a blog entry.

Here's a question: is too much rapid access to one's personal information?

Perhaps. But, the keyboard is damn slow. More on this in future posts.

Posted from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Compile Time

I've been spending too much time at work. I don't mean that I've been putting in a lot of hours, I've just been spending too much time there. It's time to move on, spend my time elsewhere.

I've been working on a few ideas. Things are compiling. We are, however, talking about old-school compile times. Punch the cards, submit them to the terminal, and go and get a cup of coffee. It'll be a while before the results come back and we know that we have a working program, or a mess of errors to be debugged and tried all over again.

So it brings me back here. Ideas are great if you start to let them out. They have to be placed on paper (or, in this case, electronic media) and given form. They can be massaged, managed, organized, discredited, scrutinized, honed, and finally given their chance to make it.

I haven't been writing much, since I have been transitioning away from being a grad student. I gave it a shot and found it's not really for me. I found that I really was enjoying the time to be creative, write, read, think. So in this transition, I became stuck in a rut. Work was a concentration for me (which is odd, considering how much I despise my boss). It's become more so lately, as I have been given more responsibility over a particular aspect of the product (which has led to some of the ideas that are, at this moment, compiling).

So part of my scheme is to simple quit. I would like to return to that time of thinking, evaluating. Go walkabout, mentally. Really get back to dreaming.

If I can keep to it, I'll keep writing until that point. I need to tap the rust off the old brain and get back to scheming on paper (err...electronic media).

Walkabout

I spent the last two weeks hiking in Glacier National Park. After having been out in the back country for almost a week, I was less inclined to hike with the group of friends I was traveling with. I was also a bit antsy; I needed to move. So I went on a day hike alone. It was nice to be walking alone again. Most of my vacations up to this point included a lot of walking by myself.

During this hike, I started thinking about the concept of walkabout. I realized that I know absolutely nothing about it, save the bits and pieces that I'd seen on TV. Oddly enough, there's not a whole lot out there on the internet that boils it down to a simple set of descriptions. There's a really brief entry here, and stuff about some movie, but other than that, there seems to be few direct descriptions of a walkabout.

Walkabout is simply as it is described. A person on walkabout is doing just that: walking about. Australian Aborigines went on walkabout to search for new food and water sources. It's more analogous to the long hunts of the Native Americans.

Western traditions seem to have latched on to the spiritual aspects of walkabout. There is an attraction to "go walkabout" and leave one's job and life behind, all in an effort to find oneself, or confront one's problems. It's been converted into something akin to the spiritual quest of the Native American.

Perhaps this generation, having no really defining challenge, is constantly in need of stepping back and evaluating their existence. Not having a "purpose" leaves one asking the questions "why am I here," or "am I doing what I 'should'". There's a sense that one gets a bit lost in the details.

Walkabout provides a way to step a way and view things from different angles. The perspective is changed when distance is applied, and the details disappear. The view becomes a big picture, with parts of one's life painted in larger brush strokes.

To interject a little of my own opinion here, at I've said it before, this is how I view a vacation. It's a chance for me to step back and evaluate what's going on in my life, my relationships, my work, everything. The view from the distance provides a startling clarity and insight. I return, usually, happier and with a better sense of where I'm going.

The Joy of Vacation

I just returned from a vacation. Two weeks in beautiful Glacier National Park. I spent the time with some friends hiking in the back country, away from work, technology, the concerns of daily life. It was a great reprieve from the ordinary.

Two weeks is important as far as vacation times go. I've heard it said, and maintain the philosophy to this day, that two week vacation is really the minimum time one should spend on a trip in order for it to be considered true time off.

There are several reasons for this. The first, being that one doesn't really stop thinking about work, etc. for at about a week. There's always that little piece of work left on one's desk that seems to sit in the back of one's mind, calling, whispering, trying to gather the brain's attention for just one more moment of processing. It takes a week for that thinking to just be deprioritized.

The best way, in my opinion, to help along this depriorization process is to keep one's brain very busy (or at least very tired) through a lot of activity. Spend the first week going to the museums, walking the streets, seeing the sights and enjoying the food. Exhaust one's self.

Now, the second week comes along. One has seen many of the sights, walked dozens of miles, and pretty much worn out feet, limbs, etc. Normally people who only take a week off have to head back to work come Monday. But those who still have that next week off can begin to relax. Now is the time to go to a cafe and enjoy a three hour coffee whilst reading a novel. It's the week to enjoy sitting on a porch and savoring a well earned beer while watching the world go by.

That first week as taken all the thoughts of work and the real world and replaced them with the new experience, the sights and sounds of the foreign place. It broadens the horizons and opens up new avenues of thinking. It makes for a wonderful time to starting thinking of new projects, such as ideas for that business one would like to start, or a new novel, or a new painting, or, perhaps, just a new way to rearrange the furniture.

This leads to a question: how are people supposed to have the ability to take this extended vacation and still be able to take time off for the little things. The majority of US companies only give two weeks of vacation. Employees need to start working towards getting more vacation, instead of working towards more money. A large portion of quality of life seems to come from quantity of free-time, not just quantity of free spending cash.

As for me, I find that after a vacation, my writing level tends to spike. I get about four good months before things start to fall off. So a two week vacation every six months seems to be a really good idea.

Oh, where to go next...

Hey, Here's an Idea...

I had come across this idea in another article (read "industry flame") called A Gamer's Manifesto.

Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources?

Well, I think it's a rather good idea. It's nothing terrible sophisticated, at least on the surface. Here are the complicated bits:

• Animal behavior
• Weather
• Time passage
• Physical wear and tear on the user's "body

Not to say this is an easy to do thing for me. I've no experience with computer games. This seems like a really good place to start. I'd need to up my C++ skills, maybe work on some artistic skills, learn some new tools, that sort of thing. I would really like to script things in lisp, though. Not sure why, but it just seems like a really good language to script AI (for the animal behaviors).

So far in the mentions of the idea that I've had, there's been a few positive responses. I think the appeal of a game like that is the tomogochi-type game addictiveness. The game would involve the survival of an avatar, but from a first-person perspective. I think that adds a bit more to the addictiveness, in that it is about virtual survival of self.

It might be pretty interesting.

Decline and Fall (Wait, no, It's Summer)

There's been a noticeable decline in the blogging space. It's seems as if the fad has begun to run it's course. There was a Doonesbury comic this morning that high-lighted this fact, which says to me that the whole situations, well, reached comic proportions.

Even the bloggers are starting to realize this fact.

I'd give this decline several reasons. First, and foremost, it's a fad. In the way that social network sites had a spike in membership, so have blogs. Everyone needed to have one, and realized that writing about their lives really wasn't all that interesting to them. Millions of people tried it out and found that it just wasn't for them.

Now the internet is full of blog sites that are never updated, nor cared for, nor visited. It's a bit like the clutter that built up after the internet's first fad stage: the personal website. Blogs have made it remarkably easy for a person to have a professional looking website. The only thing needed is content (like a bare-bones computer needs a CPU or a Chia pet needs water).

There will probably be some sort of great Blog Rapture, where the gods of the blog servers while choose those blogs that will stay and those that will be damned to the hell of the Way Back Machine. Until that time there will be a huge number of orphaned blogs out there.

I think the second reason for the decline in blogs has been that the mainstream media has co-opted it for their own uses. I know that statement has a conspiratorial tone to it, but I merely trying to think like the vast number of dedicated bloggers out there. They feel that there job is to bring the real news and really happenings to light. Now with the mainstream media grabbing hold, it's no longer seen as a tool of counter-culture. In other words, it's now a tool of the Man.

Lastly, and this really is only a personal opinion/belief/hope-for-the-survival-of-all-man-kind, is that it's summer. People have more interesting things to do, than sit on the computers and write about what they did today, which amounts to writing about there day. This may only be the case in the part of the world where I live where there is only about four months of good weather.

So get outside, enjoy that strange scent called Fresh Air.

Windy Season

I've been a bit distracted lately. You see, it's sailing season. I sail on a regular basis, starting with twice a week, and ramping up to around four, once I get my own boat in the water. Pretty much that seems to sap all of my energy. So where does that leave me for this? Pretty much out to sea...

Wow, ok, that was a bit cheesy. See, it's sapped all the creativity as well.

Why does it grab my attention so? It's one of those sports that requires an amazing amount of focus and subtlety. Usually these are two athletic skills that I lack. With sailing, when I'm at the tiller, I have tremendous focus.

This might be more true in light wind. That's where the subtlety really comes into play. The tiller only needs a soft touch to get it to point higher or bear off. In those conditions it's easy to over-steer, and when there's light wind, it may be very difficult to actually get back to a preferred course.

Tactics are important in those wind conditions, as well. The job of the tactician is not only to be aware of the other boats, but to be aware of the wind conditions on the course. He or she needs to spot the areas of stronger, larger, more consistent pockets, all of which help to gain speed over the other boats in the race. A good tactician can make the race.

In the heavier air races, it's seems to be more a question of sailing skill. The tactician is still valuable in picking the favored side of the course, and in dealing with the other boats, but much of the time is spent sailing well on a long beat. Speed is maintained on well-executed tacks and mark roundings.

To see where I stand in all this, check out the Black Bear Yacht Racing Association's (BBYRA) race results. The boat I race on is called Improv. Great little boat, with not so great little racers.

Oddly enough, I think that I've gone to exactly the place in blogging where I hoped not to go. I'm free writing.

Damn it. Really, this isn't the time or the place for it, especially if I want to seem semi-serious about the whole thing. It's just that I haven't had to many ideas for essayable subjects. Perhaps I should be putting this sort of writing into a story or a novel or something (that thing that I really want to do).

This basically puts me at the same place that a vast majority of bloggers are at: self-indulgent forms of flattery. Look at me, I'm so good.

I'm not saying that about myself. Usually I describe it as total crap. Oh, maybe I'm being a bit hard on myself.

The last post I put up was just that. I was just trying to hard to come up with something to say in. In the end (since it was through multiple sittings), it merely meanders (albeit, briefly) through a start of one subject and a discussion of another. I probably shouldn't have even have posted it.

Ah, who knows.

More Transitions

Here's a great way to start out the summer: go back to work.

Kids have been doing this for years. Schools out and one needs a little more spending cash. It's that unfortunate catch 22 of the summer. To have fun you have to work.

Although, it seems that once schools out permanently there is actually more free time. Not having homework at night opens up an amazing amount of time. This, however, causes a problem.

Many young people (myself included) seem to have a lack of purpose. They lack drive. They need something to get them from this point A to some other point B with out going through all the strange, meandering points in between (like X, Y and Z).

The question is, where am I going with this? I ask myself that question all the time. I always thought that the older one gets the more clear things will seem. This is, of course, not true. It's one of those great truths, really. The stability and composure that many of our parents conjured really just masked their own insecurities as human beings. They did it all for our benefit. Amazing really.

It's difficult to mask these insecurities. Many time they sit on the forefront of our minds. Am I doing the right thing? Will people like me? Should I really have worn the pink shirt with the beige trousers or should I have gone with black?

The interesting bit is how we deal with these questions. There's two ways to answer them. First one can simple become paralyzed by the questions, continually answering them in one way and then the other. It becomes an infinite loop of yes or no, stay or go, pink or black. The questions merely reverse for the new answer.

Or we can simply accept our first instinct. We've made this decision and we should stick with it. Come what may, it's the path we've chosen: Yes I'm doing the right thing; who cares what they think; damn it, I look good in pink. Now what we're left with is waiting and seeing what the results of our actions are. Then there will be a new set of questions and with them a new set of answers.

So what does that leave for the summer? Just a set of questions about what to do with that little bit of time left over after we've earned a little bit of spending cash.

Minor Editorial Note: I do not, in fact, own a pink shirt. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I just don't think it's my color.

Transitions

I'm writing this on my new Mac Powerbook^TM. I've finally made the switch. It's not all wine and roses.

I'm finding that there's a bit of a transition. In the back of my mind I new that would be the case. There's different key strokes, different button locations, different keyboard. The Software's all slightly different. The organization of things is very different.

Take, for example, the fact that there is no delete key. I don't mean backspace. I mean delete. You know, the one that deletes characters in front of it? I find that to be a highly useful key. I'm sure there's a way to do it. I just haven't found it yet.

But as a user it will be an interesting change. It's the first time in a while where I need to learn the fundamentals of the system again. There's a bit of joy that comes from discovering how to do things the quick way (like with a key stroke) versus the easier to find slow way (menu navigation).

It has me excited, though. As a developer, it has a lot to offer, mostly in the stability and performance areas. There's a lot of little places that I can get my feet wet. If I was ever so inclined, I could also help out porting existing open-source Unix applications to this platform.

That requires some interest and need for those applications, though. Otherwise I won't ever work on the projects. I've noticed that the best way to drive development is to write a tool that I need. Second to that is writing a tool that someone else needs (this is called business).

There will be a lot of tools that I'll need here in this new world, so I'll need to get cracking.

Points and Lines

Every now and then (sort of like my need to examine the state of my Religiosity), I need to sit back and look at why I'm doing this. It's been a few months now since I've started this blog, and so I thought I'd reexamine my purpose.

It seems like I've become an essayist. Somehow that doesn't seem quite right. I never thought about becoming an essayist. I never wanted to become an essayist. I never sat up, late in the night, gazing at the stars, and whispered into the darkness "I would like to write the Great American Essay."

What did I want? Well, I've always thought about becoming a novelist. Barring that, a screenwriter (OK, so who hasn't thought of that. I think my mistake - or success - in not becoming a screenwriter was despising LA and being unable to afford life in NY). There's a lot of glamour in the screenwriting business, or at least the fantasy of seeing your work up on screen.

There's a very similar desire to see a book on a shelf in a bookstore with one's name on it. Being a novelist really should be about telling a story. A story of a man. A radioactive man...no, wait that's been done.

Ay, there's the rub. Much of it's been done before. Or at least that's how it seems. Perhaps it's just a bit daunting to get started. That blank page makes one both fearful, nervous, yet ready to fill it with words. Hopefully words full of meaning and theme and Great-American-Novelly-type things. In other words, a grandiose tale of men (and women).

It usually ends up being a page of crap.

That page of crap is important, as I've said before. That becomes the first draft and the house of ideas in which one can raise a story.

So here's where I put myself after these few months blogging. I find that the barrier to putting words down to be thinner, taking less effort to overcome. I can sit down and bang out an essay. It's usually crap but now I accept that part of it. The crap becomes part of ideas and elements that perhaps I can use later.

Now, as far as writing a novel goes, these ideas aren't necessarily worthwhile. There not even good. But, I have been leaving out my fiction ideas. There's two reasons for doing that. First, they haven't quite gelled yet. There's still some ideas of plot, character, setting, style, pacing and that sort of thing that needs to be worked out. Secondly, its a matter of having no idea where to start.

The essays are easy. Even if it's about something I'm not too knowledgeable about, I'll look it up. That's what many of the essays have been: short explorations of an idea. Fiction has to be made up entirely. Write about what you know, they say. If I did that, it would be terrible uninteresting. So I need to really figure out how to imagine people and places and situations, before I can sit down and write about them.

Lies are all in the details, and so is fiction.

Astonishing Principle

There is a very strange informal scientific principle know as the Principle of Least Astonishment (also known as the Principle of Maximum Boredom). This principle states that "the explanation which is the least astonishing and which is the most boring is usually (but not always) the right one."[1]

Often one is using this principle when, upon coming to a conclusion, begin with the phrase "surprise, surprise, it turns out that..."

More often than not this principle is a very good starting point for prove things. Since you would be very surprised if it turned out to be incorrect, you already have a goal in mind. Sometimes actually proving that the assumption is true can be much more difficult.

Take, for example, the Fermat's Last Theorem[2]

xⁿ + yⁿ=zⁿ

has no non-zero solutions for n > 2.

What's is wholely remarkable about this particular theorem is that it would have been incredibly surprising to find that it was false. But finding a correct proof of this theorem took centuries and the cumulative work of many mathematicians.

There is another application of the Principle, which lies in the software space. When there is ambiguity, the software should do the least surprising of the two actions. An example of the opposite of this is an instance where a dialog pop-up appears asking the user whether or not they're really, absolutely sure they want to do that. The user is given the option of yes, no or cancel. Clicking cancel exits the application.

Very surprising.

It's point in UI design is intended to guide a developer to make interfaces that are moderately intuitive. Given it's other name, it certainly sounds like it has very boring outcomes. However it's a good road to happy customers, which means the software producer will never be bored, racing down the highway in his fancy, expensive sports car.

[1] Absolute Astronomy Reference

[2] Fermat's Last Theorem

Classical Journalist

Whatever happened to the old-time journalist? Tie, crappy suit, typewriter. Did it all go out with the advent of the computer and under-arm antiperspirant?

I'm sitting here waiting to head off to a fancy dress thingy. So it makes me wonder, whatever happened to the suit at work? I know that people seem to think that having to dress in one particular way seems to disuade creativity. Why is dress so important to creativity? Is there a psychological impact to dressing the same (relatively) as everyone else.

Here's a little tidbit about uniforms in schools: Schools that have uniforms have lower incidents of crime. Kids are no longer have the distraction of the coolest clothes or shoes. There is no have and have-nots. Everyone is sporting the same dress style. Sounds communist? Not really. It actually improves the sense of community as well. Kids feel like they belong. Sounds like something kids need in that awkward stage of life.

There's also a dark side, so to speak. A study into sport team uniforms saw a statistical trend that the teams that wore black uniforms were more aggressive, more penalized (probably due to the higher aggression) and more feared (they're perceived as incredibly aggressive, so the opposing team should "watch out"). The most interesting point was that this is even the case when, in football, the players are wearing their home-team white. The authors of the study theorize that it's due to the primary color of the team (i.e. black), which is shouted by the fans.

They do concede that there is a tendency to recruit the more aggressive players for these teams. The Oakland Raiders are a great example, most recently with there acquisition of Randy Moss (formerly of the Vikings - go Purple).

But what about in the office environment? Here's an excerpt from an Psychology Today:Mar/Apr 95 issue (yet again):

Corporations that have bought into informality have looser hierarchies; people are more apt to call each other by their first names. Meetings are more conducive to free thought and risk taking. People's speech, posture, and manners change; they feel free to interrupt each other--circumstances more akin to brainstorming, observes [David] Morand, from Penn State.

This works well for software companies. Mainly because we're all a bunch of children. But for other corporations like

banks, insurance firms, and law offices, industries that thrive less on creativity than on routine, detail, and logic.

There formality works better, even if employees wish they could be a little more laid back. Formal dress codes generate sober attitudes and a cool social distance between workers. That same social distance is what makes it easier for your local bank officer to refuse a friendly customer like you a loan.

So, for now, those of us who don't mind wearing a tie will just have to either wait until for the second coming of 1950's IBM, or we'll have to just become bankers.

Another Brief Note on the Previous Post

I think I've satiated my need to discourse on the subject of religion, for now. It's one of those life long issues.

But I will be back to discussions of travel, music, and literature soon enough.

Schroedinger of the Divine

Note: This is merely the opinion of the author. It is based on his own personal religious experieces and musing. Any offence taken is your own damn fault.

Part I: Schpatz Goes Holistic

It seems like everyone I know is upgrading there computers lately. Some drastically, some incrementally. A friend of mine just wrote me about buying a new laptop. That's drastic. Another friend of mine just upgraded his graphics card. That's incremental.

I'm not sure which actually ends up being worse. I've found that if you upgrade one part, there's always something else that becomes the bottle neck. I upgraded the graphics card on my desktop a while ago. Now my biggest complaint is the processor speed. Everything seems a bit slow. So now I'm thinking I should get a new CPU. But that would work better with faster, new memory, which needs a new motherboard, which would have a new kind of graphics card interface...

You get the idea.

Oddly enough, with my laptop, I find that the slowness doesn't bother me. It must be due to the fact that I can't upgrade it. Sure, I might be able to add a little more memory, replace the DVD drive, but those things will only help a little bit. The only reason I'm looking to replace it is that it's starting to go. It's "like a military academy. Bit's of it keep passing out."[1]

Part of the reason for not feeling the need to upgrade the laptop is that I can't. I accept it as it is. There's an old prayer (Catholic, I think) the asks for the wisdom to accept the things that I cannot change, or something like that. This acceptance of what the laptop is has allowed my to use it with very little complaint.

The same sort of thing should be used in our interactions with people. We shouldn't try to change people. We can only be ourselves, and hope that, by example, people may change. That's always seemed to me to be the main point of Christianity. From a philosophical stand, the concept of "love thy neighbor as thyself" is to live an example to others. Love thyself means to accept yourself, faults and all. Therefore, one must do the same with others.

Accepting the things we can't change. This doesn't mean that people shouldn't fight corruption or injustice and that sort of things. These are things that can change. They just require more people, more ideas, more social power (i.e. masses) to enact that change.

People are, however, unchangeable. They must choose to change. They must enact the change themselves. They have to replace their own parts, and upgrade their own thinking.

It's choice.


Part II: Where am I going with all this

Every very now and then I get religion. Not in the "Praise Jesus!" sense, just that I start thinking about it philosophically and sociologically. I'm still trying to figure out if it has a place in my life.

This stems back to the fact that I went to Catholic School. Only through the eight grade, mind you, but long enough. I suppose though that is the only reason I even think about it from time to time. It's sort of embedded that sense of social connection that religion provides. As well as that guilt, but that's another story.

The other thing that it's done for me is that I still like all things Catholic. There's something exceptionally profound in all that pomp and circumstance, the ceremony of it all that gives it that feeling of the divine. I never get that from non-Catholic preachers (and I don't mean Lutherans or Anglicans; they seem pretty similar). Their's is more of a "spread the good word" sort of Christianity.

I've also developed an almost morbid fascination with it. When I travel abroad, some of the things that I enjoy seeing is the old (and I mean old) Christian relics and tombs. These things are so bizarre, so occult, that it makes Christianity seem almost pagan. In some ways it could be seen that way, when looked at from afar. Catholics (which, when I'm in Europe, I'll use Catholic and Christian interchangeably) worship and pray to saints, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and, of course, God. That's quite a pantheon.

I'm quite sure that I'm being a bit naive in my view of it all. I'm sure there are some very sound theological arguments for it all.

This is, of course, one opinion from years of very limited observations.


Part III: What's with all the God Talk

Religion has been a bit on my mind lately. I recently spent a weekend at my sister's in Dubuque. Any weekend spent with my family usually means a trip to church.

Now, I don't usually think about religion, unless I'm confronted with it. More often then not, I think about the humanity of it all. What I mean by that is that religion, in the organized sense, is built up by man. It's an arbitrary construction of rules, built around the shared idea that there is something greater than ourselves.

I don't discount the possibility that there is something greater than ourselves. Call it God, if you will. I'm an agnostic, that's certain. I've never considered myself an atheist. Just as the devout Christians, Muslims and Jews have faith in their belief in God, Atheists have faith in their belief that there is no God. This always seemed a bit strange to me. I've heard atheist sound just as fanatical about their beliefs as a fundamentalist.

Not entirely arbitrary. Every religion seems to have a bunch of similar rules. Don't kill people, for example (although there are often some exceptions to this rule, which in itself is a bit strange). These rules, I think are generated out of the social contract. The social contract of all societies has been to not get in the way of other people trying to get by.

I'm also not against the value of religion. There seems to be this built in need for human nature to feel connected.

There are three different theories on why religion exists (that I agree with anyway), all three of which are somewhat right.[2]

The first is from a French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. His definition of religion is as follows: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden -- beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” [3] The sacred and the profane are two things that oppose each other. This creates a series of rites and rules around protecting the sacred from th profane. This collection of rites and the community of practitioners becomes a religion.[4]

The second is from a Romanian historian, Mircea Eliade. His notions are similar to Durkheim's – the sacred and the profane - but lack the deconstruction of religion into a merely sociological construction. Religion is based on “Timeless forms”[5]. Every religion is built upon the same set of underlying forms. Oddly, enough this concept, reduces all religions to a simple construction of these forms. He makes the point, though, that there is a fundamental similarity of the human condition across cultures.

The third is from a professor in Anthropology at Fordham University, Stewart E. Guthrie. Guthrie proposes that religion is a result of anthropomorphizing nature. This is central to the creation of religion. As for motives of things supernatural, it's attributed to the following:

“Uncertain of what we face,” he writes, “we bet on the most important possibility because if we are wrong we lose little and if we are right we gain much. Religion, asserting that the world is significantly human-like, brings this strategy to its highest pitch.” His ‘tendency,’ then, is, according to Guthrie, more a survival strategy than simply a proclivity.

...

If such wagers are correct, the payoff is large. In the case of religion and the belief that the spirits have wills, it means either eternal bliss of some sort or a relatively lower level of anxiety here on earth. Both options have their appeal.[6]

Basically, what he's saying is something very similar to Pascal's assertion about religion, which goes something like this: if I choose to believe in God, and it turns out to be false, I've lost nothing. If it turns out to be true, I've gained eternal rewards. On the otherhand if I choose to not believe in God, and I'm wrong, the rest of time will be particularly unpleasant.

These theories (and me coming to this conclusion after several hours of intense study) really describe different aspects of the same thing: the why of religion. As in everything societal, it is a question that's answer is wholly complicated and can't really be distilled down into one theory.


Part IV: Conclusions

Having done the slightest bit of research leaves me with a few questions on the subject of my own belief in God. Where does the Agnostic fit into all this? We're sort of stuck in the middle, a Schroedinger experiment of the divine, where God is in a state of both existence and non-existence. That is, until we open that box.

[1] The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams. I've been re-reading and watching the BBC series recently. Possibly in anticipation for the theatrical film. Possibly to completely ruin my viewing experience of the film, in order to have something to bitch and moan about for the rest of the summer blockbuster season.

[2] "Explaining Religion," Austin Cline

[3] The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Emile Durkheim, 1912

[4] Summary of The Elementary Forms of Religions Life, Robert Alun Jones, 1986

[5] See [2]

[6] Review of Faces in the Clouds, a New Theory of Religion, Russell T. McCutcheon, 1994

Brief Note on the Lack of Posts

I've been wrestling with some posts for the last week or so. I think they'll get merged into one longer post. They touch on some topics that I don't normally write about (religion, God, etc), and so I want to get them right.

Imagine that: me, editing.

Reluctant Expert

Everyone and their grandmother seems to be asking me questions about computers (well, at least my grandmother, anyway). It must be upgrade season.

Upgrade season happens every eighteen months. This is, I've read, the average time it takes for someone to become dissatisfied with there computer. At least this is true with the PC world, Macs are different.

There are several reasons for this. One is software related, the other is hardware.

Software bloat is one of the causes of dissatisfaction. Users aren't dissatisfied with the software, however. They're bothered by the way it runs on their PC. Software, through patches, feature creep, and the philosophy of jam-more-crap-then-the-other-guy, tends to require more CPU and memory over time. The programs are simply bigger. Take windows, for example. I've used the same set of software on my PC's for years (Java, a Java IDE, a browser, Civ III). Yet every OS upgrade has expected more and more from the PC. True, the applications have also required more (Java is notorious for being a memory hog), but it seems like some time could have been spent on performance enhancements for windows.

Games cause another level of software-related dissatisfaction. Games are the industry's cutting edge, in terms of pushing the envelop. The effect of this envelope pushing is that they bring along with them the need for the newest graphics hardware and CPUs. It's seems that every year, a game developer puts something out that finally requires the advanced GPU technologies that were developed last year. I've never recommended that anyone be on the cutting edge of graphics technology. Games are always six months to a year behind. But still, that's an upgrade that can be worth while, even staying behind the curve.

Hardware has it's own cause for needing upgrades: it breaks down. My brother-in-law's motherboard decided to do a little agricultural realestate deal recently. My laptop's starting to go. Both of these particular examples were very old, relative to the eighteen month curve. Here's where one needs to ask the same questions as one would with a car. When does it stop paying to upgrade, and just buy a new PC. For myself, I may replace the CD-ROM in my laptop, so I can put Linux on it (I'll still replace the whole thing, I just don't like old hardware to go to waste). For my brother-in-law, it was buy a new PC.

When all's said and done, I don't have a whole lot of knowledge about computers. I just work with them often and am not afraid of opening then up. This is where I get the expert status. It's not so expert. I've had worse luck with computers I've built myself (maybe there's some sort of infection from having it open for so long. Maybe I need to push antibiotics after the surgery...). They often fail faster and in more severe ways. Yet, people keep asking me questions.

Fancy that.

Language in Decline

I've noticed lately a certain problem with language and its usage. It seems to be on a downward spiral into simplicity.

There are words that should be considered easy to understand in conversation, that get a blank-stare response. Recently, a friend of mine gave me the example of the word "antiquated". I was surprised by the fact that this word was questioned and denounced as "too big a word" (a label which is often used for a word that someone doesn't understand). There seems to be a lack of contextual inference. For example, the sentence "Young people have trouble understanding older generations due to the antiquated nature of their language" gives us very good hints as to the meaning of antiquated.

Secondly, there seems to be a lack of meaning-deduction from the word structure. Many words, like antiquated, contain roots that are easily recognizable. If a sentence without contextual information was used, there still is a possibility of inferring the meaning of the word by it's structure. For example, in a conversation where one is describing a record player, the listener may respond "that's antiquated." The root antiquate- and it's similarity to antique may guide the first converser too infer that the listener has just said "that's old-fashioned" or "I really don't care what your saying because what you've just described is something I threw out ten years ago" (the two meanings, of course, depend on the tone used when the response is uttered).

There are other types of words that have come up in conversation that have been questioned. These words have unfamiliar roots. I used the word "paradox" a while ago. Now the receiving converser had never heard this word before. There could be a few reasons for not knowing this words. First, she was a college freshman, a new one at that. Second, and this only occurs to me know, is that a paradox is more often than not used as scientific and mathematic lingo. It is still a very descriptive word for the types of situation it describes.

(A little context around how the word paradox came up in said conversation. It was a question of why there were less men then women in the ballroom class. My response to this was that dancing is a bit of a paradox with guys. They don't want to embarrass themselves by looking like a dancing monkey, and therefore drive away the women on the dance floor. On the other hand, they know that women like guys who can dance, and therefore the should dance to attract women on the dance floor. This is a paradox in that they attempt to do neither. So the resort to the common method of restoring balance and sanity to a paradoxical universe: they drink large sums of alcohol).

This decline of language can be attributed to two causes. First is newsprint (and via evolution, webprint). The language used is meant for the least common denominator which is the fifth-grade reading level. Apparently, in these days of much-lauded need for higher education journalism does not assume that anyone has made it out of the fifth grade. I think print media has had these accusations thrown it's way ever since the first English-speaking newspaper rolled out in 1622[1],

The second reason, and more powerfully so, is television.

The Department of Education states that language skills are best developed through reading and interactions with others in conversation and play. Excessive television watching can impede this development. Hours spent watching TV make risk-taking and social relationships difficult for many children. [2]

Television viewing is up, much of which (and here I start to make some rash generalizations, unfounded by the fact that I am neither a sociologist, nor a parent) is probably due to the rise of the two-income household. In many of these households, the time spent between when the child gets home and the first of the parents get home is spent watching TV or playing video games. There is little physical activity as well as very little social interaction involved while TV watching is in progress. The social interaction, especially at a young age, is very important for developing good conversation and language skills. Much of a child's early language development is learned through example.

When it comes to conversation, though TV is not the only detractor. I've encountered one child in particular whose language skills were very weak, in terms of pronunciation. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom, who was also very careful about regulating the child's TV intake. However (and this may be due to a certain amount of shyness), her pronunciation of words was terrible since she lacked interaction with other children. Her pronunciation was never corrected by her parents because they understood her; there was no need to correct it. Essentially she had developed her own dialect. Needless to say, I felt like I was talking to someone from rural New Zealand, or a Cockney Londoner: I required a translator.

I find that fact that I'm interested in the use of the English language very amusing. I'm a mathematician and computer scientist by trade. Almost as a rule, we have very little formal training in written (and verbal) communications. Many of us do a lot of reading, which is a great way to research writing and language usage. The only thing missing from this sort of research are the formal rules that back things up (like the use of it's versus its, something I needed explained to me to start using them correctly). Still, we're also very good emulators. Much of our sciences are learn-by-example types of sciences. Another reason that we're a lot like little children.

[1] The first English language news pamphlet was The Weekly Newes, published in London in 1622. This wasn't a daily, but was printed whenever there was an interesting event. The first daily was the London Gazette, published in 1666, which is widely considered the first true newspaper. A Brief History of Newspapers, Phil Barber

[2] How Television Viewing Affects Children, University of Maine Cooperative Extension