Emma would probably enjoy this

Three guys, four days to do what would have taken hundreds of extras to film 20 years ago. Skip to 3:00 or so to see the result.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9cpOMYv0

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Why voters should be familiar with game theory

[By the way, Michael D. Griffin is NASA's chief administrator. COTS stands for "commercial, off-the-shelf." Think of cheap Costco night-vision goggles vs. developing special military hardware that's twice as good and ten times as expensive.]

http://selenianboondocks.blogspot.com/2008/01/discussion-of-dr-griffins-sta-comments.html

Griffin: "To this end, as I have noted many times, we must be willing to defer the use of government systems in favor of commercial services, as and when they reach maturity. When commercial capability comes on line, we will reduce the level of our own LEO operations with Ares/Orion to that which is minimally necessary to preserve capability, and to qualify the system for lunar flight."

Goff: "While I agree that the government not only is the government being "willing to defer in favor of commercial services" is a really good idea, I think that this approach (of hedging their bets by coming up with a competing in-house launcher) is fraught with risk.... The danger of having NASA in-house launch vehicles and space access capabilities that can serve as a backup to COTS also allows them to directly compete with COTS if the budgetary situation goes sour.... The frustrating thing is that by setting things up the way NASA is doing, the NASA people don't even have to be malicious for such a result to happen--it's a natural and likely consequence of the perverse incentives that NASA and Congress are setting up."

Emphasis mine. This is the same point I was trying to make with the last post on CDS. The federal government is rarely able to accomplish anything directly--as Peggy Noonan points out, what it can do is write a check and, I would add, set the conditions under which someone is able to claim that check. The government can't act, but it can set the rules for the framework within which other agents act. It's hard to predict how individuals can act, but if you do a good job of providing the right incentives you can make certain outcomes less likely and others more likely. You can't control the price an object will fetch in an auction, but you can design an auction that makes it rational and logical to offer a fair bid up front (Vickrey auctions). There's no guarantee that people will actually act rationally, but if you set it up so that rational actions lead to outcomes you don't want you're just asking for a world of hurt. System design matters.

In a democracy, of course, the government is the people. (Not in day-to-day administration, of course, but in a "the buck stops here" sense of ultimate responsibility.) Voters should have at least a passing familiarity with the Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt, and the concept that people generally act in their own best interests. Then when we talk about economic bailouts and immigration they'll at least have the tools to imagine the likely effect of proposed solutions.

~B.C.

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Credit Default Swaps

[I sent this to Jerry Pournelle earlier, but in retrospect I should have Cc'ed the blog. Actually, this needs a little explaining. The real estate side of the economy is having problems right now. The news is full of articles about poor immigrant workers in L.A. with 11 kids who are about to lose their home to mortgage default, but the real question is, how did someone with an $11-an-hour job get a loan sufficiently large to afford an 8-bedroom house when he can barely make the interest payments? Of course he was relying on the house to rise in value so that he could sell it, without any expectation of actually being able to pay off the loan otherwise. He was a bad credit risk. So even though this looks like a human-interest story, from a business perspective it's the bank trying to avoid losing money from a mortgage default--they would much, much rather that the government step in to cover the bad debt. Jerry points out that this is terrible policy and rewards poor business decisions, so why are we even talking about it? That's where this piece from Selenian Boondocks, by someone who works in the financial industry, comes in. The post is mainly about private space ventures, but the intro is relevant to the real estate debate. There. That's the context for your sake, my presumably non-existent readers.]

Subject: Credit Default Swaps

http://selenianboondocks.blogspot.com/2008/01/where-do-we-go-from-here.html

'That was the Faustian bargain in granting companies "corp"-orate status - they have equal "status" with you in the courts, but they can exercise far more economic clout than the vast majority of individuals can ("classes" of individuals at least have a fighting chance) - they can afford far, far more lawyering than you or I. When companies have difficulty servicing their debt, that raises the odds of a default, which angers the gods of CDS, and they induce volatility in the market and require that more capital pay attention to them. By lowering rates, companies whose debt is little more than a promise can at least keep that promise for a little while longer.'

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Genius

Miss Manners is a genius. That's why I read her column, because she is much cleverer about dealing with people's feelings than I am. Two genius answers in the same column:

Link

-Max

P.S. Miss Manners hates blogs. This gives me mixed feelings about having one, but Adam requested that I start one, and I'll try almost anything once.

P.P.S. In response to a comment I got encouraging me to live life free of the constraints opposed by the opinions of 1930's-era old ladies:

1.) Okay, she doesn't actually hate blogs, per se. She hates people who post personal details on blogs, as if it were a diary, but in public.

2.) I don't think she's outdated at all. Rather, she's very good at understanding people and cultural context. I don't always agree with her solutions, but she's good at helping me understand the likely consequences of my actions, in the context of 21st century America.

3.) Did I mention that she's a genius?

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Insensitivity

I've been talking with K. recently about sensitivity and pain, with specific reference to Lazarus and Enoch's vision (the heavens wept). Pain isn't going to hurt you, of course, we know this, but she wanted to know why then the Lord would weep. Blowing it off as temporary doesn't seem divine. Well, I said, you're right. Just because someone's pain is transitory doesn't make it any less real. You have to know the person you're dealing with--sometimes, the correct response is to gently laugh and remind the person that it won't hurt them, and in other cases it's not.

I remember last Christmas, E. M. called me up out of the blue and asked me to pick up A. at the airport because she was supposed to, but couldn't because J. was sick and she needed to stay with him. I had mixed feelings about this--I like A., but I was busy trying to forget K., and there was some awkwardness in my relationship with A. too--but no real decision to make. Of course I will help in any way possible; that decision was made long ago. We got kind of stuck in traffic on the way home, and A. found that she didn't have her key to get into the house, although K. (who had come home on an earlier flight) did, and she was supposed to pick K. up on campus but her car keys were locked in the apartment. I winced inside, but said, okay, let's go pick her up. So we did. I pulled my hat down over my eyes and tried to be invisible. K. didn't say one word to me the whole time. When we got back to Brentwood, I went back to my apartment. "I hate you," I said to Dante, who I thought was the one who made me go through that (even though I now suspect that keeping commitments is mostly Vlad's shtick). Then I think I cried tears of frustration, and real tears for missing her.

Then, of course, I forgot that it had ever happened. What, emotions, me?! Naaah.

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Due diligence (NOT counting coup!)

One thing that I think bothers K., as well as well-meaning members of my family, is that they think I haven't done due diligence in dating around and learning how I get along with lots of girls. On one level I can see their point because I haven't had a lot of girlfriends, or even a girlfriend, and I haven't kissed a lot of girls, or even a girl. At the same time, just because I don't talk about girls I've been seriously interested in doesn't mean that they don't/didn't exist. At lunch today, I tallied up the serious love interests in my life. Excluding the ones who were just simple crushes[1], counting only the ones I seriously investigated for real compatibility[2], I get eleven girls and 16.5 years cumulative. I'm going to be a cad here and use first names.

Melani: 3 yrs
Sierra: 3 yrs
Melinda: 1 yr
Debbie: 4.5 yrs
Jesse: 1 yr
Jenifer: .5 yr
Jane: 1 yr
Angie: .5 yr
Tara: .25 yr
Charlotte: 1.5 yr
Natalie: .25 yr

Now, this isn't all that long a list compared to some guys'. And some people would say you can't really get to know someone unless you were dating them at the time. I disagree, but do notice that the durations keep getting shorter, and if I put the years (e.g. 1995-1998) you'd see that the chart gets sparser. That's because I was learning, so during my twenties I probably overlooked a lot of girls very much like Sierra because I'd learned what it was about her that did, and didn't, attract me. So look, people, I've done due diligence! Yes, sure, I could still be wrong--I have a track record of being out of touch with my feelings, not noticing my emotions, in a way amusingly analogous to leprosy--which is probably a very insensitive thing to say, if there are any victims of Hansen's Disease here--but not in a way that more dating is going to solve. And I haven't given up on girls--I have a dinner date tomorrow with a nice girl I met recently--so if Somebody upstairs wanted to surprise me I'm doing the things to make that possible.

I think I just feel unjustly maligned, and kind of annoyed that by trying to be a gentleman and not discuss these romantic encounters I have people worrying about these things having not happened. Can't they assume that I'm doing my job? Because I am.

I suppose I take comfort in Miss Manners' relaying an old German proverb that "the essence of modesty is to be more than one appears. This saying antedates the invention of the Mercedes-Benz, paid for on installments."

-Max

[1] Which means J.F.R. doesn't count, even though I had a crush on her for years. But I never seriously thought we were compatible.

[2] Well, maybe Melani shouldn't be on this list because I wasn't at the point yet where I thought of issues like "compatibility." But she affected me enough that I'm putting her on the list anyway. And maybe Charlotte shouldn't be on the list either.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Review: Brust on Steven Pinker

I recommend this review. It's Steven Brust on Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. Brust is one of my favorite authors, and my favorite kind of critic: he tends to bring out aspects of a work that I wouldn't have seen on my own, so I can think about them. He liked the book, but had some problems with the depth of Pinker's linguistic knowledge--or rather the lack thereof. "Consistently interesting, often insightful, but never profound." This paragraph particularly caught my attention:

But here we run into another problem that may stem from Mr. Parker not being a linguist: That is how it works in English; what about other languages? If one is going to discuss language and thought, it is terribly important to know: is this sort of distinction rare? Common? Universal? He only rarely mentions other languages. He certainly does not tell us often enough for me to know when certain sorts of verb behavior reflect universal facets of the mind, and when they reflect aspects of a particular culture. It's even more frustrating because, in attacking certain other theories, he says things like, "If [these things were true], we should expect to see them in languages all over the world(page 78)." Well, yes; but the same thing is true of his theories, and only occasionally does he bring up other languages to support them, and then with qualifications like "most languages," or, "nearly all languages." On page 318, he says, ""Gender plays a role beyond the obvious fact that in almost all cultures, boys' names can be distinguished from girls.'" Almost? Almost? In other words, there are exceptions? Or was he just afraid there might be one and so didn't want to say all? If there are exceptions, that is interesting, and I wish... he'd stopped and talked about it.

Ironically, this reminds me of something Pinker once said about Noam Chomsky: that he makes pronouncements about universal rules but "hasn't done the spade-work to find out how it works in some weird little language in New Guinea."

I really liked Brust's comment on paradox and reality. I would never, ever study philosophy in a formal setting--too much navel-gazing for me--but it's kind of fun to spend a couple minutes thinking about philosophical questions. Just long enough to "solve" them to my own satisfaction. In the case of motion: it's the derivative of position with respect to some temporal frame of reference. "Derivative" implies "limit," and so it doesn't preclude the possibility of discontinuities, if whoever is creating the space-time decides to reassign the coordinates (or rather, re-map the adjacency lists). This doesn't bother me at all, even though it means that something can change position without having "moved." Now, if I were a philospher I'd probably spend several more years chewing on the problem, making up terminology, and trying to get other philosophers to accept my viewpoint. That's why I don't understand philosophers and wouldn't want to study it in school. I get it--who cares if I can prove it? Much less make up a specialized terminology for explaining it. Much less wade through other people's specialized made-up terminology for explaining their take on it. As with many of my hobbies, turning philosophy into a job would take all the fun out of it, for me.

Anyway, it's an interesting review and I may as well post the link out here so someone can benefit.

~B.C.

--

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

How I feel about polygamy

I think the way I feel about polygamy is approximately the way I feel about adopting children.

1.) It's something you do out of love, not out of a need to be loved. (Or at least, that's the appropriate motivation.)

2.) If the Lord commands it, there must be a way. Nevertheless,

3.) I couldn't do it alone. Sorry. I just don't have that much capability, and I would mess up. Frequently. I would absolutely require full support from my counterpart and/or divine intervention.

So, even though I like kids a lot I won't be adopting any, any time soon. And I'm not going to marry some random girl, either--it would feel too much like polygamy, since my heart is already allocated, and as stated above I can't split myself in two that way without support. And if I had support from her, I'd be married to her and not to our hypothetical random girl. QED.

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Metaphor

An interesting thought: Newtonian mechanics inform our social thinking, but Heraclitus' observation on change is more applicable to project management. "You could not step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you... All is flux, nothing stays still." (This reminds me of the Argo paradox.)

Plus, it's just a really cool video if you like juggling.

-B.C.

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Perspective on Iraq

K. once mentioned how she felt sorry for Rumsfeld when he was ousted because it seemed like political fallout, unconnected to how well he had done the job. These two articles provide some perspective on Bush administration officials (Condoleeza Rice) and how they dealt with specific problems within their area of responsiblity. I'm sure there are two sides to every story, but it sure is interesting. Excerpt below.

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA24Ak01.html http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA23Ak02.html

[begin quote] By the end of 2005, Rice's opposition to any opening to the Sunni leadership in Iraq became almost obsessive, according to currently serving senior military officers. In one incident, now notorious in military circles, Rice "just went completely crazy" when she learned that a marine colonel had dispatched combat helicopters to help a "a Sunni sheikh" in Fallujah fight what the sheikh called an "imminent al-Qaeda threat".

As a senior Pentagon official now relates: "The Sunni leader literally picked up the telephone one day and called the ranking colonel at the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF)and pleaded with him, 'I need help and I need it now. Al-Qaeda is killing my tribe'." The marine colonel in question was John Coleman, the chief of staff to the same unit that had gone into Fallujah to fight the insurgency after the killing of four US security contractors in April of 2004.

"Rice was just enraged with Coleman and with the marines," a senior Pentagon officials say. "She said, 'you have to stop all of that right now and you can't do it unless you have State Department permission and the permission of the Iraqi government'. Well, the marines weren't about to do that. They were taking a lot of casualties and they were fed up. And they just concluded that it was their war and not hers," a senior Pentagon civilian recently noted. "So they just ignored her and went ahead anyway." [end quote]

-Max

P.S. Quote: In fact, the shift in strategy is more the result of necessity than choice - of decisions made by commanders on the ground who opposed the White House, National Security Council, CPA - and State Department view that all opposition to the Americans must be, ipso facto, evidence of terrorism. "We've not only started to define the real enemy," a senior military office says, "but we've stopped shooting people. We've figured out that protecting Iraq is Iraq's job, not ours."

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Priesthood ordinations and Africans

[From another conference. The topic at hand was the restriction, prior to a 1978 revelation, that prevented members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had any amount of (black) African blood from receiving temple ordinances, and also prevented males of said descent from being ordained to the priesthood. This is commonly perceived, even among members of the Church, to have had something to do with racial prejudice. For a variety of reasons I find this implausible as an explanation for the policy, although I think it likely that attempts to explain the policy may have been influenced by or even strengthened racism within segments of the Church. -B.C.]

I guess it's time for me to post a substantive opinion rather than just commenting on others' opinions: for much of human history, the priesthood was restricted in its dessimination. Not just ordaining to the priesthood (e.g. non-Levites excluded, barring Melchizedek exceptions), but even the receiving of ordinances. Consider the poor deceased Roman who believed the gospel when he heard it and has been waiting for over 2000 years for his baptism! If, for whatever reason, it's appropriate to make many, many people wait, why not some living ones as well as dead ones? If some living people must wait, isn't the most convenient way of signalling that by arranging bloodlines? This doesn't say anything about "valiancy" (Christopher Columbus had to wait at least 400 years for his baptism), and it's quite plausible that some African saints, like that preacher in Nigeria that they tell about in Sunday school, were placed where they were specifically because they were capable of handling the job to be done at transition. Anyway, I don't see the priesthood issue as a group-identity thing at all--it's all about individuals, most of whom I haven't met and don't know nearly as well as Heavenly Father does.

So, yes, in terms of substantive position I agree with you. I think the Church policy was inspired, on purpose, and not because of concern about the opinions of Man (even members of the Church). It's an issue far more consequential than typos in the Book of Mormon (which Heavenly Father is perfectly willing to overlook until they can be corrected by [church leaders], perhaps at the instigation of Royal Skousen or whoever :)).

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Giant Alligator???

Giant Alligator in Mexico? Find out...

http://fredoneverything.net/AlligatorChapala.shtml

"Then Pablito disappeared.

He had gone for his usual walk along the lake, his mother said, and hadn't come back. At first, nobody was greatly upset. Kids disappear all the time, and show up at a friend's house, watching television. But Pablito didn't come back. The affair was no longer funny... A retired zoologist, Dr. William Kemper, lived in one of the gated gringo enclaves hereabouts. He asked to see the tracks and pronounced them unmistakably those of a huge alligator. This also made no sense. There are no alligators in the region, and never have been. I would have said the climate was wrong for them, but I'm no alligator expert. The idea was nuts, zoologist or no.

The Mexican press went crazy with florescent national coverage, mostly inaccurate. The US ignored it. I'll bet you have never heard of the case."

Still unsolved.

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are, Be witty if you can, But be cheerful if it kills you.

Haun's Mill

1.) This story from a contemporary of Joseph Smith, Daniel Tyler, makes an interesting metaphor for communication from the Holy Ghost. I've consolidated paragraphs for readability on the web, in contravention of English standards which require that each speaker have his own paragraph.

[begin quote] Everyone has probably heard or read of the terrible massacre at Haun's Mill. Brother Haun owned a grist mill which took his name. From two to four days prior to the massacre, the citizens of the little settlement assembled in a mass meeting and appointed Brother Haun a committee of one to go to the city for advice to know what to do. The whole country was under arms and excitement. The Apostle David W. Patten, with Brothers Gideon Carter and O'Banion, had already sealed their testimony with their blood.

Brother Haun repaired to the city, and as the Prophet was but a private citizen and minister of the gospel, in the legal sense, he first went to Captain John Killian, of the Caldwell County Militia, informed him of his appointment, and inquired what he and his brethren should do. "Move into the city," was the prompt reply. Brother Haun: "What! and leave the mill?" Captain Killian: "Yes, and leave the mill." Brother Haun: "What! to the mob?" Captain Killian: "Yes, to the mob."

Brother Haun then left the Captain and went to Brother Joseph and asked him the same questions, and received the same answers. "But Brother Joseph," responded the mill-owner, "we think we are strong enough to defend the mill and keep it in our own hands." "Oh, well," replied he, "if you think you are strong enough to hold the mill you can do as you think best." What more could he say? The Prophet's method had always been when his counsel was asked to give it freely and leave parties to receive or reject it. He could not, nor would not if he could, take away people's agency.

Brother Haun returned and reported that Brother Joseph's counsel was for them to stay and protect or hold the mill. [end quote]

2.) That makes an interesting counterpoint to one of my favorite Brigham Young quotes, doesn't it? "If I do not know the will of my Father, and what He requires of me in a certain transaction, if I ask Him to give me wisdom concerning any requirement in life, or in regard to my own course, or that of my friends, my family, my children, or those that I preside over, and get no answer from Him, and then do the very best that my judgment will teach me, He is bound to own and honor that transaction, and He will do so to all intents and purposes." [Brigham Young, JoD 3:205] In other words, when you get no answer you must use your judgment, but be very careful not to let your own judgment become your answer.

Food for thought, and all relevant to the Vlad experiment. Current status on that, by the way, is that Vlad is indeed sometimes right; but Dante is often right too, and we mustn't forget that we have two sources of knowledge. D&C 8:2 calls them "mind and... heart." Some things the mind knows but the heart doubts; sometimes, apparently, it's the other way around.

Best,
-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Mrs. Palmer's Tale

[You may have read part of this before. The whole account is interesting on all kinds of levels. Emphasis in original. Spelling & punctuation modernized already by my source. -Max]

My father owned a farm near that of the Smith family, in New York. My parents were friends of the Smith family, which was one of the best in that locality--honest, religious and industrious, but poor. The father of the family was above the average in intelligence. I have heard my parents say that he bore the appearance of having descended from royalty. Mrs. Smith was called "Mother Smith" by many. Children loved to go to her home.

My father loved young Joseph Smith and often hired him to work with his boys. I was about six years old when he first came to our home. I remember going into the field on an afternoon to play in the corn rows while my brothers worked. When evening came, I was too tired to walk home and cried because my brothers refused to carry me. Joseph lifted me to his shoulder, and with his arm thrown about my feet to steady me, and my arm about his neck, he carried me to our home.

I remember the excitement stirred up among some of the people over Joseph's First Vision, and of hearing my father contend that it was only the sweet dream of a pure minded boy. One of our church leaders came to my father to remonstrate against his allowing such a close friendship between his family and the "Smith Boy," as he called him. My father defended his own position by saying that Joseph was the best help he had ever found. He told the churchman that he always fixed the time of hoeing his large field to that when he could secure the services of Joseph Smith, because of the influence that boy had over the wild boys of the neighborhood, and explained that when these boys, or young men, worked by themselves much time would be spent in arguing and quarreling, which often ended in a ring fight. But when Joseph Smith worked with them, the work went steadily forward, and he got the full worth of the wages he paid.

I remember the churchman saying, in a very solemn and impressive tone, that the very influence the boy carried was the danger they feared for the coming generation, that not only the young men, but all who came in contact with him, would follow him, and he must be put down.

Not until Joseph had had a second vision and begun to write a book which drew many of the best and brightest people of the churches away did my parents come to a realization of the fact that their friend, the churchman, had told them the truth. Then, my family cut off their friendship for all the Smiths, for all the family followed Joseph. Even the father, intelligent man that he was, could not discern the evil he was helping to promote.

My parents then lent all the aid they could in helping to crush Joseph Smith; but it was too late. He had run his course too long. He could not be put down.

There was never a truer, purer, nobler boy than Joseph Smith, before he was led away by superstition.

-"Stories from the Notebook of Martha Cox, Grandmother of Fern Cox Anderson," Church Historical Library; Lee C. LaFayette, "Recollections of Joseph Smith," Church Historical Library

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Gift of the Holy Ghost

[Excerpt from a letter to an old friend. She had commented on the quote in my .sig, saying she had always thought of it differently.]

I agree, it is an interesting quote. It fits with what I read in the scriptures: "spirit" doesn't always mean literally a spirit body (with fingers and toes, etc.). Sometimes it means something sort of like "feeling" or "attitude," but deeper. For instance, the "spirit of contention" is not a person, even though it certainly is Satan's spirit because it's the kind of spirit Satan has. I think that's what Joseph F. Smith means by "light of truth." Light illuminates, and the light of truth is that which enables you to see that which is true, which is part of what the Holy Ghost communicates to us. Sometimes I interact with people of other religions who are very, very good people who see truth clearly and act with great courage and integrity. I think the "power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost" is precisely the spirit which rests upon such people when they are acting this way. The gift of the Holy Ghost is the legal right to have just such a spirit at all times, provided you don't purposefully reject it. (Rejecting it is simpler and more common than one might think. When your alarm is beeping at you and you KNOW you should get up, hitting "snooze" is rejecting the correct course of action, and is in my opinion a case of someone desiring not to have the correct spirit. I am not guiltless in this matter.)

[end excerpt]

~Apodictic Cobalt

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a
man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and
desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although
he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F.
Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Pornography and PTSD; Mensa

Today's entry is, I'm afraid, not going to be either polished or very coherent. Sorry. It's 5:44 a.m. and I'm freezing in my living room, if that's any excuse.

1.) What do pornography addiction and PTSD have in common? Flashbacks. Or at least, I bet they do. (I'm obviously speaking out of vast ignorance here, in order to set up the following theory.) It's been said that a neurosis is simply a normal human trait magnified to an abnormal degree, and I'm speculating here that involuntary visual re-imaging of past events is an intrinsic part of being male. (Why not female? Well, on the one hand people say that women are less visual. And women don't appear to have problems with any of the three sets of problems I'm going to talk about, the first two being pornography and PTSD. But mostly it's because it didn't fit with this crazy idea when it first came into my head.) I recently resolved to give up playing Axis & Allies, and furthermore (I hope) to never enroll in any martial arts courses, because it was getting really hard to concentrate at work since I kept having these visual flashbacks of various A&A game openings, and my brain would automatically start churning and trying to figure the numbers, to see if this would stick it to my opponent, and what I would do if I were the opponent facing this exact opening. It reminded me of the few times I've been in or close to physical fights, the most recent being that time at Family Night recently when they came in to show us aikido. I didn't think much of their claims, but after a few minutes I had to leave the room because I didn't like what it was doing to me mentally--every time they showed us a move, my brain started working out what I would do if someone pulled that move on me. Me being the hyper-aggressive entity that I am, this usually involved planning out how to exploit the fact that the aikido practitioner is expecting me to submit to the pain they're inflicting in order to do something unexpected and damaging with the body parts they don't have under control. In my mind that usually left me with at least a broken wrist. Anyway, even after I left the room, the hyper-aggressive emotions were still there and they took a couple of days to subside. Similarly, even after I resolved, "Okay. I'm never going to play A&A again, at least until I have kids and need to teach them and perhaps not even then," I still kept having these (now-irrelevant) visual experiences with the A&A board for the next couple of days. Since pornography addiction and PTSD are both stereotypically male disorders I'm generalizing these experiences to them.

Okay, maybe PTSD isn't exactly the right term for the post-combat flashbacks I'm thinking of (PTSD could, and probably does, apply to traumatic experiences like car crashes and rape), but I warned you that this wasn't going to be a coherent entry.

2.) Mensa. Remember that my reason for joining Mensa was that I realized I really do find intelligent people interesting, and wanting to meet some more. The idea is that it's a nice, generalized forum with lots of special interest groups. On the other hand, I've always had misgivings about Mensa because they seemed kind of elitist, so I'm just sort of giving them a chance to see if they're more inclusive than I thought they were. There's a Mensa science SIG that I'm planning on going to tonight. One thing that I intend to ask is if it would be okay for me to bring a friend as a guest. If they're also just interested in meeting interesting people, they'll probably be okay with that. If they're interested in protecting prerogatives as members of some special elite they will probably be less okay with that. [I think I've expressed previously that the top 2% isn't any kind of special elite anyway. There are 6 million Americans in the top 2%. Really unusual talent, like Einstein and Mozart, is probably more like four to six sigmas out there--Fields Medalists and such. By the way, I have no illusions about belonging to any such elite group. :) I'm just a dilettante.] So part of my opinion on Mensa will be formed tonight.

There's another thing going on in the Mensa program that kind of gives me the creeps. Apparently, there's this terminology: a "mixed marriage" is where one spouse is a "Mensan" and the other isn't. That is way too much cultural identity for me. It speaks of someone whose primary identity centers around being a Mensan. The only group memberships I have that are strong enough for me to imagine "mixed marriages" as an appropriate term are my identity as an American and as a Latter-day Saint.

We'll see. For the next year or so, Mensa is on initial probation with me. Of course I reserve the right to walk out sooner than that if appropriate.

-Max


P.S. I take it back. My experiences last week weren't primarily visual; they were spatial, or kinesthetic if you will. Kind of like imagining yourself tying a knot: it's an awareness of what would go where, in what order. You may have a visualization on top of that but it's a side-effect, and a lot of the details are probably missing from the visualization. (You probably don't see anything but your hands and the rope or thread. No body, no surroundings.) That's how it felt moving my tanks around. This is still interesting because men usually have enhanced spatial awareness compared to women (I heard of, but didn't read, a study where they took people to a new location and escorted them around, and asked them questions like "Which way is north?" and "Where are the exits?" Supposedly, men were 95% on knowing which way was north, and some high percentage on knowing the location of the exits; women were significantly lower but I don't know how much. I'm actually kind of skeptical that the average man would do quite that well, but it may have been a very simple location--or a skewed sample of men.)
--

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Sensitivity

[Blog: this was part of the conversation from which the "Feminism" post stemmed. My dear readers, if you exist, which you probably don't, you are well aware that this blog is merely a secondary outlet for publishing aspects of my private correspondence which, in the opinion of your humble servant the Author, are interesting enough to warrant public exposure. This is the second time that anyone has ever written back... she asked, "How do you want to express sensitivity?" I had to chew on that one for a while.]

Okay, then. First, you have to understand that Jenn is[1], among other things, a role model to me. She's a long way down the road towards being the sort of person I want to be eventually, and since I'm a natural mimic, hanging out with her puts me in the same frame of mind she has. I remember fairly recently, I happened to have hurt my head or something minor the night before and I was complaining about it. The conversation, as best I can remember, went something like this:

M: My head hurts.
J: That's interesting.
M. looks surprised: That's not what I thought you'd say.
J: Well, it's not going to hurt you. It's just interesting.
M. laughs: Okay, you're right. I guess we don't really believe in giving sympathy for pain, do we?
J: It depends. If you were a child, or someone small and weak, maybe I would. But pain isn't going to hurt you. It's just an interesting fact.
M: You're pretty cold-blooded sometimes, you know?
J. grins: Thanks.

This has actually influenced me, and I've found myself sometimes, when someone else is in pain (like, you know, a roommate has a date that didn't go well) saying, "That's interesting. Tell me about it." It doesn't seem to dramatically alter their feelings about their pain, but it lets me be sympathetic to their feelings without buying in to the idea that a bad thing is actually happening. How's that for an answer?

-Max

[1] Understand that I've normalized the tense of the verbs used. English actually isn't very good at expressing things that are going to have happened, let alone things that are someday going to potentially not have happened yesterday, in a place which isn't exactly a place. (Essentially, I don't believe in space-time as a fundamental reality.) So pretend there are only four dimensions while I'm telling this story. I'm afraid I had to choose, when relating the story, between precision and comprehensibility.

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Random

A word came to me while I was walking to work: diaphoresis. "What's diaphoresis?" I thought. "I know I've heard that word somewhere, but the only thing it reminds me of is dialysis." Turns out it means perspiration. I must have heard it on FreeRice.com.
 
-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Intelligence(s)

D&C 93:29. "Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be."

I want to say two words about the word "intelligence." Lego [legere, legi, lectus] in Latin means "read." I'm also given to understand that the original meaning was "to choose," and that the "reading" sense came from the ability to choose the correct meaning for a set of characters. To pick out, etc. Inter-lego would of course mean "to read between" or comprehend as well as "to choose between." Intelligence [intellego, intellegere, intellegi, intellectus] is therefore a particularly apt word for that eternal part of man from which spirit was created: that which comprehends, chooses between, and acts.

Note that "intelligence" is sometimes referred to as "spirit" also, which could potentially be confusing. "For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy." There's more to say on that subject, as well as on another kind of "choosing": election. Key words there are "bachar," translated from the Hebrew as "chosen" but also meaning "acceptable" or "appointed", and "many are called, few are chosen."

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Feminism

Did you read this one? It's an interesting and thought-provoking piece of writing… about why it's difficult to write about this particular subject. Her perspective on BYU culture was, shall we say, amusing. "But of course, there was no way I could admit to or discuss any of this. For one, there nothing less attractive in the world than a girl desperate to have someone, anyone, so she knows she is not a failure. So actually pursuing marriage was out of the question, because if you looked like you were looking for it, then it was certain that you would never get it."

I also liked this line: "I recently read a post on the bloggernacle responding to Sister Beck's talk saying that they object to anyone who says that a woman's fulfillment should come wholly or even primarily through raising children. Here's a news flash for you: the Church doesn't say that about women. It says that about everyone! Does the Church say that men should get a career for self-fulfillment?"

That said, I actually really appreciate feminism in the sense that mature, adult men and women are not really all that different from each other. We're all human beings, thinking and feeling in largely-similar patterns, even if we express our humanity in personal, idiosyncratic fashions. I appreciate feminism encouraging women to get an education and be intelligent, and encouraging men to be emotionally sensitive and close to their families. (At the same time, I don't want to express sensitivity the way a typical woman would.) Radical feminism, which seeks to erase truths, is different of course, but then it's also a fringe movement almost by definition. Feminism is easiest to appreciate when you contrast it with bigotry between the sexes.

-Max

--

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Iraq: rebuilding the economy with micro-loans

I have a high opinion of micro-loans, coupled with teaching business skills. When I was in the Philippines, I had a companion who was always working with members trying to find ways to help them start businesses and earn, frankly, a lot more money than they were making growing rice. A lot of the opportunities were pretty convincing to me (people pay a lot for eggs, and chicken feed is cheap, so why not start an egg farm?) if you had the start-up capital and the self-discipline not to spend your principal for personal needs. My grandfather is involved in micro-business in the Philippines, too, and he says that's one of the major obstacles. As far as the army goes, it sounds like a terrific idea. Machiavelli would point out that fear is more reliable than love, but people fear unemployment as well as murder, or in other words hope is a powerful force too. Machiavelli just meant that it's unwise to rely on gratitude for past deeds.

http://www.svherald.com/articles/2007/12/31/news/doc477889f329d59518047494.txt

[quoted from link]

(Suzanne Cronn Herald/Review) In the battle for Iraqi support, units are looking for people who want to rebuild or start businesses, so that local economies will flourish providing the population with some stabilization in their lives. To that end, the U.S. military has created a micro-grant process in which up to $2,500 will be awarded to approved applicants, said Lt. Col. R.J. Lillibridge. That is the amount he has authority to grant, additional amounts can be approved at higher command levels. [snip]

"Money is a weapon," he said, adding the right use of funds will negate al-Qaida in Iraq and other insurgents. [snip]

Saying each of his company commanders are looking for ways to help communities financially, with little direction from him, the battalion commander said there are many positive things happening, such as Charlie Company's drive to revitalize the poultry industry in their area.

But it is the micro-grants, which are aimed at individuals, that are equally important, Lillibridge said.

[end quote]

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

His sweat was as it were great drops of blood

I think I know why Luke 22:44 is phrased the way it is. It's kind of an odd phrasing, because we know from D&C 19 that it actually was blood, so why is it phrased in Luke as a simile? Let me preface the explanation by noting what appears to be a Hebrew idiom in 1 Nephi 8:4, Alma 36:22, and 1 Nephi 1:8: "Methought I saw..." Lehi clearly had a vision, but perhaps he is unsure, like Paul in 2 Cor 12:2, whether he was in the body or out of it in this experience, and it appears to me that the wording expresses this uncertainty as to whether this spiritual vision counts as what he calls "seeing." For all I know this idiom is in the Old Testament too, but if so it isn't translated the same way.

Jesus says in D&C 19, "Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit." Luke records, "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground." Here's what's happening. Jesus sweats blood in his agony. Elder Talmage notes in his book that this is extremely unusual, and would kill a normal man. Luke is not an eyewitness, but the apostles were, and some of them may have seen what looked like blood coming from Jesus' flesh during the process. Neither Luke nor the apostles knew for sure what had actually happened because Jesus didn't discuss it with them, before or after his resurrection, and so Luke is uncertain what the substance actually was. Note that this is a minor physical detail not recorded in any of the other gospels. And so the situation stood until March 1830, when Jesus saw fit to elaborate upon his experience in the revelation to Martin Harris.

~B.C.

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Prayer as a medical procedure

[written originally several weeks ago, but I think this deserves to be on the blog]

Y.A.,  

This article http://www.skepdic.com/prayer.html makes some valid points, naturally, but also commits some amusing fallacies. "A miracle may be defined as a violation of the laws of nature through willful intervention. By asking an SB or energy to interfere with the ordinary course of natural events, one is requesting a miracle. To believe in miracles, as David Hume argued several centuries ago, is to go against the universal experience that there is an inexorable order and lawfulness to our sense perceptions." Obviously this is not qualitatively different from the argument that "all things witness that there is a God." In both cases the speaker is elevating his personal perceptions to the level of universal experience. [Obviously it's possible to legitimately subscribe to either opinion--Alma did--but I hold with Joseph Smith, that God can be known only through revelation.] Anyway, this paragraph was particularly amusing to me:  

"The latest and largest of the scientific studies was conducted by Herbert Benson et al. The results were published in the American Heart Journal in April 2006 (" Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer"). Patients at six U.S. hospitals were randomly assigned to one of three groups: 604 received intercessory prayer after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory prayer (also after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer); and 601 received intercessory prayer after being informed they would receive prayer. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting the night before coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. The primary outcome was presence of any complication within 30 days of CABG. Secondary outcomes were any major event and mortality. The results indicate no effect from prayer. In the two groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not. Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer. Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the three groups."  

I haven't read the study itself (it's $30 and I'm really not that curious), but the fallacies inherent in treating prayer (or any social interaction) as a medical procedure are obvious and numerous. 1.) There's no way to guarantee that people you say aren't receiving the procedure aren't. Other people outside your control could be praying for them. 2.) There's no way to guarantee that people you say are receiving it are, in any meaningful way. By which I mean it's really hard to show that your assigned pray-ers are praying for their randomly-assigned subjects in anything like the same way that people who extoll the benefits of prayer pray for themselves or their loved ones. 3.) The term is very short (30 days). Results from prayer would show up only if they were essentially instantaneous.  

The guys designing the study did as well as they could--randomized control groups are responsible science--but it would have to be an extraordinarily strong effect to overcome the noise that factors #1 and #2 introduce into the system. I'd be surprised if you could use this methodology to show that, e.g., sending thank-you cards for birthday presents increases the likelihood of receiving a present next year. (Randomly separate them into three groups, one of which is told that thank-you cards will be mailed on their behalf to those who gave them presents last year and the other two are told that they may or may not be mailed, mail the cards for two of the groups, see if there's a statistically-significant effect on next year's presents.) Same goes for saying "please," although that would be hard to do without the recipient knowing (one of the major goals of this study was to see if it was the prayer that mattered or the knowledge that they were being prayed for--ironically, those who were told they were being prayed for did worse in this trial, 59% complications vs. 52% for those not so informed.). I suppose you could do the equivalent by selecting people threatened by mortgage foreclosure and mailing letters to some of their banks asking for leniency, but there are obvious problems with that idea and I'd be very surprised if results were found.  

Oh well. I try not to take these people seriously, but they're really fabulously wrong. I feel the same way about a lot of religious writers, too, of course.  

-Max

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

On party systems

Important enough that I'm forwarding this to the blog:

[quote]

The caucuses are the last remnants of the old system. When I was District Captain (later, House District Leader) out in Colorado, Colorado was a caucus state. We held precinct meetings (which I had to make sure were held - one year I had three precincts meeting in my house. One bunch showed up because the committeeman who had promised to host it had locked his door and turned off all his lights. They got my address from the County officers.) Each precinct would select delegates to the County Assembly and to the District Convention. (There was a technical distinction between assemblies and conventions having to do with the offices involved.) They were elected in proportion to the original caucus vote for the highest contested election - presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial depending on the year. At the County Assembly, delegates were elected to the State Assembly; at the District Convention, delegates were elected to the State Convention. The State Assembly and Convention were held together. There, we elected delegates to the National Convention.

Most of the delegates had some personal contact with and knowledge of the County and State candidates and were prepared to make more informed judgments. Less often, we had a chance to shmooze with national candidates. I didn't worry whether the caucuses were "democratic." Any registered Party member could attend and vote. We called, we offered transport. It was their choice to stay home. Their purpose was to pick the Party's candidates, and that's the Party's business, not the general public's.

But the Parties were collapsing even then. I often had trouble enlisting campaign workers because I would call on people and they would say they had already volunteered for so-and-so's Campaign. If there were congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections on, that was three "personal parties" sucking the volunteer pool dry and creating three parallel pseudo-party organizations working the same territory. Problem was, they were only interested in leafleting for their Candidate, so local offices, like sheriff, got stiffed. So the next go round, I rounded up all my precinct people and we volunteered for each of the Campaigns and went around leafleting for the entire Party slate.

Used to be the Parties served as buffers between the Candidates and the Interest Groups. They could broker deals, balance interests, and so on. Now with the Personal Parties/Campaigns, the Interest Groups go directly to the Candidates who, being smaller fish, are less well-equipped to broker them. (It's a physical mass thing: Parties are larger than Interest Groups, but Interest Groups are larger than Candidates. Work out the physics...)

Michael Flynn

[end quote]

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Alpha Geek mentality

Dear Jenn,

I've talked with you before about how strange it is that only a small minority of computer programmers are women, whereas more than half of the mathematics majors in college are female. (Remember how the Talmage was just filled with women, until you crossed the line dividing math labs from computer labs, and they all suddenly disappeared?) I tend to think it has a lot to do with the competitive, alpha-geek mentality in some segments of the programmer culture, where social status is determined by how much you know and how esoteric that knowledge is, etc.

I read a couple of news stories recently that contrast the alpha-geek mentality with an inclusive mentality. I think you might find them interesting.

1.) This one is from Michael Tiemann, author of g++ (the GNU C++ compiler, although not the author of gcc). He tells of helping his daughter to explore her new OLPC laptop:

[quote] But the real fun began after we started to explore the XO's games. I told her to open Pippy and we played the "guess the number" game. In Pippy, the source code appears on the top half of the screen, and the interaction window (where you enter your name and guess the number) appears on the bottom half. She played the game three times, averaging about 7 guesses per try, and then said "I want to play another game." I suggested she try playing a different game by modifying the parameters to guess a number between 1 and 1,000,000, instead of between 1 and 100. She looked at me with wide eyes. I explained that on the top was a program, the program of the game, and that if she changed a single number in two places, she could change the game itself. She went from a look of "no way" to a look of "OK! What are we waiting for!" in about 200 milliseconds. She started to enter a million, decided that was just a little too large, and changed it to 1,000. She hit "run" and sure enough, the prompt asked for a guess between 1 and 1,000. She looked at me excitedly. I told her to guess, and after 11 guesses, she got it. She looked at me again, somewhat amazed. I told her she had just programmed the computer. I might as well have told her we were going to spend a week in Cinderella's castle--she jumped up, shrieked, and yelled "HEY MOMMY! GUESS WHAT!? I JUST PROGRAMMED THE COMPUTER!" Needless to say there was much excitement. She tried other modifications, including a version of the game she could win every time on the first try. She got her syntax errors, run-time errors, all the other scrapes and bruises one gets on the way to learning how to program, but she was excited, elated, and became confident! [end quote]

2.) In contrast, this post is entitled " Could You Explain Programming Please."

[quote] Being a programmer and the only computer literate person in my family, I get tech support calls from my family all the time. I got a phone call from a brother-in-law today:

Him: Hey, you're good with computers right?

Me: Yes.

Him: And you know how to program computers?

Me: Yes, that's my job actually.

Him: Could you explain programming please?

Me: I'm sorry, what do you mean?

Him: I want to make a game like Halo, but I don't know how to start. Could you explain what I need to do?

Me: You should probably go to the library and get a book.

Him: Can you just tell me what I need to do?

Me: Wait a minute. Are you asking me to explain how to program computers?

Him: Yeah.

Me: Over the phone?

Him: Yeah.

My brother in law apparently made several unsuccessful attempt to "learn programming" by opening up exes in Notepad. He created a text file with the words "Morph the screen into something cool" and couldn't figure out how to run it, even had the [nerve] to ask me "how do I install my program? Do I just put a shortcut on the desktop".

My dad, a programmer, lent him an unfortunately titled book called "Teach Yourself Java in 24 hours". He immediately flipped to the back of the book and reading sections on server and Swing development, and was very excited to see that he could write his own server after just one day.

In the end, I was unable to teach my brother in law how to make his own Halo over the phone, and he decided that I wasn't a very good programmer. [end quote]

Now to be fair, this second poster appears to have been caught flat-footed, and perhaps if he were given a second chance he'd have done a bit better. Nevertheless, there seems to be an air of disdain and incredulity here, as if to say, "This fellow has no business trying to learn the High Art of programming. It takes years of dedication to master, and he wants me to teach him over the phone! What an imbecile." As it turns out, this attitude isn't even true--Python is an excellent language for teaching novices to make their computer do useful things, as the first example illustrates--but it's pretty hostile and, in my opinion, immature. To paraphrase Mark 2:27, "Computers were made for man, and not man for computers." To the extent that regular people can't make computers do something useful, it's a failure or at least a limitation of those who provided the computer; making computers easy to program is just an extension of providing useful built-in programs.

One thing I like about the Open Source movement is that it fosters this inclusive attitude. Not perfectly, probably, but I see a lot of good attitudes out there. Oddly enough, that makes them allies of Microsoft, although with a radically different approach. My understanding is that Microsoft was founded specifically because its founders wanted to get computers into the hands of regular people (as opposed to corporations with mainframes and minicomputers) so they could do cool stuff. Jerry Pournelle contrasts Windows with Unix: "Unix is a full-employment act for Unix programmers." Windows has tried to be a user-managed system that doesn't *need* you to be a professional Windows programmer to manage and use it. Perhaps that's an intrinsically difficult goal, and you can argue about how well it has accomplished that, but I think it's a laudable goal.

Give it ten years, and we'll see if Microsoft, Open Source, and their assorted unlikely allies have managed to bring the real potential of computers to regular people. But I suppose that's a topic for another day.

~B.C.

--

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

On Russia

[Cc'ed Tara, Tasia and the blog]

Y.A.,

Here's an interesting perspective on Russia that you might appreciate. I recommend skimming the whole article but here are four quotes:

"Russian foreign policy's modern-day motives are completely dissimilar to those of the recent Soviet and the more distant czarist past. Where-as the empire was predominantly about Eurasian geopolitics and the Soviet Union promoted a global ideological as well as political project backed up by military power, Russia's business is Russia itself. Seen from a different angle, Russia's business is business. In stark contrast to its Soviet past, postimperial Russia stands among the least ideological countries around the world. Ideas hardly matter, whereas interests reign supreme. It is not surprising then that the worldview of Russian elites is focused on financial interests. Their practical deeds in fact declare "In capital we trust." Values are secondary or tertiary issues, and even traditional military power is hardly appealing. Fluctuating energy prices, not nuclear warheads, are what really matter to Moscow.... Under President Vladimir Putin's watch, the Russian state has turned into something like Russia Inc., with top Kremlin staffers and senior ministers sitting on the boards of various state-owned corporations and taking an active interest in their progress and profits."

"Having survived in a ruthless domestic business and political environment, Russian leaders are well adjusted to rough competition and will take that mindset to the world stage. From their perspective, everyone can be a partner, from U.S. president George W. Bush to Hamas leader Khaled Meshal and from the Council of Europe's rapporteur on Chechnya, Lord Frank Judd, to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Equally, anyone can become an adversary, even Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko. It's nothing personal, it's business."

"From Moscow's perspective, Russian-Western relations are competitive but not antagonistic. Russia does not crave world domination, and its leaders do not dream of restoring the Soviet Union."

"From the Russian perspective, a preventive war over Iran is worse than a nuclear Iran. They believe that a war would only delay Iran's nuclear program, but at the price of a major regional crisis, political radicalization, and Muslim-Western confrontation."

"All generalizations are false," particularly when they involve people, and predicting the future is never simple. Nevertheless, this analysis rings true to me. I will think about this article as I continue to watch the international political scene and interpret Russia's current moves.

-B.C.

--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.