Praetorian Guard

I really ought to read up on Roman history sometime. And why does this description of American soldiers, from a Frenchman, remind me so much of Rome?
 
http://johnringo.com/Home/tabid/1574/EntryID/71/language/en-US/Default.aspx
 
Here we discover America as it is often depicted : their values are taken to their paroxysm, often amplified by promiscuity and the loneliness of this outpost in the middle of that Afghan valley. Honor, motherland - everything here reminds of that : the American flag floating in the wind above the outpost, just like the one on the post parcels. Even if recruits often originate from the hearth of American cities and gang territory, no one here has any goal other than to hold high and proud the star spangled banner. Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provides them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location : books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste etc. in such way that every man is aware of how much the American people backs him in his difficult mission. And that is a first shock to our preconceptions : the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team are the focus of all his attention.
 
And they are impressive warriors ! We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how. Beyond the wearing of a combat kit that never seem to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.) the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to annoy them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles on top, their sight unmoving in the directions of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues nights and days. At night, all movements are performed in the dark - only a handful of subdued red lights indicate the occasional presence of a soldier on the move. Same with the vehicles whose lights are covered - everything happens in pitch dark even filling the fuel tanks with the Japy pump. [snip]
 
We seldom hear any harsh word, and from 5 AM onwards the camp chores are performed in beautiful order and always with excellent spirit. A passing American helicopter stops near a stranded vehicle just to check that everything is alright; an American combat team will rush to support ours before even knowing how dangerous the mission is - from what we have been given to witness, the American soldier is a beautiful and worthy heir to those who liberated France and Europe.
 
To those who bestow us with the honor of sharing their combat outposts and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to those who pay the daily tribute of America's army's deployment on Afghan soil, to those we owned this article, ourselves hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and to always continue hearing them say that we are all the same band of brothers".
 
I've mentioned this before, but I don't think Daniel 2:41-42 refers only to Rome. I think it refers at least as much, and perhaps primarily, to the United States of America.
 
-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)

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

Life-to-date

[To blog: I edited this a bit before sending it on. It's a reply to an old, old friend who asked me for a summary of my life since leaving Olympia.]

M.,

It's nice to hear from you. Yes, in fact, I did move to Hawaii. Senior year, I think, which was kind of irritating actually. I'm more mellow about it now, but there were a couple of things that drove me nuts. One is that--well, you don't know this, but I have a lot of patriotic sentiment running in my veins, and they're kind of anti-American over there. (I know, it doesn't make any sense, they *are* American. But there you have it.) So that kind of got under my skin. The other thing was that I thought the girls in Washington were cuter. :) Shallow, I know, but I was pretty attached to our Olympia girls, especially the ones in my ward at church, and I resented being yanked away. Anyway, I was only there for nine or ten months and then I left for college (BYU), served my mission in the Philippines ('99 to '01), and came back to BYU for my Bachelors'. I was originally planning on going into genetic engineering, but it rapidly became clear to me that the technology wasn't yet as good as I had thought it was, and that we were a long ways away from being able to do the interesting stuff. (It really bugged me that we couldn't even predict what a protein would look like from knowing its codon sequence--we knew the amino acids, but we couldn't predict which way it would fold. I understand there have been some advances made since then.) Anyway, I had taken some computer programming classes at the same time just out of general interest, and eventually I decided that if I couldn't build nanomachines that I'd build software: a computer programmer is someone who is so lazy that he will spend three days writing himself a program to save ten minutes. :) Because then, hopefully, you never have to do that ten-minute job ever again, and neither does anyone else in the world.

Anyway, I finished in 2005, and stayed on to take some grad classes. Eventually I decided that I wasn't smart enough for grad school, or at least my research wasn't going anywhere, and so in 2007 I dropped out to work for, yes, Microsoft. Good guess. :) I work on a team that makes tools for developers, with a particular focus on networking applications. You probably know that programs and web sites are usually not written from scratch; there are a lot of sort of pre-assembled pieces that perform common tasks and get re-used between e.g. Gmail, ebay, and blogspot (to pick three random examples). I help build some of those common pieces that come for free with Windows. Anyway, enough geekiness from me today.

Let's see, what else do I owe you a response on? A day in the life:

Depending upon how cold it is outside and whether I'm having good habits that week, I get up at 5 a.m. or so and go running along my regular route a little bit north of my apartment complex, through a residential neighborhood. I get back by 5:30 or 6:00, depending upon whether I get lazy and cut in short, and... you know, somehow time vanishes into gaps in the morning. I'm not sure where it goes. I shower and eat and read my scriptures and check my email and somehow I never get to work before 8:00 at the earliest, although of course that's still an hour or two hours before the building actually starts to fill up. I usually leave work between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m., and if it's a Monday night I go to Family Night (I'm single, so of course I can't have *real* Family Night with my non-existent wife and kids, so my singles' ward at church gets together instead to have a lesson and play games and have treats--one that I really liked was where we did human foosball in the gym). On Tuesday I usually go to Institute of Religion class (like seminary, but for adults). Wednesdays I sometimes go see a movie or a play, but I often try to go to the temple and help with some ordinances. (You know I'm technically a priest, right? Actually you probably didn't.) Thursday and Friday are kind of open-ended. I guess I usually end up reading on those nights or playing games, or going out with girls. (Again, that depends on how social I'm feeling.) Saturday is weekend tasks like shopping, laundry, etc., and Sunday is church and rest time, and maybe write some letters and stuff. That's pretty much what my weeks look like, I think.
 
[Remarks of merely personal relevance deleted]

-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)

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

If Programming Languages Were Religions

I thought this was hilarious. :) http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html
 
C would be Judaism - it's old and restrictive, but most of the world is familiar with its laws and respects them. The catch is, you can't convert into it - you're either into it from the start, or you will think that it's insanity. Also, when things go wrong, many people are willing to blame the problems of the world on it.

Java would be Fundamentalist Christianity - it's theoretically based on C, but it voids so many of the old laws that it doesn't feel like the original at all. Instead, it adds its own set of rigid rules, which its followers believe to be far superior to the original. Not only are they certain that it's the best language in the world, but they're willing to burn those who disagree at the stake.

C# would be Mormonism - At first glance, it's the same as Java, but at a closer look you realize that it's controlled by a single corporation (which many Java followers believe to be evil), and that many theological concepts are quite different. You suspect that it'd probably be nice, if only all the followers of Java wouldn't discriminate so much against you for following it.

Lisp would be Zen Buddhism... [continued]

 -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)

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

Polywell fusion

This news is a little old so I may have an update later, but it looks like WB-7 was enough of a success that there may be a WB-100 (which I gather is a supposed to be scaled up to the break-even energy point).

-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)

 

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

Choice and Parenthood

http://dir.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/05/06/breeding/index2.html

For all the truth about the innate physiological rewards of mothering, he says, "The happy people are the ones who wanted kids and had them or didn't want kids and didn't have them.'

I have my doubts about the biases of the writer, but this statement rings true to me. Marriage, and raising a family, is a lot of work; it helps to know what you're getting into, and if you don't want it that much you're better off not starting. (c.f. Luke 14:28-30)

-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)

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."