Autobiographical Landmark: Mod

I've been programming computers since a notoriously terrible teacher introduced me to BASIC on an Apple II computer some time in the mists of the 1980s, but only in the last few days have I finally found a reason to use a modulo operation, which is rendered as mod in quite a few programming languages.

What context, you ask? I needed to identify and discard each of the second and third instances of an indefinitely repeating three-thingy pattern, and used mod to find them. Mod returns the remainder, so every thingy in the numbered series such that thingy mod 3 <> 1 turned out to be one of the droids I was looking for.

Neat.

I can't remember the terrible teacher's name, just the frilly white shirts she'd wear -- something like the shirt from the "The Puffy Shirt" episode of Seinfeld -- and the 1980s eyeglasses with gigantic frames that dwarfed her bony face. Alas, she was a victim of the times just as we were the victims of her impatient, incompetent teaching.

She taught me nothing of mod. And for my part, I have given you nothing here but a cosmically boring window onto my life and further confirmation that you never, ever want to do computer programming.

Blogs <> Internet: Blog Hate Watch

A guest blogger to Andrew Sullivan's blog makes a revealing slip:

Blogs are a problem, not a solution, an anonymous Army IT professional tells Danger Room. The source paints an unsettling portrait of lax military intelligence ...

He said blogs, right? I read that correctly, yes? He quotes the piece from Danger Room, but I can't seem to find the part about blogs:

Give a senior service official a BlackBerry and I can guarantee he will transmit sensitive and sometimes classified information on it without thinking. He will use the Bluetooth headset and the built-in phone to talk about sensitive topics without a care in the world as to who is listening. I have lost count of how many times we have had to collect all of the BlackBerries we issue and purge them due to sensitive or classified information being sent on them. The BlackBerry is one of the greatest weapons system in the terrorists' inventory, and we supply the bullets!

I see mention of military people speaking loosely of "sensitive topics" into Blackberry devices, and of transmitting data using Blackberries. And while it is possible to blog from a Blackberry, nothing here points to blogging -- if we're talking about blogging, purging a Blackberry that was used as an input device for blogging wouldn't achieve anything. At most, purging a Blackberry used for blogging would expunge unpublished drafts of blog posts (assuming a client-side tool that allows this); but to speak of something already blogged is definitionally to speak of something that has already left the surly bonds of its input device. To blog is to push something into a wider world of readers -- mind you, not necessarily the entire world wide web.

I dwell on this and geek out a little becuase I see it as a small instance of a larger pattern in which the word blog stands in for whatever the speaker doesn't like about the internet, and specifically about the internet's open, participatory, unfiltered nature. In tee-vee-based political discourse, it is becoming more common to hear talking heads speak of "what the blogs are saying" or "the blogosphere" in lieu of older, more candid formulations such as "what the rubes are saying" or "the unlettered masses." This is lazy at best.

The larger piece cited does claim, albeit vaguely, that blogs per se have become a source of military intelligence blunders and near-blunders. Still, I think it's worthwhile to speak as precisely as possible about these matters as part of the larger cultural effort to understand the many ramifications of internet technology, because the problems and risks cited in the present case are real ones, and they are hardly the only ones.

And please repeat after me: the internet is not going away. We're going to have to sort all of this out.

A blogger has certain responsibilities, and among these is to defend the honor of blogging by noting that while, yes indeed, blogging is an extremely wide-open sort of exchange -- one that sometimes involves naughty words and viewpoints that have not been vetted by paid opinion-makers -- not everything in telecommunications or the internet is properly called a blog. And above all, we should direct our ire where it belongs -- at those fracking Blackberries, which are going to be the ruin of us all.

Instant Insight

Consider your next ten minutes successfully enriched with a new web-based diversion! It's the Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator and it is presently diverting my socks off with appraisals like the following, which came forth just when I needed something profound to say about the next song to play on shuffle:

I'm surprised that no one's mentioned yet that the reductive quality of the Egyptian motifs verges on codifying the inherent overspecificity.

Indeed so. That does so perfectly capture "Lonesome Tears" by Beck -- too many listeners underappreciate the Egyptian motifs in Beck's songs and totally miss their reductive quality.

(H/T Eyeteeth)

Repetition

Stanley Fish reports back from the Ninth International Milton Symposium in London:

Peter Lindenbaum of Indiana University ... remarked to me that “There’s no point keeping up with Milton criticism because it keeps repeating itself.” But that is the point; the questions posed by the poetry are few, a finite set, but the ways of answering them are infinite, and because they are the ultimate questions, we want always to be returning to them. Sure we’ve heard them before, but we haven’t quite got it right, so we’re eager to give it another try. At the end of one session Tom Luxon of Dartmouth said, “That’s what it’s all about, keeping the conversation going.”

Needless to say, the questions (and answers) were already old when Milton picked them up and set them to verse.

"Sure we’ve heard them before, but we haven’t quite got it right" -- exactly my answer when asked why I repeat myself on this precious, precious blog. It sounds better than "because I'm not getting any younger and I tend to forget I've already rattled on about a given topic" but it also gets to the truth of the matter.

Humanist Symposium 22: Questions, Questions, Questions

I wish I could tell you that the postings gathered in this edition of the Humanist Symposium give definitive answers to all of life's enduring questions. I wish I could tell you a lot of things. What I can say instead is that the posts affirm both the importance of the questions and humanists' enduring engagement with them. Enjoy!

The importance of questions and questioning:

• CJ hits the theme directly with The importance of questioning posted at Spiritual Inquiry . com.


• Lirone, Truth and fear posted at Words that sing: that fear and truth are really about the same thing -- asking questions or failing to.


• Hannah presents The Purloined Letter: Approaching Reflection Collectively posted at The Purloined Letter: that clarity comes from posing questions, carefully and deeply.


• Greta Christina, "Ya Gotta Reach for Your Dreams": An Optimistic Realist Perspective posted at Greta Christina's Blog: cliches exist because they contain a kernel of truth, but a well-rounded and wise person will probe the kernel's boundaries.


• PhillyChief, Zarathustra Test posted at You Made Me Say It...: that questions play an important role in keeping us honest and within our limits.

Does observing the contrast between the natural world and the human-cultivated world provide inroads to deeper meanings? Or does it just reflect back what we already expect? The first two posts on this theme are a bit of a point-counterpoint:

• The Ridger, Dragonfly Sign posted at The Greenbelt.


• Nick, All Wrong? posted at Nemesis.


• Andrew Benardin wraps it up nicely with The "Soul" of a Blossom on The Evolving Mind: the idea of biological uniqueness is richer than the idea of a soul -- and it's true too!

Questions about sex, and quite possibly a few answers too:

• Mike White, Christians, Pagans and good ol? sex posted at A Superflous Ramble: a naturalistic, no-nonsense exploration of sex.


• Skeptigator presents Choice vs. Nature (and something about homo-dolphins) posted at FreeThought Fort Wayne: sometimes questions come in the form of thought experiments, and sometimes thought experiments involve gay dolphins. Awesome!


• Paul Sunstone relates The Soul of an Artist posted at Café Philos: an internet café: being a humanist is perfectly compatible with addressing questions to one's inner resources, intuitions, subconscious, gut, "soul," what have you.

Assorted questions, observations, and explorations:

vjack presents Picking One's Battles and Atheist Priorities posted at Atheist Revolution: do humanists and freethinkers choose the right battles and set the right priorities? A valid question.

Two by Phil for Humanity, The Definition of Morality and Ethics and The Origin of Morality and Ethics posted at Phil for Humanity: that moral questions are difficult not least because defining morality is so difficult.

Chris Hallquist, Well, this lack of a God is awkward posted at The Uncredible Hallq: my favorite post in this edition discusses the awkwardness and psychological knot-tying that comes with questioning religious belief.

C. L. Hanson presents Review of Book Reviews posted at Letters from a broad...: who says you need to believe in god to devote yourself to alternate realities?

PhillyChief, Who's Lacking? posted at You Made Me Say It...: not believing in god is no lack.

Last but not least, Ebonmuse offers Smoke on the Breeze posted at Daylight Atheism: dispelling the clouds of dogma and mysticism frees us to see more clearly and appreciate more fully the productions of human creativity.

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The next Humanist Symposium will be hosted in just a few short weeks at Disillusioned Words on August 3. It's too late for this edition, but it's not too early to turn in your entries for the next one.

Happy questioning!

Weights and Measures

So it came to pass that yesterday, I visited the neurologist to complain personally to him that he hasn't cured my narcolepsy (more on that later, mood swings permitting), and they took my weight just as the appointment began. The weight came up as W_d, which is six pounds above what I consider the threshold above which I undertake massive infusions of self-loathing. Even though I hadn't weighed myself in a while, this was not unexpected: ever since Boston, I've been eating raisins like they're going out of style. Raisins and corn chips. And peanut butter. And beer and fig newtons and almonds. And so on.

Anyhoo, after I got home, I decided to weigh myself on the bathroom scale -- by the way, is this post fascinating yet? -- because I knew I'd be able to monitor my weight on that scale over the next several weeks of self-loathing and privation. I expected it to vary a little from the scale at the doctor's office, so I wanted to pin down an exact starting point. It turned out to be W_d-9. Either I lost nine pounds on the way home or these scales just don't like each other.

As a sort of tie-breaker, I stepped onto the older scale in the other bathroom and got a W_d-12 result. I lost three more pounds walking from one bathroom to the other! It didn't feel that strenuous, but I'll go with it.

Finally, this morning I stepped on the scale at the gym -- one of those old fashioned kinds of balance scales where you slide the weights back and forth until it suspends the arm and the weights point at your weight -- and that came out to W_d-14. It was also W_b-7, or seven pounds below my weight on the same scale just before I left for Boston. That alone rings phony to me.

I have no idea what I weigh -- I can only narrow it down to the nearest stone. I would like to think the scale in the doctor's office is the outlier, but I don't think it is. It was digital, after all, and everything digital is better, right?

I suspect W_d is closest to the truth of the matter. Yay self-loathing and privation!

The Atheist 13

Bing, owner-proprieter of Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes, tagged everyone, and I am proud to count myself a member of everyone.

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?

Atheism is what happens in a person's head when he notices there is no good reason for believing that god exists.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

Yes, vaguely. I was baptised as a Methodist and attended a Lutheran school for a time, and my mom was a sort of William James-ish pantheist, although she didn't take any of it very seriously. My home town was awash in many varieties of Christianity, however. And I think Jews were allowed in town so long as they kept their book-learning ways at a healthy remove. (I picked up that very stereotype there!)

Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word?

Superfluous.

Q4. What scientific endeavour really excites you?

The efforts to revive extinct beasties from extant DNA samples. I hope someone pulls this off and we end up with a wooly mammoth, a wooly rhinocerous, a Neanderthal person, a Tasmanian Tiger, whatever.

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community,” what would it be and why?

We would have more people working to do the hard part more effectively -- namely, helping people envision life after god so as not to be afraid of it. I admit I fall short in this.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy,” what would be your first response?

"We need to discuss this." I would seize the opportunity to make him a secret agent to destroy it from within [evil cackling].

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

That the Bible or the Koran are "instruction manuals" for life, without which we'd be in a free fall of relativism and indeterminacy. The extent to which people whitewash the major Holy Books never ceases to astonish me. In the words of Reverend Lovejoy, which only barely exaggerate the matter, "have you ever sat down and read this thing? Technically we're not allowed to go to the bathroom."

Q8. What’s your most “controversial” (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?

I seem to kick up a fair amount of dust every time I suggest that religion causes good people to do evil things. I continue to maintain that religion tends to distort value judgments in a way that makes this inevitable, so that (for example) "Jehovah's Witnesses" really think they're doing the right thing when they allow their children to die from curable conditions.

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?

Since I respect them all, it's rather meaningless to pick only one, but I'll say Hitchens because a) he comes at this from roughly the same angle as I do (politics, humanities) and b) he recently allowed himself to be tortured and demonstrated great intellectual honesty about it.

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?

Joe Six-Pack.

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I'm not a big fan of the tag games, but if you're on my blogroll, or if I've ever linked to you, or if I've ever responded to a comment of yours, or if you feel I should have linked to you, or if you just find it interesting, please consider yourself tagged.

Into the Sea

Activity on this precious, precious blog will slow, and may even stop, for the next few days as the whole family (Marla, the twins, my son, my wife, Aunt Ginny, Patty-Sue, Ned, JJ, Cabbage, Wilbur, Pogo, Gena, and Ol' Red) are piling into the jalopy and heading to the Oregon coast. We regret that we won't be here to watch the neighbors burn down our house with their too-enthusiastic displays of illegal holiday fireworks, but the sea beckons.

It's possible there will be access to the internets at our destination, but not likely. I don't think they have the internets on the Oregon coast yet; it's such an enchanting and beautiful place that they've never had to bother. Or so I assume.

I hope to return with stunning photos and stirring tales of sharks, skates, sponges, sea snakes, shipwreck survivals, singing sirens, shifting sands, salty shanties, scenic sunrises, and possibly a few things that don't start with s.

Some Wordles & a Song

In honor of tomorrow's holiday, here's a wordling of the Declaration of Independence. It's a landmark document and all, but I can't muster any genuine enthusiasm for the fact that the United States is independent of Great Britain, and I don't mourn the decline in my interest in fireworks. Sorry, fellow 'mericans, but that's where I stand.

[click to enlarge this and the other wordles]

Not to suggest any sort of comparison to the D of I -- that's the mother of all tough acts to follow -- but this next entry wordles my commuting journal. Neat!



Here's a wordle of "Tightly" by Neko Case. I think I might like this song to an unhealthy degree.



Here's a live performance of "Tightly."

Wal*Mart*

Wal-Mart has a new logo for some reason. One would think that with escalating fuel prices driving up Wal-Mart's costs for shipping crap from Asian sweat shops to its US stores, now would be a bad time to impose a new color scheme and "branding" effort.

But it looks nice, doesn't it? Well, no. But it's a softer, greener, tealer, perhaps periwinkler shade of blue than before, set beside a curious yellow graphic that might be a star, a sunburst, an asterisk, an explosion, an operator in a regular expression, or that symbol that used to represent George Bush in Doonesbury.

But the news isn't all good. The dash between wal and mart is suddenly conspicuously missing, so now we get to spend the next decade as a civilization trying to figure out how to spell and pronounce the name of this retailer. The ambiguity is reproduced in the fact that both wal-mart.com and walmart.com are valid domain names that resolve to the same gigantic discount retailer.

Sigh.

Googling Morals

From the New York Times:

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

By way of background, the defense would take such an approach because under current US law,

[t]he question of what constitutes obscenity relies on a three-part test established in a 1973 decision by the Supreme Court. Essential to the test has been whether the material in question is patently offensive or appeals to a prurient interest in sex — definitions that are based on “contemporary community standards.”

Defining "contemporary community standards" is no easy task, and I would think that hit rates on the googles would be a perfectly valid way to define what's really inside and outside the community's standards since it would produce metrics on what people actually do and prioritize as opposed to what people represent about what they do and prioritize. In principle, it holds the same promise as Nielsen ratings, which measure what people actually watch on tee-vee, whether or not it matches what they say they watch.

Web scold Andrew Keen doesn't like the idea:

If one accepts this argument, if enough people in a community enter "group sex" into Google then this establishes the media distribution of group sex acts as an acceptable communal moral standard. Instead of the wisdom of the crowd determining knowledge, what we have here is the morality of the crowd determining ethical standards. Google's artificial algorithm, then, becomes both the judge and the jury in establishing what is good and what is evil.

If large numbers of people are entering "group sex" into google, it indicates they have a strong interest in the topic. It doesn't necessarily mean they approve of it, but it does indicate curiosity, and we know from the first pages of Genesis where that leads.

Keen's sneering evocation of "Google's algorithm" doesn't suffice to demonstrate that it's a faulty or misleading algorithm. That is, I think, a question worth exploring -- do google's metrics produce a statistically defensible representation of the community's web browsing habits, or do they skew toward a few googlers with very strong interests?

But to Keen's larger point: to whatever extent anyone here is arguing that "the morality of the crowd" is "determining ethical standards," it's the law, not the counsel for the defense, and certainly not google's algorithms. It's the law that suggests a relationship between "community standards" and obscenity; google is just a measurement instrument, and I say a promising one.

Weird or Common? Valid or Nonsense?

I go back and forth over whether the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator amounts to anything more than a horoscope that replaces iffy animal and mythological archetypes with iffy terms from clinical psychology and Jungian typology.

The balance was tilted toward the skeptical earlier today, when two people in a group of six offered that they are INFPs, which happens to be the same thing I am.

First, INFPs (as one of them mentioned) are supposed to be extremely rare, and second, INFPs are supposed to be the sorts of people who would be loath to offer their Myers-Briggs type unless pressed to do so, and it took no pressing to get this out of those two.

While the other two are certainly odd carrots, they don't seem very introverted to me. I wanted to say: You want introverted? I'll show you introverted! but being a true INFP, I kept this to myself to avoid any confrontation, hemmed and hawed over it for several hours, and then discussed it in writing.

As I said, I'm not sure there's anything to this stuff. That a group of six would turn out to be 50% INFP seems to require an explanation if there is anything to any of it. I wonder if the web-based assessments are, in some way, biasing people toward the INFP category?

Whatever the case, please let's not be confrontational about it unless there's a dear principle at stake.

I Hate This Kind of Blog Post

I hate blog posts that, like this one, give excuses for a foreseeable pause in blog posts. What do you care if I'm feeling ill and not feeling very post-y? You come to a blog to read the posts, not posts about the absence of posts, and certainly not illness reports unless they're interesting. And like other people's dreams, reports of other people's illnesses are rarely interesting.

I say such things should be kept brief and vague, or preferably left unsaid altogether.

Humanist Symposium #21

In case you missed it, Humanist Symposium #21 is up at Greta Christina's blog and features some excellent posts.

Humanist Symposium 22 is only a few weeks away and will be hosted right here on my own precious, precious blog.

False modesty is for weeners. You know you have a great post to submit to the next Humanist Symposium. Don't even try to deny it, just submit it.

Commuting's Brave New World

Spiraling gas prices have thrust a new commuting regime upon us all and it demands that we reinforce the hard-won lessons of the past -- or, in some cases, get and stay current with those lessons.

Exhibit A: The photo shown here displays both the promise and peril of the hordes who have recently added their distinctiveness to the Borg that is the MAX. Promise: maybe, upon a sunny day, someone will get on the MAX wearing revealing clothing. Peril: same as promise. Suffice to say not every member of the Borg should dress like Seven-of-Nine.

Exhibit B: I've already covered the apposite lessons, but with gas prices spiraling ever higher and the weather improving, I've noticed an uptick in bike commuting, and this calls for a refresher on key points.

Toward avoiding overgeneralizing, I direct this comment to the woman who passed over the Hawthorne bridge traveling west this morning at approximately 7:12AM on a blue bike: from the evidence of the saggy back tire and your fearful riding style, I gather you are new to bike commuting. Perhaps that isn't even your bike; no doubt you'd be much happier if only you could return to commuting as the only passenger in a huge SUV. But so long as you are riding that blue bike with the sagging back tire, stay in the goddamn bike lane as you pass over the bridge. And speed the fuck up -- you're endangering not only the pedestrians whom you're crowding to the bridge's railing, but also the many bikes that are passing you on the left, unsure of whether or when you'll go darting into the bike lane.

And after you leave the bridge and approach the exit ramp to Naito Parkway, if you make a left-turn signal, do turn left. Today, your slow pace and left turn signal backed up the cars unfortunate enough to find themselves lining up behind you; it slowed them because they were sure, from the evidence of your hand signal, that you'd be entering the left lane at any second. And yet you didn't. You kept going west, very slowly.

I have been known to post unflattering photographs of people who disturb the commutes of others. Out of courtesy, and more so because I didn't have my camera handy, I am not posting any such photos of you at this time. I promise no such discretion going forward.

Thanks all, and happy commuting!

The Internets, Time, and Brain-Rot

Nicholas Carr dares to ask if the reading and writing practices of the internets are forever shortening our attention spans and intellectual capacities. He notes that Nietzsche had the same worries about the typewriter:

[T]he machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

I used to worry about the effects of typing on my writing style, and I suppose I still do, although the worry is more and more vestigial with every passing day of blogging and other keyboarding. I can't remember the last time I used pen and paper to write anything of any length, so I no longer have a clear sense of the difference between my longhand and keyboard writing style: if anything was lost, it's no longer visible enough to be missed. I do know that when I pick up a pen to write something down, it feels labored and graceless -- I feel like a chimp clutching at a stick, and the penmanship is nothing short of tragic. My junior high self would scoff at the handwriting I do today.

But I wonder if Nietzsche is selling himself short, or at best misidentifying the pathology: perhaps the more terse style of his latter years reflects a decline in patience and enthusiasm with his underlying subject matter, which is to say, life itself. I wonder if it became harder and harder for him to generate the kind of manic energy it required to produce the likes of The Birth of Tragedy or Thus Spake Zarathustra regardless of the writing instrument. His failing eyesight could only add to the burden involved in rattling on at length; if this is right, the typewriter is a symptom, not a cause.

I wonder if the internets make so much so instantly available that we face an abyss of abundance: when everything is in reach, surely any failure of attention, enthusiasm, patience, persuasion, or insight falls more heavily on us -- it must be that we're simply too lazy or too stupid. Or still worse: it's not worth the effort because it has already been said and ignored at least a dozen times, including, no doubt, every last thought expressed herein.

(via German Joys)

The Emerald City Swallows a Weekend

I spent the weekend in sunny Seattle to celebrate the first birthday of nephew-in-law Jim, who is powerfully cute.

Though it's only been a weekend, I'm woefully behind on the news. Hillary Clinton graciously conceded the nomination to Barack Obama, right? And no one wrote anything dumb on any blogs, yes? And the world has more or less gotten over its belief in god, correct?

I thought so.

Humanists Galore!

Humanist Symposium #20 is now posted at Jyunri Kankei.

GPS Hoax!

It turns out the earth-sized GPS portrait was a big fat hoax -- and it was bloggers that exposed it!

[A]fter bloggers pointed out holes in Nordenankar's claim, DHL confirmed to the Telegraph that the artwork was an "entirely fictional project".

Another enchantment shot to shit. Yay bloggers! At least we still have Santa Claus and Jesus, right?

Right??

Oh well. I still say someone is using the same technique to draw a gigantic porno across the face of the globe. Just you wait.

Teutonic Lugubriousness

I don't know if Werner Herzog is playing the part of an overly-dramatic, depressive German guy in this clip, or if this is just Werner being Werner and revealing himself to be precisely that genuine article. I don't want to know which, I just love it.



I have this same clip in audio MP3 format and, once upon a time, developed the habit of attaching it to otherwise somber business e-mails and claiming I had done so by mistake.

(H/T Altering Labyrinth)