Something completely different

August 31, 2010 under technical, thehumancondition

A somewhat frightening BBC story from my link archives:

It turns out that if you’re clever with a webpage, you can pretend to be a visitor’s PC for the purpose of finding out the ID number of their router.

Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. A little technical, perhaps, but not so bad.

Umm… unless Google happened to drive down everyone’s street and take notes on exactly where everyone’s router was. And made that information available as a service. So if you *really* want to stalk someone (well, stalk their router, which is often good enough) now you can! Just get them to visit your tricky website and you know where they live!

Whenever a big accident of some kind happens, like a plane crash or an oil spill or something like that, people usually get frustrated because the cause takes a long time to figure out.

The truth is, there are almost always multiple causes, multiple failures which allowed the catastrophe to occur. The pilot was tired and the ground crew slipped up.  And the weather was rocky. And, and, and… Generally security for these things is so layered that multiple failures have to occur before a major disaster happens.

The problem is, that’s an accident. Unintentional.

Security is harder than accident prevention, because in security, there is an intelligent, malicious attacker who is actively trying to combine systems in the worst possible way.

The offshoot of this is that even if one system is arguably secure, it can still participate in catastrophic failure if one of the systems it interacts with is compromised.  You cannot make it secure – you have to make all the possible combinations of systems secure.

Which is why producing systems of jaw-dropping power is a bad idea, unless you can show jaw-droppingly proportionate benefit.

I guess I just wish that someone at Google had stopped saying, “This is so cool” long enough to ask, “Is this really a good idea?”

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Wisdom III – A Personal Good

August 30, 2010 under theology

I don’t remember the name of my Grade 7 Social Studies teacher. Does that make me a bad person?

Well, I don’t remember much of her class, either :-)

But there was one fantastic lesson in that class, and I sincerely wish that, at the time, I’d recognized what she was really saying. It went something like this:

“Everyone has a system of values, and they make decisions based off these values.”

Hmm… Now that I type it, it doesn’t seem like a big thing. Back in Grade 7 Social Studies, I sure didn’t think it was a big thing. But if you poke at it a little bit, what my teacher was saying turns out to be a very big thing indeed.

What are values? Well, they are things which are important to us. What does it mean that they are important to us? Well… we think they are better than other things. They are near and dear to us; we are fond of them.

They are the things we think are good.

Assigning values is an exercise in determining which values are better than others, which ones are good. Isn’t that nifty, that people have different opinions on which things are good and which are bad?

What my teacher did not tell me was why we have systems of values. She didn’t go into the history to explain how our systems of values came about.

Which is kind of important, because every single thing we do throughout our entire lives is determined by how we answer the question, “What is good?”.

The Bible presents an interesting history of our values system, which is, that very early on, man decided to try and answer the question “What is good?” himself, and that decision is directly responsible for every piece of human suffering present in the world today. We have tried to carve out a personal good and it is catastrophic.

My teacher never mentioned to me that choosing what to value was the most important thing I would ever do in my entire life. Because we choose our values. And there is nothing that we do which is not intimately related to what things we perceive as good.

So how do we choose?

Is Kurt Vonnegut someone you should listen carefully to?

I dunno, but he says this (read the whole article sometime, it’s a great piece on narrative):

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

And if I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, “Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?”

Is James Gosling someone you should listen carefully to?

I dunno, but he says this (about corporate behaviour):

It’s not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of “good” is really twisted:
Good adj: anything which increases the stock price.
Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or high principles have no place in the corporate discourse.

The reason we can’t define the word is so simple, so sad.

We really don’t know what it means.

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Existence

August 28, 2010 under theology

What does the word ‘is’ mean?

The simple answer is that it means, “exists”. To say that something is, is to say that something exists. “Is” is a conjugation of the verb to be, meaning existence. I am, you are, he is, she is, they are.

But this is a false answer, because we haven’t defined anything, we’ve just swapped synonyms. It’s as bad an answer as “Something better than something else” when asked, “What is good?”

In order to define something, we need to put it in terms of things that are already known, and if we are really so lost as to not know what is means, we probably don’t know what exist means, either.

But it may be a little easier to tackle the question, “What is existence” (it’s the same question), because it’s a more familiar way of asking it.

But I’d like to offer two very simple definitions for the word “is”.

1)It’s the name of God. I AM WHO I AM. Go tell the Israelites, “I AM has sent me to you”. God is the wellspring of existence. Something that is, is something that proceeds from God.

2)’Is’ means created by Jesus Christ.The set of things which exist is exactly the set of the things Jesus created.

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  — Colossians 1:16-17 (NIV)

‘Is’ really isn’t all that tricky or flexible a word. It has quite a clear, non-recursive, unambiguous definition.

But try and define it without God and see what happens ;-) You pretty much get philosophy. The more I think about it, the more I think that Occam’s Razor really does work in favour of God’s existence, after all.

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All is good in Toronto?

August 28, 2010 under curios

Toronto FC coach says there’s no rift with his striker.

Should we believe him? It might be an easier question to answer, if it weren’t for Finnish Sauna Syndrome.

At the World Sauna Championships, a competitor died from sitting in the sauna too long (that’s the point of the competition). Why? Because if you ask a sauna competitor, “Is it too hot for you?” there’s only one answer they’ll give you.

There’s only one answer they can give you. If they thought it was too hot, they wouldn’t still be sitting in the sauna, would they?

I was discussing this with my IT colleagues – it’s the same for IT projects. You can’t ask the project team, “Will you get it done on time?” because they just can’t be objective. That doesn’t make them bad or malicious or incompetent – it just means that they are strictly constrained (whether they know it or not) in the answers they can give.

Going back to the TFC coach, my immediate question is, “If there was a rift, would he know it?” Maybe the rift is that the player thinks the coach is completely out of touch with the players and with the team situation!

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Danger Porridge

August 18, 2010 under tongueincheek

…tastes better than any other kind of porridge.

But if it *does* boil over in the microwave, you have to clean it up.

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Editorial Pains

August 17, 2010 under curios

A cute little podcast from the San Franciso Chronicle.

Some people just don’t like authority, I guess.

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Blog post queue

August 16, 2010 under metablogging

Hmm… let’s see.

I’ve got two follow-up posts due and umpteen billion links to comment on. And currently not enough time to go through them.

I guess I could try sponsorship – if people wanted to “adopt an article” I might be persuaded to write them.

comments: 3 »

Wisdom II – Wisdom is Good

August 11, 2010 under theology

A Riddle

What do these descriptions have in common?

  1. Struck with pace inside the intersection of post and bar
  2. Contains no salt
  3. Deploys coherent packages of software functionality as loosely coupled, coarse-grained services

Answer?

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

They all describe good.

  1. A good penalty kick
  2. A good glass of drinking water
  3. A good enterprise architecture ( It delivers dramatically improved application flexibility, allowing enterprises to continuously adapt constellations of services to keep IT capabilities aligned with business goals!)

Meaning

Most of the time, we demand that our words have meaning. In fact, if something doesn’t have meaning, we tend to say, “That’s not a real word.” It’s nonsense. It’s babble, and we don’t use it (because it’s utterly useless).

So what on earth are we doing messing about with a word like, ‘good’? It can mean “right inside the post”. It can mean “salt free”. It can mean “salted” (Yay popcorn!). It can mean “loosely coupled”.

It seems it can mean anything. How could the same word possibly mean either salt-free or salted? It’s so flexible as to be self-contradictory.  It’s meaningless! This has to be the worst word in the English language! (Serious question to readers – can you think of a more flexible word?)

But…

No-one seems to have any problems using it. It’s one of the most basic words we have in English. I don’t recall ever having to look it up in a dictionary. (Go ahead. Try. Then come back and tell me how on earth the same word can mean both “not depreciated” and “amusing”. Ahahahaha! Your lack of inflation is killing me!)

It has simple, direct translations to many languages. Bon. Goed. Gut. Boen. Bueno. It’s not just easy in English.

Do we even need to explain it to little kids? I think they just pick it up from context. Even our dogs understand this word. It’s one of the most commonly used, least misunderstood words we have.

And yet we can’t come up with a decent definition for it. No one has ever told me what this word means.

It means *everything*. And yet we can still understand it and use it.

This is the greatest word in the English language.

The irony is, we don’t spend any time talking about it, because, well,  it’s that great! We don’t talk about it, we just go ahead and use it. Well, I want to talk about it!

Definitions and Synonyms

My previous post on wisdom is laboured. It rambles on forever – it’s brutal! (Same as this one).

But I think I have a better handle on wisdom now, because wisdom is a synonym for good. “Wisdom” means “good” in the same way that “salted” means good.

“Salted” means good popcorn. Wisdom means good decision making. Good choosing.

There is one enormous difference between wisdom and salt, however. Salt has a meaning beyond its context specific, popcorn limited, alternate interpretation of, “good”. Most of the time, it just means “salt.”

Wisdom, however, has little meaning beyond it’s core association with the good. Words we find flung around when defining “wisdom” and “wise” are “discern”, “sound judgement”, “good sense”, and of course, “knowledge”.

Some nice questions to ask here, like, “Discernment of what?” Could it be discernment of anything except other than the good from the bad? And isn’t “sound judgement” a nice synonym for “good judgment?” (Go ahead, look it up. And then come back and we can ask why the listed definitions of ‘sound’ are simply a subset of the listed definitions of ‘good’. Even ‘legally valid’ shows up both places ;-) )

The only independent meaning of wisdom apart from good seems to have to do with ‘knowledge’.  Let’s go on and dig a little deeper into knowledge. Does any kind of knowledge bring wisdom?

Actually, the very first definition for wisdom in Merriam Webster seems to answer this for us, all nicely authoritatively and decisively:

1 a: accumulated philosophic or scientific learning

Case closed. Philosophy and science are wise, all others need not apply.  Let’s go home? Nope, hold on.

Digging under the definition for ‘wise’, we find this gem:

3 (archaic) : skilled in magic or divination

Now, don’t that just beat all? If I’m reading this right, it means that over time, the knowledge thought to be wise changed. Color me suspicious, but I just might be talked into suspecting that Merriam-Webster are allowing their definitions to be swayed by our current Western fascination with Science as the answer to all our problems.

My only point, of course, is that the knowledge which pertains to wisdom is not any knowledge but only good knowledge. At some point people thought that was Magic, now they think it’s Science. But all the while, wisdom meant stocking up on the good knowledge. At no point were people well versed on pig farming considered especially wise.

Two facts are evident:

  1. Wisdom serves exclusively as a synonym for good in the context of knowledge and decision making
  2. History as presented by a snap analysis of Merriam Webster indicates that people have no clue as to what “good” actually is. It’s just not pig farming.

Conclusion

By realizing that ‘wisdom’ is really just a synonym for ‘good’ in the context of decisions, choices and their underlying knowledge, we can discover a couple really shocking things. The first is that wisdom, as a word, inherits all the problems (and the greatness) of goodness. Is it wise to deploy coherent packages of software functionality?

Well… It depends if you’re building an enterprise architecture or not! Once we think in terms of knowing the good (magic? science?), and choosing the good (salt? salt free?) things click and the question of, “What is good?” begins to loom large on our radar.

That’s the second point – If we want to know what is wise, to have any sense of how to live our lives, we have to tackle that most confusing, most contradictory of all words. We have to ask,

“What is good?”

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Wisdom – I

August 9, 2010 under theology

Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell?… God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells. — Job 28:20,23 (NIV)

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline. — Proverbs 1:7 (NIV)

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding — Proverbs 9:10 (NIV)

The fear of the LORD teaches a man wisdom… Proverbs 15:33 (NIV)

I was thinking a little bit about wisdom the other day. More to the point, I harassed the Bible Study group about it. I pestered them for examples of foolishness and examples of wisdom.

I wasn’t even as far along as, “How do I get any.” I was more in the ballpark of, “What is it?”

In some ways, this is a funny question – everyone knows what wisdom is. Sure, now and again people have a discussion about the difference between wisdom and knowledge, but when someone uses the word, no explanation is required. We all understand what it is, and we all understand well enough that we don’t ever have to talk about it.

But I wanted to stick words to it, and eventually I reached a definition for wisdom that satisfied me.

“It is wise to make a good choice. It is foolish to make a bad choice.”

It’s almost embarrassing  to make a statement this obvious, this redundant, and call it a definition. But bear with me, because there’s something worth thinking about here.

Wise decisions are the ones that  have good outcomes. Generally speaking. In the long run. Most of the time. More of the time.

Foolish decisions have bad outcomes. Foolish decisions that seem to come out okay are merely lucky. They are still foolish, because in no way do they maximize good – over the long term they are a losing strategy. Similarly, not thinking about outcomes at all is also Foolish, because it’s an abysmal strategy if you want Good Outcomes.

Knowledge fits in nicely with this definition. Often Knowledge is required to maximize good. Ignorance can keep us from knowing what will result in something good and what will result in something bad. Still, everyone already knows that wisdom is more than a question of knowledge. But what more?

For me, the most compelling aspect of this definition is that little humongous word, ‘good’.

That simple definition, “It is wise to make a good choice” performs a tremendous thing.

It links wisdom with goodness.

That’s a huge thing. It’s massive. It’s phenomenal, because once you link these two concepts,  all questions about wisdom suddenly depend on what is good.

Is it good to eat cheese? If it’s good to eat cheese, this means something very important for which decisions are wise and which are foolish. Cheese-eating FTW!

Is it good to love someone? Even when you don’t feel like it? (Big questions with a big impact on what is wise.)

Is it good to die?

These are tough questions with tough answers, but they all point to one thing.

If what is wise is utterly dependent on what is good, then the source of all wisdom must necessarily be, above everything else, the indisputable authority on goodness.

The quotes at the start of this post suddenly make new sense to me. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom because it is the willingness to pay attention to him, and what he has to say about good, and about evil.

What is the core of the fall of man? Isn’t it that he replaced God’s definition of goodness with his own, and God’s definition of evil with his own? This starts to make more sense of why the Bible is so harsh on the Biblical fool. He says in his heart, “There is no God.” There is, then, no Godly definition of goodness. Once goodness is subjective and arbitrary, then the question of wisdom is moot, and not worth the time taken to ask it.

After all, if no one can say what is right, who can say what is wise?

There is no more cataclysmic action than to cling to a version of good which is of human origin. It’s a guaranteed recipe for human suffering.

The reason understanding only dwells with God is because only God knows what is good. This is why God’s wisdom is foolishness to men. This is why the Pharisees couldn’t understand Jesus. Not because they weren’t smart. Not because they were hearing impaired.

There was a difference in what they believed was a Good Thing. Ultimately, the greatest thing we can do to make wise decisions is to value those things that are actually good. This is uncomfortable.

It means that wisdom implies righteousness.

Notice that throughout secular society, you can discuss wisdom all you like – it’s absolutely non-controversial and everyone is happy to talk about it. Even ethics! They’re considered to be God-neutral.

But talk about righteousness, now? Hmm… food for thought.

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Talent

August 6, 2010 under Uncategorized

Talent, well applied, can make big things happen on the internet.

Even if they’re just memes ;-)

The internet is a giant magnifying glass; it doesn’t change things, but it makes things ever so much more so.

Great stuff on the internet is ever so much greater than great stuff drawn from a smaller pool. Great stuff makes it bigger on the internet than in front of a smaller audience.

Horrible stuff is so much worse on the internet. Online, you truly do find the worst of the worst.

And the mediocre, unremarkable stuff languishes ever so much more in the doldrums of mediocrity. It is ever so much more average when surrounded by millions of things exactly the same as it. It gets ever so much more so lost in the shuffle.

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