Category: computer

as i have said before i really like google calendar. i really like the ability to subscribe to multiple calendars, if i desire allow other people to subscribe to my calendar, and receive text message (sms) reminders sent to my cell phone. today i discovered gvent, which allows me to add events to my calendar and check my schedule for the day all via text messages. it’s a nice thing.

i know this is going to be a post that is nothing more than a long quote from someone else but i figure what’s said is worth listing here. larry wall is a programmer, linguist, and author who is best known for developing the perl programming language. what allot of people don’t know is that wall started out to be a linguistic missionary. during his training he realized that he was allergic to allot of things and this would not be good when he was offered many different types of food (it’s not good form to refuse the food you are offered). so he took his calling and used his linguistics within the computer world. the quote below comes from a series of questions he was asked and answered for a slashdot article. you can find the full article here.

Q: I remember reading at some point that you are a Christian, and there have been suggestions that some of your early missionary impulses (a desire to do good, help others) are perhaps part of the zeal you have put into Perl over the years.

Preferring a scientific view, I am not religious, and have no desire to be. Perhaps there is a God, but if there is, I think he/she has no opposable thumbs; in other words, has no power to change anything; reality is just playing out according to the laws of physics (whatever those are).

Please tell us how in the world a scientific or at least technical mind can believe in God, and what role religion has played in your work on Perl.

A:

Well, hmm, that’s a topic for an entire essay, or a book, or a life. But I’ll try to keep it short.

When you say “how in the world”, I take it to mean that you find it more or less inconceivable that someone with a scientific mind (or at least technical mind, hah!) could chooose to believe in God. I’d like to at least get you to the point where you find it conceivable. I expect a good deal of the problem is that you are busy disbelieving a different God than the one I am busy believing in. In theological discussions more than any other kind, it’s easy to talk at right angles and never even realize it.

So let me try to clarify what I mean, and reduce it to as few information bits as possible. A lot of people have a vested interest in making this a lot tougher to swallow than it needs to be, but it’s supposed to be simple enough that a child can understand it. It doesn’t take great energetic gobs of faith on your part–after all, Jesus said you only have to have faith the size of a mustard seed. So just how big is that, in information theory terms? I think it’s just two bits big. Please allow me to qoute a couple “bits” from Hebrews, slightly paraphrased:

You can’t please God the way Enoch did without some faith, because those who come to God must (minimally) believe that:
A) God exists, and
B) God is good to people who really look for him.

That’s it. The “good news” is so simple that a child can understand it, and so deep that a philosopher can’t.

Now, it appears that you’re willing to admit the possibility of bit A being a 1, so you’re almost halfway there. Or maybe you’re a quarter way there on average, if it’s a qubit that’s still flopping around like Shoedinger’s Cat. You’re the observer there, not me–unless of course you’re dead. 🙂

A lot of folks get hung up at point B for various reasons, some logical and some moral, but mostly because of Shroedinger again. People are almost afraid to observe the B qubit because they don’t want the wave function to collapse either to a 0 or a 1, since both choices are deemed unpalatable. A lot of people who claim to be agnostics don’t take the position so much because they don’t know, but because they don’t want to know, sometimes desperately so.

Because if it turns out to be a 0, then we really are the slaves of our selfish genes, and there’s no basis for morality other than various forms of tribalism.

And because if it turns out to be a 1, then you have swallow a whole bunch of flim-flam that goes with it. Or do you?

Let me admit to you that I came at this from the opposite direction. I grew up in a religious culture, and I had to learn to “unswallow” an awful lot of stuff in order to strip my faith down to these two bits.

I tried to strip it down further, but I couldn’t, because God told me: “That’s far enough. I already flipped your faith bits to 1, because I’m a better Observer than you are. You are Shroedinger’s cat in reverse–you were dead spiritually, but I’ve already examined the qubits for you, and I think they’re both 1. Who are you to disagree with me?”

So, who am I to disagree with God? 🙂 If he really is the Author of the universe, he’s allowed to observe the qubits, and he’s probably even allowed to cheat occasionally and force a few bit flips to make it a better story. That’s how Authors work. Whether or not they have thumbs…

Once you see the universe from that point of view, many arguments fade into unimportance, such as Hawking’s argument that the universe fuzzed into existence at the beginning, and therefore there was no creator. But it’s also true that the Lord of the Rings fuzzed into existence, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a creator. It just means that the creator doesn’t create on the same schedule as the creature’s.

If God is creating the universe sideways like an Author, then the proper place to look for the effects of that is not at the fuzzy edges, but at the heart of the story. And I am personally convinced that Jesus stands at the heart of the story. The evidence is there if you care to look, and if you don’t get distracted by the claims of various people who have various agendas to lead you in every possible direction, and if you don’t fall into the trap of looking for a formula rather than looking for God as a person. All human institutions are fallible, and will create a formula for you to determine whether you belong to the tribe or not. Very often these formulas are called doctrines and traditions and such, and there is some value in them, as there is some value in any human culture. But they all kind of miss the point.

“Systematic theology” is an oxymoron. God is not a system. Christians are fond of asking: “What would Jesus do in this situation?” Unfortunately, they very rarely come up with the correct answer, which is: “Something unexpected!” If the Creator really did write himself into his own story, that’s what we ought to expect to see. Creative solutions.

And this creativity is intended to be transitive. We are expected to be creative. And we’re expected to help others be creative.

And that leads us back (finally) to the last part of your question, how all this relates to Perl.

Perl is obviously my attempt to help other people be creative. In my little way, I’m sneakily helping people understand a bit more about the sort of people God likes.

Going further, we have the notion that a narrative should be defined by its heart and not by its borders. That ties in with my linguistic notions that things ought to be defined by prototype rather than by formula. It ties in to my refusal to define who is or is not a “good” Perl programmer, or who exactly is or isn’t a member of the “Perl community”. These things are all defined by their centers, not by their peripheries.

The philosophy of TMTOWTDI (“There’s more than one way to do it.”) is a direct result of observing that the Author of the universe is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways. The universe doesn’t come with enforced style guidelines. Creative people will develop style on their own. Those are the sort of people that will make heaven a nice place.

And finally, there is the underlying conviction that, if you define both science and religion from their true centers, they cannot be in confict. So despite all the “religiosity” of Perl culture, we also believe in the benefits of computer science. I didn’t put lexicals and closures into Perl5 just because I thought people would start jumping up and down and shouting “Hallelujah!” (Which happens, but that’s not why I did it.)

And now let’s all sing hymn #42…

i’m testing out google analytics over the next four or five weeks to see if i like it or not. i use feedburner to keep track of the rss subscribers that read the blog but i can’t get it’s visitor information to work right on the actual hits to the blog. i used to use sitemeter but i like what i see in the google analytics reports better than what i saw on sitemeter’s reports. we’ll see how this goes.

i think i’m also going to goof off with tagcloud a little bit (i saw this on church marketing sicks)

my run for the day
distance – 2.0 miles
time – 19:08
pace – 9:44/mile

[tags]google, google analytics, sitemeter, website stats, tagcloud[/tags]

i’m supposed to be working at this moment but i’m burnt out on what i am writing right now so i decided to waste a little time and try out twitter. it’s basically a public timeline – a way of showing everyone else what you are doing during the day. it’s probably a waste of time that i will give up in a week but right now i figure it will be fun to record my days for awhile. you can look me up at http://twitter.com/ratterrell.

i love all the social networking stuff on the web but i do find it ironic within myself that i hate giving out marketing research to companies but i will gladly give it away for free on the net when it is within social networking community. if you were a company trying to sell me something all you would have to do is look at twitter, flickr, last.fm, 43things, and allconsuming and you would know what type of products i would buy. i know it’s inconsistent but that’s what keeps me a mystery. 😉

speaking of being a mystery i discovered a CHRISTmas present today (4/12/2007) in the box on the outside of my study door. it was a gift card that had somehow stuck to a piece of paper that i had placed in the clear plastic folder holding box on the outside of my study door. it was a great surprise but then i felt pretty lousy for not thanking the gift giver until today (almost 5 months after the gift was given). at least i had actually given him a gift at CHRISTmas because it would have otherwise been a little too late to return the favor of the gift.
[tags]twitter, social networking, time logging[/tags]

finally kfed has entered the internet search engine business and everything will be as it should be.google is really a trashy service anyhow and kfed federline is the only one that can put them in the trash pile that they belong in. to search with kevin just click here

i do not swap products easily. i need to be very brand loyal. if i find a new program that does something well i will stick with it and try to avoid swapping to something else (i.e my hatred over the downfall of wordperfect within the business world – but hopefully that will change in the future). with all of the above said i am going to take a test run with google reader. i am a bloglines user but i have lately read so much about google reader that i figure i will give it a try. i’ll let you know how things go.

my run for the day
distance – 4.9 miles
total time – 50:52
pace – 10:22/mile

i know this is useless but i found i on lifehacker while i was working on some stuff for the JESUS project. vnes hosts all sorts of old nes games. it’s the old original code so the game is the exact same as the original thing because, well, it’s the original thing. while i was on the phone i was able to play 1942. that makes a boring conversation better.

i just feel the need to say that myspace is the dumbest thing on the internet and will have disappeared into the void within a year. the world will be a better place when that happens.