Juxtaposition 2014.04.10

We start today with the Common Meditation, to which my initial reaction was "yes, of course, everyone knows that." Certainly we are judged, both for our acts and our omissions, and we frequently are our own worst critics. In fact, we tend to be dismayed and offended by behavior in others which seems to show that they fail to criticize themselves when they ought. But this begs the next question: knowing that we live in a fishbowl where we will be weighed and measured, what should we do?

SF author Lois McMaster Bujold once had one of her characters note that "reputation is what the world knows about you; honor is what you know about yourself." It seems to me that today's gospel answers our question by telling us to know ourselves, to know what we are doing and why we are doing it, and to pick reasons that we feel, as our own critics, are good for us. In that way we can increase our honor, and the more we, for good reasons, honor and revere ourselves, the more capable we become in offering honor and reverence to those we surround ourselves with.

This hits rather close to home. I have what I think are excellent reasons for blogging. Since I also really enjoy every indication that someone else likes it too, I clearly also have some reasons that are rather more suspect. 

Common Meditation for All Souls

We are all of us judged every day. We are judged by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We are judged by the faces of the people we love and by the faces and lives of our children and by our dreams. Each day finds us at the junction of many roads, and we are judged as much by the roads we have not taken as by the roads we have.(Frederick Buechner, 1926 - )

Revised Common Lectionary

Jesus said, "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
"So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
(Matthew 6:1-6,16-21)

First, find a backpack...

The first episode of Dora the Explorer that I ever saw (out of an admittedly tiny set) involved Dora and Boots finding a magic stick. The stick, it seemed, would perform a trick, but first they had to take it across a snake filled river, over a wall, and to the top of the highest mountain. I know how they felt, staring at the river.

We have a computer. Well, we have several, but this is about one in particular. It's a Mac Mini that's 6 years old. The IRS and I don't agree on much, but we do both agree that after a computer is 3 years old, you ought to be thinking about replacing it. It's running OS-X 10.5 The current version of OS-X is 10.9 or maybe 10.10. Each plus-one increase in that .n would cost around $30-40, along with the attendent grief of doing a software upgrade. The problem is twofold: first of all, it runs slowly. Secondly, we can't install anything new because no modern software developer would ever consider actually being backwards compatible that far. So, this is getting to the point (or past it) where the pain of getting a new system becomes less than the pain of not doing it.

You can tell how long an IT professional has been in the field by how badly they shudder when they hear the word "legacy." Legacy is actually a code word which means "the old crap you have that won't play nice with what you want to get but which works just well enough that you don't want to scrap it all and replace it just yet." In addition to the poor old computer, we also have a variety of legacy peripherals:

• A printer we got from one relative that's older than the computer.
• A scanner we got from a different relative that doesn't work with the computer, but which does work with another computer which has its own set of problems and we also need to get rid of.
• A VGA monitor. You know, the old kind with the 15 pin connector. We used to have two, and I was pulling my hair out (what's left of it) trying to figure out how to use a "perfectly good monitor" with new computers that only have HDMI and that are cheaper than the monitor. One died, so now we only have one that won't work with anything new we get.
• Assorted pictures, music, recipes, and miscellaneous files loaded on the Mac, on a USB hard drive that's plugged into the Mac, and in various little pockets of cloud.

So, we are here, about to find a magic stick that will do a trick. But first we have to cross the snake filled river, climb the wall, and walk to the highest mountain. Should be a no brainer. Stay tuned for updates.

Juxtaposition 2014.04.09

Today we are given the opportunity to ponder the nature of teaching, or perhaps the difference between education and training. Our All Souls reading mirrors the flavor of what is probably the most common statement of the problem: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and you teach him for a lifetime. Of course, teaching someone to fish would clearly be training - if you teach them to fish and then move them to the desert, you have wasted their time, and yours. But if we look at this as fishing for ideas, then the parallel becomes much more apt, for pupils can, we hope, learn to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions, rather than simply be repositories of preselected knowledge.

Today's Lectionary selection is one parable included in a list of several of them. Jesus frequently uses parables as a teaching method, and just as frequently the parables present us with a mental challenge in figuring out why he used that particular example. Often, for example, a good result occurs but it occurs because of actions which were taken for bad motives. This use of parables as a teaching tool resembles the Zen technique of teaching with koans, or stories which are designed to wear out the analytical capabilities of the mind and force it into a new frame where it is open to new ideas. 

It is interesting that the two outcomes of biblical criticism most known for being unkind to the mystical content - the Jefferson Bible and the work of the Jesus Seminar - both retain the parables in their attempts to winnow grain from chaff. The Jesus Seminar, in fact, tends to grant the most authority to those parables which are most obscure. This particular one, which seems to be straightforward, they claim to be not the words of Jesus at all, but simply a screed by Matthew on one of his hobby horses: the need to separate Christians from those who hadn't gotten the message.

A Common Meditation for All Souls:

The aim of education should be to convert the mind into a living fountain, and not a reservoir. That which is filled by merely pumping in, will be emptied by pumping out.(John M. Mason, 1770 – 1829)

Revised Common Lectionary:

Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old." (Matthew 13:47-52)

Oozing full speed into the 21st century

It seems to be the time for technology changes. While all the cool kids have been purely in an MP3 world for their entire lives, I started collecting CD's in the mid '80s. Between Jan and I, there was a considerable collection. If we still had all of them, storing them would take about 2% of the floor space in our current house.

At least six years ago, probably longer, I decided that digital was the wave of the future and started ripping the CD's to .mp3's. Starting with the ones I like and Jan didn't, and with several iterations of "where do we store this music?" we finally have reached the end. As of Sunday every physical CD we had has been ripped, and all 4000 or so tracks now live in Google's cloud.*

Considering the entire process, we've gotten back about 15 cubic feet of space, and eliminated a fair amount of dusting. I think it's a win.

*Don't tell anyone, but there's still a backup copy or two on physical media in the house. I love the cloud, but I just don't, quite, trust it fully yet.

May you live in interesting times

The Oracle at Delphi

Joseph Schumpeter is credited with the formulation of the concept of creative destruction in a capatilist society, when "innovative entry by entrepenuers is the disruptive force that sustains economic growth, even as it destroys the value of established companies and laborers that previously enjoyed some degree of monopoly power derived from previous technological, organizational, regulatory, and economic paradigms." In a previous post I had noted that I would probably never again buy a Windows computer, but didn't look into the reasons which are making that increasingly likely. I'd like to rectify that by looking at some of the disruptive influences which are at work in the computer industry today.

It seems to me that the two largest factors at work are the explosion of smart phones and tablets as end-user computing devices, and the likely upcoming end to the period of Moore's Law.

The IBM mainframe is 50 years old this year. The mainframe, immortalized in movies from the period as being in the big room with the white coated computer operators, the blinking lights, and the spinning tape drives, was a huge, expensive, power hungry machine which centralized the power of computing in the IT department of large corporations. In the 1980's, innovation in the microcomputer space, culminating in the introduction of the IBM PC, facilitated the transfer of computing power to departments, and then individuals, first at work, then increasingly at home. These machines have continued to increase in capability and decrease in price, finally appearing to plateau out in the form of laptops with a minimum price point in the $250 range for new Windows-capable devices.

We are now seeing the next stage in this democratization of computing power. Smart phones and tablets, which a few years ago were expensive toys, have also benefited from increases in the capability of microelectronics to the point at which 7" tablets can now be had for $31.50. Admittedly these aren't very capable tablets compared to what else is available, but they are utterly amazing when compared to the landscape 10 years ago. This has the potential of putting what is really a rather powerful computer in the pocket of nearly every person on earth within the foreseeable future, with huge consequences in terms of availability of knowledge and access to education. This trend will only continue with the current emphasis on wearable technology, as initially seen in today's hot e-toy categories: Google Glass and smart watches.

This trend has been driven by three factors:

• use of inexpensive (relatively) low-power processors based on ARM technology rather than on the Intel x86 ecosystem
• rise of free open source software largely based on Linux and exemplified by Google's freely distributable Android OS, which powers around 80% of all portable devices
• the incredible spread of the internet and the phenomenon of social networking

These have both made possible and created a demand for a legion of always-on, easily portable and inexpensive personal devices. People, once exposed to this sort of power, simply will not continue to be satisfied with computers which are controlled by others, or even personally owned ones which they have to be at home, sitting up at a desk, to use. While there will always be some applications which favor workstations, such as photo or video editing, or heavy duty wordprocessing where a keyboard is a great advantage, almost all other usage can already be handled perfectly capably by hand-held phones or tablets.

The other major factor at work is the likely end to the march of progress driven by Moore's Law. IBM engineer Gordon Moore originally stated this "law" shortly after the introduction of the S/360 series mainframes. The law says, approximately, that our capability to put transistors on a silicon chip will double about every 12-18 months. This means that there should be steady and dramatic progress in the capability of the parts used to make computers. The law has been reflected in practice, so that, again approximately, the best possible computers are now hundreds of millions of times more powerful than what was available in 1962.

It is likely that this has led to a certain laziness on the part of software developers. After all, if next years computer will be twice as fast as this years, why put much effort into trying to make a program run faster on this years computer? Instead, we can put the same effort into adding extra features and attempt to use that to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. This viewpoint is not graven in stone. The Raspberry Pi, a $25/35 general purpose computer which was envisioned and originally created to get cheap computing power into schools, has been an incredible success with over 2.5 million units sold. This is at least partly because the Pi, which is based on a cpu chip that most techies think is horribly out of date, is managed by a non-profit institution. The Raspberry Pi foundation, in an effort to minimize cost as a primary goal, has focused on tuning and tweaking the software available for the Pi to make it as efficient as possible instead of just turning out a new model every year. Since developers and hobbyists are comfortable that the basic hardware will be around for more than a few months, they are much more willing to invest time and effort into optimizing their software. Concurrently, the low cost and huge user base are enticing many new people to experiment with the system, leading to a virtuous circle in which each new advance encourages more innovation and development.

If, as many believe, physical limitations mean that Moore's law cannot continue beyond one or two more generations, then it will become increasingly widespread to both innovate as a way of finding better solutions, and to write good code to make the most of the hardware we have. Both of these should tilt computer solutions toward using hardware longer and getting more value out of it, with the corollary benefit of reducing waste.

We are at or near an inflection point where we have ridden the old computing paradigm about as far as it will go, and need to embark on a new model. Exactly what that will look like 10 years from now is far from clear. It is a rule of paradigm changes that it is impossible to predict what a new paradigm will look like until after it's in place. But however this develops, it is pretty well guaranteed to be an exciting time.


It doesn't give me much help in trying to figure out what to buy next, tho. 

Juxtaposition 2014.04.08

Walt Whitman is attributed as having said "If you done it, it ain't bragging." 

Today's meditations share the concept of having to tread the narrow path of true humility while still getting things done. Both seem to say "don't take particular pride in what you have accomplished, but don't hide your light under a basket either." Do the best you can and embrace ownership of what you've done, whether amazing or banal.

A common meditation for all souls:

Humility is often confused with the polite self-deprecation of saying you're not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well you are. Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship. If you really aren't much of a bridge player, you're apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy. True humility doesn't consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you'd be apt to think of anyone else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your own hand well than when your opponents do.
(Frederick Buechner, 1926 - )

Revised Common Lectionary:

Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, "It is written,
`My house shall be called a house of prayer';
but you are making it a den of robbers."
The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they became angry and said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read,
`Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise for yourself'?" 
(Matthew 21:12-16)

A spot of brightness for a gloomy day

Phalaenopsis sp.

It's overcast and drizzly, but looking at this I can pretend otherwise. Under halogen kitchen lights, with camera mounted flash, 40mm macro @~4"