it appears that i have a hidden talent for finding the slow line at the grocery store. i always seem to manage to pick the line in which the harmless-looking person with three items will hagle for 27 minutes over the 12 cent coupon, and have price checks on the other two items. i need to find a way to turn this skill to profit.

So, once again, I’ve arrived at the point of having too many things going on at the same time, and so being incapable of getting anything done. I’m working on two books (one Apache, one fiction) and there are at least a half-dozen books that I need/want to read. I’m trying to get 3 different servers running the way that I need them to (and one of them seems obdurately determined not to cooperate). I really want to spend some time getting up to speed with the Perl DateTime project, which I played a small part in getting off of the ground, and have subsequently abandoned due to Apache stuff. And there are a few things that I want to get done on Apache – notably, several of the howtos are crap and need redone, and there are a number of other howtos that I want to write. Oh, yeah, and I have this great idea for a series of articles, of which I’ve written the first one.

Apparently I need to get my ToDo list back into RT and try to get priorities assigned. Oh, yeah, that would mean that I need to get that server operating again, and get RT installed. And then … um … there we go again.

My great grandmother used to tell a story of the crazy old man Walt Whitman, who walked around Camden, NJ. The kids, of whom she was one, would make fun of him, and throw things at him from the button-wood trees as he walked past.

When I was in college, I found a reference, in one of Whitman’s poems, to kids throwing things at him from the trees, and I thought it was pretty neat how my great grandmother’s story was corroborated by something in this great poet’s writings.

Well, this week my mom asked me what poem that was in, and I went looking for it. I’m sure it was somewhere in Leaves of Grass, but I can’t find it. I’ve done full text searches of the entire book, and I can’t find anything that comes close to matching my memory of the mention. It was only a single line in a poem. But I’m starting to think that I made it up, or that I imagined it.

Any Whitman scholars out there who can point me in the right direction?

The discussion about the medicare bill has gotten me very angry about politics. For those of you not following it, the discussion goes something like this.

Republicans just passed a medicare bill, and the Democrats don’t like this because, darn it, Medicare is a Democrat issue. They opposed the bill, the reasoning goes, not because it was something they disagreed with, but because Democrats, not Republicans, are supposed to pass bills like this.

Huh?

I find this utterly disgusting. The idea that there’s no thought for the best interests of the American people, but only interest in politics for the sake of politics, is revolting. Even more revolting is the way that people are talking along these lines as though this makes sense, and is the way that things should be.

I’m not even claiming that the bill is good or bad. Not knowing anything about Medicare, I really don’t have any basis for an opinion. I’m just saying that the attitudes about the bill are utterly disgusting. To put party alliance above all other considerations, even the value of the bill itself, is disgraceful. To not even be aware that it is disgraceful is also disgraceful.

As I remarked in response to BrBourbon’s comments about history, I’m not sure that it’s legitimate to trace so much of human history to any one event. And, after a little more discussion on IRC, he encouraged me to write a little bit about Chaos Theory, as well as some of the other topics that we touched on.

Chaos theory, at its core, is amazingly simple. It says that when you change something small, it’s possible that it will have big consequences. The technical term is something like “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”, but that’s the basic idea. It can be explained by this poem:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The origins of this poem are unknown. The idea is that a thoughtless act can have enormous consequences, but the basics of Chaos Theory lie in these simple lines. A small change in initial conditions (nail vs no nail) have large consequences (kingdom vs no kingdom). But who is to say that the kingdom would have been won if the nail had not been lost? Even the simplest human equations depend on thousands of variables, many of which we are unable to ever know the values for.

I suggested, for example, that the variety of bean planted by a farmer in his field in the spring of AD328 may have been just as relevant to our current society as was the signing of the Magna Carta, or the outcome of the war of 1812. Perhaps more so, since it has had more time to percolate. And because of the complexity of the system, and the fact that historians only record those events that seem important at the time, we can never know how important that event really was.

So, I posit that trying to trace everything about our attitudes today, back to some source event in the past, is a *VERY* useful exercise, but is necessarily doomed to arrive at only a partial answer. At the very best.

For additional reading on Chaos, I recommend James Glick’s book, which makes the whole topic accessible to non-scientists.

Rush – The Analog Kid

Too many hands on my time
Too many feelings
Too many things on my mind
When I leave I don’t know
What I’m hoping to find
When I leave I don’t know
What I’m leaving behind…

One of the things I find fascinating about Rush is that as I get older I find more depth to Neil’s lyrics. And a title like “Analog Kid” that seemed so random in 1982 makes a lot of sense now.

I’d sure like to be analog for a little while.

Someone on a mailing list mentioned the Barber paradox – Wikipedia, which led me also to read about Russell’s Paradox and the Liar Paradox. All very interesting.

It always seems to heal the wounds
If I can get you to dance

Fleetwood Mac, “Say you will”

I am, once again, having the discussion with some well-intentioned (I assume) person intent of persuading me that the term “tribe” is necessarily pejorative. That it necessarily refers to Africans, and implies “primitive”.

I find political correctness to be abhorent for this very reason. It strives to take things that are in the common usage and cast them as offensive. Thus, we can’t use the word Chairman (gender-specific), patient (should be “person receiving treatment” – patient implies someone is sick, which is offensive), or black hat (racial bias). We are reduced to grunting, because any use of specific terms will offend someone.

I’m not having any of this. Words mean things. If ignorant people find words offensive, then they will just have to get over it. I refuse to cripple my communication skills just because someone is intent on being a victim.

For the record, the people of Africa refer to themselves by what tribe they are a member of. This has been my experience my entire life. The government of Kenya uses the term tribe when referring to the 42 ethnic/social/religious/family groups that live in Kenya. The term tribe is descriptive and precise. It does not imply anything other than what the dictionary says it implies – a group of people who are joined by ancestry, language, history, geography, religion, and various other social and ethnic factors. The word “tribe” prevents me from having to say that every time.

People that try to shoe-horn offence into every nook and cranny reduce us to uncommunicative morons. We’re always walking on eggs about what we say, in case someone take offence.

And of course it’s not just about whether someone is offended. I don’t much care whether people are offended. What’s frightening is that they can sue because they are offended. They can call it discrimination. They can call it “creating a hostile workplace.” They can call it hate speech. And they can sue. That’s bizarre, wrong, and violates my constitutional rights.

All, of course, IMHO, and I’m probably wrong, and I apologize if I offended anyone.

What is the purpose of law? I find myself having this little internal conversation every time I run the red light at Shillito Park and W Reynolds Road. The purpose of law, as I understand it, is to protect the freedom of citizens. Or, as John Adams put it, to secure the maximum amount of happiness for the maximum number of people. That is, certain freedoms (like the freedom to drive anywhere I want) must be curtailed in order to protect certain other freedoms (such as the freedom not to be squished like a frog in an intersection). And so, as I wait for 4 minutes at a red light while no traffic flows in the other direction, I have to wonder what freedom is being protected in exchange for my impatience and annoyance at waiting, apparently, for nothing. I have no answer to this. So I’m often likely to run the light, when it is abundantly clear to me that there is no harm done by my doing so. I expect that one of these days it will get me in trouble.