Returning from a trip one day and noodling in re medieval science led me to an astonishing web-essay by someone calling himself Jim Walker on a religious belief site called Nobeliefs.com for Freethinkers.
Being trip-weary and in a curmudgeonly mood, I commented on the irony of someone denouncing religious belief while believing in so many myths and legends of his own at The Age of Unreason: or Pfui
Now, thanks to the Galileo Effect -- there is always someone willing to point out an affront to another -- we havea response from Mr. Walker.
He writes that he is "not a Middle Age scholar" and then sets about proving it.
Being a free-thinker, all his thoughts are free and apparently worth the price paid. The response generally repeats well-worn fundamentalist tropes long adopted by atheists, misses the point of several things I said. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it also leaves one open to being misconstrued. In places, he mistook my intention, and in some places noted incompleteness or omission.
Naturally, being a freethinker, Mr. Walker makes no provision for comment [let alone disagreement] on his site, and so we must once more make do here, where comment [as well as thinking] really is free -- and freely debated. A Message to the Anonymoi: As usual, I ask only that non-LJ members identify themselves in some way in their comments, lest we confuse one Anonymous with another. Use whatever screen name you please. Those responding over on Blogger at The TOF Spot, the same rule applies. 1. A Few Preliminary Comments Mr. Walker has a marvelous technique for assigning things to the Medieval Period [bad] or to the Renaissance [good]. Namely, whenever he encounters something he considers good in the Medieval Period, he declares that to have really been the Renaissance. He also uses the term "Dark Ages" to refer not only to the actual Dark Age, but to the entire Medieval period up to the point where he wishes the Renaissance had begun. It never seems to occur to him that people whose beliefs he does not share could ever have accomplished anything of which he approves. The cognitive dissonance must at times be painful.
Another marvelous tool is to construe any glimmering, hint, or lucky guess in antiquity, China, Islam -- anywhere but in Europe! -- as the really-truly beginning of something, while dismissing any development during the Middle Ages as mere glimmerings, hints, or lucky guesses. Now, it is true that the Victorian Triumphalism of the Age of Science and Industry needed to be tempered. The Old Europeans tended to dismiss everything done by non-Europeans. However, the post-modern impulse to dismiss everything done by Europeans is equally wrong-headed.
A third technique he uses is a sort of guilt-by-association. The debate Question is the origin of modern science. However, Mr. Walker also brings up the crusades, the inquisition, the execution of Bruno, the trial of Galileo, the murder of Hypatia by a mob of Greco-Egyptians, even the sale of indulgences (I kid you not). Now, he shows no actual knowledge of most of that stuff; but even if we grant him the premise, good science can be done by bad people. The best science of the early 20th century came out of militaristic, jingoistic Wilhelmine Germany and its national socialist successor. But we don't say that rocket ships or jet airplanes are bad because they were invented by Nazis or that the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is wrong because the Kaiser invaded Belgium. So these arguments are mere red herrings. If I have time, I may come back to them later.
Related to number three is number four. And that is the association of one innovation with another on not better basis than a chance correlation. For example, in his anxiety to show that medievals never did nothing nohow he equates pickled herring with the fish relish used for οπσον by the ancient Greeks. Apparently, since both involve fish.... Of course, the technological innovation of pickling enabled Baltic fishermen to preserve and ship their catches over longer distances, and opened a source of protein and omega-3 oils to vast numbers of people. Greek fish relish was an appetizer for meals.
Mr. Walker is entirely correct to say that historical period-names are arbitrary. This goes double for self-congratulatory names like "Renaissance" or "Age of Reason" as well as for deliberately-chosen derogatory names like "Dark Age." Mr. Walker takes this as permission to name the historical periods as he damn well wishes. Modern historians prefer objective descriptions like "early 14th century Burgundy" to tendentious labels from propaganda mills. I find that some of the names are useful, because there really are sea-changes in people's mental picture of the world. The ancient world really did end, so did the medieval world, and so is the modern world even as we speak. That the changes were gradual and seamless does not change matters. The existence of dawn and dusk does not invalidate the distinction between night and day.
2. A Note on the Dark Age The dates are conventionally taken to run from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to the Carolingian Ascendancy, roughly AD 500-800. Two good histories covering the run-up to and most of the Dark Age is Barbarians and Romans: The Birth Struggle of Europe, A.D. 400-700 by Randers-Pehrson and The World of Late Antiquity AD 150-750, by Peter Brown.
The age was dark because a lot of barbarians burned down a lot of stuff, and a lot of documentation went up in smoke. It is a Dark Age because we "see" by documentation, and very little has survived "the shipwrecks of time." It is not called "dark" because the people in it suddenly became stupid. ( Read more... )
2:32a sherlockian tangent, in which i want heroes with plans for the future
I saw Sherlock Holmes today. It was lovely - everything I could've hoped from the trailer, and none of the stupidity that I feared. Now, there are several things I could discuss about this movie, such as a) what exactly is crack!fic, and why does it work so well?, and b) what is with this obsession with Victorian times nowadays? But right now I'm going to talk about c) why does it always seem to be villains that have Plans for the Future?
There are several good reasons, of course: villains need to be stopped, and far-sweeping plans generally up the stakes. Villains working towards a visionary goal are frequently more interesting than ones that aren't. And if you're charging straight towards your brave new world without caring who you hurt on the way, well, you're pretty much wrong by definition.
It is possible, isn't it, to make plans for the future while still caring about the present? It's harder, of course - you've got more variables in the equation. And it does bespeak a certain arrogance to make plans for the rest of the world. But arrogance is a flaw we frequently forgive in our heroes. Trust me, to carry out this harebrained plan, to save the day they ask, and we say, okay. But when someone says, trust me, to make this work, to transform... everything, we say, hell no!
This trend troubles me in movies. Storytellers are stacking the cards. There's no inherent reason that plans for a shiny new future should always involve killing people. It's a danger, yes. But it's a danger that we can only avoid by looking at it straight on. There's a multiplicity of ways to make a future; many of them involve bloodshed; and if we don't want this, perhaps we should be looking for the ones that don't.
Off the top of my head, I can think of two types of heroes with grand plans for changing the world. One type restores the fertile green Earth from future environmental destruction - think Waterworld or WALL-E. The second restores a free society from under the rule of an evil (frequently non-human) dictatorship - Dark City is the example that comes first to my mind. Note that in both cases, however, the wonderful new world will not be something new, but a return to an older and more traditional order. So in a way these seeming exceptions bolster my case.
P.S. This also reminds me of a point that is somewhat related but not quite the same, made eloquently in this essay by Catherynne M. Valente: Choose Life Magic
current mood: awake current music: remember the luck of the soldier who never saw rome anymore! ~ leslie fish
One critic, echoing the voices of thousands, asks:
“Surely if Lisp makes a programmer N times more efficient, then it would be easy to study scientifically. Have there been any studies comparing productivity?“
I wish I could reply with the immortal words of Babbage. But alas I cannot. Sadly, I can indeed “apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” It is the confusion which inevitably follows from a bean-counter mentality applied to subjects which are fundamentally alien to it and the culture it has been shaping since the start of the Industrial Revolution. For instance, take the very word “productivity.” It is meaningless alone. One must always ask, productivity at what? If the productivity in question is in the act of being a pyramid builder following orders and bringing to life the ideas of others, then without question the productivity of many a Lisp programmer is something less than heroic. This has nothing to do with Lisp, and everything to do with the kind of people who find it appealing. Now, if we’re talking about productivity at undirected invention, the story of Lisp becomes a very different one. To the now-scorned Lispers we owe garbage collection, all the roots of the modern GUI, dynamic typing, lexical scope, the very idea of a single-user computer workstation, and countless other innovations which so many people believe to have simply dropped from the sky (or worse yet, to have been invented by the sociopathic hucksters who have managed to weld their names to these marvels through Machiavellian business acumen.)
The Lisp Machine (which could just as easily have been, say, a Smalltalk machine) was a computing environment with a coherent, logical design, where the “turtles go all the way down.” An environment which enabled stopping, examining the state of, editing, and resuming a running program, including the kernel. An environment which could actually be fully understood by an experienced developer. One where nearly all source code was not only available but usefully so, at all times, in real time. An environment to which we owe so many of the innovations we take for granted. It is easy for us now to say that such power could not have existed, or is unnecessary. Yet our favorite digital toys (and who knows what other artifacts of civilization) only exist because it was once possible to buy a computer designed specifically for exploring complex ideas. Certainly no such beast exists today – but that is not what saddens me most. Rather, it is the fact that so few are aware that anything has been lost.
It is indeed possible to measure the productivity of Lisp – just as it is possible to measure the productivity of, say, the scientific method. You would not attempt to weigh the latter by setting up a gladiatorial match between stereotypical African shamans and stereotypical American physicists (randomly plucked from Los Alamos, say.) Yet there is no end to similar suggestions for measuring the value of programming systems. I am no mystic, and believe that productivity could in principle be measured (once you define the word.) However, you must measure it on the time scale where it is relevant. The productivity of inventors and the tools of invention cannot be measured in the same manner as the efficiency of two competing pieces of construction equipment – especially not in a society which routinely deprivesinventors of the fruits of their labor and awards everything to the slick and hypersocialized.
Yes, my dear bean counters, you can measure productivity. I would no more ask you to stop in your attempts at its measurement than I would ask mosquitoes to stop sucking blood. You can measure productivity – even of Lisp; even of political philosophies. You will simply need to secure a very large bag of beans – one deep enough to hold a bean for every twist and turn of a century of tinkering, politicking, and everything else associated with the messy business of successfully thinking new thoughts.
A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse. Talk of cultural problems, “the library question” (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation – one which is able to make sense not only of the obscurity of Lisp, but of many other conceptual breakthroughs (such as reflectivity) which threaten to give developers’ minds a “lever to move the whole world.”
Employers much prefer that workers be fungible, rather than maximally productive.
Yes, this holds true even at that most beloved megacorporation citadel of angels:
“One of the reasons I stayed at JPL for twelve years was that I was appalled at what the software industry had become. The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. The “interface specification” for these “components” usually involves a list of tools in which an engineer has received “training.” (I really detest the use of the word “training” in relation to professional activities. Training is what you do to dogs. What you should be doing with people is educating them, not training them. There is a big, big difference.) To my mind, the hallmark of the interchangeable component model of software engineers is Java. Without going into too many details, I’ll just say that having programmed in Lisp the shortcomings of Java are glaringly obvious, and programming in Java means a life of continual and unremitting pain. So I vowed I would never be a Java programmer, which pretty much shut me out of 90% of all software engineering jobs in the late 90’s. This was OK since I was managing to put together a reasonably successful career as a researcher. But after Remote Agent I found myself more and more frustrated, and the opportunity to work at Google just happened to coincide with a local frustration maximum. One of the reasons I decided to go work for Google was that they were not using Java. So of course you can guess what my first assignment was: lead the inaugural Java development at the company… The interchangeable component model of software engineers seemed to work reasonably well there. It’s just not a business model in which I wish to be involved, at least not on the component-provider side.”
It amazes me just how blindly complacent programmers have been in the face of the ongoing and very successful deskilling of their profession. Instead of rebellion, we see mass Stockholm Syndrome. There is no shortage of pundits ready to bloviate at nauseating length on nearly every – even the most trifling – perceived shortcoming of Lisp [1], other than this one. Once in a very long while, some daring soul will call out the “elephant in the kitchen” openly and directly:
“…in contrast, the C/C++ approach is quite different. It’s so damn hard to do anything with tweezers and glue that anything significant you do will be a real achievement. You want to document it. Also you’re liable to need help in any C project of significant size; so you’re liable to be social and work with others. You need to, just to get somewhere. And all that, from the point of view of an employer, is attractive. Ten people who communicate, document things properly and work together are preferable to one BBM hacking Lisp who can only be replaced by another BBM (if you can find one) in the not unlikely event that he will, at some time, go down without being rebootable.”
I predict that no tool of any kind which too greatly amplifies the productivity of an individual will ever be permitted to most developers. In this they shall follow in the maximally deskilled assembly-line footsteps of their grandparents. “They’ll time your every breath.” As for the “free software” world, it eagerly opposes industrial dogmas in rhetoric but not at all in practice. No concept shunned by cube farm hells has ever gained real traction among the amateur masses. [2]
[1] Ever wonder why it is customary to speak of the wildly different Common Lisp, Scheme, ZetaLisp, Emacs Lisp, etc. as though they were a single language? I would like to suggest that we start referring to C/C++, Java, Python, etc as ALGOL.
[2] Consider Linux: the poster child of successful free software. It is a knockoff of a 1970s operating system well past its sell-by date. This is because a herd simply cannot innovate, whether for fun or for profit. Every innovative work of mankind has been the product of one – sometimes two, rarely three – minds. And never the work of a herd. No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative software ought to play by a different set of rules.
The configurations problem is to propagate run-time preferences throughout a program, allowing multiple concurrent configuration sets to coexist safely under statically guaranteed separation. This problem is common in all software systems, but particularly acute in Haskell, where currently the most popular solution relies on unsafe operations and compiler pragmas.
We solve the configurations problem in Haskell using only stable and widely implemented language features like the type-class system. In our approach, a term expression can refer to run-time configuration parameters as if they were compile-time constants in global scope. Besides supporting such intuitive term notation and statically guaranteeing separation, our solution also helps improve the program’s performance by transparently dispatching to specialized code at run-time. We can propagate any type of configuration data—numbers, strings, IO actions, polymorphic functions, closures, and abstract data types. No previous approach to propagating configurations implicitly in any language provides the same static separation guarantees.
The enabling technique behind our solution is to propagate values via types, with the help of polymorphic recursion and higher-rank polymorphism. The technique essentially emulates local type-class instance declarations while preserving coherence. Configuration parameters are propagated throughout the code implicitly as part of type inference rather than explicitly by the programmer. Our technique can be regarded as a portable, coherent, and intuitive alternative to implicit parameters. It motivates adding local instances to Haskell, with a restriction that salvages principal types.
This paper has been mentioned in threads quite a few times, but never had its own story. Of particular interest is the discussion of how to safely support local type class instances where Haskell only supports global instances.
I only know of this on the Ft. Totten metro map, green line, towards Greenbelt side. There's a bit at the top left of the map (around Tuckerman and 13th St NW) that says there's a place called the Megadeath Alchemy Congregation. Google returns nothing (except to helpfully suggest that I meant 'megadeth'). There's one lone blog out there that asks the same question, but no answer. Nothing on Google maps either.
Any ideas? Mystical floating church of awesome? Prank by the map makers?
Also--Thanks to everyone who gave me suggestions for my 'unique' dining experience. I've made a list and we're probably going to work through all of those in the next few months :-)
Время летит быстро, только вернулся из одного отпуска – уже пора ехать в другой. В этот раз особо выбирать не пришлось, потому как задача была показать ребенку джунгли и слоников, а с этой задачей ни одна страна не справится лучше Таиланда. В Таиланде я уже был. В прошлый раз посещали остров Ко-Чанг, в этот раз решили не нарушать традицию и снова поехать именно туда.
По сути, Ко-Чанг - это некоторым образом оптимальное место для семейного отдыха в Таиланде (нужно понимать, что у каждого свое понимание об оптимальности). С одной стороны – остров, что сразу же дает отсутствие толп. С другой, Ко-Чанг заповедный остров, что сразу же дает еще большее снижение толп, потому как далеко, и не всем интересно ехать в Тай в то место, где нет отвязных дискотек, «ночной жизни» и толп проституток. При этом на Ко-Чанге при желании можно найти и то и другое, но немного «тильки сэбе».
8:17p I need help!
Narod.Mat' privezla mne KPK.Drevnju4ij,kak govno mamonta: ViewSonik PocketPS (poguglite sami,4to za zhelezka).S KPK udobne v inete lazat',4em s telefona.No ya tak i ne smog nastroit' v nèm svyaz' s mobiloj.tam stoit WinCE 3.0.I nomer polu4aetsya +0*99#.Konekt idèt 4erez ik port,no v inet ne lezet.Kak ubrat' etot +0,ne znaju...
2 new car keys 1 GPS Unit 1 new car batter 1 tank of gas
4 cans of cincianatti chili 4 single serve bottles of liquor: rum, gin, vodka, and very very nice Woodfield Reserve Borbourn
2 old chairs (as in old. Not antique.) 1 ancient craft table
2 boxes of philo shells 1 can of PAM 1 box of spiced nuts
In short: My parents are as always cleaning out the house- I'm going to be getting a fine selection of "things in my mother's freezer" in the morning when I start back to Chicago. Also, my car died again. Leading to this morning's fun $68 search for a newer, more powerful battery.
When I made these, they came out of the oven fairly soft, but hardened so much they were only really edible as "dipping cookies" (dip in milk / drink of choice) the next day. If you think the only way to eat cookies is with milk, this is fantastic, because they do a great job absorbing liquid and softening into crumbly deliciousness, but if you like your cookies without milk these aren't as good. Note: before/after pictures not only not particularly to scale, they're probably not even on the same scale relative to each other.
11:51a This is Me Jack Vance (Or more properly This is I) - by Jack Vance
To my Christian friends, I hope your celebrations of the Nativity of Our Lord were uplifting, and serve to remind you that a better world awaits us all in glory beyond the reaches of time. To my secular friends, I hope you got a lot of loot for Xmas.
Speaking of loot, Santa brought me a copy of Jack Vance's autobiography, which despite theovercrowded social schedule of the day (stockings upended at 8.00 AM, inlaws over for breakfast at 9.00, Mass at 10.00, friends visiting at 11.00, then driving to my relations at 12.00) I somehow managed to read the first 65 pages.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but to hear Jack Vance speaking in his own voice about his own life, I found fascinating. His ironic and erudite manner of speaking is unchanged, and parallels suggest themselves between the locations of his various adventures and those of his imaginary characters. The book promises to be not so much about shop talk (which might interest SF readers) but just about his life in general, which I personally think is the correct proiritization.
We spent the day with the family yesterday, amid jollity and good cheer, and brother-in-law and I both resisted the temptation to debate our political differences of opinion, to the general relief and comfort of the rest of the family. I should mention in passing that I have an exceptionally beautiful sister, and she married an exceptionally handsome man, and in due course gave birth to three daughters equally exceptional -- but I see with eyes biased toward my own. Remind me at some other time to tell you my theory that hidden in among the normal Homo Sapiens Sapiens who hold dominion over the planet Earth, there lives among us (as secretly as the immortals from Highlander) a second and related species, Homo Sapiens Pulcherrimus, commonly called The Beautiful People. My sister and her family are members.( Read more... )
«СП»: - Вы считаете, что по отношению к Владу была допущена несправедливость?
- А что такого сделал Влад? Да, он выпил и что, для нашей страны это новость? Я знаю много более страшных историй, чем та, что произошла с ним. Почему-то ситуация, когда некая прокурорша раздавила маленького ребенка и потом стояла в стороне и ела мороженое, не вызвала никакого резонанса. И есть очень много действительно страшных историй, на которые общество и правоохранительные органы должны реагировать. Но этого не происходит.
«СП»: - Но все-таки Влад стрелял в баре из травматического пистолета, ударил милиционера… Это же было?
- Есть запись, где ясно видно, что сын ждал в течение получаса, чтобы его обслужили, и к нему никто не подошел, хотя в этом баре ни одного человека больше не было. Я думаю, что любой бы на его месте разозлился. А Влад тогда отработал 60 смен без выходных и приехал после последней съемочной ночи. А потом, когда приехал этот милиционер, почему он сразу не увез Влада в участок? Он болтался по бару еще целый час, разговаривал с барменом, обнимался. Уж не провоцировали ли? И Влад его не бил. Он его оттолкнул. Сын пять лет не был в отпуске. Последние съемки, где он играл легендарного красного командира Григория Котовского, были очень напряженными, вот он и сорвался.
Действительно: а что такого сделал Влад? Ну, жахнул стулом по стойке бара. Ну, выстрелил из пистолета по бутылкам. Ну, стукнул мента. Да, Нургалиев тогда ещё не разрешил бить своих сотрудников, но ведь удержаться практически невозможно. Что такого-то? Ну да, многие за половину содеянного заезжают на зону года на три, но у Влада были съёмки в очередном сериале, рассказывающем Правду об этой стране.
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