Month: May 2005

We’re down to the wire on Mother’s Day gifts and I’m not sure what to send my mom this year. She’s just had surgery and so she can’t do much. She’s allergic to everything under the sun so I can’t send her chocolates or a gift certificate to a nice restaurant.

What are you all doing for your beautiful wives and mothers this weekend?

Every year my family goes on our annual camping Mayfest trip. We have been going for ten years now. We have also had the same tent for that long. This spells disaster to anyone out there with common sence. Where we go is basically in a field out in the mountains. Prone to every bit of wind and element imaginable. So of course it rained, and rained, and rained. From the wind tearing into our tent it made it very willowy. Then came the wet stuff. This created great big water bubbles right above my head. So for two nights we were pushing water off the tent and sleeping with very wet and heavy blankets. It made for interesting sleep when trying to avoid the chinese water torture. Thank God there is a wonderful creation of a tent heater. Without that we never would have gotten dry or warm. We had two running all night long. In the morning when the rain finnally stoped our poor tent that has been so faithfull to us looked like a drowned cat got ahold of it. All the fluff had been taken out of it. It’s straps were busted. It leaned everywhere. The only thing that kept us there was that the festival was fun. I got to spin fire again. Where I cracked myself right in the butt. I was doing a simple crossover when I did it. Thankfully I didn’t light myself on fire. It was the first time the flame has ever hit me. So it threw me off a little. However I had to keep on spinning cause I was still lit. My daughter got to be the May Queen. Crowned and everything. I was so proud. So all and all it was a good weekend minus the rain. I like the fire much better.

I recently had a terse response from a list member on one of my discussion forums. She holds very strongly, it appears, to Christianity. I have no objection to her opinions, but she’d held out as fact many propositions which were quite debatable. I formulated a lengthy response, and received a very short missive in reply.

I just wanted to archive my response here, because so often I receive similar replies equating science to a religion, and I think that I stumbled across a line of reasoning that might help me quantify the difference in the future.

On 4/30/05, Bonnie…. wrote: > You have a very definate belief system that works for you–good luck with > that! Mine is different and it works too. True maturity is realizing that > we are both right.

Allow me to begin with a quote.

“Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool.” — Kelvin Throop III

I’m afraid I dsiagree entirely with “true maturity is realizing that we are both right”.

1. “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Should I disagree with your definition of “maturity”, you could counter with “that’s not *true* maturity”. It makes the definition of the word “maturity” malleable to mean whatever you wish it to mean at the time. 2. The proposition that “maturity is realizing that we are both right”. Maturity is many things, including physical weight gain, height gain, the dropping of the testes and production of eggs by the ovaries, and the pruning of little-used neural connections in the brain to optimize operations. An individual is fully physiologically mature (including synaptic pruning) somewhere between twenty-five and twenty-nine. Emotional maturity is virtually impossible to quantify, though most of us (including me) routinely decide other people don’t have it.

So, unfortunately, I disagree completely that “true maturity is realizing that we are both right”. I would agree with, “respect for one another is realizing that we are both probably wrong.” I respect your opinion, but that respect does not imply reverence or inviolability from criticism. It is only from withstanding repeated scrutiny that opinions begin to resemble reality.

If you are a religionist (though you have not stated it), you have a model that works. I acknowledge its validity for you and I’m certain it’s useful.

However, do you think your model might be flawed? Could it be wrong?

Isaac Newton, for instance, figured out an excellent model for the interactions of mass. On a “human” scale, Newtonian physics works almost perfectly. One can predict many things, and be right the vast majority of the time.

Yet Newton’s model was subject to odd perturbations, and it took a great deal of time and testing to determine why. It could not handle extremely massive (planet-sized) or tiny (atom-sized) objects. For very massive or high-velocity objects, Einstein discovered the Theory of Relativity, and repeated testing over the last ninety years has verified its validity. For very tiny particles, in 1900 Planck theorized on the existenced of “quantization”, and “quantum mechanics” or “quantum physics” was founded. Thirty years later, physicists began experimenting on the theory, and finding that it held true.

We use both Relativity and atomic quantization daily. If you are sitting at a computer, you are using the results of Quantum Theory. The speed of light used as a constant in mathematical equations underlies the signal theory used to beam a signal to your television.

If confronted with incontrovertible proof that your chosen model is wrong, would you change your opinion on it?

It’s not something I want an answer for, really. There’s an apt quote for that, as well.

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” — Thomas Paine

Sincerely, — Matthew P. Barnson

I’m a big fan of three things that I get in X-Windows (on UNIX systems) which I don’t usually get in Microsoft Windows:

1. Middle-click pasting 2. Whatever I’m selecting automatically going to the clipboard. 3. Focus following mouse, allowing me to keep one application in the foreground while actually typing on the application in the background.

Usually wherever I’m contracting (at the moment, a software security company in Utah), I’m stuck using Windows despite how productive I am in Linux. Occupational hazard, I suppose. There are a few utilities I use to make my life easier when stuck using a legacy operating system such as Microsoft’s Windows:

* Cygwin. This gives me an X-Windows server (for easy interoperability with UNIX applications on remote servers which require X), a Bash shell, and most of the regular non-graphical utilities which I’m used to having on a UNIX system. * Putty. The only terminal emulator I’ve seen which surpasses Putty in usefulness is Konsole, and that is only available in KDE on a UNIX machine. It’s very flexible; if it only had tabbed windows and a more intuitive configuration dialog, it would be perfect. * Vim. I download the compiled version for MS Windows, and it runs fast and flexibly. I can gain equal utility using vim inside of an rxvt window, but sometimes rxvt seems a little bit slow when pasting a massive quantity of text. The W32 version of vim doesn’t seem to have that problem. * And now my new find for the morning: The True X Mouse Utility. You just drag this puppy into your Startup folder, and instantly you have really decent utility. The focus follows the mouse (so you don’t have to click an application in order to work in it), selection of text automatically copies that text to the clipboard (unless you middle-click while selecting, in which case it lets you select without copying), middle-clicking pastes instead of that bizarre “CTRL-C” thing, and overall it’s nifty keen. For a UNIX admin who frequently switches between X-Windows and Microsoft Windows, it’s a lifesaver. Your habits hold true for both operating systems.

Except now I have to find a mouse mod for regular X-windows which lets me abort a selection-copy using the middle button. That’s really swell.

Dig it. I have many pages up here which I mainly use as an archive to remind me of cool utilities which make my life easier. This is one of them 🙂

— Matt B.