Barnson.org

I was cruising Paul Murphy’s site tonight, even briefly considering clicking the Paypal link to send Anna some birthday money (Hah! Hah! Laughed at myself for that thought, I’m pretty broke at the moment), when I noticed an extremely long quote in Paul’s nifty “Random Quote” block:

“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”

— Carl Sagan

Now, I ask you — is the above statement an accurate portrayal of the human condition? Carl Sagan was a well-known atheist, yet he was always apologetic about it, very rarely antagonistic. He was also quite sour on the political system. Does this statement make Carl Sagan an anti-religion, anti-politics bigot, or is that statement accurate?

When’s the last time you changed your mind about a political or religious issue and acknowledged that fact, rather than trying to hide it? What’s your take on science’s changeability vs. religion’s immutability, or politics’ stubbornness?

And perhaps most important of all, how often are major religions or major politicians willing to do a 180 on an issue?

So what do you think of the modified look? I’m trying to nail down the kind of look I want for the site, so that when I upgrade my software here shortly I won’t be trying to design and update at the same time.

Changed things:

1. Instead of background colors, created background transparencies. This took a while; every color I use had to be recreated, except the background color for the site as a whole.
2. Added my picture, obviously. This one was actually taken earlier tonight. I’m not entirely satisfied with the look, though; a part of me thinks I should be sticking my tongue out and grinning.
3. Changed top banner color; I still need to whip out a logo, I think.
4. Limited number of nodes to 5 on front page. The front page was just getting terrifically long.
5. Nuked the sidebar stuff I never used: “who’s new”, “top nodes” “recent recipes”, and “who’s online”. Some things, like recipes, change so rarely, they really shouldn’t have been there anyway. Thanks to Paul for the suggestion; this really is a blog, not a portal to every gee-whiz geeky HTML gadget on the planet 😉
6. Modified a few colors to go better with the slightly more subdued color scheme.

The things I’ve noticed wrong are:

• Internet Explorer has problems with lots of transparent gifs on a page. That’s how I did the transparencies — I created 16×16 gifs where every other pixel was transparent. It works well, but when I initially did 2×2 gifs, IE was so slow it was pathetic. Maybe I should convert them all to 32×32. It’s still kind of slow rendering the page, even on my 933. Conversely, Mozilla smokes through the page like it’s nothing.
• I don’t have a nifty logo yet. I must make one.
• Lost the neat bar that held the menu in up top. Must figure out a replacement. I don’t have <div> attributes for the header as a total unit in my theme, and so without hacking the theme file, I couldn’t readily put back my blue & off-white bar.
• Trying to color-match for that picture in the corner was a bear. It looks OK now, but I had to master the “smudge” tool in the Gimp to get it nearly matched 🙂
• Rounded corners. I want rounded corners. That’s going to be pretty exciting to do in transparencies.

I’m done, I’m tired, got to get up for work in a few hours. I’m glad to have gotten this update out of the way, though, it’s a look & feel change I’ve wanted to make for a while but just haven’t taken the time. I want my site to be beautiful, not just functional.

I used to be convinced that I had only a sysadmin’s soul — that I was no artist. And yet, when I do things like this, there is a symmetry I’m aspiring for, and an aesthetically pleasing goal I’m attempting to reach. It’s almost like when I write music… I go back again and again, because there’s a note out of place that needs adjusting, or a sound that’s just not quite right for the most harmonious appeal. My web site’s becoming a bit like that for me lately, that when I’m done with work for the day and have a chance to be creative, my creativity comes out here instead of in my recording program.

Kind of interesting, that.

For some bizarre reason, I remembered this show. HR Pufnstuf. The “Barney” of the 1970’s, I guess. I loved this as a little kid when it was on TV. I discovered that, for just $14, just like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you can own the entire first half-season of HR Pufnstuf on DVD. All four episodes!

I wonder where the people went who did that show, and where they are today. I think that and “Speed Racer” were my two favorite shows when I was five. It’s the only show I remember from that time of my life, except maybe “Captain Kangaroo” by the time I was in elementary school. What were yours?

Those of you watching the Democratic pre-Primary debates have no doubt been amused by the moderator’s now-familiar refrain: “Can you sum up your entire campaign in 45 seconds?”

What I find interesting is that the whole prospect of effective campaigning rests on the candidate’s ability to distill an entire platform down to a snappy bromide. And then deliver it on television.

Right? I mean, all we hear from both the media and congressional pundits is the banal obvious: the party’s breakthrough nominee will be the one that figures out how to provide a breakthrough message. So from the 11,346 pool of Democratic Presidential candidates (so angry at the Democratic National Office for the size of the letting the field of hopefuls get this big), one of them needs to have a snappy elevator pitch. It’s ridiculous. But understandable given that television is the primary media for reaching and coercing voters. You would think that the candidates and their campagn teams would recognize the need to concoct a memorable phrase and consistently use it, time and time again. Because everyone knows the majority of the American voting public doesn’t actually read up on the candidates and the issues. The voters want action-adventure politics served up in a miniaturized matinee.

It’s probably true that those not old enough to vote know more about the candidates than the adults. Schools are studying this stuff everyday.

I wish I was Mosely-Braun’s campaign manager so when the question comes…”Carol, taking less than 45 seconds, can you explain what are you going to do for the American people?”…

“Kill the white man.”

She’d get my vote. 🙂

I wrote a little while ago about the most interesting things to talk about are the ones people are often most uncomfortable discussing. They also tend to lie on the boundaries of acceptability — where it’s OK to do one thing in one culture, but not in another. I warn you in advance, this little essay is at once long-winded, poorly focussed, and probably really “out there” to most normal people.

I remember in Glendale California, as an idealistic young Mormon Missionary, I met an Armenian family — one of many in the Glendale area. Unfortunately, I can’t remember their names… the only name I remember well is that of Armik Shahmirian, who sacrificed a lamb in our honor the day before we baptized him.

Anyway, this family had a very unique saying. In English, it reads something to the effect that “Culture is just an excuse for the way you are”.

For instance, take that tradition of sacrificing a lamb in honor of someone. No, I’m not making this up — according to Armik, it’s an Eastern Armenian tradition when you are about to celebrate something important. Yet, what is the difference between saying a prayer over a lamb before slicing its throat yourself, and going to the supermarket to purchase a lamb? What’s the difference between putting a bullet between the eyes of your old milk cow, or purchasing a rack of beef ribs at the supermarket?

Do we value life less or more, because we purchase it pre-packaged in the supermarket?

This question is of some pretty vital importance to me lately. I recently switched from a nearly-vegetarian diet (I was Vegan for a year, then ovo-lacto-fish-fowl for two — which isn’t vegetarian at all, but I digress) over to a heavily fat-and-protein based Atkins diet. Really, it’s not strictly Atkins, because I think calories do matter, so I watch calories, watch carbs, and watch my protein balance so I don’t end up with ammonia breath. But now I’m contributing so much more to the dead animal contingent of the planet.

It seems obvious to me we evolved as omnivores. We have many traits in common with other hunter-gatherers. Unfortunately, in the animal world, the only really close approximation we have in a mammal that eats a diet similar to humans seems to be the bear. Eating carbs, like berries, tends to pack on the fat. Eating meats, like that nice rotting carcass over in the corner of the cave, tend to give more protein and muscle mass. Easy comparison.

But when I go to the store on three subsequent weeks, I can be almost certain that I’m eating meat from three different animals or more. As humans, we raise these animals for meat. Pigs, for instance, have become so stupid and lazy that people are paid full-time to “plug in” male pigs into female pigs because otherwise the pigs just aren’t interested in reproducing. And yet, these are normally intelligent animals.

Are they self-aware?

I think they are. I think animals have feelings, though quite different from humans, that are every bit as real as our own. I think they are aware of themselves, just as we are of ourselves. They just aren’t as smart as we are (at least, as far as we can tell). I discard the notion of a “spirit” pretty much entirely — and I realized the other day why.

I want to build something smarter than me.

I want to program an intelligence that can think faster, longer, and harder than I possibly can. And remember more. And make better judgements. And come to better decisions, not just in my own personal space, but for humanity as a whole.

We do it in every other endeavor of life. We build planes so that we can fly, when a person flies quite poorly on arms alone. We build roads and cars to transport us at amazing speeds on land. We build computers to do math better than we do, and to beat us at chess.

We can build machines to work harder than we do. To run faster. To jump farther.

Why not to think better?

This is my dream: to have an intelligent assistant small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. That this assistant can think better and faster than I do. That I can hear what it’s thinking, or better yet, to have the results directly wired into my brain. To have a secondary memory to augment my own, either through some sort of glasses-type interface, or directly interfacing with my neurons.

And most importantly, to have a non-human to talk to.

I think we’ve done amazing work with machines in so many other pursuits of life, it’s simply a matter of time before we can create autonomous life forms that think better than we do. I really don’t think we’re going to encounter “aliens” in my lifetime… interstellar distances are just too great, and wormholes, hyperspace, superlight speed, or other theories aren’t anywhere near a reality able to overcome that ocean of emptiness.

But, I think, we can find those aliens. We must build them ourselves. And most of us won’t ever even notice they are a part of our lives until the moment of recognition has passed us by.

Today, I saw the independent film, “Bubba Ho-Tep” near Chinatown in DC. It stars Bruce Campbell (“Ash” Of Evil Dead/Army of Darkness, and Brisco County Jr. fame) as a 70 year old Elvis (who did not die, but faked his own death) and Ossie Davis as JFK (Who did not die, but is now an 80 year old Black man) fighting against a Soul Sucking Egyptian Mummy in a Nursing Home.

And They Say There’s nothing new in American Cinema.

So, as I sat in the theatre, having a blast watching Elvis vs. the Mummy, I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be one of these Horror icons.. these guys like Bruce Campbell or Robert Englund (Freddy) or Brad Dourif (The Voice of Chucky – and Wormtongue in LOTR) or any of these guys who is known in this community as a STAR, but could walk around in a mall and never be recognized. Tha adulation and the anonymity together with a hefty paycheck and a fun job scaring the heck out of the kiddies.

This comes the day after the wrap party for the Timewarps Films’ new movie “Crawler”, in which I play one of the starring roles.. it too is an independant horror film, but with fewer credentials. At the party, I was chatting with one of the actors who is now making an independent Horror film with the director of my FIRST acting experience in a Horror film, a black and white piece called “Nocturne”… both films are of the same quality as some of these people’s first works. And somewhere inside me, there’s this hope that even if I never make it as a famous actor, someone, somewhere will remember me for my days as an independent Horror actor.. never respected by the Tom Cruises or the Academy, but loved by freaks like myself, who don’t mind a little fear with their Cappuccino.

I got into an interesting brief discussion recently, and a key phrase stuck out in my head:

“I prefer to avoid doing systems administration by the seat of my pants”

What does it mean to do IT by the seat of your pants, really? And what is its opposite?

Those who know me well know that I’m fascinated by epistemology, or the study of knowledge. I also enjoy studying language, and where things come from. “By the seat of your pants” has grown from a popular aviation-related phrase into common usage in many forums.

To “fly by the seat of your pants” in modern usage means to decide a course of action as you go along, using your own initiative and perceptions rather than a pre-determined plan or theory.

On the other hand, the original meaning of the phrase comes from early aviation parlance. Aircraft initially had few navigation aids and flying was accomplished by means of the pilot’s judgement. (ref)

On the one hand, we have this largely negative connotation of the phrase implied by the first definition. Most people would interpret this to be a synonym for “underprepared”, “spontaneous”, or “chaotic”. Yet, the original meaning doesn’t mean this at all. It’s a very positive thing. A pilot would use his training, judgement, and skill to bring about a favorable outcome. It didn’t indicate a lack of planning — in fact, quite the opposite. A skillful pilot has to have spent a great deal of time in preparation for a mission, and yet in pre-instrument days, would also have to have an excellent sense of direction, and a knowledge of terrain and problems so thorough as to be little obstacle except in the most extreme circumstances.

The world of systems administration, to me, seems these days to still be a very “seat of the pants” affair. Despite all the time spent training, planning, writing up documents, and preparing for the unexpected, when the time comes that problems arise, more often than not the skill of the computer jockey in that chair is the key between success and failure. No amount of preparation can cover all possible situations.

My opinion? When it comes to systems administration, each admin should aspire to become an excellent “seat of the pants” admin. The big BUT, though, is that one needs to create a great flight plan.

A poorly planned mission is, barring a lucky accident, doomed to failure. A well-planned mission also has a significant chance of failure, but if you have an excellent pilot in the noisy seat, you have a much better chance of pulling through difficult times.

I read a really interesting article by Paul Graham entitled “What you can’t say”. It explores the nature of human moral taboos. It’s a thought-provoking piece that provides a few easy guidelines for wrappping one’s head around “moral fashions”.

Some gems:

• “To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it.” I think about the Religious Right, and the recent proclamations against homosexuality by various religious denominations, contrasted against the Liberal Left and, among other things, the phenomenon of Political Correctness.
• “Most struggles, whatever they’re really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas … It’s easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor … We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.”
• “So if you want to figure out what we can’t say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?”
• On the question of why raise questions about forbidden subjects in society: “To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that’s in the habit of going where it’s not supposed to.”
• “Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It’s like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.”
• “When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be “i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto.” Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don’t tell them what you’re thinking. This was wise advice.”
• “The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.”
• “Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller’s metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a “witch-hunt.” … Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor.”
• “…when people are bad at open-mindedness they don’t know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it’s the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn’t work otherwise. Fashion doesn’t seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It’s only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people’s idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.”
• “When you hear such labels being used, ask why.” (Particularly “-ist” labels: conformist, racist, communist, etc.)
• “When a child gets angry because he’s tired, he doesn’t know what’s happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say “never mind, I’m just tired.” I don’t see why one couldn’t, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions … Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society’s bad moods.”

I find it interesting that, it seems, many comedians get most of their source material from “forbidden topics”. I am trying to think about topics that make my friends very uncomfortable; the list is uncomfortably long. Many of them, you can dance around the core issue and be just on the verge of comfortability, yet if you drive to the heart of the question, it makes people very uncomfortable.

• Hate Speech: what makes something “hate speech”? It seems to me that, generally, it’s whatever someone finds offensive.
• Web Filtering: Kids see breasts from their first waking moments. Reproduction is part of human existence, and much more acceptable for children to understand in other societies than in ours.
• Age of Consent: What makes an 18-year-old different from a 16-year-old, really? Why the arbitrary line? An 18-year-old can marry an 85-year-old, yet a 17-year-old can’t? I’m not saying it’s desirable; I’m just saying that arbitrary line seems weird.
• Abortion: “Pro-choice” “Pro-life” “Anti-Choice” “Anti-life”… it all seems so loaded with labels. The difference in positions always boils down to moral fashion.
• Absence of Deity: Sure, I can say I’m agnostic around my friends and they handle it. If I imply, directly or indirectly, that deity simply doesn’t exist, people get really upset. I think they are too uncomfortable with the ramifications… because if deity doesn’t actually exist, then they are delusional. Nobody likes that message. Conversely, if deity does exist, that means I’m delusional 🙂 I’m OK with being wrong though.
• Divisiveness: In my opinion, it’s just fine to be “divisive”. Show people the truth and make them suddenly realize they’re on different bandwagons, or on the same bandwagon for dramatically different reasons. Draw some artificial distinctions, then tear them down. Thinking hard and talking hard about why you’re doing (or not doing) something is just good sense, not an attempt to falter some “national will”.

There are too many things to list, I think. Too many ideas, particularly in today’s repressive climate, that can get you in trouble. If someone said they supported the motives of the terrorists (oops, there’s a label!) who flew planes into the Pentagon, the two towers, and that New Jersey field… that one little statement could haunt them the rest of their lives.

Very interesting article. It makes ya think.

I ran across a site Saturday that was really sobering on what the big numbers being spent to fight a war across the ocean mean.

Wanna know how much war costs?

That’s my money at work. As always, my official position on the Iraq war is “I’m ambivalent about it”. I’m in favor in some ways, and opposed in other ways. I support our soldiers and goals, but not necessarily our methods. It’s the sort of position some people call “straddling the fence”, and isn’t always comfortable.

We arrived first for the party.

The snow crunched under the tires of my “arrest-me red” 2001 Honda Insight as we pulled into the driveway at 218 Something Lane, the home of George & Leslie Mcewan at 6:18 PM. The sky was deep into twilight, stars beginning to appear.

The driveway was wide — wider than the 2 and a half car garage behind it. Snow was piled three feet deep on either side. I swung to the left to leave room for the other guests soon to be arriving. I put the car into Park, set the hand parking brake in between the seats, shut off the lights and the heater, took my key out of the ignition, and opened the door. It scraped a little on the icy snow piled nearby.

I trotted around behind the diminutive vehicle to open the door for the passenger side, in which sat my lovely but very, very pregnant wife Christy.

We gathered our snack foods out of the trunk. Pork rinds, Fruit2O drinks, oranges, cheese, and miscellaneous munchies were neatly arranged in bags underneath the cargo net under the hatchback.

George & Leslie’s new home was beautiful. According to George, it’s a “tri-level” home, which, according to him, means “split level with an attitude”. It has a kind of foyer before you reach the stairwell, which gives the foyer a dramatic vaulted ceiling and spacious ambience.

But we weren’t here for the home tour! Within a few minutes, other guests began arriving. John & Kelly Olsen with their brood. Jay & Julie Barnson with two of my favorite neices, Rowan and Brenna. Bryan Brown with his kids — unfortunately, his wife Jenny was home ill. Jacob & Melissa Proffitt and their children. And the circle was complete.

We chowed down for about forty-five minutes, making small talk. Much of the male chatter was about jobs — leaving them, losing them, and getting them. John, Jay, and Jacob are programmers. George is a CAD draftsman for some kind of mechanical engineering firm. Bryan and I are sysadmins. A consummate geek crowd, here for a consummately geeky reason:

Mystery Science Theater 3000.

We call them “MST3K Parties”. In case you’re unfamiliar with MST3K, it was a series on the Sci-Fi channel. They’d take an old, bad sci-fi movie, wrap a thin little plot about a guy getting shot into space because his boss didn’t like him around it, and then you’d see the backs of the heads of the guy and his two robot friends as you watched this really awful movie.

The whole funny thing about this isn’t the cheesy B-movies. It’s the amazingly hilarious comments the three commentators make the whole time. The movies are generally so thin on plot that you don’t miss anything due to the commentators “down in front” on the movie screens.

Anyway, my first exposure to this was “Attack of the The Eye Creatures”. No, this wasn’t a typo. The title actually read:

Attack of the
The Eye Creatures

Really weird. They had like one goofy rubber-suited alien, and then the rest of the eye creatures were people in black sweatsuits and white gloves.

Last night’s features were:

• Lucas in Love: OK, this isn’t rightly an MST3K feature, but this ten-minute short is hilarious, and appreciated by all the Star Wars fans in our audience. I’ve never seen it before, and we laughed our butts off.
• Lassie the dog in The Painted Hills: This is an original-cast MST3K episode. Unfortunately, the most memorable thing about this one was that the tape kept getting screwed up in the VCR. The tapes are, at this point, ten-year-old copies off the television set, so it’s kind of understandable. Anyway, Lassie had definitely seen better days by the time this film was made. She was pretty fat. I’m trying to remember some of TomServo’s more memorable quips, but am falling short. Maybe someone else can fill them in? Most memorable comment by the MST3K actors: “What, he has sand in his lap and Lassie has to come rescue him?” Thought it was pretty funny.
• Beginning of the End: Some guy who’s name and middle initial is “Bert I.” made this joke. Apparently, old Bert I. was responsible for an enormous number of cheap sci-fi flicks in the fifties.
  This one was about some giant crickets levelling the city of Chicago. The special effects were fantastic. At one point, they obviously had a postcard of a large Chicago building which they had put some crickets on and then filmed them crawling across it, to simulate the crickets scaling the walls of the building. Of course, the crickets get shot by the hero and fall off, leading to the most memorable comment of the night, “Oh no, they’are going to blow on the postcard again!”. Bert I. seemed particularly proud of one scene in which a cricket falls off the building by playing it three or four times in a row in nearly the same order: hero blasts cricket, cricket falls, hero blasts another, cricket falls, one more, and it falls.
  Mmm, artistic 😉
  Old Bert I. didn’t like to waste any film, either… the first forty seconds of the movie was of an empty road. No music. No nothing. Empty road. Then a car finally passed.
  Other than the “postcard” line, the most memorable line of the movie, for me, was when there were three people jammed in the front of a car onscreen and TomServo pipes up and says “And the guy in the middle says ‘Hey, this isn’t a stick shift!'”. Pure comedy at its finest!

Anyway, MST3K night rocks. Lots of fun. If you can obtain a few copies, I heartily recommend putting together some geeky friends and hang out for a night making fun of movies. Heck, go make your own MST3K night with friends. You see, filmmaking hasn’t really gotten better — technology for effects has just gotten cheaper. For a wonderful example of this, go rent the movie “Timeline”. Invite a bunch of friends and plan on picking out all the hokey moments. Enjoy!