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How often do you think about the potential corollary to a statement you are making? A corollary is something that follows without requiring proof from a statement already proven, a deduction or inference, or a natural consequence or result. Does it even matter?

“I know I’m raising my kids right because they pray to Jesus every night.”

Is the corollary to that, “I know you aren’t raising your kids right because they don’t?”

As mad as it may make some die-hard anti-religionists out there, I’m going to say “No. The two have nothing to do with each other in the mind of reasonable people.”

I found myself thinking about corollaries today because I went to church. This is a somewhat rare occurence lately, and entirely by choice. Most of my friends and family (although not all unless they stumble across my blog) are aware that I’m actively non-theistic. I hesitate to use the word “atheist” because people assume that implies anti-religion, which I am not. I simply think that religion is irrelevant to my daily life, and has been for a very long time. Last August began letting my wife and close friends in on that fact.

Anyway, my daughter asked me to come because the “Primary” (an LDS church word for “babysitting and religious indoctrination for children 12 and under”) was going to be singing a couple of Father’s Day songs and she wanted to sing to me. I enjoyed the singing, and the winking glances sent my way by my daughter and son. I smiled and enjoyed their show of affection immensely.

The only unfortunate part is that I had to sit through some rather insufferable speeches. That’s part of the reason I stopped going, was simply that sitting through classes where they expect you to agree and not make waves when you disagree with the speaker’s opinion just doesn’t work for me. I’ve had people tell me that’s not true, and that the religion doesn’t discourage differing opinions when those opinions disagree with the official dogma. Try telling that to the Bishop who called me into his office to inform me that Church meetings were to be “faith-promoting”, and that my questions were not. Anyway, there were a couple statements that came from speakers that caught my attention:

“I’m so glad my child came to my husband and asked him to give her a Father’s Blessing. This shows that he’s a good father, and that I’m raising my children the right way.”

Is the corollary to that statement, “If my child doesn’t come to my husband and ask him for a Father’s Blessing, then he’s not a good father and I’m not raising my children the right way.”?

Initially, I thought so, and the only thing that kept me from being upset by the statement was once again reminding myself that, from the Latter-Day Saint perspective, even if I raise my children well, teach them to be moral and good people, spend time playing with them, help around the house, keep myself away from drugs, pornography, and other bad habits, and in every way try to set a good example for them, that’s not enough. Without “Temple” services, taking “sacrament”, participating in other “ordinances”, and avowing myself in front of two witnesses every two years to be free from sin (or at least as far as 14 questions can determine), I cannot ever measure up to the standard of a good father in the eyes of most Latter-Day Saints.

Once I remembered that, and that my perspective and the speaker’s perspective were completely different, I stopped being angry and began thinking about corollaries. If one assumes as fact that a God requires worship and supplication from His worshippers in order for them to be good fathers, then it follows that one who does not do that is a bad father. This is not an insult to the “bad father”, but a logical conclusion following from a completely different set of basic assumptions. Barring a dramatic opinion change on the part of the theist or non-theist, this gulf is quite difficult to cross.

Quite some time ago, I worked for a small company called “Talk2”. They were founded on the somewhat laughable proposition that internet-based speech-recognition technology would revolutionize the telephone industry, and they could make a fortune by so doing. They were partly right, but it’s turned out that voice services are just a small part of the standard suite of services with any cell phone these days. They’ve reinvented themselves as “Spontaneous Technologies”, and are focussing on VPN stuff now with maybe a dozen employees.

Anyway, a co-worker named Joel Hull, during one of our several religious discussions at work, made the statement one day that has stuck with me.

“Just because I think I’m right, doesn’t mean I think that you’re wrong.”

If we all approached life with this perspective, I think there would be fewer hard feelings and a lot more understanding in this world. I’m going to keep trying to remember this as I continue to explore Life Without Personal Religion.

I realize this is probably rather too intimate for a public forum, but a few months ago my wife and I had a discussion. She’s very actively Mormon. I’d been working very, very hard toward trying to be a better father and improving myself (exercise videos and all that), and I felt I’d made tremendous gains. In a late-night discussion, I asked her “Do you think I’m a better husband and father than I was back when I acted religiously?”

Her answer cut me to the core. “No,” she said. No explanation. I fumed, rolled over, and tried to go to sleep as that “No” echoed through my brain for hours.

The next day, she amended her statement of the night before. “In every way not involving religion, you are a better husband and father now than you were a year ago.” It felt lame, and too little too late, yet I’ve found that I can’t stop thinking about the statement for the last three months. It sent me into a bit of a downward, depressed spiral, thinking that my wife thought I was a worse husband and father, even when I practically bleeding out of the ears in my efforts to be one.

Now, I get it though. If your base assumption is that it’s impossible to be a good father without religion, then you’ll assume I’m a bad father for disavowing religion. My assumption is different — but it doesn’t make anybody else wrong. Now time to go be a good Dad.

I’ve been participating in a Slashdot Discussion today which contrasts well-known civil liberties advocate and scholar Lawrence Lessig against an RIAA representative discussing copyright. As a proponent of balanced copyright (what we have today is considerably unbalanced, in my humble opinion), this article fascinated me to get a glimpse of Lessig’s opinions and those of the recording industry. One of my favorite Lessig quotes is “Record companies value their artists in the same sense that cattle ranchers value their cattle.” Or something like that 🙂 Anyway, read more for snippets of discussion I found interesting and thought-provoking…

(Node is unfinished, sorry for publishing early.)

I came across a fantastic article about correct preparation and seasoning a Wok for use today. I’d never really understood the idea behind “seasoning” a pan before. The concept seemed repugnant to me — I mean, you’re making it ugly and black and look like it’s covered and cruddy. That’s just gross. But now that I understand how and why to do it, I’m eager to throw away some of the Teflon crap at our house and season myself some cast iron…

Check out the Wok Seasoning article here

I’m updating to the latest version of Drupal. Thus you may note the lack of any theme and strangeness from time to time. I apologize to my half-dozen readers for the inconvenience 🙂

Please note that the Gallery is down for the time being. I’m working on a new photo gallery to replace it. It still has a couple of issues (notably, problems submitting items at any resolution lower than 1280×1024). Once I’m done, though, it should be a lot more integrated and nicer than the old gallery.

UPDATE: Got the upgrade in. Cool, you should see more updates now that the Blogger API is working right. I’m excited to load up the pages on my laptop and have an opinion written by the time I get to work in the morning…

First, I haven’t posted any blogs in a while because I’ve been working on the web site for my Planetside outfit, the Outlanders. You’ll see a link to that site on the right-hand side. It uses the same technology as Barnson.org to drive it (Drupal), but it’s a newer version. Once that new version graduates from “release candidate” to “release”, I’ll be updating Barnson.org as well.

Second: My life used to be pretty boring to all appearances. Yeah, I’m always excited about my work, technology, and music, but outside of those arenas, we didn’t have much in the way of interpersonal conflict with neighbors or any other strangeness to be worried about. I mean, it seems like there are people who thrive on disasters. For a really great treastise on this subject in an easy-to-read fiction form, try The Losers, by David Eddings. It’s an engrossing read by a popular fantasy author, but it’s not fantasy. It’s a modern-day urban good vs. evil morality play, and really worth the time to read. It’s not very long, either.

Unfortunately, I found my life closely resembling The Losers last night…

Anyway, our life was pretty routine until our neighbor (I’ll call him Jim) married a Russian bride he found through an agency (I’ll call her Nona). My wife and his new wife became friends, and kept in touch even after this neighbor and his kids moved up to Canada. They started having some marital problems I won’t go into, which culminated in her arranging to come back down to the U.S. and then go into hiding with her children. Obviously, her husband was upset and suspected us of complicity in her decision to run from him. We know little more than he does about her whereabouts, other than that she’s found a safe place to stay. But that was just the beginning of the excitement.

Before I go on, allow me to caveat that we are nosy neighbors. No ifs, ands, or buts about it, we want to know what’s happening in our neighborhood, particularly if it involves those we know and care about. Part of our development is “twin homes” (townhomes that only share a single wall), so we live pretty close to a lot of people. More so than larger acreage Suburbia. We’ve known these neighbors having marital problems for years now, and consider them both friends, although the husband seems a bit psycho at the moment.

So it was with great distress my wife peered out the window and noticed several men in white t-shirts hauling stuff out of Jim’s kitchen, and handing it over the fence to other waiting men on their side of the house. In general, this activity resembled one called “burglary”.

I did a dumb thing, I guess. I hopped on my bicycle, rode around the corner (I figured my bike was a safe bet if I had to get home in a hurry, I was about to confront at least 3 fully-grown men and accuse them of burglary), and parked it in the street in front of their house. I must admit it. I was scared. Scared enough, and with enough adrenaline pumping through my veins, that my hands and knees were shaking. I just hoped that the men I was confronting wouldn’t sense my fear confronting them. I’m really a wimp, a very non-confrontational person that would rather talk my way out of any problem than fight my way out.

“Excuse me,” I began as I approached the front steps where the men and two women were hanging out, “I have a concern.” I walked closer to the steps and stopped about five feet away. “A few minutes ago, my wife noticed you guys taking items from your neighbor’s house here and handing them over the fence. I’m friends with Jim, and would appreciate it if you put them back. The police are on their way now.” I added that last part because my wife had dialed 911 to report the burglary, and the look on the face of these men, particularly the chubby blonde one to my left, were murderous.

I received a moment of stunned silence in return.

“What do you think you’re doing, riding your bike over here and accusing us of stealing?” shouted the blonde. From his slightly slurred speech, I guessed he’d been drinking.

The goateed, brown-haired guy in a wife-beater t-shirt (you know the type I’m talking about, mesh tank-top undershirt) seemed to take a more moderate approach. “Hang on a second. We’re just hanging out here, having a few drinks. What are you talking about?”

I reiterated what my wife had seens almost verbatim from the first time, but this time he caught on.

“Oh, man, that’s not it at all!” replied Goatee. “You see, Jim’s my friend too,” (I consider this unlikely, since Jim had been living in Canada until the day before since these new neighbors had lived there, but I digress,) “and he asked us to keep an eye on his house. His wife showed up in a big gray van with two other women today and hauled like twenty things out of the house. We were afraid she was going to take the rest, so we brought the TV and stuff over here. I mean, there’s like nothing in there, man, it’s pretty bare. We were even thinking about buying their house.”

In my mind, I thought about the surroundings. They had been handing items over the back fence, when they could have easily used the front yard and the nice, large front doors. All the lights were off in their house, when you’d think they’d at least want the kitchen light on so they didn’t trip over the stuff they were supposedly safeguarding from Jim’s wife. They had been whispering to each other very quietly as they moved the items over. I smelled bull manure being thrown my way, here.

“For some reason, I doubt,” I began, but Blondie interrupted again.

“Look, this is ridiculous. He left his door unlocked and asked us to watch his house. You’re accusing us of stealing his stuff. Why don’t you keep the TV at your house if you’re so concerned about it?”

I was, for a moment, completely thunderstruck by the leap of illogic. Was he actually implying that he thought they could make this right by giving me my neighbor’s stolen goods? Apparently so.

“I have no desire to keep Jim’s television,” I replied. “I think it should stay in his house where it belongs. For some reason, I doubt Jim asked you to take his stuff out of his house to protect it.”

“Wait a second, dude,” Goatee said as he backed into his house. I wasn’t sure what he was up to, and I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to find out. In his absence, the quiet Tall Guy in the corner, the two women sitting on the front porch, and Blondie all began trying to explain what was up, and how they were actually just concerned neighbors trying to guard Jim’s goods from his “bitch” wife. I nearly laughed, because I know Nona, and that would be the last word I’d use to describe her mildly hyperactive yet affable demeanor.

In a few moments, Goatee popped out of his house, a twenty-one inch television in his arms. “Here, dude,” he said, “take the television. Keep it at your house. We’re just trying to be good neighbors.”

I backed away and held up my hands. “No, thank you, I don’t wish to touch it.” In the back of my mind I was thinking because I’d really rather not have my fingerprints on your stolen goods. “I’d just like for you to return it to his house, and lock the house on the way out.”

I could sense their mood gone from initial shock and outrage, to planning. I didn’t want to stick around to see what they’d planned, so I said my goodbyes, hopped on my bike, and rode back home. My wife and I had a discussion for a few minutes about the incident. She reminded me that these same neighbors had stolen the dog run out of Jim’s back yard several months earlier, and only returned it when confronted. In her opinion, these people were of the opinion that if nobody lived there, then nobody wanted the house or its goods.

A few minutes later, two city cops arrived. They had us explain the situation, immediately went over next door to speak to the perps, and then returned with some forms for us to fill out. The lady cop informed us that the police could not enter Jim’s home without a search warrant or Jim’s permission, and that she did not see any out-of-place items at Goatee’s home that appeared to be stolen goods upon being invited in to investigate. They also couldn’t prosecute without the homeowner filing charges. I think I’ll call Jim today to let him know what happened. Anyway, we gave her contact information for Jim, then bid goodnight.

There was a lot of movement in Goatee’s house later that night. Lots of moving around, lights turning on and off; they were up later than we’re used to them being up. I had some insomnia, mainly due to stupid worries about what these irrational neighbors might do in retaliation for us turning them in.

I guess to sum it all up, either these neighbors were colossally stupid in the execution of their Good-Samaritan ideals, or they were trying to cover their burglary by justifying the crime. I suspect the latter, given the total illogic of waiting until midnight to hand things over a backyard fence with all the lights off. But hey, maybe Jim will give them the benefit of the doubt. Given that he’s back in Canada, though, I think there’s not much he can do, so I suspect these would-be thieves will get away scot-free or be able to explain their way out of prosecution.

UPDATE 11 June 2003: Those of you following the story might be interested to know that I called Jim, and he informed me that he asked those neighbors only to watch and call him if Nona showed up at the house. Definitely burglary, and he wants to press charges. I’ll keep this entry updated as news progresses.

Here are some tips I picked up recently off the Sony boards that I thought were relevant. If you don’t play Planetside, this will probably make no sense to you.

Please see the Outlanders Outfit Strategic & Tactical Guide to Planetside for more frequently-updated tips on how to play and excel at Planetside. With your contributions, we can make this the best player-maintained Planetside tips manual in existence.

1. Infiltration suit + Advanced Engineering + your base about to fall == fun. Stock up three ACE’s in your inventory (more if you can) and put them on the vehicle platform. When you see all the lemmings jostling at the vehicle platform to try to get their dozens of Reavers or whatever, blow the ACEs up. You know none of those guys are wearing Reinforced armor or heavier because they have to go pilot or drive something…
2. Remember that, if you are an engineer deploying Spitfires and Mines, to choose creative locations like the tops of stairs and behind trees. Put mines near your Spitfires to discourage runovers. Even though those Spitfires and mines won’t rack up many kills, you’re doing your job by slowing the enemy down. That’s the important thing, slow them down.
3. When driving a Galaxy, an easy way to get everyone to drop at the same time is just to lock (shift-v, click “lock”) the vehicle. This dumps all your passengers at the same time. It won’t eject vehicles, though. The driver of the vehicle needs to alt-g his own vehicle. And the gunner of said vehicle needs to NOT do so, and let the driver do his job, or else he’ll eject from the plane sans vehicle.
4. Hot-dropping is often overrated. To effectively overrun a base, though it’s not as impressive, park your galaxy a minute’s run from the base. The surprise is much better than a huge red blip on their radar letting them know there’s incoming.

So Slashdot linked to an article about Gator, the much–hated and much-imitated adware/spyware program that many people accidentally install on their Microsoft Windows [WARNING: Strong language] operating systems. I almost exclusively use GNU/Linux, particularly Gentoo, at home and work, so I’m not susceptible to accidental installation of this program… <read more>

I say almost because the kids use Windows to play games, and I use a Windows machine through VNC at work to run some Novell administration utilities.

I work at a bank. The unfortunate fact for Gator is that, due to banking secrecy legislation, having a piece of spyware report what web sites we visit to check on delinquent customers is probably illegal. Thus, I regularly clear it off employee computers — or rather, I did before I installed DansGuardian on our proxy server and blocked all executable downloads. Go me, work is easier now 🙂

Umm, anyway, the discussion about a new study analyzing Gator’s ad-generating trends is quite animated. My favorite comment is this one, entitled “Translation of the Article”, by saintjab:

“Gator is crap. Gator is being sued by many people who think the product is crap. Gator has several competitors who are equally as shady and crappy as Gator. Gator spies on you, reports to an unknown authority about your habits and tendencies, and people still use it. These people are not quick to show themselves because they know they are idiots for using this crap. Then the author proceeds to compare this crap with the success of a legitimate company like Google. How is this a helpful article? It only states the obvious. Gator and its ilk are crap and now there is a crappy article about it all”

This faith called “Otherkin” made the front page of Kuro5hin today. I must admit that I, like probably every other science-fiction fan on the planet, occasionally play with the idea that if I just think harder I can really make that pencil on the desk move with my mind (heck, there’s a training course you can take to teach you how), or that I’m really the malevolent god Hastur. Or whatever.

But building a faith around it? Well, no accounting for taste, but stuff like this is one of the reasons I avoid religion.

So I’ve been running Gentoo Linux on my home machine for several months now, and other than one thing, I’m in love.The first thing is, why am I not in love with Gentoo? Here’s my answer: Ebuilds take too freaking long!!! OK, other than that, here’s why I like it.

1. Konqueror is incredibly fast compared to Redhat 8 or 9
2. Everything is incredibly fast compared to any other Linux distribution I’ve used.
3. I can be doing an “emerge -u world” (which pretty much rebuilds my whole system if I need it), simultaneously with watching a movie under mplayer on a single-CPU system, and other than a couple of small hiccups in the DVD from time to time, everything works perfectly.
4. When I run xmms, I never, ever have a skip on any ogg or mp3 playback. Considering that I’m in the process of ripping my entire CD collection, I’m amazed. I can be ripping, playing back, and simultaneously compiling Mozilla, and never drop a beat on playback. Occasionally the video may lag due to what a heavy load it is, but otherwise it’s amazing.
5. Rock-solid stability. I’m running the Gentoo-optimized 2.4 kernel, with everything built with some pretty decent optimizations, and the only thing that has ever locked up my system was me trying to run some stupid 3D visualization when I was running xmms under real-time priority (ergo, as root, dumb dumb dumb). I chalk that one crash up to PEBKAC.
6. Did I mention it was really fast? Neverwinter Nights plays a whole lot faster than it does under Windows. I mean, really, really noticeably faster.
7. Comparing my 933MHz Pentium III at home running Gentoo to my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 at work, the Pentium 4 feels like a slow dog out of the gate. I’m thinking it’s time to upgrade to Gentoo at work, too.

What’s not to like? Well, the length of time it takes to emerge (that’s the command you run to install a software package) is one big thing keeping me from using it everywhere. As slow as it is installing KDE on my 933MHz Pentium III, I imagine it would be sheer torture on my 366MHz Sony Vaio laptop. Then again, just leave the laptop alone for a couple of days while I’m at work, and it should be finished.The other things are that sometimes there are things I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Like making USB work for my Palm Pilot, for instance. The devices don’t exist under /dev/usb. The really nice thing about Gentoo is dependency handling. For instance, I have both KDE 3.1.1 and KDE 3.1.2 installed side-by-side, and can easily swap between the two if I need to for some compatability reasons. And emerge makes it simple to clean up afterward.

I’ll write a more detailed review at some time in the future. For now, I need to go play some NWN.

I made this post on Slashdot.org today, and felt like I wanted to mirror it in my weblog. I really think that an “inclusive” approach toward Artificial Intelligence, one that is multi-disciplinary, can be the key toward creating our ultimate goal, which is (basically) a new class of slave. I’ll leave the moral implications of creating our own mechanical slaves out of the discussion for now, but really, the main benefit of creating an artificial intelligence, besides having it do stuff for us, would be to give us some company…

Posting follows:

Once we can define what it is we’re trying to artificialize, maybe we can make more progress in artificializing it.

There’s the rub. I don’t think we can begin to understand how the brain works until we build stuff that approximates its operation enough to create working theories. The Wright Brothers didn’t have a full understanding of flight dynamics prior to building their first aircraft. We’ve come to that knowledge through a lot of trial, error, and testing.

The main problem is that intelligence is such a nebulous thing. The Wrights had one goal: “make it fly”. Now when engineers design, they use that basic goal and expand it with “faster”, “safer”, “more manueverable”, “more fuel-efficient”, “able to carry this weapons loading”, “lower stall speed”, “stall avoidance in low-speed turns”, etc. We need to come up with some basic rules on what capabilities we expect out of an AI, then expand on it.

We have some pieces of that now. Like the little round vacuum-cleaner thing. The goal is for it to vacuum floors. Great, it does that. Now make it navigate stairs. Once it can do that, then make it learn to pick up stuff on the floor, rather than vacuuming around it. Then maybe create an attachment that allows it to load a dishwasher.

You get the idea.

I think the point of view of people that think AI has “failed” is a bit skewed. Yeah, we don’t have any AI that can reason at human level yet. But we have devices that can easily beat the intelligence of roaches. And we’re working on things that can exceed or augment the intelligence of small mammals at this point. We’ll get there, but incremental progress is the only way it’s going to happen, IMHO. And we’ll arrive at the goal from several different directions, probably including analog (mechanical approach, responding to stimuli using non-digital means), emergent behaviors (colonies of processes), neural net, and hybrids of these, each of which can complement the other in creating reliable systems that use different logic depending on the context of the item they are analyzing.

This discussion really, really makes me want to go back to school and get a doctorate specializing in AI. I feel like such a goober noober discussing this stuff in public, but my gut feeling is that competent, ubiquitous AI will be the catalyst toward improving the human condition around the world.