Binary Oasis

I just started reading Richard Feynman’s book The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist.  Already I have a good quote (from the first page):

In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.

That really struck a chord with me, and it also poses a problem of sorts: I have many interests, and I like to blog about many things, but as I widen my scope, I am more likely to turn off readers or embarrass myself.  Sure, it’s a risk that I’m willing to take.  If we are not forthcoming about our ideas, how can we effectively engage in “The Great Conversation” that exists in society?

10/12/06 update: I’ve been finished with the book for a while, but I thought it would be good to post a couple of other highlights:

* He talks about the “humility of the intellect,” or what I would usually refer to “intellectual honesty.”  It certainly seems that we could use more of that, especially with respect to politics.  (He talks about politics too. )

* He has a very interesting section that I would classify as relating to skepticism.  Namely, there are many things that we can’t disprove, but that don’t fit within what we know or believe to be true.  Now, there is perhaps the chance that we are wrong about them, but we should be able to get a good idea by applying some good logical thought.

I didn’t take very careful notes with this book, so I’m sure I’m not doing it justice.  It’s a fun read, and it has enough good principles and good discussion in it that most readers should be a little smarter and wiser after finishing it.

This article at Infoworld has some good quotes from Robert Ferrell.  Here’s my favorite:

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what yields a successful project, Ferrell says. “Ever read a project management book? It’s like an encyclopedia of buzzwords and ludicrously convoluted elaborations on what are mostly commonsense concepts,” he says. “Let me save you some money: Gather requirements, assemble competent people, give them clear, realistic goals, provide them with the proper materials and an environment conducive to doing their jobs, and keep communications flowing in both directions throughout the project. Poof! You’re now a better project manager than the vast majority of  ‘certified project management professionals.’ ”

I just went to update my Auernheimer Report blogger.com webpage, and I got the following message:

Are you looking for The Auernheimer Report? It is temporarily out of service. Please try again in a few minutes. Meanwhile, discover a better blogging tool.

So Wordpress is a better blogging tool than blogger.com according to blogger.com.  Now that’s honesty!

I’ve been generally happy with my Treo 700w smartphone.  Among the features that I use the most are Smoresoft Sudoku, Internet browsing (more-or-less at broadband speeds with the right data plan from Verizon), email, calendar reminders, and uh… the phone.  I also use the camera (though the “shutter speed” is usually too slow to take pictures of what moving-and-shaking kids) and VNC software to access my MLS account.

Early on in my ownership of the phone, I got fairly frustrated that certain web pages would crash the phone or bring it to its knees.  (It apparently uses a stripped-down version of Internet Explorer.)  I believe that the default home page changed at some point (due to my upgrading the OS?), and now my Internet browsing has been superb.  I took the time today to find out why.

Google has a couple of portals that are supposed to optimize content for mobile devices and PDA’s.  It turns out that www.google.com/pda turns out to be much less effective than www.google.com/xhtml.  The latter website serves as a parser; that is, if you click on one of the Google search results, it doesn’t redirect you to that webpage.  Instead, it parses the webpage to make it suitable for your device.

Here’s Google’s explanation:

Google Mobile Search lets you search and view the Web on your mobile phone. Google takes HTML pages normally viewed on a computer and translates them so that you can see them when you’re on the go. During this translation process, Google analyzes the original HTML code using sophisticated algorithms. In order to ensure that the highest quality and most useful web page is displayed on your mobile phone or device, Google may alter images, text formatting and/or certain aspects of web page functionality.

It’s a little odd to me that these sites (that is, www.google.com/pda and www.google.com/xhtml) work differently.  They even work differently on a desktop browser.

Hmm… maybe I should use www.google.com/xhtml all the time to strip out the noise from the websites that I visit?

John Piper preached this sermon (entitled “Love One Another For Love Is Of God”) a couple of decades ago, though it provides perhaps the one of the best and simplest explanations of the apparent inconsistencies between God’s sovereignty and Man’s responsibility.

I’m probably quoting too much here, but here is a block of text from the transcript in which he develops a helpful illustration:

Consider an analogy: suppose that you were about to have a baby and God came to you and said, “This baby is a gift of mine and I promise that she will live to be 100 years old.”

So when the baby is born you take her home from the hospital, but you don’t feed her. Your husband says, “Why aren’t you feeding the baby?” And you say, “Because God promised me that the baby would live to be 100 years old. So if God is going to make sure that the baby will live 100 years, I don’t need to feed it.”

Well, this husband is perceptive and says, “How do you know that God didn’t mean that he would see to it that the baby gets taken care of till she is 100 years old? How do you know that God won’t let an irresponsible mother drop dead so that he can fulfill his promise through a mother who will feed this little girl?” No answer.

Now let’s apply the analogy. God comes to us in the Bible and says to us that knowing God always results in being a loving person (4:8). He promises in effect: I will see to it that those who know me, those who are born again, will be loving people. So somebody (in their merely human wisdom) suggests, “Well, we don’t need to feed these children anything to help them love. We don’t need to give them the commands and warnings and promises from the bread of God’s word, because God promised to make them loving.”

To which we should answer, “How do you know that God didn’t mean that he would see to it that all the necessary, love-producing food would be supplied to his children? How do you know that God didn’t mean that if I won’t feed them with what they need to be loving, then he will remove me and put someone in my place who will give them what they need? Why do you assume that God’s promise is meant to be fulfilled in the most unnatural way possible?

So the most natural Biblical answer to the question, Why command a person to love who can’t help but love? is that God intends to fulfill his promise through the use of commands. God has ordained to keep us alive in love by the regular feeding of his word. And the word of God contains warnings, promises, and commands. The commands are part of the food that the Spirit has provided for the nourishment of the saints, so that our love will thrive.

The Spirit of God fulfills the promise of God by use of the Word of God. And if I try to short-circuit the way God works, he will simply remove me if necessary for the sake of his children. He will fulfill his promise. And he will use his commands and warnings and promises to do it. So it is not inconsistent for John to teach in verse 8 that all who know God will definitely be loving people AND to command them in verse 7 to be loving people.

Text and audio are available here, or search http://www.desiringgodradio.com if the link breaks.

While it would have been difficult to over-hype the web back in the early nineties, it’s certainly possible to do so today.  Distributing the Future from O’Reilly Media had a nice podcast today that included a good satire of some of the hype that exists today.

I value Wikipedia.  I stopped short of saying that I love it, just as I believe its founder would do.  It has major critics, though it’s my experience that the widely viewed topics are the best starting point for anyone looking for an overview of a particular topic.  Another strong benefit is that its entries typically have a significant number of footnotes.

Wikipedia recently made the news as they are still unwilling to satisfy the Chinese government requirements for censorhip.  Here are some quotes from that linked article:

Wikipedia, a hugely popular reference tool in the West, has been banned from China since last October. Whereas Google, Microsoft and Yahoo went into the country accepting some restrictions on their online content, Wales believes it must be all or nothing for Wikipedia.

…’We’re really unclear why we would be [banned],’ Wales told The Observer. ‘We have internal rules about neutrality and deleting personal attacks and things like this. We’re far from being a haven for dissidents or a protest site. So our view is that the block is in error and should be removed, but we shall see.’

Wikipedia’s shines in that it tends to handle conflict very effectively.  Certainly it is a difficult thing to write an article on a controversial topic that both sides of the aisle would consider to be objective, but Wikipedia has remarkable success in these situations (in my opinion).  One personal research case that I did recently was on global warming.  The article does an effective job of presenting all sides of the argument.  These written words provide a more disciplined and objective presentation than the recent documentaries from Al Gore and Tom Brokaw.  In addition to Wikipedia’s presentation of relatively extensive data that supports the idea that human activity has more than a negligible impact on the warming of the earth, there is good discussion of the ideas and people than disagree with this premise.

In writing this article, I looked up one more article to see how Wikipedia would handle it: the idea that the earth is flat.  While most people believe that the earth is a sphere, the fact that most people believe something doesn’t make it true.  Instead, the fact that it is true makes it true.  I consider it to be a fact that the earth is a sphere, though I (and most people) have little direct evidence of it.  But if someone doesn’t believe that the earth is a sphere, my exasperated response “But Science proves it!” probably doesn’t really help matters.  Instead, I should understand where that person is coming from, and then deal with his objections in a rational matter.

12/07/07 Update: Wikipedia under severe scrutiny.

I wept bitterly that day five years ago.  Now, my passions are not very strong when thinking about 9/11.  Perhaps my most prevalent emotion is one of hope that we don’t give in to self-destroying hate.  Surely it is a good thing that we have reacted to the attack, but I hope that our motivation has been justice and not revenge.

The News Hour produced a number of segments looking at others’ responses to 9/11.  Here are two links to the different segments:

Four Reflections

Group Impact Discussion

After some heated debate surrounding perceived manipulation of Digg content, there is news today that Digg will change the algorithm to reduce the weight of groups of diggers digging each others’ stories.

It is both a complex and a simple decision to figure out what content management system to use for getting your webpage up and running.  Based on my experience and research over the past few weeks, I’d definitely push most people to something like Wordpress.  Wordpress will enable you to get your site going with very little effort.  It’s got a quick install, and it’s very easy to use.

Though I haven’t used it very much, Drupal is one of the most highly touted content management systems for advanced users.  If you do this stuff for a living, I would think that you must understand how to use Drupal and what its strengths and weaknesses are.

Finally, I got a number of strong recommendations for WebGUI, though its platform requirements removes it as a possibility for the most popular (i.e. cheapest) hosting packages.