Older blog entries for cmiller (starting at number 55)

Who will be our Richard Feynman this time?

I too have used H2G2 -- years before it was aquired by the BBC. I wrote the Sweet Tea and Gnat Line entries in fact. Back then (and perhaps even now), the writing process was unidirectional: An average joe would write an entry and submit it as a potential official entry. Then, a person in the role of editor would come along, make vast sweeping changes, and publish it, without letting the author give input or corrections about the editor's changes. My Sweet Tea entry only has a few "unauthorized" changes, but the Gnat Line entry is only vaguely similar to what I wrote ages ago. Gnats are "a kind of blood-sucking fly"? Ha!

I don't think of it as very Wiki-ish. It's too edited. Too immutable. Too much like a moderated bulletin-board without the good organization. The web's progress has made H2G2 obselete; H2G2 could never be as good as a WikiPedia.

Wisdom from the 'Wiki' entry at Everything2: ``Allowing and encouraging an intranet Wiki is a sign of a good company to work for.'' It makes sense that the openness of a wiki must be anathema to companies that are unhealthy and failing. If management smiles upon free exchange of ideas, then they're probably pretty proud of they way they handle the business.

Do you have a wiki at your company? Why not?

Ah, it's been a while!

I haven't been silent, just talking to myself. I have a machine I'm intending to put on the 'net, and I've been recording my thoughts there. It's not accessable from the 'net, so the log is more of a "diary" than a "blog", I guess. Nothing wrong with that! I'm not that interesting anyway.

I am really impressed with Zope and its "TAL" method of creating pages. I was a bit unimpressed with TAL's predecessor, "DTML". It seemed really PHP-like, which made my skin crawl.

In any case, with Zope, I'm used the ZWiki product to replace my MoinMoin instance, mostly because starting up a python interpreter on a Sparcstation 10 for every request (MoinMoin currently doesn't run under apache's mod_python, unfortunately) was worse than painful. It would have been slightly faster to have a Pentium2-400 on the moon and wait for the round-trip. Using Zope and ZServer makes it reasonably fast, so the $5 I paid for the Sparcstation isn't a waste after all.

After "mastering" ZWiki, I implemented a MoinMoin Markup mode, to save me the time of converting all my pages to "Structured Text". After that, I realized that with a little bit of code, I could make a Blog out of such a wiki, so after writing just a smidgen of code, really simple things work really well. Zope is pretty neat.

The amount of time I have to fool around should give you a hint as to my job situation. I hope to be doing something productive soon. Nothing for a while and suddenly a few nibbles at once. Wierd.

I envy MichaelCrawford and his ability to strike out on his own and do cool stuff. I'm too afraid of failure, I think, to take such chances.

Though, here's a parallel of Michael's 11 Jan 2003 entry that I inserted into my own diary on the 4th:

Today's I love you (but you're a bit nuts) moment came when Mary Ellen and I are cooking in the kitchen and snacking. I told ME that containers of pistacio nuts have a built-in learning curve. "See," I explained, "the nuts arrange themselves according to their density because they're all about the same size, so that the ones with looser shells -- that is, most air between the shell and the nut -- are at the top, and the really hard ones to open are at the bottom. A well-shaken jar should teach anyone how to eat pistacios."

There's an awkward silence while ME thinks of some way to respond. Nothing pertinent yet couth seemed to come to mind, so she smiled dimly and "I love you. Here, taste this soup."

I love my country's principles, but my country has done evil things.

History Lessons

170 years ago, as new settlers into the United States claimed more and more land, the presence of Natives already dwelling on land the settlers wanted was inconvenient, to say the least, to the white settlers. In 1830, the United States' Congress passed the Indian Removal Act (which proposed exactly what the title sounds like), and President Andrew Jackson promptly signed it into law.

The Cherokee of northern Georgia, the principal target of the legislation, a group 17,000 members strong, were not a group of savages. Years before, they saw the value of many European ideas and adopted a representational government and designed and used a new writing system, all within a few years.

The Cherokee petitioned the courts, and in 1832, won a case in the U. S. Supreme Court, acknowledging the Cherokee as a soverign nation, rendering invalid the laws that would force Indian's removal. President Jackson, referring to Chief Justice Marshall, said "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it, if he can!"

The executive branch eventually tricked a small group of Cherokee into an illegal treaty that signed away their lands, and the Cherokee were driven at bayonet-point from Georgia to wastelands in Missouri and Arkansas. 8,000 died in transit, and the survivers fared poorly. Now, the Cherokee are virtually nonexistent.

commentary

A moral government would have respected the property claims of the inhabitants, and offered citizenship, and representation and participation in government. A moral government would have respected the Cherokee Nation's "right to exist."

The Cherokee were totally peaceful, and were wiped out.

bgeiger: Oh yes. Funny -- a friend of mine pointed out at the time of The Name Change, that "Volaris" sounds awfully close a Latin word for "fleeting", "ephemeral", or "volatile". You're out of an ISP; I'm out of a job. I'm sorta glad. Sic transit malia mundi.

Ah, I set up a Wiki Wiki (the 'MoinMoin' Python implementation) to play around on, until I get enough there to make public.

The New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" section has an uproariously funny article, called The Duel. I conjure thee to Read'st it soonly.

11 Oct 2002 (updated 11 Oct 2002 at 22:20 UTC) »

I'm sure there's a word for it: What is it called when a company lays-off all its employees, and sells off all its assets in order to pay back VCs, so that it can then claim bankruptcy to get out of many many long-term contracts? I'm sure there's a word for that.

On a completely unrelated matter, I'm looking for new employment after joining my current employer exactly four months ago. This should be fun. Maybe I'll abandon this high-tech industry and help Chris make and sell mail-order smoked meat.

tk wrote in response to my "Our sloppy and slipshod treatment of Science has [...] caused other countries' students to outstrip our own in technical competence.": Hey, that was bogus! [...] Then again, playing on fear sometimes does work..

A scary postulate isn't automatically an appeal to emotion, but yes, I was trying to pit patriotism against the Board's actions. If they could think clearly enough to sniff that out, they wouldn't be in the mess they're in.

Advocacy

Yes, but not Free Software advocacy. It's much more important than that.

The Cobb County Board of Education decided to insert an "Evolution is not a fact" disclaimer in their biology textbooks. Here is the letter I wrote them this morning.

From: Chad Miller <cmiller@surfsouth.com>
To: Chairman <JCL19762@cobbk12.org>, "Mr. Tippins" <lindseyatippins@cobbk12.org>, Vice-Chairman <OGF16519@cobbk12.org>, "Ms. Gray" <GB111730@cobbk12.org>, "Ms. Searcy" <laurafsearcy@cobbk12.org>, "Mr. Johnson" <JJM17920@cobbk12.org>, "Dr. Plenge" <teresafplenge@cobbk12.org>
Subject: theories and prevarication
Date: 26 Aug 2002 09:42:55 -0400
Mime-Version: 1.0

Mr. Chairman and Board,

Science is a diffcult subject to teach. In the same way many students have troubles with Algebra, the realm of Science has a layer of abstraction from the immediate physical world that a lot of students don't understand. Many people see "weird" phenomena (static electricity, dazzling chemistry, et c.) demonstrated and called "Science," and that causes them to associate "Science" with the "magical" events that they don't understand. Unfortunately, many never discover that events are understandable, and that the scientific world isn't composed of arbitrary ideas created by Man.

I understand that you, the board, have many constituents that want you to set the science cirriculum to disavow the truth of evolution. It is unfortunate that teaching of the knowledge we have accumulated isn't immune from the politics of Man -- but of course as a school board you know that.

Your constituents entreating you to set the Science cirriculum are the students that never understood Science. They are the ones who misunderstood the process of Science and think that Science's seemingly arbitrary ideas are replacable with ideas they've decided are correct.

When paleontologists, biologists, and other practioners of the "Hard" Sciences use the word "theory", they are NOT making a statement about their level of conviction about the truth of the matter. A theory is not a supposition, guess, conjecture, or result of rolling dice. Many laymen use the term "theory" incorrectly, and when they hear of the Theory of Evolution, they decide it is just as valid as their own kooky "theories" of black helicopters, fluoridation of water, the designated hitter rule, or the origin of Tang. "One theory is as good as another, right?"

Remember your middle-school math that taught you that in a right- triangle, the square of the length of the longest side (hypotenuse) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides? That principle is called the Pythagorean _Theorem._ Would the Board consider altering Math texts if a vocal group of constituents offered a conflicting "theory" based on faith to rival Pythogoras's triangle theory? I suppose not, but why would the same board treat another threory with prevarication?

Our sloppy and slipshod treatment of Science has adversely affected our understanding of the world and caused other countries' students to outstrip our own in technical competence. Further diluting and obsfuscating the nature of Science is exactly the wrong way to behave.

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