Cynical Monkey

Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction classic.  For me it is an example of the rich introspective social consciousness that is exemplary of the best science fiction.  Fahrenheit 451 is such great science fiction that most people don’t even realize that it is science fiction.

The first time I read this novel was in high school, back then I was not able to fully appreciate the message.  I read Fahrenheit 451 again, last month, right after reading some Camus (Resistance Rebellion and Death) and I was struck by the similarities between the two authors.  Both Bradbury and Camus seem very afraid of the social consequences of mass politics and mob-ocracy.  Camus saw his fears articulated in the spread of communism as a humanitarian solution.  Bradbury was alarmed by the spread of an offend-nobody-mentality, and it’s ability to destroy critical thinking and intellectual inquiry.  Both authors saw culture, society, and freedoms being boiled down to lowest common denominators in an effort to protect everybody from the possibility of being marginalized.  Both saw this slow march toward totalitarianism beginning as a popular sentiment to protect the weak.  This sentiment is institutionalized either slowly through humanist mass politics that sacrifice freedom for equality or explosively through popular revolution.

Maybe I’m a bit too optimistic, but I don’t think we will be burning books any time in the near future.  But, even if we are not burning books, censorship is a real issue.  In Guy Montag’s world they didn’t start by burning books they began by shunning controversy and socially persecuting intellectualism.  They began by only seeking ideas that supported their existing popular beliefs.  They confused happiness with freedom, and then confused security with happiness; slowly they gave up freedom and, thinking that they were happier, didn’t realize what was lost.  Dangerous and controversial ideas threatened people perception of security and those ideas became a public threat.  The censorship in Fahrenheit 451 was born out this popular humanistic desire to protect society.

Protecting people from dangerous ideas, that’s the more dangerous idea of all.

I have been reading my way through the Hugo award winning novels for the past 3 years. Cyteen was a novel I was always apprehensive about reading because of its length. After reading Downbelow Station and encountering Cherryh’s writing style I became even more concerned. Cyteen was everything I feared but it was also something more than I expected.

Cherryh’s writing style makes me angry, there is something about the way she mutilates a sentence that makes no sense to me. I don’t understand how a decent editor could overlook the low quality of this writing. Two quick examples, “You or I don’t have to have done anything.”, “They’re not a hell of a lot careful.” Although these sentences are not completely devoid of meaning they both really break my flow when I’m reading. To compound the prose problem, the novel was long and drawn out with many undeveloped and unnecessary side plots and confusing details that didn’t seem to contribute to the story.

Cyteen’s story was a very slow starter for me. I was more than 300 pages into reading it before I felt consistently motivated to pick the book up, but after that I was seldom without the novel. I thought that although the book made a decent political thriller it fell a bit short in the science fiction category. I don’t understand why tt took a setting at a distant star system 300 years in the future to conceive of a political thriller based around cloning. Why go so far when all you need is Earth 10 years from now, and then you would have a story with much more urgent and relevant underpinnings.

In the end I was quite captivated by the story, the way it build slowly and never slows until it all resolves in the final few paragraphs was truly enjoyable story telling. Adding up all of it flaws and flourishes I give it a decent 3/5.

Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge was my first enjoyable space-opera this year. Fire Upon the Deep first made it on my reading list by way of it’s Hugo status. I have a goal of reading all the Hugo award novels. Among the Hugos winners I have read it stood out near the top of the space-opera sub-genre. I found the story really drew me in and it never felt tedious.

“Zones of thought” was a very novel concept. The idea of separate cosmic layers with different physical properties is at once both fantastic, and oddly plausible. I really like the way “zones of thought” acts as a plot device for exploring omnipotence in a finite universe, and the idea of entities operating at a level of complexity that is physically beyond our level of understanding. It’s kind of like Pointland, Flatland, Spaceland (Flatland 1884) are all adjacent and one simply has to travel a bit to observe radical changes in the physicality of the universe.

I also like the Tines alien race. It was the first instance of a collaborative intelligence that I can remember encountering in my reading. I would expect a Professor of computer science to envisage a sentient intelligence that operated in such a decentralized way.  I really see potential to develop this concept more in future novels set in the universe.

Overall this book was a 4.5/5. A very enjoyable read that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys good space-opera type science fiction. I’m really looking forward to reading more of Vinge’s work.

I have been considering creating a blog for a while. Actually this is my third attempt (some of my old posts are below), but I would like to think that it is my first serious attempt.

So why am I writing to you my hypothetical reader? I’m certain that I don’t have too many interesting things to say. I know that making this admission may sound a bit defeatist. My main goal is not to impress but to experiment with the blogging medium and to practice writing with an audience in mind. You might call it exercise for my writing skills.

I will try to write regularly about topics that interest me. I’m hoping that I will be able to post at least once a week. Currently my interests include software development, running, science fiction, and food. I’m sure I will concentrate on many other topics as well.

If you do take the time to read my blog, thank you and don’t hesitate to comment or get in touch.

Person- Law. A human or organization with legal rights and duties.

How did a Corporation become a person (Corporate_personhood). I know I am a person. My brother is a person too. All the “People” I know are persons. How could the law be so twisted and wisdom of the judicial system so lacking. What delusional… idiots could take interpretation of the law so far as to arrive at this conclusion.

“Well technically…”, I don’t care about legal scholarship. The laws of the US were based on ideals and principals. Those ideals and principals are the primary formalization. In my mind, the established laws are simply a secondary formalization that’s a bit easier to apply consistently. When the secondary system differs radically from the primary, the secondary system should be corrected. I don’t care about legal positivism and other excuses that law professionals throw out to justify the historical acts of their profession. If it doesn’t make sense throw it out.

I just got back from the 2004 OOPSLA conference in Vancouver. This was my first OOPSLA ever so I am approaching this without the perspective of a longtime OOPSLA veteran. Overall it was a great experience the really got the head-gears turning.

From the keynote “The Future of Programming,” Richard Rashid makes it clear that the future of programming is M$ visual studio 2005. Rashid shamelessly made an OOPSLA exclusive product announcement midway through his keynote and invited an assistant to give a protracted demonstration of the new and improved modeling tool in the latest version of Visual Studio. Many people walked out of the room.

Notes on Notes on Postmodern Programming with James Noble, Robert Biddle was an interesting commentary on the state of modern software development practices. Their point being that all of our “failures” in software development are really a symptom of our modern view of development and maybe we should just take a different view of the current state of things and approach the practice of our craft with more love and creativity, instead of building the same systems over and over again on grander and grander scales.

Alan Kay’s Turing lecture was a refreshing and wonderful talk that challenges the frontiers of imaginable Human computer interaction. His point being that we are simply creating marginal improvements on the great ideas of thirty year ago. His inspired outlook and challenge to transcend modern human computer interaction gives me hope for the future of the profession, and the great advancements still waiting to be made.

Steve McConnell’s talk was great but very economically oriented. One might call him the “Too Pragmatic Programmer,” but his message was very clear and very true. We should really make an effort to follow our current practices and methodologies with exactness and discipline before we throw them away chasing the next big thing.

There were also many other great talks and presentations but I will leave my discussion at the big talks that really made an impression on my current views.

Memetics is the subject of a book that I am reading. The basic idea is that like genes there are ideas or thoughts that are replicated and selected for fitness. These memes spread by human imitation and communication. Memes are selected for their ability to capture our attention in the face of other competing memes, and for their ability to induce in us the need to spread these ideas. A meme is that catchy tune that you can’t stop humming and everybody around you humming it now too. The hard part about accepting this is the fact that we don’t control these memes, in fact the good memes control us. You didn’t mean to hum that tune in a meeting and get it stuck in everybody else’s head. It robs you of a little bit of your free will.

So I was sitting in the dentists office today and that hygienist says don’t worry this won’t hurt. I thought to myself of course it won’t, you don’t need to tell me that. When has it ever really been painful to get your teeth cleaned, but then it happened I got scared and winced as she started. Of course it didn’t really hurt. The painful dentist meme was taking control, in the face of a professional reassurance, my collective experience, and my rationalization I still winced. That’s pretty powerful for just an idea. It makes you wonder what’s really running the show up in your head.

My intuition would tell me that String.equalsIgnoreCase() would be a more expensive operation than String.equals(). If you think about it you have a lot more combinations that you have to test. This is where reality diverges from intuition.

The first things that both String.equalsIgnoreCase() and String.equals() check is length, and I’m willing to bet that most strings aren’t the same length, so you’re done. The reality is that String.equalsIgnoreCase() may be faster in a lot of instances because its parameter is a String so it doesn’t need to check instance and cast before the length comparison like String.equals() who’s parameter is Object.

So don’t handicap your string comparison just because you’re worried about performance. With String.equalsIgnoreCase() you can be fast and flexible.

I think that somebody should invent car tires that were hooked to your turn signal switch so that if you change lanes without your signal your tires would explode. Sure there would be a few accidents at first but people would learn fast.

While reading an inner classes article I discovered some Java syntax totally new to me..
Say you write a public inner class like so.

public class Foo {
  public class Bar {}
}

If I wanted to create a new instance of Bar I would have to do it like so..

Foo foo = new Foo( );
Foo.Bar bar = foo.new Bar();

The foo.new is something that I have never seen before but it is refreshing to see something new like this in a language that you know so well. I suppose it fits with my understanding of the language since all constructors are compiled into static <init>() methods, and Bar’s constructor is in Foo’s namespace. After all new Bar() is just syntactic sugar for the static Bar.<init>() method in compiled code.