Justin Love

When you meet someone who does martial arts, it’s easy to ask what rank the person has. I won’t be so daring as to say the information is useless, but it certainly treats the issue in it’s broadest sense.

For the uninitiated, most martial arts rank their students by a two part system, most visibly represented by the belt a person wears. A ‘black belt’ is someone who has a good grasp of a system. Below black, there are a series of kyus or gups (they name varies by martial art) which are graded in the number of ranks until black belt. Often these are the ‘colored belts’. Our systems have ten ranks, where any beginner is 10th gup/kyu and his first test is to receive 9th. Our styles once again have ten ranks, or dans, of black belt. Ranks above black belt take linearly longer to achieve, and there might (might) be one 10th dan, the founder. (It doesn’t quite form a number line, since there is no ‘zero’.) Other systems have different numbers above and below. Don’t get me started on martial arts titles.

The assignment of rank varies by style and school. In other words, two people might look at the same student and label that skill level with two different ranks. And don’t even get me started on the colored belt system – our own school uses two different color systems and has changed one of them in my memory. I tend to try and refer to ranks by gups or kyus, because it at least transcends arts and color assignments. Assuming, of course arts that have the same number of grades, which I’m doubt all do. Beyond that, the assignment of a grade to a particular skill level is essentially arbitrary. I won’t even get into the rumors of people buying belts and certificates outright, with no skill basis.

Of course the real problem is the idea that you can quantify a person with a single number. At times I’ve toyed with a system of basing the single number on a series of subgrades – kicking, joint locking, teaching, spirit, and on and on. It was an attempt to come to grips with the fact that different people might have a particular rank for different reasons, and somehow rationalize using the same scale for both. Of course, it just postpones the problem to different level – you are still trying to squeeze a person into a limited set of limited-precision numbers.

“I’m not capable of imagining you in all your complexity and… perfection.” – Inception

Faced with a messy reality, we get the ranking system. Many martial arts derive from rigid oriental societies – people have to line up in a certain order. Teachers have to keep track of an ever changing body of students. Assigning a rank is ‘good enough’, a convenient kludge to contain the complexity of real people. There are nominal rules, but in reality they bend to try and bring the raking system in line with what we intuitively feel – one person has a high rank because he has an affinity for physical activity and executes technique well, while another is a loyal supporter and servant of the school that keep thing running smoothly. The cost is this: given only the rank, you can’t say if either of those (or both, or any other quality) applies.

This was my “icebreaker” speech at Fox Valley Toastmasters. Since I don’t have the same time constraints, I’ve put back in a few asides that got cut out of early drafts.

Hello, I am Justin Love. This talk will be about me, and about a book called Now, Discover Your Strengths. The premise of the book is that for maximum success and happiness, we should focus on our strengths rather than trying to remediate our weaknesses. It includes a code for an online survey, that will attempt give you your five biggest strengths that one should focus on. For me, those five strengths were Input, Restorative, Intellection, Ideation, and Analytical.

Input is learning. I am always learning – I don’t read as many books as I might like to, but I have audiobooks, podcasts, internet news feeds, and I am constantly learning new programming languages and technologies. So, it might not be too surprising that when I started to think “You know, I really ought to get out of the house and get a little exercise”, I signed up for a martial arts class. Martial arts is something I’ve always been curious about, and it gives me the opportunity to be constantly learning new forms and techniques. Input is always learning.

Restorative is fixing and improving things. When I see something that was working and now isn’t, I get a little bothered. When I see something and think “I know how to make it better”, there is a note of dissonance in the world. Which might explain how I ended up on my condominium board. You see, the board is supposed to have five members. If it has less than five members, it could be considered a little bit broken. I’ve found, and I believe, that there often is no point in whining about something, when you can just do it yourself. Never mind that I wasn’t even in the state when I was first put on the board, but that is a story in and of itself. Restorative is fixing and improving things.

Intellection is thinking about things. Sitting and noodeling on them – what are the implications? the contingencies? Where doe it lead, and what does it all mean? So, it might not be too surprising that one of my favorite childhood toys were Lego bricks, which can be constantly combined and recombined, trying out theories of form or function, and just taking it apart if things didn’t work out. Unfortunately, sitting and thinking does tend towards sitting alone, so I have to force myself to get out now and then with things like Toastmasters, martial arts, conferences and user groups. Intellection is thinking about things.

Ideation means thinking about big ideas – or small clear concepts that take a bunch of messy stuff and distill it down to something you can easily grasp. It is looking for the best explanation for the most events. This might explain my attraction to things like Now, Discover Your Strengths, which distills a bunch of messy human aptitude down to a couple dozen strengths. Ideation is big ideas and powerful concepts.

Analytical literally means dividing into parts. Looking for the joints of nature where one take two things and set them apart, mostly disregarding their interactions. This is something I use a lot in software. You are probably familiar with software – either it’s not doing something you want, or it is doing something you don’t want, and I’m the kind of person who gets called in to make it behave. Often times I find that I am actually more comfortable dealing with software and computers because you can analyze it – form a theory about what should happen, see what did happen and use that to narrow the cause down and down and down, until you get to a bit – true or false, yes or no – facts and data. People and politics are not always so accommodating. Analytical is dividing things down to facts and data.

Everybody has their particular strengths. The things that they do well and enjoy doing. For me some of those things are constantly learning so that I can fix and improve things, really thinking about big ideas and powerful concepts in order to break things down to real facts and data.

I feel like there is more I should think about, but it hasn’t gone anywhere for the last week, and I’m quite preoccupied at present. I don’t want to wait a few years this time ;^)

Blair Reynold’s response

Yes, I did send it to you in response to your online material. Great to hear back from you. It has been a while. I always enjoy getting a blast from the past, which sometimes does happen in my e-mails. And I’m glad you found my material interesting. You seemed to do a pretty good job of picking up in the main points.

I am a process theologian, and process theology is a very technical branch of theology. I’ve been going online, trying to make it as easy as I can for laity. If you have any questions, please let me know.

You raised a point about emotion. As you are probably aware, in the West, we generally take a dim view of emotion, seeing it as something wholly subjective, just floating around in our own heads, irrational, etc. I take a more favorable view. I view emotion as our most basic experience. At rock bottom, all experience is basically unconscious affective flux. It’s emotion that bridges the gap between the “out there” and the “in here.” Our experience of connectedness with the rest of reality, our experience of causality, is primarily an affective one. We do not see the puff of air make the eye blink, but we do feel it do so. So, if principles are to have any real meaning, they must be rooted in some more primal, affective level of experience.

I think that principles have meaning because they point to a consistency in the universe. Everything is a synthesis of both consistency and change. That means principles can reflect reality, but, of course, only in very abstract way. If you describe me as a lifelong train buff, which I am, you have pointed to something unchanging or absolute about me. However, that isn’t the whole story. You need to say more, to fully describe me. Now that I and can operate a steam locomotive, I’m not the same trainbuff I was 20 years ago. See what I mean?

It is true that I did not introduce any “proofs” for the existence of God, and was largely pointing to a God who would fulfill our quest for meaningfulness. However, in a way, that is a proof. We all seek and need meaning, and from what I see in reality, the system that generates the need generally satisfies it, so there must be a God. And this brings me to the knowability of God. A totally unknowable God would not be fulfilling, hardly beautiful. At the same time, a totally knowable God would be boring, too much like us to be interesting. If we are going to have a beautiful relationship with God, and I don’t see the point of having a God if we cannot do that, then God must be alike and yet different from us, knowable and also unknowable, mysterious.

Getting back to the issue of whether God is beyond all perception: I believe God is a concrete item in all experience. By virtue of the mutual sensitivity of all things, every entity is present, incarnate in every other, and this also includes God. Hence, God is a concrete item in any and all experience. We subconsciously experience a very direct, immediate flow of God’s feelings into ourselves. It is precisely because of this experience, that people came up with the notion of God. All our concepts, however imaginative they may be, always go back to some actual encounter with reality.
You are correct. I am viewing God as a personal being, a single, individual personality which is a synthesis of al personalities in the universe. To me, anything less than that, viewing God as, say, just as impersonal principle, depersonalizes and dehumanizes us.

My immediate response
> I am a process theologian, and process theology is a very technical branch

That’s interesting. A friend of mine who attended seminary said my viewpoint would be classified as process theology and pantheist. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given there was some degree of agreement between us.

>laity. If you have any questions, please let me know.

The main point I gathered from the wikipedia article was that god was not completely omnipotent, but did exert a continuous action (process) on the world toward a better state.

> You raised a point about emotion. As you are probably aware, in the West, we generally take a dim view of emotion, seeing it as something wholly

One of my reservations in responding was a certainty that I’d get caught out on one or more points, and I was right. I dismissed emotion on stereotype, without any further reflection on what it was and how that might apply.

> that bridges the gap between the “out there” and the “in here.” Our experience

If I follow you, emotion is the first level of mental processing, one step beyond raw sensory perception. Would you then hold that god has some immediate reaction to the changing state of the world, which would be his changing affective states?

>but we do feel it do so. So, if principles are to have any real meaning, they must be rooted in some more primal, affective level of experience.

A principle, in so far as we understand it, is a human invention which arises from human experience. Sort of what happens when the higher mental processes get ahold of things and try to make sense of them. If emotion is the shape of experience, this makes sense.

> I think that principles have meaning because they point to a consistency in

Meaning that while emotions may have an uncertainty about them, repeatability over time and space points to something ‘real’?

> the universe. Everything is a synthesis of both consistency and change.

So there is a sort of momentum or gravity that pulls on some changing position or state, which is also moved by other forces.

> meaningfulness. However, in a way, that is a proof. We all seek and need

Is this at all close to your philosophy?: “Humanity, through experience, comes to recognize certain principles of the world: gravity, solid/liquid/gas, life, etc. We generally consider these things to be ‘real’ because they accord with our experience. Humanity also tends to create god(s), and by the same reasoning, this points to something ‘real’”

> God must be alike and yet different from us, knowable and also unknowable, mysterious.

This seems to be an argument for why we describe god the way we do. It only takes on the force of reality in combination with the previous argument, that what we create must be a glimpse of deeper reality.

> God’s feelings into ourselves. It is precisely because of this experience,

Would you consider god the source of the subjectivity that humanity perceives in emotions?

> You are correct. I am viewing God as a personal being, a single, individual personality which is a synthesis of al personalities in the universe. To me, anything less than that, viewing God as, say, just as impersonal principle, depersonalizes and dehumanizes us.

Would it be at all accurate to say “If god is the sum of the whole universe, he cannot be less than any of the component parts. Therefore, if we are personal beings, god is (at least) a personal being.”?

I’m just a little conflicted about money. Perhaps a sheltered life has left me without clear guidance. I’ve always had ‘enough’, and often more. Less since I started working four days a week; still enough that I can set aside some savings, but little enough that the eventual demise of my car threatens that savings. Meanwhile, other people, many of them surely more dedicated and hard working then myself, starve or struggle to get to a place of equal safety and comfort.

There was a particular incident that triggered this latest reflection. Recently one of my fellows in the martial arts school asked what I would charge to upgrade her reality shows web site, and I wasn’t comfortable naming a price.

Some of it I’m sure stems from a weak self confidence. I’ve heard a number of high consulting rates thrown around. At work we price engineering projects based on $75 per hour, although we don’t then track hours. That’s pretty low compared to others I’ve heard. Even on the condo board, we can’t get much of anything done for less than $40-50 per hour.

All rather more than minimum wage. Is the difference skilled versus unskilled labor? The woman who cuts my hair charges rather less than $50. She told me a while ago about the tough parts of beauty school – cataloging individual muscles, sufficient grounding in chemistry to avoid nasty or even dangerous combinations of chemicals, and enough knowledge of ethnic backgrounds to predict how hair and so on is likely to respond to various treatments. Perhaps the price is set by the typically brief male haircut and widespread competition.

The different cases don’t offer much guidance. Even skilled gets called into question – while I have a long history taming troublesome pieces of software, I had no experience with the Xoops package in question. At an hourly rate, figuring out the thing would undoubtedly be a expensive process, but I don’t feel comfortable changing people for my own incompetence.

In the end I picked a rate closer to the landscapers, but capped the bill at four hours, which seemed more than adequate for someone who knew what they were doing. I spent rather quite a bit more than that setting up a test environment and getting a handle on things. I actually came to the conclusion that the originally requested version upgrade was completely orthogonal to the features she was hoping to achieve with it. We set up only those changes, and now it’s back to ambiguity: if she chooses to upgrade for future proofing, technically I haven’t finished was I was asked to do, but I have spent considerably more time than originally allotted. I also found out during the course of the work that my bill was considerably more than the trickle of ad income the site generates.

Of course it’s complicated further by knowing the person. I’ve passed over requests for web site help from less familiar people before. When it comes to a closer associate, there is question hanging out there of whether it should even be a favor. A lot of things in the world run by volunteer effort alone, and a world without community driven organizations might very well be worse off. One of the reasons that I often feel rushed is because I’m involved in a couple of volunteer organizations.

Condo board members may not be paid by law. Yet someone has to watch over the common interests of the association, and volunteers are perhaps predictably scarce. If it’s not me, then it might be no one, leaving things undone.

Then there is martial arts, where I spend one or two nights a week in unpaid instruction. The martial arts is immersed in a tradition of mutual obligations – as you were taught, so teach. But it’s still out there when I start counting up where my time went. I’ve actually been pulling back lately. I cut out one class, and I’ve been going to the board game design group again, which intersects one night every other week.

I confront valuation again in software. My lifetime earnings from personal software projects is $5. Not a single solitary soul has seen fit to make use of the Disk Clock donate button. I’m considering marking the next version shareware, while still avoiding nagware.

Software is a nasty problem. A program has a duplication cost which rapidly approaches zero. Copying is free and easy, unless extra non-feature-related effort is spent to put artificial restrictions in place. Even then, what software does software can undo, and we have the DRM arms race – more and more effort being poured into making thing harder for the customer, instead of adding value for the customer.

The costs of software aren’t in duplication, they are development. The only way to match price with cost is pay for the developers time and attention. Yet the only thing most people will buy is a proven working program, which we only know how to sell through the old physical-item model. The only reason this works at all is the legal fiction of software licenses.

So I’m sitting in the frying pan of being paid for things I wouldn’t be doing left to my own devices, staring uncertainly out at the fire of scraping by through intentionally crippled software.

I had a thought experiment, which I’m not bold enough to put practice. For a period, such a year, neither give anything for free, or take anything without paying for it.

(Quite) a while back, I received a response of sorts to my personal interpretation of the word god I believe I actually fished this response out of the abandoned mail in my copy of windows eudora, which I found I could import into gmail. Back during my fit of writing ideas (2008-02), I pulled it out of the archives and put it in the queue. The actual writing of my response has been during the last week.

Looking over the message again, I realized it might be a published article rather than a personal response. Indeed this seems to be the case, as a search turns up several copies, such as this one.

I suppose I was reluctant to respond because the essay is thick with technical theological terms, implying a corpus of knowledge with which I have no familiarity. The copy I linked above includes a short biography, which indicates that Blair Reynolds does in fact have a doctorate in theology. I can still agree or disagree however, regardless of what the academics think of it.

On the whole, the essay has a number of interesting points, and seems to agree about as well with my philosophy as a it can in a theistic context (used only to mean “in contrast to atheistic” – I don’t know if it may carry other meanings as a technical term).

First part:

‘Unbiblical’ isn’t a very strong argument for me. Given translation, editing, and other effects of time, it’s hard to trust that the bible of today is the same as it was when first written. And even then, how it differs substantially from anything written today. Not useless of course – deep reflection on many works will produce insight, and the world’s holy books carry a long history of recommendation as sources of inspiration. But I’m not going to spend too much time splitting hairs on the description of a being beyond perception.

Perhaps I should step back a bit. My definition puts god as a quality of the universe instead of a being. If we take the bible as the distilled wisdom of the ages, and it’s description of god as describing the property of virtuous order, it might be more interesting. The statement “God is incarnate throughout the entire universe, which functions as his body.” fits reasonably with this view.

The questions raised become fertile ground for further reflection. The main issue here is whether god is changing or unchanging. Ask instead whether the principle of order is changing or unchanging, and it becomes as profound to me as perhaps the question about god is to a theist.

I think the thing that bothers me most about theistic position is _beingness_, especially the “changing affective states”. I don’t see emotion in a principle. Unless, perhaps, you view the order as a human invention (name for a collection of phenomenon) and the mood as a reflection of the collective mood of humanity.

Second part:

Argues that the attributes of god are reflected in his creation, which in turn reveals aspects of the creator (made in his own image?) The middle part of this section seems somewhat hesitant, talking on both sides of many issues and not really picking either.

Surrounding that ambiguity are the interesting ideas “Moment to moment, we are different persons” and “what is beautiful in one context or era may not be in another” This reminds me of the Quecha (Mayan) idea of pacha, or time-place. You can change your scenery by moving, or by waiting, but the one thing you can’t do is hang on to the same thing forever, it will never be quite the same twice. (Aside: it occurs to me that much of computing, and science in general, is composed of efforts to resist this effect.)

If we view the order as a human artifact, this is clearly true. As humanity changes, the definition of a well ordered and beautiful world changes. This raises an interesting question: if the definition of a thing is constantly changing, can we even usefully talk about whether a thing changes, if the name never refers to the same thing twice?

Going back to the first part about seeing the creator in the created, the circularity is dizzying. As a human concept, the idea of god or ultimate order reveals more about the definers than the defined. Yet we see this as a quality of the universe, exactly that which has given rise to ourselves, which itself seems to reveal the pattern.

Third part:

This is a mostly theistic argument. Perhaps I like it so much because it so beautifully attacks another theistic argument. If god is unchanging, life has no meaning, because nothing you can ever do can affect god, the one true and ultimate thing in the universe. The whole concept of free will can be likened to the old adage of a tree falling in the forest.

Of course the argument doesn’t actually prove anything about god – just which view we as humans in search of meaning find more comforting.

There is one qualifier, however. Even if we can’t ‘change’ a thing by talking about it, we can change how we define it (edit our own beliefs) which in turn affects how we interact with that thing. Maybe we can’t change god/reality, but our beliefs about these things can have a profound affect on our daily lives. For more mundane things (or if you believe that the essential is itself changeable) those interactions have ripple effects. Consider the Obama effect, a race performance gap that disappeared all but overnight after Obama won the party nomination.

And how does this affect my worldview? I can’t change the nature of the universe though logical discourse anymore than one can change god through logical discourse. But I do select particular facets of the universe and call them good or bad. If you specify these facets precisely enough, these principals can be considered constant. Whether those principals are ‘important’ or ‘good’ is not necessarily constant.

Once you’ve picked a set of principals, you can say the world express those principals to greater or lesser degrees, and this degree is subject to our influence. The world is also filled with other conscious beings like ourselves who experience joy or suffering in proportion to this agreement.

Perhaps a more biting reflection is that a world with an unchanging god is essentially undistinguishable from a world without god. For me the conclusion is the same in both cases: with no ultimate judge, what matters is the well-being of ourselves and our fellow travelers.

Fourth part:

Treats directly the concept of whether god is a part of the world, or apart from the world. Another thing I’ve never liked about theism – something apart from the world is beyond perception, and beyond knowing. Such an untestable concept is just the kind which would be used by a charlatan seeking to control a mass of people. Since I can’t trust that this isn’t the case, I can’t accept any idea of god that places him beyond question (or rather, beyond answer)

While the offered argument seems reasonable, it doesn’t do any more to assuage my fears – even with god part of the world, he is still beyond knowing.

Fifth part:

The monopolar prejudice, or ascribing one aspect to god and the opposite aspect to the the rest of the world. I agree that if there is any ultimate nature to the world, it must contain all aspects of that world.

The essay project seems to be somewhat of a failure. This one has been over a year in the making: 2008-02-22, 2008-10-26, 2009-03-10.

Creating your own clock changes your relationship with time a little bit. The process of creating it changes things in yet more ways.

Once upon a time, I declared the The timeless world. That held for a while, in a sort of partially effective way that didn’t change too much since the first report. Then I invented my own clock. Suddenly it wasn’t dead numbers or confusing interpolation. Reading time was almost fun.

Of course part of being different enough to be fun is being, well, different. I very often don’t know what ‘time’ it is. I know it’s a little past dawn, almost lunch, or a couple hours to bed time. The things I actually use time for, without having to translate it to numbers in between. Occasionally I need to work with the outside world, at which point I do have to go through all that bothersome conversion; usually I find the position on the clock and switch back to visual mode from there on. One of these day’s I’d like to get some kind of event integration so I don’t have to do the conversion myself ;^)

A few months ago, I switched every clock I can to 24-hour time. A comment playing off the ambiguity of a time I had mentioned caught me in a problem solving mood, and I didn’t see any point in having such pointless ambiguity. It probably won’t be quite natural for some time, but at least I’ve started getting more accustomed.

The process of working with representations of time has finally explained something of the traditional system, and given me a little better understanding of what it all means. I suspect the standard 12 hour clock harkens back to the sundials. The top of the clock corresponds nicely to noon, and allowing a little fudge that changes throughout the year, 6-to-6 will cover the track of the sun, and most of the useful day, pretty well. On the other end of the day, 12 midnight is an anti-peak, operating in sort of a nighttime parallel image.

Another interesting feature of Disk Clock’s daylight view is that it has a sort of nice physical correspondence to the earth. One can imagine the clock as the earth, viewed down on the south pole, an image helped, by chance, by the green and blue color schemes in the default view. If you then imagine yourself in an non-copernican world where the sun moves around you, it can make for a somewhat nice intuition for the relation between times and places. I’ve thought about making some provision to mark out other time zones of interest, which would allow for a very nice way of seeing about what time of day it is somewhere else – assuming that somewhere else was at about the same latitude. ;^) There is also the very non trivial problem that timezones, while loosely based on nature, are political fabrications, and can change quite arbitrarily – dealing with only one zone has allowed me to outsource this problem to Apple and other Javascript systems.

The Act Of Creation

There’s something about diving into a problem and forging into new (to you) territory. I often emerge with my own private language, superbly intuitive to me and utterly obtuse to everyone else. As a case in point, Disk Clock’s default 24/4/60/15 arrangement can’t hold a candle to the dominant 12/60/60.

Another interesting case was the dragon form in martial arts. As our school worked through the creation of our own forms, the yet to be created dragon form got remade as a sequencing of certain (large) set of multi-step techniques. During a break, I got stung with an idea for how to do this and put together the last 3/4 or so of the form on my own. During the course of the project. I had to fine tune and re-examine all the involved techniques in order to put them together smoothly. I actually came to the conclusion that the process – in part the act of creation – was as much or more valuable than the resulting form.

My instructor thought that form creation was something for very advanced martial artists, however. Funny thing is, as time went on and we worked with the process of transmitting this large, complicated form to the students, it was decided that it wasn’t working out very well. The replacement? Students design their own unrelated form from scratch, rather than in the semi-structured format I worked with.

Iteration

When I began Disk Clock, I started working on it every chance I got. After a little while, this settled into a pattern of working on the weekends, packing up the two days work and making a release at the end of the weekend. I tried to get all the ‘other stuff’ done during the week. This actually worked out quite well for several months, despite occasional short iterations due to a martial arts seminar or other event.

But I’m actually writing this from a much later time. The martial arts test eventually blotted everything out – it didn’t matter what the schedule was, because I wasn’t working on anything. By the time it settled down again, I was post-1.0 and didn’t have an obvious successor project; certainly nothing amenable to short complete iterations. The result was somewhat wandering attention.

I tried to keep up the weekend schedule for the most part, but a string interruptions often caused me to try and ‘trade time’, programming on into the week. Of course, this cut into the amount of other stuff I got done during the week, and often ended up impacting the next weekend, causing the cycle to start over again.

One nice thing about this pattern is that little programming in the morning was a nice kickstart to the day. It was also nice to do something joyful before going to bed, rather than depressing things until I got so down I went to bed, depressed. So, I’ve swapped. I’m currently experimenting with a little coding every day, and dealing with other stuff during the day.

Ups and downs, of course. I miss being able to really pound on a problem. But I don’t miss getting stuck on a problem for long periods. I’m never stuck for a single long time, and often times the break gives me a new idea, or allows me to get comfortable with the concept of some drastic re-factoring instead of reluctantly staring at the code searching for a better way. Meanwhile, I need to try and maintain focus on other stuff for long periods of time, which isn’t always easy.

A somewhat meandering essay on the limits of parallel pursuits, namely about three. Containing examples of how this applies, how it doesn’t apply why three may be quite wrong. Woven in with a long overdue account of recent events, which have some small bearing on the topic at hand, and why I’ve been preoccupied and silent for a rather long time

Idea put down 2008-02-22 and slightly expanded 2008-07-06; most writing from 2008-09-20 and 21.

I have a theory of sorts, that a person can really only do three things at a time with any degree of quality. (You might have seen an indirect reference earlier.) This was based on simple empirical observation. In college, programming got replaced with game playing. Afterwards, working and martial arts pushed out game playing and then game making. The harp didn’t long outlast getting more involved in the Condo association.

In spite of this, I was trying to do four again; five if you count general reading and education.

During the winter I had a pretty good run at CGD. However, despite the fact that I enjoy the programming, it seemed like I was always running a little behind on everything else. Now, the CGD project was a deliberate attempt to do more programming and less of everything else, so I can’t complain too much, but it does point to the limits of multiple pursuits.

Furthermore, that backlog made things almost, well, stressful. I’ve begun to theorize maybe it really is four things, but the fourth is leisure, which everybody needs a little bit of to stay sane.

The CGD project actually got put on hold for a while. Up until late August I was in the shadow of martial arts testing again. Since then I’ve been alternately recovering, catching up, or simply out of the habit of writing and several other things. I did attempt to learn from the last testing eclipse two years ago, by starting to work on a bit of new curriculum, the Kwon Bup – a set of 57 specific defense techniques derived from Kenpo. I successfully wrapped my head around it in a couple of months, using a few minutes each day, which did have benefits, in terms of being able to teach the material. When it was decided to make our 5th form a combination of the Kwon Bup (making for a huge form) my preparation also laid the foundation for putting the pieces together in a fit of inspiration into the optimal processes – a combination of cards to record the results and computer programming to calculate the future.

That brings us up to November 2007. This was about the time I started getting serious about programming. With the immediate task of the Kwon Bup out of the way, I mostly didn’t think about the martial arts stuff too much. Finally, earlier this year (you might notice that a lot of these essays were conceived around February, and are still getting written) I started looking at the latest version of test curriculum and realized that one of the changes was huge – 34 Kenpo techniques – and probably wouldn’t be covered in class. I did start working, on my own time, early. There was a bit of a lull at work at the time, and I did wrangle the particular beast that concerned me. However, the test was still ‘six months away’, so I continued with my original plan of making a great tour of all the material I knew.

Then my paid employment got busy, amidst the rest of the summer onslaught. By the time the next lull came along, the test was immanent and I hadn’t yet gotten to the specific material I was due to be tested on. One of my lessons from this experience is to do the essential stuff first. In any case the other ‘things’ started getting pushed out, and by the last month I was pretty solidly in 2-thing mode.

The test itself went fairly well, with only a few small slip ups; many of my weakest areas never showed up. The preparation was the real killer. I don’t plan on testing again for some time after this; it just takes too much time. The funny thing is I do kind of like to focus in on things, but there is no balance to take up the slack – there are classes almost every week now, and some weekends.

Despite enjoying focus, I must have some tendency towards being a jack-of-all-trades, because I picked up the harp again after the test was over. Music is something kind of foreign to me; I think one of the main attractions may be that I don’t like having a hole in my understanding. However, it puts me up to six things, without counting leisure.

I’m not a very good jack though – I usually find myself caught up short in conversation because the few topics on which I’m fluent in aren’t of general interest. I’ve considered that perhaps I ought to find a like minded social network, but of course that would make seven. It also runs against my homebody tendency; South Elgin doesn’t exactly evidence being a hotspot for programmer types, and something has always bothered me about traveling for companionship.

Am I contravening my own law-of-three? We’ll I’m cheating a little bit. Leisure is still a bit up in the air. I’ve gone to a 4-day work work, and I’m contemplating 3. Some things, like the condo association, come in short bursts, and others, like reading, are highly elastic; things like programming and harping are elastic in a pinch.

It’s interesting to draw a distinction between the things that are (or feel) hard, and those that are elastic. The hard ones I barely dare touch involve other people – employment and martial arts. Employment also touches on another sort of virtual thing, which, like leisure, is so pervasive that it hardly counts. Survival. Eating, sleeping, showering, finding shelter and food.

The elastic, or soft, ones only ‘matter’ to me. If I stop, I don’t die (unless we give an awful lot of weight to stress or depression) and the only reproach I fear is my own. Still, they matter, to me, and since I’m the one one making my decisions, I’m attempting to arrange my affairs so that I can pursue them.

There is a deep conflict here, or at least I feel one, between the things society values – the products of my labor which I’m paid for, and teaching at the martial arts school, which taught me and forms, unfortunately, my only real community, on one hand, and things only I value on the other hand.

Nothing’s that simple of course – the general reading has indirect feedback effects on my job for instance, but in it’s broadest sweep, you have the things I do of my own volition, and the things I do for money or peer pressure. This is a pretty deep topic, and I think it deserves it’s own essay – I suppose writing is another ‘thing’, which I’ll have to fit in somewhere.

2008-02-10 to 2008-03-11, esp 2008-02-24

When I introduced Naked Javascript, I talked a bit about my difficulties with Javascript in general – some nice things going on, but the implementation that got standardized is a little half baked. Then I thought of several things which I forgot to mention, and made a second post. later I thought of yet more things, but I didn’t make another post. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

While I might claim that my recent attempt to discuss the merits and faults of Javascript could be chalked up to sickness, meandering writings have been an unfortunate trend of late. One after another, a storm of ideas gets put off, and off, and off again. By the time I get down to writing about it, I’ve forgotten half of it and end with a little tiny post that peters out with an unexciting whimper.

We’ve got (at least) two problems here: 1. short, boring posts, which are 2. probably due in no small part to procrastination. I actually hadn’t thought about that second part before, but let’s push that on the stack for a moment. and talk about the content problem.

A while back, I saw someone writing that long blogs are better. It’s based on a very simple idea: small blogs don’t stick. They fit in short term memory. You have to ramble on long enough to blow your reader’s stack and force them to start swapping your ideas out to longer term memory.

I’m not going to be belabor that point. There’s a very long post about it if you’re interested. If you want to go read it, a few of my ideas are on the stack, so it might work just as well ;^)

Consequently, I’m going to be aiming for meatier articles. Something with, perhaps, a little more content than your average powerpoint slide. (Perhaps that’s aiming too low ;^) Would comparing some of my previous posts to a list of tenuously connected bullet points be a little too harsh?) Anyway, before I get into how I plan to accomplish this, we’ll have to return the memory problem for a bit.

As a simplification, let us say that any piece of writing has to begin with an idea. The idea is then subject to the forces such as expansion, connection, and forgetfulness. If the idea makes it into writing, that writing has to be done at some time. Lets break it down into a fairly conventional three periods.

If the writing is done ‘at first blush’, it can benefit from the initial energy and enthusiasm. The writer is still within the first avalanche of connection and expansion, so the ideas flow fast and easy, probably helped along by the writing process. Unfortunately, the ideas also aren’t mature, and many of the elaborations won’t occur right way.

If the writing is done a little later, the ideas can benefit from a little development. Unfruitful branches will have been trimmed away, but few possibilities may have also been forgotten, and others may not yet be fully explored. All and all it’s not a bad time, but some later elaboration by still be necessary to get the complete picture.

If the writing is done much later, there probably won’t be a whole lot needs to be added later – except perhaps the things that were forgotten (if you were lucky enough to remember them again) There has been greater opportunity for connection, discussion, and perhaps even some application and results, with the benefits of reflection.

What I’m going to try to do is get the best of all these worlds. Write something down as soon as possible. Don’t be afraid to change it. Continuously update as time and thought permit. Keep working at it until the ideas settle down reach a coherent form, and all the threads pan out (or die off).

Of course, I can’t get stopped up on one idea if I’m going to get everything started right way – I’m going to be keeping a couple of pots boiling at once. I’ve got almost a dozen of them so far – if you haven’t seen anything except Disk Clock updates lately (not all that unusual, really…) it’s because the lead time underwent a discontinuous change, not because there is nothing to say.

Now I’ve just got that procrastination issue to address (remember that?) Conceptually I’ve already addressed it by saying that getting something written down in the earliest stages is essential to help combat ‘oops, I forgot one thing…’ Now there is just that small matter of the difference between saying and doing. My writing cache so far is mostly filled with a few short paragraphs and bullet points; I was actually worried worried about this article itself getting off to a weak start, but it seems to be growing up somewhat nicely, so there is hope.

So, I guess it’s been more than a minute. My lesson for the day is don’t put off writing stuff down. As for that Javascript thread, it will be back, probably recovering most of the same ground for the sake of making a coherent coverage of the topic. I don’t recall the specific things I forgot to mention, but hopefully I’ll get to them in the course of a few writing passes.

One of my relatives has a son interested in game design. Though I’m not much involved, I’ve watched it enough to be able to give something of an answer:

Unfortunately, the company doesn’t do many games anymore; those we have been done were coin-operated, and often redemption (tickets; chuck-e-cheese type stuff)

I presume by the involvement of software that you are referring to computer/video games. (I’ve also dabbled in board games, but very few people are able to make a career of it) I’ve watched the industry a bit at times, but never really been involved in it. What aspect is interested in? There is programming, art, sound, production, and even ‘design’ is specializing into story/writing and mechanics (possible called ‘game design’) Aiming smaller at the casual/web/downloadable market might be an environment were multiple talents would be more common. Things may have completely changed by the time he’s making a living on it, but that could be a place to start now.

There are a few game development schools – just don’t confuse development with design. Develop is the whole thing (programming/art/etc.) and very often their brand of ‘design’ is write up a design document and then a bunch of people go build that, whether or not it’s good. Mostly I speculate; I’ve no personal experience and they may have much brighter people than I give them credit for – just make sure they are offering what you want if looking in that direction.

Otherwise, the question of schools comes back to the area he is interested in. For true game design (which I should mention is a touch gig to get) liberal arts may actually be the best bet. See the book Rules of Play (below) for an idea of the breadth required.

I haven’t looked into tools lately. I ran across Squeak EToys recently; it’s designed as a first introduction to programming in an interactive environment. Beyond that, I’d recommend finding a game framework for a dynamic language such as Python or Ruby; I also believe there is a DarkBasic that is focused on games.

Resources:

http://www.gamasutra.com – web site tied in with a publish of game industry magazines and such (you could also subscribe to Game Developer magazine I suppose) News, articles on various topics in design, programming, and trends.

http://www.myhq.com/public/r/a/rauros/#104300261935570145 – my game design bookmarks; some are related to board games or weird abstract things about the ‘meaning’ of games and suchlike.

Books:

A Theory of Fun (Raph Koster) – fairly light essay on fun; illustrated.

Rules of Play (Katie Salen/Eric ZImmerman) – a textbook of game design, but in a broad sense – includes board and playground games in addition to computer.

Patterns in Game Design (Staffan Bjork/Jussi Holopainen) – more focused on computer games, but a little dry and perhaps not the best starter book.

Chris Crawford has written a couple of books; I believe The Art of Computer Game Design is available for free online, along with a lot of other writings. Just be aware, with respect to breaking into ‘The Industry’, Chris checked out of it a while ago, and many of his writings refer to a bygone age. http://www.erasmatazz.com/

Which is a very bad title. This is something of an essay about viewing people through the lenses of programming langauge concepts; I make no comment on any other interpretation ;^)

There is a programming langauge paradigm called ‘functional’. Some functional langauges include ML, Haskell, and sometimes Lisp/Scheme. Functional languages often define themselves in terms of the lambda calculus, which is a mathematical system based around The Allmighty Lambada; the abstraction of the process of punching a hole in an expression so you can plug different values in (i.e. apply or call the function)

One thing you can do with functional programs is talk about whether they are ‘pure’, which is to say, stateless. ‘State’, if it isn’t clear, is principlly evident in variable assignments; the closest pure functional programs come to assgnment is matching function parameters with actual arguments. Most programs/langauges are not pure; writing recursive fibinocci functions is cute and all, but most real world programs find it very difficutly to get by without state.

Not that people don’t try – academics will talk your ear off about all the nasty problems of state. Not that they are wrong, just that there aren’t a lot of terribly attractive alternatives most of the time. The poster child for pure functional languages is Haskell; I’ll have to write about the hoops they jump through to do things like I/O and call it pure, but I’m on enough of a tangent just now. Haskell is also ‘lazy’ (technically, ‘normal order’), meaning that a value is only computed if it is actually needed, which like everything else can be either really good (you may never need to calculate it) or really bad (un-evaluated computations fill up your memory) depending on the program and data structure.

Anyway, pure functions can in principal be memoized (I know I’m spelling that wrong), better known as cached. If f(5) = 27, f(5) always equals 27, and you don’t need to do the computation again. Yes, this is much the same thing as GET under REST. But if you can’t guarantee that ‘f’ is a pure function, successive calls might return 28, 0, NaN, or ‘frog’ (if your language isn’t statically typed)

And people, you see, are most definately not pure. Having once asked a question or otherwise ascertained some other property, there is no guarantee that any later test will return the same value. Human interactions are, propertly speaking, completely uncacheable, and yet our entire society is built around the expection that certain values (big ones being marriage, employement, friendship, not shooting me in the head, etc.) will at least remain stable for sufficiently long periods of time for the larger structures to persevere.

Not only are people statefull, but human systems have a hard 100% uptime requirement for the life of the system – whereas one can often run a program repeatedly to try and isolate faults, there is no rewinding a person or even a conversation to try and figure out where it went wrong and make it right. Sure, most people are tolerant of interactive debugging and overwritting erroneous state, but there is a complete log – I think the greater risk involved has something to do with my reluctance to speak.

I talked some of this over with schwartzboy, who offered this anecdote:

stupid logging. Just for the record in case you ever need to know this? Wedding rings come with embedded SpouseLogger 7.5 and a microscopic RAID setup that has terabytes of free space.