When half the story is no story at all:
response to a Tribune article on Netzarim
Friends,
I opened the Tribune today to find an outrageous article
about Netzarim, a settlement in Gaza. You can read my reaction
to and analysis of it below. Here is the URL to the story (you
will need to register to see it, so I also attach the text of
the article to this message after my letter):
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0401110252jan11,1,3498630.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
I encourage you to send letters of protest to both the editors
involved and to the Chicago Tribune letters page:
George de Lama,
managing news editor gdelama@tribune.com
Colin McMahon, foreign news editor cmcmahon@tribune.com
Timothy McNulty, foreign news editor TMcNulty@tribune.com
Chicago Trib letters ctc-Tribletter@tribune.com
When writing to an editor, please be polite and back up any charge
you make with specifics.
SF
Dear Mr. McMahon and Mr. McNulty,
I just read through the above-titled article by Joel Greenberg,
in today's Tribune, and I felt compelled to write to you. In general,
I find that the Tribune does a better job than most major dailies
in the US (certainly FAR better than the Sun-Times) in presenting
a balanced view of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
Perhaps because of that, I found the Greenberg article to be almost
shocking in its incomplete and misleading representation of the
situation. I can't help but think after reading this "article"
(I cannot, in good conscience, refer to it as an article without
quotations, because it is less an article than an opinion piece),
in fact, that the unrelenting pressure from hard-liners within
the Jewish Community in Chicago may have finally had an impact
on your reporting of this conflict.
The focus of this "article"
was on the Netzarim settlement. That must be the justification
for using up an enormous amount of space with a picture of these
two nice soldier boys sitting on a big, lush lawn playing backgammon.
You might have used some of that space to show a map of the Gaza
Strip, so that readers could understand where Netzarim is located
in Gaza, how isolated it is, how in fact all of the settlements
and their Jewish-only roads break up Gaza and isolate the Palestinian
population. You could also have offered a contrasting photo of
the dusty, devastated areas of the Gaza Strip, which are in that
condition precisely because of the inhumane diversion of water
by Israel from the masses of Palestinians to the tiny Jewish colonies,
and because of the persistent attacks by IDF soldiers and bulldozers.
Since this was an "article" about the trials and tribulations
of the settlers, however, such information was apparently irrelevant
to your readers' understanding of the situation.
The focus of
this "article" was on the Netzarim settlers. That must be the
justification for going into great detail about their security
concerns and the presentation of these settlers as victims, while
paying little more than lip service to the massive violence carried
out against Palestinians by the IDF, violence which has killed
many more people and injured many more people and leaves thousands
of children homeless, hungry, thirst, uneducated...you name it.
All of this devastation, just so these few settlers can enjoy
their watered lawns and establish a beachhead for an expanded
Israeli state. Is it possible that this devastation of the fabric
of life for 1.3 million Palestinians might have something to do
with the occasional mortars that drop into Netzarim and do virtually
no damage? It is impossible for your readers to know, or even
to decide for themselves, since you have left this out entirely
from your "article."
The focus of this "article" was on the debate
within the Israeli political system. That must be the justification
for never once reminding your readers that this settlement, like
all the others in the Gaza Strip and West Bank are considered
to be ILLEGAL by the United Nations, the United States and virtually
every country in the world except for Israel. It certainly does
NOT justify, however, the fact that you repeatedly quoted from
extremist settlers, but never ONCE quoted an Israeli with a counter-position.
You simply stated that there is a debate -- and then gave one
extremist, fundamentalist Jew after another a chance to spew their
hard-line ideology. This is shoddy journalism, to say the least.
Finally, I am shocked that you would publish an article that ends
with the statement that "This [the conflict swirling around Netzarim]
is a war for secure Jewish existence in the state of Israel."
You feed and stoke deep Jewish fears, provide comfort and support
to the most right-wing, pro-violence, anti-peace elements within
both Israeli and American-Jewish society.
Greenberg's "article"
might have made sense on the op-ed page, though it would have
been more honest if it had been signed by the learned Rabbi Tzio
Tawii from Netzarim. It should NEVER have appeared on page 2 of
the main section of the Chicago Tribune.
Steven Feuerstein
THE TRIBUNE ARTICLE:
Focus of debate and attacks
Isolated settlement
in Gaza Strip not worth high price, some Israelis say
By Joel
Greenberg
Special to the Tribune
Published January 11, 2004
NETZARIM,
Gaza Strip -- Yitzhak Levy, the driver who ferries people in an
armored bus to this isolated Jewish settlement, keeps a prayer
for a safe journey posted above his seat, an M-16 rifle behind
him and a crate of first-aid equipment in the front row of passenger
seats.
"I don't think a Jew should be afraid in the land of Israel,"
he said recently as he guided his yellow bus to Netzarim, a 10-minute
ride from the Gaza Strip border on a road that has been the scene
of repeated attacks during more than three years of violent conflict
with the Palestinians.
The bus, which travels with an army jeep
escort, has three bullet holes from a recent shooting, and two
passengers were wounded by a roadside bomb in May. But Levy says
he has no intention of giving up his job or home in Netzarim,
where he has been living for three years.
"You can't let the terrorists
decide where you live and work," he said.
Perhaps more than any
other Israeli settlement, Netzarim--a cluster of red-roofed homes
and brick-paved lanes on the dunes south of Gaza City--has become
a focus of debate in Israel about the future of the nearly 150
settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
About 60 families
live in Netzarim, a heavily guarded enclave that is the most isolated
of the 17 settlements in the Gaza Strip, where 7,800 Israelis
live among 1.3 million Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon said in a speech last month that some outlying settlements
could be moved and troops pulled back to new lines if the U.S.-backed
peace plan known as the road map fails to make progress. He did
not give names, but Israeli news media have mentioned Netzarim
as a prime candidate for possible evacuation.
Protected by an
army battalion and the target of repeated Palestinian attacks,
Netzarim is surrounded by fences, watchtowers and outposts. At
the settlement's edge is a military base. Three soldiers were
killed there in October by a Palestinian gunman who penetrated
the perimeter.
Residents travel to and from the community in protected
convoys, riding in the bulletproof bus or armored military trucks
or driving their own cars while wearing flak jackets and helmets.
Palestinian attackers have killed 12 Israeli soldiers and two
civilians in and around Netzarim during the current conflict,
and dozens of Palestinians, gunmen and civilians have been fatally
shot by troops.
During heavy clashes at a nearby junction in the
early days of the fighting, Netzarim residents were ferried in
and out by helicopter. Mortars and rockets fired by Palestinian
militants still land regularly in the area.
The road to Netzarim,
once flanked by Palestinian-owned homes and orchards, now winds
through a furrowed wasteland dotted with gray army watchtowers.
The houses and farmland, along with a cement factory and gas station,
were bulldozed after attacks in what the army said were measures
to deny cover to gunmen.
A wide area around Netzarim has become
a forbidden zone for Palestinians, and bystanders have been killed
there when troops fired at real or perceived attackers.
In Israel,
debate has flared periodically about whether holding on to Netzarim
is worth the price. After the fatal October attack, Interior Minister
Avraham Poraz of the centrist Shinui party proposed that the settlement
be evacuated, leaving soldiers there instead.
No retreat, residents say
For residents of the embattled community, their enclave is
a test case. Retreat from Netzarim, they argue, would signal surrender
to Palestinian violence and encourage more attacks.
"Netzarim
is a symbol," said Rabbi Tzion Tawil, head of the local yeshiva,
where students hunched over religious texts on a recent morning,
their M-16 rifles within reach. "Leaving such a place would give
a prize to terrorism and undermine our position in Jerusalem and
Tel Aviv."
"Netzarim is a frontier community. It draws fire,"
the rabbi continued, calling the settlement a buffer against attacks
on Israel proper. "If it is evacuated, the eruption will spread.
Netzarim is blocking attacks. Who knows how many lives it has
saved?"
Whether it is drawing fire or deflecting it, Netzarim
bears the signs of a community under attack. The local school
is built like a bomb shelter, with reinforced concrete classrooms
and heavy steel window shutters. A gray concrete shelter offers
cover near trailer homes nearby. A central siren and an intercom
in every house notify residents in the event of an attack.
Outside
the home of the Moyal family, the ground was littered recently
with pieces of roof shingles and concrete splintered by a mortar
round that had crashed days earlier into an overhang near the
front door. Efrat Moyal, 9, played hopscotch near the debris.
"We've gotten used to it already," Efrat's 11-year-old sister,
Tehiya, said of the occasional mortar attacks on the settlement.
"If we lived in fear our lives would be destroyed." Down the block,
children rode their bicycles on a cloudless, tranquil afternoon.
Tzurit Yarhi, 34, a mother of seven, said she sleeps soundly at
night, despite the dangers.
"I trust in the army, and I believe
in God," she said. "I feel at home here."
With quiet conviction,
she explained that she and her husband had moved to Netzarim 12
years ago because it was part of the ancient homeland of the Jews.
"Gaza is part of the Land of Israel," she said, citing biblical
references to the area. "We believe it's important to live in
all parts of our country. Our enemies also want the whole land,
but it belongs to us, and they have to recognize that."
Settlement growth
Eyal Vered, 31, a yeshiva teacher, moved to Netzarim a
year ago with his wife and three children, part of a growth trend
in Jewish settlements that has continued despite the ongoing violence.
Government figures released last month showed that the population
of Jewish settlements has grown about 16 percent in the last three
years, during Sharon's tenure in office.
Netzarim has grown from
321 people to 399, according to the statistics.
"We live a normal
life in a complicated envelope," said Vered, whose home has metal
grills on the windows to keep out attackers. "This place is on
the cutting edge, and that has a price.
"The whole country is
dangerous," he added, referring to suicide bombings in Israeli
cities. "The problem is not Netzarim. This is a war for secure
Jewish existence in the state of Israel."
Copyright © 2004, Chicago
Tribune
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PoemGate: The President as Poet
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Oh my lump in the bed,
How I've missed you.
Roses are redder,
Bluer am I,
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.
The dogs and the cat,
they missed you too;
Barney's still mad you dropped him,
he ate your shoe.
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier;
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.
The world was introduced to the poetry of George W. Bush back in October
2003, or so it seemed, when First Lady Laura Bush "recited a poem she
said President Bush greeted her with when she returned recently from
France, where President Jacques Chirac had kissed her hand twice." (AP
article). Reuters reported that "Laura Bush told a gathering at
the US Library of Congress marking a weekend celebration of books in
the nation's capital that her husband had written the poem while she
was away in Russia this week and had presented it to her on her return
on Thursday."
I am not going to debate the merits of the poem, itself. For that,
I offer the following URL: http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/11/13/3fb3793f88b34
It is clearly a very personal, heart-felt message from husband to wife
-- or is it? In fact, did our President in actuality write this poem,
as was so widely reported and Laura Bush herself said? Just this week,
I ran across an article in the Chicago Tribune (actually NY Times content),
which lays bare the truth:
First lady urges U.S. vigilance: Laura Bush opens window to private
life in interview
New York Times News Service Published December 29, 2003 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0312290248dec29,1,1659032.story
The first lady also said that a "Roses are red, violets are blue"
poem she read at a National Book Festival gala in October was not actually
written by her husband even though it has been attributed to him. She
did not say who wrote the poem.
"But a lot of people really believed that he did," Bush said. "Some
woman from across the table said, `You just don't know how great it
is to have a husband who would write a poem for you.' "
[END OF NY TIMES CONTENT]
I've got to admit, I found this both intriguing and disturbing. Is
there anything but spin and manipulation to the lives of the Bushes?
So...we are first led to understand that cuddly-cute Georgie had written
a sweet (and simple) poem to his wife. He obviously missed her dearly.
To show everyone how much he missed her, it was of course necessary
to make sure that this poem and his apparent writing of it becomes global
news. Isn't he just the sweetest guy? Then two months later, Laura Bush
admits that in fact her husband did NOT write the poem.
This revelation leads to many questions:
- Who did write the poem?
- Can this person be trusted with intimate details of the Bushs' married
life?
- Is this person still around?
- When did Laura Bush know it wasn't her husband's work? Probably
when she first read it, as in: "George, I KNOW you didn't write this.
Who did? They are so sweet!"
- Why would George Bush have someone ELSE write such a simple, oh
fine - simplistic - poem that was so personal?
- Is George Bush illiterate? That would explain his extraordinary
commitment to the education of our children -- or at least the testing
of our children. He probably didn't do very well at all on standardized
tests. Maybe he was made fun of by his older brother. So he has decided
to take revenge on today's children by forcing them to take more and
more tests.
I believe that PoemGate reveals a shocking failure of integrity on
the part of the Bush Administration. Congress should demand that an
independent investigation be opened, with an unlimited budget. We should
engage the services of our Poet Laureate, as well as Poetry Magazine,
which recently received $100 million from the estate of the Eli Lilly
heiress. That way, the investigation won't cost the taxpayers a dime.
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Reflections on a Terminated Governership
ARNOLD - TAKE 1
So Arnold the Terminator has now assumed responsibility for the State of California, the "fifth largest economy in the world," as the newspapers like to remind us. He shrugged off an almost bottomless pit of accusations of sexual harassment, charges that might have sunk the candidacy of a lesser human being.
I am very depressed about this outcome, but not perhaps for the reasons one might think. Gray Davis was clearly a disaster for the people of California; I am glad that the state offers a recall mechanism so that "the people" can express their will and make the necessary changes. I am not sad to see Mr. Davis depart from the Governor's Mansion.
I am also not depressed about the fact that Schwarzenegger is a Republican. Who knows? He might turn out to be a fine Governor; he certainly isn't, at least on the surface, as conservative or reactionary as many in the Bush Administration.
No, I am feeling low, very low, about the election results because they demonstrated to be just how ready, willing and able my fellow citizens are to make completely uninformed choices about their leadership. Surely, it is very clear that millions did not vote for the Terminator because they understood and agreed with his policies on, say, how to save the California economy from almost certain disaster (disaster, that is, for social services, education and the poor; I doubt that those in Arnie's circle are going to suffer very much as a result of budget cuts).
How could Californians have chosen Schwarzenegger based on his plans and policies? He didn't have any, or at least he didn't respect the voters enough to share his plans with them.
So what's the big deal? I happen to like democracy. It is a wonderful framework for allowing human beings to live in peace with one another. And the variation of democracy followed in the United States (a very much indirect democracy, in which we elect representatives who supposedly reflect the views of the majority, constrained of course by the Constitution) would also be pretty darned wonderful if -- and this is a big if -- voters are given all the information they need to make informed decisions. And then they use that information to make their choices.
That didn't happen on October 7 in California. It seems to me that many people had already rejected Gray Davis. They now turned to the field of 130+ candidates for their new Governor. And there they saw a big celebrity, bigger than life, really, a hero from the silver screen, an "outsider" (who is obviously very well-connected). He didn't have detailed plans for just about anything, but detailed plans are so BORING. And, really, the whole scene is just SO COOL, isn't it? To be able to elect a guy like Arnold Schwarzenegger to be your Governor. Now, that's something to be talking about for quite awhile. Like that wrestler fellow in Minneapolis. Of course, Jesse Ventura did a terrible job and bailed out as quickly as he could, but Arnie, he's even bigger and tougher than old, washed up Jesse. Arnie will do whatever it takes. And he will do it by commuting in his private jet to the Capitol every single day.
I wonder if he has any idea how much a gallon of milk costs. If he doesn't, surely Maria Shriver, salt of the earth, will be able to fill him in.
What a guy! What a family!
Yes, there can be no doubt: this is going to be fun to watch, unless you actually depend on your state government to help you get by or to safeguard your rights.
Good Governor, bad Governor...that's beside the point. What we witnessed yesterday in California is just the latest example of how thoroughly disconnected people are from their own political system, how little we respect the power we have in our grasp, and how carelessly we wield that power.
Politics as circus. Politics as entertainment. Celebrities as leaders. Celebrities as saviors.
This may not have been the "original intent" of the "Founding Fathers" of our nation (many of whom, I would imagine, consulted their wives on the momentous matters before them), but it sure is fun!
ARNOLD - TAKE 2
A few days ago, I read a column by Stephen Chapman in the Chicago Tribune ("Bill, Arnold and double standards", reproduced at the end of this message). And it made me realize that my problems with Arnold and his victory were not just centered around an uninformed electorate.
Chapman makes a persuasive argument that "Their [conservatives] new darling is a more aggressive sexual predator than the president they tried to remove from office." Think about it: Clinton obviously had a problem keeping certain organs contained inside his clothing. But what he did with poor Monica was clearly consensual. In Schwarznegger's case, you are looking at multiple, a multitude of, accusations of unwanted and protested physical attacks. These attacks, according to Chapman's reading of the California penal code amounts to "sexual battery."
Putting the legalities aside for a moment, let's dwell on the mindset
of a man who seems to feel that virtually any attractive woman on the
planet would of course want his big mitts all over her breasts and/or
buttocks. Then consider the sort of man who will actually ACT on this
delusion -- over and over again, even when he is not doing lots of drugs,
even when he is not engaging in orgies, even as he is married to a member
of the Kennedy Clan. Is this the sort of man Californians want to be
their leader? Looks like it. If the left or liberals have attack dog
lawyers anything like Jennifer Flowers' handlers, we are sure to see
suits being filed against the Governor-elect (nicknamed "Governor-elect
Pinchbottom" by Clarence Page; I like that one) on charges of sexual
battery.
Read Responses and Reactions
Bill, Arnold and double standards
By Stephen Chapman
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune E-mail: schapman@tribune.com
Published October 9, 2003
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0310090279oct09,1,6781191.story
The California recall campaign was a noisy, raucous and often vitriolic
affair. But the most striking feature of the final days was the silence.
That was what you heard from conservatives on the subject of Arnold
Schwarzenegger's sexual escapades.
Here was a guy who, voters learned, told a skin magazine in 1977 that he had a stripper girlfriend, hung out with prostitutes and engaged in group sex. Then last week, The Los Angeles Times reported that six women said he had forced himself on them, grabbing breasts and bottoms and trying to pull off clothing.
The charges clearly had at least some truth. Schwarzenegger didn't admit anything specific, but he didn't exactly proclaim his innocence, either. "Wherever there is smoke, there is fire," he said. "I have behaved badly sometimes." Other women came forward with similar accounts.
When Schwarzenegger insisted that "a lot of these are made-up stories," NBC anchor Tom Brokaw asked him, "So you deny all these stories about grabbing?" Replied Arnold: "No, not all." But he declined to tell which ones were true. Asked by Brokaw to be more specific about his actions, he replied, "As soon as the campaign is over, I will." What's your hurry, Tom?
At best, the evidence indicates that Schwarzenegger has a habit of sexual battery--defined in the California Penal Code as touching "an intimate part of another person, if the touching is against the will of the person touched, and is for the specific purpose of sexual arousal, sexual gratification, or sexual abuse."
This goes beyond the behavior that unleashed a scandal on Bill Clinton. His encounter with Monica Lewinsky was consensual, and his crude alleged proposition to Paula Jones stopped short of using force. Kathleen Willey said Clinton forcibly kissed and fondled her, though he relented when she rebuffed him. (It was not until after he was acquitted in his impeachment trial that another woman went public claiming he had raped her, and that was never proven.)
Clinton's adulterous conduct was enough to outrage conservative moralists. Columnist and former Reagan administration official Linda Chavez said that the actions described by Paula Jones didn't amount to sexual harassment but were "gross and disgusting, and, I think, make Clinton unfit to be president." The Wall Street Journal's shocked editorial writers asked, "What manner of man is it who takes sexual advantage of 21-year-old interns?"
David Frum, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, asserted that "what's at stake in the Lewinsky scandal" is "the central dogma of the Baby Boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it's consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all." William Bennett, author of several books celebrating old-fashioned values, said Clinton "acted sexually more like an alley cat than an adult."
Maybe the defenders of virtue exhausted themselves so thoroughly attacking Clinton that they have no energy left to find fault with Schwarzenegger. In any event, I have yet to hear a peep of disgust from the major moralists of the right.
The Wall Street Journal admitted in passing that Schwarzenegger's alleged behavior was "crude and insulting"-- which sounds like a great understatement--while crowing that "his candor will strike voters as a welcome contrast to the usual political stonewalling or denials." But his "candor" was of the sort that is now universally known by the term "Clintonesque"--making a vague admission to defuse the issue while denying anything truly incriminating.
David Frum, in his regular column for National Review Online, didn't denounce Baby Boomer morality, but simply ignored the whole unpleasant business. Bill Bennett, the go-to guy on matters of morality, was missing in action. The cat got Linda Chavez's tongue.
So consider their double standard. When Clinton submitted to oral sex with
Monica Lewinsky, conservatives thought it was morally repugnant. They
also thought it disqualified him from remaining in office. As a Wall
Street Journal editorial declared, "A business executive or college
president caught having sex with an intern less than half his age would
today be quickly dismissed." Yet they're happy to have as governor of
California someone who, by his own admission, has forced himself on
unwilling women. Their new darling is a more aggressive sexual predator
than the president they tried to remove from office. Morality? Law?
They'll leave it to liberals to fret about such irrelevancies. But if
the charges persist and multiply, I predict conservatives will find
a way to address Arnold's behavior: They'll blame it on Clinton.
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Human vs. Machine
The sensationally apocalyptic nightmares presented in the (sequels/series)
of Terminator and The Matrix might in fact have something to offer us
in terms of understanding a possible future relationship between humans
and machines. A future where computers become smarter and smarter until,
using the terminology of science fiction author Ken Mcleod, a "Singularity"
is reached, a moment when all those ubiquitously networked computers
break free of the constraints of operations commanded by humans and
generate their own commands, their own thoughts, and become in science
fiction parlance an Artificial Intelligence or AI.
In Terminator, the AI is called Skynet, a product of the US Department
of Defense (whose very own DARPA, in the real world, played an instrumental
role in the establishment of the Internet).
Upon achieving “intelligence,” Skynet moves to wipe out the
human race, and the battle between human and machine is on. (Thank the
heavens for Arnold Schwarzenegger, next Governor of California, and
good, old John Connor.) In the Matrix, an even more sinister future
unfolds, in which humans are turned into batteries, our bio-electric
impulses harvested to feed the machines.
Scary stuff. And every day, every announcement from Intel or AMD about
the improvements in CPU speed, makes it seem as though we are coming
ever closer to the point when such a development might, in fact, become
possible. Yet today, decades after the creation of the first electronic
computing machine and almost unthinkably rapid progress in both power
and sophistication, computers remain quite dumb.
The fact that even the most powerful computers are still relatively
simple-minded explains, in part, why (I believe) it is actually quite
easy for humans to learn computer languages. If you are not a computer
person, you will scoff at this statement, of course. You look at the
gibberish that constitutes code today and can't imagine understanding
(much less writing) it. The reality, however, is that it is much, much
harder to become functionally literate in a human language, than to
"come up to speed" on a computer language. The reason is simple:
Computers follow commands really, really quickly (though in many operations
their speed still cannot rival that of the human brain), which gives
the impression of intelligence and thought, but they don't actually
think their own thoughts. You never have a conversation with a computer;
you simply tell it what to do.
They simply follow the commands that we, human beings, give to them,
whether inside a low-level software program like an operating system
or a higher-level set of instructions like eBay.
I spend a lot of my time consulting and training on the Oracle PL/SQL
language (Procedural Language extensions to the Structured Query Language,
in case you were wondering). I have written nine books on PL/SQL (all
published by O'Reilly and Associates). I am, in other words, a computer
geek. I have lots of respect for computers and how they have helped
-- and could help so much more -- improve the state/conditions of human
existence.
Consultants and teachers have an interesting role in society. We provide
knowledge services to other humans. As such, we should be -- or more
accurately for many us, we have to pretend to be -- a source of knowledge
and wisdom to others in our particular field of work. It is a commonplace
joke amongst us, however, that we don't have to be experts to teach,
and we don't have to be gurus to consult. We just have to know incrementally
more than those to whom we consult and lecture.
I look on the race, or possible race, between humans and machines,
humans and computers, in the same way. As long as humans know more (and
by "know", I mean both knowledge and the ability to manipulate
that knowledge using logic, creativity and inspiration), even a little
more, than machines, we can and hopefully will maintain control over
those machines. We will be able to write software that out-smarts and
constrains computers. We will be able to recognize the danger signs
of a Singularity (assuming that moment is not just the nightmarish vision
of science fiction authors) and head it off. But if at some point the
line is crossed and we find ourselves unable to control the bits and
bytes flying around in silicon, then the computers gain the advantage
and, well, who knows what will happen?
Which brings me back to the dark visions of the Matrix.
I find myself less and less concerned about computers becoming more
intelligent, and thereby crossing that line, than by humans becoming
less intelligent -- thereby lowering ourselves to the level of
computer "thinking" and, in essence, defaulting on our status
as the entities of highest intelligence on this planet.
With every passing day we increase our dependence on computers as
a medium for communication between human beings. Rather than
contact a person directly (seek them out in the real world or call them),
we use computers and the Internet. Is data the same as conversation?
I think not. This struck me most strongly when I needed to visit a friend
in Michigan (some 200 miles away). Rather than ask him for directions,
I just went to Mapquest and printed it all out. How convenient! The
problem is that the directions really stank when we got close to my
friend's house. I realized the utter silliness of choosing Mapquest's
database and sophisticated software over my friend's real world experience
and knowledge of his own environment. From Mapquest to Google translators
to email, humans are communicating less and exchanging data more.
Have you noticed how computer systems are now appearing in every restaurant,
no matter how small? Actually, restaurant computerization was the original
motivator for this essay. A few weeks ago, I walked into my favorite
Chinese restaurant in Chicagoland (a very unpretentious storefront with
the best hot and sour soup, broccoli in garlic sauce and General Tsao's
I have ever tasted) and found the manager poking a finger at a flat-screen,
touch-sensitive monitor, with a deep frown on her face. "Oh, you
are computerizing," I commented, neutrally. The frown turned to
a scowl. "My partner says this will help." She shook her head.
"I don't see the point. I can write things down much faster and
my cooks don't have any trouble reading my orders." The monitor
quickly became expensive furniture. Why would a tiny little restaurant
need such a system? I’ve read about how you can better monitor
inventory, keep an eye on bartenders serving too much alcohol in the
drinks, improve efficiency, etc. But humans have been running restaurants,
particularly small ones, for literally thousands of years, and doing
just fine. It seems like so much over-kill -- and, once again, a reduction
in the amount of subtle, nuanced communication between humans, to be
replaced by pixels flashing on a screen: MOO SHU PORK EXTRA PANCAKES.
Do you have a digital wristwatch? I don't like watches with digital
read-outs. Give me an analog, any day, especially ones without numbers.
Why? Because it makes my brain work harder. The digital wristwatch leaves
nothing to the imagination or, more to the point here, the deductive
powers of your brain. It tells you precisely what time it is
(well, more or less, but given that time is a totally abstract concept
that we impose on the world, the differences really don't matter). With
an analog watch, however, your brain is actually getting some exercise
with every glance at the watch face. You take in the position of the
hands and translate that into a time. In that same moment, the configuration
of the little and big hands might also conjure up a childhood or college
memory. The neurons fire, pathways are strengthened, restored, established.
Not so with a digital watch. The data is passed along to you, and your
brain dully accepts it.
[I should mention, at this point, however, that a friend of mine responded
to this idea saying, “I have positive childhood memories of the
time displayed on digital clocks. Like 11:11 – how trippy is that
on a watch with hands? Maybe it’s not even 11:11 – maybe 11:10
or 11:12 – but how can I know, and therefore convince myself, that
if I don’t knock on wood before the minute passes that I will be
forever cursed with bad luck? I like watches with hands, too, but that
11:11 has made for some intense times!".]
And how about those cash registers that display the correct change
for a transaction? Those infernal calculating machines have probably
resulted in more of a dumbing-down of humans, particularly teenagers,
than anything else I know of. From an employer's perspective, this is
a great feature. Humans, with the help of a machine, make fewer mistakes
and business/commerce moves along faster. Good for profits, bad for
people. I find it so painful to watch a person struggle with basic subtraction
and addition if I hand him or her an extra coin over the $20 bill, in
order to minimize the coin change. It must be so embarrassing -- with
the result that, almost certainly, that person resents me, for
putting him in the situation. And so affinity with the machine, which
gives all the comfortable answers, grows, while affinity with the fellow
human, who makes life difficult, withers.
Computer programming, in general: It really, really bugs me when I
tell people that I work with computer software and their eyes widen,
they shake their heads and say "Wow, you must be smart. I could
never do that." As I mentioned, computer languages are relatively
simple, but inflexible. Computer programmers have to train themselves
to think and "talk" like machines in order to tell the computer
what to do. You don't need to be smart to do this, though you should
be good at symbolic logic (a subject that was developed and studied
for centuries before the first computer ever showed up). One very good
question raised by Theodore Roszak in his book The
Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial
Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking is: what is the damage
done to humans, especially children, when they are trained to think
like computers (roughly speaking, in a procedural rather than non-linear
fashion)? Ironically, it could well turn out that all those "smart"
computer programmers are actually leading the way to a degeneration
of the human species down to the level of computer "intelligence."
So how do we fight back against this dumbing-down of the human race?
First of all, to be perfectly clear: I am not a Luddite. I do
not suggest we throw away our computers, turn away from technology.
Nothing like that. I own a hybrid car, the Honda Insight, and deeply
appreciate all the technology jammed into that 50 MPG vehicle. My laptop
is overflowing with hundreds and hundreds of digital photos from my
travels. I love to work with computers. I love to write software and,
in fact, believe that when done properly, computer programming can be
as much art as engineering. That artistic element is the introduction
of human creativity into a machine world. Furthermore, I believe that
technology in general and computers in particular present us with a
wonderful opportunity: I have a gut feeling that these resources may
make possible (for the first time and only, of course, with sufficient
human will) the establishment of a Utopia on earth, in which masses
of people no longer live short, nasty, brutal lives, in which humans
live in peaceful co-existence with the rest of the inhabitants of this
incredible planet.
That will not happen, however, if we continue our descent to the level
of machine. The ideas I offer below for slowing or reversing the descent
are activities I have found helpful for keeping the creative/human juices
flowing.
I stay away from the television, especially any programs with laugh
tracks (the subject for a whole 'nother essay). I trade television time,
in fact, for game time -- and one of my favorite games is Set. Set is
the most incredible card game I have ever encountered. I play this game
with my kids, other peoples' kids, my friends, students in my classes.
It shifts my thinking to a whole new level. Visit http://www.setgame.com
to purchase the game. Please do not buy the software version!).
Mastermind is also a great brain exerciser. If, by the way, you find
yourself unable to play Mastermind smoothly and quickly, you probably
also have a hard time writing software.
I got rid of my digital watch and replaced it with an analog timepiece
(a really cool Seiko Kinetic that doesn't need batteries -- or sun,
for that matter). Hey, perhaps we should get rid of our watches entirely
and instead use the position of the sun to tell us the time! That way,
we'd have to go outside more frequently, feel the sun on our
skin and the wind rustling our hair.
I strive at all times to be creative, regardless of the activity.
This is our main edge over computers and we need to maintain it. You
can be creative through the medium of a computer and software, as I
mentioned earlier. You can (and should) be creative in every single
aspect of your life, from the way you cook to the way you mow your lawn
(as a child, I entertained myself by using the Toro mower to design
patterns into the quarter acre of grass my Dad insisted on maintaining
in Long Island suburbia).
Most important of all, I seek out direct contact over machine-intermediated
contact, whenever possible. I have decided to spend less time on email.
Instead, I talk to people, talk directly to people, without using computers.
I listen to people, to their voices, watch their mannerisms, enjoy their
touch. I encourage you to bring all of your senses into play as you
move through your day. Move through your day, don't let it move
through you.
If enough of us engage thoroughly and directly with our own lives and
those of other humans, we stand a very good chance of avoiding Singularities,
Skynets and other monstrosities of a silicon nature.
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Short But Sweet
Seen on Amazon.com...I searched for Books, "the age of information"
and that oh-so helpful, incorrigibly cross- and up-selling website offered
the following as a source of "advice":
Understand the World, Then Change It or Lead
It
by Alex Lightman, writer, CEO, and reliable predictor of the future
of the world
I am jealous. I usually get the tag line "one of the world's leading
experts on the PL/SQL language," but "reliable predictor of the future
of the world" is way more COOL.
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Nephews, Niece, Switzerland and Summer
First, a poem...
"I only have ears..."
Middle-aged couple
Black-skinned
Thickening comfortably around the waist,
sitting on the park bench,
glowing in the afternoon sun.
Her voice is scratchy -
A smoker's lament?
Perhaps she'd been singing
to him
for hours.
Birds cry and circle above,
golf clubs hit golf balls.
Babies cry in strollers, bats hit
baseballs.
His eyes follow the motion
of her lips, the lifting
of her eyes. His smile
blazes in total ignorance of the
skaters, walkers, cyclers passing by.
She leans back,
parcels scattered on her lap.
She looks to the sky,
the clouds, the sun, the world,
and offers her words
up for everyone, but first
they must pass through his ears:
"...for you."
- Steven Feuerstein, after a jog through Warren Park and a passing
glance at a park bench
So it's been a busy summer...
Over the past month, we have had two different sets of nieces and nephews
visit us, Brian and Michael from Greenville, NC and Ian and Mikaela
from San Jose, CA. There were several wonderful consequences of these
visits:
* I got to know my niece and nephews much better. It's one thing to
talk occasionally with the kids (ranging in age from 10 to 15) on the
phone, quite another to spend time, day after day, with them.
* I did all sorts of "tourist" and entertainment activities
that I would otherwise not have done. I am, I must admit, a bit of a
"stay at home" sort of person (otherwise how could I have
written so many books over the last seven years?). I can recall being
someone irritated, as a young man in my twenties, to think back over
my years of growing up on Long Island, just 50 miles from Manhattan,
and realize that my parents almost never took us to the city to enjoy
what it had to offer. Now I look at my own way of living in Chicago
and see that it is not much different. We rarely go to plays, to the
museums, etc.
Ah, but with the kids here, we HAD to "experience" Chicago.
So, I took Michael and Brian to ESPN Zone and to Nike Town (where I
discovered that Nike sells "retro" sneakers -- their designs
from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and I guess they were doing so well with it
that they recently bought a retro sneaker company - Converse!). We took
all the kids over various visits to two different water parks, Six Flags
Great America (roller coaster mania), the Art Institute, the Taste of
Chicago and Fourth of July fireworks by the City of Chicago. We went
shopping for clothes for the kids, took lots of bicycles rides, played
a whole lot of pool and ping pong. It was wonderful...
Some things that stand out for me:
* Standing in an hour-long line for the Demon roller coaster, I realized
that for many (especially Middle Class) Americans, this is the experience
that most closely resembles living in the 3rd World. In a country like
El Salvador in the 1980s for example (when Ronald Reagan and Ollie North
helped kill and torture hundreds of thousands of Central Americans to
maintain US control there), much of your life is lived in a harsh, tedious
struggle for survival. You wake up, work the land, if you have any,
or work someone else's land, you scratch together the food to feed your
family. And then, at moments you cannot predict, but only live in bone-quivering
anticipation of, the death squads and/or the Salvadoran army (not that
there was much of a difference) sweep into your village, terrorize you,
perhaps kill you or a member of your family, and then move on, leaving
you to pick up the pieces of your lives.
At Six Flags Great America, you stand around in long lines, sometimes
for two hours if you are obsessed with riding the very newest "attraction"
(such as Superman or Vertical Velocity or Deja Vu), with absolutely
nothing to do but watch TV screens force-feeding you ads or cartoons
or music videos, with the sun often burning down on your head, shuffling
along as if you were on your way to a prison cell. And then suddenly
you are strapped down tightly, and sent off on a 10 second or 30 second
confrontation with death. You trust the machines, so you don't really
believe you are going to die, but your brain is receiving visual and
other input that tells you otherwise, so your body starts manufacturing
adrenaline and endorphins and you are TERRIFIED at a basic physical
level, and then you are back where you started, and you get out to stand
on another line: Tedium and Terror.
* On July 3rd, we actually took Ian, Michael and Brian down to the Taste
of Chicago/July 4th fireworks (in Chicago, you can buy the Sunday paper
on Saturday, and they shoot off the July 4th fireworks on July 3rd.
Go figure). This is generally the sort of thing that we will pay good
money to avoid. The Taste takes the concept of Food Court to its irrational
limit: something like 100 restaurants set up booths in Grant Park. You
can then buy coupons (believe me, there are no bargains) to purchases
different tastes of Chicago restaurants. On an average day, the Taste
draws about 250,000 people. On July 3rd, something like 1,000,000 people
head downtown. So in reality what you do is join an unbelievable throng
of people in the streets and inch your way to the cashier to buy your
coupons. Then you shuffle slowly along until you find a vendor whose
food looks appetizing. Then you stand on line and inch your way to the
point of getting some food. Then you search for a place you can eat
your food and end up eating it standing up. You compulsively check and
re-check the contents of your pockets to make sure your wallet and phone
are still there. Then it gets dark and the fireworks blaze the sky.
They were wonderful. Over too quickly. And then, oh my, we joined hundreds
of thousands of people oozing slowly towards the trains, buses and parking
lots to get away. It WAS an awful lot of fun to see the streets totally
taken over by pedestrians. Downtown Chicago, unlike many European city
centers, has not created too many "no car zones". But that
night, the cars had to wait for US to pass. Cool.
Speaking of European city centers, I spent a week in July in Zurich
and Bern (three day seminar for Swisscom, plus visits to friends). Ah,
it is SO NICE to get out of the United States, to escape the so-called
freedom of life under Dubya, and relax in the social democracies of
Europe, where capitalism is prevalent, but citizens also insist that
there should and will be a reasonable standard of living for everyone.
To me, Europe feels much more free than the United States right now.
Getting off the soapbox, however, I had a great time in Zurich (just
a day or two) and then Bern for several days. Both are very old cities,
with buildings (mostly churches) dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries.
In the city center, houses
are crammed together very tightly, but it all has a sense of FITTING
together, working together, providing a decent comfortable place for
people to live and shop (and, boy, do Europeans like to shop!).
There is a very nice sense of public space in both places. Lots of
parks, lots of people out and about and enjoying themselves. One thing
that struck me particularly was the broad enjoyment of chess. In Chicago,
you can find parks where there are chess boards in concrete tables and
people gather to play. In Zurich and Bern there was some of that but
there were also giant
20' x 20' chess boards constructed right into the surface of the
park or the walkways. And next to these enormous boards were boxes that
contained giant chess pieces (and smaller sets as well). They are unlocked.
So anyone can come along, drag out these pieces (the king and queen
are perhaps 2.5 feet high), and play a game out in public. Even more
amazing, the art of kibbitzing seems to be completely condoned and even
encouraged. To kibbitz is to comment on someone else's game and, in
my experience, it is something very much frowned upon among chess players.
In Switzerland, kibbitzers would snort, shout out what seemed to be
disgust with the players' moves, and so on. Very entertaining!
Finally, while in Bern, I visited Einstein Haus, which is actually
the second floor apartment in which Einstein lived with his family (wife
and two children) during what is now called the Miraculous Years. It
was very cool to walk around the small apartment (here
is a photo of the steps leading up to the apartment) and think about
Einstein sitting here late at night, the family asleep, projecting his
mind into the most abstract, virtual world of quantum physics. What
kind of joy must he have felt to be struggling with complex equations
and ways of looking at the world never before attempted -- and then
to find that so much of this resolved down to the elegant E = MC(2)
(energy = mass times the square of the speed of light). Wow!
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My last book on Oracle PL/SQL
I have decided to write ONE MORE BOOK on PL/SQL. The title is Advanced
Oracle PL/SQL Programming (AOPP). I intend this book to be both a celebration
of the PL/SQL language (and what you can do with it) and a truly ADVANCED
book, covering non-trivial topics in-depth. I think this book will fill
an important gap in the treasure trove of texts on PL/SQL. I bet lots
of you feel like my books and others are useful when it comes to your
programming efforts, but you have in large part gone beyond them, extracted
all the nuggets of wisdom and guidance they have to offer. You need
more, and that "more" is both more specialized and more complex.
I will be working closely with Bryn Llewellyn, PL/SQL Product Manager,
and hope to make this a co-authored text. Even with his help, however,
I have no doubt that I need FURTHER assistance to make this book a success...
read more
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Recollections of Rides Past and Present
Ah, the joys of bicycle riding! When I was much younger, 12 or so,
I bought myself a fairly junky 10-speed bicycle (they were all the rage
then) and started riding all over Long Island, by myself. I would just
take off in the morning (summers) and go out for hours, riding wherever.
Sometimes I rode into parked cars (well, it only happened once. Very
embarrassing!). So I have a strong association of riding a bicycle with
youth and freedom.
This past week, I got to both ride a whole lot and revisit memories
of riding from high school days. On Sunday June 15, the City of Chicago
organized "Bike The Drive (www.bikethedrive.org), in which they close
off Lake Shore Drive (a highway running along the lakefront -- beautiful
drive) for cars from 5:30 AM to 10 AM -- and instead bicycle riders
fill up the four lanes in each direction for either a 15 or 30 mile
ride. I was out on the Drive at 5:45 AM, riding no-handed down one of
the center lanes on a glorious, sunny day. Ah, most wonderful! Made
more wonderful by the recollection it brought to me of doing much the
same thing on Long Island back in 1974 with my friend Vinnie Ciullo.
We decided we would take a LONG ride - 50 miles out to Montauk Point,
the eastern most point of the island. Then we'd sleep over/camp out,
and ride back the next day.
We started really early (like 4 AM) and decided what the heck, Long
Island Expressway is empty. Let's ride on that. Oh, that was delicious
fun! Cruising over the rolling hills and wide lanes, no cards in sight
-- until a police car was in sight and herded us off the Expwy (it WAS
dangerous...).
So we continued on to Montauk Point, it was a hot and sunny day. Vinnie's
knee was giving him hell. But we get to the Point, exhausted, but ready
- for what? To find some girls to hang out with, yes, that was what
we REALLY had in mind (I was a major geek back then, no girlfriend even
though I was a sophomore in high school). And after a short time of
checking out the scene, it became somehow abundantly clear to us that
that (finding a couple of girls) was NOT going to happen.
We looked at each other, shrugged. I said "You wanna ride back?" And
that's what did. Forget the camping out. Ignore Vinnie's painful knee.
Another 50 miles back to Wyandanch, where I lived. So that was my single
100 mile in a day ride.
Later this past week I went out for another ride (about 25 miles round
trip) and just as I started my return leg, the heavens opened up with
a terrific thunderstorm. Even saw some hail. I waited at a bus stop
with a very pleasant middle aged woman trying to get home, hoping the
heavy rain would subside. I called Veva; she said it wasn't even raining
at our house (12 miles south). That was a hopeful sign. So the rain
did let up after a while, though it never stopped completely. Finally,
it was time to go, regardless of precipitation. So off I went and in
minutes the heavy rain had returned and I was splashing along the road,
blinking rapidly, sometimes desperately, to clear my eyesight, the water
and gravel and dirt shooting off my wheels and up my back and shirtfront
(I don't have fenders on my bike).
Have you ever ridden in a heavy rainstorm? At first the raindrops are
bothersome. They are usually colder than the air temperature, and you
get kind of worried about safety, skidding, etc. But then you (I) reach
saturation point. You are soaked through and through, the water doesn't
feel cold. It feels the same as the air. Your feet squish in your shoes,
your eyes sting a bit because the salt content has gotten low --not
much saline in rainwater. But you just cruise along, oblivious to what
seems to people driving in their cars as terrible weather. So that is
what I did for ten miles. It was wonderful! My only concern was that
my cell phone and/or camera might get wet and short out. I solved that
problem by stopping at a Walgreens and asking for a plastic bag. The
cashier looked at me as though I were from outer space: a dripping,
bedraggled manifestation. But he handed over the bag and I was on my
way.
And THIS experience reminded me of a bicycle ride I took with two friends
in high school. One, George Marquardt, was a tall, athletic sort --
we'd been competing vigorously for years, and were in good shape for
a hard cycle ride. The third person, Chris Fox (I think that was his
last name), was a skinny, long-haired kid who was NOT very fit. So he
lagged behind us pretty much the whole way. I can remember going up
one hill that just went on and on - to the point that I was down to
my very easiest gear and barely turning the wheels (like a slow motion
rider). But I refused to give up, as did George, and we both made it.
Chris walked up most of the way. Then on the last leg of the trip,
the skies opened up and pelted us with rain. In minutes, George and
I were cruising recklessly through the puddles, shouting with joy. Chris
was lost in the greyness of the day; we decided at that point we couldn't
wait for him. Wasn't very nice of us. I wouldn't do that anymore, cause
now I am a much nicer person.
And my final cycle reflections of the week:
My niece, Mikaela, and nephew, Ian, are visiting us for a month. Ian
is 10 and a delightful fellow, but we discovered after he arrived that
no one had taught him how to ride a bicycle. Well, that was something
that needed remedying sooner rather than later.
So yesterday morning, I lubricated one of Eli's old bicycles, a small
scale 5 speed vehicle. And off we went, zooming up and down our section
of Maplewood Avenue. As I expected and hoped, after a few rounds of
wobbly uncertainty, Ian got the hang of it and was riding on his own.
We got him a helmet and then went off nearby Warren Park, so he could
ride nicer trails, with me running alongside him. What an honor and
a privilege, to teach Ian how to ride and achieve his own higher level
of freedom!
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Privacy Equals Freedom
I just finished reading THE CODE BOOK by Simon Singh (visit http://www.simonsingh.net/
for lots more information about the book and the author). I strongly
encourage you to check it out. THE CODE BOOK is an eminently readable
history of cryptography (the art and science of both making and cracking
codes). It helped me to finally understand the fundamentals of encryption
-- and reinforced for me the importance of encryption to my own privacy
and to our entire society's freedom.
At the very end of the book, I read about something called PGP or "Pretty
Good Privacy". Without getting into all the details, it is possible
right now, today, and for no cost whatsoever to you (an individual),
to encrypt your communications so that even the NSA (the National Security
Administration of the United States, the most secret of our secret agencies,
responsible for massive data collection and analysis) cannot decrypt
or decode what it is you have written.
Why is that important? Well, first of all, let's acknowledge the downside
of such a situation: criminals and other people with bad intent can
take advantage of this capability to evade the eyes of law enforcement.
This is certainly a problem, and one that Mr. Singh explored on pages
303-313. The US Government tried to "solve" this problem by
insisting that all encryption use special technology called "Clipper"
that, in essence, allows the NSA to easily decrypt anything and everything
that is indecipherable to others.
I don't know about you, but I don't trust my government (and certainly
don't trust the NSA) to hold the keys to all my privacy. That's NOT
its job, according to the Constitution. And that effort to control encryption
did fail. So, yes, bad guys (and gals) can use encryption to hide their
nasty and deadly secrets -- which they have been doing for centuries,
anyway.
The upside of such encryption is that it means private citizens can
maintain a level of privacy and freedom from the prying eyes of their
government. In these rather dark days for civil liberties in our own
great nation, when the Attorney General justifies indefinite and secret
detention for just about whomever he doesn't like, when "terrorism"
has replaced the bogey man of "communism" and is used to justify
any and every attack on many of our cherished freedoms (and many lies
by our government, as has recently been so clearly exposed with the
absence of WMDs in Iraq), I personally feel very comforted that I have
a way to communicate securely with others, if I so desire.
But there is one catch: for me to send a message to you that no one
else can read, you need to obtain your own special "key",
just like I did (and I show you below).
How do you go about doing this? Simply visit www.pgpi.com
and download PGP. There is no charge for individuals, though if you
want to fully integrate PGP encryption in your email system you will
need to pay $50 (that's what I did). Then you install the software,
generate your key and we are ready to chat in total security!
For example, I am now going to share with you my "public"
PGP key (I also have a "private" key that I do not share with
anyone; the combination of these two keys allows us to communicate in
privacy). It is...
mQGiBD7kAnkRBADKlWxW0bplLfIcZJt9sakfjUAqtt5RAZstzkg5d/Ti2ZAiEBzU
i4p4ZIRRhhpSRJcebyfucg/HriCMgV6j5kBUkDhB9bKBZRFl3VWk4hZbYyESmITG
tdehyrHeB/5wSKi5+6T6o6BuVY5AV41vridVgNPNHt9XiFBO18dLB7B1uwCg/9G1
MflQ29HRqq9Fb1BTQSQJAV8D/2/c3CnRkBDIqunQtAomrRVDluTBOnFQ/GB0W3dd
4TB3eNgZP39t8UE48LhR+AAOrOy35VlBGz8RLLD1l2CTvUleKUP6uh/95oNe+/O9
/wb1sUqIVF39tD37fGDOVtGMiDyYdZKDIKjVxIY11oS6FsdRqaWa8nMpVo6kAgGV
tH/4A/4jv77ArrOPvq7tuU69M+YcvtX7hEwVWHFP4tkpUyOKWjvRbY29y8WOLQLm
pFyRVAWFMKOwLP13z7PmdpMe+pV/HeajVnUig4HNg61eYZFRSj0RVV/zKnAAORXF
E/WlwnXBNDnuFQFxq2KKv4rKl1vHM8DlcGao0NOC51Ed+EcaxLQvU3RldmVuIEZl
dWVyc3RlaW4gPHN0ZXZlbkBzdGV2ZW5mZXVlcnN0ZWluLmNvbT6JAFcEEBECABcF
Aj7kAnkHCwkIBwMCCgIZAQUbAwAAAAAKCRAMgwxpMAHz4x9MAKDi8Bgf+yUxfHXY
Q4FvVG9O27dg0ACg9fmSw7L7QmAnwjIys/LO2PeeyDG5Ag0EPuQCeRAIAPZCV7cI
fwgXcqK61qlC8wXo+VMROU+28W65Szgg2gGnVqMU6Y9AVfPQB8bLQ6mUrfdMZIZJ
+AyDvWXpF9Sh01D49Vlf3HZSTz09jdvOmeFXklnN/biudE/F/Ha8g8VHMGHOfMlm
/xX5u/2RXscBqtNbno2gpXI61Brwv0YAWCvl9Ij9WE5J280gtJ3kkQc2azNsOA1F
HQ98iLMcfFstjvbzySPAQ/ClWxiNjrtVjLhdONM0/XwXV0OjHRhs3jMhLLUq/zzh
sSlAGBGNfISnCnLWhsQDGcgHKXrKlQzZlp+r0ApQmwJG0wg9ZqRdQZ+cfL2JSyIZ
Jrqrol7DVekyCzsAAgIH/i/TMMFikvo/8ZyF72waFB+JlfHQgZnG5YTLQeY9+zQn
oeE7W25nogsep9KtfOEdDOPAXSQR9D+0JRDHkIC7pEORWPROUXDp7m+QouLD06kB
cFAw6ANiL7VcFTYaHVzI7LlYBojMbi3W8u2hOuboSD5IyQmgEdMNHAOaj54FAqff
Ye2tLOksd2FrGbpr9AP2Q+yjCMsErIZtusXt4FHDborKvV6ehhWnjz6RCO5tJJ1S
P2lE+eI9HCQiG/hFpkOeLiDYAKxnWiI4h6vrhmtBsVQUMNRSQHze+w13H8c1aJQh
aEpYT1CHpiwuPYfV1HAXmC5p1cCA6CZk3DmCq8INQZGJAEwEGBECAAwFAj7kAnkF
GwwAAAAACgkQDIMMaTAB8+MFXwCfY8GvlUztS+tHKt1mw0XczMOTOLUAn2iYbo++
dig8r9oAvL4AdE3z+L0F
=zahA
Suppose that I want to send the following message to a friend:
"The ability to create something new -- that is the spark of the
divine which is present in all of us."
I type it into my email message box and then click on the padlock icon.
PGP then converts my message into encrypted text, that will look something
like this (Note: for anyone wishing to crack my key by analyzing this
combination of plaintext -- my message in readable form -- and ciphertext
-- the encrypted form, please be aware that this ciphertext was NOT
generated from the plaintext described above. No, sirree. It's just
an example.):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=afnj
If you have a PGP key and make your public key available to me, you
would then be able to decrypt and read this garbled nonsense as "plaintext".
This is very cool stuff, and actually reflects some remarkable breakthroughs
in abstract mathematics and cryptography. In fact, according to Singh,
this form of encryption will probably not be penetratable until someone
manages to create what is called "quantum computer," a computing
device that works at the microscopic, not macroscopic level. That is
many years off, as is "quantum encryption."
So....please do download PGP and generate your keys. Even if you don't
see the need for this privacy now, you will strengthen the fundamental
freedoms of this country by using the software, by getting ready. Because
if the likes of Ashcroft and Rumsfeld have their way, there is little
doubt in my mind but that we will be wanting to hide an awful lot of
"stuff" (like our children) from our own "democractically
elected" government.
From the fingertips of a somewhat paranoid man, warm regards to all!
Steven
download "Pretty
Good Privacy" ( PGP)
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June 2, 2003: Two obscenities buried in the
Bush-Congress Tax Cuts
Do we really live in the greatest democracy ever known to the human
race? Maybe, but it sure isn't all that great a democracy. Consider
the tax cut just signed into law by President Bush. It turns out that
in last minute negotiating sessions, a handful of Representatives and
Senators decided that hundreds of thousands of poor families (earning
less than $27,000 a year) would be denied additional tax relief in the
form of increased child tax credits.Ý That would have cost the US Treasury
$3-4 billion.
As the White House spokesperson regretfully explained, that's just
too much money given the strained finances of the federal government.
Of course, it is only that much because there are so many very, very
poor people in this country. And there isn't enough money to help the
working poor feed their children because we must instead ensure that
Halliburton and Bechtel and the like receive their payoffs in the form
of sweet, non-competitive bids for "rebuilding" Iraq.
But President Bush says that this tax cut, which overwhelmingly favors
those already rolling in the dough, will boost the economy -- if it
actually would do that, which many (most?) economists reject.
But, OK, I guess I can accept that, as long as I know that everyone
across the board is sacrificing to get our national economy back in
order. But then I also discovered that another round of behind-the-scenes
"legislating" has resulted in an increase in the tax credit allowed
to owners of massive SUVs: 6,000 pounds or more (think Hummer H2). The
cost of these vehicles, ranging from the $25,000 to over $75,000, can
be easily written off in their entirety as a business expense. The maximum
write-off in previous years was $30,000. Congress has now increased
that limit to $100,000!!! Car dealers predict that customers who probably
would have bought smaller, less expensive and less gas-guzzling vehicles
will choose these road monsters, instead, because it will actually cost
them less money.
What sort of democracy results in this abhorrent behavior by our supposed
representatives? Seems to me that they are representing just a small,
wealthy minority in this country, the same people in fact who fill up
their campaign coffers.
I find in conversations with many members of the tech middle class
(programmers and DBAs and the like) readily admit that they feel that
their Congressional representatives are bought and paid for by corporations
and wealthy people. But they also don't feel like there is anything
they can do about it (and they are not hurting enough from this broad,
but almost invisible corruption to be angry enough to really challenge
the powers that be.
And so the rich will most definitely get richer, the poor will get
poorer, and a decade from now when cities are burning from the rioting
of desperate, hungry, outraged citizens, those with the big bucks will
shake their heads and wonder (from inside their gated and walled communities,
thinking themselves safe from the hordes) what is wrong with "those
people."
We are rapidly moving away from even a pretense of a democratic, egalitarian
society towards an 18th century-style aristocracy. And then there was
the guillotine...
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May 25, 2003: MATRIX IMPLODED
I went to the movie theater a few nights ago, and eagerly forked over
just under $20 so Veva and I could marvel in the masterful manipulations
of reality in Matrix Reloaded. Well, to be honest, I wasn't exactly
eager. I had read some of the reviews and anticipated a bloated and
talky sequel to The Matrix. But I wasn't going to miss it, so off we
went...and I came away truly disgusted.
And now you are muttering to yourself "What a downer this guy
is. Can't he just relax for a minute, forget about the myriad injustices
of the world, and enjoy a high-powered science fiction action movie?"
Well, believe you me, I can do that. I really can. Let me list a few
of my favorite movies of all time...
BLADE RUNNER
TERMINATOR
MATRIX
TERMINATOR may be just about my favorite movie, period (well, except
maybe for Bullworth, but that is a whole different class of film). From
it, and the Matrix as well, I can extract some of the features of these
films that I so love (the same characteristics apply very well to my
favorite books as well, like Fatherland by Richard J. Harris):
* Good vs. Evil on a grand scale: I like my entertainment in bold strokes.
And since I really do want to defeat Evil and bring prosperity, peace,
justice and happiness to everyone, I like to see movies that take on
the big issues. And if you are going to take on this fundamental conflict
of good vs. evil, forget the small potatoes. If you can figure out how
to construct the plot line so that the fate of the human race is at
stake, that is good. If the entire planet can be saved (or lost), a
chill runs down my spine. A battle for the existence of the whole universe,
I am SO THERE!
* Tight plot: I don't want to have to pretend to be stupid to enjoy
the plot line of a movie. The plot should be well-constructed without
any ridiculous holes or contradictions. That doesn't mean I am opposed
to the use of plot devices that are quite unbelievable, like the Terminator
machine. It just means that once you pick a plot device, use it consistently,
logically and ruthlessly.
* Some sense of gritty realism: it can't all be easy. Good guys have
to get hurt, some might even die. There should be a shocking betrayal,
the odds ought to be stacked against the forces of good, with the situation
getting more grim and irretrievable with each passing moment. And perhaps
at the end the hero might even die, as long as evil is held at bay for
that sacrifice. Someone has to pay a price.
* First-person narrative: I find myself attracted to stories told rigorously
from a first-person perspective. It engages me more thoroughly. Actually,
the Matrix did not follow this precisely; we are shown the traitor,
for example, negotiating with the Agent -- a quite unnecessary lapse,
really. Actually, the Terminator doesn't do this either...ah well, I
still like that movie a whole lot. Maybe this is something that really
only happens in books (again, check out Fatherland. Also the Shadow
of the Torturer series by Gene Wolfe).
Bottom line: I really liked The Matrix a lot. Sure the effects were
cool (though that shoot-out in the lobby of the building when they went
to rescue Morpheus was just plain dumb), but the tight story line, the
mystery, the story told centrally from Neo's bewildered perspective,
and the epic nature of the struggle really made it special for me.
I had high hopes for Matrix Reloaded, I really did. I read articles
about how the Wachowski Brothers were committed to the plot, to making
the movie more than a special effects spectacular. So I felt a bit betrayed,
as I walked out of the theater wondering if they realized that they
had actually succeeded in making a SPOOF of The Matrix. It was so bad,
it was funny. Let me give you just two examples...
1. Fight scene between Neo and 100 Smiths. You may have heard about
this. There isn't just one nasty, tough Agent Smith. There are hundreds.
And they all descend on Neo at once. And so of course Neo fights them
off...but he can't seem to actually damage any of them, no matter what
he does. So he knocks them aside, flings them in the air (GREAT SPECIAL
EFFECTS!)...over and over and over again. It was clear after the first
3 seconds (of maybe 264 seconds total) that there was NO POINT to this
fight, that he should do what he eventually did...conjure up his Superman
trick and blast off into sky, leaving the Agent Smiths shaking the dust
of their suit and walking off.
2. Neo and Trinity (so cool she seemed like a very mobile mannequin
most of the time) and Metaphor (I mean, Morpheus) are told to track
down some mysterious program entity named "Merrill-Lynchian"
(at least that was how it sounded to us) in order to find the Keymaker
(cute little guy). Merrill-Lynchian turns out to be a fairly perverted
manifestation sporting of all things a really bad French accent. And
he decides to demonstrate his amusements by feeding a woman some sort
of software glitch in her dessert that...what? Gives her an orgasm?
Fills her bladder? It is hard to tell as she scurries off, apparently
to the powder room. But before that, we are treated with a "scene"
in which the movie switches to "raw" Matrix mode -- her thighs
are presented in streaming green bytes of the Matrix code. And then
her thighs (in actually, line drawings made of little green blips; looks
like the work of a drooling teenage animator) open and something blossoms
in her privates...and I sat there wondering: Am I really watching what
I think I am watching? Did someone actually think this was clever?
Whew. Well, hey, I don't want to give away too many of the treats.
There are, of course, some good parts. I really like the plot twist
that reveals the role that Neo and Morpheus really have been playing
-- not what they thought, not by a long shot. And some of the societal
tensions in Zion, such as the adoration of the Neo as the One (hey,
wow, "Neo" and "One" -- they are anagrams of one
another!), are kind of interesting.
Here is the question I always have when I walk away from movies that
cost over $100 million to make and are filled with moments of utter
stupidity: how much could it possibly cost to hire someone who can actually
come up with an interesting, challenging, consistent and compelling
plot -- AND write good dialogue? $1 million? $5 million? How about $100,000
to the right hungry author? There is simply no excuse for the garbage
they throw at us...except that they just don't care. They don't have
to. They just have to be ready to spend enough money on marketing campaigns
to convince us identifying ourselves with this sort of dreck will transfer
some significance to our own lives.
So, listen, by all means go see the movie -- but try not to pay too
much for it...because I fear that I have uncovered the REAL story of
the Matrix in our society.
In the Matrix world, humans are batteries for machines. Our energy
is sucked out of us while our minds are kept occupied, and distracted
from the terribly distressing reality.
In the real world (or what we stubbornly insist on believing is real),
the entertainment "industry" (scary) is developing more and
more sophisticated methods for designing products whose purpose is very
simply to extract increasing amounts of wealth from our pockets, while
leaving us sitting dumbly in our stadium seating, inundated by Dolby
X and Tri-vision whatever, mouth hanging open, accepting the latest
iteration in the Matrix or Halloween or Rush Hour or Die Hard or Terminator
series (I figure that my great grand-children might finally see the
entry in that interminable testosterone bedevilment in which John Connor
DEFEATS the machines), hands groping blindly for another handful of
$15 popcorn, slurping from the $12 liter barrel of Cherry Coke.
How different are we from those slugs in the Matrix pods?
And with that thought, I wish you all well!
Steven
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May 19, 2003: AGONY AND ECSTASY
That's what software development is all about, right? I had a taste
of the intense highs and lows this week.
These days, my trainings and seminars are usually one of two topics:
The Brave New World of PL/SQL - new features in Oracle8i and Oracle9i
MIN-MAX PL/SQL - a best practices and tuning class.
In the Brave New World class, I teach my eager students about dynamic
SQL, in which you construct your queries, deletes, DDL statements and
so forth "on the fly," that is, while the application is running. Dynamic
SQL is lots of fun, but as I warn my students it can also be dangerous.
To prove this, I show them the drop_whatever procedure (code at end
of message).
With this simple command...
SQL> exec drop_whatever ('%', '%')
you can remove everything from your schema. "Show THAT to your DBAs!"
I advise the attendees. I always get a laugh, and then conclude by warning
them: "If you are going to use this utility, you might at least want
to add a validation so that you are unable to pass a wildcard to BOTH
the arguments (name and type). That way you can avoid any really dumb
and utterly regrettable moves."
OK, fast forward to May 2003. It is two days before a public seminar
I am giving in the Quest Warrenville (IL) offices. I am working on Ounit,
a really cool Windows interface to utPLSQL (unit testing framework for
PL/SQL developers -- more info on Ounit forthcoming soon!). I am experiencing
some weird behavior with synonyms so I decide to drop utPLSQL. I do
so in my SCOTT (developer) schema, but am still having problems. So
I decide that I must get rid of any utPLSQL objects in any schemas.
Here is what I do:
SQL> connect sys/sys as sysdba
SQL> @dropwhatever.sp
SQL> exec drop_whatever ('ut%', '%')
It starts running and I stare at it and then gasp and move as quickly
as possible to shut down that process, in fact, shutdown abort the database...what
did I notice?
Well, all utPLSQL objects start with "ut", it is true. But, gee, come
to think of it, there are one or two other objects in the Oracle database
that start with "ut"...like
ALL THE SUPPLIED UTL PACKAGES...UTL_FILE, UTL_HTTP, UTL_SMTP...
Argh! Sure enough, when I restarted the database and reconnected, the
UTL packages were gone. I just sat there for a few moments staring at
the screen, and then started laughing. Talk about not following your
own darned advice. It's not so often (or, at least, I do try to minimize
the occasions) that I so act the fool, following a pathway that I laid
out for everyone to see and be wary of.
Now, sure, I could have recovered just those packages, but, you know,
I am just not that adventurous (and I wasn't entirely sure that there
weren't OTHER objects removed that had sinister implications). For me
it is easier to simply do a default reinstall. Which is what I then
did...
So that was my software agony story of the week.
How about the ecstasy? Ah, I have been having a wondrous time the last
couple of months working with Patrick Barel in the Netherlands as we
construct some software and fulfill some of my long-time dreams.
We started out creating Ounit, as I mentioned above, a graphical interface
to one of my fine creations, utPLSQL(http://utplsql.sourceforge.net/).
I believe that these two "products" (utPLSQL is open source, available
to all to download and use for free. Ounit (www.ounit.com) is going
to be a commercial product, though it will be free initially and maybe
always be free...I am trying to figure that all out right now!) could
have a deep and fundamental effect on the quality of PL/SQL you write
and the productivity with which you write it. Please check it out!
Well, so that's been going pretty well, but this past week I decided
that wasn't enough. You (we, those of us who are PL/SQL developers)
need more than unit testing. We need tools that help us work much, much
smarter than we do now. This means generating, rather than writing code,
automatically validating the quality of our code and conformance to
best practices/standards, code review, and more. The IDEs that are out
there offer excellent editors, debuggers and browsers, but fall short
on these "added value" items (except for Quest's Formatter Plus, which
is an outstanding analysis and formatting tool).
So I decided to work on creating such a product (code names include
Odev, Lazybones, and ROSE - Really Outrageous Software Enhancement).
And the first step, I decided was to integrate Ounit's testing capabilities
with code generation. So I spent lots of hours this week refactoring
(reworking the internals) of some existing code generation logic. This
involved diving deep into the most awful -- and most awesome -- code
I have ever written, an 8,000 line package. And amazingly enough two
days later and 3,000 lines fewer, this code base emerged in working
order, integrated into a new meta-data structure.
What a wonderful feeling of satisfaction! This follows a familiar pattern
with me: I identify something with my software that I really want to
do. I recognize that it will take a while and, perhaps, have dubious
payback. But I SO want to do it. Should I take the plunge, tear all
my work into pieces, scatter them about on my computer and in my brain,
and then laboriously piece them back together? YES! So off I go, and
soon I reach a moment (or many such moments) when I despair at ever
being able to put my Humpty Dumpty of a program back together, when
I say to myself "Who needs this? Just delete the directory and go back
to what you had before." But I (almost always) push through, accept
the mental challenge, and make it all work. And when it does work....aaaaahhhh!
I have to tell you, this sure beats agonizing over the latest suicide
bombing, the most recent IDF attack in the Gaza Strip, the sound of
Bush brownshirts marching down the pathways of my increasingly paranoid
mind. Turning into my software is like being the skipper of a submarine,
who shouts "Descend! Descend!" to avoid the rushing attack of the enemy.
Well, I am very, very far from done in terms of the overall development
process for "Odev", but I was so pleased to see that I could work carefully
and methodically (not, I will admit to you, my usual modus operandi)
through such a tangle and come out of the other side relatively unscathed.
One downside, unfortunately, of this newfound obsession is that my
brain is going 1,000 miles a minute -- with the result that I keep waking
up at 5:30 AM with new ideas and a need to hurry downstairs to try them
out. But that's OK -- the joy of creating something new outweighs the
need for sleep...as long as I drink lots of water and get a bunch of
exercise.
So excuse me while I gulp down a glass of water and then head over
to the bowling alley for some zen-meditation-sport.
Warm regards, Steven
Click here for "DROP_WHATEVER"
May 12, 2003: When Is Now Too Late?
I have always felt that my father carries with him a feeling of guilt for not
having done more during World War II to try to raise awareness in this
country of the Nazi death camps (he was born in 1929, so in 1945 he
was just 16, so it's not like he was in a position to do much, but every
voice counts and so on). And how many lived through the 1930s, whether
in Germany, the rest of Europe or (back then) that distant and seemingly
very separated nation, the United States, to then think back and wonder:
* Why didn't we take heed of the danger signs?
* When should we have said "Enough!" and stood up to the fascists,
the brutal hordes, the cowardly assassins?
Perhaps I am alarmist. I am certainly getting more and more paranoid
as the days go by. Yet I cannot help but see parallels to that time
-- both in the United States and in Israel, very sadly and tragically
enough. Rather than offer my own somewhat inchoate observations on this,
I offer below two articles that I found very interesting and hope that
you will as well. When you are done reading, ask yourself: What would
it take? What would Bush, Aschroft, Cheney, Rumsfeld have to do in order
to force you to look yourself in the mirror and admit: "These men
do not respect our Constitution. They do not seek world peace. They
must be stopped before it is too late!"
Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon Wolin online
article PDF of article
Elsewhere, Perhaps by Gideon Levy online
article PDF of article
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May 2, 2003: A leader among men -- or at least among incompetent boy scouts
These days, I imagine that lots of people consider me a "natural leader" of
some sort, and I can see why. My obsessive-compulsive nature has propelled
me in recent years to help found and build several Jewish peace groups
(Not In My Name, Jewish Unity for a Just Peace, the Refuser Solidarity
Network). In the past, I was very involved in other progressive political
initiatives. In my professional career, I have worked hard to avoid
taking on management responsibilities, but as an author and teacher
I at least seem to offer direction and inspiration to Oracle PL/SQL
technologists.
I realized just the other day that it is quite easy for me to recall
the first moment in which I was able to glimpse even the remotest possibility
that I might actually be some sort of leader. That epiphany occurred
at a sleep-away Boy Scout camp when I was twelve years old.
Yes, I was a Boy Scout, but not of the Eagle Scout variety, which is
no big surprise given the raw material. As a child, I was afflicted
with a multitude of allergies, asthma, truly terrible eczema, and an
inferiority complex when it came to physical activity and acts requiring
manual dexterity. I will now make a naked grab for sympathy by describing
a scene or two from my early life: at the age of five, I would regularly
have to soak my legs in a hot bath in the evening so that my mother
could peel off the socks that had gotten stuck to my skin from the bleeding
sores. Around this time, my parents also resorted to tying my hands
and legs to the bedposts at night to keep me from scratching. When I
was hospitalized with a severe asthma attack, the nurses were shocked
to discover that I was so accustomed to being trussed up, that I found
it difficult to sleep in the hospital until they tied me down. I had
this strange problem with the tendons in my right knee, so that if I
crouched down those tendons would sometimes "twist" up -- I don't know
how to describe it any better -- and leave me in severe, cramped pain.
Gymnastics classes at school were pure hell.
In the third grade, my eyesight had degraded sufficiently to require
classes, which only intensified my bookish appearance -- and reality.
I loved to read. I can still remember in first grade (age 6) I was so
advanced in my reading skills that the teacher would give me, and another
alphabetically competent boy named Steven Baltrusitis, special reading
assignments. He and I would tear through the stories, competing with
an intensity that I am not sure I have ever matched in the ensuing years.
At the age of three or so, I fell into the deep end of the public pool.
I have hazy memories of floating serenely downward amidst bubbles, not
feeling terribly alarmed -- and then I was pulled to safety by my father.
The ensuing panic and hysteria at the surface, however, seems to have
left me fearful of water, so that for years putting my face under the
surface was almost physically impossible for me to do. I still recall
the humiliation of being forced by my parents to take a very basic swimming
class when I was perhaps 11, in which I towered over all the other much-younger
kids in the class -- and still steadfastly refused to jump off the diving
board into the deep end.
But please do not feel too horrified on my behalf! At the age of 14,
I embarked on a second round of allergy shots and, contrary to all despairing
predictions at the time and much to the amazement of all, my allergies
soon cleared up, my eczema ceased to torment me, and the asthma loosened
its hold on my lungs. As a young and now middle-aged adult, I am very
healthy and reasonably fit. Furthermore, I do not exhibit the slightest
S&M tendencies at this time. (Let me be clear that I do not regard such
desires as inherently wrong as long as they are fulfilled through the
actions of consenting adults). One must, of course, wonder what scars
such traumatic events would leave on a young boy. Or one might simply
get on with one's life.
That's what I do, for the most part. And right now, my life consists
of boring you with the details of my childhood. So let's get on with
it, shall we?
Needless to say, I was not a big, strapping boy who reveled in nature.
For all that, however, I always loved to play games of almost any variety
-- board games, card games, hockey, basketball, ping-pong. I was terrible
at running, wind-wise, but I loved to play, and have always been competitive.
My father, born and raised in New York City, was also determined to
(a) engage in "typical" (i.e., not terribly "Jewish") American male
bonding experiences, and (b) make sure that I enjoyed the outdoors.
For this, I thank him deeply. My father was not particularly comfortable
in the outdoors or in the physical world. He was an accountant and lawyer,
he played pinochle each week with his buddies, he went to synagogue.
But he didn't play any sports as an adult or exercise. I think he wanted
to make sure that I was able to appreciate nature and also escape at
least partly from the typical Jewish world of books and the life of
the mind.
So I joined pretty early on as a Cub Scout. My Cub Scout "master" was
the mother of a scout; my clearest memory of her is that she liked to
collect little statues of elephants. When I got older, I graduated to
the Boy Scouts. We did the usual knot-tying merit badge activities for
a couple of years, but it was pretty boring stuff. About the most exciting
thing that happened was when some bully pushed my head into a metal
cabinet while I was getting a drink at the water fountain. I appreciated
all the attention I got, and all the other kids were fascinated with
all the blood.
But then we got a new scoutmaster: Ed Hanaway. Mr. Hanaway was a hard-drinking
Irish man who ran a landscaping business and loved the outdoors like
I loved books. He couldn't give a hoot about the rigmarole of Boy Scouts
and certainly never spent a moment lecturing us on reverence of or to
anything at all, but he was a naturalist of the first degree. He could
name every plant, every tree, every animal dropping. His enthusiasm
transformed the Boy Scout experience for me and everyone else from one
of respect for some ridiculously militaristic religious mumbo jumbo
and authoritarianism into a love of nature and real companionship. To
him, the point of Boy Scouts was to provide an excuse for escaping from
the restraints of suburban Long Island life. My father and I were happy
to go along for the ride.
Ed and my father became good friends, though (or perhaps because) they
were opposites in almost every way. Ed owned several acres of wooded
land behind his house and we built a little fire circle there, with
carved wooden posts and so on. Sure, the Boy Scout troop would meet
in homes and schools, but we also sat in the back at night around the
fire, telling stories, carving small chunks of wood, and in general
injecting some sense of mystery into our lives.
And Ed loved to go camping, pretty much any time of the year. So on
a fairly regular basis, my Dad and I (sometimes just myself if he was
too busy to get away) would load up the sleeping bags and backpacks
and boots and mess kits and who remembers what else, meet up with the
crew at Taukomas Elementary School's parking lot early, early on a Saturday
morning, and drive off to a campgrounds or large park for a couple days
of hiking, sleeping under the stars, cooking over a fire and just generally
experiencing a sense of personal freedom that has probably contributed
more to my intolerance of bigots and authoritarians than my Jewish upbringing.
And then one year it was decided that our Boy Scout troop, steeped
as it was in animalism (?) and anarchy, would go to a two-week sleep-away
camp, and live amongst "real" Boy Scouts, without the protection of
our boisterous scoutmaster. I had very mixed feelings about it, but
in the end joined about a dozen stalwarts on the bus off to, well, wherever
it was. I have no idea. Probably upstate New York.
It was, overall, not a very enjoyable experience. The food was awful,
the bunkmates often cruel. Most of the kids were way more into Boy Scouts,
into merit badges and status, achievement and the showing-off of honed
skills that involved things like building bridges, than I would ever
be. And then there was the initiation rite. That's how I saw it, though
for everyone else it was simply the swimming test. Before you could
be allowed to cavort freely in the lake, you had to show that you could
swim some distance without sinking to the bottom. I am certain it was
a very reasonable distance and a minimal sort of test -- for the normal
Boy Scout. If memory serves me properly, though, they wouldn't let me
dog paddle all the way. I had to swim, to put my head below the surface.
I failed the test. It was horrible. I clearly didn't fit in, everyone
was laughing at me, I was a freak.
And then one day it was time to earn the merit badge for hiking. This
involved going on a strenuous march (no lagging behind allowed), setting
up our tents smoothly and quickly, sleeping all the way through the
night without crying for our mothers, and then hiking back to the main
campgrounds and lodges.
So off we went, a half dozen or so boys from my troop, amidst dozens
of others. It was a hot day. We were a "low-tech" group, even by those
standards, so our packs didn't fit well, our sleeping bags were heavy,
probably our canteens even leaked. We had little experience in lengthy
hikes down dusty trails in which we could not stop whenever we wanted
to appreciate a certain tree or marvel at the tracks of a fox. And very
quickly, my friends started to disintegrate. We fell to the end of the
line. We stumbled and complained. We talked about turning around and
going back.
And then I started to whistle. Perhaps it was the theme to Bridge Over
the River Kwai. Perhaps it was some marching band tune I'd learned at
school (oh yes, I also played drums rather badly). Whatever it was,
I found that when I whistled at a certain pace, my legs were simply
compelled to move along at that same pace. The whistling, the swift,
sure movement of my legs, the coordinated swinging of my arms, all of
this energized me, gave me purpose. In just a few moments, I was setting
the pace for my friends; urging them on; keeping them going. I became
the leader of the pack, my utter failure at the swim test forgotten.
They looked up to me. They needed me to keep them from failing.
In this way, we made it to camp. We then made fools of ourselves as
we scrambled to figure out all the poles and pins and fabric of our
tents, all under the scrutiny of some hardly-sweating Eagle Scout with
a stopwatch. After all, you didn't deserve a merit badge if you couldn't
put up your tent within a certain amount of time!
We made it through the night and then I whistled my friends back the
next day to the main camp site and our beds. I got my merit badge and
went on with my life. But I think that I changed in some fundamental
way on that day, walking in the hot sun, whistling through the dust
raised by tramping feet. I realized that I had some inner strength,
extra resources on which I could draw. And I saw that this inner strength
could be used to help and inspire others.
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February 20, 2003: My eyes have seen the glory...
Dear all,
My apologies for the long delay since my last missive -- and don't
panic! I am not about to unload a 10 page endless meandering upon you.
Instead, I want to take a moment to revel in the following numbers
LEFT
20-20 RIGHT 20-25
20-20? Sure, we all know what that means perfect vision. And I am
proud to announce that for the first time in my life since I was eight
years old, I can see the world without the assistance any corrective
lenses whatsoever!
How is this possible? Simple -- simple, that is if you live in a
modern, civilized state and have enough disposable income to spend over
$1500 on elective surgery.
Yesterday, my eyeballs went "under the knife" and then were
subjected to computer controlled laser beams. One day later I sit in
front of my computer, free of pain or discomfort, able to read the thin,
small letters on this screen. Quite remarkable! I once again feel very
fortunate to live in this moment (and to have been born in the United
States and, well, to have been the recipient of a number of other race
and class privileges. Just like Geroge Bush, my "affirmative
action" program is deeply embedded in the status quo. I accrue
advantages without even noticing!).
About eight months ago, I decided that I would take a
"sabbatical" this summer (June through August). I wasn't sure
then and am still not precisely sure exactly what this will mean. At a
minimum, I will step back from my positions of leadership/responsibility
in much of my political work, and keep my "work work" to a
minimum), but I am determined to do it. I will clear my plate enough o
let me step back and think about my life, and what I want to do with the
rest of my life -- and start writing a novel.
About six weeks ago, I decided pretty much on the spur of the moment
that to "kick off" my sabbatical I would have my eyes adjusted
by lasers (aka, LASIK surgery). So I did some research, went to a couple
of eye surgery places, validated that my eyes were good candidates
("Excellent!" I was assured by the doctors who would take a
big chunk of change for the privilege), and discovered that even in the
last few years technology had improved so that I could expect to be
non-functional only for a day (not the two weeks I had heard of
earlier). How is this possible? In the old days, they used the laser to
abraid or roughen up the surface of the corner so the laser could then
get under the surface and adjust the shape of cornea. Now, they have a
really really thin knife blade that slices a flap, which is folded back,
and then put back in place. Like I said, incredible times in which to
live (here's hoping Bush doesn't inaugurate a rapid slide into a new
Dark Ages)!
So I decided, what the heck! Do it now. Be free of contacts and
glasses, be able to see in the shower, walk in the rain without the
world becoming blurry. Enjoy peripheral vision. Cut down on the waste I
add to the world through the use of contacts.
I made an appointment for Monday AM (yes, I did some research and
comparison shopping and all indications pointed to this being a fairly
low-risk out patient surgery) and in I went. Lots of numbing drops in my
eyes, and in a very short amount of time I was flat on my back and
staring up at a little green light shining from the laser machine.
WARNING Graphic description of procedure coming! No blood, nothing
terribly gruesome, but I thought I would warn you.
So they held my eyes open with calipers (ever seen Conspiracy Theory
with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts? Like that). Then they lowered a
suction cup onto my right eye. The purpose of the suction is to
"firm up" the surface of my cornea. As the doc put it earlier,
"it's hard to slice a soft grape cleanly". Then they applied
pressure and my vision blanked out. Very uncomfortable. I had to will
myself to relax, to trust, to accept my fate. Then the suction cap came
off and I saw the doctor lower a thin hand-held tool to my eye and whoa!
everything went fuzzy as he peeled away the flap of my cornea.
"Hold still, it's all right, you're doing great." Good bedside
manners.
Then it was time to "Watch the red light." The red light
was the laser or maybe just some entertainment while the laser did its
work. I watched. I sweated. I held still. And I sniffed. Sniff, sniff.
Burning smell. Suddenly it struck me.
"Is that the smell of my eyeball burning from the laser?" I
asked the doctor. He hesitated. "Um, yes, I, um, guess so." I
could tell he didn't really want to admit it, since he was probably
afraid I would freak out. But that made sense, right? Laser beam
changing the surface of my cornea...well, how ELSE would it do that?
Beam up particles of cornea to the moon? So he merrily burned away the
surface of my eyeball...30 seconds and DONE! Then he smoothed the flap
back on top of my eye, keeping things very well lubricated, patting down
the edges. I couldn't quite see it, but I could feel it. It all made
sense. Then he repeated it all on the left eye...and that's it, folks! I
rested for a half hour in the dark, Veva brought me home, my eyes were
VERY sensitive to light. I took the doc's advice ("Two Motrins and
a glass of wine, and then go to sleep").
I have to wear goggles when I sleep and shower, I am putting drops in
my eyes regularly (when I remember)...and my vision is really fantastic
-- except that it is a strain to focus on the thin lines of text on a
computer monitor.
So I should really end this fine story and send it off!
It's a little too soon to tell how it all will work out; my vision
will shift around for a couple of weeks, I might have problems with dry
eyes. But I have no regrets -- and NO GLASSES!
I hope you are all well...Steven
End Notes
1. An idea for a bumper sticker to put on the back of HUMMER
H2 vehicles (especially the bright yellow models)
MY OTHER VEHICLE DOESN'T COMPENSATE.
2. I haven't written about George Dubya Bush's obsession with
carrying out a war against the people of Iraq. You can probably figure
out how I feel about his plans and his brain. On the one hand, I am
confident that decades from now historians will look back on Dubya and
rank him as one of the most dogmatic, ideological Presidents in history,
a man who came to power with a mission (one that is shared by a small
minority of this country's citizens) and had the fortune to be handed
the keys to his nightmarish kingdom, courtesy of Osama bin Laden. On the
other hand, I fear that these historians may well be working by
candlelight and quill pens, because I fear that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Ashcroft
"Square Dance of Evil" will plunge the world into a new Dark
Ages.
3. Are you totally disgusted with the cycle of violence between
Israelis and Palestinians? Are you having a hard time expressing
criticism of Israel's brutal collective punishment of millions of
Palestinians because every time you want to open your mouth some insane
or very ruthless Palestinian group blows up another group of innocent
Israelis? Well, then please visit www.refusersolidarity.net and add your
voice to thousands who support ISRAELI SOLDIERS, many of them decorated
officers, who have stepped forward publicly to say ENOUGH! If they can
say it, so can we.
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November 17-26, 2002: A trip to London,
Dublin and environs, and Ipswich: I train over 450 developers and lose
my voice...
There is a wide variety of "stuff" below, so here is a
quick Table of Contents to help you go to something you might very
specifically want to read
November 16, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Ocean I
discover another race of humankind that is addicted to the acquisition
of the highest level possible of privileges and status, no matter what
it takes.
November 23, Clontarf Castle Hotel, Dublin, Ireland
Disturbing the peace.
November 23, Newgrange, Ireland thoughts on a rough,
but effective democracy
November 25, Hilton Paddington, London figuring out
phone call rates
November 26, on the Heathrow Express from Paddington
to Heathrow ARE YOU HAVING FUN YET?
And with that, off I go...
November 16, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Ocean
I am fortunate enough to find myself sitting in seat 8E on a Boeing
777 as I zoom over to London to do five days of training for Quest
software. My "Brave New World of Oracle PL/SQL" training seems
to have struck a nerve or need we have over 250 paying customers lined
up in London, Manchester and Dublin who want to listen to me talk for
seven hours a day. Quite remarkable!
So I sit in business class, the consequence of spending way too much
time on airplanes, the result of which is Premier Executive status on
United Airlines. Now, I must tell you that the perks of
"executive" travel are very addictive, but they are on the
other hand bittersweet. I can only achieve this status by being away
from my family, friends and home. So I will certainly do nothing to go
out of my way to travel. I will not seek out opportunities to travel
simply to acquire the miles necessary to obtain or maintain a
higher-level status.
Which is why I was simply stunned when I heard a man sitting in seat
9E declare to the flight attendant "I land in London, stay for 4.5
hours and then come back." I figured, OK, that's unfortunate, but
that's also the ridiculous nature of the corporate world. I mean, what
could be so important that you would get flown to the UK from Chicago
for a single meeting?
But then he continued "Yep, we [he has a companion!] do this
every year, end of the year, to make sure we qualify for 1K." 1K,
for those of you not familiar with the multiple elevated status levels
of United Airlines, is the most exclusive of frequent fliers it means
you have flown at least 100,000 miles in a year (yes, it should be
"100K", but it isn't. What can I say?). That's a lot of miles.
Who cares? Well, it means that you get to upgrade your seat earlier than
the pathetic, loser Premier Executive creatures like me (100 hours in
advance, rather than the mere 72 of PE). And you get more bonus miles
per flight. And who KNOWS what else?
And then his friend said "Yeah, and next week I fly to
Australia. I need 25,000 more miles."
So here are these two men, both extremely buff and well-muscled (they
must get frequent flier miles for each workout!), sitting on planes for
hours and hours (and paying for these flites; you don't get FF
miles on free flites) just so that when they sit on a plane for hours
and hours they can do so in comfort.
And then the woman next to me is aghast when they bring her specially
requested meal. Turns out that she was upgraded at the last moment. When
she was scheduled for economy class, she was smart enough to request a
special, vegetarian meal to avoid the usual horrible food. When she
upgraded, she forgot to cancel the special request. So now she was
handed a plate of fruit and cold veggies. I, on the other hand, had for
my appetizer shrimp cocktail plus some sort of cute chicken pate thingie
and a fine salad. For my main course? Salmon filet, with potato cakes,
fresh peas in the pod. She was most unhappy and argued with the flight
attendant for quite a while. Receiving no satisfaction, she took up her
case with the purser, or whatever they call the head honcho attendant on
these big planes. The conversation must have lasted 10 minutes. To no
avail. Quite obviously they were telling her the truth they did not HAVE
any other meals to offer her. They quite responsibly made sure she got
the meal she requested.
And then just before we land, she confides in me that she, too, is
going to turn around and come right back, that she is taking this flite
for the sole purpose of qualifying for 1K. But she doesn't go around
announcing it, she said with a sniff.
Oh my.
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November 23, Clontarf Castle Hotel, Dublin,
Ireland Disturbing the peace
Whew. Well, I have completed my five straight days of training on the
Brave New World of PL/SQL two days at the Langham Hilton for 150
developers and DBAs, two more at the Marriott Worsley outside Manchester
(80 students), and a single day, Friday, in Dublin for another 50 Oracle
technologists. Now I have the weekend to myself (and my son, Chris, who
flew out on Thursday to spend the weekend with me), then back to London
or a presentation at BTExaCT (some sort of high tech subsidiary of
British Telecom) and then home on Tuesday.
I felt myself getting ill before the trip, but through the
consumption of large quantities of vitamins and orange juice managed to
hold off anything serious -- until today. Well, actually, Friday. My
voice was only half-present for the Dublin class, but the sound system
ensured that the attendees could still hear me. Now, however, I am
afraid that I am well on my way to a bout of bronchitis.
The Clontarf is a fine hotel built around a castle that dates to
1127. It makes for a very different "feel" in the lobby and
restaurant, but the rooms are all in the newly constructed wings of the
building -- and they didn't do a very good job of sound-proofing. I am
in room 333 and in room 335 I can tell you that there is a very shall we
say romantically active couple, and I have been unable to avoid
listening in on some fascinating non-verbal conversations. After the
latest round at 730 on Saturday morning, I slipped a note under their
door
"Dear room 335, I thought you would want to know that the walls
are thin. It is difficult not to hear any conversations much above a
whisper, particularly high-pitched voices. Regards, Room 333"
Things have quieted down a bit. I felt bad about putting a damper on
their fun, but I didn't think they really wanted me to hear all about
it...but wait! There is a very nice note slipped back under MY door
"Room #333, We are terribly sorry for disturbing your stay here
at Clontarf. We are sometimes expressive and did not realize that we
could be heard. Thanks for your kind method for informing us.
#335."
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November 23, Newgrange, Ireland thoughts on a
rough, but effective democracy
Chris and I headed out of Clontarf Castle Hotel and up to Newgrange,
the site of several enormous burial mounds. It was a remarkable
experience. We only had time in the afternoon to visit one of the mounds
and chose Newgrange, since you can actually go inside the burial
chamber. It was a wet and very cold time to be out in the Irish
countryside. Access to the sites is strictly controlled so we joined a
tour group of some 40 people. In groups of twenty we were taken inside.
So here is the story on Newgrange
Some 5,000 years ago, before the Pyramids were built, before the
enormous stones of Stonehenge were dragged across England and assembled,
the Neolithic people living in what is now Ireland had (as was explained
to us) stabilized their systems for farming and housing so that they
were able to spend more time thinking about the meaning of life (this is
ALL conjecture, though, including the many theories of the Newgrange,
since there are NO written records of the period). Whatever it is they
decided, they clearly determined that they needed this burial chamber.
Now, there are burial or passage chambers all over Ireland and around
the world, too, but what makes Newgrange so special is what happens on
the Winter Solstice. On this day (and well, actually, for two or so days
before and after), when the sun rises over the hills to the SE, the
sunlight enters a "roof box" that is over the entrance to the
chamber and pierces all the way into the inner chamber (some N meters)
in a band about 17 cm wide (they figure it was originally 40 cm) and
illuminates this otherwise pitch-dark enclosure. It is just about the
only irrefutable proof that such early humans had such sophisticated
knowledge about the sun and engineering skills to put their beliefs to
the physical test.
In terms of engineering skills, consider this chamber was built 5000
years ago. It was covered over for centuries and then in 1967 was
reopened -- and the roof box and its purpose discovered. So 5000 years
after it was originally constructed, this chamber's precise alignment
was still intact and still performed to "specs". How many of
my readers, I wonder, have any confidence that any of modern
civilization's buildings will be standing much less functioning 5000
years hence?
More than that, in wet, rainy Ireland, this chamber was perfectly
dry, started that way and stayed that way for five millenia. The
construction was astounding. I stood inside the chamber and looked up. A
complex series of interlocking, large slabs of stone, which resembled an
upside-down four sided staircase, ascending to the top slab. All were
placed at an angle so that water drained away from the chamber. No
cement of any sort was used to hold the stones in place. Many of the
stones, most impressively the "entrance stone" that stood in
front of the...entrance, are carved with intriguing swirls and diamond
shapes, one fern and one hand.
I try to imagine the devotion, the effort, the discipline that would
have been required to assemble all these stones (including 93 large
"kerb stones" that served as the foundation for the outer
wall) and then build it so precisely and am completely stymied. I wonder
did people support the effort voluntarily or were their services coerced
by the leaders of the community? Perhaps these leaders used the same
sort of fear mongering highlighted by Michael Moore in his new movie
"Bowling for Columbine" to bend the people to their will.
"We must build this passage chamber to welcome our god [the sun] or
we will be punished and will live in perpetual cold and darkness!"
Or maybe it worked like this this early community of Neolithics were
devoted democrats. They chose their leadership, but also wanted to make
sure that this leadership felt thoroughly accountable to the people. So
once a year on the Winter Solstice, the leaders would walk ever so
carefully through the meandering entrance way (it is S shaped so that
there is just a narrow space for that straight line along which the sun
makes its way, another reflection of he astonishing engineering
involved) to the innermost chamber. As the people of the community
debate the wisdom and record of these leaders, the sun rises, the light
fills the chamber, and then the people decide are these good leaders?
Have they served us well and not made themselves wealthy and comfortable
at our expense? If all agree, they allow the leaders to witness the
miracle of light and then return to the world to lead once again. Are
they bad leaders? Have they abused our trust? If so, then in this case,
the large blocking stone is placed over the entrance way, and the
leaders sit in darkness until death takes them.
That would certainly keep leaders accountable, now wouldn't it?
In fact, why we don't do that with our Presidents? It would seem
ideally suited for our current President. Here is a man who seems to
believe thoroughly that the threat of execution is a powerful deterrent
to mis-behavior (as Governor of Texas, he oversaw the execution of 152
people). So here's the idea every year on the Winter Solstice, we take a
national referendum using the latest computer technology, universal
access and highly secure database (Oracle, of course!). The votes come
pouring in thumbs up or thumbs down? Did that tax cut benefit most of us
or just Dubya's best buddies? Did he lie through his teeth about his
relationship to Enron bigwigs and run for cover when their machinations
collapsed? Did he invade and bomb the heck out of Iraq even though most
of us thought it was a bad idea? Do we really want as President a man
who would say (without jesting) that "The problem with the French
people is that they do not have a word for 'entrepreneur'"?
And when all the votes are tallied (using two phase commit and a
massive, multi-processor configuration of Intel-based personal computers
running "Unbreakable Linux")...
Hey, wait a minute, I think I will stop right there. Because I have
to make something very very clear: I AM FOR PEACE AND NONVIOLENCE! I
do not support the death penalty. That is a primitive and barbaric act,
clearly cruel and unusual punishment, especially when carried out in a
nation that is so rent by racism and class warfare. It does not function
as any sort of deterrent and simply panders to the most base desire for
revenge. And I certainly do NOT advocate any sort of physical violence
against the President of the United States, even if it is George Dubya
Bush, a man who was NOT elected, is clearly incompetent for the job, and
will probably lead human civilization into a new Dark Ages. So I am not
going to finish my little riff. I am going to move on to other, more
interesting topics, like the cost of making telephone calls from fancy
hotels in London.
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November 25, Hilton Paddington, London figuring
out phone call rates
This is my last night in the UK, then finally thankfully flying back
to Chicago tomorrow. Attached to the phone on m desk in this very nice
hotel room is a card. On one side it says in big letters
An end to hotel phone hang-ups.
And on the back side, one reads
Hilton's phone rates mean calling from your hotel room has never been
easier to understand.
And then one finds a table with "Example of a 1 minute
call" entries for destinations and times. And lo and behold, to
make a 1 minute call to the USA on Hilton's "easy to
understand" hotel phone will cost you over 4 pounds - about $8!
Yep, that's pretty darn easy to understand. Now why anyone would choose
this method when there are ads ALL OVER London for calling cards that
cost between .03 and .10 pounds per minute is WELL beyond me. But I am
glad they have given me clear warning (even though it is dressed up as a
benefit!).
I got a shock when I checked on this morning (Nov 26). It turns out
that making a call to a mobile phone in London from the hotel costs the
same as making an international call. Gee, they didn't mention that on
the phone card! So I made one call for a few minutes to a Quest sales
representative and that cost about $40! I really should complain to
Hilton. That is an outrage...[November 30: I did complain and got a call
back from the concierge at the Paddington Hilton who offered to refund
me 30% on the cost of the calls. We will see if that actually
happens...]
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November 26, on the Heathrow Express from
Paddington to Heathrow ARE YOU HAVING FUN YET?
If you have attended any of my presentations on PL/SQL, you know that
I can get rather excited about writing PL/SQL programs. This past week,
as I presented some of my most interesting examples of dynamic PL/SQL
(such as the str2list package that takes any delimited string, parses it
and deposits the individual items found into YOUR PL/SQL collection. Hot
stuff!), I asked the students (150 in London, 80 in Manchester, 50 in
Dublin and 170 at the British Telecom BTExaCT site in Ipswich) this
question
"Which of you have ever had FUN writing software?"
and I was really quite astonished to see relatively few hands raised.
This is a bit depressing, because it indicates to me that (a) most
developers take their jobs totally for granted, and (b) most developers
are missing out on a real source of joy in their lives.
Each and every software programmer lives a very privileged life. We
are paid -- actually handed reasonable to large sums of money -- to sit
around in air conditioned environs (most of us, anyway), sometimes even
with a view through a window [though if you are a UK developer, you
might only see a thick blanket of fog, as I do right now from the train]
and some sunlight, and produce things from our brain. We are paid purely
for abstract mental effort.
Now, certainly, on the one hand, this can be very hard work, but on
the other hand, LET'S GET SERIOUS SHALL WE? I imagine that a good 99% of
the population of the entire known universe of sentient beings would
willingly give up one of their limbs in order to live the lives we lead,
take care of our families as we are able to do.
We shouldn't ever lose sight of this incredible privilege. We ought
to express our appreciation daily, hourly -- and one way to do that is
to treat the software we write as the personal, sacred human act of
creation that it does represent.
Software as art
I had dinner last night in the Paddington area of London with my son,
Chris. We supped at Mr. Frascati's, a fine little Italian eatery that
offered really excellent linguini with pasta and heavenly tiramisu. He
talked about his art work (he creates murals, mosaics, paintings, as
well as music), how he will spend hours refining a particular sound that
he is inserting as a track in a song (his musical efforts are almost
entirely electronic), to get it just so. I talked about my efforts on
the Codecheck utility, getting it to work, but then going back through
each package, simplifying it, making it more and more elegant, more pure
and beautiful in its structure. And I realized that there are many
similarities in what we do and how we go about it.
At first, I thought, well, they are quite different in that my "refactoring"
efforts result in a much more "beautiful" piece of software
(smaller number of moving parts, no unnecessary effort, transparently
readable, etc.) but that beauty is entirely hidden from anyone not
reading the actual source code. From the standpoint of the user,
Codecheck simply "does its job." Every time Chris refines a
particular sound or rhythm, however, we experience it directly and
viscerally. Yet, as he and I talked further, I also discovered that
there are even similarities here, in that I can listen to his music and
appreciate it, but not really hear or understand all that he put into
it, while another musical artist in the same genre can listen to that
sound and understand the effort involved, the subtle sophistication of
what Chris has accomplished (he talked, for example, about
"softening" the electronically repeated notes so that it
sounded more like an actual human being playing the music).
So this brings me back to what appears to be the sadly barren life of
the mind of so many developers. You can look at your job as a software
developer as nothing more than drudgery. "Today, I must work on a
program to calculate the XYZ formula for requirement 5.1c of module 997
of the Order Entry system." My god, this is so boring! Get a
coffee, chew on a donut, write some requisite commands, more coffee, no
it is after 11 AM, time for Coke.
And I have been there. I know exactly what this life is like. I have
eaten those donuts (and, well, to be honest, have many fine memories of
such donuts delights), drunk that coffee (not so fine memories) and
written entirely lifeless code in the most listless manner possible. But
now I see that a different way is possible.
No matter WHAT the programming challenge in front of you, you can
bring that code and yourself to life, all with an adjustment in (I am
sorry, but I am going to use this word) attitude. I will explain. Most
of us take this attitude to our code
Get it done as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Get it to work
TODAY and do not worry about tomorrow (maintainability, readability,
etc.). Don't follow standards and best practices because they get in the
way of just getting the darned thing done with. Don't take testing
seriously, because that is an ENORMOUS drag and it is really quite hard
to do correctly. So do some cursory testing until you can rationalize in
your head making the following statement to your manager "It
works." Your manager is even less concerned with code quality,
because she or he is looking at the "big picture" (meeting the
budget constraints and qualifying for a personal bonus), so if you say
it works, it works. The code is then moved on to another group, either
the QA (quality assurance) team or the users themselves. In either case,
you have wiped your hands of the program -- until bugs are found (and
there will be many) and then you will perform the most primitive,
semi-panicked cycle of fire-fighting to paper over the bugs (maybe you
have fixed them, maybe you have simply relocated them in your code --
the way we analyze and solve problems means that we don't really know)
until you can once again say "it works." In the meantime, you
look bad, your manager looks bad, your users are disgusted ("These
are software professionals?" they ask each other over
breaks, shaking their heads), and budgets are busted wide open (with
management in shock, simply unable to understand how this happened,
because you originally "finished" the program a week ahead of
schedule), but nothing ever changes. This is just the way of software
development.
That doesn't sound like much fun, now does it? It is actually a
fairly degrading, depressing experience.
Here is an alternative you are handed a bunch of requirements to
build a really boring program. It is boring to build software for
order entry systems or materials management, etc. I will not deny that.
Yet it can also be really boring or at least bothersome to have to write
poems in the form of a sonnet. So many rules, such rigid structure. And
yet those very constraints serve as a liberating launching point for
some of the most beautiful writing known to humans. So accept these
requirements as constraints -- and a stimulus -- on your creativity,
your fundamental human spirit. Resolve to create something beautiful and
lasting in the process of fulfilling the requirements.
What does "beautiful and lasting" mean in computer
software? It means, most broadly, doing things right, and doing them (or
trying to do them) right the very first time. Specifically
** Code that is transparently readable, accomplished with an absolute
minimum of comments. Anyone can pick up your program and read through
it, understand what it does, and not be afraid to tinker with it when
necessary.
** Code in which there is nothing extra. You have implemented
everything in the simplest possible way to achieve your objective. You
did not over-design. You did not choose exotic data structures to show
off your expertise.
** Code that is built upon small, reusable modules -- and you have
actually reused some of your code! Complexities are hidden away behind
clean interfaces. There is a minimum of entanglements between packages.
** Code that contains robust error handling so that when something
goes wrong, it is easy for the user to understand and report the
problem, and it is easy for support persons to identify and fix (or ask
for a fix of) the problem.
** Code that has associated with it a comprehensive unit testing
script so that when you pass on your code to the QA organization or your
users, you KNOW with a certainty that makes you glow inside that your
code actually works according to specs.
Transparent, simple, confident, robust....sounds good to me, how
about you? How do you get there? First and foremost, you don't hurry
into writing your code. You sit down and map out what needs to be done,
and how you are going to get there. You employ top-down design
techniques built around this simple, but powerful directive
ALL EXECUTABLE SECTIONS OF CODE SHALL CONTAIN NO
MORE THAN 50 OR 60 LINES OF CODE, AND WILL BE
ENTIRELY VISIBLE ON A SINGLE PAGE OR SCREEN.
This might sound crazy to you now, but stick to it, and you will soon
find yourself relying consistently on reusable modules, as well as local
or nested procedures and functions. Your code will become more readable.
You will introduce far fewer bugs into your logic, because at every
level down, you validate what it is you are doing.
Then adopt the following guideline as rigidly as possible
ALL SQL WILL BE HIDDEN BEHIND
PACKAGED PROCEDURES AND FUNCTIONS.
By taking this approach (often referred to as "data
encapsulation"), you will write less SQL, complexities will be
hidden away, your code will be more easily optimized, and as your data
structures change, you can easily adapt your code to those changes. You
will be able to tell that you are following and reaping benefits from
this technique when whole days go by without writing any SQL at all.
Need the name of a department for the department ID? You simply call the
department_pkg.name function! Need to update the amount of a line item
in an order? No problem! You call the lineitem_pkg.update_amount
procedure.
And one final recommendation use utPLSQL, the one and only (so far as
I know) unit testing framework for PL/SQL developers. utPLSQL is modeled
after Extreme Programming unit testing principles. Through use of
utPLSQL, you can build comprehensive test
Click here for
additional details as well as the code for utPLSQL.
Click here for the
utPLSQL discussion forum for users set up by Patrick Barel.
Enough lecturing. Time to send this out!
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October 14, 2002: America's For-Profit
Secret Army
This past Sunday, I slogged my way through the 8 inch mass of
newsprint that is the New York Times. The Money & Business section
is not usually tops on my list, but the headline caught my eye:
America's For-Profit Secret Army
Military Contractors Are Hired To Do the Pentagon's Bidding Far From
Washington's View
Click here
to read the article (you will need to register with the NY Times, but
there is no subscription fee) and I STRONGLY URGE YOU TO DO SO.
This is a very disturbing article. Leslie Wayne, the
author, uses a total of 93 inches (!) of text to give us a very detailed
portrait of what may prove to be the key players in the undermining of
the United States as a democracy -- for the people and by the people.
Please just take a look at these selected but
representative quotes:
"With the war on terror already a year old
and the possibility of war against Iraq growing by the day, a modern
version of an ancient practice — one as old as warfare itself — is
reasserting itself at the Pentagon. Mercenaries, as they were once
known, are thriving — only this time they are called private military
contractors, and some are even subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies.
The Pentagon cannot go to war without them."
Not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice
"The use of military contractors raises other troubling
questions as well. In peace, they can act as a secret army outside of
public view. In war, while providing functions crucial to the combat
effort, they are not soldiers. Private contractors are not obligated to
take orders or to follow military codes of conduct. Their legal
obligation is solely to an employment contract, not to their country."
Trained war criminals, ran sex-slave ring
"In Bosnia, employees of DynCorp were found to be operating a
sex-slave ring of young women who were held for prostitution after their
passports were confiscated. In Croatia, local forces, trained by MPRI,
used what they learned to conduct one of the worst episodes of
"ethnic cleansing," an event that left more than 100,000
homeless and hundreds dead and resulted in war-crimes indictments. No
employee of either firm has ever been charged in these incidents."
Like the meat processing companies who poison us, they get to
write their own rules!
"The Pentagon has even hired MPRI to help it write military
doctrine — including the field manual called "Contractors Support
on the Battlefield" that sets rules for how the Army should
interact with private contractors, like itself."
We can't even trust corporations to balance their books. Now we
trust them with our freedom?
"We sort of blur the lines," Col. Steven J. Zamparelli of
the Air Force said in an interview. In an article in 1999 for the Air
Force Journal of Logistics, Colonel Zamaparelli said: "The
Department of Defense is gambling future military victory on
contractors' performing operational functions in the battlefield."
Friends, I don't know about you, but I am very, very alarmed. On the
same day (October 10) that Congress handed George Bush a blank check to
attack Iraq, it approved a military budget of over $355 billion. Yet
even with this enormous sum (greater than the combined total of the next
largest 25 national military budgets!), we still rely on unreliable
"contractors"?
And those contractors, many or most of them retired military
officers, are soaking up tax dollars that are desperately needed to revitalize
our economy, fund education and feed poor children.
If this is democracy, if this is the best that the "greatest
nation in the history of the world" can offer, then I would say we
-- the entire world -- are in deep, deep doo-doo.
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October 5, 2002: Pay up or get whacked
Dear Chicago Tribune:
I was horrified to see the cartoon on your editorial page of
Saturday, October 5. While your editorial correctly points out that the
port owners have locked out the longshoremen and that the primary issue
is not money, the cartoon clearly implies that the dockworkers are the
ones who have forced the shutdown and are extorting the people of the
United States for more money.
This is a shameful distortion and it does a disservice to your
readers and your own integrity to publish such malicious claptrap.
As for your editorial comment that a person (a) working 40 hours a
week at hard labor, (b) keeping the international economy humming, and
(c) earning $106,000 is on a "gravy train" I challenge the
Chicago Tribune to publish the salaries of those who write its
editorials. I would be surprised to discover that they are making less
money. And I would be very surprised if any of them did not privately
say to their husbands or wives late at night "What a gravy train! I
sure am glad I don't have to move tons of cargo for my salary!"
Your comment belies a common prejudice of white-collar (and
incredibly privileged) workers towards their fellow blue-collar
citizens. Physical labor is demeaning, we keyboard warriors believe, and
would only be performed by those who are so inferior as to be unable to
lift themselves out of the grungy world. Again, a real disservice to
your readers.
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Links to Other Parts of My Life
Here are some links to sites of
organizations and issues on which I am active, as part of my effort to
bear witness to the beauty and tragedy of this world -- and help bring
justice to those who suffer injustice.
Not In My Name - a Jewish peace
group based in Chicago that works for a just, lasting and secure peace
between Isaelis and Palestinians.
Refuser Solidarity Network
- An international network that supports and builds visibility of the
Israeli refuser movement (soldiers, conscripts and reservists who refuse
to serve because of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip).
The Crossroads Fund - part of a national network (the Funding
Exchange) of progressive, public foundations, Crossroads raises
money to support organizations working on issues of social and economic
justice in the Chicago metropolitan area. A really great organization, I
urge you to contribute to the Fund.
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FeuerThoughts
FeuerThoughts is a
distribution list I maintain so that I can send out occasional email
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