Transformation vs. Era Transitions

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to write about, and there's something I'd really like to explore over the next few years. I've been strongly influenced by two books - W.R. Clement's Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide to the New Renaissance and Peter Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society. I've written a little about Clement's book here before, but just to sum up, his basic thesis is that we are currently in the midst of an era transition brought about by a rise in the level of abstraction. That rise in the level of abstraction sets in motion a cascading wave of ideas and events that sweep away the existing status quo and create a new world-view. The only comparable event to this in our experience was the original Renaissance, in which the discovery of perspective "brought on a vigorous and profitable series of invention cycles through applications of the new science" and largely created the world we live in today.

Drucker's thesis isn't as radical as Clement's; the changes he sees are the kind of transformation in Western society that happens every few hundred years, and he gives the examples of the re-emergence of the city in 13th Century Europe, the period from the invention of the Printing Press to Luther posting of his 95 theses (1455-1517, the peak of the early Renaissance), and the events of 1776 (not just the American Revolution, but also James Watt's Steam Engine and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations). 40-60 years after the beginning of one of these transformations, "there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born".

It's almost a cliche to say that we're living in a time of rapid change; most people seem to have accepted this as the norm. But I don't think they expect (much less want) really profound change. Someone (I can't remember who) once said that it wasn't that a few people were ahead of their time so much as it was that most people were behind theirs. And I think that's the case here; profound changes are coming, will occur in my lifetime (in fact, have already begun), and will reshape society, polity, and, most of all, our worldview and our epistomology (how we know what we know).

So the question in my mind is: Is this a transformation - a regular occurrence to be expected every 200-300 years or so - or an era transition? An era transition is a much rarer and more profound event. Human nature being what it is, I prefer the more dramatic interpretation of events - it's more exciting to believe you're living in one of those epochal eras of history. But it seems to me that if we can carefully examine what's going on in the world and somehow manage to shed some of our cultural baggage in order to think more clearly and dispassionately, we can at least glimpse the outlines of what's happening and what the magnitude of change really is.

The idea of an era transition seems exciting but Clements points out that, based on previous experience, era transitions are dangerous and difficult times. It's no accident that his book's subtitle includes the words "survival guide". One way we can detect whether or not we're in a real era transition is the level of danger and difficulty.

DSL's Back
And it only took SBC/Pac Bell 27 days (after I moved a mile and kept the same phone number) to get my DSL turned on. A co-worker just returned from a trip home to India and informed me that Reliance, the big Indian telecom conglomerate, now offers wireless (home) telephone service that they can turn on in 4-5 hours after you order it. Granted, wireless is simpler than DSL. But wouldn't you expect better service here in the NorCal Riviera, just over the hill from Silicon Valley, compaed to a land still notable for its crushing poverty and widespread corruption. (Sorry, apologies to my Aryan/Hindu/Punjabi/Tamil brothers and sisters. The corruption is just as widespread here. But it's better integrated into the system. No tacky direct bribes for us, just routine corporation transactions).

Part of the problem, I'm sure, is that I order DSL through Cruzio, the local ISP, who then buys the service from the local monopoly. I'm guessing that SBC/PacBell puts those orders in the back of the queue and services direct orders first. But I prefer being shielded from SBC/PB's billing system - you know, the one where they lose your payment and then threaten to cancel your phone service as well as your DSL unless you pay a estimated year's rates in advance. I'm pretty that particular class action suit is still ongoing.

Bam, Iran
The recent earthquake in Iran is a sobering reminder of how the rest of the world lives. What's only of passing interest here - a 6.5 earthquake 200 miles away that makes your office building sway for 10 seconds - is an unbelievably deadly killer half a world away when it hits a city of 100,000 whose buildings are made out of dried mud and bricks.

6.5, baby
OK, it took an earthquake to get me blogging again. It lasted about 15 seconds or so; I heard something that sounded like some heavy equipment was getting rolled on the floor above ours, then a sound like flakes of plaster falling. I didn't realize what it was until Les, whose cube faces mine, said "earthquake". We all stood up and you could feel the building swaying. I called S. in Santa Cruz, who was standing in line at the Post Office. She said she didn't feel a thing. Mike H.'s wife in Fremont didn't either. But Les' wife did in San Mateo and so did someone in the 23rd floor of an SF office building.

Update: The epicenter was apparently about 11 km NE of San Simeon. The USGS is now reporting a 4.7 aftershock in the same area. Go here for more details. Apparently they felt it in LA, too.

Update: The official count is now 11 aftershocks of magnitude 3.9-4.7. I wonder what's it like to watch Hearst Castle sway?

Local Hero
Santa Cruz librarian Anne M. Turner wins Jane Magazine's Bad-Ass Loudmouth (scroll down about halfway) award for “reinforcing her citywide policy to shred library records every day in protest of the privacy-invading PATRIOT Act, which gives the government the right to find out which books people check out and anything else they're curious about”.

Another new blog
Terry Teachout's About Last Night, a journal on art in that Big City On The Other Coast. Courtesy of Asymmetrical Information.

Apparently, I too would be the The GashlyCrumb Tinies if I were an Edward Gorey Book. "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh..."

New Blog
Here's a really interesting new blog I just discovered, courtesy of Halley Suitt's weblog. Read this and then this.

More John Adams
The thing I don't admire about Adams was his support, however reluctant, for the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Collectively, they were the Patriot Act of their day. Adams let himself be persuaded into signing the bills by the High Federalists (led by Hamilton), his wife Abigail (whose usual good sense was trumped by her anger at the scurrilous criticism of her husband in Republican papers like the Aurora), and Adams' own vanity. While he proved mostly unwilling to use the provisions of the acts to either expel aliens or suppress dissent, his support for them ultimately hurt him. The Sedition Act was used to justify the arrests of 25 men who were either editors or associated with Republican newspapers. The men were jailed and their papers shut down. This resulted in a public outcry against the acts and contributed to the victory of Jefferson and the Republicans in the election of 1800.

There was little doubt then, and none now, that the Acts were designed to destroy opposition to the Federalist party and its agenda. Adams was not complicit in this; but he let himself be used. Fortunately, the effort backfired. But the passage of the Acts set a precedent that has, at least implicitly, been used to bulwark similar efforts of questionable constitutionality.

Japes, ribald
Sweet Fancy Moses is back, just when I'd given it up for dead. OK, it came back 3 weeks ago, and I'm as out of it as ever. But you might find this amusing.

Now, if only Suck would come back.

Desktop Linux
David Weinberger echoes my misgivings about Linux as an OS for non-geeks, this time from the point of view of a regular user.

The Archetypal Patriot
I've been listening to an abridged recording of David McCullough's biography of John Adams as part of my continuing reading about the Founding Brothers (as John Joseph Ellis called them). Adams is a fascinating character whose greatness I'd never fully appreciated. While I think that the author is a little too much in love with his subject, and I'd like to have heard the sections about Adams' diplomatic missions immediately before and after the peace of 1783, I greatly enjoyed it and want to read the entire book someday. But first, I'd like to read Cappon's The Adams-Jefferson Letters.

For me, the most admirable thing about Adams was his integrity. Two incidents in his career illustrate that integrity. The first was his successful defense of the British captain and the British soldiers (in two separate trials) who were accused of murder in the Boston Massacre in 1770. Thirty years later, his efforts as President led to a treaty with France that preserved peace, in spite of the opposition of much of his own Federalist party led by Alexander Hamilton. He was criticized, even attacked, by many for his actions in both of these events - a difficult thing for someone as sensitive and vain as Adams. But he stuck to his principles regardless of the outcome. And while the outcome of the first ultimately enhanced his reputation, the second probably cost him a second term as president.

Catching Up
It's been a while since I've had time to blog. I actually wrote this over a week ago but never published it; but I wanted to contrast it with the post above about John Adams...something about how deeds matter more than words, and how real patriotism isn't a fashion that the self-righteous get to wear.

There's something about the prose in this essay that really irritates me, even though I agree with many of the points the writer is trying to make. It's the hectoring arrogance of the tone, I think - the ways the author seeks to cut off possible arguments an imaginary reader might make instead of just making his point, as if he's worried his argument won't stand up on its own.

I also like being lectured about patriotism by someone who I suspect never actually served their country about as much as I like being lectured on morality by, say, William Bennett. Self-righteousness always strikes me as a particularly unattractive character trait. Patriotism isn't about what you say. Displaying the flag doesn't make you a patriot any more than attending church on Sunday makes you a true Christian. Serving your country - in any of the myriad of ways that you can render service - makes you a patriot. Deeds, not words, not acts done strictly for show, are the real measure of patriotism.

A Home in Paradise
Oh, and the other thing that's been keeping me busy is that we just bought a house. This picture doesn't do it justice - it's lovely - so I'll try to post a better one tomorrow




Here's the Bougainvilla on the side:

Too Busy To Blog
I've spent most of the weekend reinstalling the Brick (my aging, 4.5kg Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop) because I'd bought a 802.11b wireless card (Netgear MA401) for it and figured I'd finally get around to upgrading to SuSE Linux 8.1 (esp. since 9.0 is about to come out).

It's been painful, especially compared to the ease of getting my iMac up and going. Like having to rebuild the kernel in order to run Oracle. And downloading the Yast2-nis-client -2.6.14-120.noarch.rpm because the shipped version (2.6.14-58) errors out during install. And changing "bind prism2_cs" to "bind orinoco_cs" in /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf because the MA401 uses the Orinoco chipset, not the Prism chipset. But you knew that, right? I'll leave out the rest, but there's a lot more.

I love Linux. But it still has a really long way to go. When I can install a distribution error-free and then get Mozilla, Oracle, Java, Netbeans, Apache, MoveableType, MySQL, TCL/TK, etc., installed (I want the latest versions, not the shipped ones), configured, tweaked to suit my preferences, and ready for business within 8 hours - without hair-tearing and endless Google searches - I'll be happy, and I'll believe Linux is ready for prime time. But until then, the "Geeks Only" sign needs to stay up.

On the plus side, I actually like Gnome now that they've added Nautilus and some of the other Eazel stuff. And I still really hate the loathsome monstrosity that is KDE, absolutely the worst, ugliest GUI this side of Windows 2.0 (yes, I'm old enough to have seen and scorned both 1.0 and 2.0 when they came out). KDE looks and feels like some brain-damaged script kiddie's idea of a UI - which, I assume, is the core constituency for its user base.

I'll probably end up going back to WindowMaker since all I do is use Netbeans, Mozilla, and shell windows - plus I like the minimalism - but it's nice to see that some real progress is being made here.

But it still all needs a lot more polish before normal folks (as opposed to geeks like me) can use it.

Headlines
“Schwarzenegger Elected First Horseman Of The Apocalypse”
“Lieberman Pledges To Gloss Over The Boring Issues”
“Ashcroft Chases Down, Loses CIA Leak Suspect In Alley Behind White House”
“OutKast Universally Accepted”

You just gotta love the Onion

Another Iceberg Sighting
Dan Gillmor, from his perch up in the crow's nest, sees it too:

It's called the European Technology Rountable Exhibition, but a significant portion of the discussion here has been about the awakened giant to the east. Again and again, the conversation has turned to the opportunities -- and, to many, the threats -- China represents for the technology community.

I'm not feeling threatened, mind you. But I think this is a very interesting phenomena that bears watching. Communism won't ever succeed, anywhere. But who says China has to remain Communist?

Self-Absorbed Stupidity
Ok, I'm reading Instapundit - always a mix of the interesting and the ideological - and I come across this bit:

INSTAPUNDIT SHUT DOWN BY AL QAEDA? That's the report -- actually saying that the DoS attack that shut me down, along with some others, last night was aimed at someone else, but came from Al Qaeda-affiliated websites.

This was quickly debunked by someone from HostingMatters, the affected hosting service. The "report" mentioned in the quote comes from a site called Little Green Footballs, one of more moronic ideo-blogues I've come across. (and no, I can't be bothered to link to it).

Sheesh. Can you get any more self-absorbed than that? Of course, these are the guys who are always railing about loony liberal conspiracy theories. Now, it is possible that Internet Haganah, the site in question - which apparently specializes in identifying and working to shut down sites that support Islamic extremism - may be undergoing a DoS attack because of its mission. And it's possible that the attack is sponsored by Islamic extremists, because, let's face it, any idiot of any stripe can be a script kiddie. Or it could actually be a bored script kiddie in Illinois. Or Finland. Or China. Or someone else entirely.

But the real story - the one that's actually worth talking about - is that this particular site appears to be under attack. Not "Al Quaeda is going after all us God-fearing, patriotic right-wing sites because we're so important and so dangerous to their cause". This is just another example of the bloated self-congratulation/triumphalism that's become an increasingly annoying meme in the blogging subculture in the past year or so. It's awfully similar to a similar meme running around just a few years back - you know, the one where the VC's/entrepreneurs/techies/visionaries were running around congratulating themselves on inventing the "new economy".

Yes, blogging is interesting and important. But it's still a relatively small phenomenom in a very large and diverse culture. So get over yourselves. And please try to say something interesting (hint: more navel-gazing about blogging does not fall into the "interesting" category. Nor does describing positions or policies you don't agree with as "near-treasonous". Going all Ann Coulter tends to preclude intelligent discussion on just about any topic).

But, of course, they won't get over themselves. Clay Shirky was right when he wrote that “The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”.

*

Globalization - Another tip of the iceberg
China Puts Man Into Space (via Instapundit).

Now, I don't believe any Communist government will ever succeed over the long term, and China has lots of problems, not the least of which is circa-1964 Brezhnev-style government corruption. But what if the Chinese someday decide that the Mandate of Heaven demands some form of representative democracy?

What if India during this same time got its own problems with corruption under control, deep-sixed the caste system, reduced poverty, and starting educating most or all of its people?

And what if we decided to avoid dealing with the corruption of our own political system, stifle innovation, pursue economic policies that result in economic inequality, and spend our money maintaining the legions at the edges of the empire?

AppleMania
My new 20GB iPod just arrived, so my order from Apple (iMac, Airport base station, and iPod) is complete. I've gotten pretty blase about computer hardware over the years. But I haven't been this excited about a piece of hardware since I got my first 10-MB hard drive in 1986. More later.

CalPolitics
There's a voice in my head that's suggesting that a different result on the recall - one that ended up keeping Gray Davis in office - would have been a mandate to continue the corrupt business-as-usual nature of California state politics, at least until things got so bad that they couldn't be ignored. While I still think that the recall mechanism is a dangerous tool that has no legitimate place in representative democracy (certainly the Founders didn't think it desirable or necessary), I find it impossible to dismiss this line of thought.

And that thought process further suggests that one of two things could happen. One, Schwarzenegger's administration succeeds in bringing about real reform and turns around California governance; or, two, Schwarzenegger's adminstration fails miserably and triggers an even more impassioned revolt by the electorate - eventually leading to real reform and a turnaround in the quality of governance. I'd prefer the former to the latter, of course. A failing administration probably means lots of Californians suffer, economically and otherwise. So here's hoping for the best.

I was glad to see that Arnold got a significant percentage of the votes, in effect getting more than Davis did. This at least legitimizes the election; if he'd gotten more votes than anyone else, but fewer votes than voted No on the recall it would have something less than a mandate. But it is a real mandate, and it will be interesting to see what he does with it.

The local papers are full of news about the transition team. Much is being made of the bi-partisan composition of the team, which is supposed to find the "best and brightest" for the new administration. Best quote from the link above: "It's part symbolic, and it's part genuine outreach,'' said Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College. But Pitney, paraphrasing James Madison, said, ``the larger the group, the smaller the number that will decide the proceedings.''

The most interesting bit to me is the decision to bring in an auditor to assess the real state of the deficit. I've written before about how Ann Richards saved the Texas state government $6 billion by instituting a vigorous auditing program. Is it possible that significant savings can be achieved here as well?

Unfortunately another, more cynical, voice in my head suggests that the Schwarzenegger administration will neither scale the heights nor fall into the abyss. Instead, they'll muddle through, enacting some reforms, doling out political favors to their most important constituents, and putting significant time and energy towards helping GWB's reelection campaign in 2004. Here's one quote supporting this thesis: “...his (Arnold's) vast personal wealth did not stop him from accepting roughly $9.2 million in contributions from some of state government's most well-established insiders despite a pledge not to take contributions from "special interests." The largest portion...came from businesses, executives and their families in the real estate, financial services and transportation industries. ”

Dittoed
I despise everything Rush Limbaugh stands for, but I've got nothing against him personally and I hope he's able to recover from his current problems. On the other hand, I'm glad to see ESPN/Disney/ABC with egg on their faces after their cynical attempt to create controversy and boost ratings by giving him a forum.

After all, idiots like Limbaugh are easily identified and dismissed by thinking adults. But the cynical manipulations, pandering, and biases of the major media are much more subtle and much easier to take for granted, so it's always good to see their machinations fail miserably and publicly.

CalPolitics
So one of Arnie's first acts is to go on the Tonight show.

Ahhh, democracy...

Enron
And speaking of energy company fraud, are we ever going to see indictments of Lay and Skilling? There is something happening on that front. And here's one more possible way for it to happen.

CalPolitics
Here's some alternative speculation on what drove the recall. Take it with a grain of salt, pending collaboration from other sources. Believe it if the lawsuits initiated by the Lieutenant Governer against the energy companies are settled for pennies on the dollar after Arnold becomes Governor.

Too bad the media is too busy investigating whether or not Arnold can keep his hands to himself to look into this story.

Globalization
This is really interesting:
More and more international patients are travelling to India to seek quality health care at a fraction of the cost back home

I think this is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg.

CalPolitics
Well, there's just two days to go until the recall election, and it's looking like Arnold is going to win. I've been waffling on how I'd vote for the past few weeks, but I've finally decided to vote "no" on the recall. I have no idea who'll I'll choose for Governor should the recall pass. I'm sort of leaning towards a protest vote for the ButtMonkey Beer guy because of this quote (from the Doonesbury site):

A system that allows for two guys promoting a beer brand to be on the official ballot to run the fifth-largest economy in the world. Angry doesn't begin to cover it. Don't get me started.
CA recall candidate Scott A. Mednick, co-owner of ButtMonkey beer, when asked
"What makes you angry?"

I won't, but I'm finding it dificult to make an informed and reasonable choice. Despite my earlier comments, I was actually hoping Schwarzenegger would show me something, anything, that would give me a good reason to vote for him. But I've read and heard nothing. Not only do we have no real idea what he'll try to do if he gets elected, we also don't know what he really thinks about any important issue. Oh, you can check the boxes on the hot-button issues - Women's right to choose, gun control, immigration, education, etc.. What we don't really know is what his real political philosophy is or if he even has one.

I'm cynical enough to suspect the latter. Comparisons have been made to Ronald Reagan, but I (and others) don't think they're apt. There's plenty of well-documented evidence to show that Reagan was interested in politics 20 years before he ran for office, and he traveled for years making stump speeches for GE and others on conservative issues. Reagan wasn't a policy wonk by any stretch of the imagination, but he did bring some depth and experience in politics to the job when he became Governor of California. Comparisons to Jesse Ventura might be more fitting. Ventura got elected largely byattracting previously disaffected voters tired of politics as usual. The same thing seems to be happening here, according to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle. But Ventura had some previous political experience and also had demonstrated a real interest in politics and governing.

If Schwarzenegger has, I've seen no compelling evidence of it. Unless I do, I have to conclude that his primary motivation is simply egomania and that he's little more than a frontman for the mainstream Republicans who were part of Pete Wilson's administration. I think that the real underlying motivation for the recall is to capture California for the Republican party as a prelude to the 2004 presidential elections. Capturing California's electoral votes (difficult, but certainly less difficult with a popular Republican Governor) would virtually guarantee GWB's re-election. I don't know if the Republican backroom leadership championed Darrel Issa's efforts to recall Davis, or simply took advantage once it gained traction (and then conveniently dumped Issa); either way, they've exploited this opportunity brilliantly.

So what can we expect from a Schwarzenegger/Wilson administration after the Gray Davis interregnum? Well, the first step will be to repeal the tripling of the car tax - a move that's sure to be popular - in order to start off on a positive (if pandering) note. Special sessions will be called, audits will be initiated, any other unpopular new measures (e.g., SB 60) will be repealed, and there'll be a flurry of activity that will hopefully serve as a smokescreen while the new administration gets its house in order. It will also serve as a smokescreen for certain hot-button conservatives issues, like Worker's Comp reform and renegotiating state employee contracts.

And when that's all done, they'll still have to figure out what to do about the state's deficit and its existing debt levels. Wilson made himself very unpopular in the early/mid 90's by raising taxes in order to cover deficits, and gained little credit for lowering them afterwards. You can bet his advisors haven't forgotten that, and I'm willing to bet that no significant measures to address the deficit besides politically popular (but not necessarily effective) budget cuts will be proposed until after the 2004 elections.

The wild card in all this is Schwarzenegger himself. He has demonstrated that he's very strong willed and decisive and has the acumen to be a successful businessman. It's not unlikely that he could decide to bust out of the box his handlers want to keep him in and go his own way once he's elected. Real leadership is badly needed to address California's problems. But you have to wonder what a political neophyte with an apparently shallow understanding of the issues and no real idea of how to make effective policy would do.

Then again, it may not matter. California made have been made ungovernable by anyone due to a long series of poor policy choices stretching back to Prop. 13. Once again, I'd love to proven wrong. I'd love to see an effective Schwarzenegger administration making good policy and solving California's problems. But I'd be really surprised if that happened.

Life
Well, it turns out I have to order a Mac direct from Apple in order to get a 160-GB hard drive on an iMac, so it'll be 1-3 days before it arrives. So in the meantime, I'm consoling myself by reading all the stuff on their developers page. Here's what I got:

1.25 GHz iMac w/17" TFT (It's the one with the flat screen that comes out of the pod base)
1 GB memory
160 GB disk
Airport Extreme Base Station and Card
iPod w/20 GB

Eventually, I'll put a wireless card in the Brick (my 10-lb Dell Inspiron 7500), so that I can tote it around the house and take it to all the wi-fi enabled places around town. The added benefit of toting the brick is that it strengthens the back and builds up the biceps.

I didn't get a Powerbook, because there's a good chance my Dell notebook at work will get replaced with a Powerbook (Woo-Hoo!).
I didn't get a G5, because of the cost and because I'm figuring that I won't really care about 64-bit processing for a couple more years.

And the iMac should work great for S. All I have to do is buy a JetDirect Card for our HP printer and she'll be all set. Once she's switched over, I can convert the Tower (Dell Dimension 4100) to be a Linux Server.

And if I do get a Powerbook at work, I won't have to put up with WinDoze any more. Woo-Hoo!

Simple Minds
Stay, I'm burning slow,
with me in the rain,
walking in the soft rain,
calling out my name,
see me burning slow...

Brilliant days
Wake up on brilliant days
Shadows of brilliant ways
Will change for all time

Simple Minds, “Someone Somewhere In Summertime”

Life
It's my birthday, and I get to buy a Mac. I can't wait...

Society
Roger L. Simon on pathological politics: “Possibly the primary reason I am no longer an adherent of traditional party politics is that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are dominated by a hatred of the other that seems pathological to me”. Link courtesy of Heretical Ideas.

On a related note, I've been listening to the Books on Tape version of Joseph J. Ellis' Founding Brothers. One of things the book focuses on is the bitter (Ellis calls them "scatalogical") partisan politics of the 1790s, when the two-party system first emerged. Both sides commonly referred to the other as "traitors" to the legacy of the revolution. It's worth noting that getting down and dirty did very little for the participants' reputations; Alexander Hamilton, in particular, lost a good deal of his influence and prestige (as well as seriously damaging the Federalist party) after a vicious attack on John Adams in the election of 1800. Adams had already been suffering from the Republican opposition led by Jefferson, who just happened to also be his Vice President. Yet Adams was the only one of the revolutionary participants able to rise above partisan bickering by concluding an unpopular treaty with France that effectively ended an undeclared state of war in 1799. It doomed his chances of being re-elected in 1800; but it was a brilliant piece of policy-making that allowed the nascent republic to gain a breathing space of a few more years in which to solidify its institutions before engaging a foreign power.

Would any of our leading politicians today sacrifice their careers in order to pass an unpopular but necessary measure?

I've read a number of comments in the last few days that the 2004 campaign will be dirtiest in recent history. The recent sniping at Wesley Clark seems to be a harbinger of things to come. While it may not be as vicious as the 1796 and 1800 elections, the caliber of those engaged can hardly be said to equal the real “Greatest Generation”.

Life - Snowballs in Paradise
Summer is almost officially over, but it was over 80 today in beautiful Santa Cruz. I think it's just the continuation of a strange weather pattern this year, but it's a little odd. The Amaryllis are still blooming weeks after they're usually gone, and there still seems to be a pretty good number of tourists 3 weekends after Labor Day. The only real sign I've seen of fall is that the surf seems to have gotten heavier in the past 2 weeks, although it was a little milder today. Both dogs have gotten knocked over by big waves the last two weekends, which is a little scary; Greyhounds aren't exactly built for battling the waves.

Life has a mildly hallucinogenic quality here under any circumstances, but the heat seems to make everything even slower and dreamier. I'm driving down Soquel Avenue yesterday, just past the Harley Davidson dealership/museum on the corner of Seabright, with a guy on a Harley in front of me. I look across the street and see a 9 or 10 year-old kid taking aim at the motorcyclist. With a snowball. He throws it well behind the Harley - the rider doesn't even notice - and runs away. There's a flea market going on the next corner down and people are walking down the street on my side, but nobody else seems to see this but me.

Now, where do you get a snowball on a hot day in Santa Cruz? Come to think of it, where do you get a snowball on any day in Santa Cruz?

Politics - The Administration's Spin Cycle Never Stops
So the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defense, and now the President have all gone on record acknowledging that there was no link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and 9/11, apparently in an effort to spin some earlier comments made by the Vice President about ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune asks: “So why do seven in 10 Americans believe there is a link? Is it just their wild imaginings? Nope: It's because the White House planted the idea and has cultivated it assiduously for months”. Read the whole editorial here.

But they never actually came out and said it. They may have implied it in every way possible, and there seems to have been no shortage of off-the-record suggestions that Saddam and Al Qaeda were intimately involved. But the right level of plausable deniability was maintained.

Robert Scheer writes: “The pattern is clear: Say what you want people to believe for the front page and on TV, then whisper a halfhearted correction or apology that slips under the radar. It is really quite ingenious in its cynical effectiveness”. I don't agree with the rest of Scheer's article, but he gets this point exactly right.

This doesn't just apply to Iraq. Take tax cuts, for instance. Spinsanity debunks the latest spin on this topic. Take WMD's. Oh, but we're still looking for those.

So the question I have is this: When does a pattern of constant manipulation and dissembling in the media come to be regarded as fundamentally dishonest? Where's the dividing line between doctoring the spin and lying?

Software
The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas, is one of my favorite books about the of programming. They distill their advice down to about 70 tips, but three really stand out for me, and I've made them part of my philosophy about my trade.

• Don't Live with Broken Windows
  Don't leave broken windows (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired...Don't let entropy win.


• DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself
  Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.


• It's All Writing
  Treat English as just another programming language.

The combination of the last two is particularly powerful. For years, I've struggled with how to write effective documentation that's both concise and complete, and can be maintained along with the code. Putting those two ideas together helps a lot. So I try to let the code say what it says (this is how it's done), let the UML diagrams and other pictures say what they say (this is what the pieces are, how they're structured, and how they relate), and glue it all together with just enough prose (this is why it is what it is). A crucial tactic in this is to make the software as self-describing as possible - by putting as much application-specific detail as possible in metadata and making the code as simple and clear as I can.

A lot of developers I know believe that all you need is the code, and all you have to do is read it in order to understand the application or system. I disagree; I think that only indicates how immature the discipline of software development really is. I think we need to think of ourselves as writers, not coders, and understand the whole process as a continuum of authorship. And what we produce is writing. And we correct it, enhance it, refactor it, reuse it, and recast it for the whole of its useful life. And we should take pride in making it as easy to understand as possible. The macho attitude of "just read the code" is the attitude of intellectual adolescents.

Critical documentation that is out of date is, of course, another form of broken windows. Don't let entropy win.

Other good books on the craft:

The Practice of Programming, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike
Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, Robert Glass
Refactoring, Martin Fowler
Peopleware, Tim Lister and Tom DeMarco

and the all-time classic:
The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks - I recommend re-reading “No Silver Bullets” at least once a year.

I should read Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls, too, but I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Honesty compels me to admit that Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming trilogy is still a little over my head. I've set myself a goal of reading (and understanding) it all by the end of the decade. I have no doubt that it will still be relevant.

Good blogging
Spinsanity has two good pieces - one on debunking some of Al Franken's more inflammatory rhetoric disguised as humour (while acknowledging how well Franken dismantles Ann Coulter's Slander and Sean Hannity's Let Freedom Ring) and the other on GWB's misrepresentation of the effect of his tax cuts on both the deficit and on the economy.

I love the tone and approach. Eminently reasonable, logical, clear, well-argued prose with little or no trace of ideological bias. James Madison would be proud of these guys.

Nema, at Iranian Truth, meditates on the questions she gets about what it means to be Iranian and asks “How do you answer a question you spend your life answering?”. I think she's doing a wonderful job in the series of posts that follow.

101-365, on the delay of the recall: “...at least Davis now knows who that chubby Mexican guy down the hall is”. And scroll down and check out the Full Barley Moon and Mars with the Moon Behind a Tree.

My friend T., in his own inimitable style, has a series of posts on mortality and the afterlife. In between, he's discovered flashmobs, the new baby boom, and how Chinatown one-ups McDonalds.. He also says that because he's drinking less, he's changed the title of his blog back to Crazy, Drunk, and Unemployed. What's up with that, T?

War and Peace
Molly Ivins, after receiving the usual* hate-mail from the wingnuts on the right after this article:

“Well, I ain't gonna take it anymore. I am not shutting up for Bill O'Reilly or anyone else.

I opposed our unprovoked, unnecessary invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it would be a short, easy war followed by the peace from hell. I predicted that every terrorist in the Middle East would be drawn to Iraq like a magnet.

I was right, and I'm not going to apologize for it.”

You go, girl. Then she adds this:

“I also realize that the future in Iraq is a lot more important than any petty "I was right" vindication...I am trying hard to be a responsible citizen here; I don't think the choice is between "staying the course" or "cut and run." I think we need to change course and be honest enough to admit it to ourselves and everybody else.”

That, unfortunately, is the space (you know, the one between a rock and a hard place) that we find ourselves in. We can't abandon Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter) to chaos. Doing so would result in a defeat worse than any military setback we could possibly suffer. But we need to change course and find an effective grand strategy - one that rebuilds and stabilizes Iraq and Afghanistan and that refocuses our efforts on actually fighting the war against terrorism without turning it into a war on Islam.

*(It requires absolutely no imagination at all to figure out what kinds of things were said. That's because your basic right wingnut doesn't have any imagination; all he or she can do is crudely parrot the same tired lines. Your basic left wingnut, on the other hand, suffers from an excess of imagination, which is why they come up with such a wide variety of truly ridiculous notions.)

Greed and Stupidity
So now the RIAA is suing 12-year-old girls for downloading music. And 71-year-old grandfathers. And divorced mothers of teenagers. And anyone else they pick out at random.

Bastards.

You know, there's a lot of great music out there that the RIAA doesn't control. There are literally dozens of great artists all over the world waiting for you to discover them. And if you're like me, one of life's sweeter joys is discovering some brilliant musician or band that you never knew even existed before. There's no need to settle for the pablum the big media companies try to foist on us. I'm not telling you to boycott the RIAA (although it's certainly worth considering); I'm urging you to go out and find all the great music that's out there that isn't controlled by plutocrats who seem to feel the need to sue 12-year-old girls.

How do you know whether something comes from an RIAA member company? Just go here.

Here's a list of some of my favorites to help you get started:

Warren Zevon - The Wind, Life'll Kill Ya
Lori Carson - House in the Weeds (you can order it direct from her website)
Gigi - One Ethiopia
Bebel Gilberto - Tanto Tempo (The Special Remix Edition on Ziriguiboom - if you want the original, email me and I'll burn you a copy)
Gilberto Gil - Refavela
Paco de Lucia/Eric Montoya - Flamenco Romantico
Like Irish music? - check out Green Linnet records. I'm partial to Altan and Wolfstone.
Putumayo puts out great collections from all over the world, as well as individual artists like Oliver Mtukudzhe.
The Texas Music Group brings together a bunch of great Texas labels like Antones and Watermelon records, so you can find Toni Price, Don Walser, The Derailers, and more.

And go out and see some live music. A bigger percentage of your dollar goes to the artist than it does when you buy a CD.

Life - The Good and Bad in Santa Cruz
So the city council has decided to send a letter to the House Judiciary Committee to voice the community's concerns about President Bush's actions. It isn't quite a call for impeachment, but it's the next best thing. You might assume that this is payback for the infamous DEA drug bust of a little over a year ago (after which members of the city council handed out medical marijuana on the steps of city hall), but it actually is a reflection of the will of the electorate.

I must look for references to this in various right-wing ideo-blogs tomorrow, just for the entertainment value of watching their mouths foam with righteous indignation. I'm not really a leftist, I just prefer the goofy entertainment the left provides to the mean-spiritedness of the right. And life here in the CenCal Riveria - the land that time and neo-conservatism forgot - is always entertaining.

The bad is that I have to drive over the hill to my job in San Jose. The "hill" is actually the ridge of the Santa Cruz mountains that separates the Pacific coast from Silicon Valley. To get to work, my fellow commuters and I have to take Highway 17, a twisty four-lane mountain road that cuts through Patchen Pass, the lowest point of the mountains near Santa Cruz. Normally, it's not too bad once you're used to it, but today it rained for the first time since late April. This always catches people by surprise, and they tend to do foolish things. That last rain was on a Friday, and I waited until after 8 PM to go home because I knew how bad things would be. And I wasn't mistaken; in addition to passing 3 multi-car accidents that evening, I also two cars - one on each side of the road - flipped over on their roofs in the right-hand lane. Today I only saw 2 accidents, neither of which looked too terrible.

The problem isn't the road itself; all you have to do is slow down and drive carefully. No, the real danger is an impatient yuppie in an SUV or a BMW. I assume today's accidents will be enough to bring the CHP patrols back, and I'll be glad to see them.

CalPolitics
So Cruz is a racist, Arnold once bragged about having group sex, and Gray is...well, Gray. It's great to see how the media is focusing on the important stuff instead of wasting their time on irrelevant matters such as investigating the candidates' solutions to the state's budget crisis. Perhaps it's best to completely pass over the question of how some dignity ever gets restored to California governance.

Bustamante's worst sin, as far as I can tell, is his utter mediocrity. Could the Democrats have two more dispiriting candidates than Cruz and Gray? That may be what makes Arnold attractive to lots of undecided voters. But it seems to me he suffers from the same problem that his Democratic opponents do - he doesn't really seem to stand for anything other than getting elected. It's possible he has some very definite positions, but we have no idea what they might be. And his handlers are working very hard at keeping him under wraps. This might be his best possible strategy. Current and former Texans of a certain age (like me) probably still remember how Clayton Williams lost a huge lead in the Texas Governor's race in 1990 by repeatedly sticking his foot in his mouth.

But comparisons to George W. Bush are probably are little more apt. Like GWB, we have a well-known candidate who's never held public office. He's backed by the best-connected insiders of his party, many of whom have extensive experience in politics. In particular, the folks advising Schwartzenegger are the same ones who were part of Pete Wilson's (the last Republican Governer of CA) administration. Like GWB, there have been charges that AS is simply a frontman for the decision-makers behind the scenes.

A big difference is that the Governor's duties in Texas are largely ceremonial. The Lieutenant Governor is responsible for the day-to-day business of the state. This is not the case in California, where the Governor has far more power and responsibility. GWB was very effective in advancing his agenda during his time as Governor, but it was Bob Bullock and then Rick Perry who ran the day-to-day show as Lt. Gov.

Schwarzenegger's claim is that specifics of his positions on the issues are not that important; bringing leadership to Sacramento is what's needed. This isn't really a bad argument; tough decisions need to be made by someone who's willing to stand up, carry them forward, and get the majority of state's lawmakers on board. But at this point, we have very little to help judge if Schwarzenegger is capable of providing that kind of leadership. A good start would be to demonstrate that's he's done his homework, and that he has some well-thought-out ideas and positions. Despite some test marketing to the far right, he's still largely a cipher, and his candidacy still looks to me more like a vanity project for his ego than a commitment to effectively governing California.

Update: I wrote this on Saturday and posted it without publishing (or so I thought). The reason I didn't publish it was because I thought it was poorly written and not very well informed - based on my emotional judgements of the candidates which have been formed without sufficiently educating myself. So this is a slight rewrite of the original post. It's a little better, but not much.

Society

Here's an interesting article on ESPN's hiring of Rush Limbaugh by Rogers Cadenhead. I felt motivated to write this comment:

“There's a simple cure for the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters of the world:

By and large, ignore them. Don't buy their books, don't watch their shows. Don't waste energy debating their ridiculous positions. Doing so gives them a legitimacy that they don't deserve.

Of course, they'll continue to appeal to their core constituencies. There'll always be plenty of money to be made pandering to people's worst impulses. But remember that this sort of thing thrives on controversy, especially the emotional, name-calling, mean-spirited kind. Denying them the privilege of being taken seriously averts this and eventually results in their being reduced to irrelevance.

Now, that doesn't mean we should let them get away with anything. The truly offensive things they say and do - Limbaugh's repugnant remarks about 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton and his frequent bouts of racism, Coulter's indefensible defense of Joe McCarthy and labeling of liberals as "traitors" - need to be held up as examples of why they shouldn't be taken seriously. But the important thing is to to debunk and skewer such abuse of the right of free speech, not to respond in kind or descend to personal attacks. Rogers' article is very much in this spirit. The real point, to me, is the cynicism of ABC/Disney in hiring Limbaugh in attempt to boost ratings by 1) bringing in his core audience and 2) hoping this ignites controversy. Don't let it; in this case, principled detachment is more effective than rabid condemnation. Turning off ESPN and ABC is an easy thing to do. If lots of people do it, it's more effective than any other method.

This same advice can be applied to the idiots on the far left. Feel free to substitute Michael Moore and Al Sharpton for Limbaugh and Colter. But the point remains: call them on their nonsense, ignore them otherwise, and eventually they'll fade away.”

Barbershop Banter
Speaking of Dean, my barber Jerome mentioned a great quote while he was cutting my hair this morning. Apparently, Dean has been pointing out that he balanced 12 budgets in a row and that George Bush has never balanced one.

I'll attest to that. I was living in Texas when GWB pissed away the surplus Ann Richards had made possible during her term as Governer. And that was during the boom, not after it. Sorry, “pissed” is the wrong verb. He gave away the surplus. To his rich buddies and corporate benefactors. Molly Ivins tells you all about it here.

As an aside, Texas was facing a budget crunch almost as scary as California's current one after the '84-85 bust. One of the key reasons the state didn't melt down financially was Ann Richard's remarkable performance as State Controller and then Treasurer. Her right-hand man and successor, John Sharp, was equally brilliant. Their efforts and a recovery of the Texas economy eventually led to a budgetary surplus. California could really use someone with Governer Ann's financial acumen and leadership right now. Not to mention her wit, charm, and gift for stinging rhetoric. Instead, we've got Gray, Cruz, and Arnold.

Jerome, incidentally, was into self-publishing long before the web made it easy for the rest of us. Is that cool, or what?

Better Late Than Never
Dave Winer is asking bloggers to link to this post on blogging tips for candidates. Now, it hardly matters whether I do or not, but it's eminently worthwhile reading. Key quote: “Earlier this year I wrote an op-ed piece for the Harvard Crimson explaining the next step in democracy, voters with their own publications, everyone with an op-ed page, citizens with weblogs, a revolution in politics...it's surprising when a vision comes true, no matter how strongly you felt it would.”. The Dean campaign weblog seems to be the one that's blazed the trail, along with Larry Lessig's guest spots by Dean and Kucinich. But no one's really harnessed the medium yet. What's going to happen when someone does?

More Bernard Lewis
“Some features of classical Islamic civilization, such as tolerance, social mobility, and respect for law, are distinctly favorable to democratic development...Socially, Islam has always been democratic, or rather, egalitarian, rejecting both the caste system of India and the aristocratic privilege of Europe...[There remains] the political difficulty - the total absence of any conception or experience of representative or limited government of any kind. It is this, no doubt, that underlies the theory that democracy cannot work in Islamic lands. That there is a predisposition to autocratic government among Muslim peoples is clear enough; that there is an inherent incapacity for any other has yet to be proven.”

Books
I've been reading Bernard Lewis's The Shaping of the Modern Middle East. Here's an interesting quote:

“Of all the great movements that have shaken the Middle East during the last century and a half, the Islamic movements alone are authentically Middle Eastern in inspiration...the religious ideologies alone sprang from the native soil and expressed the passions of the submerged masses of the population. Time and again, the fundamentalists have shown, against all their competitors, that theirs are the most effective slogans and symbols, theirs the most intelligible and appealing discourse...the religious movements can still release direct immensely powerful pent-up emotions and give expression to deeply held aspirations. Aspirations are not programs, and the fundamentalists in office have so far shown themselves no better equipped than their predecessors either to solve the problems of their societies or to resist the temptations of power. But although these movements have so far been defeated or deflected, they have not yet spoken their last word.”

War and Peace
Salam Pax's postings have become increasingly cynical - maybe even a litle despairing - in the past month or two. Now his parents' house has been searched by the US Army.

“They came, freaked out my mother, pissed off my father, found nothing and left.
After refusing to get one my father finally conceded to get one of those cards that basically say you are a “collaborator”.”

Not a flip remark. Apparently, it's not safe to be to perceived as being in league with the Americans.

Still think we're winning? Apparently the right-wing ideologues do. I'm having trouble deciding where denial ends and cluelessness begins with these guys. They'd probably tell you that Salam and I are both part of the problem - foot soldiers in the army of fifth columnists who will be responsible if things don't go the way they're supposed to. Then again, as an Open Software writer and user, I'm a criminal as well as a traitor, so it's no wonder that I'm subverting the true path of freedom and liberty*.

It's easier to blame someone else when things go wrong than to admit that the policies you favored were flawed. That would too close to taking responsibility for your opinions and actions. And that can't be allowed in this blame culture (which itself, of course, is blamed on those traitorous liberals).

I was never a big fan of Ronald Reagan, but I always admired him for standing up and saying that the blame was ultimately his when something major (e.g., the blowing up of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983) went wrong on his watch. I can't imagine any leading politician of this time doing the same. I mean, can you imagine Gray Davis taking the blame for the California budget? Bush for the economy? Tony Blair for misleading Parliament? Clinton for Mogadishu? Katherine Harris for the election debacle in Florida?

No, it's somebody else's fault. It's always somebody else's fault. The right has the dubious distinction of playing the blame game better, but that's just one more indication that the left is in disarray.

Remember when politicians actually took some responsibility for their actions and policies? Remember when it was a sign of character to admit when you were wrong and that self-restraint and tact were once considered virtues? Remember when Republicans were actually fiscal conservatives and Democrats actually believed in standing up for the working man?

Has the society we live in really progressed from the one our parents lived in when they were our age?

*(But once more, for the record: I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love to see attacks against us and the British slowly wind down. I'd love to see a successful reconstruction of Iraq that resulted in a stable and prosperous democracy. I'd love to see the repressive Islamic fundamentalists in Iran overthrown and replaced by a representative democracy. I'd love to see Osama and Saddam captured and tried for their crimes. I submit, once again, that you need an effective grand strategy to achieve most of these aims and that the present strategy, including the near-unilateral invasion of Iraq (with a force too small to successfully occupy it), is badly thought out, deeply flawed, and carries too high a risk of failure.)

CC - The Leading Edge of Satire
I just read a post on Adam Felber's site making fun of Ascroft's multi-city tour. You'll note that he wrote it 11 days after I made fun of the idea. I've seen a couple of other satirical references to the same subject in the last day or two, but hey - I WAS FIRST!

Granted, Felber's way funnier than me. But it took him 11 days to be funnier. So there.

Hey, do you think that if I titled this "CC - The Fair and Balanced Edge of Satire" I could get Fox to sue me?

Policy
I'll submit that the California recall and last week's blackouts on the other coast have the same root cause - an inability to make effective policy to achieve desirable outcomes.

The desirable outcome in California is a well-governed state able to endure the vicissitudes of volatile economic changes without succumbing to fiscal crisis during downturns. The desirable outcome for our power grid is to provide safe, highly reliable power without interruption at the lowest possible cost. We've managed to achieve the exact opposite of the outcomes we desire. And the ultimate reason is poor policy.

The recall is simply a second-order effect of California's budget crisis. I'm no big fan of Gray Davis, but the recall does nothing to help solve the budget crisis. The California Journal does an excellent job of tracing the budget crisis down to it roots. “Crisis in California” identifies 5 reasons why things have gone wrong. All are examples of poor policy making. Taken together, they've created a disasterous situation. The biggest question is whether they can be effectively reformed. If not, “The doomsday question is whether Governor Gray Davis is being recalled for failing to govern a state that is no longer governable.”

A not-disimilar story - albeit over a longer period of time - unfolds if you take a look at the roots of the blackout. Since at least 1982, experts have warned that the electric grid's ability to meet its goal of uninterruptable service is becoming more and more compromised. There have been multiple warnings since 9-11. Yet little to no action has been taken. The reason, once again, is poor policy. Some excellent background information can be found here and some good free-market oriented policy discussion here.

Notice that on both of these issues, everyone can share the blame. It's a completely non-partisan failure by all concerned.

Software
I've just about finished porting Chrysalis to MySQL; heck, I might even get it all checked in tonight. It's one of those I'm-glad-it's-over kind of things, because MySQL isn't particularly interesting to work with. Truth be told, it's a toy, not a full-fledged DBMS. It's very useful for lots of simple things, but so what? Of course, this is not a PC thing to say in the open-source world - putting down MySQL is the equivalent of questioning motherhood and apple pie.

But that's not what I really want to write about. I need to work on my own unfinished project instead of critiquing someone else's. God knows, I've got at least 6 more months of work to add features and support for other databases beyond this initial port. Of course, the port isn't really finished, either. I had to make a lot of changes to the structure of the code - even though I'd originally tried to write something that would be easy to port to multiple databases - and that means I need to take another pass through it and refactor it to make it coherent enough to understand and maintain. Among my goals when I write code is to make as clear and simple as possible. I can see how to get there with my current code base, but isn't really that close to meeting those goals. And the truth is that the code really isn't production quality yet because I haven't tested it or stressed it to any great degree. At least my versioning scheme is relatively honest - no one should mistake an 0.4 release for a finished product.

Music

We are the roses in the garden,
beauty with thorns among our leaves.
To pick a rose, you ask your hands to bleed.

What is the reason for having roses
when your blood is shed carelessly?
It must for something more than vanity.

10,000 Maniacs, “Eden”, Our Time in Eden

Our Civil Liberties
It should give us all hope - left, right, and center - that common sense and an awareness of what the Founding Fathers intended seems to be taking hold. Not only does the passage of Patriot II, in any form, seem more and more unlikely, but now there seems to be a strong and growing reaction from conservatives against John Ashcroft and his misuse of both Patriot I and the Justice Department to go along with the persistent criticism from the left. Instapundit sums up this trend nicely.This is heartening because it seems as if the self-correcting mechanisms built into our system may in fact be working to swing the pendulum back.

In reaction, Ashcroft just announced a multi-city tour to talk about the fight against terrorism and the benefits of Patriot I. A multi-city tour? What, is he promoting a new album? Will there be t-shirts? Is there a DOJ staff wrangler dedicated to removing all the red M and M's? I'm trying not to think about what Ashcroft groupies look like...

Math and Computing
Paul Graham, writing about Lisp:

“So the short explanation of why this 1950s language (Lisp) is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn't get stale.”

I'll make the same claim about the relational model, which is just an application of set theory and first-order predicate logic. Fabian Pascal puts it this way:

· a database is a set of axioms;
· the response to a query is a theorem;
· the process of deriving the theorem from the axioms is a proof;
· a proof is made by manipulating symbols according to agreed mathematical rules;

The proof, of course, can only be as sound and consistent as the rules are. That makes the DBMS a deductive logic system: it derives new facts (query results) from a set of user asserted facts (the database). The derived facts are true (query results are correct) if and only if:
· The initial assertions are true
· The derivation rules are logically sound

The sad fact is that none of the above is true of commercial SQL DBMS's. They're just stale technology - because they ignored the math.

Dolphins
We saw a group (school?) of dolphins this morning at the beach. I saw 4 together, but S. says she counted 8 total while I was trying to get a picture (I didn't; need a better camera and a better photographer). They tend to swim parallel to the beach just past the surf line, their fins bobbing up and down. I usually see them from October to April, but I've never seen them before in August. From the descriptions I read, I'd guess that they were bottlenose dolphins but they could also have been Pacific White-Sided Dolphins. Doesn't matter; either way, it's a striking reminder that we live right next to one of the greatest concentrations of marine life in the world.

Follow ups

IBM countersues SCO, following Red Hat and SUSE. Apparently triggered by SCO's attempt to sell SCO Unixware licenses to Linux users, which, BTW, is a violation of the GPL. Bruce Perens points this out, and also points out the danger of patents to Open Source, which is worrisome given that part of IBM's countersuit alleges patent infringement.

So this is more of a mess than ever. I still don't believe there's any real merit to SCO's claims. But the FUD spewed by all this is a terrific smokescreen for more serious attacks on Open Source - namely, patents and other manipulations of IP protections.

What's the situation in Iraq? Depends on who want to believe. All I know is that two more U.S. soldiers are dead in an attack and more than 10 Iraqis died in a car-bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. Read Salam Pax for an insider's view.

Winning? Losing? The peace, that is.

Life
This is the time of year when the Amaryllis blooms. The local variety are a startling pink, gay and profuse. They seem to bloom overnight; you look up one day at the beginning of August and notice them everywhere. It's interesting that they choose to bloom at the least likely time - when the morning fog no longer rolls in and the sun beats down all day and it's bone dry. And they seem to grow best in empty lots, quiet corners, and other forgotten or ignored places. They only last for a few weeks and then they're gone. That, combined with the time of year, when summer peaks and then declines into the autumn, makes them very poignant to me; I feel summer's glory and passing all at once.

I also notice that the leaves on the Japanese Maples in front of Gault Elementary school are starting to turn red, getting ready to blaze with color and fall at the feet of the children when they return to school in just a few weeks.

I know neither the Amaryllis nor the Japanese Maple are native varieties, but I can't help but love them anyway.

An Abrupt Hiatus
I can't believe that I haven't blogged for a week. There's a lot of things I want to write about, but just haven't had the time; I've had to work on some critical customer issues at my new job and was also working on a little programming contest we had staged. Alas, I came in third. The winner was our intern, who used a friggin' Mergesort as the basis of his solution. Oh, the ignominy! At least I beat my boss and a couple of the other senior programmers.

Breakfast
Strawberries and Raspberries from Cortez Farms in Santa Maria. English Shelling Peas from Swank Farms in Hollister. Beef Bacon from Corralitos Meat. Co. All courtesy of the Cabrillo College Farmers' Market. Plus an Almond and Cherry granola bar.

Software - An Interview with Richard M. Stallman
I don't always agree with RMS, which is why Chrysalis uses a BSD license. But you gotta love this exchange:

GSMBOX: Therefore, you refuse the term piracy when speaking about unauthorised copies?

RMS: Piracy means attacking and burning ships and this is very very bad. But sharing copies of any information technology product over the computer for most of us is a good act, it is social cooperation. The idea of making a connection between these two acts, one absolutely immoral and the other very moral, is completely wrong. It is a term of propaganda and I do not intend to participate in the propaganda of publishers.

He also notes that "Free software is neither to the right nor the left". Is the tie to my previous post coincidence or synchronicity? Read the whole interview, courtesy of OS News.

Plagiarizing Shakespeare
Neither a liberal nor a conservative be

Social Darwinism
In the midst of a wonderful article on Saving the Net in Linux Journal, Doc Searls makes this tangential observation:

“Liberals often are flummoxed by the way conservatives seem to love big business (including, of course, big media). Yet the reason is simple: they love winners, literally. They like to reward strength and achievement...As George Lakoff explained in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't (University of Chicago, 1995), conservatives consider strength a "moral value". Strong is good. Weak is bad.”

Put another way, Success=Morality. This is what some of the Calvinists believed. There's a name for this point of view when it's taken to a certain extreme. It's called Social Darwinism. The last great heyday of Social Darwinism was in late 19th-Century Great Britian. Thanks to Herbert Spencer, English imperialists found a philosophical justification in their drive for empire. Some historians have made the argument that the abandonment of what had made England great - trade, commerce, and a grand strategy dedicated to maintaining the balance of power - in favor of hegemony and expansion is what led to the eventual decline of the British Empire. There's also direct connection between Spencer and the National Socialists in Germany less than a century later. In his Survival Guide to the New Renaissance, W.R. Clement posits that the current rise of Social Darwinism among Western elites is both a reaction to the rising tide of change in human society and a justification for establishing an dominant oligarchy. He also derides Social Darwinism as a dangerous, stupid, and short-sighted world view doomed to failure.

I am not equating mainstream conservatism with Social Darwinism. That's as absurd as equating mainstream liberalism with communism, or libertarianism with anarchy. My point is that Social Darwinism is a pernicious trap that elites, particularly conservative elites, are prone to fall into.

Databases - My Brilliant Career Tuning SQL
One of the first things I did when I started my first real job, way back when GWB I was prez, was to try to tune a bunch of complex SQL statements. My first task in my new job was to try to tune a bunch of complex SQL statements. So what's changed in 15 years? Well, the databases are much larger (hundreds of GBs vs. hundreds of MBs), we're now up to Oracle Version 9 (it was v5 then), PL/SQL and Java came along to change how we write programs, the net came along to change the kind of programs we write, Larry Ellison is even richer, etc., etc.

What hasn't changed? The basic nature of the problem. Conceptually, there has been no real progress. I'm still doing essentially the same thing - figuring out what the database engine should do and then finding a way to make the engine do it.

Yes, it's all bigger-faster-better, and yes, I don't have to ensure that every single statement is optimized like I did in days of yore. But the growth in the size and complexity of applications effectively cancels out whatever other progress has been made. And so I find myself back where I started. But I'm not alone. The whole database industry has the same problem.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. What was supposed to happen was that the database engine's optimizer would be able to always figure out the optimal execution plan for you. It would do this using the statistics collected in the database catalog together with a variety of expression transformation algorithms to produce the best possible access plan. No intervention required, and on to the next level of abstraction. But we haven't gotten there. And it's not looking like we will anytime soon.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that SQL tuning has been very, very good to me. It's one of the reasons why I receive a handsome salary. While I consider it one of the lesser talents that I bring to the show, making something run several orders of magnitude faster than it did before I performed my magic tuning act certainly impresses the masses. And the semi-arcane knowledge required seems plenty daunting to the uninitiated. It does requires a certain feel or intuitive sense, but so do lots of other things. In short, it's an overrated skill.

But the application of said knowledge and instinct ought to be completely unnecessary. Back in the early-to-mid '80's, database researchers and gurus were just about sure that the need for manual tuning could be eliminated. And indeed it can be, in a relational database system. Because in a relational database system, every query could be reduced to a set of canonical relational algebra expressions. Potential access paths could be analyzed by looking at the statistics captured in the system catalog and the most optimal ones chosen. The set of expressions could then be sequenced in the most efficient order, and the statement would be executed. All with no human intervention required. So the effort previously devoted to manually optimizing physical data access could now be devoted to figuring out how to make applications and systems work better for the people who used and depended on them - a small example of the general way in which human progress is made, i.e., formerly labor-intensive tasks are automated, allowing us to move to the next higher level of abstraction.

And for one brief, shining moment this was actually achieved. A 1988 article in Database Programming and Design showed a comparison of several different database management systems (Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, etc.) each executing a variety of SQL queries. The twist was that all of the SQL statements were semantically equivalent - i.e., they meant the same thing and produced the same results. But due to the redundancy of SQL syntax, the same 3-table join could be expressed in a variety of different ways. So the article measured how fast each DBMS executed each variation of the statement. Ideally, every statement would take the roughly the same time to execute - because the optimizer would produce the same execution plan, and the only variable would be how long it took the optimizer to figure out the access plan.

Well, it didn't work that way. The variation in execution times ranged from about .1 seconds to over 1000 seconds. Oracle, which at this time had a syntactically based optimizer, produced both the fastest and slowest results. But the others weren't much better.

With one exception - Ingres. Every query got executed in about 2 seconds. No significant variations. A bit slow, perhaps - every other DBMS's best time was better - but almost perfectly consistent. Why? Because the Ingres optimizer produced the same execution plan every time. The other DBMS's produced different plans for different formulations of the same statement. How? Well, the secret was that Ingres originally used a different query language - QUEL - instead of SQL. QUEL was much closer to the relational calculus languages that Codd originally proposed. Consequently, it was much easier to optimize - because every QUEL statement could be transformed into a canonical relational algebra expression. Ingres was eventually forced to support SQL, but they were able to apply what they'd learned about optimization of QUEL to SQL (originally, in fact, they translated SQL to QUEL and then optimized it. By Ingres 7.X, they eliminated the translation step and optimized the SQL directly. It didn't work as well as optimizing QUEL, but it was better than what anyone else was doing).

So it can be done. Ingres was slow, but making it faster was an engineering problem, not a research problem. Engineering problems, in my definition, are ones that can be solved incrementally. Making cars more fuel-efficient is an engineering problem. Research problems, on the other hand, deal with bigger, more fundamental issues. Fusion power is a research problem. Nanotechnology is a research problem. Research leads to conceptual breakthroughs. Engineering takes those breakthroughs and produces viable, usable products. Like a relational database management system (DBMS) with a reliable optimizer. It can be done.

But it won't be, at least not by our present crop of DBMS's. That's because they use SQL. And guess what? SQL can't really be optimized. Why not? Because it breaks so many of the fundamental rules for a relational language that it can't be systematically and unambiguously optimized. One of the rules of relational algebra is that an arbitrary set of expressions can be evaluated in any order and still produce the same result. However, because SQL allows duplicates, this isn't true. Different orders of evaluation can yield different results. Further complicating this is the syntactic redundancy mentioned earlier - making the task of transforming expressions into a canonical form even more difficult. An optimizer that is unable to always transform equivalent expressions to a single form and that is unable to always arrange those expressions in the most optimal manner is not going to be an optimizer that is always able to produce the best (or even an acceptable) execution plan.

And so here we are, still hand-optimizing complex SQL queries instead of solving problems for people and businesses. One of the prevailing myths of this society is that progress moves in a straight, smooth path from one technological triumph to the next. But it doesn't. The path isn't uninterrupted, it's full of ruts and dead ends, and we seldom know where it will lead us. Sometimes, we even lose the path completely for a time. That's why Western philosophy didn't advance much beyond Aristotle and Plato for over 1000 years, that's why we're still using the internal combustion engine 150 years after its invention, and that's why we don't have real relational databases.

War and Peace
I would rather have seen Saddam's sons captured and tried for crimes against their people instead of killed. The equivalent of the Nuremburg trials for the Ba'athists would set a good precedent for the importance of the rule of law in a newly democratic Iraq.

Will their deaths help to end the insurgency? That sounds more like a wish from the administration's spin machine than anything else. If the present insurgency is nothing more than a series of guerilla attacks by Saddam's supporters, then it wasn't really much of a threat because it obviously lacks popular support (proof: the celebrations in the Baghdad streets upon confirmation of their deaths). But if it's something more - like a slowly growing popular rebellion against a foreign invader - it isn't going to make any real difference.

Proposition 13
Proposition 13 was passed in 1978. It cut California property taxes by 30 percent and capped the rate of increase in the future. It still arouses strong passions for and against, but the pro and con viewpoints seem to me to miss the most significant effect of Prop 13. That effect was identified by the Santa Cruz City Manager, Richard Wilson, who wrote, "In 1978 Proposition 13 reconstituted the financial structure of California's public sector. The result was system change, from one in which the State, counties, cities, special districts, and school boards all made independent financial decisions to one in which the State is the only financial decision maker of any consequence".

This is the reason why all of California's municipalities are in trouble along with the state. Since the passage of Prop 13, the state has increasingly taken revenues historically dedicated to local government for itself. During the boom, an adequate amount was returned to municipalities. Now, with the bust and concomitant deficits, that money won't be returned and local governments will be forced to make significant and painful budget cuts. So we should expect local services and infrastructure to decline noticeably in the next few years.

Yet another example of the law of unintended consequences. It's why good policy - the wonkish, obsessed with both minutiae and outcomes, boring-as-hell kind - is so important and so critical. The devil really is in the details. California's rising property taxes and spending did desperately need to be reined in the late '70's. But Prop. 13 wrecked California's school system and transferred fiscal control from local to state government. It's worth analyzing what went wrong and what better approaches could have been taken, because those lessons could be applied today. Maybe we could find a better way to hold down property taxes, revoke Prop 13, and even transfer control over local collected funds back to the localities where they were collected. It's never too late for good policy.

Oh, and the idea of deficits being concomitant with the bust isn't quite true. Our huge state deficit can't be blamed on just the economic downturn. Good policy and realistic planning would have ameliorated the effects of the bust. Unfortunately, our Governer and the Legislature elected to go on spending as if the boom would continue forever. I'd like to oppose the recall initiative because it's just a ploy by the Republicans to get Arnold into office two years early, but Gray Davis fully deserves it. Too bad there's no way to recall the legislature as well.