200,000 Words
With that last post I just went over 200,000 words on smarties.
I hit both my one year blogging mark and 100,000 words at about the same time in 2005. The second hundred thousand words took me nearly two years. It took me 166 posts to do my first 100,000, and 198 to do my second 100,000. So posts have gotten a little shorter — but not much — and my post rate has slowed down. My post rate hasn't really slowed down. The post rate for the first year (June 2004 - June 2005) is 13.83. For 2007 through the end of April my post rate was 13.75 posts per month. The rate over the period of the second 100,000 words is thrown off by a lul of nearly a year between September of 2005 and September 2006:
| Month and Year |
Posts |
| September 2005 |
14 |
| October 2005 |
6 |
| November 2005 |
1 |
| December 2005 |
6 |
| January 2006 |
5 |
| February 2006 |
4 |
| March 2006 |
3 |
| April 2006 |
2 |
| May 2006 |
6 |
| June 2006 |
4 |
| July 2006 |
6 |
| August 2006 |
11 |
| September 2006 |
14 |
In the Inaugural Post I said that my goal was two posts per week and even with those bad months I have still managed to make that goal over the long-term, with 2.4 posts per week being my average to date. Also, it's worth noting that the percentage of words on this blog my own — versus those excerpted from others — has been trending upwards for some time now. If I recall correctly it was more or less 72.5 for the first year, then went down to I believe 71. I currently stand at 75 percent of the test my own. Bring it up to 75 from 71 in the past few months means that recent posts have been more than 75 percent my own.
So, I am at trend and even with a significant lul have still managed to make my goal in the long term. While posts are slightly shorter, they are more my own writing.
I've read the blog gottchas: where someone makes a post and an attentive reader points out that they have contradicted themself by digging out some forgotten old post. I have simultaneous wondered how it is that such a thing can happen — how can one get to the point where one doesn't know what positions one has and has not taken in the past — and yet figured the day was coming when I too would be swamped by the number of past posts on my blog. I am now definitely at that point. I routinely look back through the archive and think, "I made that post?" Starting posts, but never getting them up remains a problem and it further confuses this issue in that I can't remember which ones I posted and which languish a few sentences from completion on my hard drive.
These are just a few hasty observations. I'm coming up on my three year mark (21 June 2007). A complete annual review will be in order at that time.
Thought: Waiting for Godot
In recognition of the dawn of the second nuclear age now upon us, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock up two minutes so that it now stands at five minutes to midnight.
In macaw celebration, the January / February 2007 issue (vol. 63, no. 1) contains a host of authors discussing terrible fate. Jonathan Schell makes an insightful distinction for those who think nuclear weapons just another device on the sequence of technological advances in war ("Genesis in Reverse," pp. 27-29):
The antecedents to the events of 1945, the event itself [the advent of the nuclear bomb], and the sequel exhibit a common theme. All are acts of extermination, which is something quite specific, something quite new, that needs to be clearly distinguished from other evils.
...
For a species or an ecosystem, like a human society, is an immortal body composed of mortal beings. To be mortal is not to be at risk of death, it is to be fated to die, which is why some pessimistic philosophers have said that life is an illness from which no one recovers; but the immortal bodies, though killable, are exempted from this fatality.
It is the immortal bodies, in all their tremendous yet finite variety, that acts of extermination destroy. In doing so, extermination attacks life at a level that killing, even mass killing, does not reach. Killing removes a sentient individual from life. Acts of extermination mutilate, deform, reduce or destroy the living world from which killing removes the individual ... None of this is to say that extermination is necessarily more awful than unsystematic killing. It is only to say that it is new and different, that it damages life on a new scale and at a new level, and therefore demands new thought and a new response.
I'm sympathetic to the point and it is a useful distinction, one so subtle as to be difficult to draw. However, I am one of those pessimists of which Mr. Schell writes.
The imagined eternity of ecosystems, societies and the life-world are the shattered illusion of immortality of those who come after the death of god. They are the homily delivered at the funeral.
These things are not immortal. Nothing is. They are fated to die every bit as much as one of their members. It is just that their fates play out on an arc beyond our comprehension. If nothing else, the Earth is tethered to a time bomb. A few billion years hence, the sun, its nuclear fuel expended, will huff up and consume the Earth. It will slough off its outer layers in waves of scorching plasma. It will be a wonder if so much as a blackened rock remains as our tomb stone.
But the sun's death will be unsuffered as it will consume a long dead Earth. Well before the final days of the sun the Earth's core will cool and its electromagnetic dynamo will shut down. Deprived of an electromagnetic field, the solar wind will strip the planet of its atmosphere. Habitable planets are only so for a certain period. They are mortal.
But that is a few billion years. Long before that something, most probably of our own making, will get us: global warming, nuclear war, plague, the nanotech ice nine, the robot armies. For any one of these a wait of only a century or so will be required. All species eventually go extinct and I don't believe we have any reason to believe ourselves the exception.
It is well observed at this point that our capacity for destruction has advanced considerably faster than our capacity for ethical reasoning or our organization acumen. Some would say that the later haven't advanced one iota in a hundred-thousand years of evolution. The outcome of this trend cannot be mistaken, only put out of mind.
Recognizing at some level beneath recognition that solutions are not forthcoming, and yet unable to follow the thought through to its inevitable conclusion — we are mortal, our civilization is mortal, all structures, records and information are ephemeral, species go extinct, worlds pass away, stars turn to embers and meaning is an illusion — we turn to fantasy. New thinking! Nothing in the human ethical constellation has budged in a hundred-thousand years, but necessity will call forth new thinking! What this will be, no one has a stitch of an idea, but it will come.
As for nuclear war, given time everything is possible. Nothing lasts forever. I suggest that we learn to stop worrying and love the Bomb.
Why So Down?
I've been out of the country and not posting for two weeks so have been very eager to report my observations of Thailand and get back in the blogging swing. I got up the hey I'm back post and was about to make a Friday cat blogging post when goodleaf went down. And it has been down for days now which is unlike my admin. He is very particular about things, especially all things computer related.
Smarties is hosted by a friend who lives in Seattle, not some commercial service that warehouses its servers in a facility with redundant systems and whatnot so I am subject to the vagaries of such a set up. If he moves or his girlfriend decides that he is paying too much attention to his computers and not enough to her and chucks them out the window, well, then smarties is down for a period.
When goodleaf came back up yesterday afternoon, I e-mailed him to inquire what had happened. I had to wait until things were back up again as his e-mail is through goodleaf as well. Here is his reply:
From: <administrator>
To: "Donald W. Taylor II" <taylordw@goodleaf.net>
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2006 19:53:33 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: why so down
Worst windstorm in years in fact. Hit Thurs. As I write this Sunday, some 400,000 are still without power. For a while, a full 1.5 million people had no power around here. Sadly, even my UPSs were overwhelmed. Our power came back last night, so the machines have only just come up really. Mixed with unusually cold weather, it's really been miserable time. Sat AM, the interior of our house had dropped to 35 degrees. We actually went to stay with my parents a while. They have no power either, but with gas heat and hot water, we could at least huddle near the fireplace and get hot coffee and tea. Most of the eastside is still lacking power. Redmond and Renton are powered, but much of Bellevue, Issaquah, Factoria and Kirkland is black. My parents just left here. We'd had them over for a hot meal (since we have electricity again).
Just so you know, though, I may shut down again at some point so I can upgrade the main server. It's been running on FreeBSD 4.1 for a loooong time now. The current release is 6.2...
Of course it's never just a matter of the computers coming back up. There are broken dependencies. Things have to propagate. Even though the front page was up yesterday, it wasn't until today that I could post again. So maybe a deluge?
I, For One, Welcome Our New Sea Otter Overlords
From last week's Southpark ("Go, God, Go XII," Season X, episode 152, 8 November 2006), as the Allied Atheist Alliance plots against the United Atheist Alliance and the Unified Atheist League, a discussion of the sea otter's raison d'etre breaks out (imagine Southpark otter voices):
Blavius: They are not a logical race, Wise One! They go around chopping down trees for tables, when they have perfectly good tummies to eat on. How logical is that?!
Otter Leader: Yes! The great Dawkins said we cannot tolerate those who don't use reason! How reasonable is it to eat off wood instead of your tummy?
...
Otter Leader: Kill the table-eaters! In the name of Almighty Science!
This is actually a fairly subtle point about relativism.
Reason is but a formal system, radically unmoored from the world. It bears a questionable, theoretical at best, relation to phenomena. Reason by itself merely works on propositions about which reason itself is neutral. Not properly calibrated by a proper empiricism, it can go horribly awry. As Immanuel Kant said, "Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."
And as Aristotle asserted, ethical reasoning is not an abstract, but an empirical science. One starts with principles germane to humans. Aristotle even leaves open the possibility that one begins one's moral reasoning with the principles germane to a particular city of humans, implying that other civilizations starting from different principles might come to similarly valid moral conclusions.
Given that the principles on which moral reasoning works are the characteristics of the moral agent, it follows that sea otters, having different characteristics, would work their way to different moral conclusions, ones related to their own physical and psychological makeup. Hence, "How reasonable is it to eat off wood instead of your tummy?"
I don't think I am making this up. I think that South Park really is making the relativist attack on Richard Dawkins that reason alone won't save us because we are prisoners of our particularity. And the cynical point that we will turn to violence over tables versus tummys.
Some Small But Interesting Part of the Problem
S. works as a Data / Business Analyst. We both work for the same company so I get a pretty close-in view of what she does and watching her work, it's startling how true the following dictum is from "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL":
If there is not enough schedule pressure on the Real Programmer, he tends to make things more challenging by working on some small but interesting part of the problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in the last week, in two or three 50-hour marathons. This not only impresses the hell out of his manager, who was despairing of ever getting the project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation.
We're still at work right now because she is over at her cube trying to figure out how to calculate some trivial piece of data to plug into a query. If she would just prompt the user for the data, she would be done and we could go home, but as always it's "some small but interesting part of the problem" that causes one to obsess.
It's like the 80/20 rule: You will expend twenty percent of your effort to get the first eighty percent of the objective and the remaining eighty percent of your effort will be required to obtain the last twenty percent. Or when you're people like us, you spend the eighty percent effort up front on the odd twenty percent of the objective and then, with twenty percent of the project time left, you freak out that it remains eighty percent incomplete.
That's how I am with this damn blog. The number of posts that I got eighty percent done, but then abandoned after a wild goose chase for some obscure reference went awry is completely dismaying. I probably have twice as many posts sitting unfinished in the My Documents folder on my PC as I have up.
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Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of
California Press. 2004.
Balls, Andrew. "Interest Rates: Has Alan Greenspan
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Ferguson, Niall. "A World Without Power." Foreign
Policy. July / August 2004. pp. 32-39.
Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. "Right Man's Burden."
The Washington Monthly. June 2004. pp. 40-47.
Confessore, Nicholas. "Paradise Glossed." The
Washington Monthly. June 2004. pp. 32-38.
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