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03/26/2011

Your Ideal Gift

There are many little nuggets of wisdom throughout J.K. Rowling's Harrry Potter books. One that just occurred to me was the contrast between Dumbledore and Gilderoy Lockhart concerning their ideal gift.

Dumbledore says that his ideal gift would be a pair of warm socks. Lockhart says something about world peace and the harmony of all magical and non-magical creatures. The contrast rings true; Dumbledore is working hard every day for exactly the outcome that Lockhart wants to achieve by wishing. Dumbledore idealizes a gift that would be useful and is actually something that almost any of his friends could buy for him. A real workman thinks about his feet because he really uses them. Lockhart views the reconciliation of all creatures to be a desire that simply makes him look good, like new mauve robes.

Asking for world peace to be given to you as a gift is almost exactly the kind of thing for which Jesus's disciples asked him. James and John said "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory" (Mk. 10:37). Jesus essentially replies "you don't know what you're asking" because he is about to go and die for the life of the world with thieves at his right and left hands.

Desiring to achieve world peace is appropriate, but it requires a lot of daily, self-risking, sock-giving in the process. If you want to be the king who ushers in world peace, you have to be willing to die a little bit every day. One cannot simply pay lip service to the idea of dying all at once; such a thing is almost never asked of any one person.

03/13/2011

Erector Set

I was telling my first grader this weekend about my Erector set as a kid. Best I can tell, I had the "500" from 1984:



Couldn't find a good picture online. But it was cool - it had motors and a controller and it had these futuristic cockpits and also all the traditional straight erector girders and nuts and bolts. I remember, even as a teenager, using the girders and nuts and bolts to mount a radio in my first car.

I'm trying to find an erector set for him that will enable him to experiment - some of the best ones don't have motors, and the ones with motors don't have the good parts from the traditional ones. I'm sure I'll find something. But it is fun to remember how much time I spent, cutting my hands and being so proud of things I could build on my own...

02/28/2011

A Raven Says "hi" to me Today

02/25/2011

Overheard

"Mom, I want a neck-uh-lace with a money sign and a treble clef on it."

02/21/2011

Good American Idol Audition

02/09/2011

American Idol

The NYTimes goes a long way toward explaining why I like Steven Tyler so much as a judge on American Idol. I get teary just thinking about the episode mentioned by the reviewer. There's something really American about Tyler's presence. Not to diminish how cool the British-ness of Cowell's persona was, but if Cowell personified the sardonic, witty Brit, Tyler personifies the enthusiastic, compassionate American very well. It doesn't hurt that he also has a lot of credibility as a real maker-of-music.

01/29/2011

Massively Distributed Math

I was just thinking today that Google could put a little code in their Gmail javascript base that does some kind of mathematical transform and returns the resulting information to a server.

Then, if Google needed supercomputer sized computational nodes, it could just distribute calculations to all the browsers that are currently looking at Gmail at any given time and solve the problem. No one would notice because each browser would just be executing simple javascript calculation and returning the result.

This is kind of like the way SETI does the sharing of its number crunching, only the user doesn't have to install a client on their computers.

I don't know what the scale is, and obviously there would be a lot of speed issues with the transfer of data, but there are no supercomputers in existence that have as many nodes as the sum total of anyone using gmail at any given time.

For that matter, any company like AT&T that is essentially selling its customers millions of computer per year (iPhones, Droids, etc.) could pre-install a computation engine on each device it sells and require that this remains under their terms of service. Then they could offline huge operations if they needed to.

When you think about it, your average American home has at least three or four devices that are capable of performing mathematical operations; many neighborhoods have enough computing power combined to do a lot of interesting things. What if every single internet router in the world had a math engine that could be tapped by someone. That's a pretty mind-boggling amount of computing power.

01/24/2011

Seeing an Old Friend



Saw an old friend tonight who is visiting St. Louis on a business trip. He is second from the right, I'm third from the right. Cass and I went to the same high school, though I didn't meet him until college. It was the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS), and he was in the inaugural graduating class.

Like so many amazing people that I know from MSMS, Cass is enthusiastic about his area of expertise, and this is coupled with the ability to articulate what he's interested in, with a sensitivity to the listener's level of understanding. He works for Nvidia, and intuitively knows when to provide explanatory comments if he's telling us about a particular issue related to computer graphics. So, he is a very smart, Masters Degree educated electrical engineer who has worked for some of the world's best companies, yet he is personable, a good writer, and someone generally interested in the world.

There were so many people like this that I met through my education at MSMS. People that are as smart as they are articulate and friendly. The guy on the right in the photo is a fine artist, has graduate degrees in mathematics, and is also a successful entrepreneur. These were really amazing people who were bold enough to go to a boarding school for 11th and 12th grade just to take a chance on getting to be themselves, get an academic challenge, and be in an environment where intellectual things were okay to discuss.

Cass's impact on my life is hard to really overstate. In my first semester at Mississippi State he and I began working together at the Engineering Research Center doing work on visualizing environmental data using three dimensional computer rendering. We often ate lunch together, especially at this place called "CJ's" and we would talk about everything. Cass has always been very skeptical about religion and he really challenged me about my Christianity in a way that caused me to think more about epistemology (the study of how knowledge is gained or confirmed). Because of his good questions, I started studying apologetics - the area of theology that is concerned with defense of the intellectual credibility of Christianity. This grew into an interest in philosophy and theology that led me to change majors from computer engineering to philosophy and go to seminary and graduate school in theology. It really had to do with Cass's questions and my seeking to understand and defend (to myself mostly) the validity of my religious convictions.

But Cass also influenced me in the realm of computer programming as well. He showed me how to think through a problem, how to patiently focus on a computational issue and look at the results objectively to make sure that the algorithm was doing what it was supposed to do. I witnessed him taking a Ph.D. candidate's work, one time, and writing a routine that would output the data in the middle of a multi step transformation. This data dump was then visualized and he illustrated that the algorithm simply was not working properly. I would have hated to be that graduate student, but Cass the undergraduate simply had the patience and intellect to do things like that over and over again.

As bright as Cass was, he was also generous with his time and with his explanations. He never got exasperated with my questions because he loved what he was doing. He took obvious pleasure in helping me to understand - it almost seemed like he was grateful for the opportunity to work his own memory.

Anyway, I can't say enough about the impact Cass had on my life. Even now, as I've been learning iPhone development, I have been studying the open-source code that he released for his App (Star3Map) and because I know him and worked with him for a while, it's like getting a tutorial on how to approach a project from him directly.

There are so many people that we meet that rub off on us. They change us by our having known them, and their influence is so palpable even many years later because we finally have the perspective to see just how singular their contribution to our outlook really was. Of course, I interpret all this theologically. God is the all-conditioner; he shapes us by our experiences and the most important contributing experience to our lives comes from the people we know. I am thankful for Cass and seeing him tonight was like tangibly seeing the hand of God in my life.

01/18/2011

Blog Commenting is Frustrating

There is one blog that has kind of become a haven for criticizing a friend of mine. Almost every time I post a defense of him, the blog owner holds the post until he can write a rebuttal, and then he approves my comment along with the rebuttal. And so my posts always look "born refuted." It would almost not be worth posting, but I feel like someone has to make a witness to the truth.

01/14/2011

For Scholars of Theology or Religion in the St. Louis Area

If you're interested in participating in some collegial dialogue and hearing a few good papers, the St. Louis Biblical and Theological Colloquium is meeting tomorrow (Saturday) morning at 8:30 - here are the details.

Not sure if I will be able to make it, but let me know if you're going and it may persuade me to prioritize it.

01/10/2011

Temple Grandin Movie

I finally had the chance to see the Temple Grandin
movie this weekend and really enjoyed it. I've been putting it off. This is the second time we checked it out from the library. The first time, almost every night, we considered watching it, but when you deal with autism all day long, the last thing you want to do is watch an autism movie at night. But today, for some reason, I wanted to see something like that so we watched it. I could tell Ann would rather have watched "Crazy Heart" but I couldn't take a behind the music type plot tonight and she was nice to go along with the Temple Grandin idea.

If you haven't heard of Temple Grandin, the short story is that she is autistic and has come a long way in life, rising to be one of the world's experts on designing humane cattle handling chutes in slaughterhouses and feed lots. Like most autistic people, her mind simply works differently than the vast majority of people's minds work. She is an extremely visual thinker. If you say "dog" she flips through a set of pictures of all the dogs she has ever seen. She comes a lot closer to being able to photograph something with her mind than most people who boast of a photographic memory. Her spatial / mathematical instincts allow her to understand machines implicitly, and even take a 2-d plan and visualize herself walking through the structure.

The great thing for me, as a parent who has to deal with autism, is that Temple Grandin can articulate what her experience with autism is like. Obviously, she is not the same as any other autistic person, but even a single explorer who has visited autism land and can report back what he or she sees is more data than most parents get from their own children.

Ann and I were talking and we pretty much think that autistic kids fall into two categories - the ones that have a visual/spatial/mathematical kind of gift and the ones that have an audio/language kind of gift. By "gift" I mean the ability to work in these areas like a recording device, having almost instant access to the things they take in aurally or visually.

Our oldest son is very much of the audio/language kind of autism. He memorizes movie scripts almost instantly, and in the same way that Grandin spent time sketching machines and understanding them, our son spends hours each day simply writing his own movie scripts. These scripts are a bit like "mash-ups" in that they are at the same time 100% derivative and 100% creative. The plots, characters, dialogue, etc., are recycled, often word for word, but put together in creative ways.

Grandin found some adults, outside of her family, that encouraged her to pursue things that would use her gifts. I hope that our son can find those kinds of mentors in this world. A lot of Temple Grandin's success is the success of people taking the responsibility to help other people in this world maximize their potential and use their gifts. In Grandin's case, it was a science teacher who previously worked for NASA. He realized the kind of thinker she was and found problems that would engage her mind and bring out her brilliance in ways that other people could appreciate.

You can see my son's blog here. It mostly consists of a lot of songs that he records, but also has his written introduction to what the songs are and we ask him to respond to questions in the comment box. We are trying to get him to develop his singing abilities - really the ability to sing when people want to hear singing. Again, he has a gift, but doesn't want to use it appropriately. So the blog is kind of to help him learn to use his gifts appropriately. It is part of his home school curriculum. He also goes to public school for part of the day, and this semester he is taking Drama. I keep wondering what goes on in that class, and I hope they can find a way to engage him in that arena... His whole mental life seems consumed with what is, in effect, drama. He is our movie guy.

I don't know if our oldest son will have the kind of worldly success that Grandin was able to have. The Temple Grandin movie downplays a little bit of what a late bloomer she was, and so I'm hoping the story will be similar for our son.

01/05/2011

Things I'm Learning About Right Now

1. Mark Logic - Unstructured database server. Really fascinating stuff.

2. Amazon Web Services

3. REST APIs - an easy way to create an API for a web application.

4. XQuery (W3c descrip) - a language for querying XML.

5. Memcached - a scalable memory cache that you can query kind of like a database.

All of these things have in common the theme of moving beyond applications that live on a few servers and query a relational database. That just isn't good enough for larger applications or even for smaller applications that manage lots of different kinds of data. Most programming today stores things in objects - a shirt object may have a color, style, size, gender, etc. and then we rip apart these objects to store them in one or more relational database tables. Why not simply store the object data together? Then, there is the idea of storing the object itself, complete with its methods. That's another thing I'm studying - persistent objects.

It is very hard to keep up with these technologies when you're a workaday programmer if your projects do not require this kind of scale. But that means missing out on a lot of really good and helpful stuff. And who knows what mom and pop site might be the next Craigslist, and then these issues all become very live ones.

01/01/2011

Shoe Tree Near Cherokee, AL



I've seen this shoe tree a few times heading back to St. Louis from Ann's house and this time I decided to stop and get some photos. It's pretty majestic - lots of shoes - even purple high-heels - hanging from a sycamore tree in North Alabama.

Here's another photo:



After getting back to St. Louis, I googled and sure enough, other people have documented this tree. Including stories here, here, here, here, and here. A lot of those photos are taken by much better photographers on much prettier days.

Anyway, these kind of random instances of community activity are always interesting and curious. Who put the first shoes there? What is the turnover rate? Who is continuing to hang shoes there? What does it mean?

I am Officially Out of Touch with Pop Music

Of the top selling 32 singles on the iTunes charts for 2010, I have heard exactly one - the dance song "Like a G6". This is pitiful. I must now remedy that with the help of YouTube.

12/18/2010

I am a Protocol Droid, Proficient in Over Two Kinds of Communication



Something like this changes everything, or begins to.