Home » Articles posted by Brian Balke (Page 53)

Author Archives: Brian Balke

Reconciling Scripture and Evolution

Posted on by | 16 Comments

Posted in a discussion of our symbiotic relationship with mites, this summarizes my position succinctly:

The biologists that rely upon strictly biochemical processes of evolution will never be able to calculate rates, because the forcing conditions have been lost in prehistory. I found it interesting to ask “why does every civilization develop the concept of a soul”, and eventually concluded that Darwin was half right: life is the co-evolution of spirit with biological form. The addition of spirit influences the choices made by living creatures, and so changes the rates.

Given this, I went back to Genesis and interpreted it as an incarnation (“The SPIRIT of God hovered over the waters” – and then became God for the rest of the book), with the “days” of creation reflecting the evolution of senses and forms that enabled Spirit to populate and explore the material conditions of its survival (photosensitivity, accommodation of hypotonic “waters above”, accommodation of arid conditions on the “land”, accommodation of seasons with sight (resolving specific sources of light), intelligent species in the waters and air, and mammals on earth (along with man)).

Couple this with the trumpets in the Book of Revelation, which pretty clearly parallel the extinction episodes identified by paleontology – including injection of the era of giant insects – and it looks like science and scripture actually support each other.

The only point of significant disagreement is spirit itself. Given my knowledge of the weaknesses of modern theories of cosmology and particle physics, I found myself considering the possibility of structure inside of the recognized “fundamental” particles. It became apparent to me that it wouldn’t be too difficult to bring spiritual experience into particle physics. To my surprise and delight, I became convinced that this reality is constructed so that love inexorably becomes the most powerful spiritual force.

Software and Agility

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Back in the ’80s, when the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) movement was gathering steam, surveys reported that half of all software projects failed. Even today, a significant number of developers report that they have never worked on a successful software project. I’ve written about the relationship between this problem and Moore’s law in the past, but hucksters selling cure-alls don’t have time to investigate root causes.

This is evident most often in comparisons of development methodologies. Historically, corporate America applied the “Waterfall Model”, a name coined by Winston Royce. Royce identified seven critical activities in software development: systems requirements, software requirements, analysis, design, implementation, verification and operation. The seven follow a definite chain of information dependencies, suggesting the “waterfall” analogy. But Royce himself observed that no project followed that sequence. There were all kinds of feedback loops from later stages to earlier stages.

What is astonishing to me is that later practitioners removed the first and last step. This tends to support amnesia about the evolution of the institutions that software developers support. Prior to World War II, most businesses were dominated by “tribal knowledge” of their operations. Goals were set from on high, but implementation was organic and often opaque. That changed in the 50s: confronted with the daunting logistics of WW II, the armed services formed a logistical planning office and trained practitioners. It was these men, including Robert McNamara, who went out and transformed the practices of corporate management in the 50s.

Thus the importance of the “systems requirements” stage of the waterfall process. Information systems were being injected into organizations whose theory of operation was vastly different from actual performance. Initial users of structured analysis, for example, discovered that many significant decisions were made by white-collar workers loitering around the water cooler, bypassing the hierarchical systems of reporting required by their organizational structure. Deploying an information system that enforced formal chains of authorization often disrupted that decision making, and organizations suffered as a result.

The common charge leveled against the Waterfall model is that the requirements are never right, and so attempts to build a fully integrated solution are doomed to fail. This has led to models, such as Agile and Lean software development, that promote continuous delivery of solutions to customers. But remember what supports that delivery: ubiquitous networking and standard software component models (including J2EE, Spring, SQL databases, and .NET) that allow pieces to be replaced dynamically while systems are operating. Those technologies didn’t exist when the waterfall model was proposed. And when they did arrive, proponents of the model immediately suggested a shift to “rapid prototyping” activities that would place working code before key end users as early in the project as possible. The expectation was that the politically fraught early stages of requirements discovery could then be avoided.

Actually, this might be possible at this point in time. Information systems provide instrumentation of operations to the degree that SAP now advertises the idea that they allow businesses to manifest a “soul.” Web service architectures allow modified applications to be presented to a trial population while the old application continues to run. Technology may now be capable of supporting continuous evolution of software solutions.

But removing the systems requirements stage of the process leaves this problem: where do requirements come from? Watching the manipulation of statistics by our presidential candidates, only the naive would believe that the same doesn’t occur in a corporate setting. Agile and Lean models that promise immediate satisfaction weaken the need for oversight of feature specification, perhaps opening the door to manipulation of application development in support of personal ambitions among the management team.

Control of such manipulation will be possible only when integrated design is possible – where the purpose of implementing a feature is shown in the context of a proposed operation. Currently that kind of design is not practiced – although Diagrammatic Programming has demonstrated its possibility.

In our current context, however, the wisdom of the CMM is still to be heeded. In a comment to an author pushing Agile over Waterfall development, I summarized the CMM’s five stages as follows:

  1. Define the boundary around your software process, and monitor and control the flow of artifacts across that boundary.
  2. Require that each developer describe his or her work practices.
  3. Get the developers to harmonize their practices.
  4. Create a database to capture the correlations between effort (3) and outcomes (1).
  5. Apply the experience captured in (4) to improve outcomes.

This is just good, sound, evidence-based management, and the author thanked me for explaining it to him. He had always thought of the CMM as a waterfall enforcement tool, rather than as management process.

And for those arguing “Waterfall” vs. “Agile” vs. “Lean”: if you don’t have CMM-based data to back up your claims, you should be clear that you’re really involved in shaking up organizational culture.

Hope for Climate Healing

Posted on by | Leave a comment

California governor Jerry Brown is in Paris this week at the climate change conference. Chris Hayes had him on All In on Wednesday night to talk about California’s efforts to combat climate change. In setting the stage, Chris pulled footage from his visit to the San Joaquin Valley earlier this year.

The statistics on both sides are daunting. As the world’s eighth largest economy, California’s dispersed population consumes huge amounts of gasoline. In seeking to reduce carbon emissions, the state has opted to install a large number of natural gas electricity plants, while also pursuing an aggressive push into renewables (wind, solar and geothermal). In general, its mild climate means that CO2 emissions are low, but it appears that major reductions are still decades away.

Brown trumpeted California’s efforts, citing the state as a global leader in climate change policy. But if this is the best that we can do, how can he hope that the talks in Paris will chart a path out of a century that is projected to end with a 10 F increase in global temperatures?

The major impact of that increase will be desertification. As in the Middle East, California is seeing the consequences of glacial retreat. At the edge of the glacial range, we still had large snow packs on the Sierras, and it was this store of water that allowed the $50 billion agricultural economy to operate through the dry summer months. As the climate warms, farmers have pumped our aquifers down by nearly fifty get. Drip irrigation systems are now being adopted to maintain production with reduced water resources, but if temperatures continue to rise, snow packs will continue to decrease. The survival of agriculture in California is tied to our depleted aquifers, which are not a renewable resource.

The consequences to the nation as a whole are daunting. The San Joaquin Valley produces 40% of America’s food.

When I rediscovered Cat Steven’s Moonshadow a few years ago, upon hearing Morning Has Broken for the first time in two decades, I found  myself filled with grief as the opening piano meditation unrolled. It climaxed with a vision as the man now called Yusuf sang these words:

Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass.

In the vision, I stood on the edge of the Sierra foothills in the Central Valley. The desiccated land, scoured by wind and rain, gave no purchase to life. A pair of naked feet waited, and then began to pace across the ground. Behind them, water and life flowed.

As a student at UC Berkeley, I was compelled by the confusion I experienced in interpreting political discourse to establish my own definitions for moral dialog. When I got around to “hope”, I settled on “a connection to a future in which love is at work for you.” There is two parts to that – one is accepting love, and the other is honoring it. The first requires that we recognize our need, the second requires that we respect the needs of others.

In his conversation with Chris, Governor Brown offered this subtle piece of insight: “Modernity is individualism plus oil.” Individualism implicitly violates the first requirement for hope – it holds that we do not need others. That is sustained by oil, which allows us to consume two hundred times as much energy as we can produce with our bodies. With mechanization, we all live as though we have two hundred slaves.

But the conventions of individualism also allow us to ignore the needs of others, not least the needs of the voiceless flora and fauna that sustain ecological stability. Our fossil fuel consumption has destabilized the biosphere that some know as Gaia.

In reading the Book of Revelation, in the golden bowls I see prophesied with exactitude the climate disasters that threaten our civilization. Obviously the feet in my dream are those of the savior. But in assessing the gap between individualism and the surrender to love, I find myself recalling the experience of Jesus upon his return to Nazareth. Mark summarized it as follows [NIV Mark 6:4-6]:

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

How far will we fall before choosing to open our hearts to allow love to re-enter the world?

And you, Christians, the family he created: will you recognize him when he comes? Will you open your hearts and minds to him and – if not partaking of his burden – at least apprehend and so honor the strain and sorrow he bears as he heals with his flesh the great wound in the Tree of Life we have created in our monomaniacal pursuit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

Or will you sit back in your seats, thrilling to the amplified harmonies of your bards, consoled by the airy myths they unfold, and say with offense [NIV Mark 6:2]:

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him?“

Read the Qur’an

Posted on by | 3 Comments

When I was sitting for jury duty on Yom Kippur (a sterile exercise, as all the courts were closed), I ran into a man who claimed that the Qur’an used more violent imagery than any other book of scripture. Having read half of it, I was confused, thinking that Muhammed (PBOH) must have had a real change of heart in the second half. When I asked him, “Have you read the book?” he responded “No.”

“But then where do you get your knowledge?”

“A report from a Canadian scholar. I forget his name.”

The Washington Post has published an opinion piece by Michael Dougherty titled “The Necessary Task of Integrating Islam within the West.” Unfortunately, in the large Dougherty uses his opportunity to denigrate Islam by association with ugly politics. This includes references to female genital mutilation (an ancient African custom predating Islam), “triumphalism” (as though Christians don’t assume a right to rule), and “jurisprudence over theology” (as though Judaism isn’t defined by the 613 laws of the Torah).

Dougherty claims that Muhammad was a “military leader and conqueror, a militant posture that shapes Islam to this day.” As I understand the history, Muhammad was a survivor of aggression originating in Mecca, aggression that forced him to Medina, and when the fighting was over, he returned to Mecca as a peacemaker. Military aggression was not propagated by Muslim culture – rather, aggressive leaders used Islam as a fig-leaf for their ambitions, much as Christianity was abused in the West, not least in the Crusades.

To those that truly want to understand Islam, I would recommend Islam and the Destiny of Man by Charles Le Gai Eaton.

As I perceive the growth of the traditions of Abraham, Judaism developed reasoning in its culture through propagation of law under the authority of the covenant with Noah. Jesus came along to remonstrate with his culture, pointing out that the law was being manipulated to divide the faithful from God, and teaching them to set it aside and tie their thoughts and actions to the judgment of a loving heart.

Islam was designed to guide other cultures through that same experience. The behaviors required by the Qur’an are far fewer than those in Judaism – Sharia law is an accretion that came later. And the writing throughout encourages the individual to guard and deepen his individual relationship with Allah.

The poetry of the Qur’an is by far the most beautiful scripture that I have encountered. If anything, what the West should hope for in accepting Muslims is not that the teachings of Muhammad should be moderated, but rather that – liberated from the coarse secular politics of the impoverished regions that Islam serves – Muslims should find the opportunity to rediscover the spiritual depth of their faith.

And if they would bother to actually read the Qur’an, Westerners might find the same.

Trump and 50 Shades of Grey

Posted on by | 3 Comments

At the local writer’s meetup I attended this year, the service providers would distinguish between those that wrote for notoriety, and those that wrote from compulsion. Among the authors seeking notoriety, the success of 50 Shades of Grey was a scandal. While I was never moved to read the book, those who did complained that it was just poorly written.

But if you’re writing for the masses, maybe that is how you write. You write in the way that the soccer moms and housewives actually converse. You use concepts and terms that are familiar in their discourse. You give them something to talk about.

While the pundits at MSNBC tend to view Donald Trump’s presidential bid as a parody of a political campaign, that may be intentional. Trump’s attack on politically correct speaking may reflect his style of problem solving. Rather than crafting a consensus position that offends no one, you speak ideas that give you power over the situation. You categorize people and institutions, and force them to react to justify their existence.

So the Hispanic community includes law-breakers – of course it does, given that many broke the law simply entering the country. But when does inclusion bleed into harboring? Are there segments of the Hispanic population that shield criminals from the police? Trump may believe that his statements force the Hispanic community to consider its loyalties.

So also with Muslim communities and the Islamists in our midst, whether those are home-grown or foreign.

To his supporters, Trump may articulate their fears, and so bring them into political dialog that “PC” (politically correct) standards of speaking have denied to them. His impassioned and thoughtless policy pronouncements may reflect the way that they respond to and internalize frightening events. Trump’s popularity may reflect the permission he gives disenfranchised citizens to participate in the political process.

In the aftermath of the Prop 8 vote in California, I told a lesbian friend that “The gay community and its supporters lost because of intolerance in specific communities. But as a result of the election, we know who those people are, and we can reach out to them.”

Following a segment documenting support among his followers for Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim entry to America, a Muslim spokesman offered this wisdom: Yes, we should ask Trump’s followers if they support his position. But even more: for those that do, we should ask them “Do you know any Muslims?” If they don’t, we should then encourage them to “Go out and meet one.”

So: treat Trump’s political theater as a symptom. It’s value is to bring to light the psychological needs of a misrepresented segment of citizens. Don’t criticize Trump for the service he provides: look beyond him, and offer solutions and solace to those he attracts.

The Middle East as a Model for Climate Crisis

Posted on by | Leave a comment

As the Ice Age ended, the Middle East was the cradle of Western civilization. The “four rivers” mentioned in the Bible met in the Persian Gulf. The Euphrates River Valley, cultivated with a sophisticated irrigation system, was a breadbasket for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the mountain waters coated the soil with clay long before iron and steel plows were invented. The climate warmed, and the introduction of sheep in the Central Asian steppes caused the grass to loose its purchase. The soil washed away in the rain. The carrying capacity of the land plummeted.

Today, much of the region is dessicated. Population levels are sustained by imports financed by oil revenues. Unfortunately, those revenues are not distributed uniformly. Both ethic and class prejudice allow a small minority to capture most of the wealth, while the less fortunate scrabble for bread and shelter.

What will happen when the oil is gone?

This is a significant factor in the rise of ISIS: the Sunni/Baath minority in Iraq lost control of oil revenues to the northern Kurds and southern Shias. While IS also uses extortion and sales of archaeological treasures to finance its operations, sale of oil from captured Iraqi and Syrian facilities is a mainstay.

The brutality of the regime is intense. As in failed African states, many of its fighters are locals without any other means of support.

Is there any means for external actors to control the downward spiral in such situations? Obviously the oil economy allowed the Sunni/Baath community to amass enormous wealth, and given the focus on capturing territory over sustaining a viable economy, an investment in guns and bullets reaps huge gains for the violent few. The material left by the US for use by Iraqi government forces was also a boon to IS. But is it reasonable to expect that we can keep weapons out of the region?

The harsh climate and conditions also make it difficult to secure borders. IS is now spreading eastwards into Afghanistan, the source of much of the world’s opium, a cash crop that has moved for decades into the Western world in spite of efforts to suppress it.

The response of much of the Syrian population has been to flee. Is it possible to supply them in the region, or must they relocate to more stable societies? The Palestinian refuge camps in the ’70s and ’80s were not successful. Do we have the wisdom and skills to do better now?

My concern is that if we do not set about applying ourselves to understanding how to manage this kind of chaos, we are going to be facing the same situation all over the world in the next eighty years. Although driven initially by natural glacial cycles, the Middle East and Central Asia are archetypes for the ecological collapse and social instability that comes with global warming.

Terrorism on American Soil

Posted on by | Leave a comment

The Republican candidates have taken to the gun ranges and political stump, using the San Bernardino shooting to challenge President Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State.

Ted Cruz talks about “carpet bombing” terrorists. Umm – does that mean San Bernardino? Or the neighborhoods in Syria where IS partisans lay down their heads at night? Yes, Ted, if you were president, you could order the American military to indiscriminately kill people. Yes, you could become the biggest terrorist on the block.

But what really does IS have to show for San Bernardino? They managed to add fourteen people to the 30,000 killed annually in American gun violence? Wow, impressive. (Not!) Actually, given the parade of politicians going to the shooting range, maybe we should give them more credit. Maybe the marketing boost for the gun industry will increase the number and potency of weapons owned by Americans, and we’ll do a better job of killing each other as a result.

A little hard for IS to claim credit for that, though. Especially in comparison to Al Qaeda and 9/11. Clearly, something being done by the Obama Administration is working.

We are defeating terrorism by chopping the head off the snake and sowing suspicion among the violent cells that are scattered in its death throes. Keep your eye on the ball, people.

They’re All Crazy

Posted on by | Leave a comment

In explaining my difficulty of focus yesterday at work, I mentioned San Bernardino and a friend averred that his vote for president would go to the first candidate to stand up and take mental illness seriously.

This while the Republicans in the Senate vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. Spear-headed by the segment of the insurance industry that made money by excluding coverage for sick people (I was denied coverage because I was once prescribed anti-depressants for situational depression).

This while we had the Bureau of Land Management faced down in Nevada a couple of years ago by a rancher who used “state’s rights” theories to justify non-payment of land use fees. Not that Nevada didn’t cede land to the federal government because they couldn’t afford to secure the desert occupied by the Native Americans.

It’s not about crazy people – follow the money. It’s that people that are emotionally unstable are easy to sell nonsense to – like the idea that you’ll be safer if you and everyone else buy more guns.

San Bernardino

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Once again we are confronted with a massacre – the work of an unbalanced mind unable to manage confrontation without a resort to violence.

The gun lobby caters to these people – principally criminals, as most semi-automatic handguns are recovered at crime scenes. The NRA has fought against implementation of methods that would ensure traceability of weapons flow through criminal hands for just this reason – it is the life-blood of their industry. And then there are those terrorized by criminal activity, those confronted with a steady diet of shootings, whose self-esteem and self-confidence erode slowly, until they grasp at the tools of terror as a means of asserting themselves against a violent world.

The NRA mouthpieces believe that we should all buy a gun, and spend hundreds of hours at firing ranges maintaining our expertise in their use. The sane consider this and their mouths fall agape. I mean – what do we maintain a police force for? Why should the public invest its energy in mastery of arms when we can earn enough money in that time to pay others to protect us?

The only reason is because the NRA fosters a mentality of violence in a community that is vulnerable to a loss of self-control. It is precisely these people that should be denied access to guns.

Given the statistics – more than one mass shooting a day this year, with no incidents that I am aware of in which the shooter was brought down by a gun-toting citizen – it seems reasonable to conclude that those prone to violence are the only ones making use of their weapons. The statistics are even worse when we look at domestic violence and suicides. So why are we allowing the gun industry to sell weapons at all, for other than sporting purposes?

It is time to end this cycle of terror, where protection of the rights of gun owners is used to mask a systematic practice of funneling guns to those that should not be allowed to bear them – a practice that generates violence that is used to stimulate additional gun sales.

It’s like trying to cure the plague by giving people the plague. It’s insanity. Really, think about it: do we really want to live in a society in which the first thing we think about every time we leave the house is being prepared to kill someone else? Why do we insist on permitting conditions under which it is impossible for the police to relieve us of that burden?