Home » Articles posted by Brian Balke (Page 62)

Author Archives: Brian Balke

Authority in Scriptural Interpretation: The Value of Science

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I keep on getting caught up in debates on other sites (The River Walk and There’s a Thing Called Biology come to mind) that tend to end with charges against my intellectual integrity. The progression goes something like:

  1. I observe that the people that wrote the Bible were recording experiences that they lacked the scientific understanding to describe accurately.
  2. I propose alternative interpretations of the events in modern scientific terms.
  3. I am told that the events recorded in the Bible could not have happened because they violate scientific knowledge.
  4. I suggest that science is not as iron-clad as many believe, and direct the conversation to my “New Physics” page.
  5. The responder offers the unsophisticated interpretation of the Biblical record (i.e. – Creation occurred in seven days) as evidence that people that believe in God do not understand science, and accuses me of being a poor scientist.
  6. I offer that my personal experience of God contradicts their science, and re-iterate that that I have offered models that integrate science and spirituality for their consideration.

  7. I am accused of intellectual dishonesty and ignoring scientific truth.

  8. I break off the discussion.

This may seem like just whining, but there’s a really fundamental point that nobody seems to have grasped just yet: the reason that religious authorities offered an “unscientific” understanding of scripture was because they didn’t have enough science to interpret scripture. Receiving a document through a long chain of translation from dead languages, they interpreted the words as literal truth because they had nothing else to guide their understanding.

But we do have science as our guide. So why not make use of it?

Given what we know about paleontology, for example, we can clearly interpret the days of creation as the history of biological development, running from single-celled organisms that learned to use light as a source of energy, and ending with the mammals and man on “day” six. Along the way, the development of eyesight replaces “light” with the more specific sun and moon.

Similarly, the trumpets of Revelation are seen to correspond almost exactly with the ancient mass extinctions. The era of giant insects is noted, and the final extinction episode (involving a meteor strike, volcanic vents and egg-eating mammals) describes distinctly the mechanisms that terminated the age of the dinosaurs.

Scripture and Darwin don’t contradict each other, they support each other. In the other direction, I think that the most powerful tool we have to advance our understanding of fundamental science is not the billion-dollar satellites and particle accelerators, but rather the well-documented record of spiritual experience.

Really, I would think that we’d be getting together to shake hands and pat each other on the back, not trading barbs.

Evening Out

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I’ve found two low-key venues to hear live music in the Conejo Valley area this year. One is actually over the hill (now don’t take that the wrong way) in Malibu – Ollie’s Duck and Dive. The setting is a little cramped: they lock the front door and stand the band up in the entry. The place is aptly name – long and narrow, with the front dominated by the bar, and most of the dinner seating actually in the enclosed patio outside. But on Saturday night the four-piece bands bring people in, and there’s a collection of steady regulars. The music is eclectic, and often loud, and dance-worthy even though they don’t play much in the way of cover music.

And – what can I say? – it’s Malibu. The people are classy, and beautiful in a self-conscious kind of way. If you sit at the bar, be sure and strike up a conversation with the tenders. They’re all good people.

The other venue is The Twisted Oak in Agoura Hills. The place has a checkered history, starting off as Moz Buddha Bar back around 2000. It was a hot pick-up joint for a while, with beautiful waitresses that would dance on the bar during the seasonal parties. The cover bands that came in drew great crowds, and the dance floor was always hopping. Unfortunately, the lead guy behind the bar seemed to have connections back in New Jersey, and the girls sometimes had morals that were a little shaky. When the joint stopped being trendy in 2005, they started Tuesday night jazz with small combos. While I wouldn’t miss it, the cultured music scene never took off.

The place was revived as a micro brewery and music club with a new investor. Roger is a great guy, and loves his brewing – everything from beer to smooth moonshine to wine. He also loves music, but it’s the dinner scene that pays the bills, and the bands on the large stage seemed to interfere with gatherings. So they knocked down the stage, opened up the bar with seating on both sides, and do something pretty much like what Ollie’s does: stand a couple of guys up in front of the brew vats. The music is eclectic, original, and really, really heart-felt. I can party at Ollie’s, but some of what goes on at The Twisted Oak can only be classified as a spiritual experience. If you want to take someone out for a light-hearted date, this is the spot on Friday nights.

Tonight they had a steel guitar and fiddle duo called Skin and Bones. While they packed up, I bought a CD out of the case, and Taylor came up to chat. Just a really classy young man with his lady-friend Stephanie. He let me rattle on about my sons, and took my compliments graciously before recommending that I come back out on September 11th to hear a couple of his friends play. I certainly look forward to it.

Body Call

Posted on by | 2 Comments

A few years back after the local UU speaker’s forum, I was waylaid by an out-of-area couple in the cool of the spring evening. The husband explained that they were trying to relocate back to the Thousand Oaks area, but his wife jumped in to speak of her commitment to caring for the son that had been disabled in the Gulf War. She mourned that sometimes it was so hard to be strong in her faith, that it felt at times as if the window was closing on her.

These impulses come over me at times: I formed a ball before my heart with my hands, then shifted them to the right and opened them higher and lower. “Here it is.”

She paused, hand held against her breast, and offered “Thank-you.” And they looked at each other and asked, “When does Jesus return?”

“When enough of us say ‘Yes, we understand now. We are ready to love as you did. Come to us, right here, right now.’”

These are the closing lines of my exegetical book, The Soul Comes First. The most significant contribution of that work is to explain the Book of Revelation (not interpret, but explain). What is left unanswered still is the why. Why does he have to come again? Why wasn’t once enough?

One part of the answer is that we have free will. I have addressed this before: the true evil of “sin” is that it disposes us to believe that we deserve our suffering. We’re like the judges of the Darwin awards that celebrate those that have committed such incredibly stupid acts that they’ve provided the rest of us the benefit of removing themselves from the gene pool.

To recognize our “sin” is to convince ourselves that we must earn our healing. In Jesus’s era, that was transacted through the priesthood using a system of indulgences based upon blood sacrifice. Jesus came and said “Well, enough of that bullshit. I will be the last sacrifice, and for my sacrifice you will be given forgiveness for your sins.” Now, looking back to Cain and considering the eternal nature of the Divine, obviously Jesus was not changing policy. He was simply trying to get us to stop beating ourselves up so that we could be healed.

In a recent discussion, I asserted that the authority of Jesus over heaven and earth is rooted in the irresistible admiration that comes with his perception of the possibility of our wholeness. This is what gives him the ability to heal the world: the fact that it comes not with scorn, but a joyous “Good job!”, much as that offered by the father to the prodigal son. “You were lost to me, but – Lo! – you have shed your burdens and now are returned!”

So in this framework, Jesus comes again to deliver us the promise of healing that can only be received when we stop believing that we don’t deserve it.

But there’s more.

In the end-times prophesy of Daniel and Revelation, we have the appearance of three corrupted beasts. The first of these in Revelation famously bears the number ‘666.’ This was first explained to me as a numerological reference to the days of Creation, with the conclusion that the beast was man. But that is to make too much of ourselves: it was not only man created on the sixth day, but all of the mammals.

Carrying this back to Daniel, it becomes clear that the beast (the fourth to appear in the dream) is the collective spirit of the mammals. In Eden, human intelligence was protected by the presence of God, but the Fall forced us out into the world to struggle with all the primitive urges that preceded us. Daniel sees this only abstractly: the beast bears teeth and claws of iron that destroy life. These represent the machines that we use to reorder the earth. We use them as predators, not attempting to integrate ourselves with other life, but exploiting it for our gratification.

In Revelation the personality of the beast is resolved in more detail. There are two of them, the second a red beast ridden by the feminine avatar called “MYSTERY.” So what does this tell us about the second coming? The masculine expressions of the primitive urges, represented by the first beast of Revelation, are the hunt and sacrifice. Jesus confronted and mastered them on the cross. The feminine expressions of the primitive urges are intercourse (the mingling of personalities through sex) and maternity. What about this aspect of human nature? When does that submit to Christ?

I feel this confrontation in my own life like a wall around my soul. It comes to the fore when I walk into a store and the counter girl pushes her breasts up at me, or when a pastor looks at me, interrupting my meditation on the cross to suggest that I am sexually harassing the members of his congregation. It has been the focus of so much conflict in my life, from the Sterling Men’s group that tried to force me to stay in my marriage, into the family law system, and in the workplace where brilliant women at home find that I disrupt their influence over the men at work. It is a wall rebuilt every night when I wake up at the witching hour with sex crawling all over my body.

How to resolve this problem, the problem of “MYSTERY,” the influence that reaches into our souls from a distance and leaves us wondering “Why did I do that?” Is the image of Christ in confrontation with this influence that of the rock star with a bevy of beauties moaning in the audience? Or is it the image of the celibate, relinquishing all experience of sexuality?

My two fiction books, Ma and Golem, are meditations on this problem. Ma begins with two dysfunctional erotic encounters – one a casual hook-up and the other a long-term political bonding – and evolves as a slow-moving train wreck with the men struggling against the consequences of their failure to honor their women. Golem elaborates with a truly amazing sexual explosion between Corin and Leelay, both introduced in Ma, that arises as an expression of their service to the survival of Life. And it confronts us with an encounter between the Goddess Zenica (Corin’s mother) as she uses sex to break the will of an old adversary to accomplish the end of her re-incarnation. In relating the events to Corin, she simply offers “I did what I had to do.”

Is that where it ends: sex as a tool?

Revelation does offer us an image [NIV Rev 22:1-2]:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

To me, this imagery is incredibly sexual. And I think that is as it should be: there is no part of our nature that cannot be sacralized, that was not given to us for the purpose of healing ourselves and this reality of corruption by selfishness.

I believe that intercourse must be brought into the service of Christ. So this means that it should be a means of bringing Christ into our lives, of pouring the love that we receive from him out over each other. My interpretation of my experience in church is that the opposite has happened: we take sex as the center of our intimate relations, and when Christ enters into that he is perceived as a threat. Or for sexually active single women, the presence of Christ in a man is interpreted as an opportunity to have really great intercourse – that is, to receive a love that would be given to them directly by the source if only they would ask for it.

As long as this persists, we are going to continue to struggle. My question is whether this is really the business of Christ. Eve was sent to Adam as his help-mate. Jesus confronted the masculine pathologies on the cross. Is it really possible for him to do the same work on the feminine side? My sense is that the end game would be far less painful if women stood up to take ownership of their problems.

Exploring Solutions Space

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Perhaps the most humbling aspect of software development is the inflexibility of the machines that we control. They do exactly what we tell them to do, and when that results in disaster, there’s no shifting of the blame. On the other hand, computers do not become conditioned to your failure – they’re like indestructible puppies, always happy to try again.

That computers don’t care what we tell them to do is symptomatic of the fact that the measure of the success of our programs is in the non-digital world. Even when the engineer works end-to-end in the digital realm, such as in digital networking, the rewards come from subscriptions paid by customers that consume the content delivered by the network. In the current tech market, that is sometimes ignored. I keep on reminding engineers earning six-figure salaries that if they don’t concern themselves with the survival of the middle class, at some point there won’t be any subscribers to their internet solutions.

So we come back again to an understanding of programming that involves the complex interaction of many system elements – computers, machines, people and all the other forms of life that have melded into a strained global ecosystem where the competition for energy has been channeled forcefully into the generation of ideas.

These ideas are expressed in many ways – not just through natural and computer languages, but also in the shape of a coffee cup and the power plant that burns coal to produce electricity. The question facing us as programmers is how best to represent the interaction of those components. Obviously, we cannot adopt only a single perspective. All languages encode information most efficiently for processors that have been prepared to interpret them. In the case of a computer ship, that preparation is in the design of the compilers and digital circuitry. For people, the preparation is a childhood and education in a culture that conditions others to respond to our utterances.

This context must give us cause to wonder how we can negotiate the solution to problems. This is the core motivation for our search for knowledge – to inform our capacity to imagine a reality that does not yet exist, a reality that manifests our projection of personality. We all use different languages to express our desires, everything from the discreetly worn perfume to the bombastic demands of the megalomaniac. We use different means of expressing our expectations, from the tender caress to the legal writ. None of these forms of expression has greater or lesser legitimacy.

In my previous post in this series, I introduced the idea of a program as an operational hypothesis that is refined through cause-and-effect analysis. Cause-and-effect denotes a relationship. This can be a relationship between objects whose behavior can be characterized by the brute laws of physics (such as baseballs and computer chips) or organic systems (such as people and companies) that will ignore their instructions when confronted with destruction. What is universally true about these relationships is that they involve identifiably distinct entities that exchange matter and energy. The purpose of that exchange, in systems that generate value, is to provide resources that can be transformed by the receiver to solve yet another problem. In the network of cause-and-effect, there is no beginning nor end, only a system that is either sustainable or unsustainable.

The single shared characteristic of all written languages is that they are very poor representations of networks of exchange. Languages are processed sequentially, while networks manifest simultaneity. To apprehend the connectedness of events requires a graphical notation that expresses the pattern of cause-and-effect. Given the diversity of languages used to describe the behavior of system elements, we are left with a lowest-common-denominator semantics for the elements of the notation: events occur in which processors receive resources, transform them according to some method, and emit products. The reliable delivery of resources and products requires some sort of connection mechanism, which may be as simple as the dinner table, or as complex as the telecommunications system.

This is the core realization manifested in Karl Balke’s Diagrammatic Programming notation. Generalizing “resources” and “products” with “values”, the notation specifies cause-and-effect as a network of events. In each event, a processor performs a service to transform values, which are preserved and/or transferred to be available for execution of other services by the same or another processor. The services are represented as boxes that accept a specification for the action performed by the processor in terms suitable for prediction of its interaction with the values. This may be chemical reaction formulae, spoken dialog in a play, or statements in a computer programming language. The exchange of values is characterized by connections that must accommodate all possible values associated with an event. The connections are described by the values they must accommodate, and represented in the cause-and-effect network by labelled lines that link the services.

While Diagrammatic Programming notation does not require sequential execution, specification of a pattern of cause-and-effect leads inevitably to event sequencing. This does require the elimination of certain constructs from the action description. For example, DP notation contains elements that specify actions such as “wait here for a value to appear” and “analyze a value to determine what service to perform next.” When the program is converted to an executable form, processor-specific instructions are generated from the network layout.

In a properly disciplined design process, the end result is a specification of an operational hypothesis that allows the stakeholders in the implementation to negotiate their expectations. They may not be able to understand what is happening on the other side of a connection, but they can define their expectations regarding the values received by their processors. It is in through that negotiation that the space of solutions is narrowed to a form that can be subjected to engineering design.

As has become obvious in this discussion, in the context of DP analysis simple human concerns become abstracted. The technology of Diagrammatic Programming must be concerned not only with the variant perspectives of participants in the design process, but also with the perceptual capabilities of different processors, where the value “Click Here” is encoded as Unicode bytes in computer memory but appears to the user as letters on a computer display. This richness manifests in terminology and notation that requires careful study and disciplined application to ensure that a program can be elaborated into executable form.

Full implementation of the Diagrammatic Programming method was my father’s life-work, a life-work conducted by those concerned that systems serve the people that depend upon them, rather than being used for the propagation of exploitative egos. This introduction is offered in the hope that of those committed to the production of value, some may be motivated to understand and carry that work on to its completion. It is simply far too much for me to accomplish alone.

In the most detailed comparison study of its use, the following benefits were revealed: rather than spending half of my development schedule in debugging, I spent one tenth. When faced with refactoring of a module to accommodate changed requirements, the effort was simply to select the services and connections to be encapsulated, and cut-and-paste them to a new drawing. While the representation of cause-and-effect may seem a burdensome abstraction, in fact it supports methods of design and analysis that are extremely difficult to emulate on instructions specified as text.

The Second Coming of Donald

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Common interpretation of Revelation 11:15 is that the reign of Christ begins when Gabriel sounds his horn. Now I offer an alternative interpretation of the verse in The Soul Comes First as heralding the beginning of the age of Humanity who will bring redemption to the Earth through the intelligent exercise of divine love.

But you, know, scripture is inscrutable, and I’m beginning to realize that maybe we’ve all misunderstood.

Gabriel is known as the angel that transmits God’s truth. FOX news broadcasts “God’s truth.” A trumpet is a kind of horn. In the first Republican debate on FOX news, we saw nine Trump-ettes on the stage with Donald.

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! Jesus will be outed by the FOXing of Donald!

Of course, NBC will carry the coverage. Looks like FOX out-foxed itself.

Design by Discipline

Posted on by | 6 Comments

When I received my Ph.D. in Particle Physics in 1987, I was qualified as among the wonkiest elite in science. If I had been concerned with proving that I was smart, I might have stayed in physics, but the expectations for practical applications of fundamental physics had eroded greatly after my freshman year. I wanted the larger world to benefit from the work that I did, so I took a job at a national laboratory. After a brief post-doc in fundamental physics, I moved over to environmental science. Throughout, the growing importance of computerized control and simulation meant that I enjoyed a distinct competitive advantage over my peers, as I had learned to program from one of the foremost practitioners in his generation – my father. When I became a full-time software developer, my background in physics allowed me to collaborate with engineers, to the extent that I would be brought in on engineering meetings when my peers were unavailable.

Now this may seem like just bragging, but the point is that my career has been a dynamically evolving mash-up of science, engineering and programming. My experience was filtered through a practice of systems analysis that led me to examine and control the way that those disciplines interact. So when I think about science, I don’t think about it as “what scientists do.” I do consider myself a scientist, but I do engineering and programming as well, and I perceive the three disciplines as very different activities.

I took a course on philosophy of science as an undergraduate, and I won’t drag you, dear reader, through all the definitions that have been offered. Most of them hold that Frances Bacon’s articulation of the scientific process was a magic portal for the human intellect, as though practical efficacy and the rational ordering of knowledge had not been recognized virtues among the ancients. This leads many philosophers of science to be overly concerned with truth, when what is really of interest to us as people is what has yet to be true.

The power of science is in allowing us to pierce the shadowy veil of possibility. In biology, understanding of the variety of living things and their mutual dependencies gives us the power to sustain agriculture, breed robust animals, and improve our health. Chemistry empowers us to predict the stability and properties of new substances. And physics probes the fundamental mechanisms that determine both the stability of the world around us and our ability to manipulate it.

So science provides us with pure knowledge, unconstrained by our desires or intentions. It therefore tends to attract people that are driven by curiosity. That may sound like a trivial thing, but to find order in the chaotic milieu of nature is a source of great hope. Calendars that predict the seasons allowed agricultural societies to improve their harvests and so avoid famine. The germ theory of disease motivated doctors to wash their hands, transforming hospitals from centers of disease incubation to places of healing. Scientific curiosity – to ask neurotically “why?” – is the source of great power over the world.

That power is visible in the manufactured reality all around us: the houses, roads, dams and microchips. None of these things would have existed in the natural world. The artifacts exist only because people have a purpose for them. That purpose may be as simple as cooking dinner for our children, or as grand as ensuring that the world’s knowledge is available through the internet to any person, anywhere, any time. Which of our goals are realized is largely a matter of economics: are enough people invested in the outcome that they are willing to pay to see it accomplished? We don’t have to have a kitchen in every home, but few of us can afford to go out to dinner every night, so we pay for a kitchen. The cost and delay of moving information via mail drove the growth of the internet, at an expense that I would imagine (I can’t find numbers online) has run into trillions of dollars.

Now when people invest a substantial sum of money, they want some assurance that they’ll get what they’re paying for. Appreciating that gold does not tarnish, the sultan seeking to protect the beauty of his marble dome does not want to be told, “All natural gold originates in supernovae.” Or, worse, “If we smash heavy elements together in an accelerator, we can produce ten gold atoms a day.” Those kinds of answers are acceptable in scientific circles, but they are not acceptable in the engineering world. In the engineering world, when somebody comes to you with money and a problem, your job is to design an implementation that will realize their goal.

Since we’re a species of Jones-chasers, most of the time the engineer’s job is fairly simple. People come wanting something that they’ve seen, and the challenge is to understand how it was done before and adapting the design to local conditions. But every now and then somebody comes in to ask for something completely novel. They want to build an elevator to space, for example, or create a light source that doesn’t produce soot. The engineer has no way of knowing whether such things are possible, except by reference to science.

It is into the gap between the formless knowledge of science and the concrete specifications of engineering that programming falls. Considering the light bulb, the scientists know that heated objects glow, but also burn. Applying an electric voltage to a poor conductor causes it to heat as current flows through it. The filament will burn when exposed to oxygen, so we need to isolate it from air. Using an opaque material as the barrier will also trap the generated light. However, some solids (such as glass) are transparent, and air permeates slowly through them.

The illustration is a cause-and-effect analysis. It looks at the desirable and undesirable outcomes of various scientific effects, attempting to eliminate the latter while preserving the former. The cause-and-effect analysis leads to an operational hypothesis: if we embed a wire in a glass bulb and apply a voltage, the wire will heat and emit light. This is not an engineering specification, because we don’t know how much the light bulb will cost, or how much light it will emit. But it also isn’t science, because the operational hypothesis is not known to be true. There may be no filament material that will glow brightly enough, or the required voltage may be so high that the source sparks down, or the glass may melt. But without the operational hypothesis, which I have called a “program,” engineering cannot begin.

We examined the challenge of software engineering in the first post in this series, focusing on the rapid development in the field and the difficulty in translating customer needs into terms that can be interpreted by digital processors. Today, we have arrived at a more subtle point: the algorithms written in our programming languages process information to produce information. The inputs for this process arise from nature and humans and increasingly other machines. Those inputs change constantly. Therefore very few programs (except maybe that for space probes) are deployed into predictable environments. That includes the hardware that runs the program – it may be Atom or Intel or AMD, and so the performance of software is not known a priori. For all of these reasons, every piece of software is thus simply an operational hypothesis. It is a program, not a product.

The Modern Tower of Babel

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I alluded to the problem of language in my introductory post on programming. The allusion was hopeful, in that our machines are learning to understand us. Or rather, they are learning to understand those of us that speak supported languages.

The dominant language of international discourse today is English. That can be attributed to the success of the English Empire in the colonial age, and then to the industrial and diplomatic dominance of America in the aftermath of World War II. But the proliferation of English has affected the language itself.

The most significant changes impacted many of the colonial languages: they were simplified and regularized to make them easier to teach. Study of tribal languages reveals that they defy analysis. Few patterns are discerned in verb conjugations, and sentence structure obeys arbitrary rules. But the languages of major civilizations can also be daunting: the ideograms and subtle intonations of Chinese are a case in point. For both types of language, it is impossible for an adult to become fully proficient. But the education of adult leaders and manual laborers was critical to the stability of Empire. In the absorption of foreign populations, the complexity of the original language was eroded by the logistics of minority control.

And yet today the Brits like to say that England and America are divided by a common language. While the grammar and basic terms of the language are shared, cultural development and ambition still drive change. The physical sciences are characteristic. While my professors focused on physics as applied mathematics, it was clear to me that it was also a foreign language, with arcane terms such as “Newton’s Third Law”, “Lagrangian” and “Hamiltonian” use to distinguish alternative formulations of the mathematics used to describe the motion of classical particles. As cultural developments, the latter two came to prominence because their mathematical formulations were generalized more readily to non-classical systems. And as regards ambition, we need only note that all three formulations bear the name of their originators.

But language can also be used consciously as a political tool. Newt Gingrich created the modern Republican media machine around 1990 by distributing cassette tapes each month with terms to be applied in derogating Democratic and lauding Republican policies. Many oppressed minorities encode their conversations to prevent authorities from interfering with the conduct of their lives, and those can emerge as full-blown languages in their own right (The “Ebonics” movement reflected such a development in America).

But in other cases, new usage arises as a form of entertainment. I had to ask my son to clarify the meaning of “sick” as used by today’s youth, and was surprised to discover that, as in Chinese, nuances of intonation were essential to understanding.

Most of these variations can be expected to be ephemeral. “Cool” was “sick” when I was growing up, and all attempts to obscure meaning will eventually founder on the rock of economic realities. People that can’t describe accurately the world around them seem bizarre if not outright insane, and ultimately excuse themselves from collaboration with others. While the linguists are fascinated by variation, they predict that the number of living languages will continue to decline.

As a programmer, however, I have the opposite experience. Fred Brooks and Martin Fowler have decried the “language of the month” phenomenon in software engineering. I myself feel a certain insecurity in my job search because the applications that I develop can only be created using fifteen-year-old technologies that most programmers would consider to be “archaic.”

To understand the root of this proliferation, it is amusing to backtrack to 1900 or so. Mathematicians had developed categories for numbers: the integers (used for inventory tracking), rational numbers (ratios of integers) and real numbers that seemed to have no repeating pattern. Two very important branches of mathematics had been proven to depend upon real numbers: geometry and calculus. In geometry, the real number pi is the ratio of a distance across a circle and the distance around it. In calculus, Euler’s constant e is the number that when exponentiated has a slope equal to the value at every point on the curve.

However, philosophers pointed out that while calculation of the exact value of these numbers was impossible, even in the case that we could, any calculation performed using them could only be performed with finite precision – and that is good enough. If we can’t cut a board to better than one thousands of an inch, it doesn’t matter if we calculate the desired length to a billionth of an inch. Practically, the architect only needs to know pi well enough to be certain that the error in his calculation is reasonably smaller than one thousandth of an inch.

Given that binary notation could be used to represent numbers as well as common numerals, it was clear that computers could be used for practical calculations. When Alan Turing defined a simple but comprehensive model for digital computation, the field progressed confidently to construct machines for general purpose applications, encompassing not only mathematics but also language processing.

Now in Turing’s model, the digital processor operates on two kinds of input: variable data and instructions. The variable data is usually read from an input at execution. The instructions could be built into the actual structure of the processor, or read in and interpreted at run-time. The machine that Turing built to crack the Nazi Enigma code was of the first type, but his general model was of the second.

Turing’s original specification had fairly simple instructions (“move tape left”, “move tape right”, “read value” and “write value”), but it wasn’t long before Turing and others considered more complex instruction sets. While after the Trinity test, Oppenheimer famously penned a poem comparing himself to “Shiva, the destroyer of worlds”, I can’t help but wonder whether the original computer designers saw the parallels with Genesis. Here they were, building machines that they could “teach” to do work for them. They started with sand and metal and “breathed life” into it. The synaptic relays of the brain that implemented human thought have operational similarities to transistor gates. Designs that allowed the processor’s output tape to be read back as its instruction tape also suggested that processors could modify their behavior, and thus “learn.”

The Turing test for intelligence reflects clearly the ambition to create a new form of intelligent life. But creating the instruction tape as a series of operations on zeros and ones was hopelessly inefficient. So began the flourishing of computer languages. At first, these were simply mechanisms for invoking the operation of blocks of circuitry that might “add” two numbers, or “move” a collection of bits from one storage location to another. Unfortunately, while these operations provided great leverage to programmers, they addressed directly only a small part of the language of mathematics, and were hopelessly disconnected from the language used to describe everything else from banking to baking.

Still fired with ambition, the machine designers turned to the problem of translating human language to machine instructions. Here the most progress was made in the hard sciences and engineering, where languages such as FORTRAN attempted to simulate the notation of mathematical texts. The necessary imprecision of business terminology was refined as COBOL, allowing some processes to be automated. And as machine architectures grew more complex, with multi-stage memory models, communication with external peripherals including printers and disk drives, and multi-processing (where users can start independent applications that are scheduled to run sequentially), C and its variants were developed to ease the migration of operating systems code through architecture generations.

These examples illustrate the two streams of language development. The first was the goal of recognizing patterns in program structure and operation and facilitating the creation of new programs by abstracting those patterns as notation that could be “expanded” or “elaborated” by compilers (a special kind of software) into instructions to be executed by the machine. So for example, in C we type

c = a + b;

To anyone that has studied algebra, this seems straight-forward, but to elaborate this text, the compiler relies upon the ‘;’ to find complete statements. It requires a declaration elsewhere in the code of the “types” of c, a and b, and expects that the values of a and b have been defined by earlier statements. Modern compilers will report an error if any of these conditions are not met. A competent programmer has skill in satisfying these conditions to speed the development of a program.

The other stream is driven by the need to translate human language, which is inevitably imprecise, into instructions that can be executed meaningfully upon zeros and ones. Why is human language imprecise? Because more often than not we use our language to specify outcomes rather than procedures. The human environment is enormously complex and variable, and it is rare that we can simply repeat an activity mechanically and still achieve a desirable output. In part this is due to human psychology: even when the repetitions are identical, we are sensitized to the stimulus they provide. We desire variability. But more often, it is because the initial conditions change. We run out of salt, the summer rains come early, or the ore shipped to the mill contains impurities. Human programming is imprecise in part because we expect people to adapt their behavior to such variations.

Both abstraction and translation have stimulated the development of programming languages. Often, they go hand-in-hand. Systems developers expert in the use of C turn their skills to business systems development, and find that they can’t communicate with their customers. C++ arose, in part, as a method for attaching customer terminology to programming artifacts, facilitating negotiation of requirements. When the relational model was devised to organize business transaction data, SQL was developed to support analysis of that data. And when the internet protocols of HTTP and HTML became established as the means to acquire and publish SQL query results in a pretty format on the world-wide web, languages such as Ruby arose to facilitate the implementation of such transactions, which involve a large number of repetitious steps.

What is amusing about this situation is that, unlike human languages, computer languages seem to be almost impossible to kill. Consider the case of COBOL. This language approximates English sentence structure, and was widely used for business systems development in the sixties and seventies. At the time, the language designers assumed that COBOL would be replaced by better alternatives, and so adopted a date format that ran only to the end of the century. Unfortunately, the applications written in COBOL became services for other applications written in other languages. The business rationale for the logic was lost as the original customers and developers retired, and so it was effectively impossible to recreate the functionality of the COBOL applications. As the century came to a close, the popular press advertised the “Year 2000” crisis as a possible cause of world-side financial collapse. Fortunately, developers successfully isolated the code that depended upon the original date format, and made adaptations that allowed continued operation.

This trend will be magnified by the economics of software solutions delivery. Unlike other industries, almost the entire cost of a software product is in the development process. Manufacturing and distribution is almost free, and increasingly instantaneous. This means that the original developer has almost no control over the context of use, and so cannot anticipate what kinds of infrastructure will grow up around the application’s abstract capabilities.

The popular ambitions for software reflect this reality. The ability to distribute expert decision making as applications operating on increasingly precise representations of reality, all in the context of data storage that allows the results to be interpreted in light of local conditions: well, this implies that we can use software to solve any problem, anywhere. Some people talk about building networks of digital sensors that monitor everything from the weather to our respiration, and automatically deploy resources to ensure the well-being of everyone everywhere on earth.

In the original story of Babel, the people of the Earth gathered together to build a tower that would reach to heaven. Their intention was to challenge God. The mythical effort was undermined when God caused people to speak different languages, thus frustrating their ability to coordinate their efforts. In the modern era, we in effect seek to approximate the Biblical God using digital technology, but our ambitions lead us to create ever more abstract languages that we cannot rationalize, and so we find our efforts frustrated by the need to backtrack to repair our invalid assumptions.

In the terms of the programming discipline we will propose, however, the fundamental problem can be put this way: the digital realm is an abstract representation of reality. Why basis do we have for believing that the applications created using those abstractions accurately translate the needs described by human users? If we can’t solve that problem of describing and analyzing that correspondence, then our software must inevitably become a form of black magic that rules over us.

Military Truth-in-Action

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I’m just realizing that the military, confronted with the option of either going to war with Iran or supporting the implementation of the multi-national nuclear technology agreement with Iran, is strongly motivated to shift its loyalties from the Republicans to the Democrats in this election cycle.

What do the Republicans not understand about getting the nuclear issue off the table so that we can start grinding Iran down for it’s activities fomenting terrorism against our allies in the Middle East? Is that really so difficult to understand?

One step at a time. All that your blustering is going to do is upset the apple cart.

The Blood of the Innocent

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I was winding my evening up, thinking about how to organize my next post on programming, when I got a notice from MSN of the truck bombing in Sadr City in Baghdad. It turned my thoughts back to yesterday’s topic.

In the aftermath of Hussein’s arrest, I had a dream about Muqtada Al Sadr, the “firebrand” cleric whose father had been assassinated in the south of Iraq for his outspoken opposition to the regime. Muqtada and his Shia militia had been playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the occupying forces, attempting to wear out US resolve. In the dream, he railed against the hypocrisy of American intervention, seeing it as merely a far more active example of the means we use throughout the world to secure our corrupt lifestyle.

I did not dispute his point, only offering “But Osama is right. If Muslims lived according to the Qur’an, what America did wouldn’t make a difference.” I waited while the point sank in, and then asked “So tell me, what is the source of your anger?”

And I was down on the street with him as a wailing mother carried to him the daughter that had died of starvation.

“Everyone mourns the death of a child.” I laid in my bed and wept, and when the tears stopped, showed him my own burdens. “It’s not possible to prevent suffering in the world. The role of the spiritual leader is rather to guide the beloved community away from anger and fear by turning their thoughts toward the miracle of healing.”

The situation in the Middle East demands enormous strength from those such as Ali Sistani and Al Sadr. I see the region going through the exercise that Europe pursued in the first half of the twentieth century. Europe in 1900 was a continent full of peoples that hated each other. It wasn’t limited to the Jews – the Jews simply didn’t have an army. World War I was inevitable due to the interlocking and contradictory alliances of convenience that triggered a general mobilization following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The Treaty of Versaille and subsequent blockade of German ports were a bloody cross borne by the German people for the continent’s hypocritical great power politics.

World War I is my model for the Middle East. The conflict is not waged trench-by-trench under the barrage of artillery, but street-by-bloody street after the truck bombs explode. As in Europe, it is a cancerous explosion of violence perpetrated by men lacking the skills and imagination to succeed in productive collaboration with their neighbors. It is a cancer fed by the cowardice of leaders that surround themselves with their ethnic peers for fear of bringing the enemy too close.

The resolution in Europe, after fifty years, was brought only by the complete destruction of the industrial economies of the continent. The nations of Europe realized that there were no longer winners in wars. Today it is even worse: modern chemistry makes it too easy to create weapons, and the accumulated grief of the Middle East provides a steady stream of suicidal delivery men.

So what can America do? Until the leaders of the region agree to intervene to create peace, little except to try to brake the spread of the disease. Among the recognized governments, that may include creating dependency on advanced weapons systems that require frequent maintenance using expensive parts sourced from America. Another means is to organize economic sanctions against rogue states. Finally, we can wait for the violence to turn inwards, creating a new generation of martyrs whose avengers help us target the leaders of extremist movements.

There are no grand gestures here, no quick fixes. It’s a long grind against evil, by an American people and government that give the world plenty of reason not to trust us. But as was demonstrated in the Cold War, the Philippines and South Africa, it’s the only material means of foreign policy that will effect change.

And for those without access to those mechanisms: Pray. Open your hearts to their suffering. Will them to receive the best of your strength, faith and wisdom. It makes a difference, in ways that cannot be proven. In the face of all the reasons they have to fear, ultimately our compassion is the only way of bringing courage to the citizens that must find solutions in the Middle East.

Bushmongering

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Trapped between a rock and a hard place by the legacy of his brother’s War in Iraq, Jeb Bush delivered a speech at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley (I wasn’t invited) that followed the pattern of all self-rationalizing bullies: blame the victim.

Hillary was First Lady during the transition to Jr’s Administration. The Cole destroyer had been holed by a floating IED, and the Clinton team had determined that Al Qaeda was certainly the culprit. The defense briefings implored the Bush team to send a strong message to the perpetrators, but Karl Rove’s political calculationn was that the incident was something that could be painted as a Democratic legacy.

Instead, the Bush team set about antagonizing both allies and adversaries with strong-armed attempts to modify the interpretation of arms limitations treaties to allow deployment of a nuclear missile shield. The week before 9/11, Tom Daschle, leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, called a press conference on the Capitol steps to voice his concerns that the Bush team did not understand the geopolitical threat posed by Islamic extremists. Later reporting indeed revealed that American withdrawals in Beirut and Somalia were capped by the failure to take action after Cole. Osama bin Ladin believed that America was morally weak, and that one further blow would cause us to curl up and hide from the world.

The Bush team’s incompetence and short-sightedness was compounded in the run-up to the Iraq War. The false claim of yellow-cake trading with Niger was the linchpin of the “weapons of mass destruction” case against Saddam Hussein. When Joe Wilson, former Ambassador to Niger, stood up to dispute the claims, the Bush Administration outed the CIA’s head of nuclear threat control – Valerie Plame, who happened to be Wilson’s wife.

While the conquest of Iraq was a military masterpiece, the weakness of the planning for the peace was evident. Despite the “Mission Accomplished” announcements, the tangled web of Iraqi ethnic resentments provided rich soil for Al Qaeda sympathizers. The nation began to collapse, and the Bush team kept National Reservists in the theater and called up large numbers of additional troops in a “Surge” that finally allowed Iraq to return to self-government.

Since then, the Obama administration’s policy has been to disengage slowly, providing time and incentives for the Iraqi nation to stand on its own two feet. It hasn’t been a pretty picture.

At root, what Jr’s Administration revealed was the danger of disengaging from reality – of treating all foreign policy decisions first and foremost as domestic political decisions. The Democratic response was to serve as the loyal opposition to the nation’s commander-in-chief. They swallowed their complaints and criticism, and focused on trying to ensure that damage was minimized and lessons were learned.

So what about Jeb’s claims that the Obama administration was culpable in the rise of ISIS? How sophisticated a view of foreign policy do they represent?

Well, I would assert “naive to the point of dangerous.” Bush calls, for example, for arming of the Kurds. That can only antagonize Turkey, which has seen 40,000 casualties in a decades-long struggle for Kurdish independence. Turkey’s president Erdogan was apparently a supporter of IS until attempts to control the activities of Sunni extremists lead to a number of bombings. So, no, he’s not a reliable ally, but there’s no reason to push him into the arms of IS.

Or the claim that the Obama Administration didn’t take strong initial action against Islamic State (IS)? Far enough, in 20/20 hindsight. IS grew out of the Syrian civil war, which started as a rebellion against a leader guilty of crimes against humanity, but became a global lightening rod for militant extremists as it dragged on.

The nature and ambitions of IS were not obvious until defectors revealed that operations were actually being guided in secret by Sadaam’s Baathist generals. The initial IS surge was so successful because it exploited Sunni resentment against Shia dominance of Iraq’s government, with many of the early atrocities committed against Shia troops guarding the peace in Western Iraq.

The policies stated by Bush would be to bring additional American troops and material back into the region. That makes sense, except that the most potent weapon in the IS arsenal are suicide bombs crafted from Humvees captured from Iraqi bases. Until the Iraqi security forces demonstrate the resolve to engage the enemy, unless American commits indefinitely to a military presence, IS will simply fade into the civilian population, only to appear again after we leave to take advantage of the resources we leave behind.

And the final charge that Clinton didn’t visit Iraq during her tenure at State: well, there was no State Department presence. The entire operation was run out of the Department of Defense. What would have been the point of starting a turf war?

I understand that in domestic politics, the best defense is always a strong offense. It was perhaps to be expected that Bush would mount his attack against the Democratic front-runner. But what the tone and substance of the attack reveals is a dangerous lack of understanding of the issues. Given the documented history, Hillary will clean his clock in the run-up to the general election, or we’ll find ourselves suffering at the hands of the government we deserve.