Society and reality

Listen, Child.  This is the most important thing I will tell you.  Listen carefully:

Society is not real.

Literally.  It is not real.  All of those problems and people on TV?  They are not real.  Your life is not like theirs, nor should it be.  You don’t have to have sex like they do.  You don’t have to kiss like they do.  You don’t have to love your family like they do.  You don’t have to be straight like they are.

Your friends?  They’re not real either.  You don’t have to get married like they are, or sleep with boys like they do.  You don’t have to read as many books, or paint pictures as well as them, or like the same music as them.  You don’t have to go to church like them, or sing like them, or drink wine like they do.

Child, the rest of those pressures, those impressions and feelings you get from everybody else around you, they’re fake, too.  You don’t have to follow the law.  You don’t have to believe in god.  You don’t have to drive a car.  You don’t have to wear makeup, or wear matching socks.

The only thing that’s real, Child, is you.  You will always and forever have to answer to yourself.  You can let your parents down, you can let your teacher down, you can let your country down, and you’ll be just fine.  But you can never let yourself down and get away with it.

Child, you don’t have to be thin, goth, punk, cute, indy, valley, emo, geeky, hip-hop, or east-coast.  But you do have to be yourself.  Always and forever.  You’ll never let yourself get away with being something you’re not.

Evolution

I’m watching the Nova special on the Dover trial regarding intelligent design in the public school classrooms, and something just occurred to me: intelligent design claims nothing. It makes no claims whatsoever; it is merely a reaction to the theory of evolution. The intelligent design “theory”, as I have come to understand it, claims that evolution has “holes” in it; therefore, intelligent design is the only alternative.

Let’s assume evolution is wrong. Darwin was nuts; natural selection is incorrect. Given that assumption, intelligent design wins by default. Honestly. There’s no better alternative to evolution than intelligent design.

But.  This only assumes that evolution is wrong.  And they have not made that case.  Every claim – EVERY claim – which intelligent design proponents like Michael Behe have made against evolution has been demonstrated to be at least misguided and at most patently wrong.

Here’s a good analogy for intelligent design vs. evolution: http://friendlyhumanist.blogspot.com/2007/11/intelligent-baking.html

T-Rex on Homelessness

This happens to me pretty much every time a random person asks for money:

 http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001109.html

The Necessity Of Failure

So, obviously, dear readers (if you’re out there), my seven-day experiment is a failure. It’s really hard to keep up a daily blog, especially when you’re out of town for a bachelor party, then spending the next two days nursing your paintball welts, and then trying to fix up a snowblower with your dad.

But – and this is a very import realization I’ve made recently – this does not mean that I am a failure, or that this blog is a failure.  In fact, in my opinion, I’m off to a pretty good start.  My secret goal for the experiment was really just motivation.  See, a while ago, I probably would have just given up – failed the experiment, labeled myself a failure, and dropped the idea.  Now, though, failure’s been a good motivator.  Last week when I missed a day of blogging, I was more motivated to write something the next day to make up for lost time.

We all need to fail.  Failure is important, because it means you are practicing.  I want to be a better writer, so I’m writing.  I’m not happy with everything I’ve written over the past few weeks, but that’s OK.  I’ll get better.  I’m not trying to change the world here, at least not yet.

Computer Science > Computers

“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” -Edsger Djikstra

When I first heard this quote, I didn’t get it. “Computer science” has “computer” right there in the name! How can it not be about computers?

Then it hit me – astronomy would not exist without telescopes! They are our window to the stuff beyond our atmostphere, and they are essential to our study of the universe.  And so it is with computers. Computer science has nothing to do with studying computers – we obviously already know how they work, much as the telescope poses no mystery to the educated mind. But like the telescope is notable not in and of itself, but for what it reveals, computers are only useful for what they reveal. Through the lens of software, computer scientists study information.

As a computer scientist myself, this proves true. Information, data, entities, properties – these are my passions. Computers? I merely tolerate computers. But I am in love with what they compute! I trek through data. I ponder the relationships between objects. I spend an inordinate amount of time contriving the clearest, most succinct nomenclature I can. I draw blobs and lines on paper to visualize knowledge. I spend hours waxing academic with colleagues on how best to arrange data, how to process it, share it, chop it, slice it, and display it. I transform data from one format to another. I optimize the data to conserve space and time. I read pages and pages a day about new ways to think about data.

Maybe it’s time for a change of name – “information science” seems a more proper term.