terrbear.org

New Comment Policy

I could probably make this a page, but I’m not sure how long I’ll be using WP as my main blogging engine.

Anyways, a guy commented on my post yesterday and made a ridiculous claim about Sam Harris, without any evidence to back it up.

This irritates me, since I don’t like stupidity on my blog. So, here’s my policy, in a nutshell:

You can say whatever you want, provided it’s not too profane, and if asked for evidence, you’re given 24 hours to provide it. Otherwise your comment will be deleted.

It’s entirely possible to have fun, thought provoking, argumentative discussions without tossing out baseless claims, and keeping everything civil. Let’s work on that.

What we can learn about God from atheists

I know that title probably came off a little weird, given the context in the blog, but it’s not mine. It’s from a Sunday school class that Sara’s mom told us about at Riverbend Church, and that we attended this morning.

Now, I tepidly entertained attending, largely because I was afraid that the building might burn down, or I’d be shackled, or our room would be hit by lightning, but luckily none of that happened.

I missed the first part of the series, where the teacher discussed Bill Maher’s Religulous. I’ve tweeted about it, but in short, I thought the movie didn’t offer particularly anything new, and it was obvious that Maher used the same ambush interview style prevalent in Expelled, so I found the movie a little disingenuous.

Today he covered Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great. I was excited that I knew the book and author he was covering, because at least I’d be able to keep a mental tally of the speaker’s honesty.

Unfortunately, the very beginning of the presentation went to discuss his looks and his drinking habits. So, starting off the discussion with an ad hominem and a well-poisoning didn’t do much to offer anything promising.

Luckily after that brief introduction, the guy covered the book itself. He covered Hitchens’s main questions and problems with religion, and then offered a (sometimes too brief) synopsis of each chapter, usually agreeing with Hitchens’s points, but always providing some wiggle room for his version of his faith to be in the clear.

Example: Hitchens claims that we’re beyond the age of miracles, because we have a sound understanding of the fundamentals of the universe. In the book, he discusses his role as devil’s advocate against the sainthood of Mother Theresa, whose miracle can more reasonably be attributed to a new (at the time) Kodak film than it can to an angelic presence.

From this, I see that Hitchens explains that the most recent “miracle” was nothing of the sort. Does it mean that the previous miracles of earlier saints and of Jesus weren’t? I can’t answer that, but I can say that many things previously thought to be magic are now well understood and require no magic, so it’s reasonable to say that the earlier “miracles” were probably better explained as poor understanding than as actual divine intervention.

The speaker, however, took Hitchens as saying that because that one miracle was fake, there are no such thing as miracles. That’s a fallacious statement, because you can’t prove a negative, you can only say that things observed up to this point haven’t been magic, to our knowledge.

The speaker offered token arguments from incredulity regarding the design of the eye, which I wasn’t too impressed with, but then got to an interesting point: Hitchens doesn’t separate god from religion.

He points out that Hitchens has problems with the actions of people, and not with the actions of a god. There’s a few problems, but I think in short, he’s mostly right. Hitchens does have a problem with the people claiming to be god and the doctrine that they’re trying to impose on humanity. Original sin. The Bible. The Koran. All of those are meant to be divinely authored (or inspired, whatever) documents, but come across bigoted and evil in many chapters, so, I’d say he has a problem with god by association.

Does this mean that people are misapplying their respective Good Books? Possibly, but then it leaves open the question of what’s a metaphor, what’s fact, what’s important, and what’s “mis-translated”?

The other problem I had with the speaker’s assertion was when he says, “note that Hitchens never came out and said ‘God does not exist, and here’s proof.’” It’s impossible to prove a negative (go ahead, give me evidence that there’s *not* an invisible pink unicorn above my car that goes everywhere I go), which is why nobody tries to. The *reasonable* position, though, is that “X is false unless proven otherwise.” (see: null hypothesis).

So unfortunately the speaker (and I’d say everyone but me in the room) just start from the fiated position, “our god exists,” whereas I start from the opposite, “there probably is no god, but I welcome your evidence for it.” Because Hitchens dedicates several chapters to demolishing the arguments for a deity, there is no evidence left remaining, and I stick with my null hypothesis, and go on with my day.

Near the end, the guy insinuated that Hitchens leads an evil/depraved lifestyle, saying, “I could paint Hitchens in a really bad light because of some of the choices he’s made, but I don’t want to do that.” But that was sufficient to continue to poison the well.

And to close things, the speaker (whose name I really wish I could remember, because I hate writing “speaker” or “teacher” repeatedly) said that if you look at Maher or Hitchens on TV, they’re not happy people, and the most peaceful and happy people that he knows are Christians, implying therefore god exists. This is an argument from final consequences, and, just like every other logical fallacy, has no bearing on the question at hand.

Overall, I enjoyed listening to the talk, though was disappointed at the lack of discussion at the end (I think they met for lunch perhaps to do that, but we’ve got kids, so that wasn’t going to happen). I really like the moderate Christian stance that most of the people in the room entertained, where they just wanted to love and help people, and the rest of the book is irrelevant. I just don’t think many other people picked up on the same bad logic as I did.

There’s one more session of the same topic next weekend, but I’m not sure if I’ll go, seeing how it’s Father’s Day, and I kind of just want to sit in the hammock all morning. We’ll see.

As a closing note, I’d like to re-emphasize that I think Sam Harris is, hands down, the most likeable and articulate and reasonable modern atheist author, because his books have a much clearer point, and he can express things without slurring or relying on ad hominems. Go pick up Letter to a Christian Nation, it’s a 1.5 hour read, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Developer Requirements

Apologies for the terribly named post.

I was thinking on the way to work this morning about classes that I thought helped me write software, and classes that were meaningless. Keep in mind that I’m only evaluating these classes according to what’s helped me work, not what’s helped me in everyday conversation or social gatherings or whatever.

• Statistics - I only took 3 hours of statistics, but I think having a fundamental understanding of measuring things is incredibly useful. It helps you learn where to look for problems and pain points.
• Science - This isn’t really a class, because I don’t think any of the science classes you take in college help you learn about the scientific method. That’s not entirely a bad thing, because there’s a lot of information they need to give to you so you can understand the higher up physics courses, for example. Understanding how to isolate variables and constraints and make testable hypotheses informs everything I do nowadays.
• Automata - If you think of regular expressions as pictures, instead of arcane symbols, it helps a lot.
• Technical writing - Being able to communicate effectively over email, understanding desirable typefaces, etc., I think have been helpful.
• Data structures - You know, it’s funny. It was one of the first CS classes I took, so I thought it’d be dumb, but I got to work out a lot of how queues and stacks and trees worked before having to rely on them heavily.
• Systems programming & Operating systems - When you start running your own applications (because of funding or because it’s too complicated to convey to someone else), knowing about schedulers and memory leaks and threads and processes and shells is incredibly useful.
• Assembly or C - Most of my early classes were in C++ (I know, not C at all), but at least I got some of the syntax, and then I did several classes that involved asm. I think those were awesome, just because you understand what needs to be done to move information around a computer, and how (and when) it gets expensive.

Not so helpful:

• Algorithms - I think this is probably more a result of the teacher than of the class itself. I think having a basic understanding of bigO is important, but it’s not important for an entire semester. I think understanding code and statistics provides a better foundation for optimizing and choosing algorithms, and our teacher didn’t offer any of that.
• Chemistry - I still don’t understand why I needed to take this class.
• Circuits - Has had no bearing, whatsoever, on how I do my job. I’ve tried my hardest to block out how inductors and capacitors work.

This is an incomplete list, but if you happen to come across it, maybe it’ll make you smarter.

Tidy Gem, Rails, Segfault, Pain

I’ve been dealing with Tidy gem issues for the last 48 hours, and look to have made my way out of the woods. Here’s a few things for whoever might google this (segmentation fault, ruby, rails, tidy, eval):

1. The old tidy gem, the one you’ve probably installed (version 1.1.2) is NOT maintained. This is a problem, because as structs in libtidy change, if the tidy gem isn’t updated to reflect those changes, segfaults happen.
2. DO NOT, FOR THE LOVE OF WHATEVER, USE 0 FOR FALSE. I know, this seems stupid, since in C, 0 is false. But it’s not in the library. Right. I know. Ridiculous. This mostly applies to the tidyopts, fwiw.

Anyways, I’ve put up a gem (and will maintain it, and comment here if you have issues) that has the necessary updates to work with the latest version of Tidy.

Find it here: http://github.com/terrbear/tidy/tree/master

Happy Birthday, Natertot!

Two years ago today, Sara gave birth to Nate. It was a long labor (18 hours), and by the time he actually popped out, it was late (about 10:30PM).

He came out a screamer, which Sara’s mom thought was funny, but we were too tired to appreciate it. Lucky for us, that first night he slept great, barely crying, and providing no clues of the horrible 4 months in store for us.

After that first night, Nate was up randomly throughout the night, didn’t sleep well during the day, and only did more to develop his lungs. He can still let out a piercing scream if you try to put him in his chair and he really, really doesn’t want to eat dinner because OH MY GOD DID YOU KNOW THERE’S AN OUTSIDE TO THIS HOUSE? WITH GRASS?

He’s since developed into one of my favorite people. In the last two years we’ve helped teach and watched him learn to eat, crawl, walk, talk, dance, splash, throw, run, jump, laugh, give hugs, demand kisses, request cake at every meal, bark, meow, squawk, ribbit, tickle, knock on doors, and sleep in his own bed.

He absorbs a lot more than we give him credit for, and every day one of us asks, “how did he know that?”

Happy birthday, Natertot. Hopefully this year we figure out how to use a toilet and get those sentences down. Cause and effect might come shortly after. Who knows.

And the obligatory birthday party pic:

Get angry and make stuff happen

I really like passionate people. Even if you’re wrong, you’ve got enough energy to care and to fight for what you think. Just the same, I can’t stand apathy. Have an opinion, dammit.

Some of the best meetings I’ve been in involved raised voices. It’s not because we’re calling each other stupid, it’s because we have ideas and we’re defending them and attacking others, trying to let the best solution rise to the top.

If you presented a solution to a meeting and it was shot down and you just said, “ok,” then I’d think that either you didn’t put a lot of effort into your solution, or you didn’t care, or both. None of those are good.

Earlier this week, a buddy at work approached me about a UI thing I’d been working on. Now, I’ll be the first to admit, UX is not my strong suit. I don’t think like other people. I love vim. My shell is in focus more than a browser. It’s just how I roll.

Said buddy started talking about how I’d laid out some things, and suggested another way to do it. I disagreed, because the change seemed superfluous to me. The other guy thought it made things more consistent and simpler. We disagreed. Voices got raised. It was clear he was angry. He even tossed a bottle opener (yes, we have bottle openers in my office, because it’s awesome, and because real developers like beer) in frustration.

Which is awesome. I went away unchanged, but I think the other guy got enough fire out of it that he’ll end up redoing it and making it probably awesome for most users. It’s a lot more fun to work with people who care about their work and actually want to put in the time to do things right.

If you get 8 hours of sleep a night, you’re spending at least 30% of your waking hours at work. If you have a commute or different hours, it might be closer to 45 or 50%. If you don’t get angry or passionate about what you’re working on, you should quit. As far as I’m concerned, you’re not doing good work*.

* Unless you’re Spock. But you’re not.

Another reason my wife is AWESOME

Let me preface this by saying that Sara’s a Christian, is happy with it, and we keep our discussions about faith and whatnot civil and respectful. We have different criteria for our beliefs, but reconcile them pretty well. Plus, she’s hilarious.

Anyways, the other night I was talking to her, explaining some of my forever-held, entirely irrational thoughts. The conversation went something like:

“But that doesn’t make any sense. Isn’t being rational kind of your thing?”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s just how I think. I can’t help it.”
“Well then why don’t you just believe in God?”

Nate’s Wedding Debut

Two weekends ago, Nate and I were lucky enough to be in Cookseys’ wedding (that’s right, it’s plural now, because there’s two of them). I was a groomsman; Nate was the ring bearer.

Traveling with little kids is tricky. Nate moved into a big kid bed only about 2 months ago, so going to a hotel room or a friend’s house (thanks Meezies!) is scary to him. You have to coax him into going down for the night, and naps are really hard to get at all.

Since the wedding was at night, we decided we’d have to work to tire him out, hopefully give him sufficient time for a nap, and then he’d be good at the wedding. So we took him swimming.

The pool was freezing. Sara didn’t stay in very long, and opted to hang out with Evie, poolside, instead. This meant that I spent an hour with Nate in the pool, so I was his hands-down favorite for the day.

Our plan for tiring him out was moderately successful, and the little guy slept for about an hour as we drove in a loop through a neighborhood in Irving. About the time he woke up, it was time to head to the chapel to get dressed and take pictures.

I don’t think anyone’s quite sure when it happened, but after a while in the chapel, Nate decided he needed to be attached to me. If I put him down, he was grabbing my leg and crying. He didn’t want crackers or a toy, just his daddy.

This would all be fine, except for the quickly arriving ceremony, where I’m supposed to be standing up at the chapel - sans Nate - and he’s supposed to walk up to me and then walk back to hang out with Sara. As we were called to get into positions, Sara decided to take the Natertot off by himself so he could get over some of his poorly timed separation anxiety.

So after we all walked up to the front of the chapel, it was time to let Nate loose. Sara released him from the back of the chapel, and the poor guy looked lost. After he was about ten feet in, I walked in front of Cooksey to try to persuade him to come up front. He noticed the hundred and fifty or so people in the room, and saw me at the altar, but was so tired and upset (though not crying) that he just drifted up to the front.

He finally got to me, and I picked him up, and everything was good again. But (being anal and thinking that, you know, everyone should be in their positions), I motioned Sara over to the side of the chapel so she’d be able to take Nate into the pews.

That didn’t work.

At all.

Nate freaked out, began to scream, so I did as Sara directed and picked him back up. I ended up holding him through the bridal procession and the opening prayer and message.

It was a Catholic wedding, so they were nice enough to let the bridal party sit during most of the ceremony. So I was sitting in the pews and, to the left of me, brushing up against me, was Nate, kicking his legs back and forth and bouncing and pointing to the stained glass windows to tell me that they’re bright. Meezy was sitting to Nate’s left, so he’d occasionally get the leg pat and the same message.

It was great. What started out stressful (this is just how I think, I can’t help it) turned into one of my favorite memories of Nate so far, with us both in tuxes and him eating goldfish and holding his newly acquired tiger from the Fort Worth Zoo while bopping his head back and forth to church music. Every time he noticed something he’d try to tell me about it, and I’d have to say “shhh,” but I was laughing the whole time.

There’s not that many years of that kind of innocence and unadulterated affection, and I’m thrilled that I wasn’t too dumb to keep from looking up and noticing it.

Here, for the record, is how cool we looked:

All dressed up, ready to go

Working from Home 180

I used to be a huge proponent of working from home. Use IM, Twitter, IRC, Skype, work without pants. Everything’s better.

Recently, though, I’ve flip flopped. That’s right, I waffled. I’m a damn John Kerry, if you will.

I work from home probably about 0.8 days a week (meaning every 5th week I work all 5 days in the office). There are days when this is really helpful, when I’ve got 15 JIRA items that I want to knock out. It’s also really useful if I need to stay home to help out Sara with something, like when she has a doctor’s appt, say.

But there’s a problem. Working from home is nice because I can get my stuff done, but I’m not as much helping out other people as much. I figure this is because online communication, no matter how early you started with it, is a little tedious. I don’t mind keeping 5-10 IM conversations going on all day (and let’s not even get started about Twitter…), but they’re passive usually. Only for a fraction of the IM conversations are both people staring at the window and anxiously awaiting what the other person has to do.

It’s also harder to convey complex sequences or diagrams over the internets. Sure, I’m a shitty artist, but at least I can represent a database on a whiteboard. I can’t do anything close to that with Skitch (well, I can, but it takes about 30 minutes*).

When Meezy and I cooperate on a project, we usually work remotely, and it works well for us, but we’ve been doing projects together for a long time. But even with that level of familiarity, we’re doing Rails Rumble this year, and are going to try to work in the same room. Remote communication is the first thing to crap out when stuff gets hard, so we might as well dodge that one right now.

I think the communication benefits come from easier approachability and that most people can talk faster than they type. I don’t think it’s the questionable “75% of communication is nonverbal” claim. I could be talking to Spock**, and I think talking to him 3 feet from me would be more effective than pinging him over Jabber.

*I might have lied about this a little bit. Have you seen my awesome ejabberd integration diagram? I’m really proud of it.

**Apropos, no?

Proof of a god

Over the weekend (while visiting Dallas for Cooksey’s wedding — congrats2Cookseys!), I had a fun (and drunk) conversation with @meezy. It turned to what would satisfy as sufficient evidence of a god’s existence.

I’m at a loss for what would qualify. If you’ve got an idea, I’d love to hear it.

A few quick guidelines. I’m not going to entertain any anthropic argument crap. Yes, we exist. No, that doesn’t imply anything except that we exist. Nor will I entertain any arguments from incredulity or tradition.

Meezy decided that most evidence he’d have to write off as hallucination, so if you’ve got a way to handle for that, that’d be awesome, too.