Entries in Life

I came across the above quote while reading about Monads in Functional Programming and it seemed to tie together a few thoughts that have been percolating. The article talks about self-imposed restrictions while programming (“Don’t break encapsulation”) and how ignoring these artificial constraints makes the job of maintaining or developing your work that much harder. “What seemed like freedom [e.g. doing whatever was easiest at the time] is really slavery.” A while back ziffle on Flutterby pointed to a collection of essays in which people propounded on their “Dangerous Ideas”. The most fascinating one to me was Clay Shirky’s: Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account. Now, the idea that “free will” can come and go is, in itself, interesting. But his introductory example was the suit brought against McDonald’s “charging, among other things, that McDonald’s used promotional techniques to get them to eat more than they should.” (For more indepth commentary on these “dangerous ideas”, see How to save the world.) Then, last Monday, Jeremy Zawodny criticized an editorial in the Washington Post that claimed obesity is good for the economy. While I won’t dispute the claim that obesity can have some positive effects on the economy, many of Jeremy’s criticism are my own, Now, here’s the clincher. As said, we now have a PlayStation 2. Last night, I waffled between purchasing Dance Dance Revolution and the lesser-known Kinetic. I ended up going for the (slightly) cheaper Kinetic. When I brought it home, dvfmama frowned at the money I spent (she frowns whenever I spend money, though) until I showed her the game. Then she closed the curtains so our neighbors wouldn’t see me doing aerobics. And she said it was better than my old plan. In my old plan, I’d spent a few weeks with the RCAF’s 5BX plan. was critical of the short exercise (11 minutes) and thought I needed more. And, to lose the 40lbs. that I’m trying to shed, she’s probably right. So, while our laziness has driven our economy to provide us with more and more leisure time at the expense of our health and given us plenty of opportunities to over-indulge, I’m hoping to turn that drive on its head a little by using some of my leisure time to rid myself of that excess and putting into effect some artificial constraints where — in decades past — natural constraints would have been enough. (Update: Just after I wrote this, I talked to . Basil, the seven-year-old gamer in our family, is wearing himself out with some of the “combat” mode games from Kinetic.)

If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I’m stuck in a rut when it comes to programming languages. I’m loath to learn PHP, Java, or even Python, but at the same time, I haven’t gotten out enough. I’ve gotten stuck in Perl. Perl is a great language, of course, but I need to learn other things, too. Teaching my kids with Lego Mindstorms will help me hone my Lispish skills and learn more about Scheme, but I want more. So, I’ve burned myself a copy of the Mono Live CD. Part of what sparked this has been a general dissatisfaction. I do love Perl, but I’ve known for a bit that I shouldn’t get stuck in a rut. I’ve been learning other languages, but only on the periphery. It hasn’t been a concious effort. The proverbial straw, though, was an interview with Chad Fowler, author of My Job Went to India. He talks about the dangers of knowing only one language — another thing I’ve been aware of, but hearing it from someone else drives the point home. In fact, when hiring a Java programmer, he got so many applications, that he trimmed the pool by using only those resumes that had both Java and SmallTalk experience. “We wanted to make an offer everyone who had both SmallTalk and Java experience,” he said. And while I’m not planning on learning Java (though, Squeak’s SmallTalk is a possiblity), it seems wise to heed his warning.

Yesterday was the first day of the year of the dog, according to the Chinese Zodiac. And if it was any indication, this year will be one for the dogs. It started off innocuously enough… till I discovered that a partition on my server had filled up. A comedy of errors ensued. I got the partition problem cleared up, only to accidently put the server into single-user mode. After desperately calling a friend in New York City (where the server is colocated) for help, I got the machine back online. In my frustration, I opened a door far too quickly and knocked Lily, my year-old daughter, off her feet. And, to top it off, the server downtime coincided with my son’s Pinewood Derby, so I missed that. Finally, after taking a break from all this computer stuff, I discovered that a popular site I host was offline due to database corruption problems. And he puts out his podcast on Saturdays! I can only hope that this inauspicious beginning is nothing.

Patrick writes:

As it now stands, we watch real-time events unaided by the filters of time and analysis. After all, there are only so many hours in a lifetime. Who spends their days reading newspapers from last century?

While I don’t spend all day doing it, part of my morning routine is a quick perusal of the morning paper. I start with the comics page (which I read in full), then a quick glance at the cover, skim through the first section, glance over the “opinions” page and then a brief review of local news. Other than a few weblogs that occasionally comment on national news, that’s my source of news. After all, who has time to watch events unfolding in real time? That takes way more time than reading about them later.

Say you’re a college student with a weblog and you post your foolish thoughts under your real name. Or you’re active in some newgroups or mailing lists. Time passes, you graduate and decide to look for a job. Of course, the prospective employer will want to do a search on your name, but what will they find? Oops! Too bad you didn’t think of that before! Enter ClaimID.com. ClaimID will give you a place that you can point people to, to say “Here’s the ‘me’ I’m proud of!” The brainchild of Fred Stutzman (a brilliant Ph.D candidate at UNC and former staffer at ibiblio.org) his idea has plenty of other use cases, but that’s the one that made sense to me. (I should note that when I asked Fred for his suggestion on what language to teach my kids he suggested that I look at the Logo version of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. I promptly ignored his advice, but now that I’m thinking about how to teach my kids using DrScheme and Lego Mindstorms, I’ll be reading everything I can get my hands on.)

I got some really good comments on my post about teaching programming to my kids. In fact, Nathan commented on his own site which sparked responses here and there. These comments (besides cementing my relationship with Nate as “Nate’s Friend” — I guess people don’t want to call me “hexmode”) and the comments on Don Box’s original post show that people think this is an interesting question. I’ve been looking at DrScheme and, now, Squeak and, while the interactive aspect of Squeak and some of the efforts that have been made to teach children SmallTalk with Squeak Etoys make it a strong contender, I’m still leaning towards DrScheme. It has a visual environment and some texts, but after reading How do you compile? the pedagogical usefulness of Scheme as both a “Language A” and a “Language B” makes tons of sense. That, and after you’ve learned enough, you can program Lego Mindstorms. Perhaps I could develop some lessons that allow my kids to leverage what they’ve learned of programming so that, as time goes on, they take more and more control of the Mindstorms.

I’ve just discovered The Downfall and am eager to see it. I learned about this move from bigsleepj on LiveJournal and, from his review, it seems to be part of a different sort of movie about the Holocaust. Life is Beautiful was the first film that I saw like this. Life is Beautiful uses the Holocaust as a backdrop for a love story, but ends up with death in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. But it is a funny little movie. The humor evidently offends some people, but the humor of Life is Beautiful is powerful in the way that The Downfall‘s portrayal of Hitler as a real human (and not just an evil, inhumane monster that we’d like to think of him) is powerful. Evidently, some people would like to just say “Never Again” and let that be the end of it. But it isn’t enough, because as told me:

People want to make monsters of these leaders. Monsters that are “not like us”. I think that’s very dangerous. Either we can all become monsters or none of us are monsters but all capable of amazing evil. Either way, this is not an us vs. them. It’s in us all.

Movies like these help us to understand that the Holocaust wasn’t a special case, but that such great evil can rise from even the most mundane motives. Finally, bigsleepj says “The questions about Hitler, how such a cruel man can be kind and how people are willing to die for him despite it being clear that he’s neither a saviour nor a saint, can not be answered by a single three hour movie.” I would counter that those questions don’t even need to be asked. We are willing to die for what we love and many of us do not love Good. Many of us think Good is nice and sweet, but we don’t love it. Instead, we love power, we love comfort, we love ourselves and, while we don’t set out to cause harm to others, sometimes people get hurt while we pursue our love of power, comfort, and self. But beyond that, what we love impairs our judgment: Hitler was able to accomplish so much destruction because he appealed to people’s self-love so that they were able to overlook his unpleasantness. The humanity of The Downfall‘s Hitler isn’t a curious question, it is a warning to all of us.

My two oldest children are probably ready to start learning to program. Basil spends too much time on the computer playing games, but thankfully they’re more strategy games than anything else. Ginger doesn’t spend as much time, but might find it iteresting. I know they’re both capable of learning something. So, I’m going to use this weblog entry as a place to store different ideas I have have come across. Right now, I’m leaning toward a Lisp derivative. Lisp is clean and simple. “But you’re kids will hate it! There’s nothing practical they can do!” you say. Wrong! I’ve pretty much decided I want to use DrScheme to teach them. I was leaning towards Lisp (for its clarity, simplicity and cleanness) before reading his post on “Teaching my kids to program”, but after I reading that and his next post on the topic — “It’s down to Scheme or Logo” — I’m convinced to go with DrScheme. (FWIW, Don’s posts set off some really interesting discusson over on “Lambda the Ultimate.) There are other issues. I need something that runs on Linux and DrScheme does. It has a nice gui that includes the text to How to Design Programs, and Lisp runs on Lego Mindstorms which is also important since it will be good for kids to have a tangible result from their programming. Of course, some will say “Are you sure you want to teach your kids programming?” but I’m not really trying to give them employment options, I’m trying to exercise their analytical thinking skills, give them a good introduction to the use of logic, and maybe, just maybe, some fun. I’m not sure how age-appropriate all this is, but it looks like there are a lot resources available for this tact at Teach-Scheme.org. If nothing else, they’ll be good resources for me to use as I teachplay with them. Now, why not Java? BlueJ looks like a nice tool, but Java is Object-Oriented from the ground up. Like Don Box, I’m not comfortable with teaching OO to kids that young. For the same reason, I’m not going to go with Python or Ruby. How about Perl? I’m a great Perl programmer and I love the language, but I really do want to stick with something clean and simple. Finally, there are just a ton of resources available for teaching Lispish languages that don’t seem to be available for the other languages. I’m sure that this is partly the result of the reverence acadamia has for Lisp, but it also makes things a little easier. That, and Lego Mindstorms. What language would you teach your kids? Or, if you don’t have children, what language would you recomend?