I was really impressed by Sheri Dew’s tribute to Sister Holland, including this:

Few women have influenced me for as long or with as much impact as did Sister Patricia Terry Holland.

Her influence began decades ago. During the 1980s, when she served both as a counselor in the Young Women general presidency and as first lady of BYU, she spoke frequently. Often this was in BYU’s Marriott Center in what became known, affectionately, as the “Jeff and Pat Show,” when she and her husband, BYU President Jeffrey R. Holland, shared the pulpit at BYU devotionals. I quickly learned to pay attention to anything and everything she had to say. She seemed so young but was so wise. Pat Holland had a way of looking at life, as well as teaching the gospel, that spoke to me. I found myself hanging on her every word.

I’ve heard several talks from Sister Holland, but I’m sure not all of them. This made me want to go back and listen to them.

So, I created a podcast feed of all of Sister Holland’s talks from BYU, from 1980 to 1989, plus one in 2022. The podcast starts today, publishing 1 talk per day for 19 days, each loaded directly from BYU Speeches. There are 9 talks with Elder Holland, and 10 on her own.

To subscribe, paste the following URL into your podcast app:
https://richardkmiller.com/podcasts/pth

If you haven’t done this before, do a search online for “Add podcast by URL in [your podcast app, e.g. Apple Podcasts]”. For example, in Apple Podcasts, go to Library then “Follow a Show by URL”. In the Overcast app, click “+” at the top right, then “Add URL”.

Sister Holland has of course spoken many more times, including recorded talks not included in this feed, such as 3 talks at BYU-Idaho, RootsTech 2021, and at a faith- and hope-filled devotional for young adults just 6 months ago. But I’m excited to review her 19 BYU speeches.

The post On Patricia Holland’s Passing appeared first on Richard K Miller.

For everyone outside of Utah, you can watch RootsTech online for free. Speakers include Sean Astin (Goonies, Rudy, LOTR), Jordin Sparks (American Idol season 6), and a variety of family history speakers.

If you’re attending classes in person, I’m speaking Saturday at 8am with Joe Price and Cameron Briggs about community projects. These are projects to improve the FamilySearch Tree for your community or a community you care about.

The post RootsTech 2023 appeared first on Richard K Miller.

Your gratitude depends on seeing and remembering — what you see in life’s events and what you choose to remember.

Here’s a great quote from Henry J. Eyring, president of BYU-Idaho:

“I know of no better way…than by keeping personal records, especially written ones. It’s easier and more rewarding than you might think. You don’t need formal training in writing. And you don’t have to write every day or capture all of any one day’s events. I’ve found it useful to focus on just a few notable events and feelings…

“Moreover, you don’t have to be strictly true to reality. In fact, one of the blessings of journal keeping is the opportunity to think critically about what really has happened during your day. By habit, I try to be slightly more optimistic and generous than an unbiased observer would be. In particular, I’m predisposed to give others the benefit of the doubt. It helps to see their good intentions, and to congratulate them on their efforts, even if the outcomes aren’t extraordinary. You can recognize the opposition they face, and portray them in glowing, even heroic terms.

“I would encourage you to do the same for yourself. Take credit for what you have learned as you acted, not necessarily the way things turned out. See the would-be hero in yourself. Give yourself credit for acts of kindness and moments of courage. And look for the subtle charms of daily events. Make the weather a little milder and the scenery a bit prettier.

“As Sister Eyring and our children will attest, that is the way I write my journal. Life is an epic journey, like those undertaken in Middle Earth or Narnia, by seemingly ordinary characters who are in fact heroes-in-the-making, destined to rise above all opposition. To avoid cynicism from your children, you can make the excuse I do. The subtitle of my journal is ‘Based on a True Story.'”

Rising Above Opposition

The post Gratitude is in Seeing and Remembering appeared first on Richard K Miller.

I’ve decided I want to do this — listen to every talk from President Nelson since he was called as an apostle.

If you want to follow along, here’s a podcast I created which will publish one talk per day from President Nelson starting today. It begins in April 1984, with President Nelson giving his first talk as an apostle, and includes talks from General Conference, BYU and BYU-Idaho devotionals, CES Firesides, Christmas devotionals, and others.

There are options below to listen to one, two, or three talks per day. If you listen to three per day, you’ll finish all 116 talks in time for the October General Conference, just six weeks away.

One Talk Per Day

Open in Apple Podcasts on your phone, or open in iTunes on your computer, or copy this URL into your favorite podcast app:
https://richardkmiller.com/podcasts/rmn/daily

Two Talks Per Day

Open in Apple Podcasts on your phone, or open in iTunes on your computer, or copy this URL into your favorite podcast app:
https://richardkmiller.com/podcasts/rmn/2perday

Three Talks Per Day

Open in Apple Podcasts on your phone, or open in iTunes on your computer, or copy this URL into your favorite podcast app:
https://richardkmiller.com/podcasts/rmn/3perday

I compiled these talks from churchofjesuschrist.org, byu.edu, byui.edu, and a few others from Ben Crowder’s excellent list.

For a list of compatible podcast apps, including options for iOS and Android, read here about private podcasts. These podcasts are private in the sense that they’re not listed in the Apple or Google directories, but anyone can still use them or share them.

October 1 Update

If you’ve been listening to three per day, today was the last day. This included a 117th talk given by President Nelson just two weeks ago.

If you liked something you heard and can’t remember which talk it was in, here is a Google custom search engine which searches all of President Nelson’s talks:

https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=007532349988499727864:gyuxy3zgzt3

Of the 117 talks, there are 6 talks with no audio recording available. If you’d like to read these talks, here are the links:

• Thanks for the Covenant
• Love of the Lord – in Language and Living
• Jesus the Christ–Our Prince of Peace
• Remarks at Worldwide Priesthood Celebration
• Hope of Israel
• Jesus Is the Living Christ, Our Lord and Savior

The post All of President Russell M. Nelson’s talks as a podcast appeared first on Richard K Miller.

The ability to visit, travel, live, or work where you choose is the broad sense of immigration. I am not just speaking about citizenship, with the attendant rights to vote, receive government benefits, etc.

Immigration of highly educated people is apparently the easy part. If someone comes to the U.S. for a PhD program, why not staple a visa to their diploma upon graduation?, it has been said.

• Companies founded by 1st-generation immigrants include Google, Yahoo, Intel, PayPal, Tesla, eBay, Kohl’s, Comcast, and Nordstrom.
• Companies founded by 2nd-generation Americans include Apple (Steve Jobs’s biological father was a Syrian immigrant), Amazon (Jeff Bezos’s step-father, who raised him, was from Cuba), and IBM.
• Companies currently run by foreign-born CEOs include Microsoft, Adobe, Pepsi, and CitiGroup.

It’s hard to imagine arguing against the above type of immigration. We should want as many founders and CEOs of companies as we can get. These new companies create thousands of jobs and improve our lives through the products they develop. Similarly, in chronically under-staffed positions such as for computer programmers, nurses, and doctors in rural areas, we should want as many immigrants as we can get.

It is remarkable how much value in tech is created by immigrants, and how hard we make it for them to come start companies here

— Sam Altman (@sama) August 16, 2015

But we should not stop there.

Even low-skilled or no-skilled immigrants are a benefit to society. We should be far more accepting and encouraging of this type of immigration.

In short, we should be accepting of all types of immigration.

Immigration is often synonymous with Mexican immigration. The largest migration of one country’s citizens to the U.S. was the 12M Mexican immigrants that have come in the last 40 years[1]. However, Mexican immigration has slowed or even stopped (on net) in recent years. There are now more Asian immigrants than all Hispanics[2].

What I have learned about Mexican immigration

Why more immigration?

Reasons to allow more immigration include self-interest, altruism, and supporting human rights and liberty.

Black Swan Immigrants

Some immigrants have created life-changing companies, some of them mentioned above. However, we’ve denied entrance to many other potential immigrants. What companies and products have these would-be-immigrants not created because they lack similar opportunities at home? What if someone in Ghana, India, or China, with the right education or opportunity, has a cure for cancer or aging, or an invention that can turn salt water into drinking water economically?

What life-changing or life-saving inventions are we missing out on because of an immigrant who is not here?

It’s not just about high-tech. If you’ve eaten at any Asian restaurant in the last few years, you’ve probably seen Sriracha sauce, the red hot sauce in a large, round bottle with a green spout. It was named Ingredient of the Year in 2010. Sriracha sauce was created by David Tran, a refugee from Vietnam whose company is named after the freighter ship on which he escaped from Vietnam, the Huy Fong.[14]

What foods, flavors, and experiences are we missing out on because an immigrant is not here?

Not every immigrant will cure cancer or introduce a well-loved food product. We might call those immigrants “Black Swan immigrants,” to borrow a phrase from Nassim Taleb, because they are rare. However, to increase the likelihood of these “Black Swan” events — huge, breakthrough contributions by immigrants — we need to increase the number of rolls of the dice, allowing more immigrants to come here and take their chances. I doubt we, or even they, could know ahead of time what break-through contributions they might make under the right circumstances.

Working-class immigrants

Even if most immigrants won’t make break-through contributions to the world — and again, we won’t know which ones until they have the opportunity — all working immigrants help the economy.

Employers don’t hire immigrants for charity. Why would they? The immigrant might not speak English well, and might not be familiar with the culture. It must be the immigrant will do a a better job, at a lower price, or both. That alone is a win for the economy.

Labor is a key ingredient in most products and services we buy. When labor is cheaper, the products and services we consume become less expensive. Imagine cheaper food or electronics, or a less expensive night out at a restaurant. Cheaper products and services also help the poor, even more so than they help the middle-class.

It’s not just that immigrants sell us their labor. They buy our products too. More immigrants in the economy means more aggregate demand in the economy.

Because We’re Human

Besides the self-interested reasons above, friendliness to immigrants is altruistic and humane.

Immigration allows the poor to lift themselves out of poverty. I suspect very few immigrants want a hand-out. Most simply want to work. Why risk leaving home, living far away from family, if not for the opportunity? The “lazy” immigrants don’t immigrate; they stay home.

Immigrants send money to their friends and family in home countries. This is the most ennobling form of international aid. This money reaches individual families, one by one.

Where is the compassion for the desperately poor people who come here to work, helping themselves, their children, and us? 3/

— Russell Roberts (@EconTalker) August 4, 2015

We pray for a heart which will embrace immigrants. God will judge us upon how we have treated the most needy.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) July 8, 2013

A Natural Right

A belief in natural rights also supports immigration. This is the idea that we have natural rights from our Creator, or from our humanity, that precede and supercede government institutions.

The right to travel is an individual personal human right, long recognized under the natural law as immune from governmental interference. Of course, governments have been interfering with this right for millennia. The Romans restricted the travel of Jews; Parliament restricted the travel of serfs; Congress restricted the travel of slaves; and starting in the late 19th century, the federal government has restricted the travel of non-Americans who want to come here and even the travel of those already here. All of these abominable restrictions of the right to travel are based not on any culpability of individuals, but rather on membership in the groups to which persons have belonged from birth.
…
Yet, the freedom to travel is a fundamental natural right. This is not a novel view. In addition to Aquinas and Jefferson, it has been embraced by St. Augustine, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pope John Paul II and Justice Clarence Thomas. Our fundamental human rights are not conditioned or even conditionable on the laws or traditions of the place where our mothers were physically located when we were born. They are not attenuated because our mothers were not in the United States at the moment of our births. Stated differently, we all possess natural rights, no more and no less than any others. All humans have the full panoply of freedom of choice in areas of personal behavior protected from governmental interference by the natural law, no matter where they were born. — Judge Andrew Napolitano

In the 19th century, the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China’s Qing Dynasty, recognized “the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of … free migration and emigration … for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents”. Wikipedia

Concerns

But immigrants use our government programs

While I suspect few immigrants come here for the government benefits, but for work opportunities, it’s worth looking at this.

Temporary immigrants and undocumented immigrants are generally ineligible for benefits. Lawful permament residents are eligible after 5 years. One source indicates immigrants are less likely to receive public benefits and when they do, they use less than native-born people. [7]

In fact, it may be true that allowing more immigrant workers will help the social security program, precisely at a time when there are many baby boomers retiring and not enough young workers to fund it. [8]

It’s true that temporary or undocumented immigrants may use emergency room services and schools. However, isn’t public education considered a public good precisely because the education of youth should have a multiplying effect in society? Why would that not also apply to immigrants?

Bill Niskanen said, “build a wall around the welfare state, not around the country.” [6]

But immigrants steal our jobs

The idea that a job “belongs” to a country strikes me as odd. Why not let the employer and employee decide?

But immigrants use our government programs and steal our jobs

Marc Andreessen identified the irony of the above two claims, side by side:

“Immigrants steal our jobs!” “Immigrants refuse to work, and instead soak up social benefits!”

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) September 7, 2015

He also said if immigrants steal our jobs, so do our children.

@bm_ Yep. Also if positive net migration was bad, then babies would also be bad. Job-stealing little scamps.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) September 8, 2015

But immigrants depress our wages

As mentioned above, when labor costs can be reduced, the system is working. This means lower prices for you on a variety of products and services.

But immigrants are criminals

“Although a host of reasons exists to expect that immigrants are high-crime prone, the bulk of empirical studies conducted over the past century have found that immigrants are typically underrepresented in criminal statistics.”[9]

But if we open our doors wider, we’ll have a flood of immigrants. They will overwhelm our cities and infrastructure.

Counterintuitively, strict immigration controls may have the effect of keeping people here that would like to go home. If you’re a migrant farm worker, why go home in the off-season if it will be difficult to return?

Ronald Reagan…championed a version of open borders: “Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they’d pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. They can cross. Open the borders both ways.”[17]

But immigrants don’t assimilate

Suppose immigrants really don’t assimilate, that is, become “normal Americans”. That doesn’t really bother me. We live in a pluralistic society with a variety of cultures. Immigrants have every economic incentive to integrate with society at large, so I see no reason to force it. It will happen naturally.

In any case, one study showed, “Immigrants have opinions barely discernible from those of native-born Americans.” One hypothesis was, “Those who decide to come here mostly admire American institutions or have opinions on policy that are very similar to those of native-born Americans.”[10] That is, immigrants may have some pre-existing affinity toward the U.S. or they might not have come here.

But terrorism

I see the issues of immigration and terrorism as orthogonal to each other. That may not be entirely true, but consider this. A wall around the U.S. would not have kept out any of the 19 terrorists involved in the 9/11 attack, who came here on a variety of student, tourist, or business visas.[11] It’s also not clear to me that reducing legal immigration levels to zero would have prevented the attacks, nor is it clear that increasing legal immigration now will mean future attacks.

While I appreciate law enforcement efforts to reduce terrorist threats, terrorism is so statistically rare that I don’t see wisdom in connecting it closely with immigration policy. (You are more likely to be killed by disease, car crash, or lightning strike than by terrorism.[12])

OK, but immigrants must learn English

A non-English-speaking immigrant has every incentive to learn English to improve his/her own opportunities. One such incentive would be to access government services or apply for citizenship, but immigration alone would not require knowledge of English. I see no need for a language requirement.

OK, but only if immigrants come (or come back) legally. No amnesty.

I find this argument interesting. If the only thing you dislike about immigration is that illegal immigrants came here illegally, why don’t we simply wave our wand, declare them forgiven, and welcome them to full fellowship in the economy? That would solve their problem and ours, our problem being the dissonance about their being here illegally.

I suspect that any punitive effort to “get tough” on illegal immigrants — requiring them to pay a fine, requiring them to go home and “get in line,” asking them to pay back taxes — will not work. Illegals are already here illegally. They’re already in the shadows. Why not break down the barriers, make it easy for them to join the ranks of tax-paying workers, and welcome them to society?

Bad Policy Ideas

A Wall

There is no wall high enough, deep enough, or with enough laser-shooting drones patroling it, that can physically keep people out of the United States. When you hear a politican say, “Let’s build a wall,” it should trigger your spidey sense. Discussion about building a wall is a way for politicians to sound tough on immigration, possibly pandering to a crowd, and a great way to give a large contractor millions of tax-payer dollars. Dismiss this idea out of hand when you hear it.

VIDEO: John Stossel on immigration and building a wall

E-Verify

E-Verify is a federal program to track the right to work of each employee. The idea is that if you apply for a new job, the employer looks up your name in a national database and proves that you can legally work. Four states require all their employers to participate in E-Verify: Arizona, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

A recent audit of E-Verify concluded that the system has an error rate of 0.3 to 0.7%, meaning that if all 150M American workers were run through the system, 450,000 to a 1M workers would be incorrectly flagged as ineligible to work. If you were incorrectly flagged as illegal, imagine a DMV-like experience to resolve the issue and earn back the “right” to work.[13]

Breaking up families through deportation

In 2010, 87% of immigrants deported to Mexico were male, and 34% of those were married. 53% of the total (male and female) were the head of their household.[3] Breaking up families by deporting individuals strikes me as a horrible idea. It may also cause a previously self-sufficient home to become dependent on community or government programs.

Mass deportation

“Removing millions of undocumented workers from the economy would also remove millions of entrepreneurs, consumers and taxpayers. The economy would actually lose jobs. Second, native-born workers and immigrant workers tend to possess different skills that often complement one another.” [18]

Texas Comptroller Susan Combs stated, “Without the undocumented population, Texas’ work force would decrease by 6.3 percent” and Texas’ gross state product would decrease by 2.1 percent. Furthermore, certain segments of the U.S. economy, like agriculture, are entirely dependent upon illegal immigrants.
…
The U.S. Department of Agriculture states that, “about half of the hired workers employed in U.S. crop agriculture were unauthorized, with the overwhelming majority of these workers coming from Mexico.” The USDA has also warned that, “any potential immigration reform could have significant impacts on the U.S. fruit and vegetable industry.” From the perspective of National Milk Producers Federation in 2009, retail milk prices would increase by 61 percent if its immigrant labor force were eliminated.[15]

Restricted tourism

The average tourist from China spends $6,243 during his or her trip, and the average tourists from India and Brazil spend $6,131 and $4,940, respectively. But long waits for visas – more than 100 days for an interview in Brazil – have resulted in tourists traveling elsewhere. Between 2000 and 2010, these delays cost the United States $606 billion in travel and tourism output, 467,000 American jobs, and as many as 78 million visitors.[16]

Conclusion

I hope I’ve persuaded you to be more favorable to immigration. True, I haven’t proposed any specific policies. Instead, I’m proposing we start by looking more kindly at immigrants. As you evaluate candidates and political proposals, and discuss this issue with friends, look more favorably on immigration.

Look skeptically at politicians who label immigrants as a problem. To get “tough on immigration” should sound as odd to us as getting tough on any other good thing. Would it not sound off to hear, “tough on innovation,” “tough on economic growth,” “tough on culture,” or “tough on the poor”? “Tough on immigration” should sound equally odd.

I see increased immigration as the humane, liberty-minded, small-government, pro-growth approach.

There is room for discussion about policy details, but on the margins we should look more favorably at immigration.

Further Watching and Reading

• Let Them In? How Immigration Can Help the Economy – Learn Liberty
• Economic and Moral Factors in Favor of Open Immigration by Alex Tabarrok
• Let Anyone Take a Job Anywhere by Bryan Caplan
• 5 immigration myths debunked
• A comic about aliens
• Foreigners Are Our Friends

Sources

1. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/net-migration-from-mexico-falls-to-zero-and-perhaps-less/
2. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/05/future-immigration-will-change-the-face-of-america-by-2065/
3. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/ii-migration-between-the-u-s-and-mexico/
4. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/net-migration-from-mexico-falls-to-zero-and-perhaps-less/
5. http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/iv-u-s-immigration-enforcement/
6. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/05/todays-newly-arrived-immigrants-are-the-best-educated-ever/
7. http://www.cato.org/publications/working-paper/use-public-assistance-benefits-citizens-non-citizen-immigrants-united
8. http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=486
9. https://www.ncjrs.gov/criminal_justice2000/vol_1/02j.pdf
10. http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/the-best-argument-against-immigration/
11. http://www.factcheck.org/2013/05/911-hijackers-and-student-visas/
12. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-terrorism-statistics-every-american-needs-to-hear/5382818
13. http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/dont-reauthorize-e-verify
14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sriracha_sauce_(Huy_Fong_Foods)
15. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/203984-illegal-immigrants-benefit-the-us-economy
16. http://www.renewoureconomy.org/issues/tourism/
17. https://reason.com/blog/2015/08/20/the-gops-35-year-devolution-on-immigrati

The post Immigration appeared first on Richard K Miller.

A few months ago I realized I don’t like setting goals. However, I admire people who work this way. “I’m preparing for a triathlon next summer.” For some people, a triathlon next summer is the best way to run on the treadmill today.

If you like to set goals, you are outcome-focused. The outcomes are explicit; the actions are implicit.

The alternative (and my preference) is to focus directly on daily, weekly, and monthly actions and habits. “Read a good book every day.” “Visit the gym three times per week.”

If you like to focus on habits and routines, you are action-focused. The actions are explicit; the outcomes are implicit.

But without a goal, how do you know your gym time will make you ready for a triathlon? I don’t know. But that approach doesn’t work for me. Incidentally, I don’t signup for triathlons. (But it sounds like a fun mindset if you have it.)

Outcome focus is top-down. This is Stephen Covey’s approach in Seven Habits where he describes “beginning with the end in mind”.

Once you have that sense of mission, you have the essence of your own proactivity. You have the vision and the values which direct your life. You have the basic direction from which you set your long- and short-term goals. You have the power of a written constitution based on correct principles, against which every decision concerning the most effective use of your time, your talents, and your energies can be effectively measured. (pp. 108-109)

Action focus is bottom-up. This is David Allen’s approach in Getting Things Done:

I have discovered over the years the practical value of working on personal productivity improvement from the bottom up, starting with the most mundane, ground-floor level of current activity and commitments. Intellectually, the most appropriate way ought to be to work from the top down…. The trouble is, however, that most people are so embroiled in commitments on a day-to-day level that their ability to focus successfully on the larger horizon is seriously impaired. Consequently, a bottom-up approach is usually more effective. (pp. 19-20)

By the way, does the action focus cause more discouragement? What if I want to read a good book everyday, but I didn’t read yesterday? I prefer to think of goals, of any type, as prospective not retrospective. Goals drive your future behavior. They’re not a stick to beat yourself with.

Both approaches lead to what you are becoming. “I want to be an avid reader.” “I want to be a patient person.” No matter what approach you take, it seems important to focus on what you are becoming.

Thanks to Kevin Miller, James Miller, and Brian Henderson for conversations that led to this post.

The post Two Ways to Think about Self-Improvement appeared first on Richard K Miller.

Muscle

According to the book, called “Training for Mass” by Gordon La Velle, weight training is best done at high intensity. You might think all weight training is high-intensity. High-intensity training (HIT) is a particular flavor of weight training that advocates deliberate, intense action, in a short workout, to stimulate muscle growth. While some people who lift weights may spend hours at the gym, several times per week, with multiple sets per exercise, Training for Mass says this is overkill. It’s unnecessary at best, and may cause burnout or injury at worst. What’s needed is just one “work set” per muscle group, once per week. But it must be very intense.

“The higher intensity, the greater the growth stimulation. Within the realm of weight training, where muscular growth itself is the objective, the ability to generate a high level of intensity is the most critical factor under your control.” (p. 33)

Contrast the objective of muscular growth with the objective of appearing strong. If my goal is only to appear strong, there are certainly ways to fake it:

• Assisted repetitions — An assisted repetition is when your friend helps you lift the bar. “If someone is helping you lift the weights, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in physics to deduce that the weight you’re lifting is equal to the mass of the weight minus the force being applied by the helper….” (p. 111)
• Cheating — Cheating is to use bouncing, or momentum, or a change in your body position to lift more weight than normal. Not good. “[There] should be no bouncing, swinging, or using any other deliberate technique meant to increase the momentum of the lift. Any momentum present in the lift should come only from the simple linear movement of the weight.” (p. 107)

(Technical note: There is a place for assisted reps and cheating — on the very last repetition. Because it’s harder to raise weight than to lower weight, our muscles burn out on the raising part of a repetition (“concentric contraction”) before they burn out on the lowering part (“eccentric contraction”). When you can no longer lift on your own, assistance or cheating, if it can be done safely, can be used to raise the weight one more time, and then you should lower the weight entirely on your own.)

If your goal is muscular growth and you’ve been using assists or cheats (for more than the last rep), it’s better to reduce the weight, and the *appearance* of strength, and use a weight you can actually lift on your own.

“Why don’t these lifters just go lighter and lift the weight themselves, at least before reaching failure? This seems like it would make a whole lot more sense. Inflated egos might be the culprit here, since the lifters may want to appear to be lifting heavier weights.” (p. 111)

Character

Suppose we think of our character as a muscle. How could the above principles change our mindset about the development of character?

One of my favorite quotes of all time is from D. Todd Christofferson:

“[God] is endeavoring to make us independently strong — more able to act for ourselves than perhaps those of any prior generation.”

To me, “independently strong” is different from “appearing to be strong” or “strong when assisted.” I don’t know that we can expect to have character that’s chiseled and solid without actually lifting heavy weight. When the weight is heavy and it feels like there’s no Trainer assisting, maybe that’s on purpose.

A friend recently told me that 2013 has been the hardest year of his life. If we had been leaving the gym, and he had said this was the hardest *workout* of his life, I would have congratulated him. Maybe hard days and hard years are cause for congratulations. If you’re having the hardest year of your life, maybe you’re becoming the strongest you’ve ever been.

UPDATE on May 17, 2014: Elder David A. Bednar has an excellent talk on burdens: Bear Up Their Burdens with Ease

The post Independently Strong appeared first on Richard K Miller.

It was two years ago today that my brother David left home. We thought he had run away to start a new life or something. Then last fall, we learned he had passed away.

I feel melancholy thinking about my brother today. However, I also feel a sense of peace that I will see David again. I actually feel very assured about that.

That raises a question: Why should a rational person feel assured of something he can’t see or demonstrate, such as life after death?

The five senses are considered our inputs for rational thinking. However, I’ve learned I can know things outside of my five, traditional senses. There are other, finer senses that give us knowledge about spiritual things. We can cultivate these finer senses and trust them. They contribute to rational thinking. For me, faith and religion help cultivate these finer senses.

Traditional thought is that religion is at odds with science; it’s religion versus science. However, we can think about it differently, as religion plus science. Both are methods for learning truth.

In fact, religion may sometimes know things before science knows them, especially at a personal level. In that way, religion is sort of “indy” truth — truth before it goes mainstream. Eventually religion and science will be reconciled as separate views of one great whole.

In the meantime, religion and faith appear “supernatural” or “magic” to outsiders. Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The Subject of faith seems supernatural because we don’t understand it fully, but I think it’s more natural than we know.

As I come to understand spiritual things little by little, they seem less foreign, less “magical”. What is “supernatural” now will eventually just be “natural”, because our understanding will have changed. As Tim Berners-Lee said, “Everything you don’t understand is magic. When you understand things, there’s no more magic.”

On a day like today, I’m grateful for the possibility of knowing additional truths by faith.

I really enjoyed this 5-minute clip from Professor Clayton Christensen discussing science, religion, and the pursuit of truth (starting at 2:55):

There’s also a great interview with John Lewis, a scientist discussing religion and science as being like two lenses in a pair of glasses:

Update, Aug 2, 2014: Here’s a recent, related quote from Elder Russell M. Nelson: “Truth is truth! It is not divisible, and any part of it cannot be set aside…. Whether truth emerges from a scientific laboratory or through revelation, all truth emanates from God. All truth is part of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The post The Evidence of Things Not Seen appeared first on Richard K Miller.

Introduction

I’ve been thinking about this post for almost two years and the ideas in this post for even longer. I’m 33, so I’ve had over a decade of post-mission dating. The differences I see between my dating world and the one described by my parents’ or grandparents’ generation will likely be even more stark for my future children, so these are the observations I’ll share with them:

Be careful of distraction and other mental traps

Here are a few distractions and mental traps I’ve observed:

Facebook, etc.

It’s not really the time wasted on Facebook. It’s that you can travel down a “rabbit hole” of looking at pictures of attractive people you don’t know, looking at events that you’re not attending, and deluding yourself into thinking you’re “meeting” people. Of course, no one thinks they’re actually meeting people, but your mind can be tricked into thinking you’re making progress. And you’ll probably believe your own dating isn’t very exciting. I’ve had friends go down that rabbit hole and say “she looks like my type — why can’t I find someone like her?” and then come out of the rabbit hole to say “Where did the last 30 minutes go?”

In this trap, the strangers on Facebook we don’t know seem more attractive than the real people we do know. Of course, those strangers are also real people with strengths and weaknesses too, but we build them up in our minds.

In The Great Gatsby, Jay fell into this trap: “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams–not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion…. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

The aggregation effect

Suppose you go to a dessert party, talk to several attractive people, and have a great time. Which one do you want to date? None of them? You may have just been fooled by the “aggregation effect”.

The aggregation effect is that you mentally combine all the attractive qualities of a group of people and subconsciously believe there’s one person out there who possesses all those qualities. Amy dresses well, Beth is well-read and interesting, and Candace laughs at your jokes, which makes the party fun, but if you don’t want to take someone on a date, then your mind may have fooled you. Again, this is subconscious.

Elevated baseline

Related to the aggregation effect is an elevated “baseline”. Think of your baseline as your average day-to-day excitement or happiness. It might be loosely associated with dopamine levels in your brain. When you meet someone attractive, your excitement level rises above the baseline. It’s novel and exciting.

By constantly attending parties, dessert parties, group activities, huge dances, etc. with exciting/attractive/interesting people, I believe it’s possible to raise your “baseline” so that you’re no longer excited by one individual.

To paraphrase Jeffrey R. Holland, no one is as handsome or as beautiful or as brilliant in school or as witty in speech as all of us are combined.

With 1 person, you have to carry the conversation about 50% of the time, and you get to hear novel, interesting, or funny conversation the other 50% of the time. At a dessert party with 20 people, you might carry the conversation just 5% of the time, but you hear novel, interesting, or funny conversation 95% of the time. Parties are biased to provide you far more novelty and entertainment than any one person can provide alone.

How to kill a moth

Nature magazine published an article on how moths were exterminated in Australia using their own natural pheromones instead of manufactured insecticides. (Pheromones are a natural substance released by female moths to attract male moths.) One method was to build a snare into which the male moths would enter and not escape. The second method didn’t require a physical snare at all:

[It] is called the confusion method. An airplane scatters an environmentally insignificant number of very small plastic pellets imbedded with the scent of the pheromone, and only a few of these pellets per acre are enough to overpower the male’s ability to find the female. He is thus desensitized to the natural scent of the female by this compelling scent. The Australian article describes the confusion method as follows, “The male either becomes confused and does’t know which direction to turn for the female, or he becomes desensitized to the lower levels of pheromones naturally given out by the female and has no incentive to mate with her.” (Quoted by Dr. Donald Hilton, Lighted Candle Society Annual Banquet, May, 13, 2009)

The male moth was exterminated by raising the baseline pheromone level of its environment.

Frenzy

Adlai E. Stevenson was a candidate for U.S. president in 1952 and 1956. He said that from citizens we need “not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime”. That also sounds like a good formula for a relationship. To be open and vulnerable in marriage, you’d want your partner to be steady, not frenzied.

Incidentally, that’s opposite of what makes romance exciting. Drama is fun! Drama is exciting!

What makes slot machines addictive and dogs trainable is intermittent variable reward or IVR, the idea that it’s easier to manipulate behavior with random rewards than consistent rewards. “[A] dolphin rewarded with a fishy treat every six jumps will soon become lackadaisical about the five in-between ones; reward it at random, however, and it’ll jump vigorously, never knowing which jump will bring fish.”

If you date someone that’s up and down, hot and cold, it certainly may be exciting. The transition from cold to hot is exciting because of the contrast, but your mind may be tricked by this IVR effect. On the other hand, someone who’s consistent and steady may not be as provocative to your amygdala but they may provide more safety in a relationship. Our minds trick us into wanting excitement when we may prefer steadiness.

In pop culture, this is called being “no drama”. The recently passed Margaret Thatcher said, “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” Being no-drama seems about the same.

Lower the costs of dating, and not just financial costs

Much has been said about reducing the financial cost of dates, and I think it’s good advice. I also think it’s more than financial costs. Keeping dates inexpensive is also about reducing the transaction and risk costs.

The transaction cost of a date is all the “fuss” before and after a date.

The risk cost of a date is how emotionally painful or socially awkward it will be if this date doesn’t work out.

Things that increase the transaction costs and risk costs of dating:

• Making a big deal out of date, whether yours or a friend’s
• Jumping to conclusions about someone you like
• Jumping to conclusions about someone you don’t like
• Talking too much or too soon with your roommates/friends about your dates
• After your roommate’s date, asking “Is he/she THE ONE?”
• Spreading the news that two people went on a date

Dating as a conversation topic should be as mundane as the weather.

Privacy

I know a young lady who lived by herself and didn’t talk about her dates, even with girlfriends. She sometimes had dates on different nights with guys who knew each other but didn’t know they were all dating her. She effectively reduced the cost of asking her on a date because guys learned that they could ask her on a date without burning bridges with anyone else. Later she started dating one of them steadily and it became public.

As my friend Tristen says, stop talking about your first dates.

Optimism

Suppose I have a daughter who doesn’t get married until later in life. It may be difficult for her to stay optimistic and cheerful about dating. However, I’ll try to explain to her how important it is to be as carefree and cheerful as she was when she first started dating. I might say, “If a guy perceives that asking you on a date might get your hopes up and hurt you if it doesn’t work out, he may not be inclined to take that risk, for fear of hurting your feelings. Stay optimistic and reduce the risk for him to get to know you.”

The post Dating Advice For My Future Children appeared first on Richard K Miller.

I’m inspired to see demand-side efforts like Fight the New Drug (FTND), which teaches children at school assemblies why they may want to avoid pornography for natural, self-interested reasons. The idea is, to paraphrase Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, “Pornography isn’t sexy. You know what’s sexy? Sexual intimacy with your spouse, someone you love. That’s sexy.”

I think an approach like this can teach children that, yes, this stuff is alluring, but there are self-interested reasons you may want to avoid it and opt for a more authentic kind of intimacy. It’s an attitude of “Don’t just avoid it because I said so. Understand the reasons.”

Now that I live in Boulder, I’ve come to learn that the local ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky was behind The Truth campaign I previously wrote about: Can pornography be made unpopular? In that piece I quoted Mary Eberstadt of Stanford’s Hoover Institution who called pornography the “new tobacco”:

Yesterday, smoking was considered unremarkable in a moral sense, whereas pornography was widely considered disgusting and wrong — including even by people who consumed it. Today, as a general rule, just the reverse is true. Now it is pornography that is widely (though not universally) said to be value-free, whereas smoking is widely considered disgusting and wrong — including even by many smokers.

This makes me curious to study the causes of the drop in tobacco consumption in the last decades. How much was caused by supply-side efforts (e.g. lawsuits against Big Tobacco, smoking bans, etc.) and how much was caused by demand-side efforts (e.g. The Truth campaign)? My bet is on the latter.

I’m very skeptical of the ability of government or law (prohibition) to produce virtue in a society. I very much approve of efforts to teach and promote virtue by persuasion and reason.

The post You know what’s sexy? Virtue by persuasion appeared first on Richard K Miller.

Coldplay (my emphasis):

The birds they sang, break of day
Start again I hear them say
It’s so hard to just walk away

The birds they sang, all a choir
Start again, a little higher
It’s a spark in a sea of grey
…
Might have to go where they don’t know my name
Float all over the world just to see her again
But I won’t show or feel any pain
Even though all my armour might rust in the rain
A simple plot, but I know one day
Good things are coming our way

Jeffrey R. Holland:

Don’t you quit. You keep walking. You keep trying. There is help and happiness ahead–a lot of it…. You keep your chin up. It will be all right in the end. Trust God and believe in good things to come.

The post Coldplay + Jeffrey R. Holland appeared first on Richard K Miller.

Define attention: “your treasure”

You have a limited amount of time. You have even less attention because attention is the subset of your time during which you’re awake, alert, and have energy. Therefore, attention is more valuable than time. How you spend your attention constitutes what is important to you.

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (3 Ne 13:21)

• Where does your attention go?
• Which people get your attention?
• Which projects and causes and acts of service get your attention?

(The week after I presented this talk, Jason Fried wrote a great post on this concept: “Your Attention Please”.)

Technology can be a source of distraction

NYT Article: “Keep Your Thumbs Still When I’m Talking to You”

• Story of people at dinner at tech conference.
• Putting away your phone was like holding your breath.
• Once one person caved to distraction, all caved.
• “Mutually assured distraction”

WSJ Article: “When Twittering Gets in the Way of Real Life”

• “Sometimes, it’s like you’re here and you’re not here,” Joe said to me. “Your mind and soul are in cyberspace, and all we’re left with is the husk.”
• “Sometimes, I mindlessly find myself logging on to Facebook and staring at photos I have posted of my children when I just as easily could be staring at the real thing. I’m not proud to admit that.”
• “It’s incumbent upon me to find a way to consume less — and, more importantly, let it consume less of me.”

What we consume consumes us.

David A. Bednar: “Things As They Really Are”

“Please be careful of becoming so immersed and engrossed in pixels, texting, ear buds, twittering, online social networking, and potentially addictive uses of media and the Internet that you fail to recognize the importance of your physical body and miss the richness of person-to-person communication. Beware of digital displays and data in many forms of computer-mediated interaction that can displace the full range of physical capacity and experience.”

We’re here on earth to have a mortal experience with a body, with presence, with real people.

Distraction is the enemy of attention

• “I am persuaded that two of the greatest sins of our busy and hectic generation are distraction and preoccupation.” (David A. Bednar)
• “We need to frustrate…distraction by identifying what is critically important in our lives. We must give the cream of our effort to accomplish those things. Where there is limited time or resources, this pattern may require that some good activities be…set aside.” (Richard G. Scott)
• “Does the use of various technologies and media invite or impede the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost in your life?” (David A. Bednar)
• “Each of us should be careful that the current flood of information does not occupy our time so completely that we cannot focus on and hear and heed the still, small voice that is available to guide each of us with our own challenges today.” (Dallin H. Oaks)

When we allow some moments of our life to be quiet, peaceful moments, God can speak to our hearts through the Holy Spirit. My prayers are best when I take more time to listen in between what I say. I sometimes feel prompted to pray for something I hadn’t previously considered. We might pray for A, B, C. God may actually want to give us B, C, D, E, F, G, H. If we don’t listen, we may miss those extra things He wants to give.

Dallin H. Oaks: Focus and Priorities

We have thousands of times more available information than Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. Yet which of us would think ourselves a thousand times more educated or more serviceable to our fellowmen than they? The sublime quality of what these two men gave to us–including the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address–was not attributable to their great resources of information, for their libraries were comparatively small by our standards. Theirs was the wise and inspired use of a limited amount of information.

The truck story, ibid.:

Two men formed a partnership. They built a small shed beside a busy road. They obtained a truck and drove it to a farmer’s field, where they purchased a truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. They drove the loaded truck to their shed by the road, where they sold their melons for a dollar a melon. They drove back to the farmer’s field and bought another truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. Transporting them to the roadside, they again sold them for a dollar a melon. As they drove back toward the farmer’s field to get another load, one partner said to the other, “We’re not making much money on this business, are we?” “No, we’re not,” his partner replied. “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”

We don’t need a bigger truckload of information, either. Like the two partners in my story, our biggest need is a clearer focus on how we should value and use what we already have.

Because of modern technology, the contents of huge libraries and other data resources are at the fingertips of many of us. Some choose to spend countless hours in unfocused surfing the Internet, watching trivial television, or scanning other avalanches of information. But to what purpose? Those who engage in such activities are like the two partners in my story, hurrying to and fro, hauling more and more but failing to grasp the essential truth that we cannot make a profit from our efforts until we understand the true value of what is already within our grasp.

The post Attention and Distraction appeared first on Richard K Miller.

1. Install mod_perl, and the DBI, MySQL, and Digest (SHA1) Perl modules.

   $ apt-get install libapache-dbi-perl libapache2-mod-perl2 libdbd-mysql-perl libdigest-sha1-perl
   

2. Copy Redmine.pm to the appropriate Perl location.

   $ cd /path/to/redmine
   $ mkdir -p /usr/lib/perl5/Apache/Authn
   $ cp extra/svn/Redmine.pm /usr/lib/perl5/Apache/Authn/
   

3. Perhaps I’m not using Redmine’s projects/members/permissions correctly, but I had to patch Redmine.pm to get it to work for me. I greatly simplified the SQL statement used to authenticate a user. There’s no sense of permissions; it’s simply a yes/no for authenticated users.

   --- Redmine.pm	2011-11-12 17:33:10.000000000 -0700
   +++ Redmine.richardkmiller.pm	2011-11-12 17:37:26.000000000 -0700
   @@ -148,16 +148,11 @@
      my ($self, $parms, $arg) = @_;
      $self->{RedmineDSN} = $arg;
      my $query = "SELECT 
   -                 hashed_password, salt, auth_source_id, permissions
   -              FROM members, projects, users, roles, member_roles
   +                 hashed_password, salt
   +              FROM users
                  WHERE 
   -                projects.id=members.project_id
   -                AND member_roles.member_id=members.id
   -                AND users.id=members.user_id 
   -                AND roles.id=member_roles.role_id
   -                AND users.status=1 
   -                AND login=? 
   -                AND identifier=? ";
   +                    users.status=1 
   +                AND login=?";
      $self->{RedmineQuery} = trim($query);
    }
    
   @@ -336,11 +331,12 @@
      }
      my $query = $cfg->{RedmineQuery};
      my $sth = $dbh->prepare($query);
   -  $sth->execute($redmine_user, $project_id);
   +  $sth->execute($redmine_user);
    
      my $ret;
   -  while (my ($hashed_password, $salt, $auth_source_id, $permissions) = $sth->fetchrow_array) {
   -
   +  while (my ($hashed_password, $salt) = $sth->fetchrow_array) {
   +      my $permissions = ":commit_access";
   +      my $auth_source_id = 0;
          unless ($auth_source_id) {
    	  			my $method = $r->method;
              my $salted_password = Digest::SHA1::sha1_hex($salt.$pass_digest);
   

4. Configure and restart Apache.

   <virtualhost *:80>
       ServerName example.com
       DocumentRoot "/var/www/sites/example.com/public"
       RailsEnv production
   
       PerlLoadModule Apache::Authn::Redmine
   
       <directory "/var/www/sites/example.com/public">
           AuthType basic
           AuthName "Private Area"
           Require valid-user
           PerlAccessHandler Apache::Authn::Redmine::access_handler
           PerlAuthenHandler Apache::Authn::Redmine::authen_handler
           RedmineDSN "DBI:mysql:database=my_database;host=localhost"
           RedmineDbUser my_db_user
           RedmineDbPass my_db_password
       </directory>
   </virtualhost>
   

By the way, I’m running Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric), Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.1, and Redmine 1.2.2.

The post How to Password Protect Redmine with Apache, mod_perl, and Redmine.pm appeared first on Richard K Miller.

Corporatism is the alliance of government and business. It happens on the left (think Solyndra), and on the right (think military-industrial complex), in the Federal government (think bipartisan bailout of GM) and in local government (think Utah naming April 5, 2010 “Cafe Rio day”.)

Corporatism is pro-business. Specific businesses get government subsidies, above-market-rate contracts, or special recognition.

Capitalism is pro-market. The consumer decides whether to favor GM or Ford; Cafe Rio, Costa Vida, Bajio, or Chipotle.

I loved Phil Windley’s post today on how Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, though they seem like polar opposites, actually share a disdain of corporatism and ought to work together to fight it.

Image source: James Sinclair

The post Capitalism is pro-markets; corporatism is pro-business appeared first on Richard K Miller.

#!/bin/bash
disable_proxy()
{
        networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Wi-Fi off
        networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Ethernet off
        echo "SOCKS proxy disabled."
}
trap disable_proxy INT

networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy Wi-Fi 127.0.0.1 9999
networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy Ethernet 127.0.0.1 9999
networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Wi-Fi on
networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Ethernet on
echo "SOCKS proxy enabled."
echo "Tunneling..."
ssh -ND 9999 MYHOST.macminicolo.net

Instructions:

1. Save this to a file. I saved it to “/Users/richard/bin/ssh_tunnel”.
2. Make it executable and run it.

   $ chmod a+x /Users/richard/bin/ssh_tunnel
   $ /Users/richard/bin/ssh_tunnel
   

3. It creates an SSH tunnel to my dedicated server at macminicolo.net and routes Internet traffic through that server.
4. Hit Control-C to quit. The proxy is disabled. No need to fiddle with Network Preferences manually.

UPDATE March 18, 2011: I haven’t tried it, but Sidestep appears to be a free Mac OS X app that will enable SSH tunneling automatically when you connect to an insecure network.

The post Script to enable/disable SOCKS proxy on Mac OS X appeared first on Richard K Miller.

Reasons to enable your DMZ:

• Access your files while away from home.
• Serve web pages from your computer.
• Make BitTorrent transfers faster. BitTorrent transfers are usually faster when your computer is directly exposed to the Internet.

For my work at FamilyLink.com, I develop directly on my local machine. While working on our Facebook application, I need to allow Facebook servers to directly access my machine. (When you use a Facebook app, you’re accessing Facebook’s servers and Facebook servers are, in turn, accessing the developer’s server via a callback URL. While working on our Facebook app, Facebook directly accesses my local machine.) This requires me to open my machine to the DMZ.

Reasons not to enable your DMZ:

• Your computer is more likely to be hacked
• Your private data is more likely to be accessed

If you enable your DMZ, know which services are enabled on your machine and which files and data are being shared. There may be files you’re comfortable sharing on your local network that you wouldn’t want to share with the world. Only enable the DMZ as long as necessary.

Enabling the DMZ can be a pain — logging into your router and navigating to the correct setting — so I wrote the following Ruby scripts to make it easy. The first worked with the Linksys router I had. (I believe it was a WRT54G.) To use, fill in your router’s IP address and password, and your computer’s hardware address, then type “linksys_dmz.rb on” or “linksys_dmz.rb off” at the command-line. The script looks up your computer’s hardware address in the table of local IP addresses so the IP address can safely change from time to time.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# linksys_dmz.rb

router = '10.1.1.1'
user = 'admin'
pass = 'your_password'
hardware_address = '00:23:6C:00:00:00'

leases = `curl -su #{user}:#{pass} http://#{router}/DHCPTable.asp`
leases.scan(%r{'([^']+)', hardware_address}) do |m|
  ip_address = m[0].strip.to_s
  last_digit = ip_address.split('.').last
  if $*[0] == 'open' || $*[0] == 'on'
    post_values = "submit_button=DMZ&change_action=&action=Apply&dmz_enable=1&dmz_ipaddr=#{last_digit}"
    print "Opening DMZ to #{ip_address}\n\n"
  else
    post_values = "submit_button=DMZ&change_action=&action=Apply&dmz_enable=0"
    print "Closing DMZ\n\n"
  end
  `curl -su #{user}:#{pass} -e http://#{router}/DMZ.asp -d '#{post_values}' http://#{router}/apply.cgi`
end

Last year I switched to Verizon FIOS, which came with its own wireless router, so I had to write a new script. Again, fill in the password, then type “verizon_dmz.rb on” or “verizon_dmz.rb off” in Terminal. (This script assumes a 10.1.1.* network. Change it to 192.168.1.* if that’s what you have.)

As a side note, the Verizon router was a bit of beast to automate. It uses a hashed signature to try to enforce JavaScript-enabled browsers. Writing this script required using TamperData, Charles Proxy, and a lot of trial and error to discover which POST data were necessary.

I use this script to open the DMZ before working on our Facebook app, then I close it when I’m done for the day. Eventually, it’d be nice to find a way to enable the DMZ remotely — maybe via email or something.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# verizon_dmz.rb

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'
require 'digest/md5'

user = 'admin'
pass = 'your_password'

localhost = `ifconfig`.scan(/inet (\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+).*broadcast 10.1.1.255/).join
router    = localhost.gsub(/\d+$/,'1')

begin
    agent = Mechanize.new
    page = agent.get("http://#{router}:81")
rescue Exception
    abort "Unable to connect to Verizon Router! Check the IP address."
end

form = page.forms[0]
auth_key = form.fields.find {|f| f.name == 'auth_key'}.value
form.fields.find {|f| f.name == 'user_name'}.value = user
form.fields.find {|f| f.name == 'md5_pass'}.value = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(pass + auth_key)
form.fields.find {|f| f.name == 'mimic_button_field'}.value = 'submit_button_login_submit%3A+..'
form.method = "POST"
form.submit

post = {
    'dmz_host_cb_watermark' => '1',
    'dmz_host_ip0' => localhost.split('.')[0],
    'dmz_host_ip1' => localhost.split('.')[1],
    'dmz_host_ip2' => localhost.split('.')[2],
    'dmz_host_ip3' => localhost.split('.')[3],
    'active_page'  => '9013',
    'mimic_button_field' => 'submit_button_login_submit%3A+..',
}

if $*[0] == 'open' || $*[0] == 'on'
   post['dmz_host_cb'] = '1'
   puts "Opening DMZ to #{localhost}"
else
    puts "Closing DMZ"
end

agent.post('/index.cgi', post)

The post Script to enable/disable DMZ on Linksys and Verizon routers appeared first on Richard K Miller.

The post FamilyLink.com + Kynetx + WordPress appeared first on Richard K Miller.

For example,

• What if you could see your FamilyLink.com relatives directly in Facebook?
• If you knew which LinkedIn users were your relatives, would you be more likely to do business?
• If you knew which Twitter users were your relatives, would you be more likely to follow them?
• If you discovered that a comment on a political news story with which you strongly disagreed was from a relative, would you be more careful how you responded?

Here’s a demo video:

The post FamilyLink.com + Kynetx: How websites could be better with your family appeared first on Richard K Miller.

I developed a calendar in PHP and wrote a few scripts to scrape byucougars.com and retrieve the sports schedules. I also developed a WML app so Brian and I could add events to the calendar from our pre-iPhone mobile phones. I recall being at a party in south Provo, in a former dental office, and using my Nextel phone to add the party to Provo411. If you go back far enough, you can see events on the calendar. My brother Alan did the artwork.

I always wanted Provo411.com to have a course schedule alert system. Perhaps students would pay $3 to receive an email or SMS alert when hard-to-get classes had an opening. It shouldn’t have been hard technically, but the publicly available course catalog isn’t updated in real-time. I could have scraped the authenticated course catalog on Route Y, but BYU might have objected and it’d be a fragile business model.

My brother Michael recently came home from his mission and started school at CSN. The business classes he wanted were full, so I put the old “course schedule alert” idea to the test with some new tools — Ruby and Mac OS X’s speech. Here’s what I came up with:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# a list of course call numbers to check
call_numbers = %w{ 46405 46407 46409 46411 46415 46413 53252 53254 53256 53258 53260 53262 53268 53270 53272 53274 46423 46435 53276 46443 }

# auth_token obtained via Firefox+TamperData while my brother logged into CSN
auth_token = "123456789012345"

say "Checking"

call_numbers.uniq.sort.each do |call_number|
    c = `curl -si -d CONVTOKEN=#{auth_token} -d AUDITT=N -d CALLT=#{call_number} -d CONTINUE=Continue "https://bighorn.nevada.edu/sis_csn/XSMBWEBM/SIVRE04.STR"`
    print "Call number #{call_number}: "
    if (c =~ /<p class="p5">([^< &#93;+)<br\/>/m)
        if $1.strip.empty?
            puts "May have openings\n"
            3.times {say "Michael, class number #{call_number} may be open!"}
        else
            puts "#{$1.strip}\n"
        end
    else
        puts "could not find message"
        say "Help. I cannot access the C S N website."
        return
    end
    sleep 5
end

# Ouput an audible message via Mac OS X's speech function
def say(message)
    `say "#{message}"`
end

We set this to run every 15 minutes on the living room iMac, and we turned up the volume. Every 15 minutes we could hear “Checking” from the computer. A few hours later we heard the script announce that a class had opened up. Michael, I’m still waiting for my $3.

The post Reminiscing about Provo411.com and Scraping the Course Catalog appeared first on Richard K Miller.

This is about changing the messaging. For example, if smoking is a way to rebel against authority, then parents and medical experts saying Don’t smoke! only reinforces the rebellion. But if smoking is succumbing to executives at Big Tobacco, then smoking isn’t a form of rebellion at all, it’s a form of conformity. What rebellious kid wants to conform to Big Tobacco executives? That’s the message of The Truth campaign.

Imagine a similar change of messaging around pornography: Pornography isn’t glamorous, it isn’t sexy. Love and romance without pornography is glamorous and sexy. By making the negative externalities of pornography more visible, it would become less appealing. While organizations like CP80 and Lighted Candle Society fight the supply-side of pornography, FTND fights the demand-side.

I’m very excited about this approach.

Mary Eberstadt at Stanford’s Hoover Institution calls pornography the “new tobacco” and said:

Yesterday, smoking was considered unremarkable in a moral sense, whereas pornography was widely considered disgusting and wrong — including even by people who consumed it. Today, as a general rule, just the reverse is true. Now it is pornography that is widely (though not universally) said to be value-free, whereas smoking is widely considered disgusting and wrong — including even by many smokers.

Can we change minds again?

Columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez said:

…I’ve been flashing back to something Traci Lords once said: “I have to thank Ed Meese for saving my life.” At 18, her career as a porn star ended in a federal raid. How many Tracis are on a computer near you today? And who else is porn harming? It’s a question that our society — which in its rhetoric and culture says it cares about women and children and lives and love — needs to grapple with. If Eberstadt’s comparison is right, the time [is] coming. The shrugs will cease. Yet I hope the turnaround comes, not because the government has made porn highly inconvenient, but because we have decided we want something better. (Smoking Is Out, Porn Is In.)

Seth Godin said you can’t fight an ideavirus (“pornography is okay”) by “challenging the medium in which it spreads.” Instead, you must counter “one ideavirus with another one.”

You don’t counter racism by making the act of uttering racist statements against the law. You do it by spreading an idea (racism is hateful, wrong and stupid) that keeps the racist from expressing his ideas because all his friends will shun him if he does. (“Thinking about this war”.)

Here is some of the FTND messaging, paraphrased:

1. Educate people about the negative effects of pornography and let them choose their pornography involvement for themselves. We do not contest the legality to produce pornographic material.

2. Just because it’s legal to smoke cigarettes, doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Similarly, porn can have devastating effects on you and your loved ones.

3. Although pornography consumption can lead to powerful addictive behaviors, we don’t contest people’s right to view it.

4. People need to be educated about the negative effects of pornography on individuals, families and businesses.

5. We fight against the demand for pornography. Through education, we believe people will no longer want to use porn and those with addictive behavior will seek help from professionals.

6. People addicted to porn often feel they have no options. We’re letting people know that they have a choice.

7. We want to infuse more sexiness into the world. Two committed people together — that is sexy. A lonely, addicted person sitting in front of a computer is not sexy.

Please make a $10 donation to FTND to become a “fighter”. Ten dollars from 1,000 people is better than $10,000 from 1 person. The money will be used to develop messaging campaigns to fight the demand for pornography. This will be a grass-roots movement to make pornography unpopular.

I’ve put in my $10 and I’m hoping many, many more friends will as well.

The post Can pornography be made unpopular? appeared first on Richard K Miller.

1. Download the “Silence” ringtone here: silence.m4r
2. Copy this file into the Ringtones section of your iTunes. (Click to enlarge.)
   
   
3. Sync your iPhone with iTunes to load the ringtone.
4. On your iPhone, change your ringtone to “Silence” (under Settings -> Sounds -> Ringtone). You’ll no longer hear your phone calls.
   
   
5. For each person whose calls you still want to hear, change his or her Custom Ringtone to something audible: Click the name in your contact list, choose Ringtone, then choose something besides Default
   
   

Now you can screen calls in your sleep. Because Sunday afternoons are for napping.

The post iPhone tip: Use a Silent Ringtone to Screen Calls in Your Sleep appeared first on Richard K Miller.

1. Briefly press the top and front buttons at the same time.
2. The screen will flash white and you’ll hear a “snapshot” sound.
3. A picture of your screen is now in your iPhone “Photos”.

I’ve found it extremely helpful to make screenshots, and I do it all the time. Here are a few reasons:

Remember an Interesting Part of a Podcast

If I’m driving and hear something I like in a podcast, I make a quick screenshot of the playback screen. When I get back to my computer, I can return to that spot in the podcast and take notes.

Save a Point on a Map

Sometimes I want to “bookmark” a location on the map before looking up something else. A screenshot is a fast way to do this.

Save a Website Address Without Interrupting Your Reading

Sometimes when I’m reading in Google Reader, I want to save the location of an article to read later. (I don’t want to leave Google Reader immediately because it has to entirely reload when I return.)

If you hold your finger on a link for a few seconds, a menu will popup with the address of the link. Sometimes I simply save a screenshot of the link, then hit Cancel and go back to my reading. Later I read the items I saved in my screenshots.

Screenshots can help you practice “ubiquitous capture” — capturing all notes, thoughts, and ideas, as they come to you, so you don’t have to keep them in your head.

The post 3 Uses for iPhone Screenshots appeared first on Richard K Miller.

…there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

A new Internet might have more security, less anonymity.

As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

Stanford’s Clean Slate Project intends to “reinvent the Internet” to “overcome fundamental architectural limitations,” including security.

I’ve previously asked, Is the Internet broken? One place it might be broken is in the ability for parents to protect their children, and interested people to protect themselves, from pornography.

If the university most associated with the invention of our current Internet is willing to reexamine its underpinnings and reinvent it, more incremental changes like CP80 or Larry Lessig’s H2M seem worthy of consideration.

Of course, anonymity can be a virtue. Anonymity allows seekers to learn about a new religion in a low-pressure way or protestors in Iran to orchestrate protests.

The tech-savvy, often libertarian-leaning people you find at Slashdot.org tend to dismiss proposals like CP80, considering them antithetical to the nature of the Internet. I like that one Slashdot user offered a thoughtful counterproposal: “The people who want a ‘cleaned kid friendly Internet’ can establish an alternate port where such a thing would be delivered….” (read more)

I think Bill Cosby’s adage applies: “I brought you in this world, and I can take you out.” We built the Internet. If it’s not suiting us well, we can change it. I think the Internet has already been a great tool for good, and will continue to be, but I don’t mind considering proposals that might improve it.

The post Do We Need a New Internet? appeared first on Richard K Miller.

Wealth is not money. Money is just a convenient way of trading one form of wealth for another. Wealth is the underlying stuff—the goods and services we buy….

Where does wealth come from? People make it. This was easier to grasp when most people lived on farms, and made many of the things they wanted with their own hands. Then you could see in the house, the herds, and the granary the wealth that each family created. It was obvious then too that the wealth of the world was not a fixed quantity that had to be shared out, like slices of a pie. If you wanted more wealth, you could make it.

This is just as true today, though few of us create wealth directly for ourselves…. Mostly we create wealth for other people in exchange for money, which we then trade for the forms of wealth we want.

If you suppress variations in income, whether by stealing private fortunes, as feudal rulers used to do, or by taxing them away, as some modern governments have done, the result always seems to be the same. Society as a whole ends up poorer.

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I’m not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I’m not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he’ll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I’m saying that he’ll make you a tractor to replace your horse. (Emphasis added.)

Similar ideas can be found in a monologue from Francisco d’Anconia, the wealthy mine owner in Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged.

“Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward.

“…you will see the rise of men of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger.

“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created….” (Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged. pp. 411-14. Emphasis added.)

The post What Motivates Us to Work and Create appeared first on Richard K Miller.

This made Steven Pinker’s talk on language and thought very interesting to me. Why do we speak like this?

Language as a social interaction has to satisfy two conditions: You have to convey the actual content. You want to express the bribe, the command, the promise, the solicitation, and so on. But you also have to negotiate and maintain the kind of relationship you have with the other person. The solution, I think, is that we use language at two levels: The literal form signals the safest relationship for the listener, whereas the implicated content–the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform–allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context….

The simplest example of this is in the polite request. If you express your request as a conditional–“if you could open the window, that would be great”–even though the content is an imperative, the fact that you’re not using the imperative voice means that you’re not acting as if you’re in a relationship of dominance where you could presuppose the compliance of the other person. (Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 14:06-15:10.)

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Truman Madsen has a similar thought on the language husbands and wives use with each other:

Now, a woman who is a woman delights in being thought a woman. She is “romance conscious,” and in the deeper sense love-anxious most of the time. The language she understands includes a lot of little (and in the opinion of many husbands, disgustingly trivial) things…the tender touch, the kiss good-by, the kiss hello. A morning of robust yard work is not as eloquent to her as the quiet smoothing of little hurdles, the gallantry of an open door, helping her with a chair or a coat and these mean a hundred times more to her feelings of response than the salary you bring home. Having an eye for the new dress or even the old one, saying the word, however inept or inadequate, about this salad or that gravy, remembering and repeating utterly trivial sentiments and events which no grownup man can remember unless he wants to, no woman can forget even if she tries.
…
Universally, woman is made rich by the man who knows that these touches mean everything. This language speaks to her being. She will respond to it and give.

Now, turn to the man. A man who is a man delights in being thought a man. He is “authority conscious.” The language he understands includes a lot of little things, the language of her listening even to his nonsense, the language of biting her tongue instead of lashing with it when his decisions are finally made, the uninterrupted phone call, the restraining of curiosity, the controlling of the disposition to inquisition. (A wife who insists on knowing nothing will eventually have everything, but the wife who insists on knowing everything will eventually have nothing.) The man understands the language of flexibility in a wife who respects his final decisions (even the decision of not to decide), or even so trivial a matter as when we leave the party. The man comprehends the exhilaration of a woman who, when his delays bring him home late, offers a brighter welcome instead of a dismal doghouse.

Universally, a man is responsive to these little matters which mean everything to him. He will rise to them and give in kind.

It is easy to say that we should prize other languages. If a man brings home the bacon and doesn’t complain at the wife’s food, and shows sympathy for her lot, then why all this emphasis on the romantic sizzle? “If I don’t like your cooking, I’ll say so; otherwise you are doing fine,” said one. On the other hand, if the wife works day and night to tend his kids, to keep his home, and put up with him, then why all the childish emphasis on the authority sizzle? Does a woman have to pander to this desire of a man to have the last word?

Well, it may be strange, as some cynics say (a weird kind of insecurity which mature people ignore), it may even seem ridiculous. But the cost is so little and the results so vast that it is tragic to work against the grain. You can’t speak without speaking a language. And this language is magic. Why not master it and speak it? (Truman Madsen, Four Essays on Love, pp. 56-58.)

The post The Language That’s Magic appeared first on Richard K Miller.