A Socket for My Brain

Michael Flynn Tears "Science Vs. Christianity" Arguments To Shreds

2009-10-21T15:16:00.001+08:00

Michael Flynn, author of the amazing sci-fi novel Eifelheim, recently came upon an essay by a guy named Jim Walker, spouting the usual arguments as to why Christianity is anti-Science (you know the type: the usual mindless shouting of "Galileo!", "burning at stake!", "Dark Ages!", etc.). Flynn proceeded to systematically refute the arguments in such a way as to leave the poor Mr. Walker looking like a poorly-educated village atheist (or like a typical Bright; couldn't really tell the difference).

Here are my favorite parts of Flynn's rebuttal:

7. Walker writes: "When Christianity took over Europe, scientific and engineering advancement virtually stopped."

In no particular order: watermills, windmills, camshafts, toothed wheels, transmission shafts, mechanical clocks, pendant clocks, eye glasses, four-wheeled wagons, wheeled moldboard plows with shares and coulters, three-field crop rotation, blast furnaces, laws of magnetism, steam blowers, treadles, stirrups, armored cavalry, the elliptical arch, the fraction and arithmetic of fractions, the plus sign, preservation of antiquity, “Gresham’s” law, the mean speed theorem, “Newton’s” first law, distilled liquor, use of letters to indicate quantities in al jabr, discovery of the Canary Islands, the Vivaldi expedition, cranks, overhead springs, latitudo et longitudo, coiled springs, laws of war and non-combatants, modal logic, capital letters and punctuation marks, hydraulic hammers, definition of uniform motion, of uniformly accelerated motion, of instantaneous motion, explanation of the rainbow, counterpoint and harmony, screw-jacks, screw-presses, horse collars, gunpowder and pots de fer, that there may be a vacuum, that there may be other Worlds, that the earth may turn in a diurnal motion, that to overthrow a tyrant is the right of the multitude, the two-masted cog, infinitesimals, open and closed sets, verge-and-foliot escapements, magnetic compasses, portolan charts, the true keel, natural law, human rights, international law, universities, corporations, freedom of inquiry, separation of church and state, “Smith’s” law of marketplaces, fossilization, geological erosion and uplift, anaerobic salting of fatty fish (“pickled herring”), double entry bookkeeping, and... the printing press. (Yeah, some of the innovations are political and economic.) .
+ + +

10 Walker writes, "Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance when people began to question religious authority) did the physician Andreas Vesalius translate Galen's texts to Latin."

This is either an argument from ignorance or a flat-out lie. Gerard of Cremona not only translated Galen's Medical Art at Toledo in the 12th century, but he also translated ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, al-Razi’s Book of Divisions, and twenty-four other texts on medicine.
What Vesalius gave us (which was a genuine advance) was the Renaissance invention of perspective in art applied to anatomical drawings. De Luzzi, de Chauliac, and others had "done anatomies" before -- which is why they had begun to doubt Galen -- but Vesalius's drawings are masterful, especially when put up against the anatomical drawings in Chinese and muslin texts.

+ + +
12. Walker writes, "As for the scientists, Christians burned the priest Giordano Bruno to death for the charge of holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith."

Execution for treason are not unknown. But what has the execution of Bruno for heresy got to do with scientists? Bruno was no scientist, but a mystic of the Pythagorean sort. The translator of his Ash Wednesday Supper commented wryly that, if they had ever bothered to read it, the Copernicans would have burned Bruno. Time and again he shows that he did not understand astronomy, but rather tried to fit it into his wacky worldview. Even so, keep in mind that for seven years the inquisitors and his brother Dominicans argued and debated with him to get him to change his mind. He was the L.Ron Hubbard of his day. Of course, nowadays, we don't like to execute people even if they were spying for Stalin; but treason, both secular and religious were once capital crimes.

+ + +
14. Walker wrote: "Recently, scholars found an ancient text written by Archimedes that revealed that the Greeks knew about the concept of infinity and calculus long before the advent of Christianity. Ironically a monk had ... washed out the Archimedes text and wrote supernatural nonsense in its place. ... Without religion hiding and destroying ancient scientific texts, imagine how different the world would look today if the Church had not suppressed, just calculus alone, hundreds of centuries before Isaac Newton published the idea in 1693."

Archimedes did not invent calculus. The method revealed in the lost text was a refinement of the method of exhaustion that he had already written about. You cannot invent calculus using nothing but geometry. You need algebra, and that had not been invented yet. (The two combined produce "analytical" geometry, the threshold of the calculus.) You also need the theory of limits and that was not introduced until the Calculators of Merton in the 14th century began to reason on "first and last moments" and the nature of "beginning to be." cf. William of Heytesbury.

Secondly, the use of palimpsests was routine. The scratch paper was routinely scraped off (not "washed") using a razor. (A quo, Ockham's razor; a quo "eraser.") Paper was cheap (once its production was automated with waterwheels and camshafts) but perishable. So was papyrus in the East. Parchment was longer-lasting, but not so cheap that it wasn't re-used on every occasion. Those same monks (a monastery in the Sinai) who overwrote the Archimedes palimpsest were the ones who had copied the Archimedes in the first place. It was not an original from the Hellenistic era. At the time that parchment was reused, as we know from references, the complete works of Archimedes were in circulation and so there was no big deal in re-using a scratch copy. Most of the monastic palimpsests we have are overwritings of Christian works. The oldest copy of the Bible we have was erased and overwritten with the sermons of Ephraem the Syrian. Hand-made manuscripts are necessarily rare; and time and chance happened to knock off this one particular work of Achimedes. Walker cannot claim that the Orthodox monks living under muslim rule were trying to "suppress calculus" when at the same time they and others were busily copying all the other works of Archimedes (and everyone else!) .

+ + +
16. Walker wrote: "Interestingly, every one of the the scientists that Christians love to cite, lived during the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment when the Church began to lose its power and the populace began to wake up from its religious stupor. None of them lived during the Dark Ages [sic]."

Jean Buridan de Bethune. Nicole d'Oresme. Albrecht of Saxony, WIlliam of Heytesbury, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Bradwardine, Theodoric of Fribourg, Roger Bacon, Thierry of Chartres, Gerbert of Aurillac, William of Conches, Nicholas Cusa, John Philoponus, etc. etc. (William of Ockham showed little interest in natural philosophy.).

+ + +
22. Walker wrote: "Christian political leaders today, continue to place barriers against science. .... Many deny global warming, birth control, stem cell research and other scientific advances that could save millions of people, if not the entire human race."

Yes, and a hundred years ago they "denied" eugenics, which was also urgently needed to "save the human race." Notice that Walker has segued from science to policy and politics. Birth control is not a "scientific truth," but a public policy by which poor people should not have children. But you cannot deduce a public law from a scientific theory.

The Judas Iscariot Plan for Wealth Redistribution

2009-10-20T11:44:00.008+08:00

Recently, comedienne Sarah Silverman poster a video where she rants about the pope, claiming that he ought to sell the Vatican. (Uh, yeah... right...) Of course, that has been said many times before. Mark Shea hilariously calls it the Judas Iscariot Plan for Wealth Redistribution (pick up your dusty ol' Bible and go to John 12:3-8 to find out why). No doubt Silverman thinks she's being *different* and *rebellious* when she made the video. Of course, she's none of those; she's just plain wrong.

A few Catholic blogs have already pointed out John Allen's excellent rebuttal to the Judas Iscariot Plan, which I will just quote here:

In the public’s imagination, the Vatican is awash in priceless art, hidden Nazi gold, plundered treasures from around the world, and vast assets tucked away from prying eyes in the Vatican Bank. Reality is far more prosaic. To put it bluntly, the Vatican is not rich. It has an annual operating budget of $260 million, which would not place it on any Top 500 list of major social institutions. To draw a comparison in the non-profit sector, Harvard University has an annual operating budget of a little over $1.3 billion, which means it could run the equivalent of five Vaticans every year and still have pocket change left over. The Holy See’s budget would qualify it as a mid-sized American Catholic college. It’s bigger than Loyola-Marymount in Los Angeles (annual budget of $150 million) or Saint Louis University ($174 million), but substantially less than the University of Notre Dame ($500 million).

The total patrimony of the Holy See, meaning its property holdings (including some 30 buildings and 1,700 apartments in Rome), its investments, its stock portfolios and capital funds, and whatever it has storied up in a piggy bank for a rainy day, comes to roughly $770 million. This is substantial, but once again one has to apply a sense of scale. What the Holy See calls “patrimony” is roughly what American universities mean by an “endowment” – in other words, funds and other assets designed to support the institution if operating funds fall short. The University of Notre Dame has an endowment of $3.5 billion, meaning a total 4.5 times as great as the Vatican’s.

But what of the some 18,000 artistic treasures in the Holy See, such as the Pietà, that don’t show up on these ledgers? From the Holy See’s point of view, these artworks are part of the artistic heritage of the world, and may never be sold or borrowed against. Michelangeo’s famous Pieta statue, the Sistine Chapel, or Raphael’s famous frescoes in the Apostolic Palace are thus listed at a value of 1 Euro each. In fact, those treasures amount to a net drain on the Holy See’s budget, because millions of Euros have to be allocated every year for maintenance and restoration.

You see, not only does Silverman somehow ignore the centuries of world history showing how much the Church cares for the poor, she doesn't even realize just how pointless it would be for the Vatican to sell most of its property. There is a difference between the charity for the poor that the Church has continuously manifested from the start, and the foolish iconoclasm of throwing away religious art for temporary financial relief. But of course, what else can we expect from Silverman, who worships the cult of Differently Different and Shockingly Shocking and Totally Radical Radicalism that is so very popular among the oh-so-very modern moderns of today*.

Oh wait, blindly following the whims of our Modern Moral Superiors contradicts the concept of Being Different? Oh, pish posh!

In the end we have to look back at the first person who suggested this supposedly charitable plan almost 2000 years ago. The Gospel of John says that Judas whined about expensive oil being wasted in the adoration of Christ instead of being "sold, with the proceeds given to the poor", not because he was particularly fond of the poor, but because he wanted to take the money for himself. If Silverman was truly moved, her heart bleeding and broken, for the plight of the less fortunate, then she would applaud the very real contributions of the Church in that regard. As it is, her actual reaction leads me to suspect that she, in her contempt for the authority of the pope, merely enjoys fantasizing about the pope going down, humiliated and exiled from his temporal base of power. And when the Vatican becomes open for looting, maybe then she could get one of the cooler Vatican treasures and treat it as a status symbol.

I'd bet the Pieta would look nice in her back yard.

Edit: Of course, the issue of selling the Vatican artwork is mostly a cultural one rather than a religious one. As this article points out:

...suggesting that the Vatican should exchange its treasures for food in Africa is an impossibility due to international law...

In reality, he said, the Church "has the duty to conserve the works of art in the name of the Italian state." He affirmed, "It cannot sell them."

The prelate recalled an incident in the 1970s when a benefactor made a donation to renovate the Collegio Teutonico inside the Vatican, and the residence director wanted to give this person a small statue -- of a meager value compared to the others in the Vatican Museums -- as a gesture of gratitude.

The German benefactor had a lot of problems with the Italian state, as he was accused of taking goods that Italy was charged with safeguarding.

"In every country there are a lot of measures for the defense of works of art, because the state has a duty to maintain them," Cardinal Cordes added, noting that the Holy See treasures are also part of Italian cultural history.

--
* Who, incidentally, are mostly not very modern (in the sense of having new ideas), after all, since most of the arguments they proudly spout originate from very old heresies.

Chesterton on the Logical Consistency of Lunatics

2009-08-06T20:22:00.005+08:00

From Orthodoxy:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. [...] There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. [...] If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: "Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? [...] But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! [...] You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers." Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, "All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth." Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, "So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!"

---
Chesterton knew that logic depends on assumptions, and that perfectly logical arguments can still be flawed if the assumptions leave too much of the ordinary and sane and beautiful out of the picture. And as he showed, the best way to lure a man out of a crazy but internally consistent theory is to offer him a glimpse of sanity that his human nature longs for, but that is incompatible with his theory. He must be convinced that there is something more important to him than his theory. And the process of going about this rescue operation has very little to do with rational debate, but is rather more of a psychological battle to forcibly expose the crazy ideas that the man has taken for granted for too long, the crazy ideas that has made him blind.

The character Innocent Smith from Chesterton's novel Manalive used this method to jolt nihilists, communists and other sad, mad, but perfectly logical people back into sanity. Speaking of Manalive, there's a movie adaptation coming out this year, starring Catholic apologist Mark Shea as Innocent. Watch the trailer!

Job on Deceitful Apologists

2009-04-13T15:25:00.003+08:00

Got this from Eve Tushnet's blog.

"Will you speak falsely for God,
and speak deceitfully for him?
Will you show partiality toward him,
will you plead the case for God?
Will it be well with you when he searches you out?
Or can you deceive him, as one deceives a man?
He will surely rebuke you
if in secret you show partiality.
Will not his majesty terrify you,
and the dread of him fall upon you?
Your maxims are proverbs of ashes,
your defenses are defenses of clay."

--Job rebuking his "comforters," Job 13:7-12

Lord, may I defend your teachings, but not with defenses of clay!

Chesterton on Christian Fun

2008-12-15T11:13:00.005+08:00

(I got this from the great guys of The Shrine of the Holy Whapping)

The Christmas celebrations will certainly remain, and will certainly survive any attempt by modern artists, idealists, or neo-pagans to substitute anything else for them. For the truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticize or to destroy.

All Socialist Utopias, all new Pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified. [...] But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation. [...] Religion is much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace. Religion and riot are very near, as the history of all religions proves.

Riot means being a rotter; and religion means knowing you are a rotter. Somebody said, and it has often been quoted: 'Be good and you will be happy; but you will not have a jolly time.' The epigram is witty, but it is profoundly mistaken in its estimate of the truth of human nature. I should be inclined to say that the truth is exactly the reverse. Be good and you will have a jolly time; but you will not be happy. If you have a good heart you will always have some lightness of heart; you will always have the power of enjoying special human feasts, and positive human good news. But the heart which is there to be lightened will also be there to be hurt; and really if you only want to be happy, to be steadily and stupidly happy like the animals, it may be well worth your while not to have a heart at all.

Fortunately, however, being happy is not so important as having a jolly time. Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time. The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one's heart or thickening one's head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence. This is why religion always insists on special days like Christmas, while philosophy always tends to despise them.

Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort. The Christmas customs destroy the human habits.

And while customs are generally unselfish, habits are nearly always selfish. The object of a religious festival is, as I have said, to find out if a happy man is still alive. A man can smile when he is dead. Composure, resignation, and the most exquisite good manners are, so to speak, the strong points of corpses. There is only one way in which you can test his real vitality, and that is by a special festival. Explode crackers in his ear, and see if he jumps. Prick him with holly, and see if he feels it. If not, he is dead, or, as he would put it, is 'living the higher life.'

--G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, 11 January 1908.

(In case a reader doesn't get it, "philosophy" here means the cold, high-brow sort, the sort enjoyed by people pretending to be Nietzschean Supermen.)

Gmail Innovates. Y! and MS Makes Cutesy UI's.

2008-11-12T16:26:00.009+08:00

You can now talk to your Gmail buddies, a la the Google Talk desktop client.

You can even view their webcams while you talk.

Gmail rocks. I'm not even gonna talk about the many cool experimental features in Gmail Labs. As far as webmail goes, Google is king. Yahoo and Microsoft can shove their drag and drop Outlook-wannabes up their asses.

/end demented fanboyism

Update:

I just couldn't wait, so I went and grabbed the Gmail Video chat plugin:
http://www.gmail.com/videochat

/start shallow analysis

Let's talk pros and cons. First, it's good that you can do voice chats between Gmail and Google Talk, but this capability is somewhat hidden: when you hover on a contact (in the Chat panel) who is running Google Talk but not Gmail, then you click on "Video & more", there is no option to initiate voice chat. Instead, you'll have to start a normal chat session first, then click "Video & more" on the contact's chat "window", before you could find the "Start voice chat" option.

Nonetheless, voice chat w/ Google Talk buddies went well when I tried it. Audio is clear and the ring tone isn't irritating. I was on a Windows XP system, and I used both Firefox and Google Chrome (I'll let others test the less relevant browsers. Kidding! :P). I still need to test this with a web cam, though. Maybe I'll post a follow-up this weekend.

Other issues:

There is no ability to send voicemail from Gmail, yet (you can already do this in the Google Talk desktop client).
The new chat features are enabled via a plugin, so obviously compatibility is a problem. For now, Gmail Video chat only works on Windows XP or later.
Video chat is not yet available in iGoogle. I'm hoping the iGoogle team will use the same plugin if ever they decide to include Video chat in their Google Talk gadget. Wouldn't want to download multiple plugins for this on my slow work PC.

Update: According to Philipp Lenssen, there might actually be a Mac plugin, already. Still none for Linux. Oh well.

There is still Hope despite you, Mr. Obama

2008-11-11T12:28:00.003+08:00

“It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.”

-Samwise Gamgee, The Two Towers

Chesterton on Naturalistic Morality

2008-10-27T11:46:00.005+08:00

Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except for divine theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see the logical addendum. There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable. But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Google is the Borg

2008-09-28T21:59:00.006+08:00

It's been a while since I last talked about Google (you might think it was just five real blog-posts ago, but that also means it was back in May). Most of the Google news these past few months have deserved nothing more than a tweet or two, if that*-- though of course I still share blog posts about the company all the time-- but things are starting to get really interesting as Google's plans to take over the world, er, I mean their plan to organize the world's information... is taking them to new places (literally, in one case).

Google announced the Android platform last year, and now T-Mobile unveiled the first ever commercial smartphone that runs on it: the T-Mobile G1. I'm really hoping that such open platforms like Android and Openmoko become successful. The competition that could potentially be offered by these dirt-cheap platforms ought to accelerate the development of better, cheaper, more open mobile technologies. And with that, average people will begin to finally find some use in buying smartphones and not see them merely as expensive toys. We could finally be entering an era of smartphone ubiquity.**

Now, we knew last year that Google created a simple Webkit-based browser as part of their Android software, and that should have been a clue to the biggest bombshell they dropped so far this year: the Google Chrome browser. Cynical jokes have been made about how the Google Borg isn't content that people use their sites and is now telling people to use Google sites via a Google browser. You could almost imagine some digital monster crawling slowly but surely, first on a web page, then onto your taskbar... then suddenly you see a clawed, bluish hand reaching out from your monitor and grabbing your throat... Well anyway, Google says they created the open-source Chrome because they wanted to help others make better web browsers, because they want a better Web, because the Web is their home sweet home. Whatever their reasons really are, I'm already shamelessly using Chrome as my primary browser. It doesn't have extensions, but I just love not having to wait forever to load Firefox just to check my reading list. I'm also pretty happy with its intuitive Omnibox search features. Still, the thing is in beta.*** I use Firefox occasionally when needed, like whenever Chrome won't play nice with certain sites (the problems are usually CSS-related). Another problem is it sometimes stalls for a few seconds when switching tabs, which is quite annoying given the amount of multi-tasking I do at work****. All in all, I can't wait for the next Chrome version to come out.

The last bit of news is that the Philippines (among others) is now editable in Google Map Maker. I've been playing with it for the past few days it's been very, very educational so far. See, I once got lost in the middle of the very city I live in because all the jeepneys in the area were going to places I didn't know. Heck, I don't even know the names of half the streets in my small neighborhood. Reading all day and never hanging out with friends during the weekends does that to you. But now I can memorize all the main roads in Metro Manila without leaving the comfort of my house/office/dorm. They always say that travelling the streets and exploring places is good exercise for the body, and so I think I'll go travelling some more now. Let me just open another tab. There you go. Drag, drag, double-click... I can feel the health benefits already!

--
* Okay, okay... I'm just a lazy blogger.
** What can I say? I like to daydream. :)
*** Well, this is Google we're talking about. Most of what they do are in beta. What I meant was Chrome is in very early beta.
**** All work-related... if "work" is defined as "clicking on the mouse of the work computer".

Anarchy and Chance Part 2: The Small Laws

2008-08-23T11:46:00.015+08:00

(This is the second part of my ramblings concerning The Dark Knight movie. The first part dealt with the Joker, and here I deal with Two-Face. Just as with Part 1, I will treat the character, not as a realistic human being whose psychology could validly be analyzed, but rather I will treat him as a philosophical object. In the Part 1 I used Joker as a model of what the atheistic world view rationally leads to in terms of morality. Here in Part 2, I will use Two-Face as a caricature of someone enslaved by sin. I do this to describe my thoughts on certain concepts, not to describe actual people.)

"When you break the big laws, " says the philosopher G.K. Chesterton, "you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." This succinctly describes, I think, the central philosophical problem posed by the character in The Dark Knight film named Harvey Dent, also called "Two-Face". The villain Two-Face is a mad-man obsessed with little impromptu coin-toss-related laws that govern and dictate his every big decision. Yet even as District Attorney Dent, the White Knight of Gotham, he was already tainted with the seed of his future madness. For all his righteousness and courage and integrity, Harvey Dent already had a dent long before The Joker twisted him completely.

When Chesterton says "the big laws", he means Divine Law, specifically Christian doctrine. It is called big, not just because we believe it to come from The Big Man himself, but because it is always broad, all-encompassing, "catholic". For example, when we say "human life is sacred", we do not just mean the life of good Christians, or the life of decent law-abiding citizens, or the life of those who just so happened to be no longer dependent on their mother's womb. We mean all human life. Christian doctrine is also big in the sense that it is not limited by the ignorance, prejudices, and environment of its followers. An orthodox Catholic from the 21st century and an orthodox (and time-traveling!) Catholic from the 15th century might argue endlessly about politics, cosmology, music, and proper attire, yet their orthodoxy could still remain intact. A 27th century Vulcan might land his time-traveling spaceship in front of them, exhibiting vast knowledge and scientific insight, yet none of that could threaten their Faith one bit (the Vulcan might even become Catholic! Hello Bishop Spock!). When we call Christian philosophy a cosmic philosophy, we mean it!

Lastly, Christian doctrine is big because it is something that is whole. Like Health and Sanity, it is a balance and an intertwining of things in a way that one part cannot stand without the rest. And here we return to Harvey Dent. The problem with Dent, the problem of any typical heretic, really, is that he lost sight of healthy thinking because he was obsessed with one tiny part of sanity, breaking it away from the whole as if it was self-sufficient. Harvey Dent's obsession was basically the doctrine of Free Will, which in his hands degenerated into egotism and the irrational disregard for outside forces.

"I don't leave anything up to chance, I make my own luck."

Chesterton said in his book Orthodoxy that the act of believing in oneself, far from being an indication of future success (as so many self-help books claim), is rather often the first sign of a rotter. And the reason for thing is illustrated by the story of Harvey Dent's rotting. He poured all his hope and passion into a single sane idea, the idea that he has the power to change his environment, that he is not just a passive leaf going with the flow of the river. But he forgot two things. First, that we are all part of a bigger Plan (generally of God, though in this case, the movie makers are the gods :P), and just as there are things we can change, there are also things that are beyond us, no matter how much will we have. And so we have the prayer "Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." Secondly he also forgot that other people have Free Will as well. He fell in love with his own Free Will, which is another way of saying that he's fallen for himself, which is simply the sin of Pride. And with Pride comes th Fall. Believing completely in himself, Dent was blindsided by the Free Will of an evil clown, and by the time Joker was done with him, that tiny piece of sanity left in him blew up in his face. The Worship of Oneself wasn't so self-sufficient, after all! And in his despair, he took the rest of what was left of his sanity, and smashed it to pieces, leaving behind a bunch of tiny laws and ideas centered upon the complete reversal of his first obsession:

We are all slaves of Chance. Our will, our choices and beliefs mean nothing once the coin has been tossed.
Chance dictates who is punished and who escapes to live another day. It is the only kind of Justice: "unbiased, unprejudiced, fair".
Right and Wrong are merely the opposite sides of the same coin. An action becomes considered right only by Chance.

And all it took was, as the Joker said, "a little push".

The half-baked belief, Free Will becoming mere worship of Self (the "I believe in Harvey Dent" motto comes to mind), shattered into even more fragile pieces, simple truisms that only the insane would call "beliefs". For example, the "slave of Chance" claim is useless because it is simply a sophistic restatement of something that isn't even an argument in the first place: the truism that "things happen" (which is just as insightful as another common truism used by some who enjoy small laws: "I like doing the things I like"). Or in another sense, calling yourself a "slave of Chance" is so useless that it becomes too useful, because just as it explains nothing, it explains everything away. Once you base your philosophy on a truism, all your thoughts can be excused, for you have already excused yourself of Thought itself. Why bother thinking of Ethics, when your best friend Chance has already showed you the way to what you want? Yet whatever sense of freedom such a philosophy gives, in the end it only enslaves the mind.

You think I want to escape from this? There is no escape from this!

For a man who embraces the small laws for everything will discover that everything has become so much smaller. Like a triangle that broke from the bonds of its three sides, he finds himself free from far too much. Having freed himself, for example, from the "chains" of Free Will, he is startled to discover that he can no longer say, among other things, "Thank you", "Please", "I don't like what you're doing", "Sorry", "I forgive you", and "I love you"... at least not without contradicting his philosophy. The man of Chance binds himself with polished, refined, high-class chains that will not even let him pass the salt-shaker if he pleases, and to be thanked for it. Is it any surprise that it won't let Harvey Dent kill a traitor? Chance, after all, is a two-faced friend.

And thus Harvey Dent became Two-Face, the mindless murderous peon of an unthinking coin, somehow imagining himself to be Enlightened, like the atheistic Brights of today who laugh and sneer at believers whilst trapped in their own little prisons.

Yet the Truth shall set you free.

--
Edit: Changed the title of the post to reflect the Chesterton quote. It's what I originally intended, but writing at 2am in the morning can be really bad for one's focus.

Edit: Added stuff to the last few paragraphs in a futile attempt to improve coherence.

Edit: After re-reading Orthodoxy, added another classic Chesterton saying.

Anarchy and Chance - Part 1, The House of Cards

2008-07-30T23:14:00.011+08:00

I finally got to watch The Dark Knight last Saturday with my parents and my little sister. Just as I treated Wanted as a comedy parodying its supposed genre, I ended up seeing The Dark Knight as something other than an action movie. The few combat scenes and the car chases were a chore to watch and were mostly forgettable. No, instead of an action movie, I saw a set of philosophy lessons (wrapped in a beautiful work of film art, but that's for everyone else to talk about).

Though there were many bossy bad guys in the movie (Salvatore was there, as well as the lame-ass Scarecrow), only one of them stood out, reigning over the rest, the one central villain-- I say he's even the central character-- the Joker. But there's also another character who's almost as important, a tortured man whose villainy emerged only near the end of this tragedy, the pitiful Two-Face. It seems to me as if Batman was just there to connect these two villains, to unite the two stories of evil together. It's as if the title misled us into thinking that the story is about Bruce Wayne's alter-ego, when it actually refers to two things: the laughing "knight" of darkness and the "dark night" of a poor soul. I see the movie as just a framework to present these two sides of a philosophical coin, painted on one side, scorched on the other. It is the Coin of Immorality, spinning madly forever and ever.

***

I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.

Just some time ago I was debating an atheist friend about the proper justification for morality. I argued that while I had an a priori justification for morality in the form of a divine Law Maker, he did not. He only had the little random and selfish human commandments invented by sentimental men. None of his morality is real, not in any rational sense. Atheistic morality is the one described by Terry Pratchett's Death in his conversation with Susan in Hogfather:

You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
Yes. Justice. Duty. Mercy. That sort of thing.
"They're not the same at all!"
Really? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged"
"Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point?"
My point exactly.

That is the kind of irrational morality that some sentimental atheists have. "I've got to believe in justice and mercy or else what's the point?" My friend, being a typical enlightened Bright, scoffed at my need to believe in a bearded man in the clouds to give meaning to my life, calling my belief system a house of cards, utterly dependent on one assumption that God exists. Yet one simply cannot justify moral conduct in a world where morality is not real in principle. You cannot consider Moral Law as objective if your Law Maker is nobody but yourself, certainly not if your Law Maker is the mythical Everybody Else, the muddled and chaotic collective opinions of the people around you.

In fact the real house of cards is the belief system utterly dependent on subjective individualist dogmas, improvised to fit the current needs, like a complicated magical house held together only by superstition, like a house of Joker cards held together by kieselguhr infused with nitroglycerine. And it only takes grief or fear or gullibility or even boredom to push one card and topple the house to the ground. It takes one flame to make it go boom.

When the chips are down, these civilized people, they'll eat each other.

The Joker manages to demonstrate this multiple times throughout the movie, destroying one house of cards after another. Promising more wealth to his minions, they conveniently and systematically killed each other, eliminating the need to split up the loot. He knew that the mob bosses' plan to protect their money will fail, and used their fear to coerce them into irresponsibly hiring a madman-- him-- to solve their problems in the most destructive way possible. He made the people of Gotham agree to sacrificing Batman after he murdered the police commissioner and a judge. He threatened to blow up a hospital if a certain man isn't killed after a set time, leading a bunch of supposedly normal everyday people to go on a vicious manhunt. In the end, Joker drove Gotham's White Knight insane... but let's talk about that some other time.

The atheist would of course complain that even Catholics can be immoral, citing as usual the crusades and the inquisitions and the pedophile priests. But they miss the point entirely because while men can flip-flop and occasionally forget the philosophies they supposedly believe in, the philosophies themselves do not change, and the real test is how (and if) a person can be judged by his own philosophy.

There lies the victory of Christian philosophy: while a Catholic who has gone bad is a bad Catholic, an atheist who has gone bad is not a bad atheist. The Catholic can be condemned by his god because the god is bigger than the Catholic and can therefore be a proper judge. But what can atheism say to a Joker? Even if an atheist invents his own materialist moral codes (as they often do), those moral codes cannot condemn him because they are mere inventions of his, and are therefore smaller than him, changeable and disposable.

You have all these rules, and you think they'll save you.

The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.

And dispose of them he does. Joker calls himself "ahead of the curve" precisely because he's decided to live his atheism honestly and abolish all the illusory rules while his counterparts and enemies still continue to fool themselves with The Big Lies. In Joker we find the true atheist: amoral, hedonist, unreliable, deadly. And in him one finds at last the kind of atheism that cannot be reasoned with by any religious apologetics. He is an unstoppable force, because his philosophy is at the very least rational and consistent.

You have nothing—nothing to threaten me with, nothing to do with all your strength.

Just like anyone who has found an unassailable Truth to faithfully hold on to, there is absolutely no fear in Joker, not even the fear of death. Laughing gleefully as he falls down from a tall building, he reminds me of the stories I read as a child about certain Christian martyrs who died in ecstatic bliss, laughing as they were executed. The only difference is that the Christian martyr laughed knowing that he was about to experience the Beatific Vision of the God he truly loved, while Joker laughed thinking he was about to make the most wonderful dramatic and chaotic exit from the absurd and illusory world. One's Truth was in God, while the other's Truth was in Destruction even unto himself.

Meanwhile, the incomplete atheists and the lukewarm believers could only shake their heads in confusion at the sight of these madmen, the Dogmatist and the Anarchist. They walk away ignoring the warnings of one and the threats of the other, and go on living contentedly and happily in their colorful house of cards.

To be continued in Part 2.

Sun Tech Days

2008-06-19T10:57:00.007+08:00

Last Tuesday and yesterday I attended the Sun Tech Days conference in Shangrila Hotel, Makati. It was the 10th anniversary of the conference. The president of Sun Microsystems Philippines danced. There were lots of squishy thingies being thrown at the audience. The food was great. The speakers were...well, the food was really, really great. :P

The whole of Tuesday was dedicated to showing off the new features of NetBeans 6.1 like the Profiler, the GUI Builder, handy keyboard shortcuts, etc. Support for other languages like PHP and Ruby were mentioned, but this was a Sun Microsystems conference, so they never bothered to demo those.

Yesterday I was assigned by my boss to the Enterprise Track (the other tracks were Desktop, OpenSolaris, and SysAdmin). Here are the notable Enterprise topics discussed (though in some cases, more like blabbered):

Groovy and Grails. I was made to believe that we could choose between attending a Groovy session or a JRuby session. Turns out JRuby (an implementation of Ruby in Java) was thrown out in favor of the Ruby-wannabe Groovy. The unique thing about Groovy is that it was created with Java-interoperability in mind, such that Groovy classes can be directly imported for use in Java code and vice versa. This is really handy for people who need to work with other Java developers but who prefer dynamic syntax. Anyway, it was great to see the reaction of people to the concept of closures and to the Rails-like way of doing MVC.
Java Persistence API (JPA). This is now Java's standard for mapping objects to a relational database table, basically creating a wrapper for that table. There are of course other ways to do this in Java, like via other third-party APIs (only Hibernate and TopLink were mentioned), Entity Beans, or good ol' JDBC. JPA is cool because not only does it simplify object-relational mapping, it does this without the "unnatural need for special interfaces" (paraphrasing one of the speakers). It simply uses plain old Java objects (or POJO*) and relies on dependency injection** via Java annotations. The overall effect is it makes code look a lot more coherent, not to mention easier to unit test.
GlassFish. This is an open-source application server that implements the latest Java Enterprise Edition and uses Java NIO for faster connections. The GlassFish session also gave a glimpse to the next Java EE version and how it will use the POJO and dependency injection stuff as well. Pretty exciting, and it seems my dreams of simpler, more sensible servlet-programming is finally coming true!
Oracle's Coherence. For some reason a number of people started leaving the moment the Oracle guy was introduced. Quite a few more left mid-way into his presentation. Maybe because he was a corporate type with a strange accent. Maybe because Oracle is just boring. Anyway, Coherence is a way to store database records in memory, allowing for super-fast data-access. If that sounds familiar, you might've heard of memcached, which is similar but open-source. Most of the speaker's presentation was basically a sermon on the importance of scalability. Scalability is the main advantage of Coherence over memcached as it allows the cached data to be replicated and distributed across multiple machines. This leads to stability even in extreme volume of transactions. Well, okay, but I still wished I could've attended the Java SE 7 demo in the next room instead.

Other stuff I saw demoed included jMaki***, JavaFX, SVG 1.2 support for Java ME (JSR 287), and VirtualBox (running on OpenSolaris). Today it's my team members' turn to attend the final set of talks, the lucky buggers. Despite the incoherence of some of the speakers (pun intended!), the conference made me really excited about new Java platform technologies, and I'm glad the company I work for seems really interested in them. Technology is fun!

Update: I was able to catch up on the last set of talks for today. The MySQL talk (which was about MySQL 5.1, storage engines, and JavaDB) was a lot more interesting than the Oracle talk yesterday.

- - -
* Apparently acronyms make things cooler.
** Dependency injection means JPA will supply your objects with any dependency you specify. For example, if you need an object to be treated as an "entity" that maps to a database table, you simply add the proper annotation to the class definition and JPA will "inject" all the necessary database-related code into the object upon instantiation. You can therefore focus on coding the business-related aspects of the class definition.
*** Mainly they demoed the jMaki widgets integration in NetBeans. Pretty cool.

Bird Brain tweets for today

2008-06-15T23:27:00.001+08:00

10:48 Friendfeed allows you to tweet your comment on a Twitter item right in its interface. Cool! #
10:51 Will go to the dorm this afternoon...right after pizza with family. #
18:44 Dormward bound. Traffic is horrendous. #
21:43 Playing w/ Ruby. Number ranges FTW! #
23:24 Used someone's forwarded chain e-mail to teach Ruby in my alma mater's yahoogroup. Man, I think I'm gonna be in trouble for this. #

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Connecting with others

2008-05-16T20:27:00.008+08:00

I think I've figured out why I've been such a terrible blogger for months now, and it's not because I'm too busy with work, or because I'm too lazy to type long entries. No, I've been busy with a couple other things:

Checking out what other people are doing and listening to their thoughts.
Joining conversations on topics I care about.

Of course there's still the usual looking for cool stuff online to share with you guys, but now I share those stuff as soon as I read them with just a click of a button, with only an occasional small commentary on my part, letting you see them all in one place and comment on them if you want to.

***
I used to really hate it when I end up in blogs filled with posts like "I'm listening to this cool song right now. Oh, and my cat scratched our sofa AGAIN. I feel bored..." Let's not even get into the spelling and grammar problems. Now, if ever I see such a blog again, I'll probably just feel pity that this poor guy isn't using the right tool for the job. That's because I now see the use of letting your friends know the little things that go through your mind, whether or not you're directly talking to them. It's the little things, the outbursts of opinions, the spontaneous thoughts that might be seeds of greater ideas, the personal experiences we have...these things help others empathize and connect with us. That's exactly why chats-- those spontaneous bursts of disorganized information, opinion and reaction-- whether online or in "real life", are so important in friendships.*

The problem with some personal blogs of long ago is that some people (kids, mostly) tried to use them to chat. For one reason or another, this just didn't work. People expected blogs to start conversations, or join existing conversations...conversations that required some level of organized thought regarding topics of discussion...not to talk about the weather or about what you ate in the nearby fast-food chain (or about your current boredom). In short, the kids wanted to chat with someone...to just talk...and to listen...and to connect...but the platform they were using wasn't suited for the purpose. They wanted to chat with the world, but nobody cared.

Now with services like Twitter and Jaiku, everybody could chat with the world, to tell everybody what's up, in a place that cared about what you are doing right now. The best part is you don't have to be on a specific OS, or using a specific application. You don't even have to go online all the time. I receive updates from the Mars Phoenix Lander team every day on my cellphone. I get to read the thoughts of my high school classmates, my sister, or my crush even as I lay in my bed. The feeling of connectedness I get here just blows away anything else I've experienced in any online service, including other so-called social networks. It's just awesome!

***
I've mentioned that blogs are used to join online conversations with the public. It just so happens that I enjoy conversations, be they humorous or argumentative. Now some famous bloggers join online conversations by posting their reactions on their blog, but I realized I prefer another approach. I tend to simply post my response to some blogger, and it's usually very lengthy and blog-worthy in itself, onto his blog as a comment. If you bothered to look, most of the prose I write online will be seen on Slashdot, or on my friends' blogs, or even on random blogs I come across. I never bothered to copy my comments here. As far as I'm concerned, discussions should develop where they started, to keep the arguments in context. It helps prevent bloggers from isolating themselves in their own bubble on an issue. You could always pretend that the debate is on your side when it's only you presenting the issue on your blog. Joining in an actual thread of conversation lets everyone see how you really stand. Sometimes connecting with others can be tough, but it also helps you be more humble and objective. It helps you empathize, which sometimes hurts, but will be good for you in the end.

Light-bulb: Of course, it would be ideal if I could comment on other people's blogs and still have my comments automatically visible to my own blog readers (i.e. the four of you). Maybe the Blogger Team should develop a system to let me view and share the discussions I've joined in any Blogspot page. Better yet, they could team up with the rest of the OpenID Foundation to create a relatively blogosphere-wide system that would track my comments almost anywhere.

_ _
*Which is probably the greatest thing about the company I work for, in that it helps others generate the friendly chaos of "small talk" wherever they are.

Bird Brain tweets for today

2008-05-16T00:09:00.000+08:00

07:19 Arrived at the office almost an hour ago. At around 6:30 AM. Stupid timezones... #
07:22 Too bad your Dad made a mistake and got punished, eh, Barack? ;-) tinyurl.com/5o5axs #
11:48 I think I know what motherboard I'll be buying for my next PC. tinyurl.com/5le7n2 #
11:48 ASUS FTW! #
14:00 I noticed that Twitter's IM bot isn't 100% reliable. A few updates from people I follow don't appear, even though I'm online the whole day. #
19:51 I need to learn when a task needs to be left for tomorrow instead of making futile attempts to finish it today. #
20:35 Already two BPI ATMs have failed to reload my prepaid phone. "Special" Services... more like Retarded... #

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Bird Brain tweets for today

2008-05-14T00:09:00.001+08:00

13:26 This message was sent from my mobile via PHtwitter. Cool. #
13:36 PHtwitters allow for cheap SMS twittering from the Philippines. www.phtwitters.com #
15:30 Microsoft's World Wide Telescope is now up: www.worldwidetelescope.org/experienceIt/ExperienceIt.aspx #
18:10 Work rant: the problem could either be the GSM modem, or the old C code that's using it. I'm starting to hate both. #
18:39 "You have only been gone 10 days and already I'm wasting away..." #
18:40 I suddenly miss my guitar. Should buy new strings later. #
19:32 It seems the GSM modem they bought is just utterly flawed. No need to scour hundreds of lines of tangled C code. #
19:33 Gotta go home now so I can watch Avatar w/o my Mom nagging. :P #
20:26 Forgot that the bottle was open and promptly spilled water on my pants. Wtf?! #

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A Socket for My Brain

2008-05-09T00:12:00.003+08:00

Dudes! I just renamed my blog! This is so crazy!!!

It's been years since I realized that "The Brain" can be a very misleading title. People read it and think "Man, what an ego...he's not even that smart!", when in fact I was only trying to convey the image of this blog being a link to my head, a place where I can record the various thoughts and ideas that come into my mind, an online extension of my very faulty memory. More importantly, it's something that helps me express myself to an audience (e.g. all four of you), giving them the dubious privilege of peering into my head without having to use a hacksaw...or Matrix-style mind-hacking. Instead I became known as "the guy who calls himself The Brain".

But then, seeing an opportunity to act on a trivial image problem, I chose to procrastinate. Story of my life. I'd occasionally ponder on what name I ought to use instead: "Hack My Brain" looks cool as part of my URL, but not as a title. "Brain Dump" would look negative for people who don't know what the term meant. Apparently I had a fixation for the word "brain" that wouldn't quit. Well, by the time "/home/focoma/brain" flashed in my head, I decided I just wasn't inspired enough to think of a good title. Or maybe I was just lazy. Anyway my blog title languished in shame for many years (this blog itself barely manages to do better, but let's not go there now).

Then a few minutes ago I spontaneously renamed it to "A Socket for My Brain". Well, clearly the fixation hasn't gone, and there might even be a dash of influence from that strange Keanu Reeves movie. Too bad there's no white rabbit.

Let's just see how this goes, yes? Good night.

Bird Brain tweets for today

2008-05-09T00:09:00.001+08:00

10:07 One downside to programming in both PHP and Java is that sometimes one forgets to use String.equals() for String comparisons. #
17:38 A teensy bit of orange misses a teensy bit of yellow. #
18:25 "Planned Parenthood" is an evil euphemism. Let's use the more apt name: Planned Barrenhood #
18:32 "They introduce their horrible heresies under new and carefully complimentary names... The names are always flattery; the names are also ... #

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Bird Brain tweets for today

2008-05-08T00:10:00.001+08:00

10:11 Stayed up too late last night blogging. Will need to go home early to sleep ASAP. #
17:21 Attended the StrengthsFinder seminar. Felt like one of those "What's your personality" Internet memes. Good thing it was free (w/ drinks!). #

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Why the Google Reader Team should spawn a new project

2008-05-06T23:01:00.007+08:00

Google Reader has new features. Check `em out:

There is a new Notes section which lets you add...notes...to Google Reader. Basically notes that you create act as normal Reader items: you can share them, add a star to them, or e-mail them. They are also permanent, like normal Reader items, which is slightly strange. You might ask, why the heck did they tack a note-taking section on an RSS feed reader when they already have a perfectly fine standalone note-taking app? I'll explain below, but suffice to say the new section can safely be ignored most of the time while still taking advantage of the notes system. Update: There's now a Delete button for unwanted notes.
Ever wanted to explain why you shared an item in your reading list (e.g. "Hey look this is so cool!", "I wanna read up on this later", or "I read this idiotic piece of crap and I lol'd", etc.)? You can now do this by clicking on the "Share with note" link next to the Share link. When you "Share with note" an item, you're actually creating a copy of that item (along w/ the tidbit you wrote) and saving that as a note in the Notes section. You're not actually sharing the original item, but the noted copy. This can lead to confusion, but all you really need to know is that your shared items can now be personalized with your own comments and reactions. (You can also "personalize" your shared items list by changing the logo...meh, useless.)
There is a bookmarklet that let's you share any page on the web, whether or not it has an RSS feed. "Install" the handy bookmarklet by bookmarking this link (for bookmarklets, it's customary to drag the link to the Bookmarks toolbar to make it more accessible). When you find an interesting web page, just click on the bookmarklet and click on the Post Note button. Optionally, you can add a short description of the web page before sharing it. This is easily done by highlighting some of the page's relevant text before you click on the bookmarklet. You can also put your comments on the page. Once you click on Post Note, it will appear in your Shared Items list as well as your Notes section (but why even visit the Notes section? :D). Update: Here's a tip. If you only want to share an image in a web page, simply highlight that image before clicking on the bookmarklet.

These are great, I'm a bit weirded out by their implementation. For example, since "Share with note" simply creates a copy of an item, you can end up sharing the same content more than once! I'm thinking, why not give up on this "add a note to a post" idea and just create a more intuitive comment system where you and your friends can comment on any shared item, like the way FriendFeed does it?

The bookmarklet for sharing any page also seems badly thought-out. For one thing, it's called "Note in Reader"; what has sharing a web page got to do with note-taking? None! More to the point, what has sharing a web page got to do with RSS feeds (which is what Google Reader should be all about)? Sharing a web page is cool, but it shouldn't be a Google Reader feature. Now, if I were assigned to come up with a better web-sharing solution, I would suggest the following 4-step alternative to the ugly Notes section:

Spawn a new project. Turn Shared Items into its own app, separate from Google Reader. Let this be Google's answer to FriendFeed. The stand-alone Shared Items service would logically work with Google Reader, Blogger, Google Notepad, Google Maps, and...dun dun dun...THE WORLD WIDE WEB! Which leads us to Step 2:
Create a bookmarklet, a Google toolbar button, and a Firefox extension for adding web pages to the new Shared Items. Since Shared Items is now broader in scope, you mark web pages as web pages...not as Google Reader notes. The world is suddenly a saner place.
???
Profit!*

Speaking of FriendFeed, an interesting observation: it seems that when you "Share as note" in Google Reader, FriendFeed will detect the note and treat it as a comment. Cool!

--
* Slashdot reference. Don't try to understand it. I write this way when I'm sleepy. Sorry for the confusion. For what it's worth, I prefer my fictional Google Shared Items service to be ad-free.

Bird Brain tweets for today

2008-05-06T00:06:00.001+08:00

14:15 Sooo...sleepy... Must finish boring tasks...noooo... #

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Bird Brain tweets for today

2008-05-05T00:05:00.000+08:00

00:08 hmmm...LoudTwitter still hasn't posted to my blog. Need to do some troubleshooting. #
00:31 LoudTwitter post a bit late. I am still a happy geek. Now to get some sleep... #
00:46 What the heck does GNOME Do do?! Meh, I'll play with it tomorrow...I mean, after I get some sleep. #
00:53 Oh, finally got what GNOME Do does. Might blog about it...NO! GET SOME SLEEP, DAMMIT! #
10:14 Google Earth 4.3 Beta is so slow on my system. I seriously need to buy a video card. #
14:14 Playing w/ GNOME Do Tweet plugin. Finally got acquainted w/ gconf-editor #

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Bird Brain tweets for today

2008-05-04T00:25:00.003+08:00

22:06 Looking for a decent screenlet for Twitter #
22:18 Testing SimpleTwitter. Hmmm... seems decent enough. #
22:43 15 pesos for a single SMS tweet?! Forget it, man. Now, let's see how much receiving an update costs... #
22:53 Okay, so Twitter updates are free for mobiles. Cool! #

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LoudTwitter

2008-05-03T23:21:00.007+08:00

I signed-up for LoudTwitter, a service that regularly posts a batch of your daily tweets to your blog. You can login using an Open-ID account, which Blogger fortunately supports.

I feel that this is a more attractive way to integrate Twitter w/ my blog, compared to my previous method of creating a small Twitter page element (which I now removed). With LoudTwitter, not only will I have a handy searchable backup of my tweets, I can also create the illusion that my blog isn't as neglected as it is! :-P

My first LoudTwitter post (or as I call it, Bird Brain tweets for today) should arrive in a few minutes.

Update: It arrived! A little late, though. Confused me for a bit.

Speaking of Twitter, I've been doing some experimenting with the SMS features. Twitter short codes are only available in the U.S., Canada, and India, so sending tweets to their US number from the Philippines costs me a whopping fifteen pesos (which, to be fair, is the standard cost of Philippines-US SMS for my mobile carrier, I think). On the other hand, it's really cool to receive (free!) SMS updates of your friends' goings on.

Twitter is really starting to grow on me. Sure, its frequent downtimes are disappointing, so are a few bugs...and I'm still too much of a Google fanboi not to dream of joining Jaiku..but the thing is, Jaiku is still unavailable to the public, and while Google is taking their time on whatever they're doing with that service, the Twitter community continues to tweet: whether via web, IM, mobile, or any of the variety of community-developed Twitter clients. And we have people like the makers of LoudTwitter who are using their creativity to make Twitter even more useful.

Thanks, Twitter community!

Twitter/tinyurl problem

2008-04-21T12:12:00.003+08:00

I just realized the tinyurlification of Twitter's Google Talk bot is flawed: if you included an HTML anchor in the URL, it will remove that anchor before creating a tinyurl for it.

For example, if you send the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice#Phases_of_ice to Twitter via Google Talk, it will end up as a tinyurl that leads to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice (okay, so I was fascinated by the phases of ice...don't stare at me like that!).

I know it's not a tinyurl problem because I was able to create a tinyurl that lead to the anchor.

I was gonna twitter this flaw, but I just couldn't fit the explanation in 140 characters. Apparently I still need my blog. :-)

Update: I just realized that tinyurl is also being used in the main Twitter site (I could have sworn I've seen tweets with non-tinyurled URLs before...). Also, the problem I described isn't limited to anchors: Apparently, URLs containing certain symbols (#, parentheses, etc.) are being chopped by Twitter. Hmmm... I wonder if Jaiku is any better.

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