John Lindal’s Blog

Dear Abby

I recently saw an advice column in a newspaper at a friend’s house where a person was asking about how to discuss budding bisexuality with a conservative, Christian family. The advice boiled down to, You are not alone. If you are afraid of abuse, get help. While true, it completely missed the point. A conservative, Christian family will expect that one practices abstinence until marriage, and that marriage is a lifelong, monogamous relationship. If the person intends to do that, then bisexuality would be irrelevant. If not, then that should be the primary topic for discussion. Having sex all willy nilly is a very different lifestyle and carries all sorts of risks, e.g., STD’s.

lolspeak

I finally have a project on github: lolspeak — it translates text into lolcats speak.

Scripting vs Coding

Jeff Atwood’s latest blog, A Scripter at Heart, got me thinking. A colleague of mine recently expressed the same sentiments, namely that he preferred the instant gratification of a Basic interpreter. Looking back, I was the opposite. Yes, it was painful to switch from Applesoft Basic to FORTRAN (on a Mac, no less — Absoft had a very clever hack for integrating with MacOS), but the reason I never looked back was that by the time I switched in my senior year in high school, I was writing programs that were so large and complicated that they didn’t even fit in the available 48K on my Apple ][+. I was using chain to preserve the data whenever the program needed to load a different code segment. You can imagine how desperately I needed real subroutines instead of GOSUB! So when I could compile a complete program into one unit and get compile-time checking to make sure I was calling each subroutine correctly, I was in heaven. Besides, the pain of switching from a command input application model to an event driven application model so heavily outweighed any pain induced by the need for compilation and linking that I don’t think I actually noticed

And by the time I switched to Think C and its object model, I was again desperate, because the complexity had long since outgrown the procedural model…

Snow

We drove up to Mount Wilson this afternoon to give our daughter her first taste of snow. It’s a rather rare commodity here in sunny Southern California. The biggest patch we found was about the size of two bathtubs.

It was especially interesting because the top of the mountain was inside a thick cloud. It felt like a completely different world as we built tiny snowmen and tossed snowballs inside our little bubble of visibility.

Hopefully, we’ll make time for a longer trip soon…

Internet Outage

This is by far the weirdest service disruption I have ever witnessed. Normally, when our connection dies, the router can’t get an IP address from our cable company, so it’s obviously their problem. This time, I could ping 4.2.2.[1-6], DNS worked, and I could even call our land line and receive incoming calls on our Vonage phone. But any attempt to ping a server like yahoo.com or google.com or call other phone numbers through Vonage was unsuccessful. Truly a strange set of symptoms!

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes

I’ve only read the review in Science News, but the following struck me as amazingly similar to A Case of Conscience, in which a Jesuit priest has a crisis of faith after encountering an alien race that lacks any concept of God:

[Daniel L.] Everett portrays these masters of jungle survival [the Pirahã] as a generally jovial bunch who have no creation myths or storytelling traditions. They live in the present and believe only in what they and their comrades directly observe — a cultural characteristic that leads Everett to abandon his own faith.

Thanks For All the Fish

Just posted another story based on a dream I had just before New Year: Thanks For All the Fish

It was fun writing a story when I could legitimately spout any kind of technobabble

The Gripping Hand

Back when I read the books, I was deeply impressed by The Mote in God’s Eye, but The Gripping Hand was quite a let down. Mote is essentially a horror story which leaves you hanging, terrified that the genie might get out of the bottle. The Moties will clearly reproduce without end and overrun the galaxy if they ever get out of their solar system. The sequel was such a let down because it resolves this terror by invoking birth control.

I believe these two books were written for very different reasons. Mote was good, old fashioned science fiction asking a terrible What if…? The sequel seems to be primarily motivated by politics — it seeks to assure westerners that Arabs really aren’t all that bad. They just have a different way of doing business, and if they can be convinced to accept birth control, they won’t take over the world. (From what little I know, Islam isn’t big on contraception, so they have over population problems.) The book does this by:

• making a big point about how Jews and Muslims used to face the same direction during prayer, and when in orbit around another planet, Mecca and Jerusalem are essentially in the same direction
• showing how the Arab way of doing business (or at least, how it is depicted in the book) saves the day because it is compatible with the Motie way of thinking

A Case of Conscience

I found myself thinking about this book again this morning after I woke up from a dream which I intend to write up as a short story. It has been years since I read the book, but I still remember it fondly because it is so wonderfully constructed.

The central puzzle of the book is whether a planet of aliens who appear to be both sinless and without any concept of God explodes because of an exorcism by a Jesuit priest or because a scientist who is hell-bent on exploiting the planet’s natural resources to build nuclear weapons miscalculated and blew it up.

The beauty of this puzzle is that, as we wrestle with it, we parallel the Jesuit priest’s wrestling at the beginning of the book with a paradox from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. To me, it was clear that the Jesuit should have been focusing on the problem of the alien planet instead of the paradox, which turned out to be entirely contrived, due to missing punctuation. Parallel to this, I believe the author intended the message that we should be trying to solve the problems humanity faces rather than the entirely contrived puzzle posed by A Case of Conscience! The author hammered this home in the second half of the book where, after returning to Earth, the priest struggled with the puzzle of the aliens instead of focusing on the obvious problem of humanity’s suffering: everybody lives in nuclear shelters and riots are a constant problem.

Tailgating

Today on the way to work, a guy tailgated me so close that I swear I could have counted his eyebrow hairs if I hadn’t been wearing sunglasses. When I was ready to get off the freeway, I decided to annoy him first, so I started blinking to move out of the fast lane and then slowed down before moving over. I could tell from his hand gestures (not the finger, to his credit) that I got through. After I moved over and he passed me, I noticed that the front of his car was smashed up. Note that I could not see this while he was behind me! He must be a slow learner…