Last year / Later this year
I started this church in the middle of Covid, actually when they lifted the Ban and services resumed in June of 2020. This church makes a big deal of their small groups, to which a significant number of people go instead of the main Sunday morning service. My sister in California did that also when I last visited, some years ago. My experience with small groups is usually that they are a bunch of people sharing their collective ignorance, so I didn't hurry to join any. Then they started one up during a Sunday School hour with a Bible survey topic led by one of the associate pastors. He finished, and then it morphed into a breezy look at some of the Psalms, followed by Ecclesiastes.
Then the pastor leading it retired and we were invited to merge with another group meeting at the same time. This group was working through a study guide in Romans. They gave me a copy of the book and I dutifully answered the questions, but didn't say much. Thessalonians followed (different author, a little more text oriented), then the same author on a Book about Hebrews. Today I finished preparing (answering the questions for) the last chapter. I see a lot of my answers: "Dunno."
This guy has a formula for these studies: Twelve chapters, roughly dividing the chosen book or books into twelve weekly sections -- I guess it's designed to fit into one quarter of a year: when I was a kid they gave us "Quarterly" books of questions, probably also 12 chapters (but I didn't notice), and I quickly learned I didn't need to read the Bible at all, because each question was answered in the next paragraph of the booklet. These adult study guides aren't quite so trivial. Anyway, each chapter has 16 questions, an unnumbered introductory touchy-feely question, then four or five numbered questions asking about particulars of the (included) Biblical text, then four or five more questions in the same number sequence, presumably asking for inferences from the text, then some more "application" questions, 14 in all, then one more unnumbered summary question.
I got the impression that this guy was getting tired of his formula. He early on made the strong point that Hebrews was written to people who wanted to abandon the Christian message of grace and go back to the temple sacrificial system. That's not my problem. The book of Hebrews in the Bible may have something for me, but this study guide did not direct my attention to it. The Biblical book is too big and complex for a 12-week study, so this guy picked out isolated verses to ask questions about, leaving more than half of the Biblical text unexamined. Worse, his questions did not address any issues that are important to me in my life here and now. Even worse, while every question specifically pointed to a verse or three where the reader was expected to find the answer to that question, many of his questions had no clear answer in the referenced verses. Or maybe "Old-timer's" disease is setting in, and I'm too addled to understand his questions. I don't seem too addled to write and debug large complex software programs, which I spend 50+ hours every week doing...
I still prefer to read the Bible over books about the Bible. I never
had a very good memory, but it's noticibly worse this year than five years
ago. I no longer remember much of what I read in the Bible -- nor for that
matter, much of the code I write: I must re-read and re-think those portions
that don't work properly. I do that (andd fix it if necessary), and then
I move on to the next part of the program. (Not today) but the program
is already getting better than 90% accuracy in the character recognition.
I made some mistake yesterday and broke the whole recognition part -- it
happens from time to time -- but "God teaches my fingers to draw near"
[Ps.144:1]... The Psalmist David was a man of war and his fingers were
taught to fight in a battlefield; my fingers do their stuff on a keyboard.
Same God. I made some corrections, and it's recompiling as I write this.
Maybe it's fixed, maybe I need to work at it some more. God told Adam,
"By the sweat of your brow..." I have life a lot more comfortable than
Adam did, but work is still work.
The most recent (in my reading sequence; its copyright date is 2019, so there are probably another half-dozen sequels not listed inside the title page of this volume) story's central theme is computer security, and while the author may have picked up a few buzzwords to toss around, he shows no complrehension of what they mean, nor how the technology would actually work in his story. One term I use myself in connection with Windows computers that I have programmed in the recent past, is "air-gap firewall." It means no electrical nor wireless connection with the internet at all, which is the only way to be perfectly safe from malware attacks. He has the Bad Guys -- in this case a feminazi guy with female name and pronouns -- creating an ultra-secure consolidated information network for all of the American intelligence agencies to share, with "air-gap firewall" protection.
Houston, we have a problem here. If it really has an air-gap firewall, then none of those agencies can access it unless they are in the same room, and certainly not from the other side of the country and from offices in other countries. The author's description approximately resembles a "virtual private network" (VPN) but he does not use the term. A VPN is slightly more secure than your average internet-connected lab computer, but not by much.
The problem is that all of the internet traffic uses a security model invented for Unix, which is broken. Imagine a computer is like a walled city, with guarded gates at various points around the wall. To go through the gate you need a password, but once inside you have complete access to everything in the whole city. A secret shared by two or more people is not a secret at all: any one of those people can tell his password to a Bad Guy (usually for money). The Unix solution is to have multiple different passwords for different users, and some of those passwords can access only parts of the whole system, but every Unix system, and every VPN of Unix (and Unix-like) systems, has one "root" password that accesses everything. Multiple people know that password, because what happens if the sole password carrier has a heart attack? The whole concept is inherently flawed and vulnerable. Even this author saw (but did not describe) the vulnerability, and the system in his story narrowly avoided opening the doors to every Bad Guy in the world. Not in this story is the next time somebody gives the password away for a million dollars or the life of their daughter. The whole concept is inherently vulnerable. A much safer system is what the story's new system replaced: a bunch of independent systems with their own family of password holders, so that if one of them is compromised, that one system alone is exposed to the world of Bad Guys. Of course sharing data is much harder, but that's the point, isn't it? Which is better, sharing your secret data with the whole world (or at least China and North Korea), or not sharing it at all? There really is no middle ground.
The Unix security model assumes that each password carrier can keep his or her password secure, but that is unrealistic -- especially now, 40 years after King SCOTUS gave all the kids in every American school permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder (and also to be a traitor, just don't get caught). Those kids are now grown up and running the businesses and the government, and every one of them secretly contemplates how to do what they were taught in school. All the fiction I read mirrors real life: (almost) everybody is a Bad Guy who expects not to get caught. In computer tech, it's easy not to get caught -- until you get paid for it and spend some of tha money. The Patriot Act gives every government agency -- and therefore every politician and Bad Guy (arguably the same thing) -- access to the bank records in every bank in the country. Access to bank accounts in Switzerland and a few other tiny countries is harder but not impossible. As soon as you try to spend it, it must pass through American banks, and Poof! You are caught.
Not particularly relevant to the central theme, this author had his
hero Jack Ryan Junior off on some personal mission in Peru, and for a few
pages he described another area of my experience, using local food and
beverage and location descriptions that rang true. The author obviously
had gone there and experienced some of the locale. The difference was notable.
While they lost their tech compass sometime around when the WIRED founders sold out to a non-tech magazine conglomerate, the current issue has joined the party. Weak on tech, they filled out their page count with a couple completely non-tech personality features. Whatever.
Artificial Ignorance ("AI") seems to be the latest scare, so of course
several China-issue articles cover some part of that domain. It seems that
the Chinese are pushing past Western technologists. After a few seconds
of thought, it occurs to me that is to be expected: China treats their
people like machines, so of course it would be easier for them to create
machines like what they imagine people to be. That doesn't mean they can
sell the concept to the rest of the world.
Me, I like to watch (and read about) people who are good at what they do. Lee Child's Jack Reacher, gets in fights from time to time, and for a super-hero like Reacher, six (opponents) against one (Reacher) is a fair fight. Real people are not that good, but it's a fun read. Many modern fiction scenes improbably place super-heroic women in tech positions, then sabotage their character. I first noticed this in David Drake's RCN sci-fi series (see "Like Naaman the Leper" 8 years ago). NCIS has one lab tech with super-heroic tech knowledge but a goofy goth personal appearance. I disregard the improbable gender and appearance -- you only get good at advanced technilogy by focus, which is contrary to female neurology and any kind of side focus like Abbie's goth -- and imagine a couple or three guys in her place. One of the bonus videos interviewed the real NCIS Director, and he confirmed my perception. The NCIS lead agent and his Medical Examiner are more probably good at what they do. The secondary agent is occasionally asserted to be a good agent, but he is only shown on-screen to be a teen-age goof-off. Except one episode where the other characters acknowledged his infantile behavior and he grew up -- for that one episode only. Each episode obviously has its own writers and director, which leads to continuity problems in a TV series like this, but not seen in single-author novel series like Reacher (except when the author retires or dies, and the estate managers hire in second-rate authors to carry on the franchise, like faux-Clancy).
A TV show as popular as they claim for NCIS has to draw in male viewers too, and two out of every three American males are Thinkers who value Truth, Justice, and Duty over people-oriented "relationships," and the lead characters (the teeney-bopper idiot obviously excepted) do focus on Truth, Justice, and Duty. Like the male-dominated churches, the leadership don't have a clue what they are doing right. But they do it. Once or twice the "Making of" flick said they try to match the procedural stuff in the real NCIS, maybe that's it. It certainly isn't the personalities of the actors and their roles, not for me.
The latest faux-Clancy author is different from the previous has-beens,
maybe these guys can't turn them out as fast as the original Tom Clancy
and they are trading off different authors. That leads to continuity problems,
because different authors (like different writers & directors in TV
serials) cannot maintain a consistent personna for their characters. The
real Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan (probably like Clancy himself) was a religious
believer in Moral Absolutes, but this latest author does not believe in
them so he cannot portray such people in his fiction. I find myself skipping
whole chapters.
You know it's the Feminazi altar they bow at, because in Reality women necessarily do a different kind of leadership than guys (see my blog post "Evangelical Feminism" three years ago). The Feminazi Lie is not that men and women are exactly equal, but that women do it better. Maybe that is true in leadership questions, maybe not, but the Real World chooses differently. There are more men in top leadership positions than women because they do it better, and the USA is meritocratic: with minority exceptions (needed so we can see that there is a difference) men dominate leadership positions because they are naturally better at it. Except for POTUS (they still all have male Presidents), and except for the organization the hero works for (unless it's government), the majority of leadership positions are female. No author is going to sabotage his hero, but all the other leaders are quota-filled with females. It's fiction, those leaders don't need to actually lead, so it doesn't matter.
A few authors sabotage the women they put into male-dominated positions by making them into sociopaths (most noticible in David Drake's RCN sci-fi series, see "Like Naaman the Leper" 8 years ago) which the Feminazis are too stupid to notice or criticize. Everybody else just gives the guys in those positions female names and pronouns. They are still guys and not women at all, except on the surface. So I read them as guys with female names and pronouns, and it doesn't spoil the story too badly. It's just not Real-World, a necessary component in the Suspension of Disbelief necessary for enjoyment of fiction.
Bestselling authors are not in the same class with timeless Literature
like Shakespeare or Dickens -- they are, after all, writing to sell books
-- but that's not why I read them. My heavy-duty cognitive resources are
spent in computer programming; reading fiction is just something to do
when I'm too tired to work but not yet sleepy enough to turn out the light.
In the next chapter, different thread, US Government officials are doing the lying. Somebody, I guess it was Lord Acton 160 years ago said, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Still true. It's fiction, but don't let that fool you. Novelists become superstar by writing believable characters.
Thinking about that, I decided that my BS
Detector needed another paragraph: Anybody who grew up outside the
USA is a liar and cannot be trusted. The same goes for Americans, unless
they are mature Christians who have internalized the Golden Rule. Government
officials -- especially police officers -- are all liars. Liars will sometimes
tell the truth, but you never know when. They can swear and promise, but
still be lying, and you never can know. Assume the worst.
A couple or three novels ago, Child decided to make his long-term hero Jack Reacher into a math whiz. The problem is that Lee Child himself is not a math whiz, and as noted with a different author some 13 years ago (see "Reality"), you cannot "bamboozle" math with somebody who understands math. It's best if you write what you know about. I majored in math at Berkeley, and some of Reacher's math is just plain wrong:
A question of force, obviously,which is the product of mass times velocity squared, and that squared part puts a premium on speed, not weight. Bulking up by twenty pounds at the gym is good, because it throws an extra twenty pounds into the mix, but moving your foot twenty percent faster is better [so far, so good]. It does you four hundred percent of a favor [wrong]. Because it gets squared.Child's Reacher squared the wrong number. Adding twenty percent means multiplying the whole by 1.2, so it's the 1.2 that gets squared, which is only 44% better. Even if he had missed the +1 add, any math whiz surely would know that a percent is a fraction of 100, with an implied decimal point to the left, so 20% should be read as "0.20" which when squared is 0.400. Either way it's twice as good as a 20% increase in mass, but an order of magnitude (like ten times) less than Reacher's 400%. Most people (like Child himself) are innumerate (don't think mathematically), so they won't catch mistakes like this -- and certainly his editors and readers are innumerate and didn't -- so Lee Child remains a best-selling author. This wasn't his first math error, just the most eggregious (so far). Whatever. It's still a better read than most of the books in the library.
I live in a "fly-over" state, from which all the people greedy enough to learn dishonest lifestyles have left for better pickings elsewhere.. It's also a "Blue State" (shows blue on the TV election night maps) which tends to oppress the poor and attract the lazy, but King SCOTUS explicitly gave this city permission to push back on the lazy people, so it's not as bad as it is in Portland. Most of the people in this county are still running on the fumes in the tank after King SCOTUS took the Statement of Moral Absolutes off schoolroom walls some 40 years ago, thereby giving kids implicit permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder (just don't get caught), so I still don't need bars on the windows. Yet.
But the world I read about in these faux-Clancy novels is far more degenerate than what I see here in fly-over land. The really Bad Guys in these stories are in Russia and China, and the author has no clue why that might be the case. His President has better values than the fictional Obama clone he replaced, but author Greeney has no clue why, so his administration is trying to do some of the same things that make the Bad Guys into bad guys. Neither Greeney nor his Prez has any clue why, nor why it matters.
Nobody argues against Moral Absolutes any more, not after the first Trump election. Going on some thirty years, half the country hates the current sitting President, and the other half hated his predecessor. All they could do is hope for better luck in the next election. Until Trump won. Then there was outrage. Except outrage makes no sense apart from Moral Absolutes.
Everybody believes in Moral Absolutes, but mostly they only want other people to obey them, not themselves. Moral Absolutes make life livable. You go into a store to buy a $2 product or service, and pay with a $5 bill, and you expect to get $3 in change. 2+3=5 is a moral absolute, binding on all people everywhere and in all time without exception. Truth and Justice are moral absolutes. There is no Justice in Russia in the current faux-Clancy novel. It makes the place unlivable. Businesses cannot survive if their investment is at risk from corrupt judges. Without the expectation of reasonable profit, there is no way that businesses can and are willing to produce the goods and services that make the USA the richest country in the whole world. Moral Absolutes, taught in the Bible -- and nowhere else, not even in most churches -- did that for us, because the Protestants in northern Europe taught people to read and obey the Bible. It made life better for everybody. That's going away now. The faux-Clancy novels are a grim picture of what life will be like here in the USA (including here in fly-over states) before the end off this century. The USA will no longer be a super-power. I read the last chapter in the Book, and we are not in it.
Not my problem, I have no grandchildren. Besides, I can't do anything
about it, I'm a zero. No, worse than that, I'm a negative. Whatever I tell
people to do, they do the opposite. When I started going to this church,
the senior pastor put all the Bible references in his sermon notes handout.
None of the other (Associate) pastors did, when it was their turn to preach.
So I thanked him for the Bible references. That was the last I ever saw
of Bible references in the sermon notes. I'm a negative. It is what it
is.
After some consideraation, I think I know why that is. We (Europeans and their descendants in other countries like the USA) have a 500-year history of thousands of printers printing books and newspapers and designing new fonts that are more readable. And if I (as a human reader) can tell the difference between this letter and that, then I can write code to tell the computer to make the same discrimination. I suspect that most modern OCR engines use neural nets, which do not have that advantage. By comparison, a thousand years ago text fonts were designed to be easier to write, because the total time to hand-write a page often exceeded the total time of all readers reading it.
Here's where the Moral Absolutes come in: The Christian value system -- as taught in the Bible, but not often taught from the pulpits in churches -- is based on the Golden Rule (GR). About the time of the invention of the printing press (and perhaps for some of the same reasons) Martin Luther and John Wycliffe translated the Bible into their respective language of the people, and the Protestants taught their congregation to read and obey it. So thoughtful (Protestant) Christians tried to live the GR, which basically meant they wanted to make life better for everybody, including the readers of the printed books and newspapers. Which led to more readable fonts. And everybody benefits from their efforts, including the Catholics with no reason to do it themselves.
By contrast, Hebrew has been a dead language for some 2600 years (until the recreation of the nation of Israel in 1948), and the language was preserved almost entirely in hand-written Bibles. The number of readers was hundreds (or perhaps thousands after the Protestants made Bible reading more popular, so translators needed to know Hebrew), which did not justify making the fonts more readable -- until it became a spoken language again in 1948. In Israel today the Hebrew font faces are evolving to be much more readable, in part because Jewish rabbis teach their adherents the GR. Islam has no such moral teaching, so there is little incentive to better the life of other people in Muslim cultures, and their printed text reflects that lack of virtue, both hard to read and hard to print. Not My Problem.
The USA, having removed the statement of Moral Absolutes from schoolroom walls some 40 years ago, thereby giving school kids (and their successors) implicit permission to lie, cheat, steal, rape, and murder (just don't get caught, but nobody expects to get caught), and some of those kids are now grown up and designing new fonts... Have you ever noticed the new trend in numerals, that they distinguish zero from the letter Oh by a slanted crossbar that makes it hard to distinguish from eight? In the Goode Olde Dayes, the letter Oh was wider than a zero, and no more distinction was ever necessary, because letters and digits were never mixed, so you always knew, but if you didn't, the letter was rounder and wider. Today there is one and only one circumstance where digits and letters are jumbled together, and that is in computer passwords, which nobody ever gets to read anyway, because they are so hard to memorize that we have software tools to type them, and they are never displayed anyway. There are hundreds -- even thousands -- of contexts where the quick determination of an eight from a zero is important, like when you are reading the time off a digital watch or a (stupid) "smart" phone that tells you it's "18:88" in the morning. People no longer care about making life better for their customers, it's "my way or the hiway."
Moral absolutes, given by God to make life better for everybody.
Last year / Later this year
Complete Blog Index
Itty Bitty Computers home page