A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Dave has just released newsRiver.root v0.2. It introduces an Export OPML command, a browser-based preference system and so on. The automatic update doesn’t seem to work - I had to “curl -O” it in to the Tools folder. Help debug it!
Need a creationist? Free Talk Live talks about giantism and dwarfism, then get a creo calling in. Fun.
Austin Cline has an article about how to blog more effectively about atheism, philosophy and religion. Most of it is sensible advice whatever you are blogging about. It also points out the importance of getting honest views out there. It’s far easier for many religious people to create straw men out of us than it is to engage properly (funny, they also condemn worship of false idols…).
Hence how, in the last few months, as the batallions in the “War on Christmas” have been slaughtered by Bill O’Reilly’s sword of petty righteousness, we’ve seen the stereotype of the “Offended Atheist” pop up. The Offended Atheist is the non-believer who objects to religious verbiage and symbolism because it offends them. They oppose “In God We Trust” because it offends their atheist sensibility.
The Offended Atheist can then be dismissed quite simply by saying “Don’t be so silly and so Politically Correct - Jesus loves you!”. But the objections to the uncritical acceptance and endorsement, by government, of religious crapola like publicly-funded Nativity scenes does not stem from “offensiveness” or “political correctness”. It comes from the feeling that the government should stay out of the religion business.
It comes from a strong support for secularism. I don’t want to see religious endorsements by government, because it’s not appropriate. We all pay for government, regardless of our religious belief. It has some tasks we have given it (if you believe in the social contract - I personally don’t, since it’s the contractual equivalent of vapourware - it doesn’t exist!), and it should try and do those. The rest of us can erect Christmas trees and set up nativity scenes.
In my area, there are two big Christmas scenes set up each year. One is a Nativity scene, set up in the front window of a house by the old woman who lives there. I remember walking past there as a child, and seeing it there. She collects for charity and has a box outside the window for people to drop some cash in there. There is another, which is rather more gaudy and profane - with dancing Santas and reindeer and a very Hollywood nativity scene. This also collects for charity.
Have I, the local friendly atheist, been knocking on their door telling them how offensive these scenes are? Of course not. Get a grip on reality. I actually quite like them. But, at the same time, I support secularism strongly and avidly. If they were government funded, I would have complained. It’s not the religion that ‘offends’ me. It’s the combination of government and religion which annoys me. And, whatever your religion, it should annoy you too.
Jason Kottke on Dave Winer: “Dave has his finger on the pulse of the part of the web I care most about. He gets links so quickly sometimes that I think he’s actually part RSS aggregator”. Dude, he is.
I just unsubbed from Digg. The feeds don’t actually link to the stories, and the pages on digg.com often stress my poor old iBook.
Austin Cline has a review of a book called Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America and he says: “The Christian Right regularly accuses gays of trying to ‘recruit’ young people into the homosexual lifestyle. For such Christians, it’s inconceivable that people would be gay simply because it’s what’s most natural for them - being gay must be something like a movement which one is converted to by current members. The truth, however, is that Christian Right are the ones doing the recruiting.” Yep, and certain dispositions - homosexuality being one of them - don’t aid said recruitment.
Andrew Brown in the Grauniad is writing books in Open Office, but thinks that it’s the evidence against Eric Raymond’s “Many eyes make bugs shallow”. You know what? I think that the reason why OOo is buggy and annoying is because it is recreating unexciting rather than forcing us to rethink. I use LyX, which is software which forces you to rethink. It took me a week or two to adapt to ‘WYSIWYM’, but I now write better essays as a result.
Good software forces you to mentally reconsider what you are doing, to adapt to the software. The essence of “users and developers partying together” isn’t that the developer should be a servant to the user, but that the user should also let the developer take the reins and lead you down different and interesting paths, or at least make it easy for users to do so.
In Dave Winer’s description of OPML, he describes how different people see different things: “Every creative person brings his or her two cents to defining what computers are, what they do, and how they do it”. When I see OpenOffice, or it’s closed source daddy, Microsoft Office, I see boredom, wasting time and hindrances. That’s my personal reaction, of course.
I don’t want an open source Word. I don’t want an open source Word replacement. I want an open source Word destroyer (almost as much as I want an open source PowerPoint or Publisher destroyer). I want something to blow my brains out and carry me to a more creative place. The more something does that, the more I think it’s good software.
