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For some reason this newspaper snippet cracked me the heck up.

… So, surprise surprise… after almost fifteen years, Pete Rose has finally publicly that he bet on baseball.

It’s obvious– to me anyway– that he’s doing it for a singular goal: to get into the Hall of Fame.  I’ve read some articles and opinions (I haven’t read his just-released book), but it doesn’t seem to me he’s really very sorry for what he did.  Moreover, although he admitted to wrongdoing he didn’t admit that what he did hurt the sport, he didn’t actually apologize (no “I’m sorry”s anywhere), and the timing of the announcement and release of the book make it all too clear he’s worried he’ll never get into the Hall if he doesn’t at least put on some appearances of remorse.

Today’s newspaper quoted some statistic like “80% of baseball fans want to see Rose in the Hall of Fame”.  Personally, I think he should get what he deserves.  The lifetime ban from the game is just punishment, and with it comes a lifetime ineligibility for the Hall.  You break the rules, you’re out.  I can’t really believe eighty percent of the people think he deserves that honor, but maybe I’m in the (small) minority by thinking cheaters shouldn’t win.

Remorse aside, I think that letting him into the Hall “dilutes” it for those who are more deserving.  There are great men in the Hall, and to add to their ranks a cheater and a liar makes their honor that much less.

I just read a lengthy but fantastic treatise by Paul Graham entitled “What You Can’t Say”. It expounds on the strange question of what today’s “moral fashion” has made it unpopular, unconfortable, or even dangerous to say.

There were many wonderful points in the article, but one that was particularly interesting to me was the part where he talked about picking your battles. It’s not necessarily wise to argue something that’s unpopular (even if you believe it) because it distracts you from other– probably more important– things.

“Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as ‘yellowist’, as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you’ll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you’ll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you’re mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

“I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics, or that pro-Israel groups are ‘compiling dossiers’ on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being sued for violating the DMCA, part of me wants to say, ‘All right, you bastards, bring it on.’ The problem is, there are so many things you can’t say. If you said them all you’d have no time left for your real work.”

That’s good advice, methinks. I disagree with a lot of the current political and philosophic “fashions”, but arguing about them is typically just a waste of breath.

He finishes the topic with a great paragraph:

“The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.”

This is probably why my friends often get annoyed with my views. 🙂

“As the light changed from red to green to yellow, and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.”

For some reason this cracks me up.

It turns out it was my e-mail .sig about eight years ago.

Today we were playing on the kids’ computer as a family, and Kyra said she wanted to try the game called “Klickety”. None of us had any idea what it was, so we tried it. A board popped onto the screen with a bunch of colored squares. Clicking a few of them revealed that connecting colors disappear and the rest of the board “falls” into place to fill the gap.

The objective is to end up with as few blocks as possible, but it quickly became obvious that it’s much trickier than it seems. No matter how careful you might be, you end up with a checkerboard of color at the end.

Interestingly, Kyra proved to be quite good. She managed to whittle the 150 initial blocks down to 22. Apparently she’s a savant or something.

Now I’m hooked, and will simply have to continue playing until I get the ultimate goal: zero blocks left. With a bit of blind luck I pulled off a single block at the end, but I don’t know how in the world I’ll get it down to zero.

Ahh, another benefit of the Computer Age…

In my never-ending quest to see just how geeky I can really be, I checked my “Sent Mail” folder to see how many e-mail messages I sent through all of 2003. It turns out there are 9,835 messages in there– or roughly 27 messages for every day of the year. Assuming I don’t send many on the weekends (since I don’t) that means around 37 per workday.

Diving deeper into the math, and assuming I work around nine hours a day, that’s 4.2 messages every hour or a message every fourteen minutes. Sheesh. I am truly a geek.

And don’t even get me started on the number of spam messages I received in 2003…

Interesting stuff:

A week and a half ago, police in Johannesburg South Africa arrested fourteen people accused of operating a bootleg human-organ operation.

Apparently they would fly poor Brazilian citizens to South Africa, where they underwent surgery and had a kidney removed. They were paid between ten and thirteen thousand dollars for the procedure, and then flown back home (all expenses paid).

The kidneys were then implanted in wealthy South Africans who paid over $100,000 for the operation. After leaving the hospital, they didn’t have to worry about dialysis any more and could return to a normal life.

The Brazilian donors were all volunteers, and the money they received was often enough to buy a house, open a business, or realize other financial dreams (I imagine $13k goes farther in Brazil than in the U.S.). The South African recipients were all in dire need of a transplant and had the money to do it. And the doctors involved made a handsome profit along the way.

Everyone wins, right?

Well, it turns out there are international laws forbidding the sale of human organs. There are doubtless some moral and ethical issues. There’s the omnipresent discussion of rich versus poor, and who’s taking advantage of who.

So, the question of the day: should this sort of thing be legitimized? If everyone goes home healthy (and often wealthy) is there really a reason why it shouldn’t be allowed? Personally, I don’t have a problem with this sort of thing and in fact, it seems to me that making it illegal will accomplish two things: (1) make it more expensive and thus harder to do for those who have some money and dire medical need, and (2) make it more prone to mistakes and bungled operations, as the doctors are forced to operate underground.

There are some 83,000 people on the kidney donation list in the U.S. alone; this shortage only encourages the sort of behavior described above. If I had serious kidney problems, and knew I’d be on a list for ten years, but had the option of scraping together some cash (maybe taking out a second mortgage or whatever) and receiving the kidney of some Third World farmer who would then be the richest guy in town, I’d do it.

Francis Bacon once quipped, “Knowledge is power”.

But in today’s world of technology, I wonder if that’s still true. I would say that a more accurate statement might be “data is power”.

Consider: in Bacon’s day (late 1500’s) the printing press was still relatively new, and printed material (“data”) wasn’t yet in widespread use, nor was it easily accessible to the common person. Thus, those who possessed knowledge were powerful– they were highly paid, highly regarded, and sought by those in power. I’ve heard it said that Benjamin Franklin was one of the last people who “knew” something about almost every area of human knowledge. In those times, people with knowledge were indeed powerful.

Today, it is impossible to know something about everything. Cultural and scientific advances have brought us so much information that no single person can possibly have that degree of “knowledge”. So now, rather than a handful of polyglots we have huge numbers of specialists who are extremely well-versed in their narrow field but do not possess the general knowledge that Franklin did.

Thus, it seems that knowledge is not as powerful as it once was. Said another way, one man’s knowledge is another man’s trivia.

We see that data is everywhere. Those narrow-minded scientists who study a particular variety of bacteria publish their research and make it available in journals and the internet. The garage musicians who specialize in grunge-ska music upload their songs to their web site or burn CD’s and hand them to friends. The journalist who once wrote for a hometown paper has the ability to spread his words throughout the world via the hometown paper’s web site. All of those people take their knowledge, transform it to data, and share that data with the world.

So in my mind, it is the data– or more accurately, the control of that data– that defines power today. The network administrator who keeps the web site running, the panel that approves or denies journal articles, the editor who tosses out the news story… these are the people who have power. They can allow or prevent one man’s knowledge from reaching his audience.

Granted, such control also existed in Bacon’s day, and Franklin’s, but with the vast abundance of data available today– many orders of magnitude greater than either of those men could conceive– the role of the “gatekeeper” of the data is rising in importance.

Knowledge cannot be saved; data can. (To “save” knowledge you have to write it down or put it in some format other than electrochemical impulses in your brain, at which point it becomes data.) Data can be copied, and transferred, and changed. It can also be destroyed, lending a particular power to those in control as they can cause information to be lost forever– at least until the next person comes along and re-discovers it.

I think it’s a sign of the times, and an interesting commentary on our technological society, that data has become more powerful (more important?) than knowledge.

So what is “power” in today’s world?

I built a new computer for the kids yesterday.

Their old one, from perhaps a year ago, was a pretty pathetic old Pentium 150 or something. It ran Windows 98, because nothing more recent (from Microsoft) would run on it, and in the end it had so many issues that it simply wasn’t worth using. I figured the kids would be better off without a computer than struggling through various Windows crashes and failed software installations.

But they’ve been getting training in school, and playing on Laralee’s laptop a bit, so I figured I should set up something a little nicer for them. I cobbled together some nicer components I had laying around, and came up with a pretty nice P3-600 system that was actually faster than our laptops anyway.

After a brief debate with myself, I decided to completely forego Windows and head straight for Linux. The stuff they’re doing is pretty much web surfing and playing MP3 tunes, so there’s no reason I should worry about all the goofball kids’ software that only runs on Windows 98 or ME or whatever. I broke out my Jinux installation CD’s and set up KDE for them.

However, my usual mode of logging in– typing a username and password at the command prompt, and then running X manually– was obviously a bit more convoluted than a five-year-old might be expected to handle. So I messed around with the KDE login screen and managed to come up with a beautiful, easy to use, highly customizable login page. They can click the “kids” icon, then click “Go!” and they’re in. But even better, I made the system auto-login for them so it just pops right up into KDE and they can click the little desktop icons (one is the Lego logo, and the other is the Barbie logo) to launch the Konqueror web browser and play their little Flash games.

Adding a couple more desktop icons for MP3 playlists gives them the ability to click on, say, Mickey Mouse and get a bunch of Disney music playing in XMMS (the open-source alternative to Winamp). A big red “power” button lets them shut everything down with a click. Pepper it with some fun cartoonish icons, and they have a fun system that’s easy to use.

Ahh, ain’t Linux grand?

For the fourth year, the House Committee on Government Reform evaluated the computer security practices of federal agencies. And for the fourth year, it looks like our federal computer security sucks.

The overall grade was “D”, with several agencies earning the coveted “F” mark. The Department for Homeland Security– evaluated for the first time– got a big fat “F”. That’s particularly interesting, as one of their missions is to secure the national computer networks. Apparently they can’t even secure their own.

So, this begs the question: we appear to be dumping vast sums of money into the Homeland Security initiatives, yet we’re constantly reading about how airport security is just as lax as ever (although far more irritating), and now it seems the computer networks are in terrible shape. What, exactly, are the money and all the new agencies doing for us?

Maybe it’s because of my vocation, but I’d argue that in the 21st century it’s computer networks that are the “targets” for the Bad Guys. Physical security is important, but no one’s going to crash a jet any more– they’re going to try to take down the power grid, or disrupt the water supply, or just throw the federal government into chaos by scrambling computer links. Cyber-terrorism and bio-terrorism are the ones to watch out for.

Sigh. If only I was in charge…