A very interesting NY Times article that discusses socio-economic class, and the opinions that are common to each.

[ Link: What Class Are You? ]

BMW has embraced semacode. Too cool.

[ Link: BMW Creates Semacode For European 1 Series Launch ]

The sad thing is that looking at my own semacode above I’m struck with the notion that it looks like a Desktop Tower Defense layout.

I got all the way signed up and was about ready to start my first class, and yesterday I put an end to it. I’ve already contacted my original, brick-and-mortal university to let them know I’d be enrolling there again.

Too much to go into, but UoP is a joke. The people who sign you up are salespeople. The whole place is a total hack. Is it legit? Sure. Will the degree get me what I want? Sure. But I don’t care.

Ultimately it came down to self-respect. The place just has a trashy feel to it — like it’s a money-making scheme that’s barely holding itself together through legal representation and marketing. No thanks. I’ll pass.:

 

 

I figured something out just now. When I experience something that provokes my interest or pulls at my emotions, all I can think of is calling a friend to talk about it. I want to appreciate these things with someone. From that I realized that my overall goal was simple:

All I want in life is to have amazing experiences with great people.

All that remains is to define “amazing experiences”. The short answer, I suppose, is that of exploring the world and discovering things. That’s on the intellectual side. On the primal side I suppose it equates to tapping into as many rewarding emotions as possible without being dangerous to others.

If you only had two paragraphs, what would your life’s goal be?

We’re all familiar with the occasional maulings that take place during language translation, and most of them are harmless enough to be ignored. There’s one in the Bible, however, that is so massive that very few people know about it, and those that do rarely speak of it.

Love your neighbor as yourself. — Jesus 22:36-40

As it turns out, this extremely famous quote is not at all what it seems. The word “neighbor” is an incorrect translation of the original word — reyacha. Rather than mean “a fellow human”, which is how most Christians are taught to accept the word “neighbor”, reyacha actually means “fellow Jew“.

Fellow Jew.

Jesus was in fact Jewish (contrary to popular belief) and he was telling his followers to be kind to fellow Jews. This teaching doesn’t say to go out and love those that weren’t like them. That’s a contrived, feel-good translation based on modern morality. It wasn’t about brotherly love and open acceptance. It was about not mistreating those within your own special group.

Interestingly enough, this is a tenet (unspoken or otherwise) of Jewish culture, and it has been for some time. In fact, Jews are often criticized precisely for this behavior. I’d argue that it’s not so much that they treat others poorly, but more so that they treat each other better.

And that’s the interesting part — Jesus was promoting the same negative behavior that we see within religion today — the idea of grouping together and only looking after your own.

Some may say that Jesus taught a more open kindness in the good Samaratin story, but it matters not if there are clear cases where he teaches the opposite. And that’s the point — people take what they want from the Bible; if it exemplifies poor moral character there will inevitably be those that emulate that behavior.

Example: In Matthew 15:23 a Canaanite (non-Jewish) woman is trying to get help from him. He says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” And when she pleads, “Lord help me!” Jesus says,

It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.

So, the food was for the Jews, and a Canaanite was asking for it. That, to Jesus, is analogous to the family dog being fed food intended for human children. I think this meets even the highest standard for racism. To be fair, Jesus actually ends up healing her daughter after she says, “yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”, but I’d argue that this doesn’t help matters much.

To me, the following serves as a good summary of the encounter:

1. Woman asks for help.
2. Jesus says he only helps Jews.
3. She begs him.
4. He says it’s not right to give human food to dogs.
5. She says, “Ok, I’m a dog, but dogs get scraps from their masters!”
6. He acknowledges that her faith (and submission) is strong and heals her daughter.

To me, the fact that he ended up helping the woman doesn’t make it better in the slightest. Based on his own words, it was more like tossing scraps down from the table — like it was a dog’s reward for submitting. Remember, she basically accepted being compared to a dog (relative to a Jew) in hopes she would be helped.

Conclusion

So what does all this mean? What’s my purpose in pointing this out? Simple, really: I’m illustrating why we shouldn’t get our morality from the Bible. Here we have Jesus being racist against non-Jews, other places he’s being rude to his mother, and in another random case he kills a fig tree for no reason. But then he’s also espoused some of the most beautiful language ever written.

The only path for a modern, moral person is to pick and choose from the Bible — embracing the good within it and pretending the horrible parts don’t exist. And that’s the point: decent Christians already have an innate moral compass that guides them through these decisions. My hope is that we as humans will one day start listening to it instead of ancient and dogmatic texts that do far more harm than good.:

Yes, Address Book.

The fact that the iPhone runs OS X and I can sync my contacts (with metadata) between my mobile device and laptop is invaluable to me. Sure, the iPhone looks nice and has some cool features and a wicked UI, but I have over 250 contacts and I like their associated pictures, multiple phone numbers, email addresses, and other information to be clean and current.

I can’t stand having that information get mangled in translation between platforms. If iPhone avoids this (which it sounds like it will) I’ll be happy with it despite almost any number of flaws. If it makes calls and does contact management well I’ll happily deal with any rev1 issues while waiting for rev2, and I think this may be the case for many others as well.:

Expect iPhone to succeed, but to do so mostly because it does the basic stuff really well.:

No technology interests me more than the semantic web. I have no doubt that I will spend many years working on projects related to this vision — starting now. The concept captures my ‘grep understanding knowledge‘ theme beautifully, which is probably why it draws me so. From Wikipedia:

The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

And since ideas ride protocols, the protocol of interest here looks to be RDF. Here’s the W3C description of RDF:

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) integrates a variety of applications from library catalogs and world-wide directories to syndication and aggregation of news, software, and content to personal collections of music, photos, and events using XML as an interchange syntax. The RDF specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange of knowledge on the Web.

Based on the knowledge that I have so far (which admittedly isn’t much), I’m quite convinced that this — the semantic web riding on top of RDF or a similar XML-based protocol — is going to change the way we use the Internet. Not like YouTube or Facebook “changed” things, but more like going from BBSs to the Internet.

Here’s an example from W3C:

The word semantic stands for the meaning of. The semantic of something is the meaning of something. The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.

• The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool.
• John Lennon was a member of the Beatles.
• The record “Hey Jude” was recorded by the Beatles.

Sentences like these can be understood by people. But how can they be understood and processed by computers?

This is what the Semantic Web is all about. Describing things in a way that computers applications can understand. The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages.

The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price).

My specific area of focus, however, is going to be looking at how to leverage this technology with people.

That’s all I’m saying for now for two reasons. First, I need to research more to make sure the technology can do what I’m thinking it can. Secondly, it’s cooler if I don’t talk about it. Let me know out of band if you are interested in discussing and/or working on the project with me.:

Hint: Think “semantic personal information exchange using RDF”.

1. Metallica
2. Slayer
3. Lamb of God

Yes, Lamb of God is that good.

Keep in mind that this is looking at multiple factors. The list changes drastically when you take into account being a pioneer (Iron Maiden shows up), and falling from grace (Metallica drops off).

I put Metallica over Slayer because of albums like Master of Puppets. There they show massive range, moving from the technical to the heavy without effort. Slayer are kings of what they do, but that’s pretty much all they do.

Lamb of God I’d say is set to be the next great metal band, although there is plenty of competition for that slot.

Pioneers

You can’t put these guys on the list really because they weren’t even playing the same sport, let alone the same game. But they have to be mentioned because they invented the whole thing.

• Sabbath
• Iron Maiden
• Led Zeppelin
• Morbid Angel
• Mercyful Fate
• Anthrax

Other Metal Greats

These simply must be mentioned.

• Arsis
• Opeth
• Protest the Hero
• Trivium
• Pantera
• Testament
• Sepultura

[ Updated: 06.08.08 ]

OMG this is awesome. This should be the companion image to the BOFH literature.