Entries from January 2006 ↓

Lately, I’ve been pondering one of life’s greatest mysteries: why does my brain always make my body do such crazy shit? Today it ordered me to wake up in the middle of the night and stagger downstairs to walk some bread and toast the dog. It forced me to imbibe massive quantities of caffeine and then skip the gym and go to work and sit in a dark cube all day watching a square of reflected sunlight creep slowly down the carpet. It makes me stay up past midnight every night clicking my way down internet rabbit holes. It routinely convinces me to polish off whole boxes of cold Pop Tarts in one sitting.

My body always tells me that these are the wrong things to do. But I do them anyway.

And the brain does even crazier things than that, of course. It forces whole countries to go to war over who’s squatting on what piece of land; it makes people jealous and afraid and tyrannical and suicidal and homocial and omnicidal. It afflicts us with an effortless proclivity for the seven deadly sins and then makes us feel guilty about them. It hooks us on drugs and booze and sex. It’s a very strange brain.

But yesterday, quite suddenly, I understood it all. The thing sitting inside our heads telling us what to do isn’t our brain at all. It’s an alien invader.

Here’s what happened. Two million years ago a race of ganglionic fudge creatures decided to destroy our planet. They squeezed into their little spaceships and hurtled across transdimensional space and landed on Earth and leapt out with squishy little war cries brandishing squishy little weapons. And then fell silent.

Because they’d miscalculated horribly: the earth was about 4000 times larger than they thought it was, and it was populated with lots and lots of really big creatures with even bigger appetites; not to mention diseases and volcanic eruptions and hurricanes and earthquakes and all that stuff. Half of the invading brain army died in the first month.

But in an amazing stroke of luck, the brains happened upon a harmless race of hominids with furry bodies and opposable thumbs and a large cranial cavity where they kept little things they’d have put in their pockets if they’d been smart enough to invent pockets, which they weren’t. In fact, the hominids weren’t really smart enough to do anything but sleep and eat and mate. And eat. And sleep. They went around collecting berries and getting eaten by dinosaurs and reproducing and falling off of cliffs and just generally living in harmony with the earth. They were the happiest most oblivious most well-adjusted creatures the universe had ever made.

They were perfect.

But the brains crept up on the hominids while they slept and squeezed through their nose into their empty head-cavities and set up shop. They figured out the mechanism of their new vehicles, and then rewired them so that they were easier to manipulate. They made them sharpen sticks and make fires and build wheels. And then they broke them up into separate little groups that soon began to assault each other with sharp sticks, and set each other on fire, and run over each over with big stone wheels. They made them kill everything they saw and spread out through the world like weeds. They made them build settlements and then towns and then cities and then countries. They taught them how to smelt iron and mix gunpowder and build factories that did nothing all day but belch filth into the sky. They showed them how to make bombs that ate whole swathes of the earth. They gave them the secret of life and told them to make new diseases with it.

And now they’re nearly done. It’s taken the brain almost two million years, but it’s almost finished destroying the world.

Not bad for a little gray squishy thing.

Of all the arguments in defense of the Bush administration’s tendency to spy illegally on the communications of US citizens, the strangest by far is the “Already Screwed” theory, which maintains that our privacy is compromised on a daily basis anyway, by forces inside the government and out, so another set of prying eyes hardly matters. So we shouldn’t worry about it.

I frankly find this line of reasoning mystifying, even though I do agree with its predicate: our privacy is constantly assaulted on every front, via tracking cookies that monitor our surfing habits or web sites that sell our phone records to anyone willing to pay or national security letters that give the FBI unfettered access to our personal data. Real privacy is much harder to come by in this country than it used to be. But I’m not sure why that makes it ok for the government to listen in on our phone conversations without a warrant.

Here’s a scenario. You’re robbed one night: a burglar comes into your house and makes off with your stash of petty cash, some jewelry, and, say, a prized 20-sided die whose loss affects you very deeply. When you wake up in the morning and discover the theft, you feel more than just financially stricken. Someone has come into your house without your permission and taken something that wasn’t theirs. You’re angry and bereaved. You feel helpless, violated.

Ok. Imagine a couple of days later you’re sitting at your desk when an official looking guy in a grey suit comes by and sits down and tells you that he’s from the government, and he’d like access to your bank account, please, along with power of attorney over all your financial affairs. You ask him why the hell he needs that, and he says he’d like to take all the money out of your savings account and put it into his. When you protest, he says, well, you were just robbed yesterday, weren’t you? I mean, you’ve already been robbed. It’s not like you haven’t been robbed before. So what’s the big deal? I’m just going to rob you a little more. Oh, and also I’m the government.

It doesn’t make any sense. The fact that our privacy is dwindling doesn’t mean that we should just give it up entirely … it means we should do everything in our power to get back what we’ve lost. At the very least, it means we need to keep a very tight hold on what little we have left.

Glass Maze presents a condensed version of yesterday’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings:

Senator Joseph Biden (D): Good morning. Let’s get right into it. I’ll start by saying that bullshit bullshit bloviate bullshit abortion bullshit. But bloviate bullshit right to privacy bullshit bullshit blather bloviate. So, Judge Alito, I ask you: bloviate bloviate bullshit bloviate?

Judge Samuel Alito: I can’t answer that.

Biden: Bloviate! Bullshit blather bloviate bloviate!

Alito: Sorry. No.

Biden: Well, I must tell you, judge, I’m very disappointed that blah blah bloviate bullshit bullshit.

Alito: I cannot comment on your disappointment.

Biden: Thank you. No more questions.

#

Senator Orin Hatch (R): Judge, I know you must be exhausted by now, after all these hours of brilliant brilliant testimony, but we have an important and solemn duty here today, and as much as I respect you and your record and your flawless integrity and your lovely family and your honesty and everything else about you, I just can’t pull any punches today. I hope you don’t mind.

Alito: No. I do not mind.

Hatch: Good. Now, Judge Alito, is it your opinion, as a seasoned and brilliant member of the judiciary, as a smart and moderate judge in the mainstream of American thought, that it’s wrong to murder people?

Alito: Yes. It is wrong to murder people.

Hatch: Thank you, sir. I must say I admire your effortless grasp of constitutional principle in this matter. Now, let me ask you: do you think it’s wrong to steal candy from small children?

Altio: Yes. That is also wrong.

Hatch: A bedrock constitutional principle, that. Thank you. Now, one last question, and I’ll let you go. How is that chair you’re sitting in? Is it comfortable? It doesn’t look comfortable.

Alito: No. It is not comfortable.

Hatch: Thank you for you honesty, Judge Alito. That’s the kind of straightforward talk that’s so lacking in Washington these days. No further questions.

Glass Maze: watching the Senate go through the motions so you don’t have to.

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Update: EJ Dionne says it much better.

Back in the dim recesses of time a programming language named COBOL was born. It was a strange creature, built on ancient notions that, in the harsh light of the twenty-first century, seem as quaint and obsolete as those squat space-age concept houses that sprouted up in the sixties, all glass and metal and odd angles and strange layered roofs.

COBOL’s big idea was this: a computer language should resemble as much as possible human language, so that “managers and grocery clerks” could read it and write it. Pursuant to this dubious and quixotic goal, it uses “paragraphs” and “verbs” instead of “blocks” and “keywords”, and expresses itself in a bastardized approximation of English sentences. The result is a sort of clipped robot-speak syntax:

IF X EQUALS 3 OR 4
    ADD 1 TO X
    MULTIPLY Y BY 2
    MOVE SPACES TO S.

This syntax also happens to be ridiculously verbose, at least compared to modern-day languages. In Python, if you want to multiply two numbers and assign the product to a couple of variables, you’d do this:

foo = bar = 10 * 3.1415

Easy to read, not too difficult to understand. Here’s COBOL’s approach:

MULTIPLY 10 BY 3.1415 GIVING foo
MOVE foo TO bar

Hmmm. Pretty easy to read, I guess, and sort of English-y. But when I look at this, I don’t think hey, cool, easy to read! I think, hey, shit, hard to type! My carpal tunnel flares up just thinking about writing all that. This may be a godsend to programmers who get paid by the word, but otherwise it’s all purple prose and overwrought diction.

If C++ came up to COBOL to asked for direction to the nearest bathroom, the conversation would go something like this:

C++: me.hello(you)

COBOL: Greetings. How are you. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance on this most auspicious of days, the day on which I have made your acquaintance. Hello.

C++: me.bathroom.directions = you.bathroom.directions

COBOL: It has come to my attention that you, C++, are seeking directions to the bathroom. The bathroom is where you wish to go. Extrapolating, I further speculate that a piss is what you wish to take in the bathroom to which you want to go.

C++: break

COBOL: An interrupt has occurred in C++’s request for a bathroom in which the piss that C++ wishes to take is to occur. The information that was previously requested will now be assigned to a global variable and kept in abeyance until such time as C++ …

C++: exit()

COBOL: … is ready to use the information which was previously requested on the subject of bathrooms in which various bodily effluvia may or may not be extruded via certain excretory apparatuses …

Of all the misguided efforts over the past several decades to make software easier to write, this notion that computer languages should be more like actual language is perhaps the silliest. Human language serves the human brian, a massive unkempt ganglionic supercomputer that is possibly the most complex entity in the universe — so complex that it doesn’t even understand itself. It can handle the maddening unspecificity, the sprawling chaos of our spoken languages — untangling idioms, parsing grammatical ambiguities, registering implicit connotations. English words can have many different and unrelated meanings, accreted over centuries of use. Our brains have to tease out the appropriate definition based entirely on abstruse factors like context and connotation and a priori knowledge of the speaker’s speech patterns. And even they don’t always get it right. This is not a good model for a computer language, which demands rigor and cannot bear ambiguity. We have a hard enough time getting programs right without having to worry about connotation and inference.

Ok. Fine. COBOL is easy to mock. We in the post-FORTRAN world are pretty much conditioned to mock COBOL. It’s domain-specific and verbose and overwrought, it’s antiquated and obsolete, it’s a shambling brontosaurus in a world of skittering raptors, blah blah blah. But the funny thing is … people are still writing COBOL. Lots of it. There are about 50 billion lines of COBOL floating around out there, with more added each year. It’s still happening. This says something about what passes for conventional wisdom in our industry, and about the danger of discounting the tried and true even in an field where every new advance has the lifespan of a fruitfly. But still, this just blows my mind. It’s sort of equivalent to hacking your way to the heart of a dark rainforest and finding not a small isolated tribe of men and women still using stone-age technology and listening to disco, but an entire civilization in this state. It’s the kind of thing that makes you question your basic assumptions about the universe.

I slipped into a volition hole last night. Volition holes are hidden pit traps: you don’t see them until you’ve fallen in, and you don’t realize what’s happened until much later. But I’d fallen in. Eight o’clock found me curled up on the couch staring listlessly at a blank television set while the dog galavanted at my feet trying desperately to get my attention. My mind was a walled empty space under siege, armies of plans and responsibilities and desires hammering at the gates and scaling the walls and hurling flaming balls of pitch into the emptiness, all in vain.

One of the things you realize when you’re in the volition hole is that time is purely subjective: it can’t exist in any important way without the participation of the creatures it governs. A life shorn of activity is a life shorn of time. The clock keeps ticking in the objective world, of course: your body ages and seasons change and events eventuate, but the volitionless lie static in a bubble floating on the surge of the maelstrom, unaffected and oblivious. I did nothing, thought about nothing, accomplished nothing for three hours that passed like three seconds, then went to bed and dreamed empty dreams.

I woke to find the dog’s snout pressed earnestly into mine. New day dawning. I took him outside and, watching him perform his morning ablutions, found myself unreasonably happy to be standing there in the pre-dawn dark, shivering in the chill. Because sometime during the night I’d apparently crawled out of the volition hole, and rejoined the world of action, and of time.

It was good to be back. It’s always good to be back.

I don’t generally see any problem with people engaging in minor forms of worship in places where the constitution technically forbids it: federal buildings, schools, etc. But stuff like what’s going on Indiana right now really creeps me out. A judge just told the legislature there that they couldn’t invoke Christ’s name in the course of official business, because that would implicitly endorse a specific religion, which is a no-no: the Supreme Court found for nonsectarian invocations in 1983, but that’s as far as you’re supposed to go.

But that’s not sitting too well with a few of the lawmakers over there, or with some of the clergy they’re bringing in to say the blessings:

Matters came to a head in April when the Rev. Clarence Brown delivered an invocation that included thanks to God “for our lord and savior Jesus Christ, who died that we might have the right to come together in love.” He said he had been thinking about the separation of church and state, but decided to ignore it because “I have to do what Jesus Christ says for me to do as a witness.”

… which is exactly the problem with inserting God into the everyday of civil affairs. Ultimately, you just can’t reason with this point of view. Faith and government are fundamentally incompatible.

I like Steve Benen’s idea:

I have a compromise solution to offer: Indiana lawmakers can pray, alone or in groups, to any god they like, and with any language they like, before and after the legislative work day begins. Lawmakers who don’t want to pray, or prefer a more inclusive, non-faith-specific prayer, can get together alone or in groups as well.

That seems about right to me.