There is but one answer. God the Almighty took them away from us, for the eschaton in which all thing are made right was not yet to come upon earth. There is yet more suffering, more heartbreak, for the faithful to endure so that they may be, through trials and hardships, purified into pure gold.

Juan Roman Riquelme, mark my words, shall slip off our time, but not our hearts, for he has become Icarus, and reached too close to the heavens.

Exiled like Israel from his homeland of the soccer field, left out of every team practice yet cruelly still allowed access to the training facilities, Riquelme awaited redemption. And then it came, in the form of a loan to the club of his heart, Boca Juniors, and (I say as a River Plate believer) a meltingly, staggeringly genius run to the Copa Libertadores championship of all South America with the blue and yellows. Then the clock struck midnight, money became the word on the lips of the heathens and the tribe, and he returned to Villareal, his Babylon, deported to a quaint seaside Spanish siro.

And yet, he was called back for his country, and, given the sword, stabbed into the team of his oppressors, Pelegrini’s Chileans, not once, but again, deeper, deadlier. Shakespearean as it was, nothing else came after. Revenge against the country of your slave master must be savored, because it only lasted for 90 minutes.

Now, the gates have lifted, the captive set free, returning to La Bomberena for the highest transfer fee in Argentine history. I would not buy a ticket for first class on the same flight from Spain to Buenos Aires as him. Nor would I ride in the same limousine, eat at the same cafes, or even use the same shampoo as this “Einstein of the pitch”. For him-who-must-be-named to play for La Boca again would be too perfect. All would be made right before its time.

Juan Roman Riquelme must die. Not by me. By the deep magic of the created universe. The beginning of the Aptura campaign is imminent, and he will play for them, and will them to champions.

I was stumped.

I said, “a book about a dead guy.” It’s The Cambridge Companion to Pascal.

Additionally, I have also concluded that Scientology is a new Gnosticism, based on similarities between their cosmologies. In reading the gospel of Judas, the full picture of what L. Ron Hubbard was striving to capture all those years quickly appeared.

Regarding such uncomfortable arrangements, there’s a vague twist in the belief of the South Africans in both the witch doctor’s spells and in technology’s saving power. I suppose my dismissal of their perspective says more about my faith in technology than their faith in spells. It’s silly to ask the question of whether science and faith coexist. They do. Just look. Imagining from such an assertion, technology and miracles are equally mysterious, and become less so through intensive study. Neal Stephenson pointed out in one of his books that geeks became priests in the Middle Ages just as naturally as they do hackers now.

Both professions realize that you can’t take it with you. Fie on the materialism of the consumer and the metaphysicist.

There is a science–religion conflict

• Science performs a doxastic job of religion (answers the same questions as religion)
• Who are we
• Where do we come from
• Is there hope?
• Conflict is in naturalism and evolutionary theory (or any other science)
• You cannot sensibly accept both naturalism and evolution
• Naturalism is stronger than atheism. Atheists aren’t necessarily naturalists.
• Exemplary naturalists
• Sagan, Gould, Armstrong, Darwin (later), Dewey, Russell, Dennett, Atkins, Dawkins

The argument

• Cognitive Faculties
• Eg perception, sympathy, induction
• Theists expect cognitive faculties to be mostly reliable
• Aquinas: “In the image of God in virtue of having an intellect…an image that includes an intellect is most able to imitate God…rational creatures attain a representation of that type…He understands, and so do we”
• Is there a problem of reliability for the naturalist who thinks that our cognitive faculties are the result of a blind process of random mutation?
• Dawkins: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
• Plantinga: Dawkins is wrong
• The ultimate purpose of our cognitive faculties is not true belief, but maximal fitness.
• P. Churchland:
• Natural selection doesn’t care what you believe. It simply penalizes maladaptive behavior with death, and rewards adaptive behavior with survival
• Darwin say a problem here
• Argument from Conditional Probability: P (A / B)
• Argument in Brief: Are our cognitive faculties are Reliable (> 75%) given Naturalism and Evolution
1. P (R / N & E) is low
2. If 1 is true, then someone who believes N & E has a defeater for R.
3. If you have a defeater for R, then you have a defeater for any belief produces by your cognitive faculties, then you have a defeater for all your beliefs
4. IF you have a defeater for all beliefs, you have a defeater for N & E.
5. Therefore, N & E is self-defeating.
• Darwin’s Doubt, Developed
• Behavior & belief are related
• Two possibilities for this relationship
• Semantic Epiphenomenalism (SE)
• Epiphenomenalism: Beliefs don’t cause behavior.
• Semantic E: Belief is a Longstanding neural event with two properties:
  • NP: Electoral-chemical or neural-physiological properties (number, signals, state, etc)
  • Content: Belief of proposition P
• Beliefs cause behavior not by virtue of Content property, but NP property.
• Example from Dremski: Soprano hits high C, glass shatters. Content or meaning of the sound doesn’t matter. Physical properties of the note causes behavior.
• P (R/N & E & SE) is low
• Both Content & NP cause behavior (~SE)
• P (R/N & E & ~SE) is not much higher.
• Regarding SE: Theorem of total probability
• P (R / N & E) = [P (R/N & E & SE) * P (SE / N & E)] + [P (R / N & E & ~SE) * P (~SE / N & E)]
• Example: [.1 * .8] + [.9 * .2] = .26
• Regarding ~SE, here are some analogies
• Suppose we invent God thanks to wish-fulfillment. If wish-fulfillment beliefs are likely false, those beliefs have a defeater.
• Cartesian Evil Genius: if the evil genius causes all my beliefs, those beliefs have a defeater.
• Returning to N & E, those beliefs have a defeater.
• It is irrational to believe N & E.
• If you accept N & E given P (R / N & E) is low, you have a defeater for any belief you may hold.
• So, you have a defeater for N & E.
• Therefore, N & E is irrational.
• Therefore, there is a religion–science conflict: that between Naturalism and Evolution
• One who is torn between Naturalism
• If I accept naturalism, I have good reason to be agnostic about naturalism
• The traditional theist has no reason to disbelieve cognitive faculties produce true belief. If she believes in evolution, then she believes in an intelligent designer.

Questions

• Evolutionists doesn’t care if P is low; “hurray we won the lottery!”
• Any defeater of this type is susceptible to that objection.
• Theists don’t object to arguments that God is highly improbable by saying hurray we won the lottery.
• What about Clarkian occasionalism?
• Occasionalism can only apply to theists.
• If you try to defeat naturalism using Occasionalism, you must appeal beyond theists.
• How do you handle other causes of adaptation (hedonistic, etc).
• Given N, SE is highly probable.
• But then your beliefs are improbable
• As long as you take a materialist position, you are susceptible to this problem, no matter the motivator of adaptation.
• Can naturalists give arguments that our cognitive faculties are reliable?
• How would you do that? You can’t, because any argument presupposes such faculties are reliable.
• “If a man’s honesty were called into question, it would be ridiculous to refer to the man’s word whether he be honest or not. The same absurdity there is in attempting to prove by any kind of reasoning that our reasoning is not fallacious.”—Reid
• On the average and aggregate, our faculties appear to be reliable.
• But that doesn’t help. Sociological investigations don’t confirm anything because my cognitive faculties aren’t reliable.
• Basically, without reliable faculties you fall into solipsism, no matter what “external” confirmation you get.
• Does the acceptance of your argument depend on the P of theism?
• Doesn’t seem to be. It is just a defeater for N & E.
• The P (fine-tuned universe / N & E) is low
• P (fine-tuned / T) is high

[Update]: Gillikan posted his notes to the same lecture early this morning.

Method

• Philosophers like to talk about method
• So do scientists
• It’s admired just as much as guessing

A True Conflict between Religion & Science

• Evolutionary Psychology
• Understand all distinctive features of humans in terms evolutionary origin.
• Art, humor, play, poetry, love, religion, et al are understood in terms of evolution
• “This particular trait arose {suddenly | gradually} by random mutation, it was then found to be adaptive and adopted for further evolution by natural selection”
• Examples
• A bad explanation for religion: As prey, the switch from prey to predator resulted in a celebration. Religion is that celebration.
• Better explanation: Religion is a spandrel of rational thought. Natural selection encouraged the development of natural thought. Attempt to acquire non-existent goods by negotiating with nonexistent supernatural beings. (R. Stark later became a Christian and now teaches at Baylor)
• Michael Ruse: The group with moral intuitions will do better. However, there is no such thing as
• Herbert Simon
• D. S. Wilson: “see if the detailed properties of Calvin’s Church [in Geneva] can be interpreted as adaptation to its environment.” The aims and goals of the Church are provided by evolution.
• Plantiga interjects: I believe that I live in Indiana because that’s what is the case. There’s no goal in my belief. What’s up, Reid.
• Freud: Religion isn’t a dysfunction of cognitive faculties, but those faculties don’t function as to produce true beliefs.
• Plantiga:
• Why do scientists come up with theories incompatible with Christian belief?
• Belief in atheism
• Methodological naturalism
• Science proceeds as if God is not a given
• The data set for a proper scientific theory can’t refer to God or employ what one knows or thinks one knows by way of revelation
• Proper scientific theory can’t refer to God or employ what one knows or thinks one knows by way of revelation
• The background information for a proper theory can’t include propositions entailing the existence of God or employ what one knows or thinks one knows by way of revelation.
• Scripture Scholarship
• Traditional Biblical Commentary
• Tries to explain what the Word of God means.
• Take for granted divine revelation
• Once you figure out what God is saying, God is not required to defend it.
• Historical-Critical Biblical Scholarship
• An Enlightenment project
• Understand the Biblical books from reason
• Does not assume divine revelation
• Proceed with biblical criticism in a scientific manner
• Two ways to be scientific in regard to scripture scholarship
• Troeltschian
• God never does anything specially.
• Duhemian
• Use only evidence or beliefs everyone accepts.
• Defeaters for Christian Belief
• Suppose Christians are committed to a high view of science. Further suppose that science opposes Christian belief. Does that constitute a defeater for Christian beliefs? What should the reaction be?
• No.
• Traditional Christians think they have a source of warranted belief (faith and testimony). Such sources require the defeater to argue that they are wrong.
• Science is already a part of a Christian’s evidence base. So some part of my evidence base says that some other part of my evidence base is unlikely.
• eg the sources of information about you whereabouts are both memory and what people tell you and video surveillance. That these accounts differ does not mean that my belief about where I was is defeated.
• Analytic epistemological logic mumbo-jumbo.

Questions

• Should METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM be fought in courts?
• The Dover case relied on expert witnesses, philosophers of science, who said that science requires METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM, and that science make empirically verifiable propositions.
• I am so going to sue somebody and then claim that the defense of a settlement in my favor ruining the defendant is dependent on economics being a science, and that it cannot do so under the Dover case.
• Should Dembski’s quasi-methodological naturalism be accepted?
• Yes. Except that since Christians have a bigger set of beliefs, they should be coming up with explanations that include elements of that larger set.
• Should biblical scholarship be treated the same as Shakespearian scholarship?
• Questions of authorship, diverging accounts, etc do not present a problem to for Christian belief.
• Metaphor of an archer.
• Yes, accept. But Christians should do splience, using the empirical method and Christian beliefs to arrive a explanation that incorporate the elements of their evidence base.
• Okay. Where’s the beef?
• There may not be a difference between science and splience. But there are projects that arise from Christians beliefs, and we should pursue those projects. Atheism produces unique results, so should Christianity.
• Response to methodological naturalism’s use of Occam’s Razor type arguments against Christian’s evidence base.

Last week I noticed iTunes introduced https://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/ITCSBrowse.woa/wa/Browse?destination=StanfordPublic”>a selection of class lectures from Stanford profs, along with other silly university marketing content. I listened to a discussion on whether philosophy is the handmaiden or queen of the sciences with Peter Godfrey-Smith, guesting from Harvard University. Not a terribly stimulating session, but the potential is there for exposing your pedagogy and advancing your thinking in a way that is both hip and accessible.

Stanford is the first university to take advantage of Apple opening up iTunes for free hosting and distribution of college/university content. Josiah, I know that you were working on something like this for some Covenant faculty. Perhaps a setup like Profcast could assist in getting that off the ground–between Profcast and the new iTunes U, you have the recording, editing, hosting, and distribution of content, close to maximally automated.

For any proposition P*, it is true that either P or ~P will be roundhouse kicked by Chuck Norris.**

Welcome to the dialectic of pain.

* Where a proposition is something that can stand on at least one leg, like the letter P. Also, Chuck Norris does not roundhouse kick things that can’t stand up.

**Note: The intuitionist school invites a world of pain by maintaining otherwise.

The universe is how it is because if it wasn’t, Chuck Norris would roundhouse kick it into consistency with our existence anyways.

With apologies to the many, many cosmologists who read this blog.

First Question.

What ever happened to distributed peer-based digital signatures and public keys using webs of trust? I am reading The Code Book, and today at lunch hit the chapter on the development of public-key crypto and the saga of Phil Zimmerman. I remember quite a fuss in the mid-90s about cypherpunks bootstrapping a decentralized trusted-key infrastructure. It seems quite relevant and do-able today. Has that project met demise and failed to get off?

Next question.

Has anybody done thinking on the epistemological criteria of encryption systems? Is there a formulation for knowledge wandering around which includes encryption? The history of crypto has seen a succession of knowledge-claims about the unbreakability of systems, and a matching set of persuasive counter-examples. Is there work in this area of philosophy? Additionally, what is the status of encrypted information? Is it knowledge, and what affect does the encryption state have on status?

Last question.

In day-to-day practice, I’ve supplanted my previous criteria for precise knowledge (being able to ask a good enough question that I can get a useful answer from someone knowledgeable) with the criteria “be able to formulate a Google search query which returns the desired information.” Is that wrong? What is the qualitative difference between the two?

Please answer below, or in trackbacks. I exist to be enlightened by someone other than myself.

Now, as to the name, all I might wager is this. Objects know their states, and the states of others, better than the text that current command lines must parse in order to pipe and slice. This makes the user the Chief Monad of the system, arranging objects into a pre-existing harmony of computery goodness. Eat it, Voltaire.

Subject: Re: Harry Potter and the Lavender Brigade
On Jul 23, 2005, at 11:28 AM, Mom wrote:
Noel, would you please read this treatise and let me know what
thoughts you have after reading it. I would really like to hear your
opinions on what Doug Phillips has to say. Thanks. Love, Mom

…And poof, there went my Saturday morning. My Mom forwarded me an email-only essay by Doug Phillips of the Vision Forum organization titled “Harry Potter and the Lavender Brigade”. From appearances, they’re not posting the essay on their site because, one would surmise, of its rather poorly argued nature, I mean, its rather inflammatory nature. What with all the false analogies and such. Anyways, I won’t reproduce it here out of respect for their copyright, but if you want to read it, just leave a comment below and I’ll forward it on to you a poster at freerepublic.com has put up an unformatted copy. Below is my heated response to the argument that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series should not be read by Christians because it is an imagined world that is rooted in magic as practiced by humans, which for Phillips equates to, well, I’m not quite sure, but reading about that world is like worshipping other gods, which we may all agree is bad.

Follow the jump for my savage six-paragraph retort that I wrote for my lovely Mom…

For the Last Time, Harry Potter != Satanic!

In my reading, Jerram Barrs’ treatment of Potter is more consistent logically, as well as more grounded in Biblical criticism. I wrote something along the same lines a couple of years ago. Phillips goes off the deep end here. I counted four circular arguments in a brief skim, and I have no doubt more could follow a deeper read. But really, the first circular argument sinks his entire ship.

The tip of the iceberg might be found in Phillips inconsistent usage of what to call those who practice magic. He repeatedly refers to those, both male and female, as ‘witches’. In fact, he never uses the term ‘wizard’ to refer to a male practitioner of magic. I see this as the first indication of a systematic failure to grasp the place of magic in fantasy and in reality (both of which by definition of our faith are created, upheld, and brought to an fore-ordained end by God alone). The failure, moreover, is not just definitional, but hermeneutical. For a full exploration of exactly what magic in the world of Harry Potter is and means, please read my earlier-mentioned essay. I shall soldier on and explain the hermeneutical failure that Phillips shows.

Don’t be fools and think that we can imagine something outside the law of God, which has been imprinted on every human heart and is reflected in some way in every output of human imagination. The wretched trope of equating magic with homosexuality that Wilson pushes at the beginning lumbers, clumsy and insipid, toward constructing a logical equivalency between a single sinful act (homosexuality) and an entire moral vista as imagined by a profoundly fecund mind (J.K. Rowling’s moral, magical world of Harry Potter). Any small amount of brain matter that tries to reconcile this equivalency will spit it out like so much spoiled milk; they are not. Even the most morally wretched world as imagined by man, like the recent movie Sin City, cannot run far enough away that it gets away from Almighty God. To posit that Rowling has accomplished what Jonah failed elicits my laughter at the small, small god in which Phillips evidently believes.

Let me make clear here what Phillips leaves as an exercise to the reader: in his argument, The Lord of the Rings was a sinful exercise in imagining a godless, abominable world. Don’t agree with that? Yes, I thought you might not. But if we accept that the sympathetic inclusion of humans practicing magic is sinful, then that’s where we’re going to find ourselves. Not that I follow Tolkien rather than Jesus, but I trust him a hell of a lot more than Phillips.

Frankly, I’m sick and tired of the lack of hermeneutical imagination displayed by those of Phillips and ilk, and find refuting their every latent legalistic literalist law tedious. Which leads me to my strongest argument. Does Phillips actually think that Rowling created an entire world based on the worship of Satan and the practice of satanic powers by humans intent on destroying the People of God? I don’t know what Harry Potter series Phillips is reading, by its not the one that is #1 on the New York Times bestseller list (or, for those who like their lists compiled by a Christian source, World’s best selling books list. It’s on both, kids).

For the record, I find the most amusing circular argument in the third point of Phillips’ argument, where he attempts, after repeated denials that the portrayal of magic of any kind by a human is sinful and, by implication, punishable by death as under Deutronomical law, to carve out a small space for magical creatures (and reading between the lines, is trying desperately to allow C. S. Lewis’ Narnia back into his little AV1610 world). It turns out that writing about dragons is okay because the Bible mentions dragons. In the KJV. Based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew in 1610, therefore, dragons are in, but sinful bastard creatures like fauns are out. And heaven help us if we attempt to create an allegorical world that uses magic as a metaphor for society’s use of technology and as a device that examines isolation and anxiety as we grow from children to men and women. As it is said, so may it be.

But models do have their uses, bringing out features that we cannot access IRL. It gets better when the models allow unconstrained real-time interaction with the data they represent. When you can run those models on your laptops, nerd-bliss arrives.

This morning, Mr. Peter Ryer at Boeing nailed just that with his Desktop Tool Suite of flight model software. Want your engineers in the back of the plane to watch a model of the plane as it flies, feed in real time by thousands of sensors on the plane? Yep. They can even move the camera around the airplane as it maneuvers, see the instruments and the pilot’s view, etc.

Recently I’ve read reminders from Elissa and from Andy Crouch: don’t assume the model tells the full story.

I had concluded, “The dead become undead cannot become dead again”. I stand by this conclusion. But two more matters press themselves upon my mind as I lay a-sleeping.

First, my just-quoted conclusion is true, unless you could destroy zombies utterly. You know, something like the Greek “diapthairo”, sending them to Gehena or Sheol of the Hebrews. If you could somehow hit them with a double-existence whammy and destroy completely their body and their being, then that might work. By destroy utterly, I mean the universe must lose the sum of their atoms. I suppose they could become antimatter or dark matter, and that would work too. And you’d also have to metaphysically destroy their evil animating spirit (the demon in Josiah’s account). The point is, the body must be gone as well as the zombie demon.

A Holy Hand Grenade might do the trick.

Second, in the beginning of my last essay, I believe I glossed over an important conundrum regarding the ontological status of zombies. I said, “it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that if a zombie bites you, you become dead, and then undead, joining their ranks.” I think there’s something lax here. Does the zombie actually kill you when it bites? Or does it transform you straight-aways into the dominion of the undead? Alive -> Dead -> Undead, or the more straightforward Alive -> Undead? I must confess my ignorance upon this point, and kindly beseech my readers who are more educated in matters regarding the undead to guide me to a correct understanding upon this point.

Now, to address additional points brought up in Josiah’s generous reply to my first post regarding zombies in St. Elmo.

Josiah’s obsession with the dichotomy of spiritual redemption and heavy weapons is appreciated, and explicated by him as, “In this purpose there is the assumption of the living returning to righteousness in this life, and I can see that occurring in no other way than with somehow killing the undead.” In this he seems to combine the ideas above summarized in the Holy Hand Grenade, but I am afraid that Josiah has actually done little to clear up my misgivings, save for the reassurance that we may, in fact, kill zombies as a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. But their ontological status, which for me is the more important question, remains unknown, a rather mysterious, dare I even say zombie apparition shrouded in philosophical must. Faith in what might be seen as a type of Plantiga’s Great Pumpkin Return is not epistemically tenable with the waving of hands and unwavering belief. Just because I really believe that zombies are sent as instruments of redemption does not make them killable if that is not in fact their ontic aim.

His note regarding the difference between Halo’s Flood and a proper Zombie Attack on St. Elmo is noticed and accepted. May I propose that we focus further studies on this important matter, because as biomechanically-enhanced soldiers enter the battlefield in the near future, they may be thrown into a similar situation as Master Chief, and require the proper set of tactical and philosophical guidelines as we are now laying out for a zombie attack in Stelmo. Shotguns, the moral and physical high ground (as noted by Duffey), and a stiff upper lip. Because my goodness, observe at how quickly those zombies can take over! Is Mayor Littlefield’s office running these same simulations for the City’s disaster recovery plan?

The comments by Mr. Davidson, OTOH, are greatly appreciated and do begin to excavate the definition of a zombie. In particular, he stated, “You don’t “kill” zombies, you dismember them to the point that the enchantment/ensorcellment/possession that has caused their peculiar appetite for the brains of the living can no longer function.” Though this does not jive with Josiah’s account, it at least seems open to an inquiry from the faculties of reason, an opening that Josiah’s more pietistic account does not allow. If zombies are reanimated dead, the simple bodies unanimated by the Divine breath of life but still twitching muscles and firing low-level cerebral cortex neurons, then there is no question of whether they may be killed. They may be killed just like a robot, a machine, a vegetable. By anyone’s definition, they are no longer human, nor alive, and so may become fodder for Model 87 shotguns with no moral harm to the shooter. Animated by an evil entity, but lacking human status, a zombie should be blasted apart with whatever the most suitable weapon on hand might be. St. Elmo is not their home.

The trick this time is that the revision will undergo a revision a la Wikipedia; yours truly and others much more fully will revise, argue, battle, and agree their way to a wild working copy that Prof. Lessig will swoop down, snatch up in his legal talons, scrape away the obfuscations, and publish. Strange and neat, eh? Author, editor: meet your new maker: the Mobb.

So, if things were tough in the philosophical sphere, where we have the luxuries of semantic vagueness and dialectical truths, not to mention freedom from worries in the implementation details, imagine what a state those who are attempting to craft a specification document for digital identity are in! “What is a digital identity?” they ask, and darn it if figuring that one out ain’t chewing tough rubber.

[Bonus: You can ask me sometime as to what my favorite Chinese Room-style thought experiment is. It starts out with two twin sisters who grew up together all their lives, and then were unfortunately chosen by an evil genius for his diabolical experiment in identity in which select memories were shifted from their own perspective to the others...puts chills up my spine and most people to sleep.]

Not that the hardware is silly, nor that the data is silly. Both were quite accurately described by the incomparable Mr. Percy. What my mind balked at was to believe that four different government agencies have databases that are so easily mined, and a visualization software that can scale so well (from chemical concentrations in water to maps of the state).

Now, I think, I can finally see where we could get this. Google Maps + XML + Web Services for databases + English language data parsing.

The hard part was never getting the data (though that’s interesting). Nor was it matching one thing with another (that’s pretty cool too). The hard bit is, how do you come up with a thing in the first place just from raw data? There’s no ontology in data, it’s just data.

From the article:

“We have guys who can crack hard drives,” Mr. Alexander said. “Getting the information out is easy. The hard part is sharing it, and organizing it, so that everybody in an agency, even nonexperts, can use it.”

The data has always been there for the terrorists to use, or for companies to, ahem, lose track of (a la ChoicePoint). It’s just that there’s no easy way to pull it together into something useful.

This post is partly in response to willas comment on my last post about English language data parsing.

Transparency, I’ve come to realize, is vital in more than image-editing. It’s a fundamental ethical virtue. The present moment hosts a struggle between transparency and opacity that must galvanize us into living more transparently and calling for more transparency from our institutions. Government, business, education, and science must be transparent in important ways for their future fundamental integrity.

Korby Parnell tells a motivating tale of transparency at work in the splitting of the atom. But significantly, other institutions must act transparently as well. Higher-Ed springs to mind, perhaps from recent experiences. So does Enron, WorldCom, Google, and Microsoft. There’s varying degrees of transparency in each of those companies (and varying degrees of failure therein). For lawyers and their firms, there’s even less transparency, as Evan Schaeffer humorously relates.

Transparency. Not like a Johnsone-esque glass house, but like a piece of open code. Transparency over processes, models, and compliance. Not over execution and decision-trees. Think about why I believe it to be so important over the week.

Disclaimer aside, here’s my proposal. We need to get a collective conversation going about Covenant. Crossman & Raymond resigning, Core changing, Residence Life & handbook changes, &c. You all know where I stand on most stuff from my student days. Justin, Ellis, Mesh, and Josiah have already posted regarding these things.

Tipping point? We should start putting some pressure the school from the blogsphere. Aggregate our posts into a group blog, perhaps. Get a conversation going, initiated by the recent alumni tip. There’s no conversation happening now, and so we’re left speculating and growing discontent. Between Wired Mesh, Irresponsible Journalism, and Subcurrents, we could get some attention, methinks. Goodness knows the comments on Josiah’s recent post were an indication enough. Anybody else want to join in?

Let’s get NBN blogging, Anderson blogging, etc. Get guys like Derek into the mixtape. Two-way conversations are good things, and Covenant’s problem for two years has been a lack thereof. The power of blogs is that they effect changes in that nature.

Just a proposal. What say you, bloggers?

I started blogging because it seemed like good professional practice. This blog is my live resume, what I think about and work on. Here’s what I’m passionate about. If my reputation is tied to my digital identity in the future, then my life depends on blogging.

There’s a few other ends. It would be good for me to write about them–but later.

[Update: hmm, that gapingvoid link is dead. Don't know where it went; seems that Hugh removed that entry or some such.]
[Bonus: Yes, I know that this post doesn't have an individual/permalink page. Sorry. Working on it.]

However, as 10×10 claims to present the world according to the Beeb, the Old Gray Lady, and Reuters, does it function so much as a definition of the time, or as a commentary on the powerful control of corporate news? It seems like such a small sample, and we’re still relying on the big media companies to edit the world into our front pages. For a hundred possibilities, perhaps it is telling that there were only four discrete images on display in a recent visit. In essence, what our minds intake about the world is still seen through the filtered glasses of Reuters et al. This being a Kantian critique, our knowledge of what exists is thereby determined by these companies. How about a 10×10 that exposes visually what is not being covered by those companies?

How to design something more democratic, more exposing of the phenomenal?

When someone downloads a piece of music, it’s just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

Rosenblatt would be proud.