Explorations

I started the day by bouncing down the front steps — due to a little black ice I didn’t notice.

Sprained one ankle mildly and my back hurts as usual.

Grumble.

Geoff Arnold posts this:

There’s a nice review of books related to the “free will” debate over at the Financial Times. If you’re unfamiliar with the radical findings of Libet et al, you should check it out.

I used to be a philosophy student. Lots of things moved me away from it (like “what are you gonna do, open a philosophy store?) but among them was the realization that while the arguments were often kind of fun, a lot of them were essentially silly — they depended on definitions carefully constructed to allow for infinite disputation, but which, on examination, don’t actually offer any insight.

Any discussion of “free will” is an unendingly productive source of silly disputation.

First off, let’s start with the notion of “free will,” quoting from the FT article.

“If I had free will, I would choose to be funnier. I would choose always to have the right witty riposte ready to disarm adversaries and delight friends. But sadly, it is not so. My lot is for the same lame old gags to hobble out whether I will them to or not, like embarrassing aunts at a wedding.”

This argument (along with Scott Adams’ continual maundering about it) are based on a notion of “free will” that requires noncausal omnipotence. Look at the example in the Financial Times article: “If I had free will, I’d choose to be funnier,” etc.

Fine. If I had free will, I’d choose to speak fluent French, have ten million dollars, be able to float in mid-air, and heal Cathy Seipp’s lung cancer. Continue Reading »

Very odd day today.

Cathy Seipp died, after a long struggle with an aggressive lung carcinoma.  (She told us the actual histology in her blog, but I’ve forgotten now; it was one of the weird bad ones that just apparently comes from nowhere.  She was not a smoker, as every obit seems required to note.)

It’s not like she was a great friend; I read her blog, but I doubt if I commented more than a couple of times.   It’s more that it’s been obvious for quite a while that it was coming; she was only 49, almost three years younger than I am.

Then today I was at my desk, drinking coffee as I worked through the various emails and things I had to do today.  I’m still suffering a little from the Flu That Ate Cincinnati; I coughed as I was slurping coffee, then aspirated.  I started to cough, put up a hand as I did a spit take …

… and the next thing I knew, I was listening to a voice out of the dark saying “take it easy, just breathe….” I tried to inhale but my throat was spasming.  One harsh wheeze, then the next was a little easier.  I rolled onto my hands and knees — how did I get on the floor? — hung my head and the last of the coffee drained out of my throat.  Then I was breathing again, and pretty quick I could see and everything.

(The two most peculiar things: I was completely calm.  When I was trying to breathe unsuccessfully, I was thinking “I wonder if I should tell him to call 911?” And the earworm music that had been stuck in my head was still stuck in my head, even as I was coughing and choking.)

Tim Penick, who has the office across from me, had heard me choking and come out to see what was wrong; his was the voice I heard.

Within a couple of minutes, I was fine again, and back at work.  Nothing to get excited about.

(Heavy geekery warning, by the way.)

Those of us of a certain age remember the Captain Kangaroo show. One of the features of the show was a woman with a pleasant voice reading children’s books, while they showed the illustrations on the TV and moved them around, producing a sort of illusion of animation; one that I remember in particular was the story of “Stone Soup“. (I’m almost positive, from the illustrations, that it must have been this Marcia Brown version.)

The story is a simple and familiar one: some soldiers returning from the war pass through a village. They’re hungry, but the villagers say they have no food to share. So the soldiers say that if the villagers will let them use a big pot, they’ll make “stone soup”. It starts with water boiling in the pot, along with some smooth river stones. Then the soldiers say it would be ever so much better with some herbs; one of the villagers says he might find some chives and a little thyme. Then they ask for, perhaps, a little cabbage, and another villager finds one old head of cabbage. Then a little bit of garlic, some onions, and it’s starting to smell good; a little bit of bacon, a couple of soup bones — and, of course, after a while they’ve made a pot of pretty good soup.

By now, you’re wondering where I’m heading with this, so here’s my point.

One of the things that is a little hard to understand, at Sun, is how we expect to make a living out of open source. We’ve opened the source to Solaris, we’ve opened the source to Java — what are we going to sell?

Well, I remember when Java first came out, ten years ago. At the time, no one really thought there was much of a market for platform-independent object oriented C++-like languages. Ten years later, though, there are several languages that fit that pattern — not just Java, but C#, Ruby, Python, Lua and Io. Not to mention languages with somewhat different models, like ECMAscript/Javascript. There are dozens of portable web-programming platforms, like J2EE, Rails, and Plone. And there are multiple billion dollar companies that exist largely based on their ability to turn open source software, a few good ideas, and services they provide effectively for free into piles and piles and piles of money. Like Google. All coming from a basic bit of technology in TCP/IP, and a paradigm-breaking notion of giving away content and tools.

That’s a lot of soup. And it sure seems like with that much soup, there is plenty of chance for everyone to get a full belly.