Essay Jukebox: Playlist #1

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Wendy, their two children Clara and Simon, and their cats Ron and Nancy. 

In this post I asked boingboing readers what mini-essays by me they would want to read, and now it's time to pay the piper. Here are the votes tallied from the first 103 comments, in descending order, followed by the goods. Since some interest was expressed in all of them, I'll hit them all with at least a line or two. The top vote-getter was "D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures," with 35 votes. I guess it's true! Anyway, for those interested, thank you for your interest!

D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures. (35 votes)
M) Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability (22 yes)
L) Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry. (20 yes)
H) Poetry will become popular again. (19 yes, 1 no)
B) My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering. (17 yes)
I) "Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's. (17 yes)
C) Was Jesus a comedian? (17 yes, 1 no)
J) The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential. (16 yes)
F) Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition. (12 yes)
G) Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others. (14 yes, 2 no)
K) Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship. (12 yes)
A) What is a crackpot? (7 yes, 1 no)
E) We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem. (3 yes, 1 no)

Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures. 

If you wanted to design the perfect consumer, what would they be like? How about someone who thinks and acts like a "typical teenager" their whole life? Empathy, patience, and responsibility are hard to monetize, so there's huge commercial interest in keeping these out of our repertoires. (Sorry, together teens-- you know the stereotype.) All the seductive advertising got to me, anyway, on some level, even though I don't consider myself a big consumer type.

A coming-of-age ritual would counter the industrial production of overgrown boy-men and girl-women. Speaking personally again, I think that if I had grown up knowing that I could screw around and count on people's indulgence until I was, say, 26, and then after a big public ritual everyone would expect more, I would have risen to the occasion, as would all of my pals. Other things we call rites-of-passage (moving out, supporting yourself, getting married, having kids) can certainly have the same effect, but you can do all of those things while still just always trying to see what you can get away with.

The bar mitzvah age of 13 is too young, as one example. I'm guessing that when people came up with that age, more was expected of 13-year-olds than is today. I'd push it out, to allow for things like college and some good years of sowing wild oats. As the ritual itself, what do you think? It's great that this question got the most votes, and I just wish I had some hard information to contribute. For those of us who, like me, haven't read our Joseph Campbell, let's hop to it, and we'll all try to figure something out. Meanwhile, I love the comment from the man who marked his change by cutting his hair, and also find it interesting that a couple of generations ago, men wore hats all the time. How did you get your first hat? Did your father and grandfather ceremoniously take you to a haberdasher?

Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability. 

Let's say you're an alien who comes to Earth and happens to land in the middle of an abortion rally. Both sides are there waving signs, which you can't read, but you notice differences in the way each side is dressed. On one, colors and patterns match more closely, fabrics are smoother and more uniform, hair is neater, there are more suits, and jewelry is finer. On the other side, patterns are louder, hair is looser, materials are rougher, there's more eclecticism and asymmetry, and more costume jewelry. You wonder, is this species fighting about what they should wear?

There are many flashpoint issues surrounding reproductive and drug policy, and I think they have to do with differing views of human weakness and what to do about it. If people should be guided by divine ideals, you don't want laws to assume (and reward) falling short, and you want to wear things that are as neat and coordinated as possible. If people are fascinating, flawed animals whose missteps should be expected and provided for, you're more liable to wear things that reflect the complex collage we all live.

Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry. 

One theory I remember from a psycholinguistics class ascribes humor and laughter to suddenly resolving a tension. Like "What has four wheels and flies? / A garbage truck" or seeing someone fall and then realizing they weren't hurt. They're all "aha!" moments that revise your model of what's true, and the brain gets extra juice in order to carve revised pathways, so the new understandings stay permanent.

When you lose someone you love, you also need to carve new pathways in order to remake your model of the world. But it takes much longer and requires much more juice.

Aside: What made the Anthony Perkins character in Psycho so creepy is that (spoiler alert!) he found a way around having to process his mother's death, and so he never learned what death means.

Poetry will become popular again. 

Manifesto

The heroes of the small screen, the humans,
Sharpen their points,
And pierce the media thicket with the power of concentration.

My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering. 

This is an idea for a series of 30-second promotional spots. They're totally dishonest because they imply that you can't do as much good for the world as a liberal arts major (for example), but if you see this as a war, then I guess all's fair!

In straight-ahead Errol Morris style, each spot would present a real person in mid- or late life who regrets not having pursued science or engineering, talking about the wrong turn they took. Formula: I was interested in and good at science/engineering, but for stupid reason A, I pursued/majored in B instead. 3) So now I'm doing unsatisfying-C while my scientist/engineer friends are doing meaningful-D. Examples:

"...I was also always great at BS-ing, so when the math started getting too hard, I decided to switch to B, and then I went into advertising. Now, if I reach the pinnacle of my profession, I can convince people to buy more cars and liquor. Meanwhile, my old friend Sam, who studied Civil Engineering, is bringing clean, safe water to poor people in India. Pursue BS, and that's what you get."

"...But I also noticed that there were more babes at the Art library than the Engineering library, so I majored in something else. Now I grub for grants to do minor variations on the one concept I'm quote-unquote 'known' for, while my college buddy Alex, who did Chemical Engineering, is figuring out how to stop the spread of brain cancer."

"I was intimidated by all the hot-shot guys in those classes, so I changed to B and wound up in Law school. Now I work 70 hours a week doing corporate law to pay off my debt while my college roommate Carol, who studied Biochem, is figuring out how proteins fold. I'm happy for her."

"My buddies were mostly liberal arts majors, so that was the easy path. Now I work for an investment bank, and if I do a really good job, it means some rich people get even richer. But my friend Keven, who studied Aeronautical Engineering, and now he's building autonomous robot aircraft for putting out fires and rescuing people."

And so on. The stories must be real, not acted, which is where some actual work would have to get done. But if the subjects wanted the video to obscure their identities, all the better-- they would just look that much more pathetic. Possible tagline: Engineering - Make something of your life. It's in the grand tradition of sobering, cautionary, and presumably effective PSAs about V.D., drugs, etc.: Don't let this happen to you!

"Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's. 

When actors began stepping into their roles rather than viewing acting as a craft, it brought more attention to who they were personally. Audiences knew that Marlon Brando's "Stella!" was a window into his own emotions. As critic Richard Schickel recalls, "People who saw him as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 cannot forget the sense that they were seeing the beginning of something for which there was no precedent."

Maybe there's no cause-and-effect, but other fields soon shifted their focus the same way. Swing music's tight arrangements and orchestras gave way to Bebop's small-combo improvisation and personal signature styles. Abstract Expressionist paintings came entirely from what the artist dreamed up, with no observations the viewer could share. Beat writers rejected editing as separating the reader from their raw, original thoughts. In all cases it feeds celebrity-- to appreciate their work, you think about the artist.

Kerouac's On The Road manuscript, written on a roll of teletype paper, is currently on a museum tour. Writing that way helped him avoid breaking his flow, and if he also more self-consciously thought it might become a precious relic some day, a quasi-religious object the way Pollock's paintings were valued records of his artistic trance at the time, he was right.

I learned this stuff from reading Richard Schickel's Intimate Strangers and Leo Braudy's Frenzy of Renown, both fascinating books about the phenomenon of celebrity.

Was Jesus a comedian? 

I'd seen numerous references to Lenny Bruce's notorious "Religions, Inc." routine, and when I finally read it, I didn't find it that funny. Sure, I appreciated that it was revolutionary at the time, but in the years since, so many of us have accepted Bruce's comparison between organized religions and corporations that it's no longer daring or funny to point it out.

Humor tends not to age well. If being "edgy" means testing the edge between taboo and acceptable, then each generation turns edgy into obvious or even doctrinal as it moves the line.

Jesus reportedly called out hypocrisy and put authority in its place, and his words resonated with people, but the accounts we read are filtered through subsequent generations. If the Sermon on the Mount (or the sermons it summarized) was so daring and dead-on that it had its audience howling in the aisles, and if the surrounding culture eventually came to accept the views it expressed, how would later generations describe the event in their accounts? To say that it provoked laughter would be unthinkable.

The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential. 

Another great chapter from Frenzy of Renown describes the Iconoclast Controversy, which raged on and off from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Christian churches under the Byzantine Empire developed a tradition of icon painting, and the lay worshipers loved praying to these icons. But bands of iconoclasts, who saw this as un-Christian idol-worship, began storming into churches, ripping the icons off the walls, and smashing them.

Meanwhile, the top of the church hierarchy felt that the icons had too much power over people, and interfered with their authority. So a series of Byzantine emperors began to secretly support the iconoclasts in smashing icons. So the iconoclasts, zealots who justified their views with scripture, took payoffs from the Byzantine Empire to destroy the most precious possessions of the icon-worshipers, many of whom were mendicant monks. Wheels within wheels!

Towards the end of the controversy, one pro-icon author was captured by iconoclasts who branded his forehead with some of his pro-icon verses. After the Byzantine Empire withdrew its support for the iconoclasts, he obtained a high position in the church.

Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition. 

A great meta-recipe for systems that learn and adapt is to have opposing forces fighting each other. It's the basis for our legal system, and I see this dynamic everywhere.

One of my favorite pet pairings is Control vs Love. As I see it, Control uses a breadth-first, top-down search strategy, whereas Love is depth-first and bottom-up. Control without love causes large-scale death, destruction, and suffering in the service of generalizations and abstractions. Love without control gets pulled this way and that, universally sympathetic but unable to step back and build systems that are ultimately more helpful. Together, locked in eternal combat, they keep the excesses of the other in check.

Another requirement for the recipe is that the opposing motivations should prompt similar actions. This allows for infinite flexibility within a spectrum of motivation. When the rules of the game are set up like this, something clicks, and complexity grows.

And so, for example, the artist seeking connection and artist seeking fame search for the same cultural niches to occupy and grow from. The careerist who always wants to prove himself right follows the same course as the ethical professional who always wants to do a good job. The seducer follows the true lover's thought process when determining his next move.

I like the commenter's suggestion that "Love vs. Control" could be an album title!

Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others. 

Some countries expect young people to move away from their childhood home and strike out on their own. In others, extended families are more close-knit, and young people tend to live close to their parents, grandparents, and other relatives. The wealthy English, who traditionally hired nannies and sent their children away to boarding schools at young ages, represent the first extreme. But in the U.S. as well, young people have more distance from their families than in other countries.

The rock 'n' roll that drives the genre comes from young people who want to connect with each other over something that they love but that their parents would hate. The first type of country breeds this type of rebellion, but in more family-oriented countries, the rock musicians are more liable to produce a derivative form, by applying rock-sounding style to melodies and music that the whole family can understand and enjoy.

Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship. 

Briefly, connoisseurship develops in part as a rationalization: alcohol, tobacco, etc.

What is a crackpot? 

Someone who produces non-disprovable, non-quantitative, descriptive generalizations. Whether it's Sigmund Freud or Lyndon LaRouche, it's all the same impulse.

We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem. 

It should be a simple but complete language, not just a protocol. Then you could do anything you want in the communications layer, rather than applications themselves having to handle multiple protocols redundantly. You could write fancy cross-platform rules to control when and how to send or open all of your communications, and how to handle the ones directed to you. In the 1980's, Adobe got its start by doing the same thing with a page description language for printers, PostScript, and look what happened to them!

• [GregLondon]

  Greg: JTAG is a lousy interface. Completely stupid logic. only a few dozen flops. all the smarts has to be put into the host that is talking to it. And it’s slow.

  zuzu: If you can think of a better way to map the internal functions of embedded device hardware such as satellite receivers, routers, network attached storage (NAS), etc. — I’d like to hear it.

  JTAG is a few dozen flip flops. The only way to communicate with it intelligibly is if you ahve an external device, like an in circuit emulator (ICE), that plugs into a computer and has a big fancy softwarwe interface, and allows your computer to talk to the ICE hardware, which then translates the commands into low level JTAG commands.

  You need a processor to do JTAG, and lots of software.

  If you have a processor on your product, you could put the functionality you need into the software that your processor is already running. Like teh way my hardware firewall can serve HTTP pages to allow me to configure the firewall.

  If you don’t have a processor and software somewhere, and that software must understand the internal functionality of the chip, then JTAG is useless. JTAG doesn’t give you a generic application layer to the functionality. It gives you a hardware interface specific to your hardware, and then you’ve got to get software that can create a generic layer. If your device has a processor to do that, you might as well put it into the hardware design in the first place, rather than trying to hack something through JTAG.

  JTAG is used for low level testing of chips and boards at the factory and for low level debugging of chips in a lab to do in circuit emulation. That’s all it’s good for. Anything else you try to use it for, there is probably a much better solution, which would be specific to the product.

• [GregLondon]

  For those not aware of it, zuzu is a self proclaimed free-market anarchist.

• [Ernunnos]

  Before you go promoting science and engineering, have you considered all the people who already can’t find jobs in the field? Consider Douglas Prasher. And he’s not a unique case.

  The Science Education Myth

• [DavidJ3d]

  “We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem. ”

  Maybe I am oversimplifying things ..but for those among us who were Commodore Amiga fans doesn’t this sound a lot like ARexx?

  I can’t count the number of times I have wanted to accomplish something in software running in one version of Windows or another and thought to myself “this would be so easy if there was something like Arexx”.

  If every networked device, and all of the software running on it had something like an Arexx port that exposed functionality, then a simple scripting language could change everything.

  Security Issues aside of course …

• [zuzu]

  If every networked device, and all of the software running on it had something like an Arexx port that exposed functionality, then a simple scripting language could change everything.

  * serial console / JTAG port
  * Erlang

  Security Issues aside of course …

  For all your Jonathan Zittrain / Richard Clarke types out there:

  * capability-based security / principle of least authority (PLUA)
  * How to stop “The Skynet Virus” scenario (WMV video)

• [ridl]

  I know my time as an overnight camp counselor in my teens meant a lot more in for my own self-image as a nascent adult than my Bar Mitzvah (WTF Firefox? “mitzvah” isn’t a common enough word for you to recognize? FU) at 13 did. It was a trial by fire, and it gave me experience with authority, responsibility, and self-reliance.

  This make me think that mandatory (or strongly rewarded ) periods of public service could work as the initiation Spinrad’s (I think wisely) calling for – give some of the benefits of boot camp without the “kill on command”, “obey the hierarchy above all else” indoctrination. I strongly believe going to college immediately after High School is one of the dumbest, most damaging aberrations we’ve come up with in the US – and you can bet that if you could, say, double your Pell Grant by spending a year in some form of (well funded, well promoted, well run, responsive to the communities in which they work) service corps or junior peace corps, a lot of teens would jump at the chance. Plus, we’d have less suicide, alcoholism, and depression in undergrads who’ve had a breather from school and their parents and gone out and discovered a bit about themselves outside of keggers and midterms. Allowing a longer term of service to provide a full ride might help open university to the many who now can’t attend, as well, and an alternative to Uniforms, AKs, and PTSD as a way into college.

  Now that I think about it – Overnight camp had many initiatory aspects, even before I worked as a counselor. Actually, there were, in Y Camps, at least, very explicitly initiatory rituals – anyone else remember Rags? It was voluntary, but near the end of the week you were taken out in the dark of night, blindfolded, to a prepared space, where the counselor tied a rag around your neck symbolizing promises you made to yourself (which you’d worked one-on-one with a counselor during the week to develop) – I understand in most places this has a big Christ emphasis to it, but this was the Eugene Y, so that aspect was (thankfully) fudged, and it was all about the kids accepting responsibility and being true to themselves. There’s even a “Raggers Creed”, (actually the first couple verses of Howard Walter’s “I Would Be True” hymn) which I still have memorized:

  I would be true, for there are those who trust me;
  I would be pure, for there are those who care;
  I would be strong, for there is much to suffer;
  I would be brave, for there is much to dare;

  I would be friend of all—the foe, the friendless;
  I would be giving, and forget the gift;
  I would be humble, for I know my weakness;
  I would look up, and laugh, and love and lift.

  –read “pure” as “true to myself” and it’s actually a lovely credo, IMO–

• [SpencerJames]

  Just wanted to encourage you on your endeavor to make PSA commercials promoting science/engineering degrees.

  As one of your examples mimics, I was very good in math and science in high school – still am – but when I got to college, I decided any degree would do and ran through a marketing communications degree in two years.

  Of course, I hate advertising and only took the classes as a study in Creativity. This is nearly impossible to explain to employers who are looking for designers and imagineers who studied – and have degrees in – science/engineering, not creativity.

  It’s incredibly frustrating when friends who did study to become engineers and are working in R&D say crap like, “I’m not creative.”

  There seems to be a huge misunderstanding here.
  Engineers/Scientists are the creative types.
  They’re the ones who actually CREATE things.

  I think that’s where I got lost. Worst: There’s no way to get back on track. I would have to go back to school to study another four-year bachelor’s degree and then probably graduate work on top. Certainly nothing I can afford.

  So now I let all my creative ideas pile up waiting for scientist/engineer types to pick them up and put them into play.

  Another alternative to encouraging technical degrees is to just crank up the requirements for high school / college graduation. Make everybody a scientist / engineer. It’s possible and probably one way education needs to rethink itself.

• [zuzu]

  Professor Henry Jones: Actually, I was a wonderful father.
  Indiana Jones: When?
  Professor Henry Jones: Did I ever tell you to eat up? Go to bed? Wash your ears? Do your homework? No. I respected your privacy and I taught you self- reliance.

• [JoshuaZ]

  I’d be very curious as to seeing an expansion of the crackpot definition. Does this only apply when people claim to be doing science and produce non-disprovable, non-quantitative, descriptive generalizations or does it apply in all endeavors?

• [Anonymous]

  Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth

  Join the marine corps.

• [CANTFIGHTTHEDITE]

  The infinite shades of grey and nebulousness of certain societies produce better citizens, IMHO, as they are forced to resolve guiding principles on their own. As a result they have a greater understanding of the “why” which will aid them through the more difficult choices that don’t let you “follow the recipe.” It also allows them to change their minds if they feel that their previous judgements were incorrect.

  The truly free markets force the individual to take responsibility for their choices, as the market will adapt to what consumers want. As soon as environmental costs can be factored into economic models and concepts we’ll be on the right track.

• [funlauren]

  I’m just glad Freud got a shout-out as a crackpot. Hear, hear!

• [buddy66]

  Don’t want to let the Method/Brando/bebop/Kerouac thing roll on by without a tailgate comment…

  Five years before Brando shifted the sexual axis of America (according to Gore Vidal) Prez, Diz, Bud and Monk were creating bebop at Minton’s Playhouse. If anything, jazz is the subtext of the Beat Generation period, including The Method.

• [iveexa]

  > D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures. (35 votes)

  In the absence of this, guys (particularly in the West) will create their own rituals (see any Jackass-related videos of guys catapulting themselves into rooftops or otherwise doing “insane” crazy stunts -) An example of something the rest of the world knows that the West is lacking.

• [Anonymous]

  “Coming-of-Age” rituals work because they are required, or imposed, in close-knit and interdependent small communities, usually tribes (I suppose this is what is implied by “other cultures”). Once conferred, “maturity” and adult responsibilities are expected from a man who knows that his social standing is always on the line—everyone knows him, and he knows everybody.

  It’s the ceremonial passage from recognized childhood–with all its forgivable social transgressions & faux pas & selfdirected behaviors–to a recognized adulthood, meaning being responsibly a part of, and thus obligated to, others in the community.

  Ours is not such a society. To long for “coming-of-age rituals” is to mistake these ritualistic acts, whatever they may be, for a fundamental change in how others understand the guy, and where he stands in the community. Atavistic longing for masculinizing ceremony FTW!

• [Anonymous]

  There is already a coming-of-age ritual for men, and on average, men already do it at 26. It’s called marriage.

  Gruntled

• [buddy66]

  Yeah, I’ll agree with #3. Boot camp is a pretty good initiation. But so is adolescent circumcision, I hear.

• [Anonymous]

  So, does your definition of “crackpot” qualify as a “non-disprovable, non-quantitative, descriptive generalization”?

• [zuzu]

  @38 Greg London

  Trying to “beat the market” with government intervention (including corporate welfare and protectionism) ends up looking very much like this:

  Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
  Lisa: But isn’t that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we’re overrun by lizards?
  Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They’ll wipe out the lizards.
  Lisa: But aren’t the snakes even worse?
  Skinner: Yes, but we’re prepared for that. We’ve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
  Lisa: But then we’re stuck with gorillas!
  Skinner: No, that’s the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
  – The Cirrrrcle of Liiiiiife … “Bart, the Mother”

  I hear Congress is considering a third round of TARP now…

• [Ian Holmes]

  “Poetry is popular again” — Tweet, Tweet!

  (Tetrabrach Tetrameter, or Twitter Beat?)

• [GregLondon]

  Rotundo, could you please stop tip-toeing around and tell us what you really think?

  I think he’s upset because they took the squid out of the ending.

• [DEL]

  #2 and #4
  Boot camp is already an initiation, unfortunately it is for a specific purpose- to turn average people into killing machines who can follow orders without question. This is a great adaptation to war but terrible for overall society(though there are values that overlap).

  Any Coming-of-age ritual would need to be supple enough to lead to other specialized initiations (like military or paramedics). A big issue is how that would work in our spectrum of a culture. We have some extreme self-reliant families and some in which people still identify themselves with a sprawling extended family. Go off naked in the woods coming-of-age for week versus you and all your cohort expected to organize a small town.

  We need a series of CoAs one for self-respect and self-reliance, one for community and cooperation, one for specialized roles.

  How weird would that feel? Hmmm

• [Anonymous]

  I think that a male right of passage would have helped me along when I was younger, and have often thought about sorting one out for my son before it’s too late. Only thing is, figuring out something that ain’t physically harmful (ritual scarring etc), ain’t hippy-like, ain’t cheesy, but is memerable and meaningful.

• [pspinrad]

  That’s great info about Erlang, Arexx, Minton’s Playhouse, etc. Will investigate. Thank you!

• [zuzu]

  We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem. It should be a simple but complete language, not just a protocol. Then you could do anything you want in the communications layer, rather than applications themselves having to handle multiple protocols redundantly. You could write fancy cross-platform rules to control when and how to send or open all of your communications, and how to handle the ones directed to you. In the 1980′s, Adobe got its start by doing the same thing with a page description language for printers, PostScript, and look what happened to them!

  Agreed. In fact, a significant portion of my thesis includes this assertion.

  What I believe you’re grasping for is the Actor model as primarily devised and advocated by Carl Hewitt. TCP/IP, the Internet protocol that allows for such a large dynamic heterogeneous network to exist, is in fact a really example of the Actor model, except that, as you say, you want more than just a protocol.

  To wit, I suggest you look at Erlang, primarily developed and advocated by Joe Armstrong. (And don’t miss Erlang The Movie.)

  c.f. asynchronous message-passing concurrency, declarative programming, Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, (and even SICP since Scheme was another attempt to implement the Actor model); objects (of object-oriented programming, OOP, Alan Kay’s attempt) have been called the “shadow” of what Actors should be. Also, von Neumann syndrome, reconfigurable computing paradox, data-driven programming (i.e. anti-machine), Unix pipes and Plan 9 from Bell Labs, orthogonal persistence, the scientific community metaphor and Multics, e-Lang, capability-based security and the principle of least privilege, Alan Turing’s halting problem, Ludwig von Mises’s economic calculation problem, and David P. Reed et. al.’s end-to-end principle and dumb networks

  Tony Hoare’s communicating sequential processes, Chuck Moore’s FORTH, and no-kernel architecture (TUNES), are also worth a look; Jef Raskin’s Archy (and The Humane Interface) and Richard Stallman et. al.’s EMACS deserve inclusion in this context too.

  And of course, Doug Engelbart‘s “Mother of All Demos” and cognitive augmentation

• [zuzu]

  Oh, and I should have included distributed hash tables (DHT) in there somewhere too.

• [dragonfrog]

  I’ve heard only half-jokingly that the only reason Germany keeps compulsory military service is that Germany would fall apart without the conscientious objectors.

  The deal is that you can do your military service, or you can do civilian service; the latter requires you to assert that your are in some way unable to do military service, i.e. that you could never kill or be a supporting part of an organization whose function is to do so. Civilian servicemen (it’s only men who must do this, though there is the option for women) do all sorts of useful things at much lower than the rate of pay they could demand if they were also free to go and write ad copy for vodka coolers – odds are good the young man doing filing at the hospital, maintenance work at the nature preserve, or cooking at the orphanage, is doing his civilian service year.

• [nosehat]

  I think #4 anonymous is on to something. Without the interdependent close-knit small communities to support them, adult coming-of-age rituals are likely to be somewhat empty gestures. Consider: A CoA ritual is not just something experienced by the guy going through it; it is an ongoing activity that the whole community participates in (through their expectations of the adult individual if nothing else). Our anonymized, urbanized, plug-and-play approach to “community” makes this hard.

  Maybe we should be longing for the type of community that makes CoA rituals significant?

• [JoshuaZ]

  Anonymous at #7, Spinrad has given a definition here. Definitions are never descriptive so it doesn’t qualify.

• [zuzu]

  In other words, conscription.

  I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don’t think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can’t save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!

  – Robert A. Heinlein

• [pspinrad]

  Hi again– hey Zuzu, thanks again for the pointer to the Erlang language. So cool! That’s exactly the kind of thing that I figured should exist and must exist somewhere. I want to learn it now, and I hope everyone starts using it (which of course is the more difficult social/political problem…).

• [zuzu]

  Oh, and autonomic computing and self-management too. Sorry for the multiple posts.

  (Basically, users should never have to administer computers, and software should be completely orthogonal to the hardware it happens to run on. You’d never have to reinstall or update your operating system, for example. Instead, if you find that you need greater resources, such as more compute cycles or reduced lag/latency, you’d just buy newer faster computing hardware — thanks to Moore’s Law — and plug it into your LAN, and boom, more computing resources available automagically. I’m looking forward to the next generation of computer bus which will use 10 gigabit ethernet instead of PCI Express.)

  p.s. Sun’s “A Note on Distributed Programming is an interesting read in its methodology, although I disagree with its conclusion, as it misses the entire point of taking the programmer as the “weakest link” / most expensive component of the software development cycle. It’s always better to waste computer resources than to expend human cognition — i.e. “waste transistors“.

  Remember, computers and software, like books and publishing, are merely the means by which humans interact with each other to communicate complex concepts across space and time, asynchronously. “We’re all cyborgs” — ever since we began externalizing our memories.

• [zuzu]

  Without the interdependent close-knit small communities to support them, adult coming-of-age rituals are likely to be somewhat empty gestures.

  To quote James Burke:
  

  The oldest answers to the most basic questions about how to operate are common to virtually every culture on the planet, because at the simplest level, every culture needs to keep order — especially this kind: (James Burke displays a wedding ring.) This is one of those things in life we protect most against being changed when knowledge changes us. We protect it by turning it into a ritual. When we get married, or buried, get christened, or anything else too important to play by ear, the event is turned into a kind of play where everybody gets a role they act out. It’s a kind of public agreement to stick to the general rules about whatever it is. The people doing it are effectively saying, “No matter what else may change, we won’t rock the boat! We’re not maverick. You can trust us.” Expressions of approval follow. Most of these ritual ways of answering a social need that we got from the past look like it. They include something from an ancient rite — in this case, the old symbol of fertility: the ring. And then, it’s all done in the presence of a supernatural being: a God. So, the agreement is also made under what was once a real threat of heavenly retribution if you broke your promise later on. Some things, this ritual says, must be permanent. A ritual wouldn’t be much of a ritual if you didn’t feel like you’ve been put through the ringer, would it?

  If something becomes common enough to turn into a ritual, and then starts to involve really large numbers of people, that’s when the ritual becomes something else. It becomes widespread enough to affect the general agreement we all share. So, that’s when the responsibility for running it goes out of your hands to be taken over by the institutions set up to run the rituals that matter on a regular basis, so that people can have clear rules and regulations to follow if they decide to get up to that particular ritual. The institutions take the admin out of daily life and run it for you: banking, government, sewage, tax collecting. Or, if you break the rules and regulations, one institution can take you out of daily life. This one: (James Burke displays a trial.) In every community, the law — whether it’s dressed up like this or the village elders telling you what the local custom is — the law is all those rules I was on about earlier. I suppose what insitutions like this do, most of all, is the dirty work. While they’re putting them away here in the law court, for instance, that leaves us free to get on with making money, having a career, and avoiding the social responsibilities that these people have to deal with. And after a few centuries of this buck-passing, the institutions get big and powerful, and reach into everybody’s lives so much they become hard to alter and virtually impossible to get rid of.

• [kaosmonkey]

  In my experience, its not the ritual that’s the most problematic. Any fool can create a meaningful little one-act play. The heart of the issue in this society is that no one seems to know what a “man” is supposed to be anymore.

  You can cut off your ponytail, hunt a leopard with only a spear and a loincloth, keep your hand in a mountain of fire ants for days on end, but when the torch is passed… what do you do with it? When the mantle of manhood is finally bestowed upon one’s shoulders… what then? Does anyone even know what a “man” is? For that matter, what an “adult” is?

• [ridl]

  Which is why I was careful to say “mandatory (or strongly rewarded)” periods of public service.

• [zuzu]

  We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem.

  To address the latter point, basically the problem is with the traditional computer science curriculum taught in nearly all high schools and especially university education. It descends from the ivory tower von Neumann architecture / imperative programming (i.e. stateful) model.

  Remember how much early web programmers hated that HTTP is stateless? Well, that’s why. They’re indoctrinated into stateful (rather than message-passing) programming and it’s all they know, even if they do get some recursion and LISP along the way, those are aberrations to the tradition — particularly as updated in the 1980s as UNIX and C programming (c.f. K&R), which were co-developed as a “simpler” (i.e. less fault-tolerant, and correspondingly less-complicated clone of Multics) — e.g. segfaults / crashes are where “just reboot the computer” was seen as preferable to “try and recover your data and a working system”.

  To this day I rue Ken Thompson for inventing I/O where the distinction had not existed before, just because he thought it made more sense that way. (We’ve been conditioned to manually performing File->Open, and File->Save ever since because of that!)

  Ken, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a nice enough guy in person, but bite me!

  In conclusion, the social problem is that the way everybody writes software currently and the way future software designers learns to write software in university is wrong (except perhaps for corner cases such as scientific computing and very minimal embedded devices). In fact, most computer scientists are taught as if scientific computing were the most popular application of their knowledge and skills — it’s not. In real life, it’s mostly knowledge management, which would greatly benefit from increased end-user programming. (Which is also why compiled / obfuscated software-as-product that made Microsoft filthy rich will collapse as a viable business model.)

  But so we’re stuck with crap like C++, Java, and .NET (and crashing software, and manually managing threads, and lack of scalability) because of a path-dependency from von Neumann and UNIX / C.

  However, soon there will be a reckoning as multicore architecture becomes ever more popular. It won’t just be the IBM / Sony CELL, but today’s dual-core and tomorrow’s quad-core laptops, and so on. Eventually programers will not be able to ignore the problem anymore, just as they were forced to finally abandon manual memory management and accept garbage collection.

  IIRC, Google and Amazon already use Erlang for their scaling architecture / data warehousing, as does anyone who uses ejabberd (such as Facebook’s chat service).

• [zuzu]

  Does anyone even know what a “man” is? For that matter, what an “adult” is?

  A social construction.

  Which is why I was careful to say “… (or strongly rewarded)” periods of public service.

  Distortions in price signals (such as subsidizing whatever a political bureaucracy defines “public service” as) is just another means of making human coordination more rigid — i.e. less adaptable to the demands of changing circumstance.

  It’s a problem of attachment to pre-conceived ideas rather than exploration and discovery of new possibilities. “College is important because that’s what I was told growing up.” So now the politicians who grew up with that particular social value subsidize universities, which has done more to cause tuition cost inflation, debase the value of an undergraduate degree, and dilute the population of students seeking actual higher learning rather than simply the “college experience”, than it has done to elevate the general population’s ability for critical thinking.

  The universities have adapted to the changing circumstances, which has changed the meaning of university education, all because of well-intentioned authoritarianism to make an icon representative of knowledge more accessible.

  You’ll notice that politicians don’t propose instead to fund the creation of something like Wikipedia or alternative means of achieving the same ends. (Although this too is then subject to political pressure… such as the problems with nationalization of banks or with school voucher programs.)

  The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained miss the collapse until too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

  – Frank Herbert, “Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune”

  Moreover, such an engineer, scientist, or “first-order” cyberneticist, will study a system as if it were a passive, objectively given “thing”, that can be freely observed, manipulated, and taken apart. A second-order cyberneticist working with an organism or social system, on the other hand, recognizes that system as an agent in its own right, interacting with another agent, the observer. As quantum mechanics has taught us, observer and observed cannot be separated, and the result of observations will depend on their interaction.

  – “Second-Order Cybernetics“, Principia Cybernetica

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    I think that the problem is not a dearth, but an overabundance of coming-of-age rituals. For instance, when I was a lad, one had a ceremony for graduating from high school and one for college. Now there’s one for kindergarten, elementary school, etc. Proms are breeding like cockroaches under the stove. Sweet sixteen parties are now de rigueur for girls aspiring not to be social outcasts. Every tiny milestone in a child’s life is now celebrated with some grand public ritual, so the rituals no longer have any meaning or power. Maybe if we made passage rituals commensurate with the milestone (or lack thereof), the pre-existing ones would reclaim some of their meaning.

• [Anonymous]

  Milliner’s make hats, not haberdashers, holmes…

• [Anonymous]

  Was Jesus a comedian?

  A pastor in a Seattle church spoke on Jesus’ humour before or if you want the just of the message is here.

  The bar mitzvah age of 13 is too young, as one example. I’m guessing that when people came up with that age, more was expected of 13-year-olds than is today. I’d push it out, to allow for things like college and some good years of sowing wild oats. As the ritual itself, what do you think?

  I think college is a major part of the problem. A manhood ritual in itself is nothing, it has to be and indicator of induction into manhood, when men take responsibility for themselves and find their proper space in society. But with college, a man doesn’t have to get a steady job until he’s in his mid-20s or even later if he goes for more advanced degrees. College also postpones marriage into the late 20s or early 30s and child-rearing even later. Living at home until the mid-20s is something becoming common, caused by the economic necessities of college. That’s assuming that men even go through this anymore; living together as opposed to marriage is becoming more common and postining child-rearing or even-forgoing it altogether are also becoming more common.

  If men went through a coming-of-age ritual before they were done college it would make a farce of the whole thing as we wouldn’t expect the traditional responsibilities of manhood, but if the ritual would be meaningless as they would have been biologically mature for years.

  The problem is not that society is missing a coming-of-age ritual, it is that society is missing a coming-of-age entirely. Men are no longer expected to take on their traditional manly responsibilities until their 30s, if at all.

  College itself is the problem. Decent jobs for a responsible man can not be gained without a college degree, but college forces the taking on of manly responsibilities far too late.

• [buddy66]

  Poetry? Rhyme is always popular. It’s seldom elevated to the status of poetry, except by masters. Rhyme is with us always, as popular music lyrics of any time demonstrate. The ear loves it. But a ton of rhyme yields only a pound of poetry.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Isn’t fabricating a coming-of-age ritual sort of like giving yourself a nickname? Pre-fabricated culture doesn’t really work. And I don’t want to have to see ads for Disney’s My First Scarification Kit.

• [zuzu]

  College also postpones marriage into the late 20s or early 30s and child-rearing even later. … living together as opposed to marriage is becoming more common and postining child-rearing or even-forgoing it altogether are also becoming more common.

  I cannot wait until that “manly” gender role normalization is dead as a doornail.

  To be clear, I’m not encouraging the abandonment of fatherhood as has become prevalent in impoverished cultures (ala Bill Cosby’s cultural criticisms in Come On People), but being responsible enough to choose to be childfree and actually cultivate an inner life seems vastly more significant as a rite of passage than “settling down and breeding” is typically.

  The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

  — R. Buckminster Fuller

  Yet I’m also quite fond of the monomyth: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

  More James Bond (or Indiana Jones), and less Brady Bunch.

• [zuzu]

  And I don’t want to have to see ads for Disney’s My First Scarification Kit.

  Frankly, I’ll be disappointed if our wacky perverse consumer culture doesn’t produce this… with Hannah Montana on the packaging.

• [zuzu]

  The more jaded among us will likely point out that “Hannah Montana‘s Scarification Kit” has long since already become so commonplace that it hardly bares mentioning anymore: Sweet 16 breast augmentation.

  (Note: Invoking the word “scarification” isn’t intended to be derogatory towards anyone into body modification — including breast implants. It was just a convenient a slightly snarky segue.)

• [rotundo]

  Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures.

  Wow, the first article on BoingBoing that ever made me consider unsubscribing from the RSS feed. What a load of crap. First, why only men, what’s up with the sexism? Then, yeah, what we really need are more rigid rules and rituals to tell us how we all have to behave alike and play our little preconceived roles in society? Fuck that. And fuck you.

  Life is about improving yourself, it’s about experience and learning. Growing up is not a singular event that suddenly changes you when you reach whatever age barrier your society considers to be the transition to adulthood. We all need to be more wise, more adult, and more child-like, all at once.

  There is not a single day I’m not extremely grateful that I get to live in a society where people are free to be how and what they want to be. Stupid ‘adulthood’ roles and rites are the hallmark of the exact opposite to this culture.

  Coming-of-age rituals. Give me a fucking break.

• [robulus]

  Rotundo, could you please stop tip-toeing around and tell us what you really think?

• [GregLondon]

  zuzu@41: Trying to “beat the market” with government intervention (including corporate welfare and protectionism) ends up looking very much like this

  what you say!!

  (Does anyone else hear really badly translated Japanese Anime when they hear a free-market anarchist or ayn randian objectivist explain something?)

• [zuzu]

  Hey Paul, I think Erlang is the bee’s knees as well. Reading Joe Armstrong’s first Erlang book was a bit too dense for me starting out, but his more recent book published by the Pragmatic Programmers has been very helpful to me for guided learning of the language. As a compliment to the PragProg book, I recommend Kevin Smith’s (no, not that Kevin Smith) Erlang in Practice screencast video lessons. (He also has video of how to configure Aquamacs on OSX for hacking Erlang code.)

  YAWS (Yet Another Web Server) and ejabberd are probably the two most useful Erlang applications out there right now. But Erlang could definitely use a “killer app” the way Ruby on Rails popularized Matz’s excellent duck-typing OOP language. (Fortunately, Erlang doesn’t need glue code between it and a RDBMS, because it already has Mnesia baked right into the language itself.)

  As I said, I think that killer app will come in one form or another due to the pressures of multicore architecture and the need for scalability.

  Personally, I’d like a web browser that can keep 500+ tabs persistently running indefinitely. However, it’s not as simple as wrapping up Gecko since Erlang’s basically limited to RPC for linking libraries / APIs. As far as I can tell, the “Erlang way” is more suited to implementing protocols; so you wouldn’t try to patch Erlang into X11 so much as reimplement the entire X Window System protocol in Erlang. (But hey, maybe NeWS needs to be reimplemented from PostScript into Erlang.)

  Maybe this Erlang web browser should also support not just HTTP but all of WebDAV too. That would support wiki-like functionality without the wiki kludge of overloading POST; which is what Tim Berners-Lee originally intended the World Wide Web as.

• [Anonymous]

  > Sorry, together teens– you know the stereotype

  sorry, spinrad, you either get to insult the teenagers or not insult them, you don’t get it both ways

  btw, studies have shown that americans don’t think you’re really an adult until and unless you have kids of your own, the culture says denigrate young and other adults without children as being infantile themselves, this post looks like more of the same to me

• [GregLondon]

  david: If every networked device, and all of the software running on it had something like an Arexx port that exposed functionality, then a simple scripting language could change everything.

  zuzu: * serial console / JTAG port * Erlang

  OK, I don’t get this at all. what in hell do you need a serial port and JTAG for when you’ve got ethernet coming into your network box? Most hardware firewalls have enough smarts in them to act as web-servers for the admin control. You think you need serial or JTAG to access that? If you can’t do it via http to your box, it’s more than likely because you shouldn’t be able to for security reasons.

  JTAG is a lousy interface. Completely stupid logic. only a few dozen flops. all the smarts has to be put into the host that is talking to it. And it’s slow.

• [Anonymous]

  > Decent jobs for a responsible man can not be gained without a college degree,
  > but college forces the taking on of manly responsibilities far too late.

  If you look at the statistics, most people never get a college degree. Many never go, and about half who start never finish.

  This “anybody without a bachelor’s is a loser” credo is widely held in the halls of breakroom-donut-munching cubicle-dwellers, but it cannot form the basis for an entire population’s standards of adulthood.

• [zuzu]

  Trying to “beat the market” with government intervention (including corporate welfare and protectionism) ends up looking very much like this

  * economic calculation problem
  * The Use of Knowledge in Society

  What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions. The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses.
  This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces. And the economic calculus which we have developed to solve this logical problem, though an important step toward the solution of the economic problem of society, does not yet provide an answer to it. The reason for this is that the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are.never for the whole society “given” to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.

  The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources–if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

  In other words, this is actually a communication theory problem. Central planning will always be too slow or too dumb (or some ratio thereof) compared to the distributed action of everyone using price signals.

  People are accustomed to top-down authority, but while unintuitive, bottom-up emergence / spontaneous order is actually a more responsive / robust system of organization.

  I consider the popularity (but fallacious) of support for central planning / leadership akin to the watchmaker argument for Intelligent Design. It’s more psychologically satisfying because it’s more anthropocentric. While reality is more unintuitive, like natural selection, general relativity, or the theme of most Stanislaw Lem novels.

• [zuzu]

  OK, I don’t get this at all. what in hell do you need a serial port and JTAG for when you’ve got ethernet coming into your network box?

  Ask anyone who’s ported OpenWRT to a new router.
  Or anyone who’s had to use the serial console on a managed switch.

  JTAG is a lousy interface. Completely stupid logic. only a few dozen flops. all the smarts has to be put into the host that is talking to it. And it’s slow.

  If you can think of a better way to map the internal functions of embedded device hardware such as satellite receivers, routers, network attached storage (NAS), etc. — I’d like to hear it.

• [GregLondon]

  Central planning will always be too slow or too dumb (or some ratio thereof) compared to the distributed action of everyone using price signals.

  And this is true because you said so in your manifesto that you typed in your shack out in the woods?

  bottom-up emergence / spontaneous order is actually a more responsive / robust system of organization.

  yes, yes, intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, as long as they don’t live in a bottom-up/spontaneous order land like Somalia or Afghanistan and so forth and so on.

  As long as you live in a world with working state goverment, one can always point to some imperfection of the state and then assert that said imperfection would go away if the State were removed, and no other negative consequences would be felt.

  You’re like one of those idiots who won’t vaccine their kids because they think the vaccine causes autism. As long as they are the only ones who don’t vaccinate, they get the protection of herd immunity without any of the risk of the vaccine. As soon as everyone were to stop vaccinating, you’d get tens of thousand of children dying every year from diseases that had been pretty much wiped out by vaccines.

  put another way, the only way a vaccine-conspiracy-theorist can get traction with his crackpot theory is if everyone else is getting vaccined. Look! My kid got a vaccine and now has autism! If we remove the Vaccine then we remove Autism! And nothing bad will happen if we stop vaccinating!

  You’re basically saying, Look! the central government is wasting money here! If we get rid of the central government, then we’ll get rid of this waste! And nothing bad will happen if we get rid of central government!

  It only works because you’re saying it in a land with a fairly functional central government.

  Go find some stateless land, there are a few on this planet right now, and demonstrate real live bottom up emergence and spontaneous order, and then I’ll listen. Go to Somalia and transform that stateless land into spontaneous emergence.

  Or stop with the teenage fantasy. Look! Dad made me do these stupid chores! If Dad weren’t around, we wouldn’t have to do these stupid chores! ANd no negative consequences would come from a 13 year old living on their own!

  shorter. It works for teenagers and it works for anarchist: move out while you still know everything.