Welp, I spent all evening creating the nice little logo that you see at the top right of my blog. I've been going as OrionsByte for a long time now, and I've always wanted to make some sort of logo or image that would kind of follow that handle around, so I finally did it.
You can click the image to see a bigger version. Hopefully you've noticed that the constellation represented is, in fact, Orion. Orion has 81 "official" stars in it, which is represented in binary on the computer screen. Classical images of Orion typically show him with a shield on his right and a club on the left, but since I was giving him a laptop instead of a shield, the idea of him swinging a mouse around as a weapon tickled me.
Ah, the things we do for no reason...
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
A Perspective on Context
Imagine yourself walking through the wilderness. Deep wilderness. There is not the faintest sign of civilization for miles and miles around, and no sign that humans had even set foot in this part of the wilderness before.
As you are walking, you suddenly come to a large stone statue, perfectly sculpted in to the shape of a human being. You are immediately struck by it's beauty and craftsmanship, even as you are completely perplexed as to how it got here. Upon coming home to your friends and family, you tell them about this wonderful thing you discovered; you might even subject them to a slide show of the photos you took of it.
Now we human beings are an inquisitive bunch, so inevitably as word got out, this statue would come under heavy scrutiny. Some people would be interested in who made the statue and brought it there. They would admire the artistry and wonder what it told us about it's maker. Why did they create this statue? What message or emotion were they trying to convey? What can we learn from their creation?
Other people would be interested in what the statue was made of. How long it had been there? How did it get there? Where did the stone come from? They would take samples and examine the area around the statue to look for evidence. They would come up with theories, and then test their theories.
If these two groups of people were to have a conversation, they may disagree about what the most important topics to cover were, but in the end, they're still talking about the same statue. The first group would suffer no backlash if they were to say that a skilled craftsman had obviously shaped the stone, but they would be foolish to suggest that someone created the stone itself. Likewise, the second group could tell us a lot about the composition of the stone, and likely how stone of that type ended up in the area where the statue was found, but it would be ridiculous for them to presume that there was no sculptor, and that natural processes had coincidentally conspired to create this perfect human likeness.
Now you probably see where I'm going here, and quite possibly you're frustrated at how I've used an over-simplified metaphor. However, I still think it serves my point well enough, and my point is this:
Science and Religion are not mutually exclusive.
Have you ever thought about why we use a base-10 number system? By that I mean, why do we count to nine, and then suddenly start using 2 digits instead of 1? What is the significance of that quantity? For that matter, when the Romans created their number system, why did they choose characters to represent multiples of 1, 5, and 10, and not other numbers? The answer is fairly simple: people have 10 fingers, 5 on each hand. If people had 8 fingers on each hand, the number system we use would be very different (i.e. hexadecimal).
So the only reason that counting to 10 makes sense to us is because we have a context of 10 fingers. If someone gave you a dozen roses, there would still be a dozen of them whether you had ten fingers or sixteen, but you would represent the number differently.
It is my opinion that science is the context of Creation. To put it differently, as we continue to try and understand the world around us, we are creating a context by which we can continue to learn and study things deeper and more fully. Imagine if all scientific endeavors just stopped where they were because everyone decided, "Welp, that's just how God made it." We need science. But science has to exist within its own context.
Skeptics and atheists would argue that science describes the real world, not some theoretical sub-context of it. However, my point is simply that all the science we perform today is dependent on the science that came before it, and thus all science is relative to itself. That doesn't invalidate anything, it just puts it in context.
As a Christian, I believe that there is a God, and I believe that He created the universe and everything in it. As a person with a healthy dose of curiosity and a love for science, I also believe that in order to understand something from a scientific perspective, you have to adhere to that context. The big bang, evolution, all those "anti-religious" theories - they're all the context in which science is performed.
However, I don't see those beliefs as being at odds; I simply see them as two different perspectives of the same universe, each with its own context, but not exclusive of each other. I don't attempt to - nor do I feel obliged to - bridge the gap between those viewpoints. For example, I would never say, "God created the big bang," or, "God created evolution." That's not what I believe. If I had to put words to it, I would probably say, "God created the universe and all living things through processes that we cannot understand, but which left behind artifacts that are left to our interpretation, and which in the context of humanity's current scientific knowledge can be described as the big bang and evolution." (Contrived much?)
I also don't attempt to talk to someone about God from a scientific perspective, or have a scientific debate from a religious perspective. I think that's the reason so many people think that religion and science are polar opposites - proponents on both sides tend to try to win arguments from their own context, and the other side refuses to acknowledge that context. I really wish that everyone could, for just one shining moment, see the world from a perspective they've never considered. There's no reason to feel threatened by a different viewpoint unless you're really not that sure of your own.
As you are walking, you suddenly come to a large stone statue, perfectly sculpted in to the shape of a human being. You are immediately struck by it's beauty and craftsmanship, even as you are completely perplexed as to how it got here. Upon coming home to your friends and family, you tell them about this wonderful thing you discovered; you might even subject them to a slide show of the photos you took of it.
Now we human beings are an inquisitive bunch, so inevitably as word got out, this statue would come under heavy scrutiny. Some people would be interested in who made the statue and brought it there. They would admire the artistry and wonder what it told us about it's maker. Why did they create this statue? What message or emotion were they trying to convey? What can we learn from their creation?
Other people would be interested in what the statue was made of. How long it had been there? How did it get there? Where did the stone come from? They would take samples and examine the area around the statue to look for evidence. They would come up with theories, and then test their theories.
If these two groups of people were to have a conversation, they may disagree about what the most important topics to cover were, but in the end, they're still talking about the same statue. The first group would suffer no backlash if they were to say that a skilled craftsman had obviously shaped the stone, but they would be foolish to suggest that someone created the stone itself. Likewise, the second group could tell us a lot about the composition of the stone, and likely how stone of that type ended up in the area where the statue was found, but it would be ridiculous for them to presume that there was no sculptor, and that natural processes had coincidentally conspired to create this perfect human likeness.
Now you probably see where I'm going here, and quite possibly you're frustrated at how I've used an over-simplified metaphor. However, I still think it serves my point well enough, and my point is this:
Science and Religion are not mutually exclusive.
Have you ever thought about why we use a base-10 number system? By that I mean, why do we count to nine, and then suddenly start using 2 digits instead of 1? What is the significance of that quantity? For that matter, when the Romans created their number system, why did they choose characters to represent multiples of 1, 5, and 10, and not other numbers? The answer is fairly simple: people have 10 fingers, 5 on each hand. If people had 8 fingers on each hand, the number system we use would be very different (i.e. hexadecimal).
So the only reason that counting to 10 makes sense to us is because we have a context of 10 fingers. If someone gave you a dozen roses, there would still be a dozen of them whether you had ten fingers or sixteen, but you would represent the number differently.
It is my opinion that science is the context of Creation. To put it differently, as we continue to try and understand the world around us, we are creating a context by which we can continue to learn and study things deeper and more fully. Imagine if all scientific endeavors just stopped where they were because everyone decided, "Welp, that's just how God made it." We need science. But science has to exist within its own context.
Skeptics and atheists would argue that science describes the real world, not some theoretical sub-context of it. However, my point is simply that all the science we perform today is dependent on the science that came before it, and thus all science is relative to itself. That doesn't invalidate anything, it just puts it in context.
As a Christian, I believe that there is a God, and I believe that He created the universe and everything in it. As a person with a healthy dose of curiosity and a love for science, I also believe that in order to understand something from a scientific perspective, you have to adhere to that context. The big bang, evolution, all those "anti-religious" theories - they're all the context in which science is performed.
However, I don't see those beliefs as being at odds; I simply see them as two different perspectives of the same universe, each with its own context, but not exclusive of each other. I don't attempt to - nor do I feel obliged to - bridge the gap between those viewpoints. For example, I would never say, "God created the big bang," or, "God created evolution." That's not what I believe. If I had to put words to it, I would probably say, "God created the universe and all living things through processes that we cannot understand, but which left behind artifacts that are left to our interpretation, and which in the context of humanity's current scientific knowledge can be described as the big bang and evolution." (Contrived much?)
I also don't attempt to talk to someone about God from a scientific perspective, or have a scientific debate from a religious perspective. I think that's the reason so many people think that religion and science are polar opposites - proponents on both sides tend to try to win arguments from their own context, and the other side refuses to acknowledge that context. I really wish that everyone could, for just one shining moment, see the world from a perspective they've never considered. There's no reason to feel threatened by a different viewpoint unless you're really not that sure of your own.
A Wave of Frustration
A while ago I posted about Google Wave, a project I'm very excited about. Wave has the potential to augment (if not replace) nearly every single form of electronic web-based communication we use today. It encapsulates all of them without depreciating any of them. Email, IM, wikis, blogs, collaborative office documents, social networks - it does it all, and transitions seamlessly from one to the other, such that the boundaries between all these different forms of communication start to break down.
On Wednesday, Google started handing out "preview release" invitations to the general public. They were only giving out 100,000, but people that receive those invitations can invite 8 more people to try it out. Google said the first invites were going to the people who'd already been involved in testing, some were going to Google Docs customers, and the rest were going to "the first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com."
Now I fall squarely in to that last category, but since I heard about Wave a little later than other people, it's very possible that I didn't sign up early enough to be counted among the "first." I'm okay with that.
However, as these invitations have been going out, I've been scouring the web to see what people's impressions are, and some of the results have really frustrated me. A lot of these people just don't seem to "get" it. There are too many bloggers that have met Wave with a yawn and said, "so what's the big deal?" - which is fine, everyone's entitled to their opinion - yet when you read what they have to say about it, it's apparent that they either misunderstood what Wave is intended to do, or they incorrectly assumed that the interface was the product, which is not the case - the product is the technology.
The reason this frustrates me is that I get the sense from many of these people that they kind of went, "Meh," and have no intention of continuing to try it out. These people likely signed up for invites not because they thought the technology was impressive, but because they'd heard it was the "next big thing" and they wanted to check it out even though they didn't know what it was. So if they've already decided it's not worth their time, then Google wasted an invitation as far as I'm concerned. How many of these invites have reached their lucky recipient only to be cast aside because said recipient never intended to actually do anything with it (other than write a scathing review, which people like to do just because it makes them look tough).
So I'm not bitter or frustrated that I didn't get an invite, but I am bitter and frustrated that the invitation I could have had went to someone who squandered it. Many times over.
On the other hand, this could be indicative of the kind of hurdle this technology faces in the mainstream. If you're old enough to remember the time when you got your first email address, but most of your friends still hadn't gotten theirs, then you probably can see how a technology like Wave needs widespread adoption in order to really, well, make waves. If these first preview users give up on it so quickly, that could mean trouble, and that makes me really sad.
Here are a couple things I would do with Wave at work if I got the chance to play with it:
- Refine the proofing cycle. Currently, one of my customers emails me with a change they'd like to make to a document, I delegate that task to an employee by forwarding them the email, and they email the PDF proof back to me. I review the PDF and if it looks acceptable, I forward that to the customer, who may send back some additional changes. Rinse. Repeat. Wave could improve this process because, even if it was just being used internally, the back-and-forth nature of the revision process could be reduced to a single document that had a complete history of changes made during that proofing cycle. It would be easier to review, easier to discuss changes, and easier to keep a record of everything that happened.
- Refine the process for resolving production problems. If we have a data-related problem with a customer's file, there could be many reasons. It could be a customer-side issue, which means our CSR would need to contact them and resolve it. It could be a common internal issue, which can be delegated to our junior programmer. It could be an internal issue that's never come up before, which would probably require my attention. Sometimes, it's a combination of those. The problem is, the production team doesn't know the difference, so it can take a while to figure out who should be dealing with it. However, if the production team was able to create a wave and add all the people who might be able to help, we could collaborate on the issue, delegate specific tasks, and keep tabs on the resolution, all from the same place, without a half-dozen emails flying around.
I know that eventually I'll get to try out Wave; it just may not be as soon as I'd like. I really, really hope that most of the people getting their hands on it today are testing it and giving quality feedback, the way my staff and I would.
A Twitter post says they're still working on getting invitations out, so there could still be hope, but they could also just be referring to the additional invites that can be handed out by each if the initial 100,000. I don't know. I'll try not to hold my breath.
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