Congratulations, Python!

Congratulations, Python! It's the year 3000!

Troll culture

Yesterday I watched some TED videos (TED is a conference for important people), the two from Hans Rosling and then the exchange between Rick Warren and Daniel Dennett. I love that stuff. Rick Warren struck me in the same way that Tim Keller did, as a man out of his element. And Daniel Dennett reminded me of Richard Dawkins, a bogey not nearly so scary once he himself has to deal with actual people.

As designed, the videos inspired me to think about ideas. Here are the ideas:

• Culture makes you make culture.
  
• All culture belongs to all people.
• Everyone owns Jesus.
• Jesus belongs at the center of culture.

Now, a few days ago I happened upon the world of shock sites, the most grotesque pictures and videos that the Internet has to offer. I read up on a bunch. Every taboo is broken, as violently as possible, repeatedly, with relish. I didn't view these sites at the time (actually, one of them I had seen a long time ago). But then this morning I was woken up early, and I decided to put my ideas to the test. All culture? Jesus? So I surfed shock sites for half an hour. It made me think, later, about Jesus and taboos: who is today's Samaritan? But the immediate surprise was this: nothing shown was nearly as abhorrent as the video I watched right before bed the night before, showing abortions. The violence of war is perpetrated by governments, but abortion is interpersonal, between mother (father, doctor, nurse) and child.

The raison d'être of the Internet troll is to violently destroy our constructed cultural identities. You care about this or that? Fuck you. You're mad at me? Fuck you. You hate me? Fuck you. The troll opposes culture with the most violent anti-culture. He intends to reduce our identity to bare, and baren, existence. He forces us to submit, to not-care. Because he can. And he can, usually. But what happens when the mainstream itself embraces the most inhuman annihilation? The Samaritan question still stands, but (for better or worse) the troll ultimately loses as long as abortion is normal.

Job change

I'm leaving the Anglican Communion Network; my last day is December 31st. In January I plan to start as a contract programmer with Art & Logic.

A use for the carriage return

I just found out what the carriage return character, \r, is good for. A friend was asking for help on a command-line program: he wanted to update a progress indicator. This is like you get when downloading something with curl or wget or fetch. So I opened up /usr/src/usr.bin/fetch/fetch.c, expecting to find some low-level TTY hackery. Instead, I found this key line:

fprintf(stderr, "\r%-46.46s", xs->name);

It turns out that the carriage return moves the output cursor back to the beginning of the current line, so further output overwrites whatever was already there. It turns out, too, that this works from Python on both Unix and Windows:

>>> print "foo\rbar"
bar

Yay!

This makes sense if you think about where the term "carriage return" comes from, and it also makes sense out of why Windows includes it as part of its EOL indicator. I have a typewriter at home, and I've been using it lately to type invoices for the little bit of consulting that I still do. The bar on my typewriter that ends a line actually does perform two functions: first it scrolls the paper up—newline, \n. Then if you keep pushing the bar, it moves the carriage (the roller assembly that holds the paper) back to the right until you hit your first tab stop—carriage return, \r. So on my typewriter the EOL sequence is \n\r, but apparently on teletypes the order was reversed. And I actually do perform a \n without a \r sometimes, like when I'm lining up columns on an invoice. I can do a \r without a \n too, but that's a different knob.

Unlike so many Unix conventions that are the result of ossified traditions from more innocent times, it appears that the single-character EOL is actually an innovation. It's fun to know your roots.

Toyota doesn't do layoffs

I've owned four cars, and they've all been Toyotas. By now it's a brand loyalty. I don't want a Honda or Nissan, let alone a Ford or Chevy. Nope, my car problem is solved. Given that, this is exactly the story I want to be telling myself about my car:

Do you know how many hourly jobs GM has laid off from 2006 to July 2008? Take a guess. How about 34,000? And now, they’re talking about another 5,500 layoffs. And now they’re asking you and your government for a bailout to end their troubled, outdated, low quality, wasteful production system. But, let’s not focus on fixing GM’s problems with an infusion of cash. There’s something even deeper going on here that’s really wrong.

OK, here’s a better question. How many hourly jobs has Toyota’s American production system laid off in the same time frame? Zero. That’s right. ZERO. How? Isn’t Toyota experiencing the same slow down in auto sales as GM is? Yes, it is. And yes, Toyota has halted production at its Texas and Indiana plants for the past 3 months. But the 4,500 people who work at those plants have not been laid off. What!?!?! How? Why?

The answer: Toyota has a special culture, deep-rooted values, and respect for their workforce. Toyota’s tradition is to NOT lay off employees during hard times. This tradition hasn’t really been put to the test until now. And Toyota has stuck to its guns and its values.

The post goes on to say that the employees at the Texas and Indiana plants have either been in training, have been painting the factory and building Habitat for Humanity houses, or have been sent to other factories. This is the sort of story that makes me proud to own a Toyota. It's also the sort of story that makes me think that although size matters, it's not the only thing.

The Constitution of Christian Minimalism

Today at work we announced the draft constitution for the new church we are putting together. This has inspired me to draft a constitution for Christian Minimalism.



The Rule of Life is my favorite part. As far as I know, no individual or household has yet ratified the Christian Minimalism constitution. If any do, I'd love to hear about it.

Knuth!

(source)

Support Wikipedia

I gave money to Wikipedia. Did you?

I love my children

Leah is a Hannah Montana fan but is ashamed because I'm not. Tonight we landed in this conversation:

"It's not that I hate Hannah Montana, I just want to understand it. And I love you whether or not you love Hannah Montana. You're bigger than that."

"I'm not bigger than it, it's bigger than me."

"What is? Hannah Montana?"

"Not just Hannah Montana, the whole thing. It's like it jumps out and grabs me and takes over. When I'm 11 it will fade away, like for Molly [her older neighbor friend and main connection to pop culture]."

"Did she tell you that?"

"No, I just thought it. It'll be like I'm out of jail."

The conversation was richer than that, but it happened quickly and I knew during it that I would wish I remembered it better. I love that crap. I know[, Christy, ] that I'm supposed to not make her feel uncomfortable about Disney's latest money machine, that I'm ruining her. But I'd much rather raise kids that engage culture and actually understand it.

Centralized milk

Let the record show that after further conversation in the real world, I have agreed with Christy to give Dean Foods a score of 1 on my scale of 1 to 10.