Argh.

I've been listing to The Alan Watts Podcast (iTunes has some interesting stuff).  During the introduction to Hinduism, he talked about the Hindu concept of god, versus the Western Monotheist concept.

The first group holds that, ultimately, we're all aspects of god.  The identities that we call self are masks, roles that god plays in the unfolding of the cosmic performance.  The universe isn't all that important.  It's just the theater, the props, the necessary accompaniment.  It just sort of happens, much as a discarded box becomes a child's fort.  The second group holds that god is the architect, contractor, engineer, etc. of the world.  God sets everything in motion, directly or indirectly, and the cosmos unfolds according to plan.  The world is direct evidence of the plan, a manifestation of that plan.

It's interesting to ponder this alternative concept.  But what I thought most interesting is what it does to the "Problem of Evil."  If god is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient, then why does god allow evil to exist?  If god isn't those three things, then -- well, those three things pretty much define "god" for a Western Monotheist.  Under the "Hindu" concept, though, the problem goes away.  If we're all god, then we can't actually be hurting anyone.  It's all just performance, special effects, and corn-syrup blood.  There is no evil.  I don't why, but I find this disquieting.

It seems to me that the most-common shared human belief is the belief in the "golden age."  People seem to believe their lives, towns, states, nations, ethnic groups,  . . . . humanity in general, were better in the past.  "Life was great back when -- " I was single, the city-folk hadn't bought Johnson's farm, no foreigners lived here, this land was still ours, we still lived in the green and noble Eden of hunting & gathering, etc., etc.  Further examples are left as exercise for the reader.

My question is, "why?"  Why do (almost?) all humans believe this?  My answer is personal entropy.  We reason that our own experience must be universal.  Life, for an American kid, anyway, is amazingly good.  Their bodies are flexible, resilient, well-fed, attended by parent, physician, and daycare provider.  Their minds are nourished, their time spent in the most luxurious of human activities -- learning.  Who wouldn't want to return to that?  Who, raised that way, having played that hard, having received that much focused attention, wouldn't feel that something had been taken from them?  After all, it's reasonable to assume that one's earliest experiences are "normal."  From that assumption, life after childhood is certainly a set-back.

I made this point to a friend, the other day.  He agrees on the universality of the myth of the golden age.  But he disagrees with my explanation of it.  He holds that the myth originates in the evolution of social values.  It's not, in his view, the personal changes so much as the social ones.  One grows to maturity in a society.  At the outset, one has no society and so, one has no social values.  As one matures, one comes into contact with a society.  The values of that society, even though they are changing, appear constant to a person growing into them.  The radical change of introduction masks the subtle change of evolution.  The shocking new music that became dominant 6 months ago isn't a shock if you only started listening to the radio in the last 3 months.  Eventually, a person is no longer a new member of the society.  (Or one emigrates, as my friend did.)  The slow drift of culture is no longer obscured, and one is shocked to discover that one's society has changed.  Clearly, it's not what it was.  But it's not supposed to change -- after all, it's been constant one's entire life (so far, and only in one's perception).

In either case, I note that the myth is about deterioration.  There is no universal discussion of how things were worse, or just the same, or merely different.  Except in the aftermath of catastrophe or war, I suppose.  I wonder how this relates.  Do we simply ignore positive aspects of change?  Are positive things taken as evidence that not everything has deteriorated?  i.e., Because we know that things were better in the past, anything that is good must be a relic of that better time.  Nonsensical on the face of it.  Polio vaccination, for example, is not a relic of a better time.

I think it was Spider Robinson who observed that "Everything that happened before my birth is bedrock, fundamental, unchanging Things-as-They-Should-Be; things that happen in the first 20 years of my life are new, cool, and potentially a way to earn a living; everything after that is lamentable deterioration."

Saw 2 Redwing Blackbirds today.  They're hanging around, waiting for the pond to thaw.  Three Sandhill Cranes flew over, on their way to Canada (or at least further north than here).  They're amazing to hear.

Trying an experiment, with my finch-feeder.  I mixed cracked sunflower nuts into the Nyjer.  I hope the nuts are small enough to fit through the feeder ports.  Nicole says, if I clearly, distinctly, obviously, and unmistakably label the container, I can keep live meal worms in the refrigerator.  I might be able to attract Bluebirds.  I've seen them around, but they don't come to the feeders.  Not interested in seeds.  I have some freeze-dried larva in one of the window feeders.  But it's not very enticing.  As the nice person at Wild Birds Unlimited put it, "Would you eat jerky if you could get a hamburger?"

We should have named the dog Houdini.  She escaped again, last evening.  I guess the good news is she didn't go through the new fence on the north side.  The 6x6s staked to the ground along the fence seem to be holding.  And she didn't dig out, so that's better than last year.  The bad news is that the lumber buried under the fence, to which the fence is stapled, is finally rotten.  She broke a 2-foot length off, at the staple line, and then pushed the fence up.  The tension wire is obviously wired to the fence material too infrequently.  Hopefully, if I add more connections, it'll hold against push-ups.  If not, I'll have to replace the buried wood.  I really, really, really don't want to dig all that up.

I delivered a project, today.  That is, I tried to.  Inevitably, the intended user found it didn't do what he expected.  I could argue that the "flaw" wasn't part of the requirements.  I could point out that I'm the 4th person to be given the job, a pile of notes, and some face-time to ask a few questions.  Not to mention that I'm working on it without official cognizance.  But hey -- who am I kidding?  I'm, at best, an "Office Developer."  That means, where I work, there are no requirements except "Must be whatever user wants."  Regardless of that, learning something's not right at this point means I didn't understand what he wanted in the first place.  It's not my fault, but it's my responsibility.

That isn't what disturbs me.

What disturbs me is that the user-interface on this thing is a 5-option selection-box, 2 "OK" buttons, a "Cancel" button, and 3 standard Windows file-selection windows.  And it took the best part of a hour to explain how to use it.  How is it that I can build something so obviously simple, that obviously isn't simple?

OK, yeah.  I spent hours staring at it.  That's got to give me tunnel vision.  And I'm much more focused on getting it to do something than I am on how it looks.  I have almost no experience with user-interfaces.  Almost everything I've built has been either launch-when-the-file-opens or for my own use.  Still.  How can something with so few parts, all recognizable, performing a task that the user determined, require so much instruction?

The only thing I can think is that it's just a hard thing to do.

I just finished listening to Stephen Fox's Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama.  Alabama is the most successful commerce-raider in history.  In 2 years, Semmes captured (and almost always burned, after removing the crew)  65 Union merchant vessels.  He, with slight help from other Confederate vessels, badly disrupted Union commerce.  When Alabama was sunk, the newspapers printed a list of 900 vessels that had been sold by U.S. owners.  They were sold because the insurance, and risk of encountering Alabama, was so great they were too expensive to operate.

Strangely, the thing that caught my notice was in the closing pages.  Fox referred to Alabama as the most historic Naval vessel of the war.  Of course, my immediate reaction was "Nuh-uh!  Monitor and Merrimac!" (or CSS Virginia, if you're a stickler).  The ironclads clearly foreshadowed battleship development, with armor, gun turrets, steam-only propulsion, etc.  Thing is, battleships barely survived WWI.  They certainly didn't survive even the opening of WWII.  (You might look at the fates of Bismarck and HMS Prince of Wales, -- not to mention Pearl Harbor.)  In that light, the ironclads were evolutionary, but the lineage ultimately proved a dead-end.

Alabama attacked (almost entirely) merchant shipping.  She operated on long-duration cruise, years between returning home.  Contrary to usual practice of the day, she burned her prizes rather than sell them.  (No nation recognized the Confederate States of America, so Semmes had no one to sell to.)  Her modus operandi was speed, closing on her victims so fast they couldn't escape.  She was well-armed, but not armored.  I think she was the fore-runner of the U-boat.  They, too, just destroyed their prizes.  (In their case, no room for prisoners and it's very difficult to bring a boat alongside the rounded hull of a submarine.)  U-boats weren't particularly fast, but fast isn't necessary if one can simply materialize next to the target vessel.  Like Alabama, they were built without armor, but with perfectly adequate weaponry.  They and Alabama fulfilled the same function.  Perhaps Fox's statement wasn't hyperbole, after all.