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I came across the blogpost Why a Career in Computer Programming Sucks recently, which argues that programming makes for a terrible long-term career choice because the languages and technologies are always changing:

Computer programming is a job that’s heavily dependent on temporary knowledge capital. It’s temporary because the powers that be keep changing the languages and tools that programmers need to do their jobs. In nearly all other professions, knowledge capital increases as you grow older because you keep learning more about your field. But in computer programming, the old knowledge becomes completely obsolete and useless. No one cares if you know how to program in COBOL for example. It’s completely useless knowledge.

The technologies are all new and different every five years; therefore, anything you learn today will be “completely useless” before you know it. It sounds like common sense, but is this really the case?

My experience is that it is not. Fresh out of college I learned Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the basic script that tells your browser how a web page should look. Then I learned JavaScript, code to make my HTML pages more dynamic. Then I learned Edify, a visual interface tool that allowed me to draw programs in flowcharts (Wish I had a screenshot of the interface. People always thought I was playing videogames when I was programming). I was able to port this foundation in programming to a job writing Active Server Pages (ASP), using VBScript. With a familiarization of data arrays, I Worked my way into database development and SQL scripting.

OmniVox telephony application (A Close Approximation to What Edify Looked Like)

What kicked off this 10-year journey of exploration? Running a BBS on my Commodore 128 as a kid.

I work with people who have decades of programming experience, who spent years writing COBOL on mainframes. Far from obsolete, these developers come up with some of the most ingenious programming solutions I’ve ever seen in modern technologies. That’s because some of them have 40 years experience in programming, and can tell you why the system works the way it does.

In 10 years of working as an IT professional, I’ve learned that if you know ASP, you know PHP. If you know SQL Server, then you know Oracle. If you can make the website work in one web browser, you can make it work in all of them.

The reason programmers only get better with age is because, while the syntax for the latest programming language might be new, the logic and methodologies underlying it is the same. If/Then’s, arrays, loops, and the principles of good programming don’t change; they become more refined with time.

Good programmers refine themselves with them.

Note: Most employers don’t see it this way. Many will go with the 22-year-old developer over the one with 20 years experience because employers look for experience in specific technologies, failing to understand the common principles underlying them all.

Most employers are dumbasses, but you all ready knew that.

President Bush knows why oil prices are high when he tells us, “The only thing standing now between the American people and these vast oil resources is the United States Congress,” but his actions to lift oil-drilling bans from our nature preserves and off America’s coasts are just a drop in the bucket of what he could be doing to ease oil prices for suffering Americans.

The true future of American Oil is all around us:

The REAL Untapped Oil Supply Credit: K.E.B Photography

What those environmentalists don’t want the American people to know is that oil is made of plants. It’s true! It’s science! All the oil we burn in our cars is the natural, organic product of plants that have been squished up and converted into combustible hydrocarbons!

America needs to start proactively helping this process along by burying our national forests underground so they can begin the natural, organic conversion process. (Keep stressing those words “natural” and “organic.” Environmentalists will eat it up.) The effort of burying our country’s forests will not only create thousands of new jobs, but we can also pave over the buried forests and put Wal-Marts on top of them!

Trees are a total waste of space anyways. They just sit there, doing nothing, and serving no purpose except for sissy-prissy liberals to write poems about. We need to start planting Capitalism!

Critics will argue that it will take 100 Million Years for nature to convert our nation’s forests to crude oil, but if we had started proactively burying our forests 100 million years ago we wouldn’t be in this mess today! You ever think about that, you stupid environmentalist jerks???

Burying our Nation’s forests is just the first step Bush can take to stop capitulating to those capitalism-hating, nature-worshipping hippies and man-up to the real solutions to America’s oil-supply problems. Rush Limbaugh admires Chinese gas subsidies, but even having the Federal Government buy our gasoline for us doesn’t go far enough (however crucial it is to the effort of wheel-barrowing Limbaugh’s lard-butt around in a humvee).

Bush should remove the bans on selling our children into indentured servitude, so we can turn them over to the Oil Industry. He should replace Congress with ExxonMobile stockholders, who can then replace him with a CEO in turn. As Patrick Henry will proclaim, once the Oil Companies get to rewrite the history books, “Give me convenience or give me death.¹”

¹ From the title of a Dead Kennedys album.

“Heya!” a pipsqueak of a girl with a pair of cheap, paper-mache wings strapped to her back greeted the small gaggle of stunned onlookers. “Welcome to Heaven! I’m you’re tour guide!”

A series of “Oh’s” and “Ah’s” wafted from the group, all of whom were looking around the endless, cloud-filled landscape appreciatively.

“Last thing I remember,” an overweight gentleman with a bushy white mustache muttered aloud, “I was trying to make that 18th hole before a thunderstorm rained out the golf course. What happened to me? What about my wife and children?”

“Yeah, um, I got no idea,” the tour guide popped her gum. “That was, like, ten thousand years ago. You guys were all totally dead between then and now. We’ve got a social networking system, like you had on your Wild Wild Web, where you’ll be able to register and find all your loved ones. It’s really fab.”

“What about my cat, Mr. Snugglekins?” a little girl in pajamas asked. “Will he come to heaven too?”

“Pets are a special case,” a transparent window materialized before the tour guide, and her lips moved silently as she read to herself from it. “Pets are resurrected on a case by case… Blah blah blah… Navigate to… click on the Suggest a Pet link… Okay!” she snapped her fingers. “You can put a request in with the administrators. All they need is your four-dimensional location in the space-time continuum. You know, when and where you owned Mr. kitty, and they’ll find him.”

The little girl was frowning skeptically at the tour guide.

“That reminds me!” the tour guide took the wad of gum from her mouth and stuck it to one of her wings. “If any of you can remember homeless people, or people who didn’t have any friends, if you could take some time to describe them to our caseworkers, we’d really appreciate it. We’re missing a lot of people here.”

“I don’t understand,” a little old lady spoke up then. “Aren’t you all-seeing and all-knowing? How can you lose people?”

“It’s called chaos theory,” the tour guide was twirling her curly blonde hair with one finger now, “The universe and time are really really big. We can’t keep track of everything in it.”

“Would you mind behaving a little more professionally young lady?” a priggish woman at the front of the group piped up. “For most of us, this resurrection is a very sacred experience.”

The girl rolled her eyes, “Uh huh. Look lady, there was, like, billions of people alive on Earth when you were alive. Multiply that by, like, thousands of years, and that’s… like… Um… a lot of people, okay? … What makes you special?

“I was a devoted member of my church,” the woman replied, holding her head up stiffly, “I attended every Sunday and donated thousands of dollars to the ministry over my lifetime.”

“Huh,” the tour guide quipped, obviously unimpressed, “Well this is Science Heaven, okay? Do you remember being in some Christian Heaven before you arrived here?”

“Well, I… No.”

“Do you want us to send you back there?”

The woman appeared ready to retort defiantly, but then caught herself, looking down sullenly, “No. Thank you.”

“Okay then!” The tour guide swiveled around and began leading the group into eternity, “We have another group coming through in just a moment, so if you’ll follow me, I’ll present to you all the first day of the rest of your afterlife!”

LED Bookmark Light

For the fourth of July, I purchased 600 LEDs and 600 lithium batteries for the Port Discover Science Center to give out before the Elizabeth City fireworks display. Because I was afraid of the LED-throwies presenting a choking hazard, I decided to tape them to the top of bookmarks advertising the science center and the environmental benefits of LED lighting.

The Bookmarks had facts such as:

• Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) use only 15-percent as much energy as incandescent light bulbs and 50-percent as much energy as compact fluorescents.
• LEDs last for an average of 60,000 hours. Even if you left your lights on for half of every day, they would still last over 25 years, or longer than most people own their homes!
• The Department of Energy has estimated that LEDs could reduce national energy consumption for lighting by 29% by 2025. That would save U.S. households $125 billion on their electric bills.
• You can fold this bookmark over and use it as a book light!You can replace the lithium battery and reuse the LED again and again.

Choosing LED Colors

A variety of LED colors were provided and the bookmarks were printed on a variety of colored cardstock. We let the kids choose their own colors, and helped them put the bookmark lights together, explaining electrons and electricity as we did so. By hole punching the bookmarks with the battery exposed and LED contact left free, kids could turn them on by squeezing.

I found earlier that an LED will burn brightly for over two weeks continuously on one lithium battery. The kids DIY project ended up being quite a hit, and many people were surprised we were giving them away for free.

A baby praying mantis dropped by to see what we were up to. It was camera-shy, so here’s the best shot I could get. : )

Baby Praying Mantis Visitor

You can check out the flickr set here.

How about this for Conservatism?

See, the ChiComs need their economy growing. They need people driving around, moving around. They need people to be able to afford fuel, so they’re subsidizing fuel. They’re not bailing people out of stupid home mortgage messes. They’re buying their gasoline for them, because they need an economy. Know what energy means to this, the whole subject of economic growth. So meanwhile, the ChiComs, a country certainly growing, certainly on the rise, but it ain’t the United States of America. How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can’t see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower.

So when the free market sets gasoline prices high, the United States should start buying our gas for us to keep up with the Chinese???

Sorry Rush, I prefer to let market forces push America toward alternative energy sources to the idea that the United States should borrow more money from China to give it to the Middle East.

“Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.”
- M. King Hubbert

I’m going on five years of blogging now, which gives me enough material to go back and grade my own aptitude at prediction. My favorite bit of personal futurism was my article, Bring on the High Gas Prices, posted August 14, 2005. This idea was not mine at all, I was merely throwing my weight behind M. King Hubbert’s predictions that oil would run out in Texas, which it did. I reviewed the competing hypotheses, and I threw my support behind the idea of Peak Oil based on the data. I’m glad I got it right, but the idea was not mine.

April 2007 I officially threw my lot in with those who accept the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I reviewed the data, and was convinced that (1) It’s happening (2) We’re causing it. How fast? How much? Where? When? I don’t know, the models are being improved and the Earth’s symptoms monitored. Things are getting really bad, and things are going to get much much worse. Again, not my idea, but I knew which horse to bet on.

In my book, The Spiraling Web, originally written in 2002, I talked about two super computers battling it out on a Chessboard in order to solve the game once and for all. Chinook would solve Checkers just a few years later, but the idea of “solving” games was not a new one. I would later find that it is a topic of great interest to computer scientists who are actually working on solving Chess and other games. My idea, but others had it to. So great minds think alike (or fools seldom differ).

My bad predictions are harder to find, because I’m so resistant to posting predictions unless I feel 99.9 percent certain of their veracity. My unposted political predictions are usually wrong: “Hillary will be President” (2008), “John Kerry will be President” (2004), and “George Bush will slip on a banana peel and die in an amusing fashion before he can do any harm” (2000).

Although I never came out and said it on this blog, all of my talk about panspermia, Von Neumann Machines, and extremeophiles was a prelude to the Mars Phoenix Lander. I was working to preempt the discovery of life on Mars. I was 99.9 percent certain Phoenix would find microbial life in the Martian soil.

No such luck, but I’m still hoping. I can’t fathom Mars not having microbial life thriving on it. That seems almost an impossibility to my mind.

The new search engine cuil, which “searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft,” is not off to a good start with me.

We didn’t find any results for “ideonexus”

It’s just a bug in their search engine. If I searched on the word again from this page, I get back lots of results.

Cybernetic Interface Credit: _MaO_

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a cyborg as, “A human who has certain physiological processes aided or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices.” Under this definition, people who wear glasses, hearing aides, and even drive cars are cyborgs. With physiological defined as “consistent with the normal functioning of an organism,” we would also consider people who use computers, calculators, and even wristwatches cyborgs for aiding their normal cognitive functions with technological solutions.

The Wikipedia entry for Cyborg defines it as “an organism that has both artificial and natural systems,” but then goes on to muddy this definition by excluding contact lenses, arguing they make us no more cyborg than a spear, but does include insulin pumps because they require feedback. This opens a whole semantical can of worms as we attempt to define what constitutes “feedback.”

Science fiction cyborgs are easy to define: anything part animal, part machine that’s too advanced for present technology. As a human living in a life support suit, Darth Vader is a cyborg. As a robot living in human skin, the Terminator is a cyborg. This definition is easy because it makes cyborgs a state of being always out of reach; however, it also makes the word doomed to obsolescence as we will inevitably one day create the cyborgs of science fiction dreams.

Gian-Cyborg Credit: Roberto Rizzato

The etymology of “cyborg” is Cybernetic + Organism. “Organism” is easy, but “cybernetics” isn’t. The word Cybernetics comes from the Greek word for steersman, kybernetes (controlling-governing), as in one who pilots a ship is a cyborg. The steersman controls the boat, ‘but the boat interacts with the steersman.’ They create a system, the steersman feeling the wind and the tilt of the boat, the boat responding to the steersman’s adjustments. Together, they become a cybernetic organism that is millennia old.

Cybernetics is a fuzzily defined academic study. Norbert Wiener founded Cybernetics as the study of ‘Control and communication in the animal or in the machine.’ Heinz von Foerster emphasized the word ‘circularity‘in describing cybernetics as a discipline, the feedback loop. Principia Cybernetica’s authors seek to narrow cybernetics to the search for general principles that govern complex, self-regulating systems.

The Earth is a cybernetic system, the organisms living on it modifying its environment, and the environment shaping the organisms in turn through natural selection. This makes evolution a cybernetic principle that explains the emergent complexity of the world around us.

We are each of us organisms. We are each of us complex systems of feedback and control. Are we therefore cyborgs at birth, before we have even supplemented our physiology with clothing to keep us warm?

Further Reading: