Wow, it’s been a while.

“The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it’s not whether they prefer Python or Java. It’s whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage. By writing clear comments and technical specs, they let other programmers understand their code, which means other programmers can use and work with their code instead of rewriting it. Absent this, their code is worthless.”

While this article centers around software engineering, ineffective communication is a dysfunctional impediment not limited to the programming or technology realm, but to all businesses in every industry. Where ever humans have to effectively grasp, and convey conceptual knowledge, i.e., virtually every endeavor involving more than one individual working in coordination for some productive goal, a failure to do so effectively will cost time and money. In fields utilizing specialized knowledge of complex or intricate topics, poor communication can grind productivity to stagnation, but even more simple arenas such as taking a customer’s order at a fast food restaurant can impose drastic consequences on customer service, and inevitably the bottom line.

Seek out and support those individuals who share your values and can communicate, even simple ideas, in a clear and efficient manner - they are segues to productive achievement.

Formidable machines indeed…

The glances of women are like certain apparently peaceful, but really formidable, machines. You pass them every day quietly, with impunity, and without suspicion of danger. There comes a moment when you forget even that they are there. You come and go, you muse and talk and laugh. Suddenly you feel that you are seized; it is done. The wheels have caught you, the glance has captured you. It has taken you, no matter how or where, by any portion whatever of your thought which was trailing. Through any absence of mind, you are lost. You will be drawn in entirely. A chain of mysterious forces has gained possession of you. You struggle in vain; no human succor is possible. You will be drawn down, from wheel to wheel, from anguish to anguish, from torture to torture. You, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and, you will not escape from the terrible machine until, according as you are in the power of a malevolent nature, or a noble heart, you will be disfigured by shame, or transfigured by love.

Les Misérables - Volume III: Book Sixth, Chapter VI (Wilbour Translation)

Work:
I’ve stayed pretty much heads-down in programming over the past few weeks… hopefully things will slow down towards the end of this week. I ended up developing a full Java-based SQL parser that generates ad-hoc model objects for complex queries. The persistence framework now supports standard one-to-one entity/table OR’ish generation and the “sql2java” utility will handle any cross-sectional data that transcend table boundaries, but don’t align wholly with full relational objects, i.e., “Select two columns from every table”. The generation tool just takes the tedium out of setting up such data views. I’ve also templatized support for most of the prevalent MVC-type api’s. Essentially, you point the tool at a schema, generate the entities, generate any cross-sectional models, specify which front-end, and push the go-button. The result is end-to-end CRUD and precise finders for all entities and read-only views of the sectional models. Technically, ~75% of a java based web application will be up and running - depending on how fancy the front-end is.

Music
It’s Galax week. I’ll be heading up for an afternoon or two. Five years ago, I’d be burning a week of vacation to go Monday-Sunday and play music 10-12 hours a day until my fingers literally cramped to a halt - this year I’ll be totally content with a few hours total. Life changes.

Culture
Lots of stuff going on with health care “reform” and economy… none of it good. ;] The only positive I can cite is that it *seems* that more people are waking up to the deadly threat facing us with socialized medicine. Of course the growing objection is only on practical grounds, but this starting point creates a chance talk about the more important moral case for objection. That conversation gets a lot more interesting.

Home
Sam has changed. The first signs of a new sense of independence and freewill caught me a bit off guard. The ubiquitous terrible-twos are here I’m afraid. After seeing him transition into this phase, I’m convinced that all kids reach a point where their expressive cognition exceeds their language and reasoning. How long they stay in this phase and to what extent they actually escape it is largely due to how we as parents navigate the storm.

We’ve established very structured and consistent boundaries with Sam from the beginning and that work is already paying off. He has melt-downs, but in just about every case he can be reasoned out of the mindset. He does very well with either-or negotiations - binary reasoning. An example from a recent melt over leaving our shoes (flip-flops) on at the pool.

Mom/Dad: Either we take our shoes off, or we leave the swimming pool - your choice… but those are the only two options.

Sam: Shoes off….

The options have to be reasonable, and more importantly, they have to be absolute. To abandon the established options, e.g., allowing shoes in the pool, is a recipe for terror.

I find his ability to manage and accept this type of communication very promising.

While parsing random thoughts in the shower this morning, the notorious phrase of evasion, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”, popped into my head. For the first time that I can recall, I actually paused in an attempt to accurately articulate a response to the question. Here’s the best I could do without consulting a dictionary. I must also note that I’m winging this without a complete understanding of Objectivist epistemology. I hesitated to publish my thought process at first, but then decided it would be a valuable experience to learn from any flaws that are exposed. I’m certainly not afraid of being corrected, since a breach of the solidity in my low-level thinking will only cause intellectual strife above. Doing something my own way, only to be corrected and shown the right way, has always proven to be a very valuable way for me to acquire knowledge. Not only do you learn from the correction, but a close examination of how you came to the conclusion you did, and an abstraction of the error can save you from similar mistakes in future endeavors. I will most likely look back at this and laugh at some point in the future.

is -auxiliary verb: an expression of affirmation regarding one, many, or all attributes of an entity’s identity.

Considering this definition of it’s meaning and usage, how does it relate to communication, and more specifically, for communication that should be considered as a reliable means of acquiring knowledge? For the assertion to be accepted, a complete inventory of it’s associated evidence must be considered. Once the evidence is considered, we categorize the assertion as true, probable, possible, improbably, or false. The amount of evidence needed in order to 1) find the assertion worthy of even considering, and if so, 2) consider the assertion reliably, is based on the amount and nature of any contextual insight needed.

The need for contextual insight will vary according to the nature and complexity of the attribute(s) being affirmed. The amount of context required is inversely proportional to the degree of self-evidence. Thus, an absolutely self-evident claim, “A is A”, would require no contextual insight. Conversely, an absolutely contradictory claim, “A is not A”, would require infinite contextual insight because it could never be rationally justified. Within polar opposites there would be assertions which would need infinitely varying degrees of contextual insight. In more concrete forms, the phrase “Brad is alive” would require no contextual insight on my part as it is absolutely self-evident. The phrase “The dog is barking” would require very little insight considering this is a normal behavior for dogs. “The dog is flying” would lead me to gather more insight (is the dog on a plane?), and “The dog is speaking Portuguese” would require a substantial amount of contextual insight. Finally, “The dog is a cat” (a contradiction) is inexplicable, and could not be accepted on any amount of contextual insight.

The distinction between metaphysical facts, ones that exist in truth outside of any volitional consciousness (“The rock is gray.”), and man-made facts, ones that exist only in the context of a volitional consciousness (“Betty is Wilma’s best friend.”), is the metric by which an assertion’s degree of self-evidence can be judged.

Contextual insight can exist as information that was previously obtained by concept integrations (knowledge), or as first-hand perceptual evidence (concepts integrated real-time to form contextual certainty). One familiar with frogs may be able to accept the assertion that “Dendrobates Azureus is blue with black spots” because their knowledge provides the contextual insight, whereas an individual who’s unfamiliar with South American Amphibians may require first hand visualization.

The last key element serving as contextual insight is the reliability of the individual making the assertion, which is the sum of a tremendous number of possible variables. The first to mind are:

• Who are they?
• Why would they make the assertion?
• Are they usually correct?
• Is this a subject that they are knowledgeable in?

Each of these fairly broad criteria obviously are built on numerous other factors, all which must be considered and calculated at light speed when we encounter an assertion using the word ‘is’. This is beginning to wander a bit in to areas that are well beyond the scope of this post and my knowledge, so I’ll wrap it up.

It’s easy to poke fun and make light of the original question until you think about what a blatant evasion it is - a sassy attempt to play semantics with the law of identity. ‘Is’ implies identity.