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Laralee went to a presentation at school about “Gang Activity in Longmont”. Who knew that a cow town like this has a lot of gang activity (apparently it does), and more to the point, who knew that some of it is focused on the middle school (!) next door to the elementary school where Alex and Kyra go.

She came home with a bunch of handouts and information about how to determine if your child has joined a gang (he acts tough, swears, and gets tattoos). It even had a brief dictionary of gang terms, for those of us who don’t know what “kickin’ it” means. Pretty weird stuff.

What’s scary is thinking about how there are gang problems at a middle school… in My Day, I think the worst violence you could ever see at school was when two guys decided to have a fight after school (“psst, Jim Haney is going to fight Dave Hobold in the parking lot at 3:15”) and you could see them shove each other a few times before the vice-principal showed up. Today schools worry about knives, guns, drugs, and the like. Yikes.

Others see things as they are and ask, “Why?” I see things that never were and ask, “Wow, where did you get this stuff?”

— Seen in an e-mail joke

For some reason this newspaper snippet cracked me the heck up.

… So, surprise surprise… after almost fifteen years, Pete Rose has finally publicly that he bet on baseball.

It’s obvious– to me anyway– that he’s doing it for a singular goal: to get into the Hall of Fame.  I’ve read some articles and opinions (I haven’t read his just-released book), but it doesn’t seem to me he’s really very sorry for what he did.  Moreover, although he admitted to wrongdoing he didn’t admit that what he did hurt the sport, he didn’t actually apologize (no “I’m sorry”s anywhere), and the timing of the announcement and release of the book make it all too clear he’s worried he’ll never get into the Hall if he doesn’t at least put on some appearances of remorse.

Today’s newspaper quoted some statistic like “80% of baseball fans want to see Rose in the Hall of Fame”.  Personally, I think he should get what he deserves.  The lifetime ban from the game is just punishment, and with it comes a lifetime ineligibility for the Hall.  You break the rules, you’re out.  I can’t really believe eighty percent of the people think he deserves that honor, but maybe I’m in the (small) minority by thinking cheaters shouldn’t win.

Remorse aside, I think that letting him into the Hall “dilutes” it for those who are more deserving.  There are great men in the Hall, and to add to their ranks a cheater and a liar makes their honor that much less.

I just read a lengthy but fantastic treatise by Paul Graham entitled “What You Can’t Say”. It expounds on the strange question of what today’s “moral fashion” has made it unpopular, unconfortable, or even dangerous to say.

There were many wonderful points in the article, but one that was particularly interesting to me was the part where he talked about picking your battles. It’s not necessarily wise to argue something that’s unpopular (even if you believe it) because it distracts you from other– probably more important– things.

“Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as ‘yellowist’, as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you’ll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you’ll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you’re mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

“I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics, or that pro-Israel groups are ‘compiling dossiers’ on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being sued for violating the DMCA, part of me wants to say, ‘All right, you bastards, bring it on.’ The problem is, there are so many things you can’t say. If you said them all you’d have no time left for your real work.”

That’s good advice, methinks. I disagree with a lot of the current political and philosophic “fashions”, but arguing about them is typically just a waste of breath.

He finishes the topic with a great paragraph:

“The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.”

This is probably why my friends often get annoyed with my views. 🙂

“As the light changed from red to green to yellow, and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.”

For some reason this cracks me up.

It turns out it was my e-mail .sig about eight years ago.

Today we were playing on the kids’ computer as a family, and Kyra said she wanted to try the game called “Klickety”. None of us had any idea what it was, so we tried it. A board popped onto the screen with a bunch of colored squares. Clicking a few of them revealed that connecting colors disappear and the rest of the board “falls” into place to fill the gap.

The objective is to end up with as few blocks as possible, but it quickly became obvious that it’s much trickier than it seems. No matter how careful you might be, you end up with a checkerboard of color at the end.

Interestingly, Kyra proved to be quite good. She managed to whittle the 150 initial blocks down to 22. Apparently she’s a savant or something.

Now I’m hooked, and will simply have to continue playing until I get the ultimate goal: zero blocks left. With a bit of blind luck I pulled off a single block at the end, but I don’t know how in the world I’ll get it down to zero.

Ahh, another benefit of the Computer Age…

In my never-ending quest to see just how geeky I can really be, I checked my “Sent Mail” folder to see how many e-mail messages I sent through all of 2003. It turns out there are 9,835 messages in there– or roughly 27 messages for every day of the year. Assuming I don’t send many on the weekends (since I don’t) that means around 37 per workday.

Diving deeper into the math, and assuming I work around nine hours a day, that’s 4.2 messages every hour or a message every fourteen minutes. Sheesh. I am truly a geek.

And don’t even get me started on the number of spam messages I received in 2003…

Interesting stuff:

A week and a half ago, police in Johannesburg South Africa arrested fourteen people accused of operating a bootleg human-organ operation.

Apparently they would fly poor Brazilian citizens to South Africa, where they underwent surgery and had a kidney removed. They were paid between ten and thirteen thousand dollars for the procedure, and then flown back home (all expenses paid).

The kidneys were then implanted in wealthy South Africans who paid over $100,000 for the operation. After leaving the hospital, they didn’t have to worry about dialysis any more and could return to a normal life.

The Brazilian donors were all volunteers, and the money they received was often enough to buy a house, open a business, or realize other financial dreams (I imagine $13k goes farther in Brazil than in the U.S.). The South African recipients were all in dire need of a transplant and had the money to do it. And the doctors involved made a handsome profit along the way.

Everyone wins, right?

Well, it turns out there are international laws forbidding the sale of human organs. There are doubtless some moral and ethical issues. There’s the omnipresent discussion of rich versus poor, and who’s taking advantage of who.

So, the question of the day: should this sort of thing be legitimized? If everyone goes home healthy (and often wealthy) is there really a reason why it shouldn’t be allowed? Personally, I don’t have a problem with this sort of thing and in fact, it seems to me that making it illegal will accomplish two things: (1) make it more expensive and thus harder to do for those who have some money and dire medical need, and (2) make it more prone to mistakes and bungled operations, as the doctors are forced to operate underground.

There are some 83,000 people on the kidney donation list in the U.S. alone; this shortage only encourages the sort of behavior described above. If I had serious kidney problems, and knew I’d be on a list for ten years, but had the option of scraping together some cash (maybe taking out a second mortgage or whatever) and receiving the kidney of some Third World farmer who would then be the richest guy in town, I’d do it.

Francis Bacon once quipped, “Knowledge is power”.

But in today’s world of technology, I wonder if that’s still true. I would say that a more accurate statement might be “data is power”.

Consider: in Bacon’s day (late 1500’s) the printing press was still relatively new, and printed material (“data”) wasn’t yet in widespread use, nor was it easily accessible to the common person. Thus, those who possessed knowledge were powerful– they were highly paid, highly regarded, and sought by those in power. I’ve heard it said that Benjamin Franklin was one of the last people who “knew” something about almost every area of human knowledge. In those times, people with knowledge were indeed powerful.

Today, it is impossible to know something about everything. Cultural and scientific advances have brought us so much information that no single person can possibly have that degree of “knowledge”. So now, rather than a handful of polyglots we have huge numbers of specialists who are extremely well-versed in their narrow field but do not possess the general knowledge that Franklin did.

Thus, it seems that knowledge is not as powerful as it once was. Said another way, one man’s knowledge is another man’s trivia.

We see that data is everywhere. Those narrow-minded scientists who study a particular variety of bacteria publish their research and make it available in journals and the internet. The garage musicians who specialize in grunge-ska music upload their songs to their web site or burn CD’s and hand them to friends. The journalist who once wrote for a hometown paper has the ability to spread his words throughout the world via the hometown paper’s web site. All of those people take their knowledge, transform it to data, and share that data with the world.

So in my mind, it is the data– or more accurately, the control of that data– that defines power today. The network administrator who keeps the web site running, the panel that approves or denies journal articles, the editor who tosses out the news story… these are the people who have power. They can allow or prevent one man’s knowledge from reaching his audience.

Granted, such control also existed in Bacon’s day, and Franklin’s, but with the vast abundance of data available today– many orders of magnitude greater than either of those men could conceive– the role of the “gatekeeper” of the data is rising in importance.

Knowledge cannot be saved; data can. (To “save” knowledge you have to write it down or put it in some format other than electrochemical impulses in your brain, at which point it becomes data.) Data can be copied, and transferred, and changed. It can also be destroyed, lending a particular power to those in control as they can cause information to be lost forever– at least until the next person comes along and re-discovers it.

I think it’s a sign of the times, and an interesting commentary on our technological society, that data has become more powerful (more important?) than knowledge.

So what is “power” in today’s world?