Dana Blankenhorn

Principles and Ideology

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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What is most frustrating to me, as I read responses to my blog posts here and elsewhere, is how often I come up against raw, naked ideology.

Ideology is a soul stealer. Ideology blinds us to reality, substituting an artificial construct. Ideology, regardless of where its -ism comes from, is simply impractical.

One big reason why we have generational change is that the principles which first motivate important changes morph, over time, into ideology. This happens at all times, to all types of principle. The kind, simple words of Jesus have been transformed over the centuries into a host of warring ideologies. The same is true for Mohammad.

The same is true, in our time, for Adam Smith, for George Mason, for John Locke, even for Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, all the  great men who are credited with defining what is today modern conservatism.

I have been quite taken with the interviews surrounding the book Pure Goldwater, co-written by Barry Goldwater Jr. (who supported Ron Paul) and former Nixon counsel John W. Dean (who now seems to be a Democrat). Dean revealed that, while Goldwater Sr. was seen as a right-wing extremist in 1964 he was, by the end of his life, considered to be something of a libertarian, out of step with his own party. He even befriended the Clintons!

Goldwater was a man of principle. What he saw in his lifetime was those principles morph into an ideology, an absolutism as troubling as what he had fought in the 1950s.

An Alternative Energy Census

One of the treats in my first reporting job, at the Houston Business Journal, came in learning about geological maps. Using sonar and great creativity, engineers in the "oilpatch" mapped where potential oilfields might lie. The maps determined the value of potential oilfields, and told wildcatters where they should drill.

With businessmen now taking The War Against Oil seriously, we need new maps.

Such maps might indicate:

• How much sunlight falls.
• How deep you must drill to reach usable geothermal resources.
• How reliable is the wind.
• Where is a stream capable of taking a water wheel?

From such maps we can determine the potential alternative energy value of any place in the country.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

ADHD is like this sometimes.

Just when you think you have a handle on everything, that things are moving forward, the call comes and you're thrown back into it.

A science teacher this time. John argued about the answer to a question. It got personal. He got mad. He raised his voice. He ignored signals to calm down, to leave the room. The other kids were scared, and didn't know what he was going to do.

All the kind words and promises in the world won't do a lot of good at times like this. Talking to the teacher I feel like I'm talking someone down off a ledge, all the while feeling like I want to crawl out there with them.

It doesn't help to realize that this is happening less-and-less. It doesn't help much to realize that, when John came home that day, he was filled with remorse, angry at himself. He didn't want to hear my words. He had heard them too often. They were playing in his head all day.

Yet in some ways these are the best of times. We got a letter last week inviting John to apply to Yale. I have on my desk an invitation from five top schools, including Harvard and Penn, for him to attend a seminar on going to one of them. It's like being the parent of a top basketball prospect with iffy friends. He might become a star or he might fall down completely.

Open Source is Parallel Processing on Steroids

I was chatting up a Washington liberal today, and it was depressing.

The subject was computing. The liberal bemoaned the power of corporations to wreck a great, highly-functional government project.

The project was starved for funds, its developers allowed to leave, and now its bones were being picked by lobbyists, all aiming their "best of breed" systems as replacements for bits-and-pieces of what had once been a magnificent computing edifice.

Even if Democrats are elected this fall, he said, they don't understand these technical arguments about open source vs. proprietary. They'll be bought off just like the current crop.

Which is when it hit me, the frame he could use to tear down all those vendors and bring back what was lost, what is in the process of being lost.

Open source is parallel processing.  (Shown is the parallel processing lab at the University of Utah.)

No matter how big a vendor might be, it's still one system. Like the Von Neumann architectures that dominated computing for its first 40 years they have a bottleneck. The only way to speed up the process of finding a solution is to speed the whole process, get more GHz. It's this kind of thinking which led, by the 1980s, to so-called "supercomputers" like the Cray.

Parallel processing was developed in the 1980s at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico. The idea was simple -- to break jobs into parts, to move the parts onto many systems, and then to put the solutions together on the back end.

In the 20 years since parallel processing has come to dominate computing, relegating Von Neumann to a Wikipedia entry. First people stacked Macs to beat a Cray. Then they used parallel processing on the Internet itself, creating distributed computing projects like SETI @  Home. Today parallel processing is used inside chips -- all today's latest AMD and Intel silicon is doing parallel processing. From two to four to eight -- who knows how far we can go with it.

That's sort of how open source works. Only on steroids.

Because with open source not only do you parse out pieces of a project to different companies, or different developers, but their work can cross-pollinate. Not only can you build systems in parallel, but you can also use a vast community of users to find bugs, and another vast army to stamp out the bugs.

The genius of Linus Torvalds lies in his ability to constantly re-engineer Linux' development process, first farming out all the work, then finding new ways to coordinate the massively-parallel architecture which develops in response. And the design of Linux itself responds well to this parallel processing impulse, since it consists of central functions in a kernel, ancillary functions surrounding it, and a host of distribution providers who can build working systems from all the pieces -- sometimes using just parts of the kernel for a mobile system, embracing optional things like virtualization for a server.

The Future of Corporate-University Collaboration?

If anyone knows of any other deals like this, let me know. Because right now this looks unique.

And if anyone has any opinions, fire away, because this is not your usual blog post. This one asks more questions than it answers.

Rice has signed a deal with Lockheed-Martin in which the latter will have a sort of "mini-lab" inside the Smalley Institute. The company will pick through what everyone is doing, and fund up to six projects each year which could be quickly brought to market.

The new lab-in-a-lab is called the Lockheed Martin Advanced Nanotechnology Center of Excellence at Rice,  or LANCER.  Cute...cute name.

Another type of spam victim

Every spam which goes out has millions of victims. (I hope those lovely people at Hormel, makers of this fine canned pork-and-ham product so beloved in Hawaii and Alaska, accept my apology for the picture or, if they wish to complain, do so to John Cleese.)

When sending out millions of spams to e-mail boxes, the spammer hopes this will become thousands of larger victims, those who respond positively to the spam. By including viruses and other malware in the spam, this "success rate" increases, as many people are infected just by downloading the spam. (I learned this after installing a new anti-viral which checks mail as it hits Mailwasher.)

But there's another type of victim, as anyone (like me) who has had the same e-mail address for some time (or worse, their own domain) will attest .

That's the from: victim.