This is a story about a distant past. Not so many years, really, but the software construction world was quite different forty years ago. What was innovative then is now merely commonplace. In a word, telecommuting.
In the mid 1970's, I was working in France on a project for the French statistics bureau, INSEE. One aspect of this work is described in a previous post. The project involved the creation of a system to capture all of the data collected in the French census of 1975, and was part of a larger project, with "Colibri" as its code name*. Those with an interest in the history of census taking, and a reading knowledge of French may find it fascinating to read about this time in the history of INSEE.
The system we built was very ambitious for the time, and definitely on the cutting edge. It involved a central computer, located in Lille, attached to about 50 terminals** distributed throughout France, in 17 different locations. At these terminals, over 100 employees, mostly women, worked one of two shifts a day. Their work was to type in the information collected on the millions of individual census forms.
Our work was to develop the software system to support this. The hardware was an IBM 370 mainframe computer with telecommunication channels connected to all of the terminal locations. This was managed using IBM's SNA protocol as implemented in VTAM. On top of all this, we ran the teleprocessing monitoring system which our company*** sold, MULTIFASTER. Besides necessary bits and pieces to connect everything together, our main task was to create small programs, each one of which would handle a single transaction. A transaction was basically one screenful of information coming from one of the terminals. The small program would then validate the information and store it in a database, and that was all it did. Each such small program was called, also, a transaction. Confusing, I know.
The system we developed consisted of a collection of transactions. Each transaction was initiated from one of the terminals connected to the system. There were transactions to paint input screens onto the 3270 terminal. After the operator had filled in the blank fields, she would press the transmit key. There were transactions to accept the transmissions from the terminals, validate the information and store it in the database.
We were three software engineers writing the transactions: Marcel Sellem, Raymond Hédin, and myself. We all commuted from the Paris area to Lille to do the work at the site of the central computer. The programs were prepared on punched cards (80 column cards) and given to the operators to compile.
Once the entire system was built, it went into operation, and the data entry personnel went to work. Their work lasted for several years.
We all shifted our attention to other projects, but it remained my job to maintain the system. Every software system has bugs, and these needed to be addressed. We also had contractual limits on how much time the computer spent working on each transaction, so there was some tuning to be done as well.
At first, I did the necessary maintenance work by commuting to Lille. But then, suddenly, this innovative thought hit me: I could create a transaction which would let me edit the programs of the system. The system was a collection of loosely-coupled transactions. All that I had to do was add a new one. I did this.
The editor, due to the characteristics of the 3270 terminal had to be extremely simple. Each screen showed me three lines at a time from the program file on which I was working. The middle line could be edited. Above and below it were two lines of context: the line before and the line after the one that I could change.
Due to a limitation**** of the editing software behind the scenes, I had to work through the file in order from top to bottom. Each time that I deleted a line, edited a line, or inserted a line, I would press the transmit key, and the information would be sent to the central computer where the actual editing of the file was performed.
Once I had made all of the changes to the file, I used the same system to create a new file, written in job control language (JCL), which would direct the compilation of the modified program. I would then phone an operator in Lille, tell them where the file of JCL was located, and have them run it. Running it would compile the modified program file. If all of that was successful, I could cause the modified program to go into service.
I built all of this while at Lille doing the maintenance work that had taken me there. Once it was built, I no longer needed to commute! Instead, I would go to the INSEE head office, nearby in Paris, log in to the system from a terminal they had there, and make the needed changes.
Since the new editing transactions were part of the system, I could also modify them remotely! Of course, this would have to be done very carefully, because if I were to break the editing transactions, I would have to go all the way to Lille to fix them.
This is how I was able to do software construction without commuting, back in the 1970's.
* COLIBRI is an acronym from the French COdification en LIgne des Bulletins du Recensement Individuels roughly translated as "encoding on-line of the individual forms of the census."
** These were IBM 3270 terminals, sometimes called "green screens" because they were monochromatic black and green screens.
*** The company for which I worked was named CAP Sogeti Logiciel, and at the time, I thought it was a small company. Turns out it was a branch of one of the largest software organizations in Europe.
**** The editing software was not intended for interactive use. So calling this one of its limitations is really unfair. It was actually a feature of the editing software to allow user-supplied code to be executed as each line was considered. I took advantage of that feature to paint a new screen onto the 3270 terminal, and the editor waited until the user responded to that with a command to do some edits before continuing on to the next line.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Con without content
or, what this blog will be if I don't continue writing...
Anyone who was following my previous blogging attempt, which lasted for several years, will have given a passing thought to what may have happened. It ended rather abruptly, with a post which included, "...surgery... This is considered routine." Which could lead one to wonder just how routine the outcome had been.
Everything was fine, in that eye, at least, and the right eye (this time) was similarly treated in January 2014, with very good results.
Just had to write a little today, lest this blog be a con, without content.
Anyone who was following my previous blogging attempt, which lasted for several years, will have given a passing thought to what may have happened. It ended rather abruptly, with a post which included, "...surgery... This is considered routine." Which could lead one to wonder just how routine the outcome had been.
Everything was fine, in that eye, at least, and the right eye (this time) was similarly treated in January 2014, with very good results.
Just had to write a little today, lest this blog be a con, without content.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Contrivance without confluence
The previous contrivance (without conflation) showed how to count only user-viewed visits to a web page, depending on the user-agent (i.e. browser) to load an image each time the page is viewed. This is good because that contrivance no longer counts requests for the page from robots and web crawler software, as it did in its first incarnation.
However, much information is lost as the count is maintained, because a mere tally is a stark abstraction of the visit information. Left out are the date of the visit, the user's IP address, the kind of browser used, the referring page, etc. etc.
In this contrivance, we'll show one way of capturing the date information. This is so the flow of all counts do not run together into a single number. It is as if each day's tally is a separate river flowing into the month, flowing into the year*.
The idea is to create a folder for each year, month, and day on which a visit occurs, and to keep a separate tally for each date.
Here is a CGI script to accomplish the task.
As before, line 1 lets the web server know that a bash shell should interpret this script, line 2 informs the web server (which lets the browser know) that an image will be returned, and line 3 signals the end of HTTP headers.
Line 4 obtains the system date from the machine running the web server, in the format YYYY/MM/DD. This is convenient, as the separating slash also has meaning for the file system, indicating nested folders. Note that this machine might be in a different time zone than the web master, and very often than the visitors. This scheme abstracts out the time of the visit, along with all of the other information available to the script.
Lines 5 and 8-10 create the folder for the year, if it doesn't already exist.
Lines 6 and 11-13 create the folder for the month, if necessary.
Lines 7 and 14-16 create the folder for the day, if necessary.
Line 17 tallies the count.
Line 18 as before provides the actual image data to be returned to the web server, which will pass it along to the user's browser.
To use this script you would upload it to the cgi-bin folder of the public html folder of your provider's web server machine. Supposing you named it tallywithdate.cgi any request from an image tag in one of your web pages for
Now, the question you are going to ask is, "Why do it this way, rather than using a relational database?" Very good question. In my case, it was to avoid setting up all of the machinery required. All that I needed was the date information, and the publisher of the website was content to have the date be relative to the U.S. central time zone (where the web server machine is located).
Another reason for using this technique is that, for this web site, I did not need PHP, because all of the web pages are generated off-line, and uploaded periodically, as a collection of hundreds of HTML pages. So, I took it as a challenge to implement the few pieces that required some server-side logic using only the Bash shell.
A word about disk space requirements. On the machine that hosts the web site in question, the file system uses blocks of 4K (4096 bytes). So one of these will be required for each year, month, day, and tallies file. Since the tallies file uses base one, it will require an additional 4K block when the tally exceeds 4096, and so on. I don't know how this would compare to a relational database solution. There, each count event would require at least 10 or 12 bytes for the record to contain the count and the system date. The exact comparison will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Another useful piece of information that is available to the script is the referring page. That information consists of the entire URL of the page containing the tally (image) request. That could be quite large. As an alternative, the pages of the web site in question are partitioned into equivalence classes, and each class of page is assigned a simple identifier. Then the following script (replacing only the penultimate line of the first script) records the tallies in a separate file for each class of web page.
There you have it. Instead of a tally going into a file named tallies, it will go into a file whose name is provided as the query string of the image URL. For example, a request from one of your (fabulous) web pages that looked like this
The query string (portion of the image URL following the question mark) is sanitized (line 17) by accepting only the first occurrence of an identifier of letters and digits, starting with a letter. If such an identifier is present in the query string, then it is used as a file name (lines 18-20) to collect the tallies.
Scripts to display the count of page views for any given date, or date range, and for any class of web page are all left as exercises for the reader.
* So, with this iteration of the contrivance, we leave behind the confluence of all the counts into a single number. Hence the contrived title of this post: this is a contrivance without confluence.
[Added May 31] If you would like to limit the class names to those in a particular list of identifiers, place those identifiers in a file named, say eclassids, and add this line of code just before the last if of the script.
[Added Jan 10, 2021] Note that lines 8-16 could be replaced by this single line of code:
However, much information is lost as the count is maintained, because a mere tally is a stark abstraction of the visit information. Left out are the date of the visit, the user's IP address, the kind of browser used, the referring page, etc. etc.
In this contrivance, we'll show one way of capturing the date information. This is so the flow of all counts do not run together into a single number. It is as if each day's tally is a separate river flowing into the month, flowing into the year*.
The idea is to create a folder for each year, month, and day on which a visit occurs, and to keep a separate tally for each date.
Here is a CGI script to accomplish the task.
#!/bin/bash echo "Content-type: image/gif" echo DATE=`date +%Y/%m/%d` FOLDER_Y=../../counters/`echo $DATE | cut -d / -f 1` FOLDER_M=../../counters/`echo $DATE | cut -d / -f 1-2` FOLDER_D=../../counters/`echo $DATE | cut -d / -f 1-3` if [ ! -d "$FOLDER_Y" ]; then mkdir $FOLDER_Y fi if [ ! -d "$FOLDER_M" ]; then mkdir $FOLDER_M fi if [ ! -d "$FOLDER_D" ]; then mkdir $FOLDER_D fi echo -n 1 >>$FOLDER_D/tallies cat 1x1.gif
As before, line 1 lets the web server know that a bash shell should interpret this script, line 2 informs the web server (which lets the browser know) that an image will be returned, and line 3 signals the end of HTTP headers.
Line 4 obtains the system date from the machine running the web server, in the format YYYY/MM/DD. This is convenient, as the separating slash also has meaning for the file system, indicating nested folders. Note that this machine might be in a different time zone than the web master, and very often than the visitors. This scheme abstracts out the time of the visit, along with all of the other information available to the script.
Lines 5 and 8-10 create the folder for the year, if it doesn't already exist.
Lines 6 and 11-13 create the folder for the month, if necessary.
Lines 7 and 14-16 create the folder for the day, if necessary.
Line 17 tallies the count.
Line 18 as before provides the actual image data to be returned to the web server, which will pass it along to the user's browser.
To use this script you would upload it to the cgi-bin folder of the public html folder of your provider's web server machine. Supposing you named it tallywithdate.cgi any request from an image tag in one of your web pages for
[your domain]/cgi-bin/tallywithdate.cgiwould result in a view of that page receiving one tally or count.
Now, the question you are going to ask is, "Why do it this way, rather than using a relational database?" Very good question. In my case, it was to avoid setting up all of the machinery required. All that I needed was the date information, and the publisher of the website was content to have the date be relative to the U.S. central time zone (where the web server machine is located).
Another reason for using this technique is that, for this web site, I did not need PHP, because all of the web pages are generated off-line, and uploaded periodically, as a collection of hundreds of HTML pages. So, I took it as a challenge to implement the few pieces that required some server-side logic using only the Bash shell.
A word about disk space requirements. On the machine that hosts the web site in question, the file system uses blocks of 4K (4096 bytes). So one of these will be required for each year, month, day, and tallies file. Since the tallies file uses base one, it will require an additional 4K block when the tally exceeds 4096, and so on. I don't know how this would compare to a relational database solution. There, each count event would require at least 10 or 12 bytes for the record to contain the count and the system date. The exact comparison will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Another useful piece of information that is available to the script is the referring page. That information consists of the entire URL of the page containing the tally (image) request. That could be quite large. As an alternative, the pages of the web site in question are partitioned into equivalence classes, and each class of page is assigned a simple identifier. Then the following script (replacing only the penultimate line of the first script) records the tallies in a separate file for each class of web page.
#!/bin/bash echo "Content-type: image/gif" echo DATE=`date +%Y/%m/%d` FOLDER_Y=../../counters/`echo $DATE | cut -d / -f 1` FOLDER_M=../../counters/`echo $DATE | cut -d / -f 1-2` FOLDER_D=../../counters/`echo $DATE | cut -d / -f 1-3` if [ ! -d "$FOLDER_Y" ]; then mkdir $FOLDER_Y fi if [ ! -d "$FOLDER_M" ]; then mkdir $FOLDER_M fi if [ ! -d "$FOLDER_D" ]; then mkdir $FOLDER_D fi TALLIES=`echo $QUERY_STRING | grep -o '[a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z]*'` if [ -n "$TALLIES" ]; then echo -n 1 >>$FOLDER_D/$TALLIES fi cat 1x1.gif
There you have it. Instead of a tally going into a file named tallies, it will go into a file whose name is provided as the query string of the image URL. For example, a request from one of your (fabulous) web pages that looked like this
[your domain]/cgi-bin/tallywithdate.cgi?fabulouswould result in a tally to the file named fabulous in the folder for the current (server) date.
The query string (portion of the image URL following the question mark) is sanitized (line 17) by accepting only the first occurrence of an identifier of letters and digits, starting with a letter. If such an identifier is present in the query string, then it is used as a file name (lines 18-20) to collect the tallies.
Scripts to display the count of page views for any given date, or date range, and for any class of web page are all left as exercises for the reader.
* So, with this iteration of the contrivance, we leave behind the confluence of all the counts into a single number. Hence the contrived title of this post: this is a contrivance without confluence.
[Added May 31] If you would like to limit the class names to those in a particular list of identifiers, place those identifiers in a file named, say eclassids, and add this line of code just before the last if of the script.
TALLIES=`grep "^$TALLIES$" ../../counters/eclassids | head -1`
[Added Jan 10, 2021] Note that lines 8-16 could be replaced by this single line of code:
mkdir -p $FOLDER_DThe -p flag will cause the mkdir command to create all the directories which don't already exist without giving any error messages. This would include the parent directories for a new month and year.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Contrivance without conflation
In a previous post, "Contrivance without conclusion," I presented a device to count web page views. As noted in the post, that contrivance really counts web page requests. As such, it would also count requests from web crawlers used by search engines, and other* cases where a human being has not actually viewed the page.
The trick commonly used to count only views of a web page is to embed in the page an image containing the number of views. The technique is sometimes called a web bug. When the page is requested by a user-operated browser, the browser normally** will also request all embedded images so that they can be displayed in their proper places on the page.
There are dozens of web sites which offer free counters of this kind. However, if you choose to use one of these you will be bound by their terms and conditions, and subject to them discontinuing their service, which can occur without notice.
So, why not make your own? Here is a modification of the earlier contrivance that accomplishes this.
Line 1 as before, tells the web server that this file is a program written in the "bash" language.
Line 2 instructs the web server to send the user agent an HTTP header informing it of the type of content, in this case, a GIF image.
Line 3 as before is a blank line that signals the end of HTTP headers, so that all that follows will be sent to the user agent as the actual content produced by this CGI script (which happens only at line 15, but that is getting ahead of the story).
Line 4 as before increments the counter.
Line 5 assigns the visitor count as the value of the shell variable named SUM. As a running example, let's assume the value is 1957.
Line 6 assigns the length of the visitor count number (i.e. the number of digits it contains) to the shell variable named LEN. For our running example, this will be 4.
Line 7 assigns an initial value to the shell variable named IMG, the string "H/" followed by the actual length, "H/4" in our running example.
Line 8 begins a loop which, in our running example, will be used 4 times, since the command `seq 1 4` will return 1 2 3 4.
Line 9 open brackets the lines which will be repeated.
Line 10 appends a space character and the letter S to the IMG variable.
Line 11 appends a space character, then "P/" and, a number (the position, zero-based). For our running example, the numbers will be 3 2 1 0, as computed by having the command bc evaluate each of 4-1, 4-2, etc.
Line 12 appends a space character, then a digit from the number to be displayed. In our running example, these digits will be1 9 5 7 7 5 9 1 (because we are looking at them in reverse order).
Line 13 close brackets the lines which were to be repeated.
Line 14 changes the current directory to a folder named "counters" (which must be created--see below) which is out of the way of the files which can be served by the web server. This directory or folder must contain image fragments, which are used by the final line.
Line 15 concatenates many bits and pieces, which are each binary files. When all strung together, and ending with the contents of the binary file named T, this will produce a valid GIF file which will be the number from the web page visitor count.
In our running example, the value stored in the IMG variable at the end of the loop will be
H/4 S P/3 7 S P/2 5 S P/1 9 S P/0 1
and the complete command of line 15 would thus be
cat H/4 S P/3 7 S P/2 5 S P/1 9 S P/0 1 T
which will output the fourteen fragments--named H/4, S, P/3, 7, etc. and finally, the fragment named T--to the web server (which passes this content along to the user agent (the browser)).
To make this work, you will need to upload the file to the cgi-bin folder in the public html file provided by your web hosting company, naming it, say, "tallyimage.cgi". Once you have done this, anyone who visits the page at
You will also need to download the image fragments from the file counters.zip (which is also mentioned/used in a web page entitled "Image generation in DataPerfect") and unzip this file into a new folder named "counters" (for that is the name mentioned in line 14) in the folder containing the public html file provided by your web hosting company.
As a mnemonic, the 32 fragment names are
folder H for "header" (containing fragments named 1, 2, 3, ... 9, X(not used here))
S for "separator"
folder P for "position" (zero-based, containing fragments named 0, 1, 2, ... 9)
9 for the digit nine, etc.
T for "terminator"
Suppose you don't want to display the count on a web page, but you want to just count it as having been viewed? In this case, here is a much simpler CGI script to accomplish the task.
The first four lines are identical to the previous CGI script.
Line 5 copies a file named 1x1.gif to the the web server, which passes it along to the user agent as the requested image. This file, as its name suggests, is a small one by one pixel GIF image, which (though its name does not suggest this) is transparent, so it can be included somewhere on a page without disruption of the visual appearance of the page.
The two contrivances live:
http://sanbachs.net/tallypagewithimage.html
http://sanbachs.net/tallythispage.html
These are normal web pages, which call for and display the contrivance images. On the second page, I have enlarged the image and surrounded it will a border so that you can see where it is. This will allow you to download a 1x1.gif file more easily.
Note that these web pages (and those of the previous post) all share the same "tallies" file, and thus share a page view counter.
As a modification to the previous "contrivance without conclusion," this is a contrivance without conflation of the two kinds of visits: the ones from a genuine request to view a page, and the ones from web crawlers and other user agents which do not request the images on the page.
* Technically, any software which makes a request for a web page is called a User Agent.
** A user can disable the automatic display of images on a web page, unfortunately, so this trick will miss counting such page views.
The trick commonly used to count only views of a web page is to embed in the page an image containing the number of views. The technique is sometimes called a web bug. When the page is requested by a user-operated browser, the browser normally** will also request all embedded images so that they can be displayed in their proper places on the page.
There are dozens of web sites which offer free counters of this kind. However, if you choose to use one of these you will be bound by their terms and conditions, and subject to them discontinuing their service, which can occur without notice.
So, why not make your own? Here is a modification of the earlier contrivance that accomplishes this.
#!/bin/bash
echo "Content-type: image/gif"
echo
echo -n 1 >>../../tallies
SUM=`cat ../../tallies | wc -c`
LEN=${#SUM}
IMG="H/$LEN"
for d in `seq 1 $LEN`
do
IMG="$IMG S"
IMG="$IMG P/`echo $LEN-$d | bc`"
IMG="$IMG `echo -n $SUM | tail -c $d | head -c 1`"
done
cd ../../counters
cat $IMG T
Line 1 as before, tells the web server that this file is a program written in the "bash" language.
Line 2 instructs the web server to send the user agent an HTTP header informing it of the type of content, in this case, a GIF image.
Line 3 as before is a blank line that signals the end of HTTP headers, so that all that follows will be sent to the user agent as the actual content produced by this CGI script (which happens only at line 15, but that is getting ahead of the story).
Line 4 as before increments the counter.
Line 5 assigns the visitor count as the value of the shell variable named SUM. As a running example, let's assume the value is 1957.
Line 6 assigns the length of the visitor count number (i.e. the number of digits it contains) to the shell variable named LEN. For our running example, this will be 4.
Line 7 assigns an initial value to the shell variable named IMG, the string "H/" followed by the actual length, "H/4" in our running example.
Line 8 begins a loop which, in our running example, will be used 4 times, since the command `seq 1 4` will return 1 2 3 4.
Line 9 open brackets the lines which will be repeated.
Line 10 appends a space character and the letter S to the IMG variable.
Line 11 appends a space character, then "P/" and, a number (the position, zero-based). For our running example, the numbers will be 3 2 1 0, as computed by having the command bc evaluate each of 4-1, 4-2, etc.
Line 12 appends a space character, then a digit from the number to be displayed. In our running example, these digits will be
Line 13 close brackets the lines which were to be repeated.
Line 14 changes the current directory to a folder named "counters" (which must be created--see below) which is out of the way of the files which can be served by the web server. This directory or folder must contain image fragments, which are used by the final line.
Line 15 concatenates many bits and pieces, which are each binary files. When all strung together, and ending with the contents of the binary file named T, this will produce a valid GIF file which will be the number from the web page visitor count.
In our running example, the value stored in the IMG variable at the end of the loop will be
H/4 S P/3 7 S P/2 5 S P/1 9 S P/0 1
and the complete command of line 15 would thus be
cat H/4 S P/3 7 S P/2 5 S P/1 9 S P/0 1 T
which will output the fourteen fragments--named H/4, S, P/3, 7, etc. and finally, the fragment named T--to the web server (which passes this content along to the user agent (the browser)).
To make this work, you will need to upload the file to the cgi-bin folder in the public html file provided by your web hosting company, naming it, say, "tallyimage.cgi". Once you have done this, anyone who visits the page at
[your domain name]/cgi-bin/tallyimage.cgiwill see the number of visitors, shown as a decimal number. And that is all that will be shown in the browser, because the user will have requested an image. At this point it will be a broken image (because the script will fail to execute correctly), until you install the image fragments.
You will also need to download the image fragments from the file counters.zip (which is also mentioned/used in a web page entitled "Image generation in DataPerfect") and unzip this file into a new folder named "counters" (for that is the name mentioned in line 14) in the folder containing the public html file provided by your web hosting company.
As a mnemonic, the 32 fragment names are
folder H for "header" (containing fragments named 1, 2, 3, ... 9, X(not used here))
S for "separator"
folder P for "position" (zero-based, containing fragments named 0, 1, 2, ... 9)
9 for the digit nine, etc.
T for "terminator"
Suppose you don't want to display the count on a web page, but you want to just count it as having been viewed? In this case, here is a much simpler CGI script to accomplish the task.
#!/bin/bash echo "Content-type: image/gif" echo echo -n 1 >>../../tallies cat 1x1.gif
The first four lines are identical to the previous CGI script.
Line 5 copies a file named 1x1.gif to the the web server, which passes it along to the user agent as the requested image. This file, as its name suggests, is a small one by one pixel GIF image, which (though its name does not suggest this) is transparent, so it can be included somewhere on a page without disruption of the visual appearance of the page.
The two contrivances live:
http://sanbachs.net/tallypagewithimage.html
http://sanbachs.net/tallythispage.html
These are normal web pages, which call for and display the contrivance images. On the second page, I have enlarged the image and surrounded it will a border so that you can see where it is. This will allow you to download a 1x1.gif file more easily.
Note that these web pages (and those of the previous post) all share the same "tallies" file, and thus share a page view counter.
As a modification to the previous "contrivance without conclusion," this is a contrivance without conflation of the two kinds of visits: the ones from a genuine request to view a page, and the ones from web crawlers and other user agents which do not request the images on the page.
* Technically, any software which makes a request for a web page is called a User Agent.
** A user can disable the automatic display of images on a web page, unfortunately, so this trick will miss counting such page views.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Context without content
I approach this blog post with a bit of apprehension. It is key to understanding much of what I intend to write going forward. Yet it is a bit dry, and maybe too technical. I will do my best to keep it interesting.
First, let's consider content without context. That could, of course, be a post by itself, but I'm trying to contrast it with the topic at hand.
I had a colleague at one of my places of work, whom I will call "Brent." Brent used to enjoy writing the number "1040" on the whiteboard, and would then look at his audience expectantly. After letting some painfully silent moments pass, he would ask, "What is this?" People would propose various things. He would finally point out that we can't know what it means until we understand the context. It could be the number of an IRS tax form (this was especially fun in April), the number of a house, Brent's favorite number*, the number of visits to a particular web page, and on and on. I used to think this was a rather self-evident point, but it was important to him that people think about it, and we often dedicated a moment of silence to its honor.
This post is about context without regard to any particular content. In other words, I wish to discuss a framework for thinking about things. I invite you to pause for a moment and consider this question, "In what sense is Cinderella alive?" I recognize that I am encouraging the same** kind of exercise that Brent enjoyed, but please humor me for a moment. I invite you, then, having considered this, to read the last half of a short blog post. The half about Cinderella (starting two paragraphs above the screenshot). The post is entitled, "Lying to children," and I hope you will find it amusing. Please come back here and finish reading this post after you have enjoyed that one.
Thank you for returning! It is always a bit of a gamble, on the Internet, to refer your readers away to another author. Especially a younger one.
The context that I wish to expose you to is from Karl Popper, a twentieth century philosopher. This way of thinking about things is commonly called "Popper's three worlds". Things might exist in World One as tangible, physical objects, such as the pages in a book which comprise the Cinderella fairy tale. Other things might exist in World Two as thoughts and mental pictures, such as those imagined by the reader of those pages, or if read aloud, by the child listening. There exist also things which, while not concrete, physical objects, nevertheless exert an impact on us, such as the character "Cinderella," and he assigns these things to World Three.
I don't want to get into this in any great detail in this post, because here I am merely setting up the stage for a number of subsequent posts, which, to be understood, will require that the reader be familiar with this way of looking at things. Every time we hear that something exists, or read a question about the existence of something, we can make distinctions about that something in terms of these three worlds.
For example, recently facebook has been displaying an ad that asks, "Do you believe in Africa?" Probably because we are now living on the African continent. Well, not really on the continent per se, but the island of Mauritius is considered to be a part of Africa.
What does this question mean? I never clicked on the ad to find out what the advertiser meant, and the ad no longer appears. In World One, yes, I believe that Africa exists in the physical world. I have seen it on maps and globes hundreds of times, have flown over it several times, and I have changed planes in an airport there. Not having looked at the advertiser's material, I do not know what was in his or her head about Africa, what thoughts or mental pictures he or she wished to implant in my World Two. I can only assume that it is something about Africa as a World Three entity, perhaps its future or its potential for greatness or economic growth (or pride to be African?).
I invite you to consider using Popper's three worlds as a way to organize your thoughts about things. Is it a real, tangible object? World one. Is it an idea flitting through your head? World two. Is it something that, while not tangible, has a life of its own, that people talk about or to which people pledge allegiance? World three.
In fairness to modern thinking, I must point out that this way of viewing reality is not popular now. And, that will become my point in future posts, because it is my own cognitive dissonance, bouncing back and forth between different ways of viewing reality, which drives me to write this blog.
For the moment, this is just context without content.
* This was not one of the examples he used at the time, but, hey, it was his favorite number! Something that I had not thought of at that time, but realized at this writing.
** "Everyone is a mirror image of yourself—your own thinking coming back at you.", a Byron Katie quote.
First, let's consider content without context. That could, of course, be a post by itself, but I'm trying to contrast it with the topic at hand.
I had a colleague at one of my places of work, whom I will call "Brent." Brent used to enjoy writing the number "1040" on the whiteboard, and would then look at his audience expectantly. After letting some painfully silent moments pass, he would ask, "What is this?" People would propose various things. He would finally point out that we can't know what it means until we understand the context. It could be the number of an IRS tax form (this was especially fun in April), the number of a house, Brent's favorite number*, the number of visits to a particular web page, and on and on. I used to think this was a rather self-evident point, but it was important to him that people think about it, and we often dedicated a moment of silence to its honor.
This post is about context without regard to any particular content. In other words, I wish to discuss a framework for thinking about things. I invite you to pause for a moment and consider this question, "In what sense is Cinderella alive?" I recognize that I am encouraging the same** kind of exercise that Brent enjoyed, but please humor me for a moment. I invite you, then, having considered this, to read the last half of a short blog post. The half about Cinderella (starting two paragraphs above the screenshot). The post is entitled, "Lying to children," and I hope you will find it amusing. Please come back here and finish reading this post after you have enjoyed that one.
Thank you for returning! It is always a bit of a gamble, on the Internet, to refer your readers away to another author. Especially a younger one.
The context that I wish to expose you to is from Karl Popper, a twentieth century philosopher. This way of thinking about things is commonly called "Popper's three worlds". Things might exist in World One as tangible, physical objects, such as the pages in a book which comprise the Cinderella fairy tale. Other things might exist in World Two as thoughts and mental pictures, such as those imagined by the reader of those pages, or if read aloud, by the child listening. There exist also things which, while not concrete, physical objects, nevertheless exert an impact on us, such as the character "Cinderella," and he assigns these things to World Three.
I don't want to get into this in any great detail in this post, because here I am merely setting up the stage for a number of subsequent posts, which, to be understood, will require that the reader be familiar with this way of looking at things. Every time we hear that something exists, or read a question about the existence of something, we can make distinctions about that something in terms of these three worlds.
For example, recently facebook has been displaying an ad that asks, "Do you believe in Africa?" Probably because we are now living on the African continent. Well, not really on the continent per se, but the island of Mauritius is considered to be a part of Africa.
What does this question mean? I never clicked on the ad to find out what the advertiser meant, and the ad no longer appears. In World One, yes, I believe that Africa exists in the physical world. I have seen it on maps and globes hundreds of times, have flown over it several times, and I have changed planes in an airport there. Not having looked at the advertiser's material, I do not know what was in his or her head about Africa, what thoughts or mental pictures he or she wished to implant in my World Two. I can only assume that it is something about Africa as a World Three entity, perhaps its future or its potential for greatness or economic growth (or pride to be African?).
I invite you to consider using Popper's three worlds as a way to organize your thoughts about things. Is it a real, tangible object? World one. Is it an idea flitting through your head? World two. Is it something that, while not tangible, has a life of its own, that people talk about or to which people pledge allegiance? World three.
In fairness to modern thinking, I must point out that this way of viewing reality is not popular now. And, that will become my point in future posts, because it is my own cognitive dissonance, bouncing back and forth between different ways of viewing reality, which drives me to write this blog.
For the moment, this is just context without content.
* This was not one of the examples he used at the time, but, hey, it was his favorite number! Something that I had not thought of at that time, but realized at this writing.
** "Everyone is a mirror image of yourself—your own thinking coming back at you.", a Byron Katie quote.
Consistency without completeness
A good friend, whom I will call "Stewart," responded by email to the previous blog post, and pointed me to a column by Charles Krauthammer, as reprinted in his book, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics, pp. 64-66, Crown Publishing Group. The column is entitled, "The Central Axiom of Partisan Politics". (I would have liked to link to this column, but cannot.*)
As for the axiom itself, it is, "Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."
Where this gets interesting, to me, is his further claim that conservatives think liberals are stupid because they believe that everyone is basically good. Adding this reason to his axiom can be used to prove a contradiction, as follows (expressed from the point of view of liberals (according to conservatives according to Krauthammer)).
Well, this post isn't meant to be about politics. Instead, the mathematician in me followed the path of least resistance in response to the word "axiom," and this post is about the journey along that path. As a mathematician, I love formal logic systems, which are based on a small number of axioms, and the things that can be proven from them. If a logical contradiction can be proven from the axioms, then they are considered to be inconsistent, which is not a good thing for an axiom system.
An ideal formal system is both consistent and complete. Unfortunately, early in the twentieth century, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful formal system is either incomplete or inconsistent. This undid the grand project of mathematicians at that time, who had hoped to find a set of axioms from which all true statements could be proven.
The cognitive dissonance of this post's title would exist in the minds of mathematicians, for whom consistency without completeness is not good for a formal axiomatic system. It is resolved, sadly, by Gödel's theorem demonstrating that the desired resolution is, in fact, impossible. And we're just going to have to live with that.
Mathematicians seemed to me, in the 1970's, when I was an undergraduate minoring in mathematics, to be still (forty years later) in denial about this result, for it was not taught in the mathematics department. I had to take a course from the philosophy department to learn more about it.
*The Washington Post, in which the column originally appeared on July 26, 2002, has a web site, but it requires payment to view articles older than 2005. Very interesting. This makes it impossible for me to do a proper attribution. Yet, at the same time, I understand that newspapers have been hard-hit by the Internet, and are desperately scrambling to find ways to monetize their work product. Thus, I am quoting from the book, rather than the original source, which is hereby at least acknowledged..
**Rescher, N. (1982). The Coherence Theory of Truth. University Press of America.
***Try the "Look inside" option of amazon.com once you have found his book there.
As for the axiom itself, it is, "Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."
Where this gets interesting, to me, is his further claim that conservatives think liberals are stupid because they believe that everyone is basically good. Adding this reason to his axiom can be used to prove a contradiction, as follows (expressed from the point of view of liberals (according to conservatives according to Krauthammer)).
Every person is basically good. Conservatives are people. Therefore, conservatives are basically good. Oops. Contradiction, because, according to his axiom, liberals also believe that conservatives are evil.A contradiction in a system of formal logic would not be a good thing. But (according to Nicholas Rescher**) people don't reason using formal logic, and so we can be perfectly happy with Krauthammer's axiom. That is, if we are inclined to agree with his views on politics. I will leave that up to you, dear reader, if you are inclined to look for, find, and read the entire column***.
Well, this post isn't meant to be about politics. Instead, the mathematician in me followed the path of least resistance in response to the word "axiom," and this post is about the journey along that path. As a mathematician, I love formal logic systems, which are based on a small number of axioms, and the things that can be proven from them. If a logical contradiction can be proven from the axioms, then they are considered to be inconsistent, which is not a good thing for an axiom system.
An ideal formal system is both consistent and complete. Unfortunately, early in the twentieth century, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful formal system is either incomplete or inconsistent. This undid the grand project of mathematicians at that time, who had hoped to find a set of axioms from which all true statements could be proven.
The cognitive dissonance of this post's title would exist in the minds of mathematicians, for whom consistency without completeness is not good for a formal axiomatic system. It is resolved, sadly, by Gödel's theorem demonstrating that the desired resolution is, in fact, impossible. And we're just going to have to live with that.
Mathematicians seemed to me, in the 1970's, when I was an undergraduate minoring in mathematics, to be still (forty years later) in denial about this result, for it was not taught in the mathematics department. I had to take a course from the philosophy department to learn more about it.
*The Washington Post, in which the column originally appeared on July 26, 2002, has a web site, but it requires payment to view articles older than 2005. Very interesting. This makes it impossible for me to do a proper attribution. Yet, at the same time, I understand that newspapers have been hard-hit by the Internet, and are desperately scrambling to find ways to monetize their work product. Thus, I am quoting from the book, rather than the original source, which is hereby at least acknowledged..
**Rescher, N. (1982). The Coherence Theory of Truth. University Press of America.
***Try the "Look inside" option of amazon.com once you have found his book there.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Condescension without comprehension
This is something of a sad post for me, because it involves a disappointment from one of my all-time favorite authors, Douglas R. Hofstadter. I believe that I have read all of his books, and have studied one of them, Gödel, Escher, Bach, quite intensely. I admire both the depth of his thought and the ornateness of his writing. And, I just love all of the self-reference.
The disappointment is this quote from Le Ton beau de Marot, on page 485, in the section entitled "Concentric Rings of Diminishing Empathy".
I loved everything about the book, except for this one sentence, which I felt to be dismissive of right-wing people. It is obvious from his writing that he "leans left," but this has nowhere else been condescending in tone. The way I understood it is, "on the scale from sociopathic to exceedingly empathetic, you would encounter right-wing people first, nearer the sociopathic end, while left-wing people are more empathetic." Or, in other words, "the less well a right-wing person knows someone, the less he or she cares about them."
This is a very interesting claim, and I believe it to be an over-simplification at best, just plain wrong in the middle, and condescending at worst.
Here, I may be in a bit of trouble, because I am not trained in political science, so I ask help from readers. I think of left-wing as tending towards the welfare state and right-wing as tending towards self-sufficiency. The rest of this post is based on that assumption, so please help me understand if I am wrong.
Side remark: I also think of left-wing as being "progressive" while right-wing is "conservative." My parents were supporters for much of my growing up years of a political party in Canada named "Progressive Conservative," so perhaps this is not a dichotomy.
I am leery of the progressive movement because of this truism: All progress requires change, but not all change is progress. In order to join in in calling reckless change "progress" I would need to understand the long-term goal of the progressive movement. Someone, please paint me a picture of the ideal society towards which we are making progress with these changes? But, this would be the topic of a different post, and one which I am not ready to write until my empathy for the progressive movement increases.
Back to the topic. Personally, I identify more with "right-wing" than I do with alternatives. Nevertheless, I have personally taken early retirement in order to live half-way around the world to help people who, until recently, were very remote in my "acquaintance space." Certainly my empathy has not tailed off with the distance.
I propose that the conflict between left-wing and right-wing has nothing to do with empathy at all, but everything to do with how best to help people in need. Grosso modo, I believe, the left-wing prefers to help the needy with government programs while the right-wing prefers to help the needy with private and locally-run programs.
This is well illustrated by conversations I have enjoyed with a good friend, whom I shall call "John." John is frustrated that the government isn't doing more to help the poor. He earns a very good income and yet wishes that the federal tax rate were much higher, perhaps even 60% to 80% so that social programs could be funded, and no one would need to suffer and die in poverty. This is what is done in some countries in the world, and he wished his country was more like these. Each person in society could then choose, if they are able, to work and pay for those who are unable, or who choose not, to work.
For my part, I told him about a fund which is managed by a private charitable organization. This fund accepts donations, and has tens of thousands of local units which actively seek out the poor and needy in order to help them with food, clothing, and shelter. And to find work if they are able and so desire. The overhead for managing the fund is provided by the charitable organization from other sources, so that the fund itself uses 100% of donations received to help the poor and needy. There are millions of voluntary contributors to this fund throughout the world, and it is actively engaged throughout the world. Would you be willing, I asked, to voluntarily contribute 20% to 40% of your income to this fund? This would go a long way towards helping those in poverty. No. He was not willing to voluntarily contribute to this fund.
I have no conclusion to offer for this post. I wish that I could have a dialog with my favorite author to find out if I am understanding his meaning correctly, or if it might be that I have simply taken offense where none was intended.
I do wish to invite my readers to consider this post from another blog, "The value of struggle." I was surprised in a speech by a left-wing person to hear that they understand that struggle has value, while at the same time seeking to remove the need to struggle. An interesting contradiction.
The disappointment is this quote from Le Ton beau de Marot, on page 485, in the section entitled "Concentric Rings of Diminishing Empathy".
A few rare people are exceedingly empathetic, a few are extremely sociopathic, and most of us fall somewhere closer to the middle.
The distance in "acquaintance space" at which an individual's empathy tails off is a central character trait determining many things, including one's politics.
Grosso modo, the conflict between left-wing and right-wing ideologies is simply the battle between small-radius and large-radius individuals writ large.
I loved everything about the book, except for this one sentence, which I felt to be dismissive of right-wing people. It is obvious from his writing that he "leans left," but this has nowhere else been condescending in tone. The way I understood it is, "on the scale from sociopathic to exceedingly empathetic, you would encounter right-wing people first, nearer the sociopathic end, while left-wing people are more empathetic." Or, in other words, "the less well a right-wing person knows someone, the less he or she cares about them."
This is a very interesting claim, and I believe it to be an over-simplification at best, just plain wrong in the middle, and condescending at worst.
Here, I may be in a bit of trouble, because I am not trained in political science, so I ask help from readers. I think of left-wing as tending towards the welfare state and right-wing as tending towards self-sufficiency. The rest of this post is based on that assumption, so please help me understand if I am wrong.
Side remark: I also think of left-wing as being "progressive" while right-wing is "conservative." My parents were supporters for much of my growing up years of a political party in Canada named "Progressive Conservative," so perhaps this is not a dichotomy.
I am leery of the progressive movement because of this truism: All progress requires change, but not all change is progress. In order to join in in calling reckless change "progress" I would need to understand the long-term goal of the progressive movement. Someone, please paint me a picture of the ideal society towards which we are making progress with these changes? But, this would be the topic of a different post, and one which I am not ready to write until my empathy for the progressive movement increases.
Back to the topic. Personally, I identify more with "right-wing" than I do with alternatives. Nevertheless, I have personally taken early retirement in order to live half-way around the world to help people who, until recently, were very remote in my "acquaintance space." Certainly my empathy has not tailed off with the distance.
I propose that the conflict between left-wing and right-wing has nothing to do with empathy at all, but everything to do with how best to help people in need. Grosso modo, I believe, the left-wing prefers to help the needy with government programs while the right-wing prefers to help the needy with private and locally-run programs.
This is well illustrated by conversations I have enjoyed with a good friend, whom I shall call "John." John is frustrated that the government isn't doing more to help the poor. He earns a very good income and yet wishes that the federal tax rate were much higher, perhaps even 60% to 80% so that social programs could be funded, and no one would need to suffer and die in poverty. This is what is done in some countries in the world, and he wished his country was more like these. Each person in society could then choose, if they are able, to work and pay for those who are unable, or who choose not, to work.
For my part, I told him about a fund which is managed by a private charitable organization. This fund accepts donations, and has tens of thousands of local units which actively seek out the poor and needy in order to help them with food, clothing, and shelter. And to find work if they are able and so desire. The overhead for managing the fund is provided by the charitable organization from other sources, so that the fund itself uses 100% of donations received to help the poor and needy. There are millions of voluntary contributors to this fund throughout the world, and it is actively engaged throughout the world. Would you be willing, I asked, to voluntarily contribute 20% to 40% of your income to this fund? This would go a long way towards helping those in poverty. No. He was not willing to voluntarily contribute to this fund.
I have no conclusion to offer for this post. I wish that I could have a dialog with my favorite author to find out if I am understanding his meaning correctly, or if it might be that I have simply taken offense where none was intended.
I do wish to invite my readers to consider this post from another blog, "The value of struggle." I was surprised in a speech by a left-wing person to hear that they understand that struggle has value, while at the same time seeking to remove the need to struggle. An interesting contradiction.
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