Brian's Brain

[Originally posted under Thus Saith Brian]

I fear my frustrations with the ignorant, the uneducated, and the lazy have grown to a point where I feel it's my duty to speak out. Things have gone too far, and I think it goes without saying that the problem will get much worse before it gets any better.

My primary concern is that any interest in learning, or bettering ones self has diminished dramatically over the last 100 years. At one point in history, reading a book was considered a noble thing. During previous periods, the educated and the enlightened were regarded as esteemed individuals who had dedicated their lives to self-improvement, and the improvement of society in general. My apprehension centers around an evident observation that these ideals are no longer held with the same respect they once were.

During a recent conversation with a friend about this very topic, I mentioned that one of the things I thoroughly enjoy, rather than turning on the TV, is to pick up a technical book and learn as much as I can on a particular subject of which I had no prior knowledge. I mentioned that I felt like I was empowered, and my 60 minutes spent bettering myself yielded a much higher return than watching Survivor. A bystander, seemingly disgusted by the idea that I would spend my own time doing something productive, interrupted our conversation by obnoxiously stating, "learning is for college kids". Under normal circumstances, the opinions of a single radical rarely affect any reaction on my behalf, but in this case I fear the opinion reflected is a perfect image of the attitude I see on today's society: Learning is for the smart people. I'd rather watch television.

Non-coincidentally, this same fear fuels the problem wherein members of society possess a growing inability to think for themselves. As an experiment towards proof of this concept, watch the nightly news. The next day in the office, or at school, ask your peers how they felt about the issues presented. You will almost indefinitely find a disturbing parallel between "their" views, and the views of the source from which they obtained the information. Try this for yourself, and you will find that the "opinions" of nearly every person are not theirs at all, but those of somebody they view as an authority on the subject (typically the news media, or a relative).

Not to say that one should not yield to a more knowledgeable source under certain circumstances, but unchecked acceptance of any opinion is an extraordinarily scary philosophy! We've lost our desire to think for ourselves, because it involves effort. The media can do the thinking for us, both in news reporting and entertainment programming. We will feel how they tell us to feel during the news, and we will feel how they tell us to feel while they entertain us. Sometimes I feel like I'm off in left field when I expect people to know why they feel a certain way and be able to defend what they believe to be the truth.

Am I a radical for believing people have a responsibility to themselves and to society to be educated citizens? The plague of ignorance is spreading faster than any other disease. The cure? Eliminating laziness. It's nobody's fault but our own that we don't understand our own world. The resources we have at our disposal for education are more abundant today than any other time in the history of the world, we just have to force ourselves to use them.

[originally posted on Thus Saith Brian]

... or so I've heard them called. But just to be fair, I've never been one to base the sexual preference of an individual on their chosen means of entertainment (okay, maybe there are limits to that statement, but I'm going to avoid that tangent so we can keep this thing rated PG). It's the intelligence of the people willing to strap a board to their feet and let gravity do the rest under insane conditions that I'd like to address. (In case you're one of these people and you're a little slow on the uptake, I'm referring to snowboarders)

I should immediately point out that I have no problem with the sport itself. Winter sports are enjoyed by millions of people across the world and snowboarding has only minor variations that separate it from skiing. The problem, at least as near as I can tell, has nothing to do with the actual sport (more on that later).

The real issue at hand is that people who are frequent snowboarders almost invariably have the IQ of a peanut shell. Indeed, it seems the amount of time a given person spends participating in the sport is inversly proportional to their ability to comprehend basic ideas. (For those of you who are snowboarders that means the more you snowboard, the dumber you get).

Before you send your flames, consider all the snowboarders you know who hit the slopes more than once a week. How many of them understand how to speak in complete sentences? Do they use the word "dude" or various obscenities to make up for a lack of grammatical ability? How many people do you know who snowboard frequenly have ever received a B or higher in a calculus class? We can even take that a step further and ask how many of those people even know the basic concepts behind advanced high school math.

Again, the symptoms are not nearly as evident in people who only participate occasionally versus those who eat sleep and breath the sport. Indeed, many active participants even go so far as to admit that snowboarding is a lifestyle. I submit, however, that the lifestyle isn't snowboarding. The culture they've defined for themselves is instead centered around intellectual deprivation; Idiots seeking self-actualization through association with other idiots.

I can see the board-bunnies relaxing, knowing that this trend is mainly noticeable in guys. I freely admit the outward signs of stupidity I've described above are not nearly as apparent in the female participants. Unfortunately, I believe they are affected equally. I base this statement on the idea that if you ask a hundred random girls what traits they admire in a guy, intelligence will always be somewhere near the top of the list. If this is indeed the case, why do board-bunnies prefer the romantic company of male-boarders? The answer is simple. Psychologically speaking, humans base intelligence not on how smart the other human is, but on how smart that person is in comparison to themselves. (To a 1st grader, even the most intellectually challenged high school student would be considered a genius!) Obviously, the female participants are even more affected than the males if they can find a suitor of sufficient intellectual capacity within their own culture to fulfill their requirements.

While I would prefer to focus on snowboarders alone, it would be unfair to eliminate "skaters" and "surfers" from this column as all of the observations made above apply equally to these cultures as well. Is it the act of using a friction-friendly board as a means of motion that causes brain cells to die? Or does an increasing lack of intelligence cause people to increase their activities in these sports? Until we know for sure, it may be wise to avoid the half-pipes and the slopes at all costs, "dude".

[Originally posted on Thus Saith Brian]

Scientists at a Massachusetts technology company say they have created human embryos through cloning. They say the experiment was aimed not at creating a human being but at mining the embryo for stem cells used to treat disease. But the move is already drawing criticism from President Bush and lawmakers and rekindling the ethical debate over cloning and stem cell research. I'd like to take this opportunity to offer my opinion on the subject.

In all fairness, I am not an expert on the subject of cloning. However, I do realize that the technology is still relatively new and unexplored. I remember several years ago when Dolly shook the world after being the first succesfully cloned animal. The ironic thing about this amazing breakthrough was that none of us had any way of telling whether or not the company that succesfully performed the experiment was lying to us or not. (When was the last time you saw a sheep and said to yourself, "That sheep is a very unique sheep. I am positve it is not a clone of the one standing next to it"). Nevertheless, I would merely like you to bear in mind my lack of any real authority on the subject for which I am about to speak -- I do so in the name of science, since my experience has been that most people who claim to be experts are no more qualified to offer their opinion than most lab rats. It is for this reason that I jump on the bandwagon.

To be blunt, I have no problem with human cloning. (I feel a little differently about cloning animals, but that is the subject for another editorial). I do, however, feel that if we're going to clone human embryos that it's important to implement responsible and specific legislation in order to prevent the technology from being abused, as it so easily could be. I will focus the rest of my remarks on what I believe these laws should be.

Recent scientific studies (that I just made up) have proven that parents are now 34% more likely to have an ugly child than they were 30 years ago. This alarming new statistic is a major contributor to my opinion that cloning ugly people should be strictly outlawed. (Thanks, but we already have plenty). Additionally, because I recognize the difficulty in determining who we SHOULD clone if this is the case, I would propose that human cloning be limited strictly to Britney Spears and Jennifer Aniston.

Secondly, a sister study (that I also just made up, although it's based on actual experience) has indicated that good looking females are now 89% more likely to date jerks than ever before. I would propose that we figure out a way to make the new humans attracted to me, and only me. A lot. Doing otherwise does me no good. Naturally, I would expect scientists to play a responsible role in recognizing the importance of this particular issue.

Finally, we must strictly regulate the moodiness of the hot girls after they are cloned. It would be entirely irresponsible if we failed to prevent the science experiments from becoming what can best be described as "bitchy". This point must be strictly enforced.

I believe that if we can succesfully regulate the cloning industry by passing the legislation I've outlined above, we will have overcome all of the moral and ethical issues currently standing in our way. I am a firm believer that the science of cloning has tremendous potential for improving our society if we use it responsibly by making sure all of the clones are really hot and attracted specifically to me.

It's sad how uneducated our government and legal system can be when it comes to technology. Their fear of the subject causes them to overreact in ways my high-school computer science teacher (guilty of the same thing) could ever dream of.

I'm excited and happy that the probationary state for Kevin Mitnick is over and he can finally use the internet again. How can our country expect to make progress when the most brilliant minds are locked away in prison and, once they get out, are forbidden from using their talents? Fortunately, a federal court has since ruled that it's too severe of a punishment to prevent someone from using the internet anymore (claiming that being without it is as bad as being without a phone). Still, there are those in the federal court systems that are now terrified that Mitnick is back. Get a life -- the guy did very little wrong in the first place. The federal government attempted to make an example of him and ended up making him a martyr. They should have chosen someone truly guilty of what they were being prosecuted for.

Welcome back to the real world Kevin.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I found his girlfriends blog somewhat intriguing, and it contains lots of excellent links of this topic.

What gives us the right, as Americans, to tell another sovereign nation they can't have something (in this case, a nuclear weapon) based on the sole argument that "they might use it!". Please understand that I hate nukes as much as the next guy, but only one country in the entire history of the world has ever used a nuclear weapon. Those of you who went to elementary school should know the answer to this... That's right, it's the United States. Remember when we dropped two of them on Japan? Hey, Iraq, we know we have hundreds of these warheads.. Russia has some, Pakistan's got them, India has them, and China is loaded with them -- but we've all talked about it, and you guys can't be in the club. Oh, and don't give us that face when we tell you that we want full access to every facility and document in your country. That only proves you're guilty of..... having weapons like ours.

If another country went to the UN and said "We need to form an inspections team to go into the United States because we have substantial evidence that they're planning on building a device capable of killing 10x as many people as their current nuclear arsenal is capable" they would get laughed out of the room. We, as a sovereign nation, would never allow anyone to enter our borders for the sole purpose of investigating our top secret defense programs, REGARDLESS of how much merit there was to their claim. In fact, the very attempt to do so would likely be considered an act of war -- but gosh darnit, don't give us any crap if we want to do it to you! What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine!

Scenario: Let's say you live in a quiet neighborhood and you have lots of nice things (you've got the big screen TV, the leather couches, and a porsche in the driveway. You've worked hard for these things.) but you found out your neighbor MIGHT have a can of gasoline in his basement and he MIGHT want to use that gasoline to come over to your house when you're not looking and light your porsche on fire. Your first reaction, of course, should be to call the police and demand they break into his home, look for anything your neighbor might own that could damage your stuff (forks, knives, hammers, and especially the gasoline you've heard so many rumors about) and not only demand they take it away, but put your neighbor in jail for owning such things. Granted, you have the same things -- but you're civilized.

Obviously, this would go against all of the democratic ideals and constitutional rights we hold dear. What makes it right for you to justify your actions based solely on rumors -- even worse, how can your actions be justified on "historical characteristics" about your neighbor? Oh, you've heard he's into things like that. You've heard he's evil. You've heard he cheated on the MCAT. Then there was the incident several years ago when you and your neighbor got into a fight over something and you punched him in the face. You're sure he's out to get you now because you REALLY made him mad. Should those things make it right for you to break into his home and strip him of his right to own anything that could be used to harm you? Not only would that be cowardly, but hopefully you enjoy your OWN freedoms more than that. Hopefully you recognize that your rights are equally as important as his and that unless he actually attacks you, he's done nothing wrong.

Are we to begin prosecuting people for what we think they MIGHT do if they maybe had the tools to do it? "Throw Jim in the slammer.. if he had a stick, he'd probably start beating people with it. Oh.. break into his home.. make sure he doesn't have any sticks. Yes, yes.. I know, we don't know for sure he's got any sticks -- and heaven knows he's never used one on anybody (we did though, remember that? Boy, I'm sure glad we still have our stick!) but just the same, he just LOOKS like the kind of guy who might have one, or worse, use one! Don't you hate those kind of people? Oh, and if he tries to stop you from breaking into his house, kill him."

Grow up, America. Iraq has done nothing wrong. Even if the UN inspectors FIND NUCLEAR WEAPONS, Iraq has done nothing wrong. We have no case against them until they USE THEM. People will die if they do and it will be very sad. It might even be Americans that die if they do. That's just the way it is. We look like hypocritical fools when we don't stand by the very ideals that define our own rights. Are we the only people in the world entitled to these basic protections of our freedoms?

Many are using the argument that Saddam is an evil dictator who is guilty of multiple human rights violations and, that for the security of the world, a man like that should never be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction. To that I would first like to point out that MOST of the allegations that Saddam has killed and tortured his own people are unsubstantiated (and probably false). However, there are proven cases where this has happened. Let's keep in mind, however, that if we, as a world, are going to make a policy of keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of countries guilty of human rights violations and killing their own people, we had better be prepared to wage war on China -- the country with the largest military in the world. So much for using Saddam's history of human rights violations as an excuse for military intervention.

Another interesting development in this scenario is that ever since Bush's popularity rating on the Iraq invasion has plummeted, suddenly he's presenting new evidence that Iraq is involved with Al-Queda. Almost as if he's grasping at straws -- anything to get people to listen to him. If they are linked, why wasn't this brought to our attention before? Your timing is impeccable, Mr. Bush. Take your propaganda elsewhere.

Grow up, America. It's time to mind our own business and start treating other people (read: countries) the way we (read: us) expect to be treated. There are dangerous people in this world -- it's not our job to kill them so much as learn to treat them with the respect they deserve so that they don't harm us. Why is it that 99% of Americans have NO IDEA why most of the Middle Eastern countries hate America so bad? It's time for us to come out from under our rocks and realize that the way we treat people in this world has consequences.

Re: My "Grow up, America" post:

NeatBrian: People seem to take that topic VERY seriously.. I pissed a few people off -- got a few nasty emails that didn't get posted to the comments.
MarysBigTeeth: i dont know why you just dont mock each one of them seperately in seperate posts
MarysBigTeeth: also--you could correct their context and grammar
NeatBrian: yeah, but attacking someones opinion by insulting their intelligence is so overdone...
MarysBigTeeth: and say things like...people that love america are dumb--they lack the basic skills to write english correctly so i cannot consider their opinions as "serious" or "valid"
NeatBrian: And let's face it
NeatBrian: it's way too easy
MarysBigTeeth: yea but it's true
MarysBigTeeth: and funny
MarysBigTeeth: you can post this conversation if you like
MarysBigTeeth: then they can all send me death threats and i can play with my own feces

Can't we pass some sort of the law that says in order to report news, you must have an IQ of at least 12?

Why I wrote this

I write this not to start a flame war or become involved in a religious debate about the right language for the right job. I recognize the value of PHP to the current IT economy. It provides tremendous strength in time to market and light-weight web development apps. I am attempting to point out the short-falls of PHP in relation to its use as an enterprise web development platform, not to discount it as a web development language in general. These are the conclusions I've drawn after a significant amount of research on this subject, they are the opinions of only myself, but I believe anyone who is considering PHP for a large-scale development effort will find this information valuable in making an intelligent decision.

PHP lacks maturity

PHP has only been around for a very short amount of time, especially in comparison to other popular web development languages like Perl. Even Java, a language geared towards web development, has been around longer. This may not seem like a huge issue until you bury yourself in a project and realize that the language doesn’t yet provide support for some intricate task you’re trying to accomplish. Case in point, PHP lacks support for doing embedded evals. Further, the actual syntax for simple things like variable numbers of arguments to functions is still evolving. Further, there is no unity in the syntax of PHP functions (don’t believe me? Try to write a set of operations that maintain a sorted list – PHP keeps changing the rules!)

The PHP development team is reckless

The lack of maturity in PHP is further illustrated in the documentation, which is incomplete and does not get updated between revisions. Even the core specification seems to change between minor versions, the likes of which have no documentation other than the source code itself. Additionally, my experience with PHP in a mass-deployment environment of approximately 12,000 customers has proven that with each release of PHP comes new bugs that go far beyond “slight changes in behavior” of the code. They actually BREAK core functions in the language! (the upgrade from 4.2.3 to 4.3.0 actually broke sprintf()! (Why someone was messing with a core function like sprintf is beyond me). The end result of this being that, in my experience, not a single deployment of PHP (be it a bug fix or version upgrade) has ever happened without at least 100+ web sites of ours breaking due to some major bug in the release – often with things the developers had no business messing with in the first place. Further, the PHP team, while quick to release patches for security bugs (which tend to break other things, I might add) are often painfully slow to issue patches to known bugs (example, the $PHP_SELF problem in 4.3.0 still has no resolution, yet it’s a core function used in nearly every PHP application. Their answer instead was to issue a workaround, requiring each site using PHP_SELF to change their code).

PHP requires a significant amount of wheel re-inventing

Unlike more mature languages such as C++ or Perl, the PHP libraries are severely lacking. Indeed, in nearly every case where a connector or API is needed to talk to some other application or product, the work must be done by hand. Other languages such as Perl really shine in this area where plug-ins and modules are readily available for nearly every task imaginable (from SSH to EDI to X10, it’s probably already been done).

PHP was never designed for large scale applications

The primary design goal of PHP was to produce a light-weight application that would make things as simple as possible to install and start using. In some cases, this meant that features normally available to experienced programmers had to be left out. For example, PHP lacks support for private namespace so there is no way to create three-tiered applications that separate business logic and presentation code. Further, there is no mechanism in place for creating reusable code modules. Finally, PHP was not designed for general-purpose programming (although it now provides some hooks for using PHP from the command line, but those who understand PHP or scripting in general realize that this would be the wrong tool for any command line job). Understand that PHP is well-suited for the common tasks associated with web-scripting. However, experienced programmers will find it drastically limiting to expand beyond that scope with PHP, thus forcing the programmer to bring two development platforms to a project that could have been easily done with one. In large scale projects, a general-purpose language will always outweigh the benefits of a specialized language as the scope of the project grows.

Conclusion

PHP is a tremendously valuable development platform provoding the scope of the project stays within the realm of what PHP was designed for (extremely light-weight quick-to-market apps). Beyond that scope, PHP is very much comparable to a toy in light of better alternatives on the larger scale. Platforms such as Java, C++, or even Perl (using Mason for embedded content and template management) should be considered heavily before banking on PHP as the proper solution to a big problem.

The Russians appear to have their heads screwed on straight in light of the Iraq conflict. Even some mention of the creation of new international bodies besides the UN. A few quotes from this article:

"Countries cannot change regimes just because they don't like them", Seleznev told reporters. The current U.S. unilateralist slant is a "serious trend that needs to be confronted and to affirm that the people alone have the right to change their own regimes,"

He added that Washington "does not hesitate in imposing sanctions on Iraq on the excuse that it possesses weapons of mass destruction, and does not do the same to Israel, which does own WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and refuses to accept U.N. resolutions."

Former U.S. administrations, displeased with Cuban President Fidel Castro's regime, "had to eventually tolerate his presence and were able to co-exist with his authority. So this suggestion (to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein) is ridiculous and does not deserve discussion," Seleznev added.

Speaking at a news conference in Tunis after a three-day visit, Seleznev said these actions called for "serious thought for establishing alternative international bodies to the U.N. that could guarantee global security, especially that Russia and the rest of the world strongly reject the return to the laws of the jungle where the strong eats the weak."

It appears as though Bush has decided to take it upon himself to begin attacking military targets in Iraq that are far beyond the scope of what was previously attacked as part of the no-fly-zone operations in Iraq.

Apparently, jets patrolling the no fly zones have shifted rolls from that of being on the defensive (i.e. only attacking targets that had fired upon them, and even more specifically, only those that for surface-to-air operations) to destroying all military targets inside of the no-fly-zones. Yes, we've officially decided to start attacking the Iraqi army.

This is a clear act that the war has begun. I find it amusing that it's been done with little fanfair, almost no media coverage, and completely outside of what the UN has granted him the right to do.

Are we really prepared to take on the entire world because we think Saddam's breath smells?