Summer in Boston. It drags and drags and drags its heels, denying you even the long-awaited extra hours of sunshine, and then after all that pussyfooting one day it up and slaps you with what feels like a warm towel to the face.

Today was one of those afternoons I regret feeling in such a hurry–to the gym, then the pharmacy, then home with some fresh books, so I can have food at a reasonable time. It would have been a glorious, if sweaty, commute by bicycle, had that been an option. A good afternoon to be outdoors. At the office, our air conditioning was on the fritz (half the building reported being too warm, the other was too cold), but I didn’t notice immediately like most of the office staff, probably because we’re pretty conservative with the climate controls at home.

Books! Books. I spent the last week detoxing from The Dragon Reborn, which is number 3 of 11 in the Wheel of Time series. The first two weren’t suspenseful all the way through, but that one was. I wanted to pause long enough to think about the hours I was giving to reading Jordan; and the thing is, while I’m pretty sure I could identify enough conventionally productive activities to fill those hours, I’m too lazy to do them. You could take this as me needing a kick in my lazy if well-toned bum, or, given that I haven’t had the funds or the inspiration to plan a summer vacation like everybody else in the office, you could call it sloth that I’ve earned.

At any rate, the detox failed to get it out of my head. Consequences for my sleep schedule aside, this may be for the best. Series with large numbers of important characters are a challenge for me, and WoT is notorious in that regard. Jordan’s metaphor of the wheel and the weave isn’t just a metaphysical characterization of his universe, it’s the way Jordan wrote. Little details come back in big ways.

Just the same, I grabbed Pynchon’s V., wondering if alternating books might help me pace myself. It may prove to have been a bad pairing–Pynchon’s supposed to be pretty thick in his own way–time will tell. I was going to try to work through them proportionally, which would mean about 3/4 as many pages at a time of V.

I keep feel like I’ve been doing something (okay, several things) wrong and something helped crystallize that today. I arrived at the office, pulled my bag out of the car and found my boss parked next to me, seeming to have an animated conversation with his car.

Oh, I knew Dan hadn’t lost his marbles. Dan’s a gadget freak; he buys cars that support his iPhone addiction. The Apple hardware sets him notably apart from most of my geek friends, who tend to carry G1s, but in spirit it’s all the same. He’d phoned in to a morning teleconference with the aid of some Bluetooth middleware and was hesitating to disconnect from its superior audio system to walk inside.

The connection didn’t come to me until the afternoon. I was driving home, and doing something I find myself doing a lot lately: I was having an internal monologue I really did not want wasted. Deep thoughts tend to come to me then, when I’m slowly unraveling—my day at the office concluded and my meds wearing off—and making the difficult switch between contexts. That cool and potentially useful Java or JS component I was trying to think out, when it came time to leave, refuses to quietly yield to the Robert Jordan book I’m reading at home, its startlingly sympathetic portrait of the outlaw Logain, and the general awesomeness of a fantasy author who can pull off successive allusions to such diverse material as Lord of the Rings and chaos theory. Not to mention any number of other topical concerns, the inevitable forking off of other lines of technical brainstorming, etc.

It’s a wonder I get anything out onto paper or into the blog like this. I used to come home and do more web programming as a hobby; now, with a working VPN and the ability to carry on from home, I’m doing less work of either sort. I was thinking that, to rally myself to do more with the extra energy I keep claiming to have from my workouts, I might need to institute a once-monthly work weekend, with some kind of reward system to goad myself into some useful bursts of productivity. Gah. Too much to say.

So the thing is, I normally end up losing all the random abstract thoughts, and the fewer good concrete ones, that should be forming the basis for more posts and more freelance technical work. This doesn’t have to happen.

We live in the age of magical pocket-sized wonderment. I’ve been fretting over the fact that I can only post to Twitter, or update my IM status, upon reaching a destination with Wi-Fi, always long after the thought to do so has come; but I’ve been thinking too small.

I do need to get me a magic phone. But not for Twitter, much as it amuses me. Not even for the out-of-sight-out-of-mind benefit of intelligent feed-generating apps that let your friends know when you’re staying in their city on a trip. No, I need it so I can stop this confounded inner-blogging that ends up draining off into /dev/null.

I haven’t investigated for app availability and the quality of hardware support, but I’m pretty sure this is a model use case for either the iPhone or the T-Mobile G1. In fact I spent part of the trip home thinking about ways you could use speech processing in concert with mobile apps to make the whole process more straightforward. Straightforward isn’t really the right word, but it would definitely make it more effective. I could easily find myself geeking out over a custom hardware / software setup if I’m not careful–consensus seems to be that even the best smart phones are stingy with processing power, and liable to drain their batteries if pushed too hard. Audio processing would be a task more suited to a stationary machine or dedicated DSP… okay, so uploading to the laptop at home is a more appropriate solution, but it isn’t half as sexy

Yak yak yak.

ADDENDUM: With apologies, L33tminion is quite right, there need to be links to the original material here. Link1. Link2. Note that the choice of King James’ as a source was mostly arbitrary.

First, I will point out that there’s a line missing here: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” Here the first line corresponds roughly to line 2 in the King James:

Before time, a mysterious darkness encircled the universe. The darkness was perfect. (Bereshit 1:1)

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:2)

The first line of Genesis has no place in this version, because there is no “Why”, no instigator. I love that second line, though, and I tried to imitate it, although in the end that’s not terribly obvious. Bereshit not only fails to mention a God, it wants to and fails to say that the void was “pregnant” or any number of other loaded terms, in the way Genesis dwells on the primordial waters. It does, however, hint that the darkness contains something, however small that something.

Then, from the pit of darkness, the light of creation burst forth, the first dawn; and it was as perfect as the darkness before it. The light pushed outward against the darkness, and the darkness did not resist. (Bereshit 1:2-3)

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day”, and the darkness he called “night”. And there was evening, and there was morning–the first day. (Genesis 1:3-5)

As I see it, this is the logical moment for Creation and fireworks and the like, cosmology aside. Before the appearance of the light is an indistinguishable period, T-zero.

“Let there be light” was evocative enough that I left a trace of it. Genesis goes on to tacitly suggest God favored the light over the dark. In Bereshit, this is 100% ambiguous, and it is established only that the two are absolute and opposite. The light of creation may be taken as a metaphor for humanity, knowledge, the Big Bang or the dawn of life.

After a time, the light faltered, and was split; and where it met the darkness, there was confusion and great violence. And from the violence, things were born. (Bereshit 1:4-5)

And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. (Genesis 1:6-8)

At first glance, I didn’t know how to make head or tail of this; the language of Genesis is rich, if a bit stilted when it comes to physical details. Whatever. Bereshit moves along quickly here, getting as far as the emergence of structure (e.g., the first matter, the Cambrian Explosion) amid great physical or figurative violence. It does, however, retain the language of division: all of these things did not exist before the perfect symmetry of creation was broken. Asymmetry thus becomes the second day.

The things brought distinction and color to the world, and so were blessed. They cried out, giving voice to the violence in the world, and so were blessed. They longed to be near each other, for they were born imperfect and insignificant; and for this they were blessed. (Bereshit 1:6-8)

And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:9-10)

Having reached the epoch of Things, Bereshit requires several verses to describe them, as they are the basis of all later structures in this discourse. Bereshit 1:6-1:8 attempts to evoke the rise of the fundamental forces of nature; 1:9-1:10, the third day, with the birth of higher-order structure, stars and tribes and ecosystems; 1:11-1:12, the fourth day, and the tertiary structures seen in today’s world. Man, or at least some particular man, remains the logical endpoint, although owing to the change in narrative structure he arrives early on the fifth day.

The things carried the light of creation far off into the darkness, and prospered within it. Wherever they banded together, this light could be seen clearly, and new and fruitful sounds could be heard. (Bereshit 1:9-10)

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation…” And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning–the third day. (Genesis 1:11-13)

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth…” And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. (Genesis 1:14-19)

Ever the things were joining and parting, feeding and fed upon, dancing pointlessly and stumbling, occasionally, onto structure and meaning; and ever they coalesced in greater numbers, in patterns more intricate and dense; (Bereshit 1:11-12)

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky…” And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. (Genesis 1:20-23)

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds…” And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:24-25)

The final epoch of Bereshit involves sapience, sophistication, and ultimately, the crisis of identity that will consume the following chapters:

Until at last, the greatest of the things arose; and it spoke “I am”, at which the light bloomed brilliantly, in perfect reflection of the creation. And it heard a voice reply “Yes, you are,” and was afraid, for none had spoken. (Bereshit 1:13-15)

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule… over all the earth…” (Genesis 1:26-27)

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase…” (Genesis 1:28)

…and with no one to rest, is finished two days ahead of schedule (coincidentally the length of the work week?). It’s written to dovetail neatly with the following chapters; Genesis 1 and 2 by contrast are often seen as disjointed, and possibly of separate authoring.

Mother asked, and I have been meaning to provide, some insight into what came over me where last we left off. It’s taken a while for an answer to percolate up from the depths of my brain. Apart from the comings and goings of an eventful month–commencement @Olin, trips home, and possibly a weekend in the woods–blogging violates what I’ve come to know as the “hydraulic principle”, making it to my mind distinct from, and not entirely compatible with, creative writing as I’ve practiced it in the past, and making this harder to keep at. More on that later. Suffice it to say, the words were not ready.

I see it like this: The systems of this world are implacable; the problems that confront society, often seemingly unsolvable. The human psyche is a catalog of growing pains and existential aches. Our attempts to find peace for ourselves, down through the centuries, can be summarized crudely as Knowing and Believing. In philosophy, these two groups have always overlapped, but in practical matters, the Knowers and the Believers can be seen as having made quite separate paths, though great individuals were often firmly of both.

The Knowers have used logic and creativity (though not always credited with the latter), through the vehicle of structured, cumulative study, to shape man’s environment and thereby influence society. The Believers have done similarly, except that their canvas is the human heart, and their means, God; which is to say, belief, however structured, in a higher power.

To advance their cause, both depend on strength of numbers, as is generally understood, and on the free flow of ideas, as is frequently not.

There is of course a history of conflict between Knowers and Believers, who tend to look at life through differently tinted glasses. Is that conflict inevitable? Couldn’t say for sure, just yet. It all depends on how those who believe, view themselves and their beliefs in relation to the rest–Creation may be compatible with Evolution; but belief in a young Earth is not, any more than the belief in a geocentric universe is compatible with Kepler’s principles.

The past hundred years are a period of distinction for Knowing. I find the notion of technological singularity naive, but it is a fact that automation and miniaturization have greatly shifted the balance of society. Viewed from the rather popular perspective of a war between Knowing and Believing, it’s evident that the Knowers have been “winning” for the most part.

It’s less obvious that they have, in fact, experienced long-term losses at the same time. Among the most important discoveries of the 20th century were those that defined the limits of discovery: Godel bitchslapping Hilbert over the essential flaws of maths; Einstein’s career-long struggle with relativity and its offspring, quantum uncertainty; and definitions for important physical and computational boundaries (given by the elementary particles, various Planck units, and the NP problems). We are beginning to see limits to what we can know. Worse, what we think we do know, makes less and less sense to anyone as we probe closer to the limits, famously demonstrated by string theory.

It is that fundamental sense of alienation that concerns me most of all. On the one hand, the practical applications, if any, of a validated string theory could be dismissed as voodoo with the same ease with which courts once dismissed evolutionary biology outright. On the other hand, string theory is part of physics, a “hard” science. If people are at all uncertain that a branch of the “hard” sciences is well-reasoned, this is nothing next to their confusion about the proper place of the “soft” sciences, which are less susceptible to distillation and have no distinct boundary with society and ethics.

At least as far back as my Junior year at Olin, what I have desperately wanted, one way or another, is to validate the interweaving of engineering and the “softer” world, and the voice of science in the policymaking process, and to embody in writing the beliefs that support this. Facts there may be as well, but it’s the beliefs that count, and engineers have many. It may seem that we arrive at them in a fundamentally different way from everybody else, but I don’t think it’s so: Observation is knowing half of your time on a software project will be spent rooting out bugs; deduction is knowing that null pointer errors specific to Internet Explorer are probably syntax errors in disguise. Belief is knowing that you have chosen the Right structure for your component, that the tools you’ve been given to work with are the Wrong tools; Belief is knowing that somewhere out there, there’s got to be something better than Visual Basic.

The Dalai Lama has said that a world of religious diversity should be ruled by secular ethics, and though he modeled his system on Buddhism, its design rang true for me. Ethics have to be driven by axiomatic beliefs, but those beliefs don’t need to be explicitly backed by hellfire or even by God. That aspect of organized religion has never agreed with me. Philip Pullman’s vision of good and evil intrigued me for that reason, but ultimately did not compel me either. I just finished the first book of the Wheel of Time series, and found it quite interesting for its nuanced, Daoist-influenced morality (to my eye, Jordan combines Dune society with Celtic and Norse myth in the Lord of the Rings tradition, an odd but workable pairing).

In that tradition, I was inspired to spin off a founding mythos from the Pentateuch, since I have more working familiarity with that than with the actual roots of, say, Norse myth. I have since been asked if this was intended as D’var Torah (a study on a portion of the Torah). I’m not an expert, but I think actually it may be D’var Torah in reverse. It involved a close reading of the original, but I’m modifying that myth structure to serve my own symbolism; in D’var Torah, I gather, you search for meaning in what’s already there. Still, this seems to be something people do a lot of, and most of it silly. I hope I am able to teach people something with what I do here.

With that said… I have to go to bed and actually get on with the explication later.

Before time, a mysterious darkness encircled the universe. The darkness was perfect.

Then, from the pit of darkness, the light of creation burst forth, the first dawn; and it was as perfect as the darkness before it. The light pushed outward against the darkness, and the darkness did not resist.

After a time, the light faltered, and was split; and where it met the darkness, there was confusion and great violence. And from the violence, things were born.

The things brought distinction and color to the world, and so were blessed. They cried out, giving voice to the violence in the world, and so were blessed. They longed to be near each other, for they were born imperfect and insignificant; and for this they were blessed.

The things carried the light of creation far off into the darkness, and prospered within it. Wherever they banded together, this light could be seen clearly, and new and fruitful sounds could be heard.

Ever the things were joining and parting, feeding and fed upon, dancing pointlessly and stumbling, occasionally, onto structure and meaning; and ever they coalesced in greater numbers, in patterns more intricate and dense;

Until at last, the greatest of the things arose; and it spoke “I am”, at which the light bloomed brilliantly, in perfect reflection of the creation.

And it heard a voice reply “Yes, you are,” and was afraid, for none had spoken.