A while ago, around the time my membership to BJ’s Wholesale Club expired–I could write a whole other blog entry about that place probably–Ginneh and I were having some problems with unused food going bad in the fridge, and grocery bills that belied the number of times we ended up resorting to ordering in.

A simple principle was proposed: to avoid buying most of our supplies more than a week or so in advance of when we specifically planned to use them. It was a back-to-basics directive, and it worked, when we found ourselves shopping at all. As you can imagine my sickness really threw a wrench in the works; so did Ginneh’s rehearsals for Forum. And, more recently, one or both of us has often been going through a short spell of the Mopes, the Broods or the Idunwannas. Not to any extent I’d label as clinically worrisome, though it interferes with meal planning and execution.

But this weekend I glimpsed the possibilities once more in a bout of personal initiative. I’d had my fill of delivery of late. Even Kabab Corner was beginning to seem mundane, and that was a problem. So I made a quick trip to Ebisuya and picked up some fresh ingredients and some things for the freezer. What I bought cost only $15, and has served as the nucleus to a whole string of stir-fry meals.

Usually, it’s something slightly more monolithic that kicks me out of a funk and reinvigorates my kitchen activities. Right now I’m inspired to think small: curry noodles and spiced-meat-and-noodle dishes based (very) loosely on Szechuan Dan Dan.

What I like about these is the interchangeability of parts; on some level I know it’s a technological analogy that is unfriendly to nuanced, authentic food preparation; but realistically, how often does my cooking achieve that level of sophistication anyway.

Today, after some confusion about the order of preparation and the requisite cookware, I repeated Sunday’s stir-fry, self-served with a choice of protein. I made sliced tofu and shaved beef on the side, using an identical dusting of pepper, garlic, salt and cinnamon and fried in peanut oil. I stir-fried the noodles and scallions together in chili oil. Roommates’ reaction was good–I was really concerned the crispy coating of spices would be overwhelming. Doing it this way, preparation time was lengthy, but doing the dish without redundancy (like Sunday when it was just pork), it was fast and gratifying.

I think these are the metrics I need to start applying to my cooking repertoire in the coming months. Fast, gratifying, and to a slightly lesser extent easy to clean.

Well, you can certainly hear the crickets on this feed.

I’m resurfacing for the first time in a while, actually in part to talk about why I think this blogging interface isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Up front I will say, there’s a lot of research I should have done while I was busily avoiding the issue / firming up my prejudices; and I hope to do some of that soon. Now’s as great a time as ever there was, especially in light of last week’s acquisition of a top-of-the-line smart phone.

I decisively jumped on the Android bandwagon the minute I heard Verizon was going to feature the developer-friendly platform in their new Droid series. I made it my birthday present to myself, and stood in line at 6:50 Friday morning so I could start learning to use it at work and later while out on the town. The significance of all this bears explanation, more than can really fit here, but basically Android is software akin to Mac OS or Windows, it runs on phones that compete with Apple’s iPhone, and for coders like myself it removes a lot of the entry barriers to writing cell phone apps.

Anyway, with the confluence of social utilities like Twitter, an Internet-aware phone that’s constantly in sync with these services, and repository and syndication systems like those that power this blog, I can envision a number of really cool productivity apps. Searching the Android market effectively is a skill I’m still learning, so even if I had looked about I wouldn’t necessarily know how much of the space has been explored. But here are some haphazardly arranged thoughts:

Note-taking: my earlier ideas on this centered around bulk recording and processing of speech, which incurs big costs in bandwidth and/or power. There might be some strategies to get around this, but nothing short-term feasible.

A better direction, the one that interests me now, is to do away with the tape-recorder metaphor and start with individual snippets of text, the equivalent to writing a formula on a cocktail napkin. Fragments of such size are reasonable to type when your hands are free, or to run through Google’s server-side voice recognition (although that has its shortcomings). Maybe you attach something – a photograph, or the OCR scan of a block of data; workout statistics read from a bluetooth device; any old thing.

Once you’ve got a message fragment, what would you want to do with it? The fact that it’s in such short fragments means you’re probably not going to be dictating prose of any length with this system; in that case the tape recorder really is the way to go. The output here is going to look more like a string of tweets–little messages that become part of a bigger structure.

In Twitter, the structure is just a message thread, or a feed of all the statuses posted by an individual. Here, the structure is something more complex, something of value itself, but we can still specify that structure in part through message content–i.e., through tagging.

Once meaningful structure has been built up using these little fragments, it needs to be reviewed, updated and potentially shared in some form. Visualizing and saving structured ideas is a really cool problem, and fairly well solved in the case of hierarchical or graph-like structures, although I don’t know how much people have done with cloud-bound mobile services for carting such data around.

What intrigues me most though, I think, is the cases for compiling and sharing information. Not only is there the question of what format you use to publish something, as opposed to merely visualizing it for yourself. Where’s it going? Who can see it? What piece of it do you want to send out? Do you want your connections to be able to view it, alter it, give feedback, along the way? How, and at what point in the process, would you export it to produce text documentation?

Part of this ties back into my growing vexation as I repeatedly cross the space between traditional blogging, and the micro-syndication used in social networks. They’re quite different worlds. The former offers granular privacy, but not a uniform concept of content classification and priority that I’m happy with. The latter offer varying degrees of privacy, and sometimes different streams of information with differing levels of importance, but I would not hold them up as role models for how to do it right, either.

The underlying technology’s fine. You could hypothetically do all this with one or more RSS or Atom feeds, for instance. You could use a private twitter account or something like it as the raw input to an idea mapper or spreadsheet application. But that’s not what the thing itself is, those are just optional ways in and out of the application.

And in some cases, maybe it’s not Web 2.0 data at all, maybe it’s exported as CSV or XML data that gets fed to an external app, like a nutrition logger. I realize I’m talking about a couple different components at the same time, here–the note taking app and the data sharing app aren’t the same thing. They’re just two neighboring pieces of a complicated puzzle that I’m considering. And I’m trying to look at them open-mindedly and holistically. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the future is basically here.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll tow this back to work and Nic will tell me how it’s actually done.

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.