If you’re like me, you have a multitude of login ID’s for a wide array of different computer systems and web sites. I think I have over 100, including some commercial web sites where I purchased something once, and may never again. Obviously, committing this number of strong passwords and login ID’s to memory is impossible (at least for me!) So there’s a tendency to repeat passwords, never change passwords, and write passwords down, ALL of which are security weaknesses. To make matters worse, a lot of those sites store sensitive personal or credit card information – and online credit card theft and identity theft are growth industries.
My own system is to use a small base number of passwords, which I modify from site to site. The passwords themselves are strong passwords. (I won’t tell you my specific strategy for making them strong. There’s a lot of advice for creating strong passwords available online.) I record all my login data in a list on my computer – but I don’t record the actual password. Instead, I record a code indicating which base password was used, and indicating the modifications that were made. The strong password makes it difficult for someone to guess my password, even with the aid of password hacking software, and the coded list makes it at least difficult for someone to figure out the passwords, even if they steal my list.
Unfortunately, the strongest passwords and the most secret-agenty codebooks are still vulnerable to sniffers – programs that lie in stealth on a computer, and record the keystrokes of the password. The only defenses against these are anti-malware software and frequent password changes. Using anti-malware software is a no-brainer. But changing an entire password infrastructure, and updating dozens upon dozens of logins is still a daunting and impractical task.
What is needed is for the whole identity-check process to be moved out of the responsibility of individual sites, and centralized in some way. Then, instead of recording its own password and ID information for every user, each site would just ask you for some sort of identity token, which it could verify through some central, secure site. Personal information could be passed from the central site to the commercial site on a “one use” basis; the central site would have a flexible system that let you specify which information a site was authorized to access. Each user would now have a small number of login ID’s at the central site (perhaps as few as one), and the use of strong passwords, memorized instead of committed to paper, and changed frequently, would be a lot less problematic.
Attempts have been made to set up systems like this, Microsoft’s Passport system comes to mind, and Google’s cross-system login that works for sites as diverse as Google Maps and Blogger. Paypal also implements some of this. But these systems have not been broad enough, or well enough received. (Distrust of the motives and disinterest of the parties setting them up, as well as their commitment to security, has probably been a factor in this.) Much of the infrastructure for a centralized login system exists, I think, in the digital certificate/digital signature industry. But it seems it will take a revolution for this to replace the plethora of individual logins that currently exists.
If anybody does try to set up a central login system, I hope they will keep in mind that people need to be able to have different ID’s. This may not be obvious, at first, or it may seem that multiple identities would only be necessary for nefarious purposes. But think about it. We all play different roles in our lives, and it is very useful to be able to keep these separate. Work and personal life are obvious choices. Some people may also work two or more jobs, or run two or more businesses. People may have hobbies or volunteer activities they may want to keep distinct. It is not hard to imagine a person having a work ID for her job, one for her moonlighting, one for her activities as a soccer coach, one for her music hobby, one for managing her portfolio, and one for general personal business. That is six “identities” and six login ID/password combinations, which is a bit much to manage – but a lot less than 50 or 100!
Management of multiple identities would be easier to manage (thinking even further ahead) if computer operating systems made switching users easier and faster. The epitome of a fast switch was found in old Unix text shell systems. You could just type “su”, a login id, and a password, and instantly you were someone else, until you logged out or typed “su” again. (The command “su” stood for “substitute user”, although it was so often used to switch to the all powerful system user “root”, that it became common to refer to it as the “superuser” command.) When you used the “su” command, nothing else changed. You were still in the same directory, working with the same files, on the same project, as you were before. Minimal additional system resources were used up. Compare this with “switching users” under Windows XP. (I am a Vista Resista’.) You choose “Log Off”, and wait, “Switch Users”, and wait (and wait), then log in again (and wait), and you wake up in an entirely new environment, with no easy way to navigate back to where you were before, AND it seems (at least to me), that the other user running in the background eats up a huge chunk of system resources, which can slow performance to nearly a crawl. Windows has something a little more like the “su” command in the “Run As” option, but this is obscure (I always have to hunt for it), and is restricted to one instance of one program at a time. (Hmmm..., I’ve never tried it with Outlook. That might be an interesting way to temporarily change your default email address and folder structure. Probably doesn’t work.)
So anyway, I dream on. The future is coming... eventually. But will it be bright, or more of the same muddled murk?
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Longevity and obsolescence
Every once and a while I hold some utilitarian object in my hand and marvel at how long I’ve had it. The most recent example was a humble nail clipper. In our age, to have an artifact in continuous use for a decade or two is remarkable. My kids are amazed if something is older than a year or two.
This was not always so. In older, less productive societies than our own, useful objects were handed down for generations, and it would not be uncommon for an artisan to be using tools that had belonged to his or her grandparent. But our society is SO productive, and for some reason, rather than taking the rewards of our productivity in increased leisure, we’ve chosen to use it to produce throwaway junk.
One person to recognize this tendency was that controversial and problematic economist, the late John Kenneth Galbraith. He made it, in fact, one of the centerpieces of his work, starting with The Affluent Society, and constructed an elaborate and interesting, if not ultimately convincing, system to explain it. But I find that the easiest way to understand our obsession with the new, and dispositiveness toward the old, is to go back beyond Galbraith, and find an explanation in Marxian terms.
The driving force of a capitalist economy is the desire of people with a little property to become wealthy, and the desire of those who are wealthy to become wealthier still. The wealthy derive their wealth from profits – essentially a tax on the labor of those who work. In order to maximize this tax, the working hours of the laboring population must be maximized. What better way to do this, in a world in which technology has exploded productive capacity, than by establishing a cult of the “new”. Admittedly, this cult of newness builds on the natural curiosity of humans and other primates, but it also serves the interests of the owning classes very well; and can anybody argue that corporate advertising campaigns don’t do EVERYTHING in their power to reinforce and develop it?
Of course planned obsolescence, in which products are built to fall apart after a short period of time helps, too. Late capitalism carefully defends itself against any natural selection-type processes of the market, which might discriminate against such ephemeral products. It is generally impossible to distinguish, at time of purchase, between an object that will soon fall apart and one that will not, and constant changes of brand and style protect the producer from the revenge of the customer when it comes time for replacement.
So this is where our dependence on “free enterprise” has led us. Instead of using our marvelous technology to produce (as it well could!) durable and well-functioning things that serve us for generations, free us from much toil, and greatly enhance our well being, our monkey instincts are manipulated by the greedy to force us to work endlessly in the creation of mountains of garbage, partly to satisfy our own love of novelty, but mostly to serve the relentless drive for wealth and luxury on the part of someone else.
This was not always so. In older, less productive societies than our own, useful objects were handed down for generations, and it would not be uncommon for an artisan to be using tools that had belonged to his or her grandparent. But our society is SO productive, and for some reason, rather than taking the rewards of our productivity in increased leisure, we’ve chosen to use it to produce throwaway junk.
One person to recognize this tendency was that controversial and problematic economist, the late John Kenneth Galbraith. He made it, in fact, one of the centerpieces of his work, starting with The Affluent Society, and constructed an elaborate and interesting, if not ultimately convincing, system to explain it. But I find that the easiest way to understand our obsession with the new, and dispositiveness toward the old, is to go back beyond Galbraith, and find an explanation in Marxian terms.
The driving force of a capitalist economy is the desire of people with a little property to become wealthy, and the desire of those who are wealthy to become wealthier still. The wealthy derive their wealth from profits – essentially a tax on the labor of those who work. In order to maximize this tax, the working hours of the laboring population must be maximized. What better way to do this, in a world in which technology has exploded productive capacity, than by establishing a cult of the “new”. Admittedly, this cult of newness builds on the natural curiosity of humans and other primates, but it also serves the interests of the owning classes very well; and can anybody argue that corporate advertising campaigns don’t do EVERYTHING in their power to reinforce and develop it?
Of course planned obsolescence, in which products are built to fall apart after a short period of time helps, too. Late capitalism carefully defends itself against any natural selection-type processes of the market, which might discriminate against such ephemeral products. It is generally impossible to distinguish, at time of purchase, between an object that will soon fall apart and one that will not, and constant changes of brand and style protect the producer from the revenge of the customer when it comes time for replacement.
So this is where our dependence on “free enterprise” has led us. Instead of using our marvelous technology to produce (as it well could!) durable and well-functioning things that serve us for generations, free us from much toil, and greatly enhance our well being, our monkey instincts are manipulated by the greedy to force us to work endlessly in the creation of mountains of garbage, partly to satisfy our own love of novelty, but mostly to serve the relentless drive for wealth and luxury on the part of someone else.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Democratic choice
One often encounters an attitude, in writings or discussions about society, that being a (“small-d”) democrat requires adopting a “take people as they are” philosophy; i.e., an attitude that faults any questioning of people’s pre-existing attitudes, practices, desires or beliefs. Interestingly, this attitude has distinctive versions on both the right and left. On the right, it takes place in the context of market theory, specifically in the idea that outcomes from free market exchanges are not only economically more efficient (itself a challengeable claim), but are inherently more democratic than decisions made politically. On the left, it takes the form of cultural relativism – the idea that every society has the right to decide its own way of life, even if this involves practices (like female circumcision or stoning rape victims to death) that we may find morally reprehensible, by our own lights. The strong form of this attitude would claim that any attempt to educate others as to our own values is propaganda, imperialism and attempted culture-cide.
I would argue that both of these points of view are not, in fact, democratic, but actually anti-democratic, even anti-political, as well as elitist and degrading. I would argue, further, that they are in fact contrary to the way most people would evaluate their own decision-making process.
The market-theory version of the “take-’em-as-they-are” argument privileges small scale, individual decisions made by people acting in isolation, over those which the same people would make after collective deliberation, discussion and debate. Specifically, the individual decisions are considered “free”, and collective decision making considered to be in some way coerced. Some factors in real-life decision making are either ignored, or explicitly assumed away under such a rubric as “enlightened self-interest”. In particular, it dismisses or denies the fact that isolated individual decisions are likely to consider only a limited range of factors directly and obviously related to the immediate choice, whereas collective deliberation allows the opportunity to introduce broader perspectives, show how the decisions of one might have an unforeseen impact on others, and consider how each seemingly small decision contributes to broader, social outcomes.
One reason for this attitude in market theory, I am convinced, is that market theorists want to find a “once-for-all”, “magic bullet”-style solution to social problems. Democratic theory, in favoring collective decision making, does not offer this – it only offers a process: deliberate, discuss (perhaps argue), decide – which includes no guarantee that the final decision will be a good one. How much more appealing the idea of an impersonal mechanism (the market) that, if left alone (if we only don’t THINK too much), will automatically “get it right”. But this attitude, as it distrusts ANY form of collective decision making in favor of isolated, individual choice and impersonal mechanisms, is not only anti-democratic but it is actually anti-political. It is also degrading, in that is implies that people’s worst, most unreflective, selfish and egoistic sides are some how more “them” than their considered judgments. Further, it is often associated with a (degrading) assumption that people are more likely than not to mess up, if they try to make a conscious decision, which in conservative tradition goes hand-in-hand with efforts to limit popular participation in political governance, preferring to restrict it to an educated (usually wealthy) elite.
The “take-’em-as-they-are” theory is also contrary to the way most people would actually think about their decision making. If you were to say to most people, “The decisions you make when you think about a question, collect whatever information you can on it, listen to other people, and discuss it with your friends and colleagues, are likely to be better decisions than the snap judgments you make without doing these things,” this would not be a particularly controversial thesis.
One can also argue – not without pitfalls, but hard to refute in principle – that even the individual market decisions people make AFTER they have discussed, deliberated, educated themselves, or been better-educated, even constrained, as the result of collective decisions, will tend to result in greater INDIVIDUAL satisfaction in the outcomes than would have resulted from those ill-considered, a priori ones. This argument, if accepted, eliminates any conceivable utility-theoretical basis for preferring the less-considered to the more-considered choice.
“Common sense” decision making models also contradict the extreme multi-cultural leftist argument for non-interference. Most people have a reasonable amount of confidence in their own ability to weigh the evidence and make their own decisions. If you say, “You shouldn’t listen to other people, because they will lead you down a garden path, and convince you of things against your better judgment, and you will come to regret it, later,” people may say, “Yes, that could happen,” but by-and-large they will trust their own ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, and will not feel they need to do so by shutting their ears. (An exception, of course, is people with some pathological reason to deny reality, such as those who secretly fear their own position of privilege is unsupportable, and don’t want to listen to arguments that might turn this fear into an inescapable certainty.) Also, while people tend to be conservative about their own cultural values, they are not necessarily opposed totally and across the board to the idea of trying something new.
There are, of course, real difficulties in distinguishing between education and propaganda, and especially, there are real problems for democracy when “education” is presented within a political context marked by a pre-existing power disparity between the “educator” and the student. But to say that this means all attempts at education should be eschewed is itself elitist and anti-democratic – and self-contradictory. It makes no sense to say we should take people just as they are, and not try to educate them, because their opinions about how best to live their own lives should be trusted, and at the same time say they would not have sufficient wit to judge for themselves the pros and cons of contrary opinions we might express. People who adopt this attitude are expressing a basic distrust in political process, in favor of a head-in-the-sand, leave-well-enough-alone approach.
There are real moral problems, too, with adopting even mild forms of cultural relativism when the practices are extreme – slavery or genocide may be obvious examples, or, for that matter, stoning of rape victims. In these cases, despite theoretical pitfalls and slippery-slope arguments, it is morally appropriate to move beyond education and persuasion to outright coercion – if possible. Practical constraints here raise their ugly head, and the historical record for imposing morality at the point of a sword (besides predominating in examples of efforts later historians would not necessarily consider moral) has not been notably marked by practical success. In many cases, it may arguably only make matters worse. But I digress...
The imperfections of our “really existing” democracies do present problems with the idea of privileging political decision making over “invisible hand” market mechanisms, or in trying to promote culture-change by education and persuasion (let alone through coercion). The level of participation in public decision making in our societies is very low. Decisions are made by a tiny subset of the population, some elected by the people, others almost invisibly appointed to run agencies, or hired by those appointed, with broad latitude in how they implement the general directives that are set by the elected representatives. Public debate is largely moderated by privately (and elitely) owned news media, and the debaters mostly do not ultimately have a vote in the final decision making, which is often done by people far removed from any kind of democratic accountability whatsoever over their individual actions. The vast majority of the people only passively follow the debate, if at all, in the newspapers or (more likely) TV news stories, and limit their actual participation in the process to pulling the lever every 2-4 years. In the US a small majority of those eligible to vote usually don’t even do that much.
But anyway, that’s a topic for another post…
I would argue that both of these points of view are not, in fact, democratic, but actually anti-democratic, even anti-political, as well as elitist and degrading. I would argue, further, that they are in fact contrary to the way most people would evaluate their own decision-making process.
The market-theory version of the “take-’em-as-they-are” argument privileges small scale, individual decisions made by people acting in isolation, over those which the same people would make after collective deliberation, discussion and debate. Specifically, the individual decisions are considered “free”, and collective decision making considered to be in some way coerced. Some factors in real-life decision making are either ignored, or explicitly assumed away under such a rubric as “enlightened self-interest”. In particular, it dismisses or denies the fact that isolated individual decisions are likely to consider only a limited range of factors directly and obviously related to the immediate choice, whereas collective deliberation allows the opportunity to introduce broader perspectives, show how the decisions of one might have an unforeseen impact on others, and consider how each seemingly small decision contributes to broader, social outcomes.
One reason for this attitude in market theory, I am convinced, is that market theorists want to find a “once-for-all”, “magic bullet”-style solution to social problems. Democratic theory, in favoring collective decision making, does not offer this – it only offers a process: deliberate, discuss (perhaps argue), decide – which includes no guarantee that the final decision will be a good one. How much more appealing the idea of an impersonal mechanism (the market) that, if left alone (if we only don’t THINK too much), will automatically “get it right”. But this attitude, as it distrusts ANY form of collective decision making in favor of isolated, individual choice and impersonal mechanisms, is not only anti-democratic but it is actually anti-political. It is also degrading, in that is implies that people’s worst, most unreflective, selfish and egoistic sides are some how more “them” than their considered judgments. Further, it is often associated with a (degrading) assumption that people are more likely than not to mess up, if they try to make a conscious decision, which in conservative tradition goes hand-in-hand with efforts to limit popular participation in political governance, preferring to restrict it to an educated (usually wealthy) elite.
The “take-’em-as-they-are” theory is also contrary to the way most people would actually think about their decision making. If you were to say to most people, “The decisions you make when you think about a question, collect whatever information you can on it, listen to other people, and discuss it with your friends and colleagues, are likely to be better decisions than the snap judgments you make without doing these things,” this would not be a particularly controversial thesis.
One can also argue – not without pitfalls, but hard to refute in principle – that even the individual market decisions people make AFTER they have discussed, deliberated, educated themselves, or been better-educated, even constrained, as the result of collective decisions, will tend to result in greater INDIVIDUAL satisfaction in the outcomes than would have resulted from those ill-considered, a priori ones. This argument, if accepted, eliminates any conceivable utility-theoretical basis for preferring the less-considered to the more-considered choice.
“Common sense” decision making models also contradict the extreme multi-cultural leftist argument for non-interference. Most people have a reasonable amount of confidence in their own ability to weigh the evidence and make their own decisions. If you say, “You shouldn’t listen to other people, because they will lead you down a garden path, and convince you of things against your better judgment, and you will come to regret it, later,” people may say, “Yes, that could happen,” but by-and-large they will trust their own ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, and will not feel they need to do so by shutting their ears. (An exception, of course, is people with some pathological reason to deny reality, such as those who secretly fear their own position of privilege is unsupportable, and don’t want to listen to arguments that might turn this fear into an inescapable certainty.) Also, while people tend to be conservative about their own cultural values, they are not necessarily opposed totally and across the board to the idea of trying something new.
There are, of course, real difficulties in distinguishing between education and propaganda, and especially, there are real problems for democracy when “education” is presented within a political context marked by a pre-existing power disparity between the “educator” and the student. But to say that this means all attempts at education should be eschewed is itself elitist and anti-democratic – and self-contradictory. It makes no sense to say we should take people just as they are, and not try to educate them, because their opinions about how best to live their own lives should be trusted, and at the same time say they would not have sufficient wit to judge for themselves the pros and cons of contrary opinions we might express. People who adopt this attitude are expressing a basic distrust in political process, in favor of a head-in-the-sand, leave-well-enough-alone approach.
There are real moral problems, too, with adopting even mild forms of cultural relativism when the practices are extreme – slavery or genocide may be obvious examples, or, for that matter, stoning of rape victims. In these cases, despite theoretical pitfalls and slippery-slope arguments, it is morally appropriate to move beyond education and persuasion to outright coercion – if possible. Practical constraints here raise their ugly head, and the historical record for imposing morality at the point of a sword (besides predominating in examples of efforts later historians would not necessarily consider moral) has not been notably marked by practical success. In many cases, it may arguably only make matters worse. But I digress...
The imperfections of our “really existing” democracies do present problems with the idea of privileging political decision making over “invisible hand” market mechanisms, or in trying to promote culture-change by education and persuasion (let alone through coercion). The level of participation in public decision making in our societies is very low. Decisions are made by a tiny subset of the population, some elected by the people, others almost invisibly appointed to run agencies, or hired by those appointed, with broad latitude in how they implement the general directives that are set by the elected representatives. Public debate is largely moderated by privately (and elitely) owned news media, and the debaters mostly do not ultimately have a vote in the final decision making, which is often done by people far removed from any kind of democratic accountability whatsoever over their individual actions. The vast majority of the people only passively follow the debate, if at all, in the newspapers or (more likely) TV news stories, and limit their actual participation in the process to pulling the lever every 2-4 years. In the US a small majority of those eligible to vote usually don’t even do that much.
But anyway, that’s a topic for another post…
Monday, August 3, 2009
Epiphanies
From time to time in my life, I have experienced epiphanies, of varying degrees of profundity. For instance, there was the time in my daughter Laura's high school algebra class, on parent day, when I was racing to solve the problem on the board faster than the kids could, and I realized that I really like mathematics. Up until that point, my conscious relationship to mathematics centered on the idea that I wasn't very good at it. I think there were two main reasons for this: 1) I had high school teachers who were not very good at math, and passed on their confusion and sense of difficulty to me, and 2) as an ill-prepared freshman MIT student, I was surrounded with people who were SO good at math, that I developed a survival strategy based on doing the minimum necessary to get by, and deprecated both my own ability and my interest with regard to doing more. Not until some 20 years could I realize the amount of pleasure that mathematical reasoning could bring me. Note that nothing material had changed. I'm still not "good" at math, when measured on the MIT/Ivy League/graduate-math/physics/engineering student scale. I can't prove many theorems - but I can FOLLOW a lot more than I can prove (providing I start at the right level). AND I can derive significant enjoyment from doing so.
But the biggest epiphany in my life was when I realized that I have always been a philosopher. I mean “always” in the sense that my whole life, since my earliest memories, I have been challenging the meanings of the world, asking questions of adults, in my childhood, that they couldn’t answer, and drawing connections between answers that they found surprising; and I mean “philosopher” in the literal sense of a person who loves wisdom, at least to the extent that wisdom is represented by knowledge and truth, and who loves them to the extent of being willing to make sacrifices in their pursuit, especially, and especially in childhood, of social acceptances; but more, I feel, with Plato and Aristotle (once I finally got around to reading them), that pursuing these things is my greatest pleasure, and my truest calling – the thing that makes me feel, more than any other, both truly alive and truly me.
Similarly to my epiphany regarding mathematics, this epiphany about philosophy doesn't necessarily mean that I am a GOOD philosopher. Undoubtedly my ideas have often been naive and sophomoric; undoubtedly, because everybody's are, at some time in their life, but in my case, autodidact that I have become, it is more than likely that significant naiveté still remains. But that can't stop me from trying; can't, in the normative sense, because the endeavor is a noble one, but even more keenly in the empirical/natural historical sense. I can't stop trying, because this is who I am, who I have always been, and who I will always be until death or the ravages of age, injury or degenerative disease render my mind no longer capable of functioning. What IS a variable is whether I write, addressing my thoughts to a public audience, or just proceed as I have been, and impose them only on my wife and occasionally, a fortunate or unfortunate friend. If I had to go out in the world and find an editor and a publisher, this would probably be a foregone conclusion. But blogging is so easy...
So, I begin. I dump my thoughts to probably no one, but potentially the world. But whether I meet with approval, approbation, or simple apathy from the blog-following public, one thing I cannot stop doing is thinking, reasoning, exploring - in short, being a philosopher - because that is who I am. So I adopt a tagline from a tale by SF writer Edgar Pangborn: "Still I persist in wondering..."
But the biggest epiphany in my life was when I realized that I have always been a philosopher. I mean “always” in the sense that my whole life, since my earliest memories, I have been challenging the meanings of the world, asking questions of adults, in my childhood, that they couldn’t answer, and drawing connections between answers that they found surprising; and I mean “philosopher” in the literal sense of a person who loves wisdom, at least to the extent that wisdom is represented by knowledge and truth, and who loves them to the extent of being willing to make sacrifices in their pursuit, especially, and especially in childhood, of social acceptances; but more, I feel, with Plato and Aristotle (once I finally got around to reading them), that pursuing these things is my greatest pleasure, and my truest calling – the thing that makes me feel, more than any other, both truly alive and truly me.
Similarly to my epiphany regarding mathematics, this epiphany about philosophy doesn't necessarily mean that I am a GOOD philosopher. Undoubtedly my ideas have often been naive and sophomoric; undoubtedly, because everybody's are, at some time in their life, but in my case, autodidact that I have become, it is more than likely that significant naiveté still remains. But that can't stop me from trying; can't, in the normative sense, because the endeavor is a noble one, but even more keenly in the empirical/natural historical sense. I can't stop trying, because this is who I am, who I have always been, and who I will always be until death or the ravages of age, injury or degenerative disease render my mind no longer capable of functioning. What IS a variable is whether I write, addressing my thoughts to a public audience, or just proceed as I have been, and impose them only on my wife and occasionally, a fortunate or unfortunate friend. If I had to go out in the world and find an editor and a publisher, this would probably be a foregone conclusion. But blogging is so easy...
So, I begin. I dump my thoughts to probably no one, but potentially the world. But whether I meet with approval, approbation, or simple apathy from the blog-following public, one thing I cannot stop doing is thinking, reasoning, exploring - in short, being a philosopher - because that is who I am. So I adopt a tagline from a tale by SF writer Edgar Pangborn: "Still I persist in wondering..."
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Starting out
Well, I finally set this up... but my intended first post is far from ready. Still, I have to put something here. The point of this all is to force me to put my thoughts out there in the world, rather than confine them to my spiral bound book, the margins of the books I read, or the ears of my tolerant-but-weary family and friends. And I have many thoughts! 'Fact, I pretty much can't stop thinking... about history, economics, evolution, ontology, epistemology, morality... y'know, the small stuff.
The title of this blog comes from the title of a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Edgar Pangborn "Still I Persist in Wondering". It comes, in turn, from a line in one of the stories. The meaning for me is a little different than for Pangborn in the original context, but I think it sums up the main thread of my life pretty well. But more on that, later.
The title of this blog comes from the title of a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Edgar Pangborn "Still I Persist in Wondering". It comes, in turn, from a line in one of the stories. The meaning for me is a little different than for Pangborn in the original context, but I think it sums up the main thread of my life pretty well. But more on that, later.
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