philosophy

Legacy code—warts and all—isn't such a bad thing.

If it's built well, and maintained well, it probably takes care of the hundreds/thousands of edge cases with which your beautifully-rewritten new codebase doesn't yet cope.

Unless it's not well-documented (or self-documented), or incompatible with modern systems, it's often a better idea to refactor and clean up old code than to scrap a system entirely and rewrite from scratch.

Image from Thinking Through.

If you accuse someone of hating you (or someone else) for simply disagreeing with you (or someone else) on an issue (whether it be the best baseball team, iPhone or Android, the best candy bar, or—gasp—same-sex marriage), please look up the definition of hate, and its synonyms in a thesaurus.

Disagreement ≠ hate.

Found: An interesting article from Gladden J. Pappin on Liberty, Technology, and the Advent of Social Networking. It's a bit tl;dr, but I've read through once, and hope to sit with it a little longer sometime.

The article (and many like it) makes me think a bit about the theme of personhood on the Internet, and how our use and overuse of social media, blogging, etc. in building our own self-image is something about which we must always be cautious.

I recently watched the Star Trek TNG Episodes 'Booby Trap' and 'Galaxy's Child', and while I'm no supporter of the strange philosophies that guide Star Trek morality/ethics, I wonder if we are becoming like Geordi LaForge, who fell in love with a projected image of a person on the holodeck.

Thomas Aquinas, on whether the ends justify the means:

On the contrary, Boethius says (De Differ. Topic. ii) that "if the end is good, the thing is good, and if the end be evil, the thing also is evil."

That is a simple way of stating it, but he elaborates:

Nothing hinders an action that is good in one of the way mentioned above, from lacking goodness in another way. And thus it may happen that an action which is good in its species or in its circumstances is ordained to an evil end, or vice versa. However, an action is not good simply, unless it is good in all those ways: since "evil results from any single defect, but good from the complete cause," as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv).

While reading through a relatively decent overview/article on the current controversy, I found a paragraph that I take some issue with, especially with regard to the question of 'faith vs. science/reason':

Ms. Pynchon makes a critical observation: “These religious beliefs (that sexual conduct outside of a one man-one woman marriage is sinful and can be “cured” by Jesus) are held by fewer and fewer Americans. They have also been repudiated by many liberal American Christian churches (including my own. -JM] They fly in the face of American secular legal principles [read as separation of church and state - JM] and contradict our contemporary scientific understanding. They are matters of faith, not science or reason.” What this author is summarizing is what is becoming the national story — that our individual DNA is our essence, and we treat our essence with respect. It’s similar to our other national stories, for example, that you don’t stone a woman to death for adultery.

This morning, our beloved electrical power was gone at the seminary (apparently it left us at 4:50 a.m.). Needless to say, there was much confusion for some time. But, in the end, everyone set up flashlights so we could see while getting ready for the day, and we found that ol’ St. Nicholas had remembered not only candy in our shoes, but also a bright, red candle for ever-needed morning light. The electrical power returned just before we began morning prayer, and now we are back online and operational.

This made me think about things in chapel (where we each were holding one or two candles to read our books for morning prayer). What is power? What is our ‘guiding light’? Who controls it? Surely we lowly humans, sinners that we are, do not control our power—we are shown this in many ways, the least of which being the power outages such as the one this morning. In our society, being without electrical power degrades our feeling of power. But who gives us any power we may have? God. We must remember that all of our modern conveniences are given to us by God through the work His creation, men.

I was just thinking about a MAJOR flaw in Aristotle’s thinking of the ‘unmoved mover’; if god, as Aristotle says, is only thinking the purest thoughts, and the purest thought would be of himself (self-contemplation), why did Aristotle’s god ever have the gumption to ‘move’ stuff? Wouldn’t that be not thinking of himself? Hmm…