Influx

When I was a child, perhaps I paid better attention then most, but I remember learning about this thing called bias, and primary vs. secondary sources. At any rate I mention this because I have bias, this page catalogs just a small amount of my professional work and a large amount of some philosophical underpinnings thereto. I have core values that I endeavor to grow and explore, and I've put them to use in both the professional realm and in personal projects. They are likely to influence any future projections of my energy.

Core Values

Education: I went to public school in unReal Virginia. I went to public college at the University of California, Berkeley, which was the top school in the nation for my discipline, English, though I started out as a genetics major. I believe that quality education should be a right for everyone. That your circumstances of birth should not be something that prevents you from succeeding. That diversity of experience leads to better, sustainable solutions. That you shouldn't have the burden of debt causing career choice that would not be for the greater good of human progress.
Health: I think health care should likewise be a universal right. Outside general compassion, there are reasons for this along the enlightened self-interest point of view. Healthy people make better decisions. Healthy people won't transmit disease when they can't see a doctor, etc. I also think that pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to market drugs to the individual, when you advertise, you drive up anxiety. I also avoid all food with corn syrup in it, which is now basically in everything processed.
Freedom: We've been gifted with an amazing system of government. It is our duty to see it last for the future. It's hard to imagine, but it was not that long ago that in some countries, you were bound to the land, you had to stay where you were born. For instance, some of my ancestors and relatives came to this country after participating in a resistance to this in Germany in 1848. Liberty, while a self-evident right gifted by the creator, is not guaranteed by your fellow man. If we partake in its exercise, we have a duty to guarantee it for others.
Specialization: We as humans have evolved to the state we're in because we figured out how, in tribes, to let individuals specialize. Someone knows how to make tools better than another? They trade them for some clothing stitched by another. While people should maybe have a grasp of what's possible, not everyone should have to be as good as another in every endeavor. I don't want nurses and teachers focused on maximizing their 401(k)s and retirement benefits, I want them caring for others and teaching. Thus I believe in social security as a guaranteed benefit, and do not want private accounts.
Excellence and idealism: I believe in standards. I believe in evolving and pushing the bar higher and higher up. I don't think it does anyone any good to be told that they are good at something for trying, and not succeeding. It breeds a societal acceptance of mediocrity. I believe in looking at any system, first to see how it works, then to see how it could be made better. Nothing is ever perfect except for the striving towards it.
Civilization: Any of us can live in tribes of 20-50 people. Gathering in small towns is also not difficult. In rural areas, you don't have to worry about what the neighbors think, because they are acres away, and what you do doesn't affect them. Living in a city is another matter. I enjoy looking at systems of how people learn to live with each other in large groups. How are cities made? What makes one succeed and another unhealthy?
Middle Class: The best defense against despotism is a flourishing and thriving middle class. Democracy happens after a middle class. Anything that can be done to strengthen the middle class should be, from estate taxes and progressive taxation. Plutocracies and oligarchy only leads to destruction. Even if you are a member of the plutocracy, you should do what you can to strengthen the middle class.
Art: I like pretty things and want more of them made by not me. From stained glass to sculpture, movies to games, a well made chair, stage lighting and more, beauty is one of my ideals. I want the world to be less ugly.
Science: I want to know how it all works. I have interests in philosophy of language and mind, theoretical physics, biology, neuroscience, geology, systems theory and more. The universe is a wondrous place, and I like the notion that science lets us communicate our insights to others in a methodical fashion. Some theories are only testable in reality.
Autonomy: Not enough attention is given to the tenth amendment. I've read many many essays on individual freedoms and liberties. I think the more self-reliant one is, the better a contribution can be made to the advancement of the human race. We can evolve to the next level if we all attempt to do as much as we can by ourselves, and then join together as a group to do more.
Generosity: Giving one self through time, energy, and money leads to the best development of the individual. "True progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto" — Aldous Huxley
Curiosity: My dad taught me that education is learning how to ask better questions. I try to hold a fascination with every topic I encounter, although some bore me greatly. I know a lot about how the computer works because I am curious, not because I learned it in school.
Progress: I would like to think that we can use technology to progress as a civilization. Technology is just a tool, one of the things that distinguishes us humans from insentient animals. "Two things we ought to learn from history; one, that we are not in ourselves superior to our fathers; another, that we are shamefully and monstrously inferior to them, if we do not advance beyond them." — Thomas Arnold
Environment: We have a duty to the future to clean up our garbage. A clean environment is the sign of healthy habits by individuals and greater society. I would prefer that government not tell me how to do so, but encourage conservation efforts. I hate to agree with Dick Cheney, but conservation is a personal virtue. I think it should be a public virtue too, but these problems will not go away by fiat. We will each have to contribute to making it better.
Futurism: Where's my jet pack? How come I'm not living on Mars? I want more fun toys. How come we don't try to make more? I want more science fiction to become science fact. At the same time, I don't think we should be focussing on getting to Mars when half the world is hungry. I want these advances to be available and useful to everyone.

Effluence

Audio

I interned for the multimedia band D'Cückoo for several semesters near the end of college. They built their own instruments out of mouse-pads and diodes. I learned how to manipulate a FileMaker Pro database in order to send direct mail to fans (ah, before widespread email). I learned what a sampler was, and what code is. I even learned what OpenGL is from them, they had an on-screen character RiGBy (groan), whose facial features were also triggered by OpenGL. They had a friend from SGI who made it go.

I worked at OSC, co-owned by a band-member's boyfriend, and learned much there. The company sold software that made the hardware digital audio workstations like AVID go. Deck II was pioneering software that didn't need a card even, just the AT&T3210 coprocessor. I created a sales database, and a hypercard stack to test Apple Events, and tried to teach myself Think C in my spare time. I also helped make a few buttons for the user interface, and all the 1-bit elements. Those were important as back in those days, folks doing audio turned the colors off to devote all CPU cycles to audio processing.

Mostly though, I learned an aesthetic from them, based on the "OSC Manifesto" in the Audio Anarchist I mailed out with product (to just about every industrial band currently existing.) I continue to believe in these core values, they are still current ideas. I suppose the other thing I learned from them is that some of the best software or businesses are created by people who are not necessarily computer scientists, but have a need for a solution, and can make something that's a more general case. In this case, one of the company owners was editing film dialog, and another was in an industrial band.

I used knowledge gained here in writing the SoundTrack and Logic Pro sites for Apple.

Publishing

In several years in the publishing industry, in addition to writing and editing articles about technology, I also learned some mechanics. Writing shareware reviews gave me a broad understanding of what is possible with software. I learned html in 1994 to publish MacWeek and MacUser on the web. I took that knowledge and then made a web server for the next company, including configuring DNS files. My colleague at Ziff, Mark Simmons, had made an AppleScript that took content from Quark Xpress files and made text files out of them. I took this knowledge and then created a system for the reviews section of The Net magazine which let remote reviewers write in a database, the editors correct for grammar, and then spit out files for both web and print. The art department had to do some formatting, but not nearly the amount as if they'd done it by hand. I also published a monthly CD-ROM. Stepping into the print side of things, I used this broad knowledge to cover the Mac industry at MacAddict, which I named over drinks with the publisher. I am not a designer, but I worked with the art department of two magazines, and learned their concerns, and a few of their tricks. While at MacAddict, I also spearheaded digital supplements to magazine articles, to explore new media. Publish a how to? Here's all the shareware you need. Frustrated by PCs? Here's a video of us (admittedly childishly) smashing one. Want to know more? Here's a bunch of links to explore.

Ultimately, what drove me was curiosity and a love of novelty. How do things work? Let me figure it out. What could you do with this? Let's make it happen. And also a thought of the printing press. Ben Franklin could propagate his thoughts because he controlled the printing press. If you control the medium, you control the message. The web to me then, in its infancy, was a giant printing press, and anyone could publish their thoughts. Traditional media did not really say anything to me. To broadcast to a large audience requires huge investments in capital, and it doesn't matter what you think, if you are constrained by money, you will make compromises in what you say, in order to pay bills. I prefer Shpongle to boy bands. This is one reason I have wanted better and better computers, to give ordinary people the ability to produce and publish without the compromises needed in professional broadcast mediums. This stems from the work at OSC, who wanted people to be able to make music without investing $10,000+ in studio equipment (and now that same capability is only half the functionality of GarageBand, free on every Mac). And flows to being happy that iMovie makes it easy for anyone to make a video. In 1995, it was extraordinarily painful to do so. Now we have the opportunity to watch a million lip-sync videos, millions more cute cats, my mom's vacation pictures set to music, and the odd video catching a politician being extraordinarily stupid.

So I like technology as a tool to make and propagate more diverse art, and to publish political opinion not possible in traditional journalism.

Non-profit

I'm a member of the Rhythm Society, and co-authored its IRS application as a non-profit church. Working in leadership positions has given me great insight into community organization, and motivating volunteers. Several of us produced an event in 2004 called "Awe to Action," which featured Huston Smith as a keynote speaker. Sponsored by the Templeton foundation, luminaries such as Mark Kleiman advised the organizing committee. I facilitated and drove a talk on Open Source and social action.

I was raised in the Swedenborgian church, by one of its pastors: I'm either 4th or 5th generation preacher's kid, and thus was steeped in words, parables, and the use of story from an early age. I believe Christian literalists suffer from severe doctrinal errors that have several unfortunate effects on the well-being of this country. One: taking the bible literally, on faith, means a surrender of critical thinking skills and concomitant resistance to the empirical thinking necessary for scientific advancement. If you cannot ask questions about dinosaurs roaming the planet 4,000 years ago, and you refuse, on general principle, to accept evidence, truth, to the contrary, then you will be susceptible to any charlatan, because you will not have developed the rational faculties that are clearly a gift from god, since we are made in the divine image. Last I talked to her, God wanted you to ask lots of questions and considers it worship and devotion to wisdom, and truth, which shall set ye free.

The fact that you are reading this now is a result of scientific, logical inquiry on the part of hundreds of thousands of people, striving to create a medium that is accessible and meets certain standards. The computer, built on logic, would not exist were it not for the rational thought process. When literalists denigrate evolution, or other scientific theories, and the methods of its inquiry itself, they create a subculture which cannot innovate in the technology sector. This is bad from an economic standpoint, if we do not have a population that can think for itself, we do not have a population that can think, period. Without such capabilities, we will cannot compete. It is a boon to countries like India, and those workers themselves, that we have to import IT workers, but it is a sad state of affairs that our own country cannot produce workers capable of serving. No amount of investing in math and science teaching can overcome a brain that has been actively discouraged from asking questions. You can't do math if you resist logic, logos, the word of god.

Moreover, it creates a subculture that will ruin the enlightenment era foundations of this, our American experiment. If you have trained yourself to distrust science, then facts are extraneous. There's no reason to even listen to scientists on the matter of global warming. Want to reduce disease? Who cares about commissioning studies at the NHS or CDC, studies don't prove anything. Want to build more efficient roads? No need to look at traffic patterns, which might suggest an optimal solution. The gut knows best. I have no problem using instinct to choose between two equally good, well-researched solutions, but not researching at all is bad government. Want a winning war strategy? Perhaps engaging dissent and a diversity of opinions will actually yield success. Instead, a mindset that believes in external authority over internal judgement will perhaps succeed in the short term, but never for the long haul. And folks with this thinking have taken over the GOP, the republican party. I cannot support any organization that encourages such willful ignorance and blind devotion to its leader. If you are reading this, and are a republican, a) if you don't agree with me, turn off your computer and give it to charity. Your blackberry also depends on rational thought, so please get rid of it, too. b) facts matter. theories matter. Your theory of government has proven itself incompetent, perhaps you should question its premises, not the patriotism and judgement of your opponents.

Literalists, for some reason, also seem to not be following Jesus' commandments. I was raised to believe that those are saved who not only believe in him, but also follow the commandments of his word, namely to love your neighbor as he loved you. Look to your own self before you judge others. You don't get a hall pass for sinning just because you say Jesus is the Lord of your Life. I don't see a lot of loving your neighbor on the part of many evangelicals. Bombing clinics, calling for the deaths of Arabs, and such just don't seem to me to be loving acts. My dad used to put on the televangelical channel with the sound turned off to prove a point. The body language was all that of anger and hate, not peace. And don't get me started on all the bearing of false witness promulgated by people who supposedly want the ten commandments plastered everywhere. Maybe it's because they keep forgetting what they say. My church also taught that your neighbor is not just the person next to you and in your church and country, but the whole world.

So in both rejecting wisdom and constricting love, Christian literalists seem to me to be suffering from severe doctrinal errors. This not only has an effect on how they change the world in and of themselves, but in the reactions they cause amongst those who do not agree with their worldview. It is next to impossible now to call oneself a Christian in the logical scientific world, and one sets oneself up for ridicule if to declare oneself a Christian. I am really freaking tired of explaining that no, I don't actually believe in some dude in flowing robes. And just as literalists do not develop their rational faculties, their actions prevent the scientifically minded from considering developing religious faculties in the Christian tradition or at all. And lack of training in empathy has turned some in the scientific community into A-class jerks.

Back to non-profit and open source. I believe that there is a use in participating in activities that are solely given as a gift. I believe that not all areas of human endeavor should be subject to market forces, or in the realm of commerce. I was pleased that the discussion on open source sparked scientist Andrew Hessel's Open Source biology project. Some of my thoughts in this matter do come from Brian Behlendorf of the Apache foundation, who said in our talk "No one company should control everything." I am amazed at the success of Apache, which powers most of the web servers in the world. He also likened open source to his experience in a group that conducted activities based on the contributions of the group, freely given. I believe that foundational technology and science works best when practiced in this environment. Heck, the web was developed so that scientists could share information more easily.

I respect the GNU folks, that license was my first exposure to the idea of free software. I respect people's choice to choose how they want to propagate things in the world, to ensure that what they give as a gift is passed on. But I also think that gifts with strings attached aren't truly gifts. But that's my own philosophy, take it or leave it, but it comes from my childhood upbringing in charity as the foundation of spiritual life and earthly happiness. When you do practice it this way, and strive to make foundational technology as true and useful as possible, you will have effects that go far beyond your initial thought. I doubt Brian was thinking about the freedom of Iranian bloggers when he participated in the Apache project, but it's a testament to the great thinking processes of those who did that made a system which could unfold in that direction. Likewise, I had no idea that Mr. Hessel's listening in on an organizational meeting would propagate itself into the science of DNA. But if it's a good idea, freely given, it will propagate. If it can be made better, it will.

As you can see in this essay, politics and religion are intertwined in my head. Just breathing is a political and a religious act. I think our founding fathers gave us incredible tools to explore personal liberty, especially that of speech and religion. It is my right to go off on tangents about open source and the love of wisdom and the source of it all. And some terrible bit rot that has crept into the modern GOP. I suppose I could go on about other metaphors like monolithic procedural programming fragility vs the benefits of object oriented methodology, cellular automata, and other anarchistic thoughts.

And it is just as important to keep them separate in external reality. That is, political policy and governance should be based on sound empirical rational data, that everyone could test for themselves given the opportunity. You can't test the truth value of someone else's gut. If they want me to trust their gut, they need to externalize the feeling with rational thought. Likewise government should stay out of religion. In no way do I want the government telling these literalists what to believe or how destructive they are. That should be left to anyone in the Republican party with the stomach for it. This is crucial to keeping the system of democracy alive. I also think it's the duty of all free people to keep the system free, and to contribute time or money or both in keeping it functioning. That's why I devote time to non-profit activities. I am not just a consumer, I'm a citizen. And I want to leave the world a better place than I found it.

Of course I don't have any problem with the existence of commerce or capital, I'm not a communist. I just think trade is the lowest common denominator of what we can do together as civilized people.

I would also like the GOP to fix itself. Just as I concur that no one company should control everything, neither do I think that any one party should control everything. As a matter of checks and balances, and competition, a balance is necessary to create better solutions in the future and to check unhealthy direction. Which is what this election is about. Vote. The current GOP needs to be shown the error of its ways in large numbers. Even if your state will go overwhelmingly one way, vote. A large mandate of the people will be helpful.

Kathy Tafel - Prolog