the golden rule

http://www.atheistcartoons.com/?p=3701

The joke in this cartoon seems to be that The Golden Rule is in no way original to Jesus - that it has existed in many cultures before.

But actually, in the way it's presented at least, the cartoon seems to suggest an innovation in the Christian version of the rule.

Most of the quotes in the cartoon take the negative form of the rule, essentially: "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." According to Wikipedia, this is known as The Silver Rule. All but two of the quotes in the cartoon are in this form.

The remaining two are are in the positive form. Essentially: "One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself." The two are from Jesus and Mohamed. Needless to say, Jesus predates Muhammad.

So I wonder, was Christianity the first to offer the positive version of the rule? Naming the positive version "Golden" and the negative "Silver" suggests that the positive version is considered better than the negative. I don't know that I agree (I don't know that I disagree either!) But you certainly hear the positive version more often than the negative, and regardless, I think it's worth knowing if the positive version originates with Christianity.

Leviticus has the statement: "But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself...," and also "...love your neighbor as yourself," both of which sound like a positive form to me. Needless to say, Leviticus predates Jesus. So I guess Christianity really can't claim to have originated the positive version of the rule.

That said the Christian positive version is a bit different than the version in Leviticus. The Bible has Jesus saying both "And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise" and also "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Where the Old Testament demands love, the New Testament demands action. That's a key difference. The negative version, and a positive version in respect to love, make no demand on people to take action.

I still don't know if Christianity was the first to state the Golden Rule in terms of demanding action. But it's the earliest I have been able to find. So, maybe Christianity really did contribute something original to the Golden Rule.

I'll add that I like both the Golden and Silver rules quite a bit. If a sane person follows them, I think they'll be doing fairly well for themselves. It doesn't provide nearly as much guidance to the insane, however. (You can imagine a sufficiently insane person who might actually be best off following an inverse version!).

a musing on symmetry (and persistence of things)

The other day I was playing a video game - Okami - and noticed: when you first start the game, and choose to continue playing a game you started, you have to pick which file you want to load. But while you're playing the game, and save it, you no longer have to choose...it just saves to the one you chose to load from the start.

That struck me as an ugly lack of symmetry.

I find myself facing such asymmetry when dealing with many things that need persistence. Take opening a file in a text editor (or in MS Word or something) for instance. When loading a previous file, you need to choose the file you want to load. But saving the file back after making those changes has no such requirement.

The same thing happens in programming, when dealing with Objects that need persistence (to a db or file system, for instance). When you load the object, you need to provide some identifier, but when saving the Object back no such identifier is needed. Clearly, the Object is really keeping its identifier stored in a member variable, so in a sense it's only the interface offending my need for symmetry here. The big offender is that loading the Object comes from "outside" the Object, but saving the Object is usually from "inside" the Object. To be more precise in OO terminology: loading an Object is not part of its behavior, but saving itself is part of its behavior. You can use a static function, and that's a bit better, but I hardly think it makes for symmetry.

Here's an example, in case seeing code helps:

     //the load is OUTSIDE the object 
     //(or static in this case), but the save 
     //is a member function
     PersistentObject o = PersistentObject.load( "ID" );  //static or "outside"
     o.changeMe();
     o.save();   //part of the objects behavior

So why dwell on this? For one thing, the relationship between load and save *seems* symmetrical, or feels like it somehow ought to be. But I don't think there's a nice way to make these symmetrical. You'd need to demand that the save functionality always require the identifier to be provided (in the case of saving a document, it would mean *always* demanding a "Save as..."), which provides symmetry at the cost of inconvenience and some ugliness of a different sort.

Kepler, if I remember correctly, found it disappointing that the planets should move in anything other than a perfect circle. But I don't know that anyone is disappointed anymore.

So in some cases our aesthetic sense may be unhelpful when it comes to developing software, but I don't want to go so far as saying it is always unhelpful - I would expect that it can be a useful guide, even if we sometimes find ourselves needing to abandon what we think is beautiful or elegant for something better or that actually coincides with reality.

Bertrand Russell said: "Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes." He wasn't talking about aesthetic judgement here, but I have an...intuition...that it's related.

firefox + gmail memory insanity

I'm looking at my memory, and I see it drop ~100MB as soon as I open firefox. I log into gmail, and see it drop by another ~200MB

Is it just me, or is needing ~300MB just to read my email completely insane?

link dump - 05-08-2012

The Tough Life of a Games Tester - On the grueling work conditions and mistreatment of video game testers, who are often romanticized (a job playing video games!) but in reality are under payed, overworked, and treated without respect in their industry. Us programmers can often be found complaining about how under-appreciated we are - so I'm really not used to seeing developers categorized as one of the "bad guys". The testers say this about the developers: "They shot our opinions down without even a slight bit of consideration. They waste money and resources." I suppose programmers can be flippant about bug reports at times - but usually when it's reported by an end-user. I have less experience working with QA teams, personally, though.

Nethack for Android - A roguelike for a smart phone! That's brilliant - seems like a good match. I'm either gonna end up completely ignoring it, or spend lots of time on this. (This is a "logical or" and not in the most probable order should both happen).

NYC's oldest arcade re-opened as 'a cross between a Dave & Busters and a Chuck E. Cheese' Chinatown Fair closed last Feb. It was one of the last of its kind - an arcade for hardcore gamers, with a strong focus on fighting games. There's a documentary about it, apparently. It reopened, but in a new form, as "a cross between a Dave & Busters and a Chuck E. Cheese." One can hope they'll do better than that, though this is looking like it might be to the (remnants) of the arcade world what CBGBs is to punk rock.

plagmada - With RPGs having started during the 1970s, we're approaching a time when no one alive will know how these early games were played - the rulebooks don't tell the whole story. What is created outside the rulebooks of RPGs are cultural artifacts that are worthy of preservation. Plagmada collects these documents, but does no interpretation of the documents it collects.

A Treasure Trove of Cosplay from the Swinging 1970s [NSFW] - Some really awesome pictures from early scifi cons. Quite a lot more nudity than I've ever seen at a con. And they seem to be drawing on a very different set of scifi then what I'm used to seeing.

mosh mobile shell - mosh tries to solve some of the problems with ssh, namely network lag and dropped connections. I use GNU Screen which, among many useful features, helps with the connection drops, but still requires a reconnect. mosh requires no explicit reconnection on a drop, or when switching between networks. More interesting is its use of "local echo" and predictive heuristics to try to give the illusion of instant feedback during network lag. I suffer keystroke lag over ssh often enough to be excited about mosh, but so far my experience is mixed. I plan to write more about mosh in a separate post.

workrave - I've been using this...nagging...program to reduce/relieve/prevent RSI and CTS - the occupational hazards of the programmer. Every x minutes it reminds me to take a short "mini" break, and every y minutes it reminds me to take a longer "rest break". The frequency and duration of these breaks are configurable (the default settings are way to aggressive for anyone sane). What's clever is it only counts up the time you actually spend on your computer typing and using the mouse - it's not just using wall clock. During the longer rest break, it displays animations and instructions for some exercises and stretches. It can be a really annoying program, but I recommend it.

upgraded server

Well, I upgraded the server this blog, and my website, runs on to Debian 6