The U.K. still has blasphemy laws:
It is unthinkable that the BBC should have repeated part of a poem already found by a jury to be a blasphemous libel.
Remember "blasphemous libels" and "seditious libels"? Not against persons, but against churches and states.
I got another Godspeed You Black Emperor! CD. It's hard for me to say what the name of that CD is.
Yesterday, in a discussion of Patrick Ball's work, I said that I'd seen an essay by an author of technical books who used unusual example. Andrew Kuchling pointed out that the essay I was thinking about was "I Don't Like Your Examples!" by Steven Feuerstein.
I've been writing intensively about PL/SQL since 1994, and I have a great time doing it. At the same time, I must admit that I have simultaneously grown a little bit bored with using the same set of examples again and again (yes, those infamous emp/employee and dept/department tables), and I'm also very concerned about the state of the world as we approach the end of the twentieth century. Sure, things could be worse, but things could be a whole lot better (with my examples and the world).Given these twin preoccupations, I have decided to offer examples that are decidedly different from the usual. I'll be talking about topics ranging from the state of health care in the United States to the strength of the gun lobby, from wage structures to environmental issues. I believe that even if you don't agree with the positions I have on a particular issue, you will find that this "breath of fresh air" approach will help you engage with the technical material.
Traditional technology books, according to Feuerstein, take a limited and stereotyped view:
Most examples used in technology books focus on how to make business work more efficiently, regardless of its impact on human society and the world as a whole. As a result, we constantly read about human-resource or personnel systems. And while examples frequently touch on education, these applications have more to do with managing students (the business side of education) than with improving the quality of education those students receive. All of this seems perfectly "natural" since the vast majority of technology is used by businesses to make profits. But does it have to be that way?
If we really thought of programming as like writing and like mathematics, we wouldn't also have the habit of thinking of business applications as the natural purpose of computing. (The original purpose of computing was war -- military cryptanalysis, ballistics, weapons simulation -- and even today the world's fastest computers are used for weapons research, unless perhaps they are in Fort Meade and we don't know anything about them.)
Contact: Seth David Schoen
