I do not think it means what you think it means

Time to clear up a few linguistic issues.  These have gone on quite long enough, thanks very much, so we’re going to set it straight.

1) No more homonyms

The homonym (words that sound the same but are spelled differently) is one of the most irritating, and arguably useless, artifacts of the English language.  Take for example the classic trifecta of To, Too, and Two.  All too often, incorrect usage of one when you should have used the other hinders what we were trying to say.  The reader is distracted from the point of the message by the error, and worse it can lower the perception of the writer’s intelligence, an unfair assessment for an easy mistake.  It’s also unfair because we can easily tell what the writer meant to say, which is the point of communicating in the first place.  Which brings us to why such an arrangement is useless- meaning and context.

Context (along with sentence structure) provides all the cues, clues, and linguistic framework needed to discern the meaning of To, Too, and Two, even if we settled on one spelling.  Here are some examples to illustrate.

“I want to go to Starbucks.”  Simple and grammatically correct by our current rules.

“I want to go two Starbucks.”  This version is wrong.  How do you know it’s wrong?  The rules of sentence structure tell you that “two” is the wrong word to use in this case.  But, and this is the point, if you can determine what the writer should have used by looking at the whole sentence (the context in which “two” was used), you don’t need to have two spellings in the first place.  Allow one word to change its meaning based on context, and the problem is solved.

Here’s another example, with all three words used-

“I want to go to Starbucks, and Esmerelda and Winston want to go too, but my car only seats two people.  Sucks to be Winston.”

If we instead say this-

“I want to go to Starbucks, and Esmerelda and Winston want to go to, but my car only seats to people.  Sucks to be Winston.”

Once again, if you think this is wrong, it’s because of context.  Context tells you what the words should be, and if it can do that, then you’ve proved that you can use only “to” and still understand the proper meaning.

Even if we aren’t working within a sentence, context still works-

“I want to go to Starbucks.”

“Me too!”

If I substituted “Me to!” or “Me two!”, you’d still know what the intended meaning was, and again if you can do that you don’t need more than one spelling.

Finally, say any of these examples out loud.  You’ll quickly realize that To, Too, or Two becomes irrelevant and we rely 100% on context.  None of these homonym shenanigans carry over to the spoken language.

2) ”Came by it honestly”

Here’s a popular saying that is often used opposite from what the words actually say.  You’ll hear it most commonly used to refer to a personality trait a person has that they supposedly got from their one of their parents, and thus involved no effort on their part.  But this is the reverse of the meaning in any other case.

If I inherited a small fortune from a deceased uncle, I would not say that I “came by it honestly”.  Nor would that be the case if I took ownership of a family business by simply being the next heir.  But if I built up a business or company of my own, through nothing more than hard work and dedication, we’d all agree that I came by it honestly.  Same thing applies in other areas- religion, for instance.  If I stuck with the faith of my parents and never really considered or questioned, to say that I came by it honestly would sound, well, dishonest.  I didn’t come by anything.  But if I examined, and searched and decided on that path or some other, then I could certainly claim to have come by it as honestly as possible.  So it doesn’t make sense to say you came by it honestly just because you are as big a smart-alec/sports fan/cigar aficionado as your dear old Dad. Give DNA the credit, unless you really worked at it.

3) ”I don’t care to do that”

How do you interpret that statement?  I tell you how I interpret it- it means I don’t want to do that!  Whatever “that” is I leave to your fertile imagination.  Your list may be different from mine.  However, if you live on the eastern edge of Middle Tennessee (or the western edge of East Tennessee, depending on how you slice your geography) there is some linguistic Dark Side of the Force at work that twists sentences around for the sole purpose of starting pointless arguments and raising blood pressure.

“I want to go to Starbucks while we’re out.”

“I don’t care to do that.”

“I’ll only be a minute, you can wait in the car if you want.”

“I said it was fine!”

“What??  When?”

If you live within a 30 mile radius of the Cumberland Plateau, you may have some odd definition of the word “care” with which I was previously unfamiliar.

4) ”Do you want to go with?”

This one is not as much a problem as phrases that are used in ways that subvert their definitions, but it still took me aback the first time I heard it.  Technically, it’s ending a sentence with a preposition, but we’re kinda used to that around here.  It’s more the sudden, abrupt ending, where one expected a “me” or “us” or “Winston”.

Astute readers may want to call me out on a double-standard; I cannot claim that context is sufficient to know what is meant by To, Too, or Two even if one spelling is used, and also not allow this question.  And you’re right.  Context in any conversation where this sentence is used will give you all the clues you need to know what “with” is implying.

But it’s just way too easy and fun to f**k with…

“I’m going to Starbucks.  Do you want to go with?”

“With?  With what?  You?  Plan B?  Winston to get a haircut and then lunch?”

So yeah, you can use it and get by on context, but expect some smart-assery.

5) Quit abusing apostrophes

This is the most egregious offense, because it is so rampantly prevalent and even professional writers and advertisers do it.  Probably the worst I’ve seen was a billboard for a car dealer (and I won’t name them) that read as follows:

“You’re best deal is in Carthage!”

Yep, you read that right.  Not just an apostrophe, but as a result a different word altogether.  Expanding the contraction, this billboard actually reads “You are best deal is in Carthage!” which I suppose is a car dealer’s version of  ”All your base are belong to us”.

I’ve also seen it on packaging in the meats section at Kroger, although the name of the company escapes me at the moment.  In both cases, the misspelling had to get past the writer, the proofreader, the editor, the advertising & design people and the customer for final approval.  And no one caught it.  Amazing, especially in the case of the billboard.

Here are a few I see quite often-  Get’s.  CPU’s.  Want’s.  Kitten’s.  Two of these are always wrong, and the other two are usually wrong.

An apostrophe is used in three cases- possessive, contraction, and plurals of lowercase letters.  It is not used for possessive pronouns or plural nouns.  It is also not used in any word ending in “s” just because you freaking felt like it.

Contraction- “Do not” becomes “Don’t”

Possessive- “That is Esmerelda’s double espresso.”

Plurals of lower case letters- “This sentence has four t’s in it.”

Wrong- “Esmerelda has kitten’s for sale.”  No no no no no no no. “Kitten’s” isn’t a contraction of two words.  It’s not a possessive (the little fluffballs do not possess anything in the sentence).  And if there is more than one kitten, it’s just “kittens.”  You could say “The kitten’s claws” as this is using an apostrophe to indicate a possessive.

“It’s” is one that’s very easy to get wrong.  Just remember that it is a contraction of “it is” and you’ll get it right every time.  ”It’s” as a possessive is always wrong.

“Gets” is a usually a verb. “Get’s” isn’t anything.  It can’t be used as a possessive, and it’s not even a mistakenly apostrophized plural.  It’s just a word ending in “s”, grammatical collateral damage.  Apostrophe abuse is rarely a smart bomb.

“Winston get’s a mocha frappucino at Starbucks.”

No. No he doesn’t. He said he didn’t care to do that, so I took Esmerelda.

Microsoft wants you to party like a rock star

If you’re all atwitter about the upcoming public release of Windows 7 and can’t wait to tell your friends about it, Microsoft has a deal for you-  host a Launch Party and you get a special Signature Edition of Windows 7 Ultimate.  Ars Technica has the scoop on it here.

I actually thought about this for all of 5 seconds.  But as glad as I am to see Windows 7, and as much of a worthwhile upgrade as it is, I’m not sure I’d want to learn about it in that format. When Lynn and I throw a house party, there’s music, the margarita blender is spinning like a DJ, friends are coming and going, and there are multiple conversations going on at one time.

I could see hosting a house party organized around watching Pink Floyd’s Pulse live performance DVD, along with some live Radiohead from the “In The Basement” series (and have in fact planned to do this). Those don’t require constant attention, and if you’re putting a Windows 7 desktop up on the TV to walk through new features, that seems more “lecture” than “party” and not as much fun.

Not sure how anyone else feels, but for me the way to dive in to a new OS release is in my office, with a pot of coffee, a freshly formatted hard disk, some Rush albums in a loop on the iPod, and hours of uninterrupted time.

If I’m wrong about this and there’s enough interest, I’ll rethink it and sign up.  Otherwise, let me know if anyone wants to come over and watch some live Pink Floyd.

New OS round-up: Windows 7 and Snow Leopard

Microsoft and Apple have been busy prepping their follow-up releases to Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard.  Here’s a bit of info on both along with links to some good reviews-

Apple-

At Ars Technica, John Siracusa puts Max OS X 10.6, “Snow Leopard” through a very extensive 23-page review.  One of the most exciting new features is not a desktop widget or user interface improvement (the Mac OS is already an example of great UI design), but a under-the-hood change called “Grand Central Dispatch”.  Ars Technica goes into deep geek territory, even with programming code examples, to explain why this is.  I’ll try to bring it back down to earth here…

That blazing fast, dual-core (or quad-core) CPU in your computer has a problem- boredom. The challenges of making use of multiple cores are 1) most programs spend much of their time idle, and 2) most programs are not easily broken down into steps that can run simultaneously. Most programs are serial in nature.

The computer industry has moved to multi-core CPUs because the gigahertz race has topped out.  CPUs were hitting a wall; too much power consumed, too much heat output. So instead of building them faster, they changed the emphasis to efficient performance at lower wattage levels and began put many of them on a single chip. The problem then arises of how to make best use of them. You can see this problem any time you get the hourglass in Windows or the spinning beach ball on a Mac.  It means the system is fixated on completing a task and unable to continue useful work on another core of the CPU. It’s a software problem, not a hardware one.

Apple’s solution with Grand Central Dispatch (or GCD) is not a magic bullet that breaks down every task into multiple parallel pieces, but a programming library that makes it as easy as possible for programmers to do it themselves.  Anywhere in their programs they see a chance to split up a task into multiple simultaneous parts, they can insert a few lines of code (literally, just a few) to make use of GCD. It handles all the messy details that have normally made such programming arcane and difficult. It worries about just how many CPU cores your Mac has, and the how & when of scheduling these tasks.  A programmer using GCD can be sure that whether their code is running on a dual-core MacBook or a fully equipped, 8-core Mac Pro, it will run as efficiently as possible.

It will take time for programmers to re-write and update their code to make the most of this.  In Snow Leopard, Apple has already updated the system itself to make use of GCD, and it shows in the speed and responsiveness of this latest upgrade.

The benefit to users is simply this- increased overall performance on the hardware you already own, as programs are updated.  And as newer models come out, with 4 and eventually 8 CPU cores becoming the norm, Snow Leopard (and the versions that follow) will be able to put all that power to use like never before.

Microsoft-

Gizmodo has a series of reviews and articles examining Windows 7, very soon to be available in a general public release.  In the first article (Windows 7 Review: You can quit complaining now) they cover many of the user interface tweaks that focus on usability and productivity, welcome changes that have Windows 7 doing what any good OS should: provide a stable platform for the programs you need, provide tools to help you organize your work, and otherwise stay the hell out of your way.  This is accomplished through new features such as Jump Lists, Aero Peek, the updated Taskbar and new view styles in Explorer.  I’ve covered these briefly here, and the Gizmodo review has some handy screenshots.  They take an even more in-depth look here.  In their words, Microsoft simply took “what was good about Vista, and fixed what people bitched about”.  Nothing earth-shattering, just a solid, competent new Windows, which is usually all we want from Microsoft anyway.

Speaking of competent releases, I have to mention the built-in hardware and driver support.  Not only is it better than Vista, it’s so good it’s spooky.  The only hardware not fully recognized in my own test cases are the biometric fingerprint readers on two different models of Dell laptops.  Windows 7 properly recognized a couple of high-end graphics cards and a HP multi-function PhotoSmart printer/scanner/fax.  Not as good as HP’s own software under XP (hopefully we’ll see Windows 7 versions soon), but good enough that everything works.  It’s the easiest installation of a Windows OS I’ve ever seen.

As far as the internals go, Microsoft has actually been ahead of Apple in making use of dual-and-quad-core CPUs and supporting 64-bit processors.  A fully 64-bit Windows XP and Windows Server were released in 2005, while Snow Leopard is just now getting there. Microsoft has been re-engineering the guts of Windows with each release since Windows 2000 to be increasingly capable of using multi-core systems.  Windows 7 is no exception, with some improvements made to the underlying user interface code that is designed to keep the system responsive, even in cases where a inerrant program would freeze the desktop in XP or Vista.

While Microsoft doesn’t have a single, brilliant programming library like Apple’s new Grand Central Dispatch for application programmers to use, there are a number of tools built-in to the latest versions of Visual Studio (Microsoft’s programming toolkit) that help make “multi-threading” your code easier.

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What both these systems have in common is a goal of incremental fine-tuning and improvement, not a flurry of new features.  Apple made this clear over the past several months, pointing out that Snow Leopard was a slimming down, tweaking and fine-tuning of Leopard.  It even takes up 6GB less disk space. And while the changes in Windows 7 were more numerous, the argument could certainly be made (and has) that these changes were fixes. All over the internet, the common refrain “7 is was Vista should have been” has been repeated over and over since the first Beta release was available. It’s good to see both Microsoft and Apple doing what regular computer users and ultra-geeks alike have been saying for years- “Quit screwing around with everything and changing it- just clean up the bugs, fine-tune it, make it faster. Make what we have now work better. And if you must change something, be sure it’s a sensible improvement, one we can actually use.”

So it’s good news, whether you are a Mac or Windows fan (or both)- we get two truly solid operating system releases that are both very capable of getting the most out of the increasingly fast computer hardware that’s been available the past few years.  On the Mac, this won’t be as significant an increase because Leopard was already quite capable, fast, and a model of good design.  But Windows users, especially those holdouts (like me) still running the trusty-but-aging XP on recent and fast hardware will quickly realize what they’ve been missing.  This is one Mac-vs-PC battle where both sides win.

Why I am not a Deist

(Let’s get away from the health care debate for a bit, and on to something easier.  Like religion!)

Ever notice how, when trying to figure out what something is, we sometimes start by ruling out what it isn’t?  Here’s a couple of blatant male/female stereotypes as examples-

(Male) “Is that one of the new Corvettes?”  “No, the nose is wrong…maybe a Dodge Viper?”  “Nah, definitely not a Viper.”

(Female) “Look at those shoes!  Manolo Blahniks?”  “No way, probably Michael Kors.”  “Not his style.  Maybe they’re Jessica Simpsons?”

You get the picture.  As a general rule, it’s the same way with any question for which there are a large number of possible answers, and almost every answer shares many similar characteristics.  I’d have a hard time looking a terrier and telling you the exact breed, but I could rule out very quickly the chance that it’s a Great Dane.

What does any of this have to do with being (or not) a Deist?

Over the last few months, I’ve been mulling over the question of just what I believe. Not just whether I believe that dark chocolate is better than milk chocolate (it is), or whether golf is interesting enough to rate its own cable channel (it isn’t), but the really big belief questions.  Some who know me better may think my position on this had been decided, but if there’s one thing I’m sure of regarding belief, it’s that it should never be definitively decided. (I’ve also taken the question even further- should I believe at all? But we won’t get into that here.)

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a Deist believes that a supreme being created the universe, and that this can be determined by observation of the natural world, with no need of faith or religion.  Deists do not accept the idea of a personal God that intervenes in human affairs or even takes a particular interest in them.  Deism is by no means a formal system.  Its roots are in England in the 1600s, and it has gone through many varieties and changes, with the tenets I mentioned above changing in both degree and detail.  Deists opinions about the soul, for example, have ranged from belief to agnosticism to reincarnation.  Well-known ones are Thomas Jefferson, Ethan Allen, John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Paine.  Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin are strongly suspected.  Deism’s own core beliefs kept an authoritative organization from forming around it, but it has made contributions to Unitarianism.

Given this description, you might be inclined to think “wow, I was a Deist and never knew it.”  I suspect there may be many people who believe along these lines and never knew there was a name for it.  The appeal of Deism for many, I imagine, is simply the on-the-face-of-it sensibility of the proposition, for it can satisfy two requirements;

1)A need that may be satisfied by religion in general- that there is something more than this, some explanation for it, some ultimate meaning.

2)A need to find some constructive way to handle the dilemmas we may eventually find ourselves in- we’ve found that when we are honest with ourselves, we can no longer take the fairy-tale like stories in the Bible seriously… or we’ve realized that prayer doesn’t really work, as there is no rhyme or reason to how or if it is answered, which makes it no different from sometimes things go your way and sometimes they don’t… or you’ve realized that a profession of faith in people doesn’t determine their behavior, as many religious people act contrary to their beliefs, and many who aren’t in the least religious are very decent, so it starts to seem like people are just whoever they are, religion notwithstanding… and so on.

Deism as a belief, as a way of looking at things, satisfies both- God is present and has some purpose for setting all this in motion, but beyond that it’s all mystery.  God is not involved in our affairs, so prayers not being answered is no surprise.  The natural laws give rise to life and God planned it that way, but God expects nothing in particular from that life.  It’s up to us to work out how to treat each other, and unfortunately different religions will rail against each other over that question, but that’s a human problem, not a God one.

It sounds good.  It makes sense to people, like myself, for whom an anthropomorphic father figure personal deity makes no sense.  It leaves us responsible, as we should be, to work out the blindingly obvious; if you want to know what is good or evil, moral or not, just ask this question- am I hurting or helping? Am I, at the very least, doing no harm?  Asking that in every situation is the best barometer for behavior that you’ll ever have.

And while I subscribe to the above method of deciding how to act, I am not a Deist. This is why…

The God surmised by Deism is needed only as a placeholder, as a method to explain the beginning of the universe (this explanation has certain problems, and there are many other potential ways to describe that beginning, but that’s a topic for another day).  After that moment, everything is up for grabs.  If you like to believe that God set the ball rolling and then went off to do other things, that’s fine.  If you prefer to believe that God continued (and continues) to guide the overall progress of the universe, monitoring and maintaining the various physical laws and properties of space and time, that’s ok too.  You may even believe that God is directly guiding the processes and development of life right here on Earth. Within Deism there is room for variation to any degree you like.  And that’s the problem with it.

On the one hand, the Deist outlook is a relic from a pre-Darwinian, pre-modern cosmology era, where God was invoked because… well, no one could think of another way this all came to be. Deists had already rejected the specificity of other faiths, but left the general idea in place.

On the other hand, Deism doesn’t have the conviction or rigor of other faiths.  As described above, it has no requirements other than a vague belief that there is a deity. After that, it’s as you wish.

On the one hand, filling in the blanks; on the other hand, lazy.

Deism sits on the fence, unable or unwilling to assert anything in particular about God or faith.  It’s also unable to move to the other side of the fence, unable to admit that if your idea of God is that vague you may as well move on to the “I don’t know” of agnosticism (to say nothing of the go-where-the-evidence-leads, rationality-above-all of atheism).  As Richard Dawkins wrote, Deism is watered-down Theism.  (Add Jesus to Deism and you get liberal Christianity: instead of having whatever vague idea of God you like, you can be sure that Jesus accepts you unconditionally no matter how you live and there’s never any real judgment. Liberal Christianity makes Jesus no more consequential or specific than reading your horoscope.)

Here is where the Deist God ultimately proves not worth the trouble.  As a belief, it’s optional at best; a God uninvolved with human affairs does not, by definition, care if we worship or believe.  As an explanation of creation, it is either giving up (shrug your shoulders and say ‘God did it’) or adding to the problem (so where did this incredibly brilliant and complex God entity come from?).  As a source of comfort that your life has meaning, it falls short; if God is uninvolved with human affairs, and we assume God has a plan, no particular human life can be of any real importance to the plan.  As the end result of a search for truth, it is immensely unsatisfying.  The Deist God is so uninvolved that there is almost no reason to believe, except that maybe you just like the idea.

Here’s the question- what’s the difference between an uninvolved, non-interventionist, non-expectant, undemanding, unconcerned, set-off-the-big-band-and-run God, and no God at all?

Exactly.

So just like in the initial example where we start to determine what something is by ruling out what it is not, I can say that whatever my beliefs my be, I am not a Deist.