Fred’s Cozy Little Nook

If there is one qualifying thing about humans, it’s one thing: They love to communicate.

Witness the births and rapid development of communication technologies, from smoke signals (well, they did travel at the speed of light!) to the Gutenberg Press to telegraph to telephone to mass media systems like radio and TV to now the Internet.

Now, you can find others that share your interests, no matter how obscure, anywhere and everywhere on the planet.

You can hook up with old high-school and college chums you haven’t seen in 30 years. You can find those local with your common obscure interests and meet them in person. You can sell objects of limited interest — or find them. You can conduct business with others around the world that you have never met in person.

You can even work from home in a “virtual company”. Or you can make money selling ads on your web sites. Or find other creative ways to make money. Even find jobs and the like.

Information abounds from Wikipedia to every college and university that have cared to put up free courseware and research papers  on the web. Or you can get the goods on a person by hitting aggregate data services and track a person’s every address, job, and other activities going back decades.

Governments also have the goods on you, secretly monitoring your communications and bank transactions for whatever purposes they see fit…

My point here is that we now live in an age of hyper-connectivity. Not just instant communication, but for each and every individual being able to reach hundreds if not thousands with ANY information for ANY purpose at low to no cost.

With all this hyper-connectivity, some emergence is inevitable. The question is, of course, can or has that emergence organized itself to be a thinking, throbbing entity all its own? Is this possible? And if so, how would we mere “neurons” know it’s happened?

Keep in mind, as well, that this “mass mind” might operate — and most likely would — on time scales much different from  our human time senses would recognize. What if it took a day to complete a “complete thought”, whatever that would be? A week? A year? How would we know?

I do think this question is answerable — in time. And wouldn’t it be ironic that, in our searching and yearning for discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence, that is emergent intelligence was with us all along sitting right here under our noses?

Well, what would we call such a thing? What would a neuron call the brain? I’ll leave you with that thought.

It has caught my attention that MySQL is behaving like a tyrant with their Enterprise support policies. Basically, if your company has multiple servers running MySQL but only one is covered under its “Gold” ($2000 per sever per year), or its “Platinum” coverage ($5000 per server per year), MySQL might choose to sue you for the other machines not covered, even though you have never opened up a service request on them.

The details of this are still coming in, so stay tuned. This represents a black mark on MySQL in the eve of the Sun acquisition.  Since this predates the Sun acquisition, Sun Microsystems is “blameless” in all of this.

But this flies totally in the face of the entire notion of the FOSS concepts. If what I’ve heard turns out to be true, this will represent a black mark for the entire OpenSource community.

I wish to comment on the blog — or rather the comments added to the blog — about teaching your kid how to program.

Being a parent of 3 kids myself, I have quite a bit to say about this, actually.

Many of the comments on the “teaching your kid how to program” article were very down on the idea, suggesting it would be better to teach your kid all about sports first.

Now, I though that was rather odd. I mean, why one over the other? What is so damned special about sports? One respondent claimed that it was “imposing your dreams on your kid” to teach the kid programming, but it was “OK” to teach sports instead. How is that any less “imposing your dream?” I hear of many stories how some kids actually dread the whole sports bit, little league and all, but do it anyway because their parents have “high expectations” of them to hit a silly ball across the field.

I have two daughters. Being an ardent hacker myself, I introduced both daughters to the computer early on. One of my daughters took to the computer especially well at the age of 2, where she enjoyed playing around with a painting program to make beautiful patterns and abstract art. I also taught her number theory a year or two later, where I gave her a basic understanding of prime numbers, multiplication, and division. I manage to do this cleverly enough with pennies, and showing her how a prime number of pennies could not be arranged into a rectangle other than 1 x n, where a composite number of pennies could be. Then, the height and with of the rectangle represented multiplication of those two numbers, etc.

Today, that daughter is 15. When she was 7, she built her own robots, and programmed her own websites in PHP around 9 or so. Today, she loves art and can draw at a professional level, as well as still harboring a love for math and science. She plans to go into architecture some day, so I’d better scramble together lots of cash so I can send her off to college!

The younger daughter, now 10, also loves science. It is pure joy to see her curious about the world around her.

Both daughters are wicked intelligent, and that’s not just me saying that. Everyone who knows them say that about them as well. Now, imagine what would’ve happened to their aspiring minds if I had tried to force them into sports. They would’ve been bored and resentful. Sports is just not their thing.

And my point is?

Simple. It’s all a matter of knowing your kids. You expose them to a bit of everything, and see where their interests lie. You then make it possible for them to pursue those interests. Eventually, as they get older, there interests become more refined and individual in nature, and they are almost always never exactly what the parent “hopes for”. But a good parent will continue to support the kids in their pursuit of knowledge and wonder, anyway.

Do I have a problem with my kids being into sports? Not at all. One kid loves to ice skate, which I think is great. The other kid loves martial arts.

So, as you see, I have nothing against sports in general. However, I do think it gets over-emphasized by our culture. I took a visit to my daughter’s high-school and had a look at the news articles they had posted on their billboard. More than half of those articles had to do with sports in some form or fashion. Maybe one or two had anything to do with academics.

This was very telling.

It is clear that there is much anti-intellectualism in our country, even in the schools that are charged to teach our young. This is particularly sad, considering that the rest of the world at large tends to value education more and as a result their students are so much further along than our students in the US.

I don’t know what to do with the problem at large, but I do know what to do for my own kids. Be the right example for them as far as intellectual pursuits go, and make them feel proud for their intellectual and academic accomplishments. They will be able to compete with the rest of the world in the 21st century where many US kids will wind up working a McJob.

Well, I managed to do “the impossible” — go from complete ignorance to an Oracle “guru” in just  a couple of weeks. Well, I don’t count myself a “guru” in Oracle at all, nor do I really want to be. I do consider myself to be a MySQL guru, however. At some point, I should do a more lengthly blog comparing the two databases! Stay tuned!