The Question of Abstraction

As I recently read The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, I was reminded of an issue with hermeneutics. Namely, to what extent are the words of the prophets and apostles to be abstracted from their original context when deriving doctrine?

This example may demonstrate the point, however the question of abstraction is general and I'm not necessarily concerned with this particular application. We read in 1 Corinthians 5:11

But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.

It's obvious how the Corinthians to whom this letter was sent were intended to understand the statement. But how is everyone else intended to understand this statement (or any statement from the Scriptures). In answer to the question For whom is Paul's statement proscriptive? there is a seemingly infinite continuum from concrete to abstract:

• only the Church of God which is at Corinth (see 1:2) which received the original epistle


• all saints of Paul's time regardless of geography


• all saints facing problems of fornication, idolatry, etc (see 5:1) regardless of geography or time


• all saints with or without such problems regardless of geography or time


• all persons regardless of religion, geography or time

These are but a few conclusions that could be drawn about the applicability of this particular statement. The problem arises in that a strictly concrete application of Paul's statement makes the Scriptures purely an historical document with little use for modern application. However, abstracting Paul's statement to apply to every circumstance certainly loses some of the context the author originally intended and in this case even condemns our Lord himself for associating with publicans and sinners. Whatever one's particular view on the matter, it's clear that practically any doctrine could be reasonably supported by appealing to a convenient location and the concrete-abstract spectrum.

I have a solution to these issues, but that will wait for another entry ... (I'd make Fermat proud).

Aravis, not the mountain range

Bouquetin à la Tournette
Originally uploaded by Loin des yeux.

Our daughter's name is Aravis. She's named after the character in the C.S. Lewis novel The Horse and His Boy. I searched for other photos on Flickr tagged with her name and came across some beautiful images of the Aravis Range in France. This one is particularly spectacular.

Review: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

My wife and I finished Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Caldwell a couple nights ago. It was really a
fascinating book. The psychology experiments the author mentioned were amazingly clever. I
was particularly intrigued by the studies of the facial muscles and
cataloging all the possible expressions and their meanings. It was humorous to imagine university professors staring at each other and making faces. Nevertheless, the dedication of spending 7 years of one's life studying a single topic in such depth is admirable.

My wife and I disagreed with a couple conclusions the author made in the
book. The most egregious one was in the last chapter. He was talking
about blind auditions for symphonies and orchestras and saying that
the blind auditions had made classical music better. The disagreement
we had with is that he seems to have
forgotten his chapter on Pepsi vs Coke sip tests. In that chapter, he discusses the fact that Pepsi consistently performs better than Coke in blind sip tests. That success rate was what motivated Coca Cola's failure with New Coke in the 1980s. The point of the chapter was to say that nobody drinks soda at home in the form of a sip
test. Therefore, it doesn't really matter which cola performs better in that test. When people drink cola, they are aware of the packaging and all the associations they have with the brand. That awareness affects their experience of the beverage.

We saw that as exactly the problem with the blind auditions:
people don't listen to an orchestra or a symphony behind a blind. They
observe them in the concert hall. A conductor is perfectly
justified in choosing a musician based upon her appearance or the
expectations of his audience. If the audience is going to be distracted
from the music because a female is playing the french horn, that
detracts from the musical experience. Of course, when seleting members of an orchestra for recording purposes, blind auditions are rational.

Overall, the book was fascinating and makes for some good, light reading. I recommend it.

Tooltips with Javascript or CSS

For the Wyoming Liberty Index, I created a quick webpage using Catalyst and Perl to help rate the bills of the 2006 legislative session. On one page, I wanted to display the ratings of the bills with comments appearing as tooltips for the ratings. My first attempt was to use the title attribute on the abbr tag, but browsers only display a short summary of the title attribute as a tooltip. I wanted to display the entire comment.

CSS

My first solution was to use pure CSS tooltips. I had to make two changes to get it working in Internet Explorer. First, IE doesn't support the :hover pseudo-class on tags other than a, so I had to change the outermost tag on my tooltips to be a instead of span. Secondly, by hacking on Eric Meyer's pure CSS popups code, I determined that unless you have the following CSS somewhere, Internet Explorer won't display the tooltips.

a:hover {
  background : white; /* a color other than default */
}

Javascript

After I got the CSS hacked into shape and working acceptably, I discovered Alessandro Fulciniti's simple Javascript tooltip library. I had investigated a bunch of Javascript tooltip libraries and they were all too complex. Fulciniti's approach is simple and clean. It keeps Javascript, XHTML and CSS separated, the way it should be. With a few minutes hacking, I had it doing exactly what I wanted.

Thank you Alessandro.

Unable to login to Linksys WAP54G

I recently installed a Linksys WAP54G wireless access point to replace an older Linksys wireless router that was forced into service as an access point. The WAP54G has worked fine as an access point so far (about 1 week), but I was unable to login to the access point's web-based management utility. When I visited 192.168.40.10 (the IP I had assigned to the access point) I was prompted for my username and password. Page 38 of the manual indicates that the administration username is admin and the default password is admin. However, all that got me was 401 Unauthorized It turns out that the admin username is actually , yup no username.

So, to log in, I just left the username field blank and entered the password. Hopefully it's just the documentation that has errors and not the hardware. I noticed another curiosity on page 37 of the manual. Apparently, snmp is the standard e-mail protocol on the Internet. Hmm, that's not what RFC 1157 says. Fortunately, the body of the text correctly indicates the purpose of SNMP. I notified Linksys about both errors.

Review: The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg

My brother lent me his copy of The Skeptical Environmentalist. After both reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton, we read several of the books that Crichton listed in his bibliography. So far, The Skeptical Environmentalist has been the best. As my brother described it, this book is an almanac of statistics on controversial topics.

The essential premise of the book is that conditions in the world are getting better. The author examines numerous objective ways to measure the state of the world and in almost every instance concludes that we are better off now than our predecessors were. The data also indicates that these trends will continue into the future. Its focus and methodology remind me very much of The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian Simon (which inspired Lomborg to study and then publish this book.)

I highly recommend this book. My simple summary would be: Don't be afraid because human ingenuity can solve the world's problems. All we have to do is rationally evaluate the various challenges we face and triage the results. Or, to paraphrase a great statement (from an unrelated book), "The earth is for the use of man that he might have in abundance"

Review: Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition by Eric A. Meyer

For my job, I've been doing a lot of work on automated reports lately. The logic of the reports is written in Perl and the generated content is HTML. I've used CSS on some projects before, but decided to buy Meyer's book to learn some more of the details. I've been using the book as a general instruction guidebook and also as a reference while working on the automated reporting project.

Foremost, I am really impressed with CSS and the people who designed it. I haven't found a technology as useful as this in quite some time. When learning about a new technology, I evaluate it by roughly tracking how frequently it inspires me with new ideas. For this book, I'd say that rate was about one new idea every 15 to 20 pages. At 430 pages, that means about 20 new ideas.

Meyer's writing style was clear and concise. I wish he had found a synonym for affect, but that's a minor annoyance. He used frequent diagrams to illustrate the details of CSS in particular situations. He provided a good mix of prose, code and illustrations. I was particularly pleased with the chapter on CSS for non-screen media. Since management will eventually print my reports, that chapter was particularly valuable.

The book provided a good background and taught me many aspects of CSS that I hadn't originally noticed. Some portions of the book were a little too detailed. If I wanted to be reading the CSS spec, I would go and read the spec. Which brings me to the best CSS resource I've found on the web (now that I have enough background to understand it better): the CSS3 Selectors specification.