A Rain of Frogs

An Historical Downpour is a feature of A Rain of Frogs. It isn’t common, but once in a while I feature something I wrote on a different website under a penname. Enjoy.

Originally posted as “Schrodinger’s Tiger” at 10:27AM on July 8, 2004.

Imagine a box. It is sitting on the scuffed, oxidized hardwood floor in the loft of an abandoned warehouse. Slow, ponderous shafts of sunlight thrust down from windows high above, yellow and viscous like shafts of honey through the dusty air. ?

It is not a small box. It is rather large in fact, and made of expensive wood; oak or perhaps hard maple, the sort of wood one might find a transcontinental shipping crate made of. This is not an ordinary box. It is a special box, the sort of box that can only have something important inside.

Until now the small table beside the box has gone unnoticed, unimportant beside its more interesting wooden companion. It is an ordinary table, with chrome pipe legs and a gold-flecked melamine top. On top of the table is a small iron pry-bar and  sheaf of papers, each filled with a handwritten scrawl. The first page contains only two words: Schrodinger’s Cat. Further reading reveals the following:?

“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid.

“If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The Psi function for the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”

Suddenly the box becomes more fascinating. Not apparent before, but now visible from beside the table, are words written on the box. Tiger of a Different Stripe, they say. There is also an International Radiation Symbol stencilled in black ink beneath.??

A careful ear pressed against the box reveals nothing, not a sound, though it does reveal the smoothness of cool wood against the ear. No indication of the status inside the box.  Is the Tiger Dead? Alive? Both? Can a tiger really change its stripes?

There, on the table is the pry-bar. Using it will, as Schrodinger pointed out, reveal the status of the Tiger. With little effort, the edge of the pry-bar, deceptively sharp, slides into a seam in the corner of the box. With a little weight applied, the box opens. Inside…

??This is make-believe. The box never existed except in your mind. This is just a story, isn’t it?

Those that have been following this website for some time (and some of you have been following it for almost five years, which is insane) know that I am using a content management system called Textpattern to drive this site.

I consider myself a bit of a Textpattern champion. I have always, for better or worse, championed the underdogs in the world (Macs over Windows machines,Volkswagens over most every japanese car, the Leafs over common sense) and Textpattern has totally fit this ethos. It is very likely the overriding factor in why I began using it six years ago to run my sites, instead of other, more ‘popular’ systems.

Like Macintoshes and Volkswagens, but not the Leafs, I have enjoyed watching Textpattern develop and grow, watching a community build around it, seeing several books about Textpattern and using it be published. I have enjoyed using the software, which fits another ethos – that of elegant simplicity. And I have evangelized it a lot, convincing several friends and co-workers over the years that Textpattern was a great thing.

And it is a great thing. It just seems that lately, it’s not the best thing any more. At least not for what I am trying to accomplish.

Textpattern has some limitations which I won’t get into. Anyone who uses the system for more than a simple blog or portfolio site probably knows what I’m talking about. While most everything is really simple to achieve, some things are devilishly hard. Some are downright impossible, or the solutions are so clunky and inelegant that they defeat the philosophy of Textpattern.

The Textpattern community is virtually silent, too. It used to be quite active, and the developers were very involved. There was a sale of the software to a company, there were developers jumping ship to other packages that offered fewer limitations and more advantages. There was a fork, at one point, and more recently, an almost wholesale change of the developers running the show.

Not all these changes were bad. Textpattern 4.2.0 was released not so long ago, and brought a lot of great changes with it. But these changes feel almost too little, too late. Other competitors offer more, and do it with a lot less heartache.

And don’t fool yourself. For those of a developmental mind, stuff like this really is a matter of the heart. Web developers don’t just invest intellectually into technologies, they invest emotionally too. You might think they’re coldly logical, the Hollywood stereotype would support you, but the reality is that most web developers I know are deeply and powerfully emotional about things that are as seemingly meaningless as a CMS choice. I know I am. I’ve invested more than six years into Textpattern. That’s longer than some people’s marriages.

The upshot of all this is not that I am moving to something else and abandoning Textpattern, because I’m not. What I am doing, in a serious way for the first time in half a decade, is examining my options. I’ve been looking at competitors to our dear Textpattern, to see if any of them fit my philosophical and technical needs for a content management system.

Some of them do. ExpressionEngine seems to be very much what Textpattern could be, on a technical level, but it also costs money, and fails somewhat on the underdog score – several of my colleagues are avid supporters. It doesn’t fail entirely though. That’s the province of Wordpress, which is utterly unacceptable for what I want and need.

One of the other options I am investigating is a small little CMS called Symphony. It’s got a fairly active community – many of whom are former Textpattern folk, and it seems to be actively developed and supported. That’s two in the win column. But it’s also a whole new thing to learn, as it’s based on XSLT, something I’ve had little to no experience with in the past.

That’s not a bad thing, really. I like learning new things, it’s good for me. Symphony seems to do just about everything I need to, if only I can figure out how. I know that sounds like virtually every other system out there, but there’s something about Symphony that clicks with me on an intuitive, non-logical gut level. Playing with it has been an interesting experience. It has, in some interesting cases made me rethink the way I have done things in the past with my sites. In many ways, it’s both a CMS and a web development framework, which really appeals to me in terms of functionality.

That’s not to say that A Rain of Frogs will suddenly be a Symphony site though. I have no real plans at this time to port this site to Symphony, though it might be a test-bed for learning. If Symphony clicks in my head, and I find myself able to achieve the things I want to achieve with it, then yes, eventually this site will be built upon Symphony. But before any of my sites go into production using this new system, I have to learn it, and become familiar with it in the same way I am with Textpattern. And I expect that will take some time.

I am sure a lot of other stuff happened, but these were four things that caught my attention. Today, in history:

Napolean

Napolean was crowned in Paris as emperor of France in a 1805 ceremony officiated by Pope Pius VII.

Fleet sent to Pearl Harbor

Yamato sent his fleet to Pearl Harbor, setting in motion the Pacific Theatre of WWII.

Boeing 747

The Boeing 747 was first unveiled to the public in 1969, on a flight from Seatle to New York City.

Mars soft landing

The Soviet probe Mars 4 soft-lands on Mars in 1971.

You know how people are always saying ‘if you could go back and give yourself one piece advice, what would you say?’

The reverse seems to have happened to me. More than four years ago, I wrote something, and it was brought to my attention today. It was amazingly poignant advice, and I am somewhat impressed with my younger self.

Stephen King calls writing a kind of telepathy. Seems to me it’s a kind of time travel too.

Curious what I told myself? Take a look at Four bucks to happiness

First, let me state emphatically that I have always been an ‘environmentalist’.

The reason that’s in quotes is because that word has, like so many other good words, been co-opted and twisted and bent to mean something different than it should. To me, environmentalism has always been about intelligent, efficient use of resources and intelligent, elegant solutions to the waste produced by modern industry.

But that’s not what it means any more. Now environmentalism is about being anti-government, anti-economy, ant-establishment, anti-global-warming, anti- all sorts of things. Even meat! Environmentalism has become about being against other things, not for the environment. About shaming people into approved behaviour, and shaming them out of behaviour that isn’t. Sounds like religion to me.

But of all of it, the whole thing, it’s the global warming thing that’s been getting to me the most lately.

While I agree (who other than an oil man wouldn’t?) that we should be making more efficient cars, making more efficient use of and investment in public transit, and doing out best not to waste energy, I do not believe we should be doing these things to ward off global warming. I think we should be doing them because it’s the smart thing to do. The more efficient we are, the lower our energy costs are. Hell, my kind of environmentalism isn’t anti-economy, it’s capitalism at work.

But back to the global warming thing.

I don’t really believe in it. I don’t believe in the ‘hockey stick’ graphs that the major media outlets have been trotting out for decades. I think the science behind such charts smells bad. There’s too much politics tied up in it. One need look no further than the fact that the face of the anti-global-warming resistance is a former Vice President of the United States.

I was somewhat vindicated recently when it came to light that the science that’s been supporting this wholesale attack on the phantom menace of global warming has been seriously cooked. I don’t find myself surprised. Like I said, I’ve always believed it smelled a bit funny.

While I can, like many others, point out the extremely hot summers we had from the mid-1990s till the mid 2000s as anecdotal evidence of global warming and have Al Gore and his army nod emphatically at my astuteness, if I were to point out the last two summers and winters in this area which have been colder than any I remember in my life, they’ll just say its an aberration, and that the trend is still up, up, up! One has only look at the hockey stick graph to see it, right? Forget that rubbish some scientists have been saying about solar activity. No way could changes in the output of the sun have any effect on the temperature of the earth! Their science is wrong!

How about this? Instead of lying and destroying credibility for what could be a pretty good movement, if only it weren’t becoming the next big religion, how about we just put the science out there, the measurable facts, and let people make informed decisions. Why lie?

It’s laughable that a spike in oil prices last year did more to finally put fuel efficient cars on the road than four decades of evangelizing about global warming by bearded hippies and overfed ex-politicians and bad scientists. That’s because people react locally. Hit them in the wallet, and they’ll change their consumption patterns to minimize the impact. If you want people to use less gas, make gas more expensive. See? It worked!

I am completely behind the message, if that message is that we have to make more efficient use of our non-renewable resources before we run out of them. Yes, we need to get more sustainable energy production going, and yes, we have to compensate for any reduction in production due to responsible practices by increasing efficiency and using less to do more.

But you know what? That’s just sound economics. It doesn’t have to be sold to us with a big lie.