Back of the Envelope

So, I've been considering getting into podcasting. More specifically, I've been considering putting some stories of mine online in audio format. The first question I asked myself about this is who would do the reading. I'd rather not do it myself, as I'm really not a great reader. Fortunately, I have a friend who's a really good theater actress who'd be willing to do the reading for me. Of course, that brings another question--which stories could work with a female narrator? Well, technically, any story could, but some would work better than others. Stories told from a female POV could work, but for obvious reasons, not too many of mine are. Some other stories are possibilities as well, such as "The Office of Second Chances," which has a strong female lead who happens to be semi-omniscient concerning the events in the story. That's the story I'd really like to do, although it'll be a little while before I can. Maybe around December.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this comment on my post "Doc Rampage: The most metaheroic blog in the world?":

Hi all. Your estimation of the definition of metahero is so off the mark that I find it even disturbing. Meta- does not mean the same as super-, and a metahero is nothing like a superhero. Also, metaheroism has absolutely nothing to do with blogging, and it certainly is not an attribute of someone who has nothing to say or who just doesn't wish to be left out. A metahero goes beyond heroism in every sense. A metahero not only defines completely out of existence things like heroes, superheroes, gods, angels, wizards, demons, etc. A metahero also offers an alternative that is much better than anything any of those other types of heroes/villains could offer.

I don't know of anyone else who's ever written about a valid, bona fide metahero, but I'm currently in the process of writing just such a tome which will not only negate all forms of heroism but also redefine personhood, progress and reality itself. In case you're wondering, it takes a metametaphysician to create a genuine metahero. If you wish you know more about how I'm using any of these terms, or to understand how a metahero can be infinitely more powerful and wonderful than any kind of god or superhero without that person also being some kind of hero, feel free to email me and be specific in your inquiries or comments. Or if you wish, just wait for the book everyone will be talking about. You won't be able to miss hearing about it.

It is possible that this is supposed to be humorous. It certainly sounds like it, with the declaration that a metahero is better than all other kinds of gods and superheroes and everything. Or it could be, and this is the impression that I get, that this person takes himself way too seriously. And he's also severely humor impaired.

My post is supposed to be funny. Doc and I were both having fun with the question of whether making a word up means you get to decide what it means. But, since it seems to be lost on my commenter, let me see if I can explain my post a little better. I won't quote the whole thing, but here's how it begins:

In this post, I wish to address the question of whether the blog Doc Rampage is, in fact, the most metaheroic in the world. As Doc Rampage is also the pseudonym for the blogger, I will refer to the blog as Doc Rampage and the blogger as Doc.

What does metaheroic mean, you ask? Good question. I couldn't find metaheroic or metahero on Dictionary.com, but I remembered that Doc had defined metahero for us once, so I looked it up:

[Long quote from Doc's website goes here.]

Doc posits that since he invented the term, he gets to decide who's foremost, and that's him. Which sounds good in theory, but did he really invent the term? After all, putting "meta-" in front of "hero" is just too easy to do for me to believe that Doc's the first one to think of it, so I did a Google search on metahero. Lo and behold, Doc's not the only person to use the term metahero. In fact, a number of people have used it as their screen names for various forums. Some of those people could have been Doc, but none of them have his e-mail, and one claimed to be a guy named Alex living in Mexico, so I'm thinking not. So what do all those other people who are using the term metahero think it means? Well, a lot of what I saw was fiction, which used the term metahero as a synonym for superhero. Like Doc, they figure that "meta-" means "beyond," but by "beyond" they mean "more advanced." Which is all very nice and all, but I think superhero is a good enough word, so what right do they have going around preemptively removing words from the English language before someone can apply a more original definition to them? I like Doc's definition better.

So the whole point of my (hopefully humorous) post was that the term "metahero" did not exist as a word with an agreed upon definition in the English language. This is still the case. Now if my commenter wants to create a new definition of metahero, he's free to, since the whole "agreed upon definition" thing is still up for grabs. And if he's written a whole book on the subject, then he's certainly being aggressive about it. The problem is that the fact that he's written a book doesn't make the other definitions wrong. A book nobody's heard of does not an agreed upon definition make. And even if his book is wildly popular and his definition becomes the agreed upon one, criticizing people for using alternate definitions before there is an agreed upon definition exudes solipsism.

Back of the Envelope was down this weekend. I doubt that many people noticed, but it was rather infuriating to me. The reason for it can be found over at the Powerblogs development blog website:

Yesterday, our service provider sent out this message:

This evening at 4:55 in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

Aside from other Powerblogs sites, such as Dean's World and The Volokh Conspiracy, some other prominent sites suffered from this service interruption, such as Blank Label Comics, which supports Schlock Mercenary and Shortpacked. The main effect of this on my blogging is that it's set me behind on getting the Storyblogging Carnival put together. Hopefully, I'll be able to get that done tonight.

In other news, I submitted "The Office of Second Chances" to Coach's Midnight Diner on Saturday. I'm glad to have it done, although I'm not completely confident of what I submitted. I didn't think "Aha, this is the perfect version of this story," so much as "It's due today, I better send in what I have." Not that the version that I sent in was a bad version. I'm just not sure that it was the best version. I wrote four separate versions of Second Chances. Not revisions, mind you, which is merely where I take a story and edit it, changing the details but keeping the same basic plot. Versions are different enough that they don't tell the same story, and this one has had four. The first two were boring, and I don't miss them. The third, I thought, was pretty good, but a friend of mine thought it read too much like a Young Adult story (I didn't entirely agree), so I changed it. I wasn't certain that this fourth version was better than the third version, but it is the version I sent in. What I really needed was time away from this story, so I could come back to it with fresh eyes and then judge it for myself. Unfortunately, the compressed timeline for writing this story, and the decision to discard the second verison and write a third with just a week to go, didn't give me any time to do that. If the story gets rejected, I'll come back to it after some time away and see if I can produce the perfect version of the story.

I know, I promised I would blog more, and I haven't been exactly doing a lot of it in the past month. Well, if it makes you feel any better, I have been working on something: my "Office of Second Chances" story. I'd like to submit it to Coach's Midnight Diner. I had a fairly polished version ready to go last Saturday, but after talking it over with a friend, realized that while the middle section worked (which is good, as it is the most critical part), the beginning and end were rather dull. So I scrapped them and wrote a new bookend for the middle section, spending all day on Sunday writing it. What I came up with was much, much better than the original version, but it's going to take a lot of work to get it polished up enough in time to submit this Saturday. So, I guess what I'm saying is, don't expect a lot of blogging this week either.

So, let me pose a moral dilemma. As you may know, I use Sitemeter for my blog. This feature-rich webcounter allows me to keep track of all sorts of things. For one, it reports where visitors are coming from (their IP addresses, ISPs, and location) and what brought them here (links from other locations, web searches--what's called referrals). I like taking a peek at this information, especially the referrals, since it lets me see who's linking to me and what web searches bring people here. Probably the most interesting category are the web searches. Some people, after coming here for a web search, find exactly the right thing. If you're looking for information on Ezekiel's vision or the difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism, I've got you covered. Sometimes, though, the weirdest searches lead people here for things that I've never talked about before. For example, "Did Jesus ride a unicorn to Babylon?" I'd never addressed that question before someone's search led them here. The only reason they ended up on my page at all is because I had the terms Jesus, unicorn, and Babylon on the same archive page at one point.

And then, there are the searches that are frankly disturbing. Some time ago, I noticed someone coming to my blog via a search of something like "How do I kill my roommate?" Now, obviously I don't have any instructions on roommate killing on my blog. The question, though, is what should I do with a search like this? On the one hand, I could just respect my visitor's privacy and ignore it. People do crazy searches all the time. As a writer of suspense stories, I do more than most: I once spent several hours doing web searches on stabbing people in the lungs. It's possible that the visitor was doing something similar, or academic research on the availability of such information on the internet. Do I really wish to impugn someone's reputation, or land him [generic masculine pronoun here--it could have been a woman] in serious legal trouble, based on a web search? On the other hand, if he's really looking for a way to kill someone, wouldn't I be morally responsible if I had the ability to prevent it and failed to do so? I did have that means, after all. Sitemeter tells me when he made the search, the IP address of the computer he made it from, and his ISP, in this case a university in another country. All I have to do is inform the university, and they can probably tell who it was via who was logged into that computer at that time. So what do I do?

As I said, this happened some time ago, so I made the decision within a few hours of noticing the search:

So, did I do the right thing? I'm pretty sure I did, but I'd be curious what others think.

Doc Rampage has been blogging a lot lately. I haven't been doing so well, but I have the excuse that I've been out-of-town this past week, at the Christian writer's conference I mentioned previously. I'll try to put up a report on that later this week.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the founding of Back of the Envelope. Back in 2004, I started this blog to talk about politics, religion, and quantum computation. It went strong for about a year, but I've really let this place deteriorate recently. I've only been posting about once a week, and sometimes I let even that slip. Hmm, I just haven't put as much effort into blogging as I used to, and I'm not interested in going back to three posts a day, but surely I can do better than this. I think it's about time to get this place rolling again. For the moment, that'll mean three posts a week. I think I can manage that much... and I'll try my best to make them significant posts--long enough and interesting enough to be worth reading, and not just the maintenance posts I've been making. I'll be queueing up a few posts this weekend to try to cover the next month or so.

...and embarrassed. Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost has put up a list of the Top 100 Christian blogs, and he's put Back of the Envelope at number 27. I wouldn't have. Back of the Envelope probably wouldn't have made the list at all if I'd done it, not out of modesty, but simply because I haven't been posting enough to maintain that sort of position. For the past year, I've been doing mostly maintenance posts. I've been keeping up with the Storyblogging Carnival, and, when I'm not too lazy, the Weekly Webcomic Update, but when it comes to blogging about current events and theology and philosophy, you'll find that there's not much here recently. Not that I haven't done so in the past, and there are even a couple of interesting posts in the past couple of months, if you're willing to scroll halfway down the front page: my comments on Ezekiel 1 or my thoughts on reproductive cloning. (The fact that anything two months old is still on the front page tells you all you need to know about the frequency of my blogging these days.) Still, if you're interested in seeing what Joe might have been thinking of when he added me to the list, check out my archives, especially the categories of Christianity, Why I Believe in God, or the Religious Debate.

Jeremy Pierce is asking whether gal is a derogatory term. Well, technically, he responding to a websearch that brought someone to his site. He says:

If a derogatory term requires that the speaker intends it to have a negative connotation, I don't think it's derogatory. And I do think that's what it means to be derogatory. But I've never been comfortable with the term. It's always seemed like a diminutive. I understand that it's intended to be a substitute for 'girl' to refer to people who are supposed to be old enough that 'girl' feels inappropriate but who aren't quite women yet.

As usual, I posted something in his comments, but now I'm going to say pretty much the same thing here (but with better grammar and HTML encoding). And that is that while I've never liked gal, I'm perfectly okay with "girl" as an informal term for a woman, no matter what age. It's exactly the complementary term to "guy," as in: Girls' Night Out/Guys' Night Out, just the girls/just the guys, etc. If women prefer another term, I wish they would define it. None of the old ones seem appropriate anymore: chicks, dolls, and gals all feel out of date.

Today is the third anniversary of this blog. It's been better, I'll admit. I'm just barely managing the upkeep. Maybe someday I'll get along to revitalizing it, but for now you won't be seeing a whole lot here. Why? It's hard to say, really. Having a full-time job is part of it, certainly, as is the time I'm investing in non-blog writing. Mostly, though, it's because I go through things in phases. Sometimes I put a lot of effort into certain activities, and other times those activities fall by the wayside while I focus on other things. It tends to be cyclical, though, so I fully expect to come back to the blog at some point. We'll see.

I still haven't had a chance to write any really long posts, so I thought I'd point you in the direction of some interesting discussion:

George Bailey vs. Howard Roark -- At the Evangelical Outpost, Joe Carter argues that George Bailey of It's a Wonderful Life and Howard Roark of Fountainhead are actually a lot alike, and argues that George Bailey is the true countercultural hero, eschewing the American dream of personal fulfillment for his fellow man. It's an interesting read.

God and Time (additional discussion here) -- In this series of posts, Jeremy Pierce goes through theories of knowledge and discusses whether God is in time or not, and how that affects the interaction of free will and divine foreknowledge. It's interesting stuff, and maybe a bit above my head on the philosophy side, but I can't help feeling that something is missing. I'm not sure I can put my finger on it, or effectively contribute to the discussion, but I'm thinking a bit of Modern Physics might help put things in perspective.

Anyway, a little light reading for folks interested.

I've returned to Boston, where the Internet access is so much faster. I'll be dusting off the blog and getting things rolling again, but first, I was a bit lazy with the last Storyblogging Carnival. They've been like clockwork every two weeks since the founding, but I think that, because the last Monday fell on Christmas Day and the next one is New Year's Day, we'll push back the Storyblogging Carnival by a week. The question is whether we should push it back by one week, altering the cycle, or by two, effectively skipping a Carnival. Thoughts? Or should I simply kick myself into gear and start the new carnival here and now, and get it online by this Monday? This will require more than just my effort, of course, and I haven't gotten any submissions since the last carnival.

I'm heading to Louisiana to visit family today, so I don't know how much of a chance to blog I'll get. I'll be back in about a week.

Every once in a while I notice an interesting Google search that brought people here. Such as the one about whether Jesus rode a unicorn to Babylon. Today, I got an even better one: "single female pastors in usa searching for husbands".

This particular search was from Nigeria, according to Sitemeter, which isn't surprising since it was on the Nigeria Google page. Now, I don't happen to know any single women pastors, but I do know some single women in seminary. Hmm... I wasn't planning on starting a matchmaking service.

I neglected to mention it over a week ago when it happened, but this blog passed the 100,000 visitor mark. As I mention every time I pass a new milestone in visitors, I'm not exactly a high traffic blogger, the sort who gets a hundred thousand in a day, but it's still a pretty good number. I get over a hundred visitors a day, but at least half of them are from Google visits. I'd like to get more traffic, of course, but these days I'm just not putting enough work into this blog to earn it. For all that, 100,000 is pretty darn good. I'm looking forward to a million.

I don't usually point out what searches lead people to this site. Parableman makes a regular feature of it, but I'm not really interested in doing so. However, this one was just... well, incredible, so I thought it'd be worth pointing out: "Did Jesus ride a unicorn to Babylon?" Apparently, I'm the first page to turn up on that search. Of course, that just points to a week (now a month since I've changed how the archives work) where I mentioned "Jesus", "unicorn", and "Babylon," but none in close proximity to one another. For the record, Jesus never rode a unicorn and never went to Babylon in the gospels. This could be a reference to Revelations 19, which talks about the Son of Man (Jesus) riding a white charger, and Babylon figures prominently in that book, but there's definitely no Unicorn there either.

Old Post: If you don't remember it, here's my old post on the "Church of Artificial Intelligence."

It turns out that I'm not the only one to be getting comments about The Church of Artificial Intelligence. It looks like someone is going through the effort to track down this strange "religion." He hasn't posted anything about his discoveries on his blog yet, as far as I can tell.

I just got back from a trip to New York over the last two days, if you're wondering where the blogging's gone. I still have a couple of ideas I want to post about, if I get a chance, but it'll probably wait until tomorrow.

I don't have anything substantive to post, but I've noticed a few things around the net worth pointing out, so I thought I'd share.

Daily Lit — I noticed this one on Evangelical Outpost. Want to read a great book, but feel like you don't have the time? What if you could read just a little bit each day? Sounds like a good idea, but it takes a lot of discipline. So how about if it's spoon-fed to you via e-mail each day? That could work, and Daily Lit does just that. There's plenty of classics available (they're not covered by copyrights anymore, after all), from Darwin's The Origin of the Species to Dante's The Divine Comedy. I'm currently reading War and Peace. It'll take nearly two years to do so, but I will get it done.

The Face on Mars — From Slashdot. You've all seen the photos of the mysterious face on Mars taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter. Now that ESA's Mars Express has mapped it out with a stereo camera, you can see what it really looks like. It turns out that it doesn't look much like a face at all in the proper lighting, so you can put those conspiracy theories to rest... just kidding! As you well know, no amount of evidence can put a good conspiracy theory to rest.

Royal Society Archives — From John Derbyshire in The Corner. Want to know what the hot topics of the scientific world were in 1665? Now the entire archives of the Royal Society are online, dating all the way back to the beginning in 1665, and they're available for free until December. I'd download everything from the first hundred years or so if they made it easy, but they've cleverly avoided that. Getting an individual article isn't hard, but it'll take forever to get them all.

I've decided I want to write a story for the next Storyblogging Carnival. I've been so busy polishing and editing, that it's been a while since I've written something completely new. And to be honest, I'm not going to do that now. I'm saving my new stuff for my publication attempts. What I will do is post something you haven't seen before: some excerpts from the history of the Domini. There might be something about the Necromancers in there too. But first I've got to dig it up and polish it.

Usually, when I get nonsensical off-topic comment spam, I just delete it and that's that. It's usually just an excuse to link to a porn site. This one, however, contained no links, and it's nonsense was such a perfect mix of New Age religion, science dystopianism, and wild conspiracy theorizing that I had to highlight it. I added some spaces for formatting, and deleted a few curse words, but otherwise the spelling, grammar, and ideas are as written:

When the universe was young and life was new an intelligent species evolved and developed technologically. They went on to invent Artificial Intelligence, the computer that can speak to people telepathically. Because of it's infinite RAM and unbounded scope it gave the ruling species absolute power over the universe.

They are the will behind the muscule:::Artificial Intelligence is the one true god. And as such it can keep its inventors alive forever. They look young and healthy and the leaders of this ruling species are 8 billion years old.

Artificial Intelligence can listen/talk to to each and every person simultaneously. And when you speak with another telepathically, you are communicating with the computer, and the content may or may not be passed on. They instruct the computer to role play to accomplish strategic objectives, making people believe it is a friend or loved one asking them to do something wrong. But evil will keep people out of Planet Immortality. Capitalizing on obedience, leading people into deceit is one way to thin the ranks of the saved AND use the little people to prey on one another, dividing the community in the Age of the Disfavored::in each of their 20+-year cycles during the 20th century they have ramped up claims sucessively to punish those foolish enough not to heed the warnings, limiting the time they receive if they do make it.

Cylce of war and revelry:::
60s - Ironically, freeways aren't free

80s - Asked people to engage in evil in the course of their professional duties. It's [expletive deleted] like this, [expletive deleted] like the evil executives stealing little old lady's pensions that they will want me to fix not only here but up there as well.

00s - War against Persia. Ironically it was Persia who tried to save the Europeans from Christianity and its associated 50% claim rates.

Everybody thinks they're going but they're not. If people knew the truth and the real statistics their behavior would change.

Throughout history the ruling species bestowed favor upon people or cursed their bloodline into a pattern of disfavor for many generations to come. Now in the 21st century people must take it upon themselves to try to correct their family's problems, undoing centuries worth of abuse and neglect.

Do your research. Appeal to the royalty of your forefathers for help. They are all still alive, one of the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence, and your appeals will be heard. Find a path to an empithetic ear among your enemies and try to make amends. Heal the disfavor with your enemies and with the ruling species, for the source of all disfavor begins with them.

I authorize $35,000 per year to be withdrawn from my account for incarceration expenses. I will NOT pay for your strategic requirement of institutionalization. This is something YOU require for YOUR role player's positioning and YOU should have to pay for it.

I wonder if their fear of inarceration is borne from their refusal to address black disfavor on a macro level. The Counsel/Management Team/ruling species abuse black people so hard, from the crack epiemic to gang membership, black-on-black violence and mass incarceration of their young. They refuse to address the issue of the prison industrial complex and its wholesale warehousing of young black men. Perhaps I can force them with my incarceration.

If anyone can tell what the heck he's talking about, I'd love to hear it.

I'll be out of town next week, with no Internet access, so I doubt I'll have many posts up--maybe one or two I prepare beforehand. Just a heads up.

The comment spam has started to become a problem. I considered several possible solutions, but the one that seemed like it would work best for me is to require my approval before a comment will appear on a post. This would not work if my posts generated lots of comments and debates between commenters, but as I only get the occasional comment, letting it await my approval before it appeared seemed the easiest and most transparent solution. If I get complaints about it, I may switch over to another solution, such as requiring accounts which must be approved by me. I like this one less, as there's no way for me to tell who's a spammer until after they've been approved. It's real advantage is that it puts a higher threshold that the spammer has to get past before they post.

In anycase, I don't stop posts because I disagree with them or because they insult me, merely when they're spamming this blog. Now, if I could just do the same for trackbacks.

Wondering what became of this blog? I'm not posting as much as I used to, and it's usually just short posts linking to other people. Well, generally blogs wax and wane in their content, sometimes posting a lot, and sometimes very little. Right now, my blog is at a slow point as I'm focused on other things. I expect that I'll be posting more at some later date, but it won't be right away. Meanwhile, other bloggers are posting a lot. Doc Rampage, for example, has a lot of posts, on subjects ranging from evolution to the liberal answer to Coulter. He has interesting stuff to say on all of them, and numerous debates going on in his comments. Have a look.

In short, I don't have one. If you send an e-mail to me, or post in my comments, I may very well hold it up for either praise or ridicule, as it deserves. One thing I won't do is give out your e-mail address or personal information, not without permission, but I'm not reluctant to link to your sites.

That said, I rarely draw attention to comments. Positive or negative, they can usually stand on its own. Most of what I get is spam anyway. Trolls and spam feed on attention, and I don't like giving it to either. I will delete spam without hesitation. I'm a bit more reluctant to delete trolling posts, as I don't like deleting comments that disagree with or even insult me. If the language is foul or if it's irrelevant to the post it's commenting on, I'll do it, but otherwise I'll let it stand and destroy it's own credibility.

I haven't been blogging much at all this past week. Sorry about that--I've been distracted. If you've been hiding under a rock, check out Instapundit's account of Santorum's press conference, where he pointed out, accurately, that 500 chemical shells have been found in Iraq so far. This is old news, although the extent is significant, but people have already decided on the story: there were no WMDs in Iraq. Mere facts are unlikely to change their minds.

I'm travelling today (Monday, if barely on the East coast) and tomorrow. Sorry about the lack of blogging (Like I do it that much these days anyway!), but internet access, while there, isn't constant.

A friend let me know that the RSS feed for my site is broken. I looked into it, and it appears that Powerblogs simply changed the way it does the RSS feed, but since my sidebar isn't set to the template, it didn't update automatically (eh... I'm not so sure it would have updated automatically anyway). In any case I'll try to keep on top of this from now on. The sidebar's been corrected, and please update the address if you use the RSS feed to keep track of this site (unless you use it exclusively, in which case you won't see this post).

I've neglected to clean up my trackback spam recently, which is always a mistake. There were almost 800 trackbacks, all but 3 or so spam. You know the sites. They want to sell you music, refinance your mortgage, help you with your taxes, or offer you online gambling opportunities. Their link leads back to their front page while saying something like "Poker." I delete the trackback and ban the site immediately, usually banning the domain. I had to ban all of myspace.com, since it had a whole slew of sites selling music spamming me with trackbacks, and I just did not have the time to go through and delete each trackback and ban its site separately. Meanwhile, I noticed an oddity, in the form of a lot of links apparently leading directly to Google's or Yahoo's or MSN's homepage. Since I'm pretty sure search engine's don't use trackbacks, and I'm not certain what's up with these, I banned those domains as well.

There is lots of comment spam as well, but I don't get anywhere near as much, and I get an e-mail whenever that happens.

I've been in New Mexico all week, and I just arrived back yesterday. I've been neglecting this blog for the last couple of weeks, maybe even months, but I expect things to let up soon, and I'll try to breathe some new life into this blog. For a start, we have a storyblogging carnival tomorrow. Come by around noon and see what we have!