Awareness, denial and misdiagnosis of a problem

I have to laugh at some of the on-blog dialogs I read. You see two people going round in infinite circles, not listening to the Other. At least one but often both are in denial, lack awareness or Self and Other, and misdiagnose where the problem lies.

It saddens me as often both people's desire is to engage in mutually beneficial interaction however when one person misdiagnoses the problem the Other can't stop pressing the buttons as they distracted and are being sensitive to the wrong thing. A loving response to supposed disclosure is wasted and the person being sensitive gets frustrated as they are still inadvertently pressing the buttons when they are doing their best not to.

So my plea to all who read this is to carefully, seek to become increasingly aware and to try not to misdiagnose the source of a problem not because that is wrong but merely for the practical benefit that it allows the Other to be sensitive to the issue.

Oh, by the way, another word for misdiagnosis is blame.

Inerrancy is laughable (or love is supreme)

If God had wanted us to treat the Bible as inerrant then he could have made it perfectly clear but it seems, from the evidence, that it just wasn't all that important to him. Instead the themes of his totally sacrificial love and our responses of having faith in it and mirroring it are surely more important to him as seen by the sheer wordage and clarity devoted to those motifs.

I can hear him laughing at the nonsense we generate.

What's the core question?

Over the last few months I've been reading various blogs and engaging in some on-line discussion. There is much well written stuff. Very well written. Beautiful even.

The only problem is it doesn't resonate. There are many great and exciting ideas and the author who is most elegant tends to win and sway opinion however I look at it and still something doesn't resonate.

I hear the ideas of emerging church, missional focus, post-modernism etc etc etc... blah blah blah... I hear both sides of the inerrancy argument, the sex before marriage argument, the whatever argument... and still nothing resonates in my heart.

I wonder if all these people are really aware what the core question really is, whether they have put aside their intellectual projects, given their minds a rest and really listened to their souls. I suspect we are all driven and controlled by that within us that is left unconcious. I recognise it all around me.

Well it's time to stray from the worn path even more in search of a better land. Will be back from time to time.

Signing Off

Time for bed said Zebedee. And indeed he was right.

So it's time to go now. So long. Farewell. Aufwiedersehn. Goodbyeeee.

Thanks to all who've been reading and to all who've commented. I wish you well on your journeys and maybe I'll be back and maybe I won't but for the now that is it.

Limits of Logic

Formal methods in software were the answer to the problem. The idea was you could prove that a program had no bugs. Which would have been a good thing.

However. The longest program was a couple of hundred lines or so. Whereas useful programs are many hundreds of thousands of lines long and really useful programs are millions of lines long.

Testing is also a good way of establishing the "truth" of a program.

(From Glenford J. Myers, The Art of Software Testing (Wiley, 1979))

"Self-Assessment"

Statement of Requirements:

The program reads three integer values from a card.

The three values are interpreted as representing the lengths of the sides of a triangle. The program prints a message that states whether the triangle is scalene, isosceles, or equilateral.

Your Exercise Requirements:

On a sheet of paper, write a set of test cases (i.e., specific sets of data) that you feel would adequately test this program.

The next step is an evaluation of the effectiveness of your testing. It turns out that this program is more difficult to write than it first appears.

As a result, different versions of this program have been studied, and a list of common errors has been compiled. Evaluate your set of test cases by using it to answer the following questions. Give yourself one point for each "yes".

Answers on next page.

1. Do you have a test case that represents a valid scalene triangle? (Note that test cases such as 1,2,3 and 2,5,10 do not warrant a "yes" answer, because there does not exist a triangle having such sides.)

2. Do you have a test case that represents a valid equilateral triangle?

3. Do you have a test case that represents a valid isosceles triangle? (A test case specifying 2,2,4 would not be counted.)

4. Do you have at lest three test cases that represent valid isosceles triangles such that you have tried all three permutations of two equal sides (e.g., 3,3,4; 3,4,3; and 4,3,3)?

5. Do you have a test case in which one side has a zero value?

6. Do you have a test case in which one side has a negative value?

7. Do you have a test case with three integers greater than zero such that the sum of two of the
numbers is equal to the third? (That is, if the program said 1,2,3 represents a scalene triangle, it would contain a bug.)

8. Do you have at lest three test cases in category 7 such that you have tried all three permutations where the length of one side is equal to the sum of the other two sides (e.g., 1,2,3; 1,3,2; and 3,1,2)?

9. Do you have a test case with three integers greater than zero such that the sum of two of the
numbers is less than the third (e.g., 1,2,4 or 12,15,30)?

10. Do you have at least three test cases in category 9 such that you have tried all three permutations (e.g., 1,2,4; 1,4,2 and 4,1,2)?

11. Do you have a test case in which all sides are 0 (i.e., 0,0,0)?

12. Do you have at least one test case specifying non-integer values?

13. Do you have at least one test case specifying the wrong number of values (e.g. two, rather than three, integers)?

14. For each test case, did you specify the expected output from the program in addition to the input?

Of course, a set of test cases that satisfies the above conditions does not guarantee that all possible errors would be found, but since questions 1-13 represent errors that have actually occurred in different versions of this program, an adequate test of this program should expose these errors.

If you are typical, you have done poorly on this test. As a point of reference, highly experienced
professional programmers score, on the average, only 7.8 out of a possible 14.

The point of the exercise is to illustrate that the testing of even a trivial program such as this is not an easy task. And if this is true, consider the difficulty of testing a 100,000-statement air-traffic-control system, a compiler, or even a mundane payroll program.

Taken from: http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/daswg/docs/informal/LIGO_Software_QA.pdf

Now my question is this. If we cannot use logic to demonstrate the "truth" of something we have total control over how can we possible use logic to demonstrate the "truth" about our observations of the real-world?

Leaving Omnipotence

The world, my world indeed, feels like a bigger place than I can possibly grasp. I cannot tie it all up in nice symmetry. I can, maybe, by thoughtful trial and error discover what works and what doesn't but for the moment I give up on the attempt of having it all tied together in one manageable framework.

Leaving Intellectualism

Many of the influential Others in my life have claimed access knowledge that I don't possess. To date I've limited myself to two reactions. The first is to yield and accept what They say, and the second is to fervently study Their knowledge for myself in order to deconstruct and neutralise it.

However over the last few days my soul has changed its response and these old patterns merely appear as flight and fight.

Now I simply walk away in search of a different response to the threat.

So goodbye intellectualism. Farewell I wish you luck.