Despite the arbitrary nature of where we decide to mark a date on a calendar and call it the start of the new year, I do tend to take the opportunity to make certain promises to myself. You might call them resolutions, but my resolve can be a little bit more ephemeral than that. Last year I decided that I should read more. Now by no means have I earned the modifier “prolific” in my reading, but last year I did read significantly more than usual. Follow me on Good Reads to keep up with me this year where I will be trying to read even more! As an interesting aside, about three quarters of the books on my reading list were read on a Kindle. I guess that means it works.

My 2010 Reading List

New books

Anthem

Ayn Rand

1984

George Orwell

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

Mark Bauerlein

Surface Detail

Iain M. Banks

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Sharia Law

Nonie Darwish

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Christopher Hitchens

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson

The Girl With Who Played With Fire

Stieg Larsson

One Very Big Picture

Sydney Hickman

A User’s Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty

Dave Goldberg

Coders At Work

Peter Seibel

Being Geek

Michael Lopp

Value-able

Roger Montgomery

Audio books

Ender’s Game

Orson Scott Card

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

1776

David McCullough

Re-read

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

The Fall of Hyperion

Dan Simmons

Abandoned

The City & the City (50%)

China Miéville

Thanks to your support I managed to poll 718 votes, or nearly one percent of the primary vote — a really pleasing result given the deficiency of lead time and tiny amount of campaigning. I can only hope that the secular message catches on, and we can pull even more votes next time, sending a signal that we are concerned with the increasingly emboldened radical religious movements within Australia and abroad, and that we are prepared to vote to keep Australia secular.

On election day I stood at the Pyrmont Community Centre polling booth, giving out how-to-votes. The words of support and acknowledgement that some of you gave to me were a great encouragement and I hope that I’ve helped your voices be heard.

In particular I’d like to thank Jay, Ian, Lyle, and Warren for helping distribute leaflets in the week leading up to the election as well as Erin for donating her time to stand in the firing line at a polling booth for a few hours. Also to Matt R, for the leaflet drops, discussions and helping out at Pyrmont on the day. To those of you who emailed me directly, such as Peter and Karen, your thoughts and well-wishes were very appreciated.

Lastly, but by no means at all least, to my darling partner Mandy, who put so much effort into leaflet dropping, organising the election party, constantly salving a doubtful soul, putting up with the sleepless nights, and everything else that she always does: you’re the best and I couldn’t have done it without you.

On a final note: I’m serving as the Membership Officer for the newly formed NSW branch of the Secular Party. We’re going to be driving for 750 NSW members so that we can be registered as an official political party in this state. If you’re at all interested in joining this important cause, please email me or watch this space.

Wikipedia gives two broad senses of secularism in that it:

• asserts the right to be free from religious rule and teachings, and the right to freedom from governmental imposition of religion upon the people within a state that is neutral on matters of belief.
• refers to the view that human activities and decisions, especially political ones, should be based on evidence and fact unbiased by religious influence.

The first point relates directly to the conceptual seperation of church and state, a political philosophy codified in the constitutions of many of the world’s democracies. The second to the notion of public reason.

In Australia, the pertitent part of our constitution with regards to the separation of church and state is Section 116 which states:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

Section 116 may read in a familiar manner to many as it is based on wording from the First Ammendment of the United States Constitution. It is weaker in practice however, and Australian courts generally interpret it narrowly. The establishment clause is taken to simply mean that the Federal Government may not declare any religion to be the official religion of the nation. The maintenance of a government that operates independently from the influence of any particular religion is dependent on the promotion of secular values in the community at large, and the representation of these values in the parliament. This is what I intend to effect because I sense that these values are in peril.

Now what exactly would I stand against? Consider the following recent announcements by the Labor Party, and whether they truly reflect the way a secular society should conduct itself:

• The $222 million expansion to the Howard Government’s ill-conceived National School Chaplaincy Program which seeks to place a proponent of religious beliefs into all our schools. Many of these chaplains are dealing with social and psychological issues for which they are not qualified. Harm is being inflicted on Australian children as a result. This funding is on top of the $165 million dollars already spent since its inception.
• The provision of $1.5 million for the celebration of Mary MacKillop’s canonisation by the Catholic Church, a religious organisation that can hardly be considered as being strapped for cash.
• That they will not repeal the 2004 amendment to the Marriage Act; an ammendment which codifed a narrow, discriminatory definition of marriage in line with the notion of the religious institution.
• That they will forge ahead with their planned mandatory ISP internet filter at the behest of various religious pressure groups.

On the other side of the House is the prospect of a Tony Abbott led coalition government. Mr. Abbott’s track record needs no reiteration but as a small sample:

• He wants a study of the bible to be compulsory, imposing a single faith on all of our students.
• He wants a return to at-fault divorce, presumably an initiative to decrease net happiness.
• He is opposed to embryonic stem cell research, perhaps because he doesn’t think the job of our medical researchers is hard enough already.

Given his background, his close associations with individuals such as B. A. Santamaria and Cardinal Pell, and his stance on many ethical issues, Prime Minister Abbott would likely be the worst defender of secular values in recent history.

Neither of the major parties seem to want to stand for secular values. There are candidates at this election who will.

Given the nature of secularism, people are often concerned that the movement intends to destroy religious practice and beliefs and trample on the right of the religious freedom which is also protected by our constitution. These concerns are raised by both the religious and irreligious. Let me assert that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Secularism is the only way to guarantee freedom of religion in a country that supports communities of multiple faiths and those of no faith.

I am a Humanist, and as such I strongly support the IHEU’s minimum statement of Humanism which, amongst other things, affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. Whilst I do not personally accept supernatural views of reality, I accept the rights of others to hold them. I understand that the questions of existence and the nature of life are amongst the most important and difficult we consider. I would never deny anyone the right to draw strength and purpose from their personal beliefs.

I am also an atheist. I do not believe in the god of Abraham. This motivates me about as much as my lack of faith in the gods of Olympus or the Invisible Pink Unicorn. What does motivate me is the fair treatment of all people in our society and the advancement of individual liberty. Individual liberty must always be considered within the context of the common good, but we are still getting it wrong, and I feel that in many of these respects that the ideology of the political religious right is having a major impact in maintaining the injustice. I can’t abide it; all it takes is a little empathy to understand the unjust nature of many of these issues.

Having said that, there is one aspect of my atheism that does shape my outlook on life strongly: I do not believe in an afterlife. I believe that we all only have one shot at existence, and I want to help people fulfil their potential in this single life as much as I am able. The clock is ticking. Many of the reforms that are being actively opposed at the moment will eventually come to fruition simply through generational changes in thinking and acceptance. However, such changes still require people to actively agitate for them; and for the many who are suffering right at this moment, sooner is so much better than later.

At this election, please consider voting for a candidate other than those from the two major parties. Neither deserve your vote. If a secular society is one you think is worth defending, then I would ask you all to consider myself, your local Secular Party candidate or a Secular Party senate candidate when casting your ballot.

–
Authorised by John Goldbaum, 7 Rockwall Crescent, Potts Point NSW 2001.

Here’s the low down for:

• how to vote for me in the seat of Sydney
• how your preferences will be allocated if you vote for the Secular Party group on the New South Wales ballot

Naturally, if you do not find the allocation of preferences on either ticket to your satisfaction, you should modify them to best represent your interests. belowtheline.org.au allows you to fully customise a preference allocation before polling day to make sure your vote counts the way you want it to. Numbering 84 boxes requires some stamina but technologists are certainly doing their democratic bit to help you out!

–
Authorised by John Goldbaum, 7 Rockwall Crescent, Potts Point NSW 2001.

A snippet from the survey

Full PDF version

As many of you who know me well will also know, I do not undertake such an action lightly. I have always considered voting at an Australian election to be one of the most powerful duties I perform, but standing for election is a much weightier thing. I do this because I must; I can’t bear what I hear and see in the media and what comes up in regular discussions with my peers any longer. Many friends, whose opinions and viewpoints I respect, were despondent about the choice that they were being asked to make on August 21, even to the point of pledging to vote informally. I fear for a democracy where the people can not even choose one candidate that they feel will represent them effectively.

As for myself, I’m tired of equivocation; I’m tired of lackluster leadership; I’m tired of guarded responses and insipid discussion; I’m tired of petty, vacuous factionalism and I’m tired of policy driven by polling and focus groups rather than good governance. I’m tired of many things, and I think Australians deserve much better than all of this.

So why do I stand in this election? There are many reasons, but here are three main issues, concerning policies proposed by both major parties, that I simply can’t abide.

1) Depriving gay couples the right to be married

This is a fairly clear open-and-shut case of discrimination based on sexuality, and as such is a human rights abuse. One section of our community enjoys privileged status in the eyes of our state institutions, while another minority do not. It’s the same story repeated throughout history, just when we thought we’d left most of the bad old days consigned to the history books. I can not in good conscience stand by while people who love each other are denied the right to have their relationships recognised fully by a government that is meant to stand for their best interests. Gay couples contribute just as much to their communities as everyone else; governments have no problems levying taxes against them like everyone else; therefore they should have no problem granting them the same privileges as anyone else. The state should recognise relationships between couples universally.

2) The continued demonisation of refugees

It’s the 2010 Australian election. What’s one of the hottest election topics? I give you one guess! Yes! Just like every other election of the past decade, the miniscule number of boats carrying people seeking refuge from persecution and wars is a major debate. Do the major political parties have a “break glass in case of polling crisis” cabinet which contains a “demonise refugees” button that they can mash to gain another couple of percent in polling? They seem to reach for it all the time, and with a media that does not hesitate to sensationalise the arrival of “yet another boat” no wonder we can’t seem to shake this disgraceful treatment of human beings. People arriving via boat, seeking refuge in our country are an incredible minority of all international arrivals, and yet the subject dominates our country’s politics. At the centre of the issue, are real people, fleeing dire situations. I want to live in a country that treats these desperate people with respect and compassion, not contempt. We are an incredibly rich and privileged nation, and with such status comes both great responsibility and a great capacity to do good.

3) Conroy’s Internet filter

Stephen Conroy’s mandatory internet policy has to be one of the most exasperating examples of policy making I’ve seen. With an industry that continues to tell him that it won’t work, Internet users telling him they don’t want it, child protection advocates telling him it will not stop the exploitation of children, it still forms a part of Labor Party policy. Don’t let the two year delay fool you, it’s simply an election device to get a controversial topic off the agenda for August 21. If one of the intended aims of mandatory Internet filtering is to reduce the exploitation of children, the money would be far more effectively spent on the apprehension and prosecution of offenders. Just about every part of the policy stinks: from the secret blacklisting of URLs, to the laughable web-content only approach, to the definitions of refused-classification material. It’s bad policy; it is the policy of an Ostrich — just stuff every Australian adult’s head in the sand and all of the problems will disappear. Censorship is the tool of authoritarian governments the world over, and I will not idly let one of the greatest enabling technologies developed by humankind be subject to such unbridled and unwarranted political control.

These are not only my views, but the views of the party for which I stand. The Secular Party of Australia is a very young political party, and one of the main aims of this election is to promote awareness of the party and the ideals for which it stands. I encourage you to read about what we are trying to achieve.

In the end, I stand to provide one more choice for you to consider, and I hope it’s one that you find sensible, progressive and rational. At the very least, I would ask you to consider all of the candidates on your ballot, for both houses, and urge you to find some candidate that you can support. The Secular Party has candidates standing in nineteen seats, and Senate candidates for most states.

–
Authorised by John Goldbaum, 7 Rockwall Crescent, Potts Point NSW 2001.

Say I have an object that likes to transition solely between happy states every time a certain event occurs. Here’s how I might handle it:

 theObject.happy = !theObject.happy;

There. Simple huh? Something you probably learn how to do in an introductory programming course. It might be surprising to you, but someone asked a question on how to do this on Stack Overflow. The other alternative provided in the answer is the somewhat more cerebral:

theObject.happy ^= true;

Thanks Spock. Of course if your language doesn’t have an assigning XOR operator this option is ruled out. If you value clarity of code, or you simply don’t want less brainy maintainers pestering you about what your code is doing, you rule this option out as well.

So I’ve been writing a lot of code recently of the first form, and it’s been making me sad. There’s a strong feeling of non object oriented-ness about it. I mean, to toggle the state of an object I have to:

1. ask it what its current state is;
2. flip that state locally;
3. and then tell the object to take on this new state.

Bleh! Why the hell should I care what state it currently is in? I just want to toggle it! Shouldn’t I just be able to ask the object to toggle it’s own state; perhaps of even multiple properties in a batch sequence?

Naturally, nobody wants to write a toggling method for every writable boolean property of their objects. So either there needs to be automatic support in the platform or some ability to provide a general toggling abstraction.

One such example of a crude toggling abstraction would be a Ruby module defined like the following.

module Toggler
 
  class ToggleHelper
 
    def initialize(target)
      @target = target
    end
 
    def method_missing(sym)
      @target.toggle(sym)
    end
 
    def toggle; end
 
  end
 
  def toggle(*sym)
    return ToggleHelper.new(self) if sym.empty?
 
    sym.each { |s| self.send("#{s}=", !self.send(s)) }
  end
 
end

Such a module could be mixed-in at the appropriate levels of an inheritance hierarchy, or maybe even at the root level if you’re game.

With the mix-in mixed-in, toggling code would be more concise and less repetitious:

the_object.toggle.happy
the_object.toggle(:happy)
the_object.toggle(:wanted, :happy, :virtuous)

Doesn’t a declarative syntax such as this feel much more happy?

Please note—The following story is not meant to imply that the residents of Chernobyl were:

• tax evaders; or
• incompetent home builders; or
• mean spirited; or
• comparable to swine; or
• given to formulaic naming of their children.

Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely (and tragically) coincidental.

The Three Little Taxpayers

by C. D. Owen. (Age 10)

Once upon a time, there were three little taxpayers and they lived in a Russian town called Chernobyl. Two lived in the outskirts of the town and they had made their homes of poor building material. One whose name was Yuri had made his house of straw. The other, whose name was Yori, had made his house of sticks and branches. Everyone in the town made fun of the them. The other taxpayer lived in the upper-crust of the city and he was very well-off. His name was Yari and he lived in a magnificent sky-scraper and he made fun of Yuri and Yari as well.

One day, the big bad tax-collector came along and his name was Yiri. He came to Yuri’s house and knocked on the woven door.

“Little tax-payer, little tax-payer, let me in!”
“Not by the vinyl of my skinny wallet!”
“Then I’ll have to demolish your house!”

So the big bad tax-collector went away and then came back with a bull-dozer. He then knocked over Yuri’s residence. He then went and on and came to Yori’s house of sticks.

“Little money bag, little money bag, let me in!”
“Not by the leatherette of my medium filled wallet!” came the reply.
“Then I’ll have to demolish your house!”

And again he went away and this time brought back a demolishing ball. He then knocked down Yori’s house. Then he continued along collecting debts. He then came to the sky-scraper belonging to Yari.

“Little dollar-sign, little dollar-sign, let me in!”
And Yari replied, “Not by the one hundred percent leather of my fat wallet!”

And so away went the big, bad tax-collector yet another time. He then came back with a demolishing squad but they couldn’t destroy the sky-scraper because they didn’t have a permit to destroy large buildings.

As you have probably known, the big bad tax-collector was very greedy and he just had to have Yari’s wallet. So the big bad tax collector went to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and he shut off the reactor’s cooling systems and then the power plant blew up causing Yari’s building to glow and melt.

The next day the big bad tax-collector came back in his protective clothing and he searched the rubble for Yari’s wallet, which he never found but he was glad he gained his revenge.

The moral to this story is: pay your debts or you’ll be sorry!

Today Yahuda Katz posted his 10 favourite things about the ruby language. His list certainly reflects most of the things I find very appealing about the language. The sixth item highlights Ruby’s excellent support for blocks and lambdas and an argument is mounted that when performing file operations in languages without them, programmers are forced to use an inline “ensure” block every in the same lexical scope that they originally opened the file in, to ensure that the resource is closed. As is often the case the comparison is made to Java, but as any seasoned Java developer will tell you (and this point has probably be made many, many times) it just isn’t true. Java supports a safer and comparable idiom via the anonymous inner class.

The example given is a very succinct Ruby method to print out the lines of a text file. Ruby’s File.open ensures the file is properly closed after the block has completed, normally or otherwise:

def run(input)
  File.open(input, "r") do |f|
    f.each_line {|line| puts line }
  end
end

The Java version listed does the same but, predictably, is far more verbose and laborious:

static void run(String in) 
throws FileNotFoundException {
  File input = new File(in);
  String line; Scanner reader = null;
  try {
    reader = new Scanner(input);
    while(reader.hasNextLine()) {
      System.out.println(reader.nextLine());
    }
  } finally { reader.close(); }
}

However no Java developer that values their sanity is ever going to sprinkle this pattern through their code base any time they want to use a File and ensure that it is closed properly. Here’s what they are going to use instead:

public interface Processor<T> {
  void process(T target);
}

import java.io.*;
import java.util.Scanner;
 
public class FileSlurper {
 
  public static void slurp(String fileName, Processor<Scanner> processor) 
    throws FileNotFoundException {
 
    File input = new File(fileName);
    Scanner reader = null;
    try {
      reader = new Scanner(input);
      processor.process(reader);
    }
    finally {
      reader.close();
    }
  }
 
}

Once that infrastructure is in place, the Java implementation of the example becomes:

FileSlurper.slurp(input, new Processor<Scanner>() {
  public void process(Scanner reader) {
    while(reader.hasNextLine())
      System.out.println(reader.nextLine());
  }
});

No one can argue that this is as pretty or convenient as the Ruby version, but it does ensure that file opening and closing is handled correctly without any effort from the client code. The code in the anonymous inner class can even access variables in the current lexical context, as with the Ruby block, with the caveat that they must be declared final (not quite a lexical closure!). This pattern, in conjunction with the Processor interface may be used any time there is a need for similar resource acquisition and clean–up procedures, as might be the case for locks or database connections.

Lambdas and blocks are very useful constructs, and the anonymous inner class can act as an acceptable, if far from ideal, analogue. What an anonymous inner class can’t do is act as a co–routine; this is a truly powerful feature of Ruby’s blocks and associated method invocation features that Java can’t directly compete with.

One thing’s for certain: the Ruby community won’t win over Java developers by giving examples of deficiencies where none exist.

If I could choose, if I truly had free will,
I’d run, I’d break out, I’d be unbonded, free.
but while I’m here in this state, a listless nowhere,
I can’t, I won’t, I’ll never be.

and even now, when I feel almost alive, I’ll falter
search for words that won’t come, that will never say what I want to say
I’ll think that at the very least, I’ve created something
but for what purpose? In the end, I’ll hate them, hate it, loathe it all the same.

And the sleep still won’t come, but maybe I always am.