Tales from the jar side: Perception vs Reality
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of September 1 - 8, 2019. This week I taught an online Spring and Spring Boot class and spent a couple days with those bootcamp students in downtown Hartford.
It's September, which means now we have NFL football. As I've gotten older and more painfully aware of concussions and the overall physical cost of the game, not to mention the NFL reaction to any protest movements, I've been close to giving it up entirely. Another fundamental feature of our current world is a certain undercurrent of hypocrisy, though, and I am a New England Patriots fan. It's hard to give up the game when your favorite team is a Super Bowl contender every year, and this year is no exception.
To all of my readers who live outside New England and therefore probably hate the Patriots, I'll just say that years ago I decided that Luke Skywalker was a whiny little brat -- I'm rooting for the Empire. All too soon both Tom Brady and Bill Belichick will retire and this winning era will be over. I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.
Of course, all that is a matter of perspective, which brings up my "Big Issue" for this week: Perception vs Reality.
Fiction writers love to tell stories where the thoughts of the characters somehow affect the reality around them. One example is an old first-season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Where No One Has Gone Before, where the Enterprise winds up in a strange region of space:
In the words of the endlessly harassed teenager Wesley Crusher, "Space and time and thought... aren't the separate things they appear to be." Whatever they think about, happens, though I think the biggest lesson was that the crew of the Enterprise didn't have much in the way of imagination.
Eventually the crew all thinks happy thoughts about the Traveler and they're all able to return home. (Yes, the first season had some serious "issues", but the show got better later.) Btw, there's also an original series episode called Shore Leave where again thoughts created reality, but at least that time machines were involved.
Marketing people are fond of saying that "perception is reality", as are politicians. How we perceive the world affects how we react to it, whether it changes the actual world or not. Political campaigns are all about creating a favorable impression of the candidate and an unfavorable one of the opponent. Back in happier days I used to enjoy reading about presidential campaigns much the way I followed spectator sports, but that's far too depressing now.
My whole career, and indeed my whole life, has been focused on reality, with an emphasis on science and engineering. The goal of science is to accurately model reality in order to understand its underlying nature and how it behaves. As our understanding of the physical universe has changed, so has our perception of it. Emmy Noether's famous theorem says that symmetries in a system correspond to conservation laws. Einstein's special relativity views space and time as a unified continuum. His general relativity adds gravity to the mix as a deformation of spacetime, or, as we liked to say, "there is no gravity -- space sucks."
Later the development of quantum mechanics caused Einstein to say "God does not play dice." Stephen Hawking then described black holes as "not only does God play dice, sometimes he throws them where they cannot be seen."
(That's also an oblique reference to the dice game I discussed in the last newsletter, which the bootcamp students had to code up in Java. I spent a lot of time working out a mediocre solution. This week I found out one of the students (hi Jordan, in case you're reading this) implemented the entire craps game brilliantly, mixing Spring Boot, RESTful web services, and a jquery front end to create a complete solution that he deployed on Heroku and GitHub pages. Seriously, hire that guy immediately. I'd work to make it happen, but I'm sure it won't be necessary.)
I'm talking about all this as though it's abstract and unconnected to anything personal, but the whole issue of perception vs reality is a big issue for me. I grew up with a family member who had, shall we say, an "alternative" perception of reality, and in order to survive I had to learn to view the world from that perspective. I became quite good at it, which was necessary but difficult.
The problems came when reality intervened. You can go to great lengths to isolate yourself from alternative viewpoints, and arguably much of the Internet is made up of "filter bubbles" like that. Sooner or later, though, if your view of the world is not connected to the way the world actually works, you're going to encounter a disconnect. The real question is, how do you handle it when reality refuses to cooperate?
We all hate that, but some people get really angry and start attacking. They attack the validity of the new data, and if that doesn't work they attack the messengers, and then they attack the very processes that produced the contradiction.
The results can be seriously damaging, as when the tobacco companies spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about the dangers of smoking or when the oil and gas industries did the same about global warming (despite recent evidence that they knew the effects 30 years ago). Attack the processes of science enough and people lose faith in it entirely, leading to the re-emergence of measles by vaccine deniers. They say that newcomers to NASA look forward to talking about space exploration, but can't believe how much time they waste defending themselves to people who think the moon landings were faked.
In my own career, my first declared major at MIT was, believe it or not, nuclear engineering. My original goal was to be a physicist, but my father kept insisting that I stick to engineering as an undergrad, feeling that I'd be more employable that way. I figured nuclear engineering was a reasonable compromise that would let me do physics but still get an engineering degree.
My hope was to work on fusion, because fission was still a very dicey subject at the time. The Three Mile Island disaster happened in April of 1979, when I was a junior in high school, and my home in York, PA was inside the twelve mile radius. The accident resulted in almost nothing in the way of radiation releases (especially compared to the later Chernobyl meltdown), but people panicked anyway. The highways were jammed. We stayed home and played the late-70s equivalent of video games on an original Atari console.
What I mostly remember now about the accident:
Then-president Jimmy Carter touring the facility in yellow plastic booties
Saturday Night Live did an awesome parody called The Pepsi Syndrome
We missed three days of school and didn't have to make them up
All in all, I put it in the win column.
The damage to the perception of the nuclear power industry, however, was incalculable. By sheer coincidence, the superintendent of the "local" (as in Delta, PA, a 45 minute drive) nuclear power plant, Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station, lived in my neighborhood. I got to meet him and arranged to talk to him as a budding nuclear engineering major, and when he found out I was an MIT undergrad, he offered me a summer job. I eventually spent three summers working at the plant in jobs that really didn't suit me at all, but as summer jobs went they were interesting and paid better than most.
Still, I couldn't shake the perception problem. Within one semester I got tired enough trying to defend working at a nuke plant, and fusion was one of those promising technologies that was always ten years away -- which is still true to this day. I eventually gave up and switched to mechanical engineering, which I never had to defend to anyone, mostly because nobody really seemed to know what it meant, me included.
What triggered all these stories was that last week someone whose perception of the world is almost completely divorced from reality made a stupid mistake, and rather than admit it, he got furious and forced a collection of spineless sycophants to use a Sharpie on a weather map and deny the science-based hurricane predictions reported by NOAA. Reality intervened and he couldn't take it, so everyone suffered, and truth was undermined once again.
I lived in that world once, dominated by a person who was incapable of seeing reality, much less accepting it. Most people don't know what it's like to have to deal with someone who is truly mentally ill, who not only can't see reality but attacks anyone and anything that forces them to confront the disconnects when they occur.
I suppose I should correct that to say most people didn't know what that was like. Over the past two and a half years, everyone in America, if not the world, is finding out what that's like.
There. I managed to talk about the whole issue without once mentioning that idiot's name or the pathetic losers who keep him in power. If the result is that you feel the need to unsubscribe, I understand.
For those who are still here, thank you for your kind indulgence. My Spring and Spring Boot course was fine, and I covered a lot of the same material in the bootcamp. I received more technical reviews of the Kotlin Cookbook, which I'm working my way through. I have other assorted professional obligations to handle that don't really warrant describing here. I just really need that book be done. I feel like my perception of reality is going to be rather clouded until that happens.
Last week:
Spring and Spring Boot, online at Safari
Functional Java and Spring for the bootcamp students
More recipes for Kotlin Cookbook
This week:
Reactive Spring, online at Safari
Introduction to Gradle, online for Gradle, Inc
Two more bootcamp days
Travel to Oracle Code One, the conference formerly known as JavaOne. Much more about that next week from San Francisco, CA.