203: Non-Authoritative Information

Several days ago I was sitting in a Washington DC hotel room and had CNN on in the background. Mike Huckabee was on, and his campaign is the only Republican one I’ve really taken much of an interest in so I was paying a bit of attention and heard him make the statement that our laws were based on the Ten Commandments. He’s certainly not the first person to make such a statement, and I doubt he’ll be the last before the end of this campaign.

Whenever I hear such a statement made I am reminded of the clips of politicians which fight for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in churches but fail to name even three commandments correctly. I somehow doubt that Mike Huckabee is of this kind though, his religious credentials seem genuine.

It’s been some time since I’ve read Exodus, so perhaps my own memory of the commandments is what is faulty, I consulted a list of the commandments and decided to take a look at which of the commandments the founders chose to codify into law. (I’m aware that the specific numbering/grouping of the commandments varies, and I am using the Roman Catholic grouping for consistency)

1. I am the Lord your God / You shall have no other gods before me / You shall not make for yourself an idol
2. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
3. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
4. Honor your Father and Mother
5. You shall not murder
6. You shall not commit adultery
7. You shall not steal
8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
9. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife

Right off the bat it is apparent that any laws which would attempt to enforce the first or second commandment would be in clear violation of the first amendment’s religious liberties clause. (”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”) Although I am sure lawmakers have attempted to make such laws, the fact that the founders were dedicated to religious liberty would preclude laws based in the first and second amendments from being within the spirit of the nation. That’s fine though, perhaps they just wanted to take the moral lessons from the commandments and leave out the first two.

So how about #3? There actually are “blue laws” in the United States related to businesses being open on Sundays, but they are generally struck down if challenged as they too seem to be violations of the religious liberty clause of the first amendment. The premise that the laws of the nation are based on the ten commandments can hardly be held up by some obscure laws generally seen as unconstitutional.

Despite what parents of disobedient children all over the country may wish, there is no legal way to enforce #4. Free speech and personal freedom give anyone the right to dishonor their mother and father as much as they see fit, as distasteful as it may be.

#5: no murder! There are certainly laws against this, so we’re at 1 for 5. Not only are there laws against it, murder would seem to violate the “right to life” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.

As for adultery, it’s true that there are some laws against it in some jurisdictions. The constitutionality of such laws is dubious, and enforcement is difficult. Also, the idea that this is something that the founders based our laws one seems dubious, and remember, the crime that Bill Clinton committed was perjury, not infidelity. (As a side note, apparently punishments in different states range from a $10 fine to potential life imprisonment) I’ll throw Huckabee a bone here and say we’re now at 1.5 out of 6.

#7 is about as easy as number five, stealing is generally recognized as illegal and a violation of the concept of personal property, something the founders clearly recognize as a right. For those keeping score, we’re now at 2.5 out of 7.

#8, Bearing false witness, aka lying, is another gray area. Under oath it’s illegal, but lying in most circumstances is not. In the interest of fairness, perhaps another half-point here.

The last two commandments, often viewed as one, instruct us not to covet our neighbors wife, house, or belongings. Apparently interpretations of covet vary from “envy” to “act to acquire.” Most Christian denominations use the envy definition, but it appears as if a common Jewish interpretation is that any act to acquire something envied is a violation. Neither of these cases is illegal. Legislating against envy would be to attempt to define a thoughtcrime, and even in the case of the alternative definition, asking your neighbor’s wife to leave him for you or offering your neighbor money for his home or oxen is not illegal, but certainly would constitute coveting.

Ultimately, 2 of the 10 commandments seem to be reflected in US law. Thou shall not murder and thou shall not steal. Bearing false witness and adultery are perhaps addressed as well. But that means at best 4 of the 10 commandments are reflected in the law. That hardly seems like an underlying basis. Also one would assume that most if not all pre-Christian societies had similar laws on murder and stealing, so the existence of such laws can hardly be seen as conclusive evidence of an attempt to codify the Ten Commandments into law.

While I said earlier I didn’t doubt Huckabee’s religious credentials, perhaps it is the legal credentials of those who make claims such as his that should be questioned.

Popularity: 7%

So the title of this post probably sounds a bit more ungrateful than I mean it.. it just astounds me that people still apparently are downloading ZEngine with some regularity.

A little over five years ago according to the CVS logs, I started a 2D game engine which due to my frustration with “all the cool names being taken” was named ZEngine. I was about 16 at the time and it was actually my second attempt at such an engine. ZEngine was designed to be cross-platform, easy to use, and extensible. I guess looking back for a 16 year old it wasn’t a bad job, but I haven’t really looked at the code in about two years, and I haven’t worked seriously on it in much longer than that.

I recently got a request from someone to use the name ZEngine, and I took a look at the Sourceforge project statistics to make sure nobody was actually using it. I knew there were still a few stragglers out there, I do get an email every now and then and usually have to apologize for my own ignorance and inability to answer their question. I found out that in an average month ~100 people still download it. Which may not sound like many but for an obscure and obsolete 2D game library doesn’t seem too bad.

As the chart above shows, most months there have been somewhere near 100 downloads of ZEngine.

The ZEngine front page clearly indicates that development stopped years ago and even redirects to a similar (but also abandoned) project of mine, photon. I haven’t had much luck finding if there are unknown references to ZEngine out there that people are following, or if they are finding it on it’s own. Either way I’d be interested to know who these people are and what they are doing. Is there still such a shortage of 2D game engines that ZEngine compares favorably to any of it’s competitors?

If you’re using ZEngine and find your way here somehow, post a comment or get in touch with me, I’d be interested to hear your answers to these questions. (But no, I probably can’t answer ZEngine questions anymore)

Popularity: 7%

Ok, I feel like there are a few posts that are almost required on a blog of this kind and it’ll help me get in the habit of posting to start with a few of them. So here it is, the obligatory tools post.

Hardware: My laptop is a PowerPro J 10:15, which is a Compal IFL90 sold by the great people at PowerPro. I bought my first laptop from them years ago and it served me amazingly well, and when it came time last month to replace it, I went back to them (I’m not a huge fan of their site, but once you get past that they have a well deserved great reputation). One of the most important things for me was that I could buy it without an OS installed, but their service and support is amazing, and the IFL90 is a nice looking notebook that has been performing amazingly well.

My mp3 player is a iRiver IHP-120 which has served me amazingly well for the last four years. It’s probably the oldest gadget I still actually use, but I use it constantly and despite looking pretty beat up it works about as well as it did the day I got it. Actually even better since being loaded with the rockbox custom firmware.

I also have a 22″ widescreen monitor that I got at an extreme discount but never actually use. In theory it was a second monitor for my laptop but in practice it sits unplugged in my room since I never got in the habit of using it.

OS: Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) I’ve used every edition of Ubuntu since 4.10, and it has been my primary OS since 5.04. When I got this laptop I left some unpartitioned space in case I decided to install Windows, but on my old laptop I hadn’t booted into the windows partition in about a year, so I’m not really sure if I’ll ever even bother.

Browser: Firefox. Notable extensions include Greasemonkey, Firebug, and the Web Developer Toolbar. I also use the Gmail Notifier, del.icio.us toolbar, and ForecastFox.

Development: For quick editing, I use GEdit or vim depending on the context. When I’m working on a real project lately I’ve been happy with Komodo Edit, the free version of the Komodo IDE. It has great Python support and is simple enough to be usable as opposed to a full blown IDE like Eclipse/PyDev. When I was using Java I did use Eclipse, but I feel that lightweight languages deserve lightweight editors. I also find Meld to be an invaluable tool, both for examining local files and using as an aid when dealing with directories under revision control (an oft-overlooked feature)

Media: I do actually still buy CDs, which I then rip with ripperX seeing as it just works where sound-juicer and others either aren’t flexible enough or take far too much configuration. I tag/organize things with easyTag and then play them with the terrific KDE music app amaroK. VLC is a must for playing videos/DVDs. On the rare occasions where I’m creating something I either fire up the old standby Gimp, or use the SVG drawing tool Inkscape, which has allowed me to make things that looked nice with my severely limited artistic talent.

Everything Else: I use Pidgin to stay in touch with people. From time to time I still fire up OpenOffice although I have been transitioning to Google Docs. When I’m writing things for school I prefer to use LaTeX and I typically do my editing in Kile, a superb KDE LaTeX editor. Google handles my email/calendaring needs (but I do have my GooCal imported into Evolution for it’s nice Gnome integration. Gnome Do, Tomboy, and Compiz’s window grouping plugin all deserve a mention here as well.

Popularity: 3%

This post is more for my own thoughts than anything else.  This is probably good considering the fact that nobody knows about the site yet.

I’m hoping that polimath will be a useful site both to me and to those who visit it.  In addition to putting things I learn or discover out there, I’m a strong believer in the value of two-way dialog and hope that the eventual visitors to my site will be of use to me, both in finding direction in my work, and in bringing new knowledge and viewpoints to the table.

The first order of business is getting the site to have a bit of content.  There are a few older projects of mine that it may be ok to reflect on, both to have a log of important lessons learned and to put a few posts in the archives.

After this is done I’ll have to decide what I want the site to look like, and begin writing on my current pursuits.  All of this is done with the hope that publicizing my attempts at work will make me more dedicated to it, which is a pretty big gamble.

And so, the experiment begins.

Popularity: 2%