How did I do it? Well…

It was Monday night, after class. We both got done around 8:00 and headed home. While Joni waited unsuspectingly at home, I set my plan into action. After getting everything set up, I called her and asked her to come over.

I intercepted her before she got to my place, and I told her I had to mail a package. The post office is just a couple buildings down, so we made the walk down there. On our return, we walked through the water park, just by my building. You can see it on the map above – it’s the circle below the stick figures.

As we passed through the park, I reached into my pocket and with my iPhone, signaled the show to start. I pointed at the building across the street, where big strange white boxes were flying across the building. It was mysterious, but clearly patterned. Then it stopped, and in giant letters across the building we saw this:

2 years, 2 months, 27 days, 20 hours

7 months, 19 days, 9 hours

It was how long we had known each other and how long we had been dating, respectively. As I narrated the display, Joni realized what was going on. Next we saw words that reminded us of places we had been, things we had experienced and other things that we have shared: Munich, 1L year, Punkin Chunkin, etc.

This is the building:

Next, the side of the building turned into a re-enactment of a conversation I had with Chris Landrigan just a couple days before I asked Joni out for the first time. It went something like this:

Chris: yo – so you and joni should go out

me: wait… what?

[...]

me: i definitely don’t want to miss an opportunity here by letting it pass

So with “I LOVE YOU JONI” in giant letters, music playing in the water park, and among the trees, I got down on one knee, presented a ring and asked Joni to marry me. She managed to get the first two letters of YES! out.

We couldn’t be happier. This has been a long time in the making, and I’m so glad to be at this point now. Joni is amazing and I look forward to getting married next year!

I found a nerdy solution to the problem. Since most of those annoying “playlists” found on blogspot blogs all come from playlist.com, you can eliminate most of the problem with this command (for fellow mac users):

ipfw add deny tcp from any to 66.97.180.235

That’s it. They seemingly have dozens of domains, all pointing to that single IP. Block outbound traffic to the IP, and you’ll be free of that awful music people think you want to hear.

Windows users, try adding these lines to your c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file:

# stop stupid blog music insanity

127.0.0.2 www.greatprofilemusic.com

127.0.0.2 www.myplaylist.org www.profileplaylist.net

127.0.0.2 www.playlistproject.net

127.0.0.2 www.mp3asset.com

There are more domains than that, but I got tired of looking for them. Blocking the IP above is the best way to go.

Consider a black box. The box takes, as inputs, a number of things. As output, the box produces some output that is both expected and desired. How the box works and what’s inside of it is of no moment. What matters, for now, is whether it works or not.

Not understanding the inner workings, the only way to properly test the operation of the box is by observation. Put in some expected inputs and see if you get the right output. If the box works on the expected cases, then you have, in the least, a mediocre box.

The greatness of the box (and its component parts and design) is evidenced at the boundaries and the extremes – not in the predictable. So give to the box something quite unexpected. If, for example, you were supplying numbers, give really big numbers, followed by the number zero and some negative numbers. If the black box still produces the correct and intended result, then you have a superior box.

A poor designer, after finding that some inputs produce the wrong answer, will look to create exceptions, carve-outs and work-arounds for such inputs. The engineer should instead recognize that his design is flawed and change the contents of his black box or how they operate.

A perfect black box will work in every situation, on any input and will always produce the right answer.

The Church as an Organization

Today, at church, I taught about the organization and destiny of the church. Merely as a way to frame my thinking about the organization of the church, I considered it a black box.

The Church of Christ is necessarily the perfect organization. It takes, as inputs, every time period, every culture and every one. The Church has to take all these varied inputs, and perform the exact same operation on all of them, and lead them all to salvation. See Acts 10:34 (God is no respecter of persons); Malachi 3:6 (God doesn’t change); Moses 1:39 (God’s work is to bring eternal life and immortality to all).

God, as the architect of our salvation, has created a plan and has organized a way to bring salvation to His children. This organized way is His church and has been established at various times throughout history. But the Church has not changed. We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, namely, apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth. Article of Faith 6. And so, regardless of the historical input or scenario, the Church has not changed. That same organization which existed at the time of Christ exists again – unchanged.  And given different historical inputs, it still produces the right output.

The Church has grown from just a few members to include millions across the world. The input changes from a few people to millions. It changes from a small community, to dozens of nations. The politics, economics and culture vary across the inputs. But the Church doesn’t need to change. It continues to grow and produce the same results it always has.

Those same observations about the inputs generally are true about individuals specifically. Everyone needs to be able to come inside, receive the same treatment and eventually gain the same promise of salvation.

The Automaton

Let’s now peer inside the black box and consider why it works. This is also where the discussion turns irreversibly nerdy. I will now consider the black box in computing terms – that of algorithms and data structures. Inputs will come in, they will be operated upon, then output.

The principles of computing are based on the idea that you can have states and transitions. Any computing operation can be defined in this way, no matter how complicated. At the most fundamental level, it is asking the question, “I’m here. Where do I go next?” Usually, you know where to go based on something about yourself. “What color am I? If I’m red, go here. Otherwise, go there.”

From any given state, you can follow a particular transition and arrive at a new state. When you’re at a state, and there are rules about which transition to take, you are considered to be deterministic. That is, given some facts about you, your next step is determined beforehand. “I’m green, so I’ll go here.”

But we don’t always know everything. Sometimes, we just want things to progress to the right state. “If I’m going to turn blue in the future, I’ll go this way.” Not knowing beforehand the transition you will make, you take a nondeterministic step. But the key is taking the right step, based on what will happen in the future. Eventually, that step will lead to the right result, thus making each nondeterministic step the right one.

A state diagram from Wikipedia illustrates a nondeterministic step (they are the epsilon transitions from S0):

How the Black Box Church Operates

But how do you know which step is the right one? Based on your current state and what you know about yourself, you can’t know which step is the right one. Sure, you can use intuition or even good guessing, but this leads to the condition described in Ephesians 4:14 (being tossed about by every wind of doctrine).

You need to know the end from the beginning. See Abraham 2:8. The element in our black box that makes this all work is revelation. The Holy Ghost can inspire our minds with which step will, in our eventual hindsight, turn out to be the right one.

As an organization, the Church must have revelation to know what to do. The eternal doctrines of the Gospel define which states are available (that’s why it’s a finite state automata – the doctrine only allows for certain things to happen). The Spirit directs which step to take. This produces the right result, every time, no matter what state you’re in.

This principle is true for individuals, and applicable to the organization of the church. It has a structure, and a defined way of operating. But there are choices to be made – inputs are rarely, if ever, the same. In computing we might just guess at different options, or try them all (like doing Sudoku). But “God does not play dice with the universe” as Einstein said.

Conclusion

The Church is perfect. It does not, and will not, need to change. God gave it the ability to operate in any circumstance. But it is not a rigid structure, with everything defined beforehand. Rather, it is able to operate by continuing revelation to those appointed to lead it. Because of that, it will always produce the right result.

The other night I was thinking about a friend who shares an email account with his wife. I know there are a lot of efficiencies that come from sharing – but does that apply online, when things are free and no real resources are consumed? Sharing an email account seemed more like a bother than anything. Do I write to both of them? Then who responds? Do they have to confer?

Couples share blogs, too, and this is pretty common. But again, rather than having separate authoring accounts, every post comes from Jim & Kathy, Susan & Richard, Bramlet & Chartreuse. That doesn’t make sense. Let’s be honest – it’s the wife writing it.

I started seeing shared profiles on facebook recently, too. Facebook even provides a way to link profiles through a marriage indicator. I didn’t go to high school with both of you – that just doesn’t make sense. Again.

So I decided to see if my friend with the shared email account had a blog. I took a pretty good guess that it would be his_nameandher_name.blogspot.com. The site existed, but it wasn’t them. Surprise. Frankly, it might as well have been them. I can’t tell the difference between most personal blogs anyway – more on that later.

But I wondered – how interconnected are all these silly blogs? People tend to link to the blogs of their friends. But friends seem to form circles. So, the big question: is there enough overlap, that I could navigate from a random blog back to my own?

There’s only one way to find out, really. So I developed a heuristic [from computing: proceeding by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined] for how to traverse the blog-space:

• Prefer last names that I know
• Prefer geographical locations where I have a connection
• Prefer other commonalities
• Prefer anything familiar
• Don’t follow links already followed (obvious) [cycles don't help anyone here]

[nerdy: If you consider blogs a tree, I was doing a depth-first pre-order traversal, with a self-imposed depth when I felt I wasn't getting anywhere. But if you consider blogs a tree, you're crazy. Obviously a tree isn't the right topology for how the blogs are connected. They're more like a disconnected graph (and therefore I was doing a Prim-Jarnik traversal?). I suggest they're disconnected because it's certainly not a complete graph and I don't believe every blog is connected - unless you count google as some kind of super-node, but google isn't a blog. Really, I was building a minimum spanning tree representing my paths. And I think anyone with even the simplest of advanced degrees in computer science would recognize that. ;) And that's an allusion to a line from Simpsons, to take this nerdy post up another notch.]

So I started clicking on links. I obviously had no idea how long it would take. [nerdy: Worst-case big-O(time) would look like the number of all connected nodes to that particular blog, which is not just unknown but potentially huge.] At first I had no hope that it would actually work. But I stuck to my rules, and kept clicking.

I was so shocked that only 37 blogs later I had connected back to my own blog. Now, that was 37 trials [there were 37 nodes on my constructed tree]. But if you follow the direct path, I was only 15 steps away from my own blog [15 nodes on the tree before reducing it].

Would you have guessed that? That is, from a random blog, I was only 15 clicks away. It may actually be fewer clicks if I took different paths and found a shorter one [a reductive step].

What did I learn along my journey?

• Blogs look the same.
• For some reason, when people decide to have music on their blog, it’s usually country – so, doubly obnoxious.
• People blog about really mundane things. I wasn’t reading blogs as I went, but I could tell it was nothing exciting. But while neither I nor the internet at large cares about what people are doing – whoever is reading that blog does. That is, I care about what my sister is doing, but I don’t care what your sister is doing – unless you’re my other sister.
• People have strange last names.

[Edit: Ok, I realized that it's not necessarily a Prim-Jarnik algorithm. That would be used on a weighted graph, which this isn't. All paths here have equal weight. And this exercise was more about searching than about finding minimum-paths.]

I got tired of constantly checking for new grades. I wrote some software that does the job for me. It worked well enough that I thought I’d share it. So I created a little website where GW students can sign up and have my system automatically check for them. When new grades arrive, they can receive notification via email or SMS. It’s pretty sweet.

The biggest drawback is that in order for my system to check grades for them, they have to hand over their sacred login credentials. Yikes. I think that’s going to be a problem. So my next version will allow people to download the software itself and put their login info into that so it never leaves their hands.

In the meantime, it’s been more than a month since we started finals. We’re still waiting on a couple grades – I’m looking in your direction, Civ Pro II and Property.

Here’s what I got when I installed Visual Studio 2005 in Vista: