Eric Dobbs Bloggeth

I have been forced to disable comments on the few posts on which I had allowed them. The administration required to deal with the incredibly annoying spam was just too much. Please communicate with me by email, for which there is a link on my general Web site.

Eric Dobbs

My Web hosting provider has given me a blog space. Oh, joy. They also provided me with the unbelievably infuriating WordPress blogging software. I cannot begin to tell you how annoying it is. Yes, I can. It is so annoying, I am thinking of abandoning the entire notion of using a blog with comment sections and all that nonsense and just starting a new section of my Web site for my ramblings using plain old nasty html and cascading style sheets.

It is now a few days later, and I have decided not to edit that first paragraph; however, I finally resolved the most annoying issue that I was having with Wordpress. That issue was how to make my first post always my first post and thereby an introduction to this blog. It was a needlessly complex struggle to do this, but it’s done now. Back to introducing the blog:

I don’t intend to accept comments at first. I have enough annoyances as it is without dealing with people who are crazier than I am. Besides, I majored in English in college, and I am a bit of an old fogey about spelling. From my very first evening on the Web way back in 1995, I was disappointed with the low level of discourse and the appalling spelling and bad grammar that I found. I am still reluctant to deal with people who won’t make the effort to use English at least passably well. Harrumph.

My first inclination is to make many of my posts new pages instead of “posts,” which seem to be whatever pops into the heads of most bloggers. The new pages will be relatively finished essays and comments. You will find these disquisitions over there to the right under “Pages.” Daily (or occasional) posts will be more along the line of the random emails I have sent friends over the years, directing them to strange, funny, or wonderful sites on the Web and other amusements.

Yours in grumpiness,

Eric Dobbs

© Eric Dobbs, 2006

I was thinking about the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial, and I wondered what other fundamental principles of the modern sciences may be in conflict with statements in Genesis or other parts of the Bible. The to-do over the theory of evolution by natural selection is the conflict that gets all the publicity, but there are others. If you start with the first chapter of Genesis, there is one inescapable conclusion you must draw about the basic structure of the Universe and its contents:

Space is full of water. Basically, space is water, or at least it was before it got a firmament stuck in the middle of it. Genesis 1:2 says “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Now, granted, this is space before there was anything in it, except God and whoever or whatever was there with him. So, next thing God does is create light. The earth was created in Genesis 1:1, along with heaven, but evidently it is a soggy mess. No dry land. Just a lot of lit up water. (Rather a pretty image, though.) The story is muddled, at least in the King James Version (very popular with fundamentalists, who seem to believe that God still speaks Jacobean English), because we get a day and a night before God suddenly remembers that the earth, which is apparently a lot of water is in the middle of more water (even if part of it is divided into illuminated water and the other part is still dark), needs some space in which to be a lot of water that is not in the middle of a lot of water. A firmament is created that divides the water. Genesis 1:6 and 7 have “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.” In the next verse, God decides that the firmament is heaven. This leads to the conclusion that the first verse was actually just a preface to the story, since the heaven and the earth do not have a truly separate existence until verses 6 and 7. Not until verses 9 and 10 do we get some dry land. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. Of course, the King James Version is notorious for its mistranslations and bungled syntax, but other translations seem to present a similar problem. Some of them call the firmament an “expanse.” Some call it space! The English Standard Version calls it space, but it has a footnote that says “or canopy.” My favorite is one called The Message, and I will quote the first few verses in full:

1 First this: God created the Heavens and Earth–all you see, all you don’t see.

2 Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.

3 God spoke: “Light!”

And light appeared.

4 God saw that light was good

and separated light from dark.

5 God named the light Day,

he named the dark Night.

It was evening, it was morning–

Day One.

6 God spoke: “Sky! In the middle of the waters;

separate water from water!”

7 God made sky.

He separated the water under sky

from the water above sky.

And there it was:

8 he named sky the Heavens;

It was evening, it was morning–

Day Two.

You have to admit that the image of God’s spirit brooding like a bird over the waters is poetically powerful; that is, until you visualize him as a great big buzzard. But this poetic mood is a bit stifled by the “Day One” and “Day Two,” which remind me of Ted Koppel’s count of the days in the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1981. The Geneva Bible, published in English by the Puritans in Geneva near the end of the 1500s has notes that attempt to explain what this is all about, but they are not much help. (It was these notes that so alarmed King James that he felt forced to publish the Bible in English in England). The Geneva Bible may be read here. In any case, no matter what word other translators use for what James’ translators called a firmament, it’s still in the middle of a lot of water.

Now, the watery universe appears in just these first few verses of Genesis. After that, it gets even more complicated, because apparently God starts over with the lighting and divides it up into sun, moon, and stars. I am not sure whether there is any later reference in the Bible to this huge amount of water that is surrounding the firmament, unless you count Chapter 7 when Noah and company are in the Ark and “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” In most of the story the flood is blamed on rain, but here the water seems to come from inside the earth as well as through the “windows of heaven,” which seem to be fenestrations in the firmament.

What does science have to say about the watery universe? Nothing I have ever read about astronomy, cosmology, or cosmogony suggests that there is any liquid water filling up space either within the visible universe (the firmament?) or beyond it. If the firmament is just a big bubble in the midst of a really huge amount of water, there is no sign of the outer limits of this bubble. Also, except for stars and other luminous objects in the sky, space is uniformly dark to the eye. It is not divided into a light part and a dark part. Apparently it is full of electromagnetic radiation in the one to three degrees Kelvin range, but this seems spread out and not limited to just half or a part of the universe. So, it appears that there is a fundamental conflict between observational astronomy and Genesis. There also seems to be a conflict between the theory of the origin of the universe that has currency among scientists at the moment, the Big Bang, and the first few verses of Genesis. The Big Bang is often described as a kind of “let there be light” event, but it takes place literally in the middle of nowhere and not in the middle of a lot of water. In any case, fundamentalists don’t fuss nearly as much about scientific theories of the origin of the universe, all of which conflict with the watery account in Genesis, as they do about the theory of evolution by natural selection. At least, at this writing I know of no suits brought objecting to the teaching of the scientific theories in the public schools or insisting that the Genesis account of cosmogony be taught alongside the Big Bang. To all but the most stubborn “flat earthers” and the like, the Copernican description of the solar system and orbital mechanics are accepted by anyone who believes that his television signals are coming from a satellite. So, it is an embarrassment to most fundamentalists to go after those ideas. So-called “creation science” focuses on the origin of life and the evolution of species, since so many people think that we are made in God’s own image, and descent from a common ancestor with apes just won’t do. (One wonders exactly which one of us looks most like Him, and how old God is supposed to look. As far as I can remember, the only actors recently cast in the movies as God were George Burns in Oh God! and Sir Ralph Richardson, in Time Bandits, as the Supreme Being).

Why are fundamentalists so focused on evolution? Why not the Big Bang? Why not any other scientific hypothesis about cosmic origins? As mentioned above, the notion of being a “monkey’s uncle” really seems to bother a lot of these folks. This does not stop most of them from taking antibiotics, getting vaccinations, and using the many other medical technologies that are the fruits of a biological science that is absolutely founded in the fact of evolution, whether the theory of natural selection explains it fully or not. Observation of nature has established that evolution is a fact for which natural selection is the best explanation available at this time. In the laboratory it has been shown that alleles (genetic characteristics, in brief) can become more predominant in a population of a species over time and in response to environmental changes. That is evolution, whether the individuals displaying the allele or alleles are members of a new species or not. Given enough time and enough new or altered alleles, a descendant individual would not be able to produce fertile offspring with its earlier progenitor, if it were available for breeding. Practically anyone familiar with the game would admit that if nature determined that winning at volleyball were favorable to the survival of individuals, we would become taller over time. The tall ones would live longer to breed more. The short ones would become rarer and probably eventually disappear. Why is this concept so upsetting to so many people? Many feel that their faith in God would be shaken, if they must accept that the stories in Genesis are mythological. Apparently, if it isn’t all true, then none of it is true. This is a huge demand to place on any body of written information, even if it is “revealed” scripture. Must we throw out the Encyclopaedia Britannica when we discover some factual errors in it? Are the ethical teachings of the Bible any less powerful, if God did not create the universe in seven calendar days? Is the Golden Rule any less valuable, because chimpanzees seem to adhere to it in ordering their social groups?

Of course, many of the foregoing are rhetorical questions. I do not understand why so many people cling so fiercely to mythological religion, and I am frankly struck dumb when I encounter such people. Where to begin to talk to them? We live in totally different paradigms, but I reject the notion that all paradigms are equally valid. If we are to live in the same society together, we must find a way to communicate, but I am puzzled as to how to begin. A friend of mine has suggested asking them whether they provide vaccinations and antibiotics to themselves and their children, but this might have the horrible consequence of these things being withheld from innocents. On the other hand, perhaps nature would then select them and their offspring out.

© Eric Dobbs, 2005

This was originally composed for a meeting of the Richmond Reason and Naturalism Association and read at a meeting of that organization in May of 2005.

I have occasionally referred to the value I place on those sensations of awe and wonder that so many consider limited to a conventionally religious context - that is, to a view of the world imbued with and inspired by conventional religion. I have also said that, if there is a God, He is most sincerely served and worshipped by those who labor in laboratories and observatories. While it is true that awe and wonder are usually a part of what is called a religious experience, I do not believe that a religious attitude or capability of feeling is limited to those who believe in a personified deity or the occult. The ability to stand in astonishment and wonder is fundamental to what we call human nature, just as curiosity is apparently fundamental to feline nature.

An appreciation of beauty is closely connected with the sense of awe and wonder, and at least part of the sensation of beauty lies in a sense of mystery. I refer to the notion that what we see or hear is not all there is to beauty, that something indefinable in the experience of beauty is more than the sum of the lines, the colors, the sounds, or the forms of what we perceive.

Of course, just about anything I can say has already been said better by someone else - in this case, no less than Albert Einstein, who wrote (in German originally),

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. … To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

also this: “The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future to him is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. A scientist’s religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.”

Now, we know from other writings of Einstein that he really was in no other way religious in the usual sense, no matter how close some of these words may come to suggesting a belief in an intelligent designer.

But the fact that Einstein and countless other scientists and rationalists have reserved the right to enjoy the awe and wonder that derive from the mystery of being suggests that there is something so powerful about this feeling that it can cloud the thinking of those less careful.

Indeed, I think the attraction of some religions and certainly various pseudo-sciences such as astrology and the like is that they feed the need for mystery. For such believers there is an “is that all there is?” reaction to the facts and explanations of science, no matter how mysterious things still remain in fact. The attraction of the occult is in its very meaning: hidden, closed off, beyond the natural reach of our senses. The fact that physicists accept the reality of entities that cannot actually be seen is not enough for these folks. Even the neutrino is not mysterious enough, because very large and expensive apparatus can actually detect it.

At the heart of these cravings for mystery and the root of the rejection of simple explanations is actually a need for the world to make sense, but not in the physical sense of why things fall when dropped or why heat flows to cold. The superstitious want answers to why their lives turned out the way they did, why they don’t get along with their lovers, why they have to die eventually. Ordinary cause and effect are just too mundane for the mysteries of human existence. To them the fact that we can think about the meaning of life must show that we are meant for something higher and better than that for which the rocks and the clouds exist. Superstitious people feel that explaining things scientifically leaves no room for escape from the ordinary. If our bodies are nothing but aggregations of carbon, oxygen, calcium, and so forth, and our minds are simply the collective effect of the flow of chemicals and electricity, how are we any different from the rocks and the clouds? It simply will not do that we are no different, except that we are more complicated.

I think it is incumbent upon rational people to make clear that the mystery of existence still remains, even when we can sing “twinkle twinkle little star, I know exactly what you are.” The fact that “all there is, seen and unseen” can be held in the three pounds of organized goo in one head should be mystery enough - as well as the fact that for every black box science opens, there is another inside. But the real wonder is that each of the boxes can actually be opened using the reason and skill that almost anyone can use in the clear light of day with enough work and enough patience. And that is both mysterious and beautiful.

Note: I am addicted to parentheticals and clauses within clauses. So shoot me and John Stuart Mill. In this post I have felt the need to use at least one footnote. It is indicated by a number one in brackets. The note is at the end of the post in italics.

Anyone who tries to keep up with current events finds that certain kinds of events creep into one’s consciousness unbidden. While trying to remain current in the fields of politics and economics, I find that I also learn about the lives of celebrities and the personal affairs of people in pursuits other than those that include actors, royalty, or other entertainers. At the time of this writing - mid-February, 2007 - I have come to reflect on the lives of three persons completely outside my personal ken: Anna Nicole Smith, Lisa Nowak, and Britney Spears. The travails of these three women have occupied a great deal of space and time in the news in all media during this month. One, Anna Nicole Smith, was a true celebrity in the sense that she seems to have become famous mainly for being famous. She was famous before she had done anything apart from being visually spectacular. Britney Spears seems to have some considerable talent as a dancer and evidently sufficient talent as a singer to become famous. Lisa Nowak did not become exactly a household word from her career as an astronaut, but her recent bizarre activities in connection with her love life have drawn great attention and not a little wonderment.

When I was younger, I probably would have taken a great deal of humorous delight in the lives and antics of these people, and I must confess that even now I am not immune to this impulse. When I first read of the Lisa Nowak incident on the Internet, I immediately sent the link in an email to some of my friends and my daughter with the subject line “happy Valentine’s month.” I hope I am learning a little better.

In the past few years I have been greatly disturbed by the growth of fundamentalist religious belief and practice in the United States as well as abroad. Religion is something that I either never really had or something that I lost so long ago that I had become unable to understand the minds of people who are religious, especially in the fundamentalist way that seems to abandon reason altogether. Trying to regain some understanding of the religious mind, I have taken up a long term investigation of religion and the philosophy of religion. In so doing, I have become much more familiar and conversant with the ideas of “eastern” religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. While I have not embraced any of these, I have been led by my readings on Buddhism to a deeper consideration of the virtue of compassion.

Compassion is the cardinal virtue of Buddhism, as far as I can tell. In some Buddhist sects, compassion has even been deified in the form of the celestial bodhisattva (a kind of Buddhist saint) Kwan Yin, or Avalokiteshvara, or Kanzeon, or any of several other names. Buddhist compassion embraces not only all human beings of past, present, and future, but all sentient beings together. It envisions all sentience as a unity; and so, no man is an island, and neither is a rabbit, a crab, or even a bedbug.

My own renewed consideration of the virtue of compassion is focused on human beings and what it means to be human. If this has anything to do with acquiring some knowledge of Buddhism, then I recommend the study of that way of thinking to everyone. It seems to have helped me to become a nicer and, I hope, better person. This has surprised me a little bit, but I now find that (usually) instead of snickering at the travails of Anna Nicole, Lisa Nowak, and Britney Spears, my first reaction is to say, “poor thing.” Instead of Schadenfreude, I am inspired to just plain old Schade (pity). Schadenfreude, literally “pity-joy,” is the secret satisfaction we feel at the same time as we feel normal sympathy with someone who has been brought low from on high. It arises from the sense that someone who has been raised above the common run of mankind (whether by merit, luck, or existing wealth) has been brought low by that person’s own weaknesses.

To see a person first as a fellow human being instead of as an icon of importance, nefariousness, beauty, fame, infamy, or virtue strips him or her as well as me of the clothes of reputation and social status. To see others in this way makes us both “thou” instead of “you” to each other. A word of explanation: contemporary English, almost alone of modern European languages, lacks a distinction in the second person pronouns between people we know intimately and those we don’t. In brief, that was the use of the “thou” form in English prior to the seventeenth century (although it held on in some populations during and after that). “Thou” and its inflected forms “thy” “thine,” and “thee” were used when addressing a person one would address by the first name, that is, intimates, children, servants, and God. A compassionate view of our fellows makes everyone “thee” (objective case). We become equals.

To have compassion means to share the suffering of others not as a co-victim but as one who feels their pain without directly enduring the experience that causes the pain. It also involves having at the same time a desire or wish to relieve the suffering, if possible. That is what the Latin parts of the word mean - “with-suffering.” It is closely related to “sympathy,” whose parts mean exactly the same thing in the ancient Greek language from which they come, except that the Greek word actually meant “sharing like feelings.” The “com-” and the “sym-” mean “with” or “together,” and the “pass-” and the “path-” mean “suffer” or “feel” (among other things) in their respective languages.

When I suggest here that I had feelings of compassion for the three women named above, I mean that my fundamental kernel of personality, my “soul” if you will, [1] identified with theirs in that it understood what each was putting hers through. I have the feeling that this part of the mind of any one of the above is (or was) filled with a constant and chaotic rushing sound - a sense of being in a storm over which there is no hope of control. I have had this sense in moments of prolonged crisis in my life, and I suspect that most people feel something very similar.

But enough of definitions of terms. I suppose the next question you might ask is whether I can apply this same compassion to those who may have hurt me as well as to strangers I will never meet. Good question. The honest answer is that it is very hard, but I have resolved to try. I haven’t yet decided whether compassion necessarily includes forgiveness.

What about monsters who commit horrendous crimes? At this time, I have an answer that may seem too easy. I think perhaps the most compassionate thing would be to put such people out of their misery: death by state action. How can that be compassionate? Well, I can have no idea what the innermost kernel of such persons may experience, but I think it must be a kind of continuing nightmare. Every mind is a world, and perhaps some worlds should be brought to an end before they have the chance to end other worlds that may be beautiful or simply ordinary.

In that case, what if Lisa Nowak had succeeded in her alleged intention to murder her rival? Another good question. Happily, she was not a competent murderer, and therefore, I don’t think she is a monster. Real monsters are uncommonly successful. I think she was in the throes of the common cold of mental illnesses called “romantic love.” When I read her story, I thought, “if you put crowns and robes on these people, you would have a first class Italian opera;” but the crowned heads of grand opera are usually rather efficient murderers. This disappointed woman only ended up with a highly unflattering mug shot on the Internet and not a poignant aria in which to disgorge her passionate jealousy, her longing, and her sorrow.

And all I could think was, “poor thing, poor soul.”

Technodysphoria

Okay, so I made up a word. But it is a word for a real thing, so someone had to do it. Definition: the mental and emotional strain caused by the conflict between the attraction to technology and the disappointment that it often engenders.

I am often called upon by friends and relatives to assist with anything having to do with computers and the Internet. For me personally this can be doubly stressful. I want very much to help as much as I can, so there is performance anxiety. I also find myself in the position of apologist for the annoying aspects of technology, which are numberless.

With respect to software, much annoyance arises from what the developers of the software think the user wants. Most users just want it to be easy to use, but they also want the program or service to do what they want in specific ways. Often a conflict arises between these. In order for software to be easy to use, many times the developer must create something that does what most people want and what most users have come to expect, and not necessarily what an actual end user wants to do. An individual user may want to depart from the path that the developer expects the user to take. I have in mind specifically blogging software.

Certain conventions have grown up about blogging. One of these conventions is that the most recent writing appears first on the first page the visitor sees. I guess this is fine from a journalistic point of view, but I want to know what the blog is generally about before I begin to read. Sometimes the first visible post gives little clue to the general subject matter of the blog. There is considerable variety in templates and general layout, so there is not always an “about” or other introductory material in a sidebar. When I began my own blog, I naturally (to me) assumed that it would be a simple matter to designate my first post as a kind of introduction to the blog in general.

But no. None of the templates I tried using the WordPress blogging software offered by my Website hosting provider allowed this “out of the box.” Only by installing a “plug-in” was I able to achieve this goal. Another irritant stemming from the former was that the WordPress system allows one to post one’s scribblings either as a “post” - the latest dispatch from one’s psychic front - or a “page,” which could be on any subject whatever but was outside the chronological flow of the posts. The problem is that the pages cannot be ordered under the “categories” that allow the reader to find the blogger’s posts that refer to one particular subject area. Only posts can be categorized - at least as far as I can understand from the instructions. Sigh.

A friend has faced other frustrations using the software supplied by Blogger. He publishes a blog covering classical music in general and classical music performances and events in the Virginia and Washington, DC areas. He wants to include images in his monthly calendar of events and quite naturally wants the images to be contiguous with the blocks of text they illustrate and that they should have captions. He knows nothing about HTML and doesn’t want to. This is where the software design for the masses conflicts with the desires of the individual user. The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that the latest version of Blogger supplies apparently does not allow the precise placement of images within text. One has to resort to HTML to do that, and then in order to control how the image is placed and how the caption text is formatted one may have to edit the cascading style sheet. Don’t know what a “cascading style sheet” is? Well, if one doesn’t, one has a fair amount of “learning curve” climbing to do.

And most users have enough learning curves in their lives already. The more they pile up, the more annoying each new one becomes. Part of the problem where software is concerned is that the visual presentation of programs has become so slick and sophisticated that the user naturally expects them to behave intelligently and flexibly. “Why won’t it do X?” “Why does it do Y?” These questions are usually voiced as if “it” is a recalcitrant being whose perverse refusal to read the user’s mind frustrates the user’s intentions. Anger ensues. There is a sense of having been misled or cheated. The sense of anger, disappointment, and frustration is what I have decided to call “technodysphoria.”

How to Avoid Technodysphoria:

1. Know your own expectations.
Think through in advance what you want to do with the software. Try to research the answers to certain questions that pertain to how you intend to use it and how you want your finished products to look - whether they are text documents, images, design projects, Web pages or whatever.

2. Remember that computers are not as smart as they appear to be.
As a matter of fact, a modern personal computer is about as smart as a cockroach, but that is smart enough for your laptop to be able to operate the entire global positioning satellite system. They are really good at math, which is all they actually do. And all they do in math is add up numbers by ones (positive and negative) really, really fast. They treat all mathematical functions as variations on adding - at least that is what I am told. What they are NOT good at is devising solutions to novel situations. This is what humans expect of “intelligence,” and computers don’t have a lot of it. What they have is hardware that uses sets of instructions (programs) about how to add up lots of negative and positive ones in order to calculate things that don’t look very mathematical - like the words in this essay.

3. Give the program a honeymoon period.
Don’t get all in a swivet, if the program does not appear able to do some particular thing that you would like it to do. Possibly the behavior you desire of the program is not really necessary to achieve your major goal; but if it is, you may need to look at another way of getting there. Don’t jump to conclusions. Sometimes the developer (programmer) has failed to make a feature or command intuitively usable. You may have to hunt for the function you want. You may have to go to user forums and then try to figure out what the advice means. The folks who answer your plaintive queries often assume that you know almost as much as they do, but not quite.

4. When a problem seems intractable, have a drink.
If you don’t drink, do something else for a while. Get away from the computer and take a walk. Pet the cat. Better yet, take a nap or go to bed. Have you looked at the clock? Did you realize it was 3:00AM? Sometimes the solution has been staring you in the face, and you were just too wrought up to see it. Getting away from it for a while may make it obvious when you return. My mind continues working on problems when I am not conscious of it. Very often, when I return to a problem after a respite, the answer seems obvious.

5. Embrace Buddhism.
Well, maybe not. But Buddhism teaches the importance of non-attachment, which is the avoidance of identifying your self with the possession or attainment of some desired object, be it a person, object, or intention. The essence of it is “lighten up.”

6. Decide whether you want to acquire a necessary new skill.
You have found that the program or “solution” in its “easy” form does not offer the way to your ends; however, you have also found that some more “manual” method is available. In the case of blogging or using ready-made templates for Web pages, this involves learning at least a little HTML (Hypertext Mark Up Language) or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). In other programs it may mean learning to program your own “macros.” It may also be that the functionality you are looking for is available in another program, which means you must often …

7. Cough up more money.
Sometimes solutions are free because the developers are not motivated by money. Often these are produced by the Open Source community or by people who are coding for the sheer intellectual thrill of it. These programs may or may not be well documented, and you may be on your own figuring out how they work. Where Web development is concerned, you may have to spend a fair amount of money for the easy to use interface that is supposed to make building Web pages easier. The irony is that to take full advantage of expensive programs, a “learning curve” must be climbed. But the learning curve usually involves mastering the myriad commands available through the program’s “easy” user interface and not the acquisition of skills in an actual language for mark up or programming.

A computer is only a few steps away from a shovel in terms of sophistication as a tool. In fact, it is a sort of lever, and even a lever that offers the most extreme mechanical advantage requires some exertion. Blame Eve.