A Meme from dpaxson

[lwood]

Edited from this post by dpaxson--post it, spread it, pass it on!

As you call on the ancestors this Samhain/Winternights/All Hallows/etc, pay some extra attention to our American heroes and heroines, who fought for liberty and justice in their various ways, and surely have an interest in preserving them.

The immediate problem is the election--not so much who is going to get the most votes, but whether all those votes will be correctly counted. I'm willing to bow to the will of the People, but I want to make sure that the published results in fact express it.

My plan for the next week or so is to spend some time every evening visualizing Lady Liberty shining her torch across the land. As that light penetrates every dark corner, it banishes fear, confusion, and deception. I ask her not only to inspire people to vote for the laws and candidates that will be best for the country, but to illuminate the vote-counting process so that the true will of the people is known.

If you like this idea, spread the word. The more of us who hold that image, the more powerful it will be.

God(s) bless America.

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

The immediate problem is the election--not so much who is going to get the most votes, but whether all those votes will be correctly counted. I'm willing to bow to the will of the People, but I want to make sure that the published results in fact express it.

As I read dpaxson's post, it occurred to me that it would probably also be appropriate to invoke Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, Claude Shannon and John von Neumann. (Turing and Church independently came up with different but equivalent methods of modeling universal computation and the limits of computability; Shannon came up with information theory and laid down the foundations of using electronics to model Boolean algebra, aka "how we have CPUs at all"; von Neumann, who emigrated to the US from Hungary, invented the single-address-space architecture which all modern computers use.)

After all, dozens of states use electronic voting now, and I suspect the Alfar of computing are not pleased with the smear that Diebold et al. have put upon their names.

(I would also suggest David Chaum, father of secure electronic voting, but he is most assuredly not dead yet.)

It occurs to me that Alan Turing might also take a vested interest in the outcome of Prop 8.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Absolutely--the geekalfár (nerdalfár sounds more Germanic, but is less flattering) in no wise ought to be excluded.

It's choosing a set that would be a challenge. My very vague qualifications for saint/álf/etc include:

1. Is not known to be fictional. Preferably "is historically known to have lived a human life", but legends grant any number of corner cases. Herakles is a member of this set^*. This is the "no Superman" rule. There's a place for known-fictional characters, archetypes as expressed through modern cultural lenses and all that, but this isn't it.


2. Is known among some set of modern devotés in a way that somehow reflects who they were in life, e.g. asking Elizabeth Zimmerman for knitting advice. Some inflation and exaggeration of historical fact is expected along these lines and is not only appropriate, but may be integral to the process.


3. Is not known to be dismissive of such inquiries--while on the surface that's "no atheists", I'm skirting close to this by invoking a pile of Enlightenment-era Deists (http://www.freedomfathers.com/).

So--given all that, I'm all for coming up with geek saints, and think that would be a brilliant idea. That said, I haven't made it a point to look up to people in this, but more systems and ideas. The idea of Open Source is, after all, bigger than any of its proponents, and I can appreciate it in its own light without trying to hang a human (and likely still living) face on it.

-- Lorrie