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Ask the hard questions. Turn over that rock and look at the bugs, and you might find something interesting. I guess that's what the article boils down to for me. Don't know if I'm getting out of it what Graham put in it, but what I think of after reading it is "Seek and ye shall find... something."

Learning to ask taboo questions was a big factor in my faith journey. I always used to get worked up when people posed tough questions that challenged my faith. At one point in my late college years, I realized the reason was not only that I didn't know the answers, but that I hadn't even been willing to let myself ask the questions.

After that I resolved to ask all those heretical questions of my pastors, not to trip them up or throw them, but because I wanted to understand more. Now I find myself in a strange nether-world between fundamentalists who think you should never admit any doubt, and liberal Christians or secular humanists who are all about asking questions ("Question Everything") but who don't believe in seeking answers. "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" is a good way to put it. Neither side is a good fit, and I don't really feel accepted anywhere. Oh well, always been a geek, and hope I'll always be one.

Another place where I find myself asking heretical questions is when I'm in a group in conflict with another group. Sometimes I'm compelled to ask people my group questions that I expect the other group would ask. What if they're right about this and we're not? What if they have a point here? It's partly a strategy to try and anticipate challenges and attacks, but it's also an attempt to stay humble and to remember that the other side is composed of real people with real feelings.

This faith and peacemaking stuff is totally not where Graham went with his essay, though. Or maybe not. Whatever. But you should check it out, it's a good read, it'll make you think.

Tyler, Jason, and Diane each take different paths in dealing with the possible end of the world (or the "rapture-for-scientists", to borrow Ken MacLeod's turn of phrase). Diane falls into a millenarist Christianity that goes through several phases when the world doesn't end as immediately as they expect. Jason pursues science and tries to find some sort of solution, and Tyler takes a middle road into medicine, serving as a bridge between the two and the reader's window into the story.

As a moderate Christian, I appreciated Wilson's treatment of religion. I often cringe when I have to wade through SF authors' naive or even malicious caricatures of foaming-at-the-mouth religious lunatics. Surprisingly, Carl Sagan, that scourge of religious conservatives, is one of the few exceptions to this rule. In `Contact <http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780671004101>`_, main character Ellie interacts with a fundamentalist preacher who turns out to be surprisingly sympathetic and has a scientist colleague (appropriately named Valerian) who has a pretty balanced view of religion and science. Perhaps Sagan's wife Ann Druyan (credited as a co-author on an early paperpack edition of Contact) had some influence on him in his later years. Anyway, in Spin, Wilson shows that he is either on friendly terms with some Christians, or has done his homework, or at least doesn't feel like he has an axe to grind. He does put the word 'chiliasm' in his characters' mouths quite a bit, though, which I'm pretty sure I've never heard except from anthropologists, seminarians, or SF writers.

There aren't any fancy ray-guns or jetpacks in Spin, but there are some big, juicy cosmological ideas here, revealed deftly and which I don't want to spoil for you. Come to think of it, the book reminds me of Contact on several levels, and that's a good thing. I really enjoyed this book, and I recommend it to any and all, though maybe not to Charles Stross. :)

As an afterward, I got this book as a free download from publisher Tor back in July. It was some kind of promotion, so I don't know if it's still available, but definitely check it out. Tor seems like a really interesting publisher, doing cool things like releasing Cory Doctorow's Little Brother under a Creative Commons license. I'm definitely going to look for more of Wilson's work - Spin was a nice read.

This is not the place to explain free/open-source software - I'll leave that to others.

Broadly, the history of mainframes, personal computers, and web applications is a cycle of centralization, de-centralization, and now a re-centralization. Before PCs, computers were huge, expensive, centralized systems that were jealously guarded. A lot of the fervor over personal computers was about empowerment - individual people could now operate and have control over their own computer, pushing power away from the center. With the rise of the Internet and especially the Web, we started to hear about network effects - the idea that when you hook computers together they become even more powerful and useful. There was interconnection but also democratization (and manifestos that seem quaint today but were really inspiring back then). The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system, and it was supposed to upset the balance of power.

The so-called Web 2.0 made the internet even more useful in many ways - it enabled collaboration on a huge scale and let us access our data from anywhere. It also brought the idea of the social graph or social networking to our attention. But it also marks a huge re-centralization. Instead of keeping our data on our own personal computers (or before that, in files) and under our own control, we've started to disperse our data across the net in various web sites. True, this is still decentralized in a way (multiple web sites), but each of these sites represents one central entity controlling many users' data.

We've done this mainly because it's convenient and/or useful - we can access email from any web browser rather than having to go home or carry a laptop. But we also give away control over our data. Most cases companies use this data for benign purposes, such as gathering aggregate marketing data to sell to pay the bills. But web sites can be hacked and web companies can go bankrupt or get acquired by less scrupulous companies.

Recently, groups such as autonomo.us have started to look for ways to decentralize things again. It seems to me that the conversation is mainly about changing free/open-source licenses so web sites have to publish their source code and provide APIs or import/export functions so users can retrieve their data. To me this is great but also unsatisfying.

Which brings me to my point:

What if we could have both the decentralization advantages of personal computers and the network effects of the internet and Web2.0, but without the centralization of Big Data? What if individual users could have web applications that they could control themselves, but which enabled them to access their data from anywhere and control who else had access to it? What if all these personal web apps could talk to each other and create a decentralized social graph that's under the control of users rather than a company?