I often tell my wife that cognitive dissonance makes the world go round. When people encounter facts that are opposite their beliefs, they adjust their mental model to rationalize things, or simply ignore the new facts. There are plenty of Arabs and Muslims who believed that Saddam Hussein wasn’t such a bad guy, mainly because he opposed the Americans and because he was a staunch backer of the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel. Cognitive dissonance enabled (or, rather, forced) them to rationalize the fact that he horribly mistreated his own people, fellow Muslims, because he was probably the Arab leader who most strongly stood against things that they wanted to someone powerful to stand against.

Last night I had the horrible misfortune of watching 15 minutes or so of Fox News while waiting for takeout. They cited a poll in which 62% of Americans said that we can declare victory even if “weapons of mass destruction” are never found. Of course most people say that — the war is already all but won and who doesn’t want to declare victory at this point? Just as we can look at the typical Arab reaction and see cognitive dissonance is the prime mover, so too can we look at these poll results and see exactly the same thing. The poll also shows that 81% support taking military action against Iraq. Again, what’s the surprise there? We’ve already taken military action and we have, for all intents and purposes, already won. Again, cognitive dissonance at work. Is it too much to ask for polls that actually give us some illuminating information?

Anyway, once I learned what cognitive dissonance was, I became almost infinitely fascinated with it. In fact, my favorite moments come when I realize that it’s having an effect on me. When someone I admire does something really stupid, embarrassing, or malicious, and I start making excuses to myself on their behalf, I always get a little chuckle about good ol’ cognitive dissonance. Try it, you may enjoy it too.

Do meta tags still work for any search engines? It seems to me that these days they’re like little idols for marketing people. They don’t actually do anything, but if you don’t carry them around with you everywhere you go, evil spirits may get you. Maybe I’m totally wrong, but it just strikes me that they’re no good any more. I can’t imagine any reason why someone writing a search engine indexer would pay a whit of attention to them these days.

Salon has yet another interview with Paul Berman today.

There’s a special place in hell reserved for those people who use feigned concern for the injustices heaped upon the Iraqi people to bludgeon those who made arguments against the war in Iraq. To those people, I would ask what makes the Iraqi people special when you make it obvious that you don’t give a crap about the billions of other impoverished, oppressed, and miserable people around the world.

I maintain a Yahoo Mail account, even though I never use it for anything. Despite the existence of “SpamGuard,” Yahoo’s spam filter, it still fills up with spam on a regular basis. Every once in awhile, I go through and click on “This is spam” on every message in my in box in hopes of improving their spam filter, but things just don’t seem to be working out. In fact, the spam I get at my Yahoo account is not only the most obvious sort of spam, but also comes from the same people over and over and over. I kind of wonder what sort of spam blocker they’re using — both SpamAssassin and the Mozilla spam filter are working pretty darn well for me, so I have trouble seeing how they could be having such problems. I imagine it is a design consideration of some kind given their user base, but for somebody who gets nothing but spam in their mailbox, it’s very frustrating.

Coming this weekend — a rousing defense of the unfairly maligned Robert Fisk.

Stop what you’re doing and check out the weblog of Stuart Hughes, a BBC correspondent in Northern Iraq. He went from reporting on the war to reporting on his personal struggle as he deals with being grievously wounded by a landmine and accepting the fact that he’ll lose his foot to amputation. My heart goes out to Hughes, and I can’t help but think of how many people will lose so much to this war, and how many people have met Hughes’ fate in heavily mined countries like Cambodia and Angola. In some ways, Hughes is lucky — his colleague Kaveh Golestan lost his life in the incident.

Marines have discovered lots of tunnels under the town of al Tuwaitha, which was the home of Iraq’s “nuclear energy agency.” If we find proof of a current Iraqi nuclear weapons program, this is probably where it will be.

IBM Developer Works has an interview with Grady Booch. He has some mildy interesting things to say, and tries yet again to explain aspect oriented programming. Unfortunately, I still don’t exactly get it. Here’s his description:

Moreover, if I polish off my crystal ball I foresee the rise of aspect-oriented programming (see Resources). Today’s large software systems, systems of quality economic value, include tens of thousands of moving parts, so we tend to never turn them off.

This is easy enough to understand. Total agreement here.

Therefore, the challenge becomes how to morph such systems without turning them off and yet add value with many stakeholders as part of the solution. Stakeholders can range from graphic artists, to network types, to security people, to business experts.

So he’s saying that we need a way to make changes to systems that have to have as close to 100% uptime as possible. I’ll buy that. It would be great to have a way to improve existing systems without taking them down or more often, completely rewriting them using the latest and greatest tools.

In such cases, you can’t face the problem as a traditional programming problem. In fact, you’re no longer building a program — it’s morphing parts of a large system with those parts interconnected with each other.

So the problem aspect oriented programming attempts to address is modifying a part of an interconnected system without having to make changes to the other parts that are connected to the part that you’re changing?

In that context, with aspects you build those systems from threads that cross-cut through those pieces and let domain experts from those particular views express an aspect. In the next two years or so I think aspect-oriented programming will bear fruit in testing, deployment, and business rules.

Here’s where I get confused. Don’t we already build systems using “threads” that cross-cut through various parts of a system? I’m not sure what “thread” means in this context, but when I build a large application, I use a common logging system for all parts, a commond database driver for all parts, and many other common pieces of all parts. I generally refer to these pieces as libraries. How is an “aspect” different? How is abstraction achieved so that you can modify one of these so-called “threads” without changing everything that uses it? Let’s say changes are made to my logging system of choice — log4j. Either the changes are all internal and the outward facing interfaces remain the same, or the change is radical enough that the interface changes. If the API doesn’t change, I can probably just drop it in and reap the benefits. If the API changes, everything that calls that API has to be updated. How does a logging “aspect” differ? Is there something going on here on the tools side that enables the application that uses the aspect to be modified on the fly to take advantage of changes to the logging system’s API?

Not much to say about this other than free Mike Hawash. Or at least grant him his basic constitutional rights as a citizen of this country.

Update: a reader sent me a link to a Mike Hawash support site conveniently located at freemikehawash.org.