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Posts Tagged as ‘ideals’

The New Culture of Spam

Feb 03 2011

I realize I’m not the first one to talk about this, (see Cory Doctorow’s thoughts on the subject), but the nature of the internet and spam have changed over the years.

It used to be that you protected your e-mail address as though it were the most secretive information in the universe, next to the last four digits of your social and your weight (and/or age, depending on your gender and personality). But, just like the last four digits of your social, your weight, your age, and even probably about how much money you make, your info is all over the freaking place. But this isn’t just the case on e-mail, it is the case with blogs, forums, and any form of communication which would ever require a turing test. As of right now, I have about 200 comments on my blog, and only 4 of them are legitimate. So how did people fight this?

  1. Obfuscate your e-mail address like name (at) domain (dot) com.
  2. Turn off comments on your blog.
  3. Employ a site admin, moderator, or other full/part-time culler of the wheat from the chaff (or the spam from the real meat, whichever analogy fits your dietary restrictions best).
  4. Use the aforementioned turing test anywhere that allows human input.
  5. Automation.

The problem we have with every one of these is that they are all treatments for symptoms of an underlying disease. As far as which of these symptom treatments works best?
The shortest and last one, of course! The 200 comments on my blog, around 190ish of which are marked spam, were filtered by a plug-in most wordpressers know as Akismet. My public e-mail (nathan@nathanstpierre.com, btw) is in no way obfuscated or filtered, because it goes through g-mail, which has (as far as I’ve seen) the most intricate spam filtering system available to a public mail system. As Mr. Doctorow so intellectually pointed out, these systems exist for exactly this reason, so why not utilize them?

That being said : I still think the underlying disease goes untreated. Unfortunately, this disease is the same one that ruined the old-school forums, social media (MySpace whores anyone?), and even legitimate community tools (buy something from someone who’s not a Nigerian in Craig’s List. I dare you.). It is the chief weakness and strength of the Internet: freedom. The freedom of an open and endless system is that you end up ultimately having to be at the mercy of the demographic that utilizes it.

Great examples of the successes of this philosophy include Open Source (none of us is as smart as all of us), Wikipedia (the nice people who care will ultimately win out over the jerks, because they are not doing the easy thing, they’re doing the thing they care about). The failures of this freedom are pretty much the inverse: Reporting of false information on national TV thanks to the Bogus Blogosphere, entire systems being overrun by spammers (Google groups anyone?) and so forth. So is there a cure?

In the spirit of presenting a solution rather than a problem, I suggest a change. Not a change in software or business models, a change in philosophy. We once thought the internet was too massive and too free to infringe upon, but YouTube shattered that preconception to me when they freaking scanned a video for copyrighted material. Could software ultimately determine what’s spam and what’s legit and be a part of every ISP’s basic network protocol, insta-deleting anything that clutters their domains with horrendous spam? Potentially. But should it?

Honestly that kind of big brother dystopia –which would likely lead to my favorite cyberpunk plots being possible– makes me think that’s the more mechanical answer, which completely ignores the spirit of the issue, which is a cultural question. The culture of the internet has become beneficial to spam.

But this is a blog about web development! you say? How does being a hippie and talking about working for a new society help anything?

Well, algorithms are great, but as Google is finding out, they’re not the answer to everything (or what we call a silver bullet). For more information on an example where someone gamed Google’s algorithm in a seriously negative manner, check out the story of DecorMyEyes. To summarize: a shady businessman discovered that Google ranks things based on how often people mention your site, along with certain search terms. So he discovered that people blasting him on a thousand ripoff sites about his failure to manage their (insert glasses brand name here) order the correct way, would cause his site to show up first for someone looking for (insert brand name here) and/or “glasses.” Google’s response? Essentially, change the algorithm (to see their actual response read here).

… in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

Is this a good solution? Honestly, it’s probably the best solution given the situation. They explain this in the article, but they point out that just blocking this person or using sentiment analysis (filter of good vs. bad reviews) could cause the inverse problem to happen: game the system and post a million bad reviews of Best Buy and suddenly they never show up in Google searches for Best Buy.

But what’s happened pretty recently with them and Microsoft’s Bing makes me think the algorithm isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
If you haven’t heard the latest news, check out this article from Seattle’s own KIRO TV. Essentially, Google set up a “honeypot” by putting out some completely random result sets for random character searches, and Bing turned up the same results. Now unless they figured out how to steal one of the most carefully guarded algorithms in the tech industry, I highly doubt this would happen as a freak accident. It’s pretty clear Microsoft is doing something sketchy. Whether they are or not, let’s say someone at some point did. This would prove my point: the world ultimately doesn’t care whose algorithm it is. If you can steal it, where’s the incentive not to?

So we come back to the issue: the culture of spam. As YouTube discovered (I’m sure through Google’s technology), there are ways to automatically figure these things out. As I said before, it was probably the best of the options we have at the moment, but we honestly need to find a better way to approach this. For this, I go back to what I mentioned earlier: f*cking Wikipedia and open-source: how do they work?

They work by having the appropriate balance of resources, both personnel and technology. Enough coders are willing to clone your git repository of a new build and try to break it. This is hard and challenging. This scares off spammers, who will try to take the easiest and possibly fastest route through the maze to the cheese. People who are earnestly devoted to a cause will always inevitably find a way over people who are lazily employing practices that work by gaming systems. Why?

Ask the Russians, who spent the entire cold war stealing and duplicating western technology to master and decrypt it just in time to be three generations behind their innovating enemies. The Black Sunday Kill is a better example of this in action in the technology world.

So ultimately, what is the exact mechanism by which we can make search engines, blogs, e-mail and so forth unspammable? I don’t know. Not that I’m incapable of figuring that out, I think someone at less than my skill level can easily figure this out given enough incentive (usually motivation like anger and resources like free time). But the ultimate solution will be counter-acting the current disease: spammers are making money.

Every one of the ads you get that advertise “A bigger Pen15″ makes money, because someone who got that e-mail sent money to someone. Every time a Nigerian princess is ransomed in your e-mail, some gallant fellow cashed out his 401(k) to save her. That one man’s $5,000 is worth orders of magnitude more than the cost of sending out those spams mails, which could vary from a few hundred dollars for millions of e-mails to a dollar for thousands (depending on the location of the servers and the botnet being used). There are lots of resources that discuss this, but my favorite right now is the HowStuffWorks explanation.

So the solution seems simple enough, just keep them from making money! But how do we approach this?

Well, we’ve tried education on massive scale: from teaching your grandparents not to click on spam to educating your children through computer literacy about scamming. We’ve tried blocking those parts of the internet from people to protect them from themselves. We’ve tried spam-blockers, captchas, and every automation system possible. But these ALL address the symptoms. Even trying to legislate against spam has ended up being a pipe dream (and honestly legislation just makes breaking laws more fun for those who’d want to do that in the first place). My proposed solution at this moment?

Make them pay.

Legislation proposes fines, but the problem with legislation is it’s only justifiable if we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that suspected perpetrators are in fact perpetrators. I say, we employ the same annoying bastard tactics that we saw in use against the enemies of Julian Assange. Will it be easy? HELL NO.

As we all know, spammers utilize botnets and hordes of zombies, so tracking down all of those spam-emails will most likely lead you to victims instead of perpetrators. On top of this, they often launch attacks such as DDoS or ping-storms to people who attempt to track them down. But these are issues we can address. When these hackers take over a computer, they always leave a back door in order to access it for their various uses. They even come with a kill switch so that they can revert the server/computer/device so others can’t use their system against them. Most of these systems are freely available, and finding the kill switch is just a matter of knowing which attack was launched against your site. They hide their location and just send an anonymous text or e-mail or packet of data to the zombie herd… which makes for a perfectly good honeypot. Intentionally leave a site open to RFI attack, for example, and then monitor any packets that come into the system. When one does, you can find the source. Most likely, it’ll be from behind a series of hops, firewalls, and other zombies, but now you at least know where that came from. Repeat this process enough times, and you find the root. At the very list, you can sniff out the net and either selectively block it, or keep a database of ip addresses logged with what software compromised them so when you find a killswitch, you have somewhere to attack.

Granted these are all ideas off the top of my head, but I’m only one man. And none of us is as smart as all of us, so let’s do this. Let’s get pissed, let’s get serious, and let’s change the culture of spam. Honestly, I think it’s about time the white hats did something other than just turn up their noses at software piracy. And I’m ready to help.

Honesty

Jan 31 2011

So my resolution this New Year was perhaps a bit too broad. I had basically three different parts of my life I wanted to improve: my health, my career, and my creativity. All of these I found to be in some ways expressions of who I am, who I was, and who I want to be. For my health, I decided to make more of a concerted effort to follow a diet, which in this case was weight watchers, because I can simply count the various different things I’m putting in my body to hold myself accountable for my actions. I also wanted to work out more often in order to get into a basically “good” shape, and I didn’t specify to myself how I would do it, other than guarantee I would work out at least three times a week, no matter what days or order they came in. For my career, I decided I would push myself to do things that scared me, including working harder than I’ve ever worked before, and be willing to make drastic decisions regarding my career path. Finally, for my creativity I decided I would read, write, compose, or practice an instrument at least once a day.

So far, I’m amazed at how well I’ve kept up with all of these things. And the reason, I’ve realized, is because I’ve been truthfully, brutally honest with myself. I haven’t been as honest with everyone else, so I’ve decided to start sharing this stuff on the most public and potentially embarrassing place possible: the internet.

In the last couple of months, I’ve:

  1. worked out at least three times a week, in some cases five
  2. lost about fourteen pounds
  3. quit my job (because I realized I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do and accepted a job closer to where I wanted to be)
  4. written three short stories, over thirty poems, three pieces of music
  5. practiced piano, bass, guitar, and tin whistle

In spite of all of this: I feel like I have not yet come close to the spirit of my resolution. Why?

I have lacked honesty. I have lacked truth and the ability to express it in my personal and professional lives. Recently, I read an interview with Francis Ford Coppola, and it’s been running through my mind a great deal in the past couple of days. He said two things that really struck me, so I’ll just quote them both and then go into why they’re so important to this realization.

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve given to your children, inside and outside of the industry?
Always make your work be personal.

And, you never have to lie. If you lie, you will only trip yourself up. You will always get caught in a lie. It is very important for an artist not to lie, and most important is not to lie to yourself. There are some questions that are inappropriate to ask, and rather than lie, I will not answer them because it’s not a question I accept. So many times we are asked things in our work or in life that you want to lie, and all you have to do is say, “No, that is an improper question.”

I wake up some mornings and wonder where I am, or more importantly how the hell I got here. I graduated one of the hardest music composition programs in the country in four years with honors and no debt, and I was so completely sure throughout that time that I would be destined for musical greatness that I never really paused to think about what that even meant. I saw myself living in a loft in the city with nothing but my bass to keep me company, hunched over scores, or perhaps against the glow of a flickering crt monitor plugged into a desktop on its last legs as I struggled to create my true art.

And here I am, sitting comfortably in a suede chair in the living room of my two-story home, staring at an embarrassingly expensive gaming laptop and writing about my wasted potential. I have become a parody of myself, and I couldn’t figure out why for the longest time.

Now don’t get the wrong impression, I’m not wealthy; I’m barely living paycheck to paycheck against a mountain of student and personal debt, some of which I inherited from my wife, some of which I racked up before I was responsible enough to not live above my means. I have this house because of a government tax credit and a loan from my parents, and I am on this laptop because my company was willing to finance it for a year with no interest for me. As a matter of fact, this comfy sofa is a hand-down from my parents (it didn’t go with their new wood floor). BUT: I write code for 8+ hours a day, most of which thus far powers completely deprecated and inefficient systems in an industry I simply have very little to no interest in (disclaimer : anyone who works for any successful company in any industry knows their app is a kludge, and it’s probably a very profitable kludge). Anyone who knew me from sophomore year of high school to my graduation from UNT would be amazed that I haven’t spontaneously combusted in irony, or that the word “sellout” is not branded to my forehead.

But now I have to step back and realize exactly what has happened and who I’ve become. I’m actually sitting here, for real, and I can actually see and feel all of these things: so this is not the illusion. The dream of working on movie scores or video game music and being a respected musician was the lie. My true art would be laughed out of Hollywood or any “serious” game industry professional’s office. Why? Because it’s not honest.

I think the problem never had to do with me not having the skills or dedication. My ultimate, stinky, sweaty fear under all of those pretty and dressed up excuses was that I would be bound to a lose/lose conundrum. Either I would suffer for an eternity for no ultimate success or reason, or I would be vastly successful and hate myself for what I had allowed myself to become. I would have twisted the thing that has inspired my deepest reserves of personal passion and dedication into some kind of commercialized monstrosity in order to survive to make more, or I’d starve to death (which when you’re married is actually killing two people, more if you have kids). And then it struck me: this sudden clarity came from my personal dedication to this new resolution.

I was honest with myself about my weight. I didn’t feel attractive, healthy, or energetic any more. Being married, you stop worrying about attracting the opposite sex nearly as much, but deep down you’re the same insecure squirming kid you were in the seventh grade, hoping that no one noticed you just pick a wedgie. And how better to better myself than to devote my time and energy to honestly doing the things I’d always wanted to do? I bought a heavy bag (which I’ve wanted since I saw Rocky as a kid), started hitting the gym and the exercise bike and I’ve felt leagues better because I finally told myself the freaking TRUTH: Nathan, you’re a fatass. Do something about it.

I was honest with myself about my career. I got praise at almost every review, and was constantly being told by my co-workers that my input was needed and valued on almost every aspect of development. They told me that I was being considered for a senior position, to be a decision-maker on the system, and I was amazed at how much that failed to inspire me. I finally was honest with myself and asked a very important question: if you work these sixty hour weeks for another year and make it to a senior developer position are you still going to be in the same incredibly restrictive industry, doing business logic that makes people fall asleep when you explain what you do for a living? Being brutally honest, I said yes. So when a friend said his company was looking to fill a designer/front-end developer job, I had to admit it was time to make a change. A terrifying and potentially disastrous (for me) change. And I did.

I was honest with myself about my talent. I told myself for so long that I simply didn’t have the time to work on new designs, write new stories and songs, and practice one of the more than ten instruments I have lying around in the house. I would pine for the opportunity to go and play them or sit down and write, and every time I would stare at a blank screen or just noodle around with songs I’d played a thousand times, and went back to playing video games or watching TV, letting my mind wander to things that were in no way constructive or helpful. For this, I have to thank my wife, who is now living her dream. I was playing a really hard guitar song on Rock Band 3 and said “I wish I had the real guitar controller… or even better that I was just playing guitar right now.” She looked at me as though I had been replaced by some kind of 50s sci-fi monster and said “then… go play your guitar.”

She has said something similar to me for years, but sitting at her computer with her tablet in her lap working on a commission made me realize: 1) Holy shit. 2) I’m an idiot.

So most importantly, I got really honest with myself about my life. No, it’s not going to be easy. No, it’s not going to be cheap, and it’s not going to be fast. But I’m going to start working on myself a lot more aggressively. I’m going to start being the man I want to be, one step at a time. And the most important step, right here and right now, is being absolutely, breathtakingly, irrevocably honest with myself and everyone else. Da Vinci had Pope Alexander VI’s son, and various other patrons to pay his bills as he created everything he ever wanted to. Charles Ives sold insurance to finance his career and support his family. I can’t compare myself to such legends of the things I respect, at least not if I’m being honest with myself.

But maybe in a few years, I can say I even came close to that. Being honest, I may fail. I may end up fading into obscurity like everyone else who wanted to make their mark on the world. But being honest: I’m okay with that. At the very very least, I’m going to try. I’m never going to stop trying. Being honest with myself, I may not always rise to that challenge, I may have to put off this nebulous dream for years at a time. But living with purpose is a full-time job, and sometimes you need weekends off.

Breathe

Jan 03 2011

Shards of ice cling to each breath of air, scathing and shimmering as they enter his nose. He sneezes, shaking his head and staggering his steps for a moment to avoid the urge to breathe deeply in from his mouth. Narrowly avoiding a curb, he regains his stride and begins to count again. Left, two three, right two three. In, two three, out two three. The sky is clear save for a few wispy clouds far at the edge of his peripheral vision. The skittering of bare branches blowing in the wind against each other is the only counterpoint to the plodding taps of his cold shoes. Left, two three, right two three. His foot lands just a bit too hard and a cold pain shoots up some hidden nerve from his right knee. Wince, two three, grunt two three. He shakes the pain from his eyes and pulls the sides of his tuque down around his ears. A clump of dark hair drips a line of sweat onto his cheek, and he shakes again to free himself from it. He feels the strain in his leg and remembers to lean back a bit, bring his arms down and focus on landing each stride somewhere in the middle of his foot. This isn’t the one hundred, he reminds himself.

A child laughs somewhere off to his right and he snaps his head immediately to the source. Four children in new Christmas sweaters are throwing back and forth a shiny new ball with some kind of lights and whistles on it. They run back and forth between two yards, and he can’t help but smile. It happens before he realizes it. The world shifts and he falls backwards into a memory.

The sky was the silver of late February, and a dozen puffs of warm breath filled the air with thin wisps of vapor. He idly shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying to keep his legs warm in the chill. The team captains looked back and forth between he and his ten and eleven-year-old fellows, all eagerly bouncing in anticipation. He kept his eyes down, trying not to seem too eager, knowing he wouldn’t be the first picked. “Walker,” said one of the captains. “Eric,” said the second one almost instantly. The two boys joined their friends. “Adam,” said the first. The second waited for a few seconds before saying “Kirk.” He grunted, knowing his time would be soon. But it continued in this fashion, each successive pick sounding less and less enthusiastic to be added to that team, until finally it was down to him and one other boy. “Don’t pick him,” Walker said to one of the captains. “He can sprint okay, but he’ll be tired in five minutes.” “Typical fat kid,” the other one returned. He looked down.

The road was rushing by, the cracks in the concrete slipping beneath his feet like a pattern of cracking late winter ice on a lake. Shaking his head, he looks back up. A beeping sound had been exploding from his wrist, and he isn’t sure how long he’d been ignoring it. Looking down, his heart rate monitor whines of a drastic increase in pulse and drop in oxygen. Breathe, he says to himself. Left, two three, right two three. Pretend, two three, ignore two three. No, he says to himself. Don’t run away: run towards. He looks up, seeing his garage only another hundred meters or so away. Spotting a ninety pound punching bag hanging from the ceiling of his garage, a flush of anger suddenly wells up inside of him. Taking a deep breath, he leans forward slightly, pushing his legs up higher and extending them further, landing on his toes with each stride. Trees on the streetside whoosh as he runs by them. He feels the heat of his body focusing deep in his chest and rising, and he sprints hard towards the bag. Left, two three, right, two three. Rage, two three, pain, two three. The world disappears in a cloud of red haze.

He narrowly ducked the blow, glancing it somewhere on his cheek. The blonde-headed boy in front of him was a good foot taller, although they were around the same age. Blondie laughed as he rained blows down, not bothering with form or technique. The towheaded assailant knew that his enemy could never get inside his reach if he just kept swinging. He felt more than heard a muffled din of shouts and cat-calls around him, blending in slowly with the sound of the blood pounding in his ears. Another blow came down, but he ducked into it, multiplying the impact. The scene was replaced by a high-pitched squeal and the flash of a million tiny multi-colored lights. Shaking his head and looking up, the rage in his body congealed into a solid ball, and then suddenly there was silence. The world was still, the slight brush of warm Texas summer air blew in his hair, and he saw something he hadn’t before. A shard of what could be fear glinted in the tall boy’s bright blue eyes. With absolute calm and no sense of urgency, he shifted his weight over the front leg, whizzing by a sloppily laid jab. Using the gathered potential energy in his leg, he pushed his entire weight upwards. His arm was already curled beneath him from the earlier blow, and he pushed it up, gathering with him the energy of his shoulder and waist. When the blow connected to the boy’s chin, a satisfying crack resounded, and the blow followed through well over the height of the boy. He was vaguely aware that both his feet had left the ground, and he calmly readied himself for a landing. When he struck the earth, the silence was still there, and dozens of eyes were on fixed mutely upon him. Rather than the pure rage or random sense of calm he had felt, now a sudden wave of shame and remorse covered him. Had he been wrong to fight back? A slow and steady clap began to resound in the group, and cheers rose up. He looked down at the blonde boy, who had bitten his tongue on the uppercut, and was fighting back tears as blood drizzled from his mouth. This wasn’t revenge, this was just sad. The sudden urge to run overcame him, and he accepted it. He shoved through the crowd and ran until his lungs filled with acid, tearing at each breath.

His hands are sore beneath two layers of handwraps, and he can feel blood welling up somewhere in the palm his right hand. The rage was gone, at some point replaced by a slow and steady sense only that he was punching. Each blow lands on the bag in a rhythmic thud, and he is at once alerted to the fact that his entire upper body is numb. He takes a deep breath, and blood rushes into his ears and his arms. In, jab cross, out, duck hook. Before he has time to question how long he’s been landing blows on the quivering mass of nylon, a screeching alarm sounds. Five minutes are up. Is that the third round? The fifth? He can’t remember. It doesn’t matter: this is his last one. Suddenly, he is painfully aware of how heavy his body has become from fatigue, sweat, and spent emotion. He unlatches the bag from the ceiling and heaves it to its resting place on the wall with a grunt. He plods slowly into the house, closing the garage behind him. He barely hears something over the groan of the door as it closes.

“What?” he asks.

“How was it?” he hears his wife as she comes around the corner. She wears a bright pink robe he bought her for their second anniversary, and she’s sipping on a hot chocolate from a machine she got for Christmas. He hears the rattle of his dog’s collar as he runs in from the den with a stuffed gingerbread man in his mouth. He smiles as he kneels to pet the dog, rubbing beneath his chin.

“Keep breathing, and you’ll finish eventually,” he finally answers his wife.

Confused, she cocks her head a bit to the side with a smile. “So… it went well?” she asks.

“It is now,” he stood with a smile, bringing her in for a one-armed hug. She responds with a grunt and pushes his sweaty form away with a laugh.

“You smell awful!” she chuckles. He keeps pulling her in.

“Just breathe, it’ll finish eventually.”

He smiles, and she lets him hug her a bit before insisting he run upstairs to the shower. As he mounts the stairs two at a time, he breathes on each step. Smile, two three, peace two three.

Bards, Kings and Heroes

Apr 12 2010

In this world, there are a variety of people who live in the public view. You have a variety of public figures who have been elevated to that status as the result of their efforts in their personal lives, their choice of profession, and any other number of reasons.

For the sake of argument I’m going to say that people in the public eye exist somewhere on an axis that is polarized by their role and attitude towards the public itself. On one side, you have people who have been made popular and publicly recognized due to their contributions to society, or they’ve been elected/chosen by their peers to represent them as a paragon of their people. These are elected officials, military leaders, etc. For simplicity (and keeping with my obsession with feudal-era terminology), let’s call these people Kings. On the other end of the spectrum are people who have been elevated to public status due to their role as entertainers, or providers of some form of entertainment. These are musicians, actors, writers and the like. Again conforming with my previous theme, lets call these people Bards.

This is a greatly simplified view, but I think it describes the level of standards to which we hold these public figures. If we discover that Tom Cruise –a man who has given us countless hours of quotable one-liners delivered with a inimitable persona– personally believes himself to possess super powers and use them to free his people from an ancient alien invasion, we for the most part shrug our shoulders and laugh. If we discover that Stephen King snorted a mountain of cocaine in order to create his masterpieces of horror and fear, we just want to strike him on the shoulder and say “Oh Steve.” But if we find out that our president has done his job while having a job done to him, or a senator who has spent hundreds of hours in speeches decrying the horrors of infidelity has been accused of the very same, they are immediately called to task for their indiscretions. Maybe it’s not a fair standard, but to be honest, I think it’s sensible.

I did not elect Britney Spears to be a pop icon, so I’m not personally offended if it turns out that she has the emotional depth of a shot glass. My taxes don’t pay the wages of Brad Pitt, so I could care less if he’s decided to attach himself to an accused vampire (who may or may not drink blood but definitely kidnaps children from all over the world). Looking at this perspective in a historical and cultural basis, we see that the Bards of old were often given a kind of immunity from the laws of man. This was both a formal recognition (all traveling performers were essentially given the parley of peace to warring nations) and an informal “honor among thieves” distinction (any number of stories in which traveling poets, writers, and bards were allowed to walk through highwaymen checkpoints unimpeded).

The interesting side-effect of this duality, however, is that there are people who exist somewhere inside the spectrum that we’ve created. In this case, I think a great example is those who are paid to entertain us, but have been chosen to do so due to their status as representatives of the best of all of us. Inside of this spectrum we have a lot of people, but in this example, in these times, i think the best explanation is that of the athlete. We have Olympic Athletes, who are somewhere towards the King level due to the fact they’re not usually a professional athlete during the rest of the year. These people are held to a very high standard as they represent our nation in a world stage against other athletes that represent their nation. On a slightly more private example of the same concept, we have athletes who are paid through a variety of personal and commercial licenses, sometimes by those who view them, and sometimes by the products that those viewers buy.

These are our Heroes. In the olden days, they belonged to us, and they ruled us. Achilles was given the status of a king among men for his prowess in battle, despite the fact he had no actual ruling power. Spartacus belonged to the people and was forced to kill other heroes for the sake of the public’s entertainment.

So to me, this is very interesting in recent news. Stories of various athletes using drugs, cheating, and violating the rules of their sports is an important distinction. They are essentially breaking the agreed upon rules that have risen them to the rank of heroes in the public consciousness. If the heroes cannot agree upon those rulesets, why would there be a reason to revere these people? This, I understand.

But when Tiger Woods is found guilty of a wide and complex series of extra-marital affairs, the public view of him as both an individual and as a hero are greatly affected. Is it because we have held him to a higher standard than we hold ourselves? Is it because we secretly wish we could engage in the same kind of behavior, but that opportunity has never arisen for us? The assaults that have gone on from both ends of the argument have pointed directly at the reputation of the sport being at stake: that this damages the sport, or that others in the sport have been made to sacrifice because of it.

If that is the case, then no sport can or will survive the future. The failure of man will not bear the existence of any standard, let alone standards that are based on the way of life of the people who are not elevated to that status.

I don’t have to live by the same laws as Tiger Woods, because no one notices when I do things — no ones cares. But even if they did, they would not expect me to perform on a consistent and serious basis at any athletic event. Should we be forced to hold every person up to a consistent standard? If you’re not incredibly great at your job, you should be instantly replaced? If you’re not able to conduct your personal and professional life in a manner that is up to the standards of the highest expectations of mankind, should those things be taken from you?

All of this pontification aside, I think it comes down to the individual and how they view their heroes. When I was young, I discovered that one of my personal heroes was not perfect: he was a human being. He had a variety of personal and professional issues of which I was not aware, and I found myself losing respect for him. He used drugs, and he spoke ill of a variety of people.

Then, years later, I realized that he had never ranted and railed against the dangerous of drug use, and the personal problems he had were the exact same as the ones I did. He had never really violated any of my expectations of him, even if they would have been unrealistic or unfair.

It was then that I realized the best types of heroes to follow are the ones in whom we see ourselves. I have a hard time saying that supernatural beings from myth and lore are the paragons of my psychology and ethics (even though I think Spider-man was my first role model). As a child, the concept of trying to be like Jesus seemed impossible, and therefore Christianity seemed masochistic to me. When I read the story of Guinevere’s betrayal of Arthur with Lancelot, I was deeply offended and assumed that the concept of it was criminal and fabricated by revisionists who wanted to smear the good name of the ideals of Camelot. The birth of Mordred from the incest of Arthur and Morgana was to me criminal. Now, I think the idea of these stories make those character much more interesting, as I could see not only my ideals but my weaknesses in them. I stopped holding them to a higher standard than myself, and realized that modeling my life after them would be a mistake, but learning from both their victories and failures would be the best experiences and education I would ever receive.

So let’s say for just a moment that it’s okay to hold Heroes to higher standards than ourselves… but maybe we should remember that if they were perfect, we’d have absolutely no reason to idealize, emulate, and love them.