Over the past few months, I've enjoyed reading the many thoughtful posts offered by Kent Pitman. He is an interesting person who has had much influence on both young people just starting out in the field of computer software development and architecture and on loyal viewers of the CBS daytime drama The Young and the Restless.

Never a man to rest on his laurels, Kent is always searching for more information, more knowledge and more understanding of his world and ours. I caught up with Kent online, of course, and had, in the words of Star Trek's Mr. Spock, a "fascinating" interview.

Kent, first of all thank you for agreeing to do this.

It's brave of you to do this interview. You may or may not have known, but when I was interviewed a few years back for Slashdot about issues related to the Lisp programming language, my interview response was the first in their history to overrun the fixed upper limit they set on the possible length of an article. They ended up taking it in good humor and rather than rejecting or truncating the article, they broke it into two parts. But I'll try hard to learn from that and to keep my responses here as brief as I can.

It's hard to narrow it down to just one, but since I have a longer list of recommendations on the blog summary page of my public web site, I'll try to play along. I'm most satisfied with my poetry, I think, and of that I'm especially proud of What Love Endures. It was gratifying to finally publish it, to see it well received, and to give people some sense that there are different sides to my writing. A lot of people see me as some sort of technical nerd, but I like to think I have other facets that just aren't as visible.

I try always to learn from all the comments people make. That was a big part of the message I was trying to get across in my article Knowledge and Intuition. The individual variation in each person means each offers an opportunity for me to learn something. In my thoughts, I often use the term “mining” to discuss the process, even though it's more like “panning” (as in “panning for gold”). Each person says something that must be sifted to find the essence.

Experts offer us facts. Non-experts offer us wishes, wants, and intuitions. People who agree with us offer knowledge that what we say has been expressed in a resonant way. People who are confused can tell us what in our message we must refine. People who disagree, especially those articulate enough to say why, are the most precious of all because they offer us the key to why the world surprises us. When something happens in the world politically or socially that isn't what we expect, we can almost always trace it back to a difference in life experience or world view on the part of someone.

It is this need to hear opposing points of view that is the lifeblood of a Democracy, and the basis of my long-time claim that the founding fathers got it slightly wrong when they created a freedom to speak rather than a freedom to hear.

I like the availability of civil people who will engage an idea, even one they may not initially resonate to, rather than merely tag it quickly for discarding based on whether it is, in their view, politically correct or whether it tows a particular party line.

I don't want people to label me, I want them to read me. I'm a political independent, not a Democrat. I tend to vote Democrat a lot because the organized Republican party has been mostly an embarrassment throughout my entire adult life. But I wish there were a viable choice because I think it would help us a lot. I voted for Republican Bill Weld when he was elected governor of Massachusetts some years back. That was my kind of Republican: socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Give me more of those and I'll feel like I have a real choice. Does it mean I will vote for them always? No, not necessarily. But perhaps sometimes. I don't want a religion, I want a choice. I believe in pluralism and hybrid systems. I believe in collaborating by sharing points of view. It goes back to what I said earlier about listening and learning from people with a variety of perspectives.

Particular “blog”? Not “blogs”? Just one? Are you kidding? It's an ensemble cast. There can be no singular one.

• If I had to have only one, it would be Karen Novak. She recently cleaned out her blog, so is perhaps an odd choice for me to point to as a much read. She's off battling health issues and we're told she wants the chance to start fresh upon her return. I can only hope she saved a record of those excellent posts she'd written before she purged them, but I guess that's her choice. Frankly, I'll take her on whatever terms she offers. Even after she's been away for months from OS, she commands an audience at this site and has a place reserved in my heart. I adore her honesty and fearless writing here at OS, and wish that I could some day come to be as bold a writer as I've seen her be. I continue to feel her absence here, and I long for her return with all the emotional might a non-religious soul like myself can muster.

• Saturn Smith is not exactly a well-kept secret. She has interesting points of view and then really does her homework to set up discussion topics. She's got a point of view, but she's open to criticism. All she needs now is a paycheck.

• I'm a legal junkie, so Hobolawstudent for her thoughtful research and analysis, and her personal passion. Listening to the difficulty that someone so obviously passionate and qualified is having getting a job should inspire us all to remake society in a way that embraces people like that.

• Dennis Knight and Gary Justis are great poets and story tellers, and both also just amazing gentlemen in the finest sense of the word, which I think is perhaps related to the sense of poetry they bring in a non-accidental way. Also, Jon Henner, Leonce Gaiter, and T-Bucket offer important social commentary that generally manages to be both hard-hitting and eloquent.

• I like your blog, CoyoteOldStyle, particularly for the humanity and depth of your poetry and “photoart”; also, my wife is always making up those Foodie Tuesday recipes of yours, which I enjoy quite a lot. And Freaky Troll (Doctor of Divinity) offers a necessary emotional relief valve, full of both fabulously inventive and meticulously produced art and very subtle social commentary that is, like South Park, all too easy to accidentally dismiss as fluff if you're not paying attention.

• I could go on with so many more, and reasons for each. Susan Mitchell, Rob St. Amant, for their observations. Dave Cullen and Bob Eckstein for their craft but also for sharing the back story of the publishing world. David Brin, who is a famed sci-fi writer and futurist in his own right, but who here separately impresses me for his sincere commitment to political change in the here and now.

• And so much of Open Salon is a community, such that it would require too much space to enumerate everyone I read or even to explain why I like it when I find time to read things by dedicated, active, and interesting community members like cartouche, Caveat Canem Croceum, Don Geddis (who seems not to blog, just writes good comments), fingerlakeswanderer, Jason Korke, Mishima666, o'stephanie, Rick Lucke, Roy Jimenez. sandra stephens, Tim4change, and Tom Cordle.

Hmmm. I'd almost rather have dinner with almost any one of the people on that list above. I'd probably bring my wife, and they might bring their significant other, too. Already that's almost five. You see the problem.

In spite of my preferences, my wife loves to cook, and likes big parties, so big or small she'd probably really like it if she were allowed to whip something up herself. We might tell people they could bring some item if they wanted just for fun.

Then again, I also know some good restaurants, so if it was a crowd that preferred doing that, I could see that instead.

Well, it would be a chance to meet people and see what they liked. So I imagine we'd just go with the flow. From what I can tell, these are all people with colorful backgrounds. I don't imagine there would be a shortage of conversation topics.

Music? Interesting. That wouldn't have occurred to me. I own an iPod but it has no music on it. Just audiobooks. I'm not really musical. I don't really dislike music, I just don't think about it a lot.

Does a writer have to be famous to inspire one? Even in sixth grade, but also later, my friend Mike wrote things that were way out of my league and that inspired me to stretch to at least try to match. Thanks, Mike!

Mike and I also wrote parody together. We were inspired by the Carol Burnett show and tried to imitate it. Later, in high school, I wrote parodies of a lot of the plays I worked on. (I worked on 25 plays in 3 years, and wrote parodies of many of them.) Then in my adult life I spent several years writing parodies of the CBS daytime drama The Young and the Restless. Parody allows you to really get inside a literary vehicle and learn its structure from the inside. You have to really know either a writer or his writing really well in order to adapt and twist it. So I guess you could put Bill Bell and the Y&R writing team on the list of people that influenced me. (I like to think maybe they were influenced a little, too. I do know they were aware of my site. One of their writers posted something publicly that seemed annoyed by it, but at least that meant he read it. And I got kind email from a couple of the cast members, including one lead.)

I'd like to think I've been influenced by various science fiction writers. I quote Arthur C. Clarke's three laws a lot in things I write, especially the first and third. And I've made reference even here at OS to Isaac Asimov and his ideas. I wish I could say I was influenced by Bradbury, who is such a poet, but I'm afraid I'm not there yet.

Some children's literature was influential, too. I love the complexity of some of Dr. Seuss's wordplay, and the simplicity of the sentence structure in Donald J. Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. There are elements of each in some of the things I've written, not all of which has been published. Stay tuned.

For a while, I just thought I just had a variety of unrelated interests—science fiction, humor, and politics. But one day it clicked. These are all vehicles for social commentary, and it's no accident I like this particular set.

I started programming computers in high school on an IBM 1130 using punched cards.

I'm most proud of the programs I've done that stretch the mind and make one say “I didn't know it was possible to make something that did that.”

When I was first learning to program, I saw a game in a magazine that would guess an animal you were thinking of. Of course, I knew it must be possible because it was written up already. But I didn't know how to do it, and I was living somewhere that had no one to teach me. So it was a big triumph figuring out I could use the computer's tape drive to store my game's memory in a way that would replicate the feat. Later, at MIT, I continued to evolve the game beyond what I had seen written up, changing it from a timid program that asked a lot of questions to a bold one that just made a guess and went with it.

Later, at MIT, I used to make lists of things people said were impossible in order to have something to do on Saturday afternoons. Often the things were only impossible because people were inflexible in how they thought about the problem. Usually by a gentle relaxation of a problem description, it was possible to do interesting things after all. Fortunately, I learned to program when there were not so many people around willing to say what was impossible, and when we assumed most things were possible. I don't think as many things are possible now because people have increasingly shut their minds.

I like programming problems people have said are impossible. That means there's not a lot of stress—it's easy to do better than people are expecting.

I worked on a program called WebMaker once, that turned FrameMaker documents into HTML. The key to making it work was a labor-intensive step of writing a bunch of stupid little rules that explained how each paragraph style in FrameMaker was to appear in HTML. It was painful and slow and people didn't understand how to get started. I could barely stand to watch a demo of what it as intended to do. So I created a program called RapidRules that automated this step, which had been thought to be necessary to do by hand. Again I did this by modifying the conditions of the problem. It was hard to do perfectly, but I realized no one cared if it was perfect. They just wanted to get started. So I wrote something I gambled would be 80% correct. This transformed the problem of writing a bunch of code into the problem of fixing up a bit of code that wasn't quite right. People are much better at fixing something than creating something. And it was instantaneous for getting that 80%. You just pressed a button and it made a bold guess.

It's on my “to do” list to write a simulator of Open Salon so that I can test out the effectiveness of some of the front page policies on readership.

Well, one thing relates to the fact that I complain a lot about personal experiences. A lot of people read that as meaning that I think the world owes me a different outcome. I don't, and am not concerned about myself. I am concerned about optimizing outcomes for everyone, not just me. I use my experience to guide my intuitions about what needs fixing. I just want to live in a world that operates efficiently and fairly.

For example, I want it to be easier for good writers to get readers, etc. Not because I'm a writer, but because I'm a reader. If my favorite author spends half his life writing and the other half of his life promoting books, he's only writing half as much as he could be. I'd like a system where people are paid to do the things they're good at, not asked to do stupid extra stuff they're not good at.

One of the good things about Open Salon is that people seem to get to know the authors, so I feel like those who comment on my pieces often give me some leeway on a piece they might otherwise react to in a kneejerk fashion in other venues. That gives me more chance to do exploratory or experimental writing.

I've done political things for a long time, but at first I had to be nudged. In high school, I wrote for an underground newspaper, but mostly because my friend Paul thought it was a good idea. I was more a writer than a political activist. At MIT, I wrote for a newspaper, and I cared a great deal about journalism. But I didn't care about politics. I knew people who did, and I asked them a few questions about things when it came time to vote.

At some point, when I was in my late 20's, I was dating a friend who lived in Providence and I commuted from her house to Boston a lot, so I had an hour to sit on the bus each way. I read the newspaper cover to cover many days. The world was a mess. I had assumed I should be taking care of my problems and other people would take care of theirs. But they weren't. And so I started to read up on what I'd been letting go ignored, and I started to get involved more.

For years I posted to the net on technical topics, but as Rob St. Amant can probably attest to, since he's from that community, I often used political metaphors to illustrate technical points.

This was probably compounded, too, because I did a lot of work with language standards. Among my various roles, for a time, I formally represented the United States on matters related to the Lisp programming language when it came to international negotiations. Someone once described the International Organization for Standardization, ISO, as an agency that was only by accident of history not part of the United Nations. It had some of that diplomatic feel. I didn't have to dress up or go to state dinners or anything, but I did get very strict instructions from various organizations on what I was and was not allowed to say on your behalf when I represented all you in the US on this obscure technical matter. And I did get to learn what it was like to deal with people from various cultures from around the world. Fortunately, I had my training from theatre to fall back on to help me in understanding people's varying points of view, and the process ultimately went well, resulting in a number of strong friendships with people scattered about the globe. And now that experience in an obscure kind of diplomacy informs my understanding of real diplomacy. We take experience as it's dealt us.

No, I never studied it formally.

I got involved in studying the law due to various projects I've done that ran up against issues relating to copyright and contract law. It bugged me a bit that the law is structured in such a way that people who are not practitioners are encouraged to have no opinion at all. Imagine if something as important as food preparation or programming could only be done by people who were college trained to do it and anyone else couldn't even render an opinion or write a how-to book without fearing someone would sue them or something.

Wanting not to be forever at the mercy of people trained in this mystery area, I ended up in a bookstore staring at some audio tapes by Gilbert called Law School Legends. They were study tapes for the final exams in various classes. I bought a few and listened to them and they were great. Just what I wanted. I could listen to them in the car and feel like I had a basic understanding of some complicated topics. Then I started buying others just for fun. I found, for example, that Prof. Faust F. Rossi's tape on Evidence was great entertainment in itself, and enriched my love of watching Perry Mason, already one of my favorite TV shows, a great deal.

Also, as a computer scientist, I was fascinated by the similarity between the details of contract law and the low-level state transitions in TCP/IP. Each is an exercise in taking a set of individual actions and composing them into a higher-level, more reliable abstraction. It was almost as if the lawyers who brought us common law would have been programmers if they'd had such tools back then.

Can you provide a photo of the space in your house where you do your writing or of areas around your home that inspire your writing?

I'll have to think about that.

(later)  Oh, I guess so.  My wife insists I should.  She took these.

I was a military brat, and moved nearly every year growing up—which is actually more often even than most of the military moves. I'm told it's more typical to stay 3 or 4 years at each place. This affected me in a variety of ways, really too numerous to go into here. But perhaps most profoundly because I saw the world from so many different perspectives. I had no continuity, but for that I traded having gotten in-depth view of a lot of different school systems, for example, trying to do the same task in a lot of different ways. Fortunately, I had plenty of really good teachers all along the way. But even where things were not good, it didn't last long because we moved again.

I also learned to be a quick judge of situations and of friends. And although when I was young, geography was a nearly insurmountable problem in keeping in touch with friends, I ultimately learned not to let a little geography get in the way of anything.

Once in a while the copyright issues are an impediment, but I mostly deal ok with that. For some things I have to post at my own site where I don't feel comfortable uploading to OS.

But mostly I worry that OS, or parts of it, will go away. There have been times in the past where TableTalk has ruthlessly purged some of their own stuff when they ran out of disk space. Some good writings I'd done got lost that way. Now I keep copies of things I write. But the web of interconnection due to comments that get attached are a more fragile thing.

But all in all, I think it's a good place for now. I do worry that in its goal to reach out for more hits to satisfy the advertisers, it will lose its soul. At some point, if it gets diluted enough, it may not be worth posting for that reason. I hope they instead seek another financial model if it comes to that. It's not worth losing the community for the sake of dollars. There should be other ways to get the dollars.

Make sure you have figured out what your persona will be, and whether you'll be needing to reveal personal facts about yourself. If you are not sure, get a pseudonym. Either way, make sure you draw clear boundaries about what you will and won't say to protect your personal privacy.

Most of anything else, you can figure out later “on the job.”

Sometimes I react to the news of the day, and other times I just go for something I've been wanting to say. I write about anything I think in the moment, as quickly as I can write it down. I don't always try to finish it. Sometimes I just make notes. If I see a possible topic, I start a new file and throw a couple of words or a URL in there as a reminder. Then when it comes time to write, I cruise through the list of files looking for something interesting. Sometimes I finish that piece. Sometimes I get partway through and am tired of it, so I file what I've done and pick something else. There is always a soup of many things going on at once. But sometimes it allows me to do complex topics on short notice because they are mostly already written.

It's hard to pick just one, of course, but at least here the list is so long I couldn't even begin to do a smattering of them. How about we say the short story The Flying Machine by Ray Bradbury.

As a man, and especially one who is not religious, it's hard to know what the point of life is. I've always been very service-oriented, preferring to leave it to others to find life's purpose. For me, I suppose I want to have done interesting and useful things, to have known good people, and to have been a good son, husband, father and friend. I'd like to have put more into the world than I took from it. I've been very lucky in that life's treated me exceedingly well, so that means I have a big debt to pay.

As for writing, well, if you think of the stupid old line “he who dies with the most toys wins,” it's something like: right question, wrong answer. The truth is that it's not about the toys, which are outside of us, and will live on. It's about what's inside of us. Anything left inside in the end might as well, for all the world knows or cares, never have been there at all.

We spend only a very small slice of our temporal existence alive. Yet we live on in what we do for the world. Life is a chance to actively have an influence. After we're done, there is only the passive influence we've left behind, like our writing. Life is a process of building something, and when you're done, whatever's left is in some sense all you ever really were. So while I'm here, I try to find ways to leave little bits of me in everyone to carry on after I'm gone. And in some cases, I leave behind my writing which will speak for me in other ways after I'm no longer able.

Then again, I used to play video games. And I'd get on the high score board for a while. But always someone would pull the plug, and the board would be wiped clean, to be started fresh another day with no memory of me. If you look back in history far enough, you see things like the pyramids, where we barely remember the names of a few, and if you look farther, you see no names at all. We still have civilization, of course, even where the names of people who brought it to us are long forgotten. But we stand at a point in time where we may be looking at the death of everything due to global climate change. That would be a kind of death more profound than my own. We must seek to avoid that if we can. And one of my goals in life is to raise consciousness sufficiently of the severity of that risk, which I consider to be much more severe than people make it out to be, in order that the little bit of all of us lives on well into the future.

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