StrivingLife presents ...

It's been a while since I've written a philosophical piece, so please be kind.

Two necessary definitions

First, we must begin with definitions¹ of the key words in our topic.

life:

1 a. The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism.

1 b. The characteristic state or condition of a living organism.

purpose:

1. The object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or a goal.

2. A result or effect that is intended or desired; an intention.

3. Determination; resolution.

4. The matter at hand; the point at issue.

What the question entails

The question of the meaning of life has rich history, one that people have been debating since before time itself. The question I write about, however, is slightly different, for I talk of purpose, and not meaning.

If we look up meaning, we'd see something like the following:

1. Something that is conveyed or signified; sense or significance.

2. Something that one wishes to convey, especially by language.

3. An interpreted goal, intent, or end.

4. Inner significance.

These definitions suggest that meaning conveys something more philosophical, while purpose is much more apparent to 'the naked eye.'

These two particular lines show this quite well:

The object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or a goal. (Purpose)

An interpreted goal, intent, or end. (Meaning)

interpret:

1. To explain the meaning of.

2. To conceive the significance of; construe.

1. To offer an explanation.

Meaning suggests something that is known, whether rightly or not. A purpose, on the other hand, does not need to be known, although it can be.

While asking for the meaning of life is valid, it is a much more difficult question than asking for the purpose of life, as we'll see in a moment.

The purpose of life

The purpose of life is really quite simple, although its methods may not be.

The purpose of life is simply to recreate, or to continue living.

Some, including myself at a younger age, may have determined that the purpose of life is death. While there is some truth to this, I've now come to realize that this is not the purpose of life, but rather a side-effect of it.

If the purpose of life was death, there are far better ways to attain that result than to have mechanisms in place to keep us alive while we're at our most vunerable; generally speaking, that is when life is young.

Since the majority of (healthy²) life is able to move beyond that stage, either the purpose of life is to die a slow death, or the purpose of life cannot be death.

Beyond that stage the life form in question has some way to continue on by a kind of 'dirty' replication. Dirty compared to clean, being an exact copy. However, again, a life is usually not a copy of another life, and for good reason. Were the first the same as the later one(s), death of the first may be the same, or very similar, for the latter as well.

Life stemming from multiple 'parents' or influenced by mutation is of the best kind, if diversity is needed, which for life's purpose it is.

What about the meaning?

The purpose of life, as we've seen, is merely to continue, or procreate, reproduce, etcetera.

In this respect, the purpose is as has been stated before; a blind striving. A healthy³ life wants to live. That's all there is to it. That is the purpose, whether the individual form knows it or not.

Meaning, however, is much more philosophical in nature, and seems then to suggest some amount of analysis.

Yet, as we stated earlier, no life is the copy of another. If then we are to analyze one life to come up with its meaning, we cannot automatically assigned that same meaning to another life. Instead, we must provide a fresh analysis for the other. Certainly we can take shortcuts, and use the analysis of one as a starting point.

In short, if two forms of life have the same meaning of life, they must be nothing more than copies of each other, if not in form, then in function.

As a man (human), this seems to go against what I know it is to be a man, and therefore, I cannot rely upon another to come up with my meaning of life. I may have the same purpose as another man, but not the same meaning. Am I not an individual, with my own unique ideas and experiences?

Experiences

Ah, how does experience play into life?

3 a. An event or a series of events participated in or lived through.

3 b. The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.

We can then have life experiences in general, as well as the experiences of a group and personal experiences.

All of these have some effect upon my own, individual life. "If a butterfly flaps it's wings ..." Therefore, they all have influence, however limited, upon the meaning of my life.

As for their influence on the purpose of life, if we are to believe that is the continuation of life, or reproduction, then these experiences would have an impact on whether we are able to attain that end, as well as how well.

Purpose and meaning for man

I stated before that the purpose of life is to live. What then of those beings who bring about an end of their own life?

The examples are numerous.

1. One individual pushes another out of the path of a deadly object.
2. One individual leads another deadly individual away from others.
3. One individual allows themself to be killed, so that it can kill another, deadly individual.

There are also those cases of suicide, where one seems to bring about death when there is no threat of it, either to the individual or to others.

In all these cases the purpose of life is intentionally cut short, by some action of a being that may not have otherwise been in danger⁴.

These cases can suggest any number of things.

On the one hand, from the point of nature, if there is a sick life and a healthy life, and one must die, it is generally 'better,' in regards to the purpose of life, that the sick die instead of the healthy. Similarly, it is generally better for a life that is able to reproduce to continue, as opposed to one that can no longer do so.

This gives some⁵ indication of why the old will lead danger away from the young, or why the old will generally attempt to save the young.

As regards suicide⁶, while other animals do commit suicide, it is most known in man. In these cases either the individual must be physically healthy, or unhealthy. If healthy, or even for those cases where the young sacrifice themselves for the old, we seem to see these cases as ones where perhaps the meaning of life has negated the purpose of life.

If the discussion so far as not made it clear, all life has a purpose. But not all life has a meaning.

A meaning must, in some respect, be determined, as I've suggested, by analysis. Meaning too is unique to the life, which all combines to the realization that the meaning we give to (a) life may be wrong.

Most commonly we think of man being the only life form able to provide analysis. Assuming this to be true, it is man, then, that worries⁷ about the meaning of life, while all others worry only about staying alive, not knowing that this serves the purpose of life. This too must mean that only man can determine that the meaning of his life can be more important than merely his purpose, for this is the only purpose of man - to live and to strive - while his meaning can be so much more.

Conclusions

An hour and a half ago I set out to write on the purpose of life. I have done so.

The purpose of life, as I've suggested, is to continue.

However, I also couldn't talk about the purpose of life without also touching upon the meaning of life.

This, I've suggested, is not as clear cut. While the purpose of life is the same for all life, the meaning of life is particular to the individual life we're looking at, and must be determined through analysis.

I've left a number of things open for further discussion, but my original goal is met.

 

Endnotes:

1. As always, I'm grateful to Answers.com for making their definitions available online.
2. The discussion of the continuation of non-healthy life will undoubtedly get me into a good deal of trouble. Hence, it remains for a later date.
3. See endnote 2.
4. Note that I'm speaking here of self-sacrifice, and not normal survival. Me dying while someone is just trying to kill me is different than me dying after putting my own life in danger, when it wasn't before.
5. Note that I said some. This is a complex topic which I'm only skimming over. After all, in some cases the young are left in a worse position than they were before, and it may have been better, from a suffering standpoint, for them to have not been saved. I suppose this would also get me in trouble if I went into it too much further, so ... see note 2.
6. You'll excuse me if I don't dig too deep into suicide here, since it's a complex topic.
7. Perhaps that should have been 'it is the philosophical man' instead ...
   

 

We've been running into an issue, off and on, with ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 having issues with Verity collections.

During one of our nightly jobs, two Verity collections are purged, through ColdFusion, and then re-built. 

Sometimes this will bring the collection down, resulting in a message like the following.

Collection down after opening (10)

Using the mdvdk executable, you can get some information about the collection, and even bring it back up.

mdvdk can be found in the \verity\k2\_nti40\bin\ directory, within the ColdFusion root directory.

You can get information about the status of the collection through this: 

mkvdk -collection <path to collection> -about

You don't use the online option/switch, but rather the repair one to bring the collection back online.

mkvdk -collection <path to collection> -repair

You should be able to reindex successfully.

I also changed the code to do a refresh, instead of a purge, since the former doesn't take the collection offline.

You can find additional options by using the following:

mkvdk -help

 

This article is meant to hold some of the thoughts that I've been having about allowing a user to control the layout of a page, in particular for use within a content management system (CMS). The system would need to be able to support a user creating templates easily, but hopefully without the use of tables.

In the CSS Advanced Layout Module, there is a draft specification for Template-based positioning.

This uses @, . and letters to specify not only how the content is to appear, but also where the content appears. That is, . are used for whitespace and letters and @ are used for content placeholders.

For example, a first page of a newspaper might have the following template (bottom of 3.7):

display: "A  A  A  A  A  A  A  A  A" / 5cm
            ".  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  ." / 0.25cm
            "B  .  C  C  C  C  C  C  C"
            "B  .  C  C  C  C  C  C  C"
            "B  .  C  C  C  C  C  C  C"
            "B  .  C  C  C  C  C  C  C"
            "B  .  C  C  C  C  C  C  C"
            "B  .  D  D  D  D  D  D  D"
            "B  .  D  D  D  D  D  D  D"
            "B  .  E  E  E  .  F  F  F"
            "B  .  E  E  E  .  F  F  F"
            "B  .  E  E  E  .  F  F  F"
            * 3em * 3em * 3em * 3em *

This would give a header (A), an article spanning the full left-side of the page (B), two main stories (C and D), and two smaller stories (E and F). The specification also has information about sizing, which you see at the far right and bottom.

While I like this, ultimately for the Web you'll have content that fills it's slots, usually. So, we could simplify this, I think, by making it as follows:

display: "A  A  A  A  A  A  A  A  A"
            ".  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  ."
            "B  .  C  C  C  C  C  C  C"
            "B  .  D  D  D  D  D  D  D"
            "B  .  E  E  E  .  F  F  F"

In addition to dropping the sizing information, I've removed any duplicate row. While it doesn't immediately give us an indication of what the page will look like, as the first case does, it's actually pretty close - we still can determine what the content is, and how it spans.

However, I'm not sure that this adequately states the layout that is desired. If you examine the image that was used, copied below, you'll notice something.

First, using the far left-side column as our guide, we've actually got five columns on this page (look at the very last 'line' on the page). In other words, the following line is incorrect.

"B  .  E  E  E  .  F  F  F"

Instead, this should actually be as follows.

"B  .  E  E  .  F  F"  

Obviously, this would continue on up through all the lines.

Also, spacing can be determined via other CSS methods, and should not be a part of the template itself. It seems unnecessary to using periods for spacing, when we've already defined content areas.

Therefore, I believe we could end up with something like the following, using this system.

display: "A  A  A  A  A"
            "B  C  C  C  C"
            "B  D  D  D  D"
            "B  E  E  F  F"

This states the following:

Content A should span the entire top of the page. Below this, content B should span the entire left-side of the page, with content C, D, E and F on the right. Content C is displayed first, on its own row, followed by content D, with the same behaviour. Finally, content E and F are displayed, to the left and right, respectively, of the other. Content C and D should be twice as wide as content E and F. Likewise, content E/F should be twice as wide as content B.

To continue, what would need to be parsed is the content within the quotes, and whitespace doesn't really matter. Therefore, we have the following as the core 'code.'

A A A A A
B C C C C
B D D D D
B E E F F

To the computer, assuming no more than 26 elements on a page (or 52 if lowercase characters were determined to be different than uppercase), this would be the same:

AAAAA
BCCCC
BDDDD
BEEFF

However, since spacing helps us, and to allow for the most content, we'll leave spaces in. (This could also allow a greater number of 'blocks' to be added to a page, even excluding allowing uppercase to be different than lowercase. For example, allowing AA and AB to be used.)

Getting back on track, I believe there's a different, and better, way to call out this content.

As stated above, we basically have a 5-column layout, of x width. The layout contains six elements of variable height.

The first row consists of one block spanning all five columns.

The second row consists of two blocks, one spanning one column, another spanning four.

The third row also consists of two blocks, one continuing to span one column, another spanning four.

Finally, the fourth row consists of three elements. The first column continues the element from the previous two rows, while the next, and last, two span two columns each.

Using only numbers, we have a layout something like the following.

5
1 4
1 4
1 2 2

However, based upon this layout alone, we don't know what content belongs where. Also, we can't clearly see that there is a left-side column that spans three rows. Using the following, however, might suggest that.

5
1 4
0 4
0 2 2 

I use a 0 here because while there is an element there, it is not the first instance, or primary location, of that element. This system instantly gives us access to not only the placement of elements, in a general way, but also how many 'blocks' the content consists of.

If we were to create a layout for the standard three-column template, with a full header and footer, we'd have something like the following:

3
1 1 1
3 

Here, while the blocks are designed by the template to be the same size, we could use CSS to effectively make the middle column much larger, instead of using the following:

5
1 3 1
5 

Using these same CSS techniques, a standard two-column interface:

2
1 1
2 

Perhaps in the three-column interface we no longer want the footer to display under the left-side column?

3
1 1 1
0 2

Don't display it under the right column either?

3
1 1 1
0 1 0

Now what if we want to put the left-side column up within the header, and put back our footer to span the full length of the bottom of the page?

1 2
0 1 1
3

How about on the right-side instead?

2 1
1 1 0
3 

Since the first row would always contain the number of columns, we could simply do the necessary math to determine the number of core columns. If there is more than one number, you simply add all numbers together.

This also allows you to put the entire layouts information in one string. Using our last example, we could have something like "2 1; 1 1 0; 3;" (adding semi-colons at the end of every line, even the ending one). Or, "2 1, 1 1 0, 3," or any other character we may desire as a standard.

However, there's one thing that we may have missed.

AAAAA
BCCCC
BDDDD
BEEFF

5
1 4
0 4
0 2 2 

As you can see, there's no easy way to link elements up with the content that they contain. What if we wanted to switch the second and third rows? With the first instance, that would be done, while in the second, it would need to be done outside of the core template.

On the one hand, the 'separate content from display' hand, that's okay. On the other hand, there's something to be said about keeping these things together.

Using the W3C proposal as a guideline, we could solve this by adding characters to our numbers.

5:A
1:B 4:C
0:B 4:D
0:B 2:E 2:F

5:A , 1:B 4:C , 0:B 4:D , 0:B 2:E 2:F ,

It's questionable whether it's necessary to have 0:B instead of 0. However this would make it easier to add CSS without the use of another parser, such as a CMS (which would read/write this, as well as allow classes and ids to be assigned to the elements).

Also, the colons could change to something more applicable, such as a . or # (# would be similar to the existing CSS practice of using this for id declarations in CSS).

Thoughts? Are there instances where this wouldn't work? Would this be a suitable way for someone to learn how to create a layout, or is it at least easier than the W3C proposal ( :) )?

My next step with this will be to determine if a solution could be created that would read a string formatted like this, and then create a page based upon it, probably using tables before moving onto CSS.