Look around. Look at someone. Or, if you don't see anyone else nearby, look into a mirror.

Look closely. Do you see that face? That's a miracle.

Really, do you think that person isn't a miracle? Do you think that person is simply a particular arrangement of atoms into molecules into proteins into DNA into a particular quantum state at this point in time?

No, that person is alive. That person has a quality that can't be defined simply from quantum mechanics. No amount of biochemistry can delineate the fine point between life and death. Einstein and Bohr cannot explain the difference between two seconds before your heart stops, and two seconds after.

Yes, you are a miracle.

There now, feel better?

Before there was any life or order, the Spirit of God was already supervising things:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit (Greek pneuma) of God moved on the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)

After organizing the heavens and the earth, God commanded the living things to appear, but for man He took a special approach, shaping Adam from the earth:

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed (enephuseisen) into his nostrils the breath (pnoï) of life; and man became a living soul. (Genesis 2:7)

God gave us life through His own Spirit. But we, through sin, brought death to both our spirit and our flesh. Our all-powerful Creator, Who designed us, also knew how to undo the damage we did. In His love for us, His Son was born of the Virgin Mary.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, proved Himself the God of flesh when He made from the dirt eyes for the man born blind (John 9), repeating the first part of Genesis 2:7. He later proved himself the God of spirits when He breathed on the Apostles, repeating the second part of Genesis 2:7:

Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be to you: as my Father has sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed (enephuseisen) on them, and said to them, Receive you the Holy Spirit (pneuma). (John 20:21-22)

Adam naturally received the Holy Spirit when the Lord breathed on him; the sinful Apostles, however, needed a reminder of Whose life they were supposed to have. He commanded them, and just a few weeks later, fifty days after the Passover, they obeyed:

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind (pnoï), and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat on each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit (pneuma), and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2:4)

So on the Feast of Pentecost, we celebrate the full restoration of the life we were intended to have. The Holy Spirit (pneuma), the Lord and Giver of life, present at Creation, brought with Him the breath (pnoï) which He breathed (enephuseisen) on Adam at the beginning, then on the Apostles and on us, restoring to us the first life which Adam had.

Finally restored, we are able properly to obey the exhortation in the final verse of the final Psalm:

Let every breath praise the Lord! Alleluia!
Pasa pnoï ainesatō ton Kyrion; Allelouïa;

There now, feel better?

Dan was susceptible to schizophreniform episodes, meaning that he would need at least a month, but less than six months, to recover from his attacks of schizophrenia. He was naturally smart, thanks to genetics, but that brought with it the stereotypical thin line between genius and insanity.

His first schizo attack came when someone slipped him a Mickey Finn at a party. The perpetrator was jealous over a promotion that Dan had gotten. The criminal conviction that resulted didn't lessen the severity of the attack, which landed him in the local mental hospital. With time and treatment, he learned to recognize an approaching attack, as well as how to forestall it before it took over his mind.

Many years later, while I worked with him on my first full-time programming gig, he explained to me the experience of schizophrenia. In a nutshell, his schizophrenia manifested itself as the inability of his mind to distinguish between his cognitive perceptions and the bubblings of his sub-conscious. His description of one episode in particular stands out in my mind:

After making some progress in the hospital, he was allowed to take care of his own personal grooming and hygiene. This included brushing his own teeth; the staff trusted him not to attempt untoward acts with the toothbrush. Anyway, one day as he was rinsing the toothpaste from his mouth, he bent over to spit out the water. When he stood up, he saw Satan himself in the mirror.

As Dan stood there paralyzed with terror, a beautiful, shining man appeared in his right peripheral vision and said, "Dan, I am not God, I am not an angel; I am the part of your mind which is still working correctly. Close your eyes and turn around, and it will go away." It took all of his will-power, but he managed to close his eyes and turn around. When he opened his eyes, everything was back to normal.

I use this story to illustrate to people what schizophrenia can be like for the person who has to live with it. In fact, after Dan died, I visited his last supervisor and had a nice, long talk with her. She had no idea that he was prone to such episodes; she knew only that he would need a couple weeks off about twice a year. I filled her in on the stuff that she didn't know, using the above story as a one-off illustration of what his life could be like.

That was six years ago. This evening, I was watching the next-to-last episode of the fifth season of House, M.D. ("Under My Skin", episode 23), in which his oxycontin addiction has produced a hallucinatory companion. Within two minutes of seeing "Amber," I knew it was a schizophrenic manifestation of his oxycontin addiction.

But I wasn't ready for "Amber" to tell House, "I'm the rational you." It was almost like the show's writers had fictionalized Dan's mind. It took a lot of effort to keep myself from breaking down.

There now, feel better?

I know a fellow who, in his mid-60's, has been using Windows for about 3 years, and still had no clue what I meant by "double-click," "drag-and-drop," or "select." He already knew about double-clicking, but didn't know what it was called. The notions of "copy-paste" and "clipboard" were totally foreign to him. (So is "don't click that blind link," but that is for someone else to explain. That battle is already being fought by those who actually have something to lose.)

Putting a total-beginner tutorial in the on-line help pretty well defeats the purpose of having such a tutorial in the first place. After all, how does one reach the tutorial? By using the mouse and on-screen menus.

The GNOME and KDE implementations of such a "tutorial" is bad to the core, anyway. A quick perusal of the basic mouse and keyboard skills sections in GNOME 2.22.3 reveals lots of textual explanations, but the only graphics present are twelve mouse pointers, presented in isolation from their pertinent contexts.

For example, the help page about resizing a window mentions the "resize pointer", but presents it as a hyperlink to the list of mouse pointers. Why isn't the pointer shown in the context where it matters? The basic keyboard help also talks about the Alt and Ctrl keys, but as far as I can see, does not explain that they are used similarly to the Shift key. Brand new users don't know this!

The assumption in KDE4's on-line help is much more explicit: "We assume that you are already familiar with at least one graphical user interface, for example CDE™, Geos™, GEM™, NeXTSTEP™, Mac®, OS/2™ or Microsoft® Windows®. So we will not explain the usage of the mouse or the keyboard but concentrate on hopefully more interesting things."

How preposterous. Does the KDE team have no aspirations to lead? Do they want always to follow, to let some other desktop become the first comfortable environment for new computer users? Without even a rudimentary introduction to the WIMP interface, KDE is totally inappropriate for retail sale. It will simply be "the other woman" that some users may dally with, but few fully commit to.

I think there should be a Linux-based "total beginner" tutorial that explains these basic GUI concepts. They're pretty platform-neutral (except maybe right- and middle-clicking on an older Macintosh) so nearly everyone learning to use a computer needs to know them. Of course, launching it shouldn't mean using these skills. We need something different. We need an interactive presentation, with video or animation, which launches on the first boot, automatically, or at least as easily as possible from instructions in a "quick-start" guide.

It should present a quick demonstration of the fundamental WIMP interface vocabulary: F-keys; the Shift, Ctrl, and Alt modifiers; left- and right-click (or "primary" and "secondary", to avoid handedness assumtions); double-click; click-and-drag; selecting text and desktop icons; and the clipboard operations, cut, copy, and paste. Maybe it should even include shift-click, to show how modifier keys work not only with other keys, but also with the mouse buttons.

Each step should include an interaction, in which the new user can demonstrate an understanding of the new vocabulary. If I'm talking to my sixty-some year-old friend over the phone, and tell him to "press F8", does he know that I'm talking about the keys in the uppermost row? After taking a tutorial which prompts him to "Press F8", the odds are better that he will.

In this day and age, in which even a tiny, underpowered netbook or a ten-year-old desktop system can play Ogg Theora videos, there is no excuse for not having such an introduction. We have the computing power. We have the programming infrastructure to use any human language in the world. It doesn't have to use Ogg Theora; it could use simple animated MNG's or some other free format.

Every year so far in the 21st century, we've heard something like, "This is the year of the Linux desktop!". No year yet has been The Year Of The Linux Desktop. As long as we assume desktop users have prior experience elsewhere, Linux will always be a geek toy, with the desktop simply an afterthought.

That may fly in tech centers like Silicon Valley, but would it work in a retirement community in Florida? Without a basic introduction to the GUI, a fifty-year-old farmer in Ukraine or Argentina will see Linux as being incomprehensible. He'll go learn something else, on some other more-common platform, because the tutorials are already available.

And we all know which two platforms are the most likely for him to learn.

There now, feel better?