Engineering Principles Are Moral Blueprints
Change Advisory Board
This episode of Change Advisory Board is a deep dive for mechanics, technicians, and engineers who live every day inside load tables, torque specs, tolerances, and fluid systems—but may not have considered that these technical disciplines are also moral ones. We explore how the core principles of engineering mechanics—statics, dynamics, geometry, material science, and energy management—form a direct parallel to the ancient moral architecture preserved in Freemasonry. Concepts like moment of inertia, section modulus, lever equilibrium, fastener preload, tolerance classes, hydraulic...
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The Gavel, the Gauge, and the Broken Foundation
Change Advisory Board
This episode confronts one of the most difficult crises a person can face: the collapse of life under addiction—and the parallel responsibility of a fraternity committed to lifting a worthy brother in distress. Through a dual lens of Alcoholics Anonymous and Freemasonry, we explore addiction not as a moral failure but as a physical abnormality paired with a devastating mental distortion: the loss of perspective that allows a person to take the first drink despite knowing the consequences. We trace the progression from physical compulsion to shattered resolve, isolation, self-deception, and...
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Stone, Soul, and Software
Change Advisory Board
The philosophical principles underlying human conduct and ancient wisdom traditions establish a framework for understanding order and morality. Marcus Aurelius emphasized that the body is perishable, merely a "little flesh and breath" or a "network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries", while the rational soul should seek to know itself and choose its own nature. The end for rational animals is to follow reason, be content with destiny, and understand that the Universe is transformation. This pursuit of wisdom is paralleled in Freemasonry, which holds that all elevating and benign...
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Twin Peaks and The Unfinished Temple
Change Advisory Board
This episode traces a strange and elegant thread between David Lynch’s Twin Peaks cosmology and the philosophical architecture of Freemasonry. Both traditions distrust final answers. Both insist that mystery is not a flaw but a tool—something like a chisel that keeps the builder awake. Lynch treats closure as artistic death; Masonry treats completion as spiritual stagnation. When these two worlds meet, the owl-ring becomes a symbol of perpetual investigation, and the Square and Compasses become the geometry of eternal striving. What emerges is a shared blueprint: the unfinished temple as a...
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The Level and the War-Forge
Change Advisory Board
This episode traces a sharp line between the Masonic Level—symbol of equality, humility, and shared human destiny—and the immense industrial architectures that manufacture the tools of modern warfare. The Level teaches that all people stand on common ground, “partakers of the same nature,” and that death is the great equalizer that dissolves rank and distinction. Yet the defense industry operates on a different plane entirely: profit-driven hierarchies crafting weapons that divide, destroy, and stratify the world. We explore this philosophical collision with care. On one side stands...
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The Canopy and The Starfield
Change Advisory Board
This episode explores the shared sky between Masonry and Starfield—a symbolic canopy that says more about human purpose than it does about stars. In Masonry, the Celestial Canopy stretches from the lodge room to the edge of creation, reminding the initiate that the universe itself is the Temple of the Grand Architect. In Starfield, that same vastness becomes the stage for Constellation’s search for the Unity: a literal attempt to pierce the heavenly veil and discover what truth, if any, lies beyond it. We draw parallels between the Lodge’s starry firmament and the cosmic expanse the...
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Compassion and The Compass
Change Advisory Board
This episode walks straight into the messy, human middle ground between loving people and losing yourself in the process. Using the story of Paul and Eunice—a sober helper and a deeply traumatized veteran—we unpack what compassion really looks like when trauma, addiction, resentment, and financial collapse all live under the same roof. Guided by the compass of Freemasonry and the inner fortress of Stoic philosophy, we explore the idea of the cable tow as a moral boundary: the point beyond which “helping” turns into self-destruction. We connect that to how we run systems and services...
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The Temple and the Error Budget
Change Advisory Board
What happens when you put Solomon’s Temple next to a modern error budget and ask them both what “perfection” really means? In this episode, we explore the idea that reliable service is not just a technical outcome but a moral consequence — the visible result of character, duty, and brotherly love expressed through IT work. Drawing on Freemasonry, Stoic philosophy, and the writings of Marcus Aurelius, we unpack what it means to work logarithmically toward an ideal you will never fully reach. We contrast the Masonic Temple and its working tools with SRE and ITIL principles: why 100%...
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The Architecture of Eternity
Change Advisory Board
Freemasonry’s Moral OS and the Birth of Human Reliability This episode of The Cab Call traces the long arc of Masonic history as if it were the version-history of humanity’s oldest moral operating system. Instead of treating the Craft as a museum of rituals, we explore it as a living reliability framework—prophecy, practice, and interpretation—evolving over thousands of years to keep human beings resilient in a world full of entropy. We move from the prophetic era, where symbols like the Cube and Square encoded universal laws of stability, through the great operative builders who...
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The Gauge and the Calendar
Change Advisory Board
This episode explores the Twenty-four-inch Gauge — one of the earliest and most quietly profound symbols in Freemasonry — as a blueprint for surviving and thriving in modern system administration. The gauge’s ancient triad of vocation, refreshment, and service becomes a practical lens for navigating today’s impossible mix of project deadlines, user interruptions, enterprise timetables, automation demands, and mental load. We trace how the symbolic 8/8/8 division maps directly onto the SA’s world: focused work protected from interruption, rest defended as a prerequisite for cognitive...
info_outlineThe philosophical principles underlying human conduct and ancient wisdom traditions establish a framework for understanding order and morality. Marcus Aurelius emphasized that the body is perishable, merely a "little flesh and breath" or a "network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries", while the rational soul should seek to know itself and choose its own nature. The end for rational animals is to follow reason, be content with destiny, and understand that the Universe is transformation. This pursuit of wisdom is paralleled in Freemasonry, which holds that all elevating and benign religions share fundamental truths. Masonry, founded on Geometry, or the fifth science, utilizes symbols like the Rough Ashlar, representing the unpolished mind awaiting cultivation through liberal education, and the pillars Boaz and Jachin, which denote strength and stability.
Ancient texts, particularly the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, have shaped modern language and literature. The KJV has contributed more to English than perhaps any other literary source, providing phrases like "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41) and introducing words like helpmate, derived from "help meet for him" in Genesis. Its influence is evident across English literature in works by Shakespeare, John Milton (Paradise Lost), Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and C.S. Lewis. The original KJV included the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Apocrypha, though the Apocrypha was later removed in the 1800s by scholars concerned about contradictions and whether the books were divinely inspired. The KJV is textually connected to the Textus Receptus, and resources like the King James Bible Dictionary exist to clarify its content, covering topics such as Strong's Numbers.
In modern technology, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) embodies a structured approach to maintaining complex systems, focusing on reliability as the "most fundamental feature of any product". SRE, which originated from asking a software engineer to design an operations team, caps operational work (toil)—defined as manual, repetitive work that scales linearly—at 50% of an engineer’s time to ensure focus on engineering projects. Core SRE principles include managing service risk using error budgets, employing automation to maximize consistency and reduce costs, and utilizing distributed consensus algorithms like Paxos and Chubby to manage critical state reliably across failures. Monitoring is essential, prioritizing actionable alerts (immediate human intervention) and classifying outputs clearly (Alerts, Tickets, Logging). These practices, particularly preparedness, postmortem analysis, and automation, align with fundamental lessons learned across other high-reliability industries, such as the nuclear navy, defense, and aviation.
Source #01: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy
Source #02: Contribution of the King James Bible to the English Language - International Journal of Applied Research