All the stuff Alex Szatmary makes

Why isn't New Orleans Mother's Day parade shooting a 'national tragedy'? | David Dennis | Comment is free | The Guardian

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:40:18 +0000

Why isn't New Orleans Mother's Day parade shooting a 'national tragedy'? | David Dennis | Comment is free | The Guardian:

David Dennis, regarding the our collective capacity to notice some tragedies and ignore others:

So I shouldn’t be surprised that the Mother’s Day Parade shooting has largely been forgotten. On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene.

This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.

So why am I allowed to go outside? Where’s the city quarantine or FBI and Homeland Security presence for this act of “terrorism”?

Because this is an act of domestic terrorism right? Just because the alleged shooter was wearing a white tee and jeans does that suddenly make the shooting a gang-related affair? And we all know how irrelevant gang-related shootings are in America. The Mother’s Day shooting is so irrelevant that politicians haven’t even bothered to mention it to further their anti-gun agendas. If the shootings aren’t even important enough for politicians to spin, then it’s truly reached a black hole of irrelevance.

Did I mention the shooter is still on the loose? I have? Just checking. Police have released photos and video of one of the suspects, but he is still at large.

Now take a moment and imagine a Mother’s Day Parade in the suburbs of Denver, a neighborhood in Edina or a plaza in Austin where bullets rain down on civilians and even hit children. I can’t help but imagine the around-the-clock news coverage. And I can’t help but think it’s because most of America can identify with the fear of being bombarded with gunfire while just enjoying a parade in the middle of town. But America can’t identify with being at a parade in the “inner city” where “gang violence” erupts. The “oh my God, that could happen to me” factor isn’t present with a story about New Orleans or the Chicago southside.

This is the first I have heard of this shooting.

Hilarious versus Hysterical

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:40:23 +0000

From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary:

Hilarious: marked by or causing hilarity : extremely funny

Hysterical:

a psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions

behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess

— hys·ter·ic noun

— hys·ter·i·cal also hysteric adjective

— hys·ter·i·cal·ly adverb

Date snippets for TextExpander

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:06:22 +0000

Dr Drang recently wrote about date snippets for TextExpander in Bash. I put together a group of these snippets, plus snippets for calculating the first and last days of this month, last month, and next month.

You can download it here.

Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled | Bill Watterson's commencement speech to Kenyon College

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:40:23 +0000

Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled | Bill Watterson's commencement speech to Kenyon College:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

I, Pencil | Leonard E. Read

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:31:08 +0000

I, Pencil | Leonard E. Read:

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

This essay was frequently referenced by Milton Friedman, and is a great example of Hayek’s ideas about how prices represent information. I often think about this story in the context of my work as a scientist: I couldn’t easily do the job of most of the people whose papers I cite, and they couldn’t easily do mine. While no one can understand all of the developing scientific knowledge, cooperation enables all of us to make progress together.

I Came Here to Do Two Things: _ and Kick Ass. And I’m _.|Wes Brown, McSweeney's

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:26:15 +0000

I Came Here to Do Two Things: _______ and Kick Ass. And I’m _______.|Wes Brown, McSweeney's

In Boston and suburbs, shutdown is surreal - The Washington Post

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:33:16 +0000

In Boston and suburbs, shutdown is surreal - The Washington Post:

John Fox, the official historian of the FBI, said that the shutdown of such a major city was virtually unprecedented in recent U.S. history. He said the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was far bigger, knocking New York and Washington on their heels and clearing the airspace over the entire United States.

But beyond that, Fox said, a city shutdown has “only happened on a smaller scale.”

The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (which happened on April 19, Friday’s date) was far deadlier and devastated the city center. But the government didn’t order a far-reaching lockdown.

Other manhunts and events have terrorized and paralyzed cities, including in 2002 during the Washington sniper attacks. But rarely, if ever, has a large U.S. urban area come to such a complete and utter halt as happened Friday in Boston.

Fox said the closest recent parallel might be in London after the July 7, 2005, transit system attacks that killed 52 passengers and four bombers, and injured more than 700 others.

London was badly disrupted, with trains and buses out of service, and schools and many businesses were closed. But the city was back on its feet almost immediately, with a sentiment summed up by Ian Blair, then the head of Scotland Yard.

“If London can survive the Blitz,” he said, “it can survive four miserable bombers like these.”

Statement of the Ambassador of the Czech Republic on the Boston terrorist attack | Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington, D.C.

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:25:22 +0000

Statement of the Ambassador of the Czech Republic on the Boston terrorist attack | Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington, D.C.:

Petr Gandalovič, Ambassador of the Czech Republic,

As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities - the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.

Weekly Address: America Stands with the City of Boston | The White House

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:19:39 +0000

Weekly Address: America Stands with the City of Boston | The White House:

Barack Obama, today, in his weekly address,

On Monday, an act of terror wounded dozens and killed three innocent people at the Boston Marathon. But in the days since, the world has witnessed one sure and steadfast truth: Americans refuse to be terrorized.

What would Boston have done differently yesterday if they had been terrorized?

This Is A Tragedy—Does It Really Matter Exactly How Many People Died Or What Any Of The Details Are? | The Onion

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:46:38 +0000

This Is A Tragedy—Does It Really Matter Exactly How Many People Died Or What Any Of The Details Are? | The Onion:

And yet, there are still people—literally millions of them—who actually have to ask why we didn’t simply slow down and wait until the whole story came in so that we could run an accurate, fact-checked article that didn’t exaggerate the number of dead by 9 or 10 people. To that, I say: How could you even think about accurately reporting a tragedy at a time like this? When those pipe bombs or whatever they were—I believe they were pipe bombs—went off, we weren’t wasting time making routine inquiries with law enforcement officials, or relying on the reporting of those actually on the ground, or maintaining even a tenuous grasp on the journalistic conventions of truth and integrity. We were doing what needed to be done: dashing off haphazard, poorly sourced yellow journalism that included an entirely speculative report on a Saudi national who we strongly suggested was behind the attack without a modicum of supportive evidence.

Group of Men Have Played Game of Tag for 23 Years | Wall Street Journal

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:57:03 +0000

Group of Men Have Played Game of Tag for 23 Years | Wall Street Journal:

It started in high school when they spent their morning break darting around the campus of Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane, Wash. Then they moved on—to college, careers, families and new cities. But because of a reunion, a contract and someone’s unusual idea to stay in touch, tag keeps pulling them closer. Much closer.

The game they play is fundamentally the same as the schoolyard version: One player is “It” until he tags someone else. But men in their 40s can’t easily chase each other around the playground, at least not without making people nervous, so this tag has a twist. There are no geographic restrictions and the game is live for the entire month of February. The last guy tagged stays “It” for the year.

I thought this was awesome and adorable.

The Trials of Princess Jasmine, Classroom Pet and Father of Three | Simon Rich | The New Yorker

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:39:03 +0000

The Trials of Princess Jasmine, Classroom Pet and Father of Three | Simon Rich | The New Yorker:

She was dying of thirst, but never cried once. It was only later that I realized why: her body was too dehydrated to produce tears.

Pocahontas was her name.

My name is Princess Jasmine. I am a male, so this name is humiliating, but I’m aware that my situation could be worse. The other homeroom, 2R, has a guinea pig named Homer Simpson and an elderly turtle named New Kids on the Block.

Vampire Finch - Wikipedia

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:28:19 +0000

Vampire Finch - Wikipedia:

The Vampire Finch (Geospiza difficilis septentrionalis) is a small bird native to the Galápagos Islands. It is a very distinct subspecies of the Sharp-beaked Ground Finch (Geospiza difficilis) endemic to Wolf and Darwin Islands.

This bird is most famous for its unusual diet. The Vampire Finch occasionally feeds by drinking the blood of other birds, chiefly the Nazca and Blue-footed Boobies, pecking at their skin with their sharp beaks until blood is drawn.

I found out about these in Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut.

Kaiten | Wikipedia

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:40:00 +0000

Kaiten | Wikipedia:

Kaiten (Japanese: 回天, literal translation: “Return to the sky”, commonly rendered as: “The turn toward heaven”, “The Heaven Shaker” or “Change the World”) were manned torpedoes and suicide craft, used by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the final stages of World War II.

In recognition of the unfavorable progress of the war, towards the end of 1943 the Japanese high command considered suggestions for various suicide craft. These were initially rejected, but later deemed necessary. Various suicide mission vehicles were developed in the Japanese Special Attack Units.

For the Navy this meant Kamikaze planes, Shinyo suicide boats, Kaiten submarines and Fukuryu suicide divers or human mines. The Kamikazes were somewhat successful, and the second most successful were the Kaitens.

Research on the first Kaiten began in February 1944, followed on 25 July of the same year by the first prototype. By 1 August, an order for 100 units had been placed.

Reading about this reminds me of the general inhumanity of war and, in particular, how desperate the Japanese were more than a year before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked with nuclear weapons.

The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On - Bruce Schneier - The Atlantic

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:40:22 +0000

The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On - Bruce Schneier - The Atlantic:

Bruce Schneier:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.

It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

A letter to The Monthly Magazine regarding the preparation of coffee

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:40:22 +0000

A letter to The Monthly Magazine regarding the preparation of coffee:

A nerd writes in to The Monthly Magazine, discussing the proper method of coffee preparation. (Use a biggins. Duh.) He also dismisses another reader of The Monthly who boils an egg in his coffee.

In 1814.

Some things never change.

via Best of Metafilter

List: What Your Favorite Classic NES Video Game Says About You. | McSweeney's

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 18:40:00 +0000

List: What Your Favorite Classic NES Video Game Says About You. | McSweeney's:

By John Peck. Some of my favorites:

*Metroid: You have killed a mosquito with hairspray. *Metal Gear: You have eaten astronaut ice cream as a meal. *The Legend of Zelda: You have carried a piece of string cheese behind your ear for a whole day. *Zelda II: The Adventure of Link: You have used an oversized licorice whip as a jumprope. *Ninja Gaiden: You have used an elastic headband as a belt or tourniquet.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:40:04 +0000

The importance of stupidity in scientific research:

Martin A. Schwartz:

My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did.

That’s when it hit me: nobody did. That’s why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn’t really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s First Banking Committee...

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 22:20:04 +0000

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s First Banking Committee Hearing

Senator Warren: When did you last take a large financial institution, a Wall Street bank, to trial?

Mumbling ensues!

Vincent Wigglesworth

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 22:20:11 +0000

Just so you know, there was a real person named Vincent Wigglesworth, and he was an entomologist. Wigglesworth! He did a great job, too, he figured out some crazy stuff about how hormones regulate metamorphosis.

TeX Stack Exchange: preview-latex does not function

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 21:36:00 +0000

I have previously mentioned Preview-Latex and AUCTeX. I was trying to set it up on the work computer, but the previews weren’t showing up properly. I thought I had had the problem before, but it was a different problem. This TeX Stack Exchange question had the answer, though: disable SAFER for Ghostscript. I do not know why this works.

Allow me to recommend latex-diff and latexbatchdiff

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:26:00 +0000

I do almost all of my technical writing in LaTeX, and I do revision control on everything with git. Unfortunately, tracking changes in revisions is very difficult in LaTeX. Maybe I make a change to a single word in a paragraph: a naive diff on the .tex file shows the entire line as being changed, and, even worse, then I just have the diff as plaintext, not something I could show a non-LaTeX user.

latexdiff is able to overcome this, automatically generating indications of changes, like Word’s change tracking system: new words show up as blue and underlined, deleted text is red and crossed-out. (How the changes are indicated is configurable, with several default styles to try.) latexdiff has two shortcomings, though. First, if I’m using version control to manage revisions, I have to manually save old .tex files off to the side so that latexdiff can find them. Second, latexdiff only works on single-file LaTeX documents. I like to put each section in its own file.

latexbatchdiff fixes both of these things. I just typed,

latexdiff-git 1ca0 head.tex abstract.tex acknowledgments.tex\
    introduction.tex methods.tex results.tex conclusion.tex

and it generated a marked-up PDF. (1ca0 is the start of a SHA for a previous revision.) It’s fantastic.

I never met Steve

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:58:00 +0000

Steve Jobs died.

I have noticed three categories of reactions to this. First are the feelings of his family and close friends. I don’t know about his family, but here are some remembrances by colleagues. Their feelings are the most important right now.

The second category is the gauche comments made by people who don’t like that Steve Jobs used alternative medicines or didn’t practice the right religion or by people who say that Apple stuff is all going to suck now or by people who just don’t like Macs. I saw someone on Twitter say, “whenever a celebrity dies twitter turns into this big group of people all trying to jam the same turd into one toilet.”

The third category is the feelings of people who never met Steve Jobs, never knew him personally but who have had their lives made better by things that he made. I like this story, Chair shared by Adam Lisagor when Steve Jobs resigned as CEO, about a visit to Apple’s campus when Adam got to see Steve Jobs in person.

Since I got my first Mac and iPod six years ago, I’ve only spent a tiny fraction of my life more than ten feet from an Apple product. I spend most of my waking hours using an Apple product, my computer, iPad, or listening to podcasts on my iPod touch. As a person in the third category, I am sad that Steve died, and his death feels strangely personal to me. For me, this is different from most celebrity deaths. although I never met Steve, the things that he helped make occupy an intimate part of my life.

Steve Jobs said, “What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” That is, humans are physically wimpy compared with many animals, but a human on a bicycle is able to use the least amount of energy to move a kilometer of any animal. Bicycles are not just valuable because they make long trips shorter; they also make it easier to go on trips that wouldn’t have been worth trying before.

One of the most remarkable things about Apple products is how easy it is to share information between them. I have trouble remembering to do things, keeping track of my grocery list and what I need to do in my research, and so on. I have an anxiety disorder. Organizing my tasks and time made me about a third less anxious. Apple products made this easier: all the things I would be nervous about forgetting are on my computer and in my pocket.

Mac OS X is remarkable: I use it because it’s an operating system with all the power of Unix (which I need to do my research) and incredible usability. If I couldn’t use Apple products, I would have a much more difficult time doing my work in modeling and analyzing the physics of cells.

My Apple devices are bicycles for my mind: they make it so I don’t have to think about a lot of things that I don’t need to and make it easier for me to think about things that are important and difficult.

When people die, the effects of what they did still live on. Some people are saying that with Steve Jobs gone, Apple products are going to start sucking. They’re wrong. More than making Apple products, Steve Jobs made Apple and NeXT (he owned Pixar for a while, too). No one person can make an iPod. Steve Jobs was a leader who did not try to make copies of himself; an example of this is the difference between him and Tim Cook, the new Apple CEO. Instead, he led teams of people to cooperate to make amazing products. He also led a lot of other people, like me, by giving us tools we use to communicate with each other and to make our own great works. When I use Apple products, I am inspired by how useful they are, but also how beautiful; I want to do my work even more carefully and present my work more elegantly. The people at Apple are going to keep designing and inventing new things, and Apple users are going to keep doing the same. We’ll miss Steve.

Fear holiday

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Patriot Day is a dishonest holiday because it is supposed to be an opportunity to remember the losses on September 11, 2001, perhaps to grieve. However, America, over the past ten years, has been characterized not by grief but by fear. There is nothing wrong with simply being afraid (unless one does not wish to feel this way), but it’s best to address fear if fear is what one mostly feels. Sadness is not the only appropriate feeling.

When I learned that September 11 is called Patriot Day, I winced, I think, because of the symbol that 9/11 has become and how the word “patriot” means, instead of “lover of country”, “lover of state”. Any commemoration of 9/11, any call to “remember” or “never forget”, is political because 9/11 has repeatedly been invoked to enforce consent to war, rejection of human rights, and stupid things, as if people who resist any action of the government are “unpatriotic” and disrespectful towards the lives lost on 9/11.

The terror caused by the attacks on 9/11 was used to invent a War on Terror. This war wound up happening a lot in Iraq, although no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, nor was there any connection found between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, nor were any of the actual 9/11 attackers from Iraqi. Perhaps the United States had gotten too calm since the Cold War ended and 9/11 was an apt reminder to be wary of terrorism in general. It’s more likely that the terror the terrorists generated was seized as an opportunity to go to war; at 2:40 PM on 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld dictated to one of his aides, “Judge whether hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at the same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden].” (Image of note) Within six hours of the attacks, Rumsfeld had managed to emotionally process through the “denial” stage of grief and had moved on to “anger”; he lingered there for a while.

Thirty times as many civilians have died in the Iraq war as died in the 9/11 attacks.

The terror cultivated by 9/11 has been used to excuse many abuses of human rights. 9/11 has been used by the United States government to justify torture, detention without due process, racial profiling, and warrantless surveillance; American citizens have suffered due to each of these. (Related: ACLU Report: A Call to Courage) The New York Police Department, with the aid of the CIA, is spying on Muslim communities without probable cause.

The PATRIOT Act and similar increases of “counterterrorist” activity have resulted in actions by the FBI that are stupid. They put a tracking device on the car of Yasir Afifi, a native US citizen, without a warrant or even probable cause other than Afifi being half-Egyptian; when he found the device, they asked for it back. FBI agents often sit in parked cars to keep an eye on Scott Crow, a spindly nonviolent vegan anarchist. In a report, they noted an object on his lawn, “It had a large number of multi-colored blocks, with figures and/or lettering…may be a sign that is to be used in an upcoming protest.” “It was a quilt,” he said, “for a kids’ after-school program.”

Law enforcement, from the FBI to state and local law enforcement, to private security in office buildings, started doing more stupid things as a result of 9/11. Many police and local homeland security departments encourage reporting of “suspicious activities” including, [being] “over dressed for the weather”, “individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular telephones”, and “joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time”.

Stupid suspicion and security theater are wasteful of time and money, but they have a worse consequence. Needless and unhelpful security measures do harm because security theater tells a story about how afraid people should be. When people take off their shoes at the security line, that’s a ritual that was invented as a reaction to the Shoe Bomber. Liquids go in 3 ounce bottles in 1 quart zip-lock bags, a reminder of the Liquid Bomb Plot. The TSA was created, and the convoluted screening process it uses in airports was instituted as a reaction to the 9/11 attacks. These do not make people safer, these policies make people more afraid.

My grandpa died one Sunday. I was 18. His funeral was the next Saturday. My parents asked me if I wanted to spend the night at their house and go to church with them the next day. I decided not to. I drove back to campus that night, and then went to a church I’d never been to where no one would know about my grandpa’s death. I was sad that my grandpa died, and it was important to be with my family as we grieved. I’m sure that other people at my church were sad for my family, and I’m thankful for their sympathy, that they cared about my family, but I didn’t want to deal with them telling me repeatedly how sad it is that my grandpa died. They didn’t know him.

After the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, many college students changed their Facebook profile pictures to the Virginia Tech logo and joined Facebook groups with names like, “We are all Hokies”. This was crass. Virginia Tech students are Virginia Tech students, and other college students are other college students. The Virginia Tech shooting was sad, but it was particularly salient to other college students. College students everywhere were afraid because people like them got shot; this made it easy for them to imagine dying in a similar fashion. Saying that one is a Hokie when one is not is an attempt to borrow someone else’s sadness as a cover for one’s own fear.

The deaths of the people on 9/11 are notable because of the scale of the hateful attack that killed them. They were striking because other Americans could not help but imagine being victims of a similar attack. They continue to be remembered, not just out of sadness, but as symbol they have served; they had no choice about what their deaths would come to mean, how this event would be used to further political aims.

Many people who lost close friends or family members on 9/11 are still mourning; this is appropriate. To me, though, and to most Americans, the victims on 9/11 were strangers; all we have in common with them is our Americanness. It’s wonderful to have the empathy to be sad on someone else’s behalf. It’s harmful to expect one’s self to have sadness equal to that of the victim. Grief is not a competition.

Patriot Day is supposed to be a day of remembrance and grief, but grief is not the only appropriate emotion when considering 9/11. Fear has dominated American political behavior since 9/11, so honestly expressing fear is appropriate, too. Masking fear with shows of grief mocks the grief felt deeply by the families and friends of the victims. Remembering 9/11 without careful consideration grows fear.

If safety from terrorism is still under-addressed, more fear is not what Americans need; Americans need more perspective. Airport security is an example of the repeated loss of perspective to fear. The 9/11 attackers used airplanes as missiles, so the TSA took over airports. Then, Richard Reid tried to blow up his shoes on an airplane, so now we have to take off our shoes when we go through TSA security. Then, there was a plot to attack airplanes with bombs made of, among other things, hydrogen peroxide, disposable cameras, and Tang, and so the TSA and other agencies around the world banned a phase of matter. In each of these cases, the changes in security policy were in response to a previous attack, not in anticipation of a future attack. It’s myopic to consider commercial passenger air travel as a particularly significant terrorist attack vector when there are cargo planes, private planes, trains, cars, motorcycles, boats, horses, canals, and Segways, and threats that have nothing to do with transportation. Fear drives this decision making. Fear inhibits creativity and forces people to revisit their pain, to remain subject to it.

If Americans are concerned about safety from terrorists, they need to ask, What will al Qaeda do next? and, Who else, besides al Qaeda, wants Americans to be afraid?

In Refuse to be Terrorized, Bruce Schneier writes,

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

…

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

(I am not saying that the politicians and press are terrorists, or that they share any of the blame for terrorist attacks. I’m not that stupid. But the subject of terrorism is more complex than it appears, and understanding its various causes and effects are vital for understanding how to best deal with it.)

Everyone has experienced pain, and everyone has fear that it will recur. To continue to be identified by pain is to continue to be manipulated by it. It’s important, for example, to recognize the harm that slavery caused, but to see an African American primarily as a descendant of slaves, instead of a parent or math teacher or golf player, is to continue the identification imposed upon their ancestors instead of the identity that they themselves generate; this is small compared to the wrong of slavery and institutionalized discrimination, but it is unnecessary and painful. Forgetting, in a careful way, is necessary.

The War on Terror was misnamed because it isn’t actually a war against the feelings of terror that people have, it’s a war on terrorists or a war on people that are accused of being terrorists. What if there had been a war on terror—the feeling? More than Patriot Day, a day for grief, Americans need an opportunity to admit their fears, discuss them, and find ways to overcome them. People can cultivate courage. Maintaining good health, doing good work, and loving and being loved all help develop courage. These are things are already worthwhile.

There is no end to violence. Terrorist attacks are inevitable. When threatened by attacks in the future, America will perpetuate violence unless it becomes less fearful.

At least they aren't Dominionists

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 05:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I linked to Dominionism: Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry’s Dangerous Religious Bond by Michelle Goldberg. In discussions online, a couple of friends pointed me to these articles, Be not afraid of evangelicals by Lisa Miller and Christian Dominionism Is a Myth by A. Larry Ross. Ross and Miller both write in response to Goldberg’s article, as well as Leap of Faith regarding Michele Bachmann by Ryan Lizza and Rick Perry’s Army of God by Forrest Wilder. The part of Ross’s article that addresses these articles is,

Although her [Goldberg’s] well-intentioned article may resonate in the echo chambers of her fellow East Coast media elite, Goldberg misapplies a broad label that few, if any, evangelicals use or with which they identify. It reveals more about the author’s personal perspective and lack of nuanced understanding of the topic than it provides useful information about the subjects themselves.

Miller’s article does a clearer job than Ross of describing Dominionism, and aptly remarks,

Certain journalists use “dominionist” the way some folks on Fox News use the word “sharia.” Its strangeness scares people. Without history or context, the word creates a siege mentality in which “we” need to guard against “them.”

I don’t think that Bachmann or Perry would call themselves Dominionists, and I now agree with my friends that this label is wrong. Another valid criticism of Ryan Lizza’s piece on Bachmann is that it overstates her connections to certain extremist figures. Ross and Miller are both right to protest when people in the media try to make evangelicalism sound frightening. However, I think that Goldberg, Lizza, and Wilder, in their writing, are careful to not make blanket statements about Christians or evangelicals. They aren’t telling their readers to watch out for evangelicals, they’re telling their readers to watch out for Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry and the particular people they are influenced and supported by.

I read more about Bachmann and Perry, trying to figure out if they are “Dominionists” and realized that they aren’t. That didn’t make me feel better, though. They aren’t Dominionists, but they do support their strains of Christianity having undue influence on others through government power.

It’s appropriate for religion to influence politicians. It’s great if a Christian politician sees concern for the poor in the Bible and this motivates them to legislate for justice in our society. I am glad when Christian politicians’ beliefs about God valuing life encourage them to protect lives. It’s wonderful if a Christian politician’s beliefs about God remind them of how limited and frail humans are, and take this as a reminder to be humble and careful in the use of their power.

Our government is and should be secular, though; policy ought to be based on reason and evidence. Secularism is not just important for the non-religious, it’s important for everyone because it’s not just neutral towards religions, it’s neutral towards sects. While the United States has, historically, been mostly populated by Christians, it has always been populated by Christians of many stripes. My home state, Maryland, was founded as a colony because George Calvert (The Lord Baltimore) wanted a place where Catholics could live freely, away from mistreatment in Anglican England. I don’t think that Bachmann and Perry have secret spooky connections to religious conspiracies. However, both Bachmann and Perry openly disregard the protection of everyone’s rights equally; they advance their particular religious preferences through governmental power.

While Lizza’s profile on Bachmann was speculative regarding her connections to some figures, the leadership of her law school and the close relationships that she did have with her mentors are relevant. Bachmann went to O.W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University, which had a lapse in its accreditation by the ABA because they required students and faculty to be Christian. This was not an institution that tought lawyers to practice law with neutrality towards religion. In God’s Law is the Only Law: The Genesis of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Posner writes about one of the founders of Coburn, Herb Titus,

After Moore was stripped of his judgeship for defying a federal court order to remove his monument, Titus drafted the Constitution Restoration Act, which would have deprived federal courts of jurisdiction in cases challenging a government entity’s or official’s “acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.” The bill, which did not pass, nonetheless had nine Senate co-sponsors and 50 House co-sponsors; including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Bobby Jindal, now the governor of Louisiana, Nathan Deal, now the governor of Georgia, and Mike Pence, a conservative hero who’s now running for governor of Indiana.

After graduation, Bachmann stayed to work as a research assistant for John Eidsmoe’s book “Christianity and the Constitution”. Ryan Lizza recalls a conversation with Eidsmoe,

Eidsmoe explained to me how the Coburn School of Law, in the years that Bachmann was there, wove Christianity into the legal curriculum. “Say we’re talking in criminal law, and we get to the subject of the insanity defense,” he said. “Well, Biblically speaking, is there such a thing as insanity and is it a defense for a crime? We might look back to King David when he’s captured by the Philistines and he starts frothing at the mouth, playing crazy and so on.” When Biblical law conflicted with American law, Eidsmoe said, O.R.U. students were generally taught that “the first thing you should try to do is work through legal means and political means to get it changed.”

Bachmann’s not simply affiliated with anti-secularism, and not only in ancient history. Speaking at the EdWatch National Education Conference in 2004, she said,

It’s part of Satan I think to say that this is “gay.” It’s anything but gay.

and

If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.

Anti-gay opinions don’t have to be religious, but Bachmann’s views on gay rights clearly do come from her religious beliefs.

While in the Minnesotta State Senate, she co-wrote a bill regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools:

Notwithstanding any rule or law to the contrary, when science academic standards are taught that may generate controversy, including biological evolution, the curriculum must help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society. A quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science.

I agree with every word of that bill. It’s entirely unnecessary, though. Science education already teaches how we come to understand nature, and includes discussion of controversy; this helps students develop critical thinking skills, and science instruction should include more consideration of disagreement among scientists. Appropriate teaching of the controversy about evolution would include the fact that it ended years ago. The “full range of scientific views” on evolution does not include intelligent design, which Bachmann wants taught in schools,

I support intelligent design. What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.

Support of intelligent design is support of religion. Intelligent design as a political movement is just a re-brand of creationism, a re-brand that was rightly struck down as being inappropriate for teaching in public schools, in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. This movement is dishonest because the scientific community does not support intelligent design. If intelligent design proponents were concerned about advancing their hypotheses appropriately, they would be campaigning for more research funding on the matter, instead of demanding that opinions that are not grounded in science be taught as science in public schools. The Discovery Institute is the primary organization in the intelligent design movement. In its Wedge Strategy document, it stated the goal of having a hundred scientific publications supporting intelligent design by 2003. This did not come close to happening. They tried to start their own journal, Origins & Design, but didn’t publish a new issue since the year 2000. Political support for teaching creationism in public schools is based on willful ignorance of the actual science, and is instead motivated by religious beliefs.

Bachmann wants tax policy to be influenced by her religious beliefs,

What Jesus said, “Render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and render unto God that which is God’s,” so there certainly is a place for us to pay taxes to government. That’s legitimate. We should do that as Jesus instructs. But we render to God that which is God’s and the Bible calls for, approximately we are thinking of tithe, maybe 10 percent that we are giving to God, but beyond that we also give to charity. Jesus didn’t ask government to be the charity; he asks the the individual and the church to be charitable.”

Bachmann thinks that God is speaking through natural disasters,

I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, “Are you going to start listening to me here?” Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.

This interpretation of these events, ironically, is unsupported by I Kings 19:11.

Criticism of Rick Perry for being anti-secular is more relevant because he is currently more popular than Bachmann. In April, he issued a proclamation calling for three days of prayer for rain. (Unfortunately, this year, Texas is having its worst drought in history.) Again, he officially declared August 6 to be a day of prayer. I have no problem with politicians praying, and I don’t even mind when they personally urge people to pray. Issuing public proclamations for such is a misuse of power, though. In particular, Perry’s August 6 day of prayer included an invitation to a rally at Reliant Stadium; Wilder’s article on Perry covers this event in detail. Five days later, Rick Perry announced that he is running for president.

Regarding homosexuality, in his book, On My Honor, Perry writes,

Though I am no expert on the “nature versus nurture” debate, I can sympathize with those who believe sexual preference is genetic. It may be so, but it remains unproved. Even if it were, this does not mean we are ultimately not responsible for the active choices we make. Even if an alcoholic is powerless over alcohol once it enters his body, he still makes a choice to drink. And, even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender.

A loving, tolerant view toward those who have a different sexual preference is the ideal position — for both the heterosexual and the homosexual. I do not believe in condemning homosexuals that I know personally. I believe in valuing their lives like any others, as our God in heaven does. Tolerance, however, should not only be asked of the proponents of traditional values. The radical homosexual movement seeks societal normalization of their sexual activity. I respect their right to engage in individual behavior of their choosing, but they must respect the right of millions in society to refuse to normalize their behavior.

His respect for the rights of homosexuals to “engage in individual behavior of their choosing” has evidently arisen since 2002, when, regarding Texas’ not-yet-declared-unconstitutional-by-the-United-States-Supreme-Court anti-sodomy law, he said, “I think our law is appropriate that we have on the books.” He is “for the federal marriage amendment”; granted, this is expected of Republicans these days. The anti-sodomy law, though, intruded into people’s homes. Oscar Wilde said, “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” Perry’s support for the anti-sodomy laws, and even bans on gay marriage, is selfish.

Regarding evolution and creationism, he said,

I am a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect, and I believe it should be presented in schools alongside the theories of evolution.

Rick Perry supports Israel for religious reasons, saying,

I’m a big believer that this country was given to the people of Israel a long time ago, by God, and that’s ordained.

What sort of treatment would a candidate receive if they went to a law school that required its students and faculty to be Muslims, where they were taught to change American law if it disagreed with Koranic law? A Sikh who saught to sneak Sikh beliefs into public school curricula? A Buddhist who wanted tax policy based on their beliefs about mendicancy? A Hindu candidate who said that God was speaking through natural disasters? A Wiccan who declared days of prayer? A Muslim candidate who believed that God had given Israel to Palestinians?

How about a premillenialist politician that wanted to conduct foreign policy based on the expectation that the world was going to end soon? A politician from a mainline church who tried to force all clergy to marry gay people on request? A Catholic politician that tried to ban contraception? Secularism is not important just for nonreligious people, or for non-Christians, it’s important for everyone because at some level, everyone’s beliefs are not those of the majority.

When John F Kennedy ran for president, he had much opposition because he was a Catholic. Was the Vatican going to have a direct line to the Oval Office? Clarifying his role, he said,

I am not the Catholic candidate for President.

I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.

I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views—in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

Politicians are not given switches they can use to turn their religious preferences on and off. We should expect their preferences to influence their attention and give them passion for the wellbeing of the people, and this is often a good thing. The policies, themselves, though, must have a secular basis. Concern regarding inappropriate influence of religion on politicians is not new. JFK faced it, drawing a clear line between what he thought was appropriate and inappropriate influence of his religion on his decisions as president. In the last presidential election, Obama was compelled to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright, and John McCain rejected support from John Hagee. Michele Bachmann’s and Rick Perry’s beliefs about the role of religion in government should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other politician.

Bachmann and Perry are not Dominionists, and calling them Dominionists is characteristic of politics of fear and it’s bad rhetoric. It is also unnecessary because they don’t need to be Dominionists to be opposed to fair secular policy. Bachmann and Perry are both clearly drafting policy based on their religious beliefs, rather than reason and evidence; there is no need for conspiracy theories. The influences that Bachmann and Perry have been subject to, for example, Bachmann’s law school and Perry’s support from his prayer rally are relevant in light of this, but these are not the primary reasons why they are unfit to govern.

Restricting people’s rights to marry and forcing the teaching of bad science is not in the national interest. Tax policy should be decided based on the national interest, not on Levitical law. Support for Israel should be determined based on the national interest, and global human interest, not on God-given land deeds. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry are both unfit to govern, not because of the connections they may have to extremists, but because they themselves are enemies of a society that treats people of all religious beliefs equally.

Squirt guns and the foundations of morality

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 05:00:00 +0000

I have a friend who, recently, had a problem with little boys playing with squirt guns indoors. She called a Kids Meeting. There had not been any Kids Meetings before at this house, but that got the kids to sit down. She asked who was responsible, and all of the boys pointed at the one who was the most drenched. My friend did not believe them, but she then asked them what happens if people shoot squirt guns inside. The boys raised their hands and gave answers like, “The furniture might get messed up.” or “The squirt guns might make a puddle and then someone might slip and fall.”. My friend said, “Let’s make a rule: no playing with squirt guns inside.” The boys agreed, and they didn’t squirt guns inside anymore; at least, not for a couple of days.

The boys were not squirting guns because they had failed to grasp their prime moral imperative; they were squirting guns because they are little kids and were having fun, they just needed help to see how squirting squirt guns could harm people. And, by being encouraged to develop thoughts about their actions, they figured out, with a little help, how they ought to behave. My friend acted as an authority, but more like a teacher and less like a police officer.

I do not believe in any moral absolutes, but I think that harming people is bad and that helping people is good. I do not think that the moral beliefs that I do have are controversial. I would expect constructive controversies regarding things like whether aid should be given to kids in Somalia if warlords collect taxes on this aid, or what constitutes self-plagiarism, or whether people should eat chickens.

If two people are talking about right and wrong, they can have a good conversation if they agree on some basic points (eg, it is wrong to harm people); agreement on how they arrived at these points is not necessary. And yet, it’s often the case that secular people get asked by religious people how they have any morals at all. This is unfortunate. Although I disagree with religious people regarding whether God exists, I have more agreement than disagreement with them on how people ought to treat each other.

Human beings have a variety of beliefs about how morals come from God, or gods, or inside of people, or the structure of the universe, or something else. Human beings also have diverse sets of specific moral rules: what constitutes a stingy tip or who should be in charge in a family or how many times you need to say “thank you”. Between the source of morality and specific rules that people follow is a narrowly similar thing across humans: we think that it’s important to take care of family members, to not harm neighbors; we have empathy, especially toward people that we are related to or people with whom we can relate.

The next step for human beings to become more good is not the development of a more thorough or uniform or precise ethical basis; instead, it’s expanding the idea of who family and neighbors are by developing understanding of the commonality that humans have.

Pennies in the parking lot

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:00:00 +0000

It was difficult to get home safely at 8:30 pm. There was a storm with a lot of wind. When I got home, the lights were out, so I had to find the phone number for the electric company in the dark. I normally get billed electronically. I had trouble finding the phone number. I called the electric company, but the line was busy. I ate noodles (the gas range still worked) and gouda and I played a new zombie game on my iPod touch—I figured, since it’s dark, I might as well seize the opportunity to get properly frightened.

I called the electric company again, and finally got through. They said that they hadn’t noticed a problem in my area. I thought that maybe I was just the first to call. I told Regina that we were going to be heroes. Regina said, “No, the real hero will be the working person who fixes the power lines.” She always makes good points like that. I went outside, trying to figure out if mine was the only house on the block without power, which was difficult, because most houses on my block are vacant. I didn’t see any lights. I then checked to see if my main breaker was still on, and when I did, I saw that the basement was flooded, because there wasn’t electricity to run the sump pump. I ask for them to send someone out.

I stayed up a little, waiting for a service truck to come, but it was dark and I had gotten bored and decided that I had nothing better to do than go to sleep. At five in the morning, I got a call telling me that the truck was on its way. Half an hour later, a worker knocked on my door. While his partner drove the cherry picker to the lot behind my house, he waded in galoshes across the flooded basement to the breaker box to confirm that the power was out. The interruption in the middle of the night, the worker with the head lamp and boots, the problems with ducts all reminded me of the film, Brazil. They then positioned the bucket of the cherry picker where the line from the power pole meets my house, and saw that I had power at that line. They told me that I’m responsible for the service conduit, the line that drops from the point outside my bedroom down to my basement. I was charged $80 for this. I went back to bed.

When I woke up, I had a little breakfast and then I texted Google to get phone numbers for electricians and I asked the first business that was available to help me. R got there first, but he had to drive a while from his work site. His boss, J, got there not long after. They looked at the conduit, and confirmed that the problem was the wire in it. J went to the store to get wire and other supplies. While he did that, I spotted R as he climbed a ladder to the top of the conduit. The conduit is a metal tube, capped at both ends with openings just big enough to let the wire through. R tried unscrewing the top of the conduit. He banged on it with his wrench. It didn’t come loose. Then R and I waded through ankle-deep water in the basement to the breaker box. I felt bad for R because he was in jeans and steel-toed boots. I held the flashlight as he tried to unscrew the bottom end of the conduit, with no success.

Just then, J got back. R told him about our setbacks. J asked why there were pennies in the parking lot: we looked down, and there were maybe a hundred of them. I didn’t know what to do, the electricians seemed to not need me for a while, but I couldn’t eat or take a shower or get work done. So I said, “Do you mind if I sweep these up? Maybe the change will help me pay you.” They chuckled at that. I got a broom. There were bits of glass in with the pennies, and I didn’t know if it was worth the trouble to sort them out. I was having trouble thinking clearly, and I didn’t have anything to do so I did something. The electricians wound up just running the cable down the outside of the conduit, securing it with zip ties.

R went down to the basement to flip the breaker. I was afraid that a power line might be in the water and that R could get shocked, but we tried to be careful. The power came back on. We heard a kind of whooping, rushing sound: the sump pump was working, jetting water out across my patio. I paid the electricians. The bill was several hundred dollars. I checked the basement. Boxes had been floating around and they were now askew. I re-lit the burner on the water heater, which had been partially submerged.

I hadn’t eaten lunch and it was five. I had some toaster-oven pizza, and then I took a shower, packed my things, and headed up toward Philadelphia, to visit my girlfriend. On my way, I was still hungry, so I stopped at Burger King to get a veggie burger. I played Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent as I ate. My throat was sore from the stress, so I had some ice cream for dessert.

When I drive, I always listen to podcasts; music doesn’t normally hold my attention. I was having difficulty paying attention to the words in the podcasts, though, because I was so tired and unhappy. I wanted to listen to some music, I was especially in the mood for music made by friends. I listened to I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) as covered by Blue Electric Mongoose, as I drove up to the Girard Point Bridge.

The first time I had an article get rejected, I took a walk and sat on a bench and felt sad. The second time I had an article get rejected, I wrote a Python script to decode gibberish in a Harry Mathews novel, The Conversions, and I ate four plums. The third time I had an article get rejected I bought a new digital camera and went to the zoo and took pictures of animals.

Last summer, as I was leaving my house, I tried to start my car and it didn’t. I called a friend over to take a look at it. He recommended a mechanic. I called the mechanic. I called a tow truck. The repair shop closed for the day and I had no word on my car. I could have gotten some work done at home but I felt drained. Instead I walked to a coffee shop. I got a mocha and a waffle and read the City Paper and My Life in CIA by Harry Mathews. The next day, I woke up to a call from the mechanic telling me that my engine was no good and I needed a new one; this would cost more than the Blue Book value of the car. I called another tow truck to take the car to My Trusted Mechanic. I went to Grilled Cheese and Co while I waited for word on the car. The Trusted Mechanic called, saying that the engine was dead, but for a different reason than the first mechanic. A friend helped me clean out my trunk and gave me a ride to the lab. I got to the library just before it closed, so that I could check out Fargo: I needed Fargo.

The storm and the power outage and the flooded basement and eating in the dark and the cherry picker and the worker with the galoshes and the headlamp in the middle of the night and the loss of hundreds of dollars and my articles not amounting to much and my car dying and two two trucks and two mechanics and a new monthly payment, resulted, somehow, in zombie games and sweeping up pennies in the parking lot and a shower and ice cream at Burger King and I’m gonna be and a bench and four plums and a new camera and zoo animals and a mocha and a waffle and grilled cheese and Fargo and two Harry Mathews novels, with cortisol and norepinephrine somewhere in the middle.

Doctor, I have a recurring dream in which I am running late to catch a flight.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Doctor, I have a recurring dream in which I am running late to catch a flight. In one of these dreams, I had to rush to finish packing. Then, I went to the airport, and, inside, I was in the kitchen of a single-family home and there was a buffet of Turkish food and I had to put some in a styrofoam container to take with me so that I would have something to eat on the flight; the line for Turkish food was long and I was afraid that I wouldn’t make it to the gate on time. When I got on the airplane, just before take-off, my whole family was there, except for my dad. Dad was in the cockpit. He told the pilot, “I read last week that they design these things so that they can take off going backwards as easily as they can going forwards.” The pilot had never heard that, but he thought it was an interesting fact and decided to let Dad try flying the plane, taking off in reverse. The plane crashed into a hill, bounced, flew forward, crashed, bounced, flew backwards, and then I woke up. The most scary thing about that dream is that it’s not unlikely that my Dad would charm his way into the cockpit of a jet and get the pilot to let him fly it. He’s very friendly.

In a lot of my dreams about travel going wrong, I forget to pack my shoes, and I somehow make it to my destination before I notice that I’m in my socks. There are plenty of reasons to be anxious about travel: the car could break down, the trip itself could be unpleasant, it’s uncomfortable to be in a different environment without normal routines. At the start of my trip to Turkey, as I waited at the departure gate, I started to worry about whether I had locked my car. So, I worry some about leaving my car and house behind when I travel, but I mostly worry about forgetting to bring things. This doesn’t even need to be a major worry: as long as I have my credit card, I can buy anything that I need that I’ve forgotten.

I normally fly in order to go to scientific conferences or to visit relatives, Mom is from Alabama. While I was growing up, we would drive down south every year or two. I am the oldest of six kids. It took until I started grad school for my parents to give up on the road trip and take us by plane, instead. To have plenty of clean clothes for the trip, I did all of my laundry the night before the flight. On the day of the flight, while running errands, I was rear-ended at a traffic circle; this made me run late getting home. When I got home to pack, I had forgotten to allow enough time to dry my clothes, and so my family arrived at my apartment right as the dryer was almost finishing. I counted out slightly damp underwear, shirts, socks, and pants, and threw them all, unfolded, into a duffel bag. I felt embarrassed because I had made my family run late. It turned out that it wasn’t a real problem, my parents had allowed for plenty of time to clear security, but I was ashamed, anyway.

The first time that I attended a scientific conference, I was preparing my slides on my computer. I didn’t like how PowerPoint typeset my equations, so I installed a piece of software that would do a better job of that. Between my unfamiliarity with this software and a goofy mistake, my computer wound up in an unbootable state; I had to reinstall the operating system, back up my data properly, then re-reinstall the operating system. Between repairing my computer and packing, I was up until two AM. I had to get up at 6 AM to be at the airport in time for an 8:30 flight. I was delayed going through security because the TSA agents were confused by the external hard drive I had wedged into my luggage. They opened my suitcase, and I didn’t want my underwear to be seen in front of everybody. I finished my slides in between Nashville and San Antonio.

I make lists. I have a list of everything I wish I’d brought on a trip, and before I pack, I just delete from the list the things I won’t need. I have an extra list, five items, that I have forgotten before: soap, shampoo, pajamas, towel, and underwear. The time that I forgot my towel, I thought about drying myself with my dirty clothes, but, instead, a friend let me share his towel with him. This is the one friend that I would regularly talk with while urinating in public restrooms, and, even then, it made me uncomfortable to share a towel with him.

The time that I forgot to pack underwear, I was on a retreat in upstate New York. I had packed precisely one pair of underwear, so I didn’t notice the problem until my third day on the retreat. At first, I thought that it was a prank, but it wasn’t. I took the morning off, from studying the Gospel of Mark, and drove an hour to the nearest K-Mart.

Chronic conditions

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 05:00:00 +0000

At five in the afternoon last Tuesday, I was walking to the bathroom and I paused and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and I realized that the reason why I had had trouble getting work done was not because I was lazy or just generally distractible but because I have bipolar disorder and an anxiety disorder and so I have bad mood days sometimes.

A little later, I took a walk. I take a walk every day, going twice around the pond in front of the library. As I was walking I wanted to stop and lie down on the grass because I felt weak, like the weakness one feels when one has the flu. When I got back to the lab, I wanted to lie on the floor. A mood episode, to me, is not just between my ears, it is physical; it feels like pain throughout my body, it feels more like this than just having bad feelings like remorse or shame or deprivation.

I tried to figure out why I felt down. I couldn't think of any arguments or conflicts that I had had that were important. It was my first day back at work after Memorial Day weekend. Long weekends and vacations are disruptive to my routines and often set me up to have a bad mood. This is unusual, I suppose—people seem to enjoy having a long break from work. I could think of things that contributed to my bad mood, but I couldn't think of anything that could explain it entirely.

I thought that maybe I was dumb or lazy or weak-willed for having the bad mood day, as if it was my fault. I felt irate because I do a lot to manage my mood. I always take my medicine, I see a counselor, I have a healthy routine, I sleep well, I eat a lot of fruit, I go for walks, I meditate. I can do a lot of things to make my mood better most of the time, overall, but there's no way to keep myself from having bad mood episodes every so often. I used to be constantly distressed by my mood disorders; with treatment, I'm now happy most of the time. Psych problems are generally managed rather than cured. Psych treatment has made bad moods rarer, less intense, shorter, and they distort my understanding of myself less. When I have a bad mood day now, though, I am afraid that it's all over, that my mood will go back to the way it was.

If someone is hit with one arrow, it hurts; if someone is hit with a second arrow, it hurts more. The first arrow is pain, which is inevitable, and the second arrow is suffering, which, with practice, is optional. It’s common for people to be afraid of the dark. When they’re in the dark, some people are afraid of aliens. It’s natural to be afraid of the dark, but if, when you’re in the dark, you imagine being abducted by aliens, that narrative makes you more afraid and makes it harder for you to make good decisions to compensate for the fear of the dark.

Before I started getting treatment, mood episodes would cause me to ruminate on how much suffering there is in the world and how bad I am and how I can never do enough to become authentic, and all of that negative thinking worsened and prolonged my mood episodes. It was rare for me to just be depressed and feel sad, I would feel guilty. Rumination made me think that despair is normal and that it is normal for me to not like myself. I ruminate less when I have a bad mood episode. If I can find something about the circumstances around my mood that I can fix, I try to do that, but it’s more often the case that I need to quiet the part of me that is telling make-believe stories about what’s wrong. When I’m having a mood episode, worries will crawl up, but thinking about what to do about them at that time is often overwhelming, so I defer consideration of some worries by literally putting them on the calendar for a day or two ahead, when I’ll be feeling more competent to make good decisions. This works. I think that counseling and mindfulness practice have both contributed to this. I regard it as an accomplishment that when I have a bad mood day, I’m able to be merely sad, instead of feeling guilty or inadequate or ashamed. I don't brood anymore.

I normally have a few cups of coffee or tea each day. When I noticed my mood on Tuesday, I had iced rooibos tea, it's decaf. I sometimes use caffeine to get through a rough patch, but, last Tuesday, it was better to be tired and depressed than to be alert and depressed and maybe anxious, too.

Sometimes, working hard makes me feel better because it’s challenging and fulfilling, but, sometimes I need to rest, instead. Tuesday evening, I quit work early. I watched House while playing Hunters on my iPad. I felt bad, but I was distracted in a mindless way from my problems. I felt too weary to engage directly. I normally feel guilty when I spend my time idly, but I felt no guilt over this idleness, I felt accepting of my limitation.  I take two kinds of medicine to manage my psych disorders. I take lamotrigine, an anti-convulsant mood stabilizer, it’s supposed to keep my mood from going too high or low. Lamotrigine has done a perfect job of preventing hypomanic episodes: I haven’t had one since I started taking it. Lamotrigine also has a mild sedative effect. I also take clonazepam for anxiety. It mellows me out, I feel calmer throughout the day. I take my pills about an hour before bed. At first, I just expected clonazepam to help me by making my temperament more serene, overall. I have found that it helps me in more nuanced ways. I can fall asleep precisely when I want to. I used to stay up until 4 AM, whether I wanted to or not; I could lie in bed for hours waiting to fall asleep. I don’t have to worry, anymore, about whether I’ll sleep soundly: I always do. The hour before I go to bed, as the clonazepam takes effect, I relax. I’ll read a book and eat some cheese and not worry about anything. This is when I feel the clonazepam most intensely, and this gives me a very calm window of time. As I’m getting ready for bed, I practice having mild thoughts, to have an easy bearing with myself.

Having a structured routine is helpful for me. It was difficult for me to have a regular schedule before I started taking medications, because my sleep schedule was so erratic. Now, I know that I can go to bed on time every night, wake up on time, feeling refreshed, and then have time for a relaxed morning routine before I start working; the momentum from this routine helps me start, even when I don’t feel like it.

It is rare that a bad mood descends or lifts in the middle of the day; it’s more normal for me to have a bad mood start or end after a night’s sleep. On bad mood days, I often go to bed with the attitude that, even if I have a bad mood today, it’s possible that I’ll feel better the next day; this doesn’t make the mood go away, but it’s a little bit of hope.

On Wednesday I was feeling poorly, too. I felt averse to spending time with other people. Depression is tricky because it makes me want to be alone, but spending time with people, especially laughing, is one of the best things I can do to improve my mood. I go to a Bible study group on Wednesday evenings, but I thought about not going; maybe I should just have some quiet time alone. I’m glad that I decided to go, anyway.

When I arrived, I offered the disclaimer, “I’m having a bad mood day, and so I might have trouble listening or paying attention.” My friends in my Bible study have the sort of understanding that before we talk about Bible things, we express what has us preoccupied. It sucks when you are standing in line at a convenience store and you make a joke to a stranger about the Go-Go Taquitos, and the joke doesn’t go over well, and you think it’s because he’s a well-dressed professional who is too fancy for jokes, and then you notice that a lot of people in the 7-Eleven are wearing suits and dresses and then you see, out the window, orange stickers on a lot of the windshields of the cars in the parking lot, and you realize that these people are in between burying someone and having Caesar salad and finger sandwiches and there is no way in which any joke about Taquitos could be funny to them. It was helpful for us to have a shared understanding of my state so that we could have sensible expectations about how I would react. This consideration is normal for us, whenever someone is having a difficult time, we try to listen to them and be accommodating.

It was helpful for me to join in an engrossing conversation about the Beatitudes; I was so focused I stopped thinking about how badly I felt. We were talking about the last Beatitude, the one about persecution. I don’t think that I’ve been persecuted; I’ve suffered and I’ve felt pain, but I haven’t been attacked very much for my beliefs and values. I was inspired hearing my friends talking about making good decisions when it was hard. Feeling proud of other people helps me be less concerned with myself.

We talked about people who seem to always be happy, and one friend said that these people are putting on a mask. I was confused, because I know people who I think are genuinely consistently happy. My friend clarified that it’s a good kind of mask. I think that what she meant was that the people who seem to always be happy, or at least hopeful, are so by way of choices that they make. Another friend talked about smiling; even if you’re having a bad mood, smiling can make you feel better. Self-expression doesn’t just need to be descriptive, it can honestly represent aspiration.

On Thursday, when I woke up, I felt better. Last year, I got the flu and felt nauseous for a few days and almost vomited. After the flu passed, I still didn’t feel like eating normal food. The last time that I had the flu, someone recommended that I try Gas-X; when one has an upset stomach and doesn’t eat as much as usual, gas can build up in the intestines and make eating again uncomfortable. I think the Gas-X was helpful. So, even though, on Thursday, I didn’t feel beset with depression, I tried to be careful with myself. I took breaks, I worked on easier, less-stressful projects. It felt good to be doing productive work and to be able to concentrate again. There was a power failure on campus that night. I had been hoping to work extra to compensate for the low productivity on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I think that the power failure was a happy accident for me. I ran some errands and then got home early and had time to relax.

I rely on my close friends and family to help me with my psych problems. I have some close friends that have bipolar disorder, depression, or anxiety, and their camaraderie is encouraging. However, confronting my psych problems is a solitary challenge because my mind is the only one in my head.

I could feel robbed by my psych problems, and try to figure out how much happiness they have cost me, how many hours I’ve wasted lying awake in bed or oversleeping in the morning, how much more research I would have gotten done or how many more books I would have read, but this line of thought has not been productive for me. Instead, I find that what I’ve done to treat and manage my psych problems is some of the work that I’m the most proud of. I am more acquainted with my mind than I would be if I didn’t have the disorders. My problems have forced me to learn that there is more to my mind than my thoughts. As much as I try to find positive things about this, I do feel like having these psych problems has been a loss, overall.

This is probably going to affect me for the rest of my life. I will always have bad mood days. Everyone has bad mood days, but I think that my bad mood days are worse than average, and that’s not fair. As I age, my condition will probably worsen; I will probably have more frequent and deeper depression. Electroshock therapy might help. Even though my psych problems will not disappear, and they may get worse, I do not need to be hindered by despair.

Link: The Process Of Leaving

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 22:52:00 +0000

Lauren, who recently found my blog and contacted me, is now writing at The Process Of Leaving about her process in leaving the church. I think that readers of this blog may find her account interesting; she's describing how she feels as she has conversations with people that are important to her as she leaves.

Bedtime for Regina

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 31 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

When I get home from the lab, I set my things down, put out the baby gate, and let Regina out of her cage. On the ground floor of my house are a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen, in a row; Regina’s cage is in the living room. At first, when it was time for Regina to play outside her cage, she would mostly stay in the living room and sometimes go into the dining room, but never the kitchen. I live in a Baltimore row house that was built in the 1890’s, before indoor plumbing was common, so the kitchen was an addition. It sits two steps down from the rest of the ground floor, and Regina, being a rabbit, does not, generally, find steps worth risking.

One time, I was cooking, and thought that it might be interesting to see how Regina liked the kitchen. She immediately hid under a cabinet, tucked behind some molding such that I couldn’t see her. I ate supper, and she was still hiding under the cabinet. I didn’t know what I could try to get her out, and I didn’t think she was in danger if I left her under the cabinet, so I went out for the evening to see some friends. When I got home, she was still under the cabinet, but when she saw me turn the light on, she hopped out and let me pick her up and take her to her cage.

After that, she understood how those kitchen stairs worked and knew that the best hiding place around is under the kitchen cabinets, so I have to put up a baby gate to keep her out of the kitchen.

It was annoying for me to set up the baby gate the first time because the house is so old that there are no parallel lines in it. So, I tried to set up the baby gate in the doorway, the proper way, with the little rubber stoppers pushing out on the doorway, but the doorway flares out at the bottom, so the baby gate wasn’t stable. I settled on just leaning the baby gate in front of the doorway to the kitchen.

One time, Regina got around the baby gate and into the kitchen, and I was scared and chased after her and she hid under the cabinets. I was scared because I had a rat trap in the kitchen; at the time, I had a rat infestation. I quickly put the rat trap away, because I didn’t want it to harm Regina, and I didn’t know how long I would have to wait for her to come out from under the cabinets. This time, I sat in the dining room, reading, and she got bored and came out in fifteen minutes. Ever since then, I have propped a chair in front of the baby gate, to keep Regina from slipping behind it.

Regina and I used to have a different bedtime routine than we do now. She likes to hide under furniture, especially the futon in the living room. I put some phone books under the futon, and she likes chewing on them and tearing the pages out. Also, I have a fireplace that doesn’t work; it’s set up for a wood-burning stove, but I don’t have a wood-burning stove, so instead I have a cinderblock that props up a flue for a wood-burning stove. Regina likes to hide in the fireplace, with her head behind the cinder block but her tail sticking out.

Regina, being a rabbit, is a prey animal; this dominates her behavior. To survive and procreate as a rabbit, one must forage and groom and burrow and make friends with other rabbits, but all of that is easily destroyed in a moment by a predator; I think that Regina’s strongest emotion isn’t greed or love, it’s fear.

It is difficult to take care of a rabbit because rabbits can run much faster than I can. So, when it was time for me to put Regina to bed, I would shake the back of the futon, and she would run out from behind it, randomly picking her next hiding spot, maybe under the cage or under the coffee table or under the china cabinet in the dining room. I would follow her around and nudge her out of each spot until, checkmate, she would hide in the fireplace and I would have her cornered and could pick her up and put her in her cage. Then I would have to hold her very tightly as I would lower her into her cage; if I didn’t, she might jump right out of my arms, being excited to get back into her safe place. One time, she got her paw stuck in the bars of her cage, and it was difficult for me to lift her paw out of the bars because rabbits tend to kick when they’re scared, so she was starting to flail a little bit and I wanted to make sure she didn’t break a bone.

Canines, like wolves and foxes and dogs, are the main predators of rabbits. When a canine catches a rabbit, the canine doesn’t kill the rabbit on the spot, it picks the rabbit up and takes it somewhere secure to break its neck by shaking it. Regina is not a fully socialized animal; she isn’t wild, but she also isn’t docile. My sister has a rabbit, Shadow, that was reared by a breeder who would make sure that all of the baby rabbits were handled a little bit every day, and so my sister’s rabbit is very docile, she seeks out human touch. Regina, though, is not accustomed to being held, and her instincts make being carried scary for her. When I’m sitting on the futon, she will sometimes hop up and let me pet her a little bit, but then she’ll hop away; that she gets close to me at all makes me think that she understands that I’m safe for her. Even so, at the age she is, I don’t think she will ever feel safe being carried by a human.

Regina and I visited my family for Christmas last year, we stayed for a few days. My sister has a big rabbit pen, and we put both of our rabbits in it and tried to introduce them. Regina and Shadow hopped up to each other, sniffed each other, nose to nose, and then, suddenly, Shadow ripped a tuft of fur off of Regina, who, startled, ran to hide behind me. We separated them quickly. Evidently, this is not how to introduce rabbits.

While visiting my family, Regina stayed in a borrowed cage that sat on the ground; this was different for her, because her cage at home is like a little cart, with the base about a foot and a half off the floor. The last night of our visit, my sister and I tried to gradually introduce our rabbits to each other, and it was helpful for Regina to be in a cage that she could hop out of and into as she wished. She was nervous, in a strange place, and she had been harmed by Shadow. We put the two cages close together, maybe a foot apart. We left Shadow’s cage closed but opened the door to Regina’s; after a couple of minutes, when she felt safe, she hopped out and put her paws up on Shadow’s cage. They sniffed at each other. Regina then went back into her cage, and we shut the door. Then, Shadow took a turn coming out of her cage on her own, with Regina staying in her cage, and they sniffed some more. This was safe for them because if one was scared of the other, she could step back, and the wall of the cage would protect her. Next Christmas, if we spend more time letting the rabbits get acquainted, maybe they will be able to play together.

After we got home from being away for Christmas, I thought of how scary it is for Regina to be picked up and taken to her cage when she is done playing. Even though bedtime was scary for her, I thought that it was worth it for her to get good exercise and to have more space to explore in. I wanted to see if there was a way for her to play outside her cage without having to be picked up. On a snow day in January when I was home, I stacked some boxes and phone books to make stairs leading up to the door of her cage. She didn’t try standing on them at first, so I picked her up and set her halfway down the stairs, and she figured out how to get down from there. After I helped her practice some more, she would enter and leave her cage at will. Not long after that, I got her a little stool from Ikea that has two steps, and that works fine as stairs to let her get up and down from the cage.

It’s often the case that I have to go to bed before she would go back to her cage on her own, so I have to coax her. I might nudge her out from under the china cabinet, or lift the back of the futon, but now, instead of me trying to corner her in the fireplace, our routine looks like her taking a couple of steps and me following her very slowly so as not to startle her; if I startle her, she looks for the best hiding place she can and we have to start all over. If I’m careful enough, we walk in circles around the coffee table a couple of times, and then she looks at the stairs and decides that it is a good time for her to climb them and enter her cage. I close the cage door behind her and tell her that she did a good job.

Silly and contrived bits of folk theology

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 26 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

One Friday evening, at a fundamentalist, non-denominational Bible college, a student was returning to his dorm after supper. No one was at the front desk of the building. When he got to his hall, he saw several folded up piles of clothes. A few of the doors to the dorm rooms were open. A folded pile of clothes was sitting in a desk chair, with glasses propped neatly on top of an open book. There was silence, except for the sound of an electric shaver running; it was lying on the floor in front of the vanity, next to a folded towel.

He was studying to be a youth pastor. As he prayed, out loud, asking God why he hadn’t been taken, too, Was he unworthy? Was it too late to repent?, tears started falling from his cheeks. Then his fellow residents came out of hiding and started to laugh at him. Trying not to look embarrassed, he forced a couple of chuckles.

“You don't believe in the Rapture?!” Joanna asked me, as if I wasn’t a true Christian.

“No." I said. "Wait, you believe in the Rapture?”

I had mostly been raised going to Presbyterian churches, but at this point in my life, my family was going to a hip non-denominational seeker-sensitive contemporary church with a more eclectic set of conservative Christian beliefs. The question of whether I believed in the Rapture was suddenly more complicated than I had thought. I thought I didn’t believe in it, that only wacky fundamentalists did, but I didn’t think that Joanna was a wacky fundamentalist.

Joanna: “But I thought that all Christians believe in the Rapture. So you don’t think Jesus is coming back?”

Me: “I think Jesus is coming back, I just don’t believe in the Rapture. I’m not even sure what that is. I don’t think the word, ‘Rapture’ is in the Bible.”

We were fourteen, and I think that we were trying to have the same sort of argument that our parents would have at Bible study. One time, when Mom and Dad got home from Bible study, Mom told me that Joanna’s mom, who was leading the study, started by reading a passage from Mark and, after the reading, said, “And that’s why I’m a premillennial dispensationalist.” The discussion was, evidently, stressed, which was odd because my parents and Joanna’s parents and the other grown-ups at Bible study were friends. I don’t remember much else that was said in the conversation with Joanna. I recall that I thought that she thought that I didn’t properly believe the Bible. I had previously thought she was normal, and now I was afraid that my friend was one of those End Times people.

The distinctions between our understandings were so pedantic that I didn’t properly understand that argument until I was at least twenty. There is general agreement among Christians that Jesus is coming back someday, that the earth will be transformed, and that Christians who had died will be resurrected. The quaint beliefs that pop culture associates with Christian beliefs about the end of the world, things like people vanishing, leaving behind neatly folded piles of clothes, glasses, and their dental fillings; planes crashing out of the sky if the pilot and copilot are both Christians; computers used for processing credit cards being a sign of the apocalypse; these are bound up in the premillennial dispensationalist tradition that is American, new, and obscure.

The Rapture wasn’t called The Rapture in a way that had much traction until the mid-1800’s. The term is mostly used by premillennial dispensationalists; this group is the part of conservative Christianity that is the most likely to predict when the world will end or try to identify an Antichrist. This particular apocalyptic tradition was popularized primarily through three works: Cyrus Scofield’s Scofield Reference Bible, Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkin’s Left Behind series. The Scofield Reference Bible was an annotated King James Bible with cross-references for convenient proof-texting.

I can’t find a clear reference from scripture about people leaving behind folded clothes when they get taken by Jesus, but this sensational image is a good example of how the general understanding of the Rapture, by the people who believe in it, is folk theology.

These doctrines are explained with a lot of charts. The movement gets its name from the idea that God’s grace is given out in seven “dispensations”, that there was one set of rules for being saved in the Garden of Eden, then another before the flood, then another after the flood but before Abraham, and so on. There are charts comparing text from an Old Testament prophecy, a bit from Revelation, and a list of nations, including Israel and the United States and Iraq (the new Babylon) and a resuscitated Roman empire (the European Union?). The ideas in the End Times movement are speculative, but presented as if they’re clear and plain and well-thought-out. This method is different from most Biblical literalists’ approach.

I was raised Presbyterian, and Presbyterians, being, by nature, reserved people, they normally have more reserved views of the End Times: an attitude that no one will know when Jesus is coming back until he does, and when he gets here, he’ll tell us what to do. People from the Presbyterian tradition are likely to scoff at the elaborate, overconfident storytelling around the Rapture.

One afternoon, when I was maybe ten, I was lying on my bed, reading, when I heard a fanfare. I thought, “Maybe Jesus is coming back today!” Then I heard, “Herge’s Adventures of Tintin!” It turned out that one of my brothers was watching a video. Even though my family didn’t believe in a lot of the specifics that the premillennial dispensationalists do, and even though I knew that I couldn’t know when Jesus would come back, I still hoped that he would, soon.

“You don't believe in the Prayer of Jabez?” my cousin asked me, a little shocked.

“I believe that he prayed that prayer, and it worked out fine for him,” I said, “but the Bible doesn’t set up Jabez’s prayer as a proper example of prayer. The Lord’s prayer, or the Psalms, those are better models for prayer.” I suppose I was sixteen or so. The Prayer of Jabez was the latest evangelical fad. Bruce Wilkinson wrote a book about Jabez, an obscure Old Testament figure stuck in the middle of a list of “begets”; here is everything the Bible says about Jabez:

Jabez was honored more than his brothers; and his mother named him Jabez, saying, “Because I bore him in pain.” Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, “Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from hurt and harm!” And God granted what he asked.

(1 Chronicles 4:9-10)

Somehow, Wilkinson stretched those two verses out into a book; his publisher then made more books based on that book, devotionals, journals, and so on, albums of worship music based on The Prayer of Jabez, mousepads, keychains, scented candles. Someone’s borders got enlarged.

I think that the phenomena of Rapture fandom and the popularity of The Prayer of Jabez are parallel: they are somewhat consistent with the Bible, but not clearly supported by it. They aren’t developed gradually from existing theological traditions, they feel like an idea that some guy had one time. They are convenient, neatly packaged beliefs. With the Rapture, you get the secret code from the Bible that explains the end of the world. With The Prayer of Jabez, you get a secret password that gives you access to God’s magical powers.

There is a stream in the woods behind the house I grew up in, and there’s a little island in that stream. It’s barely an island, it’s a bump of dirt in the middle of Bynum Run. One time, when I was maybe eight, the older kids told me stories about how there used to be a house on that island and that now the island is haunted and I was scared. When Dad got home from work, I asked him if he believed in ghosts. “Yes,” he said, “One. The Holy Ghost.” He smiled, and I felt less afraid. My parents are skeptical people. Whenever magicians would perform on TV, Dad would try to figure out how the tricks worked. My parents don’t believe in horoscopes or homeopathy or Reiki energy or space aliens. My parents raised me to be skeptical, and so we rejected the folk theology around the Rapture, and we didn’t pray the prayer of Jabez, and we managed to avoid other Christian fads.

I have a complicated relationship with my previous Christian self. I feel a little disappointed in myself that it took me so long to come to non-belief in God. As a bit of consolation, I’m inclined to think that, even though I was a Christian, I was a shrewd Christian. The things that I thought then, while not correct, were more carefully put together than the Rapture and Prayer of Jabez movements.

I don't believe the story at the start of this essay, about the Bible college dorm Rapture hoax. I don’t quite remember where I heard it, and I can’t find a source to for it. For a while, I thought it was true, though. Part of why I believed the story is that it confirmed what I thought, not about the Rapture, but about the people who were preoccupied with it.

And now, as I’m thinking about Christian folk religion, I think I’m a little dishonest with myself to think that I managed to only get the good, high-quality Christian doctrines. There were silly and contrived bits of folk theology that I believed for selfish reasons, but it’s difficult for me to identify, now, what they were, because I don’t want to think of myself as gullible. For example, I was a young-earth creationist, and that sort of belief seems more well-thought-out to me than the Rapture and the Prayer of Jabez, but maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s just as thin. Maybe what makes young-earth creationism different from the Rapture and the Prayer of Jabez is that it was a thing that I believed.

New blog

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 17 May 2011 05:33:00 +0000

This blog is closed now. I'm now writing at Alex's blog. Please update your RSS readers and bookmarks accordingly. A little bit of explanation is at my website, which is the best source for what sort of web things I'm working on. This site will stay open, but will no longer be updated.

Quits

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 17 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

As I was falling asleep last night, I felt quiet, not public library quiet, but after-a-big-thunderstorm quiet. My mind felt quiet, I wasn’t having many thoughts, I didn’t feel compelled to.

One time, when I was going through a break-up, I tried to fast for a day, to clear my mind; I made it until 2 PM and then went to KFC and got a barbecue chicken sandwich and macaroni, and then I went back to fasting. The next day, I was so upset, I couldn’t eat at all, even though I wasn’t fasting. One friend describes breaking up like this: when you discover that a favorite piece of clothing is getting a little worn and maybe isn’t good to wear out and about, you put it in your bottom dresser drawer; after a break-up, it’s like you get to wear those favorite old clothes again.

Everyone has annoying habits, things like cracking knuckles or using words like “irregardless” and “inflammable”, or always being a little late, or, when going out to eat, making detailed requests of the waiter. So, even when a break-up is about something important, acts of betrayal or disappointment or irresponsibility, months after a break-up, it’s the passing of these minor, petty grievances that gives relief; realizing that you are, for sure, not going to spend the rest of your life with someone who eats their Oreos by splitting them in two and then scraping the frosting off with their teeth.

I used to do research for the Army. I thought that the war in Iraq was unjustified and, although what I was doing wasn’t going directly to Iraq, just working for the Department of Defense concerned me.

About half of the work itself was material testing. In The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace, the main characters work for the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois, because IRS work is repetitive and dull but requires attention to detail. That was what testing materials was like: a pointed boredom. One time, I did the same test two hundred times in one week. I wasn’t well-suited for the job. I would sneeze and lose samples, tiny ones, down into the screw holes on an optical table. One time, I got dizzy from epoxy fumes while trying to mount some instruments on samples.

The other half of my job was making software tools to collect and analyze data. This was more interesting than just doing the tests, but even when I was making tools, although the way that the tools worked was a little interesting to me, what they did wasn’t. Only a couple of people would even use these tools.

There were all sorts of more minor things about that job that I hated. I hated the commute, which was an hour and a half during rush hour. I hated the security policies; to get to my desk, I had to pass checkpoints and show my badge and swipe my badge. I had to wear a badge and it turns out that I don’t like wearing badges; they’re awkward and dangly. I had to take the badge to the Front Desk once a month, and I wasn’t good at remembering this; when I forgot, which was about four times, there weren’t any actual consequences except the worker at the front desk glaring at me.

I tried to quit that job once, but my next gig wasn’t lined up properly, so I was stuck with the job for another four months. I think that made my dislike of the job worse. When I finally was able to quit, I started grad school, which scared me, but I kept remembering that old job and thinking about how glad I was to have something else to do.

Most people, after a break-up, plan on dating someone else, eventually, and most people quit one job planning on starting another, at least eventually. As I was quitting Christianity, though, I wasn’t considering Krishna or Thor. I didn’t exactly find a new thing. I meditate a little, I go to weekly meetings of the Secular Student Alliance, I read, but all of those things, put together, aren’t like a replacement for Christianity. At first, quitting was difficult, like the feeling very hungry or too upset to eat; I lost a lot of sleep, I would have night panics. I would wander around outside late at night.

I used to pray, not as much as I thought I should, but enough that I felt like God was always with me. When I would go for a walk or sit in silence or drive in my car, I felt like I wasn’t alone. In the morning, my alarm clock would wake me up, I would roll out of bed, walk across my room to turn off the clock, then stand there in my pajamas and pray, just to deal with getting up.

Mornings became more difficult after I started to doubt. Why was I waking up—to what end? Why do the things that I do matter? How do I know if I’m doing well enough? How do I go about not feeling bad? Sometimes, I overslept, often until noon. I kept cans of Red Thunder by my bed, to jolt myself awake with caffeine, as soon as I would wake up.

And one day between then and now I woke up, not praying, not missing prayer, feeling a little cranky because I always feel a little cranky when I wake up. Then I used the bathroom, and then went downstairs and ground some coffee beans and foamed some milk for cappuccino, and I did the same thing the next day, and the next day, and eventually, I stopped noticing that I was alone and it seemed normal, and now it feels good.

I would say that I thought about this as I fell asleep last night, but I didn’t, because I wasn’t thinking so much as being quiet.

The celebration of the killing of Osama bin Laden

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 03 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

I am more scared by America celebrating the killing of a human than I ever was scared by al Qaeda. I saw at the top of the first news article I found after Osama bin Laden was killed:

"Justice has been done," President Barack Obama declared late Sunday as crowds formed outside the White House to celebrate. Many sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "We Are the Champions."

Alexis Madrigal has a piece I recommend, describing the crowd behavior in front of the White House upon the announcement. Chanting “U-S-A U-S-A” and singing “We are the champions” is appropriate for a hockey game. Mass expressions of sentiment rarely demonstrate self-esteem and objective moral reasoning.

From President Obama’s address:

So [Bin Laden’s] demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.

I do not welcome demises.

And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda's terror: Justice has been done.

Justice has been done when we have killed the guy who killed some of us.

Yet today's achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.

Killing is not an achievement. It is not great. We Americans grow corn, we invent things, we take care of the sick, we write and paint and we love—these are great achievements. Killing an enemy is, at best, a solemn shame. It’s one thing to approve of the killing of another human being, to decide to strip him of his life. To celebrate a killing is to attempt to strip a human of his humanity.

We recoil when other people harm other people, especially children, we recoil at corpses, at the ill, at the aged, at people who observe different customs. Whenever I have shaken hands with a homeless person, I have felt the urge to wash my hands; my conscience has difficulty telling the difference between disease and poverty. Osama bin Laden was an outsider to mainstream Americans, rich, Muslim, middle-eastern, so we ought to pause to separate the parts of our response that pertain to the harm Bin Laden caused from the parts that pertain to the alienness we feel towards him. Human beings get self-esteem from identification with a group, a culture, a nation, a hockey team, and cheering at Bin Laden’s death is an activity which has more to do with group identification than with determining justice. We need to be able to distinguish between “Osama bin Laden was killed,” “Justice has been done,” and “We won”.

In his speech, Obama noted, “No Americans were harmed.” All humans have equal moral standing, regardless of their citizenship or nationality. A moral cosmopolitan, here, would identify that one civilian, a woman, used as a human shield, was killed. This is sad.

After Jared Loughner shot several people, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, it was noticed that Sarah Palin had a map with crosshairs on Giffords, and I blogged about it. There is no evident connection between Palin’s map and Loughner’s actions. I wish I hadn't used a violent act as an opportunity to make my own points about my own political views.

I anticipate that people are now writing columns and essays, arguing that the killing of Osama bin Laden is proof that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are or are not justified and that Barack Obama is better or worse than George W Bush. Many of these will mention that it is ironic that Bin Laden was killed eight years to the day after Bush’s “Mission Accomplished speech”. This is also good opportunity for Obama fans to mock Donald Trump for being concerned with trivialities.

I doubt that many of these essays will change minds. They will, instead, make people feel more reassured of their own views. We can get self-esteem by hating Osama bin Laden, and we can also get it by hating Fox News or hippies or the Democrats.

Americans are afraid. Celebrating killing normalizes killing and homogenizes thinking. People who are powerful and afraid and united and upset are dangerous, and this scares me.

Appendix

Proverbs 24:17 "Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he is overthrown."

The Onion: Violent Death Of Human Being Terrific News For Once

An example of point-scoring:

Newspaper front pages, collected by Julie Moos at Poynter:

On "Sunday"

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I wondered whether Christians had made a parody of Rebecca Black's Friday, and called it Sunday. They had. I expected it, like most Christian knock-offs, to be bad. It was worse.

Now, I'm not expecting high art or deep theology from a parody of Friday. What struck me first about Sunday was, of course, the excessive poppiness of the song; I'm too much of a grouch to enjoy music that tries to make me like it. What sticks with me, though, is this: God gets mentioned once.

Friday and Sunday both have very high production values: this isn't stuff made by a couple of teenagers with a Flip. Friday was produced by Ark Music Factory, backed by Black's parents.

Who was behind Sunday?

Sunday was made by Community Christian Church, a megachurch near Chicago, as a plug for their Easter services. The ideal audience is potential visitors. Sunday functions as a commercial for a religious institution, with only incidental mention of the Deity himself. This is characteristic of the church acting as an organization seeking to promote its own existence, rather than acting for another goal. What's promoted is the fun times, the "Worshippin', Worshippin' (Yeah)". The lyrics apologize for other churches, “Fun, fun, church can be fun.” It doesn’t say anything about love or release from guilt or a relationship with God being a source of joy.

When I was in high school, I went to a church that had a logo. Ushers got polo shirts with the logo embroidered, church-branded coffee cups and frisbees were given away. My church was unconcerned with social justice. Evangelism that would lead to more church members was much more discussed than remote missionary work. So I made like a self-righteous eighteen-year-old and quit.

And now, as an atheist, I am still bothered when the church focuses on things other than loving God and loving people. If I want to hear a good band, I’ll go to a concert and if I want good psychology, I’ll talk to my counselor. When I go to church, I want religion; I want Christians to engage with their idea of God: I’ll have something to learn from contemplating with them or by thinking about why I disagree with them.

On “Antedisciplinary” Science

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:49:00 +0000

In PLoS Computational Biology, Sean R. Eddy wrote a Perspective, ["Antedisciplinary" Science](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010006), on how to think about emerging interdisciplinary fields in science. In particular, he is concerned with the rising expectation that research groups have members from distinct disciplines, say a team with a biologist, a computer scientist, and a physicist. He contends that, in many cases, it is more effective to have teams of generalists. This is important to me because I feel like my job is a combination of numerical analysis, mechanics, computer programming, and biology: I think this is awesome. I get bored easily, and I'm delighted that I have a job in which I get to do a lot of complementary things.

Atheist Bingo

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

(via lol god)

On "Why Are Atheists So Angry?"

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Rabbi David Wolpe wrote Why are Atheists so Angry; in it, he lists four reasons why he thinks that atheists are angry. He opens discussing how a lot of the feedback he gets on his writing on the Internet is from atheists and that they are generally angry. His four points are clearly applicable to the sort of atheists who write angry things in blog comments, but it seems to me that he didn't actually ask an atheist friend if he's angry, and, if so, why. I want to mention, here, two things in his article that make me angry.

Atheists are angry because we are members of a cultural out-group. We're not in as bad of a situation as, say, racial minorities, in that we have the choice to keep our mouths shut. We're are an out-group, though. How many atheist characters do you see on TV? I can think of Dr House; House is a stereotypical atheist, grouchy, rationalist, cynical. Dr Cameron on the same show is also a nonbeliever; she's a more sympathetic character and I wish people would notice her more. No other characters come to mind at the moment. Of course, most characters on TV don't make mention of their religious beliefs, but I wish I saw atheist characters on TV dealing with the issues I deal with, things like negotiating friendships with religious people. When people deconvert, increased tension with parents is common, and I didn't find many portrayals of people in the same situation in any media.

People treat out-group members poorly. I've heard religious people say that my worldview is meaningless, that it leads to gulags, that atheists can't have authentic systems of morality, that we're disingenuous in shutting out a belief in the supernatural—these things hurt. (I'm not saying that Wolpe makes all of these accusations against atheists.) I think Rabbi Wolpe can relate to me in this struggle: Jews have dealt with centuries of mistrust by the majority in Western culture, examples of this include blood libel and the stereotype that they are greedy. It hurts to be excluded and it hurts to be blamed.

Alienation is a frequent topic of conversation for atheists, for example, we talk the difficulty in "coming out" about our nonbelief. That Rabbi Wolpe doesn't mention alienation as a cause of anger for atheists makes me think that he wrote an article about why we're angry without directly consulting any of us; this sort of presumption makes me angry.

The other thing that Rabbi Wolpe says that makes me angry is his assertion atheists sometimes have a "want of wonder". I'm a scientist, and most of my atheist friends major in the sciences; I want to talk concretely about wonder for atheists who are scientists in particular. Scientific work leads to useful knowledge, but the process of doing science is fraught with uncertainty. I don't know if my code has a bug in it or how reliable measurements of cells in the literature are. Last week, a colleague presented experimental data and was criticized for the large variance in it. About a quarter of my job is learning new things by reading, and another quarter is learning new things by doing my own studies. It's hard work and it matters to me because I think cells are amazing and I want to know more about them. It's fiendishly difficult to describe the physics of the matter inside cells and I marvel at the possibilities in this and I enjoy following the lively and constructive debate about how to approach this problem.

The difference between research and homework is that no one has done a particular research project before; there's an Einstein quote floating around, "If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" The job of scientists is to live at the edge of what we don't know and we can't like our jobs unless we are willing to wonder. (This applies to all scientists, not just atheists.)

Atheists aren't necessarily stodgy, we just look for the unknown in things that can be studied, rather than beyond the material world. There is enough to wonder about here.

I want to mention that I agree with his first point, that atheists particularly notice suffering caused by religion, and that he's willing to let religion take the hit on this. Most of his points seem to apply to the atheists that argue with him on the Internet, but they don't uniformly fit most atheists, or at least not the ones I know personally. I don't really have a grudge against Rabbi Wolpe, but his essay touched a nerve. I'm glad he's talking about this stuff and I think he's open to listening.

On "Life as a Leaver"

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 06:00:00 +0000

In Anna Scott's Life as a Leaver, she articulates the painful effort needed to withstand doubt and judgment. Her husband divorced her, and this suffering led her to doubt. She has been, and is, pursuing a career in ministry, and as someone concerned with being theologically orthodox, she faces the belief on the part of a lot of her fellow church members that, because she is a woman, she isn't fit to serve in the capacity she feels called to. Life as a Leaver is ostensibly in response to The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church by Drew Dyck, but her article stands on its own.

Although Scott will likely remain a believer, as a doubter she certainly has my sympathies. She describes the pat answers she gets, and the frustration of realizing that the intellectual understanding she had of God's love through suffering, that understanding was not as solid as she expected. I recommend reading her article for its frankness and the all-too-rare "I don't know" from a thoughtful religionist:

Surely, I am not the only person to have “crashed” on these “rocks” of sin and suffering, sovereignty and certainty. And I no longer think that it is a sign of immaturity or ignorance that these rocks give birth to doubt; in fact, I think it is immature and ignorant to deny these very real questions: about rape, about mental illness, about earthquakes, about affairs, about divorce, about children born into extreme poverty. Where does sovereignty end and sin begin? And what does that say about God? Shouldn’t this be relevant to any discussion of disbelief?

In Dyck's article, he says:

Over the past year, I’ve conducted in-depth interviews with scores of ex-Christians. Only two were honest enough to cite moral compromise as the primary reason for their departures. Many experienced intellectual crises that seemed to conveniently coincide with the adoption of a lifestyle that fell outside the bounds of Christian morality.

Moral compromise was not a factor in my departure from belief in God, and, if Dyck were to interview me, it would be dishonest of me to cite it as a reason for leaving. The part of Scott's response that was the most relatable for me was:

I want to end this litany of criticisms [of Dyck's article] by acknowledging a point that I found both offensive and mildly insightful, but for different reasons than Dyck identifies: I do think that moral compromise plays a role in a person’s decision to leave Christianity, but I think that the negative influence is actually exerted on the developing doubter, rather than on the moral transgressor. Having attended youth group religiously (yes, I am going with this idiom despite the pun) and a prominent Christian college, followed by years in communities, churches, faith-based organizations and Christian graduate school, I can easily attest to the willingness—even eagerness—of young evangelicals to compromise biblical standards and call it doubt or rebellion. But, sooner or later, these people will find a nice Christian husband or wife and return to the church of their childhood, because doubt is not their real issue. It is those of us who are trying to build a thoughtful, substantive, deep faith who observe this behavior in young people raised in the church and wonder what has gone wrong. What the hell is going on here? I often asked myself, observing this profound lack of authenticity. Why do these people—and, in all honestly, I became one of them in college—bother retaining the trappings of Christianity at all?

As I was doubting, I became more scrupulous in my moral behavior. Knowing that good works could not save me, and that my good behavior might be some vain attempt to pacify God, I tried to find the right spiritual muscles to flex, the ones involving humility and submission and resignation. I was afraid to sin, or even, to have a wrong spiritual inclination, because that would be an indicator that my doubts were inauthentic: perhaps I was doubting my way out of my moral obligations or the challenge of relating to God. I didn't want my honest doubts to be dismissible by others or myself as mere moral compromise. Scott is right in noting that others' moral failings are as likely to lead to doubt as one's own foibles, and right in noting the wrongness of looking to blame doubters. If there were a badge to give to Christians for being relatable to nonbelievers, she gets it.

Response to bittersweet and brave

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:55:00 +0000

The following is a comment on Matthew's brave and bittersweet; this is part of an ongoing conversation outlined here regarding secular hope. Here, I want to respond to a couple of points that Matthew raised in brave and bittersweet.

Previously, I posed the question:

Which is the better source of hope: this world, small, and often backwards as it is, but certain, or transcendent meaning and eternal life, known by invisible evidence? What can comfort?

This question is clearly answered differently by different people. I suppose that a lot of people believe that meaning and security and comfort can only be had if there is a God, a promise of heaven, and the assurance that God is acting on the world now. Not everyone wants these beliefs or finds them helpful, though.

Matthew wrote:

A secular hope is a great thing for educated people who have the resources to avoid most of the pain and insecurity that come with disease, hunger, war, and oppression.

Secularism tends to skew more towards people who are well off. That doesn't mean it's inaccessible to people who are suffering. I have been reading lately about the Pirahã people in Brazil, hunter-gatherers who have no concept of God or spirits; life is not easy for them. More broadly, when it comes to existential beliefs, polytheisms tend to have more in common with atheism than they do with monotheisms; people can have supernatural beliefs but be functionally very similar to atheists in their outlook. Ancient Mesopotamian religions were fatalistic; the people believed that gods existed, but were cruel or indifferent or capricious. My understanding is that the structure of their outlook is common among agrarian civilizations. It is not apparent to me that it is the nature of human beings to either expect a paternal God, or to be despondent and hopeless without this belief. It's important to not provide pat answers, certainly, and the beliefs of privileged people regarding suffering are often unhelpful to the poor and oppressed, sick and alienated; this goes for both religious and secular beliefs about suffering.

Matthew mentions that secular concepts of hope are limited in two ways in particular: in secular concepts of meaning, everything is temporary, and everything is relative. These are both good points, and I recommend bearing both in mind. Yet, we don't call bread bad because it gets moldy, or because we get hungry again after eating it, or because there's better bread out there somewhere. Bread is precisely as big as bread is, and I'm glad I have enough bread for today.

Matthew compares secular hope to a lottery ticket and religious hope to the assurance that comes from adoption by a rich man. Belief in justice or wholeness or relief coming from a spiritual domain seems, to me, to be like buying a lottery ticket: there is an offer of infinite payoff, but the factual support for this hope is tenuous. Devout religious people don't live thoroughly consistently with their beliefs because it is difficult for humans to have the spiritual imagination to accept that God's will is perfect and in their interest; spiritual imagination is needed because their confidence is from faith in unseen things. When I say that hope from the material world is certain, I mean that we know for sure that this world exists and that there are things in it that give us some comfort and happiness and security. These things are small and limited and they wear out, but they are what we have for today. This materialist sense of hope can't stop death, it can't eliminate suffering, but it can sustain life for a little while. It's like farming, with modest yields coming from hard work. Sometimes there is plenty of rain, and sometimes there's drought. I can't offer a solution that will eliminate suffering or even death, or something that can transcend them, but adversity can be encountered with courage and dignity.

As I read both Andy Crouch's article and Matthew's post, I found myself unconvinced that my sense of hope is lacking, not because their logic was explicitly wrong, but because I myself feel fulfilled and secure, and I feel like I respond to the small challenges I face in a way that I am content with. I don't feel a need that they say that I should feel. I know that I'm not alone in not feeling a need for a belief in God in order to have a satisfying life in this world.

Links to share regarding secular hope

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 05:02:00 +0000

Matthew and I have been discussing ideas about secular hope over the past few weeks, and I want to point to his side of the discussion here. I suppose these discussions started with some talk on Twitter, which is a terrible venue for discussing serious matters at length. Written up in essay form, in chronological order, are:

My Regarding that XKCD comic
Matthew's also regarding that xkcd comic
My On "A World Without Jobs", and, implicitly, Obama's speech at Tucson
Matthew's brave and bittersweet

If you have thoughts to share, either comment, or blog something and send one of us a link.

On "A World Without Jobs", and, implicitly, Obama's speech at Tucson

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Andy Crouch wrote A World Without Jobs in response to Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, announcing that he is taking medical leave. Crouch, he contrasts the hope offered by Steve Jobs' "secular gospel" with Barack Obama's expression of hope in his recent speech at Tucson after the shooting there. Jobs' gospel, according to Crouch, is technological progress and courage in the face of death found in a meaningful life here and now. (Jobs' thoughts on the matter are expressed well in his commencement address at Stanford; I recommend watching this.) Jobs, on death:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Crouch says, in response:

Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself, and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil it is strangely inert. Such a speech would have been hard to take at the funeral of Christina Taylor Greene, nine years old, killed along with five others on a bright Saturday morning in Tucson, Arizona. It is no wonder that Barack Obama, who had to address these deeper forms of grief this past week, turned to a vision which only makes sense if there is more to the world than we can see. Anything less is cold comfort indeed.

Which is the better source of hope: this world, small, and often backwards as it is, but certain, or transcendent meaning and eternal life, known by invisible evidence? What can comfort? In Obama's speech at Tucson, he presents both of these ideas of hope, and this is most apparent in his remembrance of Christina Taylor Green, the nine-year-old who was killed in the shooting. First, the secular hope:

I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here—they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us—we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.

Contrast this with his more symbolic and religious appeal to hope:

Christina was given to us on September 11th, 2001, one of 50 babies born that day to be pictured in a book called "Faces of Hope." On either side of her photo in that book were simple wishes for a child's life. "I hope you help those in need," read one. "I hope you know all of the words to the National Anthem and sing it with your hand over your heart. I hope you jump in rain puddles."

If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today. And here on Earth, we place our hands over our hearts, and commit ourselves as Americans to forging a country that is forever worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.

May God bless and keep those we've lost in restful and eternal peace. May He love and watch over the survivors. And may He bless the United States of America.

(Emphasis mine.)

Crouch closes his article:

Steve Jobs’s gospel is, in the end, a set of beautifully polished empty promises. But I look on my secular neighbors, millions of them, like sheep without a shepherd, who no longer believe in anything they cannot see, and I cannot help feeling compassion for them, and something like fear. When, not if, Steve Jobs departs the stage, will there be anyone left who can convince them to hope?

The question of what is the better hope to offer someone who is suffering, "Certain goodness in the material world, though modest and mixed, or possible perfection from above?", this question is an empirical one, if subjective. I offer for consideration my story as a case. As I was deconverting, finding the claims of Christianity to be dubious, I was upset at the loss of the hope from heaven, hope for a better life in eternity, and hope for justice in this world; the loss of these beliefs was the most painful element of my doubt. I don't miss these at all now, though, and I shudder when people like Andy Crouch say that I should feel like my worldview offers only "cold comfort"; I don't need his compassion and I don't need him to fear for me on account of my naturalist worldview, and I find these offers condescending.

Since I accepted my nonbelief, about a year and a half ago, I've been consistently happy in a way that I haven't been since I was a kid. I have a rabbit and I enjoy chili and reading books and doing my job and going to the beach with friends. Jobs' commencement speech reminds me of the motto, memento mori, remember to die. I understand that my life is finite and I occupy myself with making the most of it now: enjoying it for myself, loving the people close to me, and trying to do work that is useful for strangers. This attitude clearly doesn't work for everybody, but looking for hope from somewhere outside of the universe hasn't worked for me.

I'm thinking now of conversations with religious friends, concerned that I, an atheist, am deprived of hope. I hope that they can accept that I have a happy, meaningful life, and that it is possible to have hope without God. I hope that my friends who doubt are not pained by the threat of a loss of hope, that they can peacefully consider their beliefs. I hope that when humans suffer, we would be filled with courage, regardless of our source of solace.

Regarding atheists going to church

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I was at a party and somehow I got to talking with strangers about my non-belief in God; this happens a lot. I mentioned that I go to church sometimes, and the strangers were pretty sure that they hadn't heard me properly; this happens a lot, too.

We had two visitors at church yesterday from the Mennonite Central Committee. One of the visitors is a librarian and she is starting a library in Burundi. Her plan to do this involves people here donating books, filling a shipping container, and sending that container to Burundi. She doesn't have high standards of quality for these books; old calendars count. As she was explaining this plan, I was thinking of the blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough and all of the articles on it about the troubles with donations.

The librarian read a book to the kids. In the book, the main character, a little boy living in a village in Africa, invited a lot of people to his home to have pancakes for supper that night; this made his mother nervous. Everyone brought something, though: put together, this was a feast. There is a way in which librarians read books to kids at story time, and I had happily sat through a lot of story times when I was a kid. I don't like the librarian's plan about getting old books and putting them in a shipping container, but, as I write this, I have trouble even formulating an argument in my mind to complain about this properly because I like books and I like that this librarian likes books, and I am glad she got to come to church and ask us to share books with people in Burundi.

So, I was talking with some people at this party and someone asked me how I, as an atheist, would explain how the universe began. I gave my normal response to this question, that at the moment of the Big Bang, quantum effects would have encompassed the entire universe, making causality impossible. I said that when I think about things, I don't start at the beginning, I start where I am, with the experiments and experiences I know about, and I work backward and forward, and I suppose that we have a pretty good understanding of what happened between now and the first moments of the universe. Another non-believer helpfully added that you can't talk about a time-before-the-universe because there wouldn't have been anything to make the time pass or to measure it with.

The subject changed, but I kept thinking about what I'd said about the Big Bang, and then I sort of apologized to this new acquaintance. Atheists are used to being asked antagonistically where the universe could have come from if there is no God to make it, and I'm used to giving an argument. The religious people who would ask this question are, I hope, motivated by a belief that the universe was started by someone wonderful, and for me to say that it's not meaningful to discuss a before-the-beginning might be correct, but it's not fulfilling.

I won't say the universe was started by someone wonderful, but I'll say that its beginning was something wonderful. That something wonderful isn't the same as the something wonderful inside of blueberries or the one that makes people smile at strangers or that helps people share oranges in concentration camps, but I imagine these something wonderfuls as relatives of each other. I dread being thought of as a deist or universalist or spiritualist or something, please don't read me that way. I'm an atheist, I say that God doesn't exist. My church works for me because my nonbelief doesn't invalidate my friendships with others in my church.

At the party yesterday, I got to talk with a Sufi about a mutual friend of ours; this friend is an evangelical missionary type, and the Sufi and I admire her because she has firm beliefs and, without compromising them, shows respect and friendliness to people like atheists and Sufis. There are people like that in my church and they make church worthwhile for me.

Regarding that xkcd comic

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 06:00:00 +0000

A comic about finding answers when dealing with serious illness was posted on xkcd recently. One of my brothers was recently in the hospital for a while and I have been thinking about him. I like the comic.

I have bipolar disorder and I didn't get treatment until four years after onset, and I think about what I made of my illness before I got a diagnosis. Now that I'm getting appropriate care, pills help, but the other half of my treatment is cognitive, and most of that is getting information from my mood about how to keep myself well. It used to be that if I felt guilty, apropos of nothing, I would first think seriously and sternly about whether I'd done anything bad lately, and, if not, judge myself according to impossible ideals, fretting about God or social justice or fame or what is necessary to live a meaningful life. Now, when I feel guilty and it's not obvious why, I first ask myself if I need a snack or a nap or to take a walk; I think it's important to save guilt for actual sin. I certainly don't expect my mood to tell me anything new or constructive about spirits. I used to interpret my confusing mood fluctuations as information about what's out there, in the cosmos or in the heavens, but now, when my mood confuses me, I look for information about what's going on inside of me, and the second pattern works better.

When I got the message at 1:30 AM that my brother was in the hospital, I didn't speculate about why God would will such a thing, or why he would allow it, or what my brother was supposed to learn from his hardship. Instead, what's been meaningful to me is seeing how loving and supportive my family can be, and how resilient and patient and funny my brother is. I don't want to look for what lessons I'm "supposed to learn", I want to make my own lessons out of the experiences I have.

I remember hearing a story on NPR regarding the role of psychologists in relief work, responding to the earthquake in Haiti. A lot of psychologists evidently planned on showing up and sitting victims down on the proverbial couch and talking with them about the traumas they've faced. Instead, they were put to work helping people find family members and connecting them with resources to get necessities, like shelter and clean water: to help disaster victims have healthier minds, acting like a social worker seems to be more helpful than acting like an analyst. The talk therapy is important, but it comes later.

I like science because my job holds me in tension between concrete, observable facts, and the fact that scientific knowledge is always changing; what we know is reliable but we're always learning surprising new things.

When I'm suffering, I want support from my religious friends, I'm happy that they pray for me, because it's good to know that I'm cared for. I don't want them turning this into an opportunity to try to make me reconsider something that I've reconsidered a thousand times and have finally settled in my mind. When my religious friends suffer, rather than thinking of God as a source of answers, I hope that they look at their God and are inspired by his love, and, remembering that God is incomprehensibly big, remain open to their suffering having no perceivable meaning. I would rather that they not expect their suffering to have a built-in meaning that we can discover in our lifetimes. The best religious impulses are humble and loving; I hope that my religious friends can be open to seeing suffering as ambiguous, and that they can find meaning first by courageously overcoming their challenges.

I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes, the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth it's that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs; and if it comes to a choice between spending another ten million years finding that out and on the other hand just taking the money and running, I for one could do with the exercise.

—Frankie the mouse, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

The War for Christmas: Jesus versus Santa

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 06:00:00 +0000

The idea of a "War on Christmas" is silly. Sure, Target doesn't let their employees wish customers a "Merry Christmas" and you can't put a nativity scene in front of the city hall. Yet, the religious aspects of Christmas have been less diminished by any conspiracy than by people changing how they themselves choose to observe Christmas. Rather than a war between Christmas and secular Grinches, it's more appropriate to think of a war between two Christmases, one about celebrating the birth of Jesus, the other about Santa and presents. The second Christmas is winning, easily.

Christian Christmas is no fun and entirely inappropriate for children. The story of the birth of Jesus is lurid, involving teen pregnancy, homelessness, and a bizarre intrusion by big government, mandating a meaningless mass migration to everyone's home town so that they can be counted. Near the end of Matthew's story, all of the baby boys in Bethlehem are butchered; this is absent from your classic Joseph-in-a-bathrobe Christmas pageants. The story is supposed to tell how God was born in human form, but all we see is a silent baby in a creche. For the Christmas story to have a grander meaning, it needs extra context, how this God-child is supposed to be sacrificed as a propitiation for our sins. I would rather wait until Seasonal Affective Disorder has completely overtaken me, say, in February, to contemplate my sins and mortality; in the mean time, I'll enjoy the fun Christmas.

My Uncle Bart says that Jesus came to bring us Christmas cookies. He died so that we could be saved, but that's what Easter is about; Christmas is for Christmas cookies. I like the song about Rudolph who wasn't allowed to join in the other reindeer's games; as the kid in first grade who was kicked out of the Bat Club for having cooties, I find Rudolph to be a relatable character. The story of how he saved Christmas by being himself is inspiring. I like egg nog and I'm glad that we, as a society, have restricted its use to one month out of the year, for the sake of our own health.

It's obvious to everyone that the true meaning of Christmas is presents. I got fossils of a trilobite and a fern, and lots of comic books, and a mandoline. I gave microscope slides to one brother and to another, a steering wheel for his Playstation. Both were delighted, and I like it when my brothers are happy.

Religion loses ground with people less from being proven wrong and more from being proven dreary, irrelevant, or boring. I suppose that I stopped believing in God for rational reasons, this was a result of a careful thought process. What was more difficult for me was coming to a happy acceptance of my non-belief. I became a happy non-believer when I saw ways in which beliefs in God and heaven and spirits didn't give me as much fulfillment and orientation as reason, literature, science, my job, my friends, my family, and good coffee. People aren't, on the whole, going to consider atheism unless they think that it will make them happier and healthier. Secularists succeed when they promote non-belief in ways that are less like arguments and more like fun Christmas.

Some inspiration from "If This Sleigh is A-Rockin', Don't Come A-Knockin'" by Sarah Vowell, act two of The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Suit on This American Life.

Allow me to recommend AUCTeX, preview-latex, and Vincent Goulet's Emacs for OS X Modified

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:34:00 +0000

I am wanting to start typesetting my articles in LaTeX rather than using Pages+Endnote+Mathtype or, worse, Word. I don't like the LaTeX writing process of write, run LaTeX, run LaTeX again a couple of times to get the equation numbering correct, convert the dvi to a pdf, open the pdf, find a typo in an equation, cry, go to the bathroom, make a cup of tea, write some more. AUCTeX is a package for Emacs that makes it easier to write LaTeX with handy keyboard shortcuts and syntax highlighting, for example. Most notably, AUCTeX comes bundled with a tool, preview-latex, which presents rendered math equations in-line.

This requires a GUI-enabled Emacs. On the Mac, Cocoa Emacs is the most current. Vincent Goulet has prepared a special build of Cocoa Emacs, Emacs for OS X Modified, which includes AUCTeX as well as ESS and psvn if you're interested in those, too.

I don't know if this is a common problem, but for my installation, preview-latex didn't work properly until I disabled TeX-PDF-mode by C-c C-t C-p or adding (TeX-PDF-mode nil) to my .emacs file. I got the idea from this mailing list discussion.

Notes and references from How to Talk to Christians

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:57:00 +0000

The following are notes and references on a talk I gave to the Secular Student Alliance at UMBC on 2010-10-19. The talk was called "How to talk to Christians (politely) with examples regarding evolution, homosexuality, and abortion."

Terror management theory:

Film: Flight from Death (Hulu)
Article on response to messages about drunk driving: Shehryar and Hunt. A terror management perspective on the persuasiveness of fear appeals. Journal of consumer psychology (2005) vol. 15 (4) pp. 275
I found out about Terror Management Theory by listening to Reasonable Doubts episode "Denying death"
The plot of Bush's approval ratings is from Wikipedia, the data was taken from Gallup and USA Today polls

"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."

-James Baldwin

Evolution

Genesis 1-3
Romans 5:17
On the date and context of Genesis 3: Mendenhall, George E. The shady side of wisdom: the date and purpose of Genesis 3. In: A Light unto My Path Old Testament Studies in Honor of Jacob M. Myers. 1974. (You can email me for a PDF.)
The Problem of Pain, chapter 5 The Fall of Man, CS Lewis
The Literal Meaning of Genesis, St Augustine
Enuma Elish lines 135-146 on the slaying of Tiamat to make the sky

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."

-St. Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis

Homosexuality

Genesis 19
Leviticus 18 and 20
Romans 1:26-27
Film: For the Bible Tells Me So (UMBC library call number UMDVD 4411)

Abortion

Psalm 139:13-15
Exodus 21:22-25
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's essay, "Abortion: Is it Possible to be both "Pro-life" and "Pro-Choice"" or "The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers"
Evidence of high incidence of early loss of pregnancy and miscarriage: Wilcox et al. Time of implantation of the conceptus and loss of pregnancy. New England Journal of Medicine (1999) vol. 340 (23) pp. 1796; Wang et al. Conception, early pregnancy loss, and time to clinical pregnancy: a population-based prospective study. Fertility and Sterility (2002) vol. 79 (3) pp. 577.

"When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."

-The Supreme Court on Roe v Wade

Epilogue

Good news from primordial ooze

Regina rabbit in her cage

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 05:00:00 +0000

When I was a kid, I would save my allowance to buy toys; my little brother would spend his allowance on candy. I would rather have toys later than candy now, because candy is temporary and toys last forever.

The rabbit that lives with me, Spots Regina Leonora Bandita Cookies and Cream Skeptical Empiricism Obama, has no concept of progress. She lives in a cage and eats salad and poops it out into her litter box. She will die someday. She doesn't seem to believe in God or heaven. She can't write literature or invent technologies. She will be completely forgotten eventually. She passes her time playing with her favorite toy, a ball that has another ball in it, with a bell in the smaller ball. She picks up the big ball with her mouth and throws it across her cage and the little bell rings. I can't imagine anyone being so callous as to call her life meaningless or hollow.

During the troubles last summer, when I had a hypomanic episode, I couldn't feel my normal feelings about what matters. I was obsessed with ideas about efficiency and rationality, and I was both terrified of and hoping for a future in which robots took over the earth.

During this time, on a particularly painful day, a friend let me hold a rabbit. I felt a little better. I thought it might be nice to get a pet. A couple of weeks later, this friend decided that she had too many mammals and gave me the rabbit that I had held, and that's how Regina came to live with me.

My feelings were contorted during the troubles, I had trouble figuring out which of my old values were still important. I wanted to make a better world, but I had trouble imagining what a good world for me would be like. It was easier for me to imagine a better world for Regina. I make salad for her every day, I let her out to play, I give her toys, I keep her safe. Maybe that doesn't mean much, but it's easy to tell how much taking care of Regina matters: one rabbit's worth. Taking care of Regina matters more than that: by practicing taking care of her, I think I'm a little more compassionate and gentle, in general.

(Now, Regina does not live in natural circumstances, with other rabbits, in a warren, underground. She only gets to really run around when I let her out of her cage, and I don't think she'll ever really get used to wood floors—she slides on them. She isn't about to be eaten or to starve. I don't know whether it's better to be a wild rabbit or a house rabbit, but Regina lives in a house now and I don't think she would do well in the wild anymore, and so I take care of her.)

When on the manic end of the mood scale, people with bipolar disorder are more prone to form mental connections between ideas. I was thinking a lot about how I'm a mammal and how I'm connected to other mammals and how mammals are interesting because their reproductive strategy is, rather than to have a lot of babies, like turtles and fish and flies, we have a few and we nurture them carefully. I thought a lot about how Regina and I are connected by being living beings. Everything that limits meaning for her, being small and mortal and forgettable, applies to me, too.

Siddhattha Gotama was a prince, who had grown up in three palaces, one for each season. His father, the king, kept him from pain all his life, hoping that the prince would be an apt successor. When he was 29, he secretly left the palaces, and went out into the world. On different trips, he saw an old man, a sick man, and then a corpse; on each trip his chariot driver explained to him what he saw: aging, sickness, and death had been alien to Siddhattha. I wonder if Siddhattha felt despair, as he lost belief in a perfect world. If I were in his place, I suppose I would be distraught and confused. I wonder if he felt that he'd lost a world free of pain; can you feel loss about something that was never real? There is suffering in this world; is there any full and lasting relief from it?

When I stopped thinking that God exists, and, with that, any sort of belief in heaven or hell or any place we can go to that isn't in this universe, I felt confined. This universe has an age and a size and a lifetime; the matter might last forever, but, eventually, everything will wind down. Is there any meaning to be had, or is everything vapor?

I think that Regina lives a meaningful life. Who would say that Regina's life is void or meaningless? Who would say that about humans? The main differences between Regina and I are that I live in a bigger cage and that I have thumbs.

It's tough to say whether Regina is happy or sad, overall. I see her relax a lot, but, being a prey animal, she gets frightened easily. Actually, rabbits are unusual because they play. Other animals play, but few animals that play are herbivorous; play is practice for hunting, for most animals. Sometimes, when Regina is out of her cage, she jumps and dances, it seems, for no other reason than fun. It's difficult to compare the emotions of humans and other animals, so saying whether Regina is happy or sad the way you and I feel happy and sad is not straightforward. What is certain is that she is not suicidal or lackadaisical, so maybe she finds her life meaningful to the extent that a rabbit can think about meaning; she always finds something to do that matters to her.

Lessons I learned from Regina:

Eat lots of fiber.
If you're scared, you can hide under the futon. You can relax under the futon, too, if you feel like it.
If you're not in danger of being eaten, playing with toys is your top priority.
Exercise is important, and most fun on a red rug.
Most things are bigger than you, and that's scary.
It's okay if humans make you nervous.
Always pay attention to how things smell, because, why not?

A letter to my high school English teacher

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 05:19:00 +0000

[Note: This is a letter for my high school English teacher, but I can't find an easy way to get in contact with her. If I could, I would have sent this to her, first. Some parts are cut for the sake of politeness; at other points, I provide extra context for readers who are not my high school English teacher.]

I am at the beach for the weekend; I have gone "downy ocean" as you would have said in your lesson on dialect. In addition to the library books I'm reading, I wanted to bring an old, small paperback work of fiction that would be safe to read on the beach; I brought One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's pretty good. There are a lot of elements of the story that I wouldn't have noticed or appreciated if I hadn't taken your ninth grade honors English class. I hated that class.

[…]

In the first week of school, you made us take qualifying exams so that we could decide if we wanted to stay in your class. You graded harshly. When I complained of having gotten a D, a 66, on the first exam, a lot of my classmates told me that I shouldn't; I had gotten a very high grade, relatively. About half of the class quit and went to the next-easiest English class. Those of us who stayed were apprehensive.

[…]

After reading Of Mice and Men, we had to write essays about the book. [If you have not read it, at the end of Of Mice and Men, the main character, George, kills his best friend, Lennie, rather than have Lennie die at the hands of a mob. When I read it, I thought it was the saddest, most pointless ending to any book I had read.] I wrote that I didn't like it because I'm a Christian, and so I believe that God works everything out in the end. We have a hope for heaven, where things will be as they ought to be. Stories ought to end with a positive resolution. I didn't like Of Mice and Men because it didn't mean anything to me, I didn't learn anything from it; I didn't see any virtue rewarded in it, and it didn't entertain me. I forget what you said about that essay, but I remember getting a bad grade on it. I think it was around then that I tried to get out of your class, to join the regular English class, but it was already filled with students who had previously left your class.

I remember when you gave us assignments on "situational ethics"—my words, not yours. We had to consider various bizarre situations: ten people in a cave, with a fat man blocking the exit, or people on a lifeboat deciding who to eat first, or a person standing at a track switch as a trolly approached, with the trolley about to run someone over or to go off a cliff, depending on how the track switch was thrown. We had to write essays in which we considered possible choices in these scenarios and whether they're right or wrong: is it acceptable for the spelunkers to blow up the fat man with a stick of dynamite, so that they could escape? I thought, at the time, that you were trying to undermine my belief in a God with a set of absolute laws, and that you were trying to make me into a moral relativist. Maybe you were.

When considering whether throwing the track switch is right or wrong, everyone ought to be able to provide a better justification for their decision than "because God says so" or "because it's right". Everyone needs to be able to apply moral reasoning to difficult problems. As I recall, my answer to my ethical dilemma is that if one had faith, God would intervene to resolve the scene.

It's not right for a public school teacher to impose beliefs on students, or to undermine their spirituality, and you certainly did this at times. Regardless, I'm glad you made me write essays about ethics. When I stopped thinking that God exists, I needed a way to figure out how to live a good and meaningful life. Those assignments helped me think about meaning and morality on real, human terms. You did more than any other teacher I have had, in public grade school, or all through college, to prepare me for life as a non-believer.

One time, you criticized a student for starting an essay with "I feel". You made it clear to all of us that starting an essay with "I think", "I feel", or "I believe" is immediate justification for an F; our personal beliefs don't matter as much as whether we can explain them and defend them. I am prone to starting essays with "I think" to relativize what I'm writing, out of some fear of being wrong. Whenever I'm tempted to write "I think" I remember your rule and I find another way to phrase my text.

In reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I've been paying attention to how Miss Ratched, "Big Nurse", a woman, is at the top of the social structure of the ward, then the other nurses, then the black orderlies; the white male patients are at the bottom; in the ward, mental illness is more significant than race or gender in determining class. Chief Bromden is an unreliable narrator; Kesey uses Bromden's narration to emphasize that all stories are perspectival. Bromden's fear of the Combine, the personification of machines and social systems, is a dominant theme. (I've only read fifty pages of the book so far.)

When I was taking your class, I asked why we had to study literature. I understood that reading and writing are important, but I wasn't expecting understanding literature to be part of my job, in the same way that math and science would be.

I don't think anymore that God exists. I used to think that he could define meaning, he would tell stories that we fit into. As I passed through doubt, I read apologetics, then Christian philosophy, Kierkegaard, trying to make sense of God. I read secular philosophers, trying to find a solid, objective purpose in life. The philosophers that I look to now don't write dense logical prose like Hegel, they tell stories. I read fiction because it lets me practice understanding the world and deciding how I want to live in it. And, I don't just read fiction that's supposed to mean something big, I'm reading fiction for fun; fun matters.

After I finished the school year in which I took your class, I spoke ill of you to other people, calling you mean and crazy. I am sorry for that; please forgive me. I could bring up other grievances about that class, but I won't. You challenged me, you made me think. I don't think this was part of your job, but you made me question my beliefs, and I'm glad, now, that I had that practice.

-Alex

They Might Be Giants: Damn Good Times

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 04:32:00 +0000

They Might Be Giants: Damn Good Times

This is my favorite song on The Spine after Experimental Film.

Apple TV iOS portable remote

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 05:28:00 +0000

The rumors and speculations regarding the Apple TV before it was announced on Wednesday, these I found to be wild guesses. People were talking about it being renamed the iTV as if this were "exciting". It was pretty certain, and confirmed, that the Apple TV runs iOS. I expected this to just be handy on the back-end, so Apple programmers could use one programming architecture for all of their non-computer devices. Others guessed, hoped, dreamed, that apps would be available for Apple TV, which I found bizarre. I can't think of many apps that I would want to use with a five button remote, looking at a screen across the room. One suggestion was that portable iOS devices could work as screens for individual users for games, like tile racks for Scrabble; the iPad Scrabble app supports using an iPhone/iPod touch as a tile rack. I think this is possible, but only really useful for board games. Some people imagined that the Apple TV could act as a game console rivaling the Wii; I don't expect the latency between an iOS controller and Apple TV to be fast enough to use as a game controller, nor do I think that a $99 set-top box could be powerful enough to play modern games.

I also noticed that Apple is offering an app to use iOS portables as a remote for the Apple TV, and this is probably the best use for Apple TV/iOS portable integration. I'm surprised that this has earned minimal press coverage, except for at iThinkDiff and Wireless and Mobile News, and their treatment of this feature is about one or two sentences long. There was wild speculation about iOS portable integration with Apple TV before the Apple TV was announced, but little coverage, now, of what this integration can actually do. The remote app hasn't been released yet, so reviews of it can't be written; even so, the noise leading up to the Apple TV has dwarfed the actual coverage of facts regarding what the Apple TV can do with iOS portables. I have a pet peeve about Apple tech news coverage mostly being wild guessing and punditry, with much heat and little light; Daring Fireball is the main exception.

Or else, what?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I remember one time I was walking across campus with a friend, we were having a chat about what it would be like to be an atheist. As we turned a corner around the fountain, I said that I'd commit suicide; my friend agreed that he probably would, too, either that, or he'd be an unrestrained hedonist.

A few years later, I was starting to doubt earnestly. Doubt didn't sound, in my head, like I would have expected it to. In the Commons, by Pete's Arena, the crappy pizza place, I ran into a friend, and he asked me how I was doing. Always loath to give a one-word answer to any question, I said, "I think that I'm becoming an atheist." We chatted a little, then I said, "Well, I'm going to go burn down a church or something," and we laughed a little. And I guess that was funny because it wasn't true, I didn't want to burn down a church, but I didn't know how I was supposed to feel. After that I got supper.

We could go about knowing whether God exists by looking at common knowledge, or reason, or history, or spiritual experiences, or science, or some combination of these; these are all information. Regardless of the personal consequences of believing that God exists, say, salvation or damnation, these ideas about what my belief or non-belief would bring me aren't evidence about whether God is real.

Non-belief carries the threat of another sort of damnation, a death of the mind, in which my capacity to know God could by shut off by my doubting, my perceptions would be confused, maybe my heart would be hardened, as was Pharaoh's in Exodus. Or, maybe my doubts were dishonest in the first place, because I didn't want to submit to God's rules, or tradition, or to the idea of a spiritual entity bigger than people. Any of these might be the case, but there is no way to account for them in my thought process.

Apologists like Ravi Zacharias insist that we can't have a real morality without God, so it is imperative that we believe in God. Even if the nonexistence of God meant moral nihilism, that's no evidence that God is real. Presuppositional thinkers like Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Haddon Clark, and Francis Schaeffer insist that any worldview that doesn't presume the truth of the Bible and the existence of a triune God, any such worldview would be either inconsistent or futile. Schaeffer said, "If the unsaved man was consistent he would be an atheist in religion, an irrationalist in philosophy (including a complete uncertainty concerning 'natural laws'), and completely a-moral in the widest sense." Even if Schaeffer were correct about the implications of a non-Christian worldview, that wouldn't mean that it's logical to presume that God exists; it's not logical to assume that God exists just for the sake of making one's system of thought work smoothly. These arguments don't persuade non-Christians, they only make religious people more stubbornly religious.

I'm not unique in having confusions about God; knowing God is difficult for all human beings. There isn't a majority opinion, among humans, about what God is like. No matter who you are, most humans disagree with you about most important things about God: clearly, human beings aren't consistently good at knowing God. Maybe our minds are too small to comprehend God. Maybe God can only be known on his own terms, when he sends a sign or when he opens one's heart to receive him. There are many ways to impugn human perceptions of God. When figuring out whether God exists, threat of damnation, hope for salvation, suspicion of one's own cognition, none of these are evidence about God, regardless of how they weigh on one's mind.

Maybe doubt is a sin. However, the rule, "Believe in God, or else!" is meaningless without something following the "or else!" If God doesn't exist, there is no punishment for doubt. If God does exist, but would punish people for doubting that he does exist, this punishment would be unjust.

If doubt is a sin, I couldn't know if God exists. I might refrain from considering whether God might not be real; I might not pick up books by atheists, I might avoid non-believing friends, or at least, avoid listening to them with the idea that I might want to agree with them. I would avoid asking questions like, "What would the universe be like if God wasn't real?" or "If God disappeared all of a sudden, how would we notice?", or I might ask those questions, and be satisfied with weak answers. I might make my mind an aluminum-foil-lined house, impervious to secular influence, yet there would be a voice between my ears that would ask me if I knew that God is real, or if I was just too afraid to ask. I would sit in a rocking chair in this house, wondering if I knew that God is real, but afraid that I lied to myself saying that he is.

To this idea of, "Believe in God, or else!" it is sensible to respond, "Or else, what?" If God isn't real, there is no loss. If God is real and loving and good and worth having over for tea, God wouldn't punish me for doubting.

So, there's this distinction between evidence that God exists, and feelings and hopes and fears that one has about the idea of God, and this distinction is relevant, logically. Disentangling these two categories is slow, painful, and difficult, though.

The idea that God is infinite makes thinking about God a quagmire, because one can't be unbiased. I want an iPad, and I saw that I can enter a drawing to get one. It would be so useful, I could read articles on it, I wouldn't have to print things out on paper, I probably print about a hundred pages a week. There's a neat game where you tilt the iPad and a marble rolls around on it past obstacles. I was thinking about which carrying case I should get for the iPad when I realized that the odds of me winning the iPad are very low. Anyway, I was afraid that, if God didn't exist, there would be no way to have meaning or morality in life, everything would feel hollow. If God were real, experiencing his perfect love would be worth forgoing everything else. I wanted to believe in God so much that I was afraid that God isn't real and that I'm just biased to think that he is.

I recently had to buy a car. I didn't have any special knowledge on how to buy a car. There are a lot of uncertainties when buying a car, like how safe it is, how much it will cost to repair it when it breaks down, and how likely it is to break down, and how long it will last before it breaks down completely and must be scrapped. These are probably the most important things about a car, but I don't know how to know them, so I picked out my car based on price and how good its cup holders are and whether I can plug my iPod into it.

I can't think of any story in the Bible that rides on a person's belief or non-belief that God exists; what matters is how people deal with God, whether they want to be on his team. When the Israelites approached Jericho, the people of Jericho were not atheists. The people of Jericho were afraid precisely because they thought that the God of the Israelites does exist‚ and would destroy them like Og and Sihon of the Amorites. Rahab was different from everyone else in Jericho, not because she believed that God exists, but because she believed in him, she put her trust in him, she wanted to join his side, and she was rewarded for this faith.

In the Bible, the word "believe" is used in two ways, meaning either to suppose as true, or to rely and trust upon. In "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household" (Acts 16:31) "believe" means rely on. James makes it clear that these two meanings are distinct, "You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder." (James 2:19). Thinking that God is real isn't what saves one, so mere doubt can't damn one, either. The people of Nazareth doubt Jesus (e.g., Mark 6:1-6), they have no faith, but this isn't a show of equanimous non-belief, "they took offense at him" because "prophets are not without honor, except in their home town". Similarly, the Pharisees seem to doubt Jesus, but they're not intellectually considering him, they're casting aspersions on him because he's a threat to their power structure.

Yet, religious people treat honest doubt like it's a sickness or a problem or a sin; this does more to ensure conformity among believers than to reassure doubters.

I was compulsively ruminating on contradictory ideas, that non-belief in God is empty and void, and that belief in God is a desperate fantasy. This psychological tension didn't enlighten me about God. I decided to live in a way that would be as meaningful as possible if God isn't real, and in a way that would let me find and relate to God if God is real. When I didn't think that God exists, I still tried to have faith in him, to rely on him, and not myself. By trying to minimize the consequences of my vacillating belief that God exists, I was able to think a little more clearly. Was God hiding from me because I was sinful? Was I mistaken about God not existing? How could I have meaning? How could I know what is right to do? I still had questions like these; even though I knew they didn't show me God, I anguished over them.

Appendix

A previous post, The God I want to believe in, has some ideas related to this essay.

"I want God to be real, and I want to relate to him. I look for God carefully, but I don't see him. Not at all that I think that I'm saved by any of my own virtues, but if God would damn me for not believing that he exists when that's not what I have honestly seen or experienced, I don't find that God to be worth bothering with."

There is another important meaning that the phrase "Or else, what?" has for me. Normative statements, statements about what ought to be, rules of morality, for example, are meaningless on their own. "You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass." isn't meaningful;

"You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass, or else people will become sad from the ugliness of the overpass."
"You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass, or else God will be angry at you."
"You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass, or else you'll regret it later."
"You shouldn't paint graffiti on the overpass, or else you might get arrested."

are meaningful statements. Thinking about norms, things like values and morality and purpose and meaning, by posing them this way, has been helpful for me as I've tried to make decisions as a non-theist.

The Joking Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 04:15:00 +0000

The Joking Computer:
Computer generated jokes than your third-grade brother would tell. For example:

Q. how is a nude stream different from a reserve legal document?
A. one is a bare spill, the other is a spare bill.

One that made no sense to me until the computer explained the joke:
Q. what do you get when you cross a banquet with a geographical area?
A. a feast africa.
Its reasoning: "east africa is a kind of geographical area". This site lives in the uncanny valley of puns.

Three times a day

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 02:58:00 +0000

Three times a day, on average, I remember that I have bipolar disorder and that I'm getting treatment and that my life is so much better, happier, more pleasant, than it was before I got treatment.

Just now, I was going through some files on my computer, and found "Tea Optimization.numbers", a spreadsheet I used to track how long and at what temperature tea ought to be brewed at. I'm a fastidious person, and always have been, and I do think it's important to brew good tea. I brew loose tea, and I use a timer to make sure I don't stew it. When I saw the spreadsheet file, though, I felt a little silly.

I had distrust in the idea that boiling water should be used to brew tea. This was something that I liked to talk about at parties, I would talk about how the tannins were released if you brewed the tea at above 180 Fahrenheit. (I don't actually know what tannins are.) So, I was brewing my tea very meticulously, measuring time and temperature, trying to get it perfect. I made a spreadsheet to record how I brewed tea because I didn't trust anyone else to have properly experimented with brewing tea.

Before I started treatment, I felt guilty and anxious a lot of the time, even if nothing was wrong. I feel at ease now, not all the time, but most of the time, enough that normal feels normal. I'm not filled with distrust anymore about ultimate truth or tea.

So, that was one of my three or so things for today that remind me that life is better now.

Icon veneration

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:13:00 +0000

I think that icon veneration, as practiced and taught by the Orthodox and Catholic churches, is idolatry, it's a violation of the second commandment. Let's discuss in the comments.

Graven images

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 05:00:00 +0000

It's pretty common for inquirers into Orthodoxy to be troubled by icon veneration, it seems like idolatry to us. I heard some statements about the practice that provided color, like, "Some people kiss photographs of loved ones; they don't love the photograph, but their affection applies to the person in the picture."

The second commandment says that making and bowing before images is wrong. It is a clear condemnation of practices observed in the cultures around ancient Israel. What made Orthodox icon veneration different from idolatry? What does the second commandment mean?

The explanation that I got was that icon veneration is different from idol worship because in idol worship, the actual idol is being worshipped, while with icon veneration, the icon is just a focus, and that honor passes to the prototype through the icon. That's not true, though: this distinction between honoring an object and worshipping a god, this distinction is also made in many pagan religions. It's not like people were commonly trying to confound an image with its prototype. If the second commandment were limited to making this distinction, it would be near-irrelevant. What could the second commandment mean?

In Chemosh is a god not an idol I write about this in more detail. This quote is relevant:

In Bible times, worshippers of Ba'al Hadad would make sacrifices in front of bull statues. No one ever thought that Ba'al Hadad was actually a bull; he obviously looks like a human being. However, everyone knew that Ba'al Hadad was powerful, and so are bulls, so by sacrificing to a bull statue, one might hope to manipulate Ba'al Hadad to access his power for one's own purposes.

St John of Damascus wrote a famous defense of icon veneration, but he was mostly writing to address iconoclasts, people who thought we should make no images at all. (The second commandment obviously doesn't mean that we should have no images, because the priestly code has many instructions about making images.) He makes several arguments, but the one I find notable is that he says that honor ought to be paid to icons, not worship, so worshipping an icon would be wrong, but honoring an icon of Jesus would bring worship to Jesus himself. St John emphasizes that worship does not belong to icons, only honor.

I thought that this explanation was interesting because the difference between sin and piety would be a matter of degree, honor an icon, but don't worship it. However, it sounded to me just like what one would say to justify icon worship if one thought icons shouldn't be worshipped, but one wanted to worship them anyway. Orthodox Christians light candles for icons, they wave incense before them, they bow before icons, and heathens treat idols in this same way. There isn't much that non-Christians do before idols that Orthodox Christians don't do before icons. The difference between sin and piety would have to be one of subtle internal spiritual orientation. I wouldn't expect myself to have this right orientation consistently enough for icon veneration to be safe. Does the second commandment speak to having a certain internal spiritual orientation? How is it possible to violate the second commandment? What does the second commandment mean, anyway?

I would wake up in the middle of the night, startled and sweating, and I would lie back down and try to sleep and I couldn't. I had bad dreams about the seventh ecumenical council, the one that affirmed icon veneration. In my dream, the bishops at the Seventh Ecumenical Council conspired to teach icon veneration, even though it's wrong. When I woke up, I didn't know if I should trust myself or the bishops. All of my reason told me that icon veneration is idolatry in disguise, but I also didn't want to trust my intuition. The bishops had studied theology, practiced intense spiritual disciplines, and had the support of the laity. Would you sooner listen to them or to me? On the other hand, Chico Marx said, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" I felt insubordinate not trusting these wise people, affirmed by the church, with the weight of scholarship and diligent spiritual practice behind them. Yet, I myself couldn't believe that icon veneration is what God wants.

I was comparing two stories about how icon veneration got to be accepted by the church. In the first story, icon veneration was always accepted by the church, just never mentioned in the Bible because it was so normal. However, this practice was uniformly supported by the tradition going back to the apostles; Luke, the gospel writer, painted icons also. The iconoclastic controversy was more about cultural responses to Islam than about any theological development. Icon veneration felt funny to me, but that was just because the Protestant Reformation left a strange aftertaste. I could trust that icon veneration is correct; it was accepted by the entire identifiable church at the end of the eighth century. If I could trust God to speak to me about little things, I could trust God to be clear to the whole church about something important.

The other story was that icon veneration is idolatry. It was alien to the apostles. Icon veneration was idolatry repackaged, brought into Christianity by converts keeping old practices, or Christians adopting non-Christian practices to be more accessible to outsiders. Culture can shift to make many wrong things seem acceptable, and Christian culture isn't exempt from this. Eventually, the whole church endorsed a wrong practice because the church is made out of human beings who are frail and prone to err.

If I believed the first story, I would have become Orthodox. It's internally consistent, but not the story I would expect if God were to intend icon veneration. It's suspicious that there's no mention of icon veneration being encouraged in the New Testament, there's minimal mention of the practice before the first Nicene council. Icon veneration seems so similar to idolatry, but the distinction between the two is not made clear in the scripture or in the writing of the early church fathers. If God really did intend icon veneration, I would expect him to assure me of this through scripture and consistent witness of leaders in the church, not just because a lot of people venerated icons for a long time. But if the second story were true, what would imply about the church, myself, and God?

I started to look into Orthodoxy because I had given up on scripturalism and was looking for something more decisive. Scripture alone led to divergent interpretations, and I wanted a sound way to know what God wants that isn't just someone's opinion—opinions are cheap. I wasn't happy with just listening to my own opinion, either; if I can't rest with another person's opinions, I can't rest with my own. I didn't think that scripture was bad or wrong, it's just that using scripture alone led to inconsistent readings of the Bible about important things. On the other hand, traditionalism, in Orthodoxy, and in Catholicism, too, led to enforcement of wrong practices. I would like to hold a compromise position, but a person who believes the tradition except for when he doesn't isn't halfway in the middle of the two approaches, he's a well-read scripturalist.

I wanted a good understanding of revelation. I posed this in terms of knowing doctrine. Revelation isn't just about logic and information, it's about function. I don't care if proper doctrine can be deduced from scripture alone because scripture hasn't been consistently understood. I'm more concerned with how well people actually know God than I am about a theory of revelation, of how they ought to go about knowing God. I think it was helpful for me to think in terms of doctrine about important, concrete things, like who should be baptized, how should church government be structured, and whether icons should be venerated.

I didn't care so much about these issues of doctrine, though, as I did about the world and myself. I didn't learn until I was 17 that a fifth of the world's population is malnourished. Poor people aren't just a few people in my neighborhood who need some canned goods, no, most human beings live in a state of physical hardship and suffering that I had never been close to being forced into. Also, I believed that to not know Jesus is to spend eternity in torment, and, because most humans aren't Christians, pain forever was what they would face, barring an intervention. On campus, I was seeing evangelism take no effect; I could count on one hand the number of conversions I saw in the college fellowship I was in for over five years.

I had to look to find a church where poverty and justice were spoken about regularly from the pulpit, and even then, it's rare for me to hear a Christian teacher speak with penitence for the role that Christians have played in injustice. Christians ought to teach with urgency and fear and hope about suffering and damnation that are imminent for most people, providing concrete advice on how to respond radically to crisis. I didn't just want a good understanding of revelation, I wanted to see what God was up to and know what he wanted me to do to help.

Advocates of religious pluralism often make reference to the story of the blind men and the elephant. One might feel the side of the elephant and say that an elephant is like a wall. Another might feel its tail and say that it's like a rope. Another might feel its ear and say it's floppy. They're all right, they're just talking about different aspects of the elephant. This is a critically incomplete analogy, because elephants can't talk. Is God silent, only allowing us to know him by groping for him in the dark?

There are different kinds of disagreements. There are differences of perspective or emphasis or phrasing, and then there are flat contradictions: icons ought to be venerated or they ought not, the church should be led by bishops or the Pope or a number of elders or by a congregational vote, babies ought or ought not be baptized.

Idolatry is a sin because people use idols to manipulate and misrepresent God. I started seeing other things that Christians do as idolatrous. People make up rules and say that God commands them—this is idolatrous. People cause harm to people and say that this is good because God wills it—this is idolatrous. People bargain with God, or they try to pray with a special technique, or they butter-up God with compliments that they don't mean, hoping to get what they want—this is idolatry. People say that scripture provides sufficient knowledge for salvation, but God didn't say that, the Bible didn't say that about itself, even; this is idolatry. When people give tradition the weight of divine revelation, this is idolatry, too.

The second commandment forbids making and bowing before graven images, and the Orthodox and the Catholics and anyone else who uses art as a proxy for God are guilty of this. We should be surprised if it weren't the case that many Christians are idolaters, if the church is anything like the ancient Israelite culture that it is supposed to be a continuation of. To judge by the Old Testament, the people of God live in cycles of idolatry, judgment, repentance, and deliverance. Why should God's people today be any less frail?

I don't think the Orthodox and the Catholics are the worst idolaters. Bowing in front of an image is a violation of the second commandment, but it doesn't seem to harm any human beings directly. When a sick person is told that she will get better if she has faith, she might falsely blame herself if she gets sicker. People with psychiatric conditions are told that God doesn't want them to take pills. Charlatans extort money from people who can't afford to give it, telling their marks that God will pay them back a hundredfold. It makes me angry when people give bad advice and false consolation, and support what they say with a "thus sayeth the Lord".

I like Orthodoxy. I like paintings. I like the icons of Jesus and the saints and the angels, they inspire me. I like the stories told in Orthodoxy. I've found ancient Christian spiritual practices to be helpful to me. My objection to Orthodoxy, and to Catholicism, is not to people bowing before marble or wood and paint, but it is to the establishment of the church as a proxy for Christ. The church is an image of Christ, but it isn't him. The church is imperfect, it makes mistakes, it is fallible—I'm convinced of this, and so I did not become Orthodox or Catholic.

After I first learned about the extent of injustice in the world, and the church's insufficient response, I stopped calling myself a Christian—I called myself a Jesus-follower or something, instead. I felt like I knew better than the rest of the church, that I could see injustice and care about it in ways that the rest of the church couldn't, which is such an adolescent attitude to have. Fortunately, that phase only lasted for about a week.

Revelation doesn't work. Protestants can't come to agreement on basic, important things, and the Orthodox and Catholics have converged on bad conclusions. I could privilege my point of view, and say that I have the insight to see through a mistake made by the ancient church, or that I have the insight to get good-enough doctrine for myself from the Bible. I decided that it would be immature for me to think that I have some sense of spirituality that most people don't have. When I stopped assuming that I'm special, I didn't think I could do much better at figuring out God than most of the people that I disagree with.

God is supposed to be all-powerful. The Bible could have been a little more specific on important things. The history of Christian theology made me despair over whether I could figure out God in a meaningful way, myself. In evangelicalism, finding out God's will for one's life, listening for the Holy Spirit's direction, praying for guidance, these things are normal. Yet, if I couldn't trust God to be clear to the whole church about something important, like icon veneration, how could I trust God to speak to me about little things?

I wasn't just looking for something to cross-stitch and hang on my wall. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I was horrified by global injustice, and that people around me were satisfied with the meaning they found in living comfortable lives. What did God want me to do about war and hunger and disease? What did God want me to do about helping people know him? I had thought that God had been leading me, inspiring me, giving me understanding, but maybe that voice was just my own little idol.

Triceratops and Torosaurus become a thorny issue

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 02:12:00 +0000

I was nervous when I saw the title, Triceratops and Torosaurus become a thorny issue - chicagotribune.com: "Triceratops: Beyond extinct". Triceratops has always been my favorite dinosaur. Triceratops and Torosaurus are likely the same species, at different maturity levels. This quote made me less nervous:

"Triceratops: Beyond extinct"; "You'll get a lot more hits on Google if you type in Triceratops instead of Torosaurus, and if you don't understand why that matters, you're, well, a dinosaur. So let's agree: A Triceratops isn't a baby Torosaurus — a Torosaurus is a grown-up Triceratops."

I got an email thanking me for signing a petition that I didn't sign, regarding bear farming.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:35:00 +0000

I just got the below email in my inbox from the World Society for the Protection of Animals. (Ricky Gervais is on the front page of their webpage. Also, they stopped bullfighting in Catalonia, so I guess that's good. I've never heard of the WSPA before today, and I certainly didn't sign the petition mentioned below.

Thank you for signing the petition against bear farming in South Korea. Your signature will help us show the government that people around the world are calling for an end to this brutal cruelty.

Right now, thousands of bears are suffering in desperately cruel conditions bear farms across Asia. Most are held in cages the size of a telephone booth, in which they are unable to stand and can hardly turn around.

These bears are confined so bile can be extracted from their gall bladders and sold for use in some Traditional Asian Medicines, even though research has proven that herbal and synthetic alternatives are just as effective for treating ailments.

The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) believes that bear farming is cruel, unnecessary and must come to an end. Increasing numbers of Traditional Asian Medicine practitioners agree and are turning to herbal and synthetic alternatives to bear bile.

If you agree that no animal deserves this horrible treatment, support WSPA with a donation today. WSPA is working to end bear farming by: working in partnership with Asian governments — using research, education and diplomacy to work for an end to bear farming; calling for an end to the illegal trade in bear products; and, working with practitioners and consumers of Traditional Asian Medicine to promote alternatives to bear bile.

You can make an online donation, securely through this website: [redacted]

Thank you,
Silia Smith, Regional Director
WSPA Canada

Wild variety of things hit by car en route to pool

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:31:00 +0000

A teenager fell asleep, and drove through:

all terrain vehicles
go-carts
garage
grape arbor
swing set
dog run
deck

before landing in a:

swimming pool (above-ground).

It's like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but with a car instead of a caterpillar, and a swimming pool instead of a beautiful butterfly.

I have catalogued other car in pool things.

The acute effect of local homicides on children's cognitive performance

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:30:00 +0000

The acute effect of local homicides on children's cognitive performance by Patrick Sharkey in PNAS

Violence makes it tough for kids in a community to read, even a week after the event, and even if the kids don't witness it themselves. Living in inner city Baltimore, I am exposed to other things that make it difficult to learn. I don't have air conditioning, and city heat is stifling. The only real grocery store within walking distance closed in January. People fight and yell in front of my house.

Suburbanites talk about the city as a dangerous place. Sure, we have higher incidences of theft. Violence is more frequent, but it mostly happens between people with grudges, "don't start none, won't be none." Living in the city is hard, but mostly not from big things, like a car getting jacked; what affects me, drains me, is the environment, and what most affects urban kids is probably that plus lack of access to resources that are normal for me: healthy food, good books, safe, clean spaces to play in.

Flathead The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 03:41:00 +0000

From Flathead: The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman by Matt Taibbi:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

CoffeeGeek - Why I like Bodum

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:08:00 +0000

CoffeeGeek - Why I like Bodum:

After work, one or two of them would come over, we'd set up on the back elevated sun deck of my home (actually, the roof of the car garage, with a fence around it). I'd boil the water, I'd bring the grinder right outside (there was a convenient plug), I'd grind up the coffee, and we would enjoy the aromas. I would carefully measure out the grinds, pour in the boiling water, stir just a bit, and set the plunger for a 3 to 4 minute 'steep'. We'd take turns each day on who would push it down, and dole out the goods, in the matching cups. Then we'd talk, reminisce, or watch the world go by (my house was on one of those streets that combine small shops and restaurants and cafes with homes). We'd play a variety of those intellectual-type board games, share experiences, and... become closer friends.

Bodum was a big part of this. The ritual, the subculture was one appreciated by myself and my friends, and I think this was (and is today) the company's intent - a culture of simple sophistication and the production of a quality beverage to go along with it.

It's hip to not like branding because it's manipulative. I like it when a brand is associated with an idea, and promotes that idea in an important way. I got my coffee press from Ikea, though.

Links regarding Facebook being crummy

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:10:00 +0000

I blogged some about Facebook recently. Here are some articles that I've seen in that vein: the problem with Facebook isn't that it's doing dishonest things to us (but it is), it's that Facebook is closed and makes it difficult to quit.

Merlin Mann's WebVisions talk. He talks about how Facebook munges up our expectations for how information will be shared.
Openbook is a way to search Facebook status updates for key phrases. I like "I'm pregnant". Oops.
The quest for frisson by Roger Ebert, who has a consistently worth-reading-every-word blog. In it, he talks about how easy it is to get obsessed with the Internet. He says: "Facebook has no charms for me. It looks inward. Twitter looks outward, and I've found remarkable people to follow." That's why your note you wrote on Facebook will never be seen by more than a couple of hundred people, no matter how earth-shattering it is.
Anil Dash on Facebook usernames when they were first released. "None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook."

Allow me to recommend Perfecto Coffeehouse, Grilled Cheese and Co; also, allow me to re-recommend Catonsville Engine and Transmission.

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 01:42:00 +0000

I have had a very stressful past two days, what with the death of my car. Yesterday, as a self-care activity, I went to Perfecto Coffeehouse, which is within easy walking distance of my house in Mount Clare, Baltimore. It's a new place, and I think they're still working out the kinks. I had ordered an iced mocha and a waffle. The waffle was a stunning deal at $3; it wasn't a huge Belgian waffle, but it had a delicious batter. I got mine with fruit (strawberries and mango) and whipped cream. I also got an iced mocha, but it wasn't very mocha-ey; the mocha syrup pump had gotten clogged. As an iced latte, it was fine; the mocha syrup pump was the same Ghirardelli syrup that I'd seen elsewhere. Seating was limited; there were only six tables: four inside, one on the patio, and one on the sidewalk. There wasn't any competition for my seat at 7 PM; I don't know what it would be like at other times of day. I had a great time reading while bohemians from Gallery 788 (warning: tacky MySpace site) bohem'ed through. I stopped by Gallery 788 on my way home; they have an opening the first Thursday of each month. I thought the art was pretty boring.

Warning: Do not go to Wilkens Service Center at the corner of Wilkens and Monroe. They completely misdiagnosed my engine problem; I hereby cast aspersions on their professionalism and insight.

I wanted a pleasant break while waiting for a diagnosis from my trusted mechanic. A mere block away is Grilled Cheese and Co, which opened a mere three months ago. It's a grilled-cheese-centric sandwich shop. I got The Fresco and I was delighted. I have had to have my car towed twice, my schedule had been completely ruined, I am out of fruit, and I had left my MacBook in the lab, so I couldn't work on my research. The sandwich helped me forget the suffering. I also had shoestring fries, which were pleasant. Grilled Cheese and Co was founded by Vic Corbi and Matt Lancelotta; Vic Corbi is related to Joe Corbi of Joe Corbi's pizza, so I guess it's a cheese thing. Jazz music is played; I was delighted to hear "Baby, It's Cold Outside" on a July afternoon.

I would like to remind you of my recommendation of Catonsville Engine and Transmission, an excellent, trustworthy mechanic. They confirmed that my car is dead, but have been great sports about helping me make burial arrangements.

Bleg: buying a car

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:16:00 +0000

My car broke down yesterday, and it's at the point where I should just get a new one. Well, new to me. I would like tips on getting a car. Here is my rule for advice:

Anecdotal evidence doesn't count.

Every car has some problems, and every model has some lemons. I hear that most lemons are made on Mondays and Fridays. Anyway, I want to consider overall statistics about reliability and total cost of ownership.

I'm thinking of getting a car that's 2-3 years old. I hear that buying a brand new car is a bad deal. I also don't want to buy a car that's cheap, but so old it's about to die. Do you have any ideas about the sweet spot in terms of the age of a car?

I'm re-watching Fargo as I write this: are there any scams that I have to watch out for like Trucoat?

I'm interested in a few features, so if you have experience with these, let me know: * An aux-in plug for my iPod. I don't want a special iPod docking port, just a regular 3.5 mm jack. Also, it's really important that there's a 12 V adaptor for my iPod and GPS chargers. * The seats in the back seat should fold down so that the trunk can hold a bunch of stuff.

My family has had great experiences with Maven Motors. It's run by an Orthodox Jew who is honest and offers deals so good that he doesn't let you haggle. He has these cars on hand. I'm thinking especially about the Ford Focus and the Ford Taurus, and I'm leaning toward the Focus. Are there any other cars listed that catch your eye? Do you know of any reasons I should have trepidation about the Focus or Taurus?

I've also heard good things about CarMax. Any ideas?

Again, I'm not looking for one-off experiences, but overall insight that's evidence based. Thanks!

Allow me to recommend Markdown

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 05:00:00 +0000

John Gruber and Aaron Swartz's Markdown is a plain and open tool for making blogging and other webby things easy and fun. It lets you represent the most common HTML tags that would be used in day-to-day web writing as intuitive punctuation. For example, instead of linking to Markdown by writing

<a href="http://daringfireball.net/
         projects/markdown/">Markdown</a>

I write

[Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/
           projects/markdown/)

I think the simplest way to use it on a Mac is to copy Markdown text to the clipboard, then run the following script:

#!/bin/bash
pbpaste|~/handyscripts/Markdown.pl|pbcopy

A marked-down copy of your text will then be on the clipboard. I pop up Launchbar to call the script in a jiffy, and using a clipboard with history helps manage the whole mess.

Use RSS

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I first used the Internet when I was 10 or so. I made a webpage when I was 12; it was 1997 and I was using the Maryland library system's free text-only Internet service through a terminal emulator. It was a big deal when we found out about NetZero. When I was 14, I made a blog-before-there-were-blogs. Somehow, my friends kept up with what I was doing, and I kept up with what they were doing, without clicking a Friend button. We emailed a lot. Rather than writing notes to everyone, we emailed each other, having long, detailed conversations about spirituality, video games, politics, books, and magic.

Since I started using the Internet in 1995, a lot of things have changed, sure, but the biggest change in how I use the Internet is RSS. It used to be that websites were like textbooks: they were solid, you'd put them on a shelf, you'd refer to them when you wanted information. When a friend sent you a link to his website, you'd poke around on it for a while finding what he's made that you find interesting, and then you'd let it sit. Like textbooks, webpages got updated sporadically, and it wasn't clear what was new, or when you should go back and check a webpage. I would email my friends when I'd updated my webpage.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) changed this. RSS made the Internet feel, to me, more like a newspaper delivery than a textbook. For example, I'm currently kind of obsessed with Daring Fireball (thoughtful Mac journalism). Rather than going to DF several times a day, like I would have back in the 90's, I see new articles pop up in my RSS feed when they're written. I also read webcomics this way, blogs, some Twitter feeds, The Onion, and scientific journals.

Rather than explain how RSS works or how to use it, I would recommend trying Google Reader; it's pretty self-explanatory. There are oodles of other good RSS readers that are worth checking out, too, some are web services, like Bloglines, some are programs you run on your machine. I've had good experiences with NewsFire for the Mac. I think that Facebook is ubiquitous and Twitter is popular because most people don't use RSS readers. Twitter equals a blog limited to 140 characters plus the Follow feature, which is like subscribing to an RSS feed, except easier. Facebook's news feed is sort of RSSey, but also easier to use, but with much less control for the user. Facebook messages are to email as the Facebook news feed is to RSS. A Gmail user can email a Hotmail user who can email someone with an email address that they got from their job. It's impossible to send a Facebook message to someone without a Facebook account.

I use a custom Yahoo pipe to combine all of my feeds for my blogs into one feed, making it easier to keep up with all the stuff I do (see my website. FriendFeed and Buzz also allow you to export an aggregated RSS feed.

I like seeing what my friends are doing on the Internet. I also like Facebook for what it's good at: conversations about imported stuff, sharing contact information, handling guest lists for parties.

The harder it is for people to keep up with their friends without Facebook, the more Facebook is going to treat its users poorly. It's a little work to learn to use RSS, but it was a little bit of work to learn to use email in the 90's. I believe that we would see fewer cases of Facebook misusing personal information if everyone used open alternatives to as many bits of Facebook as possible.

A bit on photos

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:00:00 +0000

My screed against Facebook wasn't about privacy, but I have thoughts on that, too. Sure, Facebook, the company, has a bad track record, but most of the breaches are things like releasing information about who you're a Friend with. I think that we're sensitive to stories about breaches in privacy on Facebook because using Facebook feels eerie just to start with.

I went to Turkey during winter break of last year, and it was one of those figure-out-what-I'm-doing-with-my-life-by-seeing-the-world kind of trips. (I blogged about the trip, and took [pictures][tkpic]). On Pi Day of last year, I had a party at my house. It was kind of an open-house joint, with people coming and going at will. There was kind of a lull in the evening, when a couple of great friends came over; I'd been meaning to show them my pictures and tell them about my trip and what it meant to me. We sat and ate pie and chatted. Then, about a dozen people showed up, and we shared pie and sat around the living room and my friends endured the vacation picture slideshow storytelling. Some of these friends were super-close to me, some were acquaintances, and some I'd just met that day, but the atmosphere was cozy and cheerful. I have two guesses about why sharing pictures on Facebook feels strange. 1. Although I don't mind any one of my 306 Facebook friends seeing my photos, it feels weird to think of all of them seeing them. 2. When someone comes over to your house, they might flip through a photo album if it's sitting on the coffee table. They won't flip through a photo album that's sitting on a bookshelf without asking permission first, though.

Facebook doesn't make it easy for friends to politely ask permission to see pictures. Instead, permissions to see things are managed through lists. The problem is that the list of a dozen people sitting in my living room on Pi Day doesn't match any of my social groupings. It was spontaneous. Privacy settings should be about the content first, rather than what categories Facebook friends fit into. Most of my photo albums are fine for anyone to see, they're pictures of trash cans and fire hydrants and plants. Some of my albums have pictures of my siblings, and I want to protect them. I would like it if anyone could see that I'd made an album of pictures of my siblings unwrapping presents on Christmas, click one button to ask my permission to see the pictures, I would click one button if I wanted to show them, and they'd get a notification of this. Then, I would know who's looking at my pictures and we could have a chat about them.

BAAM-UMBC: So Uhhhh What's the Situation on the French Toast Makin...SItuation?

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:36:00 +0000

BAAM-UMBC: So Uhhhh What's the Situation on the French Toast Makin...SItuation?:

"Maybe I'll just sit here and blog about his crazy movements as they happen like that English assignment that everyone gets. You know, the one where you're supposed to sit in a place like a cafe and write down everything that happens around you. Only mine will be the Mike German experience. Here he comes again. His Achilles tendon has been hurting him. He's hobbling around like an old bear man. Here he comes with a sleeping bag, who wants to bet that he's going outside? Oh no... the dining room.... oh! and the surprise by the balcony door decision. I did not see that one coming. He grabs a pillow and an extra blanket and he is outta here."

Again with the phrase, "The Mike German Experience". It's a thing.

More excellent coverage of the Biking Across AMerica adventure, mostly covered by Shelly Kessler, Blogger Extraordinaire, at the BAAM blog

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:59:00 +0000

Good Intentions Are Not Enough is moving. It's such a good blog about misguided aid and social justice work, and how to do better at caring for people.

On Rosenbaum's Agnostic Manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:09:00 +0000

On An Agnostic Manifesto by Ron Rosenbaum:

This article is frustrating. An excerpt:

In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I can't wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.

I… I didn't know that was a thing that atheists were concerned with this. Do atheists, in general, say that we know why there is something rather than nothing? They certainly don't infer an unknown cause and call it God.

It's amazing how the New Atheists boastfully stride over this pons asinorum as if it weren't there.

Rosenbaum uses a latin phrase to make atheists look unsophisticated. He's made the discussion between agnostics and atheists boring, because he's removed it from what human beings are concerned with, meaning, morality, purpose, joy, and posed the labels in terms of an obscure philosophical problem.

I've heard various self-described agnostics describe their label as any combination of the following:

I have no knowledge of any God.
I don't know if a specific God exists.
I don't know if an unspecified God exists.
I don't know if something exists that someone calls God.

I use the first definition. I don't mind atheists calling me a "weak atheist" and lumping me in with them; ever since I was kicked out of the bat club in first grade, I've been looking for acceptance. Rosenbaum seems to follow 3 and 4. I'm sure that Rosenbaum and I agree about most things about magic and meaning. The divergence between agnostics and atheists is a subtle philosophical one. We have the same challenges, it is sensible for us to be cultural allies. Rosenbaum's critique of atheism is nit-picky and detracts from this cooperative relationship.

The cool aunt

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I think everyone has an aunt who, when in her twenties, had spent a few years studying Hinduism at an ashram in India. At funerals and family reunions, her eccentricities get glossed over in conversation. Now, she wears a lot of scarves that look "ethnic" and she's a vegetarian, and she peppers her speech with words like "lifestyle" and "mojo" and "flow". She's been divorced, twice, and is now dating a guy who has a pony tail and calls pot, "cannabis". The only people who think she's cool are the people in the family who weren't born yet when she was in India, but, for these nieces and nephews, she's the coolest relative that there is.

In a family where everyone grew up Lutheran, everyone's been a Lutheran, going back to Luther himself, the only sort of person who would convert to something as extremely different as Hinduism would have to be sort of a doodle, like Aunt-so-and-so. She went to India to get real Hindusim, not just white-people yoga-studio Hinduism. She wasn't looking for the word, Hinduism, she was looking for truth or transcendence or meaning. I think that a lot of these aunts would have stayed home if the Vietnam War hadn't happened.

So Aunt-so-and-so ran off to India, alone; nobody else in the family did, they were concerned with graduating college or getting married or getting partner at a law practice. What's striking about Aunt-so-and-so is that she eventually came back from India; she doesn't call herself a Hindu. So, while she was in India, everyone in the family would mutter about how irresponsible she is, and when she came home, everyone would look at her, "Told you so". It's just that Hinduism seemed to her to have something real, in a way that it didn't for anyone else in the family. She's a realtor now, though.

As I'm thinking about my Aunt So-and-so, I wonder if she went to India to go to India or to leave the US. She told me that when she was watching coverage of the march on Selma, with kids getting teargassed on the bridge, Grandpa said something about how he thought that black people should be treated better, but that these demonstrations were more trouble than they were worth. She talks now about how the war in Iraq is cleaner than Vietnam, but no better. I found out about the Japanese internment camps from her.

Facebook is a content abyss

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 02:57:00 +0000

Summary: This is basically an endorsement of FriendFeed and Google Buzz, and an unusual condemnation of Facebook: I'm more bothered by its stinginess with my media than I am by its promiscuity with my data. If you don't want to bother with my griping: 1. Go to FriendFeed and sign up and befriend me, AlexSzatmary. If you already have a Facebook, Google, or Twitter account, it will take you literally two mouse clicks. 2. If you have Gmail, you already have Buzz. Auto-import your blog, Flickr albums, Twitter. Think about what in your feed you want to share publicly. It's super easy to set up. 3. Give friends links to public feeds of your FriendFeed or Buzz. Put it in your email signature. Put it on your Facebook profile. 4. If you feel like it, go to my Buzz feed and subscribe by RSS, or follow me in Gmail. Or you can go to my website, and subscribe by RSS to whatever you please. 5. Use RSS to keep up with things people make. You'll need an RSS reader for this; I like Google Reader, but there are other good options.

Granted, Facebook has done a terrible job with everyone's personal data:

Their Privacy Policy is longer than the Constitution
The maze of menus one needs to maintain their privacy settings would befuddle as gifted a reckoner of hierarchically sorted information as a medieval scholastic.
One needs to navigate a maze of menus to maintain their privacy settings because Facebook changes all of its rules a couple of times a year.
Facebook gives away data about you to strangers without your permission.

These are all bad, but, really, I'm not bothered. I have 306 Facebook friends, and I'm strange in that I periodically de-friend any people that I don't have an actual relationship with of some sort; I might have far fewer "friends" than a lot of my friends. Sharing things with 306 friends isn't private.

I'm griping because Facebook is a content abyss. Most of the really cool stuff that I see pop up on my feed came from somewhere else, it's a link to a news site or it's a picture someone took or a YouTube video. The only new content that I'm seeing generated on Facebook is notes, which are really blog posts that are locked into Facebook. Facebook isn't where I make stuff, I write stuff on my blogs (see my web site), I put my pictures on Picasa, I put my videos on YouTube, I toot on Twitter, and I post my bookmarks on Delicious. I don't need Facebook as a publisher. Facebook is a hole that I throw things into.

I went to http://www.facebook.com/alexszatmary, logged-out, to see what a stranger would see. I have all of my privacy protection settings cranked low, I only guard my contact information. When a stranger looks at my facebook page, they see this:

All that a stranger can make of this is:

Alex has sat on a stone bench and made funny faces
Alex has some Facebook friends
Alex likes Napoleon Dynamite, Carl Sagan, and soup

What I find most offensive about Facebook is that it won't share any of my content with strangers unless they get a Facebook account. The evil thing, as far as I'm concerned, with Facebook, isn't that it's promiscuous with my personal information, but that it's stingy with my media that I made that I want to share with 306 people plus my mom who isn't on Facebook. Facebook gets more money out of locking people into using Facebook than it does by doing skeezy things with your Likes or 25 Things. My mom doesn't have a Facebook account, so sharing anything, not just pictures, with my mom by way of Facebook is irritating or impossible.

Facebook got to be really cool when it acquired FriendFeed, that's when everything got comment-on-able. People discussed clever links, we joked over old pictures, and walls became places where people could chat. This is the reason why I have a Facebook tab always open: Facebook is good at making conversations.

FriendFeed still exists on its own. I set up my own feed, where it's easy for anyone to see what I've been up to lately and have a chat about it. I figure that almost anything that I can share with 306 people, I want to be able to share easily with the whole world. FriendFeed lets me do that. It also has privacy settings:

Here's what my public FriendFeed looks like:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

FriendFeed doesn't do much on its own, it just grabs things that I make and puts them in one big pipe. It publishes the stuff I make, link to, like, whatever, and lets people see it. If you want to comment on something on FriendFeed, you need to log in, but it's free to look. You can also follow people individually on FriendFeed.

Buzz also doesn't make you join to see my stuff. A stranger coming across my profile sees this:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

A stranger looking at my Google profile can see some pictures I took, links to my websites, and my Buzz feed. Facebook makes people join first, then gives them content; FriendFeed and Buzz both let their users open their profiles as much as they like.

To put stuff on the Internet, I use

They each do a better job of the one thing they do than Facebook does. They each have privacy settings, and they're typically sensible and easy to use. I can quit any one of them at any time and switch to a different service easily. I'm thinking about using Vimeo for the occasional video that I make.

We allow Facebook to be a bully because it has high barriers to exit. Once you put stuff into Facebook, pictures, notes, video, whatever, it's not easy to export it again. Delicious, Picasa, and Blogger have built-in tools that make it easy to export all of your stuff from them. Also, for people to see the stuff I make on Facebook, they have to have Facebook accounts, too.

Facebook is closed in two important ways: 1. If I decide one day that I don't like, say, Delicious, I can check out, pick a new social bookmarking site, and import my old bookmarks; it might not be seamless, but it's something. You can't do anything like that with Facebook. If I quit Facebook, all of the information I've put into it is gone forever. 2. If all of my friends use Friendfeed or Tumblr or Twitter or whatever, and I don't, I can still see their pages or subscribe to their RSS feeds without signing up for an account. It's expensive to quit Facebook, so we let Facebook behave poorly. We can make it cheaper to quit Facebook by diversifying how we put content on the Internet. It's good etiquette to not make your friends use a service just because you do.

Unreactionary

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I had grown up Presbyterian, and my denomination placed a strong emphasis on the belief that God had power over absolutely everything. We were contrasted with, say, the Baptists, who emphasized our free will to choose to trust in God or not. The problem with the Presbyterians, the Baptists would say, is that they don't treat humans as beings who are capable of meaningful actions. The Presbyterians would criticize the Baptists for undermining the sovereignty of God. When I was discovering Orthodoxy, I wanted to learn the Orthodox stance on free will versus God's sovereignty. I found it very difficult to accept the Orthodox church's teaching on how free people are, but when I did, it didn't feel like I was rejecting belief in God's sovereignty at all. Not only that, but I didn't even understand why there was a conflict about the matter in the first place. It just seemed like the Baptists had gotten a little confused in one direction, and the Presbyterians had gotten a little confused in the other, and they went back and forth, arguing, and drifting apart.

Orthodoxy felt like the opposite of wild mood swings. I was used to either feeling smug when I did right, or guilty when I did wrong, but I was being taught in the Orthodox church to be more concerned with finding life than with judging myself one way or another. Whenever things get too busy for me and I have papers all over my desk, I gather them up in a pile. I pick the top paper off the pile and do what I need to with it: file it, note a to-do, throw it away, whatever. Then I pick up the next paper and deal with it. The feeling of sensibility that I get from doing that with paper, I felt that way, that simple single-mindedness, about Orthodox thought. Orthodoxy felt unreactionary to me.

Even before investigating Orthodoxy, I had felt despair about whether we could know right doctrine confidently. I was thinking of things like whether to baptize babies and how to get saved and what the ground rules are for church government; if God thought these things were important, why didn't he have the Bible written more clearly? I had always supposed that Christian truth was somewhere in a circle drawn around the Bible. I started asking, though, "Why would God leave only the Bible as authority if it can't be made sense of consistently?" and wondering why I hadn't asked that before.

In my discussions with Orthodox Christians, I was encouraged to ask that question. For God to be anything other than cruel, he would have to make doctrine, at least, the very important bits, clear to the church. Not only that, but it would have to be the same truth, for Christians in India and Egypt and Ireland and Bolivia now and in the Middle Ages and during the Roman Empire and through the Industrial Revolution. To me, that meant that Christianity had to look something like the Orthodox or the Catholic church, something like what the whole church looked in the first millennium, before the split.

There was a four-hundred-year-old oak tree in the back yard of my house I grew up in. When I was building forts or gathering acorns or spying, I felt safe near that tree, because it was big and old.

Armchair

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I'm noticing as I'm writing this that I'm talking about my experience of Orthodoxy in a not-Orthodox sort of way. Prayer and fasting and worship weren't things that I just discovered, these were things that Christians had been practicing since the time of the apostles, and so I was connected with Christians throughout time and around the world. Before that, I had invented spiritual practices, like reading a chapter of the Bible and then writing something about it in a journal, or waking up early to study, or going for a lot of walks to pray, and these were all helpful, but I would do them for a couple of weeks or a couple of years, but intermittently. In Orthodoxy, I was doing old disciplines, I was trying things that people had already tried and refined; I also felt like I had moral support from those who had gone before me.

One Friday afternoon in January, I went over to the home of Fr Gregory, the Orthodox priest, to have a chat. On my way there, I had gone to 7-Eleven for Pop-Tarts and coffee, I ate the Pop-Tarts on the way there, and struggled to finish the hot coffee during the 15 minute drive to Fr Gregory's house. I suppose I woke up around 11 that morning, and was to meet with Fr Gregory at around 2. Buying Pop-Tarts at Seven-11 is a bad deal; I must have forgotten to go to the grocery store for proper breakfast food. I would have gotten doughnuts or something at Seven-11, but it was a Friday, and Pop-Tarts are vegan. Then, I got worried because I was running late, and then, I felt ashamed, because who runs late to a 2 PM appointment because they overslept? I'm sure my disturbed sleep came from my psych issues, but I was blaming myself for being lazy rather than going to the doctor.

Anyway, I got to Fr Gregory's house, and I apologized for being late, I was maybe ten minutes late. Of course, he was forgiving. Most people don't mind if you're ten minutes late. There is a difference between saying, "It's not a problem" and "I forgive you" and I felt Fr Gregory warmly forgiving my tardiness. We sat in armchairs in the living room. I told him that I was interested in Orthodoxy, that I was almost certain that I was going to become Orthodox. He told me that it was good that I was so eager, but that it was important for me to not just have good reasons to become Orthodox, but to practice knowing God through the life of the church.

He also suggested that I pray the psalms, so I did. I'd gotten advice on spiritual discipline before, but I know that I took that tip—pray the psalms—differently than advice I'd gotten before: the advice came from a priest. I was used to the idea that pastors are the same as anyone else, but pastors and priests aren't just like anyone else, they've studied a lot about spirituality, they teach it, and they are noted by their communities for their diligence and perseverance and wisdom. By thinking of Fr Gregory as not just like everyone else, it helped me take his advice more seriously. Having grown up Protestant, I had been warned about priests causing harm, spiritually, leading people to compliance out of fear of their clerical authority. That's not what I felt that Friday afternoon. Fr Gregory wasn't inventing a new rule for me out of nowhere, he suggested that I pray the psalms because he knew it had helped people for thousands of years and thought it would be helpful for me.

Sanctuary

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I had a roommate who had depression. Sometimes, it was so bad, he would just hit a wall. He would literally hit a wall, he was so wound up. Sometimes, he would feel washed out, as if he'd just gotten over a 24 hour stomach bug. His mom ran a gym, so she knew some things about health, I guess. She recommended that he try Red Bull, because it has a lot of vitamin B, which, she says, gets burned off by depression. My roommate let me try a Red Bull, and it made me feel better, too. I'd had problems with anxiety for a year at that point, and the vitamin B might have rounded off some of the jitters. This might sound counter-intuitive, it might not even be right, but the caffeine helped me with the anxiety because it helped me focus, to get a grip on reality.

My anxiety was worst while I was sleeping. I would wake up in the middle of the night in panic. I would look out the window, just in case something was coming. I only ever saw the tree, the parking lot, and the dumpster.

Red Bull is pretty expensive, but I found Red Thunder at Aldi for 75 cents a can, so I drank a lot of that. I would pop a Red Thunder first thing in the morning. Sometimes I'd mix it with orange juice, a Red Thunder screwdriver. The caffeine would jolt me awake. You know how, when you wake up in the morning, and you've been dreaming, you sometimes think that parts of the dream are real? The Red Thunder would help me wake up past that.

The first times that I went to Orthodox services, I was mostly confused. I started going to Vespers services regularly, and I found them therapeutic; I could feel the anxiety dripping off my elbows and down through my shoes. My favorite words in the service were in this part that was a call-and-response for intercession. The priest would sing, "For travelers, by sea, by land, and by air," and "For this city and all the people who dwell therein" and "Help us; save us; have mercy on us; and keep us, O God, by thy grace", and we would sing, "Lord have mercy".

That line, "Lord have mercy" is peppered throughout the prayers and songs. To some people, at first, it sounds like the Orthodox are perpetually afraid of a bloodthirsty God, that they need always to be asking obsequiously for a stay of execution. That's not how the "Lord have mercy"'s felt to me, though. Whenever I sang, "Lord have mercy", it wasn't with an attitude that I needed to plead God for mercy, that he would give it to me begrudgingly, but with the faith that that was exactly what he wanted to give me, and that I was praying the prayer he wanted me to pray. There is a prayer, the Jesus prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." I had a prayer rope, and I would count knots on it, one for each prayer; I was encouraged to pray the Jesus prayer a lot. In this praying for mercy I felt safe; the discipline was apt.

I started fasting, too, which wasn't too difficult for me. Fasting, for the Orthodox, means being vegan on Wednesdays and Fridays and during a few fasting seasons. I was already vegetarian, so being vegan a couple of days a week didn't seem difficult. In the protestant church, I had only ever fasted for the 30 Hour Famine, as a sort of publicity stunt for world hunger. There was one time when I had a crisis and needed divine insight, so I fasted, but I got very hungry, so I took a break and went to KFC, and then got back to fasting. Fasting was the sort of thing that was done as a last resort, or I knew some guys who fasted before they proposed to their girlfriends.

I think it's good that we have to sleep, and that we get colds sometimes. We're limited, but we're so used to being limited, that we don't notice it. Fasting dropped the ceiling on me, and it made me feel my human limitation more deeply and I felt ready to be filled by God.

Allow me to recommend Cyberduck

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:50:00 +0000

Price: Free

Cyberduck is a reliable, easy-to-use FTP, SFTP, S3, etc. browser for OSX. And you get a cute rubber duckie in your dock! I used to use Fugu, and I find Cyberduck to be much more pleasant.

If this is allowed in the future

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Ads shown by third party applications
Facebook does not give third party applications or ad networks the right to use your name or picture in ads. If this is allowed in the future, this setting will govern the usage of your information.

Emphasis mine. #facebookisevil

Buzz

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 24 May 2010 00:27:00 +0000

Check out my Buzz profile.

Most confusing chart of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 21 May 2010 03:58:00 +0000

The most confusing chart of the day award goes to:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

from Ide and Ophir. Orientation development in thermotropic liquid crystal polymers. Polymer Engineering and Science (2004) vol. 23 (5) pp. 261-265. Depicted are three values (tensile modulus, tensile strength, and area reduction) for five datapoints. Three scales appear on two y-axes. I think that this plot means that the tensile modulus for the extrudate decreases with increasing shear rate; I'm not sure why I should care about the other two variables because they don't look like they change very much, but it's hard to tell, because they are also on a smaller visual scale than the tensile modulus.

Fixed newspaper comics

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:21:00 +0000

Here are my favorite fixes of newspaper comics.

Garfield minus Garfield

Marmaduke Explained

Scott Meets Family Circus

The Nietzsche Family Circus

Lower case Scrabble set

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:07:00 +0000

Be careful what you ask for. A couple of days ago, I tweeted,

I just invented the lower-case Scrabble set. You can use b's as q's, n's as u's, m's as w's, and l's as -'s.less than a minute ago via txtAlex Szatmary
AlexSzatmary

Today, Paul dropped by my lab to give me,

From Alex's id funnel

Thanks, Paul! Anyone want to play lower-case Scrabble?

Pages' proofreading

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:48:00 +0000

In Episode 5 of the Mac Power Users podcast, Word Processing and Writing, David and Katie point out the proofreading feature in Pages. Like in Word, and in all native Mac programs, misspelled words have red underlines. Word also has a grammar check, the green squiggly underline, which I've grown accustomed to ignoring; it consistently has worse grammar than I do. Today, as I was writing an article, I looked for Pages' green proofreading marks, and it made some suggestions:

in terms of: Wordy in certain contexts. Consider simplifying with 'with', 'for', or 'of'.
"this same": Redundant expression. Consider deleting 'same'.
"for the purpose of": Wordy expression. Simplify by replacing with 'to' and an infinitive verb.
relative to: Wordy expression. Consider rephrasing with a more precise preposition.
"in general": Stock phrase. Use sparingly.

I pasted my troublesome phrases into Word. It didn't catch any of these. Pages' proofreading is one of the most thoughtful features I've seen in software.

Chrome download bar interface fail

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 12 May 2010 19:24:00 +0000

I love Chrome, but it annoys me in one small, pedantic way: the download bar. Whenever a file is downloaded, a bar pops up at the bottom of the screen. The only way to close the bar is to click on a tiny button on it. There's no keyboard shortcut. There's no way to disable it. There's no way to make it disappear once a download is completed. I googled for a solution.

The top hit for "Chrome download bar" is "Removing the download bar?". Ouch.

Allow me to recommend TextExpander and Dropbox

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:27:00 +0000

I'm fond of TextExpander; some people rave about it. I think it's handy, I can type "ttel" and TextExpander turns that into my phone number; I have other snippets for my websites, email addresses, and I've imported some libraries with HTML tags and autocorrections for common typos. It's handy.

I have a byzantine, quintuple-redundant backup system, with a Time Machine backup in my lab, a clone of my hard drive at home, two daily Flash stick backups, and a Dropbox backup. Dropbox gives me 2 GB of storage for free; there are paid plans for more space, but I don't worry about that, I just use Dropbox to back up my most important files and settings. Dropbox is an application you can install on all of the computers you use, and it will sync a folder across the cloud, so you have access to all of your stuff everywhere. I just use it as an extra backup.

Anyway, today, I noticed that my TextExpander snippets had disappeared, I don't know what happened. I went to dropbox.com, found my TextExpander settings, clicked Previous Versions, picked a working copy of my settings from a couple of days ago, clicked Restore, and immediately TextExpander was working again. TextExpander is a handy program that gets bonus points for having an open way of storing its settings, so that it's easy to back up and throw around. I'm shocked by how well Dropbox's version control worked.

11 ways to simplify your Facebook life

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:15:00 +0000

Don't be friends with someone that you're not friends with in real life.
If you didn't have Facebook, and wouldn't call someone to invite them to an event, don't invite them to that event on Facebook.
If you didn't have Facebook, and wouldn't email someone a message, don't tag them in a note on Facebook.
If you can email someone, don't send a Facebook Message instead.
Don't leave ambiguous status updates that make everyone think you just went through a break-up.
Don't enter into "a relationship" with someone of the same gender unless you are sexually attracted to people of that gender.
Quit every group that you aren't a member of in real life.
Don't use applications.
Don't take quizzes.
Don't write 25 things about yourself just because your friends are. You probably can only write six interesting things about yourself, anyway.
Don't put information on Facebook that you wouldn't put on a completely public website.

iWork Numbers Automator Actions to import text

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:57:00 +0000

I love iWork, especially Numbers; good golly, does Office suck on the Mac. iWork isn't up to speed, yet; notably, Numbers is horrible at importing text and formatting it into spreadsheet cells in a sensible way. Here are some OS X services that I made with Automator that are helpful for me.

As near as I can tell, the only way for Numbers to import plaintext table data is as a CSV file. The file needs to be comma-delimited, and ending in a .csv extension. I often want to grab data from the terminal, though. The Import CSV Text To Numbers Service takes selected comma delimited text and pops open a new Numbers document with it. The Import Whitespace Text To Numbers Service does the same, with whitespace delimited text. You can install these services by extracting them from the .zip files and moving them to your ~/Library/Services directory.

Note 1: For both of these Services, a scratch file is generated. A dialog box will pop up, asking to delete the scratch file. Only click OK once the file has finished loading.
Note 2: These Services operate on blocks of text, not text files; you can open a file and select the text you want imported to Numbers, that works fine.
Pedantic note on Import Whitespace Text To Numbers: This works via the sed command
sed -E 's/^[[:space:]]+//;s/[[:space:]]+/,/g'
which actually takes all blocks of whitespace and converts them to commas. The file is then saved as a .csv, and is opened by Numbers. This means that any commas in the source text will be treated as delimiters, as well.

Import CSV Text To Numbers
Import Whitespace Text To Numbers

Heirloom furniture

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I heard many stories about protestants becoming Orthodox; a common event in these stories is a realization of the beauty of the church's expressions. Some people are overwhelmed by the smell of the incense or the ornate robes worn by the priest or the icons or the chandelier. The Orthodox have great chandeliers, and in some services, the lights on the chandelier get turned on when the divine light is mentioned in the chant. The chants sounded familiar to me; I realized that much of the services are directly drawn from scripture. I suppose some westerners are put off by how alien the Orthodox services are. The music is in different keys than we're used to. The paintings don't show perspective properly, they feel like pop-up books.

In an Orthodox service, every sense is affected. The atmosphere is benevolently strange, not strange like being alone-in-the-woods-at-night; the space feels fantastic, as in fantasy. Halfway into Divine Liturgy, one would expect talking animals to appear and join in. Maybe they would wear clothes, like Peter Rabbit in Beatrix Potter's stories. I was running a Dungeons and Dragons game at the time, and looked to Orthodox services for inspiration.

Badgers were an inside joke in my D&D group; at one point, I and a few other players made it our characters' ultimate goal to get pet badgers. I heard that the Orthodox believe that the Bible isn't the only authority, but that there is authority in tradition. I Googled for the words "saint" and "badger"; if anything came up, Orthodoxy was not to be taken seriously.

St Piran was a missionary to Cornwall in the sixth century. Upon arriving there, he started building a cell. Animals helped him, so his first converts were a fox, a bear, and a badger.

I asked about this; is it necessary to believe that St Piran evangelized a badger for one to be properly Orthodox? An Orthodox friend told me, no, the tradition can't be taken like that. Just because someone, somewhere, is telling a story doesn't mean that the whole church backs that story. There are some stories that are wrong and false, there are some stories that are fun and helpful but of dubious veracity, there are some stories that probably happened and are good to remember, and then there are the things that the whole church affirms and has always affirmed and that are essential to fellowship with God. Having grown up a biblical literalist, I found this nuanced understanding of truth to be helpful. I don't think that St Piran actually baptized and taught a badger and a fox and a bear, but I think it's a nice story that makes me smile, and it reminds me that you can tell a lot about someone's heart based on how they and animals get along.

I was then beginning to appreciate how mature Orthodoxy is in its approach to truth, and to see that maturity in other things, too. At some church fellowship meals, wine would be served—that's classy. It was understood that everyone would be reading good spiritual books. People kept in their homes hand-painted icons.

I have a particular attachment to the booklets that were given away for free in the lobby. I remember that the booklets were printed by Conciliar Press, I appreciated them so; I would pick them up and hold them and look at them. In evangelicalism, I had seen shoddy gospel tracts, like Chick tracts, that seemed to do good only to the people handing them out. These Conciliar Press booklets, though, are well-written, sensible, regarding things that inquirers into Orthodoxy would like to know about. They are excellent examples of writing that is suited to its audience, but they're also notably well-printed booklets, cleanly designed, and printed on sturdy bright white paper. I'm agnostic now, it's been three years, and I still can't throw away my Conciliar Press booklets.

Around this time, I remember sitting in my church and thinking that it wasn't as classy as an Orthodox church, but there were some good things that were in common. I looked around the sanctuary and saw a cross at the front of the room and paintings on the wall. Our cross was probably made out of a bannister, our paintings aren't on wood, our music was nice but not as mysterious as chant. I wanted to make sure that I was becoming Orthodox for important reasons, not just because I wanted to be classy. And then, looking around my church, I saw a praise banner being waved; it had four arcs: red, white, blue, and camouflage.

control-z bg

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:48:00 +0000

I guess I've been writing simulations for half my life. I was eleven or twelve when I first started meddling with QBASIC. My dad would bring a laptop home from work, an old notebook with a monochrome screen and a trackball. Since it was a work computer, we weren't allowed to install any games on it, but it had QBASIC, so I figured I could write my own. It turns out that writing computer games isn't as fun as playing them, but I started programming, anyway; it's fun!

When I was sixteen, I started working at a particle accelerator lab with the Army Research Lab. It wasn't a huge Fermilab kind of thing, our accelerator was a small, linear thing. We'd shoot ion beams at materials to see what would happen. I wrote a little QBASIC program to help design ion beam sweep patterns that would leave even coatings.

Later, my boss wanted me to analyze some data from a simulation. I spent the summer learning C so that I could write code that would do all sorts of things with the data. It was my first time using Unix; I was using an old SGI box.

Unix is paralyzingly unintuitive, and this machine didn't have a neat desktop environment installed. It was running X and some sort of window manager, but not much else. I had to work mostly from the command line. A command line is a sort of typewriter way of interacting with the computer; you type a command and hit enter, and the computer types something, giving you the information you asked for, for example, and then you can type again. When you start a program that runs in a window, I was using an application called nedit, the computer locks the command line. I couldn't type anything else! I felt panicked! My boss taught me: hit control-z to interrupt the program. That stops the program, so you then use the command bg (for background) to start the process up again.

This is the sort of thing that most people never need to know, but that Unix users have to do every day; at the time, it seemed like I was doing really fancy geeky stuff.

My boss introduced me to other things, Unix and Mozilla (that was before it was Firefox).

In grad school, I've done computational research; I use fancy numerical methods to study how fluids interact with membranes on the micro-scale. I've written code to run on clusters of computers, I've re-worked a couple of things in the code that solve partial differential equations.

Today, I installed a program, VisIt; it makes pictures of simulation data. I mostly use programs I can start up by typing a few things, and leave them running on a server; I download the data and look at it with Matlab. VisIt popped up a little window. I hit control-z bg.

Wrong turn

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:18:00 +0000

Today, I was driving home from Alexandria to Baltimore; I decided to try taking I-295 north, rather than cutting through DC. I wound up taking I-95 south for 25 miles. I didn't feel bad. I felt a little sad over the loss of time, I could have been having more fun, but I didn't feel guilty.

That was new for me. One time, I got lost by a similar amount, and wrote a pages-long blog post analyzing each of my mistakes, I was obsessed. Today, I thought, "Huh, I went the wrong way. I'll turn around. No big deal." I started thinking about what that lost 50 minutes meant to me, this would come to mind several times as I drove home, but I wasn't self-accusatory today.

It was very rainy today. I left Alexandria at 3 and got home at 7; even with having made the wrong turn, the rainy traffic made it so my trip would have taken three times what it normally would have. Roughly.

I have a cold today, I have a headache, I feel drowsy, my throat is sore. I would have gotten home sooner if I hadn't stopped at Wendy's for a Frosty for my sore throat. I would have probably gotten home at 6:30 if not for the Wendy's trip, which was actually pretty long, because the line moved very slowly, and it took them 10 minutes to give me my fries, and I had to go to the bathroom. There were two cops from the DC metro police there and they had very cool uniforms, the shirts had a lot of pockets and they had neat walkie-talkies with earpieces, like the secret service officers. Most little kids, at one point or another, want to grow up to be police officers; I know that I did. When I was five, I stood at the side of the road with one hand up, indicating that the cars should stop. The drivers just waved and drove past. I don't think that that's something I totally grew out of.

Anyway, the cold helped me feel better about having made the wrong turn; I made the wrong turn because I was inattentive because I was sick. I didn't give up 50 of my best minutes, I gave up 50 pretty low quality minutes that would have probably been spent napping or reading Cracked.

The rain helped me feel better about my mistake. The rain and a bunch of other people in cars cost me twice as much time as my own mistake did today. I suppose it would have been nice if I had no traffic and would have gotten home by 5. I try to optimize my use of my time, and I think that I would deal with my time in a healthier way if I were to realize how much of it is taken up with things that are ordinary and uneventful. If I were to compare the amount of time I spend on mistakes with the amount of time I spend commuting and going to the bathroom and waiting for a latte to be made and going for a walk to clear my head and watching a movie for enjoyment and sleeping, all of these things that take up time but don't seem productive, I think I would feel better about my mistakes, I would regret them less. Life takes a lot of time, and I have trouble remembering that.

I haven't been blaming myself very much lately, and I'm glad for that. I used to blame myself a lot. This summer, I took Lexapro for anxiety and that was unpleasant. All of my feelings were thrown around, even my feelings about right and wrong, and I think that when I saw that my feelings about right and wrong didn't have to be one way, they could be another way, or any of a dozen different ways, that helped me see that my feelings about right and wrong are quite different from any sort of absolute morality. I trust my feelings about what is right and wrong much less now; I mostly call them feelings rather than rules.

It turns out that I had the bad reaction to Lexapro because I have bipolar disorder; antidepressants can do bad things to people with my condition. I often feel guilty, with no connection to things that I've actually done. When I got my diagnosis in September, I realized that my feelings of guilt were probably more due to my disorder than my actual failings. If you felt guilty most of the time, you migh become meticulous about noticing every wrong thing you do. I did.

On the day I got my diagnosis, I went to the library and checked out Bipolar Disorder for Dummies which has been a helpful manual in dealing with the disease, but the title should probably be something more like, Bipolar Disorder for People who have Troublesome Mood Swings, but it's not their Fault that they have the Disorder. I got a large iced mocha and sat by the pond and read the book for a while. I called my mom, and told her the news. She said something like, "Oh, no." or "I'm sorry." when I told her, and I told her that I thought that was a funny reaction.

I'm not happy to have bipolar disorder, I'd rather not have it, but I'd rather know that I have it than not. The diagnosis was symptomatic; I already knew that I was suffering. If I took a test and was told that I have cancer and am going to die soon, I would say "Oh, no!" When I was told that I have bipolar disorder, I was excited. The diagnosis wasn't news to me, it was a new word for the problems I had already been feeling. When I got the diagnosis, that meant that I could get better. I'll probably need medicine and psychotherapy for the rest of my life, but that's a lot better than ennui, anhedonia, and delusions. Before I got the diagnosis, before I even tried Lexapro, I dwelt a lot on the idea that I'm going to die. Mom and I talked a while, a bit about my problems and a bit about how my family is doing, and I was glad that the whole conversation wasn't about my disorder; it's good to talk to Mom.

I figured that a lot of stuff that I thought was my fault, feeling sad and guilty a lot, those feelings aren't my fault a lot of the time, those came from a real disorder, real genes tweaked real funny in the real nuclei of some of my real neurons. I spent that afternoon sitting in the sun, drinking a mocha, and reading Bipolar Disorder for Dummies, not so much for the information as to make myself feel like I was doing something to help myself get better. Even though I was glad to get a decisive diagnosis that day, it took me a while to accept it, to apply the diagnosis to myself. I sat on that bench for a couple of hours that afternoon, when I could have been in the lab getting work done. I think I used my time wisely.

The cold (disease, not temperature) and the rain made it easier for me to accept my wrong turn today. I would like it if I didn't need things like that, rationalizations, to help me not put blame and guild on myself when I make petty mistakes. I would like to become good enough at accepting mistakes that I could just move on as soon as I had gained the relevant insights, but I'm not that good at accepting mistakes yet. I think that it's okay that I'm not that good at accepting mistakes.

Overheard

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:36:00 +0000

In a thrift store, I saw an old man with light hair, cut short on the sides. He was wearing jeans which had colorful embroidery on the pockets. I think he thought he was a cowboy.

I also saw a man wearing one of those bandannas that seem to be worn in support of Palestine. He was carrying a cat toy.

Driving home, I saw a man wearing an orange jacket and a green hat, carrying a big black garbage bag. He looked like an urban pumpkin hobo.

I walked past some neighbors, a mom yelled at her son, 'Do you know what happens on four days?' I didn't hear the answer, but I wonder what happened then.

I walked past two other neighbors, on said to another, 'I've got a fifth of Ever...'

Numerical modeling and computer programming are different jobs, sort of

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:17:00 +0000

I write in Fortran. Fortran is basically not taught in schools anymore, nor should it be. It's an ugly, outdated, backwards programming language. My code has a two-dimensional array called number (hint: everything in my code is a number). It's barely commented. There are redundant subroutines that do subtly different things that should probably be combined.

There are no buttons or widgets or dialog boxes. There isn't a prompt you can type things into. It doesn't even have a command-line interface. To run the code with a different set of values involves editing Fortran source code and recompiling. The code is its own user interface.

My friends in computer science hear about this and shudder and moan and gnash their teeth. I did, too, when I started my job, because, unlike most mechanical engineers, I have read a lot of books on how to program properly. I read a lot of articles about coding standards. I've gotten red in the face over how curly braces should be used in C. According to Good Programming Practice, my code I use for my research is backwards, barbaric, and ugly. It's like your racist uncle.

The code is exactly how it should be.

Research code is completely different from commercial code. I scrawl out notes to my roommate telling him yes-I-know-I-left-a-pile-of-dishes-in-the-kitchen-I'll-get-to-them-soon-honest-I-promise, but spend weeks revising material to be published. Research code, designed for a small handful of technical, intelligent, skilled people who want data right now, I mean now! Commercial code, used by thousands, needs to be less buggy, run on different systems, and be maintainable. It at least needs an interface.

At least, that's what I was told after I started doing graduate research in numerical modeling. That's what everyone tells you to do. I have one professor who joked about how you never read manuals, you just copy-and-paste your old code. There are places in my code where I have a list of if statements where I should use a select case instead, and didn't, because it was easier to write a few extra lines of code than to turn around and pick up the manual.

I'm starting to reconsider this school of thought, though. I started to think that research code should meet a higher standard when I got frustrated, recently.

In my code, I simulate fluid-structure interaction. For my research, I look at capsule dynamics, that is, the physics of elastic membranes in fluid flows—think balloons. I had been looking at test cases involving one capsule, and for me to look at two, that would mean copy-and-pasting the initialization for the first capsule, changing the code that tells the second capsule where to go. I also need to change array sizes everywhere in the code.

I'm fed up with code that's obnoxiously difficult to work with. It stifles creativity and innovation. Even if I'm the only person who will ever see my code, I'm going to start writing good code. I have a rigid testing protocol, starting now. I'm using version control several times a day, rather than a couple of times a month. I'm writing documentation. I'm making a total overhaul to the code.

I think I might write a version of the code in C++ because Fortran sucks and. I haven't written C++ since I was seventeen, and I work on Fortran every day. Last week, I decided to play with some old code and in minutes I fixed a seven year old bug in some linked list code I'd written for practice. C++ just makes a lot of sense, and Fortran doesn't.

Stop corn subsidies!

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:56:00 +0000

Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway, and I am not making this up, this is by Dave Barry

I want to point out that, if you go to dollarbook.blogspot.com, you can find oodles of great, fantastic, unclaimed books. If you give me a dollar, I'll give you the book and I'll give the dollar to World Vision. If you want to give more than a dollar, that's awesome, I'll give whatever you give me to World Vision.

If you have a slew of books you want to get rid of, give them to me, and I'll distribute them through Dollar Book.

If you like the Dollar Book idea, but aren't in Baltimore, let me know, and we'll see what we can do to make a Dollar Book thing happen in your area.

Holes

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:06:00 +0000

Holes, by Louis Sachar

Childrens' books and science fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 05 May 2009 05:29:00 +0000

Cheaper by the Dozen, Frank and Ernestine Gilbreth
The Giver, Lois Lowry
Dogs Don't Tell Jokes, Louis Sachar
There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, Louis Sachar
Dianetics, L Ron Hubbard (This is the second copy for Dollar Book Blog)
Sphere, Michael Crichton
~~Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein~~
~~The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkein~~

Found at a Village Value thrift store in Laurel; children's fantasy

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:48:00 +0000

~~Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll~~

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J K Rowling

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

These books have no common theme

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:24:00 +0000

~~The Jungle Book~~, Rudyard Kipling
The Great Divorce, CS Lewis
The Prayers of Peter Marshall, edited by Catherine Marshall
Practical Photography, John Freeman (Hoss, this one is hard cover, glossy pages, great pictures. Good coffee table book.)

A Walking Pig; Also, Animal Farm

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:33:00 +0000

Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard
~~Animal Farm, George Orwell~~

A couple of UK guys; light reading

noreply@blogger.com (Alex) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:04:00 +0000

~~Naked Pictures of Famous People by Jon Stewart~~
~~The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis~~
~~The Complete Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton~~
~~Alligators in the Sewer: And 222 Other Urban Legends by Thomas J. Craughwell~~
What Christians Believe by C. S. Lewis (It's like a mini Mere Christianity)