If you have to take a break at work try CognitiveLabs. I checked out a couple of their tests and am impressed enough to go back for more :). These folks convert research notes in the field of cognitive speed into interesting games, brain exercises and tests. Their claim is that ...

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Another month, another trip. On Tuesday I’m off to Chennai, to visit some of the engineers from Amazon’s development centres in India. I’m flying Lufthansa through Frankfurt (my home away from home!), but fortunately I’m going to be on A330 and A340-600 planes, not their awful 747-400s. I’ll get to Chennai late on Wednesday night, recover and prepare for the meeting on Thursday, meet on Friday and Saturday, spend Sunday as a tourist, do more stuff at the office on Monday and Tuesday, and then fly home on Wednesday, leaving soon after midnight and getting back to Seattle in the evening.

This will be my first visit to Chennai, and my first to any tropical coastal city. I’ve got a full day earmarked for doing “touristy” things - beach, temples, art, that sort of thing. I gather that there are only two seasons in Chennai: summer (hot and humid) and monsoon (wet). And it’s not monsoon, so that means highs around 92F, lows around 78F, and scattered thunderstorms every day.

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Off we go, into the wild blue yonder

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Here’s a nice piece by Christopher Hitchens in Slate, in which he muses about the implications of blind cave-dwelling creatures: species that once had eyes but have lost them. Obviously such cases are going to be difficult for creationists. People who get all misty-eyed at the improbability of the evolution of such complex organs are unlikely to be happy with nature’s obvious “easy come, easy go” approach to adaptation. And Hitchens makes another, more general point:

I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?"

Even many atheists still cling to the idea of Progress, with a capital “P”. Of course it’s a more sophisticated, less species-centric notion of progress: the old notion that humans represented the summum seems… quaint. Nevertheless there is often an assumption that, over time, complexity and functional sophistication will increase. But… “ceteris paribus”, dear boy, “ceteris paribus”. As Hitchens reminds us, the blind salamander is evidence that such things are contingent. It’s fitness that wins, not sophistication. And sometimes there is no “win” available.

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Turning conventional questions around

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There’s a really cruel blog-meme going the rounds: list your favourite album for every year of your life. (Bonus points for those you actually own.) Where the hell do you find the data? Various sources, including Amazon.co.uk, have got the number one albums for every year, but the charts only go back to 1956, and few of my favourites ever made it to number one. Wikipedia to the rescue: they have information about every year from 1950 to 2008. So in principle I could use the following procedure: scan each year’s releases in Wikipedia and pick my favourite. Then go through my top hundred or so albums, check the release date, and decide whether it beats out the current choice for that year.

I’ll be getting back to you on this, when I’ve found a couple of hours to crank through the data!

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The cruellest meme

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From Marty Kaplan’s HuffPo piece, Beyond Sicko:

“I had a colonoscopy the other week,” the CDC’s Dr. Gerberding told the 400 public health officials, business leaders and nonprofits she was hoping would sign on to a “healthiest nation alliance.” “Actually,” she added, “I was billed for two colonoscopies, though I’m sure I only had one.”

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The state of American health care

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Mara and I had an eventful weekend… Mara did some weddding planning while I took the opportunity to clean up my apartment and work on some programming.  We also had a fantastic dinner at Antony’s house and had the pleasure of meeting his wife and daughter… a really great family.  Antony was a really impressive cook and we had a great conversation.

To cap the weekend off, Mara & I went with Bo & Victoria to Metropolitan Golf Links in Oakland to play 18 holes.  We’ve been diligently practicing at the driving range for the past 2 months about 2 times a week and it was time to play our first 18 holes.  Despite being relatively sunny all week, the weather conditions were less than idea.  It was windy and a bit cold, very strange for July.

After about 5 hours of play, we did manager to finish the 18 holes.  Mara and I played a scramble format and we shot 101, which is pretty good for our first time out.  I’m especially proud of the PAR we saved on holes 3 & 18.  In general, I drove the ball pretty consistently (my longest drive rolled about 240 yards) and hit my fairway woods better than expected.  But I’m still having a lot of issues with my longer irons.  I definitely need more practice.

I was really proud of how Mara hit  Especially at 17 and 18, she teed off with her woods very well.  She’s really starting to hit her irons, hybrids, and woods very consistently and I would say she has very good touch on her short game.  On top of that, she’s starting to generate good pace on her longer clubs now.

I can’t describe how excited I was to go out with Bo, Victoria, and Mara this weekend… and after 18 holes I feel even more excited about the sport.  Golf is such a great game to play and I’m already looking forward to our next time out.  I’m already playing back in my head many of the shots to see how I can improve them for next time.

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upgraded the shared wordpress blog installation to 2.6

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It’s a good thing when a team has complete confidence in their driver. On the other hand, it’s possible to get carried away with this. Today’s German Grand Prix was a good example. Lewis Hamilton took the pole, and at the start of the race he simply ran away from the field. Only one thing could spoil his domination: a Safety Car period. And sure enough, Timo Glock’s suspension broke, his Toyota snapped into the pit wall, and out came the Safety Car. Everybody lined up, and waited for the pit lane to be opened. The obvious strategy was going to be to pit under yellow, take on the final set of tyres and enough fuel, and then wait for green. Inexplicably, McLaren told Hamilton to stay out, not to pit. They seemed to think that he’d been going so quickly that he would be able to pull out over 20 seconds in just eight laps, so that he could refuel under green without losing the lead. Lewis did his best, but he could “only” pull out about 14 seconds. He rejoined in fifth, and provided a thrilling finale by passing his team-mate, muscling his way past Massa, and then blasting by Piquet to take the win.

Coming so soon after his British Grand Prix win, this was another crushing victory. The Ferrari team must be feeling really demoralized. Even though they still lead the Constructors Championship, Raikkonen could only finish sixth, while Massa was unable to put up any resistance and couldn’t even run down young Piquet for second. So Hamilton has opened up a four point gap over Massa at the top of the Drivers Championship, 58 to 54.

There’s two weeks until the next race, in Hungary. I’ll be on the road then - I’m heading back to India, visiting Chennai on business - so I’ll be relying on my trusty electric monk DVR to urge on Lewis to victory.

UPDATE: From the official FIA post-race press conference:

Q: Lewis, on behalf of all race fans we have to thank you for making that such an exciting race by not coming in with the safety car. You gave yourself so much work to do in the latter stages of the race.
Lewis Hamilton: Well, thank you. I didn’t plan on doing that.

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So much for “there’s never any passing in Formula 1″!

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It is common investment wisdom that every rally in a bear market should be sold. But, sometimes you do not want to sell tickers that are working. If, you can identify a range in which your favorite stock trades, here is a way to make some money in a sideways ...

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went down to Castle Rock State Park this afternoon with Jaime & Zac again. we went back to a place i haven’t been in almost 6 years: The Underworld. spooky sounding name for a great secluded bit of rock.

i’ve decided i want to make one more trip back up to Shasta to climb at Castle Crags (yes confusing, Castle Crags & Castle Rock are two very different places - but i love them both). there is this fantastic (3 out of 3 stars on rock quality) 5.8ish 8-pitch 1000 foot climb that i’m dying to do.

minor problem: we have 3 climbers. we need a 4th, and more specifically - we need a 4th who can comfortably lead 5.8/5.9 trad (sorry no bolts). anyone around in september sometime and fancy a weekend trip up to Mt. Shasta?

Billy Goat’s Tavern in Shasta (a short 10 minute drive away after the climb) is a fantastic post-climb brew+burger.

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The DVD of the moment is the zany and eclectic recording of the party that the Dresden Dolls hosted at the Roundhouse in London back in 2006. I’ve only seen them perform live once, opening for the Legendary Pink Dots in the early oughts, oops, years of this decade a few years ago. Here’s a clip to whet your appetite:

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This is the punk cabaret

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I just pushed version 0.5.0 of the SHOUTcast Directory add-on for Songbird which adds a preference feature for allowing users to type in a comma-delimited list of genres. Interestingly, I knew this would be a requested feature when we pushed 0.4.8 in conjunction with Songbird 0.6, but I didn’t know how much. Turns out a lot of international folks wanted to be able to list different language genres, and that this missing feature was a lot more popular than I expected.

Anyway, version 0.5.0 supports this now. Time to get back to my OSCON prep…

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If you think you’ve seen this theme before, you probably have. Mandigo is one of the more popular WordPress themes out there. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it’s incredibly flexible and reconfigurable: the theme-specific control panel seems to go on for ever. On the other hand, the colours (there are seven to choose from) are all a bit garish, and the various glyphs and icons are much more intrusive than I like. So I’ll play with it a bit: come up with my own title image, and maybe tone down some of the visuals.

One feature of Mandigo that I really like (and which ought to be part of the base WordPress system) is that you can define your custom header and footer code and Mandigo will inject it where appropriate. This keeps the base theme PHP files uncluttered. One of the things that I had to remember to do whenever I installed a new theme was to cut the Google Analytics and Amazon Associates Javascript from the footer of my present theme and paste it into the new one. Usually this is obvious (it goes in footer.php), but some theme designers skip this file, and simply include calls to the WP footer function in various places. Mandigo gets this right.

I still wish that I knew what was broken in the Breaking News theme. Everything seemed to be working except for single post display. Moreover the failure mode was hard to debug: the WP engine just failed to respond. Since it was an out-of-the-box failure, I’m guessing that it was a subtle incompatibility with WP 2.6. Breaking News is one of those themes that I mentioned above, where the designer refactors things in a way that diverges quite a bit from the standard WP patterns. This approach is always liable to expose some unexpected (or unintended) dependency.

UPDATE: That’s better - a clip from my favourite picture of Tommy makes a nice header.

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Convenient, though a bit garish

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As you can see (unless you’re viewing this through the RSS/Atom feed), I’ve changed the theme and added a bunch of Amazon Associates widgets to the right-hand sidebar. The theme is OK, not great, but pretty clean. From my point of view, its delightfully simple - perhaps half the size of the previous one, measured in lines of code. The original was in German, though, so I had to go through translating the text into English. Please let me know if I missed anything.

As for the Associates widgets: yes, I know that they add to the page load time. Most people wouldn’t use so many relatively heavyweight widgets. (I’m just using three right now, but you can expect to see the number, and the selection, change.) On the other hand, this does highlight any latency and rendering issues. Is it better to get a simple frame and header in place before starting any of the content, or should we do most of the heavy lifting on the server side?

The most interesting widget should be the first, Page Recommender, because the content is based on the viewer’s history. I have no idea what you are seeing in this widget; what I see is based on my own history. And it’s going to take a while for the widget to build up a history of page views on my site. It may well be the case that my kind of blog is simply the wrong kind of site for this widget. If most people simply read the current entries via the base URL, and don’t check the comments or older postings, there may not be enough intra-site traffic for the widget to work with. In that case you’ll probably see nothing but product links.

These are not the only off-site widgets that I use, by the way. The other obvious example is the Shared Items from Google Reader. I read most of my daily web content (154 feeds!) through Google’s RSS aggregation, and I tag as “Shared” various items that I think my audience might like to read. These show up in the sidebar widget, under the (presumptuous!) heading “Items from other blogs that you should be reading”. This is really convenient for me, but it doesn’t generate blog content in the same way that, say, a “Links of the day” posting does. In fact, I suspect that the crawlers don’t index content from this kind of widget, so I’m not really helping myself or the items I’m recommending.

Perhaps I need to switch to using del.icio.us, which is how I presume Adriana is generating her “Links” postings, but it will mean finding an alternative RSS reader: one that has built-in del.icio.us support. (And it must work on the iPhone. I read a lot of my RSS feeds whenever I have a few moments: on the shuttle bus between Amazon buildings, standing in line at Starbucks, waiting for a soccer game to start at Qwest field….)

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New theme, new experimental content

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or rather, i guess i should be saying “good to see you again”.

the OpenSolaris fan inside of me is sad to see my good friend Patrick Finch leave Sun. having seen his expertise and impact from both inside Sun and outside Sun, he will be missed greatly. Patrick has always been one of the most well-thought-out and eloquent supporters of OpenSolaris (as much as it pains me to admit that a Liverpool FC fan can be eloquent, I’ll concede that he is indeed eloquent). he’s had a huge impact on open source strategy at Sun, and i’m bummed that Sun and OpenSolaris shall no longer have his services (hopefully we’ll always have his support though).

the Songbird and Mozilla fan inside of me is super-psyched and happy to say that Patrick is joining Mozilla though! he’ll be joining as their European marketing manager, and i have no doubt that he will totally rock at his new gig. i’m looking forward to seeing Patrick at many more conferences and get-togethers in the future, chatting about how Songbird and Mozilla can do more and collaborate more to build our Mozilla posse, and, of course, continually discussing EPL, UEFA, and all things football (though preferably English).

so to all my friends @ Mozilla & Songbird - give a warm welcome and shout-out to Patrick.

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Miss Poppy points out that the Catholics have a long tradition of irrational violence when it comes to the eucharist:

Between the years of 1243 and 1761 thousands of Jews were tortured and executed for the crime of host desecration. Most were burned, many were mutilated. In 1370 almost every Belgian Jew was massacred, man, woman and child, for the crime of host nailing.

(Via Jesus’ General.)

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“Host nailing”

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Like PZ Myers, I have a strong, almost visceral reaction to the whole notion of transubstantiation. I can’t speak for PZ, but in my case it all goes back to about 1958. It would not be unreasonable to say that the doctrine of transubstantiation is what made me an atheist.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, I was raised as a Roman Catholic. (I got better.) I can’t remember exactly when I had my first communion, but by 1958 I was certainly being exposed to Catechesis in preparation for the big day. The woman who handled this class (not, I think, a nun, though they were in the vicinity) had the delicate task of explaining the significance of the Sacrament of the Eucharist without risking questions about (eeeew!) cannibalism. To do this, she relied upon the adverbs stressed by the Catechism (and originally by the Council of Trent): “truly, really, and substantially”. I think that she also used the technical terms “substance” and “accidents”, which was probably a mistake.

Up to this point, I’d been asked to believe a great many religious ideas “on faith”, and for most of them I didn’t see any reason to object. Souls? Sin? God? Holy ghost? Angels? Heaven? All very intangible, none of the ideas clashed with common sense. Jesus? Mary? The Gospel stories? Miracles? All a long time ago: many of the ideas seemed implausible, but I couldn’t refute them.

But transubstantiation was a direct affront to my 7 year old empiricist epistemology! I was reading everything about science that I could find, from articles in my encyclopaedia to books that my mother brought home from her work at the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. In catechism class, I asked if a scientist in his laboratory could tell the difference between a consecrated and an unconsecrated host. I was bundled off to talk to the parish priest. I’m pretty sure that I would have been happy with a vague answer, whether metaphorical or mysterian in nature, but he stuck with the party line: even though all appearances and any kind of scientific investigation would show that the wafer was still made of bread, the underlying reality was that it was now the body of Jesus - and not just a bit of his body, but all of him: body and soul, human and divine.

And even though I would not then have used the term, I smelled bullshit. We use science to grasp the reality of everything in the world - rocks, turnips, giraffes, nuclear reactors. Why introduce this “underlying reality” stuff for just one thing: to explain away a bit of religious gobbledygook? Why (using the contemporary term) apply magical thinking to something so concrete and immediate as a wafer of bread in one’s mouth? It was all too convenient, too ad hoc - and completely unconvincing.

Over the next three or four years, my skepticism about transubstantiation spread to just about every claim of religion: to souls, deities, life after death, and the entire supernatural realm. Various writers helped: Shakespeare, of course; Roger Lancelyn Green with his magnificent retellings of the Greek, Egyptian, and Norse mythologies; Bertrand Russell; and finally Jean-Paul Sartre, through a couple of English expositions of his key idea that “existence precedes essence”. (I still haven’t read La Nausée.) Like Christopher Hitchens, it wasn’t so much a matter of conversion, or change, as of realization.

One reason why people stick with their religious beliefs is that they are able to compartmentalize their thinking. How else can they go along with creationism in church and yet trust that DNA testing can establish paternity or assess the risk of breast cancer (or as a plot device on CSI)? For me as a child, transubstantiation was one of those ideas that refused to stay in its compartment, and the result was that the whole edifice collapsed. And that was a good thing: reality is better than magical thinking.

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Transubstantiation #2: The starting point for my atheism

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Don’t you hate websites that only work with Internet Exploder? These days I only power up my old Windows laptop for two reasons: to play games (it’s a decent games launcher) and to navigate through sites designed by morons who don’t understand the importance of browser neutrality.

I love it when dumb companies that operate these broken websites wind up screwing themselves. Case in point:

Apple has an exclusive deal with network operator O2 in the U.K.—but O2’s Web-based activation system requires the use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser to register a new phone: It won’t work with the Safari browser bundled in Apple’s Mac OS X.

More at Macworld.

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There is some justice in the world…

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The scm-migration-dev team (in charge of getting ON moved to Mercurial) did its tools putback today. Congratulations to the entire team. That’s a huge huge huge step to the upcoming migration to Mercurial.

Wish I coulda been there for the celebratory drinks.

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I headed up to Mt. Shasta for the July 4th weekend with Jaime & Zac, and after two days there, I think I’m about as sore as I’ve ever been in my life.

On Friday, we ran 5 miles in the Mt. Shasta 4th of July Fun Run. Jaime and I kept pace with each other and came in at 51 minutes (10:12/mile). I’ve no idea whether that’s a good pace or not (Zac came in at 38 minutes, so I suspect not :-P) but that was the first time I’ve ever done a timed race past P.E. class in high school, so I was pretty happy. That was also the first time I’ve run any distance more than a mile or two, and I felt it…

The rest of Friday was spent stretching groaning calves and quads.

A sane person probably would have taken Saturday off to rest and recover. Instead, we chose to hike 2 miles in (with a 1200 foot elevation gain) in Castle Crags State Park to the base of Six Toe Rock, where we climbed Six Toe Crack, an absolutely gorgeous 5.7-5.8 3 pitch crack. The weather was beautiful… sunny (but the route was in the shade) with a cool breeze. The first pitch had a tough start, and a tough second crack - but was definitely doable and within the 5.7/5.8 rating. The second pitch was where things got tough. I took my longest trad leaderfall yet, falling about 20 feet. I placed a #7 Trango Flexcam, got about 5 feet above it, and was stuck in an off-width 5.9 shoulder jam. I worked it for a minute or two, thought I was making progress and ended up pitching off, and falling my total 20 feet.

It was strange, it happened so quickly - I don’t even remember the fall. All I recall is my left hand losing grip, me pitching backwards, screaming (yes - my first scream of my climbing career too… this weekend was full of firsts), and coming to a stop looking down at the sky and my feet. Yup, I’d managed to completely invert myself. I righted myself, took a few seconds to catch my breath (some combination of the fall and the harness tightening had knocked the wind out of me), and checked myself out for injuries. I ended up hitting my left calf against an outcropping getting some road rash (all superficial, so it should heal fine - though showers will be a bitch for the next few days), and getting a nasty nasty rope burn on my right bicep (which strangely doesn’t hurt - but is making for a real pretty bruise).

Anyway, I took a 5.7 variation off to the right hand side after that, finished the pitch and brought Jaime & Zac up. After some route-finding (the guidebook was vague as to the finish for this climb), we ended up on the summit, rewarded with a fairly large summit top, and a gorgeous 360 degree view of the rest of Castle Crags, and Mt. Shasta in the distance.

This was definitely the most challenging lead of my life so far… this whole day I’ve been thinking “What if that #7 cam hadn’t held?” I would have ended up pitching down about 40 feet - almost certainly injuring myself seriously. I’m thankful I sank that cam, and I’m really thankful it held. Taking a leaderfall occasionally is a good reminder not to get lazy and run things out unnecessarily.

Some thoughts and notes for anyone looking to climb this rock: The guidebook is good, but gives no sense of scale. I went in thinking this would be like Castle Rock in Saratoga… a meandering trail with rocks scattered here and there to climb. WRONG. The hike isn’t easy (though the trail is fantastic), and the rocks are MASSIVE. Purportedly there is a 8 pitch 1000′ climb (which I’m dying to do next time I can get up there). The rock quality is great (not as good as Tuolumne/Yosemite, but definitely better than the sandstone we get here in the Bay Area). I highly recommend Six Toe Crack - it’s one of the most beautiful cracks I’ve done, and is a great rewarding climb with solid anchors. (3 pitches, the first belay station is 2 old bolts backed up with a new bolt, new chains, and new webbing. Second belay station is a solid outcropping/flake slung with at least 6 pieces of webbing and rap rings. Contrary to what the guidebook says, the summit is topped with one old sketchy bolt (the one it says to rap off of), with two brand new bolts and two shiny shiny chains). We ended up rapping the three pitches back down the crack instead of doing the sketchy looking descent gully.

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What an extraordinary drive by Lewis Hamilton at today’s British Grand Prix! Horribly wet conditions, with great puddles of water on the track, and a few dry spells to tempt people into risky tyre changes. Everybody seemed to be spinning, or sliding off the track, except for Lewis Hamilton in his McLaren, and he wound up winning by over a minute, lapping everyone up to third place. Unquestionably the best drive of his short career.

The Driver’s Championship is in a fascinating state: half-way through the season, we have a three-way tie at the top, with Hamilton, Räikkönen and Massa all on 48 points. Nine races down, nine to go. This is going to be fun.

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I do not want to regurgitate Christine Rosen's article on The New  Atlantis about "The Myth of Multi-tasking". But, this post has some notes for myself. One of the reasons why people have to multi-task is that great publications like this one are quite long. All those names, affiliations, times ...

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I’ve posted a few pictures that I took when I went down to the waterfront last night to watch the fireworks. Enjoy.

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I’ve been kicking around an idea for a blog post on the relationship of dualism and religion. The arguments go something like this: small children are natural dualists (and animists) for a whole bunch of adaptive reasons: taking the intentional stance towards stuff is often a good way of modelling the world. And if you never get a chance to question this dualism (and culture, family, language, and wishful thinking can make it hard), you wind up with a worldview which needs some kind of supernatural authority to make sense of it. Etcetera. Not very novel, perhaps - various writers, from Scott Atran to Dan Dennett, have visited this territory - but perhaps it makes clear the fact that arguments about religious epistemology are mostly intended as justification.

And then I started to think about all of the reasons why people do, in fact, question dualism. I imagined that some might reject theism as incoherent, and then find they have no need of the supernatural, while others might come to a materialist monism as the best explanation of the world that they see, and only then realize that they had no need of a deity. “Best explanation of the world…?” What might this be? Mental illness replacing demonic possession? The effects of drugs on the mind, demonstrating an unquestionably physical basis for aspects of emotion and personality?

It was at this point that I realized that I actually knew very little about the history of the brain: how personal experience, evidence, and dogma have influenced the way in which people have thought about brains, minds, and souls over history. And by a happy coincidence I came across a highly-esteemed book on the subject by an author who is a new favourite of mine. So I picked up a copy of “Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain - and How It Changed the World” by Carl Zimmer, the author of “Microcosm”, the wonderful book on E.coli that I just finished.

“Soul Made Flesh” doesn’t pretend to address the entire history of the study of the brain. Instead, Zimmer concentrates on one man: Thomas Willis, a 17th century English doctor who effectively invented neurology. I read the first two chapters over dinner this evening, before going down to the waterfront to watch the Ivars fireworks on Elliott Bay. Zimmer’s style is as deft as it was in “Microcosm”; I’m really going to enjoy this. (And when I finish it, I may be able to write that piece on dualism with a little more evidence to support my hypothesis….) My only frustration? No Kindle edition. Sigh….

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Theism, dualism, and brains

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John Mayer just released a new CD of his live performance in Los Angeles.  I ordered it from Amazon.

He’s widely recognized as one of the most talented and accomplished musicians of my generation.  And many people I’ve talked to firmly believe his abilities with the guitar approach those of Clapton, Santana, and Hendrix.  But what impresses me most about John is his dedication to growing and how he has evolved throughout the years.  He started off accoustic, moves into teen rock/pop, releases an album dedicated to the electric guitar, then he blends together blues/jazz/country/rock, and now he’s performed all of these different style in the same concert.  If you get a chance to preview his version of Tom Petty’s 1989 “Free Fallin’”… really pretty remake.

For me, John Mayer’s music has represented a reminder of transitions in my life.  I still vividly remember watching John host and perform “Bigger Than My Body” on Saturday Night Live at my friend Dan’s house the night of my grandfather’s funeral.  Before that, I had never really paid too much attention to his work.  And I constantly think back to one of Mara and my first dates, where we saw John Mayer (opening act by Maroon 5) at Shoreline.  I felt that night was a real turning point for us…

He’s definitely grown up so much since “Room for Squares” and has shown an incredible range as a young musician.  Whenever you watch him, it’s clear that he absolutely loves his music and his guitar solos seem to be meditative moments for him… I’m interested to see where his music goes in the future.

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Christopher Hitchens sees for himself.

I am somewhat proud of my ability to “keep my head,” as the saying goes, and to maintain presence of mind under trying circumstances. I was completely convinced that, when the water pressure had become intolerable, I had firmly uttered the pre-determined code word that would cause it to cease. But my interrogator told me that, rather to his surprise, I had not spoken a word. I had activated the “dead man’s handle” that signaled the onset of unconsciousness. So now I have to wonder about the role of false memory and delusion. What I do recall clearly, though, is a hard finger feeling for my solar plexus as the water was being poured. What was that for? “That’s to find out if you are trying to cheat, and timing your breathing to the doses. If you try that, we can outsmart you. We have all kinds of enhancements.” I was briefly embarrassed that I hadn’t earned or warranted these refinements, but it hit me yet again that this is certainly the language of torture.

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“if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture”

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Sun hosted the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Data Center Energy Summit on June 26, 2008. Talks and panel discussions touched every facet of building energy efficient data centers. Interesting tidbits from the summit: - Synopsys forecasts that we will see machines with 350000 cores by 2013. (Source: Sriram Sitaraman's presentation from Roundtable ...

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Further confirmation (and expansion) of Libet’s classic work demonstrating that we start to act before we are conscious of our decision to do so, and rewrite our subjective experience so that we feel that we’re in control:

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices — which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take — appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. “The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us,” Dr. Dijksterhuis said.

(From the Science Journal at WSJ.com)

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Rewriting history (as we all do, all the time)

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Riazat Butt, the Guardian’s religion reporter, has been writing about Gafcon, the meeting of conservative Anglicans in Jerusalem. Ostensibly this movement is all about African bishops bemoaning the moral laxity of US and UK Anglicans, and offering them an alternative free from the blight of homosexuality. Apparently, the American conservatives (dominionists, even) who are actually behind the whole thing are now trying to keep the Africans in their place:

In the fateful press conference – regarding torture – Akinola said that what was permissible in one culture was not permissible in another, without realising that same-sex unions have become the norm in western society and should therefore be accommodated in the same way that discriminatory legislation and treatment of homosexuals are par for the course in some African countries.

If the white bishops can turn a blind eye to polygamy and persecution then surely the courtesy should be returned.

Hypocrisy seems to be thriving in the Southern Cone…

UPDATE: Ruth Gledhill of the Times has posted an analysis of Gafcon which portrays this event as far-reaching:

Organisers believe the Jerusalem gathering is the most significant event in Anglicanism in their lifetimes and will lead to a new “movement” that will herald a “new reformation”.The movement could be akin to the Anglo-Catholic and evangelical revivals that revived a moribund Church of England in the 19th century. It will possess its own bishops, clergy and theological colleges, and eventually its own structures, but will be constructed entirely within the legal constraints of existing Anglican institutions.

And she says of the participants in Gafcon:

The majority do not want a split. They want their Church back. They appear to have decided that the best way to achieve this is not to start another one but to remain within the one they have got, and reform it from within.

Well, maybe. I don’t see how a split can be avoided: I reckon that the only thing still to be decided is who will play the part of the Judean Popular People’s Front. But the reactionaries really have to make their move now: all of the trends suggest that twenty years from now there will be no constituency for homophobia.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

How to shoot yourself in the foot…

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As of this date (June 25, 2008) the only practical solution for Java ME development on Mac OS X seems to be installing Netbeans 6.1 on an alternate operating system (Windows * or Linux) running over VMware Fusion. Sure, there are a couple of blogs that describe workarounds to getting a ...

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This past weekend, Zac and I successfully climbed and summited Cathedral Peak. This was the 4th time I’ve tried Cathedral, the 2nd time I’ve been successful, and the 1st time I’ve pulled it off without any disaster. (hmm..power of 2 pattern emerging there)

The trip went perfectly… Zac, Jaime, and I left SF @ noon, got up to Tuolumne and despite only having a reserved permit for 2 people for Saturday night, we were able to change it to a permit for both Friday & Saturday night for 3 people.

We hiked in along the climber’s trail, and ended up camping virtually at the base of the Southeast Buttress. It was warm enough that I decided to ditch the tent and save some weight by just bringing the sleeping bag and tarp. This would have worked out perfectly if there weren’t a million mosquitoes around… at 9700 feet, no less! After slathering on the Jungle Juice, we finished consuming our gigantic Safeway $5 sub for dinner, and went to sleep. My only thoughts for that night were that the moon is insanely bright at that high an elevation. I thought there was someone shining a flashlight in my face.

I woke up at 5am to the mosquitoes, and slathered on more Jungle Juice and started arranging the rack. Jaime & Zac made breakfast (bacon!!) and we racked up and got started. The plan was for Zac and I to climb, me leading the whole route up, Zac following and cleaning gear while Jaime hiked up the backside to meet us up top. We ended up doing the Supertopo C variation (mostly 5.6 with one section of 5.7), and according to our EXIF data, summited at 11:14am PDT.

Throughout the climb, we noticed clouds far off in the horizon. By the time we summited, they’d gotten significantly closer… from all 360 degrees. Given my last experience climbing Cathedral, I was wary of the famous Tuolumne afternoon showers, so we spent about 5-10 minutes on the summit debating between the sketchy downclimb descent versus leaving a nut and sling to rappel off of. I took one more look at the clouds, left a nut and sling and we rapped off the backside.

We met up with Jaime who led us down the backside scramble around the eastern side of Cathedral where we stopped for a quick one-pitch lead (for me) and top-rope (for Jaime) so she could get some climbing in, and then headed back to camp to pack up. We hiked out, noticing the overcast clouds the entire time, and about 10 minutes from our car thunder clapped and the storm broke. Hopefully that nut and sling I left up at the summit was useful for anyone up there needing to escape in a hurry.

Our climb victorious, we drove to the Evergreen Lodge for the most well-deserved blue cheese and pancetta burger before driving back home.

I’m psyched we climbed Cathedral without incident, I was really happy with Zac as a climbing partner - he kicked ass and climbed great. We’re looking to go to Castle Crags up by Shasta for July 4th weekend now where they have a ton of climbing - up to 6 pitch 1000′ climbs!

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Via the Bad Astronomy Blog comes this graph from a Gallup Poll of US beliefs.

Now a number of bloggers have commented on the party political differences that are highlighted by the survey. However, I want to ask a different, rather simpler question.

Do I know any of you?

More specifically, is there anyone that I know - someone who reads this blog - who actually falls into the category “God created humans as is, within the last 10,000 years”. Because if the answer is “yes”, I’d really love to exchange email with you.

I know that people with these ideas exist - I’m confident that Gallup isn’t simply making up the numbers - but I simply haven’t ever (knowingly) met any of you. And I’d love to learn more. Do you take medicine? Do you use computers or fly on airliners? How do you reconcile your trust in science with your anti-scientific beliefs? Do you keep the ideas in different mental compartments, or do you find them genuinely compatible? I’m honestly interested in your answer. Puzzled. Incredulous, even. But definitely curious.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Do I know any of you?

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I discovered the rather strange online video site Jaman today. It’s a streaming (or download-to-rent) service, which has a large library of movies and short subject material from “the long tail”. The films range from silent classics to recent gems such as “Conversations with Other Women”, which I saw recently. In addition to pay-to-rent items, there are also quite a few free (ad-supported) treasures: cult schlock like “Bad Girls Go To Hell”, quirky short subjects like the strange Greek film “Single Bed”, and documentaries like “Farewell Routemaster”. It’s a long tail indeed….

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Farewell Routemaster (and other interesting fare)

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Yeah, I searched for all those terms on the web and on the netbeans.org site. But, could not find the descriptions. But, eventually managed to get help using the following on my Mac: Netbeans->Help->Help Contents->Search: Look for "icon" Sometimes, hovering the cursor on the actual icons or badges does not provide a ...

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upgraded gallery to 2.2.5

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A quick check at the posting dates for the last few entries in my blog confirms that my blogging rate has fallen off recently. The interesting thing is that I’ve been contributing as much to the blogosphere as I usually do; it’s just that I’ve found myself contributing a lot of comments to other people’s blogs.

And this provoked the following thought. Presumably, people that visit my blog do so because they are interested in what I’m writing about - atheism, science, philosophy, software, aviation, music, the family, whatever. And most of my recent comments have been about these very subjects. I wonder if there’s an easy way to weave these threads together: to post a comment on, say, Secular Philosophy, and have the same material show up here, decorated with just enough contextual infirmation that you could decide whether you wanted to pop over to the story I had commented on and read the whole thread.

If we all used the same blogging software, I could imagine ways of implementing true “multiple inheritance” of blog content. Absent standards, this is likely to be a manual process for a while. (Or can Digg or Feedburner help out, perhaps?)

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Lack of blogging, and a thought

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Recently, I got the opportunity to tour Sun's Santa Clara, CA data center. I must say, I was pretty stoked! A significant design difference that I noticed as soon as I entered the facility was the absence of raised flooring. The data center was constructed on a concrete slab floor. Such ...

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This afternoon (actually, yesterday afternoon) my buddy, Jenny, got married.  The lucky guy who managed to snag her is Peter.  If I get my hands on any photos from today (err… yesterday) I’ll post them.  And believe me, I think Jenny’s used up her quota of once-a-year-esther-photos for her entire life.

I mean, I know weddings = photos.  And I love wedding photos.  BUT… not with me in them.  And definitely not in the copious quantities that were taken today.  Good grief, I close my eyes and still see the after-image burn of the flash of cameras.

In the meantime, I do have photos from Thursday’s bridal shower which I’ll post next while I wait for my hair to dry.

That’s another thing… I don’t think that I’ve ever had so many bobby pins simultaneously in my hair.  Once I finally pulled out all of them from my elaborate coiffure, I counted sixty.  SIXTY bobby pins.  No wonder the pile of hair on the top of my head seemed so poofy!  It wasn’t just my hair and what seemed like an entire can of hairspray and glitter glue.  Those sixty bobby pins went a long way in increasing the volume and weight on the top of my head.

And all that glitter sprayed into my hair…  My hair was really pretty - especially with that can of hair spray to prevent the hairdo from falling apart (as if sixty bobby pins couldn’t do the job).  Needless to say, I hate the crunchy feeling that hairspray leaves, so I washed my hair at quarter to 1 am and now I’m waiting for my hair to dry.

Ah, that reminds me.  Because I am cosmetics-retarded, I also had a make-up artist do my face.  Let’s just say, I must not have the right cleaning agent because I still have smears of whatever it is she used as an eyeliner… or maybe it’s the mascara that’s making me look like a dazed raccoon.

OK, I’m about ready to fall asleep, so I guess that’s my cue to go upload the bridal shower photos.

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seriously. i love firefox as much as the next guy… but this article cracked me up.

i love the accompanying photo - but is that really the best accompanying photo they found to run it with?

screenshot here in case the article changes:

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I just noticed an atheist blog-meme over at The Barefoot Bum. I’m shocked, shocked that nobody has tagged me with it, but never mind: I figure that I can always tag myself. So here goes.

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?
Atheism is the opposite of theism: the belief in god. This may seem to be a cop-out, but in fact it’s inevitable. People have used the word “god” to label many different (and incompatible) concepts; and what they mean by “believe in” usually depends on the type of god involved. At its simplest, atheism is just a psychological state in which one has no kind of “belief in” anything that one would label “god”.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?
My mother converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism when I was about 6, and I attended various RC churches until I was about 13. I was an altar boy (but never abused), and I sang in the choir. I loved the Latin of the Mass, and the antiphonal church music of the time. I read the Bible from cover to cover, which was an eye-opener.

In spite of all this activity, I never had any kind of strong religious feelings, and by about the age of 12 I realized that I was an atheist. It was pretty clear to me that conventional concepts of god were simply contradictory or incoherent, and that there were perfectly good natural explanations for everything that religious people ascribed to the supernatural. I hung around the church for a bit longer, just for the chance to sing in the choir, and then I quit.

Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word?
Devious.

Q4. What scientific endeavor really excites you?
Neuroscience.

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community”, what would it be and why?
Make it larger! Otherwise, nothing. It’s a stretch to refer to it as a “community”, anyway; the only thing that really brings them together is dealing with the prejudice of theists.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy”, what would be your first response
Well, he did! (And he’s well on his way to achieving his objective.) I can’t remember what my first response was, but I think that I hoped for his happiness at the same time that I worried about how he’d cope with the turmoil in his denomination (the Episcopalians).

Q7. What’s your favorite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?
No, not design, or first cause, or evil, or anything like like. My favourite is the “argument from personal experience”, which I enjoy because it lets me go after the dualism which is, I think, at the root of most of this nonsense. Side-trips can include the synthesis of religious experience using drugs, the gradual re-interpretation of demonic possession as mental illness, mental causation, and Descartes‘ infamous pineal gland.

Q8. What’s your most “controversial” (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?
I’m vehemently opposed to religious schools of any kind. I think I was strongly influenced by the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the way denominational schools were used to inflame sectarian hatred. (See Stephen Law’s “The War for Children’s Minds”.) But there’s probably a personal element in her as well: I remember when I was a student at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, how I had to stand outside the morning assembly with other non-members of the Church of England until they’d finished the hymn and the lesson. (Remember Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”?) Then we would all walk in and stand at the back for the secular part of assembly - announcements, awards, that kind of thing.

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?
Dennett, but only because I count him a friend. Three of the four are wonderful, each in his way: Dennett’s robustly naturalistic philosophy, Hitchen’s exquisite prose and biting wit, and Dawkins for one of the greatest books of science ever written: “The Ancestor’s Tale”. Harris is OK, but I wish he wouldn’t get all dewy-eyed about Buddhism.

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?
Tony Blair. No, that’s too easy. The Pope - just for the theatrical possibilities.

Hmmm. What happened to the last three questions?
Beats me. Although one participant suggests that the name was chosen for Friday 13th, the day this got started. That’s consistent with the alternative title of Triskaidekatheism.

Now name three other atheist blogs that you’d like to see take up the Atheist Thirteen gauntlet:
No thanks. I think I’ll let them select themselves.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

The Atheist Thirteen

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i’ve been craigslisting stuff like mad lately… old snowboards, old furniture, basically anything i can find in the basement that we’re not using i’ve put up on craigslist. it culminated this weekend with me selling my Audi A4 (which, mind you, was NOT in the basement)

i was hugely bummed when my A4 blew, but i’m glad i found a good home for it. the guy who bought it clearly knew cars, knew about VW/Audi’s, and is going to rebuild the engine himself and get it running again. that helped assuage my conscience a bit for selling my first car i ever loved (the ‘87 Thunderbird i totalled in high school doesn’t count)

zac, jaime, and i went to Castle Rock State Park on Saturday and climbed Castle Rock Falls. i’ve climbed it once before, but this was the first time i lead the main falls climb (100 feet of 5.8ish) up the face. i’d forgotten how beautiful and aesthetic a climb it was… we got out there early in the morning and soaked up the sun and had a great time. this was the first time i’d been belayed by zac on a lead climb, but it felt pretty good and pretty comfortable…. so hopefully we’re all good for next weekend’s climb up Cathedral Peak.

i’m really really psyched to go to Cathedral. i’m determined that this year will be the first year that doesn’t end in disaster of some kind. cross your fingers for me.

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Casualties in Afghanistan now exceed those in Iraq (and they’re growing).

By the Pentagon’s count, 15 U.S. and two allied troops were killed in action in Iraq last month, a total of 17. In Afghanistan it was 19, including 14 Americans and five coalition troops. […] Even when non-combat deaths are included, the overall May toll was greater in Afghanistan than in Iraq: a total of 22 in Afghanistan, including 17 Americans, compared with 21 in Iraq, including 19 Americans, according to an Associated Press count.
The comparison is even more remarkable if you consider that there are about three times more U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan.

This story was linked to by Juan Cole as part of his reporting of a major guerilla offensive in Afghanistan. But he didn’t quote from it, possibly because AP is running around harassing bloggers and trying to rewrite the “fair use” doctrine. My old friend John thinks that we should boycott AP; I’d prefer to smother them with love, and generate so many trackbacks and pingbacks that it looks like a DDoS. Atrios just tags them as the “wankers of the day”, which seems a fair compromise.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

While we were looking the other way….

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(Scooter’s “Jumping All Over The World”. H/t to the Pub Philosopher.)

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Mental health break

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grommit just passed 200 days of uptime! (please don’t take this as an invitation to attack my machine now. it’s been a fairly cruddy day otherwise, and i have no energy to fend off an attack at the moment)

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My brother sent me this clip from From Tim Ferriss’ blog:

“Good afternoon, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger…” my voice boomed out through the sound system with a half-second delay, making it almost impossible to remember my lines, memorized word-for-word. I continued:

“If you were 30 years old and had no dependents but a full-time job that precluded full-time investing, how would you invest your first million dollars, assuming that you can cover 18 months of expenses with other savings? Thank you in advance for being as specific as possible with asset classes and allocation percentage.”

Buffett let out a small laugh and began. “I’d put it all in a low-cost index fund that tracks the S&P 500 and get back to work…”

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