Who kidnapped Deepak Chopra, and where have they hidden him?

Normally, Deepak Chopra’s contributions to HuffPo and other forums have been unadulterated woo; pure mystical New Age claptrap. But today he nailed Rick Warren’s fatuous Saddleback forum in uncompromisingly blunt language..

For McCain, it’s all as simple as what Reaganism carved out almost thirty years ago: Gay marriage is bad, abortion is bad, activist judges are bad. Winning in Iraq is good, getting Osama bin Laden is good, offshore oil drilling is good, and freedom is great. Obama talked about the hard work and sacrifices we need to make in order to overcome energy dependence and academic mediocrity, also the respect we need to accord others on the abortion issue–not quite as stirring as reactionary platitudes.

In short, McCain appealed to our escapist magical morality, Obama appealed to reason and practicalities. That has been the story throughout the campaign. Everyone concedes that Obama’s way is more mature, realistic, and ultimately right. But I doubt that’s enough to cure a case of sweaty palms.

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Good grief! I agree with Deepak Chopra!

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Matt watches Richard Dawkins trying to teach children about Darwin, and comes up with some useful terminology:

While its true that the creationists featured in the documentary certainly displayed a fundamental ignorance of evolutionary theory, it quickly became obvious that clearing up their misconceptions had no real impact on their beliefs. As one of the pupils at the school Dawkins visits in part 1 so concisely explained: It wasn’t that he didn’t understand evolutionary theory, it was just that his religion told him it was wrong. Through (I assume) a combination of bribes, threats and social pressure, his religious beliefs had managed to shut down a large part of his capacity for critical thought.

This is – what I’d call - “Regressive Theology”. It teaches that the Truth has already been revealed, and all knowledge which challenges it must be rejected. Failure to do so often results in the most extreme punishment conceivable...

At the other end of the spectrum[...] is “Progressive Theology”. This religious view of the world is built around the idea that understand (sic) of (the) God(s) is incomplete and one of the best ways of advancing it is through increasing our knowledge and understanding of “Creation”.

Many religious people need to feel threatened. It is one of the supreme ironies of our time that in the USA, easily the most religion-soaked country in the so-called “First World”, religious leaders get worked up into a frenzy about how Christianity is under vicious attack from a minuscule number of militant secularists. And of course the Pope joins in, to try to whip his flock into line. For these religious leaders, science - especially evolution - is, literally, a Godsend! The greater the progress of science in explaining the origins of the cosmos, the emergence of life on our planet, and the evolution of one rather curious species of hominids, the better they like it.

In part, I suspect, it’s a matter of tradition. The semi-mythical founding figure of Jesus is represented as a revolutionary, persecuted by Jews and Romans alike, and like other wacko sects during the latter part of the Roman Empire the Christians were a subversive underground movement. And fear is a great way of building solidarity. Once Christianity had achieved a near monopoly of power, it was forced to build up various forces - Satan, demons, witches, the mentally ill - as omnipresent threats, simply to instill fear and obedience. The rise of Islam was another Godsend - if Mohammed had not been born, the Pope would have had to invent him.

How many religious leaders do you hear in the USA (or Europe, for that matter), saying, “Relax; it’s OK. A handful of ‘new atheists’ may be selling a few books, but Christianity isn’t under any serious threat. In fact we’re being more and more successful in persuading politicians to pander to our prejudices and accomodate our unconstitutional demands. So chill, my flock; keep tithing and enjoying your SUVs and reality TV. There’s no danger from secularism.”

Are you kidding? That’s no way to energize the masses!

(And yes, I could have written almost the same account of Islam. I’ll leave the substitutions as an exercise to the reader.)

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Christianity needs science, to reinforce its paranoia

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after 263 days of uptime, i rebooted into a newly upgraded snv_95 build.

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A long time ago, when I was using different blogging software, I used to maintain a book page, in which I listed some of the more important atheism-related books in my library. I’ve decided to revive this, and I’m using my Amazon Associates aStore to do so. If you click through to the store, you can browse about 50 of the more influential volumes that I’ve read which are relevant to the subject of atheism. I don’t agree with all of them - that would be tedious - but all have made me think. The list is relatively light on works of academic philosophy, because in the near future I’m going to organize my favourite philosophy books along similar lines.

I’m adding a permalink to the store in the right sidebar of the blog.

Anyway, enjoy the list. And no, I’m not looking for click-through sales. I’m just using this as a convenience, and letting Amazon.com do the heavy lifting for me.

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Selections from an atheist’s library

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Juan Cole comments on recent Republican claims of success in Iraq, and the way journalists are writing about them.

It is a measure of the Orwellian state of the US media and politics that he should have to bother. I mean, the place is a burned out hulk where hundreds die every month in political violence, where armed militias are ubiquitous, where nearly 5 million people remain displaced from their homes, where you have unemployment rates of 50% in some major cities, and where pro-Iranian Shiite fundamentalists face off against Sunni Arab nationalists and Salafis and Kurdish separatists. If this is a success, I’d hate to see a failure.

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“If this is a success, I’d hate to see a failure.”

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Yesterday Mike and I went to get our marriage license. Do this sooner if you want to have it registered at some place cool like San Francisco county =). I checked and they only take appointments and all were taken for August, the next availability being in September. City hall in SF is so nice and it would be fun to take some pictures there holding our marriage license. But anyways we ended up going to register in San Mateo County instead which has their office located in Redwood city so that was fine.

I spent the rest of the day cleaning after taking a food coma nap. The apartment looks already 100 percent better and i can see the potential of the end result. It is starting to feel like home and i love having everything I need here in Berkeley instead of in an overnight bag which I never pack fully anyways. Still trying to tackle the rest of the final details for the wedding …

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Detailed article on using MySQL from inside NetBeans 6.1: http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/ide/mysql.html Here is a brief write-up with just the instructions: 1. On you NetBeans, open up the Services tab using Command+5 OR Window->Services. 2. Right-click the MySQL (Connector/J driver) and choose Connect Using 3. Replace :/ with '/' so that the URL reads "jdbc:mysql:///". For ...

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Since I wrote a post on this topic I found this wiki page information on the icons and badges in the Visual Mobile Designer Palette: http://wiki.netbeans.org/VisualMobileDesignerPalatteReference

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Andrew Sullivan on the hypocrisy of American protests over Russia’s actions in Georgia:

Once you trash the international system, declare yourself above the law and even the most basic of international conventions against war crimes, you have forfeited the kind of moral authority that the US once had. Bush and his cronies speak as if none of this has happened. Their rigid, absolutist denial even of the bleeding obvious allows them to preach to the world about international norms that, when they would have constrained American actions, were derided as quaint and irrelevant. You really cannot have it both ways.

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“You really cannot have it both ways.”

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In previous versions of Songbird we had a “Web Media History” node that was basically a media library of all the media you encountered on the web. It was somewhat confusing to new users, so we took it out of Songbird 0.7. Past users of Songbird seem to be missing it though, so I built a quick add-on this morning to re-enable the node.

Right now there isn’t an icon that makes it look good in Gonzo, but komi assures me he’ll fix that

You can download it here

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I spent my first jobless day waking up early and refreshed! This despite not being able to fall alseep until 1 am last night and yet at 8 am I was ready to get up and clean. Except that I didn’t clean my now new home because what’s the point when my new “wardrobe organizer” (aka two rolling racks ordered from Khol’s) will arrive by this Friday? Better to put it off until then when I can do it all in one fell swoop me thinks =) But in the meantime living in this mess (aka Michael’s Berkeley studio despite his great cleaning and organizing job) is sort of distracting. All my clothes, still on its hangers, are piled onto the couches.

Things for the wedding are scattered about, chocolates for the favors are in one corner, pink Victoria’s Secret boxes from my shower are in the kitchen, etc. It’ll be amazing if I can find everything we need for the wedding next week when we need it.

So even though I didn’t clean today, I did order water bottle labels for the wedding. What are these for? Well, while going over the timeline with my dad yesterday it is starting to look like people may have to kill some awkward time between the ceremony and the reception. We tried to get a later ceremony time but it just wasn’t possible and we tried to minimize the gap as much as possible but alas, there is still probably 1/2 to 1 hour at the most when people will have to wait for the reception to start. So my plan is to have lots of picture taking done at the ceremony site with our friends and family and to offer our guests bottled water. It’ll give them something for the lag time I hope. I just visited the ceremony site again yesterday too and it is still very beautiful and there is plenty of shade and places for people to mill around and chat. I am so excited about it and after picking out the music with the music director yesterday it is starting to literally “sound” like a real wedding!

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I went to see “The Dark Knight”. I saw it in Cinerama, in a packed cinema, and I was in the middle of the row. This meant that I couldn’t easily do what I wanted to: leave.

I hated it.

It was, without doubt, the most negative, life-denying film I have ever seen.

This was quite clearly a post-9/11 film. Back on September 16, 2001, Dick Cheney notoriously said:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

In this film, there is only the dark side. The light side is lost, swallowed up in the shadows. Oh sure, the director tosses us a bone in the form of the two ferries at the end, but by then the pointless, inchoate mayhem has numbed us to the point where we can hardly appreciate it. All of the good guys have given up on the values they professed, and the best we can do is lie about them or make them our scapegoat.

As we left the cinema, I looked around me. Everybody seemed subdued; nobody looked happy. For myself, I jammed my headphones into my ears and cranked up the loudest music that I had on my iPhone; when I got home I knocked back half a bottle of wine in a couple of minutes. I felt as though I had lost something. I want to un-see the film, to have that bit of my life back.

Brilliant? Oh, sure, but so very, very cynical. Others have invited us to look into the pit, have shown us the fragility of civilization - Dante, Picasso, Golding, Bosch, Spiegelman - but none of them laughed at us as they did so.

UPDATE: I’ve been reading some of the reviews over at RottenTomatoes. Only one reviewer seems to have seen the film as I did: Armond White of the NY Press. Money quote:

Aaron Eckhart’s cop role in The Black Dahlia humanized the complexity of crime and morality. But as Harvey Dent, sorrow transforms him into the vengeful Two-Face, another Armageddon freak in Nolan’s sideshow. The idea is that Dent proves heroism is improbable or unlikely in this life. Dent says, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” What kind of crap is that to teach our children, or swallow ourselves? Such illogic sums up hipster nihilism, just like Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Putting that crap in a Batman movie panders to the naiveté of those who have not outgrown the moral simplifications of old comics but relish cynicism as smartness. That’s the point of The Joker telling Batman, “You complete me.” Tim Burton might have ridiculed that Jerry Maguire canard, but Nolan means it—his hero is as sick as his villain.

And here’s the oddly-named Camila Batmanghelidjh in the Independent:

What worries me even more than the violence was the lack of human compassion surrounding it. Human life is presented as worthless. For me, the apathetic bystanders who facilitate violence are more disturbing than the Joker himself. His perversion, at least, has a sad logic to it. The indifference of the onlookers, though, is shocking.

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Utterly, unredeemably negative

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In response to this xkcd, ASofterWorld finally strikes back.

These are two of my favourite webcomics; I read them every day, along with Jesus and Mo, UserFriendly, Sinfest, and the delightful Questionable Content. I also feed the slightly more twisted aspects of my persona with Explosm and Basic Instructions.

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Duelling webcomics

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I had my last day at work today and it’s hard to say how I feel. I had flowers and gifts and well wishes from anyone who I had worked with so that part was nice. But at the same time I am glad that is over and I can focus on the final details of wedding planning!!! I am also free to blog!

My schedule is clear for the next two weeks to tackle the remaining to do items on my list and it is long. Money has been flying out the window as I make final payments to vendors and it seems like there’s always another check to write. I keep track of every bill and so far we are on budget but it is still amazing what the final bill will look like, it is one big number.

At the moment I am getting ready to move from my apartment in Santa Rosa to Mike’s place in Berkeley. I just sold my couch yesterday and hopefully my coffee table and chairs will go as well. If anyone is interested here is the craigslist ad: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/fuo/784918180.html

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A useful reminder by Leon Hadar in The American Conservative:

The benchmarks to measure success in Iraq should be the ones that Bush, McCain and the other cheer-leaders had provided before Congress authorized Bush to go to war. That should be the context for the debate on Iraq during this election:

1. We would discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

2. We would uncover the ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin.

3. The war in Iraq would be as short and relatively costless in terms of American lives and U.S. dollars as the war in Afghanistan.

4. “Liberated” Iraq would be a unified nation-state and free of ethnic and religious rivalries as well as of foreign occupation.

5. A democratic and secular Iraq would become a political model for the entire Broader Middle East and would create the conditions for a political and economic liberalization in the Arab world.

6. Iraq would not require American economic assistance since it economy would grow and the country would become prosperous thanks to its growing oil revenues.

7. The U.S. military victory in Iraq would strengthen U.S. strategic position in the Middle East

(a) encouraging other global and regional powers to jump on the American bandwagon,

(b) weakening the power of anti-Americans governments (Iran) and terrorist groups,

(c) helping revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process (”The road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad”),

and (d) putting pressure on North Korea and Iran to end their nuclear military programs.

Now…based on these high standards set-up by the Bush Administration, it has failed in achieving all these seven goals (and related others). Seven F’s. Time to switch that kid to another school.

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While McCain and the WSJ declare victory….

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For Songbird 0.6 I built the SHOUTcast add-on, and for Songbird 0.7 I put together the Concerts add-on. Now that 0.7 is wrapping up and (knock on wood) I think I’m done with Concerts, it’s time to move onto my next add-on project…

For our next release my plans are to revisit and completely re-whack my very first Songbird add-on: mashTape. When I joined Songbird, one of the first things I thought was über-cool was going to be how simple it would be to pull this sort of contextual information into your media player from the web. Unfortunately, when I first joined Songbird - my XUL/JS was… well… about what you’d expect from someone who’d been doing systems/kernel development since undergrad.

mashTape has been in need of some serious love for a few months now, so I’m looking forward to getting the chance to rewhack it. as part of that, i’m moving mashTape over to Mozdev, so you can find it’s new home at http://mashtape.mozdev.org

you can see webpage design is clearly not my forté, but, ATM, all i’m interested in is some solid good Mercurial extension hosting (and having access to their project-owners mailing list ;-)). maybe when i get some free time (hah), i’ll make a better webpage for it.

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The good news: I was able to find an Indian cable TV channel that carries Formula 1 races live, so I’m able to watch the Hungarian Grand Prix live today.

The bad news: the channel is ESPN Star Sports, which has two of the most incompetent commentators I’ve ever heard. I think that the chief fool is a guy called Steve Slater, working with a straight man called Steve Dawson. Almost every technical observation that he makes - from the fuel rig problems to Adrian Sutil’s “shattered brake disc” - is simply silly.

Fortunately I’ve programmed my DVR to record the US broadcast, so when I get home I can listen to a competent team of commentators (especially the irrepressible David Hobbs).

And the race? Well, it was quite interesting until Hamilton’s left front tyre failed. (And the way Slater reacted to this event was monumentally clueless.) After that, the only question was whether Glock could hold off Raikkonen for third place.

And now Massa has just blown up! Slater’s asinine comment: “And now that podium will remain empty!” Sheesh! Anyone remember Colemanballs? And so Kovalainen gets his first win, while Glock nails P2 after Raikkonen backed off. Hamilton comes in 5th, and retains the championship lead by 5 points over Raikkonen; Massa drops to third.

UPDATE: The biggest upset from this race was in the Constructors Championship. Ferrari stay in the lead on 111 points, while McLaren jump to second with 100, leaving BMW in the dust.

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Good news, bad news dept.

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Amazon.com is becoming a large company, and I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that I met a colleague here in Chennai who had travelled out from Seattle on the same flights that I’d taken. What did surprise me was to learn that on the segment from Frankfurt to Chennai, the passengers in economy had no food whatsoever. I’d upgraded to business class, and I thought that it was disappointing that, because of the strike, we’d got a hot lunch but no other food except a bag of assorted snacks. I guess I didn’t know how lucky I was.

Nine hours, fifteen minutes without food. Longer, actually, because our take off was delayed while we received a fresh overflight clearance for Iraq and Iran. That’s ridiculous.

(Now I’m even more anxious about whether I’ll be able to upgrade my return flights on Wednesday. Right now I’m waitlisted…)

UPDATE: It looks as if the strike is over.

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9 hours 15 minutes, with no food

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Caught a recent episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservation episode about Shanghai on the Travel Channel. I was quite amused by the traditional Chinese fishing method of using long-necked fish-eating Cormorants to catch fish. Apparently Erhai lake in Dali province has an economy built around cormorant fishing! The fisherman (can we ...

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Seattle-Frankfurt-MadrasChennai. Long. Delayed. But completed. I’ve checked in to my hotel (the Asiana), it’s 2:23AM local time, and I’m hitting the sack.

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Arrived in Chennai

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Day 3 (Friday) for me was … well… rough. I woke up feeling completely nauseous. Given that I had done a wee bit of drinking the night before, I was inclined to think it was alcohol-related. (Good thing I had that handy dandy hangover kit from Beerforge!)

After spending until the full 12:00 checkout time puking in the toilet, I was ready to write-off alcohol for the rest of my life. Many many many apologies to Eric Jung of Mozdev for ducking out in the middle of our lobby conversation to go throw up in the hotel lobby bathroom. Many apologies to the folks who also witnessed me puking off the side of a MAX platform (fortunately it was one near the airport which was all rock and weeds off the platform)… and apologies to the folks at the security line at the airport when I went rushing past to the bathroom to go puke… and to the folks on the plane who had to watch me rush to the bathroom three times en route (you might (or might not) be happy to know only two of those times resulted in puking, the third was mostly dry heaves).

At this point, I realised it might not be the alcohol. By the time I landed in SF and puked once more (sorry SFO deplaning passengers!), I was pretty sure it was food poisoning. Talking to my wife (who, unlike me, actually HAS medical training), my er… other symptons, definitely seemed to point to food poisoning.

Food poisoning is a really really really unbelievably shitty thing to have when you’re flying/traveling. And that’s all I have to say about that.

So in the end, after a couple days of being sick to my stomach - I’m pretty much all better.

And I take back my thoughts at writing off alcohol. Sweet sweet tasty beer.

(and one final apology to anyone reading this who gets offended by posts about puking)

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I was going to post my thoughts about the killings at the Tennessee Valley UUC, but
Terry put it better than I would have done.

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Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity: Accessories before the fact to murder

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I just uploaded a set of photographs to provide an apples-to-apples comparison between my three digital cameras: the Kodak P850, the Casio EX-S600, and the new Panasonic DMC-TZ4. All were taken from the same spot. I was concentrating on the zoom, but looking at the non-zoomed shots it’s clear that the Panasonic has a significantly wider field of view. (The Kodak and the Casio are pretty much the same in that area.)

I think that the Panasonic with its 8.1MP and 10x zoom is the ideal compromise. No, it won’t fit in a shirt pocket, but that’s about the only limitation.

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Comparing cameras

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From the Herald Trib:

Lufthansa faces a major strike by ground crews and others starting Monday after the union said that its members voted overwhelmingly to support a mass walkout.

Guess which airline I’m flying on Tuesday. And “starting Monday” implies that it’s an open-ended action that may escalate.

Let’s see… I could go on ANA to Tokyo, then Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong and on to Chennai… Never mind: let’s see how things unfold over the weekend.

UPDATE: Well, the latest indications are that the strike isn’t affecting the long haul schedule at all. Right now it looks as if I’ll be good to go on my originally scheduled flights.

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Uh-oh…

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Gadget day here at Chez Geoff. First, I finally got my iPhone 3G this morning. After my frustrating wait in line a week or so ago, I spent an age on the phone with AT&T Customer Service to make sure that my account was unencumbered. All clear. Then last night I checked in at the iPhone availability page at Apple.com, and saw that the Bellevue was going to have inventory. According to the website, the store opened at 9:30, so I planned to arrive at 8:00. I did so, to find a dozen people in line ahead of me, and the store open for business! After an hour I reached the head of the line, got a 16GB white phone, and headed home. It took nearly half an hour to transfer the saved state of my old iPhone to the new one; while I was doing this, I was erasing all of the data on the old iPhone. (Apple finally realized that it was important to get this bit right: with the 2.0 software, erasing an 8GB iPhone takes over an hour! That’s thorough.)

Meanwhile, my new camera arrived. For the last couple of years I’ve used two cameras: a tiny Casio Exilim S600, and a bulky Kodak P850. Both are low-res by current standards (6MP and 5MP respectively), which is not necessarily a bad thing, and the Kodak does decent RAW and zooms to 12x. The trouble was the weight/bulk of the Kodak. Over the last two years I’ve relied almost exclusively on the Casio; yesterday I found myself literally “dusting off” the Kodak. And as a tourist camera, the Casio is far from ideal. Yes, it’s conveniently small, but the relatively narrow field and 3x zoom are really limiting. I think that my trip to Beijing was the final straw: I was continually frustrated while trying to capture the sweep and grandeur of the Forbidden City.

So yesterday I ordered myself a Panasonic DMC-TZ4 from Amazon, along with a spare battery and an 8GB(!) SD card. 8.1MP, 10x optical zoom, nice wide-angle Leica lens. It’s my seventh digital camera, and like all of them (except the Kodak) it cost under $300. Why not the DMC-TZ5? Partly to save a little money, and partly because I’m still not convinced that I need that many pixels. (The lower resolution means that I’ll get a couple of hundred more pictures on my SD card with the TZ4.)

Hopefully the weather in Chennai will give me the opportunity to put the camera through its paces.

UPDATE: Per dpreview, it appears that I need to update the firmware in my camera. Why am I not surprised?

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Gadgets

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You can find my photos from the second day of OSCON here.

Woke up early and headed in to catch Tim O’Reilly’s keynote where he made some awesome points on data-lockdown, loss of data-portability freedom, and the programmable web which pretty much made my point for me for my Songbird talk the next day.

After that, we headed down to the booth (which Jay Patel had freaking awesomely setup the night before for us - thanks Jay!) I spent most of my day here at the booth answering questions, talking about Songbird, and of course selling our t-shirts (proceeds went to the Mozilla Foundation). The booth was fantastic, it was great talking to a ton of people about Songbird. We heard a bunch of great feedback and talked to a lot of people who were familiar with it, had run it in the past, and were just waiting for it to get to 1.0. I also had a lot of great discussion with Moz, MailCo, and Miro guys. I’ll post a separate blog of some of the issues and topics we talked about.

I got to see a ton of familiar friends on the floor… Intel Dave, and Intel Max, my many friends and fellow OGB members from Sun, all the folks from MindTouch Deki, and of course a ton of folks from Mozilla & Mozdev.

That evening I went to the Mozdev BOF where we chatted about extension development, and some tricks and tools for building extensions. Following that I attended the Mindtouch party for a bit to say hi and chat with Deki folks, and then ended my night at the Sun party.

Highlights from the Sun party were the copious gin & tonics, just barely losing to gman in air hockey (10-9! damnit!), watching plocher and joerg schilling sumo wrestle (it was close, but I think plocher won), and watching Postgres (Josh) & MySQL (Monty) sumo wrestle (MySQL schooled Postgres).

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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&aposs 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 &apossomething&apos 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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