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All of it

In On Writing, Stephen King recounts an attitude he had when he was an alcoholic. At restaurants he would notice another diner with a half-drunk glass of wine, and be seized by the desire to march over and ask why they weren't finishing it. Alcoholics don't measure how much they're drinking. They drink all of it.

This weekend, I noticed that I have the same propensity to eat all of it, especially when "it" is meat. I was informed in some health class or other that meat is worth a hundred times its weight in grains necessary to produce it; I feel bad letting it all go to waste.

Or do I? I decided that I'm some kind of a foodaholic if I can't stop myself from cleaning my plate, eating all of it. Not wasting food is a red herring. I can just take less to begin with if that's the real issue. So I see myself as rationalizing away my addictive behavior.

I also noticed that when it comes to political blogs, in the last month or more, I've been getting really bad about reading all of it. It's cut into my work and family time, and the benefits I gain don't match the time I'm losing.

I think I get obsessive at times, and I need to learn to let things go. I need to be happier with what I have.

There's another one: remembering all of it. I realized this weekend as my parents were telling stories about their families and childhood that I have a lot of stories no one else knows, stories that are intensely personal and even unique. I have boxes of things I've saved, ways I saw myself. I feel like I should annotate them or something, like they're a window into my world. Save my remembrances. Put them in secret scrapbooks. Enjoy my history.

I don't know whether to be frightened that what I've done will be forgotten, or just to let it all go. In a way, I feel at loose ends with myself when I've forgotten my life, like I don't exist, or like the footprints I've made in the world are slowly washing away in the tides of time.

On the plus side

We've been having a wonderful time with my parents. They are visiting and enjoying our son.

Mom read an entire book while we were here. It is the alternative history of the Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked.

We watched the first Pink Panther movie. How did I forget that it sucks? But it does. It wasn't nearly as funny as I remember. Oh well, just have to go buy the other ones (except for the abominable Trail of the Pink Panther clip show).

We've been playing Settlers of Catan. For some reason I seem to keep getting boxed in, no matter what I do. I think I'm not used to playing in fours.

Dad has made some fabulous food: lemon ginger scones, clam chowder served with good champagne (or is that good champagne served with clam chowder and strawberries?), omelettes, pancakes, steaks tonight. We also bought Thai food at this new restaurant, Kamin Thai. Not even in Google Earth yet. They served our pineapple fried rice in a hollowed-out pineapple half. You could scrape fresh pineapple into your serving.

Dad also took Sarah and I to the liquor store and educated us about wine. He recognized makers he'd visited when he lived in Spain. Sometimes I forget what incredible sights my Mom and Dad have seen in their lives.

For those watching for news on the NSA spying story, I recommend this meta-post by Glenn Greenwald, who has carefully measured and found wanting the various Administration legal apologia for the commission of felonies in order to spy on Americans. There are various links in that post to the more detailed arguments. It's hard to beat Glenn Greenwald in general for information on this quite important scandal.

Two quotes

"... as Heraclitus says, an ass would prefer chaff to gold..." -- Aristotle

"Twenty dollars? Awww, I wanted a peanut." -- Homer

A little late, but

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, love does not boast, love is not proud. Love is not rude, love is not self-seeking, love is not easily angered, love keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Republicans set to kill NSA spying investigation

[Cross-posted at Daily Kos. Background: Last week, Republicans claimed they were interested in a broad investigation of the Bush Administration's domestic wiretap program. After heavy political pressure from the White House, including meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, who recently shot a man in the face, the same Republicans are pooh-poohing a serious investigation, claiming it would be "punitive". Interesting that the same executive that they are supposed to be investigating can persuade them not to investigate. Read more at the link in the first paragraph.]

From the article:

As for Rockefeller's bid, Hagel said: "If some kind of inquiry would be beneficial to getting a resolution to this issue, then sure, we should look at it. But if the inquiry is just some kind of a punitive inquiry that really is not focused on finding a way out of this, then I'm not so sure that I would support that."

The Republicans want to have it both ways: both a fair, honest inquiry to follow the truth to its resolution, and a non-punitive inquiry. What a load of crap. The two options are mutually exclusive. You can't follow the truth up to a point, only as long as it doesn't punish the President. You might as well prosecute the Mafia only as long as it doesn't lead to any convictions.

A punitive inquiry and a non-punitive inquiry are two sides of the same coin. One is biased to impeach the President and the other is biased to exonerate the President. The Republicans want the latter.

I want none of the above. I want subpoena power and fair judges. I want a special counsel independent of the Congress and the executive. I want the truth about the President's surveillance, even if the truth is far more innocent or far more sinister than we have been led to believe. I want transparency. I want oversight. I want checks and balances. I want a law-abiding president.

If the full Congress votes to soft-pedal its oversight of the NSA spying program, if the Republicans decide to shut down the investigation, Harry Reid should shut down the government. He was going to do it for the sake of the filibuster, remember; that was going to be the Democrat response to the nuclear option. He shut down the Senate for a day to protest the lackluster Phase II investigation. He should shut it down for nine months to protest the abuse of power by the executive.

What is at stake here is not just the power of a minority in the Senate to prevent laws from passing and judges from being confirmed. What is at stake here is even more important than learning whether or how politicians misled a country into war. What is at stake is the power of the full Congress to make laws at all. What is at stake is the unbounded, secret power of a wartime executive applied against the citizens he governs.

Twenty years ago, Senator Frank Church warned of the dangers of letting the NSA get involved in domestic intelligence gathering. He said that the "potential to violate the privacy of Americans is unmatched by any other intelligence agency." If the resources of the NSA were ever used domestically, "no American would have any privacy left.... There would be no place to hide. .. We must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is an abyss from which there is no return."

-- Bruce Schneier, on Project Shamrock and the spying scandal

Scientific notes

Some quick thoughts about science, inspired by this, via this.

A principle of reinforcement learning (for computers) is that an agent acts in an environment, and remembers in order to predict the future state of the environment, then (or at the same time) maximizes its total reward over its lifespan in the environment. Thus, learning systems solve problems embodied by the structure of their rewards. It seems to me that what science claims to do is almost the same thing: predict the future state of the (physical) environment given a certain action in a present state (some would prefer to omit the idea that actions exist). But science omits the other part of reinforcement learning: the maximization of reward. In science, there are no fixed rewards. Thus, there are no fixed problems.

How do we know that induction (essentially, science) leads somehow to justified true belief (knowledge)? Why should it be privileged over intuition or mysticism or revelation as a knowledge-seeking tool? As I understand Wittgenstein to say, there is nowhere to stand to judge such questions.

A few notes

I made the best spinach artichoke dip I've ever had and the Seahawks still lost the Super Bowl.

Sarah got a relatively new G4 iMac from her brother, who got a Mac from his dad, who bought a new Mac. I didn't get a Mac, so I ordered a microphone to record music on the computer. I'll learn GarageBand and make plunky loops with my mandolin.

I'm past the middle of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a Napoleonic-era alternate history of English magic. The language and point of view are just about perfect. And it's really funny. And it's addictive! I have no clue how it's going to end.

Today I kept half an ear on the start of something very important: the first hearing on the President's secret warrantless domestic wiretap program. Attorney General Gonzales was in the Judiciary Committee arguing that the program is legal. The Bush Administration felt free not to follow the controlling law, FISA, because it was authorized broadly to combat al-Qaeda, or failing that, the President's commander-in-chief powers allow him to violate duly enacted legislation.

To my great relief, most of the Senators on the committee, including all the Democrats and even some Republicans (though not all of them), saw Bush's arguments as ridiculous and untenable. As especially Senator Leahy drove home, this one program, whose existence was leaked to the New York Times, is probably only the tip of an iceberg of broad expansions in domestic surveillance. For several years, the Bush Administration wiretapped people it had no business wiretapping, and it didn't tell anyone, and no one found out; did they abuse the power once they figured they wouldn't be caught?

A deeper issue: the Administration's second argument seems to imply that the President can break any law as long as he determines that it is necessary to do so to combat al-Qaeda. This means that de facto anything is legal as long as no one finds out about it; if Bush keeps it on the down low, he can order his branch of government to do whatever he wants. We shouldn't just be worried about how the President has actually used this power (which is bad enough); we need to be worried about a President who feels like he has a free hand to ignore the law. Access to that kind of power is anti-American. Broad executive power is taking us down an autocratic road, and we should all be disturbed by that.

Wars

It occurred to me while reading this post by Digby that we call the fake war, the one with no attacks on American soil since after it was declared, the one with no battlefields and no uniforms and no Geneva Conventions, "war on terror", but we call the real war, the one where American soldiers are dying every day, "war in Iraq".

The war on terror has enemies but no location, the war in Iraq has location but no enemies. The location of the war on terror is everywhere and nowhere. The enemies in the war in Iraq are everyone and no one.

Because the location of the war on terror is everywhere, the president's war powers are now domestic. The terrorists have already won. Every step the president takes to protect our security at the expense of our essential freedoms is a victory for the terrorists. They didn't just want to kill people; they wanted to destroy our way of life. Sadly, the war on terror is nowhere; we don't have victories in the war on terror, just missile strikes in nameless villages on nameless terrorists, killing nameless people. Five more appear for every one that dies. There is no place to win the war on terror. It will never end.

Because the enemies in Iraq are everyone, trust is impossible, and victory is impossible. Anyone can blow you up. Almost everyone has a reason to. Because the enemies in Iraq are no one, defeating them is impossible, and victory is impossible.

Lest we forget, Bush has repeatedly conflated the war on terror and the war in Iraq. He wants to shore up the deficiencies in each war by giving the Iraq War a face and the war on terror a country. Never mind that this construction has been ridiculous since the first days after 9/11, when Bush was convinced that Saddam was behind the attack.

It's become increasingly clear in recent weeks that the war on terror's face and location are American, at least to the American President. What is he doing? What is he thinking?

A bad week for staying on task

Well, that was the most godawful seven days of studying I have put in at Utah State, bar none. Sarah has been trying to keep me keeping it together. But it has been truly terrible. I don't know why exactly. I think Sarah and I are both trying to adjust to me being home all day and available for X and Y and Z.

I have an uninhabited office on campus that is basically mine to run around with, so I might start working up there some days.

I am also thinking of going back to exercise. Most of my old friends would put me to shame in personal health, I'm afraid. So this has been a bit of a phase. A four-plus year weight gain. I think I said recently that the physical affects the spiritual and the mental and emotional; maybe my lack of having to walk several blocks to my car every day has been wearing on me for the last few weeks. It was bitterly cold all the way to my parking spot, but I reaped the benefits last semester in inches and pounds.

As a Christian, I'm not obsessed with body image. I have more important things to be obsessed about, like social image and looking competent for my professors. I get sick of this and just want to be myself, but I don't know what the professional distance is with my mentors, my colleagues.

I had very strange problems with social image in Undergraduate v1.0, where I would miss a class or an assignment, and then I would cut class until the drop date, then drop. Or just not drop and fail. Or, in one of my many classroom horror experiences, fail to drop, and have to go take the final, and fail the final. As near as I can put it, I was extremely anxious about looking like a bad student, or like a failure. I had my priorities out of whack too, so I would miss one class because I stayed up too late playing Tekken 3 or whatnot, and then for the next class all my sensors would overload. If I'd been more honest about the whole thing, I would've run around the dormitory screaming and waving my arms around. That's how I felt about it every time: naked fear. My jaw is clenching right now just remembering it.

This lasted for the better part of four years. I didn't get over it until I started up at USU, after several months of the real world to knock some sense into me (including a stint as a production worker at a Camelbak-type waterbag factory).

But it still comes back sometimes, especially when I'm talking to professors. I stutter and have it all worked out in my mind ahead of time, like notes. I'm a nice guy, but I can't loosen up. I don't even know how to try; I have fun and I enjoy most everything that I'm learning. Maybe I desperately need to go to a department picnic or something.

I feel a bit better for having said all that.

Meanwhile, I'll be taking Tolkien on tape to the exercise machines, for a long overdue healthening. Like I said, I'm not obsessed with body image. But there are reasons to consider healthening to be the Christian thing to do. Jesus said once that "out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks." I have been mulling this over for a while and I'm starting to think it's a pretty deep statement. But anyway, by analogy, out of the overflow of my self-concept, or my character, my body is shaped. And right now my self-concept looks pretty flabby and lazy, and forgotten. Also, and perhaps more to the point, "You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body." This is an interesting little proof, and I will be exploring it in detail at the gym.

Good healthening to all of you too.

One by Endo

I finished one of the best books I've ever read. Again. It's Scandal by Shusaku Endo. I've commented on Endo's work before; he's one of the best authors you will ever read, the Japanese Graham Greene. Book space is dear at our house, but I have eight of his books on my shelf.

Here's Scandal on Amazon. I wrote a spoiler-free review there, but others gave away more than I would have. So here it is:

Scandal is the story of an acclaimed Japanese Christian novelist in old age named Suguro. At an awards ceremony honoring his distinguished career, Suguro hears disquieting rumors that he has been seen carousing in the red-light district. He enters the district to investigate the rumors and safeguard his reputation, but is unprepared for what, and who, he finds there.

Shusaku Endo uses this story as a kind of autobiography, accurate in depth of feeling, if not character and circumstance. He said in his A Life of Jesus that he thought of the Gospels as collectively forming a true portrait of Jesus, even where he saw them as fuzzy on the details. That is a good way to read Scandal, as a portrait of Endo.

Suguro struggles with old age, oncoming death, and the dissonance between his private self and his public reputation as an upstanding Christian. In many ways, Suguro is forced to confront himself; he learns that the foundations he has built his life upon are unsound, even his work, his marriage, and his religion. Endo's unflinching portrayal of himself in the figure of Suguro is thus poignant and, at times, tragic.

Scandal is about, among other things, a man going to a dangerous, uncertain place with his religion. Some religious people will not want to follow him there. On the other hand, this is not an exclusively Christian novel, and readers of any religion, or none, would have much to gain from it.

It is helpful, but not necessary, to have read some of Endo's other work to put Scandal in context. Silence and A Life of Jesus are classics. At least ten other works are in English translation.

Scandal is so rich and complex, and finally, so human, that it practically requires a second reading. But I am beginning to find that each time I read it, I demand another reading myself. I doubt that I will ever come to the end of it.

It's hard to explain further than that unless you've read the book, which I hereby suggest you all do.

Work, Utah, religion, publicity

I wrote this post in a sort of meandering way, so expect the main topic to slide around a bit.

Three years ago plus about a month, Sarah and I got married in Maranatha Baptist Church here in Logan. About a week later, I started working for WestWords, a college textbook compositor. We designed typesetting and book layouts, then published them all the way from red-inked manuscript to the printer.

I was especially proud of working on The Feynman Lectures on Physics. This is sort of the Holy Grail of physics textbooks, by Richard Feynman, a very popular guy for a Nobel Prize winner. They hadn't been corrected for decades. We worked on the definitive edition. I designed the mathematics typesetting that we used to enter corrections.

I also worked as the customer service point person for our company's software, MathMonarch. It stretched me a lot to work out problems with customers, with no training in business writing and such. I tried to act like their advocate and see things from their point of view.

Anyway, yesterday was my last day. I felt very ambivalent about leaving this job, which completed my longest continuous stint at any one workplace. I got another job for roughly equal pay, to do research for one of my professors at USU. It was a good career move and it will give me good scientist experience.

But I'll miss all the people I made friends with. Since I went to part-time when I started school in June 2004, I've felt some disconnection from them.

To be honest, too, because I live here in Utah and 80-90% of my co-workers were LDS, I felt somewhat disconnected from the dominant thing in their lives. I didn't have much way to share what they saw.

I remember early in the job, one of the managers, not with the company now, came and talked to someone who'd started when I did, about all their personal connections in the valley. Around here, family is intimately connected to religion and I felt very isolated.

I'd been through a pretty bad set of months just before starting at WestWords where I worked in a bottle factory as a temp (bought by Nalgene when I left). I had gotten into arguments, and even one shouting match about religion, even at work. I didn't have any sense of what should be public and private. I was very gung ho about being in Utah and shining my lonely Protestant light, adrift on a raft of orthodoxy, floating above an endless ocean of darkness. It didn't take me long to see the inadequacy of this viewpoint.

So at WestWords, I turned the other direction. most of my discussions about religion began and ended with the fact that I wasn't Mormon. I found it hard to follow my co-workers into their religious territory, even couched in very broad terms. If any of them reads this, I would want them to understand that I didn't blame them for this and I had no hard feelings. They were fish swimming in their own water. I learned a lot by listening to them talk about what their religion meant to them.

Now that I'm working elsewhere, I get to decide how public or private religion should be with my professors. Sarah gave me a necklace with a cross on it for Christmas. I asked for it because I wanted, among other things, to have a sort of physical expression of my inward belief. Maybe there is some parallel here to the Sacraments. Or, like CS Lewis said in Screwtape or somewhere, there is something different about praying in your head and praying aloud on your knees, because humans are physical beings, and physical movement alters the mental, emotional, and spiritual.

But I wear it under my shirt because the cross is not socially acceptable in Utah. The long practice of the LDS people is to regard wearing the cross as somewhat morbid and concentrating on the suffering of Christ rather than the resurrection of Christ. If you Google "mormon cross" you will run across the explanations (from Mormons and non-Mormons alike). I'm not trying to make big waves because of something that's on my shirt, so it stays hidden, just for me.

[digression: Incidentally, there is an interesting thread at badchristian.com about making waves for Christ through the wearing of shirts, particularly shirts with quasi-Christian messages calculated to shock or offend. I wrote a comment there that probably makes more sense if you read the discussion it refers to.]

Still, by accident, I've had it out in front of both of my professors, and this is only the third week of the semester.

Starting Monday, I have one class-hour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a meeting for my research on Mondays, and a meeting for my independent-study class, meeting at, well, irregular intervals. Five hours are spoken for. The rest of my time is my own.

And so again, I'm ambivalent. It's a stunning opportunity to show what I'm made of, how responsibly I can manage my time, and what a career in research might feel like. But I don't have as much direction, nor a manager, nor insulation from bureaucracies, nor co-workers. I could get pretty stir-crazy in my cave. Time will tell, I guess.

Threads

When I was a foolish, foolish young man going to college, I took a spice rack that had doors on hinges, with all the spices it contained and a few others nearby. My childhood home in Seattle has essentially two units, and this spice rack came from the unused downstairs kitchen. It had 21 spices, some that I'd never even heard of (like foenugreek; is that spelled right?).

One of the other bottles had a white label with permanent marker: "SAFRON". It was an ordinary sized spice jar.

It was also full.

I didn't understand the significance of this for quite a while. I felt vaguely guilty, but I thought it should smell good, so I put uncrushed threads of saffron in my microwave popcorn. At some point, the guilt got to be too much for me, and I stopped using it. Fortunately, most of the bottle was still left.

I told my dad about the popcorn and he thought I was incredibly crazy.

For those who don't know, saffron is the handpicked stigmata (female sex organ) of a Crocus Sativus Linneaus. Each flower has three. It takes 100,000 or so to make a pound. Here's a helpful article that is quite interesting; among other things, it pegs the price of saffron at $40 to $65 per ounce, more expensive than silver. Whole Foods, it says, was selling some at $8.99 per 0.04 ounce, which is more like $225 per ounce.

I finally saw saffron on sale at our local kitchen store. It is sold in spice jars with small cards that look like flypaper, with a thumbnail's worth of the spice trapped on the side. I have no clue now how much my stash is worth. I've noticed that time and gravity have ground down the spice near the bottom of the jar, but the vast majority are still whole.

Today I took out my jar of saffron. It has been snowing since the morning and I decided to make potato soup. I picked out a few threads, less than 10, and put them into a white 1/4 cup measuring cup so I wouldn't lose any. I dropped one on the floor and picked it right up. Then I used the back of a small spoon to grind the threads into powder. At the end, I held it up to my face, and they stirred like iron filings attracted by a magnet while I breathed through my nose. I couldn't believe that such a small thing could flavor about a gallon of potato soup, but I dumped them into the slow cooker anyway. The liquid turned yellow immediately.

A few hours later, the onions aren't done, but the broth is delicious.

Sometime, go to the store and buy some yellow rice in a packet, by Vigo or Mahatma or a similar brand. Look at the ingredients list; after all the spices, salts, and even chemical preservatives, the least, final ingredient is saffron.

Century mark

For this 100th edition of Letters and Papers, a few comments on a he-said she-said article from the LA Times.

The postmodern-esque disease at the root of modern political journalism is the propensity to act as sound-bite stenographers. You're not allowed to say who is lying, or who is wrong. You must give equal time to opposing partisans. If an issue reflects badly on one party, a similar pejorative issue must be found for the opposing party, no matter how dissimilar or inconsequential. No judgment, no reasoning. The main tool is the tape recorder.

Witness the article I linked, where the main story is "Bush says critics in Iraq war 'irresponsible'; critics disagree". It has 22 paragraphs, 18 of which are devoted to direct or indirect quotations. By the latter I mean things that could have been replaced with a quotation, like "Bush said the war's critics should stop questioning the motives that led him to launch the invasion of Iraq in March 2003." It doesn't get any shallower than this.

The journalists say their readers can judge for themselves who is lying and who is wrong. And that the story is all there if you read between the lines. To my mind, this is completely irresponsible. The first-drafters of history are selecting information and weaving narratives; maybe they congratulate themselves on their subtlety.

But they are the public's paid summarizers, and they aren't doing their jobs. You have to go to editorial and partisan and advocacy viewpoints just to get to truth-telling above reproach. It ticks me off that these news organizations are not willing to put their credibility on the line to tell the truth.

Anyway, I wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't noticed an odd juxtaposition that is like reading between the lines. It involves one of the four non-quotation paragraphs in the article, and an apparent non-sequitur.

[Bush] said that when soldiers in a battle zone heard politicians questioning their mission, "it hurts their morale."

In a new surge in violence, 120 Iraqis have been killed in suicide bombings in the last week in Karbala and Ramadi, and 29 were killed in an attack in Baghdad on Monday, Associated Press reported. Since the Dec. 15 elections, 498 Iraqis and 54 Americans have been killed.

Get it? The second paragraph follows the first because it responds to the first paragraph. After all, if politicians criticizing the President hurts your morale, just imagine what getting killed a lot does for it.

The rest of the article is about Bush-said and Democrats-said; but the important thing is Reality-said. And it was a doozy, right? That's how you read between the lines and find out the truth, on Paragraphs 17 and 18.

This completes the initiation into the Hermeneutic Order of Newspaper Reading, Guardians of the Public Mysteries, Keepers of the Purple Shaft. See you tomorrow, in between Paragraphs 15 and 20.

Language problems in Christianity

[Note: This was cross-posted as a comment on a post on badchristian.com about Christian politics.]

I read TS Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions recently, so cribbing from that, you might see Christians with different approaches to politics as members of different language communities, and dialogue between them as a translation problem. The reason conservatives and progressives have trouble talking to one another is not just that they disagree about appropriate means to a common end. Like scientists of different paradigms, they disagree about the appropriate problems to be solving in culture. Also, some of the concepts just don't translate well.

This happened to Newton when the Principia came out. Pre-Newton physicists rejected it at first because it did not explain the origin of innate forces like gravity. That explanation was thought to be an essential component of any proper theory of dynamics. Then they used F = ma because it worked so well and explained so much. The mystery of the origin of innate forces was moot for a while (until general relativity). Similarly, if progressive Christians were running things, "the abortion problem" might take a back seat to "the wealth gap problem". It's not that abortion's not important, it's that progressives live in another world from conservatives.

[digression]
I don't mean that progressives go to California and conservatives go to Texas, I mean that they look at the world with different eyes. Reminds me of when Sam Seder went on CNN a month ago and started talking about the War on Christmas in terms of the war in Iraq:

"Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it’s almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money."

To me, that spoke volumes about the relative importance of the two wars, and how pointless it was to talk about destroyed Nativity scenes when soldiers were getting blown apart in a forgotten conflict. To the anchor and the conservative guy in the same segment, it sounded like nonsense, or more accurately, foreign language. ("I don't think that exists. Bob? Help me out here.") The conservative guy went on talking like he hadn't understood a word Sam said, which was, of course, the case.
[/digression]

So it is for us progressives and conservatives. I don't just disagree with conservatives about the most efficacious way to decrease abortions to the glory of God. I locate abortion in a different constellation of political issues than a conservative. Same dots, different lines, different sky.

The hard quest before us is not just to listen to each other (though it would be a good start!), because we're sure to hear barbarisms, or what we want to hear. Jesus encountered this kind of hearing a lot. We have to get inside our fellow Christians's heads, stop translating what they say into our own language and learn theirs. It all looks very different from the inside. The same goes for non-Christians's heads as well.

It can be scary to get inside someone's point of view like this. I think what I have been afraid of most lately is some radical reconstructive surgery on my religion. I am content with my Christianity, and it's taken me a while to get to that point, so taking the risk of understanding is pretty traumatic.

Almost, almost back to normal

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Track Weighting Data and Average Daily Gain for each weighing
Can be used chute side (laptop) or in the office.

I am hard pressed to explain why this is the best spam ever. First I thought it was a joke, then an awful porno, then a Lemmings-type video game. But I scrolled down, and it is indeed sheep management software.

So "Sheep Master Gold" pretty much says it all.

It was cost-effective for a very niche, $99 product to advertise to me this way. Somewhere out there, someone will click through this spam because they are having trouble herding their sheep.

Arcadia, welcome to the 21st century.

Half-Life

I received Half-Life 2 for Christmas, so I went to the local video-game reseller (Fun Unlimited) and picked up the Half-Life Platinum Edition (with all the first-generation games) for $10. I've been enjoying it quite a bit. For those who haven't heard of the games (you should!), Half-Life is the story of MIT theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman. When a science experiment at a remote research facility goes dreadfully wrong, weird alien things start popping out of nowhere and the government comes in to stage a cover-up. Freeman takes a trusty crowbar to hand and starts breaking his way out. Video game drama ensues.

This was a momentous game at the time for many reasons. Call of Duty and similar games with scripted sequences owe a huge debt to Half-Life's raising the dramatic stakes on the industry. But its biggest contribution was to create a culture that allowed ordinary users to access the game engine and create new games using the same tools the Half-Life developers had. It spawned games great in their own rights, like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. The sequel is poised to do the same.

I really felt like I should finish the old ones before I played Half-Life 2. Like wanting to watch A New Hope before The Empire Strikes Back.

I admire something about perfection in sport and elsewhere, so I was rooting for the Colts to go undefeated in the NFL and I'm rooting for USC tonight in the Rose Bowl. Only a few more days, then I can settle into a routine of computer use and work again. And blogging, I guess.

Write a letter to your Representative about domestic espionage

I wrote a letter to my Congressman about the recent revelations of domestic wiretaps by American spies of American citizens without a warrant, authorized by the American President. I'm posting this letter so other people can read it and, if inspired, learn more about these issues and send a letter to their Representative.

You can read all about the domestic surveillance scandal in a New York Times article that broke two weeks ago, reproduced here. There are also several good posts by security ruminator (and computer security expert) Bruce Schneier on his weblog with pertinent links. Here's what he said about the NYT article: "This is a very long article, but worth reading. It is not overstatement to suggest that this may be the most significant violation of federal surveillance law in the post-Watergate era."

The upshot is that if you want to begin surveillance of an American citizen, you need a warrant; if you don't have probable cause, you can get a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) from a secret court. All you have to do is show that someone may be the agent of a foreign power.

President George W. Bush repeatedly authorized a program in the National Security Agency (NSA) to wiretap American citizens without any warrant whatsoever. Recent news reports are that purely domestic calls were intercepted.

Aside from being illegal on its face because it violates FISA, the program smacks of an illegal search prohibited by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The President says this is justified by executive "war powers" under Article 2 of the Constitution, but this would make a mockery of our checks and balances. By his legal theory, he can break laws that the Congress creates in the name of preventing terrorist attacks. What could he do next?

In a last great irony, now people charged with terrorism are using this revelation to assert that evidence against them was obtained illegally and should be thrown out. If you watch Law and Order you know that the worst thing that can happen to the lawyers is when the cops do some monkey business like not reading a suspect their Miranda rights. Cases get thrown out on these technicalities. If you want to read about how deep this goes, read this take from a former prosecutor.

So here is the letter I wrote. Crib from it, love it, weep for our country, laugh at the bleeding-heart. But the year is steadily churning backward from 2005 to 1984. We are the worse for it as a nation.

Dear Congressman Bishop:

I write to you asking for representation on a very important issue: the domestic surveillance of American citizens, without a warrant, by the chief executive. As you no doubt already know, this surveillance occurred (and still occurs) as a secret program in the NSA with no meaningful Congressional or judicial oversight.

There are practical reasons to abhor such a scheme. It violates the privacy of presumed-innocent American citizens. The potential for abuse is unchecked; for example, the system could be abused for partisan political purposes, or even for personal reasons, whether by the executive branch leadership or by individual NSA employees.

Still worse, the program is illegal. It violates explicit surveillance powers of the President set out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A warrant must be obtained to spy on Americans, and it can only be granted if the American is an agent of a foreign power. No such warrants were obtained.

The President justifies this illegal behavior by claiming that his emergency war powers in the war on terror trump Congress' passage of legislation restricting his freedom and barring such actions as criminal. In the long run, I believe this specious reasoning will be exposed. There are many reasons why, but the main one is that it makes a mockery of the rule of law.

A President defying Congress through emergency powers in a years-long emergency, in a war on terrorism that has no final enemy and no foreseeable final victory, is a grim and terrifying specter for our democratic ideals. To a crime without charges, a prison without a country, a cell without a number, a prisoner without a name, and torture without practical or moral justification, we can now add a wiretap without a warrant. Against these horrors we had set blind justice, that no violators would be safe from the law, that all victims would be secure in the law.

I appeal to your principles. Protect the innocent by taking this oversight seriously. Call for and participate in hearings on domestic espionage, FISA, and presidential war powers. Don't let the terrorists win by destroying the great principles our country was founded on. Believe in our system of government: in checks and balances, in innocent until proven guilty, in no person above the law.

Thank you for your thoughtful consideration.

Daniel Lewis

Quick Hits

Someone searched in looking how to tune a mandolin by the hertz. This should be easy enough to find out, but the easiest way is to tune the bottom strings to a standard acoustic G string (from EADGBE), then tune in fifths (7 frets) up the instrument.

Here are my initial brief takes on Kuhn, though I haven't quite finished the book. I haven't started reading in my area yet, but the technology is new enough that I may be embarking on a pre-paradigm specialization for my thesis. This makes me very nervous, so I am entering the next semester with a lot of questions about how to search for standard methods, algorithms, data tests in natural language processing.

Second, I am interested in analogies to historiography, historical paradigms. It seems to me the main difference between history and science is that history never repeats, so there is no consensus reality. This makes different paradigms legion, because not only are the same facts interpreted from different paradigms as in science, but different facts are admissible. I think this makes crisis and revolution dependent on unimpeachable facts that alter a dominant paradigm. I don't know if that makes revolutions rarer or not in historiography.

Third, and somewhat related, I am interested in how coherence theories of truth work for religion. I've read a lot of unclear arguments about religion that pretend it is possible to criticize one religious paradigm in terms of another, or look for disproof of a religious paradigm in its anomalies. All theories have certain anomalies in them. Even in the physical sciences, it can take decades or even centuries before they are resolved, but they don't necessarily lead to a crisis. What that means is that you shouldn't take rejecting a religion lightly; that goes equally for my opinion of Islam as it does for someone else's opinion of Jesus.

This point of view is helping me think through some well-meant but naive things I have done in my life with religion, especially talking to other people about Christianity. Sigh. One that came to mind as I was typing is the Campus Crusade 4 Spiritual Laws/Knowing God Personally tract. It is a thumbnail sketch of Christianity, but calling it a presentation of anything like the Christian paradigm (or even the 21st century Protestant paradigm) is laughable. Evangelism revolving around such a tract seems dreadfully untenable to me, but YMMV.

So Mere Christianity looms ever larger as a primer on Christianity, because it isn't a sustained argument; it is a paradigm presentation, or using a term from David Tracy, a systematic theology. It is the story rather than the apologia, so it actually communicates with people of other paradigms. Lewis writes something like "I believe Christianity... because by it I see everything else." The connection to Kuhn is clear. If you think about religions as paradigms, ways of seeing, as opposed to theories to accede to, religious dialogue changes a lot.

For one thing, we would all have a lot more listening to do.

I got to think about all these things in depth yesterday on a very relaxing day off for my 3rd wedding anniversary. I have a thousand days of marriage under my belt... and boy are my arms tired! Insert your own joke. Anyway, here's hoping for many more.

That in-depth thinking time was at least partially inspired by this essay. I heard many echoes of myself in it; time will tell if I become rich and famous through science though. It's entertaining either way.

Tonight Sarah's brother Brian is coming over to watch Alex so Sarah and I can go out to Belated Anniversary Dinner Date, then we'll play his newest addiction, Settlers of Catan, which we got for Christmas. Yes, we hooked another one. First one's free! Seriously, download Sea3D at the link to the left if you want to know what the hubbub is about.

Happy New Year, and go Pac-10!

YAGFCP

Yet Another Gone For Christmas Post.

As you may have been reading elsewhere, there is a war. A war on a holiday. That holiday is on Sunday.

Well, I am a soldier in that war. This "Christmas" has left me no spare time to become rich and famous through blogging. Instead it takes all of my money and renders me more profoundly insignificant than several months of idiotic blather. This is an affront to my patriotic sensibilities.

Unfortunately, I must march half a mile half a mile half a mile onward in my struggle with "Yuletide". So actual thinking must be deferred in favor of Southern Comfort eggnog, Shaq v. Kobe, Amazon wish-lists, and sundry carols, presents, seasonal films, et al.

A thousand apologies.

[The actual thought most on my mind this week has been our President's unilateral circumvention of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (prohibiting unlawful searches and seizures). He did this by wiretapping American citizens without a warrant. There are lots of reasons you don't want the President to do this, but the simplest one is that it is completely illegal.

Running a close second, I've been reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for the first time, and trying to decide how to apply it to my research. With the book in my left hand and a pen in my right hand, writing in a diary. Very interesting stuff, but I feel somewhat adrift without knowing much of the history of science.

Back to normal in a long time.]

To my newest readers

Hello, all. I have been detoxifying from a particularly stressful semester and have been unable to come to the blog or the internet. Time with family. Meanwhile, I have been reading your blogs (friends, you know who you are) and I will be back shortly... more longly than shortly, it appears, but still. I will be glad to talk to you.

More long thoughts in a few.

Light posting

I was up pretty late working on finals, so I won't be posting till tomorrow. Instead, it's a post-semester celebration and an early bedtime.

Only two shopping days left

until Beethoven's birthday.

Busy bee

I had a couple of projects due over the weekend. I'm happy to say that the one I really cared about came out fantastic. The other one was ok, but probably too much work for one man anyway.

I can't wait for the week to be over. This semester has been too much for me and I am ready to become a genius in thinking computers and concentrate on my thesis.

1. Write a thesis in knowledge-leveraging natural language processing.
2. Work for Google? Or...
3. ????
4. Profit!!

Longer thoughts coming after the end of the week...

I'm almost done with A Tale of Two Cities. I am noticing some weird stuff with how Dickens did long time dilations. Where a modern author would just skip ahead and fill in the pieces slowly, he always provides a transition from this week to 3 YEARS LATER, like the white text at the bottom of some political thriller movies. Also, I don't know if I'm getting a sense of how the story is coalescing exactly. The nouements aren't hitting me quite right, with Charles returning to France. Maybe it's because I kind of remember the story from high school, but not completely. I'm enjoying the language but, hey, I'm an adult and so is Dickens, maybe the plot sucks.

Site design

It just occurred to me that for a blog about Letters and Papers, I have a pretty bland site design. I have all 26 letters at my disposal, as well as countless pictures of piles of paper, things made out of paper, manuscripts, books, correspondence, and so on. So my blog could look pretty cool. All I have to do is learn CSS and graphic art and have fun. I like the current colors, but perhaps I need a little more zazz to become rich and famous through blogging.

Free Time + Carol Sunday = ... ?

Here's a little ditty I composed the Tuesday morning after we did Christmas Carols for church, on few hours' rest, while waiting for a Software Engineering teammate.

What spy is this, who cover-blown,
Keeps Rove and Cheney from sleeping?
Whom pundits greet with yawnings sweet
While prosecutors watch are keeping?

This, this, is Valerie
Whom agents guard and traitors flee
Haste, haste to come to trial
The Plame, the spy N.O.C.

When will she bring the civil suit
Where unindicted are paying?
The president drinks because he thinks
The architect won't be staying

I guess that is rude, but the whole story is pretty rude (not to leave out treasonous).

An atheist's take on religious people

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1567604,00.html

This article does some interesting talk about whether religion actually changes you, not just the moral stuff we all agree on (religion or no). "Yet men and women who, like me, cannot accept the mysteries and the miracles do not go out with the Salvation Army at night," the atheist writes. He can't quite put his finger on what is different about these people, or rather, what mysteries and miracles have to do with the moral stuff he agrees with.

For me, the Christian answer is that the disconnect the author sees is between belief and action. There is the stuff we threaten to threaten to threaten to do (an Andrew Bird allusion), then there is the stuff we actually do, and they are not close to the same. One contrast with other religions is that Christianity has a theory about how to alter your human condition; many other religions just order you to get busy altering, adding rituals and theology, maybe, but basically leaving the onus on you. What this turns into is another set of beliefs that cannot be rejoined to action. What can you do when you are the problem? Christianity sees this as the human condition that Christ changes, in a mysterious spiritual way, by way of his death on the cross; Jesus extends to people the opportunity to be remade and live differently.

This opportunity is extended in community, in churches and small groups of friends. Christians (with their hearts in the right place, one hopes) bring people into the new life, not into some farcical parroting of the Christian doctrines. The missionary impulse is to help people live authentically, to give people true action to match their deeply held beliefs. Like the columnist says, rich men become poor to advance the cause of authentic, new life.

The columnist's evidence is all anecdotal, but clearly your religion is working right if it's taking you places you don't want to go, to serve those with whom you disagree, for the sake of a mystery that "civilized" people think is fairy circles and moonshine, to honor a God that you can't see. I don't mean this as an argument that the religion is true; but the religion is lived out in your life, and that's more true than the finest theology. And this kind of religion is hard. Like he says, these religious people have gravitated toward "the monotonous performance of the unpleasant tasks that relieve the pain and anguish of the old, the sick and the homeless".

That reminds me of another man.

Interlude: A dumb post on Washington Monthly

[This is a post for Don P, a poster on the Washington Monthly who said some truly stupid stuff about how Christianity is the vilest thing on the planet. If you don't care about my rebuttal, skip this post. Otherwise, read on.]

Don P, "the values and ethics of Jesus--not to mention the rest of Christianity's sacred writings--strongly support all the horrible things I listed" is an overreach. But your list of claims about Christianity, I can only assume is not a troll because you have argued for so long and vehemently in this thread. But they sound like a troll anyway, so you got me; I'll bite.

The first non-starter in your list is the meaning of the word "Christianity", as in "Christianity has traditionally oppressed women." One wonders what evidence could possibly disprove this sentence. Christianity is not a character in history; it is not a person. It is a hodgepodge of religions, streams flowing from a vast ocean. There are three enormous divisions between the traditions of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant, and the subdivisions of Protestant are too numerous to count; if you want to throw Mormon and Jehovah's Witness into the mix, Protestantism has spawned whole new religions. The Quakers, Lutherans, Anglicans, Pentecostals, and Messianic Jews aren't even included in the above divisions.

"Tradition" also cuts broadly. Do we pay attention to the GWB Christian right or the backwater missionaries or the Sunday upper class publicity whores or the ritualized pre-Vatican II ultra-Catholics or the revival altar-call walkers or the pacifists or the soldiers or the dark poets? And that's just in the last few decades. How about a Japanese Catholic novelist educated in Europe in French literature who sees a certain resemblance between a view of Christ that emphasizes his weakness and Mahayana Buddhism? Is that not also Christianity?

Frankly, the varieties of Christian experience are unclassifiable as a whole, and take an especially vague character in the grand statements divorced of cultural and historical context that you've made. The form of the argument is so bad that I'm not going to list counterexamples. If you can't agree that Christianity is at least a mixed bag, full of sinners and saints like all of humanity, including atheists, Hindus, Muslims, artists, scientists, feminists, mothers, and favorite uncles, you're not only wrong, you're blind. e.g.

The most charitable spin I can put on your argument is that some statements in the Bible are so full of oppression and vileness and have twisted so many people to evil, that they are responsible for the ills of the human race. It would be quite a testament to the writing's power to move, for good or evil, that such a thing was true.

So let's examine some of your statements and see if the premise that "the values and ethics of Jesus--not to mention the rest of Christianity's sacred writings--strongly support all the horrible things I listed" actually have support in things Jesus said. I'll give examples of things Jesus did and said, and things that the New Testament Christians did and said, that cut against the grain of your worthless generalizations.

"Christianity has traditionally oppressed homosexuals... Christianity has traditionally oppressed Jews, Muslims and other religious minorities."

Jesus was silent on the subject of homosexuality generally, but had a lot to say and do for minorities. For instance, he frequently held up Gentiles, people who did not believe in Yahweh, as examples of great faith, like the Roman centurion and the Syrophoenician woman. He appeared to Peter in a vision and said "Let no man call unclean what God has made clean," which caused the early Jewish Christians to abandon their tribalism (they were "God's chosen people") and accept people of other backgrounds as brothers and sisters. He preached a parable about a Good Samaritan being more holy in God's eyes than a priest or a Levite. This would be like a neo-Nazi telling a positive story about a black man. This is also the same Christianity that proclaims loudly that "You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." The kinds of things he did not say were "Black people are inferior to white people" (unless you think the Mormons represent all Christianity, and even they changed it eventually) or "Jews are better than everybody". He spent his public life reviling the most religious people in his religion and had no respect for class.

I admit that the record of Christians through the ages toward minorities is mixed (witness the Abolitionists vs. the Race Rehabilitationists, or today's religious right vs. the Christian left).

"Christianity has traditionally regulated sex, marriage, reproduction and family life very strictly."

It's true Jesus did affirm the Jewish view that marriage is when "a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." But he also said that a man's right to divorce his wife for any reason (which his culture promulgated) was illegitimate, and that divorce apart from infidelity was adultery. For the man this is stricter; for the woman this is safer. He elevated the rights of the woman in marriage to equal to the man's. Paul did this too when he said that "the wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife." And it's true that Jesus believed in sex within the confines of marriage but not otherwise. But I think his treatment of prostitutes tells us more about how important he thought issues of sexual sin were.

"Christianity has traditionally supported economic and political policies that produce large economic and social inequalities."

In Jesus we find a penniless preacher, not a political program. Remember, the same Jews that welcomed him in to Jerusalem on Sunday as the political Messiah who would free Israel and rule the new kingdom killed him days later after he preached in the temple square daily. What did he say, I wonder? There is some speculation that he freed the Jews from the very illusion you ascribe to Christianity; that it has a well-defined political or social program. When Pilate was trying Jesus for treason, he asked if Jesus was a king. He responded, "My kingdom is not of this world."

Your statement applies with more force to modern capitalism than Christianity, as in "Modern capitalism has traditionally supported..." You could also say "The Hindu caste system" or "Communist China" though.

"Christianity has traditionally taught the reality of heaven and hell, judgment and damnation, and that unrepentant sinners are cast into hell where they are punished for all eternity."

That's more or less true, Jesus talked about it a good deal. I'll give you the reality of heaven and hell, judgment, and damnation. Who exactly goes to hell and what exactly is going on there are subjects of considerable debate in the breadth of Christian tradition.

What I fail to see is how this meme has affected humanity. Unlike the others in your list, this is a point of theology without an obvious story of woe attached. Bach? Dante? Thomas Aquinas? They believed this story and it didn't seem to make them into serial killers. I believe this story and all I am is a Christian blog commenter who is feeling a bit snarky at the moment.

"This all seems to be considerably more consistent with James Dobson's version of Christianity than with contemporary liberal Christianty, which often seems to be little more than the Golden Rule dressed up in a bit of religious drag."

So let's be frank. You make sweeping generalizations about my religion, compare two sects to each other and decide that one is more faithful to the breadth of Christian tradition than the other, which breadth you show no signs of acknowledging or understanding. You would rather trot out the same tired cases and tropes of the evils of organized Christianity; as if every other society had no evils of its own! As if the evils of Christianity were beyond comparison! How is that less hidebound and anti-intellectual than the fundamentalists themselves? How am I supposed to intelligently come around to your views? Maybe I haven't been snorting the same propaganda.

hamletta said "I think comparing him to the whole of Christian history is dopey." You said "Why?" Well, the answer is that you can make broader generalizations the wider you draw your view, but the generalizations are more likely to be wrong. The devil is in the details, but God is in the details too. On a scale from dopey to inane, I give your generalizations a resounding 10.

So you ask, "Why? The claim was that James Dobson, and presumably conservative Christians in general, does not represent real or authentic or true Christianity. Why should we believe contemporary liberal Christianity is more real or authentic or true as Christianity than Dobson's variety?"

Well, I guess to answer that question we would have to take up a long comparative study and define things like "true Christianity" and "represent". I've made a few quotations and claims above that suggest my idea of true Christianity, and I could go on.

The dominant threads I might suggest as a starting point are "But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." and "Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!"

But it's sufficient just to say that the arguments are fraught with difficulty and intelligent people have disagreed for hundreds of years, so strong statements like yours are not credible.

So I'll let Billy Madison have my last word:

"Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

The Day After Yesterday

Well, I did some kind of weird stuff at the concert, like take short videos with our Kodak EasyShare from the balcony and write down all the set lists for both bands (the better to remember you with, my dears), but I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I was on the edge of my seat most of the time.

I went with my friends Paul and Stacy Petersen. They were excited about the concert as I was, and we bought our tickets pretty early. We were lucky, because it sold out in six weeks. We had a nice drive down, discoursing on many topics, and got some pizza on the way. I thought I was getting sick because of the weird taste in my mouth at dinner time, but it turns out it was the water in our pitcher. Somehow I don't find that reassuring. The parking lot was full, so we had to park at the high school next door. We walked out on the black-iced blacktop and slid into our seats right on time, just as the head honcho of the theater introduced the first act, Andrew Bird.

Andrew Bird is quite stunning live. You have never seen anything like him, I tell you. He was a scarecrow in a three-piece suit, and he still looked like his thin legs shouldn't support his weight. His hair flew around when he shook his head in time to his music. He gestured with his violin bow, not like a conductor, but like a fiery orator stabbing his finger into your chest to convince you otherwise. And that wasn't even the music.

Paul says he sounds like Beck, but with a good voice. Here is how you do that: He starts a groove pizzicato on his violin, then sends it looping, then another one and loop. His drummer comes in and starts an awesome beat, then he starts whistling pure notes and playing the glockenspiel at the same time. A few times through the loop, then he starts singing and playing the electric guitar. Later, the drummer starts playing a keyboard with his left hand. You just won't believe it if you don't see it.

He is on the Live Music Archive, so you can listen to tons of his music. His album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs is very different from the live shows and can be heard in its entirety at the link. And I just found something awesome: a live video of a concert he did in May 2005. I managed to get it running ok at 56K in IE (I have 256k DSL and would prefer Firefox, but this is what I got to work) so you will probably need a true 500K connection to see it well. So you can see for yourself; the drummer is in that one.

The song of the night was probably "Capital I". I have heard a lot of runs of this song, but that one was incredible. It will only see the light of day in concert because the lyric, "We all live in a capital I," is from a song on Sesame Street ("Capital I" is about why kids are so mean to each other, and the answer turns out to be something like the number 1, Isolation, Independence, and I; maybe a religious person would add Iniquity). If you listen to his live shows, listen to that and you will see how arresting it is. He played a new song too, "Plasti-cities", that I'll call second best. It was very human, about the power of art and song against the dehumanizing marketing and consumerism of modern Plastic society (at least, that's what I took from it; I only heard it once). It was catchy, and, for a song lionizing art, more free from the arted-up filigree than some of his songs from his latest album.

In "Why" he did something very interesting; I never imagined it while I was listening to the live concerts on the Archive. He played this part in the song very strangely, like not with the loop or in rhythm or in tune; he is a sort of twitchy artist live, but this looked like he was totally nuts, like he was really frustrated and barely able to handle himself. So right in the middle of the song, he does this sort of dialogue where he says, for the audience, "Why'd you do that?" Then he answers for himself, nervously: "Why'd I do what? I'm just standing here, you know." And so on, listen to this to hear what one is like (incidentally, "Why" is also in the video I linked above). It was like an Andy Kaufman joke where you can't be quite sure if he's pulling your chain. The more I thought about it, the funnier it was.

He finished his set, took a bow, and then quickly dismantled so Nickel Creek could come on. Paul and I used the facilities, then headed back in.

They dimmed the lights once, then dimmed them down all the way. I'd just finished telling Paul that they would probably be introduced (Andrew Bird had gotten an introduction last time). But instead Nickel Creek all came out together. The cheering was electric, so loud. I hope they felt like rock stars. I really think my voice wasn't very loud because I had yelled it out the other day. But I clapped with the best of them.

TO BE CONTINUED

What not to do the night before a concert:

Do Johnny Bravo impression by making muscle poses and expressive grunts, just because it makes your son cackle like a drunken sailor.

My throat may be too hoarse to scream at Andrew Bird, and Nickel Creek.

There is a video.