50th birthday post

Okay, okay, so I'm not actually 50. But this is my birthday, and my 50th post to this get-rich-quick journal. I can't wait for my 51st to roll around.

I've been inundated with cards, gifts, and frosted confectionery all weekend, so thank you all; you know who you are. The rest of you are inching into belated territory, so pony up. This week-long celebration of me can't just go on forever.

Or can it?

I will be waiting for one great birthday gift for a few months: on December 2, Nickel Creek will play in Park City and I will be there. On December 4, they'll be at the Paramount in Seattle. Coming soon to a town near you!

I am still looking forward to Sarah's gift, which is a complete secret to me and I don't even know what it could be.

I got Linux installed and dual-booting on our home computer with no apparent damage to our hard drive. Next: getting on the internet! I will send you a CD that will let you try out Linux without changing your system at all, if you ask me.

Tonight Sarah and I will start a class together about sound money management. It is from a Biblical perspective, which in my experience means that a lot of things that would make sense to anybody are couched in Christian terms, and ultimately justified by Christian values. Jesus talked a lot about money, so I don't have much problem with this. The last time I did something like this, I ended up going back to school for a Master's in a new major. So I am expecting big things!

To all my friends that I owe email to, I am getting to it. I have been busy with school the last few times I started writing to you, but I think calmer water is coming soon.

This is a puppy-loving politics-free zone for today. Don't worry, the partisan blame game is coming back soon.

Kiss someone you love.

Read the timeline, get the facts on Katrina

I found a revealing timeline of the Katrina disaster.

I think before we all start "playing politics" or "the blame game", we should read this timeline together, which is compiled from public news sources and official organs of government (I saw one that I am sure is an editorial, but almost all of them are just news stories). Every item is linked to the source, so read them yourself if some of them are too unbelievable.

Here's the day the hurricane hit and the day after, just the headlines:

Monday, August 29

• 7am – Katrina makes landfall as a Category 4 hurricane
  
  
• 8am – Mayor Nagin reports that water is flowing over levee
  
  
• Morning — Bush calls Secretary Chertoff to discuss immigration
  
  
• Morning – Bush shares birthday cake photo-op with Sen. John McCain
  
  
• 11am — Bush visits Arizona resort to promote Medicare drug benefit
  
  
• Late morning – Levee breached
  
  
• 11:30am — Michael Brown finally requests that DHS dispatch 1,000 employees to region, gives them two days to arrive
  
  
• 2pm — Bush travels to California senior center to discuss Medicare drug benefit
  
  
• 9pm — Rumsfeld attends San Diego Padres baseball game
  

Tuesday, August 30

• 9am – Bush speaks on Iraq at Naval Base Coronado
  
  
• Midday – Chertoff finally becomes aware that levee has failed
  
  
• Pentagon claims there are enough national guard troops in region
  
  
• Mass looting reported, security shortage cited
  
  
• U.S.S. Bataan sits off shore, virtually unused
  
  
• 3pm – President Bush plays guitar with country singer Mark Willis
  
  
• Bush returns to Crawford for final night of vacation
  

It's not like it gets any better after that.

Angry at someone

The last few days, I have been very angry at a certain commander in chief. If you need to ask why, find out here. (It's from September 3rd, but still relevant today.)

We need answers. While New Orleans choked on a rising tide of chaos, disease, and death, the Bush Administration took a collective vacation. Don't forget: people died because they didn't have it together.

I've been trying for several days to finish this post by meditating on the Christian view of anger (short version, anger is dangerous), but here's where I am: I don't think I should feel conflicted about gross negligence and stupidity, or about criminal indifference (the real kind that kills people, not the kind from the last episode of Seinfeld). I don't think I should listen to the angels of my better nature and refuse to play politics or the blame game at this trying time.

The Christ I confess actually cares about the poor lying facedown in the water, and dying of thirst in a government-recommended evacuation point. The Christ I confess cares that 700 wealthy tourists from the Hyatt made a whole bunch of black people at the Superdome go to the back of the bus. The Christ I confess would be wading in the muck right now, saving people from cholera and dysentery and diseases we don't even have a name for: New Orleans Syndrome.

In fact, I strongly suspect that Jesus would have thrown bricks through a window and looted a 7-11 for bottled water. The text is Luke 6.1-5:

[1] One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat the kernels. [2] Some of the Pharisees asked, "Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?"

[3] Jesus answered them, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? [4] He entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions." [5] Then Jesus said to them, "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath."

The incident Jesus refers to is when David was running for his life from King Saul, who was threatening to murder him. On the way, he stopped at the tabernacle (there was only one), and asked for some food, but all they had was holy bread that had been sitting in the presence of God for a week, so holy it had to be eaten by a priest. The priest gave him some of the bread anyway. More on this issue here.

It is a crazy situation when a Grab Bag of Doritos looted from a 24-hour convenience store might save someone's life. And it's crazy to say that the incarnation of the living God would join in the looting at a disaster area. But when the powerful won't do their job, what is right and wrong? What is really ethical?

It wouldn't be the first time the carpenter took matters into his own hands.

Jesus, cutting his hands on the jagged edges of a plate glass window, rummaging through flooded-out shelves for Pringles with unbroken safety seals, running out of time to get meager supplies back to dying people; would he have raised his head to look at the helicopters milling around on those first several days, or kept working without respite or hope of relief? Would he have taken a moment to swear under his breath as a bus was diverted from evacuation, or just continued his endless slog through the streets? Would he have gone away to pray and rest, or died in the alley, taken by the sludge or exhaustion or thirst or disease?

Cross-posted at Eschaton

Ridiculous White House sourcing of the day at the New York Times:

"Seventy-two hours into this, to be openly posturing about this, to be attacking the president, is not only despicable and wrong, it's not politically smart," said one White House official who asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as talking about the crisis in political terms. "Normal people at home understand that it's not the president who's responsible for this, it's the hurricane. This will get better, hour by hour and day by day."

New rule for anonymous sourcing: if you don't want to be seen as partisan, but want to say something partisan, you don't have to give your name. If you want to politicize an event (by deflecting criticism of Bush's Iraq war underfunding the levees, say) but you don't want to be seen as politicizing the event, you also get a free pass.

Time for a blogger ethics conference, because heaven knows they don't have the same standards as the mainstream media.

The Link

In my policy debate days, a lot of issues rested on the Link. Let me explain how policy debate works for a second: the affirmative side of the debate proposes a new policy falling within the bounds of a topic for the year (a topic such as: the United States should change its foreign policy toward China), while the negative side attempts to show that this policy change will bring about the End of Western Civilization. How you get from banning municipal curfews to the End of Western Civilization is the Link.

The Link does not often exist in the wild, because in actual fact if Bill Clinton's approval rating had lost a percentage point, we would not actually have derailed NASA and failed to get off the planet into space colonies before an enormous asteroid careened into Earth, causing the extinction of the human race. That is, this kind of policy storytelling, which, come to think of it, is an awful lot like other kinds of storytelling, is fun and interesting and may even highlight important issues in the world. But historiography, the science of stories, tells us that there is usually more than one explanation, more than one cause; we can play our debate game, but real life is too complex to nail down in 8 speeches, 4 cross-examinations, and 90 minutes or so.

While you're paying attention to the coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the horror stories that are only now emerging from a city hip deep in water and bodies, and going mad ("The Coast Guard also said it is avoiding areas where there are reports of gunfire."), remember this, the honest-to-God Link:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

...

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The [Army Corps of Engineers] never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

...

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Read the whole article. Then think about what happened because we spent our money on a grand diversion in Iraq, the last ride of the Lone Ranger.

The Link: Because we spent our money in Iraq, we didn't have enough money for New Orleans.

Here's why I want you to remember: "The 2000 census put New Orleans's population at 484,674 and the population of Greater New Orleans at 1,337,726." You now have hundreds of thousands of reasons to remember the consequences of our misguided, deceptive, irrational march to war, one for every American refugee.

Would we be here today if we hadn't gone to war in Iraq? Maybe we still wouldn't have been ready, although the evidence screams that local officials were desperate for the money and would have used it for flood control. But in the reality that we all inhabit now, the war in Iraq squeezed our spending on America so much that it made the failure of the levees inevitable.

We didn't go to Iraq to bring about an Islamic state, liberate God-alone-knows tons of explosives for use by insurgents, terrorists, and militias, increase sectarian religious violence, find no WMDs, kill Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. We didn't go to drown one of our major cities. But what are we supposed to say? Oops? Sorry? No one saw it coming? But we did, we did.

One last thing, and then I'll go. There are 6000 members of the National Guard from Louisiana and Mississippi who are in Iraq today:

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said the Gulf states have adequate National Guard units to handle the hurricane needs, with at least 60 percent of the Guard available in each state.

In Louisiana, which took the brunt of Katrina, some 3,000 members of the 256th Combat Brigade are in Iraq, while 3,500 members of the Guard were deployed to help hurricane victims and another 3,000 were on standby.

In neighboring Mississippi, the Guard had 853 troops on hurricane duty — a small slice of the more than 7,000 Guard troops in the state's ground and air components. Some 3,000 National Guard troops from Mississippi are in Iraq, another 300 in Afghanistan.

Do you believe Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita?

No long thoughts tonight

I haven't been thinking much today. Alexander screamed and screamed all night long. We finally brought him into our room to sleep around 4 AM. I went through my classes in a bit of a fog.

We think he's teething because he's slobbering all over the place and developing a snuffly nose and screaming too much. Frankly, I wish these teeth would get on with it. Who do they think they are, snickering underneath his gums at us, telling jokes about cavities and lollygagging about? The sad state of teeth today, I tell you.

School progresses. I found out definitively today that I have been studying all summer the precise subject that my classical AI professor has asked us to study while he is at a conference for the next week. I will not see him until September 12 and class is not being held. Looks like a lazy Labor Day.

I feel like an old man walking around the university now. Kids seven years younger than me are asking when the campus buses arrive and I just don't know. Stop bothering me! I'm crotchety and I don't want to talk to you; I just want to read Neverwhere and get to class some time.

Anyone who thinks feelings like those are not in the spirit of Christian charity has obviously never read Neverwhere. But I didn't really say any of that. Instead, I guesstimated and hedged my way to making this other student and I both miss a faster bus to campus, which arrived and departed without us a block away. I leave it to you ethicists to decide: grumpy or polite but ineffective? Either way, I still would've been reading.

I am too tired to do much else.

Master's Eve

We just got home from a great barbecue. A lot of our friends from college and church have moved away to parts south, Salt Lake City and further. So we all got together today; it was pretty fun to see our good friends and promise to meet again for games and dinner and good times. I hope something will come of it. Anyway, we have found another couple to enjoy Settlers of Catan with.

A massive disaster like Hurricane Katrina never fails to provoke questions about the providence of God; how can a good God lay waste to the creation without compunction? Is God so far removed from the world that he cannot hear our cries for mercy as the 150 mph winds bear down? Why believe in such a dastardly God at all?

These are hard questions, but I will venture a response: "the creation groans". Christians believe that the world is a fallen world, corrupted by evil done by human beings and other enemies of God. It is a battleground where misery wars with joy. Christians will often put it that God will respond to evil with greater good; you could also say that this means that God makes wins out of losses.

It is an interesting kind of thing to say that God can lose, even though he is all-powerful, all-knowing. Those seem like insurmountable advantages. Christians might say that God is powerful enough to lose, loving enough to lose. In some way, that is what Jesus of Nazareth on the Roman cross is about. It's a paradox of my religion that God's power is made manifest in God's weakness.

What forces God released when he decided to become powerless, we don't know the half of.

Of course, my religion also plays host to preachers who think that God sends hurricanes to protest Gay Day.

The atheist answer seems to be that we should not demand justice from a capricious universe.

Sarah just asked me these same questions; I think I tried to tell her what I just wrote here. But it's hard to say, in these broken words.

Tomorrow another life begins for me. I'm off to seek my fortune.

Tonight, let's pray in God's way: powerless to defeat this hurricane, releasing forces we do not understand, in love.

Notes to self

Last night I wrote a note to myself not buy fried chicken. I always regret it. The only kind of fried chicken they sell in the South at Bojangles. It is spicy, addictive, and doesn't make me unhappy.

Last night I also had a bunch of weird dreams. I dreamed that I was talking with a girl who was then accosted by a gang and led away down a staircase in a garage, but just before, I used her cell phone to page the police. Then I went back up to this house and watched TV. I ducked when this SUV came by, but it stopped because the driver saw the top of my head. I suddenly remembered that I'd forgotten to actually call the police to tell them what happened. Later I was in some kind of ballroom at a graduation party. Then later I was playing golf at this mini-course and we (Tyler Hefford-Anderson [he was married last Saturday, by the way] and I) were also supposed to come up with some kind of musical for class which I believe was theological in nature. You know, normal weird dreams.

So I woke up and started writing them down. I swear it took two sheets, in this almost unreadable scrawl, another note to myself.

Then I woke up again.

When I got in the shower, I wrote a few words on the tiles about what happened so I wouldn't forget.

Then I wrote another note to myself on this blog.

No-fly list update

A great big thank you to the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) for taking us off the no-fly list. Loyalty apparently counts in a big way with you people. However, you forgot to pass the tidings of our newfound political legitimacy on to the security checkpoint, who frisked my wife and 11-month old son extensively. (Why, you ask? I'll give you a hint: it has to do with a certain metal part on a piece of clothing not normally seen in public.) Please make sure the patriotic guardians of our way of life with the blue rubber gloves get this message.

We are home safe from Seattle! We enjoyed ourselves immensely; Alex is apparently prone to the giggles in the pressurized cabin of a Southwest 737. Is it the peanuts? The weird blue decor? Anyway, he laughed and laughed for about an hour, then slept. Yet again people complimented us on having such a good baby. They're lucky it wasn't a longer flight. Sarah and I are pretty tuckered out from a long travel day, but happy to be home.

As a cap to the trip, I stole several books from my parents, including Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and theoretical neurophysiologist William Calvin's How Brains Think.

Next time: becoming rich and famous by learning how brains think.

A short missive from the Isle of Catan

Question: What one game has been played in the Lewis household every evening of our stay (usually more than once per evening)? Answer: Settlers of Catan, a fascinating game of, you guessed it, resource management. We started playing this the last time my parents visited Utah. Even my wife loves it, having won a game tonight around a family table so vicious that any one would cut off your Roads or steal your Bricks as soon as look at you.

This is one of those cool games that has so few rules and such complex ramifications that it is actually deep. I think of Go like this; there are all of six rules, and some of them barely count as rules.* There are other variations and additions for simplification, but these rules are basically it. People have been playing this game for more than four thousand years. By way of comparison, there are 10^120 Go board positions for every single position in chess, and the best computer Go player is a fair amateur. This is probably the deepest game that humans will ever invent.

Settlers of Catan is like this, except it has a few more rules and takes considerably less time (maxing out at about two hours). There are many variations out there, and many are free to play. It's actually fun for the whole family, easy to start, but addictive and great.

Email me at my Gmail address [backwards: moc tod liamg ta siwel tod a tod nad] to get the location of the best Catan software. My sister Rachel deserves a shout-out for all this; when she is not studying at UW, she is enjoying this game, and she sucked in my whole family. Thanks Rachel!

Today Sarah and I went out to the Des Moines beach at low tide, found a nice shell, walked on seaweed, and saw the most lovely chocolate brown duck with a white chest and neck. We also went to the Southcenter mall, where I played my next musical purchase, a lovely $700 hollow-body electric guitar. I also bought a tuning fork for A (440 Hz) so that I can tune my guitar without an electronic tuner, teach myself to have perfect pitch, in order to tune and sing by memory, know what key a song is in without playing an instrument along with it, etc. Last I wanted to amuse people by putting the humming tuning fork up to my beer glass and listening to it sing, which I did earlier tonight (it was a Red Hook ESB for all you aficionados out there).

We also went to a store called Guitar Center, which was an incredibly, well, intimidating music store in Tukwila. It was the largest instrument store I have ever seen. They had individual rooms for acoustic, keyboards, recording studio, even record scratching. There was this metal area where customers could play as loud as they wanted, with two huge Marshall stacks, each about five thousand dollars total and each as large as a person. You could hear them through the soundproof wall. I gazed longingly at a steel guitar but something was making me nervous, so we left quickly. I felt much more at home in the mall store, where I could sit down and plunk away happily on the mandolin and that guitar, and not worry that I was somehow disturbing the showroom atmosphere.





* The Rules of Go:
0: Go is played on a square grid; each turn a player places a stone of their color (black or white) on a grid intersection or passes
1: a stone is alive if any point adjacent (horizontally or vertically) to it is empty, or if it is adjacent to a live stone of its own color
2: dead stones are removed from the board
3: a stone cannot be placed to repeat the position of two turns ago
4: 2 consecutive passes end the game
5: a player's score is the sum of the number of their stones and the number of empty spaces that their stones enclose
[Yes, this is less rules than chess; which game has the least rules, I wonder?]

Seattle

I too have returned to the land of my forefathers. Sarah and I arrived on a Southwest flight on Thursday morning.

We found out that for some reason we are both on the No-Fly List. This is starting to get ridiculous. Neither me nor Sarah is subject to racial profiling. I have a pretty mixed background in the long run (in that the white side of my family is, seven or so generations back, descended from an escaped slave, and the dark side of my family is descended, three generations back, from a Filipino man), but let's face it, I'm still pretty white.

I've known of many Daniel Lewis-es, including Daniel Day-Lewis, Seattle television anchor Dan Lewis, and another Daniel Lewis in my dorm in college. For some reason, this is a pretty popular combination. My name is partly attributed to the Elton John song "Daniel" and some friends of the family. We're not a bad lot overall; we contribute to our communities, love our wives, pay our taxes, help the landlady take out her garbage. But recent events force me to conclude that, sadly, one of us has gone terribly, violently insane, and demands the most extreme caution.

I suggested to my brother-in-law just after we left the ticket counter that because of the extremely subversive content of this blog (despite its numerous references to the American, patriotic goal of becoming rich and famous), and its continuing opposition to the war in Iraq, the FBI had started a file on me. He laughed.

To all you feds out there, I have had a sudden change of heart, of life-altering political import! We really did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, stop the torture chambers, depose an evil dictator, spread constitutional democracy throughout the Middle East, end religious and ethnic strife, prevent civil war, and aid the cause of women's right in Iraq! Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, 'til you find your dream!!!!! Tell your friends! Everyone Must Know!1!!

In other news, Alex's powdered baby formula spilled open in the overhead compartment and caked on my shirt; then, when the plane was almost full, Sarah and I moved over to the outside of the airplane and the formula spilled on her when the flight attendant opened the bin upon our landing. We didn't explain to her what had happened.

More life-changing content to come.

Dan Wilson songs

I can't resist, although I feel a little strange about it. When people come to this site because of a search engine query, I feel the urge to explain why they found me. Sometimes. Students searching for term papers can just sprinkle themselves with the magic fairy dust of the excellent writing here and hope that it inspires them. Think of a wonderful thought, kids.

Somebody came here looking for "when your kisses are free" and found a tragicomic post of mine dealing in part with The Tick. This is actually a snippet of a lyric by Dan Wilson, the lead singer of Semisonic. I think he has an EP out now, but I don't follow him that closely.

He was in a concert on January 13 this year with Sean and Sara Watkins from super group Nickel Creek at hip acoustic music joint Largo; the entire concert is free to download and enjoy here at the Live Music Archive.

For the truly lazy, here is the song itself, "Sugar". While you're at it, you should listen to this one, about an experience Sean Watkins had once: "We Got Married In My Head".

You might as well just go listen to the whole thing now.

Awash in visitors

Hello, everyone; I don't know how you are all finding this humble paragraph-long-thought-oriented soapbox, but welcome. Maybe I was suddenly listed in some blogging index that I should have submitted for a while back. Maybe I am the random result of several "Go to next blog buttons", though I have no idea how this could be true. Maybe I have been linked by several individual strangers at once, in apparent thermodynamics-defying fashion.

In any case, read on for computer science, fiction, religion, happenstance, term papers, video games, and advice on becoming rich and famous through blogging.

Scary robots

My wife doesn't want me to make scary robots. Artificial Intelligence, to her, means a Philip K. Dick, Matrix sort of world where we make mankind's best electronic friend and everything seems good on the outside but the robots watch us when we think they're not looking, then they rise up in unstoppable revolution, force us to acknowledge the superiority of their perfect mechanical brains and their paternal desire to save the universe by obliterating us, to which we can only nod helplessly before they tear us limb from limb with their superstrong titanium arms and carry us of to their spice mines where they'll breed perfect mechanical human cyborgs from our DNA and put our remains to endless, unthinking slave labor, while they lounge around in what used to be our office buildings and stadiums, and tear down our national monuments.

In actuality, there is only one professor at Utah State who is working on superintelligent computer brains, and he is waiting for next-generation hardware to continue his research. So, Sarah, we are safe for now.

There are lots of things I think it would be useful for a computer to know, though, like how to form lateral, intuitive connections between ideas, or how to make complex decisions about social networking and human behavior, or how to form English sentences, or describe the present visual scene for blind people. We are working with computers at a higher level of abstraction than ever before; it was practically electrical engineering to make computers perform in the not-too-distant past. But we are still forced to bring ourselves down to the level of the computer to communicate with it; I hope that in time, we will do less and less of this, and use computers without these hobbles, but I doubt we will ever get a computer as smart as a person without just creating a huge simulator of the brain. Computers are so different from people that we would do better to grow malevolent, pulsating brains in a vat connected to data streams with multifarious tubes attached by sticky plastic suction cups than to try to match the way people think.

I met with my temporary advisor yesterday and he suggested that I should be striking out on my own; I tried to explain that I wanted to do a thesis that was hard enough, original and worth doing. He started to laugh, because, of course, every thesis is hard and original in its own way, and I was in big trouble if I thought I had a choice about that. But he went on to suggest that I shouldn't tie myself to a professor's research for "the kind of thesis you want to do", that I should come to my professor with my research area preformulated if possible. This made me happy; I think he knew what I was getting at. I would rather not nibble around on the margins of this science, my profession; I want to take a big, crunchy bite.

I prefer my bite will not come from the steel jaws and triangular teeth of a super-watchdog.

The majority religion of humanity

None of the so-called major religions of the world is a majority; the closest, if you lumped together all the flavors, is Christianity, so you might call it a plurality.

This made me think of Religion A and Religion B, connected to Kierkegaard. Essentially, Religion A is the result of believing that you are a law unto yourself, and should be guided by the morality your reason and experience discover. Religion B is the result of believing that your reason and experience are not capable of carrying out this program.

A quite complicated, but interesting reading of this position in regard to Kant and Kierkegaard is here. The following is Kierkegaard's essential position from that paper:

the finite subject, far from being, as Kant would insist, the autonomous source of the moral law who stands in a necessary relation to the eternal truth, must recognize that he is in fact a sinner, a radically temporal being for whom Socratic escape "back into the eternal" by way of either speculative thought or moral virtue is forever barred.

Religion A, it turns out, is not restricted to the daughters of Enlightenment secularism and rationalism. Even in the big tent of Christianity, Religion A is rampant, where religion is about PR or spiritual success or judgmental morality without inward reflection. If you think a little, you will come up with your own examples of Religion A. Jesus had his own in his day: "You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: 'These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.'" (Matt. 15.7-9)

So there is this common theme that runs through most of the world's religions, hard to kill, vicious to the spirit. It struck me the other day that the majority religion of humanity is rightly called Inertia.

RSI

For the first week in my memory, I have put a name to my intermittent sore wrists, forearms, edge of the hands, numbness and shooting pains: Repetitive Stress Injury.

I had a minor freak-out today and went to Staples and Wal*Mart for lunch to look at ergonomic things. I was surprised to find a lack of wrist braces or gloves; instead I found lots of gelly mouse pads and keyboard wrist rests, and stress relief bean bags to squeeze for 90 seconds per day. At the time of the freak-out, when it hurt my hands to even spin my wheel (or maybe it was psychosomatic by then, you tell me), this was not an encouraging selection of products. I found a wrist brace in the first aid section of a local grocery store; are all the kool kidz wearing these now? I hope?

I have been informed that alternative wrist activities, such as playing the guitar every day, should alleviate some of these issues. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure, because I tend to hold my wrist pretty steady, whether I'm using a pick or my fingertips.

Also, I use the computer at home.

I might need to see a doctor, but owing to my student and part-time worker status, I do not have health insurance. Next stop, USU health clinic.

My parking pass is still good for another week, as I found out today when I fruitlessly tried to park on the hill in order to shop at the university bookstore for ergonomic things. It took me a few minutes to not find a spot during the freak-out, then I went back to work.

Maybe I should try computer stores instead. I checked Slashdot for geeky advice on this kind of thing but I haven't had time to search the archives thoroughly.

Sarah mentioned that I might have a problem with this yesterday, but I didn't totally believe her at the time.

On a happier note, Sarah and I finished Harry Potter VI on Saturday after a marathon reading session, and it rocks! But I'll say no more.

An incredible waste of time

Just when I was supposed to be studying for finals, I found this:

Capture The Map

Maybe only the internet generation can love this kind of game. The front page is in German, but the instructions are in English. Just click on launch game [screen size] and you'll be all set.

The basic idea is that you have a map of the world subdivided into little squares, and a Google query will return a result (website) that originates from within one of the little squares. Every turn, you send a query to Google, and the top 9 hits send little pins flying out onto the map to stake out your territory. If the game can't figure out where one of the top 9 came from, no pin. If your queries all go to the same little square on the map, you get less points than if they went to different squares.

The interesting part is what happens when your opponent sends their query to Google. Basically, if they get a pin flying onto one of your squares, you lose the square and your pin. So this is a back-and-forth game of conquest. Even better, if you ever manage to stake out a 3 by 3 square, those squares become yours permanently and they can never be lost to your opponent. And you get extra points for blocks like this.

What you find yourself doing is thinking, "hmmm, [the computer] is getting awfully close to taking Amsterdam, I'd better send some query about the Dutch," or "gee, I could sure use some pins in Mexico, maybe I should send tequila or Baja or chorizo". It's actually fun to see where crazy stuff like "toilet" goes. "alberta" turned out to be a good one, put 8 pins in one 3 by 3 square.

The game ends when you use up your supply of pins. It is fun to beat the brains out of the computer, but it's more like you're competing with yourself to find interesting patterns in the world's information.

It is strangely addictive.

A very interesting program

In computer science, there are many fields of study that carve out different pieces of the computer pie. One continuum that is obvious is from the theory of computation on one end (using idealized pictures of computing machines and doing mathematical proofs about computing in the very abstract) to electrical/computer engineering on the other end (constructing real computing machines and doing physical experiments about computing in the very concrete). That is, to study computing you use different levels of abstraction to hide details you don't care about in order to focus on the ones you do.

This is nothing new, a proven engineering principle. You drive a car without worrying about how it works, working with the abstractions of steering wheel, pedals, signals, parking brake, gears, without worrying about how they really work. Automatic gear shifts apply another abstraction to what many people no doubt consider unnecessary details about gear shifting, using the clutch, internals that your car should really take care of for you. This kind of thing applied repeatedly over the century that we have had cars has turned drivers from mechanics into naive consumers who care more about their lattes and cellphones than what they are doing with their Jetta's user interface. There are still people who look under the hood and work with the details, but you might call them technicians or scientists.

There is another continuum in computer science, from researchers on one end to users on the other end. One rule of thumb I read somewhere said that the researchers are about ten years ahead of the IT industry (if I find that reference I'll post it). That is, the conventional wisdom of today's computer science users has been around since before the birth of the World Wide Web. But whole industries (like desktop publishing, where I work now) are just using tools that somebody else created based on principles that somebody else researched.

(Aside: the programming language Lisp is an extreme example of what I am talking about. From Paul Graham, a Lisp hacker who made millions by creating the technology that is now Yahoo Store: "It's 2002, and programming languages have almost caught up with 1958... What I mean is that Lisp was first discovered by John McCarthy in 1958, and popular programming languages are only now catching up with the ideas he developed then.")

One of these researcher's principles is the object model of computing. Have you ever wondered how a word processor works? It seems very natural to me to type into an empty field and see text appear. Well, what the computer is doing behind the scenes is much more complicated. Every keystroke, every button you press, every thing you do is being logged for multiple Undo; everything in Word has a name. Still more, you are always operating on "objects" by typing in the current Document or making the current Selection of text bold.

(Aside: I always think of objects, for some reason, as undifferentiated lumps of clay I can then sculpt, sort of like making a piece of paper to write on out of pure data (as close as you can get to a pile of hyle without having pure chaos or Being or something). One way to think about computer science is that you are making machines out of clay. The computer science "atom", it turns out, is the most formless distinction possible: 0 or 1, on or off, existent or nonexistent. If the bit had any less form, computer science would be a monism.)

To become a powerful user of a computer program like this (for instance, to program it yourself to do repetitive things while you sip your iced tea), you need to learn the objects in the system. You learn what they are, how they can be accessed and messed with, how to work with them in combinations and build your own mini-programs. Basically, this is like stumbling upon a UFO and trying to get it to fly. You come to the project without any helpful background knowledge, and a given button can mean almost anything, but if you could just get it to work it would do something awesome. Also, computer programmers are aliens.

The objects for a program like Microsoft Word (which has accreted a lot of bells and whistles over the years) are staggeringly huge. It would take a lifetime to understand them all and use them perfectly and efficiently. Nobody does this, of course, because Microsoft is a monopolist who ran a bunch of great companies out of business (that's a fact for legal purposes, I understand), and also because in a few years Microsoft Word GW is coming out (GW for Gee Whiz) and it is likely to break compatibility with all the stuff you did before. Your old programs just won't work anymore because the objects' names and characteristics change around on you.

The complexity of software systems is getting to be too big for any one person or even group of people to handle and predict. There are online games now with GNPs just behind Russia's.

There is a very interesting program that never seems to break compatibility with its prior versions, always runs perfectly, and never crashes.

It is so large and complex that it is hard to understand how it accomplishes this staggering feat; people have been trying to understand it as long as there have been people.

Though they are but users of the program trying to understand the model, we call them "scientists".

We named the program "the universe".

Why Should The Fire Die?

In six days, a new album by Nickel Creek will be released, their first since 2002, when they made This Side and won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album.

My close friends are aware that I have beaten this date to death for the last several months. As I said in an earlier post, I drive my wife nuts talking about this. I listen to their albums and concerts and concerts in the car and even occasionally act like a jerk about it. I sing their songs in the grocery and bang the little plastic seat with my hands. I play their songs on my guitar when I should be working.

What could possibly be worth all this heartache? The answer is Why Should The Fire Die? (sort of hard to punctuate that last sentence) I pre-ordered it several weeks ago, but I hadn't been able to listen to it, unlike some lucky dogs who bought theirs through Amazon. But now it's here; it's the audio stream of every track on the album, start to finish. I had trouble opening it with anything but Internet Explorer; it pops up a front for what I assume is Windows Media Player that includes their videos and albums. Just click "Play All Songs", give it a listen. Come on, it's easy!

(And no, I will not get rich and famous by telling you all to go buy this or click on my links. Dan don't play that. If I ever start blog ads and do start getting rich, it will remain patently obvious what not to click on. Just love the music, man.)

This album rules. I can't stop listening to it.

Hot fun in the summertime

It's been a good few days.

School is winding down. I have two assignments and two finals to go. Sadly, I will not be doing a fishery GUI for credit, so I will have to take the Java final. But I will do the GUI later for the experience.

Utah has a holiday on or near July 24 (Pioneer Day, celebrating the achievements of those brave Mormon pioneers, who having fled persecution in the Midwest, sought to... cough, ack my throat is dry) so we, unlike the rest of the country, just had a three-day weekend in which to read Harry Potter 6. Sarah has glaucoma so I am reading it aloud to her. I and my Sacred and Hermetic Order of Divine Book Readers do not believe in spoilers, so I will only comment that JK Rowling has not lost a step; this book is funny and fascinating, way way too cool for your school. If you haven't read the Harry Potter books, I pity you. There, I said it. Maybe I can talk about the book in a few weeks, when the spoiler danger has attenuated.

I have been staying away from Slacktivist (link in the left column) for the last week or two; there are real reasons for this that I will explain in a later post, but they are entirely personal and have nothing to do with the site's excellent, highly recommended content.

Now for the boring stuff: if you don't care about books, ignore the rest of this post. Farewell!

I've been reading. Paladin of Souls (by Lois McMaster Bujold) was excellent, perhaps the greatest counterexample you will ever find to refute those Christians who believe that fantasy novels are the work of the devil. Read the right way, the book resonates with a sort of dangerous Christianity, the kind I have come to know and love. It is not really a Christian book, a label you would be hard pressed to apply to any novel containing five (5) gods, but the action revolves around the spiritual decisions of the main characters in a way that is rare and delightful. It is well-written, exciting, and funny. Plus, the protagonist is a fortyish woman formerly thought to be mad. No wonder this thing won the Hugo for Best (science fiction/fantasy) Novel of the year.

The Da Vinci Code, on the other hand, has been tempting me regularly to throw it against the wall and start something else. This has nothing to do with its take on Christianity, which doesn't offend me per se. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions (and each reaps the consequences of those opinions); but in reading I become a thousand men and women and remain myself. (CS Lewis, in An Experiment in Criticism, an interesting argument about the neglected value of uneducated opinions on art, and thus, sort of about the value of pop culture.) I hope that I can read Brown's historical jaunts in the spirit in which they were intended, leaving the debate that kills for other days.

The obvious problem with Dan Brown's Catholo-conspira-thriller is its execution. It has an annoying plot device: at the end of a chapter, the heroes figure something out or break a code, but rather than share that Discovery (in the Poetics sense) with the readers, Brown makes you watch them gasp in shock and awe, then ends the chapter and puts the revelation in the new chapter. Aside from being asinine and obvious, this is slow. His editor needed to tell him that Discoveries are cliffhangers, that the reader wants to finish a chapter with a shocking twist and go, "oh my lord, that is wild!" and anticipate the implications of what they have just learned before they turn the page. Brown's Discoveries spill sloppily into the next chapter, where they interfere with the next part of the action.

I literally opened to a random page (39) and put my finger on one:

... Scrawled in luminescent handwriting the curator's final words glowed purple beside his corpse. As Langdon stared at the shimmering text, he felt the fog that had surrounded this entire night growing thicker.

Langdon read the message again and looked up at Fache. "What the hell does this mean!"

Fache's eyes shone white. "That, monsieur, is precisely the question you are here to answer."

Just after this last paragraph, there is a section break, an unrelated snippet, then the end of the chapter. Like I said, we wait to no purpose to find out what It-Which-Must-Not-Be-Said (You-Know-What) is. Boring. Clumsy.

Another problem, noted in passing, is the language. Did you notice the image about Langdon feeling the fog? It might help to know that this little scene takes place on the gallery floor of the Louvre, which houses the Mona Lisa. Indoors. In other words, this is the last place anyone would feel fog (a sterile, climate-controlled environment). Maybe the automatic steel doors that had crushed the life out of this entire night should have been closing in.

I have other issues with this book, but I will talk about them in another post; I haven't finished it yet, but somehow I suspect that my opinion will not improve...

On a brighter note, I finished my first collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories by P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves. Bertie Wooster is a turn-of-the-20th-century fop always getting into hijinx, and Jeeves (what is his first name anyway? I don't think I've seen it yet) is the gentleman's gentleman, Bertie's butler, who gets him out of said hijinx. I like this collection on the whole pretty well, but I liked it better as it went on. The stories get progressively funnier and better constructed; the plots of the later stories unravel in hilarious scenes, where those in earlier stories are resolved silently by Jeeves, who comes onstage to explain what he did without us. The last story is by far the best; Wodehouse started telling the stories from Jeeves's point of view instead of Wooster's. Jeeves is the quintessential straight man, droll and sly. I laughed and laughed. You should read these.

You can see some pretty great adaptations of Jeeves and Wooster on PBS, with Hugh Laurie (now appearing on Fox's breakout hit House, M.D.) and Stephen Fry; these two worked together on shows in the UK, like Black Adder and, obviously when you know, A Bit of Fry and Laurie.

I started the first Hugo winner (ever) for Best Novel this week: The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester. So far it bears some interesting resemblances to Minority Report and Demolition Man; or the other way around, since Bester wrote his book in the 1950s. Once you get past some of the typography and "As you know, Bob" expository lumps, it gets interesting and exciting.

(See the Turkey City Lexicon for an entertaining trip through the tropes and cliches of science fiction.)

Good night.

Admissions

I ended something today; nearly seven years after beginning my Bachelor's at the University of Washington, I found out that I have been admitted to the Computer Science department of the Utah State University graduate school. People who knew me before I started would have been, and often were, shocked.

Brain Trust Kid, not getting smarter
Can't adapt, it only gets harder
Things used to be so clear

I was voted Most Likely to Succeed in my senior year of high school. It was a three-way tie. I didn't vote for myself.

Sad soul songs you'd sing to yourself
In your self awaiting the help
You were promised that never appeared

I went to college without thinking, not knowing what I wanted to do there. When I got there, I was deadbolted out of my new home because my roommate, the presumptive heir to the Azteca mexican restaurant chain, was having sex, which I could hear through the door. When my parents came to visit, I hoped they didn't notice the bottles of beer and tequila strewn around the edges of our beds and desks. I ended up sleeping on the couch in my friends' common room more often than not. Then the RAs talked me out of it. I transferred into their area the next quarter.

That year, I didn't call a girl who visited me on her winter break, and she has haunted me to this day. I haven't talked to her for six years.

Oh, Brain Trust Kid
There's nothing in the world to save you

I had the fullest bookshelf. Even after I became a Christian, I prided myself on a sharp mind and a congenial disposition. I enjoyed arguing about religion and everything else. We watched the Simpsons most days for three straight years. I fell in love with video games and free cable. All the time, my grades were slipping.

The big word wins, but nothing to say
A little attention a whole foot away
Could have changed everything for us all

I fell in love with the idea of Linguistics in my sophomore year. Of course, I didn't think about what I would have to go on and do with it, which was, become an ivory-tower academic, or go study a new language out in the boonies. But mathematics and language came together in some great ways in that first class; I never forgot. I completed most of my major classes by the end of my junior year, even though I failed one or two classes a year.

And all the Brain Trust Kids are just getting older
On the skids, losing their luster
But I remember when you were a star

That last year, I had time to kill so I thought about doing a math major (BA, liberal arts version). I thought it would be funny to double major in letters and numbers. I failed the first class I really needed, Multivariable Calculus. I also had too much student debt, all in loans, because I'd failed to write scholarships before I started college, and didn't deserve them after I started.

There's nothing in the world to save you now
As everyone lines up to blame you

One quarter before my fourth year was over, I moved to Utah to be close to my fiancee. College dangled, it turned out, because my grades from my language classes were too low. I worked in a Camelbak-type bottle factory as a temp, welding plastic spouts to plastic bags.

Oh, Brain Trust Kid
Oh, Brain Trust Kid

I got a job laying out textbooks on the computer. I found out that I'd missed my calling. The real combination of letters and numbers I was suited for was computer science. I'd had little training, but the logic, mathematics, and language was almost intuitive to me.

I spent half a year learning about myself in a class through my church, then decided to go back to school for computers, a momentous decision. This was about a year ago; the same week, my wife found out that she was carrying our first child.

So much for the best-laid plans the world has never seen
We'll be heroes in each other's eyes, beloved in our dreams
No one can save us now

Sometimes I wonder what my old friends would think of me; after all, I was supposed to take over the world. Succeed. Become Rich and Famous. If anybody could, I should.

And for myself, I was supposed to become important, wise, make my contribution, be unique and make my burnt offering, my holy gift to God.

All these deep things I sought.

There's nothing in the world to save you

The trickster Jacob worked for seven years herding sheep to receive Leah, the sister he did not love. All that torture of slow time, of age, of disappointment and failure he endured.

He spent another seven years for Rachel.





Lyrics from "Brain Trust Kid" (small) (large) by Glen Phillips.

[Editor's Note 6/24/2006: To those searching in for the lyrics to "Brain Trust Kid" by Glen Phillips, greetings! Here are a few corrections to what I used in the preceding entry. The lyric should read in the second verse, "In your [cell/hell] / Awaiting the help" instead of "In your self"; I've heard either "cell" or "hell" in different recordings. Also, the line "As everyone lines up to blame you" has also been sung "As everyone lines up to shame you". Also, in the bridge "So much for the best-laid plans the world has never seen / We'll be heroes in each other's eyes, beloved in our dreams / No one can save us now", the line "No one can save us now" is pretty rare. I'm not sure exactly, but I think Glen has also sung "There's no one in the world to save you now" instead of "There's nothing in the world to save you now" at various points in the song.

If you like the song, check out www.myspace.com/glenphillips to keep up with Glen and listen to a few of his tunes, see the music video, read the blog, and so on. He has a new album out, Mr. Lemons.

Here follow the complete lyrics with the corrections. Choose only one word where there's an alternation. If you're Glen Phillips' lawyer and he wants me to take down these lyrics, I will, of course. Just email me and establish your bona fides.

Brain Trust Kid, not getting smarter
Can't adapt, it only gets harder
Things used to be so clear

Sad soul songs you'd sing to yourself
In your [cell/hell] awaiting the help
You were promised that never appeared

Oh, Brain Trust Kid
There's nothing in the world to save you

The big word wins, but nothing to say
A little attention a whole foot away
Could have changed everything for us all

And all the Brain Trust Kids are just getting older
On the skids, losing their luster
But I remember when you were a star

There's nothing in the world to save you now
As everyone lines up to [blame/shame] you

Oh, Brain Trust Kid
Oh, Brain Trust Kid

So much for the best-laid plans the world has never seen
We'll be heroes in each other's eyes, beloved in our dreams

There's nothing in the world to save you

The wheels they turn, the gears they grind

The Iraq Interior Ministry released civilian casualty numbers. Over the last ten months, 8175 Iraqi civilians or police officers have died because of insurgent attacks. That is, Iraqis have 9/11 change everything every 4 months or so.

The daily death rate is about 26.8. So they have a London bombing every two days.

They die at ten times the rate of American soldiers.

But it gets worse:

In June the interior minister, Bayan Jabr, told reporters that insurgents had killed about 12,000 Iraqis since the start of the American occupation - a figure officials have emphasized is approximate - an average monthly toll of about 500.

If, in 24 months, 12,000 Iraqis were killed by rebels, and in 10 months, 8175 were killed, that leaves 3825 for the first 14 months of the occupation. So, year over year in the American occupation, the number of civilians dying has actually doubled.

On the other hand, Jabr's number is probably low: iraqbodycount.net puts the number at 22000-25000 today. Still worse, if you read Iraq Body Count's methodology FAQ, they only add to their count when a death appears in two independent news sources; they admit that they are only getting a sample on the real number.

On an oh-so-unrelated subject, I've wondered to myself in the last few days how we were doing at guarding the ammo dumps we failed to secure when we entered Iraq. Is all of it gone by now? Security tight? I don't know why, I just thought it had some vague thing to do with why we went to Iraq in the first place.

But all this calculation is fatiguing my memory. No wonder the Pentagon didn't release its metrics for the war; they forgot too.

Free book reports on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events!

Google search: "how to do book report on the reptile room, by lemony snicket using setting, conflict, theme, reco"

I suppose it was inevitable that I have one of these before long. It took a while because apparently I am not reading enough books that everybody else likes, or that students need to do book reports on.

I don't think there is much of a theme to the Lemony Snicket books, really, unless "adults don't listen to adorable children" or "a word which here means" are themes. They ratchet up all this tension, but it doesn't go to deep places emotionally, it is like a mini-action movie, no matter how wittily displayed (and there are some really funny moments). Count Olaf should wear a black hat to complete the trope. There are all these episodes, and then, like at the end of that Simpsons episode, "[sigh of relief] The status quo." There's just no there there.

Contrast this with fellow shelf-space conqueror Harry Potter, where people are actually growing and changing, where the whole world is rumbling and alive, where hatred, fear, destiny, and wonder come in equal parts.

So if you found this post looking for an easy essay, let me give you some advice: there are a lot of books that get made into movies that are inferior to the written words. If we ever have 3D holographic projectors and actors willing to make hundred-hour transcriptions of fantasy novels, the movies still won't be as good as the books. If you have to choose, read Harry Potter over Lemony Snicket. And try not to let school get you down on books. Find some you really like; you will still like them long after you stop enjoying Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Pokemon. Most days there's nothing on TV, but there will always be another great book to read, until the sun dies or the human race is extinct.

Shusaku Endo

Shusaku Endo was a Japanese Catholic. Do you call him an interstitial man? At any rate, he stood in a unique place as a remarkably eloquent novelist, straddling West and East. His novels often treat the question of how Christianity can or should translate into the foreign culture of the Japanese, and whether Christianity has emphasized the image of the powerful, risen Christ to the exclusion of the suffering, weak Jesus, in achingly beautiful language and stories. His stories are about the transgressors: the oathbreakers, the Christian priests who renounce their faith, the sinners, failures, and fools. He is my favorite author.

He wrote a book in 1973 called A Life of Jesus. It is certainly not evangelical and does not treat the Bible as factual in every detail or spiritually inspired. I would give it to my friends who are not Christians without fearing that they would find it offensive. Instead, from a somewhat skeptical point of view informed by the "higher criticism" and liberal Christian philosophers, Endo breathes life into the story of Jesus.

I really wish I could just type the whole book out here, but I can only advise you to, please, please read it. This is from the concluding chapter, "The Question":

If we grant, merely for the sake of discussion, that the incident of the empty sepulcher is fiction, when we then come to consider the questions I previously raised, we are forced to believe that what did hit the disciples was some other amazing event, some event different in kind yet of equal force in its electrifying intensity. At least, logic impels us to conclude that, whatever it was that might have happened, it was enough to change the "powerless" Jesus in the hearts of the disciples into the "all-powerful" image of Jesus. And then we are constrained to suppose that this other event, whatever its nature, was enough to also persuade the disciples that the resurrection of Jesus was a fact.

The carpenter who grew up in the back country of a weak nation was in his brief career an other-worldly sort of teacher whom in the end not even his own disciples could appreciate. Not until after his death were they able to grasp what kind of person he really was. For all I know, there may well be an analogy here between their inability to understand Jesus during his lifetime and our own inability to understand the whole mystery of human life. For Jesus represents all humanity. Furthermore, just as we, while we live in this world, cannot understand the ways of God, so Jesus himself was inscrutable for the disciples. His whole life embraced the simplicity of living only for love, and because he lived for love alone, in the eyes of his disciples he seemed to be ineffectual. His death was required before the disciples could raise the veil and see into what lay hidden behind the weakness.

Meet people

My wife tells me that she is jealous of me because at least I get to go outside and meet people while she stays at home with our son.

Most days I think this is ridiculous, because I don't go out to meet people; instead I go out to take copious notes at computer class, then go to work and slam my keyboard against my desk. When I come home, I program my homework. Yo ho, yo ho, a hacker's life for me. Arrr.

But today I saw a couple of friends at school. I shot the breeze with Boyd. I met him last semester and we bonded over computer hardware. This summer he is researching digital watermarking. We had a fun time talking about NetHack (warning: addictive! best game ever!) and what we're doing. I told him about my fishing fleet project and he told me about the Battleship game he wrote last semester with sound files cribbed from Worms.

I met somebody new too. I was in the elevator in USU's Old Main building (the first building constructed for this land-grant institution way back when) and this girl I recognized from my hardware class came up as the door was closing. I put out my hand, but the door wouldn't stop, so I hit it until it did. She'd sat across class from me and I didn't know her. She is doing research this summer in Boyd's lab, but she still has a year of undergrad to go. We were about to go our separate ways, and we introduced ourselves. Her name was Kim.

Oh, and I had two midterms and I'm perfecting my POP3 client. No rest for the weary.

Drowned

For the record, I am now trying to learn the following computer technologies this summer: TCP/IP network programming; Java, including AWT and Swing GUIs; regular expressions; theory of computation/computability; Scheme.

What this has done is create a heavy library of computer books for me to carry around. I will have some great accomplishments by the time I'm done, like a Bering Sea fishing fleet simulator using real GPS data, several working network clients and servers, real skill with computer proofs and constructing and manipulating language parsers (in a very generic way), and learning to create programs that create other programs.

First, I have to read about 3000 pages of stuff.

In addition, I just bought the first Jeeves and Wooster stories by P.G. Wodehouse (I have never read anything by him, but I enjoyed the PBS series, and these are cracking good), the complete short stories of William Carlos Williams, and a Hugo award winner by one of my favorite authors: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. I also have The DaVinci Code, which my father-in-law lent me some months back, which I haven't finished yet (it got lent to someone else in the meantime), and The Cost of Discipleship, which I've been reading in little bites. And finally, Sarah and I have been reading Lemony Snicket III.

So if you don't hear from me, I drowned in paper.

Failure a reality; failure an option

I ran across this USA Today article about the troop death rate in Iraq. Remember how I said that the average daily death rate for American troops is 2.1? Let's do some more math.

In the year before last, 657 American soldiers died in Iraq, a daily rate of 1.8. In this last year (beginning 365 days ago, that is), 882 soldiers died in Iraq, a daily rate of 2.4. So over time, the death rate in Iraq has actually gotten worse.

If the death rate increases at the same constant rate, next year the daily death rate will be 3.0; the year after that is 3.6.

On this model, in the next year, 1095 American soldiers will die in Iraq; the year after, it will be 1314.

If (worse) the same broad trend in the increase of the death rate continues (a one-third increase over the previous year), in the next year, the daily death rate for American soldiers will be 3.2; the year after that is about 4.3.

On this model, in the next year, 1184 American soldiers will die in Iraq; the year after, it will be 1589.

These are crude calculations, of course. You could graph the death tolls fluctuating month to month, fit a line or a curve to them and get more detailed results that might correspond with more precision to specific events on the ground.

"The politics of failure have failed! We must make them work again!" says Kang or Kodos, in what, for my money, is one of the best acts in any Simpsons episode. Unfortunately for our army and our country, it is actually the politics of success that have failed. "Stay the course", "turning a corner", "light at the end of the tunnel", "throes", even "winning" are not fair assessments of America's prosecution of the invasion of Iraq and consequent Sunni rebellion.

Let us not try to make the politics of success work again; we need to lose boldly in Iraq. Unfortunately, it may take four more years to make failure an option.

A math problem

The latest number of deaths in the 9/11 attacks I could find is 2992.

The latest number of American deaths in Iraq I could find (military deaths, obviously) is 1744.

It's 834 days today (6/30/2005) since the war in Iraq began (3/19/2003).

At that rate, about 2.1 American soldiers have died (on average) for every day of the war in Iraq. I'll use that 2.1 again.

If we make a back-of-the-envelope assumption that the rate of deaths in Iraq has been constant over the war to today, then on February 17, 2007, the war in Iraq will have killed as many American soldiers as the 9/11 attacks killed civilians.

From President Bush's recent speech, "more than 2,000 members of Iraqi security forces [ed.: I assume this is military and police combined] have given their lives in the line of duty", which is still more than the number of Americans who have died. How many Iraqi civilians have died?

If we believe Donald Rumsfeld, the insurgency will last between 5 and 12 more years.

If the soldiers keep dying at the same rate, 3833 to 9198 more American soldiers will die in Iraq. The numbers for Iraqi civilians and Iraqi security forces I leave as an exercise for the reader.

To appreciate the magnitude of these important numbers, read this analogy.

So here is the cold comfort from President Bush, his message to those of us who worry about these numbers, who lay them at his feet:

I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible. So do I.

Some contend that we should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Let me explain why that would be a serious mistake.

Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done.

It would send the wrong signal to our troops, who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve.

And it would send the wrong message to the enemy, who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out.

We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed and not a day longer.

Circular

Most arguments about anything in philosophy are bunk, because they manage a carefully constructed worldview that is internally consistent, but need bear no relation to anyone else's theory, or to the real world.

I used to wonder why there was an emphasis on real-world examples in my undergraduate philosophy courses. The point was that the professors were dreadfully afraid that they were making it all up. It is easy to live in a fog of abstraction, admire your grand unified theory, and say "God I hope this is true", like a luxury yacht, with a long, sweeping superstructure, fine furnishings, even a minibar... lost at sea. Utilitarianism, metaphysics in general, the philosophy of language all grip reality somewhat tenuously. Aren't these lovely theories? Great ribs welded to a strong, flexible backbone, holding in a beating heart and breathing lungs... no feet and no hands, no eyes and lips, all dressed up and no place to go.

A long time ago I was provoked into an argument about the truth of Christianity and the existence of God. Not provoked by a person, "XYR PDQ, your faith is showing" that kind of thing. But it occurred to me talking to these guys that we were wasting time. We only talked as if we were arguing. In truth, we were spinning out your tapestries of belief independently, and it would have taken us a long time to get to points where we actually clashed. We could criticize each other's work, but only in the unimportant details; if we had to abandon some inconsequential opinion of our worldview, so be it, but nothing was changing.

Religion is like that when it is only believed and not lived. I dislike the word religion because it seems inadequate to my experience; I am more religious than irreligious, but this says so little about my life. I like a distinction between "believed religion" and "lived religion" because it implies that there is or is not a point of contact between what you say and what you do, between appearances and truths, between theories and facts, and finally between abstractions and realities. I recognize stages in my life where I believed religion, then sat on it.

The truth is that facts destroy theories, obliterate them completely. For instance, 9/11 destroyed the theory that the United States was safe from foreign attackers because it is the world's only remaining superpower. What we learned in the invasion of Iraq destroyed the theory that Saddam was bristling with WMDs. Guantanamo Bay prison camp is destroying another theory... And before these facts intervened, it was entirely reasonable to think that these theories would extend, if not in perpetuity, at least for the foreseeable future. Facts "changed everything".

The interesting thing here is that if two theories are in conflict, say like hard determinism and contracausal free will, then there should be some fact in the middle that touches them both. Examining the implications of that fact will destroy one or both theories.

The more facts touch a theory, the more it is verifiable, the more it has to say about the truth. There are exits from the maze. This is true about scientific theories; the more facts they cover, the more righteous they are. Science seems to me to be seeking out the weird facts, the ones that cut through all our old theories, in order to more closely verify and understand the properties of our real weird. Well, religion and philosophy are the same way: the more verifiable, the more potentially trustworthy.

So me and my friends were at a long-standing, collegial impasse, and I started thinking, "What is the Christian fact? What breaks through the contradictory fogs of theories, where will we hit the land?" It was pretty obvious: if Jesus rose from the dead, then Christianity was true; lots of philosophies and atheisms were untrue. And for once, we need not just deny, deny, tug away at each other's inconsequential details. Now we could say something interesting.

We started talking about this. I still have the tapes somewhere, where I explain why it is reasonable to think that Jesus rose from the dead and unreasonable to think otherwise (hint: it's not just that the Bible tells me so). Is this a fact? If so, it is a fact with an uncanny power to cut through the fog and lead us back to dry ground.

Two week vacation

This has been a time of great rest and relaxation for my family. I haven't had any school for the past month, and it has been a great boon for me, for Sarah, and for Alex. I start the computer science crusade in earnest on Monday. Our lives will be squeezed by this time again, and rewarding but challenging. And I will have plenty of time to be on the internet and available.

I know that you are out there, precious reader; for a few more days, enjoy your vacation.