One year ago, I made my first tentative post to this blog.  It was really a test more than a post, as were the handful of posts for the next two weeks.   We really didn’t get running until mid-March, 2006.  

In that month of March 2006, “Grumpypilgrim” and I were happy to see that, on average, 29 people visited this site every day.  Probably 20 of these daily visits were me. This month (February, 2007), there have been almost 2,000 visits to this site every day.  I guarantee that most of them are not me.   Over the life of this blog, we’ve now published 830 posts and we’ve received more than 3,000 comments.  

I am honored that so many people would take the time to visit this site and to actually stay for awhile.  The average visitor reads three pages, the most commonly read page being the home page, which consists of the ten most recent posts.  

I am truly fortunate to be sharing this space with my co-authors.  Some of them, such as Jason, have been my friends for a long time.  Others are people I’ve met (in person or electronically) more recently.  I carefully read everything each of them posts to this site.  

Many people ask whether I can tell who is visiting the blog.  The answer is no.  My traffic software does not provide me with any meaningful identifying information.  It does show me, though, that most visitors are from the U.S.   Next in line are “unknown,” then Canada, UK, China, European Union, Japan, Netherlands, Germany and Australia.

The traffic stats are fun and exciting, though too-often distracting.   What is even more satisfying are the emails (more…)

February’s Big Read in Missouri has selected a surprising novel–Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  I should not assume everyone today has read it, so briefly it is a novel about a future in which it is illegal to read books.  The fire department, because all houses are built of fireproof materials, no longer puts out fires, but burns books when it finds hidden caches.  A fairly decent film was made of it in the Sixties.  The reasoning behind this future is the eventual, clinical “rationalization” of history by a technocratic elite who have decided that fiction–and dreams–are inimical to peace and productivity and happiness.  The scientific age did this, with its hyper rationality and impatience with anything that cannot be measured or controlled.  It is a parable much of its times–the Fifties–and a terrifying landscape to anyone with half a brain and an ounce of independence.

But…

Ray Bradbury got it wrong, but when I first read Fahrenheit 451 I believed him. He scared me to the core with that book. That and the related stories, like The Exiles and Usher II, chilled me and set me on schemes of hiding my books from the sterile-suited, cold-eyed rationalists bent on doing me good for my own sake. Scared me terrifically, but in the end he got it wrong.

I was eleven when I read both 451 and The Martian Chronicles.  I was in parochial school, among people ready to protect me with great spiritual warmth from a world that seemed determined to do away with God. Somehow in that strange time in the middle to late Sixties, communism and science had gotten entwined. It’s clear now. Most of the sf films of the Fifties and Sixties depicted the scientist as an emotionless drudge, all consumed with reason and facts. Communists were likewise shown to be people who would sacrifice their parents in the name of the state, the collective, the greater good of the proletariat. There was no room for love or faith or kindness. It was an aesthetic alliance, a tone and pervasive comparison that we just took for granted. We were children, we didn’t know.

And most didn’t care. There was baseball and muscle cars, rock’n'roll and miniskirts, and Johnson, whose Texan drawl was anything but literate and scientific, was going to make the country povertyless and free. Science was going to moon, not learning how think. Communism was “over there” in rice paddies and Red Square and the quickest way to get a punch in the eye was to call somebody a “Commie.”

But I was reading these stories of how in the name of the orderly society all the books were going to be collected and burned and it was going to be the scientists–the rationalists– who were going to do it. After all, it wasn’t rational to believe in alternate worlds or aliens or ghosts or Atlantis (even though archaeologists were searching, but they weren’t after all scientists–were they?–scientists worked in laboratories and wore white smocks…); it wasn’t rational to dream about John Carter or Tarzan, pretend to be Horatio Hornblower or James Bond; it wasn’t rational to prefer reading fantasies about other stars rather than textbooks about them.

Was it?

I wasn’t sure. Even while I made preparations, hidey-holes in which to squirrel away my books, something nagged me about the whole premise. For one thing, while I was reading Bradbury, I was also reading Clarke.

The thing about Arthur C. Clarke, especially at that age, is the impossibility of coming away without a sense of his profound faith that science–Reason–will give us the stars. And everything else in between. Clarke’s work shares a pervasive confidence–not loud and splashy, but quietly insistent, just there in the background–that the true spirituality of humanity is expressed in its ability to solve problems and realize dreams.

Wait a minute. Dreams? But scientists aren’t dreamers, are they? I mean, the books I love, the novels and stories, they’re dreams on paper, made living by the reading…they aren’t rational. They won’t solve problems or give us the stars…will they? The scientists will burn them…won’t they?

Like most things at that age, obsessions come and go. I recovered from my fright. I didn’t think about it for a long time, until I ran into committees organized to pull books from library shelves, people who published lists of banned books, boycotts against bookstores designed to get rid of certain books. Then all the fear Bradbury had evoked in me as a child came back, full force.

But they weren’t scientists. Or communists.

They were people who believed in ghosts. People who believed in devils and plots with communists. People who were afraid of scientists. People who, if they read books at all, only read the books they are told to read by those who make promises they cannot deliver.

Bradbury got it wrong. Partly, at least. The book burners don’t know anything about science, nor do they want to. If they win they will not be clean, sterile technocrats. They won’t be burning the Bible along with Narnia and the Galactic Empire. They won’t go to Mars. They won’t go anywhere. Science is a dream, too.

Clarke understood.

I’m glad I read them both.

One of our earlier posts concerned the efforts of evangelicals to relegate early hominid fossils to the back room of Kenya’s National Museum.   That post recently drew this comment from James Davenock:

It seems that many here could simply replace the name Sam Harris, with Jesus, Newton or Sullivan in their writings. Many keep quoting others in an attempt to get their point across rather than just trying to get their point across. You could say “Dave, I admire Jesus’ viewpoints” or “Dave, I admire Sam Harris’ viewpoints” or “Dave, I admire Newton’s viewpoints”. . .

 The difference between Science and Religion is Science has a process by which to prove its ideas while Religion does not and requires you to simply accept or excommunicate. I have found the same smugness in both religious and science types and that is a bit disquieting.

The wise man first says “I do not know”

I started responding to James Davenock’s comment at the location of that earlier post, but it grew long enough to justify posting at this separate location.

Davenock raises a good point.  I suspect that there are many non-believers out there (all of us, some of the time), who “hero-worship” people like Richard Dawkins just like many theists hero-worship James Dobson or Jesus. You can quickly spot these folks by their writings, which essentially amount to “Way to go, Charles [Darwin]!”  Or “Way to go, Jesus!”  This lack of thoughtful content is no more informative than the rote prayers many people utter in churches.  “Amen!”

Admittedly, it doesn’t take much to write a “me too!” comment.   Such comments don’t add much to the conversation.   I suspect that most “me too!” comment writers could tremendously enhance their contributions by adding even one extra sentence to let us know what motivated the “Me too!”   But, alas, many of them don’t give us that extra sentence or two.

Maybe they can’t.  Some “Me too!” comment writers who admire scientists or freethinkers might not be sufficiently intellectually engaged with the ideas of those they purport to admire to write that additional sentence.  Maybe they can’t yet articulate why they are attracted to a writer.  Or maybe what attracts them is only the ultimate conclusions of a Richard Dawkins or the panache of Sam Harris, rather than the intellectual path that those writers have mapped out.  Or maybe those comment writers are driven by frustration with the theories offered by believers and they are essentially rebelling without a well-articulated reason for rebelling.  Perhaps they are engaged emotionally, but not intellectually.

On the other hand, there are also lots of thoughtful readers who have carefully reviewed the arguments of people like Dawkins/Harris before giving their fully-informed consent.  When those people say “Way to go, Sam [Harris],” they have read, pondered, critically analyzed and only then approved of Harris’ writings.  Unfortunately, they sometimes don’t add an extra sentence to their comment to let us know that they are truly intellectually engaged.

In short, a “Me too!” comment might mean a lot and it might mean not much.”  Approval and admiration fall along a continuum.  “Me too!” might constitute only the mindless name-dropping by someone who amounts to a groupie or it might be the too-quick and too-short work of someone much more intellectually engaged.   Each “me-too” comment needs to be judged individually.  Again, there’s often not enough information in the comment to evaluate the extent to which the me-tooer is mindlessly me-tooing.

As a general rule, I don’t mind providing space to me-tooing skeptics.   In a world where Jesus is promoted on every fourth billboard, as well as on t-shirts, books, political speeches and all of those Bibles I find in my hotel rooms, the interests of skeptics have traditionally been underserved. (more…)

Below is a link to a blog called 101 Reasons to Stop Writing.  It is a blog about writing and actually does have a list of reasons to stop, which, when one considers the amount of verbiage being generated by the human race, might seem like an impossible challenge.  Those of us with presumptions to actually be  writers–professional, that is, receiving coin for our sentences–are afflicted, I think, with a singular mix of obsession and insecurity. 

There is, however, no Twelve-Step Program for us, and even if there were, the initial admittance–that we are powerless to control the urge to run out streams of words on the off-chance someone might actually read them (or, more, enjoy them)–means for us that we are subsequently powerless to continue with the 12-step.  But, on the other hand, explaining our affliction, paradoxically, feeds the monkey–more words.  And explaining to each other about our affliction sustains us in times when we feel ignored by those who only read what we write.  We are subject to puzzled bemusement by people who “don’t understand”; made sometimes to feel guilty by people who want us to come out and play who, when told we are busy writing, complain that we’re not doing anything.

Writing requires both solitude and congeniality–to write about people, we must know them, but we are by nature prone to misanthropy.  The more we know people, sometimes, the less we like them, yet we must be sympathetic lest we ostracize the very public we need to support our habit.

But enough about me.  I have fiction to write.  I shall leave you all with the analysis.

Heather Havrilesky of Salon is a gifted writer, indeed.  She opens a recent article by discussing the delighted innocence of her baby girl, “my own happy tadpole, who just arrived on this overheated blue sphere four months ago, gazes at the branches of trees and feels the cold noses of dogs and pronounces them exciting and delightful.” But then the discussion moves on to what dawns on us adults when we realize what we once were: 

This is why so many parents of young kids look simultaneously giddy and heartbroken: They share in the raw happiness of little people (an intoxicating experience that’s not foreshadowed at all by spending time with other people’s messy little monsters) but they’re also forced to recognize what blind, embittered, joyless shells they themselves have become over the years, by comparison. When my little sponge stares, rapt, at blades of grass, it makes me wish that I could scrub off 36 years of neurotic tics and self-defeating habits, that I could forget about the burgeoning population of pedophiles uncovered by Dateline’s queasy “To Catch a Predator” series, that I could just appreciate the greenness of grass, not to mention the million or so other things that healthy, dry, well-fed middle-class people like myself have to feel thankful for …

For the schadenfreude, read the rest of her provocative article, “The dreams of aspiring Broadway stars and white rappers are crushed while a nation looks on, delighted!”   Havrilesky has put her finger on something that I never quite articulated so well.  Her focus is NBC’s Grease: You’re the One That I Want,” a show that “taps into a scary subculture of wannabe Sandys and Dannys out there, an odd assortment of humans with big saucer eyes and disturbingly earnest looks pasted on their faces.”

Molly Ivins has passed away. We’ve lost one of the sharpest voices in political journalism, an erudite and empassioned observer. The CNN report is here.

I’ve followed Molly’s words on and off for the better part of two decades and I have found her cool judgment and sound reasoning cause for optimism when, in the heat of partisan ignorance, both sides, left and right, ramp their rhetoric up to earbleeding screed level. As an example, here is her last column.

In memory of a sane voice and a champion of rationality, take a few minutes and try to reset your potentiometers to a level where reason has a chance to make a difference.

Here’s a long and thoughtful article by Gary Kamiya on Salon, titled “The Readers Strike Back.” The article is as long as it is thoughtful.

Kamiay brings out the many ways in which unedited, immediate and intense reader feedback (especially at newspapers & e-zines) affects writers and their craft.  Here’s the before and after snapshot: 

[T]he newly vocal masses contain not only thoughtful and respectful readers but also large numbers of fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts. Moreover — and this is a crucial point — the percentage of letter writers who are fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts has exponentially increased. In the old stamped-letter days, the difficulty of writing in weeded out more of these types; letters tended to be somewhat more thoughtful, and letter writers usually adhered to certain conventions of etiquette and decorum governing communications between reader and writer. Not forelock-tugging subservience to their betters, but simple courtesy. There was a tacit acknowledgment of the implicit contract between writer and reader, one characterized by at least a modicum of idealization and respect on both sides. I don’t want to exaggerate this — certainly there were plenty of ad hominem and intemperate letters back then. But having edited several magazines in the print-only era, I can say that there were far, far fewer. Perhaps the unseen presence of an editor, the slightly formal nature of writing a “letter to the editor,” led readers to be on their better behavior.

Now, in the glorious days of “disintermediation,” when writing a letter or posting a blog is as easy as banging away on a keyboard for a few seconds and clicking “Send,” that contract has been trashed. Formality? The context of online communication is more like being in your car in a traffic jam than sitting across a table from someone and having a talk — and it’s easy to flip somebody off through a rolled-up window. As a result, the kind of people who are prone to flipping others off, braying obscenities and ranting pointlessly are disproportionately represented in online letters sections and reader blogs.

The article makes the point that the “worst online abuse is directed at writers who make themselves vulnerable by revealing intimate things about their lives.”  Kamiya quotes Salon writer Laura Miller: “If you write something revealing, people mob up and become predatory.”  This tendency toward abuse illustrates that online writing is (like so many other important things) subject to the ”the tragedy of the commons.”  

The benefits of all of the writer feedback are many, but these benefits need to be weighed against the greatest danger: creative paralysis experienced by the writers.   

I’ve recently been digging into the family of blogs that goes under the umbrella name: scienceblogs.com.  Here’s the general mission:

Our mission is to build a community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about science and its place in our culture, and give them a place to meet.

The Science Blogs are a tremendous resource, consisting 57 dedicated scientists and science writers reaching out to accomplish the above mission.  Look down the left column here for the bloggers.  Recently, I have spent time on these science blogs:

Discovering Biology in a Digital World, is authored by a woman who describes herself as follows:

I am a microbiologist and molecular biologist turned tenured biotech faculty turned bioinformatics scientist turned entrepeneur. My passion is developing instructional materials for 21st century biology

She presents some cleanly-written articles on topics the deserve cleanly written articles, like “How do you Sequence a genome,”  What is a gene?  and “Make your own stem cells.”

Consider visiting Retrospectacle, whose quest is to ponder “how science intersects with politics, culture, policy, money, medicine, and religion in an attempt to be more than just a niche scientist sitting in the oh-so-lovely ivory tower.”  In this link, she ponders the science of being rich.

Did you ever wonder why we curse?  Page 3.14  explores that issue here.  Or try out this demonstration to see how well you could create a carbon-neutral future if your were “King for a Day.”

For a bounty of thoughtful posts, visit Mike the Mad Biologist who, according to the blog, rants about “politics, evolution and microbiology.”  A good example of the high quality writing is “Chickens and Group Selection.”  You’ll also get a good dose of religion and politics from Mike.

Actually, you’ll get a good dose of politics stirred in with science at many of these sites, including Corpus Callosum and the Scientific Activist (including this post about yet another unqualified Bush Appointee at NASA). All of this “political science” is necessary, of course, because modern politics so often can’t bear to follow the lead of good science to follow the evidence where it leads.  Yet another engaging site along these lines is Dispatches from the Culture Wars, a site written by Ed Brayton.

Though not part of the Science-blog family, here’s yet another good science-education site I recently discovered.  Would you like to see some really impressive collection of science-related images and video, combined with crisp writing?  If so, check out Neurophilosophy.    Here is how the author describes his interests:

I write about most aspects of neuroscience, from the molecular to the cognitive. I am particularly interested in neuroethology, cognitive evolution, philosophy of mind and the application of nanotechnology to the biomedical sciences. I occasionally throw in a bit of astronomy/ cosmology, and anything else I find interesting.

I could imagine spending weeks reading the posts at these quality sites.   If only I had weeks . . .

I’m reporting again from Memphis, where I am attending the National Conference for Media Reform sponsored by Free Press. 

This morning, I attended a panel discussion entitled “Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media.  The panel was headed by Eric Klinenberg, who teaches sociology at New York University.  He is also the author of Fighting for Air: the Battle to Control America’s Media (2007).

Klinenberg indicated that we have been experiencing decades of deregulation in the media industry and we’re now paying for it.  To those who attended this conference, however, he asked whether they remembered the moment when they figured out that they did not have to accept the toxic misleading filtered version of the media that they had been getting.  He asked them if they remembered that moment when they realized that they could do something about this problem, about this media that has become “a war-mongering media.”

Large corporations are striving to finish the job of taking over the media.  They are trying to take over the entire media system and to “plunder” it for their own profits.  How bad have things gotten?  Klinenberg states that he can’t find a single person who is more pleased with the media today than he or she was 10 years ago.  No one he asks tells him that “after that newspaper chain took over, I learned so much more about my community.” 

Pete Tridish of Prometheus radio was the first speaker. Prometheus is handing out flyers containing this headline:

Can you do a better job than big media?  Now is your chance to get your own radio station!

This flyer pertains to an unusual event.  The FCC will be handing out free powerful radio licenses to not-for-profit groups in the United States in the spring.  Pete’s project also includes low-power community radio, however.  To learn more about either of these projects, go to the site of Prometheus radio.

Pete is an unusual hero, in that he came out of nowhere (with regard to the media world) to be an effective spokesperson for an extremely important issue.  He was working as a carpenter when it occurred to him (and to some of his fellow activists), that they needed to build their own radio station. He strongly belived that radio stations should be for anyone who has something to say that is not getting aired.  For instance, Clear Channel has 1200 stations, but regular people cannot have any stations like that nor readily get significant time on those stations.

Pete started his pirate radio station in Philadelphia about seven years ago.  He and his friends soldered together the electronics and eventually came up with a working radio station that could broadcast with a range of a few miles.  His friends joined in and eventually they had 80 shows running on his “pirate radio station.”

Eventually, the FCC announced that it was going to shut them down.  After those who were engaged in this enterprise talked it over, they decided to issue an ultimatum to the FCC to “bust us at noon in front of Ben Franklin’s printing press.”  (more…)

About ten years ago, when I first started auditing graduate-level classes in cognitive science, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to learn (I still do). The topics included such things as connectionism, evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and education theory.  It felt like I was learning less and less about more and more to such an extent that I was eventually going to know nothing about everything.

One of the professors acknowledged the enormous scope and depth of the material.  He commented to me “it’s like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hydrant.

That phrase stuck with me ever since.  It seems like I run into yet another entirely new overwhelming topic every few weeks.  It helps me to keep in mind that it’s often not supposed to be easy.  That’s why people spend much of their lives getting good at each of the many hundreds of disciplines.  There’s very few people that have command over more than a few of the numerous challenging fields out there.

That feeling of being overwhelmed while studying cognitive science reminded me that I felt the same way in my first year of law school.  If you did what many of the professors told you to do, you would be spending 18 hours every day reading material that would be largely unhelpful.  An alternative strategy that worked for me was to work hard to quickly determine what to ignore.  In law school, the teachers often required us to read long cases (some of these were 30 to 50 pages long) in order to learn a individual legal principles.  The cases were oftentimes superfluous factual illustrations of those simple principals.  Unfortunately, much of the material contained in many of the judicial opinions did not concern the principle being studied.  Rather, judicial opinions often spend a lot of time setting forth a tangentially relevant complex fact situation and, oftentimes, an equally complex and tangentially relevant procedural history.  Many of the times we did this (though, admittedly, not every time), it was for the purpose of learning a single legal principle that could be articulated effectively in less than a minute. 

Once I learned what to ignore, I could skim the parts of the case that didn’t concern the important legal principle. Instead, I could focus my time on the relevant facts and procedure. (more…)

I would like to take a few lines to introduce people who don’t already know this writer to James Morrow. As it happens, Jim is a friend of mine. I admire and respect him and I find his writing a delight. He is first and foremost a satirist, of the first water, and I must immediately recommend his Godhead Trilogy as one of the finest riffs on the whole idea of Jehovah in the modern world I have ever read. The three books are utterly fearless: Towing Jehovah, Blameless In Abaddon, and The Eternal Footman.

In the first of these, God has died. An angel comes to a disgraced oil tanker captain with a last commission from the Lord, whose immense body is floating in the south Atlantic. The angels have prepared a tomb in the Arctic and they wish this captain to tow the corpse there for internment. Naturally, the trip is fraught with peril.

The second novel details the trial of God (posthumously, of course) in The Hague. The last is about the world coming to grips with life without a god.

Superb writing, superb thinking, marvelous examinations of some cherished nuggets of human qualities.

The occasion for this piece, however, is his latest book, The Last Witchfinder. Up till this, Jim has been mainly a science fiction or fantasy writer, and intends returning to that milieu for his next book. But this one is an historical novel, based on actual events, and is a lucid examination of two completely incompatible modes of thinking during the time of their separation from each other and their subsequent war with each other. Set during the last days of James II reign and the beginning of William of Orange’s reign, this is the fertile period of the Enlightenment. The time when Locke, Newton, Hooke, Boyle, and the Royal Society began the solid first steps away from occult and alchemical suasions and set the West firmly on the road to reason. At least, it ought to have been. No one who has read this blog can think that we’re done with all that nonsense many hoped had been left behind in the Middle Ages, and in this novel Morrow shows us how the fight began (in a modern sense) and how the arguments have both changed and remained essentially the same.

Besides, it’s a very good read.

Recently, Jim gave an interview in the magazine LOCUS wherein he talks about reason, secularism, and the fray in which we find ourselves today. There are excerpts on-line here.

But here is a sampling, and one of my favorite observations on the current situation:

“You really get the sense that the Bushies would be perfectly happy to see a low-level, feel-good, smiley-face theocracy descend upon this republic. The Bushies know that the Christian argument is correct in an absolute sense, so why should anybody have a problem with it? For me, the great irony of our time is that even as Bush is denouncing Darwin, condemning stem-cell research as blasphemy, and encouraging what he calls ‘faith-based initiatives,’ his administration is hoping against hope that something resembling a rational, secular, post-Enlightenment republic will emerge in Iraq. It’s a towering irony.”

Jim and I met at a convention several years ago and sort of intersected during a discussion with another person about the utility of western style materialist thinking, as opposed to other philosophies. It became a heady, profound review of the problems of modern academic reassessment–deconstruction, relativism, the notion that science is “merely a narrative” with as much usefulness as any other “philosophy”–and we left the party after a few hours of this, dazed and a bit drained. We walked down the corridor toward our respective rooms in the hotel and at the elevator, Jim looked at me, a bit bleary-eyed, and asked: “Who are you?”  The way he said that, he meant is as a compliment, and I have been as proud of that particular question asked from that particular man under those particular conditions as almost anything else in my life.

Since then we’ve had opportunity to have other, less intense, but no less fruitful conversations, and I have come to think of him as a kindred spirit. I always thought he was a gifted writer, and his new novel proves the case.

The Last Witchfinder is also the latest of a number of novels dealing with the period of The Enlightenment by science fiction writers, who seem to be returning to the very font of our freedom from superstition to try to divine the source of both our chosen world-views and the beginnings of the battle we continue to wage against those elements of irrationality which plague us today, as if by reviewing the time, the personalities, the thinking of the day, we might find a clue as to where we have gone wrong recently, resulting in the startling statistic that some 40% of Americans are waiting for the Second Coming.

Other forays of note include Neal Stephenson’s immense Baroque Cycle–three volumes, Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World–which examine that same period as a set of processes and discoveries which teased the mind of Western Civilization away from the dead-ends of spiritual dictatorship and produced the Modern Era. It is a look at history in a way only a science fiction writer could see it.

I commend these books. They are fiction. They are fun, but they are enlightening.

Check out Jim’s other books, too. Go to his website. www.sff.net/people/Jim.Morrow/ Treat yourself to the special pleasures of a fine writer doing solid work…and learn a few things along the way.This announcement has been brought to you by a concerned aesthete.

A novel in every sentence! 

I’ve been collecting quotes for years.  Here are some of my favorites.  No particular topic.  BTW, “The Quotations Page is a good place to get a quote of the day. 

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (referring to the benefits of openness and transparency).

If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.

Robert G. Ingersoll, American politician and lecturer

Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t.

George Bernard Shaw

“Success is going from failure to failure without a loss in enthusiasm.”

Winston Churchill

“The best time to plant a tree… was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.”

Chinese Proverb

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

The besetting sin of political and media types is that about 98 percent of their public conversation is utterly dishonest. The language is inflated, pompous, deceptive. The words are soft, squishy evasions of reality, coated in a layer of Olympian certainty. There’s a fundamental disconnect between the speaker and the listener.

Jeff Greenfield      

“If this is the ‘ultimate game,’” Duane Thomas said, “how come they’re gonna play it again next year?”

As quoted by Jeff Greenfield

“The mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.”

Thoreau, from “Life Without Principle.”

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.  ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know.’  
‘Then,’ said the cat,’ it doesn’t matter.’

  Lewis Carrol: Alice in Wonderland

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Martin Luther King Jr., “The Trumpet of Conscience”, 1967 (more…)

Every couple of weeks a reader asks me (through email) whether it is OK to link to one of our posts.  Absolutely!   Linking makes us more available to more readers.   Further, linking to our posts makes our site more visible on Google and other search engines.  

Therefore, if you see a Dangerous Intersection post you’d like to share on your own site, link away!  There’s no need to ask permission.  Just be sure to give credit to our site and our writers.

I’m still relatively new at administering a blog, but it has now become clear that we need to give our readers notice as to what will and won’t fly regarding comments.  

The starting point is that we love comments.  Without them, our posts lack life.  Therefore, if you are tempted to comment, please do send it to us.  You can do so anonymously (readers won’t see who you are).   I rarely use the email address you provide in order to comment, though I occasionally write a note to a potential commenter asking for a clarification or thanking him or her for an especially good comment).

As of late, a few commenters have used their comments to pull the conversation way off-topic. I fear that allowing this to happen is annoying those who want to stay on-topic. There have been a few other problems, as well.  Rather than rejecting these problems on an ad hoc basis, I thought it would be more fair to publish some guidelines as to what “works” as a comment.   I added a few other housekeeping items in this list as well.

To reiterate the bottom line, please do send us comments.  We really enjoy hearing for you.  We want to know what posts “work” and where we need to improve.  We get more than 1,000 unique visitors each day now, and we’d enjoy knowing who you are and what you are thinking.

Without further ado, here is our new Comments (etc) Policy (I’ve also posted this file also in our “About Page”):

Comments

We welcome comments, especially those that disagree with our posts and those that point out perceived errors.  Please send us your comments, as long as they are relevant to the post, informative and polite.

We consider all comments you send us to be intended for publication with attribution.

We reserve the right to edit your submitted comments for content, clarity, and length.

We will reject or edit comments to the extent that they contain the following:

• Potentially libelous comments.
• Obscene or racist comments.
• Personal attacks, insults, or threatening language.
• Plagiarized material or copyright violations.
• Private, personal information published without consent.
• Comments totally unrelated to the topic of the post.
• Promotions or spam.
• Comments that attempt to change the topic of the post to an unrelated topic.
• Repeated comments by the same author making the same point.
• Name-calling, personal attacks or racist taunting.
• Hyperlinks to material that is not related to the discussion.

Don’t send us comments that consist of lengthy writings you’ve pasted in from elsewhere, including news articles.  Doing this could constitute a copyright violation.  Instead, you should link to that information.

Anonymous posters should consistently identify themselves with the same name, so that readers know that all such comments are coming from a single individual.

Email

All emails received by this site (or by the individual authors) are considered intended for publication with attribution unless otherwise requested in the initial email from the writer.

Other Notices and Disclaimers

In case there is any doubt, we would be honored to have you link to our posts.  No need to ask permission.  We would prefer that you not copy entire posts, but that you limit your copying to excerpts (especially on our longer posts).   Just make sure you give our writers credit!

The content contained in each of the posts on this site is exclusively attributable to the individual author and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of any of the other authors.

Dangerous Intersection is not responsible for, and often disagrees with, material posted in the comments section. Because this is an oftentimes vigorously paced opinion site we make no claim that we are able to fact-check each claim made by each comment.

Last evening, I wasted about 1½ hours working in the basement on some uninteresting but useful titanium accessories that I call Fat Wires on MrTitanium.com. I had a dyslexic moment, and made them slightly wrong. Just wrong enough that I can’t in good conscience sell them. I found this very frustrating. A big waste of time.

This morning I started over. This sort of fine craft allows my mind to wander as I cut, hammer, punch, drill, grind, band-aid, polish, bend, re-polish, and assemble. I reflected on Erich’s post on Fungible time: The principle that time, like money, is commutative in an accounting sense. In brief, time is spent whatever you do, so you should make the best of it.

So I wondered (in between thinking about the imminent Buy Nothing Day and listening to FM blather) why I was so upset at having wasted 1½ hours on honing my craft but getting no product, yet a comparable time wasted playing Doom2 or watching YouTube doesn’t bother me. I quit TV several weeks ago.
(more…)

We recently received this comment from Scholar:

Erich or Grumpy,

May I please have some more links to the discussions here at dangerous intersections which you have found to be most interesting, *must read*, or highlights in general.

Thanks,
Scholar

–

I took Scholar’s request seriously and went back to review many of our posts.  I still can’t get over how many topics we’ve addressed in nine months, covering 592 posts! 

Rather than call these posts the “best of,” I would merely call them the more memorable posts to me, keeping in mind the triple asterisk that comes with the assembly of this list:  1) I simply didn’t have the time to review each of the posts again.  Therefore, this list is only representative, not complete.  2) It is difficult to determine any meaningful criteria on which to base such a list, other than (as I’ve already suggested) the idea that this list includes many of the posts I found memorable.  Other people will certainly have different ideas of what posts are worthy 3) Scholar’s request puts me in an awkward spot, given that I write for the blog. 

To the extent that I’ve included my own posts, then, it should be with the understanding that I am not trying to judge the writing so much as considering whether the ideas addressed are memorable to me, whether the ideas expressed therein seemed important or whether they moved me.  Here’s another way of looking at it:  if you want to know what this site is all about, here are some good places to start.

It is so very hard to choose.  It’s like asking a parent to choose his or her favorite child.  Without further ado, here are my selections:
Reflections on Hotel Rwanda  

Why Do They Hate Us?  

Why Does a Recently Created World Seem So Old? 

My limited vision. 

Banking laws for sale  

semantics, schemantics

A new age of immaturity 

The greatest sin–and virtue–of human memory 

God’s attractive nuisance: the Tree of Knowledge 

Playing to the terrorists’ strength 

SEX 

Alien Rapture

Wither Thou Goest…

Consumptious Conspicuosity  

Sticks, Stones, and Prayer Mats (more…)

Watching the furor generated over Erich’s post about Bart Erhman’s book has been awesome.  I mean that in the strict meaning of the word.  It is awe-illiciting.  After watching the average responses to our posts rise and fall around five to ten each, with a few fetching somewhere in the twenties, here we have a thread running well into the four hundreds with no sign of ebbing to a halt.

I’ve been dipping in from time to time to see where the argument is, and some patterns have emerged which are both frustrating and heartening.  By any objective criteria, the folks of a generally pragmatic, secular viewpoint have held to a bit higher standard of argument than those of the religious/romantic side.  The silliness of watching people over and over again assert that, basically, the evidence doesn’t matter, the universe is the way I  believe it is because, well, I believe it’s that way (the bible says so, after all, even when it doesn’t) reminds me strongly of a kindred, albeit much more modest and almost invisible debate which is related to my own profession.

Jason Rayl is a pseudonym.  There are a variety of reasons for using one, but the chief one for me is that it keeps two sides of my writing life separate.  I write fiction–get paid for it–and while doing so I use a voice somewhat different than what I use as Jason.  Jason allows me a certain freedom I might not allow myself under my “real” name.  It also removes the possibility of people taking the view that my words here are somehow to be taken differently because I’m “that writer guy there” and I have a persona.  People think they know who you are by reading your writing.  Only when you write autobiography or memoir should that actually be taken to be true (and as we’ve learned in the last few years, not even then is it entirely to be trusted).  People should not judge a writer of fiction by the work produced.  It’s fiction.  We make it up.

Still, certain proclivities can be gleaned in a broad sense about the artist. 

I write science fiction.  I’ve published ten novels, scads of short stories, essays, reviews.  I’ve even been shortlisted for a few awards, so apparently I do my craft at a reasonably high level, which leads me to assume I know something about that which I write.

I do not write fantasy, as a rule.  (I have  committed fantasy from time to time, as experiment, but my preference is overwhelmingly for SF.)

There’s a good reason I eschew fantasy, most of which I do not read, either.  And it relates to this ongoing secular vs religious argument–in many ways. 

This has been a debate in the field for a few decades now.  Most people are getting bored with it, and so it wanes from time to time, only to be reborn when some young turk comes on the scene and makes A Pronouncement, which usually runs something like this:  “Science fiction is really a subset of Fantasy, which has a much older pedigree.  Therefore, science fiction can lay no special claim to being any more plausible or realistic or believable than fantasy.”

Originally, this argument was made by fantasy writers who had a much smaller market share than science fiction.  They were jealous.  That situation has now reversed and SF is a smaller part of the single SF/F genre designation.  Fantasy writers are getting more money, selling more books, and, of course, have more readers than science fiction.  So now the argument is rather condescending when it comes up, a kind of “I told you so” rant on the part of fantasy authors.  Pathetic, really.

It is a matter of concern for those of us practicing SF.  We don’t quite understand why the Adventures of Dronan Thunderthighs and His Elf Courtesan are outselling us by such margins.  We don’t quite understand, you see, why the former audience for SF has abandoned what we consider a better read (more intellectually stimulating, at least) for pure escapism.

Now, here’s where the two different debates, in my mind, have some similarity.  There is, despite the well-deployed critical arguments of certain fantasy writers, a major difference between SF and Fantasy and it has to do with world views.

This is one of those instances of slippery definitions.  It is more often a matter of “I know it when I see it” rather than a hard and fast rule that can be applied to determine the difference.  I’ve been intuitively convinced that the two genres are utterly different for a good thirty years, but only when I was confronted by a rabid, evangelizing fantasy fan did I begin trying to really concretize my impression.  What I have come up with it, as briefly as possible, is that science fiction is Epistemological fiction, while fantasy is Religious fiction. 

By that I mean SF is, underneath all the slick effects, spaceships, aliens, physics, and rayguns, thematically concerned with knowledge and how it works and how the universe is structured.

Fantasy could care less about how anything works.  It is concerned with symbol, fate, and moral reification.

These distinctions work in the subtext, as starting points from which the point of view of the work springs.

Roughly, SF is based on a universe as understood by science, fantasy is based on a universe as understood by myth.

Despite the fact that certain works have over the eighty-odd year history of the genres tried to blend the two, for the most part they don’t blend.  Science fantasy is a mongrel creation that is neither fish nor fowl.  It can be very enjoyable, but it is never a true hybrid because, depending on what the author is concerned with, the work tips over into one or the other.

The first three Star Wars movies (nunbers 4, 5, and 6, that is) are pure fantasy, despite the science fiction trimmings.  Lucas tried to turn the whole thing into SF in the first three (numbers 1, 2, and 3, that is) only to create a hobbled, stumbling mess, because he lost the thread created in the first first three.

How is this like the debate between secularists and religionists? 

Well, for the most part SF writers grumble about the popularity of Fantasy but don’t try to turn it into something it’s not.  We don’t tell fantasy writers that what they’re doing is really SF, it’s just that they don’t know it (or do it well).  But fantasy writers do try to tell us that we’re just writing fantasy.

Science gets regularly accused of being a religion.  I don’t think any scientist ever accused religon of being something other than religion.

But also in the discourse between the two groups, there comes a point when reason breaks down and the fantasy devotee (I’m speaking now of the reader, the fan, not the writers, who know better) starts making accusations about how this or that just doesn’t work in SF, which makes it less than claimed, and really fantasy.  The SF side continues to point out problems with the comparison, never resorts to name-calling, just sticks to, well, epistemology.  Eventually, the SF devotee just walks away, having at some point “won” the argument (which is to say, made the point, proved the point, offered examples in support of the point, and finished making the case), while the other side keeps frothing.

What bothers me these days is how many young people turn away from SF–it’s hard, harder than fantasy, which offers sagas of validation for characters who have little more than their birthright, their family name, their so-called destiny, and win the day usually by killing someone.  SF–good SF–prompts thought, you need to know a little something to comprehend it, it elevates the idea of learning, and that problem-solving is not a trait “owned” by a bloodline…

Anyway, I wanted to lighten this up a little bit and make an observation from the smaller to the larger.  I can’t help seeing people stuck in a religious tautology as fantasy fans who don’t and won’t understand Einstein or quantum mechanics or the fact that all you really have is a brain that needs filling.  Maybe this sounds a little harsh, but to me religion and fantasy do roughly the same thing–let one escape, for a short while, the idea that magic (miracle) doesn’t happen and that, really, it’s not necessary–just a little learning, which seems frightening to people who want to feel special because they belong to a certain club, not because they’ve worked hard to be someone worth while.

One more similarity between the two debates.  In SF, there is no single, seminal work that defines the field.  You could pick maybe ten books that sort of do that, but it’s impossible to reduce what science fiction is  to one work.  Fantasy, on the other hand, does have a single work that pretty much contains all that fantasy is–The Lord of the Rings.  The genre can be reduced to a single work with a single idea.  Interesting all the more since ever since Tolkein published his book work, most of the fantasy field has been engaged in copying it in theme and trope, endlessly–and almost all the imitators have missed the point Tolkein was making.

Thanks for your indulgence.  Back to our regularly scheduled current event etc.

And have a happy Thanksgiving.

I have been accused of being a curmudgeon by more than a few people who know me well. Perhaps I deserve it, based upon the intensity with which I approach writing.  Also, I too often fall into the trap of seeing the world as a set of problems needing to be solved rather than an experience to be enjoyed.  Though it is likely true that I am not a prototypical “happy” person, it would be horribly inaccurate to assume that I am unhappy.  I hope that the “not unhappy” side of me also occasionally shows through in my posts.

I truly appreciate the many opportunities and challenges life has thrown my way.  I am lucky to have found so many people who have influenced me in so many good and important ways, not the least of which are my wonderful wife and daughters. I am also extremely lucky that I have met so many people who have taken the time to challenge my ideas and thereby teach me important lessons.  Many of these people who have made me a better thinker and writer are those of you who have taken the time to contribute comments to this blog or send me notes via e-mail.  Truly, thank you.

About a year ago, “Grumpypilgrim” and I had a well-established routine: we traded ideas and book recommendations by email on almost a daily basis.   I suggested to Grumpy that we should start a blog to see if anybody else might show some interest in the sorts of topics that interested us.  Grumpy was a wee bit tentative.  With the incredibly generous help of Nick Smith (of www.nicksmithdesign.com), however, this blog made its first appearance on the Internet back in February 2006.  We didn’t begin posting with any regularity until March, 2006.  In those early days, someone we didn’t know personally sometimes actually posted a comment.  Grumpy and I celebrated many of those early comments with commemorative phone calls (grumpy lives in Madison and I live in St. Louis).

One by one, we invited other people to join us as authors, people who shared our passion for writing and who shared our interest in the sorts of topics and ideas we feature on this blog.  Currently, fourteen different authors have appeared on the blog.  What they bring to this blog (as you can see from the “About” page) is a wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds that are manifested in their writings.  The authors write because they love to write.  As you can see from the site, we don’t advertise.  Therefore, this blog does not make any revenue with which to compensate the authors for their dedication.  What you see at this blog, then, is a labor of love by all concerned.  For some additional background on why this blog exists, check out one of my earlier posts, “Why I Blog.”

It occurred to me that some of the readers might be interested in knowing how much this blogging community has grown since March, when we had 53 visits for the entire month.  Through the month of November, 2006, this blog is receiving a daily average of 1,500 visits.  More than 5,000 pages are downloaded daily from the site.  This surprises and delights me, of course.  I am pleased that the topics that have long interested me have been presented here in a way that so many others find worthwhile.

Through the history of this blog, the authors have written more than 500 posts, which have received in excess of 2000 comments.  During that same time period (March, 2006 through the present), the blog has also received more than 6000 comment-spams.  This ever-increasing amount of spam might require us to take some steps to combat the spam.  I certainly hope that whatever steps we are forced to take (we are considering several possibilities) will not in any way discourage anyone from joining us with their comments. 

In closing, I wanted to use this Thanksgiving holiday to thank each of those people who have taken the time to contribute posts and comments to this blog, as well as those who have visited this blog or recommended this site to others. I have been overwhelmed by this little success story, and I truly appreciate that this writing community exists. 

We’re just getting warmed up here at Dangerous Intersection.  There’s a lot more to come. 

Thank you once again for being part of this endeavor.

Erich

I’ve gotten used to the world of email and blogging. Back in October I read a (typically good) short article in Smithsonian Magazine about Regional American Dialects entitled “Say What?” by Ulrich Boser.
The last line quotes University of Pennsylvania linguist Bill Labov commenting on linguistic drift:

“But it’s not really like biological evolution. No linguist believes that language gets better as it changes.”

To which my mind immediately snapped: “Say What?!?” I typed a quick reply commenting on the misapplied value judgment attributed to the course of biological evolution. I got an email this week advising me that the editors will print my “letter” in the December 2006 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

Oops.

(more…)

OMG! I just installed the FireFox 2 browser and noticed something. It spell checks form entries as you type! Just as Word and its ilk do in their documents.

Since its inception, I’d been using FireFox just because of speed, safety and security advantages. I added the Google toolbar only a month ago for spell checking in form entry fields. Then MSIE 7.0 came out, and had almost all the features of FireFox 1, and was nearly as secure. So this week FireFox riposted with its version 2, to stay a step ahead in both features and security.

As I was typing a response this morning, I noticed the Word-like squiggly red underline. Puzzled (because I hadn’t manually started the Google spell check) I rt-clicked, and it suggested the word I meant to type.

Yay! FireFox 2 is the Bloggers’ bee’s knees. No, I’m not actually that old.

I’m not sure if version 2 requires separate installation of the Google toolbar because I already had it. Maybe all you need is FireFox 2. Someone try it and let me know.

The Bible version of God doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t believe in any traditional sort of God.  I am not that sort of person who finds any purpose in worshipping or asking favors from invisible Beings.  I don’t ascribe any emotions or sentience (certainly, no vindictiveness) to any Person or Thing that might have created our universe.  How the universe came into being is beyond what I can know. 

I do cherish my universe, though, and I realize that I am an incredibly tiny and incredibly ignorant part of it. Many fervent believers (though not all) would characterize my beliefs as “atheism” although that word, as commonly construed, would characterize me in a misleadingly cartoonish way.  

Given my beliefs, most people would be surprised to hear that I sometimes go to church to be inspired and energized. What’s my secret?  I go to church when no one else is there—I like to go to empty churches.  When nothing else is going on other than one’s own breathing, meditating, thinking and writing, going to church can even be exhilarating.

With a pad of paper and a pen in my hands, in search of solitude, I walked to church twice this week.  I had previously noticed a huge church a few blocks from a courthouse where I sometimes work.  Only after walking to this church on Monday did I learn that it was called “Saint Peter’s Roman Catholic Cathedral” in Belleville, Illinois.  Here’s a photo I took on Wednesday (yes, a dreary looking day), just prior to my second “visit.”

The majestic interior of the church is also a treat to the eyes.  The thick stone walls morph into the peak of the ceiling as they rise to meet