Are You Ready To Roomba?

What do you get when you combine kids, a lazy Saturday afternoon and the arrival of a robotic vacuum? Screams, running, laughter, and a clean, clean floor. I check woot.com daily for their offerings, and I’ve often thought a Roomba robotic vacuum for the house would be a great time saver and investment, so when it popped up at a great price, and after doing some due diligence in the way of research, I ordered it. It’s only been here a day, so it’s early to be touting it’s benefits and functionality, but my initial impressions have been good ones, and if this lives up to the reviews and reputations we’ll have some daily help keeping up on the dust and crumbs that come with a home and kids. Meanwhile, the kids are thrilled when it’s in motion and have named it like a pet. A pet that cleans up after itself.

What Was I Thinking?

I, like I am sure we all do, get my fair share of emails with jokes that require scrolling down to reach the punch line, home loan solicitations, viagra ads, and images of kittens doing stupid things with stupid captions that only amuse the same demographic that kept “Full House” on the air for so many years. But every once in awhile something comes across that is actually entertaining, insightful or moving. And this week a very good friend of many years sent a “Joke” email that was not only funny, but frighteningly familiar. As I was reading it, chuckling, I started to recognize my own actions. I started to wonder how the author knew. I started to search the house for hidden cameras and microphones.

I’ve lamented before about a fading ability to stay on track, remain focused, and just frickin’ accomplish one task. I use the metaphor of being the guy on an old Ed Sullivan show that’s doing the ‘spinning plates on sticks‘ bit.. and it’s unbearably frustrating to find myself running between five or more ‘spinning plates’, trying just to keep them balanced, and having more plates stuck in front of me along the way…. I do the best I can to keep them all going, but sooner or later there’s ones that never gets started, and some that crash and shatter from my inability to keep on them all at the same time.

I have to admit that much of this is my own doing, as I’m usually prone to being easily distracted by the bright shine of some new gadget, new software, ideas for this website, setting up and managing my video library, or any other wide range of ‘optional’ choices that I make and undertake. So in reality, the person handing the plates to me is…. me. Life’s got it’s own case of plates to hand me in the realm of work, home, family, and all that goes with it. And then I’m going off and getting more out of my own inability to reign in my desire to be doing anything and everything all at once.

I remember once, at Confoti, when I was struggling to really communicate why it was taking so long to complete a specific task, taking a pad and paper and making a list of every single task that came my way that took me “off task” during a full day. The list was two pages long and had a detailed hierarchy of interruptions that each had their own subsequent distractions or sub-issues… it was “crazy making” to just read. And it read very much like the following list does.

When I read what JF sent me, I felt a sense of comfort and kinship to know that there’s others our there are struggling with the same condition. To quote Steven Wright, when referencing that jarring sensation of falling one occasionally feels as they’re going to sleep…. “… I feel that way all the time“.

Read this. Follow the sequence of events. Then please let me know that it’s not just me. :-)

Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder
This is how it manifests:
I decide to water my lawn. As I turn on the hose in the driveway, I look over at my car and decide my car needs washing.

As I start toward the garage, I notice that there is mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mail box earlier. I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car.

I lay my car keys down on the table, put the junk mail in the garbage can under the table, and notice that the can is full. So, I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the garbage first.

But then I think, since I’m going to be near the mailbox when I take out the garbage anyway, I may as well pay the bills first.

I take my check book off the table, and see that there is only one check left. My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the can of Diet Coke that I had been drinking.

I’m going to look for my checks, but first I need to push the Diet Coke aside so that I don’t accidentally knock it over. I see that the Diet Coke is getting warm, and I decide I should put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold.

As I head toward the kitchen with the Coke a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye – they need to be watered.

I set the Coke down on the counter, and I discover my reading glasses that I’ve been searching for all morning.

I decide I better put them back on my desk, but first I’m going to water the flowers.

I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water and suddenly I spot the TV remote. Someone left it on the kitchen table.

I realize that tonight when we go to watch TV, I will be looking for the remote, but I won’t remember that it’s on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the living room where it belongs, but first I’ll water the flowers.

I pour some water in the flowers, but quite a bit of it spills on the floor.

So, I set the remote back down on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill. Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do.

At the end of the day, the lawn isn’t watered, the car isn’t washed, the bills aren’t paid, there is a warm can of Coke sitting on the counter, the flowers don’t have enough water, there is still only one check in my check book, I can’t find the remote, I can’t find my glasses, I don’t remember what I did with the car keys, and my neighbor called to tell me he turned off the hose that was flooding the driveway.

Then when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I’m really baffled because I know I was busy all day long, and I’m really tired. I realize this is a serious problem, and I’ll try to get some help for it, but first I’ll check my e-mail.

“Well, What Would You Say… You Do Here?”

Well, I get the specifications from the customers and I take them down to the software engineers. Oh, and along with my role tied to an internal project related website, I also deal with engineering related projects and updates. For example, we’ve just released Battery Update 1.2, which I’ve been the project manager of for the life of the project. It’s an update that will be visible and installed by probably every apple customer that uses a MacBook or a MacBook Pro, and I’ve had the honor of shepherding it through the process from definition to delivery. I’ve worked with some awesome engineering, marketing, QA and support team members and I’m thrilled to be able to say it’s now available for immediate download.



I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can’t you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!

Light Reading

Many years ago, perhaps a decade, I read and was amazed by Carl Sagan’s “The Demon Haunted World”. It’s subtitle is apropos to it’s subject matter, as it really does shine a brilliant light of reason on many things relatively unreasonable in today’s day and age. Don’t let the name Sagan sway you, it’s not about billions and billions of stars and you won’t fall asleep listening to it. That’s right… listening to it. Because a simple search of it today turned up a link to the audiobook available for download. SO if this is of any interest at all please do download this and listen on your iPod, or burn to a set of CDs for the car. It’s a fascinating book and you’ll find it… well, enlightening.

A Shred Of Evidence

One of the selling points of the home we bought was it’s location at the very end of a dead-end street. It feels safe. We also like that there’s a couple of families with kids on it as well. It feels homey. When we learned that the guy directly across the street is a 50 year old single man, it raised a bit of curiosity in my wife’s mind as to why. It’s not typical but it’s also not unusual that somebody in their 50’s might be single. Hell, had it not been for my meeting her, I might have become that man at 50 as well. But as a mother, and somebody’s who’s counseling education has exposed her to child abuse, her radar goes off at the slightest of indications and possible warning signs. And in this case it’s just been something she’d made a mental note of and shelved away without any further concern, but just an added consciousness.

Two weeks ago he put out his recycling bins, as did we. And his bin was filled with shredded paper. When they picked it up and dumped it, hundreds of pieces were tossed into the air and scattered by the winds across the street and onto the front section of the sidewalk by our house. I didn’t opt to make any efforts to pick them up as they’re all tiny cross-cut segments no bigger then my daughter’s pinky, so I’ve just figured they’d gradually disappear into the wind, rain and lawnmower.

Sunday, while a friend was visiting and helping with some sprinkler issues, my wife bent down, picked up one of the dozens of random pieces still lying about the grass, and the alert status was immediately escalated to the next level.

The tiny section of paper contained a short block of text ending in a 5 letter word, the first letters being “peni” and last being the cross cut top half of an “s“.

Now, I’m not about to jump to any rash conclusions. That’d be completely unreasonable and I despise assumptions. I believe strongly in the seldom used concept of innocent until proven guilty. For all we know, this guy’s shredded materials could be something he was discarding for a friend, it could be medical reports about erectile disfunction, it could be any number of possible things.

I did continue to examine some of the tiny clipped bits and pieces. The paper appears new and not aged, and recently printed. Based on my findings of words including “her“, “hard“, “warm“, and some cut of clips of words including “vibr” and “ock“…. well, it’s probability of being erotica is high. Fortunately, there were no references to anything like “child” or “bound” or “donkey” so I don’t believe it might have been anything extreme or cause for serious concern. And it’s not like he’s breaking any laws by having printed adult stories in him possession (although my friend joked about them being printed asking “doesn’t he have a laptop?”).

I am certain he’s aware of the fact that they spilled out when being picked up. I wonder if he has any concerns or worries about them being “discovered”. I’ve not seen him since, but then he’s not somebody we see frequently as it is. I don’t have any concerns about him being a threat to our kids in any way, and I don’t hold it against him that, for whatever purpose, he had some ‘dirty stories’ in his possesion. Big deal.

I do intend to diplomatically make him aware, though, that we did find some words on those documents that we don’t particular want our children exposed to. I want him to know we know. Not to embarrass or humiliate him, but because I want him to exercise caution and to be aware that the parents of the children across the street are serious about protecting their kids. Fortunately, they’re too young to read, but there’s other kids on the block that are older.

Disbelief or Dat-belief?

It’s not my desire or intention that this site be focused heavily on religion, and yet it’s been a recurring theme and topic of late, in my life, and as such, echoes in the content here. So bear with me, and I’ll eventually get back to movie reviews, reflective observations, humorous recollections and the occasional fart joke. For the moment, given that I’ve been doing some reading on religion and that some conversations with friends have been along the same topics, I wanted to quickly touch base on a prior post and the discussion of Atheism and Agnosticism. In a nutshell, as much as I strongly believe that the term ‘GOD’ means many very different things to many people, so do the terms Atheist and Agnostic. The ‘fine line’ between the two does not, as I believe it is incorrectly assumed, result in Atheism being the absolute denial of anything spiritual, or that death in the human sense means all aspects of consciousness or any other plane of existence does not exist. It’s simply about having either a doubt and uncertainty about, or a conscious conclusion about the invalidity of, theism… being the existence of gods and/or deities.

Therefore, I’m concluding that they’re really just about the same damned thing.

Literally. :-)

Nothing To See Here. Move Along.

It turns out the guy that shot up the campus in Virginia made some videos and sent them to the media. Several copies to several locations. Have you seen it? I’ve made every effort possible to avoid any and all exposure to it, and I think it’s shameful that it’s being aired at all.

Because that’s what the guy wanted.

And he’s getting it.

Regardless of whether or not it’s preceded with suited commentary and observations on his mental state, it’s wrong to give him any further attention.

Yes, we should definitely be aware of and mindful of ways in which, especially in today’s society, we might detect and help defuse a potentially volatile person or situation. And we should use such occurrence to remind and improve our awareness.

Consider this: that guy setup his computer or video recorder, consciously selected apparel, spewed his opinions, then sat down to do some post production work in order to create a final edit, and to feel good about what he was broadcasting to the world. Then he did just that; packaged it up, labeled it, and took it with him, where I’ve read that he mailed it off between killing two and then thirty more people.

Ultimately, at least as some significant level, this all took place so you’d watch his video.

And people do.

That’s what I’d call, regardless if his being dead or alive, rewarding bad behavior.

Consider this as well: If historically, videos and manifestos issues by people that go on killing sprees were never aired/released and just buried with them, do you think there’s be less motivation for the next guy to do these things? I do.

Ideally, I’d have loved to have had it turned over to the FBI, reviewed, researched, perhaps used in publishing a guide on detecting signs of stress and possible conflicts. Then burned and buried along with his body, unseen by anybody, and undocumented in any further way.

I have to say, too, that at some level within the media, when this arrived, there’s absolutely had to be some person or persons that felt a sense of elation of having this ‘hot item’ in their hands. This highly valued sensational piece of added drama to air at 6.30, with plenty of advanced press touting it’s airing.

To a point I’ve raised before, this video, along with many other video’s that circulated the internet and television, is the result of a society that’s allowed too many lines to be crossed for the sake of titillation. This, like video’s of the beheadings of a captive American that have also been considered ‘news worthy’, is not something that’s presented or used to help drive home the point that we’ve got some serious issues and problems to resolve. They’re sadly based on sensationalism, ratings, and water-cooler awareness. I vividly remember being the ‘odd man out’ that had not seen the Nick Berg beheading video. It’d been out for a month or two. I felt out of touch. I watched it, painfully and actually stopping and turning off the sound. Then i wanted to vomit. I felt a need to shower with brillo. I felt filthy, not only because of the gruesome subject matter but because if my own capitulation and by action, relative trivialization of a life taken so violently.

You can learn about and learn from the violent actions like these in so many productive ways. And by watching a video they made for you to watch, you give them what they want.

That’s the absolutely last thing I am willing to do.

---

Postscript 04/19/07 12:51 PM:
My friend Matt, a former news reporter with more then his own share of stories, directed me to Tim Goodman’s SFGate articles, from which I subsequently found this piece, which echoes some of my own thoughts.

Cop Out of Line

Driving into work today, I observed, with great shock, a motorcycle exit north-bound hwy 85 and do something insanely illegal. They got in the left hand turn lane at the off ramp, which leads them back across the freeway overpass. Yet instead of waiting for the light to change and following the legal street rules, this guy turns his cycle on to the sidewalk of the overpass, going against street and pedestrian traffic, and then drives along the sidewalk across the overpass in order to get back onto the south-bound 85 onramp. Fortunately, there was a CHP officer right there at the time. Unfortunately, he was the one driving the motorcycle.



As far as I understand things, the laws of the road apply to all of us, law enforcement included. My added understanding is that they have the ability to break those laws when there’s a need to do so that involves pursuit, rescue or other aspects of their involvement in serving and protecting the public.



This guy didn’t appear to be doing anything other then taking a shortcut. One I’d be busted for, with good reason, in a second.



I could be wrong. Perhaps he saw some safety risk or accident or incident I didn’t, and he was taking these measures in order to get there as quickly as he could. That’s a possibility, yes. But based on what I observed, there was no use of sirens, no scrambled or frantic driving, no radio usage, and once he crossed the overpass, he didn’t appear to be in a hurry to get back onto the freeway.



One of my very best friends is a CHP. And even when I’ve been pulled over for one reason or another, I know, respect and appreciate that they’re there for us when we need them and they’ve, for me, been more often of help then of hindrance. So I don’t have any animosity towards the uniform or the institution. But I do have significant issue with a sense of entitlement that might accompany somebody that might feel that they can bend and break the rules that I can not simply because their role is to enforce those rules. There’s a hypocrisy in that situation. “Do what I say, not what I do“.



If I want hypocrisy I’ll look at my own parenting, thank you very much. ;-)



I thought about calling and complaining. I even visited the CHP website to see if there was a way to do so. They I remembered that, hey, there’s no way in hell any call I make is gonna go anywhere or make any difference whatsoever. I don’t have it on film, I don’t have all the details and know the conditions and reasons, and it’s not like anybody’s gonna stop what they’re doing, find that guy and say “bad, bad chippy“. It’s a futile use of my energy.



Whereas writing about it here… now that is a productive use of time. :-/

The Great Gig In The Sky

 There's a moderately sized dining room just inside the lobby of Building 4 on the Apple Campus, which is adjacent to the Cafe. Inside it, there's a grand piano. When I get to work and the underground parking is filled around my building, I'll park under the Cafe in order to get coffee on my way in, taking it with me on the short walk across campus to my office. This morning, as I ascended the stairs from the parking level, I heard somebody playing the piano. Just as I badged in, they started into a beautiful and melodic version of "The Great Gig In The Sky". I stopped in mid-step and turned back in order to just take a moment to listen and enjoy. Playing piano is one of those things I regret never learning, and this particular song is one that has always been a favorite. Add to that my underlying sense of sadness over the shootings yesterday and the general sense of melancholy, and this brief moment was somewhat apropos and calming.

Dumb Struck

Yesterday, while I paused for a few moments to post a link to startling images that I feel puts the trivial issues of daily life into an overwhelming perspective of complete insignificance, something horrible was happening on a college campus in Virginia. Only 6 months ago, almost to the day, I wrote about the impact a shooting at a children’s school in Pennsylvania had on me, and those words and thoughts bear repeating today. I went back and re-read them and they echo how I feel, just as I did only half a year ago.

Tonight, my wife and I talked briefly about the events today. Also, a post at theshapeofdays.com, a blog I read regularly, touched on the concept of blame that tends to arise.

Personally, I have to wonder if we’re all not collectively to blame for being complacent and tolerant of the decline if not the disappearance of moral boundaries in our daily lives and the media that pervades them. It’s sickening to compare what was ‘acceptable’ a mere 25 years ago and what we see, view, say and hear daily today. I strongly believe that the continue presentation of violence as entertainment, and the extremely graphic depictions that are allowed, contribute to a desensitized populace. Just as one example: it’s become so bad that we frequently rely on TiVo’s fast forward feature in order to skip past the gruesome and disturbing images used just in trailers for many of the films being made these days.

Yes, people snap. Over lovers quarrels, being slighted, feeling like outcasts, or family abuse. People snap. They have historically and will continue to do so. But for some reason, barring my own ignorance of the metrics, it seems like the frequency of people’s reactions to the pressures they’re feeling leading to pickup up a weapon and taking lives, even random lives, seems to be greatly on the rise.

My brother was living with a woman in the late 1980’s. He, she and her roommate, Glenda, worked at ESL. Both his girlfriend and Glenda were close to our family and we all spent time together having dinners, drinks and just socializing. My brother had moved out after the relationship soured, but not long before Richard Farley walked into ESL on a morning in February and went on a shooting spree, killing seven innocent people that were in the wrong place at the wrong time, one of which was Glenda. It shocked our family, the community, and the nation. It seemed unbelievable and inconceivable, as things like that just “did not happen”.

Now it’s worked it’s way up to being something we’re seeing a couple times a year.

What’s changed? Really…. what’s changed that’s somehow contributed to this being more common place? Why do schools need metal detectors? Why does the preschool my children attend need to have, for god sake, a contingency plan in place should a shooting incident arise?

WTF? And what will change the trend?

The Great Gig In The Sky

There’s a moderately sized dining room just inside the lobby of Building 4 on the Apple Campus, which is adjacent to the Cafe. Inside it, there’s a grand piano. When I get to work and the underground parking is filled around my building, I’ll park under the Cafe in order to get coffee on my way in, taking it with me on the short walk across campus to my office. This morning, as I ascended the stairs from the parking level, I heard somebody playing the piano. Just as I badged in, they started into a beautiful and melodic version of “The Great Gig In The Sky“. I stopped in mid-step and turned back in order to just take a moment to listen and enjoy. Playing piano is one of those things I regret never learning, and this particular song is one that has always been a favorite. Add to that my underlying sense of sadness over the shootings yesterday and the general sense of melancholy, and this brief moment was somewhat apropos and calming.

Nock It Off

I feel a bit like a traitor, sitting here in the campus cafe, drinking my coffee and wearing black ear buds, not white. That’s right, I’m at Apple, I’m wearing black ear buds with black cords plugged into a black shuffle cranking out the thumping drum beat of 80’s era Fleetwood Mac as Lindsey stammers and stutters his way through a marching band backed refrain…. “t-t-t-Tusk”. So where’s my white earbuds? Well, these Sony’s capture all the deep bone-vibrating bass and drum beats worthy of this 25th Anniversary re-mastered deluxe version of their recording, that’s why. And as trendy as it is to “walk the white line” when it comes to MP3 fashion, these blow away the packaged earphones.

But that’s not why I feel like a traitor.


Did I mention the color of the shuffle?


Yes, that’s right, it’s black. And as such, given that no black model exists, it’s either a prototype or a nock off. Believe me, were this a prototype, I’d certainly not sit in the café wearing it. Not for long, that is. I’d quickly be approached by two martix-inspired agents, dark glasses and coiled earphones included, and summarily ‘shuffled’ off to a room where I’d be shown the contract I signed by a man wielding garden shears as he pointed out the clause where I said I’d give my left nut before I’d disclose company secrets.


It’s a nock off, an overseas imitation, made without any rights to do so. It’s a bit bold to so publicly display it on campus. Remember this is an unauthorized copy of a a product we make, not a consumer choice between a Zune or an iPod…. as if such a thing exists. The makers of this product openly and aggressively violated our patents and design. The packing was even identical to that of a shuffle. Identical! Hell, Phil Schiller just walked through the café and I started to wonder if this is such a good idea. Were Steve or Jonathon Ive to walk in I don’t know if I’d hide it or show them an ask what they’re doing to prevent it? But then again I can’t and don’t assume they don’t know. I know for a fact that Apple’s aware of and working to address this, but internal law is a bit of a sticky business.


As far as sound and features, I have to admit that the sound is very good. That’s coming from a non-audiophile set of ears that have lost hearing after way too many full volume playbacks of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. There does not appear to be a true, ‘shuffle’ mode, at least not that I’ve found, but I’ll just load on shuffled music to start with. It does not appear within iTunes so loading it is a manual process, although the app I use for my Treo helps with that. And the battery life is allegedly only 4hrs or so, far less then a legitimate iPod Shuffle.


If I am so opposed to the fact that they’ve copied our design and packaging down to the letter, why did I buy it? That’s a reasonable question. Primarily, because it was SO damned cheap (Under $20) and because I didn’t think they’d be around long and wanted one for posterity. I really don’t use a shuffle, I have my Treo and it’s my MP3 player, but when i saw the articles about this and all the buzz about the rip off of the design and how quickly it’d be shut down, I just wanted to snag one for the history of it, before they were gone.


Like I said…. I feel a bit like a traitor. In my own desire to have it for the wow factor, I’ve support it’s production and it’s taking away from Apple’s own sales. Bad employee. Bad Bad Bad employee. But I did fwd the info to a friend in the iPod division and they confirmed that legal was aware and engaged. So why are these still available? I won’t link to them here but they’re still online and selling. I’ll enjoy showing this to friends and i’ll likely use it for some moderate neighborhood walking and other ad hoc needs, but the “Shuffle” this induces will be one of my feet as I stare at them and admit to having supported their existence in the market place.

So It Goes

I thought I’d pause for a moment and reflect on the news I just read about Kurt Vonnegut’s passing away. His novels, like those of Bradbury and Heinlein, lined the shelves of my father’s study. Just looking at the tattered cover of the image here brings the musty smell of his office, that of damp wool and cigarette butts, freshly into my senses. I was encourage by he and my mother to explore these books, and although I fell head-first into Bradbury’s works, I never made it to Vonnegut. Perhaps that’s the curse of an alphabetized book shelf. I wish i’d had the foresight to have done so and perhaps had even further connection to conversations we’d have shared about the stories and subtext. Just the author’s name alone, and the knowledge that his passing would have been a noteworthy occurrence for him makes his passing of significance to me as well. I’ll have to see if my mom still has any of the books around still. It’ll be worth cracking the cover for the smell alone.

The Return of TNL

TNL, Thursday Night Life, has been on hiatus for several weeks, pre-empted by an unscheduled multiple-week marathon of “This Old House”. But as of this week, its back for a brand new season, ready to address all the lingering questions left unanswered in season one. This week’s episode found Geoff attending a spur of the moment gathering for beers with friends in downtown Los Gatos.



God, I love that show.

…and The Last Thing I Heard…

I’ve been testing out an idea on the sidebar and after some tweaking, I think it’s finally working. I’ve always thought it’d be pretty cool to have songs I’m listening to in iTunes appear on my website, but it’s not a slam-dunk to do so without hosting your own site and tinkering with plugin and such. Feh. But with a cool little AppleScript and an account on Twitter, I’ve been able to make this work. For the past 4 days I’ve just left my iTunes running at work as I’ve addressed and fixed a few hiccups and bugs, and at this point the sidebar section titled “The Last Thing I Heard” is updating routinely throughout the day.

How about that? Even more useless crap about me to add to the stack of things you really couldn’t give a damn about ;-)

10 Years of ‘Think Different’

I’ve just finished reading through a great article titled 10 Years of ‘Think Different’: The Ad Campaign that Restored Apple’s Reputation. The campaign was one that swept not only the world, but the Apple Campus as well. It was stirring and motivating to be working there, having gone through the lowest period, and to get such a focused and invigorating breath of fresh air back into our sails. The iconic selections, the prose and the images were all inspiring, and I made a point of collecting every poster I could, including some extreme rarities. Not only do I have one of every poster ever produced and released through normal channels, I was also fortunate enough to have received a couple of books memorializing the campaign which were handed out at an employee communication event. When they were being hung around campus I grabbed a complete set of the 6ft x 4ft tall ‘bus shelter’ size posters including Ali, Aldrin, Einstein and more. Through contacts I had I managed to get my hands on posters featuring Buzz Aldrin, an Alternate view of Picasso, Flick [from a bugs life], Chaplin, Copolla, the Dali Lama and even a signed Joan Baez. It’s a prized collection from a great time and even greater campaign.

Grooving Up Slowly

I’ve just updated the ‘header’ image on this website. Although I’ve previously stated an intention to use photos I’ve taken myself, I’m bending the rules to allow photos of myself in interesting locations too. Thus, the image above, snapped in the mid-90’s on a trip to London. It required a modest journey on the underground to the St John’s Woods section of London, then a few paces down some side streets, staring at a map, until I stood in front of Abbey Road Studios. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, having been a Beatles fan for many, many years. It was exciting to stand there and to imagine how much musical history took place in that building. In addition to most of the Beatles music, it was also the ‘birthplace’ of Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon“. It’s was a great moment and a memory I’ll never forget.

And of course, as I’m sure is the case for so many others, I had to take a photo walking across the street.

Here’s the full image

We’ll Not Risk Another Frontal Assault

Oh sure, you’re spending the morning celebrating the Easter holiday… finding hidden eggs and stuffed bunnies, attending church, wearing pastels that only belong safely contained in a large bucket of sidewalk chalk… but there’s a horror here to contend with too. And as this photo I dug up from my childhood archives indicates, the dangers of hip-hop have been around since the mid-sixties. Exhibit A: A photo snapped by my father of my poor brother, just seconds after being attacked on easter morning by a killer bunny. We have reason to believe it was of welsh descent. Although the arm was surgically reattached, my brother’s never fully recovered and his faculties remain, well, somewhat impacted. I warned him, but did he listen to me? Oh, no, he *knew*, didn’t he? Oh, it’s just a harmless little *bunny*, isn’t it?

We’re All Driving On The Same Highway

I was thinking this morning about a show I once watched about psychology and behavior. I was specifically recalling the portion that delved into the behavior of people in their cars. The upshot of it is that when somebody’s driving a car, their sense of isolation from everything around them tends to lull them into the state of mind where they forget that they’re out in public. Of course, things such as windows being open, speed of travel and the volume of sounds being played all factor into it, but it happens all the time.

In general, when I’ve consciously look around as I’m driving, I’ve see solo drivers tapping the steering wheel, laughing out, belting out a tune, talking to themselves, even dancing in their seats at a stop light to the point that the car was rocking to the beat. I’ve seen people shaving, putting on makeup, pulling gray hairs, picking at wounds or with an index finger so far up there nose you’d expect to see the tip start wriggling out of their ear. I’ve observed drivers locked in a mindless state with a blank stare, the kind you’d expect to see just before they jerk their head slightly, as if they’re shaking the brain stem back into an active state. I’ve also seen faces that looked world worn, tired, sad and even tear stained. All on display in a moving, 3-dimensional montage, allowing a 3 second glimpse not only into the vehicle, but often into the persons state of mind as well. Leaving it to your own imagination to fill in all the blanks about who they are, where they’re coming from, where they’re going and what’s running through their minds or happening in their lives.

Knowing that I’m constantly in somebody else’s view as well is not something I’m typically conscious of, but on the way to work today I found my thought drifting to something I saw yesterday, heard discussed last night, and see looming in front of me as a task I have to attend to this Saturday. At that moment, at that stop light, with an overwhelming sense of sadness, reddening eyes welling with restrained tears, I glanced to my left to find the face of a nameless driver gazing into my own, probably putting together their own 3-second interpretation or assumptions of my own state of affairs and the reasons I might look sad.

My sister-in-law Jennifer came down last night to spend the night, and to help my wife with keeping an eye on the kids today, so she can focus on getting some of the remaining boxes in the house unpacked and preparing for the delivery of some furniture tomorrow. Furniture that I’ll be picking up in a rental truck and driving to our house. Furnishing from her mother’s house, in Roseville, which is being cleared out and going up for sale following her passing away last December.

Earlier in the afternoon yesterday, my brother-in-law Chris, (Jennifer’s husband and my wife’s brother), sent the family a web link to the home on the realtor’s website. My wife’s already made trips up there to be involved in the family affairs, but I’ve not, and I’ve not see images of it either. So when I clicked on the URL and the page loaded, I was taken aback to be looking at a completely empty house, one in which I’ve celebrated holidays, stayed at for days on end, and visited repeatedly during the 2+ years she’d lived there.

It was a brand new house, an actual model home when she bought it, so it had all the finest top-notch upgrades throughout. She loved it. I think it was the first/only really nice home she’d ever had, and she’d put her typical French woman’s efforts into decorations and ambiance. The home not only housed her and her belongings, but also those of her father, who’d passed away only a few years prior to her.

Looking at the empty rooms and bare walls in the online photos was an unexpected shock. Here was this very familiar place, once filled with warmth, laughter, and even occasional family conflicts and tensions too… completely empty, vacant, and devoid of all of those objects. Yet it remained brimming with the memories of the experiences amongst them. It was chilling, warming and bittersweet all at the same time.

I’ve been detached and going through the motions lately. My thoughts and consciousness, even when my wife was up there going through the house with her family to sort through the place, have not spent any time really focused on these recent events. Sure, through the funeral and following there were times of reflection and sadness but it’s remained a surreal experience, and one that i’ve maintained a reasonable amount of composure around.

When Jennifer arrived last night, the wine started pouring and the chatting began, at times so loud that my son politely called to us from the closed door of his room just around the corner, asking that we keep it down because we were keeping him awake. Jennifer is hilarious, and so much fun to be around. She has a boisterous laugh used without restraint, and a tendency to speak whatever is on her mind, so conversations can be quite dynamic and entertaining.

Yet as the topic of Nicole came up, my wife, who’s been having a hard time of late herself, was relating her feelings, and Jennifer was referring to the range of feelings she’s had or not had, in comparison with this event and the passing of my father-in-law some 8 years prior. Jennifer lives about a mile away from Nicole’s house, and was present at the hospital shortly after she’d passed away there. She and my wife both had shared experiences and perspectives on each of these parents. And so they went on, back and forth, as I sat quietly listening from a chair across the room. I didn’t join in or have anything to share at the time, or perhaps, that I wanted to share. I just listened to them talk, before eventually retiring to get some much needed sleep while their conversations continued for several more hours.

On the drive to work today, the visions of that empty house, the echos of the reflections between my wife and Jennifer, and the knowledge that I’ll be at that house tomorrow, packing some of the items and their associated memories into a truck to be driven away from and likely to never return to again, overwhelmed me. Of course my earlier and unwhitting choice to listen to the morose songs of “Death Cab For Cutie” didn’t help the situation. So I drove along Hwy 9 en route to work, taking in all of the reminders and feeling an overwhelming sadness at the loss, when I found myself being observed and likely assessed in a manner I would do myself in the reversal of the situation.

It didn’t phase me, beyond the obvious realization and embarrassment of being caught letting my emotions be seen. But it did make me remember and consider that I’m in no way alone in any of these experiences. I’ll have more along the path of the rest of my life, as have and will all of the other passers by on my path to work and back, and every other place I go. And for every other person I notice, or am noticed by. It put things in perspective. Not that it made it better, worse, or changed the feelings, but just being the observer being himself under observation gave me a sense of unity with the flowing tide around me.

Thank God For Science

Easter is just around the corner, and it always strikes me as odd that most people celebrate the day as a religious holiday, without taking the time to learn more about the background, it’s existence as a pagan holiday, the altered timelines and the blending of the Christian practices into that same holiday, and it’s subsequent gradual assimilation into what we celebrate today, without question.

There’s an article about people’s belief or disbelief of God in this week’s Newsweek. The pole states that 91% of people polled believe in God. What’s truly revealing is that the survey was only based on the responses of 1,004 Americans from an undisclosed location. And then subsequently maligned to somehow represent the 300,000,000 Americans in this country. How such an imbalanced subset of data can be used and presented as a comprehensive study is beyond me, but I also have to accept that I live in a relatively liberal part of the country. I’m well isolated from some of the more extreme ‘fundamentalist’ sections of the nation. But I do believe that the press has conservative and liberal extremes, each with their own agendas.

As unpopular and controversial as it seems to be, even today, to admit… I don’t believe in God. I vacillate between being an agnostic and atheist, but lean towards atheism because the other feels a bit to non-committal. What do I believe? Well, in a sentence, I believe that there’s likely something to be experienced beyond what we know as ‘This Lifetime”, and I believe that my thoughts and consciousness are not tied to my physical body. But beyond that it’s anybody’s guess. And that’s also how I view most of religious doctrine… as somebody’s guess.

I just read (partially, due to time constraints and it being due at the library) an interesting book called “The God Delusion” and it was quite fascinating. One of the earlier points it raised was just how taboo it is, in our society, to question or challenge religious beliefs. We can get into the most heated debates about politics, sexuality, environment, even computing platforms, but when you start to attack somebody’s religious beliefs you’re suddenly treading on eggshells and you’re silently expected to not push too hard or ask question that might make somebody uncomfortable.

Why is that? Why do we have that social constraint around dialog and intellectual discussion and conversation? I wrestled with that for several years when I was investigating religions and talking frankly with friends who always seemed to get terribly uncomfortable when I really launched into a rant about the absurdity of their belief system.

Well, this will certainly be a topic I spend more time on in the future, but for the immediate moment, I started this post because I found a very interesting interview between Sam Harris and Rick Warren on the Newsweek website. It’s a very long read, but so very interesting to hear the back and forth conversation between such extreme sides of the argument.

For what it’s worth, I’m on Sam’s side. How about you?

And yes, the irony of the title of this post was very intentional :-)

The article online:
God Debate: Sam Harris vs. Rick Warren – Newsweek Beliefs – MSNBC.com

I’ve also added it to this post for posterity.

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God Debate: Sam Harris vs. Rick Warren NewsweekSAM HARRIS: There’s no evidence for such a God, and it’s instructive to notice that we’re all atheists with respect to Zeus and the thousands of other dead gods whom now nobody worships. RICK WARREN: I see the fingerprints of God everywhere. I see them in culture. I see them in law. I see them in literature. I see them in nature. I see them in my own life. Trying to understand where God came from is like an ant trying to understand the Internet. Even the most brilliant scientist would agree that we only know a fraction of a percent of the knowledge of the universe. HARRIS: Any scientist must concede that we don’t fully understand the universe. But neither the Bible nor the Qur’an represents our best understanding of the universe. That is exquisitely clear. HARRIS: Well, there’s clearly a spectrum of confidence in the text. I mean, there’s the “This is literally true, nothing even gets figuratively interpreted,” and then there’s the “This is just the best book we have, written by the smartest people who have ever lived, and it’s still legitimate to organize our lives around it to the exclusion of other books.” Anywhere on that spectrum I have a problem, because in my mind the Bible and the Qur’an are just books, written by human beings. There are sections of the Bible that I think are absolutely brilliant and poetically unrivaled, and there are sections of the Bible which are the sheerest barbarism, yet profess to prescribe a divinely mandated morality—where do I start? Books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus and First and Second Kings and Second Samuel—half of the kings and prophets of Israel would be taken to The Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity if these events took place in our own time. WARREN: I believe it’s inerrant in what it claims to be. The Bible does not claim to be a scientific book in many areas. WARREN: If you’re asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal, but I do also know metaphorical terms are used. Did God come down and blow in man’s nose? If you believe in God, you don’t have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it’s fine with me. WARREN: Oh, absolutely. WARREN: Well, I do believe in the goodness of God, and I do believe that he knows better than I do. God sometimes says yes, God sometimes says no and God sometimes says wait. I’ve had to learn the difference between no and not yet. The issue here really does come down to surrender. A lot of atheists hide behind rationalism; when you start probing, you find their reactions are quite emotional. In fact, I’ve never met an atheist who wasn’t angry. he dead and materializes objects. I mean, you can watch some of his miracles on YouTube. Prepare to be underwhelmed. He’s a stage magician. As a Christian, you can say Sathya Sai Baba’s miracle stories are not interesting, let’s not pay attention to them, but if you set them within the prescientific religious milieu of the first-century Roman Empire, suddenly miracle stories become especially compelling. HARRIS: Well, I don’t think that the religious books are the source. We go to the Bible and we are the judge of what is good. We see the golden rule as the great distillation of ethical impulses, but the golden rule is not unique to the Bible or to Jesus; you see it in many, many cultures—and you see some form of it among nonhuman primates. I’m not at all a moral relativist. I think it’s quite common among religious people to believe that atheism entails moral relativism. I think there is an absolute right and wrong. I think honor killing, for example, is unambiguously wrong—you can use the word evil. A society that kills women and girls for sexual indiscretion, even the indiscretion of being raped, is a society that has killed compassion, that has failed to teach men to value women and has eradicated empathy. Empathy and compassion are our most basic moral impulses, and we can even teach the golden rule without lying to ourselves or our children about the origin of certain books or the virgin birth of certain people. WARREN: I don’t feel duty-bound to defend stuff that’s done in the name of God which I don’t think God approved or advocated. Have things been done wrong in the name of Christianity? Yes. Sam makes the statement in his book that religion is bad for the world, but far more people have been killed through atheists than through all the religious wars put together. Thousands died in the Inquisition; millions died under Mao, and under Stalin and Pol Pot. There is a home for atheists in the world today—it’s called North Korea. I don’t know any atheists who want to go there. I’d much rather live under Tony Blair, or even George Bush. The bottom line is that atheists, who accuse Christians of being intolerant, are as intolerant—HARRIS: I wouldn’t put it in such an invidious way, but— HARRIS: It is intellectually dishonest, frankly, to say that you are sure that Jesus was born of a virgin. ou are not. WARREN: There’s no doubt where you’re born influences your initial beliefs. Regardless of where you were born, there are some things you can know about God, even without the Bible. For instance, I look at the world and I say, “God likes variety.” I say, “God likes beauty.” I say, “God likes order,” and the more we understand ecology, the more we understand how sensitive that order is. HARRIS: The thing that bothers me about faith-based altruism is that it is contaminated with religious ideas that have nothing to do with the relief of human suffering. So you have a Christian minister in Africa who’s doing really good work, helping those who are hungry, healing the sick. And yet, as part of his job description, he feels he needs to preach the divinity of Jesus in communities where literally millions of people have been killed because of interreligious conflict between Christians and Muslims. It seems to me that that added piece causes unnecessary suffering. I would much rather have someone over there who simply wanted to feed the hungry and heal the sick. WARREN: All of the great questions of the 21st century will be religious questions. Will Islam modernize peacefully? What’s going to happen to the influx of Muslims into secular Europe, which has lost its faith in Christianity and has nothing to counteract this loss in religious terms? What will replace Marxism in China? In all likelihood it’s going to be Christianity. Will America return to its historic roots—will there be a Third Great Awakening, or will America go the way of Europe? HARRIS: To some degree the stridence of my writing is an effort to get people’s attention. But I can honestly defend the stridence because I think our situation is that urgent. I am terrified of what seems to me to be a bottleneck that civilization is passing through. On the one hand we have 21st-century disruptive technology proliferating, and on the other we have first-century superstition. A civilization is going to either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact or it won’t. And perhaps that fear sounds grandiose, but civilizations end. On any number of occasions, some generation has witnessed the ruination of everything they and their ancestors had built. What especially terrifies me about religious thinking is the expectation on the part of many that civilization is bound to end based on prophecy and its ending is going to be glorious. WARREN: Because we were made in God’s image, we were made to last forever. That means I’m going to spend more time on that side of eternity than on this side. If I did not believe that there is a Judgment, if I believed Hitler would actually get away with everything he did, that would be a reason for great despair. The fact is, I do believe there will be a Judgment Day. God is not just a God of love. He is a God of justice. So death is a factor. On the other hand, even if there were no such thing as heaven, I would put my trust in Christ because I have found it a meaningful, satisfactory, significant way to live. WARREN: The politically incorrect answer is yes. HARRIS: I wouldn’t put it in those stark terms, because I don’t have a rigid view how someone should spend their life so as not to waste it. HARRIS: Right now, we have to change the rules to talk about God and spiritual experience and ethics. And I’m denying that that is so. You can have your spirituality. You can go into a cave and practice meditation and transform yourself, and then we can talk about why that happened and how it could be replicated. We may even want, for perfectly rational reasons, to say we want a Sabbath in this country, a genuine Sabbath. Let’s realize that there’s a power in contemplating the mystery of the universe, and in reminding yourself how much you love the people closest to you, and how much more you could love the people you haven’t met yet. There is nothing you have to believe on insufficient evidence in order to talk about that possibility. WARREN: I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There is no contradiction to it. When I look at history, I would disagree with Sam: Christianity has done far more good than bad. Altruism comes out of knowing there is more than this life, that there is a sovereign God, that I am not God. We’re both betting. He’s betting his life that he’s right. I’m betting my life that Jesus was not a liar. When we die, if he’s right, I’ve lost nothing. If I’m right, he’s lost everything. I’m not willing to make that gamble.At The Summit: On a cloudy California day, the atheist Sam Harris sat down with the Christian pastor Rick Warren to hash out Life’s Biggest Question: is God real? A NEWSWEEK exclusive.April 9, 2007 issue – Rick Warren is as big as a bear, with a booming voice and easygoing charm. Sam Harris is compact, reserved and, despite the polemical tone of his books, friendly and mild. Warren, one of the best-known pastors in the world, started Saddleback in 1980; now 25,000 people attend the church each Sunday. Harris is softer-spoken; paragraphs pour out of him, complex and fact-filled— as befits a Ph.D. student in neuroscience. At NEWSWEEK’s invitation, they met in Warren’s office recently and chatted, mostly amiably, for four hours. Jon Meacham moderated. Excerpts follow.JON MEACHAM: Rick, since you’re the home team, we’ll start with Sam. Sam, is there a God in the sense that most Americans think of him? Rick, what is the evidence of the existence of the God of Abraham? WARREN: To you. HARRIS: There is so much about us that is not in the Bible. Every specific science from cosmology to psychology to economics has surpassed and superseded what the Bible tells us is true about our world. Sam, does the Christian you address in your books have to believe that God wrote the Bible and that it is literally true? [To Warren] Is the Bible inerrant? Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it? HARRIS: I’m doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience; I’m very close to the literature on evolutionary biology. And the basic point is that evolution by natural selection is random genetic mutation over millions of years in the context of environmental pressure that selects for fitness. WARREN: Who’s doing the selecting? HARRIS: The environment. You don’t have to invoke an intelligent designer to explain the complexity we see. WARREN: Sam makes all kinds of assertions based on his presuppositions. I’m willing to admit my presuppositions: there are clues to God. I talk to God every day. He talks to me. HARRIS: What does that actually mean? WARREN: One of the great evidences of God is answered prayer. I have a friend, a Canadian friend, who has an immigration issue. He’s an intern at this church, and so I said, “God, I need you to help me with this,” as I went out for my evening walk. As I was walking I met a woman. She said, “I’m an immigration attorney; I’d be happy to take this case.” Now, if that happened once in my life I’d say, “That is a coincidence.” If it happened tens of thousands of times, that is not a coincidence. There must have been times in your ministry when you’ve prayed for someone to be delivered from disease who is not—say, a little girl with cancer. So, parse that. God gave you an immigration attorney, but God killed a little girl.HARRIS: Let me be the first. WARREN: I think your books are quite angry. HARRIS: I would put it at impatient rather than angry. Let me respond to this notion of answered prayer, because this is a classic sampling error, to use a statistical phrase. We know that human beings have a terrible sense of probability. There are many things we believe that confirm our prejudices about the world, and we believe this only by noticing the confirmations, and not keeping track of the disconfirmations. You could prove to the satisfaction of every scientist that intercessory prayer works if you set up a simple experiment. Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is within the capacity of God. [Warren is laughing.] I find it interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions that are self-limiting. WARREN: That’s a misstatement there. HARRIS: Let’s go back to the Bible. The reason you believe that Jesus is the son of God is because you believe that the Gospel is a valid account of the miracles of Jesus. WARREN: It’s one of the reasons. HARRIS: Yeah. It’s one of the reasons. Now, there are many testimonials about miracles, every bit as amazing as the miracles of Jesus, in other literature of the world’s religions. Even contemporary miracles. There are millions of people who believe that Sathya Sai Baba, the south Indian guru, was born of a virgin, has raised tSam, what are the secular sources of an acceptable moral code? Rick, Christianity has conducted itself in an abjectly evil manner from time to time. How do you square that with the Christian Gospel of love?HARRIS: How am I being intolerant? I’m not advocating that we lock people up for their religious beliefs. You can get locked up in Western Europe for denying the Holocaust. I think that’s a terrible way of addressing the problem. This really is one of the great canards of religious discourse, the idea that the greatest crimes of the 20th century were perpetrated because of atheism. The core problem for me is divisive dogmatism. There are many kinds of dogmatism. There’s nationalism, there’s tribalism, there’s racism, there’s chauvinism. And there’s religion. Religion is the only sphere of discourse where dogma is actually a good word, where it is considered ennobling to believe something strongly based on faith. WARREN: You don’t feel atheists are dogmatic? HARRIS: No, I don’t. WARREN: I’m sorry, I disagree with you. You’re quite dogmatic. HARRIS: OK, well, I’m happy to have you point out my dogmas, but first let me deal with Stalin. The killing fields and the gulag were not the product of people being too reluctant to believe things on insufficient evidence. They were not the product of people requiring too much evidence and too much argument in favor of their beliefs. We have people flying planes in our buildings because they have theological grievances against the West. I’m noticing Christians doing terrible things explicitly for religious reasons—for instance, not fund-ing [embryonic] stem-cell research. The motive is always paramount for me. No society in human history has ever suffered because it has become too reasonable. WARREN: We’re in exact agreement on that. I just happen to believe that Christianity saved reason. We would not have the Bill of Rights without Christianity. HARRIS: That’s certainly a disputable claim. The idea that somehow we are getting our morality out of the Judeo-Christian tradition is bad history and bad science. WARREN: Where do you get your morality? If there is no God, if I am simply complicated ooze, then the truth is, your life doesn’t matter, my life doesn’t matter. HARRIS: That is a total caricature of—WARREN: No, let me finish. I let you caricature Christianity. If life is just random chance, then nothing really does matter and there is no morality—it’s survival of the fittest. If survival of the fittest means me killing you to survive, so be it. For years, atheists have said there is no God, but they want to live like God exists. They want to live like their lives have meaning.HARRIS: Our morality, the meaning we find in life, is a lived experience that I believe has, to use a loaded term, a spiritual component. I believe it is possible to radically transform our experience of the world for the better, very much the way someone like Jesus, or someone like Buddha, witnessed. There is wisdom in our spiritual, contemplative literature, and I am quite interested in understanding it. I think that medita-tion and prayer affect us for the better. The question is, what is reasonable to believe on the basis of those transformations? WARREN: You will not admit that it is your experience that makes you an atheist, not rationality. HARRIS: What in your experience is making you someone who is not a Muslim? I presume that you are not losing sleep every night wondering whether to convert to Islam. And if you’re not, it is because when the Muslims say, “We have a book that’s the perfect word of the creator of the universe, it’s the Qur’an, it was dictated to Muhammad in his cave by the archangel Gabriel,” you see a variety of claims there that aren’t backed up by sufficient evidence. If the evidence were sufficient, you would be compelled to be Muslim. WARREN: That’s exactly right. HARRIS: So you and I both stand in a relationship of atheism to Islam. WARREN: We both stand in a relationship of faith. You have faith that there is no God. In 1974, I spent the better part of a year living in Japan, and I studied all the world religions. All of the religions basically point toward truth. Buddha made this famous statement at the end of his life: “I’m still searching for the truth.” Muhammad said, “I am a prophet of the truth.” The Veda says, “Truth is elusive, it’s like a butterfly, you’ve got to search for it.” Then Jesus Christ comes along and says, “I am the truth.” All of a sudden, that forces a decision. HARRIS: Many, many other prophets and gurus have said that. WARREN: Here’s the difference. Jesus says, “I am the only way to God. I am the way to the Father.” He is either lying or he’s not. Sam, is Rick intellectually dishonest?Let’s say Rick’s not here and we’re just hanging out in his office. WARREN: I say I accept that by faith. And I think it’s intellectually dishonest for you to say you have proof that it didn’t happen. Here’s the difference between you and me. I am open to the possibility that I am wrong in certain areas, and yHARRIS: Oh, I am absolutely open to that. WARREN: So you are open to the possibility that you might be wrong about Jesus? HARRIS: And Zeus. Absolutely. WARREN: And what are you doing to study that? HARRIS: I consider it such a low-probability event that I—WARREN: A low probability? When there are 96 percent believers in the world? So is everybody else an idiot? HARRIS: It is quite possible for most people to be wrong—as are most Americans who think that evolution didn’t occur. WARREN: That’s an arrogant statement. HARRIS: It’s an honest statement. Rick, if you had been born in India or in Iran, would you have different religious beliefs? HARRIS: Then God also likes smallpox and tuberculosis. WARREN: I would attribute a lot of the sins in the world to myself. HARRIS: Are you responsible for smallpox? WARREN: I am responsible to do something about it. No doubt about it. I am responsible to do something about the 500 million who get malaria every year and the 40 million who have AIDS, because I will be held accountable for my life. And when I say, “God, why don’t you do something about this?” God says, “Well, why don’t you? You were the answer to your own prayer.” HARRIS: I totally agree with Rick: it is our responsibility to help bridge these inequities, but I think you become even more motivated, potentially, to help people when you realize there is no good reason, certainly not a supernatural good reason, for the fact that I have so much and my neighbor has so little. Do you think that religiously motivated good works are actually harmful? WARREN: You’d much rather have somebody—an atheist—feeding the hungry than a person who believes in God? All of the great movements forward in Western civilization were by believers. It was pastors who led the abolition of slavery. It was pastors who led the woman’s right to vote. It was pastors who led the civil-rights movement. Not atheists. HARRIS: You bring up slavery—I think it’s quite ironic. Slavery, on balance, is supported by the Bible, not condemned by it. It’s supported with exquisite precision in the Old Testament, as you know, and Paul in First Timothy and Ephesians and Colossians supports it, and Peter—WARREN: No, he doesn’t. He allows it. He doesn’t support it. HARRIS: OK, he allows it. I would argue that we got rid of slavery not because we read the Bible more closely. We got rid of slavery despite the profound inadequacies of the Bible. We got rid of slavery because we realized it was manifestly evil to treat human beings as farm equipment. As it is. Rick, what is your role as a pastor in encouraging reformation of other faiths? HARRIS: I think the answers, in spiritual and ethical terms, are going to be nondenominational. We are suffering the collision of denominations, specifically the collision with Islam. Whatever is true about us isn’t Christian. And it isn’t Muslim. Physics isn’t Christian, though it was invented by Christians. Algebra isn’t Muslim, even though it was invented by Muslims. Whenever we get at the truth, we transcend culture, we transcend our upbringing. The discourse of science is a good example of where we should hold out hope for transcending our tribalism. WARREN: Why isn’t atheism more appealing if it’s supposedly the most intellectually honest? HARRIS: Frankly, it has a terrible PR campaign. WARREN: [Laughs] It’s not a matter of PR. HARRIS: It is right next to child molester as something you don’t want to be. But that is a product, I would argue, of what religious people tell one another about atheism. Sam, the one thing that I find really troubling in your arguments is that I am guilty, to quote “The End of Faith,” of a “ludicrous obscenity” when I take my children to church. That is strong language, and it doesn’t exactly encourage dialogue. WARREN: I believe that history split into A.D. and B.C. because of the Resurrection. And the Resurrection is not only the resurrection of Jesus Christ, it is the hope of the world: it says there’s more to this life than just here and now. That doesn’t mean that I do less, it means that this life is a test, it’s a trust and it’s a temporary assignment. If death is the end, shoot, I’m not going to waste another minute being altruistic. HARRIS: How do you account for my altruism? WARREN: You have common grace. Even in people who don’t believe in God, there is a spark God has put in you that says, “There’s got to be more to life than just make money and die.” I think that that spark does not come from evolution. Sam wrote that without death, the influence of faith-based religion would be unthinkable. HARRIS: How is it fair for God to have designed a world which gives such ambiguous testimony to his existence? How is it fair to have created a system where belief is the crucial piece, rather than being a good person? How is it fair to have created a world in which by mere accident of birth, someone who grew up Muslim can be confounded by the wrong religion? I don’t see how the future of humanity is in good care with those competing orthodoxies. Rick, let’s be blunt. Is Sam’s soul in jeopardy, in your view, because he has rejected Jesus? HARRIS: Is that the honest answer? WARREN: The truth is, religion is mutually exclusive. The person who says, “Oh, I just believe them all,” is an idiot because the religions flat-out contradict each other. You cannot believe in reincarnation and heaven at the same time. Sam, let’s be blunt as well. Has Rick, in your view, wasted much of his life on behalf of a Gospel that you think is a first-century superstition? WARREN: What’s your politically incorrect answer? HARRIS: I think you could use your time and attention better than organizing your life around a belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and the best book we’re ever going to have on every relevant subject. How would the ideal world work, in the Sam Harris view? WARREN: Sam, do you believe human beings have a spirit? HARRIS: There are many reasons not to believe in a naive conception of a soul that kind of floats off the brain at death and goes somewhere else. But I do not know. WARREN: Can you have spirituality without a spirit? HARRIS: You can feel yourself to be one with the universe. WARREN: OK, then why can’t you just take the next step? Because right now you’re talking in extremely nonrational terms. HARRIS: There’s nothing irrational about it. You can close your eyes in meditation and lose the sense of your physical body, totally. Many people draw from that the metaphysical conclusion that “I’m just spirit, and I can transcend the body.” That’s not the only conclusion you have to draw from that experience, and I don’t think it’s the best conclusion. WARREN: You’re more spiritual than you think. You just don’t want a boss. You don’t want a God who tells you what to do. HARRIS: I don’t want to pretend to be certain about anything I’m not certain about. Rick, last thoughts? 

A Suite Deal

Once again, as has been the case on numerous other occasions, my friendship with one of the founders of ownerspass.com afforded me not only the opportunity to attend a Warriors game in Oakland last Sunday, but to extend the invitation to my brother in law, his family, and my nephew as well. Concerts and sports experienced form luxury suites are a whole different experience then that of being in the seats. And it’s not necessarily that the views are all that better, it’s all about the space.

Imagine the typical ticket holder’s experience of sitting in a single seat, somebody’s elbows pressed up against yours, your coat, backpack or any other belongings either held in your lap or resting on the trampled, sticky cement behind your feet, and your kneecaps pressed against the rough plastic of the backing of the chair in front of you. Getting up for any reason requires the inconveniences of shuffling past the twisted and retracted torsos of those sitting between you and the isle. And returning with a beverage or snack only adds to the clutter you must balance and juggle on your way back to and while sitting in your seat. Yet in some cases, this 3+ hours of ‘enjoyment’ can costs over $100 per person.

Now imagine walking into what is, in essence, a mini hotel room sans bed. There’s counter space and tables, and even a closet, for your belongings. There’s a ‘fridge stocked with cold sodas, mixers, water and beer. There’s running water. There’s sofa chairs, bar chairs and two rows of comfortable seating for you to sit and relax. There’s TV’s positioned about for close up views of the live event or instant replays. Need something to drink? Want to stand a bit? Need to step aside and take a phone call? Need a quick bathroom break? It’s all right there.

I’m not a sports focused guy. I’m a geek. I can’t hold my own in any real detailed conversation about sports on my best day. Yet that does not mean I don’t enjoy a good game, and Sunday’s was an exciting one to watch. My wife asked me afterwards if I was going to start sitting around and watching the game, and I said I was if it meant doing so from a luxury suite :-)

I can’t say I’d willingly pay and go through the associated hassles of going to a live game merely for the experience of having see n it live. It’s still not quite that interesting to me. But then I’m sure writing daily entries for a website that 4 or 5 people might read on a given day is not a strong draw for some of my friends as well. But that’s what’s great about friends and family: the acceptance that we don’t have to all like the same things in order to spend time sharing the things we do mutually enjoy.

That said, another lesson learned this week was that making the statement that the Dixie Chicks were “not so bad” when you’re driving in a Jeep filled with rock ‘n roll loving men, one’s that don’t quite share your willingness to branch out to such extremes, can easily result in a potentially long walk home from a game you never did get to in the first place.

Two Key Observations

I left the key to the rental house on the counter Sunday as I exited. I felt a great deal of relief. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks coordinating and executing a move, the last part of which has involved the sale/dispersal of unwanted belongings and the house cleaning that typical accompanies relocating. Saturday was formally the ‘last day’ but even after the house was cleaned, a lone crib remained, awaiting a potential buyer, who came in the evening and was my final cause for returning.



It felt so good to drive away without a feeling that there was still something left to return and tend to.



It was a good house, sans the recurring theme of rat encounters. I’ve already written about 2 of the 3 rat related stories, and I swear to you that I was expecting one last tail tale to arise out of the move, especially when I was rustling around the area I’ve come to know and “Rat-Alley”. But I was spared any final rodent exposure, and those stories aside, the house served it’s purpose and gave us a place to stay comfortably while we regrouped and refocused our home buying efforts.



I’ve strived to, and surprisingly, I’ve succeeded in keeping the number of keys on my keychain to an absolute minimum. For some reason, perhaps just that of it having been a focus and ritual of my life for some 20+ years, I’ve silently and subconsciously equated the number of keys I carry around on my keychain to the complexity of my daily life. Yet if you’ve read more then a hand full of my posts on this website… you know as well as I do that the concept is far from reality. Still, I get comfort in doing so.



For the past few weeks, were you to add them up, three would be the number thoust would count, and the number of the counting would be three. Four wouldst thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three.



Today, the count shall now be two. Three is right out.



And there is much rejoicing.